The Rock Star's Daughter (5 page)

Finally, as it began to get late, my father
informed me that they were going to close the casket. It was my
last chance to say goodbye to my mother. He and Jill agreed to step
outside the viewing room to grant me a moment of privacy with her.
I had avoided approaching the casket for the entire five hours of
the wake, not wanting to see my mother's lifeless, waxy face.
Seeing her face motionless was going to confirm for me that she was
really and truly gone.

I knelt down before the casket, a little
freaked out by how eerily quiet the room had become since all of
the whispering guests left. The air conditioning had turned the
room's temperature so low that I had goose bumps. My mother's body
had been dressed in a silky navy blue dress that she often wore to
auditions several years ago, back when she still was trying to get
a regular gig on a soap opera. The dress was somewhat professional,
and I remembered how I liked to see her wear it when she left the
house because it made her look like she had a real job, like a
secretary or paralegal. She was also wearing a pearl necklace and
pearl earrings, and I supposed that it had been Julia who had
rummaged through her closet in search of an appropriate burial
outfit.

My mother's lips were fixed in a strange
semi-smile, and painted with a shimmery shade of pink lipstick that
she never would have worn had she been alive. Her skin had been
layered heavily with thick foundation, and her hair had been curled
and fanned out across the silk pillow on which her head had been
laid. I wanted to both scream at her for being so irresponsible to
leave me like this, and cry because I missed her. But the tears
wouldn't come, and I couldn't formulate a logical statement in my
head. I had never been so close to a dead body before.

I had been hoping that I would at least sense
her presence in the room with me. But my mother was gone, long
gone, and I was waiting for a response from something that could
not possibly give me one. I was afraid to even touch her face.

I took an orchid, dyed orange, from the
enormous arrangement next to my mother's casket, placed it in my
pocketbook, and left. I would say goodbye to my mother some other
time, in some other place, but not there. 

CHAPTER
4

"I totally saw you on
Access
Hollywood
!"

"Shut up," I replied. I was stretched out on
a deck chair poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel six days after my
mother's funeral, and could see Brice Norris, the lead singer of
Sigma, one of Allison's favorite bands, eating lunch with someone
who appeared to be a reporter at the Polo Lounge a few feet
away.

"For real," Allison insisted. "On your way
out of the funeral home."

"Great," I grumbled. "My big television
debut, and I'm sure it was my finest hour."

"Your hair looked really good," Allison
assured me. Allison knew I was sensitive about my hair. "You're in
Fame & Fortune
, too. They referred to you as Chase
Atwood's long-lost secret daughter with Sunset Strip scenester Dawn
Beauforte."

"Scenester? Are you sure you're not making
that up?"

"I'm reading it right now!" Allison
exclaimed. "Wait, a customer just came in. I'll call you back."

I tucked my cell phone into my backpack and
reclined on my deck chair, wishing that I could instead be across
the city at Robek's making smoothies with Allison. There seriously
might have been something wrong with me that I would prefer serving
wheatgrass to lounging around a celebrity hot spot, but I was
finding my sudden deliverance into the high life a little
jarring.

For the last few days my dad had been hard at
work on his Blackberry trying to get his summer tour back on track.
It was the middle of June, and the tour was supposed to resume the
last week of June at the Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville,
Florida. We were still staying at the hotel; I was passing as much
time as possible floating on my back in the pool to avoid having to
talk to anyone. The suite was amazing; I had my own huge king-sized
bed and fancy marble bathroom, but I felt like strangers were
holding me captive. I was growing tired of being on good
behavior.

"You're getting quite a tan out there," Jill
commented as I was passing from the kitchen area of the hotel suite
to my room, drying off my hair.

"I guess," I said.

"Kelsey and I were going to go over to The
Grove this afternoon to catch a movie. Any interest?" Jill
asked.

