by Victoria Fox
Guided by the sound of the ocean, they decided to take a different route back. Jacob’s torch had gone out and Tawny led the way. She heard him stagger and didn’t hold up: it gave her pleasure to hear him struggle. Once, on a night like tonight, she would have seduced him. Had sex with him right here on the jungle floor. Instead he had chosen that scrawny doe-eyed flake. Tawny wondered if they’d had sex yet, if Jacob had been able to get it up for her, and died a little at the possibility.
Through a shield of foliage, they stepped into a clearing.
Moonlight flooded the glade, and in the centre was the tube of fuselage they had abandoned on the first day. It was pale and glowing. Eerie. A bird shot out of one of the windows and the front was crumpled where the cockpit should have been.
They stood for a while in silence, thinking of the captain and his first officer, buried over the mountain, and the flight attendant who was still at large. It seemed wrong to speak, disrespectful, as if this were more of a grave to those men than the one they had been given.
Eventually Jacob said: ‘I never saw this before.’ The last time he had laid eyes on this craft was in Jakarta, before they had boarded. ‘What do you think happened?’
‘We crashed, asshole.’
He stepped closer. ‘How? Why? Do we know?’
Tawny couldn’t be bothered to think of the reasons. It didn’t change anything. It was too late to go back and do it again. They were here and that was the end of it.
As Jacob explored the cabin she crouched, planting her torch in the ground. A heap of detritus was gathered along the wing. Curious, she advanced towards it: stuff that had been brought from the hold, useless and abandoned.
She rifled through it. Ash stained her fingers, death and dust.
Her grip fastened around something familiar. The shape was so accustomed, the memory so firm and so wonderful that she let out a sob.
‘Everything OK?’ came Jacob’s voice.
She did not want him to see. This was just for her.
Tawny wept as she fell across the residue of her beloved hair straighteners. There wasn’t much to them, melted plastic, not yellow any more but bone-white and grey, the cable twisted and the handle morphed and a great hole in the middle where they had softened completely. A relic in a deserted house: a trace of someone who used to exist.
Did she used to be so beautiful? Who was that girl?
‘TO THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL, WITH LOVE & ADMIRATION.’
Now it read: ‘T HE F IRE T F H M AL W V & DMIR TION.’
It seemed to Tawny a symbolic sort of horror.
68
She kept the straighteners from Jacob, securing them in the waistband of her shorts.
Some time later, they emerged onto the beach. Those still awake were relieved at the find. Kevin was sharpening a spear, his eyes reflecting the flames.
‘We need more meat,’ he said. ‘It’s better at night.’
But it wasn’t a question of needing—it was a question of wanting. Kevin had become consumed by the hunt, stalking the beasts and baiting them, from boldness to recklessness, as if the Great White wasn’t enough, and he could and would slay anything that crossed his path. His growth was in defiance of everything they endured, the wasting away, the weakness, and it could not be understood. He showed no signs of slowing. Day on day, week on week, he just got bigger.
Tawny held the treasure out to Angela.
‘What are they?’
‘My hair straighteners.’
‘Oh.’
Tawny had expected a more gratifying response, not so much for the object itself, but for the world it elicited. She had hoped it would serve as a reminder of who she was. Despite how Celeste had ruined her, she was still one to be revered.
Eve joined them. ‘Where did you find them?’
‘In the wreck.’
The reporter took them. Tawny saw her scepticism—a woman like Eve didn’t care for such vanity. She would make a mockery of them, and in turn a mockery of Tawny. But Tawny was made up of these things: they were what defined her.
‘Careful—’ said Tawny.
Eve fingered the middle section, where the gas would have been. Its contours were molten, smooth as wax where the plastic had bent out of shape.
Eve looked at Angela. Something was exchanged.
‘What?’ Tawny said.
‘Was there a canister in here?’ said Eve.
Tawny shrugged. She had no idea how her straighteners worked. They got heated and they made her pretty—there was nothing more to say.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
In the jungle, a vicious shriek burst out of the trees. She pictured Kevin, triumphant, his spear raised.
