Melissa Senate (16 page)

S
TELLA CAME BACK JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT
. T
OM AND
I
HAD DOZED
off on the bed, and when the door opened we both jumped.

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “I didn’t realize you were here, Tom.”

“You didn’t get your twenty cell phone voice mails from me?” I asked. She could have picked up just once. She could have called back just to check in with an
I’m alive, don’t worry, just need to be alone.

She shook her head. “I turned off the phone and never turned it back on. I just wanted to think.”

Tom squeezed Stella’s hand and left for his own room to give us some privacy. When the door clicked shut behind him, she said, “So I guess you made up your mind.”

“Do not say another word,” I warned her. “He could hear you.”

“He
should
hear me. He should know that you’re in love with someone else. You owe it to yourself to tell Nick how you feel about him. He came all the way to Nebraska, Ruby! But you can’t bear to live without your safety net.”

“Well Tom came all the way here,” I pointed out. “And he’s not a safety net. He’s my fiancé and I said yes to him for a reason.”

“Because he’s safe.”

“Because I love him, Stella. You’ve been telling me I don’t for three thousand miles and I haven’t agreed with you yet, have I?”

She walked over to the window and stared out at the lights. “I just thought that if I’m going to face reality, you should, too.”

“Stella, I don’t want to argue with you. You had a really rough couple of days, and it’s late and we’re both exhausted, so let’s just get some sleep. I’m happy to stay here if you need me. But I think we should go home tomorrow. I think that’s how we’re going to face reality.”

She glanced at me, then began reaching into the dresser drawers. She exchanged the tank and yoga pants she was wearing for another set.

“Is that a tattoo?” I asked, eyeing the red heart on her ankle.

“A fake,” she said, her voice tight. “So, Ruby, there was another reason I wanted to come out here. The reason I wanted to stop in on Sally Miller along the way.”

I stared at her and waited. She didn’t say anything. “Stella. What?”

She glanced at me, her big blue eyes up to something. “Daddy lives here.”

“
Daddy?
Now he’s Daddy?”

“He was the last time we saw him, Ruby. That’s what we called him.”

She had to be kidding.
Daddy?
“That was over twenty years ago! And didn’t we settle this? We talked about Eric Miller way too much on this trip as it is.”

“Aren’t you curious?” she asked. “Don’t you want answers?”

No, I did not want answers. Why would I want anything from that deadbeat thief? He’d walked out on us, all of us, and didn’t look back. And not only did he take his “cut,” but he’d never paid one penny of child support to our mother. He’d never sent a birthday card. Not a single one. Why—how—had he let our seventh birthday pass without at least sending a card? Just a fake Hallmark greeting to let us know that a) he was alive and b) he was thinking of us, did love us, in his own way. Instead, we got dead air. And check the mailbox, we did. For the week leading up to our seventh birthdays, we opened and closed the little black door to the mailbox at least twenty times a day, asking our mother over and over if she’d taken out the mail, if a card had come for us. We would have been happy with one card addressed to both of us.

The card never arrived. Not leading up to our birthday, not on our birthday, not belatedly, either. We must have broken our mother’s heart with our checking and pleading and constant conversation about it, about how sure Stella was that a card was coming, and how sure I was that elephants would fly first. I hadn’t wanted to be right. We did pretty much the same thing, on a slightly lesser scale, on our eighth birthday. On our ninth, only Stella bothered. And she never stopped, until she left for New York. She’d probably been checking her mailbox for a birthday card from Eric Miller all these years.

Why did Eric Miller deserve to know us now?

She walked back over to the windows and leaned against the windowsill. The sheer drapes fluttered with the very necessary air conditioner. “We’re here, Ruby. And so is he. He lives here. Grammy Zelda told me.”

My mouth dropped at that one. “Grammy Zelda? How does Zelda know where Eric Miller lives?”

“When I told her that we were going to Las Vegas for a vacation—of course I didn’t tell her about J or about you possibly getting married there—she said that Mom told her.”

“Mom?” I repeated. What?

“Zelda said that Mom started tracking him about ten years ago, just in case we ever wanted to look for him. Mom figured that with what she knew of his background, relatives, job stuff, whatever, she would have an easier time.”

“And the last place she tracked him was here?” I said. “Why wouldn’t Mom have told us herself?”

“I asked Zelda that, but she didn’t know. She thought that maybe Mom just wanted the information left for us, so that if we ever did want to find him, we would have a starting point. Zelda said the information is at least ten years old.”

