The Rock Star’s Daughter
Caitlyn Duffy
© Caitlyn Duffy 2011
Published by Lovestruck Literary at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition
This is a Treadwell Academy Novel
All rights reserved. http://www.lovestruckliterary.com
ISBN 978-0-9833980-2-8
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
I don't remember much about the first three weeks of the summer my mom died. I suppose those weeks passed in the same way most previous summers did before the year I was fifteen; my mom picked me up at L.A.X in her Benz, I totally pigged out on food I wasn't allowed to have during the school year at Treadwell Preparatory Academy, lounged around by the pool with my best friend Allison, and endlessly hoped for a few moments alone with her older brother Todd, who I wanted to fall in love with me. My mom would have been around, I'm sure, occasionally asking me to help her with her suntan lotion or walk over to Larchmont Village to get her a coffee smoothie. For the most part my mom was somewhat of a shadow in my summer days even before the accident. Allison, who I've known since I was in kindergarten, used to say my mom was a periphery character.
She was always in the background, usually nursing a hangover. There were a few summers when she was recovering from plastic surgery, padding around the house in a robe with her swollen face bandaged. On weekend nights she would appear in my bedroom doorway wearing an obscenely short or low-cut dress and ask me how she looked. "Embarrassing" was never the answer I gave her.
She was not the kind of mom who baked cookies. Or gave out motherly advice (unless you'd consider advising your daughter to pad her bra to be typical parental guidance). She never seemed especially concerned about where I was going or who I was going out with – maybe because I was rarely going anywhere with anyone other than Allison. I think my insistence on attending boarding school and genuine interest in schoolwork floored her; my mom was a bit of a livewire when she was my age and I don't think she ever imagined she would give birth to a violin-playing bookworm. But however atypical our mother-daughter relationship was, it worked. By the end of the summer she usually seemed sad to see me pack my suitcases and head back to Massachusetts, and usually around Halloween I would feel a little homesick and miss her knocking around in the kitchen with her satin sleep mask propped up on her head.
It was just me and Mom, the two of us, the only family I had ever known. We lived in a small but pretty bungalow in West Hollywood and Mom worked from time to time doing guest roles on soap operas or singing back-up on commercial jingles. Having a mother who has one foot in the entertainment industry and spends the majority of her time milling around the house and ordering stuff on QVC isn't really that rare for Los Angeles. But I would consider my life to be abnormal because of my dad.
My biological father is a rock star.
Possibly the most famous American rock star there is, or at least he was in the early nineties when his band, Pound, first broke the charts. Luckily my mother had the sense not to give me his last name; I've always gone by Taylor Beauforte, which is my mother's last name. It's bad enough that everyone at Treadwell knows that my dad is Chase Atwood. It would be pure torture having complete strangers guess my genetic lineage if my last name were to give them a clue.
Not like I had anything to do with Chase Atwood, anyway. Up until that summer I had only met him twice. Yep. That's right. Twice in fifteen-and-a-half years. Once, when I was seven, Pound played at a huge amphitheater in Orange County and my mother took me backstage. My father had long hair then, with garish blond streaks, and in the Polaroid that my mother snapped of us together he was wearing a white leather coat with fringe on the sleeves. And, I suspect with horror, eyeliner. Total fashion tragedy.
Then, when I was twelve, I had a very uncomfortable lunch with him at a trendy burger joint near the airport, where our waitress kept winking at him and refilling his water glass needlessly while he and I tried to "connect." This awkward second meeting was entirely my mother's idea. At the time, I thought she was innocently trying to help us establish some kind of father-daughter relationship but later I pieced together that it was a calculated step in her hitting him up for my tuition at Treadwell, which far exceeded the amount of his child support payments. He was already covering my clothes, doctor appointments, violin lessons and ballet classes, the latter of which had been my mom's idea.
What my father and I talked about during that lunch, I have no recollection.
Afterwards, he went back to his new wife and new daughter in New Jersey, and I packed my bags for ninth grade at Treadwell.
There were a few brief phone calls after that lunch in Los Angeles (mostly long stretches of deadly silence and nervous chit-chat about the weather and my subjects at school), but for the most part my dad was another periphery character in my life. He was just a ghost who lived on the East Coast. I figured out that the town where he lived was a four-hour drive from the Treadwell campus. Never once did he visit.
Don't get me wrong, I was never hurt or angry. My mother had told me a long time ago that she and my dad had just been an item, they were just having fun, and I was the end result. They had been engaged but never married. Neither of them especially wanted to be a parent when I came along. When I had to talk to him on the phone the summer that I was fifteen, I honestly couldn't remember the last time we had spoken.
What I do remember pretty clearly is that one night in early June before my junior year of high school, I was a few chapters into Jane Eyre (mandatory summer reading) when I heard glasses clinking out by the pool. Mom was throwing one of her trademark impromptu parties. I guess it's weird to think of your own mom being kind of a party animal, but my mom was. Her party friends included sleazy Hollywood executives, her good-time girlfriends from her wild days on the Sunset Strip, every once in a while a movie star, and a lot of guys who were a bit younger than my mom who seemed to especially like our pool and fridge full of food. Sure enough, an hour later there was funk music blasting and I could hear my mother's guests laughing and doing cannonballs into the deep end. Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Earle, called to complain around eleven. She was at least a hundred years old and was the widow of an old time television star who had been in a popular Western show.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Earle," I told her. Most elderly neighbors might assume that a ruckus next door was the fault of the teenager in residence, but Mrs. Earle knew that it was never me who was the source of the racket at our house.
