I'll Be There (2 page)

CARMEL, CALIFORNIA

August 1983

EVEN WHEN SHE wore a big hat and dark glasses because she thought they would make her look dramatically different, the disguise didn’t do her any good at all, because what everyone recognized about her to begin with was her nose and her bright red hair and her funny little walk. So on those days when she was going out in public, she’d put on the hat, then the glasses, and within minutes people would still come right up to her on the street, or stop her when she and Nina were walking on the beach and ask, “Aren’t you Cee Cee Bloom?”

Most of the time it was okay with her to be approached by fans, but on days when she wasn’t in the mood, she could be impatient or abrupt with them, and on those days Nina would overhear the people when they walked away saying things like “What a bitch,” after Cee Cee had autographed their chocolate-smeared paper napkin from Mrs. Field’s Cookies, or a deposit slip from a checkbook, which was sometimes all the paper the people had with them.

Today, when Cee Cee and Nina took a long silent walk on the beach, nobody came over to talk. Maybe because it was just a day when everyone was too busy with their friends and their dogs and their kites to notice them walking arm in arm. Or it could have been that people did notice them but sensed this was a very bad time. Her tie had died exactly two weeks ago today and later this morning Cee Cee was taking Nina to the boarding school in Santa Cruz, which Bertie’s tight-ass lawyer decided was the best place for the kid to be. So this was the last walk they would take together on the Carmel beach they had grown to depend on for solace over the last few months.

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In an effort to make sure she was doing everything right, Cee Cee had called the lawyer a few days after Bertie’s death, weighted down with a grief so heavy she could barely talk. But that didn’t seem to matter to the all-business lawyer who did most of the talking anyway, while Cee Cee, trying to focus through her acute pain, only understood about half of the legal bullshit he was spouting, and during the other half she said, “Uh huh” and “Yeah” a lot so he’d think she got it all. The part she did get was that his law firm in Sarasota, Florida, was the “guardian of the estate,” which meant they were in charge of the money Bertie had left to Nina.

“And you, Mizz Bloom,” he said, putting a real buzz on the Mizz, the way some men did to show they’d rather say Miss, and didn’t go for what they thought was some made-up feminist bullshit title, “are the guardian of the person.” End of sentence, she thought, but no such luck. “Provided, of course, the guardianship isn’t contested by anyone else,” he had added in a snarky voice that made her clutch. Who in the hell was he talking about? Who was gonna contest it? Bertie picked her and that’s the way it would stay. Wasn’t it?

“Since Mrs. Barron’s verbal nomination of you as Nina’s guardian, I’ve made some inquiries into the school situation, and have a strong suggestion as to the most appropriate private school for Nina,” was what he said next, and Cee Cee, who had been so racked with sadness watching Bertie leave this life, trying desperately through it all to hold herself and Nina together, had to admit she sure as hell hadn’t thought as far as where she was going to put the kid in school.

“Isn’t it summer?” she blurted out, then felt dumb when he answered.

“It’s August. Long past the time to apply. School begins in two weeks.”

The body ain’t even coldyet, asshole, was what she wanted to say, but instead, probably because the little putz had thrown her off with that stuff about somebody contesting her right to Nina, she laid off and tried to be obliging. “Well then.., suggest away,” she said, picturing some pompous little pain-in-the-wazoo lawyer sitting in Florida deciding what was best for a kid he’d probably never even met. And it was clear as glass he wasn’t just “suggesting,” because then he said that as soon as Bertie told him how after she died she wanted Cee Cee to be Nina’s guardian, he’d located “the perfect boarding school” for

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the kid, “situated conveniently in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. And,” he added, while Cee Cee sat there, knowitg things were going very wrong but feeling unable to stop them, “I’ve already sent the school a deposit in order to hold a place for the child, since I was certain you’d agree.”

