Bleh.Now Playing: "Broken" from The Punisher soundtrack
Now Reading: Blue Moon by Laurell K. Hamilton
Swear Words Spoken Today: 0, surprisingly. Very surprisingly.
Mother's Day sucked so muchly that I do not wish to speak of it. So, instead, here is Part Two of the continuation of the continuing saga of Edward and Lin…..
Breaking News
The first thing I said when Estrella’s younger son answered the phone and told me that his mother had died wasn’t “Oh my God.” Nor was it “how did it happen,” “I’m so sorry,” “are you okay,” or, God forbid, “what do you need me to do?” No. I guess I wasn’t that kind of person, no matter how hard I sometimes tried to be. My first question to Paul Sloane, upon returning his call and learning of the death of his mother was “does Alan know?”
Sad part was, some deep-pitted and immensely worried part of me already knew the answer. Lin’s last two recordings left on my machine were replaying through my mind too loudly for me to have any conceptions otherwise. He’d been furious. Or at least that was what I’d thought at the time. That was all I had heard in his voice, or all I’d chosen to hear. Now, though, I was tempted to hit the play button and listen to them again to see if I’d misinterpreted that anger for franticness. Alan was so unaccustomed to having to rely on others for support that more than traces of frustration would not have been out of the question for him. He had never enjoyed acknowledging his own weaknesses. What he perceived as having to flaunt them to others was unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances.
Paul didn’t seem to mind that I didn‘t seem to give a damn about him. I doubted he was in any condition to. The complete and utter shutdown that comes from being dealt such a traumatic emotional blow will do that to a person. I’d felt it a few times myself. Instead of getting angry or reminding me that Alan wasn’t the only one who had lost someone, he merely thought about my question for a moment and, in that same weak, exhausted and vacant voice with which he’d broken the news, answered me.
“I told him earlier,” he says. “He was at work. I think…I don’t know…he was upset about something. I probably should have asked…. But he said he’d be right over. That was—“ A pause fills the line between us. I imagine him checking the same watch he’s worn since he was fifteen years old. “That was about four hours ago.”
He stops again. He thinks. I let him. It’s the least I can do. I’m entirely too busy trying not to think about entirely too many things. I’m primarily thinking that now is really not the time to fall to pieces which, in turn, makes me realize how dangerously close to falling to pieces I am. I’m thinking, how in the hell could I have let myself lose contact with all of them over the past few months. After everything Alan’s family--Estrella especially--had done for me over the years, how had I dropped out of their lives without even bothering to send a Christmas card? Of course, I’d been in rehab over Christmas, and Estrella’s birthday, but that wasn’t really an excuse. I’d just told myself I’d get around to calling her at some point when I’d have my head on straighter, so that she wouldn’t have to worry about me. She’d always worried about me, sometimes more than her own children. No, that wasn’t fair. Sometimes more than Alan, maybe. Definitely sometimes more than Alan. God, she’d treated me like I was her own--
“Teddy?” Paul asks, reminding me, once more, that now was not the time to fall to pieces. Not yet, at least.
“I’m here.” My voice is a little weaker and I’m wishing I wasn’t so close to having to blink back tears, but I was there and I was determined not to give Paul one more emotionally frantic person to worry about. He’d probably been making too many of these calls both before and after he’d left the message on my machine. He needed to hear at least one person who was going to hold up well. I could do that much for him, at least.
“It doesn’t take four hours to get here, does it?” he asks me.
From where Lin works? “No,” I tell him. “I don’t think so.” The truth of the matter, and Paul knows as well as I do, is that it takes forty-five minutes in heavy traffic to make the drive. Paul knows this. But now is no the time for me to remind him.
“Do you—“
“I’ve been trying his cell since I called you,” Paul says at the same time I start to speak. Whatever he’s got to say is more important and probably a hell of a lot less stressful than my string of unasked questions. “I keep getting those…those recordings.” He spits the last word out as though it was a curse. He is disgusted by his brother’s decidedly unique choices of answering machine material. I’ve always found the recordings to be amusing and accurate snapshots of the state of affairs of the life of Alan Sloane. But now’s probably not the time to mention that, either. Or to act on the sudden urge to dial up his cell and see what, exactly, he has to say now that he’s probably not answering.
“What’s it say?” Needless to say, I hadn’t meant to ask that question out loud. I swear silently once I hear myself say the words, come close to knocking my fist against the desk.
“What?” He sounds numb, confused. They’re adjectives I’m not used to using in reference to him.
“The messages on Lin’s machine. What do they say?”
