Fix You (29 page)

“I’m fine. I already feel better.” He coughs again, like his body can’t help but tell me the truth. “Listen, I promise, this isn’t a reason to worry.”

“It’s just, this is the worst kind of déjà vu, I have to say.”

His face registers. He gets what I mean. Peter.

He runs a hand through his hair. “God. Now I feel like a total ass for not taking better care of myself.”

I shake my head. “No, no, I didn’t say that to make you feel bad. It just sort of knocked me flat when I walked in the door.”

He sits up. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll hibernate, you’ll try to make some chicken soup—and who are we kidding, it’ll be out of a can—and then it’ll all be good. No worries.”

I grip his hand. “You’re right. We’ll fix it. I’ll make you soup, make you some tea, and we’ll get you better.”

He closes his eyes. “I hope so, ’cause honestly, I feel like shit.” His face seems to relax. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I wish you could just come to Idaho for a while. I could take care of you.”

“This is where the work is. Could you stay here for a bit?”

“The boys go back to school next week. Spring break, you know.”

“Yeah. I guess you can’t play house. You’ve got a real one to go back to and all.”

“Maybe someday it’ll all be the same thing.” I’m trying to say something here, I think, that involves the two of us living in the same place. Not that I’m saying it clearly, or anything, but…

“I don’t know.” He’s noncommittal. Or too sick to focus. Either way, it doesn’t feel good. Time to change the topic.

“Sleep.”

I take a minute and clean up the whole room. I commandeer the stuff by the bedside. I make sure the humidifier is clean. I pull all the towels from the bathroom to wash in scorching hot water and bleach. I dig around and find him a new toothbrush and throw out the one from the cup on the sink.

I will do battle with his illness. This is something I know how to do. And the encouraging thing here? Pneumonia is something people recover from. Especially young, healthy men. This thought takes a little of the panic out of my head.

After I get a very basic pot of chicken noodle soup on the stove, I mill about for a while. The house is basically clean. I don’t think Andrew’s been spending much time here. Besides working, I try not to think too much about where else he’s been of late. I find a can of orange juice in the freezer and whip that up, but there’s not much more to do.

He’s still sleeping. This is a tempting opportunity. I know. I’ve been wavering about invading his privacy. But a little looking around his house is irresistible. I make a bargain with myself that I won’t open drawers. Maybe that makes it okay.

In the living room, I spend a little time at the piano. There are sheaves of sheet music with assorted scribbles. I hope he’s been writing. I suspect it’s therapeutic for him. He needs something, I can tell. I can only pump him full of chicken soup for a few days, and then he has to work out whatever is bugging him on his own.

On the top of the piano are photographs. Most of them I can tell are his family: his folks, his sisters, pictures of him with all of them. There’s one picture that intrigues me, though. It’s a young girl, high school age or so. Cute, red-haired. No one that looks like him. It looks like a senior picture.

My interest is piqued. We haven’t had the discussion of the exes. My discussion is short, I guess, and involves basically just the one whopper of a former love, Peter. So I guess we’ve had that talk. But I haven’t asked him about his past loves. Because what? I need to know about the drop-dead gorgeous models and actresses he’s been with? I don’t know if I need more fuel for the freak-out fire.

I flip the picture over. The frame’s nondescript, but there’s gold pen on the back.

Emily Waylon.

It’s not Andrew’s handwriting. I try not to freak out. This is someone important.

Now, try not to judge me. I go to my laptop. Yes, I’m looking her up. Is it snoopy? Yes. Should I just ask him? Yes. Am I afraid to, especially since he’s been in such bad shape lately? Yes.

I fire up my computer. I type in her name and his home state, Pennsylvania. There’s an obituary. I click on it.

It makes me physically sick. She had recently graduated high school, a sophomore in college. Mid-year. It’s a beautiful death notice, and it most notably does not list a cause of death. I’ve read enough obituaries (hell, I’ve written one) to know that often a family leaves off that detail if the loved one took her own life.

My hands tremble, but I go to IMDb and type in Andrew’s name. I’ve never actually looked at his bio on here. Now I’m looking for Emily’s name.

There she is. It actually has quite a poignant paragraph, even quotes him from an early interview. She was a good friend in high school. I click on the interview citation and go straight to the magazine archives for the article.

It’s long. It’s about his role in the remake of
Camille
, about where Andrew’s inspiration might have come from for such an emotional movie. There are very few direct quotes from him besides the one IMDb mined. Much of it seems to have come from “sources.” I wonder who would give up such a sensitive part of Andrew’s life to a national magazine. Someone who didn’t care for him too much.

They dated, he and Emily, according to the article. They broke up when he moved to LA, and she went off to college. They remained in contact, remained good friends. When she was a sophomore, she sunk into a deep depression. She was planning to come out to LA to see him on her spring break that year. In February, he canceled on her, having just landed a role on a soap opera. He received word on his birthday, the first of April, that she’d been found in her dorm room, dead. She’d taken too many of her prescription sleeping pills. The death was ruled an accidental overdose. Andrew did not attend the funeral, and the article goes on to quote a “Hollywood insider” who relates that his agent had to haul him out of a hotel room to report for his first day of shooting on his first real acting job. He’d apparently been drinking heavily.

I stare at the screen. His birthday is in two weeks. It all falls into place. Yes, the movie tour; yes, the constant work; yes, the illness; and maybe missing me and/or Todd. But Tucker left out one big thing: an anniversary that he probably doesn’t even know about. All of this makes sense to me now.

