by Aimee Ferris
“So I tell him—Quigley? Quigley can rock a piccolo! She’ll play the best piccolo in the history of the parade.”
“Anne, piccolo was hard! It was the worst. Four months and we never even once hit a decent note. They made us switch to the cowbell.”
“Maybe they just needed more cowbell. What does it matter anyway? You’ll get the forty bucks and fake it. The rest of the instruments will drown you out.”
I pulled the laces loose on my other running shoe. “Anne, can I ask you something without you getting pissed?”
“When you start out like that, probably not,” she laughed.
“I’m just wondering. Do you think we’re being a little silly about the dress thing?”
There was a moment of silence on the line. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s just a lot of money to waste on something your mom would be happy to make us for free.”
“That’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing, Quigley! I thought you were with me on this. Where’s the best-friend support?”
“I know. It was just that Zander told me the other night how he bought his car for only four hundred dol—”
“Gawd, Quigley. You’re not going to be that kind of girl who is always spouting ‘my boyfriend said this’ and ‘my boyfriend did that’ now, are you?”
I blushed at the B-word. “No! I just thought it seemed like something real to hold on to, compared to a dress we can really only wear the one time.”
“Fine. You go find yourself a car for four hundred bucks. I’m sticking with the plan. If I’m feeling generous, I’ll pull over in the limo and give you a ride when I see you broken down on the side of the road. But no promises.”
I sighed. “You’re pissed.”
“Of course, I’m pissed. We’ve been working at this for months now. You wouldn’t have even met your guy if it weren’t for my Betterment Plan and getting us this gig with my mom. Now you’re backing out.”
“No, I’m not. I swear. I was just bringing it up for discussion,” I said.
“Well, are we done discussing?”
“Totally.”
“Look, I know you think my mom is the best thing in the world, and so cool and everything, but it’s a lot different from where I’m sit—oh no.”
“Anne?”
The only thing I could hear through the phone was the sound of her tabloid news program.
“Anne? Hello?” The faint laughter sounded different from her usual deep belly laugh. “Anne? What’s so funny?”
It took a minute to recognize the sound as sobs. In nine years of knowing her, I had never heard my best friend cry like that. My chest ached with panic. “Anne, talk to me. Hello? What’s going on?” The tabloid show droned on in the background. I pressed the phone so hard against my ear that it went numb and caught the newscaster in the background mention the name Gordon.
“I’m right here, Anne. Tell me what’s going on. No matter what, everything’s going to be okay. Okay?” I tried to steady my voice as I frantically flipped through the channels to see what her dear old dad was up to now.
The phone slid from my hand as his smiling voice came across the screen. “Sexiest man alive turned sexiest dad alive, Keith Gordon has confirmed he and his adopted child will be returning to the United States as soon as the paperwork is completed. Keith Gordon is quoted as saying he’s always wanted to be a father, and would appreciate being given privacy and the opportunity to bond with his new daughter outside of the public arena.”
“I’ll be right there, Anne.”
Chapter Eleven
I peeled several bills off and stuffed them in the cab-driver’s hand. Having no clue if you were supposed to tip or not, I put an extra two wrinkled ones on top of the fare and ran up Anne’s drive and hit the doorbell. I fidgeted and stabbed at the bell two more times and peered into the foyer, which appeared broken into prismatic shards through the ornamental glass door. Ms. Parisi’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I let myself in.
“Anne?”
I raced up the stairs toward the muffled sobs. Something heavy leaned against Anne’s door, but I managed to nudge it enough to stick my head in. Her nightstand was knocked over, and shredded confetti covered her lime-green rug and black bedspread. I took in what must have been hundreds of ripped-up magazine pages. Pushing my way in, I lifted a piece and recognized the trademark smile and chin dimple Anne didn’t inherit from her mom. The mounted flat screen had a deep dent that matched the broken vase lying lopsided on the dresser beneath it.
“I’m so sorry, Anne.”
