Life, Libby, and the Pursuit of Happiness

by Hope Lyda

  I did the math. “Wouldn’t that still require you to use her front door?”

  “Normally, yes. But then I ran into a neighbor and told her I’d lost the key to the apartment, and asked if I could use her balcony to get to Cecilia’s.”

  “And she let you?”

  “She assumed I’d gotten by Goliath at the gate, so I was within the realm of safe and sane. I climbed over the partial wall to Cecilia’s back window and wedged a Bic pen and a safety pin into the door jam and slid it up off its rails and set it to the side.”

  “Did they base Alias off of you?” My eye now throbbed as I envisioned a way to repeat this gauntlet in order to review the series of hologram images without activating the security cameras at the front door.

  “And the next day I had to hire someone to come up to her place and reattach the sliding door. Thank goodness I figured out how to dismantle her security cameras. All it takes is a magnet…a strong magnet. That keeps the camera from moving. It basically records the static image of the fake palm plant by the front door.”

  “What?”

  Rachel smiled at me mischievously. She knew that’s what I had wanted all along. “Did you think you really knew something I didn’t know?” Rachel rubbed her hands together sinisterly. “What are we up to anyway?”

  I rolled my eyes and started to braid the edges of my hair—a nervous habit of mine. How much should I tell my friend? “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes!” She motioned locking her lips and peered at me with wide brown eyes.

  “Cecilia is up to something,” I whispered.

  Rachel tilted her face upward and started to laugh hysterically.

  “No, I mean really up to something. A plot even.”

  Rachel kept laughing and then put her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound. “No kidding? That’s a shocker.” She paused for a moment, took in my serious face, and then swallowed the rest of her giggles before saying, “Got it. This is different. I’m listening.”

  For the next forty-five minutes I filled Rachel in on my life’s adventure. With every turn she met my news with the appropriate looks of surprise, shock, and even envy. There was a point in which I felt amazingly in control; this is when I started crying.

  “Libby, what is it? I’ll help. It’ll be fine.”

  I sobbed louder. Stress was erupting in a pathetic display of sadness. Rachel sat beside me on another bucket and put her arm around my shoulders. I felt ridiculous. “I completely let Blaine down. I didn’t know how much that mattered until I saw the expression on his face when I told him I’d been hiding Hudson at my place.”

  Rachel ruffled my hair. “Oh, silly, naive Libby. That wasn’t disappointment.”

  “Then what was it?” I took a stuttered breath in to regain my composure.

  “Jealousy, my dear. You’ve been so focused on secrets that you couldn’t see the blatant, and I mean blatant, big like Blaine has for you.”

  “Big like?” I asked.

  “If I said love and you did screw up this entire relationship before it started, you’d be crushed, destroyed, and emotionally crippled forever. But now it’ll just be a ‘big like’ you once could’ve had.”

  I squinted my eyes to help my mind focus on and follow her words. “Love?”

  “Ah, you missed my point. Stay with big like. It’s for your own good.”

  “I forgot a pen. Do you have one?”

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out a pen I had swiped from my bank. I put it back in the black hole of my bag and scrounged some more.

  “I’m not picky, but I am holding up half of a sliding glass door. By myself.”

  I retrieved another pen. “Sorry, but that one was my smoothest writer. Other than the beautiful one Blaine got me. That one I’ll have to take really good care of. It’s expensive and… well, now meaningful. I thought about what you…”

  “Did I mention this is glass, and heavy, and breakable?” Rachel’s face became a darker shade of red under the duress.

  “Hey, I carried my laptop for the whole Kilimanjaro climb up here.” I wedged the meaningless pen into the top tracks of the door and sure enough, the door popped out. I grabbed my side so it wouldn’t fall atop both of us and we shuffled it over a few feet to lean it against the outside wall.

  “Who’s home watching the important package?”

  “We had plans with Pan, so I sent him on alone. I hope I didn’t goof up.”

  “You said your friends didn’t recognize him at your birthday party, right?”

