by Teddy Wayne
The side of Jane’s lips twisted like she’d been punched but was trying not to show it. “And what do you want out of this?”
“I don’t want anything except a chance to see my son.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Jane said.
“It’s true,” I said. “He was in Australia the last few years. That’s why he wasn’t in touch.”
Jane looked at my father first, then at me. He didn’t look at either of us.
“Jonathan,” she said slowly. “He’s a drug addict. He’s been one for years. I didn’t tell you because you didn’t need to know what a lowlife you have for a father. He hasn’t been to Australia. I bet he doesn’t even have a passport.”
My father didn’t say anything.
“Is that the truth?” I asked.
He took a few seconds. “I’ve been clean six months,” he said. “I didn’t want to reach out while I was still using. But I swear to you, I haven’t touched anything in six months. Here.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a big copper coin. Inside a triangle it said “6 Month Recovery.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought that off some junkie he’s friends with,” Jane said.
I ignored her. “What about Australia? Didn’t you live there? To have an adventure?”
“No,” he said. “A friend did.” He put the coin back in his pocket. “I guess I wanted to impress you. You’ve got this life, and I didn’t want you knowing I was strung out on drugs, living in halfway houses, and that’s why I was ashamed to get in touch all these years. All I wanted was to see you.”
Jane laughed a mean laugh. “Just like you did when you left after Michael.”
I thought she meant Michael Carns, which didn’t make sense. But the way Jane’s face looked, ready to break apart like an egg even though she was angry, and the way my father’s face fell down to the ground for the millionth time like he’d done something really bad, I could tell it wasn’t.
So his name was Michael, too. And he really was my little brother. I must’ve been too young to understand what was happening and they never discussed it and I wasn’t old enough to really remember anything.
He said, “I’m sorry, Jane. I’m very sorry.”
I thought about me and my father in that diner again, and him telling me to order whatever I wanted, he didn’t care.
Jane kept staring right at him like she was either going to cry or punch him. “Six years later, and I finally get an apology,” she said.
“People change, Jane.”
“Right,” Jane said. “Jonathan changed a lot, so now you conveniently want to see him.”
And Jane in her hospital bed, holding the baby with my face.
“I’d want to see him no matter what,” he said. “I don’t like what happened any more than you do. My life’s back on track.”
Everything happens for a reason.
“Anything else you have to say, you can say it to my lawyer,” Jane said. “If you don’t leave immediately, I’m calling security and putting you in jail.” She took her phone out of her purse like it was a weapon.
“Janie,” he said.
She dialed. “Don’t you dare sweet-talk me. It doesn’t work anymore.”
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
“Now, wait a minute.” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, the same pocket that had my photo. “First of all, the restraining order hasn’t been approved yet. I’m well within my rights to talk to Jonathan, especially if he’s invited me, which he has, to the concert and on the stage and into this room.” He smoothed it out and gave it to her. “Your lawyers are receiving this tonight.”
Jane’s eyes bulged out like after I’d fainted as she got further down the page, but she kept her cool. When she finished, she folded it crisply in half, like it was just any old piece of paper. Complete control.
“If you believe you’re financially entitled to all this, you’re very mistaken. You owe thousands in child support. You probably think coming here and charming Jonny is going to make it easier than if you’d gone through your lawyers, but you’re wrong.” She handed the paper back to him. “He’s mine, Al. Not yours.”
“We’ll see,” my father said. “We’ll be releasing a statement to the press this week if your lawyers don’t talk with us.”
He really did look a lot like me in the face. If he had my talent he could’ve been a star. Except maybe not, because a lot of being a star was about sacrifice and work ethic. There was something about my father you could pick up that made him look like someone who did what Rog called the bare minimum. The bare-minimum singers who were lucky were one-hit wonders. The ones who were less lucky never made it at all, they only played small clubs and were bitter and eventually burned out of the industry. The real stars didn’t kill themselves only when they liked the work, which anyone can do. They killed themselves when they hated it, when they’d rather be anywhere else. You don’t get to ten thousand hours just by having fun.
