by Emma Dibdin
One minute there’s silence and the next there’s chaos, and I realize distantly that I must have made noise, loudly enough for everyone to come running.
Everything seems fuzzy and when Justin asks me, ‘What’s going on?’ I can’t speak, but by now Jerome has seen the same thing that I saw through the hedge, has muttered ‘Oh Jesus’ under his breath and raced out of sight, around the hedge and towards the gate to Skye’s patio, Clark a heartbeat behind him. Without thinking, I follow them and nobody stops me.
The gate hangs open, creaking just slightly against the force of the evening breeze, and the sun has slipped below the horizon leaving everything in a dusky soft focus. It’s almost too dark now to see the blood in the water, but on the tile it is unmistakable, pooling beneath her now she has been dragged fully out of the water as Jerome applies pressure to both her wrists. Beside her Clark looks folded in on himself, clutching her head in his hands, silent.
‘Is she—’ I ask, but no one is listening. Behind me I hear Peyton’s voice shuddering as she speaks to 911, trying not to give away Skye’s identity or Clark’s, telling them only that a nineteen-year-old has been hurt badly. Has hurt herself badly.
‘What are you doing?’ Tanya hisses at my side, her hand tight on my shoulder, dragging me away from the gate. I shake her off, but she’s right of course. This is not mine, this thing that I stumbled onto, however much it feels that way.
We stand in silence after that, not looking at each other, not looking back towards the gate, intruders in someone else’s home witnessing the worst moment that will ever take place here, a point of no return for this family. We should not be here, but by leaving we would only draw more attention to ourselves, and so we stay as still as possible. I pull out my phone on reflex, eager to look busy, but quickly realize that it looks even worse to be thumbing through Twitter at this moment and so my phone stays in my hand, held at my side like a talisman. I strain to hear the paramedics but they’re too far away, and when they whisk Skye and Clark and Jerome away in an ambulance we all look away, modestly.
‘You all need to go,’ Peyton says, waving us towards the house, but Tanya and Chloe are already emerging from the front door with their equipment in tow, ready to leave.
As we’re driving away the first news trucks pass us in the opposite direction, somehow already tipped off, racing to stake their spots outside Clark’s house.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ I ask, knowing that nobody has the answer, and that someone will try nevertheless.
‘Didn’t look good,’ Justin replies. ‘I heard one of the EMTs say he couldn’t get a pulse.’
‘God.’
‘She had to know there was press there, right? She did it on purpose,’ Chloe pipes up, gratingly loud.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘Her patio is pretty hidden away, I don’t think anybody would have noticed if I hadn’t—’
‘She was bleeding into the wraparound pool.’ Nick, the photographer, speaks for the first time. ‘Right? She was hoping to bleed enough for it to spread through the water all the way around to the back yard, fuck up the photographs.’
None of us can think of anything to say in response to this. It seems absurd, and yet not.
‘TMZ already has it,’ Justin says, lifting up his phone to show me the tweet. ‘Story Developing.’
‘Of course. They have a source at the hospital, probably more than one.’
I tune them out after this, only dimly aware that they’re still talking. My thoughts are consumed by Clark now, by the unimaginable pain he has to be feeling, by the possibility that he has already lost his daughter, suddenly and violently just like he lost his parents. There’s a physical ache in my chest at the thought of him, riding beside her in the ambulance and clutching her hand, maybe praying, maybe sobbing, maybe silent. There are so many images of him in my head in extremis, every emotional conclusion played out on-screen in one scene or another: his long-building mental breakdown in the third season of Loner, his violent temper in the gangster movie Fall Guy, his quiet vulnerability in every role. I want to be more present in my daughter’s life, he said to me, barely two hours ago, and now what?
‘What if they need me for something?’ I whisper to Justin.
‘Huh?’
‘Like, what if the police want to talk to me? Don’t they have to investigate, with something like this?’
‘I don’t think there’s a lot of ambiguity about what happened.’
Already I’m casting myself in a role within this drama – the key witness, the one who found her – but even if the cops get involved, I have nothing of value to tell them. I saw what everybody else saw, only first.
It takes us less time than I expect to reach the office, and once we’re all piled out onto the sidewalk the banality of everything sinks back into me, the impossibility of returning to normal now. The others all disperse too quickly, almost without a goodbye, with no acknowledgement of what we have all just witnessed.
I want to ask Justin to come and have a drink with me, but we haven’t yet reached that stage of colleague friendship where spending time together outside of work becomes a given, and I don’t have it in me to breach the divide now. So I smile and wave to him as he leaves to meet someone, probably his boyfriend, probably someone with whom he can share.
‘You gonna be all right?’ he asks, half-distracted.
‘For sure. Have a good night,’ I say with a smile. And he’s gone.
This is one of those rare times that I have not accounted for, the times on dark winter nights when my own solitude closes in and I haven’t buried myself in enough work to stave it off. I’m busy enough that my lack of true friends is easy to mask. There are always publicists to network with, acquaintances to sit with at screenings, events where I can get through the night on small talk. I made poor choices in friends when I first moved to LA; most of the fellow expats I knew back then have either switched coasts for New York or given up on the American Dream altogether, ground down by the striving and the competition and the endless hidden costs of everything.
