Toronto Collection Volume 2 (Toronto Series #6-9)

by Heather Wardell

  Patrick nodded and began asking me questions, starting with of course the most obvious. I answered them all exactly as rehearsed.

  No, of course it wasn't true.

  No, I had no idea why someone would say such things about me.

  No, it wouldn't change my plans in any way. My song "Talk Misty to Me", which I'd debuted at the concert the night before, would be released early next week.

  No, no, no.

  Patrick didn't pressure me nearly as much as Ned had during the preparations, but he did pull a shocker out of a file folder at the end. "This is the man, Misty. His name is Shawn Daniels. Do you know him?"

  I looked at the picture, at the cold brown eyes, then raised my eyes to Patrick's. "I've never seen him before in my life."

  No, no, no.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "I think Jo's right," Jason said. "Cindy messed up."

  "Do you think you'd have done better? I know I wouldn't have. And she was so sorry."

  In fact, she'd been pathetically grateful when I went back to her office after the interview. She raised her tear-stained face to me and I said, "It's okay," and she promptly burst into tears again, gabbling unintelligibly about how much she liked working for me and how sorry she was and how she'd do better in the future. I'd only managed to stop her by saying, "The next time someone accuses me of being a hooker you'll do better? I kind of hope this was a one-time deal," making her laugh through her tears.

  I didn't want her feeling so indebted to me. Ned had really made Jo change her mind, not me, and anyhow Cindy hadn't deserved to be fired. She'd done her best.

  "Sorry doesn't save your career," Jason said.

  He didn't know I'd planned to end my career that morning. Nobody did. I'd wanted to do it without anyone knowing, so nobody could try to make me change my mind. But after the interview with Patrick and another meeting with Jo and Ned to lay out our plan of attack ('stay silent and it'll die down'), I hadn't had the energy to quit, and besides quitting then would have made everyone believe Shawn's story. I'd have to stay on for at least a while. "It looks like I'll be fine."

  Why had I told him about Cindy and the phone call? I didn't want to hear him criticize her. He already knew about the accusation, of course, before I came home and told him. Everyone knew. Even my parents had heard, and they'd sent me an email telling me to keep my head high and not let that jerk get me down since nobody would believe him.

  Lots of other people, in the industry and not, had sent me similar messages, and they were all right: after scanning the gossip sites Cindy and I had breathed twin sighs of relief at the general consensus that Shawn was nothing but a pathetic blackmailer. He had no evidence, no proof at all, for his accusation and since he was also quickly revealed to be flat broke his motivations became even more suspect.

  I was delighted that nobody believed him, and surprised at exactly how delighted. Of course I didn't want people believing I'd done it, but I was going to quit anyhow, going to slide back into obscurity, so what did it matter what the world thought? They wouldn't remember me in a few weeks.

  My stomach tightened and I reached for my tea to help soothe it. I'd felt off since throwing up. Not a surprise, really, given the events of the day.

  "You'll be fine, sure, but not because of her." He paused. "Look, I think you should get rid of her. And take Carla instead."

  My poor exhausted brain fell out of gear and couldn't get itself going again. Finally I managed to say, "Carla? Why?"

  "She needs a good job. And she's a great talker and really organized and great at typing and filing. She's like me, good at cleaning up messes and getting things working right."

  True, but... "She also hates me. Which is not a qualification for being my assistant."

  He sighed. "She needs a job. I would hope maybe being my sister gives her a bit of an edge."

  I shut my eyes. "Jason, don't. I can ask Jo if she can hire Carla for something else but I am not firing Cindy for her."

  "Even though I want you to?"

  I didn't open my eyes. Cindy believed with all her heart I'd never been within five miles of Shawn. Carla probably believed I'd serviced half the population of Toronto. "Not even then."

  He got up and left the apartment.

  I didn't try to stop him. I didn't have the energy.

  I switched off all the phones, took one of the sleeping pills Jo had sent me home with "in case this nonsense makes it hard for you to sleep tonight", and tried to escape the world.

