The Rock Star's Daughter (The Treadwell Academy Novels)

by Duffy, Caitlyn

  "Detroit?" Jake said quietly as I stepped off the elevator.

  "Yes," I assured him.

  My head was spinning and heart was beating so fast as I crossed the lobby toward my grandparents, clutching my blue Coach bag tightly to my side, that I didn't listen to a word my father said as he reintroduced us.

  "Bye, Dad, see you later," I said, following my grandparents out of the hotel's front doors. I was distracted completely by the desperate hope that I'd catch a glimpse of Jake in the parking lot before I got into my grandfather's Lincoln Town Car. But I hadn't noticed which way he'd gone after he stepped off the elevator, and I didn't see the gold Saturn anywhere in the parking lot.

  "So are you enjoying your summer, Taylor?" my grandmother asked from the front seat, where she kept fidgeting with the air conditioning vent in the dashboard.

  She looked quite a bit like my mother, the same wide-set blue eyes, cupid nose that turned up at the end. My mother had gotten her height from her father. Grandpa Bill was over six feet tall; he towered a good foot over Grandma Marjorie when they stood next to one another. Now that I was a little more coherent than I had been at the wake, I observed that they really weren't that old at all. Allison's mom had already turned forty, and I guessed that my grandparents weren't too much older than her.

  "I guess," I said, still so jostled by what had happened in the elevator that I wasn't entirely mentally present in the back seat of the car. "It's been a lot to take in, you know? A lot of changes to get used to."

  "Your father said you were in Chicago a few days ago. That must have been exciting. Your mother wanted to go to college there, to Northwestern," Grandpa Bill told me.

  "That's weird," I said. "She told me she didn't want to go to college."

  "Oh, she was accepted," Grandma Marjorie said. "But she deferred her admission for a year because she wanted to go to L.A. and start a rock band. I guess the rest is history."

  These were two strange revelations; not only had my mother once considered going to college, but she had also wanted to start a band. No wonder she always pushed me to try to learn how to play guitar. Why had she gone so far out of her way to make me think that she had always been an airhead? My gut hunch was that she was maybe ashamed of how her life had ended up, and it was less shameful to pretend she never had any greater ambitions in the first place.

  "She was accepted? She told me she was never really any good at school," I said.

  "Your mother was one smart cookie," Grandpa Bill corrected me, merging into the left lane on the highway. "She was a good student until her senior year of high school, when she got it into her head that she wanted to get a record deal."

  Had I been paying attention back at the hotel when my father was talking to me in the lobby, I wouldn't have been so surprised when my grandparents drove through a residential neighborhood and pulled into the driveway of their home instead of into the parking lot of a restaurant.

  "Here we are, home sweet home," Grandma Marjorie announced, unbuckling her seatbelt.

  "This is the house where your mom grew up," Grandpa Bill told me. "We thought you might like to see it."

  The house was a square two-story brick home with white shutters. A plaster lawn gnome cackled near the cement staircase leading up to the front door. Carefully pruned bushes lined the base of the house.

  "We had always hoped Dawn would bring you for a visit, but the timing just never worked out," Grandma Marjorie told me wistfully as we waited for the garage door to lift.

  The inside of the house was as suburban as could be. An overstuffed plaid sectional couch took up most of the living room, facing a large-screen television. A hand-knitted quilt was thrown over the back of the sofa, and a small brown Dachshund snoozing on the Ottoman looked up to address us.

  "That's Dottie," Grandma Marjorie said. "You can go ahead and say hi, she doesn't bite."

  Dottie sniffed my palm for a second and then decided she was not interested in me and went back to sleep. I stroked the top of her head anyway before following my grandparents into the kitchen. The house smelled like savory meat – meatloaf perhaps, and Grandma Marjorie turned the oven light on to check dinner's progress.

  "I hope you like pot roast," Grandpa Bill told me.

