No Ordinary Life (36 page)

86

S
abotage the show
. The notion is unsettling and perversely attractive.

Grabbing my purse and phone, I follow Helen out the door, for the first time in a week, certain of what I need to do. If there's a person who will know how to bring down a show it's Bo. Home. I need to go home.

Too impatient to wait for the elevator, I take the stairs. Because the kids are no longer around, neither is the paparazzi, so as I walk toward the Pathfinder, I am unconcerned that my hair hasn't been washed in days or that I am wearing stained sweats and an old T-shirt of Sean's that says, “C.S.A., Can't Stand Idiots.”

I am ten feet from the car and clicking open the locks when a man steps from the shadows, startling me and causing the keys to drop from my hands.

“Where is she?” he says.

It takes a second for me to recognize him, and if it weren't for the round glasses, I might not know him at all—John Lennon. But he doesn't look like the clean-shaven young man who used to wave at us from the corner. This morning his face is shadowed with beard, his hair is long and unclean, and his expression is anything but friendly. In his left hand is a folded sheet of paper, in his right, a small gun.

My heart clatters around in my chest. The gun is not pointed at me. It hangs loose by his side. But regardless of its aim, there is a man with a gun standing two feet in front of me demanding to know where my daughter is.

“Where is she?” he says again.

I want to answer, but I can't, my voice lost in my fear.

“I need to see her.” Despite being in his twenties, the man sounds oddly like a little boy.

My head shakes back and forth, and my strange waitress voice emerges to say, “She's not here.”

“When's she coming home?”

“I…I don't know,” I stutter. “She doesn't live with me anymore.”

“She lives with the man with the red car?”

I don't answer, my eyes fixed on the gun.

“I don't like him. He isn't nice.”

I don't mean to, but my head moves up and down.

“She's with him because you hit her? You shouldn't have done that. That made me mad.”

I wait for the gun to rise and shoot me because I made him mad, but surprisingly it is his other hand that rises.

“You need to give this to her,” he says, thrusting the paper toward me.

My hand trembles as I take it. Then he bends, picks up my keys, and holds them out, dangling them by my keychain that says “World's Greatest Mom,” a gift from Emily two Mother's Days ago.

“You'll give the letter to Molly?” he asks as I take the keys from his extended hand.

I nod.

“Thank you,” he says with bizarre politeness, then he walks past me, shoves his hands and the gun into his jacket pockets, and walks out of the parking garage.

I whirl and race back to the stairs. My fingers fumble with the code, and my feet trip up the risers, but I manage to make it up the six flights.

My first call is to my mom, warning her not to come home. She tries to ask questions, but I cut her off. There's no time; I have other calls to make.

My second call is to the police. I explain who I am and what happened, and the operator instructs me to stay on the line, but like I did with my mom, I don't have time and hang up before she finishes the request.

The third call is to Sean.

“Calling to grovel,” he answers by way of greeting. “Tough being on the other side of the custody fence.”

“Sean, there's a man with a gun, and he's looking for Molly.”

It takes nearly ten minutes for me to sputter out what happened, and with each word, I feel Sean's anger rising. “Christ, Faye, you need to get the fuck out of there. I'm coming to get you.”

“No, Sean. I'm fine. The police are on their way then I'm leaving. I'm going to Bo's for a couple days.”

“That's good. Bo's is a good idea.” His tension and fear for me resonates through the line. “Did you bolt the door?”

“Yes.”

“And the chain?”

“Yes, and the chain. Sean, he's not coming up here. I don't know why he had the gun, but he wasn't threatening me with it. It's like he wanted me to see it so I would know he was serious, but he wasn't trying to scare me with it. He was just showing it to convince me that I needed to give the letter to Molly.”

“What's the letter say?”

I sit down at the table and, my hands still shaking, unfold it in front of me. The paper is plain white and unlined, the lettering rudimentary and sloppy:

“Holy shit,” Sean says, just as sirens pull up outside the building.

“The police are here.”

“Molly's not going anywhere fucking near that goddamn hotel,” Sean says, fury in his voice.

The letter sends the police into a tizzy, and the condo looks like a squad room, and I've been interrogated by at least a dozen different people from half a dozen different agencies. The president's staff has been put on alert and the itinerary for his visit changed so he will no longer be staying at the Hilton when he arrives next week.

Stakeouts are now in place at the hotel, at the condo, at Ethan's apartment, and at Sean's apartment, and an APB has been put out on Ethan W. Howell.

It's nearly two thirty, and my head is throbbing.

My mom has returned and sits with me on the couch as the whirl of activity spins around us. The current debate seems to be whether Molly should be used as bait to flush him out if they are not able to apprehend him before the president arrives.

Sean's answer is an adamant no. And for the first time in her life, my mom agrees with my ex-husband. I should be relieved that the decision is not up to me since custody at the moment solely belongs to Sean, but I'm not. Ethan's sad, troubled eyes keep piercing my brain. If he sees Molly, he might not hurt anyone, and he might not hurt himself.

At three o'clock, I call Sean. “Sean, please listen to me. This guy, he won't hurt Molly. He's just confused and a little off…”

“Confused and a little off with a goddamn fucking gun. I told you, Faye, Molly's not going anywhere near him. I hope the police take him out with a sniper bullet.”

“Sean, don't…”

“One less fucking nutcase in the world.” He hangs up.

I'm thinking of calling him back when the phone buzzes in my hand. Chris is calling.

87

C
hris huffed and puffed, swore up and down that he had nothing to do with the custody hearing, acted furious when I refused to come back unless the court order was reversed, then hung up on me.

