Strings Attached (23 page)

“That’s what I have my parents paying my therapist to figure out,” she announced, then cocked her head, smiling at last. “Of course, I’m a little pissed that you got hot with him while I was upstairs, but I understand. I mean, he’s
gorgeous.
Everywhere he goes, people gawk. They do double takes. So he works everyone, like I said before when you weren’t listening. And don’t forget that I saved your ass that night from him,
literally,
so you owe me. And you can start repaying me by making things right with Reed.”

“I’ll do anything.”

“Then write her a letter and I’ll give it to her; I’ll even talk to her myself. And in the meantime,” she touched his cheek, “you need to realize you’ve got some pretty heavy power yourself. Start using it to get what
you
want. And by the way, please come out of the closet. This wishy-washy shit?
Not attractive.
There’s the bell, gotta run.”

“Ellie?”

“Hmm?”

“Thanks.”

“No worries, doll. Write that letter.” And she was off.

Leaning against the side of his car, Jeremy sighed. Around him, other students scurried and chatted their way to their classes; he figured he should do the same, but he just wasn’t ready. Not ready to face Coby in swim practice, or Reed in English Lit, not his teachers or anybody else. He simply needed to get his thoughts together. And besides, he had to write his letter to Reed.

He climbed back into his car and started it, backed out, threw it into drive, and roared out of the parking lot. After stopping for the signal at the end of the street, he made a right and headed toward the desolate beaches south of Oxnard, speeding north along the road that edged the shimmering Pacific on his left.

Eventually, he came to an inconspicuous sign on the opposite side of the road indicating El Matador State Beach, so he double-checked for oncoming traffic and made a quick left, then followed the narrow driveway down to a small dirt lot and parked. From there, he spotted a precipitous pathway that wove its way through the rocks down to an abandoned stretch of pale sand below.

Perfect.

He grabbed his book bag from the car, chirped the alarm, and began picking his way down the steeply creviced decline.

Halfway down, he paused to look. The blinding shine of the morning sunlight on the water stabbed his eyes as he scanned the horizon. He saw the paper-white sails of faraway boats to the east, then the flock of gulls that reeled and dipped above the froth-tipped waves churning the sea to the west. A chilling gale whipped through his jeans and sweatshirt and throttled his body, blowing his hair about his face. He curled his toes within his dirty white deck shoes and jammed his hands into his front pants pockets, squeezing his eyes shut so hard that he saw orange tingles floating amidst dim red.

His memories tumbled like shoes in a dryer: memories of sleepless nights, lying on the sofa, taunted by images of what would surely become of him, a gutter-branded boy with no past to uphold him and no prospects for the future.

But so much has changed,
a voice said.
Things are different now.

Aunt Katharine’s face floated before him, then came gentle Reed, then sophisticated Ellie and dangerous Coby, and next his true friend Carlo—and finally, sweet, sweet Arthur. These were the people who orbited like planets around
him,
the nebula that had felt too unworthy to gather up its gas and dust, a fledgling star too frightened to blaze the darkened heavens with its own holy light.

But not anymore. He stood windblown, still now as the gaudily painted flying lady on the bow of a clipper ship, drinking in the blaring song of this moment when he began, at last, to understand the magic of how it feels to be
alive.
He embraced the excitement of owning a life so voluptuous with possibility: the chance for love and acceptance and friendship and reciprocal lust,
all within his grasp!

He began sweetening inside, as if a chocolate vine were weaving its way through him as it bloomed flowers with candy-corn petals, shooting tendrils of delicious bliss, stretching and curling through his taut arms and legs, through his heart and inside his lungs, then down his cock and up his backbone, along both sides of his neck to the top of his nobly held sun-drenched head. He saw Ellie’s eyes swimming before him, her voice echoing old movie–style,
“…you need to realize you’ve got some pretty heavy power yourself. Start using it to get what you want…”
Jeremy opened his eyes, threw his arms in the air, and grinned; just like a grown-up Pinocchio, he was truly alive, at last.