What am I going to do with this newfound information? Not a thing. It was a breach of privacy. I shouldn’t know about it. I’ll take this information and use it to deepen my patience and understanding, but unless Andrew decides to confide in me, I know nothing of it, as far as he’s concerned. Everyone is allowed a few secrets. And the trouble is, no one seems to allow Andrew any secrets.

I spend the rest of the afternoon feeling like the heel that I am. When Andrew finally wakes up, I tend to him. I try to give him as much tender care as he must have needed ten years ago, and I hope it’s enough to help him out of the quicksand he seems to be slipping into right now.

35: Blue Midnight

A
NDREW
S
TRUGGLES
T
HROUGH
another day of post-production work, and I clean his house top to bottom. Clearly something is wrong—I never clean. Jeremy contributes to the cause by sending over dinner. Once Andrew’s home, we eat a little, talk a little, drink tea, and Andrew collapses into bed, exhausted.

I fall asleep in one of the other bedrooms, but only after I spend a good amount of time staring at the ceiling, clutched in panic. I worry about having left the boys to come down here. I worry they’re mad Tessa is running them to spring break camps instead of me. I worry about the Emily information. I worry about Andrew. I fidget with the fringe on the bedspread, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gnawed all of my fingernails down to the nub.

I do actually sleep, because I wake up in blue moonlight. I sit up. It’s not a nightmare that’s woken me. It’s sound. I don’t know what it is at first. Then I listen, fully awake.

It’s the piano.

I slip softly down the stairs. Andrew sits at the piano. He plays softly, making little notes on a sheet of staff paper on the top of the piano every so often. There is a lit cigarette in an ashtray next to the sheet music.

“Hey.” I announce myself.

He startles. “Jesus. I didn’t know you were up.”

“Why aren’t you asleep?” I touch his hand. The feel of his skin stirs something in me, but I keep my focus on his eyes, looking to read them for a clue.

“No reason.” He looks away from me, busies himself stubbing out the cigarette.

“Andrew.”

“I’m so tired, but I lie down, and there are too many things.” He leans into me, draws me to him, and I feel his breath on my neck.

“You can’t get better if you don’t rest. All those things? I was boring a hole through your ceiling earlier, worrying about them. Let me worry for you. You rest.”

“A designated worrier.” He smiles, then frowns as a coughing fit comes on.

I rub his back and wait for it to subside. “Come to bed.”

“I want to, and what I really want to do is lie down and kiss every inch of you. I don’t think I have the energy, of course, but still.” He laughs a little. Then another thought must come to him, because his expression clouds over again.

“Stop. Stop and rest.” I take his hand and lead him away from the piano. He follows me up the stairs, to his bedroom. He climbs into bed, and I sit on the edge.

“When I’m better, we have a lot of lost time to make up for.” He traces my cheek down to my lip with his thumb, thinks for a moment, and lies back, arms over his head on the pillow. I think he’s about a second from sleep.

“What were you writing?”

His eyes suddenly fill with tears. “I promised someone a song once. I never got a chance to write it. I was thinking I might write it now.”

Emily. That’s the someone. My heart might break for him. “I think you should. It’s never too late to keep a promise.”

“I don’t know about that…” His voice trails off. He’s finally let go, and he’s asleep.

I go back to my bed and cry myself to sleep.

36: Castles in the Sand

I K
NOW
T
HE
P
ARTY
in Malibu is a bad idea from the get go. But it’s been four days, Andrew seems to be feeling a little better, and I want to be supportive. Plus, I wonder if getting out might be a good distraction. He’s an adult, and if he says the house party is a good idea, I’ll trust he’s right. I want to trust him.

“It’s mostly going to be networking.” Andrew’s talking while he drives. I’m riding shotgun in the black convertible. The spring weather is warm today, and his cough is sounding better. We have the top down. Maybe he’ll get a little color in the afternoon light.

“This is the producer from
Churchill’s Man
?”

“Yeah. He never wants to let it go. It’s been like six weeks since the premiere, but he’ll probably invite some writers to the house tonight too, in hopes that one of them’ll wheedle an interview out of me. More press for the movie.” This makes Andrew seem tired again.

“But the other guy?”

“Yeah. Greg Nero’ll also be there, and he’s shopping a movie around that I’m interested in. It’s about Northern Ireland in the eighties. I guess it was bad then.”

I skip the part where I tell him I was alive and old enough to remember how bad it was. But that movie is enough reason for us to go to this party. This party means his next job, potentially, and by all appearances, he needs to go back to work.

I think again about Emily. In a normal relationship, I wouldn’t know about her. I’d just be confused about why he’s been falling apart, and really worried. Now, through the magic of the Internet, I’m still really worried, but I know where some of this might be coming from. I wonder if he’s intentionally skipped mentioning his birthday to me too.

“You know, you’ve got a birthday coming up.” I think I can mention this safely.

“Don’t remind me. April Fool’s, isn’t that rich?” His tone seems bitter.

“What do you want to do for it?”

“You mean, me and you?”

Uh-oh. Are we not thinking in me-and-you terms? “What do you usually do for your birthday?”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “Out here, not much. Sometimes Todd’s around and we go out, or once we went to Mexico for the weekend. Usually my folks call, my sisters send me cards their kids have made, Jeremy sends me a gift basket full of stuff I hate, and that’s about it. To be honest, Kelly, there are a lot of reasons why my birthday always sucks. Some of them I should tell you about.”

My heart jumps. “You know I’ll always listen.”

“I want to tell you. Maybe not on the way to a party in Malibu, but…”

“Well, we should do something for your birthday before I go back home. You’re almost thirty—maybe you’ll catch up to me soon. I’ve stopped aging, you know.” I’m trying desperately to put a smile on his face. “Maybe we can make it a good occasion again.”