“Baker, I hope you’re not going to get all Hollywood on me and forget to make requests like a gentleman. I’m not one of your entourage.”
It was a joke, but the remark was sharper than I intended. Will slumped as he fell back on the bed.
“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry. I sound like an asshole already.”
His despondency erased any irritation I had, and immediately I rustled out of the covers and into his lap.
“I was joking,” I said as I leaned my head on his shoulder. “You’re kind of always an asshole.”
Will chuckled, then wrapped his arms around me and gave a heavy sigh. “You want to get out of the city for a while, Lil? Please?”
I pressed back into him, all fatigue gone. “How soon can we leave?”
Two hours later, we were navigating my old Passat out of Manhattan, safely protected by its decidedly un-movie-star looks and old-school tinted windows. A black SUV containing Will’s security detail trailed us as Will drove up the West Side Highway, cut across the Bronx and Queens, and eventually hooked onto I-95 going north along the coast. Clearly he knew this drive well.
I stared out the window, entranced as we left the city and literally crossed into greener pastures, with trees gradually replacing the odd jam of crumbling brick and stone alongside the great metal high-rises of New York that seemed to spear the sky. After we entered Connecticut, occasional glimpses of water held me rapt. Small inlets and harbors decorated with marinas and cattails gleamed through the maples, barberries, birches, and all the other trees that would turn various colors come fall, but for now hugged the turnpike with green.
It reminded me of home, or at least being outside of the city. Even if my reasons for leaving had been the wrong ones, and even if Newman Lake with its sometimes suffocatingly small and narrow-minded community wasn’t necessarily the right place for me, I knew now that New York wasn’t home either. I needed to be someplace I could swim. Run. Ride. Breathe.
“We’re almost there,” Will said a little over forty-five minutes later as he took one of the last exits in Stamford. We had driven through downtown, a small urban area, but were back in the suburbs again, on a two-lane road that morphed from strip malls to row houses and eventually to single-family homes on large lawns without even a sidewalk to separate them from the street.
The neighborhood was decidedly mixed-income. Some of the houses were big, newer places that had clearly been built recently or were remodeled colonials. Others, split-level homes or a saltbox here and there, bore the marks of time with peeling paint, chain-link fences, and cars parked outside that were older than I was.
“It’s changed a lot,” Will said, noting some of the bigger places. “I’m not surprised.” He took a right, then a left down another, even smaller street.
“Was this a bad neighborhood or something?” I asked. It was hard to believe as I noted more than one basketball hoop hanging above garages, along with several children’s bikes lying on their sides in the front yards. People didn’t do that in bad neighborhoods. They kept their things locked up.
Will shook his head.
“Not bad, no. Just always pretty…average.” He pulled to a stop on the side of the road, then turned to me with an uncertain, shy expression. “This is where I grew up, Lil. At least…whenever I got the chance.”
I peered out the window at the house next to us. It was all very…average, like he said. A two-story split-level. Faded blue paint. Modest, with a two-car garage, a waist-high fence that had probably been white at some point, and a shed on one side that seemed like it needed to have its rusty lock replaced. There were bits of debris on the lawn, forgotten in the summer sun: a set of gardening shears, some old gloves, and a hose that had never been re-coiled.
“I thought you grew up in the city,” I said, still taking in the house and the flat, unremarkable piece of grass that included one homely beech tree. “Behind fences and gates and loads of security.”
“Mom didn’t get an apartment there until I got the role on Bailey’s Life,” Will said. “But even then, I’d come back here on my days off. Dad stayed here.”
I turned back to him. “They seem very…different from one another.”
“Well, you’ll notice that Mom is fairly young,” Will said dryly. “She was seventeen when she got pregnant with me.”
My eyebrows popped up. Tricia had looked young, but I had assumed that was mostly plastic surgery. Apparently not.
“They met in high school in New Haven. Dad was a fisherman, so he was gone. A lot. Mom was bored and liked to…I don’t even know. Go to the mall? She entered me in one of those contests for babies––you know, the ones where they take your picture and enter you to be a spokesbaby for some stupid brand. When I won the whole damn thing, apparently that’s when she realized I was her ticket out of New Haven.”
I nodded. “So, when did you move here?”
“When I was three, I think. I’m not sure. I don’t really remember any other place but this house. I only know that I did a bunch of commercials that earned the down payment.”
I frowned. The more I heard about Tricia Owens-Baker, the more I absolutely hated the woman. It was really hard to understand a mother who would use her toddler to mitigate her own boredom and buy herself a house.
“Were they ever actually divorced?” I wondered.
Will shook his head. “No. There was no need. They separated and did their own thing. I think…I think my career actually provided a way for them to live apart without having to face the fact that their marriage was terrible. After a year on Bailey’s Life, I started getting letters. Threats. Some people even tried to break into the house once. It was pretty clear I couldn’t live here anymore, but Dad wouldn’t leave his business. He hated the city, and loved the water. So I got to visit on weekends, sometimes. Whenever I had a break longer than a few days. I never wanted to leave.”
