“Well, how have you two been doing this week?” the doctor asked. Nina shrugged and made a noise which sounded like “N’kay,” and Cee Cee said nothing. She thought seriously about grabbing Nina by the neck and shaking her hard enough to scare the shit out of her, and to maybe scare out a confession, too, knowing that the shrink would pull her off before she really hurt her.
“Did you have a drug test, Nina?” Florrie asked matter-offactly.
“No,” Nina said. “Why would I?” As though a drug test had never been discussed in this office.
Florrie looked at Cee Cee as if to ask her why anybody who had been as crazily convinced one week ago that her kid was taking drugs wouldn’t have pushed her to take the promised test, but Cee Cee looked away from her at Nina.
“Nina,” Cee Cee said, pausing before she asked the next, wishing
she didn’t have to. “Where’s the emerald ring?”
“What?”
“Your mother’s emerald ring. The one Neetie tried to take from you. Remember how excited we were when it finally fit your finger? And you wore it a few times to parties. Where is it?” There was a long pause, during which the silence drummed away in Cee Cee’s ears.
“I lost it.”
“When?”
“A while ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? You knew it was insured. In fact that
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was why we decided it was okay for you to wear it every now and then. I could have reported it and you could have had the money to replace it. Do you remember where you lost it?”
“If I remembered where I lost it, I could go there and get it and it wouldn’t be lost, would it?” The bitchiness in her voice helped Cee Cee to proceed, and ask a question to which sadly she knew the answer.
“Are you lying?”
“I forgot about the insurance,” Nina said, looking hurt and slumping into the chair, “and | know how emotional you get and | thought you’d go crazy. Besides, it was my ring. My mother left it to me. So why should I have to answer to you? I lost it.”
“Well, I found it,” Cee Cee said and pulled the ring from her pocket, where she had been holding it tightly in her fist all the way to the doctor’s office from the school, and which she now held up as the three of them looked at its deep green glow catching the overhead light. “I stopped Nancy at school today and bought it back for you. And my compact too.”
“Oh, shit!” Nina cried with an embarrassed agonized howl. “I hate you so much,” and she covered her face with her hands.
“So you’ve been conning us, Nina. Conning Cee Cee for a long time. Covering your tracks very well. That must have been a hard job,” Florrie said quietly.
“Did you take my car out at night?” Cee Cee asked.
From behind her hands, Nina nodded a slight nod. “When you were sleeping. A lot of times.”
Cee Cee felt cold all over. “Nina, what did I do? Where did I screw it all up? Why didn’t you tell me what I was doing wrong?”
Nina took her hands away from her face now and got to her feet. All her coolness was gone and her face was splotchy with anger and her hair askew. “Guess what?” she said, glaring into Cee Cee’s face. “This time it isn’t about you, Cee Cee. For once in our lives, something isn’t about you, it’s about me! Me! I am sick of you trying to make everything in the world about you.” And she rushed to the door and with a grunt pulled the inner door toward her, then forced herself against the outer door, ran through the waiting room, and with a slam of that door was gone.
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When she wasn’t home by ten that night, Cee Cee sat with the high school roster and called the home of every girl she ever remembered being in her home. Some were asleep and their sympathetic-voiced parents said they had no idea where Nina was. Some phones didn’t answer. Soon in her anguish Cee Cee wasn’t sure which ones she had called and which ones she hadn’t. She thought about calling Kcvin Myers, but over the past year, probably because hanging around with him hadn’t been considered cool, Nina had pretty much phased him out of her life.
At two in the morning she still sat with her hand on the phone, trembling with exhaustion, not sure if she should call the police or drive the streets and look for Nina herself. Runaways. She had skipped over that chapter in the book about parents and teenagers, not even imagining it would ever be necessary to read it. Now she read it.
Running is almost always a cry for help, and you must face these needs and learn to deal with them. Over a million teenagers choose this solution every year and the average runner is a fifteen-year-old girl. Usually within a few days your child will be back at home.
Please God. As the sun came up, Cee Cee walked upstairs with a blinding headache and a heart that felt ripped in half and called Doctor Kagan. When she got the answering service, she begged them to let her hold on while they tracked her down.
“Cee Cee, what news?” the doctor said within minutes.
“What should I do?” she asked. “Tell me what to do. Should I drive all over town looking in alleys? Should I hire a detective? Should I call the hospitals and the morgue? Please tell me what I’m supposed to do, because I can’t stand not knowing where she is. What if she needs food? What if she thinks I won’t take her back? I have to tell her that I’m going to help her through this.”
“Cee Cee, what I’m going to tell you will be the hardest thing for you, but I think you need to wait, to give it another day or two, let her play this out, because | believe she wants to come home and that you’ll hear from her very soon.”
