Dangerous Games

by Selene Chardou

  Etienne broke down and I watched with morbid curiosity but did nothing to make him feel better. “If you pull the plug on my mother, I will make sure you regret that choice for the rest of your life. As long as my mother has brain waves and she’s a functioning human being, she stays alive. I will involve my father, the police and everyone else I can think of. I will show you out to be a cold-hearted son of a bitch who murdered his own wife for money.”

  His eyes turned cold and he glared at me. “Go ahead but if you do that then I will make sure everyone knows about…”

  He didn’t have to say it because to be honest I didn’t want to hear the words spoken out loud.

  I cleared my throat. “I assume there is a reason why you brought me out here. You said we had to talk so what is so pressing that we need to talk about it now?”

  “If she hasn’t woken up in a week then I will pull the plug, Evie. I don’t want her to be tied to some machine for weeks, months…years. It isn’t fair to her and it isn’t fair to us. When was the last time you slept?”

  I shook my head. “Power naps or eight hours of rest?”

  “That just goes to show you. If you can’t remember then that isn’t exactly a good sign.”

  The tears came again and I sniffed a little as I turned away from him. “Then if you’ll excuse me, I want to spend the rest of this time with my mom since you plan on pulling the plug even if she isn’t a vegetable.” I began to walk away before I stopped and turned his way again. “By the way, how much did she leave you? I mean of her fortune?”

  “Your mother is worth well over half a billion dollars when you factor in stocks and bonds. She was one of the highest paid women in the film industry and Cristal Englund Carter-Goldsmith is her agent. At one time, she had you as the sole beneficiary but when she changed her Living Will, she made some amendments to her Will as well. She left me forty percent, and you sixty percent. That alone should stop you feeling guilty about what happened to her. Who leaves a man they have barely known for a year forty percent of their wealth? In France, that kind of trust is unheard of.”

  My heart thudded in my chest just the same but I felt like someone had taken their fist and sucker punched me in the gut.

  “Well, it was her money and therefore she was free to make any decisions she liked,” I responded.

  My throat was dry and I swallowed down the rest of the flavorless Starbuck’s coffee as I walked back to my mother’s room.

  Why couldn’t I have tried harder this time? None of this would have happened if I had never left Seattle for Boston instead of coming straight back to Los Angeles in the first place after school ended for the summer. This was all my fault and no one could tell me any different.

  “Have you started your paper for Abnormal Psychology yet?”

  It just occurred to me perhaps I had smoked a bit too much marijuana at Kyle’s apartment. He was cool and not really boyfriend material but he lived off-campus and sometimes we got together for old time’s sake in exchange for getting high together on the excellent chronic connection he had. The boy knew how to get the good stuff with no seeds and just sent you into a haze of smoke and endless feelings of euphoria and joy.

  “Shit.” I wiped my eyes and hoped they weren’t too red before I stared at my roommate, Amaani. “When’s it due?”

  She was a studious young woman from the Netherlands by way of Somalia. Her English was impeccable and she actually took school seriously. She was also unbelievably gorgeous with her perfect bone structure, mocha colored skin, model-tall height and matching slim figure.

  We were also lovers as well and though we had a very solid relationship, I didn’t want her to know about Kyle. I was still a cheater even if I was just using him for drugs and occasional sex. I had someone special in my life and to cheapen that with casual sex with someone else I barely liked let alone knew didn’t particularly ease my conscience.

  “Two days from now,” Amaani replied before she set a stack of papers in front of me. “I took very detailed notes. Everything is there for you to write a decent paper.”

  I yawned out loud. “I have a better idea. Why don’t I write you a five hundred dollar check and you do the paper for me? Make a few mistakes so Professor Asshole thinks it’s me and I can finally get some rest.”

  I knew she needed the money; her mother had called the other day begging her to send two hundred dollars for something or other regarding her little sister. She had a full ride scholarship. Of course that didn’t absolve the money problems her family constantly suffered back in suburb of Haarlem—the original place as opposed to the tough neighborhood in New York City—where her family resided.