  A staircase led to the second floor, and it was lined with framed photographs of my mother over the course of her life. I began climbing the stairs, taking in the pictures of my mother as a gap-toothed first grader with braids, a sixth grader with feathered hair, an eighth grader with a retainer. There was a photograph of her in full stage makeup beneath the stage lights in what looked like a high school production of a musical.

  "White Christmas," my grandfather informed me. "Your mother had the Rosemary Clooney role right here at our town high school. She had a beautiful voice."

  I couldn't disagree; she had certainly gotten enough backup singing jobs for commercials over the years to support the claim that she had a great voice.

  "Come on upstairs. I'll show you her room while your grandmother finishes dinner."

  "Don't call me that," Grandma Marjorie called after us. "I don't feel old enough to be anyone's grandma!"

  At the top of the stairs, a door was open to a bedroom covered in old rock posters. A white canopy bed stood in the center of the room as an oddball in the rest of the room's décor. Three thick wooden shelves hung on the wall, each covered in trophies for track and field. Pictures of my mother, when she was a teenager with her hair sprayed high, hung on a corkboard over a white lacquered antique desk.

  I thought, as I stepped into the room, that perhaps I'd sense my mother's presence in this room. It was unbelievable to think that she had slept right there, in that bed, when she was my age, no doubt dreaming up the very escape to Los Angeles that had led to my own birth. I had always imagined, largely from what she had told me, that my mom was kind of a dead beat in high school. Maybe kind of a slut. A girl who was far too interested in her own torn jeans and eye makeup to pay attention in class or do homework. So it was a little odd to find that wasn't actually true. She had been on the track team. She had starred in plays.

  "Look at this," Grandpa Bill pointed to a framed certificate on the wall. "Your mother won first place at the Minnesota State Junior Engineering League for drafting."

  My jaw dropped. "I didn't know she knew anything about drafting."

  "She didn't," my grandfather laughed. "She really wanted to be on the team so that she could spend the competition weekend at a fancy hotel in Minneapolis. They needed someone on the team who could take the test for drafting and she studied all of the tests from the previous ten years. Memorized all the answers. She could do anything she put her mind to."

  I sat down lightly on her bed, and looked around. I picked up a ratty-eared stuffed dog that was missing an eye. There were bottles of perfume still on the desk whose contents had evaporated years ago, but there they remained; Love's Baby Soft, Calvin Klein's Eternity. I wanted very badly to feel my mom's spirit in this place, but I just felt like I was in a weird carpeted museum.

  "Your grandmother wants to renovate this room now and make it more of a guest room. She's got this crazy idea in her head that she wants to have a foreign exchange student from Africa come stay with us," my grandfather told me. "All these years of us waiting for Dawn to come home… she thinks it's time for us to move on."

  My heart ached a little for them. I knew how careless my mother could be about other people's feelings when she was hell-bent on doing something. I imagined her at the age of eighteen packing her bags for Los Angeles and promising to be back to visit at Christmas time. And then Christmas coming and going and her making flimsy excuses, constant assurances that she'd visit soon, and then suddenly seventeen years had passed and she had never once been back to Minnesota.

  "I think that's a great idea," I said. "Inviting a student from Africa to stay with you? You'd be offering them a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the United States."

  "Ah, well, I don't know," my gra
ndfather replied. "But I am glad you got to see Dawn's room before Marjorie redecorates. She's got red paint picked out. Shanghai Rouge, it's called."

  My grandmother served a pot roast with carrots and potatoes, and I lovingly recalled my mother complaining to me once that pot roast was the only real dinner her own mother ever made. I was grateful for the home-cooked meal. It was certainly more effort than my mom ever put into one of her microwave dinner specialties.

  "So have you been to many cities this summer?" Grandma Marjorie asked me.

  "Sure. Virginia Beach, Atlanta, Chicago," I rattled off the list. "I don't actually get to see much of the city, though. There's a lot of work that goes into each of my dad's shows."