  “Yeah, but Pan’s mind is all focused on music, music, music. You’d think she’d connect the dots. She did say he looked kinda like Jude Shea. Maybe that is all she’ll think. I mean who would believe Jude Shea was hanging out in my apartment?”

  “Gotta give Cecilia credit. She knew where to hide him.”

  I nodded and walked into the beautiful apartment through the balcony opening.

  “I love big, open apartments like this. It feels like the set of a Doris Day movie.”

  “Yeah. It reminds me of Mary Tyler Moore’s first apartment.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Are you really going to leave me?”

  Rachel gave me a “Don’t start that” look. What she didn’t say with her expression, but we both thought, was that I wouldn’t be at Reed and Dunson either…not once all this came out in to the open. I shut up and set up my computer while Rachel got the hologram television remote set to run the slide show.

  From my Favorites window on the computer, I pulled up two sites that featured photos of Paulo Carrera. One was his law firm’s website, which looked a bit more like an ad for plastic surgery with a slide show of actors and pop stars running like movie film over the top of the screen. The other was Vogue archives from the mid-1970s. It showed a photo of a very dashing, young Paulo at some Hollywood premiere.

  Rachel clicked through the photos and stopped on the one of Cecilia and the handsome Latin man and pressed pause. “Got it.”

  I looked from screen to screen. “We got ourselves a match. Come look.”

  Rachel walked over to the bar where I had my laptop plugged in and looked at the image on my computer and then to the one frozen in full dimension. “It’s the sexy crinkle around the eyes. I love that. Maybe I’ll fall in love with a beautiful, brilliant, rich Spaniard, and I’ll never come back.”

  I looked closely at her. She’d thought of this life plan before. We all carried personal fantasies with us. I’d let mine weigh down the God-given dreams of my heart. Had I ever truly desired the scenario I’d envisioned every year at review time of career advancement and the perfect man about to propose? Or had it just seemed like the right dream for a woman of my age and my unfortunate job situation? It all felt generic now that I wanted only the assurance that I was doing what God made me to do. More and more I was relating to Aunt Maddie’s personal faith choices. From Mom’s perspective, her sister was crazy and irresponsible and destined for destitution. From God’s perspective, Maddie was a faithful servant bound for the riches of a fulfilled life.

  In spite of Rachel’s comment, I knew I’d survive the loss of the Big Like as long as I believed God would make good of my failings, but at the thought of losing Blaine, my heart skipped a beat. This getting my life on track wouldn’t be so easy. I looked again at the hologram. I felt bad for Cecilia. She had been that bright light in her heyday, and even now could be the most engaging, captivating person; no wonder she wanted to continue to shine. As envious as I could be of her career, former starlike qualities, and her wealth, I realized that she represented everything I was hoping to avoid—a life lived in fear that I’d never be good enough.

  “Maybe Cecilia was faking her need for assistants all this time,” Rachel called out from another room, bringing me back to the moment.

  “Why?” I yelled back.

  Rachel emerged from Cecilia’s office with a bright red folder. “She has her own filing system at home.”

  “Amazing. She once
threw a bottle of nail polish remover at me because I suggested we could save time if she returned account files in alpha order.”

  “She’s not into alpha except alpha females, of course, but she is into color coding. And guess what red is.”

  “The new black?”

  “That too. Red means hot, hot, hot. You can thank me later.”

  Rachel walked over to me, pulled up a bar stool, and removed the contents of the “urgent” folder. Paulo’s name and law firm’s LA address were at the top of a fax cover page. In the handwriting I recognized from the letters, a note was scribed which read, “Got ’em!” I quickly scanned the rest of the fax, which was a twenty-page music contract for Torrid. I ran my finger over the last page to the elegant signature of Jude Shea. This was signed the same year I started the training program. How weird that five years later our life paths were intersecting. For the first time I felt a deep reassurance that my time at Reed and Dunson wasn’t wasted and wouldn’t be a blemish on my life’s résumé. There were reasons I might not ever understand for this time in career purgatory.

