We drove from the beautiful tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills down Wilshire Boulevard toward the ladies' office facility. The day was already getting kind of hazy and hot by the time I was brought to a large corporate office and asked a series of questions while Connie typed up a file on me. Full name? Piece of cake. Father's name? My answer produced the expected reaction; Connie raised an eyebrow and I added, "yes, that Chase Atwood." Social security number? Seriously, no clue.
My mind started to wander back to my house. Had anyone even locked the doors when we all split for the hospital? Were they going to let me go back and at least get my reading list for school? What about my violin? I was supposed to be practicing every day – I had just won first seat in the Treadwell Junior Symphony Orchestra. What about my mom's body? Where was it? Who would plan a funeral?
Despite my panic, I was starting to get really sleepy. It was a Wednesday, nearly one in the afternoon. I realized I had missed my shift at Robek's and didn't even have my cell phone to call Allison and let her know what had happened.
After I let loose a mighty yawn, Lois frowned at me and told Connie that she could finish my paperwork later. Connie took me up to the dormitory floors and led me to a stark room with bunk beds. I was informed that for the duration of my stay at the Department of Children and Family Services facility I would be roommates with a girl named Anna who was at summer school for the day. None of this information was making any difference to me. I crawled under the blankets on the lower bunk and closed my eyes until Connie stopped talking and left me alone.
I had been wearing pajamas all day. I had no idea how or when I was going to be able to get in touch with Allison or my mom's friends to tell them where I was. And my mom was dead. Gone. They hadn't even let me see her body. I started crying until I could barely breathe, and at some point I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up I immediately got the distinct sensation that I was being watched. Upon opening my eyes I saw my new roommate, a heavyset girl at least a year older than me, standing over me with her arms folded across her chest. It was dark outside. I had no idea how long I'd been sleeping.
"You're in my bed," the girl said sternly.
I sat up instantly. It hadn't occurred to me when I chose the lower bunk that the room's existing occupant probably slept there.
"I'm sorry," I said, pushing back the blankets and standing. "I didn't know."
"It's OK," the girl said. "Whatever."
Not wanting to make small talk, I climbed the flimsy ladder to the top bunk and laid down again facing the wall, my back to my new roommate.
"Your parents beat you up or something?" the girl asked.
"My mom died," I said, trying my hardest not to start crying again just by having to say those words.
"Yo, that sucks," she said. "My name is Anna. I just got kicked out of my foster home and sent back here. Stupid assholes expected me to watch their toddler every day after school. I ain't no free nanny service."
I wanted to be cordial, or at least not make this roommate angry, but I couldn't find the strength to roll over and even face her. From the moment she started talking I just wanted the room to be dark and silent again.
Anna got the picture. "Listen, it's dinner time. I'm supposed to tell you to come downstairs if you want to eat. They're strict about the schedule."
I made no attempt to move. Anna gave up on me and went downstairs alone, muttering her signature, "whatever," on her way out the door.
There's not much to say about the two days that I spent in the facility other than that I never once had the bright idea to ask to use a phone. Lois told me that one of my mother's friends would be bringing over some of my clothes, but no one ever materialized. On my second day there, after the other kids left for their part-time jobs and summer school classes in the morning, I braved the showers alone and got back into my dirty pajamas.
I was in a state of shock about how my life had transformed so quickly. No one ever thinks she's going to go to bed in her bedroom one night and the next day find herself a ward of the court, living in a city-run facility that smells a little like mothballs and is still buzzing with chatter at night even after lights-out. I was offered the services of a psychiatrist, which I turned down. I was thinking more along the lines of needing a lawyer. In the two days that passed it was becoming terrifying to me that my dad was on his way to Los Angeles to claim me. I was almost sixteen and surely I could get by alone on what he gave my mother in child support. I could become emancipated. The last thing I wanted was to intrude on his life unexpectedly and be a burden.
