Chapter 44
Laine
Nothing was right. Nothing was exactly wrong, but nothing was right. I had things to figure out, and I didn’t even know what they were. I should have been out getting work, but I wanted to go to bed. Not to lie under the covers but to sleep. Forever.
I’d done the right and honorable thing. I knew immediately why so few people bothered with it, why so many just went where their heart pulled them. Because doing what made sense hurt. I had a physical pain in my chest. Doing the right thing wasn’t supposed to feel like that. It was supposed to be uplifting. But the loss of him… well, the only word I had was pain.
I pulled an ice-crusted container of French vanilla out of the freezer. Maybe I’d just freeze out the sad. I opened the drawer for a spoon, and I stared back at me in black and white.
Jake had already copped a plea for two years behind bars, and still, the problem of that old me was nestled with the spoons.
I took the picture of sixteen-year-old me out of the drawer, ice cream forgotten. Look at that kid. She was tough. She did what she had to. She’d been given nothing and turned it into something.
I didn’t flinch from the photo. That girl had screwed up any chance I’d had at happiness, but she had given me that chance in the first place. I didn’t hide the picture or try to not think about it. She was mine. She was a part of me.
“I forgive you,” I said, then I started crying.
I think I cried for two days. Two and a half. Normally I viewed every tear shed as a sign of weakness, as a lack of ownership and control. But I gave up on that in the first ten minutes. I’d been through a lot. I earned my tears. This snot-shooting, breath-catching blubber was mine, and I deserved it.
Irv called, and I texted back that I was busy. Tom emailed me an invitation to a Razzledazzle show, and I texted back that I couldn’t make it. No one called to tell me who was eating at what restaurant without their underpants.
Sometimes I called up memories of Sunshine and Rover, with their brightly colored everything. I knew they loved me. I had been with them for two years, and I had to be ripped away from them. I remembered the funky smell of the van, sweat and love and something else.
I’d always thought they’d abandoned me, but maybe it was more complex than that. Maybe I shouldn’t have grown up in a van. Maybe they thought I could do better than them. At six and a half, I had no idea what it meant to leave behind someone you loved.
It sucked.
Michael was the only person who could soothe me, the only one who could make my crying stop, but I’d abandoned him. I had no right to call him to comfort me.
But what I could do was look at him. I thought it would hurt to pull up the pictures I’d taken of him, from the loft upstairs to the first pap shot I’d gotten by the valet of the WDE Agency. I’d filed them by how handsome he looked, how happy, how engaged he was with the camera. I had one where he was scratching his head and looking pensive, and I stared at it at three in the morning, trying to understand him. I couldn’t. It was just a picture.
In the evening of the third day, I realized I’d stopped crying. I felt clean. I felt powerful again, and though I hadn’t slept, I was wide awake.
So I went to see Razzledazzle at the Thelonius Room. It was so dark I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. Even the foot-high candles didn’t cut through the murk.
“Where have you been?” Tom yelled over the music of the opening band, Spoken Not Stirred.
“Home crying.”
He looked away from his camera. “You?”
“Yeah. You got a problem?”
“You should have called me.”
I shrugged. “I’m sorry. You like doing this. I shouldn’t have distracted you with being a pap.”
He nudged me with his shoulder. We had more to talk about, but Razzledazzle came on. He disengaged to do his job.
I knew enough people around the room to hold conversations, but by the third song, I was alone at the bar, trying to get away from the noise. I ordered a glass of crappy wine from a skinny girl in black jeans. She’d done her hair in a fancy twist, but after hours of work, she looked worn out.
Though I felt strong, I knew it was a moment of weakness when I called Michael.
The call bounced. I was off his list.
Sure, being cut off hurt, but the worst part was knowing I’d upset him enough to get pulled. I hadn’t expected hurting someone to feel like this. I thought leaving someone behind would be okay, not a big deal, because I’d be the one in charge. But it wasn’t like that at all. I felt sorry. I’d done the right thing, but it came with a flavor of regret I hadn’t tasted before.
I left and stalked the streets of downtown, taking pictures of… I didn’t even know what. Corners. Garbage. A broken water main. Doorways. A club let out, and I took pictures of the drunks. I did it the next night, and the night after. I didn’t know what I was doing but avoiding my own sadness, but I was doing something.