‘Tawny,’ said Eve, ‘these are what caught fire.’
The night fell away.
‘Oh no, Tawny,’ Angela whispered. ‘Oh no.’
69
Los Angeles
It had been two weeks since Sketch Falkner’s heinous reveal.
In that time Joan Chase had barely let a morsel pass her lips. She slept all day. She dosed up on Ambien, zonking herself out so she wouldn’t have to dream.
Every accusation she threw at herself: a barrage of loathing and shame. She was a terrible mother. She should have noticed. She should have stepped in. She should never have let Kevin get involved with Cut N Dry in the first place.
She should have known, because wasn’t that what moms did? All that time, Kevin had been suffering under a noxious regime, and she hadn’t had a clue.
If she had, they would have got Kevin away from the industry years ago. None of this would have happened. He would never have been on that fated jet.
Joan could not forgive the men who had done it. Sketch had committed an abominable crime: the worst betrayal of a boy who had looked up to and respected him; who had obeyed in ignorance of the machine that controlled his every move.
She hated Sketch. She would put ten Sketches on that plane over her vulnerable son. Half son, half daughter, what was he?
She didn’t know.
Sketch tried to see her. He came to the house, pleading at the door, but she did not let him in. He left messages on her voicemail, begging and wheedling:
‘You won’t tell the police, will you, Joanie?’
‘Answer my calls, I’m going out of my mind.’
‘Please can I see you? Let me explain …’
There was nothing to explain. Sketch had done all the explaining he needed to, and nothing he could say or do in the aftermath could possibly lessen the blow.
Joan ignored his attempts with stoicism. She hoped he was in distress. She hoped the Cut N Dry execs were in hell.
However bad they were feeling, it couldn’t be a drop in the ocean of her suffering. The pills, one red, one blue …
She couldn’t believe it.
One morning, something changed. Joan woke up and the sun was shining. As usual her body was sluggish, but her mind was awake. She felt alert, unusually engaged, and the clock by her bed read ten—the earliest she had been up in weeks.
She made her way to the bathroom. Trey sniffed at her heels, watching seriously at the door while she took a pee. On autopilot, she opened the cabinet for Xanax, and when she closed it again she caught her reflection.
A woman she did not recognise stared back at her. The time since Sketch’s bombshell had taken pounds off her. Her face was thinner than it had been in years, her eyes wider and her lips fuller. Her roots could do with a touch-up, but on the whole she had an Olsen-twin thing going on and, despite her mood, she liked it.
‘Hello,’ she said, to no one in particular.
Over the next forty-eight hours, Joan came to a decision. She began, methodically, to sort through Kevin’s belongings. She wasn’t fighting it any longer.
She started answering the phone, cataloguing messages from reporters and deleting the ones from Sketch. It was strange to hear such a powerful man reduced to tatters. Sketch had always been the on
e to impress, the guy with the muscle, but all he had become was a mid-life crisis with a fuckload on his conscience.
Now Joan was the one in charge. That made her important. Over the years Kevin had eclipsed his mother as an accessory to his cash and success, offering her a snack but never the full feast, which seemed grossly unjust since she was the one who had brought him into this world. So when the phone calls changed tack, a splurge of agents and managers seeking to back Joan ‘through this heart-wrenching time’, she paused to consider what a month ago would have been impossible.
Why shouldn’t she claim some of Kevin’s legacy?
Didn’t she deserve it, after the years of struggle and toil?
All the encouragement she had given him, putting her life on hold, tidying away her own concerns and desires—wasn’t she entitled to her share?
What could her life have been without Kevin? What might she have become?