I formulated a plan to run this scenario past him, certain that he would be totally down with just paying me to take care of myself. It would be a win-win situation for both of us.
When Chase finally did arrive, I'm not sure that the Department of Children and Family Services was any more prepared for him than I was. For starters, the paparazzi had caught wind of the story and had met his flight arriving at L.A.X. They followed him in what could basically be called a motor cavalcade all the way to the facility on Wilshire where he was coming to meet me, and he climbed out of the backseat of the limo to a flurry of flashbulbs popping.
"Please try to have some respect," he yelled at the photographers as he pushed his way to the front lobby. This, I know, because I was watching from the window of my tenth story room. After I waited for almost an hour, an administrator summoned me from my room.
On the elevator ride down to the first floor to meet my dad, I started feeling nauseous and self-conscious. He was an internationally recognized rock star, and I was a mess who hadn't even touched a hair brush in two days. I had been given a pair of jeans to wear once someone had finally acknowledged that I had been wearing an oversized concert t-shirt and a pair of rainbow-striped Victoria Secret pajama pants for over forty hours straight, but the jeans were clownishly large and unflattering. In the three years since I'd last seen my dad I'd grown nearly a foot, had my fair share of zits, started wearing a bra and had an unfortunate boarding school incident involving red henna in my hair. Was he even going to recognize me?
I was led down a long hallway to an office I hadn't been in yet, past the huge first-floor cafeteria where I had, hours earlier, eaten a peanut butter sandwich with two fourth graders who had convinced the staff that they were too sick to play volleyball with their peers.
My dad was sitting at a desk across from Lois signing paperwork when I walked in. He looked the same as he always does on the cover of Expose Magazine – professionally frosted hair, hoop earring in one ear, semi-lame goatee. He was wearing dark washed jeans and a distressed flannel shirt, obviously moving into a retro-grunge fashion moment. Anyone else's dad would show up to a formal meeting of this nature wearing a golf sweater or at the very least some respectable Dockers. Not my dad.
"Hi," I said weakly. I thought about adding Dad to my greeting but I don't think I had ever actually called him that.
He was on his feet and hugging me in a second. He smelled like expensive, spicy cologne and he had stubble on his jaw offsetting the goatee that I guessed was from travel and not part of a really misguided attempt at being sexy. It was kind of weird that I was only a few inches shorter than him. The last time I had seen him it had been much clearer that I was a child and he was an adult, but now, looking at him, I was far more aware of his fake tan… and of his nose looking a little straighter than it had looked in photographs I had seen in magazines.
"Hi, baby," my father said, messing up my hair. I was seated in a hard plastic chair next to him at Lois's desk.
"Now. Taylor, your father tells me that he has never before had custody of you," Lois began, getting down to business.
"That's correct," I said. "I've lived with my mom my whole life."
"And you are in the tenth grade, going into eleventh?" Lois asked, reviewing forms that apparently my father had filled out while I was upstairs. He had known my social security number. I was momentarily impressed.
; "Yes," I said.
"And where are you enrolled in school?"
"The Treadwell Preparatory Academy," I said, a little choked up. What a jerk I had been to my own mother. I had wanted to get away from her so badly that I had demanded boarding school and had made her go to my father and grovel for money. In the days following her death, the slightest regret could cause me to burst into sporadic tears.
"And where is that located?" Lois asked, clueless.
"Massachusetts," my father interjected.
Connie, the other administrator who had met with me at the hospital, entered the office with a manila folder that had BEAUFORTE typed on a label on its tab. "There's a small complication," Connie announced. "You are not listed as Margaret's father on her birth certificate."
My father looked stupefied. "Well, I'm not contesting that I'm her father."
"Who's Margaret?" I demanded to know, confused as to why they were suddenly referring to me by a different name when I was sitting right there, mere inches from them.
Connie lowered her glasses to inspect my father more closely, completely unimpressed by how famous he was. "That's not the issue, Mr. Atwood. The issue is that we are not authorized to release her into your custody."
