Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Tiki’s life might have been easier had Zack let me go. I thought he had let me go. I thought it was over for both of us. I thought that my own reaction to the affair, my declaration that Zack and I were finished romantically, had effectively snuffed out that flame forever. But I was wrong. Zack had not let go. The flame guttered and spat, but never died, feeding itself mostly from an over-romanticized memory of our brief courtship and from the tallow of guilt that Zack felt for his own behavior. In the process of shoring up his own relationship with Zack, Tiki had become Zack’s confessor. He had had to listen to Zack pour out his feelings of remorse, vowing to win me back and to prove that he had seen the error of his ways. From Tiki’s perspective, I was competing for Zack’s affections even in absentia.

  Tiki was not framing Zack.

  He was framing me.

  Maria had been discovered and purged. It was my turn. It was not enough, apparently, that I had broken things off. What mattered to Tiki was Zack’s lingering affection for me. Shallow sex romps were one thing. Indeed, the greater the promiscuity the better. But romantic aspirations were quite another thing and Tiki’s worshipful affection for the Golden Boy would not tolerate such emotional distractions. Whatever the origins of the drugs in Zack’s Escalade, Tiki saw an opportunity to dampen Zack’s mooning over our breakup. He made me into a vengeful threat, trying to convince Zack that, far from sharing his affection, I was so angry over both the affair with Maria and the sex video that I was trying to destroy him. I knew the keypad combination for the Escalade. I had planted the drugs. I had made the anonymous call to the Hollywood Sheriff’s Department. The accident had been a fortuity for me in my greater scheme. I was a woman scorned; a woman wronged; the interloper looking for trouble. Yoko.

  But all of that information came much, much later. On the day Burton and I learned that the police were looking hard at Tiki, all I knew was the sickening feeling that I had been horribly wrong about Zack. He really hadn’t known anything about the video. He had tried to explain.

  “I’ve got to talk to him,” I insisted. Burton shook his head.

  “Not a good idea. Things are looking better, Tilly, but you’re still not out of the woods on this.”

  “I blamed him. It was Tiki.”

  “Could have been both of them. Could be they were both in on it.”

  “No. It was Tiki. Zack had no idea. I believe him now.”

  “Why would Tiki do that? It was before the thing between Zack and Maria, so…”

  I shrugged.

  “Just… for kicks maybe. A prank. Zack was all about good pranks. He could dish it out. It was part of the Zack Pack ethic. Or maybe just because he’s a pervert. For whatever reason Tiki was holding on to it and then Zack and Maria were revealed.”

  “And then he wanted the private prank on the news. Revenge?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Money. If you don’t mind me saying, that thing could go for a lot.”

  I looked at him sternly.

  “I mean, not that I’ve seen it or anything,” he said embarrassedly. “But it’s you… and Zack West. That’s big. That’s a pretty penny.”

  “Maybe revenge and money,” I said. “I don’t really know what makes Tiki tick. All I know is that I need to talk to Zack. I need to clear this shit up.”

  “There will be time for all of that. The investigation is still way too active right now for you two to be having conversations. Zack’s lawyer is not returning my phone calls. Maybe he’s busy or maybe that’s not a good sign. Maybe he doesn’t want to be answering my questions while there is an active plan to get my client talking on a wire.”

  I nodded. We both knew I was going to do it anyway. To Burton’s credit, he did not waste my time and Blair’s money trying to stop the inevitable, adding only, “just don’t have the discussion on the phone. Meeting in person is better. Go swimming with him. Talk about the video. Leave the drugs for another day. If you have to do it, at least be careful.” It was like the prom date discussion I never had with my own father.

  By the time I was stepping off the elevator of Burton Dalrymple’s building, Zack’s phone was ringing in my ear. The call rang over to voice mail. I left him a short message about getting together to talk about “some things,” but in a tone infused with such warmth and understanding and so tinged with regret that I hoped he would understand my general intentions even if not my specific purpose.