Jane finally cracked, getting up in my father’s face and calling him an asshole and a bunch of other curses, much angrier than when she’d yelled at Kevin the TV producer after the morning-show concert, and he took it without saying anything.
They were about a foot away from each other, near the door, and I was still on the beanbag chair in front of the TV. I could slip out the back door and they wouldn’t even notice. They were arguing over me and they’d totally forgotten about me at the same time.
After half a minute the front door opened again. Walter.
“Calm down, calm down,” he said as he wedged himself between them with his hands out, like they were paparazzi hounding me postshow, but they wouldn’t, or at least Jane wouldn’t.
Walter looked over at me while he was in the middle of them like, Should I kick him out? and I shook my head no real quick. But another part of him was looking at me more like, Sorry about this, brother. It could be all right to live with Walter. He didn’t know how to take care of me or understand anything about the industry, but at least he was savvy about protection. It was a stupid idea, though, because if he was going to take care of anyone, it would be his own daughters, just like Nadine had her own boyfriend and she’d marry him and have her own kids soon.
Jane was all I really had. And I was the only thing she had. Just the two of us.
“Stop it,” I said, and no one heard me, so I used my diaphragm more but without shouting and said, “Please stop it.” This time they all shut up like they’d finally remembered I was there.
My father’s eyebrows were pinched together, waiting for me to say something. “Show me the paper,” I said.
“You don’t need to see this, Jonathan,” he said.
“Show it to me.”
He unfolded the paper and held it out like it was a bad report card. I didn’t understand any of it. Except for a dollar amount at the end. It was a lot of money, more than my father could make in a hundred lifetimes doing construction. But I’d seen the figures from my record deals, gate receipts, and merchandising. We could afford it.
And in a funny way, maybe I wouldn’t have had a career at all if things had been okay with Michael and if my father hadn’t left. Jane wouldn’t have needed to make me busk for extra money, wouldn’t have put my videos up on YouTube, wouldn’t have pulled me out of school and moved us to L.A. I would’ve just been some kid in school who lived in Dogtown and was a super-talented singer who joined a rock band in high school like his father did. And I would’ve had a younger brother around I could play Zenon with and teach how the double switch works in baseball.
“I’ll make sure her lawyers talk to yours,” I said. “We’ll work out a deal. You’ll get enough money to last you a long time.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Jane said to me. She looked at Al. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. I’m in charge of all the finances.”
“You might be in charge of it,” I said. “But I can walk away from all this if I w
ant. This can be my last show.”
That shut her up. I’d never said anything like that before. She looked afraid of me, even.
That time we watched the Cardinals game on TV, my father was all sweaty and talking fast. Now he was calm, and he didn’t look like he was a drug addict, at least not like the ones in movies. He looked like if you cleaned him up and had him lift for a few months, you could put him in a catalog for men’s clothes. Like a guy who got a lot of girls when he was young and women could sense that so he still got a bunch of them.
Jane was an addict, too. Not to drugs, because she couldn’t do as much as she did if she was. That was the difference between addicts like Jane and addicts like my father. Some addicts could still turn their son into a pop star in L.A. and be a successful music manager. Other ones got in fights outside bars in Pittsburgh and stayed in halfway houses and lied about living in Australia.
What my father said was true. People did change. But there was some part of them they could never get away from, no matter how hard they wanted to. He was a bare-minimum worker, then and now. He’d probably always say his friend was guilty and he was innocent, in a logic test and in real life. And he still looked like the type of guy who left his wife after her baby died to raise their other son on her own.
“And whatever’s in this thing sunsets.” I handed him back his legal letter. “Deal?”
He seemed scared, like this was the last thing he expected and he didn’t know what to do. It was the first time I’d ever proposed a business deal, so I should’ve been the one who was scared. Only I wasn’t. I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing. I guess I’d learned from Jane. I bet she was kind of proud, even.
