On each silk-covered table rests a pair of iPads, where clients can access the Boomerang site, create profiles, even enter a drawing for a year’s free membership. Mostly, I want it to feel intimate and sexy here, with my film reminding them of what a big, lovely adventure dating can be.
As long as you’re not me.
“Ethan, you stud!” exclaims Paolo, and jogs the last few yards to the display to give Ethan a vigorous bro hug, which consists of half handshake, half chest bump.
My own footsteps slow, and Ethan looks up at me. I smile, and he smiles, but I don’t believe either of us.
Then he turns away and starts to confer with Rhett, who I now see is on his hands and knees on the floor, plugging cables into a chain of tidily arranged power strips.
Rhett sees me, gets to his feet, and dusts off his hands. “How’s it going, Mia? You ready to rock Adam’s world?”
My whole body goes cold, and I fire a look at Ethan. Did he tell Rhett about my text?
But Ethan gives me a subtle head shake, like he’s reading my mind, and I feel a weird bubble of hysteria rising in me. Is everything—every casual comment—going to remind me of him? If I never see him again after this weekend, do I still have to carry him with me everywhere I go? And for how long?
“Mia?”
“Sorry, yeah.” I say. “Just going to get the video connected and test run it a few times.” Then I just have to wait for a banner delivery with my slogan: Life is short. Make it an adventure. Catering will come Monday morning.
“Sounds good. Let me know if you need help.”
Apparently, Raylene agrees with Rhett. His face has fleshed out a bit in the last month or so. And he seems less coiled and intense. More teddy bear, less Skeletor.
It occurs to me how many couples have gotten together in the few months Ethan and I have been working together: Raylene and Rhett; Paolo and Mark, who used to work in accounting; Skyler and Brian. It’s like we’re some kind of a relationship version of Dorian Gray. Everyone around us hooks up, and we keep disintegrating.
Okay, Mia, focus.
I head around to the back of the display, where I’m going to connect my laptop to run the video.
“Hey, Paolo, do we have HDMI cables around here somewhere?”
Paolo comes around to my side of the booth, holding a set of cables in each hand.
“Is it the one with weird prongs that look like a smiley face?”
“Umm . . . No. I don’t know what that is.” I hold out my hand for both cables but don’t recognize either. “Crap. Not what I need.”
Music blares from Ethan’s side of the display, followed by a sharp whooshing sound.
“Oh, that’s sick, E,” says Rhett, and I can’t help myself. I have to see.
Over on Ethan’s turf, I find Rhett wearing a vinyl glove with glinting metal plates on the knuckles. A screen in front of him displays a grid with heart-shaped signposts measuring distance in ten-foot increments.
“I’m going for thirty this time,” Rhett says. He hefts an imaginary object in his gloved hand, then cocks his arm back and swings it at the screen. A red-and-blue boomerang, bearing the Boomerang logo, comes whipping in from the corner of the screen. It soars past the ten-foot marker, the twenty, and almost makes it to thirty before spinning in the air and coming back toward Rhett.
He bounces on his feet and lunges forward, hand closing on air. On the screen, an animated hand passes right through the boomerang, and it disappears from the screen. Red letters appear: “MISSED.”
“You grabbed for it too quickly,” says Ethan, and his tone carries the same amused patience it does when he coaches his kids. “Wait ’til it fills about a third of the screen and snap it up then.”
“Got it.” Rhett does it again, and after a couple of tries, he’s flinging the virtual boomerang at least forty feet and nabbing it back on each try.
“There you go,” says Ethan, and then he finally notices me standing there.
“It’s looking really good,” I tell him. “All of it.”
And it’s true. Everything looks polished and put together on this side. Appealing. Like him.
“Thanks.” He brushes his bangs off his forehead, and I feel a full-body longing to do it for him. Just for an excuse to touch him.
“Hey, do you guys have an extra HDMI cable?”
“About six of them,” Rhett says. “Help yourself.”