“How could he?” The small voice came from the floor of the closet. I waded through the piles of paper and tried to hug the huddled lump that was my friend. She flinched at my touch and hugged her knees to her chest tighter.
“I don’t know. I’m so sorry.” Why hadn’t I called Ms. Parisi? What could I say to make this better?
“How could he?” she demanded. “I want to know! How could he throw me away? It should have been me!” Her fists pounded the closet walls, and she spun around and kicked the neatly stacked shoe boxes into crumpled cardboard pieces. “Why didn’t he want me?” Her clunky military-style boots stomped the boxes against the wall with each word before she dove back into a ball of hysterical sobs.
I swiped at the hot tears now running down my face. “I don’t know.” I reached out and touched her trembling leg. “I’m so sorry.” I winced at the stupid useless phrase.
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until the startling hollow bang of the front door followed by the mad click of heels up the stairs made me suck in air.
“Anne! Anne, honey! Honey, I have to tell you some—” Ms. Parisi’s faking-calm face peeked around the door. She’d wiped away her bleeding mascara, but telltale pale streaks ran down her cheeks where her own tears had washed away her makeup. “Oh God. You heard. Honey? Baby. Baby, it’s going to be okay.”
“Okay?” Anne struggled through the broken boxes and lunged out of the closet. “Okay?”
I slid back against Anne’s DANGEROUS CURVES sign, wishing I could disappear.
“Nothing is okay! You ruined it. You ruined everything!” Anne’s face was a blotchy purply red. “If you meant anything to him at all, he would have wanted to be my dad. I always knew he wanted me; he just couldn’t stand to be around you. This is your fault! I hate you! I hate you!”
Anne’s heavy boots clomped down the stairs. Ms. Parisi jerked at the slam of the door and slid to the paper-littered bed in defeat. She picked up a handful of the torn pages as a bitter laugh turned to a sob.
I stayed frozen against the wall. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to cry in front of kids.
“She’ll be back in a few minutes,” I finally said in a low voice.
She nodded and wiped her wet cheek and took a deep breath.
“I didn’t even know she collected these.” Ms. Parisi tried to put the pieces together and then swept away the jagged, smiling face with a sigh.
“It wasn’t like that, you know,” she said, picking up and stroking a particularly large slashed piece featuring the famous man’s left eye and cheek with an expression near regret. “We were just kids. It wasn’t about wanting, or not wanting. What eighteen-year-old kid wants to be a dad? We both thought we were going places. We knew it. I mean, everyone knew they were going places back in those days, but, luck of the draw, for both of us it turned out to be true. Marrying a stranger and playacting some happy-family routine wasn’t going to get us to where we belonged. We both agreed. It wasn’t the time. So we went our separate ways.” She let the image flutter to the floor, her eyes pleading for understanding. “I just … changed my mind.”
I patted her back and felt our roles shift. After a minute of awkward silence, I pulled over Anne’s black leather trash can and lifted handfuls of the torn paper into it. Ms. Parisi joined me, and we cleaned the room together, silently lost in our own thoughts.
We relocated to the living room a
nd sipped ineffectual herbal tea whose box promised it to be “calming.” Ms. Parisi started at every sound outside, but the afternoon light faded and Anne still hadn’t reappeared. “Quigley, would you mind trying again?”
“No problem, Ms. Parisi.” I hit redial to call Anne’s cell.
“Victoria,” she corrected absently, and continued staring at the window with glazed eyes.
“No answer.”
“Is it still turned off?” she asked.
“It went right to voice mail.”
“Do you think you could stay? I’ll call your parents and let them know, if you want me to,” she said, her shaky voice lacking its usual command.
I nodded. “You don’t need to tell them about, well—you know. I can just say you were making dinner or something. Or that Anne and I wanted to study.”
We looked at each other. It struck us at the same time how unlikely either of the two excuses sounded, and we burst into laughter. We laughed harder and harder until tears flowed from the release of the afternoon’s tension. The reflection of blue-and-red lights spiraling across the darkened wall interrupted our giggles.