  I spent the balance of the afternoon wandering aimlessly around Griffith Park trying to mentally contain the unruly tendrils of my own life. Without my jogging attire, I was slow and easily recognizable. People stopped and whispered and pointed and took pictures. A few of the bolder souls approached and politely asked for my autograph. I obliged as graciously as I could, scribbling my name on lunch bags and the backs of Griffith Park maps and answering questions about everything from what kind of shampoo I use, to whether I thought Katie Finn should have hanged for murder, to what it was like to kiss Zack West. The latter came from a girl about thirteen, swinging a purple water bottle on a cord. Her pale twiggy body still belonged to a child, but her face – brown and smeared with the remains of color for her eyes and lips – was leaching its innocence. If she knew of a video in which I took kissing Zack to new heights, she did not let on. Her mother – a stout, corn-fed Midwesterner – clearly knew, knocking the girl on the arm.

  “Emily! That’s personal.” She said, blushing like she might burst into flame. The girl shrugged and looked at her shoes.

  “That’s okay,” I said trying in vain to sign my name to the white plastic cap of her water bottle. “Zack West is a really sweet guy, a very good kisser and a super good actor. This isn’t working. The plastic is too hard.”

  Emily offered up the underside of her arm. I scrawled out some banal words of greeting across the mushroom flesh and signed my name. I handed her mother the pen as Emily admired the script.

  “My dad would probably kill me if I made a sex video,” she said.

  “Oh my Lord!” The mother gave me a mortified look and yanked the girl by her freshly autographed arm off towards a picnic table. Emily yowled and looked back at me for help. All I could do was shrug. My dad would probably kill me too, I thought.

  Of all of the subjects vying violently for the puck inside my head, the thought of my father’s reaction to my life, let alone the sex video, was the least appealing. He dogged me most of the way back to the car, accusing me of whoring and of wasting my life. Most of all he wanted to convince me of his own complete lack of surprise at how everything was turning out.

  I sat in the car for a long time, watching people enter and leave in molecular clumps, as if caught up in some process of park-wide respiration. The sky was darkening. I gave Zack another call.

  Zack, it’s Tilly. Look, I know things are really weird and a little scary and I’m not even supposed to be talking to you right now, but I really want to talk with you. I want you to know how sorry I am for not believing you. I feel like a real shit and I want to tell you that. And I have some news that I wanted to share that you probably already know but just in case… it’s about Tiki. I don’t want to leave a message. I’m at the park but I’m headed home. Call me Zack.

  I spent much of that evening in my living room with the lights off in the glow of the television, pulling Chinese food from a carton with my fingers as I flicked from channel to channel. This had become the increasingly defining activity of my depression: trolling the entertainment news channels looking for signs of myself; looking for proof that I still existed. It was the leading edge of a pathological narcissism that threatened to overtake me entirely, blackening my identity like some sort of gangrenous mold.

  I told myself that I was not looking simply to feed upon my own reflection; that the disease was not yet so advanced. I was looking more purposefully for news of another shoe to drop – some development in the police investigation leaked to the press or some report from some corner of the entertainment world that someone had been
caught trying to sell the video. And while that was true, I also knew that this was the beginning of an obsessive, professional preoccupation with what others – strangers, the public generally – knew of me and thought of me. I knew that eventually there would be no difference between that “knowledge” – right or wrong – and what I knew of myself. I could feel myself being slowly devoured.

  My phone trilled from across the room that I had a new text message. I put down the carton of noodles and got up. It was from Blair. I read the words several times, trying to find some meaning other than the most obvious.

  Got your message. What part of stay off my bloody set did you not understand? You were advised in advance. Access to the lot has been revoked. Ivanova is lost to you. I will find another.

  I returned slowly to the couch, staring at words on a phone that I could no longer see. I sat heavily. A bubble of something, part disbelief, part grief, part horror escaped me in a choked, guttural gasp. The phone went black from inactivity and I fell back into the couch cushions. A hard lump of something in my pocket pressed uncomfortably into my thigh. I extracted the Matilda key fob with the chunk of aquamarine Simon had given to me hours earlier but what then seemed to have been a long, long time ago.

