Between You and Me (26 page)

“I’m tired.”

“You ran a stop sign!”

“I’m fine. You’re fine.”

“Pull over!” I scream. He slams on the brakes.

“Fine! Fuck!”

My beaded clutch vibrates between us.

A few minutes later I
run past a bewildered Michelle, stretching awake on the couch. Upstairs Aaron is standing awkwardly over Kelsey in the far corner of their bathroom. He backs out of the way, and I crouch where she’s curled between the bidet and the wall, a towel clenched around her shivering shoulders. The top of her dress is undone under the terrycloth, its gold strings pooling between her legs.

“She just started hyperventilating.”

“Kelsey.” I look into her face, but she’s staring down, her eyes large O’s.

“I—I can’t do it. I can’t—”

“Okay. It’s okay. You don’t have to do anything,” I say, trying to reach her. Her teeth are chattering. I go to take her hand, but she jerks back, bracing her feet against the porcelain as if to burrow away from us through the marble.

“What happened?” I turn to Aaron as Finn comes to the door.

“I have no idea.” Aaron points at the bottle of milk on the counter. “She was pumping, and she started apologizing about making us leave, and I said it was nothing, and then—”

“What’s all this?” Michelle leans around Finn. “Kelsey?” Kelsey jerks her face up, her whole body tremoring. “Oh, she’s just drunk.”

“She’s not,” I say.

“She didn’t drink barely anything.” Aaron corrects Michelle. “A glass of wine, that’s all.”

“Kelsey.” Michelle grips the vanity and bends her knees. “You’re scaring your husband half to death. Is that what you want? What kind of welcome home is that?”

Kelsey grabs the bidet, twists her head, and heaves the last contents of her stomach into the porcelain.

“Tell me that’s not drunk.” Michelle
tsks
.

“I can’t.” Kelsey lifts her palm defensively, as if Michelle is about to
spit on her. “I can’t, please. Just go, Momma. I can’t have you here.” Kelsey’s voice thickens.

Michelle’s eyes narrow, and she spins to leave. “Your daughter fell asleep just fine, in case you’re wondering,” she calls over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Kelsey murmurs as I nudge Aaron forward to scoop her up in his arms.

“You’re welcome!” Michelle yells before we all hear the back door slam.

“We should call someone. A doctor,” Aaron says to us, the veins in his arms popping.

“I kinda agree.” Finn leans on the wall.

“No, baby, please, just lie down with me. Hold me. I’m freezing.”

Aaron carries her shivering into their dark bedroom, and that’s when I realize my own hands are shaking. I’m surprised by a rolling lightheadedness as my vision tunnels to a cone, my mouth drying as if I’ve opened it in front of an industrial fan.

“Now what?” Finn asks quietly.

I tuck my palms out of sight. “I need to stay in case the baby wakes up.”

Nodding, he follows me out to the hall. “It’s not like I hit the guy,” he begins again. “Nothing happened.”

“Finn, I can’t. Please.” As we descend I’m unsettled by the sensation that my feet aren’t making contact, as if with each step, I really drop. Holding the wall, I lead him to the guest room. I force myself to check that the front door is locked and security on and then shakily take the baby monitor from where Michelle left it on the coffee table.
It’s okay. She’s going to be okay. I’m going to be okay
. Back in the guest room, I curl away from Finn’s snoring and somehow, at some hour, pass out myself.

I come to, sweaty and
dehydrated, the patch in the skylight still an inky black. For once, the dream that woke me is gone entirely, like a wave, but in its wake—certainty.

I push off the covers, grab my phone and tread to the kitchen. “Hello?” my mother answers, sounding panicked.

“I don’t remember the accident.” I lean against the glass that looks over the pool.

“Logan, go back to sleep.”

“I don’t remember it,” I say emphatically.

“What have they been telling you?”

“I’m calling you.”

“I . . . you were spared.”

“The memory?” I ask, confused.