  “This is the fifth paper I have done for you this semester,” Amaani remarked in anger before she said something under her breath in perfect, fluent Dutch. “Fine. You know I need the money so I’ll do it. But really, you should get more serious about school. Is that how all rich kids get their degrees? Someone else—preferably a smart, impoverished foreign student—does all their work for them? And you wonder why you have so many imbeciles in your government.”

  “Are you calling me stupid?”

  “No, Elvira, but I wish you would apply yourself.”

  “Thanks, sweetie, but I have a mom, and I don’t need another.”

  “Even if you have one?”

  “Artemis is not my mother. She’s just my dad’s trophy wife. There is a difference you know.”

  Amaani laughed and threw a copy of Society Magazine my way before she remarked, “Looks like your mother is working on a trophy Daddy for you too.”

  I grabbed the magazine and quickly searched the contents to find the main story which was about my mother and her new boyfriend. Well, not exactly new as I had known about her dating some French model for a while. My father had mocked her as if he had any room to talk.

  His wife was only twenty-seven though she had a birthday coming up in August; men, even my father, were sexist as usual. It was okay for him to date a British pop star in her twenties but if my mother found a guy who happened to be thirty then she had committed some kind of cardinal sin.

  My mother had been incredibly famous and still was but in her heyday, she’d been in the same sentences as Demi Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry. She was in her forties—forty-five, according to her agent and publicist, though she was actually forty-eight since her birthday the previous month—and still looked great for her age.

  She’d dyed her hair blonde most of her career though she was a naturally a brunette but now it was a pretty chestnut brown with blonde highlights. Not that I could do much complaining because I also dyed my hair. My natural color was dishwater blonde but I dyed it flaxen blonde with platinum highlights.

  Though she had aged beautifully and looked great, there was an obvious age difference between this guy, Etienne Fournier, and her. He was youth personified and she was…well, older. It wasn’t as obvious as Madonna and her boyfriend or Jennifer Lopez and her boy-toy but no one would think my mother and her lover were in the same decade let alone the same generation.

  I read the article with increasing interest though it was obviously quite exaggerated and played up to sell more copies. I grabbed my Ulysse Nardin phone and walked out of my dorm. I voice-dialed my best friend, Monika Dahlin Carter-Goldsmith, and she picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey, sweetie. How’s Seattle?” she wondered in her usual cynical tone.

  “Cold and rainy—what the fuck is new? Listen, how serious are my mom and this model she’s dating?”

  If anyone had the lowdown on the celebrity scene in L.A. then it would be Monika. The daughter of one of the top agents’ in the business plus the step-daughter of the most famous agent in the City of Angels, she knew everything about everyone.

  Her real father was Swedish, like my own, but she’d been raised in L.A. since childhood and had two famous step-fathers and two half-siblings on her mother’s side of the family. Her first famous step-fa
ther, Bret Carter, had died in a horrific car crash in 2006 and shortly afterwards, her mother had married Markus Goldsmith II; her rumored half-uncle but since no one could prove it, the marriage had gone through without a hitch. She had an eleven-year-old brother from her mother’s marriage to Bret Carter and a five-year-old sister from her marriage with Markus.

  “It’s pretty serious,” Monika finally replied after an interminable silence. “I mean, Athena isn’t bragging about her boyfriend which is always a bad thing. Usually, the man she’s dating is the best thing since sliced bread but with Etienne, mum’s the word.”

  “Fuck.” I had finally reached the outside campus and lit a Camel though I’d promised I would quit. “What do you know about him? Is he just after my mom’s money or something?”

  “I don’t think so. You know your mother can’t keep her damn trap shut but she really appears to be very happy with this guy. My mom says they seem like a genuine couple and he is a complete gentleman despite his profession.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone said about Gabriel Aubrey until he turned into a complete and utter psycho,” I murmured under my breath.