  *****

  Afraid I wouldn't be able to wake up to meet with Jo at eight the next day as she'd arranged so we could discuss whether we needed to do more damage control, I'd only taken one sleeping pill instead of the two she'd suggested. When I awoke at three in the morning I regretted that decision but knew I couldn't take another pill then.

  The faint snores I could hear from the living room told me Jason had come home but hadn't wanted to sleep beside me. Probably just as well. I didn't want anyone near me.

  I pulled my comforter tighter around my shoulders and tried to breathe away the sick feeling in my throat and stomach. What a hideous mess. Everyone trying so hard to defend me, and in every set of eyes I could see the same question they knew they didn't really want to ask.

  Did you do it?

  If they didn't ask, they could assume my innocence and not have to think about what sort of slimeball would accept money for a blow job. They could work with clear consciences at keeping me in my career, the career that was so lucrative for them and for me.

  The career I'd decided to give up.

  At that thought, two tidal waves hit me in rapid succession. The first was a rage like nothing I'd ever felt before, and the second was enough tears to fill an ocean. I clung to my pillow and sobbed, burying my face to make sure Jason couldn't hear me, and my only thought was, "No," over and over.

  I cried and clenched my pillow in fury and cried again until the waves passed, leaving me limp and exhausted. And finally aware of the truth.

  I did want to be Misty.

  I'd been thinking of my singing career as a fling. A joke even. Nothing worth doing forever. Not that I'd even considered that. It was all about making money for the center. That was what I was supposed to care about.

  That was what I did care about.

  But, lying there alone, I knew it wasn't the only thing.

  I'd come to love the music career. Even with the weirdness of Misty's costumes and the occasionally ditzy lyrics and the awful media attention, I loved it. Standing on stage and holding an audience in the palm of my hand? Nothing better.

  My eyes filled with tears again, with no rage behind them this time but with endless sadness. I'd promised myself I'd start the center for Giselle. I had to do it.

  But I couldn't let go of being Misty either.

  Chapter Twenty

  "Misty and Tim should sit together. A long flight's a perfect time for them to write another song or two."

  Tim said, "Window or aisle?" and gave me a gentle smile.

  "I don't care. Your call."

  I'd only made one call in the eight days since the scandal of Shawn broke. When I went to Jo's office the morning after, she'd complimented me on how calmly I'd handled the situation, "other than when you threw up in my office," she'd added with a smile, and said she wanted us to keep moving forward. Still stunned by how much I wanted the career and how little I'd realized it mattered to me, I'd signed her offered contract of another ten songs and an immediate European tour with even more confusion than I'd felt the first time.

  Shawn had done a bunch of interviews and had made a fool of himself every time. Hardly anyone had believed his story at the beginning, and even fewer did by the time he'd finished telling the world the sordid details of our supposed encounter. He didn't seem to realize he looked far worse than I did: propositioning a teenage girl and taking her to a dark alley to pay her forty bucks for a blow job? But the interviewers, naturally, did realize and they tore his story a
nd his character apart.

  At Ned's suggestion, Jo and Sapphire Angel had maintained a 'this is too ridiculous to even discuss, and of course we don't need to defend Misty against something so pathetic' attitude. My interview with Patrick had been my only public statement and then I'd answered the few questions I'd been asked during other interviews with "we don't really have to discuss that foolishness, do we?"

  It had worked, too. I looked better than ever and Shawn was an Internet joke.

  But.

  I couldn't stand how many of my fans were saying, "It's kind of sexy, really, if she did. Wild and dangerous." I didn't want them thinking there was anything remotely sexy about prostitution, especially the teen kind. They were right about the dangerous part, though, but not the way they meant it.

  I wanted to speak out against their attitude but Jo had flatly refused. "As long as they're not saying you did it, or hating you in case you did, we are happy. We won't stir things up."

  But with my new-found commitment to my career, I hated that. My fans looked up to me and I didn't want them thinking they were looking up to a hooker.