“I don’t remember,” Paul admits, sounding truly sorry that he can’t answer me. “About two hours ago, they just stopped. The phone just keeps ringing now. Nothing picks up. I‘ve--I‘ve been trying him about every twenty minutes.”
The disconnecting of his answering service tell me that Alan had made a stop by his hacienda to pack before driving like hell across the Nevada border.
Then it occurs to me that I’m probably the only person privy to that information; who knows that Alan had been feeling so overwhelmed by the double-blows he‘d been handed that he‘d skipped town, country and right across the state line. Which helps explain why Paul called me. He would have wanted me to know about their mother, but he’s also apparently (and rather blissfully) unaware of the fact that Alan and I have spent the better part of two months not speaking to one another. Which means that, without even trying, Lin’s once again put me in the middle of a damned impossible situation. How am I not supposed to tell his own brother what I know, especially given the circumstances surrounding the entire situation?
He knows I can be egocentric, petty, self-serving and occasionally demanding, but I’d never imagined he could think I was so unapologetically cold-hearted.
“Are you okay?” I finally ask. No point for me, though. I’m asking entirely too late but, mostly, I’m asking to keep him from asking the question that was his inevitable reason for calling me in the first place. I’m also trying like hell not to think about what I’m wishing I didn’t feel like doing to Alan the next time I saw him for planting me squarely in the middle of his family crisis.
“Yeah.” It’s barely a noise, much less a word. “Um, Dani’s here with me, so are the kids. Sheil’s on her way over.” Dani is Danielle, his wife. Sheil is Sheila Sloane-Bishop-Bridges, the eldest of his three siblings and a completely and utterly unbalanced woman I’ve had to obtain a restraining order against.
“I’m—I’m okay.” Paul adds after a moment of silence. It’s rather obvious that he’s not, but he’s doing the best that he can.
“Just let me know if you--”
“Teddy, could you do me a favor?” His voice wavers when he asks me, which means he hadn’t heard that I‘d been on the verge of volunteering my services for whatever he might need to help take some of the load off his shoulders. “I mean, if you’re not busy or anything. I—you’re not on a shoot or anything, right?”
“No,” I say, even though I’m supposed to report back to the set in a few hours, once the mess with the lighting rig was sorted out and suitably repaired. “I’ve been taking some time off ever since I got out of treatment. What to you need?” I can call the set and make my excuses. The director probably won’t understand, and I’ll probably tell him he can sue me if it makes him feel better.
“Can you find Alan for me?” he asks. The request succeeds in doing what the revelation of losing Estrella had not. I find myself sliding down in to my seat, my throat feeling completely closed off. I have to fight not to drop the phone, fight harder to find my breath.
“Teddy?” As badly as I hope my struggle to keep my own composure isn’t filtering through the line, Paul’s damned quick to realize he’s asked me for something I’d rather not be doing. “You’re busy, aren’t you?”
At least I can take some small comfort in the knowledge that ignorance, no matter how personally earth-shattering, can be someone else’s bliss.
“No,” I manage to say. “No, of course not.”
“You’ll find him, then?” Paul asks again, and in his voice is the kind of hope that I can not bring myself to extinguish. “I mean, he listens to you. If he’s screening calls, he’ll answer for you.” There’s a pause. “Right?”
He’s searching for validation that I cannot, in good conscience, give him. I also absolutely cannot let him try to cope with the loss of his mother on top of the fact that I’m now the least-qualified and downright worst choice of a person to help track down Alan. Worst choice of a person, definitely. But I realize one more, that I am hardly the least qualified. I had a message sitting on my recorder telling me everything but the room number of his hotel.
The knowledge only added to the feeling that whatever decisions I made during the duration of the phone call were going to throw my life even more out-of-balance than it already was. I couldn’t risk upsetting it anymore than I already was. Not for Alan. Not even for Paul.
“Listen, I--”
“Please?” he interrupts, and in that word is a weak, raw and desperate cry for help. With that one word, and all the plea behind it, I decide I can tell a few lies to help Paul hang on to what little sanity he has left. I can even get the hell over whatever it is I’ve spent these past few weeks feeling about Alan and try to get a call through to him in Vegas. I’m not sure how much good the effort will do me, especially when I take a moment to consider the shape Alan must have gotten himself into by now.
“Sure,” I tell him, sounding as aloof and casually confident about the matter as I can manage. “If he’s around, I can find him for you.” He’s not around. It will take the better part of the rest of the day for him to be anywhere close to around. But I can find him, and I could try to talk some sense into him and try to talk him down from whatever he’s gotten himself into during these past few hours. I can help Paul maintain the few illusions he has left about the state of his life and the people in it. I owe him that much.
