Tanya realized that even though she worked side by side with Maria, she didn’t know much about her background, and she wondered where her dark skin came from. Spain? Jamaica? Mexico? She didn’t have an accent at all, so maybe her parents immigrated, but all of a sudden Tanya wanted to know. She wanted to know where Maria was born, what her family was like, what she dreamed of when she was a little girl…
When Maria finished the song, Tanya said, “That was beautiful.”
They drank some more wine and Emma yawned. “I need to call it a night, girls.”
“Me too,” said Cathy. “Don’t forget to be sure that fire is out.”
“We’ll take care of it,” said Tanya.
When they were alone, Tanya asked the questions she suddenly had such a strong desire to know the answers to. She moved a little closer to Maria and they found themselves talking about everything: their backgrounds, their likes and dislikes, their dreams, their nightmares.
The bookstore was always so busy, they’d never really had a chance to just spend time alone. Customers were always demanding their time and when there was the odd quiet, Emma was always there.
Soon, the third bottle of wine was finished.
Tanya reached out and took Maria’s hand in her own. Her skin felt so soft and wonderful. It’d been so long since she’d touched another girl’s hand and felt her own hand being squeezed.
Sigh…
“Maria,” whispered Tanya.
Maria was staring at her, as if she was afraid to move. Tanya knew she had to be in control. She leaned in and kissed Maria lightly on the lips. She pulled back a bit and then kissed her again.
She felt Maria kissing her back. Tanya opened her lips and found Maria’s tongue with her own.
God, that feels so nice.
They kissed slowly, tasting every bit of each other’s mouth.
Then Maria snapped her head back. “Oh, God!”
Tanya felt like she’d been hit by a brick. “What’s wrong?”
“We can’t do this! Oh, God, what was I thinking! I’m not a — I’m not like that. I can’t — ”
“It’s okay. It was just a little kiss.”
“No, it was more than that. You wanted more. I know you did. You wanted to make love.”
Tanya felt ashamed, like she had all those years ago in high school when her friends found out she was gay.
Maria stood and backed away. “You used me. It’s so humiliating. God, it’s so… you’re evil.”
“But — ”
Tanya couldn’t reply. She wouldn’t have known what to say but even if she did, Maria had walked off and was in the tent with Emma. She was crying.
She poked at the fire and wondered what just happened. After an hour, she put the fire out and went to the other tent, climbing into her sleeping bag next to Cathy.
Cathy - The Amazon
Cathy Jameson was lying in her sleeping bag when she heard Maria crying in the other tent, and she knew the wine she’d started flowing had done its job. She didn’t have a lot of sympathy for Maria. Everyone had free will to do whatever they wished.
She’d learned that the hard way.
Cathy had been born in Missouri and had a rough childhood. Her mom and dad were both drunks. When good old dad had a tough day, he liked to take it out on Cathy. Her whole life, she’d been told later, had been forged from that childhood sexual abuse. The counselors always called it that: abuse. They never called it what she knew it was: rape. Her father would come to her in the middle of the night and fuck her, not caring how much it hurt, not giving a damn how it made her feel. He’d just fuck her till he came and then he’d leave her to crawl into a fetal ball and cry.
When she hit fourteen, she ran away and learned to live on the streets. She put out for money and found the easy path to drugs that would take the bad memories away. She realized she liked to feel pain, would take tricks where the john wanted to punish her. By feeling the pain, at least she was feeling something.
In the summer, she lived in Charing Park, sleeping on benches.
“Home,” she’d say, when she lay down on the bench each night.
She was sitting there one day when a man sat beside her. She forced a smile in case he could be a new customer. He wore a business suit and was drinking a coffee. He tossed some bread crumbs to the pigeons nearby.
“You know, you don’t have to live like this,” he said.
He didn’t look at her, just kept tossing bread to the birds. She looked in the other direction and didn’t reply.
“You’re so young. There’s so much out there for you. Life isn’t a dress rehearsal, miss. This is it. Don’t waste your life. You don’t have to live like this.”
Then he got up and walked away.
Cathy dismissed him. Pfft! What does he think he knows about me? I don’t need his fucking advice.
But try as she might, she couldn’t get him out of her mind for the rest of the day.
The next morning, he came back and sat on the bench beside her again just as she was waking up.
“Morning.”
He had black hair, dark skin, nice build.
“You said I didn’t have to live like this. What did you mean?”
He looked at her with gorgeous brown eyes. She couldn’t help but feel he could see into her soul, and the force of his stare locked her eyes right back at him.
“I meant exactly what I said. You don’t have to live like this.”
Cathy somehow found the will to pull her stare away from his eyes. It’s just words. He has no way to help me.
Then the pain of her childhood rushed over her like a tidal wave and a vision of her future hit her: she’d be forty years old, staring zombie-like as she tried to find some new customer to pay her for a quick fuck or blow job. Her face would be scored with deep lines and her soul dead. She knew her body would soon follow.
Tears fell from her eyes.