Boarding school, she wanted to scream. Who the fuck goes to boarding school, you heartless little prick? Maybe Oliver Twist, and all those other characters from Shakespeare. Not my kid. Her kid. Now that’s what was the hardest to believe about all this. To really get it into her head that this funny little pain-in-the-ass creature, this little lost soul of a girl, who was an amazing combination of Bertie’s beauty and Michael’s steel-jawed iciness, was now in the care of Cee Cee not-exactly-the-odds-on-favorite-for-Mother-of-the-Year Bloom. And here she was, already proving she was no good at it by caving like an empty beer can at a fraternity party, and by her silence, agreeing to let Nina go to boarding school.

Yeah, it was definitely because the snotty little lawyer had scared her with that stuff about contesting her right to Nina, filled her head with terrors of courtroom scenes where she had to fight Bertie’s ex husband or Bertie’s aunt, two people who would jump at the chance of flinging a little mud about Cee Cee’s past. And it was the vision of those two coming after her that had made her sit there on the phone with the guy like some spineless blob, never saying what she should have, afraid to challenge him, and now it was killing her.

Filling her with guilt, because she knew that implicit in her pitch to Bertie to give the kid to her was a deathbed promise to show Nina a world filled with the kind of passion and spontaneity Bertie knew only Cee Cee could provide. And now, because she’d let the lawyer walk all over her, she wouldn’t even be around the kid, except during school vacations. Of course those other two phone calls she’d made during that first week hadn’t exactly helped her confidence in herself either. One of them was to her agent at the William Morris office, Larry Gold, and the other one was to her business manager, Wayne Gordon.

Each of them had been real sympathetic and sweet about her friend’s dying. And why wouldn’t they be? Their percentage of her earnings over the many years they’d represented her would put all of their kids through college. But after the words of sympathy, each of

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them had warned her in an ominous voice that her exit, in the middle of production, from her television special a few months earlier had damaged her career. And now that she was coming home, if she couldn’t make peace with the network, she could find herself in a tough spot.

“They’re pissed off, Cee Cee. You walked out on them, and there’s a real good chance they’ll say they don’t want to be in The Cee Cee Bloom business anymore.” If that was true, she’d definitely have some big financial problems. Have to live off her savings for a while and sell some of her stock and hustle a little to get work. And that could mean traveling anywhere the work was happening. Maybe to make a movie in some far-off place, or worse yet put together an act to take on the road, which was not exactly the life for somebody raising a kid. Which was another reason why, even though it felt so shitty, she had agreed to let Nina go to that boarding school. At least for now.

When they had reached the southernmost end of the Carmel Beach Cee Cee looked at her watch and already felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach, just thinking about having to say goodbye to this little girl whose screaming entry into the world she had watched in the hospital delivery room so long ago. All right, so she’d only watched part of the time, until she realized how bloody it was going to be, and then she’d fainted so the nurses had to peel her up off the floor in the middle of the whole thing. But that was just a detail. The point was that she and Nina were connected very deeply from way back.

“I think we’d better hit the road, kiddo,” Cee Cee said, hearing the lack of conviction in her own voice. An old lady wearing faded jeans and a fisherman’s knit sweater walked by with two little dogs the size of mice on leashes, and one of the dogs stopped, lifted its little leg, and peed in the sand. “Good boy,” the lady said, and they walked on. Nina stood looking down at her own pretty little toes as they curled up to scrunch bunches of sand under and between them and then released the sand and did it again. This really is the best thing for her, Cee Cee thought. For now this is the best thing. But it was hard to convince herself when she looked at Nina’s tiny face, because what she really wanted to do was to zip the kid inside of her Windbreaker and hide her there forever.

Last night they’d spent hours packing up the house Bertie had

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rented in Carmel. First they organized their own things and then they went throtgh all of Bertie’s. Her personal effects. “Is there any of this you want to wear now?” Cee Cee had asked Nina, sorting through some of Bertie’s jewelry, while a kind of slide show of the times she remembered Bertie wearing each piece played itself out in her mind.

Nina took a bracelet of seed pearls out of the box and looked at it for a while, then handed it to Cee Cee, who opened the clasp and looped the delicate thing carefully around the girl’s wrist, which she needn’t have done because Nina could have easily slipped her tiny hand and wrist into the bracelet without opening it. Then both of them looked back into the box at what was clearly the most special piece of jewelry there. It was the ring Bertie had worn every day of her life since 1970, when Rosie, her own mother, died and left it to her.