“Yeah. If this doesn’t happen, my lawyer talks to the press about how you’re shutting me out.”
“It will happen.” I thought it would be a lot harder to say the next sentence out loud. It wasn’t, though. “But the deal is going to be that I don’t want to see you anymore.”
You could see him turning it over in his mind.
“No,” said my father. “I want to see you. That’s more important to me than the money. I didn’t come back to charm you so I could get the money, I came back because all I want is to have you in my life so we can do all the things we never did together. I want to take you to Cardinals games again and play video games and travel to Australia and drive you to diners and order French toast for dinner.”
Except that’s not what he really said. I could restart from a game saved right there a million times and he’d never say that. He nodded once. That was it.
“Please leave,” I said, without any diaphragm this time.
He put his lawyer’s letter back in his pocket and stared at the floor and shuffled out. His boots didn’t make a sound on the floor as he left, like he was a ghost in Zenon. I’d waited half my life to meet my father, and after I’d spent half an hour with him, I was never going to see him again. And I’m the one who’d made the deal.
Me and Jane and Walter stood there for a few seconds. Then Walter did something he never did, probably because he was afraid someone would call him a child predator, but he came over and put one of his meaty arms around my shoulders and palmed the top of my head and patted it once.
“I’ll be outside if you need me,” he said.
He left, and Jane moved for the first time in two minutes. She took a while to talk, and when she did, her throat sounded froggy. “I wish you didn’t have to hear all that.”
I shrugged. If she’d just told me everything about my father before, I never would have had to hear all of it right now.
“I know I’m not the perfect mother, but your father . . .” She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were a little watery. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, the same way she’d said it in the hospital, and she clutched me to her chest and hugged me and I let her do it but didn’t hug back. I closed my eyes. What I was thinking about instead was the picture in my bedroom in L.A. of us on the seesaw in St. Louis. I imagined us going up and down on it a few times, then her slamming down hard and me flying off into the sky, up past the clouds and airplanes and into space and floating away in all the blackness, with Jane holding her arms out to reach for my body but me departing the realm away from her.
“It’s okay, Jane.” I slid out of her arms and moved back a couple feet. “I think I want to be by myself for a little while.”
She swallowed and rubbed her eyes even though there still weren’t any tears coming out and told me to get her when I was ready. Her phone pinged on the way out, and she looked at it. She started to talk, stopped, and started again.
“We got over a hundred thousand live-stream purchases. Nearly a third bought in at the very end,” she said softly, without turning to me. “Ronald says congratulations.”
I didn’t say anything, but we were both thinking the same thing, that all the bad press the last couple weeks had helped out, and me bringing my father onstage made us go viral. Sex sells, but controversy really sells.
I went to close the door, but before I did I leaned out in the hallway and said, “Jane.”
She spun around on her black high heels. I was with her when she bought them in L.A. But she didn’t buy them, she got them free, because I was with her and the boutique loved the publicity. She really did dress like a serious businesswoman. You’d never know she once bagged groceries in St. Louis with Mary Ann Hilford.
If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. I’d work twice as hard. I’d sacrifice everything in my life that held me back. We’d get the best choreographer, the best producer, the best publicist, the best fake romances, the best scandals. And I already had the best manager. I was the only client she’d ever have.
“I want to do the tour,” I said. “You can start planning it now.”
I wasn’t just going to be the next Tyler Beats. I was going to be the next MJ.
A smile curled up on her face like she’d forgotten everything that happened the last few minutes, and I went back inside my room and swung the door shut, harder than I meant to.
I fell down onto the beanbag chair like standing another minute would kill me, and restarted Zenon and plugged my iPod into the portable speaker and set it to shuffle. I tried a few new weapons and spells, but got damaged by the Emperor each time. After a few songs, the lullaby came on the speakers. I don’t listen to it much on my iPod, so I can save it for when Jane sings it.