"I'm going to call the police, Taylor," Mrs. Earle warned.
"Please do," I insisted. I knew from experience that nothing short of a uniformed cop knocking on the door was going to end the party before dawn. I could smell charcoal burning in the grill on the deck.
I hung up with Mrs. Earle and knocked loudly on my bedroom window, which overlooked the back yard and pool. I searched the crowd for my mother's cascade of blond hair and finally spied her sitting on the lap of a man from a TV show about cops that I was pretty sure had been cancelled.
My mother waved at me, over-enthusiastically (possibly drunk), and I raised my window.
"Keep it down!" I commanded.
I don't even think she heard me over the music.
"Come down and have some salmon!" she called up to me. "Rocco's firing up the grill!"
I rolled my eyes, shut my window, changed into my oversized Japanther t-shirt, and got under my covers. This was a typical summer night in our household and I was too distracted with the pathetic details of my fledgling love life to get worked up about my mother's pool party. Earlier that afternoon I had been over at Allison's and Todd had offered me a small glass of the wheat grass juice that he prepared for himself daily. I had been out of my mind with excitement that he had even asked me if I wanted to try it. It had taken me ten years of lounging around in the Burch family's kitchen to finally catch his attention.
I don't know how many hours passed before I sat straight up in bed. I heard the sirens of an ambulance in our driveway and heavy footsteps racing from the front of the house to the back. If I had looked out my window at that moment I might have seen someone pulling my mother's lifeless body out of the pool. But I didn't. Instead I crept downstairs in a daze and saw a lot of adults gathering around the sliding doors in the kitchen that led out to the back.
My mother's best friend Julia, a buxom brunette wearing a pink bikini that put her liposuction scars on full display, was wringing her hands in the kitchen.
"What's going on, Julia?" I asked.
"Don't worry, Taylor, everything is going to be OK," she assured me. Her breath smelled like rum and her voice was hoarse. She reached for my hair and smoothed it.
Then the paramedics came through with my mother on a stretcher. She was soaking wet, her hair was dripping on the kitchen floor, and an oxygen mask was on her face. She was wearing a batik bikini I had never seen before.
"What happened?" I kept asking everyone in the crowd. The partygoers followed the paramedics out to the front lawn and I pushed my way through them.
"That's my mom," I told one of the paramedics once I reached the back of the ambulance. "Is she going to be all right?"
The paramedic looked at me like I was a piece of lint on a sweater. He searched the crowd for someone who appeared to be responsible, or sober. "Can somebody drive this kid to the hospital?"
The moments after the ambulance pulled away were a chaotic blur of faces and colors. In the end I was driven to a huge hospital in Beverly Hills by a man in a Hawaiian shirt. I sat with Julia in the waiting room for what seemed like hours. One of the nurses brought her a lab coat to wear over her damp bikini and she howled and sobbed the whole time. I was under the impression, maybe from spending too much time in the TV lounge at Treadwell, that doctors frequently came out to the waiting room to give family members updates on the condition of their loved ones. This was not the case the night my mother died. Each time I approached the nurses' station for an update I was asked to have a seat.
It was hours before my mother's doctor came out to the lobby. The sun was up outside the waiting room windows. The View was on the overhead television. It was a freakish feeling, being so tired in the morning, with a strange sense of urgency as if it were not summer vacation and I was late for school. The doctor, who was very bookish in appearance with a thick gray beard, seemed to move in slow motion as he approached me and Julia. He asked me to follow him to a private room. Julia, who had been nodding off next to me on the striped sofa where we had been sitting all night, was suddenly at full attention demanding to know where my mother was and how she was doing. The doctor ignored her and led me to a small office down the hall.
"Taylor," he said, reading my name off of a clipboard. "Do you have any relatives in the area?"
"Is my mom OK?" I asked, my voice cracking.
The doctor shrugged and looked at the floor. I got the sense he wasn't accustomed to having to break bad news to kids. "I'm sorry, Taylor. We did everything we could to save your mom. She suffered a stroke, we think as a result of a drug overdose, in the pool, and took in a great deal of water."
My hands and feet started feeling numb. It just didn't seem real that he was telling me that my mom was dead. All I could think about was how badly I just wanted to go home to our house on North Laurel Avenue and crawl back under my blankets. I wanted to wake up later that afternoon to the sound of Mom banging around the kitchen, looking for Tylenol. I wanted to have a normal summer day of walking to The Grove with Allison to see a movie, or maybe her older brother Todd giving us a ride in his new Toyota. But I could tell, in that small bare-walled office that stank like cleanser, that my normal summer days were over. Forever.
"Are you in touch with your father? Grandparents? We need to contact an adult who can take responsibility for you," the doctor told me.
Looking back on those confusing, jumbled moments now, I guess I didn't realize how seriously in trouble I was at the time. My mother wasn't the type of woman who planned for the future. Sitting in that office, I thought my next steps would be as easy as just having Julia drive me home.
How wrong I was.
Two hours later after I tried to tearfully explain to the hospital's social worker that my dad was a rock star on the other side of the world who could not - and would not - drive right over to pick me up, Julia finally managed to talk her way into the office to see me.