Almost as if she tracked him until we were eighteen and legally adults. “But, Stella, it’s not like Mom ever brought up the subject of finding our father to
us.
She didn’t say, ‘You know, if you ever want to find your father, I can help you with some history on him.’”

“It doesn’t mean she would have been against it, Ruby. If she were, why would she bother tracking him down?”

“And why would
we?
” I asked. “What could you possibly want to know after almost twenty-five years?”

“It’s about closure,” she said. “No, actually that’s bullshit. It’s about something else.”

“What?”

She stared at me, then at her feet. She’d clearly had a pedicure during her solo day. Her toenails were a vampyred. “
I’m
the one who looks like him, Ruby. Do you know how much that sucks? And what if Silas or Clarissa looks like J? A father he or she will never know. My child will look in the mirror every day and not know who he looks like. I’ve never been okay with it for me, so how can I make it okay for Silas or Clarissa? I need to get it settled, Ruby.”

I nodded. I had no idea how it felt to be the Miller twin who looked like the absent parent, the one who’d left. I looked so much like my mother, took so much comfort in that resemblance, that safety. Our hair was not only practically the same color, but the same texture. And we were blondes with pale-brown eyes, unusual. And all the while, Stella, with her blue eyes and her dark hair and her aquiline nose, looked exactly like Eric Miller.

“Do you know that I once asked Mom if it bothered her that I looked so much like him?”

I took a deep breath. “What did she say?”

“She said she’d been very much in love with Eric Miller and my looking like him just reminded her of how much she liked his looks. She said she was glad I was a constant reminder of the man she’d married and loved so much. She also said she didn’t hate him.”

I remembered Stella telling me that when we were fifteen, that our mother said she could never hate the father of her children. Stella had been relieved; I’d been confused. Something had been shaken in my permission to hate him.

“If I can find Eric Miller, Ruby, if I can just close that door, I can go home with a better understanding of how to deal with handing my child the same set of circumstances.”

“But, Stella, what makes you think you’d be closing the door? You’d be opening a door. Who knows what will happen? What you’ll find out.”

“I have to be willing,” she said. “And I am.”

Talk about facing reality.

I knocked on Tom’s door, but there was no answer. That was odd. Tom was the lightest sleeper, and he must have known I’d come once Stella and I had talked. I called the front desk to make sure I had the right room.

Turned out there
was
no room anymore. Tom Truby had checked out of the New York-New York ten minutes ago. Which meant he heard what Stella said.

He should know that you’re in love with someone else. You owe it to yourself to tell Nick how you feel about him. He came all the way to Nebraska, Ruby! But you can’t bear to live without your safety net.

He clearly hadn’t heard my response. Like that awful moment in
Wuthering Heights,
when Heathcliff overheard Catherine say terrible things about him, but ran away before he heard her say that she didn’t care about any of that, that she loved him like mad, that she
was
Heathcliff.

When had Tom Truby turned into Heathcliff? That was Nick’s domain.

In any case,
Wuthering Heights
did not end well, unless you counted in death.

If he was still in the airport, he wasn’t answering his cell phone. And if he’d already managed to get on a flight to Portland, I wouldn’t be able to get in touch with him for hours and hours.

I sat in the lobby, in all its art deco, golden age of New York splendor, under the lithograph of the Chrysler Building. Not too long ago, Tom had sat in this very club chair. And all was okay with the world. I leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, as impressive as the marble-wonder lobby itself.

I heard clapping and cheers and wolf whistles and sat up straight. A bride and groom were having their pictures taken in front of the “subway station.” They were not themers. She wasn’t dressed as a mermaid, for example. Last night, while on my mad dash of Las Vegas fountains, I watched the staging of a mer-bride being helped “out of the water” by her groom, a nonfish, while a photographer snapped photos. And then off they went in a white limo. Since arriving in Vegas, I’d seen all kinds of themed couples clearly headed to or from the chapels. There were many Trekkies, too many Elvis and Priscillas (hadn’t they divorced back in the 1960s, anyway?), and quite a few anything-goers.

This bride wore a truly beautiful white satin gown, the kind I might like. She looked like a movie star, though being rail-thin and tall probably helped. Her hair was down, but off her face in gentle waves. And her groom, tall, dark, and handsome in his classic tux, was grinning like crazy.

They looked so happy. Happy. They were clearly both where they belonged.

I sighed and leaned my head back down. My cell phone rang, and I lunged for it.

Tom.

“Gun to your head, Ruby. Me or Nick. I don’t care about the particulars, I don’t want the details, I just want to know. Me or Nick.”

