Unbound (4 page)

I nodded, doing the math in my head. If I got clever and combined my personal assets with finances from the store, it could be done. Things would be extremely tight for while (especially if this little venture wasn’t quickly successful), but it was doable.

“
Mind if I think about it a bit?”  I asked, not being one to act overly eager.

“
Of course. It’s been out there for almost an entire week and you’re the first person to ask about it. So take all the time you need.”

I gave him a smile and thanked him before leaving the store. When I stepped back outside, I looked out to the small blue plane, bobbing on the water. It almost seemed to be nodding to me, as if it approved my plan.  I pictured the Pine Way logo on the side and beamed.

This could really work… how hard can it be to get a pilot’s license anyway?

That would be the first thing I’d have to find out, I supposed. I smiled warmly at the plane and walked back to the Pine Way with something in my stomach that was either excitement or dread.  I honestly didn’t care which it was. It was something other than anger and loneliness and that was more than enough for me.

I unlocked the door the Pine Way and when I stepped inside, I had nearly forgotten about the uncomfortable visit from Amber Dawson. All I could think about was Mel Tanner’s airplane and how it might have the potential to take my business—and my life—to the next level.

4—Devlin

Five weeks.

That’s how long it took me to make the fall from feeling as if everyone—from my agent to my fans—expected the world of me, to being a useless, scraggly, waste of space. I had done absolutely
nothing
since I left Aubrey in the hotel. Well, that’s not exactly true. In fact, for the three days after I left her (and Hollywood, and my agent, and my fame, and the director for the next film I had lined up), I had been quite busy.

I had stuck to the random statement I had given the limo driver. I had caught a flight to Alaska. I had caught a red eye to Anchorage. I slept most of the way and made my way through the airport with a severe hangover. It was the first time I had ever flown without any luggage and it had been marvelous. Had it not been for the hangover, I think I might have actually enjoyed it.

I’m not particularly proud of it, but I worked off most of my hangover in the airport. I'd flitted between the Starbucks and the Japanese restaurant, watching the news. I wore a Boston Bruins hat and a pair of aviator sunglasses that did a decent job of hiding my features. I spent five hours in the Anchorage airport and only two people recognized me.  Thankfully, they didn't make a big deal about it.

When I ordered my coffee from Starbucks, I used cash, something I never did.  I used my black credit card for everything – in fact, I had gone so far as to pull it out and hand it to the cashier. But then I was pretty sure that doing so would mean that Adam would somehow trace the transaction. He’d probably do it within six hours. And that would put a big fat hole in my plans of escaping from Hollywood, and the expectations that had made me into the monster I had become.

Okay… so maybe not a
monster
. I’m not sure what in the hell I had turned into. All I knew was that it was hard to look at the man I saw staring back at me in the mirror. I also knew that it had been well over a year since I read a script for a potential starring role without rolling my eyes. It hadn’t taken long for me to get jaded on Hollywood. Sure, I drank the Kool-Aid and found it quite tasty—but the poison quickly corrupted my mind. And the night on the red carpet with Aubrey had been the night it had finally reached my heart.

After spending six hours in the airport, I took a cab to the nearest hotel and checked in (again, all of these transactions made with cash). In my room, I looked through the local (and not-so-local) papers, searching for some place to stay for a few days, maybe even a few weeks.

I ended up spending two days and two nights in the hotel. I ordered take-out pizza and Chinese food. I did nothing but watch TV and read. On television, there was already speculation that something had happened to me.
Friends say he is not returning his calls and his agent is declining to comment at this time,
the reporters were saying.

I laughed out loud at this, thinking about how I had thrown my phone across the hotel room. I had been cupped in the lap of luxury then. I had one of the most beautiful and lusted after women in the world in my bed waiting for me, a paycheck coming from a studio that would buy a nice summer home, and a body that most other men my age would kill for.