He picked and shuffled his way to the bottom of the trail, until finally his feet disappeared into the powdery beach at the base. His skin soaked in the warmth of the sunny-salty air, and he watched the disintegrating lace of the sea foam inches from his feet.

Paradise.
It was as if he’d never seen it before.

He stooped to examine the running cuneiform of a lone seagull’s tracks in the suedelike sand and then lifted his head to follow a squadron of a dozen sandpipers, in bomber formation, as they skimmed the water’s surface before invading the soggy beach. Enraptured, he smiled at how they charged the fizzing tide in unison, scurrying furiously on invisible legs. Ambling then toward the water’s edge, he bent to examine the thick clusters of lavender-shelled mussels, like petrified grapes, that napped between tides while nestled within the protective folds of the low craggy rocks.

His eyes beheld the curl of the waves before they slapped the shoreline, and beyond them the scattered patches of dirty seaweed that undulated atop the rolling waves as they gathered and built toward the sloping beachhead. On opposing tilting rocks out in deep water, he made out twin shadowy cranes, like soldiers from enemy countries guarding their respective borders, while craggy boulders pushed themselves out of the sand, surrounding him like waking dinosaurs.

Peace.

He decided at last that he was ready, so he plopped down cross-legged and took out his journal and a pen from his bag.

Dear Reed,

The reason I’m writing this is because I’m hoping that you’ll please accept my apology for what I did. There is no excuse, except that I just really didn’t have much of an idea about who I really am until now. I want you to know that you helped me so much, and for that I will always be grateful to you and so happy that I have had you as a part of my life.

I’ve learned only recently what it means to want something for myself, instead of wanting something because someone tells me to. I know this might sound confusing, but if you grew up with my mom, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. I never had the chance to be the kid who was asked, “What do you want for dinner?” or “What do you want for your birthday?” Instead, I was happy if there was any food in the apartment, or if my mom even remembered my birthday. I always learned that it wasn’t OK to want something, because if I did, it just meant being disappointed more. So I learned to turn all of that off and ignore my desires.

My life has changed so much in the past four months that I can’t believe it. I went from one extreme to another, and some days I have a hard time knowing what to do. It’s just like I was living in one TV show for seventeen years and suddenly I’m thrown onto another movie set and I’m expected to handle it all. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great. But I’m still adjusting.

That’s why I allowed myself to be dishonest with you. I really couldn’t be truthful with myself because of everything it would mean. I thought when I moved here that everything in my life that had been wrong would suddenly be right. Sure, I knew that I was sometimes attracted to guys, but I figured all that would be left in Fresno. And when I found out you liked me, I figured you were the missing piece to the puzzle that would make my life complete. In other words, I believed you could fix the deepest, most messed-up part of me. And I was wrong.

I was wrong about you fixing me and wrong about that part of me that I thought was so fucked up and really isn’t wrong, it’s just different from most people. I’m learning that even if I am gay, which I think I am, then it’s going to be OK eventually.

I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life as I was that horrible night, and I wish I could relive the whole thing again so I could make it all turn out different. But I can’t.

Ellie wanted to go wake you up right away when she saw us, but I begged her not to so the three of us could cool down. After she and Coby went into their room, I couldn’t sleep at all. I just sat there in the living room waiting for the sun to come up so we could get the trip back home over with. It was the longest night of my life, and believe me, I’ve had some really long ones. And then the next morning, I actually thought about killing myself, seeing you cry the way you did after she told you what happened. You looked at me with such hatred, which I totally understand, because I hated myself then too.

I haven’t seen or talked with Coby since then and don’t want to. Ellie says he was just playing a game with my head, and I believe her. So now I feel like the biggest idiot on earth.

But enough about all of that.

Please know that I do love you, just not in the way we both hoped. I really want you to be a part of my life. I miss you, and I wish you would e-mail me. There’s so much I want to say to you in person. Please don’t shut me out.

Jeremy

He tore the pages out of his journal to give to her later, folded them, and shoved them inside his backpack, then raised his arm to frisbee the book into the waves, but stopped. Instead, he cracked the book open and turned back the pages until he found it, the pessimistic sentence almost not written on that first night in Ballena Beach:

I wish I was a real man.