Barbara Waiters and her crew would be arriving in a few hours to tape an interview with her, and Cee Cee knew she looked as horrible as she felt. So what if I look like shit, she thought. Dear God, bring me my kid back safe and I’ll turn in all the fame, all the nominations,
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and every fucking ticket anybody ever bought to come and see me anywhere. But the phone didn’t ring with any word of Nina, and after a blazing hot shower, which Cee Cee took with the shower door open and the phone pulled across the bathroom so she could hear it in case it rang while she was in there, and three cups of coffee she brewed so strong they could wake the dead, she answered the door to her makeup lady by saying, “I think you’ve got your work cut out for you today, girl.”
She could hear Barbara Walters’s crew arriving as the base coat and concealer and blusher were being applied, and while her face was being powdered in place, and her hair Was teased, combed, and sprayed into obedience, she tried desperately from some reserve tank of wherewithal to dredge up some enthusiasm for the interview she had made a commitment to give. Finally with a face painted on that magically brightened her own pale-with-fatigue one, she dressed in a soft pink jersey shirt and pants and went into her living room, which was now filled with cameras and technicians and lights, to chat with Barbara Waiters. And as she passed the assistant producer, she thought she heard the young woman doing a last-minute check on details before they started to shoot.
“Telephone bells turned off?” Cee Cee heard her ask.
“No!” Cee Cee vhirled around and shouted. “You can’t shut the
phones off, I’m expecting an urgent call!”
“But we —”
“No! You can’t shut the phones off and that’s final!”
The young woman looked over Cee Cee’s head at the producer, who gave an everybody-has-their-own-craziness nod back to say it was okay to leave the phone bells alone, and Cee Cee went in to meet Barbara Walters. But the phone didn’t ring at all.
“You’re a busy lady. A movie star, a producer, a single mother. Tell me about your daughter.”
The lights were hot and Cee Cee held tightly to the arm of the sofa. She was trembling and weak and so sick inside she was sure it had to show, but she fixed her face into the Cee Cee Bloom position and answered. “She’s sensational,” she said. “A joy and a gem and
the light of my life.”
The interviev seemed to take all day. Questions about her past, her marriage, her television show, her films, her future plans, but
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later when the lights were turned off and Barbara Waiters left after thanking her for a great interview and the crew had cleared out, she sat by the telephone again, and all she could remember about the interview was what she had said about Nina.
There was no word that night either, and the next morning, after about an hour’s sleep, she went to have her dress for the ()scars fitted at Bob Mackie’s studio. The dress was long and slinky and covered with bugle beads, and when it was finished it would fit her like a glove. Cee Cee stood still as Bob Mackie circled her, congratulating her for the nomination with his sweet boyish smile, amazed at how thin she was these days. And that was when she realized she hadn’t eaten anything in nearly two days.
When the fitting was over, she went into the three-way-mirrored dressing room to slip the dress off carefully to avoid the pins, but before she did, she leaned against the center mirror and watched as an infinite number of Cee Cees in all directions covered their faces and wept.
Three days had passed. It was a Monday afternoon and Cee Cee was in her office, in a meeting for her next film. The director, the writer, the two producers, and all of the development people, Cee Cee’s and the studio’s, sat spread around the room, on chairs, on the sofas, and on the floor, talking about the script and some of the last-minute changes, when the door opened.
“Cee Cee,” her secretary said, “it’s Nina.” Her face looked alarmed. Cee Cee left the meeting, walked to her secretary’s desk in the outer
office, and took the phone.
“Hello?”
The voice on the other end of the line was Nina’s but in a panic that made it sound shrill and eerie. “Cee Cee, you have to help me. I can’t breathe and my face is swollen and I… I’m sorry, but I snorted something at Lisa’s and I…”
“Where’s Lisa’s house?” Cee Cee asked her.
“On Tigers Trail. Six four one.”
“Hang on, I’m coming,” Cee Cee said and hung up.
She drove like a maniac over the canyon, running stop signs and red lights, and when she reached Lisa’s house she double-parked and ran up the steps, tried the door, and barged into the house. There
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were dozens of crumpled tissues all over the floor and the chairs, and
Lisa sat crying on the sofa, holding bunched-up tissues to her face. “I’m okay,” she said, “but she’s really bad.”
Cee Cee heard a loud moan, which she recognized as Nina’s, and followed the sound to a little chintz and ruffled powder room where Nina crouched over the toilet retching and vomiting. Cee Cee put an
arm around her, brushed her hair from her face, and held her head. “Sorry, Cee, I’m sorry,” Nina said.
Cee Cee wet a washcloth with cold water to wash Nina’s face, which, now that the girl turned to her, she could see was swollen and distorted. And when Nina looked up and. caught sight of herself in the mirror, she wailed, “Oh God,” and Cee Cee could hear by the gurgled sound of the wail that her throat was closing.
The doctor in the emergency room told Cee Cee they had to intubate Nina because her vocal chords were swollen and her airway was in jeopardy of obstructing, which could have killed her if they’d been a few minutes later. The swollen face was an angioneurotic edema, caused by the drug. It was crank, a mixture of speed and God knows what else that had been used to cut it. Lisa had been put into a separate hospital room from Nina with only a dripping nose, and by the time her parents, a curly haired conservative-looking man in a gray suit, and a pretty blond mother, arrived at the hospital, Cee Cce was standing beaten and drained in the waiting room, placing her fourth phone call to Florrie, but still getting only the answering service. The parents didn’t see her as they passed, but Cee Cee, who recognized them from school meetings, heard the father say to the mother, “| told you Nina probably got drugs from that piece of garbage Cee Cee Bloom and then gave them to Lisa. But you’d never listen, would you ?”
