Between Me and You Page 14

  Leo is sitting at the table with my new stepdad and his daughter, Veronica. Leo winks at me as I pass by, reaches out and squeezes my leg. “Yo, bro. Love ya.”

  “Daddy!” Joey shouts from his perch on Tatum’s lap. “That’s my daddy!”

  Everyone laughs and turns to gaze at him, in his tiny Brooks Brothers suit, with his curly blond hair that resembles neither mine nor Tatum’s.

  “That’s your daddy!” Tatum says, and everyone laughs again, not really because it’s nearly as cute or funny as when Joey said it but because people laugh and fawn when Tatum says just about anything these days. It’s not her fault; I know this. It’s simply inevitable, the way that fame shifts everyone else’s perception of you while you’ve done nothing to ask for it. Been in a few good movies, locked in a few excellent performances. That’s not nothing, but it’s not everything, either, in the way that fame can masquerade that it is.

  Tatum would say this too. But she’d tell you that the fame part of it, that’s just someone else’s expectations and has nothing to do with her or the work or our day-to-day lives. Still, it’s an amorphous mass, a cancerous blob that has taken root, and though she tries to ignore it, tries to pretend that nothing has changed—that her being asked for autographs in the airport on our way here, that her being comped a ridiculous bottle of wine when we snuck out to a small Italian joint around the corner is all status quo—in truth, her fame has shifted nearly everything.

  Maybe everything is me being ungenerous. I hate this side of me, but like that cancerous blob, I don’t know how to simply cut my pettiness out of me. Its toxicity is everywhere. Also, Tatum is so often not present that she hasn’t felt the mass, hasn’t noticed what’s festering. Maybe that’s what keeps it alive in me: that like a child, I want her to give me attention, stand up and say, I still see you. Sometimes she does. I don’t mean that she doesn’t. And I know that I am thirty-five and no longer able to excuse juvenile behavior away.

  It’s textbook.

  So why isn’t there an easier fix? For me to find? For her to suggest? Therapy, sure. But I don’t want to be one of those LA types who sits on a couch and moans about the inadequacies of his cushy life. I want my wife. I want to see my wife. I want her to see me. Then maybe I won’t be so brittle, maybe I won’t be so easily broken.

  Tatum sees me today, though, meeting my eyes again. Wishing me on. I clear my throat, gaze at my mom and Ron, who seems to wholly love her, and whom she appears to love wholly in return. I’m not eight or ten or twelve years old; I know that he is not taking my dad’s place; I know that my mom should be happy. My eyes move to Leo, and I wonder if this isn’t a bit how he felt over this past decade, how I tried to be his father without him asking for it. It’s different, of course. I’m his blood; I promised my dad I’d look out for him. But this notion that someone can be taken from you, disappear into a void in a matter of literal seconds, and then you have to live in the vacuum of that void? It hasn’t gotten easier. So maybe that was why I tried to put my foot down with Leo, tried to guide him in the way that I thought my father would think best. Maybe that’s why I’m pricklier with Ron, even when I know better.

  I raise my flute toward the open sky in the back of Mitch Sterling’s garden, which has been lavished in yellow roses, my mother’s favorites. “Lub you!” Joey calls to me before I can start speaking.

  “Love you, buddy,” I say back.

  Love you, Tatum mouths to me.

  Love you, I mouth back.

  “Love you,” Leo shouts, which makes everyone giggle again.

  “Love you,” I say sincerely back to him.

  Leo rises and wraps me in a hug, slapping my back, holding me for a beat longer than the pre-rehab Leo would have. He’s been clean for almost a year now. He calls me on Sundays to check in, he is rededicated to his job, he left the nightclub business, and he never told my mom about any of it. His skin is shiny, his eyes well rested, his muscles strong when my hands press against his shoulder blades on the other end of the embrace. It wasn’t a seamless process, my tough love, my insistence that he finally grow up and grow a backbone and accept responsibility for the roads he’d put himself on. Tatum wanted to do it differently, and Walter, her dad, told me I was mistaken, that I needed to offer support, not just firmness. But here we are, and he is thriving, and Leo and I proved them wrong.