“Oh God, no!” Ms. Parisi had run in a panic through the door in her stocking feet before I even recognized the flashing lights as those of a police car.
Chapter Twelve
“Are you the mother of Anastasia Gordon Parisi?” asked the officer.
Anne’s mother rocked on her feet and looked like she might pass out. “She is,” I yelped and grabbed her shoulders as the officer dove to support Ms. Parisi’s crumpling body.
“Ms. Parisi! Ms. Parisi, your daughter is fine,” he said. “We came down as a courtesy due to your public persona and the possibility of media interference once this story breaks fully.”
“She’s okay?” Ms. Parisi’s voice squeaked out, desperate for reassurance as she gripped the man’s uniform. “My Anne’s okay?”
He nodded, and together we helped her lean against the patrol car to regain her composure.
“Ma’am, you need to call an attorney for your daughter. She’s been arrested on multiple charges, some of which could prove quite serious. Unfortunately, some of the evidence has already gone public; a video was posted to the Internet. Kids.” He shook his head. “When we realized she was the daughter of such a noted public figure—”
“She told you?” Ms. Parisi and I gasped simultaneously.
The officer looked at us with a puzzled expression. “Yes, ma’am. You are her mother, are you not?” He flipped open a little notebook. “Victoria Parisi? We helped you out a few months ago with those photographers?”
“Oh, me. Yes, I’m a public figure. I mean, yes. Yes, I’m her mother. I see.”
I hoped the officer assumed her incoherence came from shock. My heart thudded at how close we had both come to letting slip the secret that could forever change life in the Parisi home.
“Ma’am. Pardon me for saying this, but you don’t seem to be in any shape to drive.” He looked around as concerned neighbors—unused to the sight of a police car in their conservative, well-to-do enclave—peered through windows and open front doors. “We seem to already be attracting a fair amount of attention. Perhaps you’d like to hop in and we can bring you down to the station? You can contact your attorney from there, if you like.”
Ms. Parisi nodded and turned to me. “Can you? Would you mind?”
“Of course,” I said, and took her trembling hand.
The officer turned off the flashing lights and opened the back door. I slid in onto a hard plastic molded seat. The rough nonskid material gave me a bit of rug burn as I scooted across to make room for Ms. Parisi.
She climbed in, still dazed, feeling the spot where a door handle would have been and took in her unlikely surroundings. “There are no seat belts.”
“No, ma’am. Injury risk.”
I tried to block out the images of those who had previously occupied this seat as the officer pulled away from the house and headed toward the main road. He picked up the radio to report the presence of two passengers en route to the station.
I took advantage of his distraction to whisper to Ms. Parisi. “Gordon? I thought her middle name was Guinevere. Why would you risk—”
She leaned close. “At the time, I thought it would be a nice memento.” She waved away the absurdity of her words. “I’m sure the morphine from the C-section didn’t help my reasoning powers at the time. I romantically thought she’d appreciate the nod to her parentage down the road. How was I supposed to know that before she was even old enough to realize she had a middle name, his would be plastered all around the world? Obviously, there was a lot about that time in my life I hadn’t thought through.”
“But Anne hates ‘Guinevere’—you always said her middle name was a family name.”
“In a way, it was.” Ms. Parisi shrugged off the irony with a weary sigh. “What was I going to do? I don’t lie to my daughter, Quigley, but this is one little detail she’s not fully aware of.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just one of those things that wasn’t an issue, until suddenly it was. He hit it big about the same time I had to register her for kindergarten. It seemed so insignificant; I just changed it on the paperwork to ‘Guinevere.’ She was already a bit of a spark plug, and I hoped she’d never be tempted to use such an old-fashioned name. The Department of Motor Vehicles only uses a middle initial, so it just never really came up.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” She nodded. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but let’s just hope it’s not anything that draws too much attention. My God, do you have any idea what she might be up to?”