Then he said it: “Let me help you.”
“How?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but he just nodded and said his name was Dan. He opened up his home to her. He showed her a spare room to live in. She knew he’d want sex in return, but she didn’t care. She’d fucked a thousand men by now and all it meant was that she could buy some cigarettes with the money.
But he didn’t want sex.
He didn’t want anything at all.
He took care of her. He bought her clothes and fed her. There was only one condition. He made her promise to go back to school and work hard. “If I find you back on drugs, even once, you’re gone.”
Somehow she did it. She stayed off the drugs and she started back at school, knowing this was the one chance she might have to pull herself out of the cesspool she’d been living in.
About a month passed before she asked Dan, “So, you just go around saving people like me?”
“Nope. You’re the first one.”
“Why me?”
“I was married for ten years. She was my childhood sweetheart, and we always felt we were destined to be married. Her name was Elizabeth, and she wanted children more than anything in the world. From the day we started dating, we knew we would have children. Maybe lots. I knew she needed that to make her happy, to be complete.”
Dan and Cathy were sitting at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. He sipped a cup of coffee and seemed to stare into his own past.
“Turns out I’m sterile. Elizabeth and I were both shocked. Nobody could ever tell me why, but my sperm count was close to zero. No way I’d be having children. We could adopt or do something like artificial insemination…”
“But she didn’t want that?”
“She was determined.” He stared at Cathy and sighed in resignation. “I’ve been alone ever since.”
A couple of minutes passed before he continued. “When I saw you on that bench, it felt like I was transported back to those days when I desperately wanted my own kids and what a shame it was that you were just wasting away. I had this sudd
en urge to help. That’s it.”
“Oh.”
Cathy still had hard days staying clean from the drugs, but she was determined to try to repay Dan for saving her, and the only way she knew to do that was for her to truly turn her life around.
One day she found a camcorder in the hall closet. Dan said he’d bought it back when he was with Elizabeth and they had so many plans for the future.
The camcorder felt like silk in her hands, and she knew then what she wanted to do with her life.
Cathy stared at the roof of the tent. Maria had stopped sobbing and Tanya had come into her tent.
“You okay?” asked Cathy.
“Sure. Just tired.”
“Did you want to talk about it? Off the record?” Cathy had no illusions of any chat truly being off the record, but Tanya didn’t know that.
“Maybe in the morning,” she said.
Ten minutes later, Cathy heard her quiet even breaths. She was asleep.
Chapter 16: Production
Cynthia - Los Angeles
Cynthia Wright had always enjoyed living alone. Her apartment was furnished with brown leather furniture and stainless steel appliances. She had a king-sized bed that she could sprawl across and a Jacuzzi that could fit two people even though she’d never invited anybody to join her.
Not even Rick.
Rick had left a few touches. He kept a small shaving kit on a shelf in the medicine cabinet and he kept a couple of clean T-shirts in a corner of one dresser drawer. That was it. Cynthia had never allowed him to encroach on her space in any other way and that was how she liked it.
At least she’d always thought so. Even when she’d had the first bout of leukemia, she’d never regretted living alone. Maybe that was because she hadn’t expected a brush with death. Now that she knew the dark messenger would come for her, too, there were times when she crawled into bed at night when she thought it might be nice to have somebody there when she woke.
Tonight was one of those nights. She’d gone to bed at 12:45, after reviewing the most recent dailies. Something hadn’t seemed right with the day’s events on the show, but she decided not to dwell on that. She blinked away a tear and realized she wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep easily. The silky brown sheets felt good on her arms and legs, but when she tried to take a deep breath and just let herself fall down the rabbit hole to sleep, the pain in her leg called to her.
Scavenger Hunt was only ten days into production. Less than two weeks of the eight-week run and here she was off her game.
Hell, she was off her whole fucking life.
The throbbing pain wouldn’t stop, no matter which way she turned.
Shit, she thought. Not now.
“Rick,” she called. She did it mostly to prove she could sound normal. He wasn’t in her apartment. She assumed he was still at the studio where she left him. These days, their roles almost seemed reversed, with him being the one with the greater stamina.
Pain shot through her body, and she couldn’t stop herself from crying out.
“God, it’s getting so much worse…”
The shooting pain subsided a bit but the throbbing pain she’d been feeling the past couple of days was there as much as ever.
Sixteen months earlier, she’d called Rick to get her to the hospital. She needed to be admitted again, but she knew she couldn’t rely on him. The show needed him now.
Maybe she could hold out. Maybe the relentless call of death would hold out just another couple of months.
Sure and maybe I’ll just teleport over to the studio in the morning, she thought.
“Stop thinking about it,” she admonished herself. “That never does any good.”
But she couldn’t help it. The pain called to her like a forsaken lover and she reached to her thigh to try to make peace with it. That only made the pain seem worse and another lightning bolt screamed through her body, twisting her with pain.
“Ohhh…”
She found herself hitting her thigh, pounding the pain, trying to overcome the agony by brute force. It only served to use up the little strength she had. She collapsed on the bed and cried.