  “You are so judgmental.” Monika laughed on the other end. “Seriously, I have met Etienne and he’s really cool. I mean the guy is hot as hell and sex on a freakin’ stick but he isn’t interested in jailbait. I tried to flirt with him at a party I attended last weekend and he blew me off so fast, he made the Airbus seem slow. I am tellin’ you the guy is genuine and seems really interested in your mother, not her money.”

  “Fine.” I dragged from my cigarette and exhaled slowly.

  “Are you smoking again? Gross! That is such an incredibly nasty habit. You have to quit as soon as possible. By the way, your future step-dad doesn’t smoke so he is so not the stereotypical Frenchman. All I am sayin’ is when you finish up and come home for the summer, give the guy a chance, okay?”

  “Look, I gotta go. I wanna call my mom.”

  “Laters!” Monika exclaimed before I ended the call.

  I didn’t know if I was ready to talk to my mom yet. If she was happy then who was I to interfere? I would only be meddling because my own life was pretty crappy at the moment and that certainly wasn’t a reason to butt into hers.

  I was coming off my marijuana high and I knew I would make sense if I called so without thinking, I voice dialed my mother’s cell phone.

  She answered after a few rings. “Evie? Hello, my dear. Have you been kicked out of another university?”

  “Not yet,” I murmured in a sarcastic tone. “However, I did get the latest copy of Society Magazine and guess who is on the cover?”

  “It’s a terrible photo if you ask me. They caught us after I was finished filming for the day and we were leaving a restaurant here in Montreal. I sometimes hate the press,” she responded in her gorgeous husky voice which, had become huskier over the years due to her hidden cigarette habit.

  My mother had made it her life’s work of keeping a squeaky clean image. I suppose it had something to do with her being adopted by the woman who raised her and her genetic mother being Creole. She had that exotic-enough look though like Angelina Jolie, she just appeared to be a very beautiful white woman instead of mixed. Her stepmother and natural father were Irish and all her siblings were either dark-haired or blonde and alabaster-skinned with these gorgeous cornflower or blue-gray eyes and there she was: the odd one out with her gray-green eyes and peaches and cream skin with just a hint of olive.

  Cristal Englund Carter-Goldsmith, her agent, and Ruth Atwater, her publicist, did a very good job making sure that no one ever bothered to dig up anything less than kosher on my mother. As far as Wikipedia was concerned, she was the oldest child of Declan and Cleona McKenna, both first-generation Irish-American immigrants whose families had come to the States before they were born. She’d grown up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston, and gone to Catholic school her whole life.

  Like many of her generation of actresses, she didn’t have a big break per se. She basically had to work her way up and one day, she’d accepted a role in an independent film where she had to play an Irish woman trying to get justice for her son who had been murdered by the British Army in Belfast. Based on a true story, the film didn’t get much recognition but it did earn my mother an Academy Award nomination for best Actress. After an endorsement from Oprah, she actually won the award, beating out Nicole Kidman that year. Not only did she win the Academy Award but she also collected a Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG.

  That had the beginning of my mother’s illustrious career and it didn’t hurt she had begun dating one of the biggest action stars of his generation, my father, Rolf Sandstrom. Her career did nothing but climb and once they married, she was unstoppable. Somewhere in this history of my mother, I should have told you I was the love child of my parents for about eight years before they married.

  My first eight years were spent in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston, as the ward of my maternal grandparents. Although I’d tried my best to perfect a Californian accent after my parents decided I should live with them in L.A., my Boston accent still came back with a vengeance sometimes. It was even more prominent when I was unhappy or pissed off.

  I cleared my throat and said, “So, it’s true? I take it you’re serious about this guy then?”

  My mother, the great Athena—supposedly named after a Greek goddess but in actuality was my real maternal grandmother’s middle name—breathed on the other end of the phone. “Yes, Etienne is very special to me and I want you to meet him but only if you are going to respect my wishes. I won’t have you chasing him away.”

