Between You and Me (32 page)

He slides his ID in front of a box, and a door unclicks to a circular room awash in the same pastel-hued fabrics as the stones of the castle. Craig flips on a pink chandelier because the small windows let in minimal light. And are sealed shut—it is utterly airless.

“Make yourselves at home. I’ll just get the air conditioning going. Again, if we knew you were coming . . . Well, our castle is your castle! I’ll be back.” The door slams, startling Jessie. Her face scrunches red and then opens into a wail as Kelsey tugs the bottle from the bag. Jessie stops crying as she sees it.

“He didn’t put the cold pack in.” Kelsey holds the bottle to her cheek to check the temperature. “I don’t know when he packed it. I don’t know how long it’s been sitting out—”

“I’ll get some water from the sink, and we’ll make a fresh one.”

“It’s coming, baby, it’s coming,” Kelsey murmurs as I prop the bathroom door open with my foot so Jessie can keep it in her sight while Kelsey sways with her. “She hasn’t been like this in months. I don’t know what it is. Do you think she’s just too hot?” She stops in her tracks to twist her head and see what Andrea has written. “Teething? Teething,” she repeats as Andrea stares past her. “You hear that, Logan? Andrea thinks Jessie is teething. She is officially making note of the fact that I did not know that.”

“Okay, Kelsey, I’ll have it in one minute.” I splash my hand under the hot tap, waiting for the icy water to warm.

“It’s true. I didn’t expect her to be teething. I also didn’t expect her daddy to leave us. Or take her away from me. Or a judge who uses
TMZ like it’s documentation from God himself. Or my crazy fucking parents to call
me
crazy. I did not see myself standing here hovering over Fantasyland in an oven with the very important Princess Andrea who I have to pretend isn’t here. No, I didn’t see
this
being the way I realized my baby girl was teething.”

Andrea stands up. I turn off the sink and come out.

“She’s hot,” I say apologetically as Andrea roots in her purse. “We’re all just hot. She’s not angry—”

“Why would I be angry? Just because the whole world—and some people say that, but I get to really fucking mean it—the whole world thinks I’m a shit mother. A stupid bitch mother.” Kelsey tries to keep hold of a hysterical Jessie. “I would die for this baby, Andrea. I
am
dying for this baby. I don’t want to eat or sleep or sing. I don’t want to take air into my lungs. But I’m doing all of it. I’m getting through the day so I can get to see her, and I’ll take her any way I can. Even with you.”

Andrea fingers in three digits to her phone, and with an eye on both of us, she finally speaks. “Yes, my name is Andrea Salazar. I am a court-appointed social worker with the State of California, and I need to request an emergency removal.”

“What?” I cry as Kelsey’s arms tighten around her baby. “She’s just hot, and the photographers—”

“Yes, I can.” Andrea walks to the slim window and looks down. “Disneyland. The castle. There’s a VIP room—”

In three long steps, Kelsey grabs my arm and tosses me into the bathroom. She slams the door and locks it and then thrusts Jessie at me as she spins around, grabs a pink chair, and wedges it under the knob.

“Kelsey, what’re you doing? Open the door.”

“No, Logan.”

Andrea pounds from the other side. “Open up!”

“Kelsey, open the door.” I step forward.

“They’ll take Jessie,” she says frantically, looking around for something heavier to barricade us.

“Miss Wade, open up!”

She starts shoving the pink dresser from under the window.

“Come on, Kel.” I grab the chair.

“Logan,” she says, her voice slicing. “If you open that door, I swear on Jessie I will never talk to you again.”

The hot room rapidly feels dwarf-size, and I find my breath coming in pants. I drop onto the pink toilet lid with Jessie and dig around in the diaper bag for something for her to gnaw on. In a side pocket, I find three teethers. Nice of Aaron’s nanny to keep Kelsey updated.

“Miss Wade, the police are on their way—please open the door.”

“There,” she says as she pushes the dresser the final inch to brace the chair holding the knob. “We have diapers and formula enough for hours.”

“Kelsey,” I say, fanning the baby, my own panic pulsating in the confined space. “What’s the plan here?”

Kelsey opens her arms for Jessie, who quiets as soon as Kelsey gives her the teether. She lifts Jessie’s face over her shoulder and bounces.

“This is security, open the door!”
a man’s voice bellows.

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” She holds Jessie’s head, her eyes shut. She presses her face into Jessie’s little neck and takes a deep breath through her nose. “I’m never letting you go,” she whispers.

We hear that sound that’s become so familiar that I don’t even notice it until I notice it, like a refrigerator hum, the din of a crowd gathering below the parapet.

Then we hear the short siren bursts of police cars inching their way through that crowd, a bullhorned request to step back. Please step back.

“Kelsey, what do you want?” I ask again, my vision tunneling, the claustrophobia winning, my tremoring hands locked under me.

She looks up from the baby, her face so open, so gentle, as if we’re just home, as if we’re okay. “This.”

“I know. But we need to make a plan—”

THUD! The door shakes on its hinges.
“Anaheim PD, open up!”

Kelsey suddenly grabs me and pulls us under the skirt of the vanity. I cough from the dust as she tugs the curtain closed—

My brain splits—

“We were together,” I say urgently as the image from my dreams
fills in behind my eyes, Kelsy in her Pocahontas nightgown. “In the bathroom.”

Jessie starts to cry. “I’ve left the bottle,” Kelsey says. “Out there, I left it out there.” She peers through the skirt, seeing the stacked furniture jostling—THUD!