  “I know I’m a writer,” I begin. “But that doesn’t make me an expert in the ways of love.”

  “Bullshit!” Leo calls out. “You married Tatum Connelly, so you must be doing something right!”

  “That’s true!” Tatum shouts from a couple of tables behind him.

  “Well, marrying my wife was the one smart thing I’ve done in the name of love my whole life. Though that just makes me lucky; that doesn’t really make me smart.” I don’t know why I’m announcing this, my most neurotic insecurity, to the crowd of my mother’s and new stepdad’s friends, and I don’t know when I started to think that this might be true. But it comes off as self-deprecating, and everyone grins, then turns to gaze at my wife in the back of the room.

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Tatum calls out, playing to the audience, and everyone laughs. She says this a lot to me now—Don’t sell yourself short, dream it, be it!—and I know she’s not trying to be patronizing, but it is. It’s fucking patronizing and demeaning, and even now I feel a red flare of anger rush through me. Like if she still saw me, she’d know that I don’t need uplifting quips to get me back on track; she’d know that I’m already trying to right my train.

  “OK, well, with that established,” I say, “I just want to say that I’m not necessarily wise in the ways of love. I don’t know why our dad was taken from us, and Ron, I can’t say why your wife was either. But I can only say life sometimes grants us second chances, and if they should fall upon you, if you should be lucky enough to be offered another chance at happiness, then you’d be a fool not to seize it.”

  I look at Leo, with his own second chance, and he nods, grateful. I look at my mom and Ron, who are genuinely overcome with emotion: her with tears on her cheeks, him wiping them away.

  “And so, I’ll ask all of you today to raise your glass to second chances. May we all be lucky enough in our lives to be granted the opportunity for love and joy and family, and when that opportunity presents itself, may we all be as smart as my mom and Ron, who refused to let life slay them when life sure as hell tried.”

  Everyone raises their glasses.

  “To second chances,” they all say, as Ron leans close to my mom and kisses her. Tatum meets my eyes and blinks, our old code, our old signal. She still sees me now, like she used to, like we both used to.

  “To second chances,” I say again, telling myself I won’t squander my own, whenever the opportunity arises.

  14

  TATUM

  MARCH 2005

  Piper calls with the news while I’m in hair and makeup for Scrubs. It’s nothing glamorous, a guest star as a college student who comes down with shingles, but the exposure is good, and it’s another line for my résumé. Since The O.C., the work has been steady, though not swift, nothing so lucrative and assuring that I’ve wanted to quit P. F. Chang’s. Well, I always want to quit P. F. Chang’s, but I still take a shift now and then, and I still stop in on Thursdays to keep Mariana company or sometimes jump in for her hours if she has an audition of her own or a gig that’s come up. None of the customers recognize me, no one thinks I’m anything to double-take at. I’m not. Half the waiters have booked guest spots of their own or have made it all the way to testing for pilots. At Tisch, I was something special; in LA, I’m a slash—a bartender/actress. I have an audition next week—a period piece called On the Highlands that would shoot later in the year in Scotland—that would launch me out of the slash category, propel me into the full-time actor mode, but I’ve stopped pinning all my aspirations on every audition. There are too many nos to get invested each time.

  “Pipes,” I say into my cell
, holding it an inch from my cheek so I don’t mess up the shingles makeup that took two hours to perfect at six o’clock this morning. “Not the best time.”

  I can tell that something’s awry before she even speaks. Maybe it’s in the way she inhales or the way that she hiccups or just the way that sisters who have been through so much together can intuit one another, even when thousands of miles apart.

  “Piper,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

  “I know you don’t want to hear about this,” she says, her voice breaking, then dropping into a whisper. “But I don’t know who else to call.”

  “You call me,” I say. “You can tell me anything.” I forget about the painstaking makeup and press the phone to my ear, like that somehow brings us closer.

  “It’s Dad.”

