The Rock Star's Daughter (21 page)

"What Marjorie's trying to say, Margaret," my
grandfather began.

"She goes by Taylor, Bill," my grandmother
corrected him.

"What she's trying to say is that if you are
at all unhappy with your living arrangement, all you have to do is
call us. We'd be more than happy to have you stay with us," Grandpa
Bill told me. "We have a nice community center with a big pool, a
huge public library, and all sorts of activities for young
people."

"I still don't understand why you go by
Taylor," my grandmother continued, getting up to retrieve a warm
cherry pie from the oven. "Margaret is a lovely name. You could go
by Meg, or Maggie."

I was beginning to understand a little why my
mother and grandmother didn't get along.

When my grandparents dropped me off at the
hotel that night, I thanked them warmly for their hospitality and
waved goodbye to them as they pulled away. I was unsure when I
would next see them, or if I would see them again, ever. It was a
small comfort knowing that I could live with them if I reached a
point where I could no longer tolerate my father, but I was
unconvinced that life with them would be a more comfortable
option.

That night I when I got into bed in the dark,
I whispered, "Seriously, Mom? Where did you go? Couldn't you just
give me some kind of a sign? Anything?"

Even seeing the home where my mother had
spent her childhood didn't make me feel any closer to her memory.
And my chance encounter with Jake had left me more unsettled than
secure. Both events had just left me feeling more alone in the
universe than ever.

CHAPTER
13

And then finally, after days spent in
Wisconsin that felt like months, we were on our way to Detroit.

It was close enough to the end of the summer
that my classmates at Treadwell were preparing for the return to
school. Ruth, my roommate, had emailed me asking if she brought a
television, could I bring a mini-fridge? Bringing cool appliances
with me back to Massachusetts was no longer an issue as it had been
in the past. Tanya would just order whatever I asked for online,
and it would be shipped to Treadwell. I no longer had to beg my
mother, knowing that anything I asked for would require a sacrifice
of clothing or drinks on her part.

As the signs on the highway indicated our
proximity to Detroit, I started getting butterflies in my stomach.
I had not had the nerve to ask my father why he had deflected calls
from my mothers' parents until he had started the legal process of
obtaining custody of me. Surely his behavior could have been
explained by the fact that he was a total control freak, but I
wanted him to have to tell me to my face that he wanted to block
them out of my life. Only, he and I had barely exchanged words
since the day at Six Flags, and I was feeling like a stowaway
again.

It was never too far from my mind that my
father could decide at any time that he no longer wished to pay for
Treadwell. And for that reason alone, I was trying to play it by
the book until we got to Detroit.

The hotel where we were staying was in the
Fairlane section of Dearborn, Michigan. My extensive internet
research suggested that we were way too far from the auditorium in
Auburn Hills for me to even attempt to venture out using public
transportation. I wished with futility that I had picked Jake's
brain further about his life at home. There I was, potentially only
a few mere miles from his house, without any inkling about the
neighborhood in which he lived. But judging from the enormous brick
mansions we passed on the way to the hotel, I was guessing that
Jake didn't live anywhere nearby.

"Can I go downstairs and hit the treadmill?"
I asked Jill as she was trying to force-feed lunch to Kelsey. I was
feeling both lackluster and desperate at the same time. I felt like
if I could get out of the hotel room, I might just wander out to
the parking lot and down to the highway and keep walking
forever.

"You're grounded, remember? If you wait until
your dad gets back from sound check you can go to the gym with
him," Jill replied.

I sulked in the suite's second bedroom and
surfed the web all afternoon. Around five, Jill knocked on the door
to remind me to get dressed; we'd be eating dinner with the band at
the arena where Pound would be performing later that night. My dad
had never stopped back at the hotel that afternoon, so I had been
spared the ordeal of trying to run a few miles next to him at the
gym. I was dreading a big meal with the entire band and all of the
families… group dinners took on the feeling of how I imagined large
holiday celebrations with extended family to be. Forced. Fake.