I entertained the idea of walking through one
of my favorite places on earth with my spray-on-tan vegan
stepmother and her happy, skipping spoiled brat of a child and
immediately decided against it. In my awkward week of hotel life
with my dad's family, I had come to understand that the entire
world revolved around Kelsey. Her allergist traveled with the
family. He had flown to Los Angeles from Turkey with them. Once,
Jill commented quietly that this little unexpected trip to Los
Angeles was causing Kelsey to fall behind in her French and Spanish
lessons. I had caught my half-sister messing with my violin case
and when I asked Jill to please make sure Kelsey didn't touch my
instrument, Jill instead asked Kelsey if she wanted to learn how to
play the violin.

"No thanks," I said. "I think I'd like to
just hang out here and take it easy."

"I think it might be helpful for us to have
you meet with someone," Jill called after me.

"Like who?" I asked. I automatically sucked
in my gut assuming that she was implying that I meet with a
stylist. The only thing I had on my mind was slipping away and
taking the #20 bus back to my house. I was getting antsy. My dad
and Jill were flying to Florida on Wednesday morning and I hadn't
had a chance to privately talk to him about what was going to
happen to me.

"A therapist," Jill said, as if I should have
known. "You've been through a traumatic experience. I think it
might be helpful for you to have someone to talk to."

"I'm OK," I assured her.

Jill looked me over skeptically. "When we get
back to New Jersey I'm going to have you meet with Dr. Rothstein,
my therapist. I really think it would be good for you to share your
thoughts."

I was fuming when I got back to my room. I
stood under the shower for probably thirty minutes wondering why
Jill had the audacity to think I would want to see her therapist or
what had given her the idea that I would be accompanying her and
Dad to New Jersey. Dad and I had agreed that we would take this
thing day by day, but it had been six days already, and I was eager
to have my privacy back.

Jill knocked on the door to my room while I
was drying my hair to announce that she and Kelsey were leaving,
and I took advantage of having the suite to myself for the first
time by whipping out my violin for practice. I'm not exactly a
tragic band nerd; I feel obligated to point out that making it into
the Treadwell Academy Junior Symphony is pretty prestigious. I've
taken lessons since I was six years old and planned on majoring in
music if I could get accepted into Berklee College of Music or
Juilliard. Of course, I had never told my mom any of this. She
always encouraged me to try to learn guitar because I think she
would have been much more comfortable if I joined a garage band
than if I was a concert violinist.

Anyway, that summer I was pretty sure that I
wanted to have a career in music. I pulled the sheet music for
Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni out of my suitcase and stumbled
through it. The composition is four movements, each dedicated to a
season of the year. In September I would have to play that
composition on a huge stage in downtown Boston and I realized with
a bit of humiliation that I had a lot of practicing to do. The
first violin solo of "spring" was maddeningly fast and furious, and
at its end, when the rest of the symphony joined in, the volume was
overwhelming when played live. I aspired to do the violin solo
enough justice to make that moment when the other strings are
raised as emotional for the audience as it was for me the first
time our band leader, Mr. Ferris, played the piece for us.

I struggled with the music; it had been three
weeks since I'd even tried to spot read sheet music, and stopped
after having completely bungled the piece. I was horrified when I
heard clapping outside my door.

"Dad," I exclaimed. "That is so totally wrong
of you to listen!"

"Why? You're fantastic," he told me. "I had
no idea you were a musician. Although it makes sense since music's
in your blood."

I don't know why, exactly, but this comment
made me blush. I never really thought about any of my talents or
traits having come from my dad.

"I need a lot of work," I informed him. "I
have this big thing coming up in September and I need to
practice."

"Oh yeah? What kind of a big thing? A
gig?"

I was finding myself getting a little
tongue-tied. My mother never showed much interest in my violin
playing. She had only been to Treadwell once, to drop me off my
first year, and had never come to any of the junior symphony
concerts. It was a little disarming to have someone taking an
interest in my abilities.

"Um, yeah. A big concert in Boston for all of
the board members of my school. And I have a solo, so I really need
to practice," I told him, and was planning to segue into how this
was part of why I really wanted to stay in Los Angeles all
summer.