  The television continued to disgorge itself noisily at my feet as if nothing had just happened within the circuitry of my cell phone or within the well of my heart, the insipid news anchors utterly indifferent to my confusion and pain and rage. Their lips moved as they recited the day’s news. They blinked and the pictures over their shoulders changed. The words and images merged and elongated and flowed around me and over me like I was an unfeeling boulder in a gushing river.

  Zack’s photo was gone before I had the presence of mind to focus. They had used his mug shot rather than his usual publicity head shot. His eyes were like ragged wounds. His mouth, slightly open, was a dark slit that mocked his famous lips. The intoxicants in his system at the time the photo had been taken had left him looking hollow and lifeless. Red abrasions on his face and forehead from the accident made him look the victim of a mauling. It was like someone at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had invented a camera that could capture a man’s soul. This was Zel Wippo.

  There was video of the Malibu beach house and of the ocean beyond. I tasted salt on my lips and could feel my stomach spasm and my heart calving in great crumbling sheets. I clutched the key fob and its chunk of ocean like my life depended on it.

  The anchors arranged their faces into pretensions of confusion and concern.

  He was known, they said, to have been quite an accomplished swimmer.

  CHAPTER 60 – Susan

  “Susan?”

  “…”

  “Susan?”

  “One second.”

  “Sorry.”

  “… okay. I needed to finish that thought. What’s up?”

  “Thought you might want to know that Kristen went home.”

  “Home? It’s … it’s two-thirty in the morning.”

  “She’s out.”

  “And Meredith?”

  “A mess. It got ugly. She’ll pull it together. She just needs sleep. So do you.”

  “I couldn’t sleep if my life depended on it. I’m never sleeping again. Ever. I’ve slept far too much.”

  “She won’t be able to manage all of this by herself. Kris is a first class bitch but she did have some talent for getting out the message and keeping us organized. The rest of us can help in some ways, but …”

  “I know. I’ll be there. First thing tomorrow pull everyone together for a meeting on priorities and marching orders. Right now I’ve got to keep working on this.”

  “I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Gayle, listen. Don’t tiptoe around on my account. It’s your room too. Come on in and go to bed. You’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow.”

  “I snore.”

  “If you can sleep with my light on, I can work with you snoring.”

  “Okay, boss. Get you anything? Backrub?”

  “More paper.”

  CHAPTER 61 – Hollis

  Bethany Koan stepped out of the North Robson Police Station into the desert night, shoes in one hand, micro-purse in the other, like she was a bridesmaid absconding from a wedding reception; a starlit daffodil, taken to the night wind. She wore the same yellow ensemble that she had worn to his house, and to Wally Nunn’s retirement party, and then back to the seventh floor of the Westin. It was the same yellow that she had shed, like night sheds the day, before standing before him as naked and luminous as an autumn moon. It was the same sumptuous yellow that had pooled at the same naked feet as she kissed him. The same yellow that had burned in his mind ever since.

  Bethany paused and turned as the metal door that had just closed behind her opened again. A uniformed officer poked his head out and said something in response to which Bethany spread her arms and lifted herself gracefully on the toes of one foot, bending the other behind her. The officer laughed and shoed her away. Bethany laughed and waved back at him. He closed the door and she turned back to face the parking lot. Hollis waved so that she would see him.

  And she did see him.

  She stopped, suddenly, and then, just as quickly, exploded upright into an excited, gleeful acknowledgement of his presence. She waved at him with both hands, high heels swinging from the straps around her fingertips, and then burst forward in a run that seemed to Hollis a kind of floating.