"Can we have a moment alone?" she asked the social worker.
Once we had some privacy, Julia knelt down in front of me and wiped the tears from her eyes.
"Don't worry about anything," she whispered to me. "Your mother would want me to take care of this, and I'm going to."
"Where am I going to live?" I asked her. "Why won't they just let me go home?"
"I'm going to do everything I can just to get you out of here, OK?" she assured me.
She stood and patted me on the head and I realized that a woman who just six hours ago was totally drunk and possibly high, who was still wearing a bikini and a lab coat, was making me promises about my future. It was then that I got really scared. Up until that moment I had blindly trusted that adults always knew what was right, but Julia really had no more authority over the hospital staff than I did. I started having visions of being sent to an orphanage. It occurred to me that my mom's parents were still alive somewhere in Minnesota. I had never met them. I really didn't want to be put on a plane to Minnesota.
Suddenly when the social worked returned to fetch me in the office, he was talking nonstop about my dad. He had spoken to my dad on the phone, he was saying. My dad was flying to Los Angeles to pick me up. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services was sending two case handlers to retrieve me, and I was to wait at their office until my dad arrived.
"Wait, what?" I was starting to feel like I was going to pass out. I was lightheaded and dizzy. "Pick me up and take me where? I don't even know him."
"He wants to speak with you," the social worker told me, picking up the receiver of the phone on the desk and dialing.
"No," I said emphatically. "I have people I can stay with here. And I go back to school in September. I don't need to talk to him."
But the phone was pressed into my hand, and my dad was waiting on the other end. And that's when my new life began.
Since I didn't know my father personally very well, I never could have known prior to our very short, very serious chat on that fateful morning that my father is a very emotional man.
"Are you all right?" he asked me. That was the first thing he asked when I was handed the phone, and it occurred to me that he was the only person all morning who had asked me how I was doing. And in that moment as I was preparing to tell him that I was fine, it all hit me. A huge volcano of sadness and fear erupted inside me. It all came pouring out and I started sobbing.
"I'm OK," I managed in between sobs and snorts. I am sure it was more than evident to him by the tone of my voice that I was anything but OK.
Then, incredibly enough, he started sobbing. "You just sit tight, Taylor. We're getting on the first flight to Los Angeles to come and get you."
To this day I am not sure how what happened next became reality, because certainly in my head I was dead-set against my father coming to get me. I had accepted the phone fully prepared to tell my father that his assistance would be unnecessary, that I could go crash at Allison's for the summer and continue on with my part-time job mixing frozen juices at Robek's and combing the Farmer's Market at The Grove for cute guys. But the idea of my dad coming to get me was comforting in a way that I can't even explain. It was overwhelming.
So instead of saying, "Don't worry about it, man. It's cool. I'm going to just crash with a friend until school starts," I heard myself say in a tiny voice, "Please hurry."
My father and his wife, Jill, were all the way in Turkey, the hospital social worker informed me. Little had I known that Pound was on a sold-out world tour promoting their latest album, Stagger. Unrelated to my situation that afternoon, the album was receiving rave reviews and the band was playing in over forty cities across Europe and Asia. All that meant for me, though, was that I was going to have to go to Koreatown with the two Department of Child Welfare case handlers who arrived to fetch me: Lois (the old one) and Connie (the one who wore large hoop earrings and smelled like beef broth). And with them I would wait at the Department's temporary living facility for my dad to arrive.
We drove from the beautiful tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills down Wilshire Boulevard toward the ladies' office facility. The day was already getting kind of hazy and hot by the time I was brought to a large corporate office and asked a series of questions while Connie typed up a file on me. Full name? Piece of cake. Father's name? My answer produced the expected reaction; Connie raised an eyebrow and I added, "yes, that Chase Atwood." Social security number? Seriously, no clue.
My mind started to wander back to my house. Had anyone even locked the doors when we all split for the hospital? Were they going to let me go back and at least get my reading list for school? What about my violin? I was supposed to be practicing every day – I had just won first seat in the Treadwell Junior Symphony Orchestra. What about my mom's body? Where was it? Who would plan a funeral?
Despite my panic, I was starting to get really sleepy. It was a Wednesday, nearly one in the afternoon. I realized I had missed my shift at Robek's and didn't even have my cell phone to call Allison and let her know what had happened.
After I let loose a mighty yawn, Lois frowned at me and told Connie that she could finish my paperwork later. Connie took me up to the dormitory floors and led me to a stark room with bunk beds. I was informed that for the duration of my stay at the Department of Children and Family Services facility I would be roommates with a girl named Anna who was at summer school for the day. None of this information was making any difference to me. I crawled under the blankets on the lower bunk and closed my eyes until Connie stopped talking and left me alone.
I had been wearing pajamas all day. I had no idea how or when I was going to be able to get in touch with Allison or my mom's friends to tell them where I was. And my mom was dead. Gone. They hadn't even let me see her body. I started crying until I could barely breathe, and at some point I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up I immediately got the distinct sensation that I was being watched. Upon opening my eyes I saw my new roommate, a heavyset girl at least a year older than me, standing over me with her arms folded across her chest. It was dark outside. I had no idea how long I'd been sleeping.
"You're in my bed," the girl said sternly.