  “Come on, Mom, I’m nineteen. That would be completely silly and foolish of me. I want you to be happy too.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I mean it,” I replied after an interminable silence.

  “I still thought you hated me. I mean, after everything you’ve been through, including that unpleasant and awful situation when you were fifteen with that boy…” she trailed off.

  No, my mother wasn’t referring to a cast member on Jersey Shore, she was talking about the “subject that shall never be discussed” so it never was and merely called “The Situation”. Not exactly the most inventive phrase when one considered my mother was an actress but what the hell, it was all water under the bridge now anyway.

  “I’m fine. And I hope you’re happy and this guy isn’t just taking you for a ride. I’ll meet him soon enough.” I cleared my throat again. “Listen, I gotta go but we’ll talk soon, okay?”

  “You do plan to spend summer in L.A., don’t you?” Although she phrased it as a question, it was more of a statement.

  “Yeah, Mom, I do. Two more weeks of school and then I’m flying back to L.A.”

  Not that I’d bought a ticket yet because I really didn’t know if I wanted to go back to the land of the fake and plastic. I’d been running from that miserable place since I’d been plopped down in it at the age of eight. I looked for excuses to spend time in Boston around my mother’s family because my father’s side of the family was so far away and I felt at home back east.

  “Okay, let me know when school’s over and I’ll get away so we can have some ‘face time’ together.”

  Another euphemism a celebrity’s child got used to hearing. My parents spent so much time on film sets and rarely had ever taken me along, spending time with them was promptly labeled “Face time”.

  “Yeah, that sounds great.”

  We said our goodbyes and I stuck my overpriced phone in my overpriced Louis Vuitton handbag and made my way back upstairs to the dorms. School couldn’t end fast enough as far as I was concerned.

  “Ms. Sandstrom, can I speak to you please?”

  Professor Klitzmensch, who I lovingly referred to as Professor Bitchmensch, called after me as class ended.

  We had received our papers back from our Abnormal Psychology assignment and Amaani had managed to score
me an A minus so I was actually quite pleased.

  Our professor, a fussy little woman with frizzy graying hair tucked in a bun, unflattering glasses and clothes always covered in cat hair, beckoned me over. I thought I looked normal enough in a pair of a designer indigo blue jeans and a white cashmere sweater. It was, technically, spring, here in Seattle, but to me it was still chilly and I’d worn sweaters year round while I’d been here.

  I approached the professor and smiled though I didn’t have the megawatt charisma as my mother. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attractive but I had one of those garish personalities that people either loved or hated. Amaani had dealt with a lot in her life so my surly attitude never bothered her and as my roomie, she found herself five thousand dollars richer due to writing various papers for me throughout the two semesters.

  “Listen, there is no point in beating around the bush. We both know what you did but since I can’t prove it, I am going to offer you an alternative. You can leave the school and at least all your credits will transfer to the new university you pick out,” she explained in that annoying nasally accent many in the Northwest happened to be cursed with.

  I glared at her with anger and resignation. “You can’t make me leave this school!” I exclaimed.

  “Actually, I can.” Professor Klitzmensch smiled, revealing off-white less-than-straight teeth. “I can prove you have cheated. No, you weren’t quite that obvious about it but I am offering you an out. You can go anywhere you want. This is a prestigious university and UCLA or Pepperdine would be happy to have you. To be honest, I think you would be happier at that type of university.”

  The woman had had it out for me since her daughter had been humiliated during pledge week. I didn’t actually join a sorority but I knew most of the women who were members and it had been my idea her daughter was made an example of. One of the Greek fraternities had taken it too far. One of the hottest jocks in school invited Ruth Klitzmensch out for a date and then took her to a party where she drank too much and embarrassing photos of her dancing around naked managed make their way around the campus via Facebook and uConnect. It wasn’t a great situation. The poor woman had a nervous breakdown and took classes online though there was a rumor she planned to attend the Autumn semester.