Catch a Falling Star

by Culbertson, Kim

  Mom watched Adam in what she thought was a sly way, but I noticed. “Stop staring at him,” I whispered.

  “I’m not.” She kept staring. “He’s so good-looking.”

  Adam’s phone buzzed. Annoyed, he texted something. “Adam, if you have to go, you can go,” I told him. “We’ll be fine.”

  He tucked his phone into the pocket of his lemon-colored shorts. “They need to reshoot something. Hunter’s imploding. You sure you’re okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I assured him. “The doctor said he’s not in critical condition.”

  Adam glanced first at me and then at Mom, his face creased with concern. “You can call if you need anything.” He crossed the room in big strides and gave me a sloppy bear hug, my body enveloped; before I could hug him back, he stepped away, engulfing Mom next.

  Surprised, Mom gaped at me over his shoulder. Pulling back, he nodded once more at me before disappearing through the glass doors of the hospital into the purpled light. I could see Mik idling the Range Rover through the window, his brake lights glowing. Several hospital employees standing outside perked up as they watched Adam climb into the back. They watched the Range Rover disappear.

  “What was that?” Mom adjusted her shirt.

  “Turns out, the jerk’s a pretty nice guy.” I studied the spot where the Range Rover had been parked. I would miss Adam Jakes when he left Little in a few days. That, at least, was the truth. I wasn’t sure about all that had happened between us, about our blurry line between what was real and what was scripted, but I knew when he left, he would leave behind an Adam-shaped space in my life.

  Dad emerged into the room, his face pale. He twisted his baseball cap in his hands. “We can go see him.” He motioned for us, his face sad. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”

  Pretty bad shape didn’t really cover it. I hovered in the doorway, my breath caught somewhere in my chest. John was like wadded-up Kleenex, a crumple in the bed under pale sheets. His body seemed like one tie-dyed bruise, swirls of yellow, blue, purple, and rust covering his skin. His left eye was swollen, like a halved apple had been fastened to his face, and his mouth had a gash bisecting it perpendicularly, dividing it into quadrants. He was bandaged, wrapped, taped, stapled, essentially held together like a rag toy.

  My brother, the patchwork quilt.

  Mom made a sound like a wounded animal, a whimper. Slowly, she went to his side, touched his arm. He stirred, one eye opening only a slit, the other not opening at all.

  “Mom?” He tried to sit up.

  “Don’t,” she breathed, her voice shaking. “Don’t try to move.”

  They whispered a bit to each other. Finally, Dad motioned for Mom to follow him into the hall. They brushed past me in the doorway, and I went to sit with my brother.

  “You don’t look so hot.” I smoothed some hair out of his eyes.

  “Take pictures,” he managed through his cracked lips.

  We sat in silence for a couple minutes.

  “Carter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t —” He tried to lick his lips, but he couldn’t even manage that. “Don’t give T.J. any money.”

  “I won’t.” I held his hand. “Mom has help for you. She has a place you can go.”

  He blinked one eye at me. “Yeah, she mentioned.” Even under the mounds of blankets and pain medication, I could sense his body resisting.

  “You have to go. It’s best for you.” I squeezed his hand.

  “I know.”

  We listened to the hum of the hospital room, the whirl of the air-conditioning. Someone flushed a toilet in the next room.

  I wanted to ask him where T.J. was, if we could do anything, but my brother had fallen asleep again.

  Outside, I texted Mik so he could give me a ride home. My parents were staying with John for now, and I would drive my car back to get them. The night had cooled, but compared to the icebox temperature of the hospital, it felt warm. My body shuddered a bit in the sudden freshness of air. It wasn’t too late, maybe ten, but a spray of stars freckled the night sky. I tilted my head up, scanning it, and didn’t see the man until he was standing next to me.

  “Oh!” I started.

  He held up his hands in apology. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” It was the man from the café, the one with the decaf latte who Chloe had powered in front of the other day to show me Adam’s hand on Beckett’s backside. This time, he was dressed in khaki pants and a green polo shirt, and wore a badge on his belt. “I’m Clint Meadows, Senior Investigator.” He gave a nod toward his badge. “Sorry about your brother in there.”