  My grandparents exchanged loaded glances.

  "We were a little worried that life on the road was going to be a bit much for you after what you went through in June," Grandma Marjorie said. "We thought it might be in your best interest to come and spend a quiet summer here with us."

  No one had told me that my grandparents had offered for me to come and stay with them. Sure, in the aftermath of my mother's death I was opposed to the general idea, but it made a difference knowing that they had actually wanted me.

  "Oh," I said, feeling dumb, "no one told me that."

  "Well, your dad really wanted to spend some time with you," Grandpa Bill told me. "We had a difficult time even getting through to him to find out about the wake and funeral, what with all the lawyers and managers and agents we had to talk to just to track him down. By the time we were able to get him on the phone, he had already secured custody, and that was that."

  I was a little embarrassed by this. Now that I was part of my dad's traveling entourage, it had never occurred to me how hard it must be for someone on the outside to even place a phone call to one of us without knowing our cell phone numbers.

  "I have to say, I am a little concerned about the example that's being set for you," Grandma Marjorie told me. "I'm sure you see the gossip magazines, too. I am not convinced that living with a rock band is the best scenario for a young girl such as yourself."

  Now I cringed. My face turned beet red and I dared not look anywhere other than directly into my plate. The structure of my grandparents' relationship had been revealed; my grandfather was the peacemaker, my grandmother was the fire starter. My mother must have grown up in the middle of their polar dynamic.

  "What Marjorie's trying to say, Margaret," my grandfather began.

  "She goes by Taylor, Bill," my grandmother corrected him.

  "What she's trying to say is that if you are at all unhappy with your living arrangement, all you have to do is call us. We'd be more than happy to have you stay with us," Grandpa Bill told me. "We have a nice community center with a big pool, a huge public library, and all sorts of activities for young people."

  "I still don't understand why you go by Taylor," my grandmother continued, getting up to retrieve a warm cherry pie from the oven. "Margaret is a lovely name. You could go by Meg, or Maggie."

  I was beginning to understand a little why my mother and grandmother didn't get along.

  When my grandparents dropped me off at the hotel that night, I thanked them warmly for their hospitality and waved goodbye to them as they pulled away. I was unsure when I would next see them, or if I would see them again, ever. It was a small comfort knowing that I could live with them if I reached a point where I could no longer tolerate my father, but I was unconvinced that life with them would be a more comfortable option.

  That night I when I got into bed in the dark, I whispered, "Seriously, Mom? Where did you go? Couldn't you just give me some kind of a sign? Anything?"

  Even seeing the home where my mother had spent her childhood didn't make me feel any closer to her memory. And my chance encounter with Jake had left me more unsettled than secure. Both events had just left me feeling more alone in the universe than ever.

  CHAPTER 13

  And then finally, after days spent in Wisconsin that felt like months, we were on our way to Detroit.

  It was close enough to the end of the summer that my classmates at Treadwell were preparing for the return to school. Ruth, my roommate, had emailed me asking if she brought a television, could I bring a mini-fridge? Bringing cool appliances with me back to Massachusetts was no longer an issue as it had been in the past. Tanya would just order whatever I asked for online, and it would be shipped to Treadwell. I no longer had to beg my mother, knowing that anything I asked for would require a sacrifice of clothing or drinks on her part.

  As the signs on the highway indicated our proximity to Detroit, I started getting butterflies in my stomach. I had not had the nerve to ask my father why he had deflected calls from my mothers' parents until he had started the legal process of obtaining custody of me. Surely his behavior could have been explained by the fact that he was a total control freak, but I wanted him to have to tell me to my face that he wanted to block them out of my life. Only, he and I had barely exchanged words since the day at Six Flags, and I was feeling like a stowaway again.

  It was never too far from my mind that my father could decide at any time that he no longer wished to pay for Treadwell. And for that reason alone, I was trying to play it by the book until we got to Detroit.

