The Truth about My Success (11 page)

People have a tendency to see what they want to see, even when what they’re looking at is the complete opposite of whatever that is. As an example of this phenomenon, although Paloma is looking at the wooden houses and barns of a working ranch in the distance, what she sees is more along the lines of the summer palace of Kublai Khan.

Even when they’re so close that it would be obvious to a fish that Old Ways has more in common with a tugboat than a luxury liner, it isn’t until Ethan Lovejoy says, “I’ll show you where you’re bunking so you can unpack what you need and have a shower if you want,” that Paloma finally starts to sense that something is very wrong.

“Bunking?” she repeats.

He swerves the truck around a pool of chickens, and laughs. “That’s just what we call it. It’s not really a bunkhouse. Two to a room and a bath you share with the girls on the other side.”

She opens her mouth to explain that she doesn’t share anything with anyone, but is so overwhelmed by the enormity of what he seems to be saying that she shuts it again.

“Then you can come on over to the office and I’ll explain how everything works,” he goes on. “Get you properly oriented before everybody comes back.”

Paloma, unused to having anything explained to her by the hired help, says, “You? Isn’t there a… you know, like a manager?”

His laugh, as anodyne as his speaking voice, is already getting on her nerves. “Well, that’d be me.” Ethan Lovejoy, of course, is not a janitor but the president and chief psychologist of Old Ways. “Dr Ethan Lovejoy. Founder, owner and chief honcho. But folks just call me Ethan.”

“I don’t understand.” Paloma has been known to throw a five-alarm tantrum because someone was sitting in her seat or brought her a latte instead of a cappuccino, but now that something really bad is happening she is eerily calm. “What is this place?”

“We’re a working ranch and what’s called a Wilderness Centre.” Paloma isn’t sure what a Wilderness Centre is, but it doesn’t sound like it’s likely to have a health spa or luxury shops. A stagnant pond, maybe. Maybe a dimly-lit store heated by a pot-bellied stove. A store that only sells beef jerky and bird feed. “Which is just another way of saying we’re a good place to stay and chill and take stock of things.”

From somewhere very, very far away, Paloma says, “But I was told that this is, like, a ten-star hotel.”

“
Ten stars
? Pshaw! Ten stars is nothing!” Ethan Lovejoy doesn’t really have a voice, she decides, what he has is a whispery gurgle. The whispery gurgle of some warty creature that lives under a rock. “We have ten million stars out here, Susie. Wait’ll you see them, you’re going to be really glad you’re not in some fancy hotel.”

This, of course, is so astoundingly impossible that the only reasonable response would be to laugh out loud.

But Paloma doesn’t feel like laughing right now. There’s an old saying that she has never heard, and this is it: the scales fell from her eyes. Meaning that she’s realized the truth at last.

Or at least some of it.

Ethan Lovejoy’s office is a small room with a large window that looks out on infinity – assuming that infinity is made of sky and sand. There are two chairs, a desk and a bookshelf. The walls are blue and decorated not with prints or pictures like most walls, but with quotations:
The shame is not in failing but in failing to try… Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement… What matters is playing the game not winning the prize… Today is the first day of the rest of your life… Your worst enemy is the one inside you… The only day you can be sure you have is the one you’re in…
It looks more like a room you’d find in the basement of a church than the main building of a working ranch, though Paloma doesn’t find this thought as comforting as you might suppose.

“Sit down, sit down.” Ethan takes the seat behind the desk and waves her to the one across from it. “Take a load off your feet.”

Paloma doesn’t sit down. “That’s OK.” She’s not planning to be here that long. “I’m afraid a really bad mistake’s been made, Ethan. Because I’m not supposed to be here. Like I said, I’m supposed to be at this ten-star hotel.” Mistakes like this do happen. Something very similar occurred in an early episode of
Angel in the House
when two babies were accidentally switched in a hospital because the lights went out for a few minutes. Paloma doesn’t think that the lights went out and caused confusion at Paradise Lodge, but she does think that Jack and Leone thought they’d booked her into an exclusive dude ranch only some underling – probably Jack’s loser secretary with the big nose and the chronic split ends – went to the wrong website and signed her up for Old Ways instead. “So if somebody could just give me a ride back to the airport…”

Ethan Lovejoy leans back in his chair. “Oh there hasn’t been any mistake, Susie. This is sure as shootin’ where you’re supposed to be.” Old Ways, he explains, is a residential rehabilitation centre for problem teenagers. Which seems to be what they think Paloma is, though nobody told
her
that. Its motto is: Old Morals, New Change. It promises results, and it gives them.

