by Lexi Whitlow
“Oh shit... oh shit… oh shit,” Donaldson mumbles, his voice warbling with terror.
“Be cool,” I say, hearing my own voice like it’s coming from some distant place. “Lower your weapon,” I tell Donaldson. “Slowly.”
I lower mine, raising my hand, palm up toward the boy. I tell him we’re not going to hurt him, but I know he can’t understand me. I motion toward Ransom’s lifeless body on the floor, pointing at him, trying to show the boy I just need to get him, and we’ll go.
“Two minutes,” Pegram shouts over the coms. “Donaldson. Vaughn. Where the fuck are you?!”
“Lieutenant, we have an issue,” I say calmly. “We’ve located Ransom. Condition unknown. He’s not conscious.”
“Get him and get out,” Pegram insists.
“Not that easy,” I reply coolly. “We’re in a bomb factory, with a kid holding a detonator. Trying to negotiate extraction now. Give us a few minutes. If things go boom, go home without us.”
“Fuck,” Pegram says. “Fuck!”
“Yes Sir,” I reply, noting to myself that Pegram always did have a firm command of the obvious.
I drop to my knees so I’m the same height as the boy, keeping my gloved palms open toward him. I inch my way across the floor toward Ransom while Donaldson hyperventilates behind me.
“Be cool, Donaldson,” I whisper. “Breathe. Don’t scare the kid.”
The boy watches me while gripping the device in his fist, his knuckles white, his whole body shaking with fear. He probably watched Ransom kill everyone in this room, probably his father or brothers. If he survives, he’ll grow up to hate Americans as much as they did. He’ll want to make more bombs to blow us up with.
Who could blame him?
I reach Ransom, getting only near enough to clip a tethered carbineer onto the webbing of his vest. Once that’s done I move back on my knees as quickly as I dare, clipping the other end of the tether to my belt.
“Get out Donaldson,” I say. “Cover me.”
With the kid’s eyes still locked on mine, I get to my feet and start reeling Ransom’s body across the floor toward me. His dead weight slides through blood and debris over the concrete, leaving a gruesome trail. As soon as he’s close enough for me to get a grip on his vest, I haul him and me both backwards through the open doorway and out into the hall.
“Close the god damned door!” I shout at Donaldson as I heft Ransom onto my shoulders. “Cover me. Let’s go!”
I haul ass with damn near two hundred pounds of dead weight on my back, toward the pick-up. One chopper has already dusted out. One remains, kicking up a roiling, red cloud of Syrian dirt.
“Come on! Come on! Come on!” six guys all shout at once over the coms.
“We’re taking fire,” one of the pilots says calmly. “How about you ladies pick up your pace?”
I’m fifteen feet from the helicopter when I feel the ground beneath me rumble. The air moves past my ears with a dull roar. I look up and see the helicopter tip to its side, then pull up hard. Everything slows down into a surreal display of stop-frame animation.
The last thing I’m conscious of is debris flying past me like a tornado has touched down. Boards, bricks, shards of metal and glass, move like missiles past my peripheral vision.
Something stings the back of my legs. I hear Donaldson make a noise that sounds like all the air leaving him at once. And then—nothing. Nothing at all.
Nothing until the dreams come.
Dreams of a girl with fiery red hair and icy blue eyes, her heat like lava, enveloping me. Her voice ringing in my ear like the tinkling of small bells. Her fingers dancing against my skin, playing me like an instrument she mastered long ago.
Winter… my favorite season.
Chapter 4
Winter
“I’m sorry Winter, the decision is final. It isn’t my call. The agency has decided to move in a different direction.”
I hear Ella’s words, but I can’t believe them. The agency loved my work, and when we went over sales figures, they said my photos were the most popular in the entire line.
I also can’t believe it, because this is the same conversation I’ve had three times this week. The last art director I spoke with used almost the exact same line. All my clients are going away. The work is drying up. It was all going so well and now it’s just… gone.
Suspicious.
My father offered me some projects with his studio. I guess I could take those to tide me over until things pick up again. The work there is banal and routine, with no creativity or expression required, and the environment of the place is downright toxic, but I have to do something.
The idea of going to work for my father is enough to make me queasy. It turns my stomach. I’ve been trying to get out from under his control since grade school, but he always manages to reel me back in. Especially when he thinks I’m out in the world exposing myself to things he doesn’t think I should see.
My father dropped by my studio unannounced last week. I had some of the digital prints from the SEAL calendar shoot hanging up on the walls. He took one look at my work and his eyes went narrow. He crossed his arms and scowled. The only thing he said was “So this is how you’re spending your time now, producing pornography.”
