My Double Life (19 page)

Too late. Kari already knew Maren was trying to make inroads with her father.

I watched as Maren slipped her cell phone back into a clip on her belt. She always wore it on her belt. And my father’s number was on it.

I hadn’t planned on calling him; I wanted to meet him face-to-face. Still, it was aggravating: my father was just a redial button away—and I still had no way to talk to him.

After my shower, I took the sapphire necklace and slipped it around my neck. I decided to wear it all the time. Perhaps it was an outside chance, but my father could stop by and see Maren sometime. If he did, I wanted to be ready.

I spent the next week making appearances in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico while Kari holed up at her house, writing and practicing songs. Maren came with me, and I noticed she never left her phone unattended. It stayed on her belt during the day, and she charged it in her hotel room at night. Once while we ate breakfast in the hotel, I pretended to be interested in upgrading my cell phone and came right out and asked her, “Can I see yours?”

She pressed her lips together in an unapologetic smile, as though she enjoyed telling me no. “I never let anyone see it. It has private information.”

So much for getting my father’s number from her.

I thought about him a lot when I was out on the road performing. Being up on stage made me feel close to him. Sometimes when I was alone staring out a hotel window, he would come to mind, and my hand would reflexively go to the sapphire necklace around my throat.

I would think about his decisions, how so many decisions, really, affect more than the people who make them. Dwelling on this might make me responsible, or paralyzed, I wasn’t sure which.

Luckily I wasn’t alone very much. Some sort of assistant—either mine or people from whatever event I was doing—always seemed to hover around.

It was getting easier to play my role as Kari. I especially liked being gracious to all the staff I came in contact with: the tech people working on the sound systems and the spotlights, the ushers, the waiters, the hotel employees. I’d spent my life being one of the overlooked; I wanted to notice and thank them for their work now. And they were always so pleasantly surprised at how nice Kari Kingsley was.

Even when things went wrong that would have normally upset me—like when the sound system wasn’t ready, thus causing one of my concerts to start twenty minutes late—I brushed it off. I didn’t want to have a temper. That way no one could criticize my sister for being a prima donna.

Grant called every night while I was gone, which was always the highlight of my day. It wasn’t the thunderous applause I got after a song, or the throngs of people giddy to see me. It was relaxing in my hotel room and Grant’s voice on my phone that made my skin tingle. He made a date for the first day I was home and kept running ideas past me.

“Skydiving?” he’d ask. “Bungee jumping? How about running with the bulls in Pamplona?”

I kept telling him it didn’t have to be anything elaborate. “Pizza and a DVD would be fine.”

I knew I couldn’t have a relationship with him. Too many obstacles stood in our way, not the least of which was that he thought I was my sister. But after that kiss at Kari’s, I couldn’t immediately break things off with him. That would make Kari look like some sort of trampy tease. And besides, I wanted to see Grant again. I craved it.

So I would allow myself to go on a date or two and then tell him it wasn’t working out between us. Sometimes that’s how things went. He probably wouldn’t mind. The guy who’d never been turned down wouldn’t have a hard time finding the next trophy girlfriend to take my place. I just had to make sure I didn’t let my feelings get involved. I had to keep myself aloof.

Grant told me to dress casually and wear tennis shoes for our date, but I had no idea what he was planning. I also had no idea what I’d tell Maren about my absence or how I could go out without an entourage coming with me. It became a sort of mental game—thinking of different ways to escape.

After we flew back to California, Maren and I stopped by Kari’s house. The art director had e-mailed mock-up covers for her new CD, and Maren wanted to get Kari’s opinion on them.

Kari answered the door with a splint across her nose and bruises around her eyes. I gaped at her, wondering who had beat her up. Maren nearly dropped the covers. “What happened to you? Are you okay?” she asked.

“Did you call the police?” I asked at nearly the same time.

“Oh, this—” Kari touched her nose gingerly. “I got my dose done like Alegia’s.”

We both stared at her. “You what?” I asked.

“Once the swellig goes dowd, it will loog great. Everyone is goig to love it.”

“Yeah, I already love it,” I said, trying not to sound too horrified, “because it’s
my
nose.”

“Right. It looged good on you so I dew it would coordidate with the rest of my face.”

I wanted to say, “You can’t just copy my nose without my permission,” which of course was stupid. She already had, and we were trying to look alike, but still. My nose was one of the few things that was mine, not hers.

Maren gritted her teeth. “You were supposed to be working on your songs. You’re supposed to be recording them. We’ve already announced you’re debuting two new songs in San Diego. The show’s less than a month away.”

“I ca’t regord lige this,” Kari said. “I’m recoverig from surgery. I’m swolled, bruised, and my voice sounds lige it’s fleeing through my dasal passage.”

Maren let out an angry grunt, but she didn’t yell. She just said, “We’ll talk about your schedule tomorrow,” and we left.

Kari’s surgery turned out to be a boon for me in a lot of ways.