  “Oh, right, thanks.” Investigator? John must have done something pretty bad this time.

  “Did Adam mention he’d given me a call?” I shook my head. Investigator Meadows nodded, his closely cut hair gray in the faint outside lights of the hospital. “Probably best. Adam shadowed with me a while back for a movie he was working on. A week or so ago, he called me about some of the stuff going on with your brother.” He gazed out over the parking lot, narrowing his eyes at a couple of guys leaning against a Honda. He let his eyes slip back to me. “I looked into it. Small stuff, mostly.”

  My mouth went dry. “Not small to us.”

  “Right. No, of course. Listen, I’m heading back to Sac tonight. Got another case I need to get back to, and I already spoke to your parents, but I wanted to let you know you don’t need to worry about T.J. Shay, okay? That kid’s not going to bother your brother anymore.” He rested a cool hand on my shoulder.

  “Really?” This felt too simple, too easy, that Adam could just make a call and — poof! — the bad guy’s gone. Of course, T.J. wasn’t the real problem; he was just feeding on the real problem. And the world had plenty of T.J.s.

  Investigator Meadows let his hand drop away from my shoulder. “What happened to your brother in there, well, that looks bad right now, but it was the sort of thing we needed to grab T.J. and his brother. They messed around in waters they weren’t prepared to swim in, if you know what I mean. Been watching too many Mafia movies, in my opinion, and got a bit big for their britches. What a couple of idiots.”

  I didn’t know the details, but if Investigator Meadows had bought my brother some time to figure himself out, I had no way to repay him. “Thank you.”

  He pulled out a phone, frowned at the screen. “You’re welcome,” he said, tucking it back into his pocket. “And tell Adam I said hello. Hope he doesn’t have to hold a gun in this movie. That kid couldn’t hold a gun to save his life.” Laughing, he walked toward a silver sedan, got inside, and drove off down the curve of driveway.

  “wake up, Sleeping Beauty.” Adam sat on the edge of my bed, holding a coffee and some sort of Danish.

  I pulled the covers to my nose, peering into the dim light of my bedroom. “What time is it?” I mumbled. “What kind of Danish is that?”

  “Apple. And get dressed. We’re going on a little trip.” He poked at me through the covers. “Get. Up.”

  I pulled the sheet over my head. “I work at eleven.”

  He pulled the sheet back off my face. “Today you’re not working at all. I’m not long for Little, and I want to take you on a trip.”

  I peered at him. For a guy who’d shot a movie all night, he didn’t even look tired. “My brother’s in the hospital.”

  “Okay, this is ridiculous.” He stood up and whipped the covers from my bed.

  I leaped up. “What if I’d been naked?”

  “Then it would have been my lucky day.” He held up a sundress. “Get dressed.”

  “Another dress?” This one was pale pink with tiny parrots in lime green and white all over it. “It has parrots on it.”

  He tossed it at my head. “There’s a good chance you’ll have your picture taken in that today.”

  “Will they ask me if Polly wants a cracker?” I held the dress up against me.

  “Oh, and you’ll need a swimsuit and a hat and something warm to change into.” With that,
he left the Danish and coffee on my nightstand, and went to wait outside my door.

  We drove to Tahoe. The trip started out in an ordinary enough way. Once we got to Tahoe City, we veered right, stopped at Tahoe House for sandwiches, more coffee, and a half dozen of their amazing raspberry pockets. A few photographers had managed to follow us up there, snapping pictures as Adam smiled at the woman at the counter. After giving a brief wave to the photographers in the parking lot, we drove the pine-lined edge of the lake past Sunnyside, blue flashes of lake breaking through the trees, and, at some point, pulled into a private lakeside home.

  I’d lived near Tahoe my whole life and never once set foot in a house like this one. Mik punched in a code at the gate, and we entered a shady circular driveway. The gate closed behind us, shutting out the world. We got out of the car, and I just stared. The house was massive. Whoever designed the house had clearly decided on a theme of Mountain Extravagance. Seriously, a small forest must have given its life for all the wood constructed in front of me.