  I already know, once she has said this, why I was the one she didn’t want to call. Other children might worry about car accidents or heart attacks or some sort of unfortunate accident befalling their solitary living parent, but not me, not us. We’ve lived through this too many times.

  “What did he do?” I ask. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to pick up more pieces. I want a mother who is alive and a father who is sober, and if I had to swap one for the other, my mom should be here, not him. It’s a horrible thought. I stare into the illuminated mirror in the makeup trailer and actually think this—That is a horrible thought—but it’s true, and it’s not like I haven’t thought it before. When she was going through chemo, and he coped with whiskey: It should be you, not her. When we buried her, and he showed up at our childhood home’s door, sober but not exactly put together: Why her, not you?

  And now again.

  “Scooter found him passed out on the side of the road last night. Held him for the night, called me this morning when Dad had woken up.”

  Scooter Smith was Piper’s high school boyfriend. They’d split just before college—she’d gone to Ohio University, and he headed to Wisconsin for football—but they were still friendly, the types who sometimes had a beer together if they’d run into each other earlier in the day, sometimes slept with each other if one beer turned into four. He was a deputy sheriff, thought about being mayor someday, which you’d really never, ever expect if you’d known him back in high school. Still kind of didn’t expect now. But I was sitting in a makeup chair playing a college junior with shingles, so what did I know?

  “Bail?” I say. “Do you need bail money?”

  “Tatum!” she snaps. “No, Scooter let him out, but I mean, we need to get him help.”

  “Again. We need to get him help again,” I say, just as a production assistant hustles into the trailer and barks: “Tatum Connelly, you’re up in five. Tatum Connelly, five minutes.”

  “Don’t say ‘again’ like we’ve had to do this a million times,” Piper says.

  “How many times then?” I nod to the PA, and mouth Wrapping this up, and he answers me by marching out and slamming the door.

  “Three,” she sighs. “OK? Three times. Does that make you happy?”

  “Of course it doesn’t make me happy, Piper!”

  “Well, it doesn’t make me happy either. But you’re out there in fancy Los Angeles; I’m here sitting in the shit trying to clean it up. So please stop giving me a hard time and help.”

  “Fine. How can I help?” I say, kinder now. “Is it money?” I don’t really have any money but Ben has plenty, and what’s his is mine. Theoretically. We didn’t sign a prenup; he didn’t even mention a prenup, and he takes care of me in the ways he expects a husband to provide for his wife. But I still haven’t quite adjusted to having a safety net. Thus, the Thursday shifts at the bar. Also, the (modest) checking account I opened shortly after I landed The O.C. gig last year, splitting my paycheck between our savings and, well, now my savings. Ben wouldn’t have cared if I’d told him. But I didn’t. I’d planned to, the night that I went to the bank, and now I can’t even remember why I didn’t; maybe I’d fallen asleep while he was working late or maybe he’d done something that irritated me, or maybe I’d just wanted something for myself when my husband seemingly had everything else. Either way, my checking account won’t fund my dad’s rehab, but Ben could. Ben would. Happily.

  “Not money,” Piper says. “Well, I mean, maybe some money. But I want him at an in-patient facility. No more do-it-yourself patchwork sobriety.”

  Do-it-yourself patchwork sobriety was my dad’s specialty.

  “I’ll ask around, Pipes, OK?”

  The makeup artist’s walkie springs to life. I’m needed on set.

  “Why don’t you come home?” Piper asks, her voice shaking.

  “I can’t just come home.”

  “Because you’re a big, important person now?”

  “Hardly. But I’m working. And we adopted the dog, and Ben is out of town half the time, and Monster weighs a hundred pounds and isn’t exactly well trained, and I can’t just take him on the plane with me.”

  The makeup artist says: “Tatum, they’re ready for you.”

  Also, there is nothing I’d rather do less than go home. Home is cobwebs and ghosts and memories of my mother, who should be here. Home is discomfort and high school awkwardness and working at the pharmacy or at Albertsons while other girls were cheerleaders and going to homecoming dances. Home is my dad drinking a case of Coors Light in one sitting and us tiptoeing in the kitchen the mornings of his hangovers so we don’t wake him and have to smell his puke. Home is our back garden, which my mom nurtured once my dad left but now holds her ashes. So even that had turned to literal dust. I’d do just about anything other than return home.