“Your dad was tearing the house apart.” The memory replays itself with cutting clarity. “Your mom pulled us into the bathtub.” I can hear the sound of Andy smashing Kelsey’s trophies against the door.

“Anaheim PD! Stand back!”

Kelsey’s eyes lock on mine, and I remember us trapped. She shook—shook uncontrollably as Andy had hurled his body over and over at the door. I could see the lock giving, hear the wood splinter.

“Sing, Kelsey,” Michelle had whispered. “Sing so he stops.”

“‘Stars shining bright above you,’” Kelsey choked out.

“Sing!”

“‘Night breezes seem to whisper I love you.’”

“Ms. Wade, we’re coming in on the count of ten!”

“You threw up,” I say. I had scrambled out of the tub to grab a towel.

Jessie screams. I dart my hand out for her bottle.

“Logan, no!” And I don’t know if it’s ten-year-old Kelsey in my memory or Kelsey with me now.

“Two, one!”

The Disney door bursts off its hinges, the cops rush in—the Wade door burst off its hinges—Andy grabbed me up and smashed me hard into the tile wall—I slid to the floor—my blood splattered the porcelain—“I’m sorry, oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” Andy had said, taking me in his arms. “I thought you were Kelsey.”

Part V
 

I halt my pacing on the hospital hallway’s linoleum because I sense, the way you do when someone across a crowd is staring at your back, that on the other side of this security door, a psychiatric patient is shuffling in rhythm with me, tuning into my movements and mirroring them.

I rest my hands on my aching hips and look up into the fluorescents until black spots float, making censorship dots over Andy’s and Michelle’s menacing faces in my memory. Now that it’s finally been unearthed, I can’t stop seeing that night compressed into a kaleidoscope of locks, curtains, eyes, towels, and blood. Once again, I raise my face to the small mesh window, peering to see if she’s among the gaunt figures in gowns that drip down shoulders like old candles—whoever’s moaning moans again.

I wish I could sit. But there are no chairs. Because no one is supposed to wait here.

“Logan!” Andy rounds the corner from the elevator landing. “Thank God.” Michelle comes into view over his shoulder, looking drained and small and, for the first time, unequal to her surroundings.

“We were so damn scared she was alone,” Andy says as he goes to the door.

“No, I was there.” I find my voice, anticipating Michelle’s demand for an explanation.

She looks around at the soiled gurneys waiting to be stripped, her sweater folded over her crossed hands. “Aaron called us to—”

“Don’t touch me!”
a man screams violently on the other side, and Michelle flinches.

“I can’t see her,” I say, watching Andy crane his head at the window.

He drops back on his heels. “Is this really—does she have to be in there?” he asks.

“She was committed by the time I got here, and no one will talk to me.”

“They’ll talk to
me
,” he says. But then he looks around helplessly as I had—there isn’t even a call button. “Dan’ll be here soon,” he sounds more hopeful than convinced. “He’ll get us back in front of the judge. He’ll fix this.” He catches Michelle’s wandering eye, and she nods.

“Today was all a huge mistake. I can testify. It was hot, and she got rattled by the observer—she got frustrated—” I’m distracted by Michelle absently touching a pile of sheets. “But she’s
not
crazy.”

“Thank you, Logan.” Andy turns away, placing both hands on the door, dropping his head, and I realize he’s crying. Soon someone on the other side meets him and matches him, their grief entwining as Michelle seats herself on the gurney and stares at the wall.

It takes two days for
Dan to get Kelsey a hearing. Andy’s been on the phone, accomplishing a transfer from Anaheim to Mount Sinai in L.A., pleading with anyone who can help, any celebrity who has donated to that hospital, any doctor who has a pet cause we can fund, but there is no upgrade from involuntary incarceration, no VIP area, no private anything. We have not seen her, do not know how she is, only that she’s been heavily sedated.

Under siege from the media, to the point where I don’t know how any of them are reporting a word over the grind of the generators, I’m effectively trapped in Kelsey’s house. I don’t answer when Finn calls, magically hoping he can sense that I grip the phone when I see his name, as if I were squeezing him tight to me. I can’t talk to him, because a reassuring explanation doesn’t exist. Michelle’s taken to the glider in Jessie’s room with her needlepoint, leaving me to watch as the dining table is cleared of Kelsey’s own optimistic career map and buried under a mound of legal files. And Andy’s so uncharacteristically quiet, so obviously
scared as he pores over them, that I override my need to confront him with my need to believe that despite all that’s happened, he has a plan, a strategy for making her okay.

When the car pulls up at the courthouse the morning of the hearing, GM and three colleagues form a human chain to allow our passage through the roiling sea of journalistic excrement.

Dan is waiting on the second floor, wordlessly holding open the door to the courtroom. It isn’t at all what I expected. A drab little chamber with water-stained ceiling tiles and only two rows of benches. We take the seats behind Dan.

“All rise. The honorable Judge Borenstein presiding.”

“Be seated.” She smooths her robes beneath her.

“Inmate entering!” the bailiff yells, and Kelsey shuffles in wearing a white jumpsuit that drapes her laceless sneakers. Her hair is pulled into a greasy ponytail, and her eyes are glassy. Andy purses his lips to keep from breaking.

The prosecution makes its case—that Kelsey is a danger to herself and others. That she should be kept indefinitely in a psychiatric facility. He is prepared to call the Anaheim police, Sage and everyone involved with the crash, the head of the Swedish F.C.C. even Aaron’s nanny, who apparently is now a foremost expert on Kelsey’s deficiencies as a mother.

Dan stands. “Your Honor, Ms. Wade has been through a tough time—”