It’s not pornography, not by a long shot. But it’s pointless arguing points of fact with my father. Bill Addison is the first and last word on all matters of good and evil, right and wrong, or who is going to hell in a hand basket. He’s the worst kind of born-again zealot. He came late to the party, having lived the first half of his life in a coked-out blaze of womanizing and general debauchery. When he had his first heart-attack, the real narcissism kicked in. He realized that it was entirely possible that he could die, and the world would keep going on without him.
That idea was so disturbing, he took up religion (because it conveniently promises immortality.) Since then he’s been making up for lost time, legislating on everybody’s sins, forcing everyone in his sphere onto the straight and narrow path toward the pearly gates.
My problem is the straight and narrow is boring, and death doesn’t scare me. I want to live.
Some days I wish I’d been born into a different family with normal parents.
I wish I’d been born with a mom who put bandaids on my knees when I fell, a dad who took me fishing in the summer.
But you can’t have something that never existed.
Normal parents don’t hang out with celebrities, don’t send their kids to summer camp in Switzerland, and don’t pay half a million dollars for their kid to go to a private art school in New York City to study photography.
I guess there’s a benefit to that, even if my father is a narcissistic, controlling sociopath.
Unfortunately, I’m probably lot more like my father than I’m willing to admit, and that’s depressing. I think about my life sometimes, and it feels empty—just like his.
I look over at the wall filled with prints of the SEAL named Gates. I can’t get Gates out of my head. He was so unexpected. He’s nothing like any of the other guys I worked with on the SEAL or the Force Recon photoshoot. The rest were all arrogant pricks, full of themselves. Gates was different. And—good lord—he was amazing in bed. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like him.
I shouldn’t have ditched him like I did. I was so freaked out. I woke up with the dawn light just starting to brighten the room, and found him sleeping beside me, looking like a vision from someone else’s perfect life. I knew if I stayed, things would be much more complicated.
And I don’t do complicated, not in my life.
I should have stayed.
Chapter 5
Winter
Six Weeks Later
My father stares down at the prints spread out over his desk. They’re stills from a film shoot in production with the studio: a drama about a kid with cancer who is visited by an angel during her chemotherapy treatments. The angel tells her if she just believes hard enough, she won�
��t need chemo, that God will cure her. There’s stuff in there about how if she does die, it’s because she and her family had sinned.
I don’t have too much trouble with the first part—but the second frustrates me. It makes me uncomfortable in a visceral way. People respect my father. They look up to the messages he sends to the public. And a message where a sick woman is blamed doesn’t feel right to me.
This is the kind of story my father sells to the public. They eat it up like ice cream on a hot Sunday afternoon. It’s made him wealthy and one of the leading producers in Hollywood.
“The actors are all stiff,” my father says, pointing at the film’s two stars. “They look like scarecrows on an expensive soundstage.”
That’s because they are stiff. They’re terrible actors. They’re both miserably self-conscious, lacking any theatrical skill whatsoever.
He waves his hand. “They’ll do,” he says dismissively. “But next time, try to catch a little more animation. For heaven’s sake Winter, didn’t they teach you anything about working with talent in that expensive art school you went to? I didn’t go to college at all, and I could get more natural looking photos.”
“Um,” I start. I never quite know what to say around my father.
“It was a rough day on set,” the director says, attempting to come to my rescue. “We were behind schedule and everyone was a little tense. Maybe next week, when we’re on location, it’ll be a more relaxed and we can try again.”
My father waves off the notion. “We’ll deal with these. Winter needs to learn that when she does sub-par work, it’s going to be seen by more than just us. It’s a hard lesson, but necessary. Send ‘em out. Let the Hollywood press see what she’s capable of.”
I feel sick to my stomach.
I wouldn’t have taken this job, except there are no other jobs. No one will return my calls. I was down to doing head shots for wanna-be actors who don’t even have an agent yet. That work doesn’t pay the bills. It costs more to fill up the gas tank on the Range Rover than I earned in a week of scrambling for bottom-of-the-barrel work.
I’ve been nauseous all day, and biting my nails down to the quick. I knew my father was going to hate the photos. I hate the photos. I think my second-guessing and anxiety is why they’re so bad. My state of mind comes through in my work.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to throw up.
Back at home, I call my best friend Margot, just to have a shoulder to cry on. We’ve known one another since kindergarten. We’re both Palos Verdes brats with messed up parents and weirdly privileged lives. I think we may be the only two people in the world who get us. Margot reminds me to laugh instead of feeling sorry for myself. Right now, that’s a perspective I’m sorely in need of.
“Your dad is an ass,” Margot says, after I tell her what he said about my stills from the set. “And he’s mean. And he’s just trying to break your confidence, so you’ll feel like you have no other option than to work for him exclusively. You know you’re brilliant and talented. Don’t let that old fart steal your joy.”