I go to a bar alone, a generic hole in the wall with drinks too expensive to qualify as a dive, and of course the saga is already unfolding on the TV screen above the bar.
‘Tonight’s top story: Skye Conrad has been taken to hospital following a 911 call from her father’s residence. Early reports say she’s in critical condition following an apparent suicide attempt. We’ll have more updates on this story for you as they come in.’
But in lieu of more updates, the network goes into what already feels queasily like an obituary, describing Skye’s upbringing in Beverly Hills, her modelling stints for Urban Outfitters and American Eagle, her admission to USC after graduating high school, and then her decision – announced on social media – to drop out of college before the end of her freshman year, and take the time to ‘figure herself out’. The newscaster reads out her last Instagram post, sent at 3.31 a.m. – ‘Let’s just be wild while we’re young’, alongside a selfie of her and two models I dimly recognize, all of them making exaggerated kiss-faces at the camera. They look glossy and vicious and invincible.
‘Pretty awful, right?’ the barman says, watching me watch the TV. ‘Super nice guy.’
‘You know him?’
‘I do a little body double work.’ Of course he does. Everybody in LA has a second job in the industry. ‘Worked on The Tie-Breaker, so I got to meet him a few times. Super, super genuine.’
I nod. Everybody says the same, and my fifteen minutes with him today did nothing to make me inclined to disagree.
‘The daughter’s a hot mess, though,’ the barman continues, now addressing me and three other solo patrons who have all looked up from their drinks, thirsty for insider gossip. ‘I heard she OD’d.’
I don’t contradict him. Quietly, I reach into my bag and start my digital recorder, without entirely knowing why.
‘Did you ever meet her?’ I ask him.
‘Oh yeah,’ he
replies with a nasty laugh. ‘Yeah. I used to work at the Chateau doing valet parking, and everybody hated her. She literally threw her car keys at me, and she never tipped a cent. One time, she had a full meltdown in the bar and broke a bunch of glasses – and apparently, I wasn’t there, but apparently Clark showed up the next day and wrote a cheque for everything, personally apologized to the staff. She chilled out after that.’
‘Aren’t you meant to keep everything that happens at the Chateau a secret? Code of discretion, and all that?’ I ask mildly, with just enough of a smile to show that I’m not actually judging him. In fact, I’m taking notes on my phone in case I can use any of this on background one day.
‘Yeah, well, that’s why I used to work there.’
Once he finally gets called away to serve other customers, I scroll through Twitter to get a sense of people’s reactions: mostly sympathy, some snark. Several outlets are already running with ‘overdose’ in their headlines regardless of the truth, which leads me to wonder if somebody at the hospital is deliberately feeding out a false story. More likely, Skye’s reputation precedes her.
I stop breathing for a second when I see the headline. ‘Skye Conrad Dead At 19’, but it’s a screen grab of an article that has already been deleted. A mistake. Somebody at that outlet is getting fired, but was it really a mistake? Maybe that reporter had a source nobody else did.
I can’t stay asleep for more than an hour at a time that night, the alcohol and the anxiety jolting me, and so I refresh my feed at two and three and four and five in the morning, seeing if she is still breathing. I dream of her in a hospital bed, her hair a frantic halo, not a spot of blood anywhere on her.
By the next morning there is still no new news, only endless filler from outlets desperate to cash in on this opportunity for clicks – galleries showing Skye’s progression on the red carpet from adorable child to awkward tween to racoon-eyed socialite, articles speculating about her relationship with Brett Rickards – did he dump her? Did she cheat on him? Did he give her the drugs she overdosed on? I never thought I’d feel bad for Brett, but that was before I saw the photographs of him dashing from his car into the hospital late last night, trying to hide his face from the cameras, perhaps for privacy or perhaps because he is clearly crying. He’s even younger than her.
The office feels cold and far away to me when I arrive, but it’s not until I’m almost at my desk that I realize why it’s so empty. It’s Saturday. The bus took longer to come than usual, the roads were so much emptier than usual, but none of this registered with me. I have nowhere else to be, and so I end up staying to transcribe my interview with Clark, forcing myself to simply type without engaging with the memory. Partway through my cellphone rings, a number I don’t recognize. This has to be it. This has to be news.
‘Jessica, hi, it’s Jackie.’
‘Hi!’
‘Sorry to call you so early on a Saturday.’
‘No, it’s fine, I’m actually—’ I cut myself off before telling her I’m in the office. It’s weird. ‘Just doing some work anyway.’
‘I just wanted to touch base, obviously, and see how you’re doing.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’m sure yesterday must have been disturbing.’
‘Yeah, it was.’
‘Tanya spoke to the publicist this morning, and it doesn’t sound like there’s anything conclusive yet on how she’s doing.’