“Thanks, Teddy,” he says. A sigh of relief follows that, to me at least, has a lot to do with unburdening an enormous amount of worry from his shoulders. “I mean it, thanks. I wouldn’t ask, but—“
“It’s not a problem,” I can interrupt before he has a chance to start rambling and feeling burdened again. The ‘Teddy’ part grates and has been since he first used the aw-shucks moniker, but I can ignore it. He calls me that because, more than twenty years ago, my agent turned ex-wife decided that Edward was too stuffy a name for a pretty-boy movie star. I’ve always—always—loathed the nickname. I hear it shouted by entirely too many people every time I show up for something that’s important to the industry. The talk show hosts call me Edward. They’ve learned. So have the reporters who do their research in effort to get on my good side. There was a subconscious part of me that’s since become conscious that will only sign autographs for people who at least make it as far as Ed. It’s one of those things I’m now working on in therapy to make me a more well-adjusted human being.
The moral of the story, however lost, is that my best friend’s little brother just lost his mother. He can call me whatever the hell he wants to.
“Paulie?” Unconscious revenge for having to be called Teddy over and over again? God, I hope not. I don’t think I’ve called him that since he got his Ph.D. It slips out, and somehow it feels right.
“Yeah?” Despite that dame, barely audible word, I hear him come close to laughing at his old, detested childhood nickname. If he’d been in a better mood, he probably would have warned me to watch it, and I’d have been telling him he started it. It’s a amazing, sometimes, how much and how little changes.
I don’t know what to tell him, or what I’d started to tell him, but I have to make an effort of saying something. Everything in his world has to be upside down and backwards at the moment, spiraling towards a black hole. I remember that feeling. I’m starting to remember it all too well, and to worry that I may be joining him thee shortly. I need to give him something—anything—
“You’ll be okay.” No matter how feeble. “I’ll try and find Lin and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
There’s a moment of silence. I wonder what he’s thinking, or if he’s even capable of thinking at all right now. “Thanks.”
Another hesitation, then the phone slips into the cradle. Paul’s gone back to his wife and his kids and waiting for his sister to arrive, while trusting me to make sure his brother does the same in something close to acceptable condition. All that and trying to accept the fact that he’s never going to see his mother again, and having to worry about things like burial outfits and coffins and flowers and those little papers they give out at the funeral homes with the obituary printed inside, while outside there’s some image of a cross at sunset with words from the Bible, Tennyson or Byron.
I’m left holding the phone, and somehow can’t bring myself to hang it up. Estrella’s dead. Paul’s got to be in shambles. Sheila’s probably more unraveled than usual. And Alan? I seem to be the only one who knows that Lin started his day off by getting fired over breakfast. Lunch was served with a phone call from his younger brother saying their mother had died. He’d gone to Vegas, presumably to get himself immensely drunk and drugged up and screw his way back into a better mindset.
I happened to be the only person who knew that particular piece of information. After two months of not speaking to one another, after trying to convince myself to move on with my life because we were probably never going to speak again, me had told me where to find him. Realization finally dawned on me--and I wasn’t quite sure if it was for the first time or not--that he wanted me to be the one to find him.
He didn’t want me to call. He hadn’t left me a phone number, and the fact that he wasn’t answering his cell told me he didn’t have it with him. He never screened calls on his cell, despite what Paul was thinking. I’d never known him to, at least. It was the number that all his clients had, so he didn’t recognize half of them when the ID picked them up. After the fist year, he’d stopped making the effort. He didn’t want me to call. He wanted to go to a fucking hotel room in Vegas and find him and make an effort of helping him sort himself out.
With a sigh that takes most of the air from my body, I rest my elbows on the desk and run my fingers through my hair until my face is buried in my hands. I can feel my throat trying to constrict again and have to consciously focus on the often taken-for-granted process of inhaling and exhaling.
I’m on the verge of a monumental collapse of my own at a time when too many people are asking me to be their lynchpin. I need to sit back, think and put a call through to my therapist and my sponsor before I even think about having an independent-minded thought. Instead, I turn the phone off, turn the phone on and call my agent. I tell him to tell the director I won’t be in for the rest of the day, possibly the rest of the week, possible the rest of the foreseeable future. He doesn’t take it well, so I deicide not to ask him to book me a last-minute flight out of the state. He asks me if I’m thinking clearly, which I assure him I am. He asks what happened, which I assure him is nothing, then think ‘screw it’ and proceed to tell him I’ll be needing the production company’s private jet for a few hours to make an emergency trip out-of-state.
