Leaning his head against the window, he closes his eyes and thinks of his mother—selfless and sacrificing and giving up so much so he could have everything. His mother, who felt the need to keep Michael Shipman from him.
Twenty miles outside Oceanside, Phoebe says they need gas. Adam checks the fuel gauge, nods again, and they follow signs to an exit ramp and a Chevron station.
“It’s on the front passenger side,” Adam says, the first words he’s spoken in an hour and a half.
Stopping at the pump, she kills the engine and puts a cautious hand on his shoulder.
“Well, Michael Shipman seemed nice,” Adam says.
A choked laugh from Phoebe. “Yeah, he did.”
Her flat response strikes Adam as perhaps the funniest thing he’s ever heard, and he starts laughing and can’t stop, laughing so hard tears shimmy down his face and his stomach aches as if he’d done a year’s worth of crunches.
“Are you all right?” Phoebe asks, brows upslanted peaks of concern.
“I’m fucking amazing,” he manages.
Apparently unconvinced, Phoebe gets a restaurant recommendation from the attendant behind the counter. The place—one of those seaside joints with a name playing off the water—has rickety wood steps, smells of sewage, and looks as if it’s closing down even though it’s ten past nine. But there’s a full bar, and a waitress seats them by an open window overlooking the ocean and the glow of Camp Pendleton down the road.
Adam downs his first Jack and Coke like a shot, gets a second, and chugs that as well.
“Did you eat anything today?” Phoebe asks (ironic, considering how little she ate when they first met, when she was just another would-be actress).
Adam shrugs, and she tells him if he’s going to drink like that, they should get food. He’s way too knotted to eat but appreciates her custodial care, so he orders a chicken sandwich and a soda sans whiskey.
He sips his Coke, asks, “Do you think he’s telling the truth, about how things went down with my mom?”
Phoebe shakes her head. “I don’t know, sweetie.”
“I sorta figured the reason she never told me was because it was kind of bad—like she had a one-night stand or was raped or there were so many different guys she honestly didn’t know which one it was.”
“Would that make you feel better?”
“I dunno. But that guy we met, he … it seems like…”
“Like he might have been the kind of father you would have wanted?” Phoebe finishes because Adam can’t say it. Even thousands of miles from his mother, he can’t bring himself to betray her by speaking the thought aloud.
Clenching his eyes closed, he bows his head and nods in agreement.
Phoebe puts her hand on top of his on the table, and when he opens his eyes, she’s looking at him as if working out a complex equation. Opens her mouth, then closes it again. Finally she says, “I had an abortion once.”
Once again, so not what he was expecting. Adam feels his eyes grow, and that’s before he does quick calculations, realizes that if this happened in the past seven years, it was very possibly his. While he’s always been absently pro-choice, he’s never really thought much about any choices that may have been made without his input.
This must register on his face.
“Not you,” Phoebe says, far too easily.
He wonders what he would have said if Phoebe had come to him, wonders what to say now, settles on, “I’m sorry that happened.”
“It is what it is,” she says. “But the minute I realized I was pregnant, I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood. I didn’t tell anyone, not the guy, not my parents, no one.”
Adam pushes aside the unspoken I didn’t tell you, squeezes her hand. “Pheebs.”
“It’s not that I regret it, I don’t.” She shakes her head. “I’m saying I made that decision instantly. I knew that it was right for me.”
“Are you saying I should be glad my mother had me?”
“I’m saying people react to things in different ways. Maybe your mom knew what was best and that meant not telling Michael Shipman.”
“Like what? She had a sixth sense he would beat me or something?” Adam sighs. “He didn’t really seem the type.”
“Maybe he would have. Or maybe he would have been controlling, or maybe he would have talked her out of having you. You can’t know what she was thinking.”
“I guess.” Even in the dim light his chicken sandwich looks anemic and unappetizing, but the fries are surprisingly crisp. “I suppose I could ask her.”
“There is always that.”