I went into the Emperor’s room and was thinking of what I could do and if there was another angle I could attack him from and how nothing worked against him. The lullaby was playing, but for some reason, in my head I heard that song “Stay,” and hummed its melody, and I remembered what I’d just told my father, how in Zenon you sometimes have to do the opposite of what you think you should do. And I thought, What if I don’t stay in the room with the Emperor, but just run away?
So, before I could attack him, I ran back out the way I came in and closed the door behind me.
And in the tunnel leading up to the room was a gem, the last gem I needed.
I picked it up and my experience points kept climbing, which is different from normal where they go up a set amount, and soon the screen turned black and then white, and the narrator’s voice and screen said, “You have gained sufficient experience points. All other living beings have departed the realm. You can no longer be damaged. The Secret Land of Zenon is yours entire.” The screen flashed back to normal and I was on the first level again, except no one else was around, no people or animals or enemies.
The lullaby finished. I took the iPod off shuffle and went back to the song and put it on repeat and whispered along with the last verse while I played.
Go to sleep
Don’t you cry
Rest your head upon the clover
Rest your head upon the clover
In your dreams
You shall ride
Whilst your Mammy’s watching over
My character walked all around the first level
of Zenon, and I could instantly transport myself to any level. I didn’t need gems or experience points. If I chose to go somewhere, I could.
Then I knew what I wanted to say for my final exam for Nadine. Normally I have a tough time outlining my essays. For this one, though, I could already see the beginning, middle, and end, and what my supporting evidence would be. I only hoped it would fit in a thousand words. But I could articulate it now.
The picture of me and my father at the baseball game was on the floor. I turned up the volume on my iPod and set it on top of the picture. It covered his body, right up to me sitting on his shoulders. The part you could still see with me had just my father’s head poking out between my legs, like I was a mother giving birth to a grown man. The opposite of a premature infant.
I jumped to a new level in Zenon. The land was mine to explore, all mine. I could go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, no one stopping me, nobody else around, over the tall mountains and through the deep forests and into the dark dungeons. Just me.
I could no longer be damaged.
Acknowledgments
THE MRS. GILES WHITING Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts provided generous financial support that enabled me to complete this novel. Several people in other fields shared their expertise with me: for medical matters, Clara Boyd, Andrew Epstein, and Andrew Gassman; in the law, Josh Gradinger; and about the music industry, Morgan O’Malley and Matt Paget. Dr. Jane O’Connor’s The Cultural Significance of the Child Star, along with an article she sent me before its publication, proved to be my most fertile research resources. I am grateful to Kathryn Davis, Joshua Henkin, Marshall Klimasewiski, and Kellie Wells for their continued guidance and help. A cohort of selfless readers improved this novel substantially: Sarah Bruni, Maura Kelly, Eric Lundgren, Diana Spechler, John Warner, Paul Whitlatch, and my beloved retired agent, Rosalie Siegel. Jim Rutman’s unwavering confidence and sagacity would make him, in an alternate universe, a superior manager for Jonny Valentine. I am deeply indebted to Millicent Bennett for her brilliant editing, passionate advocacy, and consummate professionalism; her assistant, Chloe Perkins; Sarah Nalle; publisher Martha Levin and editor in chief Dominick Anfuso; Meg Cassidy, Jill Siegel, Carisa Hays, Nicole Judge, Suzanne Donahue, Jackie Jou, Erin Reback, Stuart Smith, Karen Fink, Wendy Sheanin, Nina Pajak, and the rest of the robust sales and marketing departments; Carly Sommerstein, Ellen Sasahara, and Beth Maglione in production; the innovative video team at Studio 4; Jonathan Karp; and everyone else at Free Press and Simon & Schuster for their enthusiasm and faith. Thank you, Jenna McKnight, for being a good kid. And, lastly, my ongoing gratitude to my parents.