An hour later, the police and FBI finally gone, he called back. At first he tried to be cajoling and sweet, and when that didn't work, he tried bribing me with more money. When I refused to budge, he rattled off a litany of expletives and threatened to sue me, and that's when I hung up on him.

The next morning, while I was having breakfast with Bo, he called and said he would see what he could do. And that afternoon, as I was driving home, my lawyer called to tell me the judge had reversed the order. The reversal was based on affidavits she received from both the nurse and Beth recanting their earlier statements as well as from two street vendors who witnessed Molly being looked after by Emily only a few feet from where I was applying for jobs. The new evidence also included a video of the airport incident from a different angle, showing clearly that I did not hit Molly.

The only evidence that remained was Ms. Glenn's report, the security director's testimony about me slapping Emily, and Emily's letter. The judge dismissed Ms. Glenn's report as irrelevant because it wasn't current and because I did get Tom into therapy, and she interviewed the security director and Emily and must not have found their testimony compelling enough because she rescinded her judgment immediately, declaring me fit as a mother and admonishing Sean for fabricating evidence against me.

88

W
hen Molly and Tom walk into the condo, I can't stop hugging them, and within an hour, they are completely sick of me. But I can't help myself. I can't believe they're really back.

Emily refuses to return, court order or not, and there's nothing I can do but hope to figure out a way to get us out of this mess and back to Yucaipa, hoping when the gravy train dries up, Sean will move on, leaving Emily no choice but to come home.

I make a nice dinner, give the kids their baths, read the script to them for tomorrow, then leave to drive across town to Burbank.

I park in front of a large Mediterranean house that is unremarkable from its neighbors—pale stucco, a brick driveway, neat hedges lining a manicured lawn. Surprisingly there's no security gate and no paparazzi. My eyes scan in my rearview mirror, searching for lurking predators, and when I see no one, I step from the car and walk unencumbered to the front door, realizing that, though Gabby is famous, she is less adored than the other Foster family cast members, none of whom could ever live in a home so unguarded.

“Faye,” Gabby's mom says, surprised when she sees me. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm sorry to disturb you, Graciela, but there's something I want to discuss with you, and it needs to be said in private.”

“Please, come in,” she says, a shadow of distrust crossing her face.

I follow her into the house, through the living room, and into the kitchen, passing two boys sitting on a couch playing video games.

“Is Gabby home?” I ask as I settle on a stool at the granite-topped kitchen island.

“She's in her room. Would you like some coffee?”

“No,
gracias
,” I say, immediately regretting the use of my limited Spanish.

She goes about making the coffee anyway, perhaps for herself, perhaps to bide time.

I watch her as she works. She is an unremarkable woman—her hair flat black, her skin brown, her weight somewhere between thick and heavy—and even though we've met several times, it's possible, if I were not in her home, I might not recognize her. We don't know each other well. Gabby is sixteen and therefore no longer needs a guardian on the set. So, other than to say hello, we've barely said two words.

The coffee begins to drip, and she takes the stool across from me, her fingers laced on the counter in front of her. Her hands are older than the rest of her—chafed and scarred from a life of hard work. The nails, however, are freshly manicured, painted a pretty blush pink. It's an odd juxtaposition of the two lives she's led, one as a poor Mexican migrant worker and the other as the stage mom of Gabby Rodriguez, famous actress and singer.

“You're here about Mitten,” she says, catching me by surprise and rendering me speechless. “I heard about your older daughter. Emily, is it?”

I nod.

“I will save you time,” she says. “We have no intention of saying anything about Mitten.”

“So the rumors are true? Gabby…he and Gabby…” I get stuck on how to word it.

She helps me out. “Had sex? I have no idea.”

I swallow, and my face blanches with her directness. My plan is simple—take out Mitten. As Helen said, without him there is no show. Bo confirmed it. Actors are only as good as their lines. If Mitten goes, the good actors like Jules and Helen and Kira and Jeremy will follow, and the show will collapse. Jenga.

“But if they had sex, that's rape,” I say.

“Only in America would you call it that,” Graciela says. “Where I come from, girls have sex when they are ten for a loaf of bread.”

She is not emotional, quite the opposite, her face as dispassionate as if we were discussing Gabby having been stung by a bee three years ago, and my skin crawls with her coolness.

“Gabby got much more than a loaf of bread,” she continues. “Sex. Puh. I heard the rumors—that bitch, Kira, telling people that Gabby was cast because Mitten has a thing for fat girls. I did not ask Gabby. I do not care. Gabby is not so special. There are many girls as pretty and who sing as well. If it was for sex with that little man, so what?”

I cringe, and her mouth curls into a cruel smile. “You think you are better than me, but you are not. We both sold our daughters for a price, to live a better life, to have a future, the only difference is I am willing to admit it.”

I stumble to my feet, mutter something about being sorry to have disturbed her, and as I flee, her words follow me. “You come to my house with your judgment and ask me to jeopardize what we have to help you.
No gracias. Prefiero montar un burro a través de una alcantarilla
.”

My Spanish is limited, but I'm fairly certain she said,
No thank you. I'd sooner ride a donkey through a sewer.

I drive home defeated. It was ludicrous for me to think I could take down the show. Preposterous and foolish. And dangerous. I squeeze my eyes and pray Graciela does not tell Chris about my visit.

I just got the kids back and already I have jeopardized keeping them. No more stupidity. From here on out, I toe the line. Until our contract is done, I will lay low and play by the rules. We have two and a half years to go. Molly will be seven, Tom eleven, and Emily fourteen. Tears fill my eyes.