I'll Be There (33 page)

That week was crazy busy for Cee Cee. The Oscar nomination had created a flurry of events in her career, offers to field, magazine layouts to do, phone calls from Barbara Waiters wanting her to tape a show in a few days which would run on Oscar night. Thankfully, and unusually, everything at home was so calm and almost back to pleasant, she didn’t even mention the idea of drug testing for fear of stirring up an argument.

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In fact, she was starting to feel as if maybe the whole drug thing had been her paranoia, another example of her going too far, and that finding the drugs one of those bratty little girls had hidden in Nina’s room had been God’s way of getting the two of them to counseling so their mother-daughter problems could get fixed. On the morning of the appointment with Doctor Kagan, the shrink, Cce Cee told Nina she would pick her up at school at three o’clock.

She was early so she was able to get a parking spot right in front of the school where she sat for a while thinking about what the two of them might say to one another in today’s session, feeling hopeful that things between them were on the mend. It was hot in the car, so after a while she got out and leaned against the door and watched the kids pouring out of the building. For a long time her eyes followed one particular group of girls who were a little older than Nina, walking along laughing and talking, and she was impressed with how womanly and sophisticated they seemed. More sophisticated than she had ever been at that age. At any age, she thought to herself, and wondered how those girls got along with their parents. In another passing group she noticed a tall straight-haired blond girl dressed in a plaid skirt and green sweater who was clearly the focal point of her friends. The girl was talking away and gesturing, and as she did, Cee Cee noticed that on the third finger of her right hand was Bertie’s emerald ring.

The answer, the cash. That’s how she got it. Goddammit. Goddamn her. I won’t fucking have it. A crashing rush of adrenaline flooded through her. Stop it, she told herself. You’re imagining things. The girl had walked by pretty fast, so she could be mistaken. There were a lot of emerald rings in the world. In fact the emerald was the birthstone for the month of May, so maybe the girl’s birthday was in May and it was her own ring, which just happened to resemble Her tie’s from a distance. But instead of staying by her parked car where she had promised Nina she’d meet her, Cee Cee moved quickly after the girl and her friends who were now about a half a block away. You’re crazy, she told herself, you’re going to make an asshole of yourself and of Nina because you’re a certifiable lock-up case.

“Hi, Nance,” she heard a boy’s voice yell from across the street, and Cee Cee saw the girl who was wearing the ring raise a hand high

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to wave at the boy. The wave gave Cee Cee another look at the ring, and this time, even from the distance, she was sure it was Bertie’s ring. Nina’s ring. Now she moved faster, and when she was a few feet behind the girls who had now turned the corner she shouted, “Nancy!” The girl turned around to look at her and so did her three friends. Cee Cee noticed the friends exchange looks when they saw who had stopped them. When they realized it was Cee Cee Bloom, not just anybody’s mother but a movie star, they looked nervous. That gave Cee Cee enough of a feeling of power to move closer to the girl

with the ring, who, she could now see, looked as guilty as sin.

“I need to talk to you,” Cee Cee said.

“Okay,” the girl replied and gave one of those nods to the others that a gangleader in a bad crime movie gives to the gang to tell them “It’s okay to leave, but don’t go too far away, just in case.”

Cee Cee braced herself as the girl walked farther down the block next to her, with a brash confident walk that only a girl who looks that good can, and the minute the other girls were out of earshot she said, “She told me it belonged to her, not you. That she needed the money. She said that her real mother left it to her when she died so she could do whatever she wanted with it.”

“She told you the truth,” Cee Cee said, looking down at the girl’s perfect hand holding on to a history book, and there was the ring, looking just the way it had once looked on Bertie. Cee Cee flashed on that time in Miami when she’d spotted the ring on Neetie’s hand and had gone bananas over it, and how that night when they had arrived at home in Malibu and Nina put the ring back into her musical pink ballerina jewelry box that plunked out “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round” she had thanked Cee Cee gratefully for retrieving it.