I forgot that Tom had been there, that day Nick had said that “gun to his head” was how he made his tough decisions. We’d been in the BLA teachers’ lounge, marveling at how the coffee was always terrible, no matter who made it, even Tom, who made great coffee. And then Daniel Parks sat down with a cup of it and chugged it down, and then glanced around for spies, which meant we knew he had some good gossip. He leaned in and told us he had no idea what to do, he’d been offered a better paying job at the regional high school for fifteen thousand more a year. But he didn’t like the principal, and he’d been at BLA for six years and could create interesting courses and design curriculum, etcetera, etcetera, which included a crush on a math teacher. What should he do? Take the money or the love?

We all said it was a tough one. And then Nick told us that when he was faced with a choice like that, he pretended someone really violent and merciless was holding a gun to his head and telling him he had to choose now. Or die. What came out of his mouth under those circumstances was the true-blue answer.

“Ruby,” Tom said through gritted teeth. “Gun to your head. What’s your answer?”

My mind was completely blank. I couldn’t conjure up Tom or Nick. The real live men or the miniature head-bobbers. There was just white space where a face, a feeling ought to be.

“Your silence sucks,” he said. “When you figure it out let me know.” And then he hung up.

“R
UBY, ARE YOU UNDER THERE
?”

I grunted, hoping she’d get the hint and go away, but she yanked the blankets off my head.

“I left for breakfast almost two hours ago and you’re still in bed?” she asked, walking over to the windows and drawing open the curtains. Bright one-hundred-degree sunlight flooded the room. It even
looked
hot outside.

I’d been under the covers since I’d gone back to our room last night and could see staying there for a while, all day in fact. “I don’t feel well.”

Of course I didn’t. I’d hurt Tom, who’d stood by me through the thickest of thicks and the thinnest of thins. We’d had our usual share of couple fights, some big, some small, but nothing like this. Nothing that had ever been the potential end.

She came over to the bed and peered at me. “You look okay. You sound okay.”

I let out a deep breath. “Tom heard what you said. He checked out of the hotel and flew back. He told me to choose and…”

“And?”

“And I couldn’t. He said, ‘gun to head, me or Nick,’ and nothing came out of my mouth. Even I don’t get that.”

She stared at me, really stared at me. From every angle.

“Stella, I don’t have fifty bucks to spend on hearing that my face registers my misery.”

She smiled. “It’s on the house.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and took my hands as if she channeled spirits, too, and looked me over. “You’re definitely miserable. So let me pull a Ruby Miller and break it down for the middle-school crowd. Tom proposed and you said yes. Nick proposed dating, and you said nothing. Now Tom is asking you to choose between him and Nick, between being engaged to him or nothing with Nick, apparently, and at the moment you’re choosing nothing. But with no one. Is that a double negative?”

“Not bad,” I said. “But why would I choose nothing when I love Tom and want Nick? Why would every fiber of my being come up so dead and blank when asked to choose?”

“We need Dr. Phil,” she said. “He’d know.”

“Normally if I had a problem or a big decision to make, Tom would tell me I needed space and time. But he didn’t give me that.”

She took the little coffeemaker decanter into the bathroom to fill it up, then returned and added the packet of grounds to the filter. “I guess he figures you should know if you want to marry him or not.”

“I don’t know anything anymore.”

“So let’s have some strong bad coffee and go find our stupid-ass father and see if that tells us anything important about ourselves. It’s not like either of us can figure ourselves out on our own. It’s not like we have anything else to do, Ruby.”

“I don’t know, Stella. Last night I was trying to think about looking for our father, and I just don’t know.”

“Well, I
do.
So therefore, we’re doing it. Now get dressed and come with me.”

It was nice, someone else taking charge. That it was Stella was slightly scary, though.

We went back to the Internet café with my little spiral notebook and pen. The bad news was that when we typed in
Eric Miller
and
Las Vegas
into the Google search engine, there were 1,950,000 hits. The good news was that when we added the word
agent,
that number shrunk to fifteen hundred.

The really bad news was that there wasn’t a talent agency, modeling agency or any agency called The Eric Miller Agency, or some variation.

“Are you two showgirls?”

We turned around to find two aging, balding hippie types with soup bowls of coffee in one hand and pastries in the other.

“Yes,” Stella said. “And we’re not allowed to speak to tourists.”

“Really?” one said. “That seems a little exclusive.”

Stella shrugged. “Company policy.”

“Our loss,” the other said, and the two sauntered toward another female duo spread on the purple sofa.

