California Dreaming (6 page)
Anna and Logan waited to board the buses, and she felt like they were on an elementary school field trip. Around her, she heard the sound of gathering applause, and turned to see the entire flight crew—twelve flight attendants, the pilot, and the copilot—walking wearily toward them together in their matching navy uniforms. The pilot looked like he was out of central casting. Chiseled chin, regal bearing, silver hair. His copilot was Indonesian, and had a huge smile on his face. The passengers greeted them with wild applause and cheers, and Anna joined in, yelling at the top of her lungs, even though her throat still felt scratchy and dry. The copilot took a bow; the captain merely doffed his cap.
Fifteen minutes later, the white lights of the airport felt blindingly bright as they emerged in the baggage-claim terminal to an enormous crowd. There were hundreds of friends and relatives, as well as representatives from what seemed like every newspaper, magazine, radio, and television station from Los Angeles to Bangkok. Anna craned her neck, looking for her dad. When she'd finally gotten ahold of him on the bus earlier, she'd found that Sam had already called him: he'd told her he would be in the baggage claim, just past the TSA doors.
Finally she spotted his brown hair and lean frame, his blue eyes searching the crowd wildly for Anna. He wore Calvin Klein jeans, a faded white golf shirt, and chocolate-brown Ugg slippers—Anna realized that he must have been too stunned by the news to put on actual shoes. Well, that made two of them.
Jonathan's face broke out into a huge smile as he spotted his daughter, and he held his arms out to her. She had only been safe in his embrace for about ten seconds when she heard her name shouted from another part of the crush. “Anna! Logan!”
They turned to see Sam and Eduardo approaching breathlessly, Sam looking radiant in an emerald chiffon party dress she hadn't been wearing earlier. Anna pulled away from her father just as Sam tackled her, wrapping her in a bear hug.
Anna nestled her head into Sam's brunette waves and inhaled the scent of her Juicy Couture perfume. The hug went on and on, until Anna finally pleaded for mercy.
Sam smiled, the expression on her face one of utter joy and amazement, as if she couldn't believe she was really looking at Anna. “I know this is going to sound selfish, because it should be all about you right now,” Sam began, grinning from ear to ear, “but I'm so glad you're here, because later this week Eduardo and I are getting married, and I want you to be a part of it.”
Anna looked at her friend, stunned for the second time that night. But this time it was a happy kind of shock. “Congratulations!” She grabbed Sam again and hugged her tightly.
It was too much. This night. Her father. Her friends. All the people around her, laughing and crying and hugging. Anna saw the man still carrying the little girl in the pigtails, who was crying to a woman who looked like her mother. For a moment, Anna almost dissolved in tears too. But she was too overwhelmed to cry. She didn't know what she felt, beyond being so, insanely glad to be alive and on the ground.
She looked from Sam to Eduardo to her father, and finally rested her eyes on Logan, who'd been so quietly patient during her whole reunion. She'd almost forgotten the thing she most wanted to say. “Thank you.”
He cocked a blond eyebrow. “For what? Inviting you to Bali on a flight that nearly got you killed?”
“For being so wonderful when I was losing it. You got me through it.”
“We got through it together.”
Anna felt entirely comforted. Surrounded by her friends, her father beaming appreciatively at her, and with Logan by her side, it felt like the complete opposite of an hour earlier. Wearing airplane slippers and a sundress, in the midst of a sea of people in the international-arrivals terminal of LAX, she felt truly free. So she did what she never would have done at any other time in her life: she grabbed Logan and kissed him.
He kissed her back.
It was a kiss of hope. A promise for the future. It was, more than anything else, a kiss of life.
Saturday evening, 8:45 p.m.
A
s Sam pulled up to the valet stand at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the hallowed grounds where the Hollywood elite had partied, mated, dated, and overdosed for years, she decided that this had been one of the more insane days of her life.
First Anna had nearly died. Then Anna had survived. Then she and Eduardo had called his parents to deliver the news that they were getting married in a week. His parents, Pedro and Consuela, had cut short a vacation in Cabo and caught a flight to Los Angeles that afternoon, renting one of the hotel's most exclusive bungalows for a week. Sam next called her estranged mother, Dina, who agreed to fly in from North Carolina immediately. A cozy dinner for six was planned—Sam, her fiancé, and both of their parents—at the Polo Lounge in the back of the hotel, at 9:30 p.m.
