The Woman Who Stole My Life (31 page)

Carmello twiddled a length of my hair around her finger and considered my reflection in the mirror. ‘You’ve great hair,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

‘With a proper cut, it could be really something.’

‘… Er …’

Suddenly Ruben popped up at my side. ‘How much longer will you be?’ He was nervy at the best of times but he sounded like he was going to start shrieking and not be able to stop.

‘A bit more jhzuujhzing,’ Carmello said, languidly. ‘Then I’m ready for Annabeth.’

But Annabeth Browning wasn’t here. She’d been expected an hour and a half ago, and there was no sign of her.

‘Ring her again,’ Ruben told his assistant.

‘She’s not answering.’

‘So text her, tweet her, friend her on Facebook, but find her!’

I was in a suite in the Carlyle Hotel, being readied for a five-page feature for
Redbook
magazine. Annabeth Browning had finally left the convent where she’d been hiding out and had moved home to live with her two children and her husband, the Vice-President of the United States. Everyone in the world wanted to interview her, but she’d agreed to an exclusive with
Redbook
and someone, somewhere – and I’d
no idea who or how – had persuaded her to make the entire interview about how
One Blink at a Time
had ‘saved’ her. Eventually the piece had morphed into ‘When Annabeth met Stella’.

It was a big, big deal and both Annabeth and I would benefit. Annabeth would get her chance to say all the usual rehabilitation stuff (‘I am stronger.’ ‘My marriage is stronger.’ ‘My faith in God is stronger.’) and
One Blink at a Time
would get tons of publicity, just when I was doing my first tour to promote it.

People were milling about the suite – as well as Carmello, there was a make-up artist, a clothes stylist, a photographer, a features editor from
Redbook
and Ruben, my publicist from Blisset Renown. All the main players had brought assistants. I even had one myself – Mannix, who was wearing a dark suit and leaning against a wall, watching me and looking like he was in the CIA.

‘Still no answer,’ Ruben’s assistant said.

‘So go down to the street and start looking for her. All of you! Go! You! Make-up girl. Go, go, go!’

Everyone stared at him.

‘You!’ He pointed at the photographer. ‘And … you …’ He’d turned to scream at Mannix, but whatever he saw in Mannix’s face made him step back in alarm.

Ruben’s phone pinged. He looked at the message, and said, faintly, ‘Sweet Jesus.’

‘What is it?’

‘Pack up, guys,’ Ruben screeched. ‘She’s not coming.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘Switch on the TV. Where’s the TV? Try Fox News.’

But it was on every channel. Annabeth had been arrested again. Just like the last time, she’d been driving erratically while banjoed out of her head on prescription drugs. A helpful
passer-by had filmed her taking a feeble swing at one of the officers.

‘Looks like your book didn’t cure her, after all,’ someone said.

Appalled, I stared at the screen. Poor Annabeth. What was this going to mean for her marriage, her children, her life?

Silently, everyone in the hotel suite began tidying away their stuff. As they left, they swerved around me, as if my bad luck might be contagious. A little later than everyone else, I realized that Annabeth’s misfortune was also mine.

‘Come on,’ Mannix said. ‘I’ll take you home.’

‘Let’s walk back.’ I felt dazed. ‘Some air might be good.’

His phone rang. He looked at the screen and rejected the call.

‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Phyllis?’

‘Not your concern.’

It was definitely Phyllis.

He took my hand. ‘Let’s go.’

Late October and Manhattan was lovely – the temperature was mild, the trees were changing colour and the shop windows were full of beautiful boots – but I was finding it difficult to appreciate it all.

‘It’s really bad, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Annabeth relapsing?’

‘Bad for Annabeth, sure. Bad for her family. But for you? It’s just one publicity component. Ruben has lots of other stuff up his sleeve. Hey, was there something weird going on with his hair?’

I nodded. ‘He does that thing. Puts soot on his head to cover the baldness. Not actual soot, it’s called Baldy-Be-Gone or something, but yeah, you weren’t imagining it.’

‘I wonder what’s for dinner?’

‘I wonder.’ We both laughed, because we knew it would be Mexican. It was always Mexican.

When Bryce Bonesman had said we’d be getting a housekeeper and driver, I’d assumed he meant two separate people. But it was just the one person, a brooding Mexican woman called Esperanza. And there was no car; the Skogells had given theirs back to the dealer when they left for Asia.

Esperanza worked like a dog – she did all the shopping, the cleaning, the laundry, the cooking and she babysat in the evenings if Mannix and I went out. But she barely spoke and I wasn’t sure if it was a language problem or a personality thing.

I tried making friends – on our first night, I invited her to join us for the dinner she had cooked, but she said, ‘No. No.’ And retreated to her woefully small living quarters, where she watched very loud Mexican soap operas. I felt uncomfortable about the her-and-us divide, but, as the days passed and more and more work was heaped on me, I got too tired to feel guilty.

‘How am I going to spin Annabeth’s relapse in my blog and Twitter feed?’ I asked Mannix.

‘Let’s have dinner first and then we’ll go to work on all of that.’

As soon as we came in, Betsy and Jeffrey darted to the kitchen table. ‘Hurry,’ Jeffrey said. ‘We’re starving.’

No matter what else was going on, dinner with the kids was a fixed point in every day.

Esperanza – silent as the grave – served the chilli and I murmured, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ She set a bowl of guacamole on the table and Mannix said, ‘Thank you, Esperanza.’ Then she set down a pot of refried beans and all four of us said, ‘Thank you.’

‘That looks delicious,’ Betsy said.

‘Yes, delicious,’ Mannix said.