He smiled, took one final look at the beach, gathered his belongings, and then trudged back up the hill to his car. Glancing at his watch, he realized that second period was about to start, but there was no way he could make it back in time. What could he do in the meantime until third period?

The counseling office.
He needed to go by and pick up some transcripts anyway, and if he did it this morning, they could write an excused absence note for him that he might be able to use tomorrow in his first two classes.

He sprinted up the hill and, moments later, was roaring south down the highway toward school, singing a noisy duet with the blaring radio.

The celery-green walls of the group therapy room glared like an ER under the fluorescent fixtures zuzzing overhead. The lights made Tiffany’s shoulder-length, recently dyed auburn hair look ridiculous, and she knew it. In fact, after she had rinsed the purple goop from her hair yesterday, the reflection in the medicine cabinet had startled her; the wiglike uniformity of color clashed alarmingly with her waxen, jaundiced skin.
But what the fuck.
She slumped in her tissue-thin pink T-shirt and matching sweatpants, braless and potatolike in her seat, rolling her eyes as the emaciated heroin addict across the circle of folding chairs recounted, as if for the first time,
as if they had all forgotten already,
how her mother had once humiliated her.

“When I turned ten, she made me a birthday party,” she began, “with everyone from school, but halfway through she came out with a brandy glass up to the top, and she got real drunk and started bangin’ on our piana singin’ ‘Dearest Jesus,’ but she kept forgettin’ the words, so she kept havin’ to start over again.” Athena dabbed at her eyes with a wad of toilet paper. “Then she gave up tryin’ to sing and just played the piana and told me I had to sing now, but she kept hittin’ the wrong keys, and I started cryin’, so I couldn’t remember the words either, and when the mothers started sneakin’ their kids out, she yelled, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you people? Ain’t y’all Christians? Don’t y’all love Jesus?’ And then she hollered, ‘You may not leave! You may not leave!’”

Noisily, Athena blew her nose, then hiccuped.

“At least you had a mother,” said David, the bald-headed sound engineer who’d been abandoned at three and was striving to overcome his two-year-long addiction to Vicodin that started after a botched hair-transplant operation.

“At least she gave you a birthday party,” Tiffany added, picking at a ball of lint on the front of her T-shirt, remembering that she hadn’t thrown a party for her own child since he’d turned two. She had figured at three and four he was too young to know he should have one, and by the time five came along, he was used to not having one, so why should she start now?

“Your dismissal sounds like you were avoiding Athena’s raging anger from her crippling trauma, Tiffany. Could it be that you wonder what stories your son will tell others about you and your disease?” asked Dr. Bourfay, the group’s therapist.

“I don’t have to wonder,” she replied sourly, then switching to baby voice, “I didn’t realize I sounded so
mean.
I’m sorry, Athena.”

“No one is saying you sound
mean,
Tiffany. Mean is a wildly judgmental term, and we stay away from that here.” Dr. Bourfay always tried to steer his groups into as neutral a territory as possible, being wholly terrified of genuine conflict and anger himself. “Certainly by now you can see the difference between denying someone their feelings and being just plain
comtemptable,
” he stated officiously, glaring at her through his black-rimmed spectacles.

“Like I said,
sorry for being so comtemptable.
”

Tiffany despised him. She saw him as a self-important, aging pretty boy with a bland personality and questionable training. He usually appeared for their daily three-hour groups dressed in meticulously pressed khakis and a series of pastel button-down Oxfords, the collars of which were clipped closed with the same jaunty yellow bow tie; she guessed this was his attempt at impersonating the Waspy cognoscenti he lacked the breeding or the intelligence to be. She rolled her eyes as he goaded the participants of the group into focusing on their here-and-now feelings while adding bland advice, and she mimicked his platitudes, most of which were laced with overused hyperbolic phrases and—usually mispronounced—polysyllabic words.