“He spared you. And that’s all that matters—”

“I don’t think there was a car accident,” I say before I realize I’m going to, before I realize I even think it.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

I hear the cicadas outside, and the rush of blood in my ears. “I think I am.”

She hangs up on me.

At the yard’s edge there’s a blue glow coming through the leaves. I listen to the whir of the AC and the faint gurgle of the pool filter, and realize it’s coming from the guesthouse. From Andy’s TVs. My mind trips back to the bathroom. To Kelsey.

Shit—the breast milk. Still sitting on the vanity.

Upstairs the light from the bathroom still spills onto the carpet. Kelsey, her dress unzipped, lies across the bed, asleep with her hand flung out for a garbage can Aaron holds. His back against the side of the bed, the jewelry box at his feet, he is wide awake.

Hours later I stir as
Jessie’s gurgles shoot the illuminated green dots up the monitor. Grabbing the guest bathrobe, I drop it in my pocket. I make a bottle and snuggle up to feed Jessie on one of the lounge chairs outside.

“You’re going to wake her?” I hear Kelsey hiss, and look behind me before realizing that her voice is emitting from the terry-cloth folds at my hip.

“I’m not going to just jet without saying good-bye,” Aaron whispers. “Dammit. Michelle’s already grabbed her.”

“You can’t go away again.”

“I have to get this album wrapped.”

“Why?” she asks plaintively.

“Why couldn’t you hang out last night?” he retorts.

“That’s just mean. I told you my boobs were—”

“The hell happened to you when we got back here, Kelsey?”

“I—I don’t know. It was a long day, with the shoot—maybe I ate something. It won’t happen again. You have to stay, you have to—”

“I told you, I’m not living off you. That’s not the father I’m gonna be.”

“You think I don’t see the pictures, Aaron?”

“I’m making connections, doing what I have to do. Some of us work at this. We didn’t have it all handed to us at sixteen.”

I inhale sharply.

“Fuck you. So, that means you don’t want to use my producers?” Kelsey’s voice grows brittle like Michelle’s. “Or drive my car, fly on my ticket, stay in my hotels? I mean, I wouldn’t want to
hand
anything to you.”

Jessie’s face scrunches to cry. Embarrassed, I fumble for the device.

“That’s what you think?” He sounds like she’s punched him in the gut.

“I’m just—”

“You’re just forgetting
you
called me.
You
proposed to me. If you really think that’s what I’m in this for, you can go fuck yourself.”

I find the off button and click it.

Following almost a whole month
of consoling her through Aaron’s terse texts, canceled Skype dates, and no homecoming in sight, I arrived at Kelsey’s this morning to find her in the living room, hovering on the edge of the couch with a tapping foot. She looked as if she’d been up for hours, but her mood was frenetically energized. She told me she’d had a brainstorm, that she needed to make a play like the one that got Aaron to fly to her in the first place. Then she passed off a manila envelope to hand-deliver. She was so eager for me to make the flight she’d booked that she didn’t want to slow to tell me anything more, even when I called to press her from the car.

“I don’t want to talk about it and lose my nerve, Logan, start second-guessing myself. Just go.”

I’m guessing it’s a ticket to meet her somewhere romantic. Maybe that island. She was talking about this the way she does when she gets one of her big video ideas, before the details have to be reality-tested by budgets and physics. I sense she has a half-sketched storyboard in her mind, including a drawing of my limo drive to south London.

At the studio, I’m told Aaron has moved to another facility, and we drive even farther into the labyrinth of municipal council estates.

“Sorry, can you repeat your name?” the voice requests as I stand by the rusting buzzer on the desolate street of brick row houses.

“Logan. Logan Wade. I’m Aaron’s wife’s assistant.”

“I guess you can come up . . . ” A skinny teenager is waiting as I huff to the top floor. “He’s in back.” I follow a curving warren of egg-crate-covered walls to a small room saturated with the aroma of cigarette butts floating in congealing coffee.

“Aaron?” I tentatively call, only to realize he has headphones on. I wave in front of him, and he leaps back, the taut cord jerking the headset.