I couldn't help but frown in the small
limousine throughout the ride from the hotel to the venue. Jill was
chatting a mile a minute about the famous chef who was preparing
our special meal, and how he had agreed in advance to whip up a
vegan delight for her. I was tuning her out. All I could think
about was Jake, and whether or not I would be able to find him that
night. I assumed my best bet was going to be to try to slip away
during the show and find him at the t-shirt booth, but how I was
going to do that, I had no idea. I wasn't even sure if Dad and Jill
were going to allow me to stay at the venue for the show after
dinner, since technically that was not in accordance with the terms
of my grounding.

Everything else in my life seemed like it was
in the distant past. Treadwell, my house in West Hollywood, summers
spent roaming around L.A. with Allison… those memories seemed like
they belonged to someone else. My grandparents' house in Minnesota
already seemed a world away and it had only been a week since I had
eaten dinner there.

Finding Jake was all that mattered. I
couldn't face another three weeks of touring and then heading off
to school without seeing him once more.

At dinner, despite my best efforts to sit as
far away from my dad as possible, I was seated directly across from
him. He was in one of his giddy moods, psyched to be going on
stage, thrilled to have the whole band and families together at one
long table. He filled his wine glass with a rich red wine nearly to
the rim despite a glare from Jill, and then refilled it within
minutes.

When Jill asked me to pass her the platter of
quinoa roasted with almonds, I neglected to respond to her "thank
you" with a meaningful "you're welcome." Not because I had no
manners or was trying to send Jill a nasty message, but because my
brain was in a fantasy universe, its wheels spinning wildly about
the Jake dilemma.

Nevertheless, this act of unintentional
rudeness caught my dad's attention.

"We say please and thank you in our family,
Taylor," my father reminded me. "I would appreciate it if you would
acknowledge your stepmother."

He was slurring a little. His reprimand
didn't even make sense. I had lost track of how many times he had
refilled his wine glass, but suspected maybe the wine was getting
to his head, which was just foolish so soon before taking the
stage.

"Sorry," I said to Jill, seated at my right,
in a sarcastic voice. "You're welcome to ask me to pass the
quinoa."

Jill huffed at me. "Taylor," she sighed,
exasperated.

"All right now, Taylor, that is quite
enough!" my dad snapped.

I realized, even in my daze of hazy day
dreams about Jake, what was happening. The wine had finally
loosened the last few weeks' worth of my dad's frustration with me
after I had caught him with Karina. Rather than having the adult
conversation with me about responsibility and other garbage that I
had been fearing he would try to initiate, he was just going to
immaturely punish me for what I had seen.

"Dad," I said calmly, wondering why he had
chosen such a public venue to pick this fight with me. "Relax. I
didn't do anything wrong."

Jill raised an eyebrow. Wade was paying
attention now even though he was seated further down the table
because my father's mood had shifted dramatically and it seemed to
have changed the temperature in the room.

"You are excused, Taylor," my father informed
me.

I looked around. We were backstage in a suite
at one of the largest concert arenas in the country. Where exactly
was he implying that I was excused to go?

"All right," I said. I folded the napkin that
had been in my lap and placed it over my half-eaten dinner.

"Excuse me," Jill said, looking confused at
me and then my dad, and then at me again. "What is going on
here?"

"Some people need to learn manners," my
father snapped.

I was really beginning to wonder if my dad
was an alcoholic or just crazy. This side of him, which I had seen
so little of that summer, was volatile and unpredictable. It was
safe to say that I hated him when he was like that. I walked
briskly toward the door to the hallway.

"Taylor!" Jill called after me, standing up
at the table.

But I was already in the hallway, breaking
into a jog toward the large gray security doors that led to the
seating area of the arena. I passed another suite backstage with
its door propped open, where Sigma was eating dinner and the
guitarist was lazily strumming on a couch. I heard someone say,
"Brice, there goes your jail bait," as I ran past. But I didn't
dare look over my shoulder.