  “Bring him here, Piper,” I say rashly, without thinking it through, my mind already on the set, on to nailing the role so I’ll get something better, something bigger, something that will take me further from who I used to be. “Just . . . get on a plane and bring him here. We’ll figure it out together.”

  We drive him down to a thirty-day dry-out clinic that weekend. Ben has made some calls, asked for favors, and we found him a bed at Commitments, a no-nonsense facility whose motto is Commit to Yourself, Commit to Life, Commit to Your Sobriety. Piper and my dad sit in the back, Ben drives with his knuckles turning white against the steering wheel, and I stare out the window at the rush of palm trees and desert that whips by.

  “You won’t have to do this again,” my dad says as we flank him in the lobby, as a kind nurse with huge fake breasts and adhesive eyelashes pats him on the shoulder and prepares to walk him to his room.

  I chew on my lip and say nothing.

  “I know I have failed you,” he says, crying now. “It’s not like I don’t know it. It’s not like I’m not ashamed.”

  Piper hugs him. “We’re all fallible, Dad, it’s OK.”

  I want to scream: We are not all fallible, not in the ways that he is. But I do not.

  He says: “I just miss her so much, your mom. And I shouldn’t have found the answer in the bottle, I know that. I’m stupid. It was stupid, I hate myself.”

  Piper takes his hand. “We’ll get you through this, Dad. I’m sure you can stay here as long as you need. Can he take your guest room after?”

  “Our guest room?” I repeat. We hadn’t discussed plans after this, but this certainly was not part of it. No, my dad would return home with Piper, get back to work, get back to his own life. But I can’t say this now, as we’re checking him in to dry out. I can’t set him up for failure before he’s even started. “We’ll see. OK? Let’s just see.”

  “It would help him recalibrate, get away from his triggers,” she says.

  “I said we’ll see.”

  She nods. Ben narrows his eyes, starts to say something, then does not. It occurs to me that it’s his guest room too, that he’ll want a say. But Ben is always benevolent; of course he’ll offer for him to stay.

  The nice nurse with enormous breasts says, “OK, well, family is welcome next weekend, in seven days. If you head to the desk around the corner, they’l
l give you all the information.”

  And then she nods to my father, who is so defeated and looks so much like a broken little child, and ushers him through the swinging door, which eases back into the frame and latches.

  Piper starts crying, and I stand there, my hands flanking my hips, my brain drifting to all the ways I want this moment to be different, like I’m in a movie and writing my own script. Like I’m a daughter with a mom who is alive and a daughter with a father who hasn’t been a terrible disappointment. In my mind, in my new role, I’m anyone I want to be, anyone I dare to dream.

  “Let’s go,” I say, unable to stand there a second longer in the muddle of the real moment. “Please, can we just get out of here?”

  I spin quickly and head for the exit. They linger for a moment before following, because they are better equipped for this reality; they don’t need to write themselves into a world of make-believe to get by.

  15

  BEN

  JUNE 2009

  The doorbell rings early, too early. The sun has barely risen, and I can’t imagine who could possibly be at the front door before seven a.m. I roll to my left but Tatum’s side of the bed is empty. She must have gotten up for a crack-of-dawn run on the beach. She’s been doing that lately to lean down to ensure that she fits back into the corsets for As You Like It after gaining fifteen pounds (all muscle) for Army Women (a break from the awards-bait films in an attempt to go commercial and expand her fan base).

  The doorbell rings again.

  Shit. This had better be an emergency. And whoever it is had better not wake the baby. I push myself to my elbows, then flop my feet to the carpet. Then I remember the last real emergency from eight years ago, when my dad—when three thousand people—died, and chide myself for ever wishing for something so stupid. The best you can hope for is that there’s never an emergency again, you dumb fuck!