‘There was a lot of blood.’ I say this without realizing that I’m going to. ‘I don’t know if…’
I can’t remember whether the cuts on her wrists were vertical or horizontal. How could I forget a detail this important? Already the mental image I have of the scene has been corrupted, fading a little more every time I bring it to the surface. If the cuts were vertical, opening a vein, then surely she would not have survived the night.
Jackie sighs.
‘I can’t imagine how jarring that must have been. You’d already completed the interview before this happened, yes?’
‘Yeah, I did, but I got even less than twenty minutes. It was all a little messed up, we sort of started early and then finished early – the relationship between Clark and his publicist seemed a little off.’ Then, realizing that I sound like I’m making excuses, I add, ‘But I got some really great stuff. He was very open, he talked about his work, he brought up the divorce, some of his frustrations with the industry…’
‘That’s good.’ Jackie’s tone suggests otherwise. ‘But we’re in a delicate situation now given what’s happened. Tanya obviously didn’t push on this too much when she spoke with the publicist today, but it doesn’t sound likely that we can move forward. I want you to transcribe your interview and your notes, and then I want you to prepare for the very real possibility that we’ll have to spike the piece.’
‘Really?’ This isn’t a surprise, not rationally, but the idea of yesterday being all for nothing is impossible. ‘I mean, I understand. It’s just…’ I trail off, because there’s no way of saying ‘wasted opportunity’ in this situation without sounding monstrous.
‘I know it’s frustrating. But we can’t afford to look tasteless, or like we’re cashing in on tabloid gossip. It will seriously impact our reputation and our ability to get access in the future, and I just don’t see a version of this piece that wouldn’t look tacky, even if we just run it as a house gallery.’
‘What if I could get a follow-up with him?’
‘What?’
‘Obviously, if Skye survives. If she’s okay. What if I could get him to acknowledge it, incorporate it into the piece in some way?’
She is silent for a long beat.
‘What makes you think that’s a possibility?’
‘I don’t know. He talked about her during the interview, how he wanted to be more present in her life. He built this whole additional section on the house just so that she could have privacy.’
‘And she tried to kill herself there,’ Jackie says. ‘This is not a decor story any more. There’s no version of this that we can run on Nest.’
I keep forgetting what site I’m writing for.
‘Right. And it’s not like I can take this elsewhere, because—’
‘Because he granted the interview to us, and we own it,’ she interrupts, sharply.
‘Of course.’
‘Look, if you can persuade him to do a follow-up, let’s talk then.’ Every syllable laced with scepticism. ‘But for now, I would transcribe your interview, type up all your notes, and then try to forget about this for the weekend. Take a hike. Get some air. Take care of yourself. All right?’
She might be genuinely concerned, but it’s hard to tell beneath all the patronizing. I don’t even know what I’m arguing for – I don’t want to write this story for Nest. I don’t want to pad out Clark’s quotes with colour description of his house and quotes from Jerome about the finishings. I don’t know exactly what story I want to write, but that’s not it.
‘Okay. Thanks, Jackie.’
She is almost certainly right. Two realities co-exist in my mind now more or less harmoniously: one reality in which I’m delusional, an idiot attaching significance to an encounter Clark will already have forgotten, scarcely better than those red carpet fans who weep over a two-second glance from their favourite. The other reality is one in which Clark and I shared something, something genuine and rare that will endure, and that will force me back into his memory no matter what happens next.
During the endless bus ride home along Sunset, I choose the latter reality.
6
I need a new story.
This becomes clear to me three days after the interview, the Monday, when at four-forty in the afternoon it’s growing dark and I realize I have accomplished nothing. There are two galleries due up on the site tomorrow which I haven’t started. Everything since the canyon feels irrelevant, laughably so, but I only have three weeks left at Nest and I can’t afford to slip now. I need to use this as a springboard to something
else.
Skye will live. The cuts on her arms were horizontal, the blood loss severe but not fatal, and now a throng of reporters and paparazzi have set up permanent residence outside the hospital, accosting everyone who emerges on the off-chance that they know something or have seen something.
I saw him for the first time in pictures, emerging from the hospital on Saturday evening looking shattered, his eyes bloodshot and his gait hunched like he’d aged twenty years in as many hours. He seemed smaller, and though I loathed myself for it I couldn’t resist watching the twenty-seven-second video clip of him, lit up by camera flashes as he darted from the hospital doors alone, trying half-heartedly to shield his face. It was his ears that needed shielding as they peppered questions at him like rifle fire, trying to get a rise.
‘Clark! How’s Skye? Is she alive?’
‘Mr Conrad, was this a suicide attempt?’
‘Was it because of the divorce? Are you in touch with Carol?’
‘Any comment on the nude photo leak?’
This story has been around for weeks, as it turns out, but through some kind of wilful ignorance I had managed to avoid it until after that Friday, when I really began Googling Skye. There are supposedly nude pictures of Skye online, barred from publication by any legitimate outlet but still easily available for anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the internet’s darker corners. Pictures allegedly taken by Brett Rickards, the creep I actually let myself feel sorry for the other day. His team issued a denial, of course, but there’s no real doubt that it’s him. Given too much wealth and privilege, too young, he now sees women as just slightly less than human, as something to be consumed.