The next morning, instead of planning out my schedule, Maren decided she needed to spend the day with Kari. As she gathered up her laptop and briefcase, I told her, “I’m going shopping later. I might be gone a while.”

“Take Nikolay and Bao-Zhi, and only go to approved stores,” she said and swept past me out the door without another word.

Escaping my entourage had just gotten a lot easier.

I wasn’t about to take Nikolay out on a date with Grant, but since I’d been able to buy Bao-Zhi’s silence with good tips, I had him chauffeur me to meet Grant. Our designated spot was a back road in the middle of nowhere. I felt sort of like an underworld spy, going to these lengths to avoid detection, but I didn’t want to let anyone else take a picture of us together.

When we got there, I handed Bao-Zhi a wad of bills, told him I’d call when I needed him again, and climbed into Grant’s Jaguar.

I should have been used to his good looks, to his square jaw and the sweep of his hair, but he looked at me and I lost the ability to speak. All I could do was mumble, “Hi.”

Grant pulled onto the road. “Are you glad to be back home?”

Maren’s house could never feel like home. “Yeah,” I said.

Grant let his eyes drift from the road to my face. “I missed you.”

The phrase struck a blow to my plan of aloofness, but I tried to hold firm. I shifted in my seat to put more distance between us. He didn’t notice. He was back to watching the road. I tried to keep my voice businesslike. “So where are we going for this mystery date?”

“It’s still a mystery,” he said. “You won’t know until we get there.”

“Am I dressed right?”

His gaze ran over me, lingering on my face. “You look great.”

It wasn’t what I’d asked, but I still liked hearing it.

We made small talk, then finally pulled up to the airport. “What are we doing here?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just steered the car away from the terminals. We drove onto the tarmac and pulled up to a private jet.

I stared at it in disbelief. I should have known this wouldn’t be like dating the guys in Morgantown.

As we got out of the car, I laughed nervously. A sudden fear sprung to my mind: Maybe he’d found out who I was and was sending me back to West Virginia. Instead he took my hand and stepped onto the plane with me. It looked almost identical to the one I’d come to California on, right down to the beige leather seats.

I sat down and buckled up, glad that I’d already been on a plane once so I knew how to work the safety belts. “So where are we going for our date that requires a plane?”

“You’ll know when we get there,” he said.

“I think that’s something you say when you’re kidnapping a person, not dating her.”

He laughed, but didn’t tell me. For the next hour we talked and ate a lunch of raspberry-glazed roast duckling and artichoke hearts. We might as well have been in some elite restaurant. And no matter how many different ways I asked, he still wouldn’t tell me where the plane was headed.

When we landed, he took out a blindfold and slipped it over my eyes. “Have any more guesses as to where I’m taking you?”

“Right now I’m thinking a firing squad.”

“Wrong again.” He took my hand and led me slowly toward the exit door. As I stepped outside, a wall of heat engulfed me.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked.

“An oven? Hades?”

“Las Vegas,” he said.

“Why are we in Las Vegas?” I reached for my blindfold, but he wouldn’t let me take it off. He led me along the runway and then helped me step up into another vehicle. He climbed in beside me, buckled my safety belt, then put headphones over my ears. “You’re going to need these in a minute,” he said.

Before I could ask why, the vehicle shuddered and thumped with a loud chopping noise. I reached for my blindfold again, but Grant took hold of my hand. “Not yet,” he called over the noise.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Helicopter.” He didn’t let go of my hand. I interlaced my fingers with his and tried to figure out where we could be going. What was around Las Vegas that you couldn’t drive to?

Wherever it was, it took an annoyingly long time to get there. But finally Grant reached around to the back of my hair and loosened the blindfold. I blinked in the light, adjusting my eyes, and the Grand Canyon came into focus in front of me.

I’d seen pictures of it before. And I knew the word
grand
meant big, yet I’d never imagined it could be so huge. I felt like a speck in a plunging rock sea. The world had suddenly become layered stacks of orange and brown.

I gasped and leaned closer to the window. “It’s amazing.”

“Better than pizza and a DVD?”

I squeezed his hand, but kept my gaze out the window. The helicopter made a lazy descent so that the canyon walls seemed to reach up and surround us. “You know, you’ve set a really bad precedent for first dates,” I said. “How is anyone ever going to top this?”

I turned to him for the first time. He was watching me, not the scenery. “I brought you here because I wanted to see the look on your face when you saw this place.” He smiled, and my heart flipped over. “It was worth the trip.”

Eventually, the helicopter landed in a remote spot. We wouldn’t have to worry about being seen down here. The pilot handed us a couple of backpacks with water, sunscreen, and hats. Then we stepped out into the vast landscape of towering rock walls. The Colorado River stretched out before us.

I knew long before Grant took hold of my hand again that my plan to remain emotionally uninvolved had disappeared somewhere among the layers of sun-baked stone.