The decision was made easier by the fact that she no longer recognised memories of her son. The Kevin she grieved had been lost to her way before the Challenger jet disaster. For years Sketch and his cronies had stunted their protégé as one would a Bonsai: no wonder they had borne so many tears and tantrums, as Kevin chased the eternal carrot of puberty. No one could deny the treason—yet somehow, it became a fringe of comfort. The Kevin who had used to crawl around her hallway carpet and giggle as she tickled him in the tub was not the same as the one she had lost: that Kevin had been twisted by hormones, pumped full of pills and switched into a circus freak. All in the pursuit of fame, to appease generation upon generation of Little Chasers—the ultimate prince who would never grow old, who would always be their boyfriend, cute and playful and safe.
What would have happened had he lived? In what state would he have ended up? Would Kevin have been doing the same when he was forty, fifty, older? What kind of a mutant would they have raised by then?
Perhaps Kevin’s death had been merciful, in its way. Joan clung to that hope because she needed to believe it. She couldn’t accept that his loss had been in vain.
On Thursday morning she signed with an agency on Sunset. Within hours, they were inundated with offers for talk shows, magazine interviews, panel appearances, a book about Kevin, an autobiography, a film script of the crash in which Joan would play herself, a commercial, even her own reality TV show. Every party affiliated with the victims had juice that was ripe to be squeezed—and, in her capacity as mother of one of the biggest heart-throb pop players of the twenty-first century, none more so than Joan. She was given a stylist and an assistant, and was pledged a new woman.
Joan Chase was ready to become a star—this time in her own right.
At the weekend she stepped out of the mansion for the first time. Her hair was piled high on her head and her killer heels struck the drive. In her arms was Trey, nude except for a studded diamond collar whose tag bore the words: KEVIN RIP.
She was heading to her first ever TV show.
The paps leaped to life, frantic to snap the money shot they had been waiting for weeks to secure. Joan’s name was shouted from the ranks. The fans rushed at her, their hands grasping through the gate, begging for a word or a glance.
She gave them neither.
Joan climbed into her BMW and slammed the door, negotiating a path through the photographers, their cameras pressed up against the window.
It couldn’t help but be a sign when she hit the radio and one of Kevin’s songs blared out of the speakers. This was what her son would have wanted.
70
Las Vegas
‘You can’t do this to us. She’s not even been declared dead yet, Zenetti, and you’re making this call. This screwed-up, soulless, sonofabitch call …’
Carmine Zenetti had expected the brothers to kick off. After all, this was the glittering Silvers fortune they were talking about. Orlando and Gianluca had found themselves destitute, from heroes to zeros in less than a week.
‘I won’t accept it.’ Orlando leaned in, his palms splayed across Carmine’s mahogany desk and his eyes full of fire. ‘Even if Angela never returns, you’re not getting your dirty hands on a cent of our money and that’s the end of it.’
Carmine tried to be patient. Naturally, it was a shock. The brothers had arrived in town full of ideas for growth and progress, for recouping their share of the business and putting their father’s legacy back on the map. But Lady Luck hadn’t been smiling down that day. Orlando had raged; that faggot Gianluca trailing him out of here like a sick pup. There had been threats of lawyers.
Carmine wasn’t concerned. The deal was in black and white.
‘Orlando, Orlando,’ Carmine smiled, ‘you keep forgetting. Why do you keep forgetting? We have a contract. One your sister and your father signed.’
‘Screw the damn contract.’
‘That kind of defeats the point, doncha think?’
‘So that’s it: Angela’s gone and we don’t see a penny.’
‘Got it in one.’
‘I swear to God, Zenetti—you and me, right now, outside.’
Carmine laughed. Orlando went to strike.
‘You’re through,’ he growled, as Luca drew him off. ‘Do you get that?’ Rage he had kept in check since the plane went down—since before, since the night he had walked out on Eve and said all those things he didn’t mean—made him want to smash and smash until there was nothing left of Carmine Zenetti but a shivering pulp. He had lost his sister and his lover and the promise of his child. Protecting their dynasty was his final hope, the only thing that stood a chance of keeping him afloat.
‘Don’t you care?’ Luca said. ‘Aren’t you hurt that Angela’s gone?’