  “I thought you’d hit panic mode, not nirvana when you saw this,” Rachel said and pointed to a paragraph half a page up from the signatures.

  My eyes followed her finger and I read:

  Should the signing band with its signing members prove unable to provide a market-length album recording every eighteen months during the life of this contract to FreeTime records, the band and all signing members will be in breach of their contract and will thereby relinquish all rights to their music published through FreeTime records or any of its subsidiary labels and will be prohibited from signing with another label for the duration of this contract’s timeline plus two years.

  “What is the contract’s timeline?” I asked aloud.

  Rachel reviewed the pages. “Here it is. They have another year on their contract.”

  “They wouldn’t be able to record with anyone for three years. Some music careers don’t even last that long. They’d be ruined.”

  “And look at these addendums with the dates of all their recordings. In two and a half weeks it will be exactly eighteen months since they submitted A Sinner’s Ruin, their last CD, and my least favorite, if anyone’s asking. It was so dark. It gave me the creeps.”

  “A Sinner’s Ruin. My gosh…I’d forgotten what the name of the CD had been.” Jude hadn’t only visited the edge of Seattle’s landmark. He’d been on the edge of total despair. No wonder he ran.

  Thirty-Seven

  The sound of laughter filled the hallway outside my apartment. The smell of farm soon followed, and then Pan and Hudson emerged with mud and grass caked on their shoes.

  “Stop there!” I raised my hand to halt my friends and went to find something to put down on the floor in front of them.

  “I’m so sorry I stood up for Max’s right to art at Libby’s birthday party,” Hudson said, letting out an authentic laugh. He wasn’t holding back at all. For a brief second I was jealous that Pan could bring that out of him. We’d had fun conversation and deep conversation, but there was something different about him tonight.

  “Who knew watching sheep was more fun than Disneyland?” I muttered as I placed newspaper sections and paper towels down before them.

  Pan wiped tears from her cheeks. “I was a bit self-righteous that night, wasn’t I?”

  “I had higher expectations after your salt, pepper, and butter knife preview.”

  She giggled and shoved him away from my makeshift foyer. His dirty right boot came within an inch of my fingers. I rolled my eyes and wiped up bits of field from my beautiful hardwood floors. To think that I just spent an evening breaking and entering to save this guy’s career while he was out cavorting with sheep. And now my friend was falling for a guy she could never have—in her documentary or in her life.

  I didn’t like being ignored. “I said, who knew watching sheep was more fun…”

  Hudson reached for my hand and pulled me up. “You should’ve come with us, Libby. You would’ve found it hilarious.”

  Without smiling I said, “I can crack myself up just by recalling his satin jumpers. Even thirteen-year-old girls stopped wearing satin jumpers two decades ago.”

  They laughed even harder.

  I went to the bedroom and grabbed a pair of Hudson’s jeans and my terry cloth robe with bright orange flower appliqués along the sleeves. It had been a gift from my mother. She sent it with a “get well soon” card after I’d missed one of her important lectures—I’d been taking a college final. My apartment was filled with passive-aggressive gifts from my mother and the gift shop owner she counsels.

  “Here, you two.” I said, bringing out the dry clothing. My cell phone rang. “I’ll be in the bedroom. You can fight over the robe.”

  Again they laughed hysterically. Again I rolled my eyes.

  “Hello?”

  “Where on earth is the mail I asked you to send?”

  My hand went to my forehead. I rubbed my temple to ease the pending migraine. Had I only just mailed those letters from Paulo today?

  “Cecilia! I’m sorry. Those will arrive in the morning. Somehow they didn’t make the original package. You’ll have them tomorrow first thing. I promise.”

  “I don’t know if I should trust you. You’re friends with Rochelle, right?”

  “Who? Rachel?”

  “Whatever. She’s quitting. Can you believe it?”

  “Much stranger things have happened,” I said pointedly. It was lost on her.