My father began to object. "Well, I'm her father. What do I have to do to prove this? You want to do a paternity test? Let's get this over with."
"Why did she call me Margaret?" I nagged my father.
"That's the name on your birth certificate," he informed me. I craned my neck trying to see the document in Connie's hands.
"It's not that simple, Mr. Atwood," Connie explained calmly. "This kind of thing can take weeks to make its way through the courts."
My father looked at me carefully and cleared his throat. "And what happens to Taylor during those weeks? Can we rent a house in Los Angeles and keep her with us?"
Connie shook her head as if my father was a complete fool. "Mr. Atwood, our standard policy would be to place the child in a home that has been previously approved by the state."
"You mean, like foster care?" my father bellowed. He was starting to get somewhat worked up. "Taylor, would you mind if I have a word alone with these ladies for a moment?"
I stood, surprised that I was being asked to leave. My mother never asked me to leave a room so that adults could speak in private. In fact, my mother would have never even contested what Lois and Connie told her. She was never very tenacious in arguments.
"You can go wait in the car outside," my father informed me.
I left the office but lingered outside the closed door, a little afraid that my father was not going to win this battle against two middle-aged ladies. I also did not want to brave the paparazzi alone. In all honesty I was pretty sure that my father was going to leave me in Los Angeles and I was going to be dropped off at some weird foster home in the Valley.
A moment later, my father exited the office, grabbed my wrist, and led me toward the main lobby of the facility. Over his shoulder he called to Lois and Connie, "You can send information about the court date to my management in Beverly Hills."
And that was that. A storm of flashbulbs and a slam of a limo door later, I was in my dad's custody. I recognized the host of Extra when he knocked on the window on my side of the limo and yelled, "What's it like having Chase Atwood for your father?"
"You good?" My father asked before the limousine pulled away from the curb.
"Yes, I think so," I said.
"Did you have anything in there with you?" he asked, nodding in the direction of the building.
"No. In fact, it would be nice to stop by my house and pick up some stuff," I suggested, hoping he'd agree.
"Sure, no problem," he said. "Jill and Kelsey are at The Beverly Hills Hotel. You can take all the time you need."
"How come no one ever told me my legal name is Margaret?" I asked after we pulled away from the curb.
My dad shrugged. "You were named after my mother. Taylor is your middle name."
We drove the long expanse of Wilshire back to West Hollywood in an awkward silence. If you've never been to Los Angeles in early summer, I'll mention that the city is at its height of beauty. There isn't a single street that doesn't have at least one flowering bush on it, and the breeze is pungent with floral perfume. Usually June in Los Angeles is gloomy – days on end of gray skies – but that morning the sky was a hue of blue like no other. It was nearly hypnotizing, I was thinking, as we rounded the corner to North Laurel Avenue. Focusing on the hydrangea just past the window of the limo was easier than thinking about how the man in the backseat with me was basically a stranger, and that it was perhaps the last time in my life I would ever be driving down these familiar streets headed toward my home.
When we rolled into the driveway my heart sank, because the house looked so unassuming and serene it was impossible to believe that anything had changed since I had last seen it in daylight. I felt certain as I climbed out of the limo and closed the door behind me that the last two days had been some kind of twisted dream, and that when I entered the front door Mom would be stretched out on the couch in her robe, watching TV. I raced up the stone path to our front stairs while Dad called out behind me, "Taylor, wait a second."
At the front door, I realized I didn't have my house key. Leaving the house without a key is so unlike me; I have never lost a school ID or set of keys in my life. Dad caught up to me on the front landing and just before I had a chance to tell him that we were locked out, the front door opened and Julia was embracing me and planting juicy kisses on my cheeks.
"Taylor! You're home! Thank god! Those awful people at the hospital wouldn't tell me where you were taken," she cooed. She was wearing a mesh t-shirt over a black one-piece bathing suit and her hair was wet. She smelled of chlorine, and it disgusted me to realize it, but vodka, too.