As for herself, during the previous three months, she had channeled her considerable sober energy into earning herself an early release by adhering to the minutiae of every conceivable rule, and by passively irritating Dr. Bourfay every chance she got. It was unusual for any client to be discharged early, but she had petitioned the Case Review Board each week since her arrival and had finally worn them down by her dedicated composure, unflagging determination, and a signed affidavit stating that if she betrayed her sobriety they would not be held liable. The board voted 5–4 in her favor, with Dr. Bourfay having cast the deciding ballot.

Finally, it was Tiffany’s last day, and her final group session at the Arbor Vitae Rehabilitation Centre, just outside Camarillo, between L.A. and Ventura, and less than an hour’s drive from Ballena Beach. They had already been going for two and a half excruciating hours; if she managed to make it through this last thirty minutes, she was done. And she would lick the linoleum clean if it would guarantee her release this afternoon.

Dr. Bourfay cleared his throat.

“Since we are finished with the main part of the group for today, I would like to devote the last few minutes to saying farewell to Tiffany, who, as we know, is leaving today to return to the arms of her loving family.” He continued scribbling on his clipboard as he addressed the five people circled around. “So, now is the time for us to say any last words to her and to share any parting thoughts.” He turned to face Tiffany, the friendly lilt in his voice contradicting his frigid stare. “Let’s go clockwise, starting with you, Priscilla.” He nodded to the globe-shaped methamphetamine addict to his right.

Tiffany scanned the motley gathering for the last time, her back and shoulders tense with anticipation for her imminent release. Her feet tapped, and she had to stop herself from sprinting for the door.

“I just wanna say one day at a time, girl,” Priscilla told her, raising her caterpillar eyebrows and nodding in earnest as she spoke. “’Cause you know it’s gonna be tough out there. Hang in there, Tiff, and know you’ll always be right here.” She accentuated the word
here
by punching herself in the collarbone with her fist.

Tiffany smiled. “Thanks.”

Therese, the elegant alcoholic suburban grandmother with the tall red bouffant, spoke next. “Never forget what you will be throwing away by taking that drink,” she warned, her voice a whisper on velvet, her cinnamon eyes boring holes. “And every morning and each night, you should remind yourself what you’ll be putting your son through again if you do.”

Tiffany nodded appreciatively at Therese, wondering for the hundredth time how she kept her hairdo in place at Arbor Vitae without a resident beautician.

“I have faith in you, Tiffany. I know you can do it,” bald David stated, his eyes avoiding hers. “You’re a strong lady. And I’m…going to miss you.”

Miss the occasional fuck in the basement is more like it.

“I ain’t gonna miss you one bit, you stanky bitch,” Athena huffed, folding her matchstick arms across her sunken chest, her Tootsie-pop head swiveling side to side as she spoke. “We all know you gonna be slammin’ down Thundermug by sundown and wakin’ up tomorrow morning with the Devil’s hangover at the county morgue.”

“I’m hearing a lot of anger there, Athena,” Dr. Bourfay said with a sly smile.

Tiffany stood up, grinning ear to ear.

“Fuck you all,” she stated gaily, making slow and deliberate eye contact with each person except Therese. “I’m outta here.”

She picked up her jumbo Ziploc of personal belongings from the front desk, sneering at the sight of the raggedy slippers, sweatpants, and bra she’d worn the day of her last binge back in October. She riffled inside the baggie and withdrew from it her California ID and her Casio watch, which had subsequently quit working. These two items she threw into her new sky-blue-with-pink-piping overnight bag, a gift from the Thousand Oaks Women4Women Foundation, along with her toothbrush, half a box of tampons, and a month’s worth of insulin and syringes.

But no cigarettes.

Shit.

“Bye-bye,” said the round-faced Filipino attendant behind the counter, waving her short-fingered hand in the air like a cheerful robot.

“Bye-bye,” Tiffany mimicked, not bothering to make eye contact.

After the automatic glass doors slid swiftly apart for her, she strode evenly out of the building’s sparkling terrazzo-floored lobby into the blinding January California sunshine, then tossed her plastic-wrapped clothing into the concrete trash receptacle standing just outside. She hoisted the overnight bag over her right shoulder, momentarily imagining herself a businesswoman at an international airport waiting for a taxi instead of the car Bill had promised he would send for her.