I sat up instantly. It hadn't occurred to me when I chose the lower bunk that the room's existing occupant probably slept there.
"I'm sorry," I said, pushing back the blankets and standing. "I didn't know."
"It's OK," the girl said. "Whatever."
Not wanting to make small talk, I climbed the flimsy ladder to the top bunk and laid down again facing the wall, my back to my new roommate.
"Your parents beat you up or something?" the girl asked.
"My mom died," I said, trying my hardest not to start crying again just by having to say those words.
"Yo, that sucks," she said. "My name is Anna. I just got kicked out of my foster home and sent back here. Stupid assholes expected me to watch their toddler every day after school. I ain't no free nanny service."
I wanted to be cordial, or at least not make this roommate angry, but I couldn't find the strength to roll over and even face her. From the moment she started talking I just wanted the room to be dark and silent again.
Anna got the picture. "Listen, it's dinner time. I'm supposed to tell you to come downstairs if you want to eat. They're strict about the schedule."
I made no attempt to move. Anna gave up on me and went downstairs alone, muttering her signature, "whatever," on her way out the door.
There's not much to say about the two days that I spent in the facility other than that I never once had the bright idea to ask to use a phone. Lois told me that one of my mother's friends would be bringing over some of my clothes, but no one ever materialized. On my second day there, after the other kids left for their part-time jobs and summer school classes in the morning, I braved the showers alone and got back into my dirty pajamas.
I was in a state of shock about how my life had transformed so quickly. No one ever thinks she's going to go to bed in her bedroom one night and the next day find herself a ward of the court, living in a city-run facility that smells a little like mothballs and is still buzzing with chatter at night even after lights-out. I was offered the services of a psychiatrist, which I turned down. I was thinking more along the lines of needing a lawyer. In the two days that passed it was becoming terrifying to me that my dad was on his way to Los Angeles to claim me. I was almost sixteen and surely I could get by alone on what he gave my mother in child support. I could become emancipated. The last thing I wanted was to intrude on his life unexpectedly and be a burden.
I formulated a plan to run this scenario past him, certain that he would be totally down with just paying me to take care of myself. It would be a win-win situation for both of us.
When Chase finally did arrive, I'm not sure that the Department of Children and Family Services was any more prepared for him than I was. For starters, the paparazzi had caught wind of the story and had met his flight arriving at L.A.X. They followed him in what could basically be called a motor cavalcade all the way to the facility on Wilshire where he was coming to meet me, and he climbed out of the backseat of the limo to a flurry of flashbulbs popping.
"Please try to have some respect," he yelled at the photographers as he pushed his way to the front lobby. This I know because I was watching from the window of my tenth story room. After I waited for almost an hour, an administrator summoned me from my room.
On the elevator ride down to the first floor to meet my dad, I started feeling nauseous and self-conscious. He was an internationally recognized rock star, and I was a mess who hadn't even touched a hair brush in two days. I had been given a pair of jeans to wear once someone had finally acknowledged that I had been wearing an oversized concert t-shirt and a pair of rainbow-striped Victoria Secret pajama pants for over forty hours straight, but the jeans were clownishly large and unflattering. In the three years since I'd last seen my dad I'd grown nearly a foot, had my fair share of zits, started wearing a bra and had an unfortunate boarding school incident involving red henna in my hair. Was he even going to recognize me?
I was led down a long hallway to an office I hadn't been in yet, past the huge first-floor cafeteria where I had, hours earlier, eaten a peanut butter sandwich with two fourth graders who had convinced the staff that they were too sick to play volleyball with their peers.
My dad was sitting at a desk across from Lois signing paperwork when I walked in. He looked the same as he always does on the cover of Expose Magazine – professionally frosted hair, hoop earring in one ear, semi-lame goatee. He was wearing dark washed jeans and a distressed flannel shirt, obviously moving into a retro-grunge fashion moment. Anyone else's dad would show up to a formal meeting of this nature wearing a golf sweater or at the very least some respectable Dockers. Not my dad.
"Hi," I said weakly. I thought about adding Dad to my greeting but I don't think I had ever actually called him that.
He was on his feet and hugging me in a second. He smelled like expensive, spicy cologne and he had stubble on his jaw offsetting the goatee that I guessed was from travel and not part of a really misguided attempt at being sexy. It was kind of weird that I was only a few inches shorter than him. The last time I had seen him it had been much clearer that I was a child and he was an adult, but now, looking at him, I was far more aware of his fake tan… and of his nose looking a little straighter than it had looked in photographs I had seen in magazines.
"Hi, baby," my father said, messing up my hair. I was seated in a hard plastic chair next to him at Lois's desk.
"Now. Taylor, your father tells me that he has never before had custody of you," Lois began, getting down to business.
"That's correct," I said. "I've lived with my mom my whole life."
"And you are in the tenth grade, going into eleventh?" Lois asked, reviewing forms that apparently my father had filled out while I was upstairs. He had known my social security number. I was momentarily impressed.
"Yes," I said.
"And where are you enrolled in school?"
"The Treadwell Preparatory Academy," I said, a little choked up. What a jerk I had been to my own mother. I had wanted to get away from her so badly that I had demanded boarding school and had made her go to my father and grovel for money. In the days following her death, the slightest regret could cause me to burst into sporadic tears.
"And where is that located?" Lois asked, clueless.