  In the rare moments I didn't spend feeling sick about how my fans saw it, I worried instead about myself and what I'd decided in the middle of the night. The center had been my dream for ten years. Could I seriously be considering giving it up for... what had Jason called it? Prancing around in a ridiculous skirt?

  I was.

  I could fund the center and not run it myself, of course, but that hadn't been the plan. Giselle and I had talked endlessly about being right in there, hands-on, helping the teen girls find themselves and their inner strength. I couldn't do that by standing back and throwing money at it, but I didn't want to quit singing either, and I couldn't think of a way to be completely committed to both goals.

  With all the sleepless nights spent worrying and thinking, I simply had no energy left for the immense work of that week. Rehearsals and costume fittings and packing my own clothes and supervising the selection of my costumes for the tour of Europe, which Jo wanted to do right away so people would see I wasn't intimidated by Shawn. Germany first, then France and England and Spain and Italy and Denmark and Sweden and Belgium, all in three weeks. I dragged myself through my days, trying my hardest to keep up the front, and though I felt numb and lost I thought my happy act had fooled nearly everyone. Even Jason, although he didn't like that I'd signed the new contract, was pleased I'd gotten over the Shawn mess so quickly.

  Tim, though, wasn't fooled. He and I had managed to steal several chunks of time from my crazy schedule to work on new songs and I had been about as useful as a guitar amplifier in a power failure. I couldn't find any words. The turmoil in my head and heart was too great for anything song-related to get through. Tim didn't harass me for it, but I could tell he was confused and disappointed and I felt bad.

  But maybe I'd manage to get something done on the plane to Frankfurt.

  Tim and I ended up with a row to ourselves at the back of the half-empty first-class cabin. Jo was coming over to push my songs with various local distributors, and she and her assistant were across the aisle and two rows up. Luckily Angel was already in Europe for a magazine shoot; I'd have jumped from the plane without a parachute if I'd had to sit with her. I wasn't her opening act any more; in Europe we'd be getting equal time on stage but I'd sing second, which nearly made her my opening act. I was excited, but also nervous, and her supposedly joking but catty little comments about whether I could handle the pressure weren't doing much to reduce that pressure. Which I felt sure she knew.

  The plane took off at ten o'clock at night, and once we were in the air Jo came to Tim and me, a sapphire-blue eye mask on her forehead, and said, "I'm going to sleep. Don't bug me unless we're about to crash. Then wake me up so I can land on you."

  Tim laughed, and I managed a smile.

  Flight attendants offered us drinks then the cabin lights dimmed, and Tim said, "Did you want to sleep?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe." I wouldn't, of course. I'd been waking up crying most nights and I could hardly let that happen on the plane. But if he slept, I could probably hide my face in a blanket and let out a few of the tears that seemed permanently to be nudging at the back of my eyes these days. "You?"

  His forehead creased. "Actually, I was thinking of working. Want to, at least for a bit?"

  I sighed. "Sure."

  He opened his laptop without another word and pulled up the word processing program. He didn't open the song we'd been working on at the airport, though. Instead he typed into a new document, "I'm worried about you." Without looking at me, he said, "What do you think so far?"

  I bit my lip. "It's okay." It wasn't, though: my stomach and emotions were churning. Would talking about it help? Tim was the only one who'd noticed I was still upset. Did I want to open myself to him like this?

  He nodded and typed, "You haven't come up with a half-decent lyric since that jerk and his story. I know all that was awful but even so it's not like you. I'm not trying to push you but I wanted you to know I see it and I'm sorry."

  I moved my hands to the keyboard. "Thank you."

  We sat still for a moment, while I wrestled with what I wanted to do, then he said, "So, how about this one?" and opened the actual file for our current song-in-progress after closing the one we'd been using without saving it.