I look to Ethan for confirmation that it’s okay, but he’s already bending over a tangle of cords to find me what I need. “Here you go,” he says, and hands it over. “More here if you need anything.”
We stand there for another awkward moment before I think to say thanks and retreat back to my side of things.
There I connect my laptop, power it on, and wait. Paolo drifts back over to Ethan’s side, and I can hear the three of them taking turns on the game and talking about what time to bring in seating and food on Monday.
Once my desktop icons appear on the big projection screen, I go into the folder for my presentation. I click on it, and a box appears on the screen: “Error 2048—File type unsupported.”
But I’ve run the file a dozen times already. I know it’s supported. I try again. Same error.
A swell of panic laps at my brain, but I force it back. I stored an extra version of the file in the cloud, just in case.
But as I sign into the hotel’s wireless and sign into my account, I feel the stirrings of nausea in my belly. I download and click on the file.
“Error 2048—File type unsupported.”
Because of course I must have saved it after it became corrupted somehow. How else was this day going to go?
A taste of something metallic rises in my throat, and my body goes limp. I sink into a chair at one of the café tables.
I’m screwed. Ethan has the perfect, smart presentation going over there, and I’ve got nothing. A weird fake café with some iPads at the table. That’s going to absolutely dazzle the investors.
But I don’t really care about that. I just don’t want to humiliate Adam—or myself. And I have no idea how to spare either of us.
“Mia?”
I look up, and of course, it’s Adam, standing there in all of his elegant glory, in charcoal jeans and a tailored black oxford.
Then I notice that he’s left a button in the middle of the shirt undone, and for the first time since we’ve met, his expression is grim.
“What’s—”
“It’s your mother,” he says, holding his cell phone out to me. “She’s been trying to reach you.”
Chapter 50
Ethan
Q: Crises: wake you up or shut you down?
Zeke designed the advanced mode on the boomerang game so it’s like skeet shooting: when you hit Start, a series of three targets—hearts, which I thought were going to be cheesy but actually look pretty badass—appear across the sky on screen. Only one of them is the “right” heart—distinguishable by the quick flash of red that illuminates it the instant before you have to throw. The goal is to hit that one while avoiding the others and still catch the boomerang when it comes back.
It’s genius—and addicting.
The only problem, for me, is that the red is right in my color-blindness blind spot, which makes it almost impossible for me to see the cue.
Almost impossible.
I hit Start, wiggle my fingers in the glove, ready to try again. Most of my booth is set-up, and I can feel the other vendors’ envy. Once Mia figures out her file problem, I’ll have a little more competition, but right now, my display is the one to beat.
“Ethan,” Rhett says, catching my arm just as I’m about to launch the boomerang. “You better get over here.”
His tone of voice sends a shot of adrenaline through me, and I wonder if someone else is hurt. This exhibit floor is a hazard. One of the GetLucky.com people already fell off a stepladder and twisted an ankle. I follow Rhett, hoping none of our team is hurt—that Mia isn’t—and that it’s just
the file problem she needs help with. But as I come around to her side of the booth, all bright white and stylish, I stop in my tracks.
Mia stands by one of the café tables, a cell phone pressed to her ear. Her shoulders are bunched, and she’s still, like her entire body is bracing and distressed. Adam stands beside her. Adam, whose personal worth is about fifty million dollars over anyone else’s in this convention hall, and who isn’t supposed to show up until tomorrow, when the show starts.
As soon as he sees me, he waves me over. His hair is wet and uncombed like he had to rush from a shower, and he has a five o’clock shadow—which he’s never had before.
“Her grandmother,” he says quietly.
Jesus. My whole body goes numb. Nana.
Mia still hasn’t said a word. She stares vacantly into space, listening to someone on the other end.
“What happened?” I ask.
“She’s in the hospital,” Adam says. “I don’t know anything else. Mia’s mother called me. She had my number from a piece I commissioned. I guess this hall is a dead zone for Mia’s phone.”