  She came, “Hollis! Oh my God,” exclaiming as in song, her music reaching him before her body and then, her body itself, falling into his arms, asking him to catch her as if the rapidly closing distance was not a horizontal parking lot, but a vertical building in flame, the force of her momentum pushing him back against the door of his silver Civic.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” she sang. “I mean, I believe it because you said you would, but I still can’t even…”

  She did not bother to finish. She dropped her shoes and her purse on the pavement and stood on her toes and seized his face in her hands and then kissed him long and full on the lips. With considerable assistance from the car at his back, Hollis did not withdraw. He received her as an igneous cliff receives a rogue wave rising out of the Pacific and giving up a thousand miles of longing in one spectacular, life ending spray. His hands, first hovering uselessly in the air around her body, came to rest on the slopes of her waist. She was soft and light in his grasp, like he was holding a yellow swan. He wanted to lift her up into the air; wanted the sensation of her feet leaving the ground; wanted to kiss the underside of her perfect chin. But the visceral sense of her pelvis, its firm contours lining up with his own, made him pull her into him rather than lifting her up. Her breath was hard and her body smelled vaguely of sweat, lending the moment a certain rawness, a palpable sense of urgency, and even a top note of desperation, all of which tended to add kerosene to the fire.

  It was all over, gravity restored, respiration resumed, in less than three seconds.

  Bethany lowered herself, her head suddenly at the level of his inflamed crotch, and picked up her shoes and her purse, continuing as though nothing had happened.

  “…I still can’t even believe you’re here. Thank you, Hollis. Thank you so much.”

  Hollis, his capacity for normal conversation utterly destroyed, had to swallow before the power of speech returned.

  “Sorry I took so long,” he said. “I had…I had to make arrangements for Ben.”

  “Are you crazy?” She stood and swatted at him in mock disgust. “I’m grateful that you’re here at all. Sweet little Ben. How is he? How is David’s girlfriend?”

  His face clouded as he searched for understanding. It came back to him slowly and in chunks. Mae. Ben. Table. Threat of concussion. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “Oh, Mae? She’s fine. Bump on the head. Speaking of which.” He pointed at the small Band Aid on her forehead.

  “Oh this.” She touched her lovely pate self-consciously. “Fo
rgot about that. I kind of bumped my noggin’.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No more than the rest of my head.”

  Hollis leaned in to kiss her gently on the head. She closed her eyes as he did.

  They fell silent, looking at each other. Too much to say. Too much to ask. Too much to feel. A patrol car pulled into the lot, the headlights sweeping over them, breaking the spell. Hollis looked at his watch.

  “It’s almost nine.”

  “I’m starving, Hollis. Can we go get some food someplace?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Anything. Seriously. Anything.”

  “Waffles?”

  Beth beamed and brushed his cheek with her hand.

  It was the careful, halting, jerky baby steps of small talk – insipid observations of things along the side of the road, the weather, his rental, her rental, his plane ride, her plane ride, people who litter, people who smoke, the cost of gas, the sparse desert terrain, the lush Ohio Valley – that got him to the restaurant. Hollis was relieved to be able to pretend that something normal and unremarkable was transpiring; something without a past to be explained or a future to be contemplated. It was just talk and that was just fine.

  They found a family restaurant called Paradise Pete’s with two semi cabs in the parking lot and a tall, yellow revolving sign that promised breakfast twenty-four hours a day. They swatted each other in the arm and pointed and laughed. “Waffles!” she proclaimed. “Waffles!” he answered. There was not yet any melody that they might have identified as “their song.” It was truck stop waffles that had come to define them.

  Inside, Johnny Paycheck was telling people exactly what they could do with his job. A little waitress with big hair breezed by with a silver pot of coffee and asked them to follow. Hollis let Bethany go ahead, guiding her with the slightest touch of his fingers along the underside of her arm.

  She walked, he followed. He watched the metronomic swishing of her hair, back and forth across the flesh of her neck and her shoulders. Others were looking. Looking at her. Looking at him looking at her. Hollis could tell that the men eating alone looked with unapologetic appreciation and envy. Men with women and children looked and looked away and then looked back again.