* * *
When Adam first left Coral Cove for NYU thirteen years earlier, going home had easily been dismissed as a financial impossibility. His scholarship covered almost everything, but between plays, auditions, and studying, he usually had time for only an occasional odd job, and that money was quickly eaten up with books and food and life. As he became more established, the price of a ticket home was no more extravagant than a night out, and yet he still didn’t buy those airline tickets. When he’d started doing well, he began flying his mother out to LA or Vancouver several times a year, or they would go on vacation together, but Adam can count on one hand the number of times he’s gone home since he left for NYU.
As student body president, he was theoretically responsible for planning the ten-year reunion of his high school class, but he hadn’t stayed in touch with a single person from CCH. The invitation arrived in California a month after the event, forwarded from his grandparents’ house to his old apartment on MacDougal Street in New York, and finally to LA. The party had been held in the Coral Cove VFW Hall. The vice president, who’d apparently married the treasurer, had put it together. Even though the date had long passed, Adam had briefly felt his guts seize when he held the invite. It’s the same doomed feeling he had when he bought a ticket home the day after meeting Michael Shipman.
Orlando is the closest airport, so Adam flies out with all the families going to Disney, rents a car, and drives the uneventful hour on Highway 4—all flat grass crunchy from the August sun.
With its fading smiling dolphin, the familiar sign welcomes him to CORAL COVE, POPULATION: 25,000. Feeling the oppressive heat through the windshield, he recalls exactly how it felt to live here with that constant countdown to escape. The sensation kicks up as he turns off the state route and onto Sunflower Street. Only two more turns until Marigold Drive and his grandparents’ house, with the paisley couch and love seat in the living room, the kitchen and its olive green appliances that had been so fashionable in the midseventies. Before he bought the condo or the car, the first thing he had tried to splurge on was a home for his mother in the newer development outside of town; she’d flat-out refused.
It’s 4:00 P.M. on a Friday, and his grandparents have long since retired. They’re probably sitting on the screened-in porch, the ancient metal fan teasing them with its rotating stream of air. Last Christmas he’d sent them an enormous HDTV, but he wouldn’t be surprised to find them watching the same fifteen-inch set of his youth, the wires still tamped down with duct tape snaking from the outlet in the house through the window to the porch.
His mother won’t be home for at least two hours. Two hours of his grandfather nodding along to Fox News or the Military Channel and his grandmother offering cans of lukewarm caffeine-free soda. Two hours of their questions about his life and what brings him home while he waits with a nervous eye on the clock, wondering how to ask his mother what he hasn’t been able to ask for the last thirty-one years.
Desperately he wishes he’d taken Phoebe up on her offer to come along despite her summer term finals.
As he’s about to make the last turn, he realizes he hasn’t brought his grandparents anything, U-turns back toward the main stretch of town, and parks in an angled spot marked by faded yellow paint.
The downtown, with its little roundabout of shops, is almost unrecognizable. The post office is still there, and the diner, tho
ugh it’s pea green with a new awning. His grandparents sold Sally’s Scoops years ago, and it’s now a 31 Flavors with the blue-and-pink BR logo. There’s a coffee shop with a sign to make it look as though it’s a Starbucks and a new “art” gallery that’s really a frame store with a few posters of famous paintings. Almost everything else is gone—the hardware store, the old bookshop, the pharmacy, the shoe store—all empty storefronts with FOR RENT signs in the windows. A few years ago, his mother mentioned that the Walmart down the road was putting everything out of business. He hadn’t thought much about it, because he tried so hard to never think much about Coral Cove.
Captain Ahab’s Bar is still the last stop on the strip, depressing and ramshackle as always, the same neon beer signs in the tinted windows, probably full of the same drunks from twenty years ago—the ones his grandfather would call “dumbasses” and “layabouts.”
He’s giving serious consideration to joining them for a drink when he sees her getting out of a minivan a few spaces away. Almost unconsciously, he shields his eyes with the back of his hand to get a better look, to make sure it’s really her.
It is.