  We entered through two polished wood doors into a great room with sweeping ceilings, angled wood beams, gleaming hardwood floors, and smooth granite counters. Adam had said we’d be going to his friend’s “mountain cabin,” but this was the biggest house I’d ever seen. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcased a stretch of green lawn, a private beach, and a wide blue yawn of Lake Tahoe. I moved toward the window to take in the view of the lake.

  When I was little, I’d thought Tahoe was the ocean. Once in a while, my parents would drive us up for the day, and we’d play at the park at Commons Beach. I would stand at the edge of the blue water, looking out at the waves, the color changing in stripes of blue and green and gray. It always seemed like the lake spread out forever, the far mountains blurry.

  “Some view, huh? Sweet cabin.” Adam came to stand beside me at the window. He turned, dropping his bag onto the suede couch in the center of the great room.

  “And by cabin, you mean castle?” I couldn’t pull my eyes from the view. At the end of a gray dock, a sleek speedboat bobbed lazily.

  Adam followed my gaze. “Want to go for a ride?”

  We cut the engine far out in the lake’s blue center, the air swirling around us. The sudden silence crushed against my ears but was soon replaced with the waves lapping the sides of the boat. We’d left Mik on the dock, sprawled in a lawn chair, another romantic spy novel half-finished in his big hands. Watching him stuffed into his chair, his face serene, he became one more piece of all of this I would miss.

  Adam turned from the wheel. He had flipped his hat backward, and he seemed younger somehow, like a small boy playing with his father’s tools. He must have noticed me watching him. “What?”

  “Do you ever feel guilty about all you have?” I motioned to the boat, but also back in the general direction of the house, a gesture meant to imply — all of it. I kicked my legs onto the white cushioned cover of the engine, the boat’s rocking making me sleepy. Everything that had happened with my brother last night felt so far away, like the patchy memory of a dream. In a few weeks, that might be what Adam felt like, too.

  Adam pulled off his shirt, tossing it onto the seat next to him. “Sure, sometimes.”

  I tilted my head, tugging the brim of my hat lower, struck by the way his skin gleamed in the sun. It was like he had no freckles or imperfections or anything, just miles of bronzed skin. It wasn’t fair. Turning my eyes to the water, I said, “I would feel guilty.”

  “Do you feel guilty now?”

  “A little.” I thought about all the magazines devoted to documenting this life Adam led. Celebrity. Wealth. The amount of energy people spent tracking it, wanting it, wishing for it. Mostly, it was harmless. A distraction. For most people, celebrity was a sort of pageant, and peeking in on that world gave them a visible fantasy, a grown-up version of dressing up like a princess or a superhero. Celebrities were like exotic zoo animals, and most of us just watched them through the glass, munching on popcorn.

  But for people like my brother, people with darker, addictive natures, that visible fantasy tipped too far into jealousy, into restlessness, into trying to make something bigger out of something small. He’d started gambling to win something, to be larger than us in some way. And it ate him up.

  “Thanks for what you did for John,” I told him. At his look of surprise, I told him about Investigator Meadows coming to see me last night at the hospital. “He’s hoping you don’t have to hold a gun in this movie.”

  Adam laughed. “Hey, I got pretty good.”

  “I’m sure.” The shadow of a bird passed over the water. “But, seriously, thanks.”

  “Celebrity has its privileges.”

  “Obviously.”

  We were quiet for a minute. “To answer your question, I prefer to feel lucky,” Adam said finally over the sound of the waves. He unwrapped a sandwich, chewed it thoughtfully, his sunglasses full of reflected light and water. “I’ll admit it’s not fair. That I have this life and other people don’t. Absolutely, it’s not fair. But we can only live the life we’ve got.” He shrugged. “If I spend too much time worrying that it’s better than someone else’s or not as good as someone else’s, well, what a miserable way to spend my allotted time on this planet. I don’t want to live like that.” He took another bite of sandwich, staring out over the water.

  I followed his lead, unwrapping my own sandwich. “Who could possibly have a better life than you do?”

  “George Clooney.”

  I laughed. Wasn’t that a funny thing? Even Adam thought someone had it better.

  “But he’s old.”