That had been five weeks ago. Now, I had a thick, blond goatee that did a good job of disguising my face. My hair was shaggy, curling out over my ears and flopping like dead leaves on my forehead. I wore flannel shirts and cheap jeans. I showered once a day (okay, once every other day if I didn’t do anything active). And already, I like this Jack guy. He’s a lot more down to earth than Devlin Stone. He probably didn’t have any sort of a shot with a woman as blindingly hot as Aubrey Henning, but I was warming up to him. I didn’t care for Devlin Stone any more. That guy was a dick.

I discovered my little hideaway cabin in the real estate listings. A small yet chunky little cabin that sat in one of the more rural areas of Sitka. Steeped in Russian history, Sitka was an interesting little place. Situated on Baranof Island and facing out towards the Gulf of Alaska, you could only reach it by taking a ferry or plane. The town itself was quaint. If Norman Rockwell had have stepped foot in Alaska at any point during his life, I feel like his little paintings of ideal neighborhoods would have ended up looking slightly different, taking on a certain Russian and northwest coast Indian flair.

I fell in love with the cabin at first sight. There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a modest kitchen, and a small living area. A large deck sprawled out behind it, shaded by trees. Through the tree branches, I could spy the sparkling and frigid waters of the Gulf of Alaska.  Seriously, where else could you find totem poles, matryoshka dolls and a Russian Orthodox church together?

I negotiated with the realtor, managing to get the place under a rent-to-own contract for a year. I funneled the money for the first month’s rent out of a personal account that Adam knew nothing about. I had around fifteen thousand dollars in it, something I had decided to set aside in case of emergencies.

A year seemed like a long time. I realized that as I signed the contract. I didn’t know if I’d be in Sitka that long. Maybe at some point I’d realize that I was simply having a mid-life crisis and go running back to the lights and attention that had so badly misaligned me over the last four years. 

But five weeks later, with the goatee grown in and the nice people of Sitka no longer doing double-takes when they thought they had seen Devlin Stone, I found it hard to imagine running back to Hollywood. While I wouldn’t go so far as to commit to a cliché and say that I was falling in love with Sitka, the isolated feel of the place and the fjords, towering timber and sea all around seemed like a perfect fit. Slowly, I began to get a sense that this was where I was meant to be. Even before enrolling in the army and taking the strange path of events that had led me to receiving my first script, bedding my first a-list actress, and giving my first interview, I think I was destined to end up in Sitka—an odd thought, as I don’t believe in destiny.

The love affair with Sitka started during the second week I was in the cabin. I met a man at one of the local fish markets that told me about the network of hiking trails that stretched through the Sitka wilderness. My interested was sparked at once; I’d loved hiking and all things about the wilderness even as a boy. It was a passion that had taken a back seat when I joined the army and then it had been pushed away when I started making movies. The closest I had come to being involved in the woods was spending nine days on location in rural North Carolina for an action movie that did fairly well last summer.

Joy and determination set me out to find those trails. And when I found them, I felt like a child again. I walked along trails that were bordered by large trees and an immense and impossibly blue sky. I took in the smells of an unharmed forest, of spruce and fir that had been thriving there long before I had been brought into the world.

One day on my fourth week in Sitka, I found a small cliff just off of one of the trails. I walked out to a large outcropping of rock and looked out into the Gulf. Looking at it and noticing how it melded with the horizon made me think of things that did not end. It was
that
large and uninterrupted. Suddenly, my issues with Hollywood and this dulled midlife crisis I was going through seemed miniscule.

I sat there for at least three hours, watching Bald Eagles soar in the sky and a group of sea otters frolic and play in the dark salt water. I enjoyed being alone. I liked the solitude and the quiet. I would have stayed there well into the night if I hadn’t started to get cold as the sun made its decent beyond the horizon, setting the sky ablaze in fiery hues of pinks, purples and oranges.

By the time I returned back to the cabin, the idea of staying in Sitka for a year was welcoming. Hell… the idea of
buying
the cabin outright and staying here for as long as I lived seemed even more appealing.