“But I’m not a problem teenager,” protests Paloma. “I’m a TV star.”

Ethan Lovejoy’s smile glides across his face like a hunting owl across the sky. “I think there may be a difference of opinion on that question.”

And whose different opinion would that be? Paloma doesn’t need more than one guess to answer that. She should have known. Like Leone would ever send Paloma away by herself to someplace wonderful. If this really was a celebrity dude ranch Leone would have been in the seat next to her on the plane. And they would definitely have been in First Class.

“This is all my mother’s doing.” Audrey Hepplewhite’s accident must have been as big a blow to Leone as it was to Audrey. Instead of being freed from having to keep an eye on Paloma by the long days of shooting the new season, she was stuck with her for a few more weeks. Which would interfere with Leone’s lunches and her dinners and her I-am-so-great networking. As if Leone actually does anything besides spend Paloma’s money.

“I talked to both your parents, Susie.” This, as it happens, isn’t strictly true. Ethan Lovejoy thinks he did, but in reality he talked to Leone (very briefly) and Jack Silk taking the role of Arthur Minnick (quite a lot). No one likes to burden Arthur with too much information. “We had a very long conversation about you and about Old Ways. It was a decision made by both of them, with my agreement. In the end, they decided that sending you here was the best thing they could do.”

This
?
This
was the best they could do? What, were all the high-security prisons in the world filled up?

“Maybe you all should’ve asked me what I thought,” says Paloma in the flat, tight way that Ethan Lovejoy will soon recognize as the calm before the really bad tornado.

“Let me just ask you something, Susie.” Ethan’s voice is as comforting as a fire on a snowy night. “If your folks had been 100% honest with you, would you have come?”

Does she look stupid?

“But it’s
my
life! They don’t know what’s best for me. And neither do you. I do!”

“Not necessarily.” Ethan Lovejoy points to a quotation on the wall to his right. This one says:
O would some power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us
.

Paloma’s lips squeeze together very tightly as if she’s about to spit out a dart. “And?”

“It means that we’re not always the best judges of what’s good for us and what isn’t.”

“That doesn’t mean somebody else is. You don’t know my mother. She may’ve been all sweet and concerned when you talked to her, but she’d do anything to make me unhappy.”

“I think you’re very wrong about that, Susie.” Ethan shakes his head. The world, his shaking head says, is a world of sorrow and misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding makes everything worse. “Your parents would do anything in their power to make you happy. What they’ve had to do this time is called tough love. And believe you me, it’s a hard thing to have to do, even if it’s the only way. They wrestled with their hearts and asked for guidance before they made this decision. And I give you my word that it saddened them greatly not to level with you, but it would make them so much sadder if you waste this precious life that’s been given to you and don’t grow into the wonderful woman they know you can and want you to be.” He has been holding his palms together but now he opens them as though letting out a secret. “You can’t make an omelette if you don’t break some eggs.”

“I don’t want to make an omelette,” says Paloma.

“But you do want to have a wonderful life, don’t you? And that’s what your parents want. Only a wonderful life doesn’t come without some sacrifices.”

It doesn’t escape Paloma’s notice that she’s the one making the sacrifices.

“Old Ways isn’t a place of hardship,” says Ethan. “It’s a place of genuine opportunity and genuine change.” He points to another sign on the wall behind him, the one about today being the first day of the rest of your life. “Though, naturally, we do have some ground rules.” And he goes on to explain the basic system that governs life at Old Ways Ranch. If you could call it life. If you could call them rules and not weapons of torture. No phones. No personal computers. No iPods. No communication with the outside world, though parents, of course, are kept informed of their child’s progress.

“You what?” interrupts Paloma. “No communication?” Apparently, outer space isn’t the only place where no one can hear you scream. “Isn’t that illegal?”