As Sam had waited for Anna's plane to land, one part of her brain was so deeply steeped in Hollywood that she'd felt removed from the terror, as if she were watching one of her father's big-budget action movies, and whether or not the plane crashed, whether or not people survived, was nothing more than a plot point. But another part of her—a part she liked—had been terrified. She'd cried, she'd felt nauseated, she'd even prayed.
But now that it was over, with a very Hollywood-esque happy ending, Sam was back to worrying about her own life and her upcoming nuptials. Eduardo's parents were light-years different from her own. Would they hate each other? Would worlds collide?
Sam slid out of her Hummer and handed the keys to the red-uniformed Italian valet who wore, she noticed, those supposedly invisible braces on his teeth.
Wannabe actor
, she thought. Sporting the Invisalign was always a dead giveaway.
A uniformed doorman opened the glass doors to the hotel for her, and she strode through the lobby of the Pink Palace—the nickname for the pink-hued hotel that had seen so much Hollywood glitter and decadence over the decades of its tenure on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Beverly Hills. It had certainly earned its nickname, with its pink-and-white carpeting, dusty rose-colored gold-framed chairs, and enormous arrangements of native California flowers (many of which were, of course, pink). The only thing that wasn't pink were its majestic yellow pillars. The lobby itself was something of a hangout, and tonight it was crowded. Martin Scorsese was at the fireplace having a drink with Matt Damon, and Jessica Alba sat in a low-slung chair in the corner, chatting with a couple of friends. Sam had known the indoor part of the Polo Lounge would be equally crowded, so she'd asked Eduardo to book a table on the quieter terrace, where the green-and-white striped tablecloths, huge white umbrellas, and wrought-iron seats promised a quintessential Los Angeles dining experience.
Sam caught a reflection of herself in a spotless columned mirror flanked by massive vases of freesias and orange blossoms. She wore a zebra-patterned Givenchy cotton T-shirt under a cantaloupe raw silk jacket with lantern sleeves, Chanel black trousers, and cantaloupe-and-black polka-dot Gucci heels. Casual enough to be hip, grown-up enough to suit a “fiancée,” and flattering enough to minimize what needed to be minimized.
Sam tore her gaze from her own reflection. Where were her parents? They'd said they'd meet her in the lobby. She nibbled unconsciously on a recently manicured fingernail. Her stomach flip-flopped. If she was this nervous about dinner, how nervous would she be at the actual wedding? Her side of the aisle would likely be quite a bit more complicated and more crowded than Eduardo's. For starters, her father. Jackson, had a virtual harem of ex-wives, one of whom was Sam's biological mother, Dina, who had left America's Most Beloved Action Star when Sam was still in elementary school and moved to North Carolina. Though Sam had seen her at graduation, that meeting had been the first one since Sam had been in elementary school. To say that she was estranged from Dina was an understatement. Yet when she'd called her mom early that morning, Dina hadn't hesitated. There was a ten o'clock flight from Asheville to Charlotte, and a noon flight from Charlotte to LAX. With the time change, she could be at the Beverly Hills Hotel by four.
Frankly, Sam was shocked that Dina was showing up at all, as she had really only called her out of obligation. It kind of begged the question, If it was so easy for her mother to hop on a plane when Sam asked her to, why the hell had she hopped out of Sam's life in the first place?
Sam asked herself now: How did she feel about Dina dropping back into her life? She felt … nothing. Didn't care one way or the other. She wasn't about to invest any emotional energy in the woman, since apparently it had slipped her mind for years that she actually had a daughter.
Well, at least her father hadn't offered Dina a room at their Bel Air estate. That would have been too weird. Instead, he was graciously picking her up here at the hotel. But they
were
having a drink together at the Ivy, before meeting everyone at Pedro and Consuela's bungalow and then adjourning to the Polo Lounge for dinner. Sam checked her Omega Constellation watch. They still had ten minutes.
