Someone Is Watching (27 page)

“Suppose you ask her on your way out.”

“I’m really sorry about this,” Travis says. “Honestly, Bailey, I …”

“Just go.”

Travis turns toward Heath. “Come on, man. Let’s get out of here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re in violation of a court order,” Claire reminds him.

“So sue me,” Heath says. “Oh, I forgot. You’re already suing me. Sue me again,” he says, even more provocatively. “What are you doing here anyway? Don’t you know you’re in violation of a court order?”

I’m about to explain that I merely intended to show Claire the exterior of the house where I grew up, when Claire stops me. “Don’t waste your breath.” She checks her watch. “One minute,” she warns.

Everyone scurries into whatever clothes they manage to locate, then flees the room.

Everyone except Travis and Heath.

“Bailey, please …,” Travis says again.

“Just leave.”

Travis offers no further protest as he walks from the room. Heath pushes himself off the bed, about to follow.

“Not you,” I tell him.

“You just said …”

“Not you,” I repeat.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Heath says. “I’ll stay … if Florence Nightingale goes.”

“Heath …”

“Take it or leave it.” He turns to Claire. “You can spare her for a few minutes, can’t you, sainted sister? You can go keep Travis company. Get to know him better. I think you’ll find you have a lot in common. He’s a bit of leech as well.”

“Bailey?” Claire asks.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” Heath repeats.

Claire reluctantly exits the room. Heath kicks the door shut after her with his bare foot.

“What’s going on, Heath?”

“Nothing’s going on. You’re overreacting. I had a few friends over. So what?”

“Those are your friends?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Do you even know their names?”

“What difference does it make what their names are? They’re upstanding citizens, fellow actors and future stars, every one.”

“They’re lowlifes.”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“Wait a minute. You said they’re actors?” My mind is racing. What am I thinking? “Do you know Paul Giller?”

“Who?” Heath looks toward the door, then at the floor, anywhere but at me.

“Paul Giller. He’s an actor. Do you know him?”

“Should I?”

“Why aren’t you looking at me?”

“Why are you yelling?”

“Do you know Paul Giller?” I ask again.

“I already told you—no. What’s your problem?”

“
You’re
my problem,” I cry, frustration getting the better of me. “You bring these strangers into our parents’ home, you get wasted out of your mind in the middle of the afternoon, you break in …”

“I didn’t break in. I have a key, remember? I don’t get why you’re so upset. What’s the big deal? This is my house.
Our
house. Our father left it to
us,
along with his considerable fortune, and our greedy half-siblings, including the sainted Claire, have absolutely no right to any of it. I will fight them to my dying day before I let them have a single dime.”

“With what?” I ask plainly.

“What do you mean, with what?”

“You need more than willpower to fight them. Gene is threatening to tie us up in court for years, and he has the power and the know-how to do just that. Sooner or later, whatever money we’ve managed to save up is going to run out. I have no idea when I’ll feel strong enough to return to work, and you don’t have a job.”

“What? You think I’m not trying?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I came this close,
this
close,” he says, bringing his thumb and index finger almost together for emphasis, “to getting that damn Whiskas commercial. I rolled around on that stupid floor for hours,
hours,
with that fucking cat licking my face, giving the director exactly what he said he wanted. The commercial’s in the bag, my agent tells me, a national spot, residuals up the wazoo. And then at the last minute they decide they want to go in a different direction. Nothing personal, my agent tells me. The director loved what I was doing. It’s just that I’m a little too good-looking for what the client has in mind. After reviewing the audition tapes, the client’s worried I might upstage the fucking cat. So they’ve decided to go with more of an everyday Joe, someone the average-looking cat-lover can relate to.”

“I’m sorry, Heath,” I tell him. “I know how frustrating it must be.”

“You have no idea how frustrating it is,” he snaps. “You have no idea what it’s like to keep getting the door slammed in your face. Time after time after time. Everything’s always come so easy for you.”