"Massachusetts," my father interjected.
Connie, the other administrator who had met with me at the hospital, entered the office with a manila folder that had BEAUFORTE typed on a label on its tab. "There's a small complication," Connie announced. "You are not listed as Margaret's father on her birth certificate."
My father looked stupefied. "Well, I'm not contesting that I'm her father."
"Who's Margaret?" I demanded to know, confused as to why they were suddenly referring to me by a different name when I was sitting right there, mere inches from them.
Connie lowered her glasses to inspect my father more closely, completely unimpressed by how famous he was. "That's not the issue, Mr. Atwood. The issue is that we are not authorized to release her into your custody."
My father began to object. "Well, I'm her father. What do I have to do to prove this? You want to do a paternity test? Let's get this over with."
"Why did she call me Margaret?" I nagged my father.
"That's the name on your birth certificate," he informed me. I craned my neck trying to see the document in Connie's hands.
"It's not that simple, Mr. Atwood," Connie explained calmly. "This kind of thing can take weeks to make its way through the courts."
My father looked at me carefully and cleared his throat. "And what happens to Taylor during those weeks? Can we rent a house in Los Angeles and keep her with us?"
Connie shook her head as if my father was a complete fool. "Mr. Atwood, our standard policy would be to place the child in a home that has been previously approved by the state."
"You mean, like foster care?" my father bellowed. He was starting to get somewhat worked up. "Taylor, would you mind if I have a word alone with these ladies for a moment?"
I stood, surprised that I was being asked to leave. My mother never asked me to leave a room so that adults could speak in private. In fact, my mother would have never even contested what Lois and Connie told her. She was never very tenacious in arguments.
"You can go wait in the car outside," my father informed me.
I left the office but lingered outside the closed door, a little afraid that my father was not going to win this battle against two middle-aged ladies. I also did not want to brave the paparazzi alone. In all honesty I was pretty sure that my father was going to leave me in Los Angeles and I was going to be dropped off at some weird foster home in the Valley.
A moment later, my father exited the office, grabbed my wrist, and led me toward the main lobby of the facility. Over his shoulder he called to Lois and Connie, "You can send information about the court date to my management in Beverly Hills."
And that was that. A storm of flashbulbs and a slam of a limo door later, I was in my dad's custody. I recognized the host of Extra when he knocked on the window on my side of the limo and yelled, "What's it like having Chase Atwood for your father?"
"You good?" My father asked before the limousine pulled away from the curb.
"Yes, I think so," I said.
"Did you have anything in there with you?" he asked, nodding in the direction of the building.
"No. In fact, it would be nice to stop by my house and pick up some stuff," I suggested, hoping he'd agree.
"Sure, no problem," he said. "Jill and Kelsey are at The Beverly Hills Hotel. You can take all the time you need."
"How come no one ever told me my legal name is Margaret?" I asked after we pulled away from the curb.
My dad shrugged. "You were named after my mother. Taylor is your middle name."
We drove the long expanse of Wilshire back to West Hollywood in an awkward silence. If you've never been to Los Angeles in early summer, I'll mention that the city is at its height of beauty. There isn't a single street that doesn't have at least one flowering bush on it, and the breeze is pungent with floral perfume. Usually June in Los Angeles is gloomy – days on end of gray skies – but that morning the sky was a hue of blue like no other. It was nearly hypnotizing, I was thinking, as we rounded the corner to North Laurel Avenue. Focusing on the hydrangea just past the window of the limo was easier than thinking about how the man in the backseat with me was basically a stranger, and that it was perhaps the last time in my life I would ever be driving down these familiar streets headed toward my home.
When we rolled into the driveway my heart sank, because the house looked so unassuming and serene it was impossible to believe that anything had changed since I had last seen it in daylight. I felt certain as I climbed out of the limo and closed the door behind me that the last two days had been some kind of twisted dream, and that when I entered the front door Mom would be stretched out on the couch in her robe, watching TV. I raced up the stone path to our front stairs while Dad called out behind me, "Taylor, wait a second."
At the front door, I realized I didn't have my house key. Leaving the house without a key is so unlike me; I have never lost a school ID or set of keys in my life. Dad caught up to me on the front landing and just before I had a chance to tell him that we were locked out, the front door opened and Julia was embracing me and planting juicy kisses on my cheeks.
"Taylor! You're home! Thank god! Those awful people at the hospital wouldn't tell me where you were taken," she cooed. She was wearing a mesh t-shirt over a black one-piece bathing suit and her hair was wet. She smelled of chlorine, and it disgusted me to realize it, but vodka, too.
"Julia…" I said, at once both relieved to see her and profoundly disturbed that she had clearly been hanging out in my house all day, swimming in the pool where my mother had died just two days ago, and raiding my mother's liquor cabinet. "What are you doing here?"
"There are things to take care of, Taylor," Julia said offensively. "I had to be here early this morning to have the pool drained and refilled. I've been on the phone with the funeral home all afternoon." Her eyes narrowed and she directed her next comment at my father. "I'm glad you're here, Chase. We need to talk."
"Yes, we do," my father said sternly. "Taylor, go pack a suitcase. Take your time."