We stand there, me and Rhett and Adam, a small protective circle around Mia. Cookie wanders over, quiet and rigid. I give her a look, letting her know if she dares say a word—about anything—I will physically silence her, and she avoids my gaze, wisely choosing to stand down.
Across the booth, Paolo, Sadie, Pippa, and Mark watch—and even beyond, people have taken notice. Our booth was generating lots of buzz before. Now it’s drawing the somber attention that only comes from tragedy.
“How critical, Mom?” Mia says finally, her voice thin and shaky. It’s quiet again as she listens. Then, “but she’s going to live, right? She’ll be okay, right?”
Fuck the job. Fuck everything.
I put my arm around her shoulders, and her eyes are still far away, in Los Angeles, but her weight shifts slightly onto me.
“Okay,” Mia says. “Okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine, okay? You just worry about Nana. I love you. Bye.” She hands Adam his phone and says, “Thank you,” and we’re all standing there waiting for her to explain, but she doesn’t. She’s off the phone, but it’s like she’s still listening to her mother’s voice.
“Mia,” I say. “What happened to Nana?”
She looks up. When she speaks, it’s only to me. “She was hit by a car. She’s in bad shape. All broken. They don’t even know how badly yet. And she has some internal bleeding, and she hit her head, and—” her voice breaks, and I tighten my arms around her.
“It’s okay, Mia. What else?”
“The doctors don’t know if she’ll make it.”
I draw her against me because she’s so close to the edge now, so close to losing control. I can feel it like it’s me, my own body. And I can’t give her privacy but I can give her me. My arms will have to do right now.
“I’m going back with her,” I say to Adam.
It should have been a question. He’s my boss. But it wasn’t.
Paolo’s here. I only notice him when he speaks. “We just checked all the major airlines,” he says. “Flights are booked out of Vegas until noon. You’d get there faster if you drove.”
Adam looks from Paolo to me. He fishes his keys out of his pocket and holds them out. “It’s faster than her Prius,” he says, handing them to me.
I take them, tuck Mia under my arm, and we’re gone.
Back to Los Angeles.
Chapter 51
Mia
Q: Who always has your back?
The drive back to Los Angeles goes by in a blur. Highway. Desert. Dust.
My dad calls at one point to fill me in, and I find out that my grandmother wandered down the canyon road in her nightgown. In the dead of night. The car that struck her had a seventeen-year-old girl at the wheel, the daughter of new neighbors my parents just had over for dinner.
I give Ethan the report. “Nana’s in surgery to stop the bleeding and repair a punctured lung. She’s got a broken hip, a broken nose, and one of her legs is completely shattered. They still don’t know . . .” But I can’t say the rest of it.
“It’s going to be okay, Curls,” Ethan says, his voice soft but so filled with certainty, he almost convinces me. He takes my hand and squeezes it. “Let’s just get you there.”
And he does. Faster than should be possible, we pull up to the entrance of Cedars-Sinai.
“I’ll park and find you,” he says. Then he lifts my hand to his lips, and immediately, the tears I’ve been working so hard not to shed spill out of me. “I’ll be right there. Go.”
Vision fogged, I race through the sliding glass doors and find my way through a maze of sterile hallways to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit, in a totally different building. There they have me call from the lobby before I’m allowed to head up to the surgical floor. By the time the elevator doors close, my body is drenched in sweat, and I can’t stop the tears from coming. I feel like I’m in a nightmare where letters blur to nothing in front of my eyes and where every step feels like it takes an inhuman effort.
Finally, I find the waiting area. My mom sits on a vinyl-cushioned chair, staring up at a monitor that lists patient names and statuses. She sees me and gets to her feet. We collide in a clumsy hug, and my mom’s tears wet my cheek. I tighten my arms around her, and we stand there for a bit, then she sinks into a chair and pulls me down beside her.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He went for coffee,” she replies. “And your grandmother’s on her way out of her first surgery. They stopped the bleeding and repaired the damage to her lung. I guess they did what they could with her broken bones too. But . . .” It feels like my heart stops beating while I wait for her to finish. “We have to see if she wakes from surgery. Her brain’s injured, and she just might not . . . regain consciousness.”