Carmine sat back. The tycoon thought it a moot point in light of their exchange before realising it was his son being addressed, not him. Dino was sitting on his father’s cream couch and picking his thumbs. ‘Sure I do,’ he grumbled. ‘But we gotta face facts, don’t we? There ain’t no point wishing for something that can’t happen.’
Carmine smiled.
‘Angela is coming back,’ said Orlando. He was adamant, as deluded as the rest. It was tragic to see. Carmine would have wept if he were a crying man; as it was, he hadn’t shed a tear since Juliet Caretta had stood him up by the bike sheds in fifth grade.
‘How long’s it gonna take,’ said Carmine, wondering the same about this rendezvous, ‘a week, a month, before it sinks in? You gotta start makin’ plans.’
‘It’s our money.’
‘Not what my papers say.’
‘Fuck your papers—and fuck you.’
‘This, my friend, is business.’ Carmine stood, the pumping heart of the Strip rolling out behind him. ‘And this is the end of our meeting. Goodbye, boys, and good luck. Something tells me you’re going to need it.’
71
Washington, D.C.
Paparazzi circled her husband’s apartment like scavengers. They had heard Melinda Corrigan was coming. At last, friends and relatives of the deceased were crawling from the woodwork: a dream for those savvy enough to know where to find them.
Melinda had already attended the Farley Senate to pack up his office, where she’d encountered the usual stricken faces. ‘Are you sure it isn’t too soon?’
Like hell was it too soon. The weeks since the incident had spelled purgatory. Time abandoned its usual order, morphing and dissolving until the days and nights became inseparable, part of the endless cycle of her grief. The sooner she could clear Mitch away, the sooner she could come to terms. She had been widowed.
She missed him. God, she missed him.
‘How are you, Melinda? How are the kids?’ Photographers bleated their frivolous questions, assailing her as she fumbled the key code. ‘What do you make of Noah Lawson’s rescue expedition? Do you intend to join him out there?’
Melinda hurried inside the building and closed the door. Shaking, she located the card to Mitch’s opulent quarters and took the elevator to the penthouse.
Yes, she had b
een tempted to follow Noah. Yes, she had considered it. And then she had hit her face with cold water, slammed to her senses and instructed herself not to be so goddamn ridiculous. It was all well and good imagining Mitch setting up shop on a desert island somewhere and finding a cow or two to milk, or to picture him growing a beard in a cave, indulging in home dentistry and winding up naming a fucking basketball, but the reality was here. It was in this phantom of an apartment. It was at home, with her two kids who had no daddy. It was in bed, where his side remained cold. It was at Thanksgiving, when there would be no Mitch to carve the turkey and toast marshmallows by the fire.
Melinda worked through his belongings, stacking them in boxes and gathering them in bags. Each time the tears brimmed, she swiped them away.
The last time they had been in Washington she had been a bitch. Saddened by his lack of interest in her sexually, Melinda had thrown out cruel ultimatums. No wonder he didn’t get turned on. For all the ways in which Mitch had changed over the years, she had changed too. For starters, she had begun fucking Gary Stewart.
It was a release to get away from her neighbour. Since their confrontation in Gary’s gym, he had eased off, but that didn’t mean she was immune to the occasional revolting message. I miss your pussy, the last one said. She had promptly changed her number.
After an hour, Melinda fell onto the bed. Her bones were weary. Her heart was tired. Her head was sick of wondering. She lay on the side where Mitch used to sleep, trailing a finger across the pillow before lifting it and pressing it to her face, inhaling it in the hope that his scent would still be there. It smelled of detergent.
When she put her head back down, it met with something hard.
Melinda sat up. Beneath Mitch’s pillow was a book. It was narrow and leather-bound. A diary? A journal? She frowned and picked it up. What was it?
It felt wrong opening it, without Mitch here to defend himself—for what lay in these pages was clearly private. It was reams and reams long, scattered with capital letters and explanation marks and hectically underlined passages. She flipped to the front.