He followed me inside the house and without even saying a word to Julia, passed through the kitchen and out to the backyard to make an assessment of her presence in the house that day. It struck me as a little odd that he was so familiar with the layout of our house, when as far as I could remember, he had never been inside. I had never given much thought to how much a part of my mother's life Dad had been before I was born, but naturally he knew Julia from when they were young. Julia and my mom used to go to concerts together and hang out on the Sunset Strip before my mom and dad met. It was obvious that my dad was not fond of her.
I reached the top of the short set of stairs to the second floor and lingered in the doorway to my bedroom for a moment. The lamp on my nightstand was still on, presumably from two nights earlier. My blankets were still pushed back, and my bedroom window was still cracked open. I was overwhelmed by the desire to crawl back into bed and try to rewind the last few days… so that's what I did. I scurried beneath my covers, pulled them up over my head, and wished and prayed as hard as I could that I could just go back in time, and this time notice my mom falling in the pool, or yell at her more harshly to end the party… anything I could have done differently to have prevented this nightmare.
Despite having my eyes squeezed shut and not having any intentions whatsoever of eavesdropping, I could hear my father and Julia exchanging words from the backyard.
"We'll take it from here," Dad was assuring Julia.
"Oh, sure you'll take it," Julia retorted sarcastically. "Just like you're going to take care of Taylor. Just like you took real good care of Dawn."
"Now you hold on a second there, Julia. Look around. I took good care of Dawn. She never had to lift a finger."
"Oh, right. Leaving someone like her to raise a child alone, that's just great," Julia berated him. "You knew Dawn could barely take care of herself."
My father's voice got very steely, and even though I could tell he was trying to lower the volume, he sounded louder at the lower pitch. "That kid up there is fantastic, so whatever Dawn was doing, she was doing it right. What she didn't need was deadbeat friends like you looming around all the time for happy hour. What kind of person shows up and drinks cocktails all day at her dead friend's house, Julia? You have no right to be here on this property."
I covered my head with my pillow, wanting to block out all of the ugliness that I was hearing, but the voices carried through. What had been so wrong with my mother that Julia considered her unfit to raise me?
"Someone had to clean up the mess left in this house. Someone had to plan a wake and funeral, Chase. These kinds of things can't just wait until your G5 flies in from Europe. Speaking of, Dawn had no life insurance and the funeral home is going to charge fifteen thousand dollars," Julia yelled. "Where am I supposed to come up with fifteen thousand dollars? The bank won't release any of Dawn's assets because she didn't leave a will."
The bickering continued and at some point I nodded off to sleep. When I woke up, my bedroom was cool and dark. It was twilight beyond my window, and the sky was striped with ribbons of orange and pink from the setting sun, the kind of amazing electric sunset you only see in Los Angeles. The house was silent and for a few minutes I sat still in bed, wondering hopefully if Dad had left me there alone. Being in such a state of panic was amplifying my crush on Allison's brother so much that I almost wanted to faint at the thought of leaving Los Angeles and not being near the Burchs' house. I convinced myself that I could just pack a duffel bag and take the bus over to Allison's house, and never worry about this matter of custody again.
Then I slowly became aware that the television set was on in the living room.
Dad was sitting on the couch looking through one of Mom's photo albums containing my baby pictures. The nightly news was on, featuring yet another car chase on the freeway, which is pretty typical news for L.A..
"Hey there, sleeping beauty," Dad said.
I sat down in the armchair. "What time is it?"
"Eight-thirty," Dad informed me after checking his fancy mobile phone. "You're probably starving for dinner."
I hated to admit it, but I actually was. And if memory served, the only food in our kitchen was frozen stuff from Mom's last trip to Trader Joe's. But my legs felt like they were made out of cement. I didn't feel like leaving home again, not for takeout burritos (my favorite) or the fanciest restaurant dinner in the whole city. I knew somewhere a few miles away, my father's wife and other daughter were biding time in a hotel room waiting for us to show up. This was probably my last chance to plead my case with my dad – to convince him to just leave me here, where I could take care of myself and the house. At that point I was even thinking I wouldn't even want to return to Treadwell; I could just stay in Los Angeles and finish high school nearby.
"Listen, Dad," I began carefully. I was on the debate team at Treadwell and knew that I had some serious persuasive powers within me. "I really do not want to be any more of a burden on you than I've already been. I was thinking it might be the most practical thing for me to just stay here, take care of Mom's arrangements, finish out school until I get my diploma-"
"Taylor," Dad interrupted me. "You're fifteen years old."
"Yeah, but," I defended myself, "I can take care of myself. And you're on tour, I'm just going to be in the way of your life."
"The tour's cancelled until further notice," my father said firmly. "We called off Europe and are going to start rescheduling dates in the U.S. You are my responsibility now and I am not going to leave you all on your own in a city like Los Angeles."
He was staring me down. I was completely unaccustomed to an adult telling me how things were. With my mom I could talk my way out of anything… out of a curfew, out of a mess left in the kitchen, but I could see that Chase was the king of his castle and was not going to stand for any lip. This was not at all good news for me. I began to feel my lower lip trembling and I knew the tears weren't far behind.
"That's really not fair," I told him. "I haven't even seen you in three years and now you suddenly show up and know what's best for me? This is my home. I don't want to leave. I can go live with my best friend if I can't live alone."