The night only got worse and finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. This time, instead of calling Rick, she called her neighbor, a woman named Ingrid, who she barely knew. About all she knew about Ingrid was that she was a lonely old woman who cherished privacy; Cynthia knew she could trust her.
Ingrid arranged the ambulance to take her to Cedars Sinai. As Cynthia was being lifted onto the stretcher, she felt in her heart that she was leaving her beloved apartment for the last time.
Cynthia - Cedars Sinai Hospital
“Your partner is here,” said Dr. Woolings.
“He can wait,” Cynthia said.
She’d woken in less pain. Thank God for whatever was in the IV.
She’d fainted from the agony in the ambulance. During the rest of the night, she’d drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes seeing doctors and sometimes just seeing an empty hospital room. Of course she had a private room and she knew that the outside world would never know she was there. Only Rick would be called. She wondered how long he’d been waiting.
Part of her didn’t care. Not about him, and not about the show.
That shocked her. How could she have lost the drive to make the best show ever? Scavenger was her holy grail, her life’s crowning achievement. Now…
Now it was hard to think.
“What’s the story?” she asked.
“Well, you have a fever of 103,” said a doctor she didn’t recognize. “It seems you’ve had a couple of hallucinations. You told the EMTs in the ambulance that a tiger was biting your leg.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“It was hard for us to find a vein to draw blood from. You’re very weak and your systems aren’t cooperating.”
Cynthia stared at him. He was younger than her, maybe forty, and for one of the first times in her life she felt old. More to the point, she felt like death was nearby, circling her. Maybe that’s the image that inspired her comments about a tiger.
“What else?”
“Your gums are bleeding. Your tissues are weak. We’re starting you on chemo later today. How’s the pain?”
“It’s okay with whatever you’re giving me. I can take it.”
“Do you know you’re slurring your words?”
The doctor seemed to become thin and then fat. She blinked to try to get him back into focus.
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
He hesitated before answering, which was all the answer she needed.
“We’re going to do our best to make that not happen,” he finally said. “But, you’ve been hiding this and it’s very, very serious.”
When Cynthia was ready to have Rick visit, he came in and immediately took her hand. He was shocked at how she looked.
He fake smiled at her, not wanting her to know how his gut was turning inside. It’d only been twelve hours since he’d seen her, but she was like a totally different person. Her normally bright eyes were glazed over and dull. Her cheeks seemed to have sunk, but that couldn’t be possible, could it?
Cynthia had always commanded attention, had always controlled the agenda in all circumstances. She routinely managed multi-million dollar projects with only her instincts and intellect to guide her. Now, she looked like she couldn’t control a goldfish bowl.
“You’re going to beat this again,” he said. “You did it once, and you can do it again.”
She nodded and seemed to try to smile. As Rick held her hand, she barely squeezed back.
“They tell me I have to brush my teeth with a sponge because I could bleed so much.”
“You’re going to recover, Cyn.”
“And they say I saw a lion or something. I don’t know how that could be. Maybe I was thinking of the show. The Serengeti.”
“I’m sure that’s it.”
Cynthia opened her eyes wide. “Don’t fucking patronize me,” she snapped. “I’m not dead yet.”
“Sorry. I’m not good at this.”
“Who is? What’s happening on the fucking other side of the world?”
She let go of Rick’s hand and seemed to hug herself.
“Brittany is going to town with Steve. They’re still screwing while Carlos and Fernando are on the top of the cliff rounding up an Atlantic puffin. The audience is going to love it. I think Steve’s pretty disgusted with her but you made the right call for him to seduce her. She’d fuck anything that had a dick. You had her nailed from day one.”
Cynthia nodded.
“We’re still waiting for Maria’s reaction when she gets up. When we gave them that wine, it was perfect. Tanya just needed a bit of encouragement to go after her. That’s going to really go over well. The kiss and then Maria’s reaction, especially.”
Cynthia licked her lips and said, “Tasted like chocolate.”
“What?”
“My lips taste like chocolate.”
Rick couldn’t help himself. He stared at her, not knowing what to say.
Cynthia closed her eyes. “Will you come to my place tonight? I really want you. It’s been too long.”
Then she started to cry, without making a sound. Tears washed down her face and Rick watched, as if she were an actress in a silent movie.
A nurse came into the room. “Maybe you should go now,” she whispered.
Cynthia - Eight Months Earlier
The second meeting with the Reality TV executives took place in Cynthia’s office. It was two days after she and Rick had pitched Scavenger Hunt to them. She knew their lawyers had spent the night reviewing the detailed contract Rick had left with them.
She knew that Carlton Ellsindale and Jayson Smeele rarely went to a producer’s office. It was always the show runner who went to see them. Not this time. Cynthia wanted them to know who was boss from day one.
“Welcome,” she said. She gave them her best plastic smile and saw theirs returned. “It’s not as fancy as your house, but we like it.”
Scavenger Hunt Page 14