At the lobby bar, CNN was on a strategically placed flat-screen TV. The crash-landing of Anna's jet in darkness at LAX was still the lead story—the reporter described it as a miracle and the captain as a hero. Sam paused for a moment to watch: dozens of television cameras had caught the landing from every conceivable angle, and it was being rehashed and analyzed like a key play at the Super Bowl. She'd seen this footage a hundred times since last night and couldn't imagine what Anna had gone through. She'd tried to call Anna at around noon, but her father had said she was asleep. Sam couldn't blame her. Though from a strictly budding director/storytelling point of view, she was dying to find out what it had been like.
“Sam!”
She started slightly at the sound of her father's deep, resonant voice and turned around to be greeted by a rare sight: her father and mother together, striding across the pink hotel lobby toward her. They'd seen each other at graduation, of course. But Sam couldn't remember the last time they'd actually spent any time together, let alone sat down for a drink and a civil meal. That they were doing so now, simply because Sam had asked and said it was important, filled her with a kind of light, bubbly feeling. She didn't trust this feeling. Experience had taught her not to trust in such things a long time ago. But still, for the moment,
in
the moment, it felt good.
Dina was as Sam remembered from June. Her dark brown hair, streaked with gray, was still frizzy, her clothes—a simple, loose-fitting black pantsuit—three years out of date, and her simple black fabric shoes built for comfort. She was incongruous next to the buff, charismatic Jackson. His presence pretty much commanded the attention of everyone—even seasoned Beverly Hills matrons—in the lounge. He had the kind of chiseled jaw that seemed to exist only on movie stars, and boyishly cut sandy hair that hung fashionably shaggy over his eyes. Today, he wore black Armani jeans and a baby blue silk shirt; black-and-white rattlesnake cowboy boots added a good two inches to his natural height of six feet. He was a man whom age had treated well. The few lines on his face were all character and charm, especially the crinkling around his sparkling cerulean blue eyes.
As they moved toward her, and she toward them, Sam could see several guests stop their conversations to watch. A ponytailed girl, no doubt a tourist, lifted her Nokia to take Jackson's picture, then shrieked to her friend, “Oh my God!” Sam figured this photo, or a similar one, would probably end up in some gossip rag with a headline that read,
JACKSON SHARPE AND EX-WIFE #1 MEET FOR SECRET TRYST
, or some such bullshit. Well, hell. That was the price you paid for getting twenty mil a movie.
“Hi, Mom.” Sam hugged her mother. It felt forced. It
was
forced. Sam considered changing her maternal greeting to “Dina.” That would be better. And more honest.
“Hey, pass it around,” her father teased, and held his arms out for her. She hugged him, too. Wow. They were just such a hap-hap-happy family. Except that she hardly ever saw her father. And her mother had abandoned her long ago. But, you know, other than that …
“I think Eduardo must already be with his parents. They're in the Paul Williams bungalow out back,” Sam declared. “So let's go.”
She took a tentative step in the direction of the glass doors that led to the bungalows. But Jackson and Dina weren't moving.
“Just a sec, sweetie,” her father began. “Your mother and I have been talking about this whole marriage thing. …” He shifted his weight to one leg and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his black jeans.
“And we wanted to talk about it with you,” her mother chimed in, nervously patting her semi-frizzed blond hair.
Okay, this was surreal. Sam had anticipated the “you're too young to get married” rap. But that her mismatched parents were standing there as a parental unit, out of concern for the daughter they had not exactly nurtured together? It was beyond bizarre.
The truth was, Sam had given the “you're too young” speech to herself many times since Eduardo had proposed a few weeks ago on the Santa Monica Promenade, and had given it to herself a few more times since Anna's plane had safely landed last night. She'd said yes to a marriage in a week under some duress—the impending death of one of her best friends. Honestly, Sam thought in retrospect that if Anna's plane hadn't made it, she would have been at a funeral in New York City in a week and not at her own wedding. But now she was seeing an exchange of vows with Eduardo as some kind of predestined thing. Anna had made it. That was a miracle. Maybe her own marriage was meant to be, too.
Or some such quasi–New Age, it's-all-destiny reasoning.
“We hope you're willing to listen,” her mother added, shifting back and forth on the rose-and-white carpet.
Sam shrugged. “Fine, Dina,” she replied, trying out the first-name thing. It definitely felt better than “Mom.” Dina didn't flinch, and Sam leaned coolly against the yellow marble pillar behind her, waiting for the avalanche to descend.