My dad stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. "Taylor, you have just suffered a tremendous loss. I can't allow you to stay in the house by yourself at such a delicate time with your mother's bloodsucking friends trawling around. Do you want me to lose custody of you? Because that's what will happen if I leave you here tonight. And I'm not going to be able to live with myself if I have to trust strangers to finish raising you. Now please, go pack a bag."
I stood up, stormed out of the living room and was howling uncontrollably by the time I got to my bedroom. I even slammed the door for the full effect; giving him a taste of every tantrum he had missed out on while he was packing concert halls and arenas throughout my entire childhood. Somehow, in between the tears, I managed to stuff my big rolling suitcase, the one that came with me to and from Treadwell, with underwear, clean jeans and t-shirts. By the time I was looking wildly around my room at all of my treasured possessions that couldn't possibly fit in my suitcase, I noticed my dad was standing in my doorway.
"You don't have to pack it all," he told me comfortingly. "We'll figure it out in the next few days."
"I can take care of myself," I said again, more for my own benefit than for his. "You don't even know me. But I can handle this – planning a funeral and taking care of the house."
My father sat down on my bed and looked at me with admiration. "I'm sure you can. But you're fifteen. You shouldn't have to."
I glanced around my room again at all of my stuffed animals, my Barbie collection, my ice skating costumes still hanging in my closet from elementary school. I had always assumed that all of my possessions would be right here in my sky blue bedroom forever.
"Taylor, look, I know I haven't been here for you," my dad began slowly. "Things between me and your mom, well, you know. From the day we split up, things were not good. But I'm asking you for your trust. Can we just take it day by day and see how things go?"
He looked pretty miserable sitting there on my bed, surrounded by my ratty old stuffed animals. My dog-eared vintage New Order poster hung above him, and he looked tired and aging and a little like a fashion victim with his goatee and earring. And for the first time in my whole life, I realized that my dad is just a man. Forget the rock star part, and he's just a guy with feelings.
So I agreed to take it day by day, and we locked up the house for the night.
When I woke up the next morning in my father's Presidential Suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had no idea where I was for about ten minutes. I was in a ridiculously enormous bed and sun was streaming in through the window. When I pushed back the blankets and looked outside, I was gazing down upon an enormous crystalline swimming pool that was being cleaned by men in uniforms. Then I saw a woman who I recognized from the cover of People Magazine wearing a terry cloth cover-up sitting down on a deck chair and slathering sunscreen onto the shoulders of a little girl around the age of five. And then all of the events of the last three days came flooding back to me.
My father had been on the phone well into the night making arrangements. A wake for my mother was being held later that afternoon in Beverly Hills, and my father's extensive team of managers, lawyers and accountants had begun settling her estate. Before I had nodded off the night before I had come to understand vaguely that there wasn't much of my mother's life left to settle.
Our house on North Laurel was a rental. I don't know how I had been so ignorant of this; I had always thought of it as our house. But my father had been paying rent on it since I was a baby. And Mrs. Earle was our landlord. How had I never known? Why hadn't Mrs. Earle ever thrown my mother out for her rowdy partying? At any rate my father had arranged for a locksmith to change all the locks on the house that morning and install an alarm system to keep it secure until new tenants moved in.
My mother had no savings and no assets. She had a check that came once a month for the backup singing she had done on a Chevy commercial when I was in eighth grade. Every time the commercial aired anywhere in the world, she made a few pennies, but I would soon find out that her monthly liquor expenses were far more than that residual check. Part of what my father had been sending her in child support since I was a baby had been intended for a college savings account, and apparently no such account existed.
I certainly knew nothing about one.
My mother's parents were on a flight in from St. Paul. The concierge at the hotel was arranging for a black dress to be delivered to our suite for me to wear to the wake, as I didn't own anything formal (although simply black would not have been a problem as black turtlenecks and jeans were my personal uniform at school). Everything seemed to be moving so fast… and at some point I was going to have to make my way down to the pool to introduce myself for the first time to my father's wife and daughter.
There was a knock on the door to my room.
"Taylor, are you awake in there?"
It was my dad. I opened the door and found him carrying a leather-bound menu with a little tassel on it.
"Did you sleep well?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"You should come downstairs and eat. We have to be at the funeral home at two and the stylist will be here with some dresses for you to try on in an hour," my dad said.
A shower and a fresh pair of jeans later, I made my way down to the pool, where my dad had joined Jill to order breakfast. Now it's probably important to point out that when my dad married Jill, I read about it in Expose Magazine just like everyone else in America. Jill was a fashion stylist on a shoot he had done for Rolling Stone, and they exchanged vows at the Fundu Lagoon resort in Zanzibar. My mother had noticed the cover of the magazine when we were standing in line at Vons to buy toilet paper and ice cream. She had snorted with disgust and read the article aloud in a dramatic British accent for my amusement.
Two years later, when I had met my dad for burgers near the airport, he had told me that he had invited me, and that my mother told him it was hardly possible for me to just drop out of my fifth grade classes and jet off to Africa. At the time I thought he was probably lying but realistically my mother kind of had a point. Since then, I've seen my dad and Jill on Extra, attending the American Music Awards and Grammys; I even got a complete tour of their mansion on the Jersey shore not far from where the Bon Jovis lived, courtesy of Cribs. But never once was I invited to visit in person.
"Hello, dear," Jill called to me, standing and pulling off her Gucci tinted sunglasses to get a better look at me. "Aren't you just the spitting image of your mother."