My legs were unstoppable. I was running. The
red EXIT sign over those gray doors was beckoning.

"Taylor, come back here!" Jill yelled from
behind me. She had followed me into the hallway but was far behind,
way too far behind, as I pushed the doors open and stepped into the
throngs of fans.

It was an hour before show time, but the
gates had already been opened for general seating. I ran through
the aisles of sparsely populated seats toward one of the arched
doorways that led to the cavernous hallways where I hoped to find
Jake selling t-shirts. The arena was nothing less than enormous,
and as I ran past row after row, it flabbergasted me that enough
people cared about my father's music to fill a venue this huge.

I reached the vestibule, cool and dimly lit.
There was a chill to the night air in Detroit; it had been raining
for a week before our tour bus had rolled into town. Long lines
were already forming at the hot dog and beer stands. I suspected
that the t-shirts would be on sale near the main entrance, but the
problem with that logic was that there were several main entrances.
I ran toward one, sweating slightly, and my heart sank when Jake
wasn't behind its counter. I spun around wildly.

If he wasn't at the arena, I had no idea what
I would do. Going back to the hotel with my dad and Jill was not an
option. Moving in with my grandparents and having my grandmother
punish me for all the ways in which my mother hurt her was also not
an option. I would have preferred going back to Los Angeles and
living in the cinderblock building on Wilshire with other displaced
kids until school started. At least there, I could be myself and
wasn't going to be made to feel like an unwanted guest. I roamed
through the thickening crowd aimlessly, dodging any concert or
arena staff carrying walkie-talkies.

I had twelve dollars in my wallet and
mentally scolded myself for being such an idiot. I wasn't going to
experience much success as a runaway, if running away was an
inevitable course of action that night, on a twelve-dollar
budget.

The faces of concert-goers whirled past me.
There were girls my age, their eyes heavily lined in black pencil,
giddy to be out for the night without parents. There were women
like my mom in attendance, having a girls' night out, dressed to
the nines in lace tank tops and stretch denim jeans. Middle-aged
couples out on dates clutched beers in plastic cups and held hands.
I wistfully longed to truly be one of them, just a normal person
with a normal home in suburban Michigan and a life to which I would
return after the concert.

I was running out of time. The lights were
lowering and the crowd was scurrying toward seats. The announcer
was presenting Sigma. My eyes searched the crowd. He had to be
there. Absolutely had to be there.

The crowd in Detroit was ready to rock, that
was for sure. At no other city so far in the tour had the crowd
screamed more loudly. I meandered back into the hallway, not
expecting to find Jake anywhere in the dark moving mass of the
crowd, which was composed of raised lighters and jabbing elbows and
joints held furtively down near knees.

I pressed my face against a window in the
hallway to look out into the parking lot. It stretched out as far
as I could see, every single space taken, with the sparse remains
of the lowering sun's beams of light reflecting off windshields.
Sigma was wrapping up their tenth song. Their set would be finished
soon. I felt like crying; my chest was getting tight and a lump was
growing in my throat.

It occurred to me to leave the theater and
roam the parking lot, but naturally if I were to do that I would
never find my way back into the amphitheater because I pathetically
couldn't afford a ticket. I rested, tucked into my corner in the
hallway, watching hundreds of fans leave the seating area, visit
the bathrooms, and return. The lights once again went down. There
was a thunderous drum roll. A burst of smoke.

Pound was taking the stage.

And then suddenly I saw him.

Jake had made his way to the entrance to
seating section C, and was lingering there in the darkness, peering
forward, trying to find me in the crowd.

I ran up from behind him and touched his arm.
He turned and saw me, and immediately threw his arms around me and
kissed me, hard. All of those days of wondering when we would next
meet had been worth it. His kiss knocked the wind out of me; I
didn't care what else happened in my life before or after that
kiss. It was like a movie; like everything was going to be just
fine now that he had arrived. When he pulled away he was a little
out of breath.