Fourteen years after she left him on the beach to get beat up by Sean Dooley, there’s Molly Kelly.
Jogging over, he calls her name. She turns, surprise melting into a smile.
Since high school she’s gained twenty pounds and has her thick hair in a careless, unflattering length between shoulder and chin. Fine lines splinter and spread from her familiar blue eyes, and she’s wearing legit mom jeans. None of it matters; Adam gets hard just looking at her.
She hugs him. He kisses her cheek.
“So what brings TV’s sexiest bad guy to central Florida?” she asks.
“Please.” He rolls his eyes in mock modesty. “Do they even get QT out here?”
“Oh, don’t pretend your mom doesn’t tell you how the whole town watches every week—you’re big news.” She swats his arm gently, lets her hand linger. “They do a feature on you in The Bee every other week.”
“And no one ever calls to ask me for comment.”
“Yeah, they’re not the most thorough paper.” Eyes lit up, she leans into him. “So you’re home for a visit?”
He nods. “I forgot to bring my grandparents a gift and was hoping to grab something in town. But there’s not a whole lot of town left, is there?”
“Nah.” With her hand she bats away something imaginary. “There’s a decent wine store around the corner on Sunflower. You could get a bottle of California wine and pretend you got it there.”
“That’s brilliant,” he says. “Any chance I can get you to show me?”
“Sure. I was gonna grab coffee and kill time while the boys were at practice, but it’s not every day I get to hang out with a TV star.”
She leads him down the street and through the intersection, and he asks about her life.
Apparently she has three sons—thirteen, twelve, and nine—whom she dropped off around the corner at Martin Field for baseball, because “they all hit like Willie Mays, one good thing they got from their father.” Adam assumes this means Kyle Dooley; four months (122 days) before he left for NYU, he’d seen their wedding announcement in the Coral Cove Bee.
He’s expecting the kind of seedy liquor store that blooms in sketchy parts of Wilcox or Vine in LA, but Adam is surprised that Coral Cove Wine Shop is clean and has a sizable selection of bottles, all about 15 percent cheaper than anywhere he’s been in recent years. He gets a California cabernet and a Shiraz.
“Don’t forget to take off the price tags,” Molly jokes.
They walk back toward the car, passing the Baskin-Robbins. It’s still early, so he suggests they get ice cream for old times’ sake.
“Rocky road still your favorite?” he asks, and she nods.
The teenage boy behind the counter is handsome and friendlier than most kids in service jobs, and Adam wonders if he has an escape countdown all his own—each scoop one more brick in the bridge out. Discreetly, Adam slips a hundred-dollar bill in the tip jar.
There’s a Nelson bench in front, and Adam and Molly sit, licking at their already melting scoops.
“You are really great on the show,” Molly says, more serious than before. “And in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—jeez.”
“Thank you.” A warmth on his cheeks that has nothing to do with the sun. “That’s really nice to hear.”
“What’s it like, working in Hollywood? Is it what we thought when we were kids?”
The question is an offering, the kind he’s become very familiar with since the show exploded. All it will take for him to accept is a brush of his hand along the underside of her wrist, a certain kind of crooked smile, and a tale of something grander than Coral Cove. He could tell her how the cameras and crew evaporate when he’s really into a scene or about the emotional exhaustion of living in another person’s skin. That’s it, and he could be in her bed, the one thing in the whole god-awful town he ever really wanted.
There’s Phoebe, whom he loves so much it still keeps him awake some nights. But there’s more than that.
Fourteen years ago Molly had come to him with a different offer and the hope that he might save her from a life she didn’t know she wanted. He couldn’t do that for her then, won’t do it for her now.
“It’s not really very glamorous,” he says. “It’s all shot in Canada. Mostly I sit around freezing my ass off and trying not to mess up my makeup.”
She nods, and he sends her back to the baseball diamond with a slight disappointment in her blue eyes. When she kisses his cheek, she leaves a faint smudge of rocky road.
* * *
The phone rings on the quick drive to his grandparents: Phoebe reporting that Marty messengered over an early version of the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof screenplay.