“Shut up, Frank,” she heard the woman answer.
Cee Cee’s first impulse was to run after the guy, grab him by the throat, and scream obscenities into his face. To tell him it was his kid who got the dope, not her kid, and she started out the door to go after him, but stopped when she saw Florrie walking briskly down the corridor toward her.
“I got your message and came immediately. Is she all right?”
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“The doctor said she will be,” Cee Cec said. “Can I see her?” I’ll take you in.”
Nina had a tube in her nose that was draining and a tube coming out of her mouth, and though Cee Cee had already seen her, each time she looked at her this way she had to hold on to the footboard of the bed to keep her knees from buckling under her. Nina narrowed her eyes when she looked at Florric and realized who it was, and she wouldn’t even look at Cee Cee.
“Nina,” Florrie said, “it must feel pretty horrible being in that bed with all of those tubes in you, knowing that you came very close to dying. And I think it’s significant that you called Cee Cee to come and save you instead of calling an ambulance yourself. Does that just mean you were afraid the police would find out about the drugs? Or does it mean that you’re finally ready to accept Cee Cee’s help with your drug problem?”
Nina stared at the ceiling. Cee Cee’s face and body hurt with anxiety and pain, looking at this baby, this young child, so disfigured and destroyed by the abuse she’d brought on herself in this horrible way. God give me strength, she used to hear her own mother utter every day of her life. And now it was what she found herself asking, God give me the strength to get through this one. Leona, she thought, I’m using your prayer because I finally get it, l finally understand you, and I’m sorry for every time I ever made you worry about me. For every time I shrieked at you, hated you, wanted to hurt you and didn’t know why. Because now, at last, I understand how you felt. How a mother feels. And I wish you were around to say you told me so.
“Dear girl,” Florrie said to Nina, “perhaps now we can begin our treatment, because I’m sure that after this you’ll be willing to make a commitment to stop using drugs. Won’t you?”
Nina’s response to Florrie’s question was to turn her face back to the ceiling with an expression that, despite the helpless state and her supine position, still managed to look defiant. Florrie took Cee Cee by
the elbow and moved her out of the room into the hospital corridor. “What do I do?” Cee Cee asked.
“You put her into detox and then a rehab program. I know an excellent one in Newport Beach. You take her there, you leave her there,
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you do whatever you can to find out why she uses and try to change that, which can be a long and painful process. But Cee Cee, mostly . .” Florrie put her hand on Cee Cee’s arm. “Mostly you pray.”
The sky was a muddy brown as Cee Cce drove south on the San Diego Freeway. Nina was asleep in the passenger seat; her face, though still puffy around the eyelids, was almost back to it’s normal size. That morning at St. Johns Hospital she had stared out the window, sullen and pouting while Cee Cee packed the few toiletries she had used in the last few days and was allowed to take with her to the rehabilitation clinic. Her clothes were packed and waiting in the car per Florrie’s instructions that Cee Cee take her directly to the drug clinic, because a stop at home could be disruptive to the process.
“Many times parents have said, ‘We’re just stopping off to pick up some clothes,’ and when they got home, they were manipulated into changing their minds.”
For a few minutes before they checked out, Florrie sat with the two of them in the cold, metallic, stripped-bare hospital room. A nurse came by pushing a wheelchair as standard hospital pro
cedure to take Nina down to the car, but Cee Cee waved her off.
“Nina,” Florrie said very softly, “can you connect with the specific
pain you’re feeling when you use?”
Nina didn’t answer.
“What does being high give you that you can’t get on your own?” It looked as if Nina wasn’t going to answer, because she continued to stare out the window at the hospital wing opposite, but then she said, “Because my outsides don’t match my insides. Outside I’m this nice
quiet, okay-looking girl, but inside I want to be something else.” “What kind of something else?”
Again she thought for a while, then said, “I want to be able to be funny and tell jokes and have people like me because I have guts, and wear something with rhinestones in it … and unless I’m high I’m too scared.”
Cee Cee couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The kid was gorgeous; so many times she had looked at her in awe of her burgeoning beauty, thinking that she looked like all the beautiful girls Cee Cee had envied all her life. And with a brain and a sense of humor to
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match that beauty. How could she not know that about herself? “So I get high to go to school, because otherwise I’m nobody, and if I have to be nobody, I’d rather be dead.”
“Nina, when you’re high, who’s your behavior model?” Florrie asked her.
The answer was so obvious Cee Cee wanted to blurt it out and would have if Florrie hadn’t raised a hand to stop her. When Nina replied, there was amazement in her voice, because she spoke the answer just as she realized what the answer was.
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