  After a few minutes, though, during which I contributed nothing but one terribly generic rhyming phrase, I knew I couldn't live like this any more. The plane was dark except for the light on over his seat, the engine hum meant nobody would overhear anything we said, and I felt safe with him. "Go back to that first file," I said, hearing the rasp in my voice.

  He shot me a glance but opened a blank file and typed, "Type or talk, it's up to you.

  I swallowed hard. I didn't know if I could do either. Finally I turned the laptop toward me and typed, "I feel terrible."

  He shifted the computer enough that he could reach it but we could both see it. "I'm sorry. What a mess."

  I nodded and looked around the plane. Nobody in view. Nobody behind us either. "I can't seem to find lyrics. Everything just feels" I drummed my fingers on the keyboard, looking for the right word, then typed, "wrong. Off-center."

  He shook his head. "I can imagine. But at least it's not true."

  I hadn't expected him to say that, and I stared at his words on the screen for a long moment. What to do, what to say?

  He typed, "Amy?"

  I made my decision. Carrying this alone for eight years was more than long enough. I turned to look at him.

  He looked back, confused, then I saw him realize. His eyes widened and his mouth moved like he was looking for words but couldn't find any. Now he knew how I felt. I watched his face, waiting for the disgust and judgment to arrive.

  They didn't.

  Sympathy arrived instead, then he reached out and took a gentle but firm hold of my shoulder.

  I snapped my eyes shut and bit my lip hard, not wanting to bawl on the plane, and wished I could somehow tell him how much his support, his willingness to touch me after what I'd done, meant to me.

  The sound of keys being pressed made me open my eyes. With the hand not on my shoulder he was slowly typing, "I don't know what to say. Except I'm sorry."

  I nodded and whispered, "Thanks."

  "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  Did I?

  My head moved, so slowly at first I wasn't sure it was happening, and I nodded again.

  *****

  Typing the story made it easier somehow. I didn't make eye contact with Tim, just kept typing a sentence or two at a time, feeling increasing relief as I let the secret out. My report to him was purely the facts, but as I typed those I relived the emotions too.

  It had been two weeks since Giselle's funeral and I was still utterly lost. My best friend had gone for an illegal abortion entirely alone. I hated that I hadn't been there for her, hated her for dying, and hated myself more for hating her. Wit
h all of that combined with my grief at her loss, I was sleepwalking through my days.

  I stood waiting in pouring rain at a bus stop when the black car pulled up. The guy inside was old, easily in his thirties, but still cute. The kind Giselle called 'well-aged meat'. Thinking that, with her gone, stabbed me so deeply I could barely mumble "Hello" when he said, "Hey there."

  He smiled. "Pretty girl like you shouldn't be taking the bus in this weather. Need a ride?"

  I started to shake my head, in fact turned it to one side, then let it fall back to center again without finishing the gesture. His eyes and his tone told me what kind of ride he was offering, and the idea of losing myself in sex suddenly had appeal. I'd lost my virginity the year before, and slept with two guys since, and I knew how good it felt to be wrapped in male arms.

  It was insane, and I knew it even as I stepped toward his car. But I needed something to break through my numbness, and on some level I probably wanted to do something stupid. The rage I felt, against Giselle and the doctor who'd killed her and the parents whose anti-teen-pregnancy rants had made her desperate and especially against myself, demanded it.

  I closed the car door behind me and he leaned over and kissed me hard without a word, driving his tongue deep into my mouth. I let him, though I didn't like it, but when I tried to kiss him back he pulled away and put the car in gear.

  He took me to a dingy alley behind the grocery store, where rumor had it drug deals were frequent. Nobody was there but us, though. Him, and me who was fast changing my mind. I hadn't thought it through, obviously, but I'd have assumed we'd go somewhere inside. Not this filthy horrible-smelling alley.

  As we reached the back corner, I said, "Look, I should go."

  He pressed me against the rough wall and kissed me again, invading my mouth and grinding against me, and though I mostly hated it my body was stirred by it and I hated that too.

  Until he said, "Thirty bucks if you blow me."