“It’ll never be as good as our scene in Theta’s workshop,” Adam says.
Phoebe laughs, and Adam wonders, for the millionth time, why she’s given up on acting. Now, when he’s finally in a position to help her, she chooses to shy away from the spotlight and cameras when she accompanies him to premieres and parties. To modestly smile and dismiss it when people (people with the connections to make things happen) tell her she could model or do commercial work.
“That may be, but it’s pretty solid,” Phoebe says. “Want me to send it there?”
“Naw.” He pulls into his grandparents’ driveway behind the hybrid his mother had let him buy her last year. “I’m not going to be in Florida long.”
She asks about his flight and if he’s spoken to his mother yet, tells a story about their dog—the child they do share. “Kraken found a chicken bone in the canyon, and I almost lost a finger wrestling it from him.”
Again, he wants to know about the pregnancy she terminated but instead tells her he loves her.
“I love you, too,” she says. “Let me know if you need me to come out there.”
That fantasy of living in an isolated world where the two of them are the only dwellers.
His grandparents’ house is unlocked, just like when he was a kid.
Black hair still damp from a shower, his mother is on the paisley couch of his youth, reading something by Thomas Hardy. He doesn’t remember a whole lot from the English classes he took at school (and probably hasn’t read ten novels since graduation), but he remembers Hardy, thinks how fitting it is for his mother.
After a few seconds, she notices him and smiles, still so beautiful in her early fifties.
“Hey, baby.” She takes him in her arms, her skin soft and cool despite the heat. “Your grandparents are having dinner with the Bentleys. I think they wanted to give us time alone.”
“Ma,” he says, realizes his hands are shaking again.
“What’s on your mind?” She’s still holding him lightly at the elbows. Her gray eyes (his eyes), keen as always. In all the places he’s been and seen, he’s yet to meet someone so genuinely knowing.
Dips his head. This is
how it felt to tell her he was leaving fourteen years ago, something she’d probably been expecting his whole life. And isn’t this the other thing she always had to know was coming?
“Baby, what is it?”
“I met Michael Shipman.”
“Oh.”
“I wasn’t looking for him or anything.” Adam feels the need to explain. “He found me because of a stupid magazine story.”
“It’s good.” His mother is noticeably rattled but still in control. “I should have told you about this years ago.”
Women and their choices.
Molly Kelly on the beach, agreeing to drive back to Coral Cove with Kyle Dooley. Phoebe, positive pregnancy test wand in hand, calling Planned Parenthood in Burbank. His mother packing her things in Atlanta, ignoring Michael Shipman’s phone calls, fleeing the city as if it were burning a second time.
“So he is…” Adam asks.
“Yeah.” His mother nods. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”
Women and their choices and the men who may never fully understand them.
Kyle Dooley straightening the unfamiliar bow tie at the VFW Hall, Molly already showing in her mother’s yellowed wedding gown. Michael Shipman breaking down the door of his girlfriend’s apartment, finding only empty hangers and a sad stuffed animal he’d won her at a state fair. Some guy (him?) stuck in traffic on the 405, humming along to a dopey song on the radio, oblivious to what Phoebe was going through across town.
“No, there’s nothing I need to know,” he says, realizing this is the truth. That despite Michael Shipman and his good intentions, Adam was right all those years ago when he told his grandpa it didn’t matter who his father was, that it had nothing to do with him. “I’m sorry.”
“Baby, it’s fine.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, feels like he can’t breathe. “I should have come home more often. I haven’t been—”
“Shh.” She strokes his cheek. “S’okay. You’re my good boy.”
CHICAGO
Nothing sums up your relationship with your half sister better than the random Thursday in August when the door to your apartment buzzes after 9:00 P.M., the buzzee says, “It’s Natasha,” and you rack your brain for a solid half minute trying to recall if you’ve ever dated a Natasha or if it might be your Russian-born landlord’s daughter who came by last winter with a space heater when the radiator was broken.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 21
