Then I slowly became aware that the television set was on in the living room.
Dad was sitting on the couch looking through one of Mom's photo albums containing my baby pictures. The nightly news was on, featuring yet another car chase on the freeway, which is pretty typical news for L.A.
"Hey there, sleeping beauty," Dad said.
I sat down in the armchair. "What time is it?"
"Eight-thirty," Dad informed me after checking his fancy mobile phone. "You're probably starving for dinner."
I hated to admit it, but I actually was. And if memory served, the only food in our kitchen was frozen stuff from Mom's last trip to Trader Joe's. But my legs felt like they were made out of cement. I didn't feel like leaving home again, not for takeout burritos (my favorite) or the fanciest restaurant dinner in the whole city. I knew somewhere a few miles away, my father's wife and other daughter were biding time in a hotel room waiting for us to show up. This was probably my last chance to plead my case with my dad – to convince him to just leave me here, where I could take care of myself and the house. At that point I was even thinking I wouldn't even want to return to Treadwell; I could just stay in Los Angeles and finish high school nearby.
"Listen, Dad," I began carefully. I was on the debate team at Treadwell and knew that I had some serious persuasive powers within me. "I really do not want to be any more of a burden on you than I've already been. I was thinking it might be the most practical thing for me to just stay here, take care of Mom's arrangements, finish out school until I get my diploma-"
"Taylor," Dad interrupted me. "You're fifteen years old."
"Yeah, but," I defended myself, "I can take care of myself. And you're on tour, I'm just going to be in the way of your life."
"The tour's cancelled until further notice," my father said firmly. "We called off Europe and are going to start rescheduling dates in the U.S. You are my responsibility now and I am not going to leave you all on your own in a city like Los Angeles."
He was staring me down. I was completely unaccustomed to an adult telling me how things were. With my mom I could talk my way out of anything… out of a curfew, out of a mess left in the kitchen, but I could see that Chase was the king of his castle and was not going to stand for any lip. This was not at all good news for me. I began to feel my lower lip trembling and I knew the tears weren't far behind.
"That's really not fair," I told him. "I haven't even seen you in three years and now you suddenly show up and know what's best for me? This is my home. I don't want to leave. I can go live with my best friend if I can't live alone."
My dad stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. "Taylor, you have just suffered a tremendous loss. I can't allow you to stay in the house by yourself at such a delicate time with your mother's bloodsucking friends trawling around. Do you want me to lose custody of you? Because that's what will happen if I leave you here tonight. And I'm not going to be able to live with myself if I have to trust strangers to finish raising you. Now please, go pack a bag."
I stood up, stormed out of the living room and was howling uncontrollably by the time I got to my bedroom. I even slammed the door for the full effect; giving him a taste of every tantrum he had missed out on while he was packing concert halls and arenas throughout my entire childhood. Somehow, in between the tears, I managed to stuff my big rolling suitcase, the one that came with me to and from Treadwell, with underwear, clean jeans and t-shirts. By the time I was looking wildly around my room at all of my treasured possessions that couldn't possibly fit in my suitcase, I noticed my dad was standing in my doorway.
"You don't have to pack it all," he told me comfortingly. "We'll figure it out in the next few days."
"I can take care of myself," I said again, more for my own benefit than for his. "You don't even know me. But I can handle this – planning a funeral and taking care of the house."
My father sat down on my bed and looked at me with admiration. "I'm sure you can. But you're fifteen. You shouldn't have to."
I glanced around my room again at all of my stuffed animals, my Barbie collection, my ice skating costumes still hanging in my closet from elementary school. I had always assumed that all of my possessions would be right here in my sky blue bedroom forever.
"Taylor, look, I know I haven't been here for you," my dad began slowly. "Things between me and your mom, well, you know. From the day we split up, things were not good. But I'm asking you for your trust. Can we just take it day by day and see how things go?"
He looked pretty miserable sitting there on my bed, surrounded by my ratty old stuffed animals. My dog-eared vintage New Order poster hung above him, and he looked tired and aging and a little like a fashion victim with his goatee and earring. And for the first time in my whole life, I realized that my dad is just a man. Forget the rock star part, and he's just a guy with feelings.
So I agreed to take it day by day, and we locked up the house for the night.
CHAPTER 3
When I woke up the next morning in my father's Presidential Suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had no idea where I was for about ten minutes. I was in a ridiculously enormous bed and sun was streaming in through the window. When I pushed back the blankets and looked outside, I was gazing down upon an enormous crystalline swimming pool that was being cleaned by men in uniforms. Then I saw a woman who I recognized from the cover of People Magazine wearing a terry cloth cover-up sitting down on a deck chair and slathering sunscreen onto the shoulders of a little girl around the age of five. And then all of the events of the last three days came flooding back to me.
My father had been on the phone well into the night making arrangements. A wake for my mother was being held later that afternoon in Beverly Hills, and my father's extensive team of managers, lawyers and accountants had begun settling her estate. Before I had nodded off the night before I had come to understand vaguely that there wasn't much of my mother's life left to settle.