It had a platinum band and a small round emerald that was such a brilliant green it always used to catch the eye of people who saw it on Bertie’s long slim finger. Nina slipped the ring over her own ring finger. “Much too big,” she said, disappointed.

“Nina, the ring is yours, and it’s insured. It’s very valuable, but if you want to wear it, I have a chain with a good safety clasp in the back, and you could wear it hanging from the chain, at least for now.”

Nina thought about it and then turned the ring over and over in her hand. “I’d like that,” she said.

Cee Cee found her chain, slippec the ring onto it, and had Nina hold her hair up so that she could fasten the chain around her neck.

“How do I look?” she asked Cee Cee, and stood to see herself in the oval pine mirror above the dresser. She was so much the picture of Bertie at that moment Cee Cee had to take a deep breath before she answered.

“More beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen.”

This morning when they got back to the house and squirted the sand from their feet with the hose at the side door, Cee Cee went inside and found her car keys on the hall table, then she picked up the small suitcases they had piled up last night in the hallway near the front door and carried them out to the car, with Nina following her carrying another, her two hands wrapped around the handle as the suitcase bumped against her legs.

When the car was loaded she climbed into the passenger seat, and

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Cee Cee went back to lock the front door of the house, remembering the first day she arrived, summoned hy Bertie, not knowing then what the reason was for the urgency, never imagining it would be months before she would leave. With Nina and without Bertie. “Goodbye, house,” she said softly. Then she got into the car, made sure Nina was bcltcd in, fastened the seat belt around hcrsclf, and started the engine of the big Chevy she’d rented the day she arrived.

“I gotta get gas,” she said, looking at the gauge on the dashboard as she pulled away from the curb, then turned the car up to Ocean Avenue, and after a while made a right turn and drove a few blocks down one of the streets of Hansel and Gretel shops, to the gas station.

“It’s a good thing we’re getting out of this place,” Cee Cee said. “I’m about to overdose on quaint. What about you?”

Nina didn’t answer. The gas station was busy and they waited in line behind a camper with the bumper sticker that said PROTI;CTEI)

BY SMITH AND WESSON.

“How do I get to Santa Cruz?” Cee Cee asked the gas station attendant while he was cleaning the windshield. She had mostly used the big clunky car to take Bertie from the house down the few blocks to the Carmel Beach after the time had come during the illness when Bertie was too weak to walk that far. Now the gas station attendant had to push down hard on the scraper because the windshield was thick with a residue of salt air and leaves as a result of the car sitting unused for so long.

“You go up to Highway One, then get on it going north and you can’t miss it.”

“Got any maps?”

In a few minutes the man came back with a map and Cee Cee opened it, turned it and folded it, then unfolded it and muttered to herself, because she didn’t have a clue how to read it. All those little blue and red lines and numbers and letters were the same blur they always were when she looked at maps.

“Where the erring hell is Santa Cruz?” she said impatiently. “The guy must have brought me the wrong map because it’s not on here.”

“May I help?” Nina asked, and she spotted Santa Cruz on the map before the map was even in her hands, but politely took a minute to act as if she was searching for it so Cee Cee wouldn’t feel too stupid.

“Here it is,” Nina said, holding the map so Cee Cee could see it.

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“Oh yeah,” Cee Cee said. While the gas station attendant was processing her Master Charge, she tried a couple of times to refold the map to the original size, but finally she gave up and tossed the large open piece of paper over her shoulder into the backseat and started the car. Nina wasn’t saying a word, and Cee Cee knew it was up to her to saw something first, something important or reassuring, but she couldn’t think of anything so she drove through Carmel in silence.

Just as they reached the end of one of the long tree-lined residential streets and drove around the bend, the stone dome of the adobe Carmel Mission rose against the blue sky ahead of them. The mission was the place they had chosen a few days ago to have their own little memorial service for Bertie. Janice Carnes, the lady from the hospice, had been there and Jessica, the nurse who had been hired to take care of Bertie before Cee Cee came to take over, showed up too, and Made line, the cleaning girl, arrived carrying a little bouquet of flowers from her garden for Nina.