Ignoring questions of legality, Ethan Lovejoy says, “We find it makes the transition easier.” Though he doesn’t say for whom. “However, we do encourage families to write weekly postcards. To reassure you that they’re thinking of you.”

Not as much as she’ll be thinking of them.

The list of delights at the ranch continues. Up at six a.m., in your room by nine-thirty, lights go out automatically at eleven. Besides classes and therapy sessions and special activities (both individual and group), everyone is expected to take part in the everyday workings on the ranch – caring for the horses and cattle, cooking, cleaning communal spaces, that kind of thing. Not that life here is all about work. They have fun, too. Hikes. Horse rides. There are board games, cards, dominoes, ping-pong, a pool table and a 55" widescreen TV in the common room. They have a library. They have campfire nights where they all sing songs and tell stories. Camping up in the hills and sleeping under the jewelled night-sky, more beautiful than anything made by Tiffany. Team games. Dances. They even have an annual rodeo, though no bucking broncos or steer wrestling, of course.

Well, now, isn’t that good news! She was a little worried she might be expected to ride a bull.

It takes a few seconds for the state of shock brought on by all the images of trekking up mountains and sleeping on the ground with coyotes slobbering over her to pass, but pass it does. “Are you serious?” Paloma’s laugh comes out more as a screech. “You think
I’m
going to do any of that crap? What do I look like? A Boy Scout?” There is no sign of the wonderful woman the Minnicks know Paloma can be now. “You have got to be kidding. I mean, you really have got to be kidding.” How can anyone be expected to live without the Internet? Without her phone? How can
she
be expected to cook? Cook what? And what the hell is she supposed to do with a horse?

In his already too-familiar talking-to-celestial-beings voice, Ethan says, “I wouldn’t joke about something as important as your life, Susie. Life is the most precious thing we have. I’m totally serious.”

“But this is supposed to be my vacation!” wails Paloma. “I’m supposed to be having the time of my life!”

“And that’s exactly what you shall have,” Ethan Lovejoy promises her, so calm and unruffled you wouldn’t think Paloma was red with rage and screaming loudly enough to be heard back at the airport. “The time of your life. You’ll never be the same again.”

“No, I mean time of my life like in fun. F-u-n. You better think again if you think I’m staying here. On a freaking farm!” Paloma looks around for something to throw, but Ethan Lovejoy’s office is unadorned and neat as an operating theatre. There isn’t anything on the desk – no lamp, no paperweight, no pictures of his family – not so much as a Post-it note. Paloma isn’t the first teenager who has stood in this office and wanted to throw something. “Because I’d rather have leprosy than stay here for more than five minutes. I’m going home!”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Susie. You’ll be here for at least three months. Possibly longer. Six months. Nine. It all depends on you and your personal growth.” His smile is intended to be encouraging, but that isn’t, of course, how Paloma takes it. To her it is the smile of a sadist enjoying someone else’s pain.

“You have to be mental!” Having nothing to throw, she waves her hands in the air. “Completely, totally and two-hundred-percent out of your microscopically tiny mind!”

“I think it’s time for you to calm down,” says Ethan Lovejoy. “Nothing’s achieved by tantrums.”

Which can be considered a point of disagreement between them.

“You calm down!” screams Paloma, though if Ethan Lovejoy calms down any more he’ll be mistaken for dead. “If I want to have a tantrum, I’ll have a tantrum. You’re not my boss. And you can’t make me stay here. I know my rights. That’s kidnapping. And that’s a crime!”

Ethan Lovejoy leans back in his chair. “I think you’ll find, Susie, that I can make you stay. You are a minor, and I have a signed consent form and agreement from your parents.”

“But I can’t stay here three months!” Paloma kicks the desk. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Of course I know who you are. You’re Susan Minnick.” Which is all he does know. The only mentions of TV and star that Ethan Lovejoy has heard have been in connection with Susan’s habit of making up stories about herself, otherwise known as telling lies. Living in a fantasy. Refusing to accept reality. The world of espionage lost a lot when Jack Silk decided to become a Hollywood agent.

“No, I’m Paloma Rose! I’m famous. I’m really, really famous. I’m the star of one of the most popular shows in the history of television.”