My mind went straight to T-Shirt’s crew, but I didn’t want to rat my best friend out if it was something completely different. Considering Anne’s mood, it could be anything. Still, my loyalty to Ms. Parisi pulled at me.
“Here we are,” the officer said, saving me from the tough call.
The officer ushered us through a back door into a long hallway that smelled faintly of ammonia. The blank, cream-painted concrete walls and antiseptic square offices reminded me more of a hospital or school than what I would have imagined a police station to be like. He stopped in front of a room with a single, large glass window facing the hall. Tiny lines of steel ran through the glass creating a diamond pattern you’d notice only if you were actively trying to ignore the view through the pane. A pale and defeated Anne sat hunched over on a bench in the otherwise empty room. She looked half her age.
“She’s right in here. We haven’t processed her yet. We wanted to reach you before the media did. It’s not procedure, but if you’d like to have a few words? Then you can call your attorney, and we have some paperwork you need to fill out.” He turned to me. “I’m sorry, but you’ll need to stay here.”
I nodded, strangely relieved. Down the hall, a tall man wearing a suit even I could tell was expensive had his arm protectively around T-Shirt’s shoulders as they walked to what appeared to be the main desk. Two other suits carrying man bags blatantly ignored the NO CELL PHONES signs and flanked the pair. The grim-faced officer seemed unimpressed by T-Shirt’s entourage, perhaps due to the day’s words of cottony wisdom: WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHY AM I IN THIS HANDBASKET?
Inside, Ms. Parisi plastered Anne’s face with kisses and smothered her to her chest.
A matronly, uniformed woman approached. “I’m ready for her now.”
The officer cracked the door. “Ms. Parisi, we’ll need you to come handle some paperwork.” He turned to Anne. “Officer Munroe will take you to get your fingerprints and photographs for the file.”
Ms. Parisi flinched at fingerprints. She clung to Anne’s arm for a moment before giving her a quick hug and kissing her forehead with a pained fake smile of reassurance. Officer Munroe’s far more believable kind and businesslike smile helped ease the tension as she led Anne past us to another room. I touched Anne’s arm lightly, but my presence didn’t even registe
r on her exhausted face.
I sat in the cold office chair and wrapped my legs around the metal legs to stretch. Ms. Parisi spoke heatedly into her cell phone, earning a nasty look from the desk. As she stepped outside to finish her call, the realization hit that I had somehow ended an otherwise lousy day sitting all by myself in a strange police station.
“Shouldn’t be long now,” Ms. Parisi said. Her perfect lip liner smudged as she absently bit her lip. “I can’t tell you what it means to have you here.”
I reached out and squeezed her clenched hands, triggering her ragged intake of breath I feared might turn into a sob. She composed herself and stared straight ahead, still clutching my hand hard enough to leave faint crescent marks from her manicured nails.
After what seemed to be hours, Ms. Parisi’s attorney secured the necessary permissions from a judge, and we prepared to leave the station and the ordeal behind us, for the moment.
“Thankfully, Anne’s still a minor. Public access to the police reports should be restricted, as long as there aren’t any leaks,” Ms. Parisi said as we waited for Anne’s official release. She lowered her voice. “Including her full name and mug—well, images.”
I nodded and yawned.
“Poor thing, I’m sorry for keeping you so long. Thank you for being here with me, you’re a good friend—to us both,” she said. “I’ve called a cab. I think the neighborhood’s had enough excitement for one day without any more patrol car appearances. It’s probably not the best night to stay over. Can we drop you on our way?”
“Actually, I’m way out of your way. Anne probably just wants to get home. I think I’ll try Zander, if it’s okay.”
Ms. Parisi smiled. “Just check in with your parents first, okay, Quigley? We like to know where you girls are.”
“Okay, Ms. Parisi.”
Zander’s phone rang nine times. It was really late. Maybe he was sleeping. But it clicked the way it does when someone hits ignore—strange, since Zander always clicked over to tell me if he was tied up. I hung up, checked the number, and tried again.