Our house on North Laurel was a rental. I don't know how I had been so ignorant of this; I had always thought of it as our house. But my father had been paying rent on it since I was a baby. And Mrs. Earle was our landlord. How had I never known? Why hadn't Mrs. Earle ever thrown my mother out for her rowdy partying? At any rate my father had arranged for a locksmith to change all the locks on the house that morning and install an alarm system to keep it secure until new tenants moved in.
My mother had no savings and no assets. She had a check that came once a month for the backup singing she had done on a Chevy commercial when I was in eighth grade. Every time the commercial aired anywhere in the world, she made a few pennies, but I would soon find out that her monthly liquor expenses were far more than that residual check. Part of what my father had been sending her in child support since I was a baby had been intended for a college savings account, and apparently no such account existed.
I certainly knew nothing about one.
My mother's parents were on a flight in from St. Paul. The concierge at the hotel was arranging for a black dress to be delivered to our suite for me to wear to the wake, as I didn't own anything formal (although simply black would not have been a problem as black turtlenecks and jeans were my personal uniform at school). Everything seemed to be moving so fast… and at some point I was going to have to make my way down to the pool to introduce myself for the first time to my father's wife and daughter.
There was a knock on the door to my room.
"Taylor, are you awake in there?"
It was my dad. I opened the door and found him carrying a leather-bound menu with a little tassel on it.
"Did you sleep well?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"You should come downstairs and eat. We have to be at the funeral home at two and the stylist will be here with some dresses for you to try on in an hour," my dad said.
A shower and a fresh pair of jeans later, I made my way down to the pool, where my dad had joined Jill to order breakfast. Now it's probably important to point
out that when my dad married Jill, I read about it in Expose Magazine just like everyone else in America. Jill was a fashion stylist on a shoot he had done for Rolling Stone, and they exchanged vows at the Fundu Lagoon resort in Zanzibar. My mother had noticed the cover of the magazine when we were standing in line at Vons to buy toilet paper and ice cream. She had snorted with disgust and read the article aloud in a dramatic British accent for my amusement.
Two years later, when I had met my dad for burgers near the airport, he had told me that he had invited me, and that my mother told him it was hardly possible for me to just drop out of my fifth grade classes and jet off to Africa. At the time I thought he was probably lying but realistically my mother kind of had a point. Since then, I've seen my dad and Jill on Extra, attending the American Music Awards and Grammys; I even got a complete tour of their mansion on the Jersey shore not far from where the Bon Jovis lived, courtesy of Cribs. But never once was I invited to visit in person.
"Hello, dear," Jill called to me, standing and pulling off her Gucci tinted sunglasses to get a better look at me. "Aren't you just the spitting image of your mother."
I sat down across the table from my dad, who was drinking some kind of fruit smoothie. Jill was very tall and tan, with streaked blond hair. She looked like the kind of woman who grew up riding horses and eating granola.
My mother, by comparison, was soft all over and had a lot of help from Clairol and Slimfast.
Jill looked me up and down, and with one expression made me feel like the world's biggest idiot for showing my face at the pool of this hotel wearing jeans bought on sale and a Red Sox t-shirt.
"I'm Jill," she said, formally introducing herself and extending a stiff hand as if I were on an interview for an internship.
"Taylor," I said in return, although I'm sure she knew my name already.
My half-sister, Jill's daughter, ran up to the table with wet hair and plastic floaters secured over her upper arms. "And this little monkey here is Kelsey."
Kelsey, who was skinny and tan and had my dad's shockingly green eyes, hid in my dad's arms and giggled at me.
"Go ahead, little girl. Say hi to Taylor. She's your big sister," my dad told her.
I had never previously given much thought to the notion of having a sibling. And yet here one was, my very own little sister. Half-sister.
"You should order something to eat," Jill instructed me. I had looked over the menu up in my room and had been a little daunted by the prices. Twenty dollars for French toast? Even a box of Munchkin donuts was a little bit of an extravagance for me and Mom.
"Jill is very interested in raw food," my dad informed me, and I interpreted his statement as a casual warning that my selection would be judged. "She reads a lot about how food loses its nutritional value after it's been exposed to high temperatures."
"I was thinking that I'd like the Dutch Apple pancake," I said, throwing my dad's caution aside. I was starving.
"Oh, there are probably three thousand calories in that!" Jill exclaimed.
"Relax, honey. Taylor can have whatever she wants. She's had a rough couple of days," my dad said.
Only as I was practically licking the syrup off my plate did I wonder what Jill meant when she said that I looked just like my mom. How did Jill know what my mom looked like? Had they ever met? Was her comment intended a compliment or an insult?
I wish I could remember the details of my mother's wake, but the hours that we spent at the funeral home went by in a flash. My mother's parents appeared, gray-haired and well-dressed, and then disappeared. They appeared to be deep in a serious discussion with my father, and my mind wandered toward the possibility of having to live with them in Minnesota. Many of my mother's friends appeared, knelt at her coffin and wept, and then left to go to happy hour at Boardner's bar in Hollywood.