He stared at the house for a long time, and for a second, I could practically see the ghost of a small, blond-haired boy playing football with his dad in the yard. Pushing a lawnmower. Riding a bike. And just as quickly I saw the arguments, the tears that must have happened when he had to leave his father behind. The begging to stay, only to be told no, time and time again.
It wasn’t only Tricia’s fault that Will had lived this life, I realized. It was his father’s fault too—a father who may have loved his son, but who certainly never fought for him. Not enough, anyway.
Will pulled a set of keys from his pocket. They were worn brass, and had a chipped metal keychain on which I could barely read the words “Stamford Sailing Club” on its glass face.
“I need to go in,” Will said, his voice thick. “The house will be gone soon—Mom will sell it, every last bit. So I have to say goodbye before I leave.”
I took one of his hands. I felt terrible for not anticipating this on some level. Only a few weeks ago, right before all of the chaos had descended upon us, Will had gotten a terrible letter from Benny, informing him that his father had died of a heart attack. I hadn’t forgotten exactly, but Will hadn’t said much about it since.
He internalized. Just like me. Which is how I knew the best thing to do wasn’t to ask him what he needed in that moment, but to wait for him to tell me. Because eventually, he would. That’s why I was here.
Will glanced around the neighborhood, which was practically empty in the mid-morning. There were a few small children running around a yard down the street, but most people here had gone to work, their kids in daycare or summer camps.
“All right,” Will said as he pulled a baseball cap low over his face. “Let’s go inside.”
My hand clasped tightly in his, I followed Will past the creaking front gate and waited patiently while he collected the tools in the yard.
“Fucking waste,” he said as he set the tools on the porch. “Dad would have hated that rust.”
He unlocked the front door, and we walked into the house. It was dark and smelled like stale coffee and s
alt water. Dank and gloomy, everything was covered with a fine layer of dust, like no one had been here for weeks.
“What the fuck,” Will muttered angrily as he swiped a half-empty coffee cup off the kitchen table. A newspaper was on the corner, open to the Sports section.
He tossed the paper in a bin, then brought the cup to the sink, where he started scrubbing it out immediately, along with a few other bad-smelling dishes.
“No one came,” he said. “Can you fucking believe this? No one, Lil. His shit has been sitting here since he keeled over.”
I gripped the top of one of the kitchen chairs, trying to think of an answer, while Will furiously washed the rest of the dishes. When he was finished, he grabbed a spray bottle and cloth to clean off the tabletop.
“Fuck,” he hissed when the nozzle jammed. Maniacally, he clenched the sprayer again and again. “Fuck!”
“Let me,” I said, taking the bottle from him. I adjusted the stream and sprayed the liquid all over the table. Then I took a rag and began wiping until I realized that Will was now the one watching me.
“What?” I asked as I moved on to the counters.
He took a deep breath, then let it out. “I love you.”
I softened. He was so stolid, and yet so broken at the same time.
“I love you too,” I said softly. “Let’s finish in here, and then we’ll move on to the next rooms, okay? Tell me where the vacuum is. We’ll take care of everything.”
Three hours later, after having scrubbed, mopped, and vacuumed nearly every surface in the house, Will and I moved to the back porch with the last two drinks in his dad’s fridge: a seltzer for me, and Bud Light for Will. There were a few deck chairs that faced the water, and we sat down and cracked open the cans.
“Wow,” I said as I looked out.
The lawn, flat and almost lifeless, extended another two hundred feet from the house into cattails and brackish water, out of which a long dock continued the journey into the Long Island Sound, across which you could see the silhouette of Long Island itself. The house, the land—none of it was anything to write home about. But the view was stunning.
Will stared out at the water for a long time. “Yeah,” he said. “It is wow.” He took a sip of his beer. “If it had been up to me, I would have fought for Dad to be…put to rest…out there. He loved the water.”
“Where is he now?”
Will shrugged. “Rotting under some gravestone about an hour from here. Benny said there’s even a big monument.” He snorted. “Dad would have hated that. He hated any kind of pomp and circumstance.”
I nudged his shoulder. “Sounds like someone else I know.”
A crooked smile whispered across Will’s face, but faded almost instantly. “Yeah. Well.”
We sat together for a long time, looking out at the water.
“He would have liked you, you know,” Will said after a while longer. “He wanted me to find someone just like you.”
“How do you figure?”
Will turned and grinned.
“‘Willy,’” he said in a gruff, coarse voice with a thick New England accent slathered on top of it. I knew immediately it was exactly what his father must have sounded like—Will was uncannily good at doing impressions. “‘Willy, you listen. When the time comes, and it’s comin’ sooner’n you think, choose a real woman. A woman who ain’t afraid of a little dirt under her nails. That’s how you’ll know she’s someone who’s gonna stand by you, through thick and thin.’” He chuckled, took another long swig of beer, then picked up my hand, which currently had very dirty fingernails after the morning’s labors, and kissed each fingertip reverently. “So I did, Dad. So I did.”
He watched me for a moment before turning back to the water.
“Out there, that’s where we used to keep the boat.” Will looked sadly at the empty dock. “Dad started teaching me to sail when I was maybe four or five. I guess…I guess he never got a new one, though.”