“You’re right,” I say. But my father is supremely effective at stealing my joy and breaking my confidence.
“You know what you should do?” Margot says, her voice lilting up with mirth. “You need to print out big, beautiful, poster-sized prints of your best work, and line the walls of your apartment with them, just to remind yourself how good you are.”
That’s not a bad idea. Gates is easy to look at and recalling him always lifts my mood.
Stop thinking about him. It’s been so long since you’ve seen him. He doesn’t remember you.
“And put a gallery on your phone so when you father says horrible things about your work, you can look at the good stuff and know he’s full of shit.”
“Yeah, okay. You’re right. I’m good. I know I’m good. I just need a few reminders every now and then.”
“And one more thing,” Margot adds. “Just because there’s no work happening for you right now, doesn’t mean you can’t do your own thing. The world is full of beautiful people who want their pictures taken. Let your father pay you to do his shit work, and use the money to do great work on your own time.”
That’s a great idea.
This is why I love Margot. She lifts me up when I’m down.
“Now, let’s talk about me,” she says. “Me and my desire to go to Vegas this weekend and spend obscene amounts of my parent’s money on alcohol, partying, and pretty boys. Are you in?”
I laugh. “Yeah maybe. I’ll see if I can get away.”
“You know you can get away.”
“Fine. I guess that could be good.”
We make a plan for the upcoming weekend. A couple days in Vegas is just what I need to get my usually bubbly good mood back. I’ll run up a tab on my Amex that’ll make my father’s head spin. He wants me back in, he gets all of me. If I’m going to be forced to endure his abuse, I’m going to get the perks.
Another wave of nausea comes on. Maybe it’s the thought of continuing to work with my father. I wait a moment for the feeling to pass. But it doesn’t.
“Margot, I should go. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“What?! Do you have a stomach virus? Food poisoning? You know the last time you had sushi, you got awfully ill for two days. That place down by your apartment is no good. Super sketchy.”
She’s still talking while I catch my breath.
The nausea subsides a little.
“No… I don’t know. I’ve been queasy all day. Yesterday too. I don’t know what’s wrong. It comes and goes.”
There’s a long pause at the other end of the line. Margot gasps. “How long has it been since you had your period?”
“Shit,” I say. I scroll back through the calendar on my computer. One week. No, two weeks. Jesus. I thought I’d gotten my pack of birth control last month, but in all the crap with the jobs, I didn’t get it refilled.
“Winter. Talk to me.”
“I don’t think it’s that.”
“You were with that Navy SEAL guy a few weeks ago.”
“I… I… We didn’t plan it very well,” I say.
Margot takes a deep breath. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. I’ll run by the drug store and pick up a pregnancy test. Stay there.”
I cannot be pregnant. My father would murder me. He’d cut me off completely, or worse – make me move back home. This is a disaster.
When was my last period? I can’t remember. I keep scrolling through the calendar. I’m miserable at keeping up with these things. I have an app for it on my phone, but I haven’t logged anything in months. Oh, this can’t be happening.
My father will melt down if I’m pregnant. He’ll say I did it just to humiliate him. And then he’ll want to know who the father is, and if I tell him I don’t even know the guy’s last name, he’ll murder me all over again. He already thinks I’m a complete fuck-up. This will make me completely unredeemable in his eyes.
He’ll cut me off. I’ll be homeless, broke, unable to work because I’m useless and pregnant.
My life is over.
By the time Margot gets here, I’m a tangled-up ball of tender nerves, weeping and wringing my hands, howling at how I’ve screwed up my whole life.
“Get a hold of yourself, Winter,” she insists, taking me by my shoulders. “Just take a deep breath and remember there’s no problem these two heads can’t solve. You’re my best friend, and I’m not going anywhere. Chill your jets on the pity party. My mom and dad are crazy, but they love you. Even if you’re pregnant.”
That’s true. Margot’s folks are crazy, but in the crazy-good way. They smoke pot and throw wild parties, but they’re warm people. They do love me. If my father disowned me, they wouldn’t let me be homeless. I could probably move into the pool house.
“Take this,” Margot says, producing the small cardboard box from the drug store. “And follow the instructions.”
Oh god…
I look at th
e box, then up at her. “Come with me. Please?”
Margot rolls her eyes, then turns me around, pointing me toward the bathroom. I do the deed, tinkling on the little stick while she waits, arms crossed, smacking her chewing gum impatiently.
When I’ve just about soaked the thing, I lay it on the edge of the tub and we wait. And wait. It seems like forever, but it’s just minutes.
“Time’s up,” Margot says.
I can’t look.
She leans down, peering over my hunched shoulders.
“Girl…”