“I feel a million miles away from that,” Stella said, turning back to the computer. “Meeting men, I mean. Being picked up. Flirting. The only action I’ll be getting is my belly expanding.”

“And I, apparently, will be hanging out with Marco.” I froze. “If Tom and I broke up—not that we are breaking up—would I lose Marco, too? I love that dog.”

“You’d figure it out. Maybe work out a custody arrangement.”

“Tom loves Marco as much as I do. Maybe more.” I closed my eyes for a long moment, then opened them. “I don’t know how I got here, Stella. One minute I was home in Maine, celebrating my engagement. And the next I’m in some Internet café in Las Vegas looking up our father. What the hell?”

She squeezed my hand. “We’re doing the necessary thing. The mother of invention, right? When you don’t know what to do, you do the necessary thing. Which is finding Eric Miller. I know it sounds crazy, Ruby, but I think finding him, meeting him, talking to him is absolutely necessary.”

Stella had a way of twisting things so they fit her schemes and plans, but in this case, she was on the money. “Let’s just visit as many of these agencies as we can stand,” she said. “We’ll pretend we’re auditioning to be showgirls. Apparently, we pass.”

“At almost thirty, we’re probably over the hill.”

I’d forgotten about our birthdays. July 22. And coming right up. If “take a cross-country road trip in search of your twin sister’s baby’s father and look for your own, while you’re at it,” was on some Things To Do Before You’re Thirty list, we were on target.

“Do you think our dad even remembers our birthday?” Stella asked. “Thirty is a big milestone.”

“Yeah, like thirty years ago, I had two baby daughters, but six years later, I decided I didn’t want to be their father, after all, so I just split. I’m sure he doesn’t remember the date.”

She winced. “When you put it like that, I can see why you’re so angry at him.”

“I don’t know if I’m angry at him,” I said. “He’s not even like a tangible thing, you know? He’s just an idea, really. A former something. There’s definitely no
there
there.” I took a sip of my coffee, which had gotten cold. “I guess I’m angry at the idea that someone could just walk away from his children. I’d be angry on anyone’s behalf.”

She nodded. “But you don’t want to find out why?”

“I know why, Stella. He didn’t care about us. Just like our kind, sweet aunt said. He was a selfish prick and that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to him.”

“But maybe there’s another side to the story,” Stella said.

“Like that maybe the casting agent wanted to lock us in a dungeon and in order to save us from that cruel fate, he gave us up?” I suggested.

“I know it sounds stupid.”

“Stella, she wasn’t our evil stepmother. There was no dungeon.”

“I like the fantasy, I guess. It’s kept me from really thinking too long and hard about it. About having a father who ran away, who didn’t love me.” She stared at me. “You like the fantasy, too, Ruby. Maybe that was why you couldn’t make a decision between Tom and Nick. You wanted a life with Tom, but you liked the fantasy of Nick. And Nick wanted to turn that fantasy into reality. But fantasy was so much safer.”

Whoa. “If fantasy is safer than reality, then it’s Nick who’s the safety net. Not Tom. Tom is reality. Tom is forever.” I shook my head. “No, Stella, this isn’t making any sense. How could Nick be a safety net? Aren’t I afraid of ‘going for it’ with him? Aren’t I choosing the safer guy, the safer future?”

She twisted her long hair up into a topknot. “I don’t know. I just know we’re on to something, Ruby. Something really important. For both of us.”

I nodded. “I guess we do have to find that asshole.”

“If not for that little fantasy of mine,” Stella said, “I would have hated Eric Miller like you do, Ruby. And I guess I couldn’t stand that.”

Did I hate my father? I didn’t think I had any feelings for him. I certainly didn’t still love him, so how could I hate him? The lack of him all these years, the majority of our childhoods most importantly, was simply a cold, sorry fact.

“Let’s just get moving,” she said. She eyed the list. “There are five agencies nearish to here. Let’s just visit those and see what happens. I doubt we’ll find him so fast. But maybe someone at one of the agencies will have heard of him. Maybe the Las Vegas talent world is a small one.”

And so Stella and I took a crash course in Vegas transportation, since our flip-flops and sandals weren’t exactly serious walking shoes. There was a Las Vegas Boulevard bus, and a double-decker tour bus, and a trolley system, so between them, we should get around okay.

We started with the Miller Talent Group, on the third floor of a nice enough building on a side street just a few blocks off the strip. Several people were sitting in the waiting room, a mix of men and women, of all ages. There were Miller Talent Group brochures on every available surface. They specialized in actors, models, extras, look-alikes, specialty acts, narrators, showgirls, and celebrities for everything including television, film, commercials, print campaigns, conventions, trade shows, sales meetings, and special events.