"Julia…" I said, at once both relieved to see her and profoundly disturbed that she had clearly been hanging out in my house all day, swimming in the pool where my mother had died just two days ago, and raiding my mother's liquor cabinet. "What are you doing here?"
"There are things to take care of, Taylor," Julia said offensively. "I had to be here early this morning to have the pool drained and refilled. I've been on the phone with the funeral home all afternoon." Her eyes narrowed and she directed her next comment at my father. "I'm glad you're here, Chase. We need to talk."
"Yes, we do," my father said sternly. "Taylor, go pack a suitcase. Take your time."
He followed me inside the house and without even saying a word to Julia, passed through the kitchen and out to the backyard to make an assessment of her presence in the house that day. It struck me as a little odd that he was so familiar with the layout of our house when as far as I could remember, he had never been inside. I had never given much thought to how much a part of my mother's life Dad had been before I was born, but naturally he knew Julia from when they were young. Julia and my mom used to go to concerts together and hang out on the Sunset Strip before my mom and dad met. It was obvious that my dad was not fond of her.
I reached the top of the short set of stairs to the second floor and lingered in the doorway to my bedroom for a moment. The lamp on my nightstand was still on, presumably from two nights earlier. My blankets were still pushed back, and my bedroom window was still cracked open. I was overwhelmed by the desire to crawl back into bed and try to rewind the last few days… so that's what I did. I scurried beneath my covers, pulled them up over my head, and wished and prayed as hard as I could that I could just go back in time, and this time notice my mom falling in the pool, or yell at her more harshly to end the party… anything I could have done differently to have prevented this nightmare.
Despite having my eyes squeezed shut and not having any intentions whatsoever of eavesdropping, I could hear my father and Julia exchanging words from the backyard.
"We'll take it from here," Dad was assuring Julia.
"Oh, sure you'll take it," Julia retorted sarcastically. "Just lik
e you're going to take care of Taylor. Just like you took real good care of Dawn."
"Now you hold on a second there, Julia. Look around. I took good care of Dawn. She never had to lift a finger."
"Oh, right. Leaving someone like her to raise a child alone, that's just great," Julia berated him. "You knew Dawn could barely take care of herself."
My father's voice got very steely, and even though I could tell he was trying to lower the volume, he sounded louder at the lower pitch. "That kid up there is fantastic, so whatever Dawn was doing, she was doing it right. What she didn't need was deadbeat friends like you looming around all the time for happy hour. What kind of person shows up and drinks cocktails all day at her dead friend's house, Julia? You have no right to be here on this property."
I covered my head with my pillow, wanting to block out all of the ugliness that I was hearing, but the voices carried through. What had been so wrong with my mother that Julia considered her unfit to raise me?
"Someone had to clean up the mess left in this house. Someone had to plan a wake and funeral, Chase. These kinds of things can't just wait until your G5 flies in from Europe. Speaking of, Dawn had no life insurance and the funeral home is going to charge fifteen thousand dollars," Julia yelled. "Where am I supposed to come up with fifteen thousand dollars? The bank won't release any of Dawn's assets because she didn't leave a will."
The bickering continued and at some point I nodded off to sleep. When I woke up, my bedroom was cool and dark. It was twilight beyond my window, and the sky was striped with ribbons of orange and pink from the setting sun, the kind of amazing electric sunset you only see in Los Angeles. The house was silent and for a few minutes I sat still in bed, wondering hopefully if Dad had left me there alone. Being in such a state of panic was amplifying my crush on Allison's brother so much that I almost wanted to faint at the thought of leaving Los Angeles and not being near the Burchs' house. I convinced myself that I could just pack a duffel bag and take the bus over to Allison's house, and never worry about this matter of custody again.
The Rock Star's Daughter (The Treadwell Academy Novels) Page 2