  The hotel where we were staying was in the Fairlane section of Dearborn, Michigan. My extensive internet research suggested that we were way too far from the auditorium in Auburn Hills for me to even attempt to venture out using public transportation. I wished with futility that I had picked Jake's brain further about his life at home. There I was, potentially only a few mere miles from his house, without any inkling about the neighborhood in which he lived. But judging from the enormous brick mansions we passed on the way to the hotel, I was guessing that Jake didn't live anywhere nearby.

  "Can I go downstairs and hit the treadmill?" I asked Jill as she was trying to force-feed lunch to Kelsey. I was feeling both lackluster and desperate at the same time. I felt like if I could get out of the hotel room, I might just wander out to the parking lot and down to the highway and keep walking forever.

  "You're grounded, remember? If you wait until your dad gets back from sound check you can go to the gym with him," Jill replied.

  I sulked in the suite's second bedroom and surfed the web all afternoon. Around five, Jill knocked on the door to remind me to get dressed; we'd be eating dinner with the band at the arena where Pound would be performing later that night. My dad had never stopped back at the hotel that afternoon, so I had been spared the ordeal of trying to run a few miles next to him at the gym. I was dreading a big meal with the entire band and all of the families… group dinners took on the feeling of how I imagined large holiday celebrations with extended family to be. Forced. Fake.

  I couldn't help but frown in the small limousine throughout the ride from the hotel to the venue. Jill was chatting a mile a minute about the famous chef who was preparing our special meal, and how he had agreed in advance to whip up a vegan delight for her. I was tuning her out. All I could think about was Jake, and whether or not I would be able to find him that night. I assumed my best bet was going to be to try to slip away during the show and find him at the t-shirt booth, but how I was going to do that, I had no idea. I wasn't even sure if Dad and Jill were going to allow me to stay at the venue for the show after dinner, since technically that was not in accordance with the terms of my grounding.

  Everything else in my life seemed like it was in the distant past. Treadwell, my house in West Hollywood, summers spent roaming around L.A. with Allison… those memories seemed like they belonged to someone else. My grandparents' house in Minnesota already seemed a world away and it had only been a week since I had eaten dinner there.

  Finding Jake was all that mattered. I couldn't face another three weeks of touring and then heading off to school without seeing him once more.

  At dinner, despite my best efforts to sit as far away from my dad as possible, I was seated directly across from him. He
was in one of his giddy moods, psyched to be going on stage, thrilled to have the whole band and families together at one long table. He filled his wine glass with a rich red wine nearly to the rim despite a glare from Jill, and then refilled it within minutes.

  When Jill asked me to pass her the platter of quinoa roasted with almonds, I neglected to respond to her "thank you" with a meaningful "you're welcome." Not because I had no manners or was trying to send Jill a nasty message, but because my brain was in a fantasy universe, its wheels spinning wildly about the Jake dilemma.

  Nevertheless, this act of unintentional rudeness caught my dad's attention.

  "We say please and thank you in our family, Taylor," my father reminded me. "I would appreciate it if you would acknowledge your stepmother."

  He was slurring a little. His reprimand didn't even make sense. I had lost track of how many times he had refilled his wine glass, but suspected maybe the wine was getting to his head, which was just foolish so soon before taking the stage.

  "Sorry," I said to Jill, seated at my right, in a sarcastic voice. "You're welcome to ask me to pass the quinoa."

  Jill huffed at me. "Taylor," she sighed, exasperated.

  "All right now, Taylor, that is quite enough!" my dad snapped.

  I realized, even in my daze of hazy day dreams about Jake, what was happening. The wine had finally loosened the last few weeks' worth of my dad's frustration with me after I had caught him with Karina. Rather than having the adult conversation with me about responsibility and other garbage that I had been fearing he would try to initiate, he was just going to immaturely punish me for what I had seen.

  "Dad," I said calmly, wondering why he had chosen such a public venue to pick this fight with me. "Relax. I didn't do anything wrong."