I sat down across the table from my dad, who was drinking some kind of fruit smoothie. Jill was very tall and tan, with streaked blond hair. She looked like the kind of woman who grew up riding horses and eating granola.
My mother, by comparison, was soft all over and had a lot of help from Clairol and Slimfast.
Jill looked me up and down, and with one expression made me feel like the world's biggest idiot for showing my face at the pool of this hotel wearing jeans bought on sale and a Red Sox t-shirt.
"I'm Jill," she said, formally introducing herself and extending a stiff hand as if I were on an interview for an internship.
"Taylor," I said in return, although I'm sure she knew my name already.
My half-sister, Jill's daughter, ran up to the table with wet hair and plastic floaters secured over her upper arms. "And this little monkey here is Kelsey."
Kelsey, who was skinny and tan and had my dad's shockingly green eyes, hid in my dad's arms and giggled at me.
"Go ahead, little girl. Say hi to Taylor. She's your big sister," my dad told her.
I had never previously given much thought to the notion of having a sibling. And yet here one was, my very own little sister. Half-sister.
"You should order something to eat," Jill instructed me. I had looked over the menu up in my room and had been a little daunted by the prices. Twenty dollars for French toast? Even a box of Munchkin donuts was a little bit of an extravagance for me and Mom.
"Jill is very interested in raw food," my dad informed me, and I interpreted his statement as a casual warning that my selection would be judged. "She reads a lot about how food loses its nutritional value after it's been exposed to high temperatures."
"I was thinking that I'd like the Dutch Apple pancake," I said, throwing my dad's caution aside. I was starving.
"Oh, there are probably three thousand calories in that!" Jill exclaimed.
"Relax, honey. Taylor can have whatever she wants. She's had a rough couple of days," my dad said.
Only as I was practically licking the syrup off my plate did I wonder what Jill meant when she said that I looked just like my mom. How did Jill know what my mom looked like? Had they ever met? Was her comment intended a compliment or an insult?
I wish I could remember the details of my mother's wake, but the hours that we spent at the funeral home went by in a flash. My mother's parents appeared, gray-haired and well-dressed, and then disappeared. They appeared to be deep in a serious discussion with my father, and my mind wandered toward the possibility of having to live with them in Minnesota. Many of my mother's friends appeared, knelt at her coffin and wept, and then left to go to happy hour at Boardner's bar in Hollywood.
I plucked an orchid off an arrangement and sat on an overstuffed couch, thanking passersby for coming and assuring everyone that I was OK. I was uncomfortable in the itchy Zac Posen black shift that Jill had selected for me back at the hotel. I had told her more than once, when trying on the dresses delivered by the hotel concierge, that my style at school was very laid back. She matter-of-factly told me that whether I liked it or not I was going to have to start paying more attention to fashion.
The only big surprise of the afternoon was that Allison came with her parents and brother. Allison, wearing a black sundress I had never seen before, and her mom both rushed over to me while her dad shook hands with my dad. Todd lingered behind, mostly looking at the ground and seeming very uncomfortable, but looking insanely cute anyway. Todd had just graduated from high school a few weeks earlier. He was leaving for college in Connecticut in the fall and I had been harboring a secret hope for months since he had been accepted at UConn that he would drop in on me at Treadwell once we were both on the East Coast. Naturally I could not share this hope with Allison, as she found my crush on her brother totally disgusting.
"Oh my god, Taylor," Allison said over and over, her eyes brimming over with tears. "I can't believe this is happening to you."
"It's all right," I found myself saying repeatedly, even though I didn't believe myself.
"You know, Taylor, anything you need, all you have to do is ask," Allison's mom said. Allison's mom went to church daily and wouldn't let Allison wear makeup. She drove an ugly minivan and taught yoga part-time. Allison often complained about how old-fashioned her mom was but I knew she would never have traded hers for mine.
"What's going to happen to you now?" Allison asked.
"I want to stay here until school starts," I said. I hadn't completely given myself over to the possibility of spending the summer with my dad. September seemed impossibly far off in the future. "I don't know if my dad's going to let me, though."
"Well, it would be best for you to be with people who care about you," Allison's mother told me, stroking my arm. At first I was comforted by this statement, because I thought she was providing me with what I wanted more than anything that evening: an invitation to move in with them for the summer. But when I looked up at Allison's mom for confirmation that my worries could finally end, I realized that she was implying that I would be best off with my dad.
Todd stepped up and his mouth twisted into a frown when his eyes met mine. "Sorry about your mom, Taylor," he said. His voice sounded kind of gravelly. Todd had Allison's huge, heavy-lidded blue eyes but had a slightly noticeable scar over his lip from cleft palate surgery he had as a baby. He was planning on majoring in International Relations in college. I pretty much thought he was the cutest, smartest, funniest boy ever. And totally unattainable, as to him I was just his dumb kid sister's pesky friend.
"Thanks," I mumbled, trying not to cry.
He gave me an awkward hug and pecked me on the cheek.
I tried not to be delighted to get a kiss on the cheek from him. I noticed Allison glare at him. It's totally wrong to be thinking about cute boys at your mom's wake but I couldn't help but be flattered that he had come with the family when I am sure he had a million other things he would have wanted to do that afternoon. Had my mom been alive to do so, she would have teased me.
Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-25 show above.)