“Shit.” He catches them before they hit the floor. “Hey!” His face lifting, he smooths his hair as he darts around me toward the hall.

“I’m—” I go to stop him. “No, I’m on my own.”

“Oh.” He slouches. “You, uh, here for work? I could’ve met you in town. You didn’t have to drag your ass all the way out here.”

“Where is everyone?” I can’t help but asking. “They told me you were shifted to this place?”

He drops back into the wheeling office chair. “Those assholes were totally useless.”

“The producers?”

“The label needed them for another gig, and I was just, like, see ya.”

“When?”

“Sometime after the single dropped.” He makes a little explosion sound and blows apart his hands with a feeble laugh.

“You’re finishing this alone?”

“Well, I’ve got Douglas out there. He can pick up smokes and
carry-out fish and chips like a fucking pro. Seriously, will.i.am could do no better. Dang, I’ve got to tell you, it’s nice to see a familiar face.”

“You, too,” I say automatically, covering my surprise that he seems to genuinely mean it. It’s been weeks since there’ve been any pictures of him going out. I guess no one wants to risk a contact case of public stink. “You look great,” I lie. His skin makes Kelsey’s look sun-kissed.

“How’re my girls?”

“Good. Missing you. I’m here to give you this, actually.” I whip out the envelope and hand it over my arm with flourish. “From my lady.”

“Nice.” He grins. “That’s cool of her. I just felt like I had to get this in better shape before we talked. You know, have something to share.” Taking it, he walks away from me the few feet the room will allow where I see he’s taped up photos of Jessie and Kelsey. There’s a picture of Kelsey getting coffee only two days ago. He eagerly rips into the manila, pulling out the document that doesn’t look like an itinerary.

“What is it?”

He hurls the papers onto the board, and grabs a pen. “Fuck.
Fuck!
” He throws it at the wall. “Do you have a pen?”

I dig into my bag and hand it to him. “Aaron, please, I honestly don’t know what it is. What is it?”

Seething, he scrawls across the bottom and flings the pages at me. “You won. All y’all.”

I clutch at them as they scatter across my chest, lifting one to read: “Petition for Divorce.” “Oh, my God—I’m sure she doesn’t mean this. She’s just hurt—”

He glares at me with black eyes. “She’s yours.”

It was only when I
checked in for my return flight hours later that I learned the seat next to me had been optimistically booked for Mr. Watts.

I dropped my bag into it and asked for a stiff drink. And then another.

She comes from the house to greet the car, hair done, Jessie in herarms,
the scent of her cinnamon rolls wafting out to greet me. When I emerge unaccompanied, her face collapses for a brief moment. “He’s coming.” She turns around, and I see the yellow rose brooch has been pinned to her ponytail. She returns to the kitchen and puts Jessie in her exersaucer.

“Kelsey, he’s really—that was just—I’m sorry, but
what
were you thinking?”

“He’ll see I want him with us or not at all. That I love him that much.” She ties her apron. “He’ll come.”

She bakes and checks her phone and refreshes her makeup and scans the driveway. Finally, after two full days of silence, she says she has to get out. At the corner coffee bar, I hang by the door with Jessie while Kelsey places her order. A guy in a rumpled suit jog-trots to the entrance with a singular look of purpose. I hold Jessie close as he passes. Then I see that he isn’t carrying a camera but an envelope that he hands to Kelsey.

We somehow get Kelsey calmly, expressionlessly into the car, as if, to onlookers, she was supposed to meet this man for this very exchange. He’s an old friend, bringing an expected document—a contract, maybe. Nothing going on here, folks, keep moving.

As the motorcycles escort us home we don’t rip it open. I grip the wheel, and she makes herself sing “Old MacDonald.”

We pass through the safety of the gates, and, obscured from the road, I immediately stop the car. She hands me the envelope with tremoring hands.

“It’s a countersuit,” I read quickly. “Petition.”

“What? What is he suing me for?”

“Divorce.” I puzzle, my eyes scanning down. “No.” I grab her wrist. “For Jessie.”

Part IV