I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t met Michael Baker, but something told me that the kind of man who would have a heart attack from seeing Will get arrested would be put off sailing after thinking his only son died in a boating accident.
In front of us, the ocean gleamed almost white. Will stared at the expanse, seeing something out there besides the waves. He stared long enough that he forgot to blink, his eyes tearing up in the wind.
“Fuck.” The words shuddered, hard, bitter, painful from his throat. “Fuck.” Then he turned, pressed his face into my shoulder, and began to shake violently.
As he fell apart, silent and painful sobs wrenching out of him, there was nothing to say, nothing to do but hold him. I did my best, wrapping my arms around his lurching shoulders, and let him keen into me as the waves of emotions I could feel so clearly but knew just the same he couldn’t quite name, rolled through us both.
Will didn’t need my words. He needed my presence. My strength. My willingness to bear with him the pain that had convinced him at some point in his young life that his parents, his father, would be better off thinking he was dead. Pain that had cost him the last few years of his father’s life. Pain that had brought him back here to face a gamut of memories he had shut away for a very long time.
I understood that kind of pain. It was only at this point in my life I was starting to understand the costs of denial. But that was also how I knew, as I rocked him slowly, that I could help Will bear it. That I’d sit here on this lonely porch with the man I loved for hours. Days. The rest of my life. I’d sit here for as long as it took for him to forgive himself and understand that he was no longer alone.
After Will snooped around the house and took a few mementos to keep, he paused one last time at the car, looking over the hood at his childhood home before we left.
“This is it, I guess,” he said. “I’ll…I’ll miss it.”
“Why don’t you buy it from your mom?” I wondered.
A blond brow rose. The idea had genuinely never occurred to him, though of course, Will could probably afford to purchase the property several times over and not make a dent in his accounts.
“No,” he said, turning his back on the house. “It’s not my home anymore. It hasn’t been for a really long time.”
I didn’t know what to say. I could only imagine how painful it must have felt to stand on the threshold of your own family’s home and feel like it was no longer yours. I had my own issues with returning home, but it was still home. It was still my place, even if it was only in the privacy of that small, simple shack.
My heart ached, and a pang of guilt thrummed in my stomach. I had been gone for almost three weeks now, with hardly a word to Mama. God knew what she was getting up to without me there, if Theo’s video was any indication.
But then there was Will, who was about to return to a life that had almost killed him the last time around. Who, if his visible shaking whenever we encountered a crowd or fans of any sort was an indicator, was going to have to face some serious demons of his own over the next few months. In part because I had brought them to his doorstep. Was it really fair for me to leave him to deal with all of that?
“Come on,” he said, slinging an arm around my shoulder. He pushed his sunglasses up his nose and turned us toward the waiting car. “We both need to pack. And you need to go home.”
“And what about you?” I asked. “Will you even be able to find an apartment before you have to dive into work? What’s going to be your home now?”
Will paused, hand at the top of the door. He looked down at me and grinned—not the cheesy, for-the-cameras grin, but the one I recognized from only a few times before. It was the one he kept for me.
“Lily pad, how many times do I have to tell you? My home is with you.”
He leaned down and kissed me, oblivious to the phones held at the ends of outstretched arms across the street. Apparently someone had told their parents who was outside. Then he smiled again, and the world seemed a little brighter.
“Give me
a few weeks,” he said as he turned back to the car. “And then we can both be home together.”
11
“Come on, Mama. Time to get up. You have to get to work, and so do I.”
It had been two weeks since I left New York, since Will had boarded a private plane, and I’d driven my old Passat across the country for the third time in two months. Two weeks of phone calls back and forth from California to Newman Lake, snapping at each other when the patchy cell service dropped our calls. Two weeks of trying and failing to ignore the incessant news and gossip columns as America adjusted to one of its favorite sons coming back from the dead. And two weeks for me to be completely forgotten from that narrative.
The last part, I was fine with—except when the Botoxed ladies on E! began speculating on who would end up “Fitz Baker’s next girl.” The only pictures that showed up of him anywhere were the few paparazzi shots people got of him coming in and out of Beauregard studios, but as far as I could tell, no one had figured out where he lived. In all of the photos, he looked grouchy and miserable. Gorgeous, of course, but miserable.
I bunched my hair together and pulled it off my neck for a little fresh air. Late July was already setting records up and down the coast, and a burn ban was in effect for all of Washington. All I wanted was to jump in the water, but instead I needed to go turn down the empty rooms at the Forster Inn, where I’d been hired part-time as a housekeeper until we could start renting out the extra rooms on Mama’s property ourselves.
I shook Mama’s shoulder. “Mama, come on. You have to do Kerryanne Duff’s hair in forty minutes.”
Mama groaned. “Heaven above, Maggie Mae, do you have to shout like that?” She sat up, clenching her temples, and gave me a black look that matched the eyeliner smudged under her eyes.
I sighed, but turned toward the door. She was up and sober. My work here was done. “I left you coffee on the counter, some ibuprofen, and a yogurt. Don’t forget that you have an appointment at one, so no margaritas at lunch, all right?”
Indiscreet (The Discreet Duet Book 2) Page 11
