Page 76 of Holiday Star
Wayne doesn’t even blink. “I know what Caleb is going to do. The thing I’m not sure about isyou. You’re the wild card. Will you take him back? No matter how broken he is?”
He pulls his phone in close to his face and, using the hand holding his cigarette, scrolls through pictures with his pinkie. “Let me show you another.” He finds the one he’s looking for and holds it out to me.
It’s a photo taken in front of my mom’s house. I recognize the brown stucco and double front doors. Caleb is rushing down the front steps with Marjorie right beside him. Her hand is gripped so tightly around his upper arm that I can see where the fabric indents under her fingers. My grandmother’s quilt is thrown over his head to hide his face, but it’s slipped enough that I see his profile and the fear stamped across his features. Eyes so wide they are mostly white and his mouth twisted.
Caleb looks terrified.
“Caleb’s been dealing with the paparazzi since he was a kid,” Wayne says. “Never seen him frightened before. Annoyed? Yes. Pissed off? Sure. But not frightened. Answer me this, Doctor, who do you think he’s scared for in this picture?”
Me. He’s worried about me.
I brush that thought aside, not willing to examine it in front of Wayne’s prying eyes. “He was just mad he got caught.”
Wayne shrugs. “Okay, then. I have one more for you. It’ll be in the paper tomorrow, but you may want the first peek.”
It only takes a second for him to find what he’s looking for. This time, he hands his phone to me. I hold it up to the streetlight. The image is dark, slightly distorted, as if it was taken at night through a window. The setting is a bar with a long granite countertop.
A lone man sits with his back partially turned to the camera, shrouded in an air of melancholy. He’s hunched over a glass, the short kind that holds hard alcohol like bourbon or scotch. His hands curl loosely around it, caressing it. Head hanging heavily, a lock of hair falls into his eyes. He gazes into the drink like all the love left in his world resides at its bottom.
It’s Caleb.
“Oh no,” I whisper, tears springing unbidden in my eyes. “No. No. What have you done?” I ask the man on the screen. The first tear slips down my cheek as I touch my fingers to his image, wishing I could reach through the phone and grab him. Lift him out of that bar and bring him home to me.
I barely notice Wayne studying me carefully. Barely hear him whisper, “Maybe not such a wild card after all.”
More loudly, he says, “There are other photos, too. Ones that his parents and PR team have suppressed. A bar fight in Calabasas. Passed out in Santa Monica. You knocked him off the wagon, Dr. Wright. How do you feel about that?”
Each word is a blow, hitting behind my knees until I want to crumple to the ground. I stay standing, though. I stroke my thumb over Caleb’s face on the tiny screen. “Can you not print it? Please,” I beg, understanding the damage this picture will do to Caleb’s career.
“Sorry, sweetheart. Business is business.”
I hate him in that moment. Hate the whole world for being so cold, so cruel. Hate all the people, myself included, who buy those magazines and read about other people’s lives. Thrilling when celebrities fail because it makes us feel better about our own meager existence.
The dirty look I send Wayne has no effect. I hand him his phone and wordlessly go up the stairs to my apartment, where I sit on my lumpy secondhand couch. Pulling out my phone, I stare at Caleb’s number for a long time.
The picture of him at the bar keeps flashing through my mind. The misery in the droop of his shoulders is burned on my eyelids, a stain I’ll never be able to remove.
Heart in my throat, I dial.
Somewhere in California, his phone rings and rings.
No one answers.
47
The next morning, with the first rays of dawn skimming the horizon, I charge down my apartment stairs. Wayne falters when he sees me, pausing with his Styrofoam coffee cup halfway to his lips.
“He’s still in L.A.?” I bark out my question, the airline website already open on the phone in my hands. Caleb may not care about me, but as much as I wish it were different, I still care about him. In that damn picture, he looks like someone who needs saving.
That’s my job. I save people. Heal them.
Wayne takes a sip, wincing like the coffee tastes terrible. “You’re too late. He’s gone.”
Tick tock, Gwen.
“What? Where?”
He eyes me shrewdly, taking note of my desperation. I can practically see him writing the article in his mind.