Can he be serious? His self-absorption takes my breath away. Heath has always been self-absorbed—interestingly, that’s part of
his appeal—but can he really be so oblivious as to what I’ve been going through these past weeks?

As if my thoughts have suddenly appeared in bright lights across my forehead, he softens. “I’m sorry,” he says, hand over his heart. “That was insensitive. Even for me.” He offers his best “forgive me” little half-smile. “I don’t mean to dump on you. I know things have been kind of messed up for you lately.…”

Heath has never been good at dealing with any kind of unpleasantness. I understand that he has to keep what happened to me at arm’s length, minimize its trauma, or he will fall apart.

“It’s just that I’ve been dealing with this sort of crap all my life,” he continues, returning to his comfortable oblivion as my legs grow weak and I sink down on the edge of the bed to keep from crumpling to the floor. “I’m either too handsome or not handsome enough,” he is saying. “Either too tall or too short, too thin or too muscular. Whatever it is, I’m never just right. I’m never good enough.”

I know he’s referring to more than his erstwhile career, that he is no doubt referencing the look of disappointment he claimed he always saw on our father’s face, but I don’t have the strength to go into that now. “It’s the nature of the business,” I offer instead, my heart aching for my brother despite his profound self-involvement. “You knew that going in.”

“It’s not that I’m sitting around on my ass. I’m going on auditions; I’m putting myself out there.”

“What about your writing?”

“What about it?”

“That screenplay you’ve been working on—”

“Still working on it,” he says, cutting me off. “What are you getting at, Bailey? Are you saying that I should give up my dreams and settle for some stupid nine-to-five job? Is that where this is leading?”

“No, of course not.” I say this despite what I am really thinking, that regardless of what you hear on TV shows like
American Idol,
where the tearful winner urges all those watching from their living rooms to hang on to their dreams, no matter what—
forgetting about the thousands of other contestants, the millions of other desperate wannabes whose dreams of stardom will
never
come true—that sometimes it’s just better to choose another dream, that living an actual life is better than just dreaming about a life that will never be. “It’s just that there’s no money coming in, and all our assets have been frozen.…”

“All I need is a couple of national spots and I won’t have to rely on Dad’s money, no matter what the courts eventually decide. I’ll even have enough money to take care of you for a change, the way you’ve always taken care of me. Please don’t be mad at me, Bailey. I can’t stand it when you’re mad at me. I love you more than anything in the world. You’re all I’ve got.”

“I love you, too.” I fight the impulse to take him in my arms. “I was just thinking it might be smarter in the long run to settle this thing.…”

“Are you kidding me? Is she kidding me?” he asks the surrounding walls.

“Heath, listen to me. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of money to go around. We’re talking about millions of dollars. Tens of millions …”

“I’m not giving those vultures ten cents.”

I lower my head. This is not what I wanted to talk to Heath about, although I no longer have any idea
what
I wanted to talk to him about. I almost smile. Heath has that power.

“It’s just that if Dad wanted to divide his estate evenly,” my brother continues, “he would have done just that.”

“I know.” In truth, I know no such thing. The fact is that there was nothing our father relished more than a good fight. Claire would probably say that this lawsuit is what he’d been hoping for all along.

“And we have to respect Dad’s wishes,” Heath is saying. “We can’t just take the easy way out. In spite of everything we’ve been going through lately.”

Everything
we’ve
been going through, I repeat silently. What I say out loud is, “You’re sure you don’t know Paul Giller?”

“Never heard of him.”

I have no choice but to believe him. “Promise me you won’t do anything like this again? That you’ll respect the court order and stay away from here?”

“I’ll be a good boy from now on. I swear.”

“You don’t have to swear. Just promise.”

He gives me one of his most genuine smiles, one he once confided he spent hours, if not days, perfecting in front of his mirror. If I were a producer looking to cast the part of the hapless heroine’s sensitive, deeply misunderstood older brother, he’d be perfect for the role. The smile deepens. “I promise,” he says.

“I’m really upset with my brother right now.”