"That is totally, totally awesome," my dad
said, smiling like a huge geek. "Can parents go? The tour will be
over at the end of August. I'd really like to be there if it's
allowed."

I stammered. My plans for securing my escape
from his clutches for the summer were dashed when he then invited
me to hang out at the studio with him and the rest of Pound the
next day while they rehearsed for their tour. For one split second
I forgot that my dad is the lead singer and felt totally excited to
get to meet the band.

Pound, one of the top-ten selling bands in
American history, formed in 1989 when Chase Atwood, Wade Norfleet
and Tommy Castro were juniors at Trenton High School in New Jersey.
They recruited Dusty O'Shea from a nearby Catholic high school to
play drums and began performing gigs up and down the Jersey Shore
at legendary clubs like The Stone Pony, where Bruce Springsteen got
his start. Their first album, No Rest For The Wicked, was released
on Atlantic Records, and the video for the title track, which
featured a scantily clad young Cindy Crawford as a waitress on
roller skates, got a fair amount of play on MTV.

After the moderate success of their first
album, the band members moved to Los Angeles, where they signed
with Geffen Records. Their new manager was convinced that they were
destined for greatness, and they began playing frequent shows at
all of the big clubs in West Hollywood: The Viper Room, The
Troubador, The Roxy. Their second album, Stake in the Sound, went
triple platinum and solidified their status as major rock
stars.

I know this only because the night before I
met my dad's band for the first time, I had to look up their
history online. Probably half the kids my age across the globe
could state the band's basic facts from memory, but I didn't know
more than the lyrics to a few of their songs that got a lot of
radio play.

The current band line-up consisted of my dad,
lead guitar and vocals, Wade on bass, George Bolivar, rhythm
guitar, and Dusty O'Shea, on drums. My mother had always told me
when I was a kid that drummers are all nuts, and Dusty was no
exception. He had frizzy white hair and wore a bandana tied over
his forehead to keep sweat from getting in his eyes when he was
jamming. George was not an original member of the band; he had
stepped in to replace Tommy Castro when Tommy's cocaine problem got
too out of hand (I know this from reading
Spin Magazine
).
George was originally from Argentina and was quiet, well-read, and
a gentleman. Wade was another story. Wade, my dad's oldest friend,
was enormous; a solid 300-pound walrus of a man, with long curly
hair and a wicked grin. He was on his third marriage, this time to
a sitcom star named Phoebe Morris who played Janice on Allison's
favorite show, Seven Seas, about the romantic entanglements of the
staff aboard a cruise ship.

"Nice to meet you, little mama," Wade said
the next day, shaking my hand so hard that it felt like the bones
might break.

I had taken my dad up on his invitation to go
to the studio in Beverly Hills where the band was rehearsing,
getting their act back together to continue the tour.

"Nice to meet you, too," I said.

"And that over there is Dusty," my dad
informed me, pointing to the guy drinking bottled water behind a
drum set. "Wade," he said in a stern voice.

I turned to find Wade shrugging his shoulders
with an innocent grin, and I deduced that Wade had been checking
out my butt. Gross.

"She looks a lot like Dawn," Wade said.

For the record, I do not look much like my
mom at all. When my mom was younger, she had a killer body, long
wavy hair that cascaded to her waist, and dimples when she smiled.
I was still waiting for my curves to show up. As far as boys went,
I would have probably attracted more attention from the male
species if I were a skateboard.

That morning, I watched the band rehearse all
of their classic favorites, and came to realize that my dad was
kind of a difficult person to work with. He was somewhat of a
perfectionist, and would make the band stop and start over if he
heard a missed note or beat. At one point, I saw Wade roll his eyes
and then wink at me.

Around lunch time, the band's touring
manager, Keith, arrived with a full spread of El Pollo Loco.

"Don't tell Jill," my dad warned me with a
smile. Eating junk food at the studio when she wasn't around was
his dirty secret. One of several dirty secrets, I would come to
understand in the next few weeks.