Imagine: me a businesswoman.

Glancing skyward, she beheld the bristling tan hills that surrounded her in all directions like a giant stadium constructed of mud.

My own little dust bowl.

A smattering of images made a sudden slideshow in her head:

Jonathan making love to her even as she plotted

Jeremy’s face at the hospital

Jonathan screaming at her that night at Lake Estrella

The newspaper broadcasting his accident

Bill Mortson

Her blood surged at the thought of seeing him after all these years, and she ground her few remaining molars. Here she was always the one perceived as the villain; everyone, including her own son, blamed her for everything. But that would change soon enough. She wasn’t the guilty one.

This was no dust bowl she was gearing up for, this was the Super Bowl.

A whoosh caught her ear, and she turned to see the gleaming limousine Mr. Mortson had ordered to take her to the Tyler Compound. She squinted her eyes as the majestic vehicle lumbered to the curb and stopped, looking to see in the reflection of the onyx glass just who from inside the building in back of her was watching her celebrity-style departure. But instead of seeing a gaggle of wide-eyed hospital workers, the reflection that met her was one belonging to a scrawny, haggard-faced woman with pulled-back hair and huge pink ears. She realized sadly that she looked about as out of place entering a sparkling limo as a cleaning lady would look walking down the red carpet with a bucket and a plunger at a Hollywood premiere.

She waited impatiently for two, then five, then nearly ten minutes for the driver to get out and open the door for her, not knowing that Bill had given explicit instructions for him not to, under any circumstances, or there’d be hell to pay.

The car idled imperceptibly while she shifted from foot to foot, her arms folded across her drooping breasts. And then with horror, she noticed reflected in the glass a number of Arbor Vitae employees, first three, then five, then eight, and more, some laughing and pointing, and all of them looking at the spectacle of her being snubbed by the driver. Finally exasperated, she reached down and grabbed the door handle and pulled, but nothing budged.

Locked
.

Muffled laughter stung her ears.

She pounded belligerently on the glass until a velvety
chick
issued from the door. She grasped the handle, threw the door open, and slid herself inside the black leather cocoon, then sealed herself inside with the hardest slam she could muster.

“Fucking asshole!” she screeched at the driver, who dutifully ignored her, and in spite of her outburst accelerated gently and expertly away from the curb. She settled back in her seat opposite the obscured glass of the chauffeur’s partition, glancing first at the brush-littered hills as they sped by ever faster, then at the polished walnut compartment in the forward center console whose unlocked contents gaped tantalizingly at her like a fresh bouquet of roses and hemlock.

She narrowed her eyes at the car bar between the seats. It proposed just one glittering crystal highball glass filled to the rim with ice, a perspiring bottle of Absolut Mandrin, and a bulging manila envelope with
TIFFANY TYLER
scrawled on it in Bill’s unmistakable hand.

Jackpot!

Her hand settled briefly on the vodka bottle just to caress its frosty sweat, noticing at the same time how the contents were up to the neck but the protective plastic seal had been removed.

Courtesy or poisoned?

With a shaking finger, she pressed the window switch, and the black glass descended with a hum into the door; at once, turbulent air buffeted her scowling features. She grasped the frigid bottle from its cradle, then cocked back her arm quarterback style, ready to heave it onto the rushing asphalt.

No. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking she’d stolen it.

Delicately, she placed the bottle back in its tabernacle-like holder and then snatched the bulging envelope from its resting place. She tore away a corner of the flap and dragged a ragged fingernail across the width of it, then peeked inside.

Her breath caught.

Suddenly, the driver honked and swerved, and the huge vehicle listed like a cruise ship riding a tsunami. The envelope slid off Tiffany’s lap and emptied its contents onto the floor and surrounded her feet with faded, crinkled hundred-dollar bills.

She giggled.

Then her eyes spied, amidst the flotsam, a bright-yellow Post-it note with three little words scribbled on it:

Remember our agreement.