I think about the photos she just showed me and of that bold, wry look on her face, the same expression I’ve seen a thousand times. That girl who marched in Alabama, who was one of only nineteen women in all of New York State to receive a paralegal degree in 1963, still lives in my grandmother. I can’t imagine this is the end of that person or the end of the life she’s lived since.
Even though she’s been slipping away for years, I’m not ready to let her go.
“She’ll wake up,” I say. “She’s so strong.”
“And stubborn.”
I smile. “That too.”
My dad arrives with a cardboard holder loaded with coffee cups. He sets them down on a scratched laminate table and gives me a fierce hug. Then he smooths the hair back from my face and kisses my forehead.
“Where’s Ethan?” he asks.
“He’ll be up soon.”
“I’m glad he brought you,” my mother says. “I couldn’t stand to think of you traveling here alone.”
I know what she means. I’ve had this feeling since we left Las Vegas of being more vulnerable, of having spent my life in some kind of protective bubble that burst with Nana’s accident. I know it’s crazy, that no such bubble exists, but I’m still drenched in that feeling of fragility.
“What happened? Why was she out there this time?”
My mom shoots a look at my dad, but neither of them speaks.
“What? What it is?”
My dad sits down next to me and puts a cup of coffee in my hands. “She got on a tear this afternoon. Going on and on about that girl again. The one she thinks keeps stealing things from her.”
“Who is that girl? Is it one of the home health aides?” I don’t believe she’s stealing from Nana, but I can believe my Nana would get that idea in her head and not let go. “What was she missing this time?”
“Her photos,” my mom says softly, and she gives me a strange, sad look. “And the film reel from Selma.”
“She gave those to me.” I start, and then the reality sweeps through me, and it’s like a punch in the gut. “Wait. I’m the girl?” How can that be?
But I can’t deny the sense of i
t. The way she constantly tried to give me things—her jewelry and old photos. That video. And the last home health aide I met was Grace, an older woman. I don’t know why I didn’t put it together sooner.
I sit with it for a while, a cold ache in my chest. It’s devastating to imagine myself so thoroughly rewritten in my Nana’s mind. It feels like such a betrayal. But I know that’s wishful thinking in a way, like my protective bubble. Even though it’s totally unfair, it’s as real to my Nana as the rest of her unreliable thoughts.
A doctor comes out in scrubs, his surgical mask wadded beneath his chin. At the same moment, the elevator doors open, and Ethan steps out. Seeing the doctor, he hangs back, but my mom beckons him over.
“Well, she’s a fighter,” the doctor says. “She’s coming around from the anesthesia.”
I start to sob on the spot, I’m so happy.
My mom squeezes my hand. “Oh, thank God.”
“But she’s got a long uphill battle, and a tough one given your reports of dementia. Her leg’s going to be held together with pins for months, and between that and damage to her spine, it’s unlikely she’ll ever walk again.”
“But she’s alive,” my dad points out, and the doctor nods.
He goes on to detail her injuries, which were even more horrific and extensive than I’d imagined, and then takes us through her surgeries, which sound even more gruesome—though completely miraculous, too.
“When can we see her?” I ask.
“You can go in now, though she’ll be asleep for a while still. They only let one person into SICU at a time and only for five minutes each hour. Your grandmother still requires a great deal of care, so we need to keep the room as clear as possible.”
“Mia Moré,” my dad says. “Why don’t you go in first?”
“Me? Shouldn’t that be Mom?”
But my mother shakes her head and says, “No, he’s right. You go. Then we’ll find you a flight back to Las Vegas.”
“No, I don’t need to—”
“Mia,” my mother says. “Your grandmother’s in excellent hands, and we’re only allowed to see her for five minutes at a time. She’d be thoroughly livid to think she kept you from an opportunity. You can see her tomorrow morning and then head back.”
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