I plucked an orchid off an arrangement and sat on an overstuffed couch, thanking passersby for coming and assuring everyone that I was OK. I was uncomfortable in the itchy Zac Posen black shift that Jill had selected for me back at the hotel. I had told her more than once, when trying on the dresses delivered by the hotel concierge, that my style at school was very laid back. She matter-of-factly told me that whether I liked it or not I was going to have to start paying more attention to fashion.
The only big surprise of the afternoon was that Allison came with her parents and brother. Allison, wearing a black sundress I had never seen before, and her mom both rushed over to me while her dad shook hands with my dad. Todd lingered behind, mostly looking at the ground and seeming very uncomfortable, but looking insanely cute anyway. Todd had just graduated from high school a few weeks earlier. He was leaving for college in Connecticut in the fall and I had been harboring a secret hope for months since he had been accepted at UConn that he would drop in on me at Treadwell once we were both on the East Coast. Naturally I could not share this hope with Allison, as she found my crush on her brother totally disgusting.
"Oh my god, Taylor," Allison said over and over, her eyes brimming over with tears. "I can't believe this is happening to you."
"It's all right," I found myself saying repeatedly, even though I didn't believe myself.
"You know, Taylor, anything you need, all you have to do is ask," Allison's mom said. Allison's mom went to church daily and wouldn't let Allison wear makeup. She drove an ugly minivan and taught yoga part-time. Allison often complained about how old-fashioned her mom was but I knew she would never have traded hers for mine.
"What's going to happen to you now?" Allison asked.
"I want to stay here until school starts," I said. I hadn't completely given myself over to the possibility of spending the summer with my dad. September seemed impossibly far off in the future. "I don't know if my dad's going to let me, though."
"Well, it would be best for you to be with people who care about you," Allison's mother told me, stroking my arm. At first I was comforted by this statement, because I thought she was providing me with what I wanted more than anything that evening: an invitation to move in with them for the summer. But when I looked up at Allison's mom for confirmation that my worries could finally end, I realized that she was implying that I would be best off with my dad.
Todd stepped up and his mouth twisted into a frown when his eyes met mine. "Sorry about your mom, Taylor," he said. His voice sounded kind of gravelly. Todd had Allison's huge, heavy-lidded blue eyes but had a slightly noticeable scar over his lip from cleft palate surgery he had as a baby. He was planning on majoring in International Relations in college. I pretty much thought he was the cutest, smartest, funniest boy ever. And totally unattainable, as to him I was just his dumb kid sister's pesky friend.
"Thanks," I mumbled, trying not to cry.
He gave me an awkward hug and pecked me on the cheek.
I tried not to be delighted to get a kiss on the cheek from him. I noticed Allison glare at him. It's totally wrong to be thinking about cute boys at your mom's wake but I couldn't help but be flattered that he had come with the family when I am sure he had a million other things he would have wanted to do that afternoon. Had my mom been alive to do so, she would have teased me.
Finally, as it began to get late, my father informed me that they were going to close the casket. It was my last chance to say goodbye to my mother. He and Jill agreed to step outside the viewing room to grant me a moment of privacy with her. I had avoided approaching the casket for the entire five hours of the wake, not wanting to see my mother's lifeless, waxy face. Seeing her face motionless was going to confirm for me that she was really and truly gone.
I knelt down before the casket, a little freaked out by how eerily quiet the room had become since all of the whispering guests left. The air conditioning had turned the room's temperature so low that I had goose bumps. My mother's body had been dressed in a silky navy blue dress that she often wore to auditions several years ago, back when she still was trying to get a regular gig on a soap opera. The dress was somewhat professional, and I reme
mbered how I liked to see her wear it when she left the house because it made her look like she had a real job, like a secretary or paralegal. She was also wearing a pearl necklace and pearl earrings, and I supposed that it had been Julia who had rummaged through her closet in search of an appropriate burial outfit.
My mother's lips were fixed in a strange semi-smile, and painted with a shimmery shade of pink lipstick that she never would have worn had she been alive. Her skin had been layered heavily with thick foundation, and her hair had been curled and fanned out across the silk pillow on which her head had been laid. I wanted to both scream at her for being so irresponsible to leave me like this, and cry because I missed her. But the tears wouldn't come, and I couldn't formulate a logical statement in my head. I had never been so close to a dead body before.
I had been hoping that I would at least sense her presence in the room with me. But my mother was gone, long gone, and I was waiting for a response from something that could not possibly give me one. I was afraid to even touch her face.
I took an orchid, dyed orange, from the enormous arrangement next to my mother's casket, placed it in my pocketbook, and left. I would say goodbye to my mother some other time, in some other place, but not there.
CHAPTER 4
"I totally saw you on Access Hollywood!"
"Shut up," I replied. I was stretched out on a deck chair poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel six days after my mother's funeral, and could see Brice Norris, the lead singer of Sigma, one of Allison's favorite bands, eating lunch with someone who appeared to be a reporter at the Polo Lounge a few feet away.
The Rock Star's Daughter (The Treadwell Academy Novels) Page 3