For so many years Nina’s hand had been too small to wear the beautiful piece of jewelry on her ring finger, even with ring guards, but last year she tried it on and came running in to Cee Cee’s room to show her that it fit her on the same finger where Bertie had always worn it, and it was like a rite of passage. Coincidentally, two days later she got her first menstrual period. Since then she’d worn the ring for special occasions, always when she did stopping frequently to look down at her hand to admire it.

“It did belong to her. But her mother was my best friend, and it

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belonged to her grandmother first, and it would mean a lot if you would sell it back to me.”

The girl sighed a sigh which said, I don’t want to do what you’rel asking, but you’re an adult and if I don’t you’ll probably start a big stink about it.

“How much did you pay for it?” Cee Ccc pressed.

“Seven hundred dollars.” The goddamned ring was worth a hell of a lot more than that.

‘I’ll give you nine hundred.” The girl was pouting and looked as if she was thinking about giving Cee Cee a hard time. “I don’t have that much cash on me,” Cee Cee apologized, knowing the girl might just get up and storm away if she didn’t handle her properly. “But if you give me the ring now, I’ll have my secretary meet you here tomorrow at this time on this spot with the money.”

As if she was ending an engagement, the girl reluctantly slid the ring from her finger and handed it over to Cee Cee. “Tomorrow at this time on this spot,” she said looking into Cee Cee’s eyes.

“You got it,” Cee Cee said, and turned to go when the girl’s voice stopped her.

“She threw this into the deal too.”

Cee Cee turned back. In the girl’s hand was a compact. It had fake rhinestones on the lid, and had been a gift from someone at the studio to Cee Cee for Christmas. Kept in her room, in her own jewelry box. The kind of glitzy item teenagers liked, and Nina had taken it to sweeten the deal when she sold the ring. Stole it from Cee Cee and sold it. It was hard for Cee Cee to think those words. When she got back to her car, stinging with the ugly truth, Nina was sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for her.

“Where’d you go?” Nina asked.

“Down the street,” Cee Cee answered and got into the car.

In Doctor Kagan’s waiting room, Cee Cee, too numb to even think about what she was going to say when they got inside the office with the cool I’ve-seen-it-all lady doctor, watched through a veil of fear as Nina paged through some schoolbook, a legitimate way to aw)id conversation with Cee Cee. She was wearing a nearly angelic look on her face, and looking at her sitting there, Cee Cee remembered when she was a kid and Leona took her to see Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

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on Broadway. When the mother in the play realized her child was a murderer passing herself off as an innocent, the look Nancy Kelly who played the part wore on her face had to be the same one Cee Cee wore now. Stiff, pained, shocked, hurt.

“Well, now,” Florrie said, leading them into her office, and Cee Cee felt a terror of what would happen next, because she knew she was about to break open the blister of lies that would have to release the poison into their lives. Had to tell Nina now that she knew her secret. And after she did there was no outcome she could imagine that wouldn’t be painful. Every ending for the scene she had played in her mind as she drove blindly to Brentwood and parked and rode up in the elevator to this office was horrible.

“Well, how have you two been doing this week?” the doctor asked. Nina shrugged and made a noise which sounded like “N’kay,” and Cee Cee said nothing. She thought seriously about grabbing Nina by the neck and shaking her hard enough to scare the shit out of her, and to maybe scare out a confession, too, knowing that the shrink would pull her off before she really hurt her.

“Did you have a drug test, Nina?” Florrie asked matter-offactly.

“No,” Nina said. “Why would I?” As though a drug test had never been discussed in this office.

Florrie looked at Cee Cee as if to ask her why anybody who had been as crazily convinced one week ago that her kid was taking drugs wouldn’t have pushed her to take the promised test, but Cee Cee looked away from her at Nina.

“Nina,” Cee Cee said, pausing before she asked the next, wishing

she didn’t have to. “Where’s the emerald ring?”

“What?”

“Your mother’s emerald ring. The one Neetie tried to take from you. Remember how excited we were when it finally fit your finger? And you wore it a few times to parties. Where is it?” There was a long pause, during which the silence drummed away in Cee Cee’s ears.