  “It’s betrayal, that’s what it is. Corporate betrayal.”

  “Did you study drama in college?”

  “Whatever made you think…oh. Ha, ha. Very funny. You won’t be laughing if that mail is not here first thing. I will awaken, have my cappuccino with a light dusting of chocolate, and then I will head straight to the mail center to check my PO Box.”

  “They let you leave?” I asked. It would be a mistake to let her know that I assumed she was probably in a five-star hotel penthouse with Paulo by now.

  Cecilia was silent for quite a while before saying, “For good behavior.”

  “Do you have a plan update for me?”

  More silence on her end. But the laughter from the next room was rising more than falling. I tried to muffle the receiver, but it was too late.

  “Where are you?”

  “My apartment.”

  Cecilia now laughed. “Where are you, Libby?”

  “My apartment!” I said, indignant.

  “And where is the package?” she asked sternly.

  “He’s the one laughing.”

  “Hmm. Maybe I had better speed up the plan after all.”

  “That would be very wise. And now I’d better go tone down the package’s laughter or a neighbor might come over and expose us all.”

  “Oh, dear. Go!”

  Click.

  I looked at my phone and then the door to the living room, better known as comedy central. I got up, pushed the door almost shut, and then returned to the bed where, with a racing heart I scanned my contact number listing and selected Blaine’s name.

  “Libby?” Blaine answered.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I have you…on my phone. In my phone.”

  “Oh,” I said, pleasantly surprised. And surprised by the pleasantness of the surprise. “I’m sorry to call you after hours.”

  Blaine cleared his throat. “No problem at all. I went through the files. Have you ever considered private eye work?”

  “I’ll be needing a new field,” I said in jest, but the proceeding silence made me mean it. “We found a copy of the contract. I think you should look at this right away.”

  “We? Found?”

  “Rachel. I told her today because I needed her help. She found the contract by cracking Cecilia’s filing color code.”

  “Red for hot priority?” Blaine asked, amused.

  “Okay, smarty, do you want to look at this tonight or not?”
>
  “Tonight?”

  Too forward. “Or first thing in the morning. The contract changes the urgency of the timeline for our plan. Something needs to happen soon, Blaine.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “Well, not to be pushy, but Hudson and I have company.”

  “And I now understand after reading these files that Hudson is code for Jude. But how wise is it for you two to be entertaining guests?”

  “It’s my friend, Pan. She doesn’t know.” I lowered my voice a few notches and glanced at the door. Through the slight opening, I could see Pan trying on Hudson’s leather jacket. I should have warned Hudson about Pan’s feelings. This was going to snowball into an emotional disaster. When she finds out Hudson isn’t interested, she’ll be upset with herself and Hudson. When she finds out that Hudson isn’t Hudson, she’ll be terminally peeved at me.

  “Come over. I’ll send a cab to your place. Is ten minutes enough time?”

  “We live in the same neighborhood. What’s the address? I can walk.”

  “Can we please do some of this my way?”

  Some of what? I glanced at my sad outfit in the mirror and said, “Give me fifteen.” We hung up and I spent twelve minutes changing clothes and applying mascara, two minutes questioning the final selection, and one minute telling Pan and Hudson I had to go to my sister’s house for an impromptu family meeting.

  Hudson perked up. “We’ll be fine. Do you mind if we watch the rest of The Usual Suspects? That is, if Pan wants to?”

  “Yes!” Pan said and then promptly slapped her hand to her forehead. “Dang. I’ve got to go home and let the dogs out.”

  “I’ll go!” Hudson said. I shook my head at him.

  “Really?” Pan asked full of nerves and a crush.

  “Oh, actually I just remembered I have some work to do tonight. While I’m away from the office, I have to send through a lot of reports.” Hudson revisited our old lie.

  “Sure, I understand.” Her face fell and so did his. I realized that Rachel was right. I was so used to secrets lately that I was blind to real things happening right in front of me. Pan’s like for Hudson was mutual!