Between You and Me (9 page)

The volume of the surf is at once turned up. I blink at the shimmering crests as they roar into the sand. We run down to where the icy water swells. Standing there with the lavender hem of her blanket swirling, the warming sun on my back, the sky stretching out seamlessly—it is almost the delivery on the invitation Delia made to me.

Before I know it, Kelsey has handed off her blanket and sliced headfirst into an oncoming wave. With an exhilarated shriek, she comes racing back out, wriggling her fingers for the cashmere. I wrap it around her, and she drops onto the beach with a sigh. “Fucking awesome.” She shakes her hair. “Aaron, I mean.”

I laugh, sitting beside her. “You were officially due.”

“Payment in full.” She pulls her hair to the side, untangling it from her K necklace, and squeezes it out, the water running down her arm. “I didn’t expect him to be so . . . he was . . . tender.” She nudges me. “And you?”

“He had skills.”

We nod and sit there, smiling at the sea. A pair of joggers kick sand as they pass, driven forward by their iPods. “So,” I ask brazenly, “a bunny?”

She laughs, sitting up on one cheek and twisting her head as if she could see her own butt. “Not just a bunny. It’s the Velveteen Rabbit.”

“I am blown away that Andy let you get a tattoo.”

“I did it with Eric. They trusted him to keep an eye on me.” She picks up a cracked shell and makes an arc in the sand. “Don’t tell anyone. Some blogger guessed it’s a teddy bear, but that’s as close as people have gotten.”

“No, sure. Why the Velveteen Rabbit?”

“You’ll just have to read it to your child someday to find out.”

“That’s far off.”

“I hope not.” She adjusts the blanket. “I want a family so badly. That thing, you know.” Blissed-out, she stares at the encroaching tide. “That guy, that love. It’s all I think about.”

“For the record”—I dare to revisit yesterday’s conversation—“I believe you’re going to find that.”

“Back at ya.” She rests her head on her knee. “I think I could actually sleep.”

“I’m not sure I have time to.”

She turns her face to the surf, and we watch the seagulls dive for their breakfast. “I want to share this with you.”

“We could stay in touch now, Kel.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “You’re the person.”

“Person?”

“Do this with me, Logan. Take her job. I know you’d be amazing.” She looks at me searchingly. “It’s time.”

I run a quick inventory of what I’ve acquired since she last made this offer: a job more demanding than fulfilling, an apartment more habitat than home, a guy more sex than substance, and a group of friends who’ve somehow found all of those dream things and are intently moving on. Somehow the life I’ve spent the last decade building is losing relevance, the veneer I’ve spun frantic circles to secure showing its cracks.

I feel myself nodding yes. A jogger puffs box office numbers into his cell as he approaches, oblivious.

I wrap my arm around her cool shoulders, unsurprised at the ease with which we fit, and realize how weird it’s been to be with her these days and barely touch. She drops her head into my lap, turning on her side as I pull the wet strands from her cheek. And then she closes her eyes. I lean back, wriggling my fingers beneath the warming sand as Kelsey’s breath slows until she’s asleep.

Part II
 

Once again, I wake in my berth as soon as the tour bus’s engine cuts. I stop the Berlitz app, and check the time—three-fifteen
AM
, not bad. If I was in New York right now, it’d be after nine, and I’d still be in the office, eating cold takeout. Instead, we just made it from Budapest to Vienna in less than four hours. When I first saw the crammed schedule, I thought—well, I thought a lot of things, one of them being that there was logistically no way we’d be able to hop from country to country like this, a show every day or every other, each for a different nationality. But with three weeks and sixteen cities notched in my belt, I’ve learned that Europe is actually very small, and connected by a network of superhighways that we only traverse after midnight.

Hearing Andy heaving Kelsey’s wheelie to the aisle with a grunt, I fling back the curtain, knowing we can’t afford a repeat of Athens. “Hi!” I say brightly, swinging my flats to the metal treads. “Welcome to Vienna!
Willkommen!
” I call to everyone in the surrounding berths. I hop down the bus steps into the hotel’s underground parking lot and sprint to the elevator bank. In the silent lobby, a dour-looking matron mans the desk, her pin curls locked in place. I arm myself with an Austro-Hungarian-size smile, bigger than German but way smaller than Oklahoman.
“Guten morgen!”
I say chipperly.
“Wir sind mit der Gruppe Namens Wade. Viden dank.”

“Wade?” she asks, pronouncing it “Vade” with obvious displeasure, even though I called, at Andy’s urging, to confirm our pending arrival somewhere outside Bratislava.

“Ja.”
I nod, nearly at the end of my Berlitz.

“One moment.” She leaves the console to rouse her colleagues, as, with three people going top speed, it will still take more than an
hour to check in all two-hundred-something of us. Now well versed in the odd economics of tour accommodations, I’ve learned that only a handful of hotels have drive-in parking with tour-bus clearance, which security mandates. Of those, maybe two have the class of rooms that Michelle demands on Kelsey’s behalf, which no one begrudges. I’m not dancing for a hundred and twenty straight minutes a night, and I’d like a soaking tub.

I would have thought that these establishments would be falling all over themselves to secure such massive group bookings. But our travel coordinator explained that hotels also host conventions. And whom would you prefer, insurance salesmen who’ll leave your establishment cleaner than they found it, and with hefty in-room porn billings to boot, or assorted dancers, singers, gymnasts, and crew who’ll scuff, snag, and stain not just the rooms but the hallways, no matter how much I beg, and whose keynote equivalent will choke the entrance with paparazzi? Which is why when Andy went red-faced and pounded the desk with his varsity ring in Athens, the clerks obstinately refused to bring on more staff to speed check-in, dancers fell asleep in the lobby, were late to rehearsal, and the run-through was a disaster.