I am perched on the tan sofa in Elizabeth Gordon’s inner office, and she is sitting in the navy chair across from me, in virtually the same positions we occupied a week ago.

“What is it that’s upsetting you?”

I tell her about the incident at my parents’ house.

“What upsets you more—the fact that your brother disobeyed a court order or that he was there at all?” she probes.

“That he disobeyed a court order,” I answer quickly. Too quickly, I think, understanding she is probably thinking the same thing. “It’s more than that,” I continue, although I have no idea what I’m about to add.

“I can see you’re conflicted,” Elizabeth says. “Try to put whatever you’re feeling into words.”

How many times have I overheard young parents encouraging frustrated three-year-olds to “use their words”? Has my rape rendered me so infantile? “It’s not just that he was in the house. It’s that there was something so sordid about the whole thing.” I tell her about the state of the various rooms and the hangers-on my
brother surrounds himself with. I don’t tell her my gut says that Heath is hiding something from me.

“Were you frightened?”

“No. Why would I be frightened?”

“A bedroom full of stoned, naked men,” she remarks. “I can certainly understand why that might be intimidating to you.” She tilts her head, her frizzy brown hair falling across her right shoulder, revealing a delicate diamond stud in her left ear.

“You’re wearing different earrings,” I say.

Her left hand reaches absently for her earlobe. “What earrings did I have on last time?”

“Small gold hoops.”

“You’re very observant.” She leans forward. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re experiencing.”

“That’s just the problem.”

“What is?”

“I’m not sure
what
I’m experiencing anymore.”

“How so?”

“I just feel so strange all the time.”

“How so?” she asks again. “Are we talking panic attacks?”

“Sometimes. But it’s more than that.”

“How is this different? You can trust me, Bailey,” she says after a pause. “I understand you’ve had it very rough lately—”

I interrupt. “Rough doesn’t begin to sum it up.”

“What does?”

“It feels as if I can’t breathe. It feels as if I’m losing my mind.”

“This is good, Bailey.”

“
How
is this good? What possible good is this doing?”

“Listen to me.” She leans forward in her chair. “It’s hard for people to understand how this process works. But by explaining things to me, you’re also explaining them to yourself.” She lays her pen across the notepad in her lap. “Picture yourself on a skating rink. You’re worried about falling through because the ice is so thin. Therapy allows the ice to get thicker so you can skate better. With confidence. Right now you’re not skating on very thick ice.”
She pauses to let the image set. “I understand that these things are very upsetting for you to think about, let alone talk about, but it will be helpful to you if you can just put it out there.…”

I glance down at the beige shag carpet at my feet. “I don’t know if I can. I don’t know.”

“It’s better to share whatever’s going on inside you right now—to put those feelings into words—than to try to keep those feelings all bottled up, waiting to explode. Now I know you don’t have a lot of trust in people right now. But the important thing is, can you trust
me
? Can you trust me—and yourself—enough to put these feelings into words? If you can, I promise it will help relieve your intense anxiety.”

“How can you promise that?”

“Because I can help you, Bailey, if you’ll let me.”

“I just don’t know if I’m ready to do this.”

“I’m here, Bailey.
Whenever
you’re ready.”

“You can’t imagine what’s been going on with me.”

“Well, then,
tell
me precisely what’s been going on.”

“I don’t sleep. I have such awful dreams. But then I wake up, and I’m even more anxious.”

“Tell me about your dreams. Describe them in as much detail as you can.”

I recount my recurring nightmares: of sharks swimming beneath my feet in placid waters; of faceless men waiting for me on the shore; of a woman watching me through a pair of binoculars from the balcony of her apartment, the woman’s face my own.

“These are anxiety dreams,” Elizabeth tells me. “You feel helpless and confused and frightened, maybe even a little guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“I sense you feel some responsibility for what happened to you.”

“I know I shouldn’t.…”

“Forget about ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t.’ The fact is, you
do.
Just what do you think you could have done differently, Bailey?”