"I don't know," I say. "I've never really… She’s so small."
"You'll be fine," Hayes says.
I wash my hands and sit before he places her in my arms. She’s the most darling human I have ever seen in my life, with her tiny rosebud mouth pursed, sucking in her sleep as if she's dreaming of being fed. Her fingers are impossibly small, clutched into tiny fists, and I feel something unfurl inside me as I look at her. "She's perfect," I whisper, and to my horror, my voice cracks.
Hayes glances over at Tali. "Do you think she's hungry?" he asks. "She's doing that sucking thing with her mouth."
Tali smiles at him adoringly. "You worry too much," she says. "I assure you she will not just forget to eat."
He takes the seat beside her and their eyes meet. For a quick second, it’s as if they’re the only people in the room. I used to claim that I didn’t want what they had, that I didn’t want a little girl like the one in my arms, but it was simply that I thought those things were impossible for me.
And it turns out I was right.
But it hurts a lot more now than it used to.
46
JOSH
She’s blocked my calls. I have the insane impulse to get on a plane and beg her back, and I fight it every day. She could have gotten killed coming here the way she did, and if she had, it would have been my fault. Just like it’s my fault that she got hurt by this whole thing. I knew better than to start this, and I certainly knew better than to continue it.
I get through work every day, but my heart is no longer in it. I find myself wishing I’d never gone into medicine in the first place, simply so that I wouldn’t have come, so they wouldn’t need me to stay.
I’ve told the director of operations I need out, and he asked me to give him a year to find a replacement. It’ll take every day of that year. We just had another bomb threat yesterday, one of our guards was shot this morning and a refugee camp to the south was attacked while I was in Hawaii. No one with an ounce of sense would choose to come here now.
So…a year. It will be too late to win Drew back by then, but what was I going to do anyway, under the circumstances?
“You look awful,” my mom says when I call.
She does too, but I keep that to myself. “Just busy here,” I tell her. “How are you feeling?”
“I’d feel a lot better,” she says, “if you were home and your brother was okay. Have you spoken to him?”
“We’ve texted,” I tell her, though in truth it was just one text I sent asking him to look in on our mother, to which he did not reply.
“The breakup with Drew has really hit him hard,” she says. “I think he’s drinking.”
I laugh, scrubbing a hand over my face. For once my brother and I have something in common. “Mom, was there ever a time when he wasn’t drinking? He spent most of the trip to Hawaii drunk. Aside from the part he spent in jail for drugs.”
She sighs. “Your father thinks he needs to go to rehab, but I just think if Drew would come back he’d—”
“Do not suck her into his spiral, Mom,” I say. Her eyes widen at my tone. “She’s got enough going on. She doesn’t need to be dealing with an addict on top of everything else.”
“But…he could support her too,” she argues. “They could be there for each other. Marriage and a baby would change everything for both of them.”
“A baby?” I repeat, aghast. Aside from the fact that marriage and babies didn’t seem to improve my parents’ life much, it’s not really ideal for a guy with addiction issues and a very recent arrest record. Mostly, though, it’s for selfish reasons I want to derail this entire line of thought.
“He’s been talking about it,” she says. “The other day he was here. I guess that friend of Drew’s, the writer, just had a baby. She posted about it. Joel thinks maybe if he made a grand gesture, she’d come back.”
The camp siren goes off for the third time in as many days. “Sorry, Mom, I have to go.” I end the call to report to the hospital. We’ll probably be on lockdown again all night, my life is likely at risk, and I’m so depressed after the call from my mother that I barely even care.
47
DREW
For the next two weeks, I do what I have to do.
I get through the interviews and get my dress fitted for the premiere and go to the studio, putting in the motions of bringing the demos to life. My performance is so lackluster that Davis finally explodes and tells me to take a few days off and pull my shit together.
I don’t feel sad. I simply feel numb. LA is still sunlit and busy and I feel like a ghost as I float over its streets. I have no purpose anymore. Ben is still on me about the forensic accountant and I can’t commit to that either. I don’t know how my life can be so empty yet feel unbearably heavy at the same time.
Someone has uploaded a video of me performing my new song that last night in Oahu, having finally realized who I was. The comments are equally divided between That’s way better than Naked and Tell her to stick with what she knows. It hurts to watch. There was so much love in my eyes as I sang to Josh. I had so much faith in him, and it’s never coming back.
The only bright spot, the only bearable moment, is when I visit Tali and the baby each day. They’re at their house in Hollywood Hills, as—to Tali’s chagrin—Hayes is temporarily refusing to leave LA.
“Just in case Audrey needs, you know, emergency brain surgery at UCLA,” Tali explains with a laugh, pulling the baby to her shoulder and burping her like an old pro. “He’s insane.”
“It’s sweet, though,” I tell her, watching as she offers a pinky to Audrey, who grasps it. That’s the thing with mothers, I’m finding—they can’t seem to stop seeking contact, even when the child no longer needs it. Even when, as in my mother’s case, they sometimes do more harm than good.
Tali looks up at me and sees something on my face. “Have you spoken to Josh?”
I swallow. “I told you. I blocked his calls. The whole thing was pointless. It was just going to drag on forever.”
She gives me a sad smile. “Not everything that drags on forever necessarily hurts forever, though,” she says.
I swallow in polite disagreement. In her life, things work out okay. In mine, even the good things go to hell, eventually.
On the day of the premiere, I reluctantly rise and prepare for a day I could hardly be less interested in. Getting ready for something like this is a lot like getting ready for a wedding, if that wedding was taking place at three PM and involved millions of people discussing your weight, pores and love life afterward. An entire day wasted in hair and makeup, then a red carpet, then a movie I don’t want to watch followed by a party I don’t want to attend. A thousand women would kill to trade places with me and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s also nothing wrong with the fact that I’d kill to trade places with a woman staying home. I’m tired of pretending to be excited and grateful all the time.
I’m in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel because my cottage wasn’t large enough for all the people it will take to make me presentable. By nine in the morning the facialist is there, complaining about broken capillaries and blackheads I can’t even see. And then the rest of the crew moves in—manicurist, hairdresser, makeup artist, stylist.