This clerk quickly returns, and I can hear her colleagues stirring through the office doorway. “Thank you so much,” I say, “I greatly appreciate it. Could you be so kind as to process the suite for Miss Wade and her parents first, and then we can do the rest in this order?” I hand her the stack of passports.

Andy steps off the elevator in his rumpled tracksuit and aggressive stubble, pulling Kelsey’s bag. “All set?” he asks gruffly. “Can I tell GM to wake her?”

I give him a thumbs-up, and he leaves her case by the ashtray. I tell Fraulein I’ll be back, and head to the top floor to complete my daily ritual. It’s challenging, each time the elevator whisks me past the plebeian floors, not to flash to my initiation into the world of penthouse suites, and pull out my phone. But each day I don’t call Finn is a day I can look forward to calling Finn. As Jeff Stone taught me, savor the anticipation because reality has a way of depositing you in a cab.

In the presidential suite I kick off my sneakers, because Michelle hates tread marks on freshly vacuumed wall-to-wall. First I order Michelle’s chamomile tea while I open the balcony doors, letting in fresh air to vanquish the predecessor’s or the predecessor’s conquest’s perfume. Michelle has a very sensitive nose from her days as a mall spritzer. Then I turn on Kelsey’s tub, set out her toiletry case, and run across the suite to make sure the hotel completed the turn-down service in Michelle and Andy’s room. By the time Kelsey’s bath is run, she’s usually listing bleary-eyed in the doorway. Andy throws the TV on full blast and settles in on the couch while Michelle follows Kelsey to the bathroom, seating herself on the toilet lid with her tea to discuss the performance, the day, the next day, while Kelsey, her eyelids drooping, musters murmured responses, her mouth managing to stay just above the bubbles. While simultaneously supervising the check-in of two hundred plus other people, I periodically swing back to make sure that Michelle doesn’t need anything. And finally, when they hear the TV mute, Kelsey gets out, Michelle goes to bed, and I am dismissed for the night.

Today we’re doing pretaped segments, which means I don’t need to wake Kelsey until eight. I’m about to knock on the Presidential Suite when I feel my hand buzz with a voice mail. I don’t even bother to check the time stamp. My messages are slowly finding me, hours, days, sometimes weeks later, like birds thrown off their migratory pattern by electric wires.

“Logan, it’s your mother. I just spoke with some man named Greg who answered the phone in your apartment. He has never heard of you and was quite emphatic that you don’t live there.
What
is going on? Have you moved? Call me back.”

Fuck.

I tap the door with my forehead, and Michelle answers, already in her TV outfit, a royal-blue cashmere sweater over black slacks, her blond hair rinsed gray-free for the tour. Andy’s in his sweats in a wing chair, mopping up his runny egg yolks. “Mornin’, honey,” she says, pouring me my second coffee. “Sleep well?”

“Thank you, yes. You?”

“The sheets here aren’t as soft as—where were we Tuesday? With the gold wallpaper?”

“Prague.”

“Yes, those sheets were heaven, but the water pressure here is better. Make a note of it in the file for next time, could you?”

Andy is flipping channels. “I never can get it.” He lifts his toast at the screen. “Is something news or isn’t it, did it happen or didn’t it? BBC is leading with this toxic spill in Hungary, but CNN hasn’t even covered it. Does that means it’s bullshit, or CNN isn’t doin’ their job properly?”

I slide the cup onto a nearby chest. “They’re probably gearing the coverage to their audience. You could Tweet Wolf Blitzer.”

He points to the map on BBC World. “Well, if it goes across that valley there, we’re gonna have to change our route next week. Come on, Wolf, help a dad out.” He looks at me, and I take my cue to sit next to him, my phone full of vital e-mails at the ready. “VIP list been given to stadium security?” he asks, because, as he has repeatedly shared, one time it wasn’t, and from what I can ascertain, some people were stuck momentarily in a hallway feeling unimportant.

“Check,” I affirm, scrolling my screen.

“Souvenirs arrived at the stadium?” he asks, because one time, they didn’t, which represented thousands in lost revenue, of the million or more that Kelsey, Inc., takes in nightly.

“Check.”

“Costumes gone on ahead?” And so on, through every anxiety dream that’s ever come to life over the last eight years, a daily litany of responsibilities that should be outside our purview but which were once bungled and now compete to inspire my first gray hair.

“And the radio stations have their gift baskets?”

“I—” Inhale. And then sit there, chest taut, jaw open. “Will get right on that.”

“These things have got to be dealt with first thing. First. Thing.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“It may not be some fancy Wall Street job, but you still have to take this seriously—”

“I do!” I’m quick to reassure him. I quit that job—over the phone—and let Charlotte put my stuff in storage, which probably means she’s wearing all of it while she has sex with this Greg, so, “I could not take this more seriously.”

“Oh, Andy just wishes he could be driving the bus himself.” Michelle places a thin piece of ham on brown bread. “I love how they give you sandwich fixings for breakfast here. So fun. I’m gonna make one to put in my purse for later.”

I look at my binder, determined not to screw up another thing today, as the door to Kelsey’s room opens and she stumbles out in her pink pajamas.

“Mornin’, Drowsy,” Andy greets her.

“Mornin’, Daddy.” She gives her mom a kiss and fixes herself a plate from what’s left while I turn my still beating face to the side table. These suites have so much furniture, as if people live full lives here, requiring sideboards and breakfronts and oversized vases.