“I lost it.”

“When?”

“A while ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? You knew it was insured. In fact that

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was why we decided it was okay for you to wear it every now and then. I could have reported it and you could have had the money to replace it. Do you remember where you lost it?”

“If I remembered where I lost it, I could go there and get it and it wouldn’t be lost, would it?” The bitchiness in her voice helped Cee Cee to proceed, and ask a question to which sadly she knew the answer.

“Are you lying?”

“I forgot about the insurance,” Nina said, looking hurt and slumping into the chair, “and | know how emotional you get and | thought you’d go crazy. Besides, it was my ring. My mother left it to me. So why should I have to answer to you? I lost it.”

“Well, I found it,” Cee Cee said and pulled the ring from her pocket, where she had been holding it tightly in her fist all the way to the doctor’s office from the school, and which she now held up as the three of them looked at its deep green glow catching the overhead light. “I stopped Nancy at school today and bought it back for you. And my compact too.”

“Oh, shit!” Nina cried with an embarrassed agonized howl. “I hate you so much,” and she covered her face with her hands.

“So you’ve been conning us, Nina. Conning Cee Cee for a long time. Covering your tracks very well. That must have been a hard job,” Florrie said quietly.

“Did you take my car out at night?” Cee Cee asked.

From behind her hands, Nina nodded a slight nod. “When you were sleeping. A lot of times.”

Cee Cee felt cold all over. “Nina, what did I do? Where did I screw it all up? Why didn’t you tell me what I was doing wrong?”

Nina took her hands away from her face now and got to her feet. All her coolness was gone and her face was splotchy with anger and her hair askew. “Guess what?” she said, glaring into Cee Cee’s face. “This time it isn’t about you, Cee Cee. For once in our lives, something isn’t about you, it’s about me! Me! I am sick of you trying to make everything in the world about you.” And she rushed to the door and with a grunt pulled the inner door toward her, then forced herself against the outer door, ran through the waiting room, and with a slam of that door was gone.

I’LL BE THERE

When she wasn’t home by ten that night, Cee Cee sat with the high school roster and called the home of every girl she ever remembered being in her home. Some were asleep and their sympathetic-voiced parents said they had no idea where Nina was. Some phones didn’t answer. Soon in her anguish Cee Cee wasn’t sure which ones she had called and which ones she hadn’t. She thought about calling Kcvin Myers, but over the past year, probably because hanging around with him hadn’t been considered cool, Nina had pretty much phased him out of her life.

At two in the morning she still sat with her hand on the phone, trembling with exhaustion, not sure if she should call the police or drive the streets and look for Nina herself. Runaways. She had skipped over that chapter in the book about parents and teenagers, not even imagining it would ever be necessary to read it. Now she read it.

Running is almost always a cry for help, and you must face these needs and learn to deal with them. Over a million teenagers choose this solution every year and the average runner is a fifteen-year-old girl. Usually within a few days your child will be back at home.

Please God. As the sun came up, Cee Cee walked upstairs with a blinding headache and a heart that felt ripped in half and called Doctor Kagan. When she got the answering service, she begged them to let her hold on while they tracked her down.

“Cee Cee, what news?” the doctor said within minutes.

“What should I do?” she asked. “Tell me what to do. Should I drive all over town looking in alleys? Should I hire a detective? Should I call the hospitals and the morgue? Please tell me what I’m supposed to do, because I can’t stand not knowing where she is. What if she needs food? What if she thinks I won’t take her back? I have to tell her that I’m going to help her through this.”

“Cee Cee, what I’m going to tell you will be the hardest thing for you, but I think you need to wait, to give it another day or two, let her play this out, because | believe she wants to come home and that you’ll hear from her very soon.”

Barbara Waiters and her crew would be arriving in a few hours to tape an interview with her, and Cee Cee knew she looked as horrible as she felt. So what if I look like shit, she thought. Dear God, bring me my kid back safe and I’ll turn in all the fame, all the nominations,

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