The one hang up, of course, was money. Not that I was broke, far from it.  I had more than enough money. Earlier in the year, my accountant had informed me that my net worth was somewhere around twenty-two million. I knew that I had at least three million sitting in one checking account and nearly five hundred thousand in another. But to get to those funds, I’d have to access the accounts of Devlin Stone and that would eventually get to Adam and probably my accountant, too.

I spent that night trying to come up with ways to get to the money. The two most likely scenarios was to call either Adam or Aubrey. I felt like I could let them in on what I had done, trusting them to secrecy. But something about that didn’t feel quite right.

So before sleep started tugging at me, I had another idea—one that made no sense but warmed me inside.

I’d stay here in Sitka and start a business. What sort of business, I wasn’t sure. But with the funds I had currently available, I figured that I had at least another three months to figure it out.

****

On the third day of my fifth week in Sitka, I watched the news for the first time since staying in the hotel. I flipped through the trashy entertainment channels, curious to see how the search for me was going—or if there was even still a search. My hope was that some teenaged celebrity had gone on a drug binge and done something stupid, making the public totally forget about the fact that the 'handsome action-and-rom-com star' had gone missing.

But what I found was the exact opposite. There were multiple rumors swirling over what might have happened to Devlin Stone. One theory suggested that I had secretly become a Scientologist and was hidden by the higher-ups. That was a good one and made me laugh.  Another theory was that I had gone back home to where I had grown up in Maine. My favorite, though, was that I was having a secret affair with an older woman who, just last year, had been rumored to be sleeping with me (she had not).

There were a few shots of reporters trying to get a statement from Aubrey, as she had been the last person of note to see me. They showed footage of us on the red carpet, including the juicy kiss. More recent footage of Aubrey had her giving reporters the bird as they shoved cameras in her face and asked her if she knew where I was.  Aubrey looked sad and, I hate to admit it, betrayed. I felt bad for leaving her high and dry.

I cut the television off and looked at the blank screen for a moment. Seeing Aubrey in such a state was the first time I had legitimately felt bad about my decision to abandon the Hollywood ship. She was a sweet girl and didn’t deserve to be treated like that. I wondered if I should call her but I ignored the urge as soon as it was recognized.  What a shit storm that would be.

Instead, I threw on my coat and boots and stepped outside. It was a typical Sitka day; fat and beautiful puffy clouds rolled by while the sun beamed down enough to make things look bright but not enough to make things feel warm. The thermometer read 52 degrees.  My cabin looked down a hill that was dotted along its right side with four similar cabins. At the bottom of the hill, one of the few main roads wound out into a small valley. I could barely see the outskirts of town from my porch. Towering snow-peaked fjords bordered it all to the right. I took in a crisp breath of fresh air and sighed.  The natural majesty surrounding me made me feel like I was practically stealing the cabin at the great rate I had secured.

I hadn’t yet purchased a car. It felt like a risky purchase to make, seeing as how I wasn’t yet certain how I was going to get my hands on my money. What I
had
done was dropped one hundred bucks on a used mountain bike. I spent an afternoon keeping my physique in check and so far, during my five week stint in Sitka, riding the bike was the only form of exercise I was doing. It was a welcome change from the workout regimens my movie roles usually required.

The bike was a great way to enjoy the scenery and just slow down. I think that if I had a car, I wouldn’t have appreciated Sitka quite as much. Sure, it made grocery shopping a pain (I had to pay a teenage kid ten dollars to deliver my purchases to my cabin), but it was worth it.

I hopped on the bicycle and pedaled out of the yard. I stuck to the side of the unmarked road that led to my cabin, coasting slowly down the hill towards town. I still wasn’t used to the goatee or the shaggy hair, so it still made me want to smile as all of the hair tickled my face when it ruffled in the breeze.

I made my way down to the main stretch of road that lead into Sitka. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going. I just needed to get out and didn’t have the mental capacity at the moment to trust myself on one of my long reflective hikes out into the wilderness. By the time town crept into view, I thought that I’d maybe ride Tanner’s Fresh Fish down next to the pier to get something for dinner. Maybe I’d swing by a Red Box and see if there were any good movies I hadn’t seen yet. Anything to occupy my mind.