  Adam smiled at me, plucking a raspberry pocket out of the white bag. “Good point. You’re right. No one has a better life than I do.” But even as he said it, I saw the dark flicker I’d seen that night stargazing when I’d teased him about his arrest, when the light from a passing car had let me see the mask come off, even for a moment.

  We’d come to Tahoe partly because Adam’s friend was throwing a party. I had yet to meet the friend, didn’t even know if he was actually on site, but it wouldn’t be a small party. I could tell by the setup. Adam told me it would be a press-free party, though, so I didn’t need to worry about reporters. Still, he warned me, even specially invited guests and catering staff couldn’t help but tweet things, post things on Facebook, take pictures, so I should consider it a public event. My stomach bubbled with nerves. So far, I hadn’t had to play too much in his world. I had a sense that was about to shift. The house glowed with lights, the energy building as a catering company set up café tables and brought in mounds of food from white vans parked in the circular driveway. A bartender spread out glittering glassware and bottles.

  Around seven thirty, people started buzzing at the gate. Within a half hour, dozens of people milled through the house, stood out on the deck or the lawn, holding cool drinks, chatting with one another. Everyone seemed twenty-one, not a day older or younger. Like life-sized models for the Forever 21 stores. Most of the girls wore sundresses similar to what I had on, their hair in various summery updos, and the guys wore collared shirts and Bermuda shorts, but they all seemed partly gilded, diamond studs glittering in earlobes, expensive watches on tanned wrists. They seemed straight from the pages of The Great Gatsby, walking Instagram photos, bronzed people, who played tennis and golf, darted down ski slopes in the winter — all slightly bored, but still, each stealing glances at Adam over the glimmering rims of their cocktails.

  I hedged closer to the guy passing out the crab cakes.

  Later, as I stood with Adam, who was sampling the shrimp tower, an electric sizzle moved through the room, and I could tell someone important had just arrived. I craned my neck, making out a glossy, dark ponytail. The ponytailed girl turned toward us, her smile flashing, and I heard Adam mutter, “Oh, man, what is she doing here?”

  Ashayla Wimm, her beauty like a tidal wave.

  Adam vanished from my side. I scanned the room, trying to see where he’d g
one, but there was no sign of him.

  Everyone watched Ashayla, this sudden, consuming center of light. Everything else, everyone else became reflections, extras. She worked the room, nodding to people, stopping to chat, her body seemingly made of liquid.

  Then Adam reappeared, like a seal diving then emerging again in a separate space of ocean. Across the room, his back purposefully to Ashayla, he spoke animatedly to a couple dressed in almost identical striped polos. I drifted closer. He was telling them a story from the set, something about Hunter flipping out over the protesters returning, his gestures wide, his voice silvered, the story captivating everyone near him, drawing them to him like moths. They laughed exactly where he wanted them to laugh, eyes widening at all the right places. As he acted out the protester’s retreat, their laughter buoying him, it was clear how much he needed them to be watching him and not Ashayla.

  As his story came to a close, Adam grabbed a cocktail from a passing tray. He swallowed it in two gulps before the waiter had even moved on. I wasn’t an expert, but I was pretty sure someone right out of rehab wasn’t supposed to be sucking down martinis.

  I set my half-eaten shrimp on the edge of the table. Watching him, I couldn’t believe I’d ever, even for a moment, worried about something as small as that picture with Beckett Ray, couldn’t believe I thought Adam and I had begun building a sort of something that could exist as part of the same world, the same sky. I thought of the article Chloe had brought to the café the other day: “The Star and the Moon.” The first headline I’d seen that hadn’t made some sort of reference to Little. It was Robin Hamilton’s story, which had been, despite Adam’s warning, funny and sweet. Chloe had tacked it to the message board in the back, circling it with her green Sharpie. “‘The Star and the Moon’ — so stinkin’ cute!” Cute, but a complete fantasy, conjured up because my last name just happened to fit so perfectly in the title. The Star and the Moon. Cute words with no meaning. Everyone saw the moon, that unofficial ringleader of the sky. And it was pretty clear, especially tonight, that in the orbit of this particular star, no one could see me at all.