Stella and I walked up to the reception desk. The receptionist, who reminded me of what an aged-out showgirl must look like, smiled with very white teeth.

“Good morning,” I said. “Does an Eric Miller work here?”

“There are three Miller brothers, and none are named Eric,” she said. “Would you like to fill out an application?” she added, looking between me and Stella. “You both have lovely smiles and excellent skin.”

“Thanks,” I said and Stella beamed. A compliment always buoyed her spirits, despite how many she must get all the time.

“Have you heard of an agent named Eric Miller?” Stella asked her. “We’re trying to track him down.”

“Did he close shop and take off with your picture fees?” she asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

She shook her head. “Jerk-offs like that give reputable agents like the Miller brothers a bad name. Sorry, girls, but I don’t know any Eric Miller. But I’ll tell you, I’ve been working here for seventeen years on and off, and you two would be booked in a
snap
for regular people jobs. Infomercials, that kinda thing.” She must have caught Stella’s
Huh? Moi, a mere regular person?
expression because she added, “Don’t get me wrong, you’re both very attractive, but the competition for the model and actor jobs is fierce. You have a much better shot of getting work as a regular type if you’re pretty.”

That seemed to make Stella feel better. “Well, it’s not like I’m twenty-two anymore,” she said as we left, admiring herself in the large oval mirror hanging by the door.

“You mean it’s not like we’re
two
anymore,” I corrected. “That was the last time we were in really high demand.” Outside in the hundred-degree-plus heat, I asked Stella what she planned to say to Eric Miller when we found him.
If
we found him.

She wrapped her hair into a high bun and secured it with a Miller Agency pen. “Just hi, for starters. We were in town and heard you lived here, so we figured we’d look you up. How the hell have you been?”

“Is that really what you’re going to say?”

She shrugged. “Won’t know until I see him.”

We went to two more agencies that didn’t require public transportation. Same drill. Except the receptionists either didn’t think we’d make it as regular people or they just weren’t the chatty types. I wondered if this was what our own quick exit from kiddie modeling had been like. Our agent getting constant nos, sending us on “go-sees” and being shot down. I couldn’t remember those days at all. Just random snapshots of experiences, a studio here, a makeup chair there (yes, at three years old, full makeup).

We walked along the strip and bought ice-cold lemonade from an outdoor kiosk, then stopped at the Bellagio fountain to watch the water dance to Frank Sinatra.

Stella absently sang along to “Fly Me to the Moon,” pressing the side of the ice-filled plastic cup to her forehead. “Grammy Zelda always said that if you ever need to find out something, you should go to the biggest yenta. Who would be the equivalent of an old busybody among Las Vegas talent agents?”

“An old-time agent with sad-sack clients who can’t get booked,” I said. “Kind of like Broadway Danny Rose. But older.”

I reached into my purse for my cell phone, got out my list of agents and called the first agency we went to, the one with the chatty receptionist. Apparently, Freddy Jones-Jones was our man. Been around for forty years and knew everyone and everything about the talent biz in Las Vegas.

“If this agent you’re looking for ain’t dead, then Freddy will know where he is,” the woman said.

“Oh, sure, I remember Eric Miller,” Freddy Jones-Jones said. “He showed up in Vegas, let me think—” He leaned back in his rickety black leather chair and chewed the inside of his cheek. “Early, no—maybe mideighties. He had that big pouf of hair, I remember that. He modeled himself on Don Johnson from
Miami Vice.
Remember that show? White suits with pastel shirts. He and his wife had their own little agency. Minor talent. Let me think—what was it called?”

As Freddy thought deeply, flipping through his Rolodex and staring up at the ceiling, I glanced around, wondering if Freddy had any clients. The little office was immaculate, not a piece of paper to be seen. Freddy’s office was located on the top floor of a five floor walk-up in a dingy building far off the strip. On the walls were signed glossies of men and women that he probably represented in his better days.

“We researched online, but couldn’t find any record of him,” I said. “Do you know where he works now?”

“Some hole-in-the-wall storefront,” he said. “But he doesn’t go by that name anymore. Hasn’t in years. He and the Mrs. had to close up shop to beat an outstanding arrest warrant from another state. Something about parking tickets. I heard they were living in an RV so they couldn’t be tracked. But I know he hung up a shingle with a new name. Changed his own name, too. Well, not legally, of course. Probably started doing everything under the table.”