‘Yes, delicious.’ I was sweating from the awkwardness.

Eventually Esperanza withdrew to her little room and her telly started bellowing in Spanish and I was able to relax.

‘So?’ I focused on the kids. ‘How was your day?’

‘Great!’ Betsy said.

‘Yes, great!’ Jeffrey echoed.

They were in high spirits – school was great, they were making friends and they loved being in New York. ‘It’s like living in a movie,’ Jeffrey said.

My heart hopped with joy. Knowing that Jeffrey was happy took some of the poison out of my horrible afternoon.

‘But I miss Dad,’ he said, quickly.

Right. ‘Of course you miss him,’ I said. ‘I mean, you were with him practically twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. There’s a lot to miss.’

‘Stella …’ Mannix put his hand on my arm.

‘Don’t do that,’ Jeffrey said.

‘What? Touch your mother?’

‘Guys,’ Betsy said. ‘Let’s be nice.’

We ate in silence for about five minutes then Betsy said, ‘Are we all good? Because I have something to share.’

‘Oh?’ I was instantly worried.

Betsy put her fork down and bowed her head. ‘Please don’t be sad but Tyler and I have broken up. He’s a great guy, he’ll always be my first love, but it’s impossible to sustain my schoolwork
and
give quality time to a transcontinental relationship.’ She raised her head and her eyes were shining with tears that I couldn’t help feeling were a tad manufactured. ‘We did our best. We tried so damn hard – sorry for swearing! But we just couldn’t make it work.’

‘Oh dear,’ I murmured.

‘Are you okay?’ Mannix asked.

‘Sad, Mannix. Thank you for caring. Totally sad. He’s still
my best friend but we’re transitioning to a new phase of our relationship, so I’m way sad.’

‘There’re plenty more fish in the sea,’ I said.

‘Mom!’ She widened her eyes in horror. ‘It’s like
decades
too soon. First I’ve got to mourn and honour my relationship with Tyler.’

‘Of course,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.’

‘You got that one right,’ Jeffrey said. ‘So are we done with this crappy dinner?’

‘If you’re okay to finish there, Betsy,’ I said.

‘I’m okay,’ she said, in a near-whisper. ‘I just needed you guys to know. You may find me crying or just staring sadly out of the window and I need you to know that it’s not you, it’s me, simply working through this.’

‘You’re very brave,’ Mannix said. ‘And please know we’re all here for you.’

‘I appreciate that.’

‘Right, then,’ Mannix said to me. ‘Let’s get to work.’

‘Who made you the boss of her?’ Jeffrey said.

‘I did,’ I said.

‘But you’re always working. You never stop.’

‘Because there’s a lot to do.’ I was sick of explaining this to him.

Bryce Bonesman wanted fast-track changes to
One Blink at a Time
. ‘You have to rewrite a lot of the book. Some of those sayings just don’t cut it. And some, they belong to other people, right? So we have copyright issues.’

Basically, they needed twenty-five original inspirational sayings and they needed them by mid-November in order to publish in March. ‘I wish we could publish in January,’ Bryce said regretfully. ‘No one publishes in January, it’s a wasteland – you could have the market all to yourself. But we don’t have time to turn it around.’

Every evening, Mannix and I went through the notebooks he’d kept of our conversations in the hospital and so far we’d polished and finessed nineteen extra sayings that Bryce Bonesman had deemed acceptable. But we still had six to go and our deadline was two short weeks away. It was a lot harder than I’d ever realized, to be wise.

What made it more difficult was that Bryce had told me that my second book was to be ‘more of the same’. ‘Exactly like your first book, but with new material, obviously.’

So I was in a constant bind between wanting to give all my good sayings to
One Blink at a Time
but also needing to hold some good stuff back for the second book.

Mannix and I withdrew to our bedroom, which also doubled as our office.

‘That call you got after the photo-shoot?’ I asked. ‘Was it from Phyllis? She’s cancelled tomorrow’s meeting?’

Mannix hesitated. He tried to protect me from bad news. ‘Yes,’ he said.

True to her promise, there was no day-to-day contact with Phyllis. All she cared about was the optimum moment to do the best deal for my second as-yet-unwritten book with Blisset Renown. So when she’d heard about my upcoming interview with Annabeth Browning for
Redbook
, she decided it would be ideal to have a meeting with Bryce and his team on the morning after. ‘They’ll be high as kites and in we go, boom! We walk out with half a million dollars.’

‘Another time will come,’ I said. ‘So how bad is the fallout from poor Annabeth’s relapse?’

‘The public aren’t making any connection with you.’

‘But …?’

‘Sorry, baby. There’s an email from Ruben saying four of the glossies have cancelled the pieces you’ve written.’

Ruben had made me do countless articles for the monthly
magazines – some big, some small, everything from my first kiss to my favourite tree to the lipstick that saved my life – to be run in the April editions. The April editions – which were published in March, to coincide with my first tour – were about to be put to bed, so I’d been killing myself to get everything written in time.

‘Okay.’ I took a moment to feel the loss. ‘What’s done is done. So today’s blog? Should I say that we’re praying for Annabeth? They love that holy stuff here.’

‘I think you should distance yourself from her.’

‘That sounds a bit … brutal.’

‘It’s a brutal country. No one wants to be associated with failure. You saw what they were all like today at the photo-shoot.’

Mannix’s phone rang. ‘It’s Ruben.’

‘Great news!’ Ruben yelled. Even though he was talking to Mannix, I heard everything.

Some Midwest magazine called
Ladies Day
wanted me to write an article about my illness. ‘I know,’ Ruben said. ‘You’ve never heard of it. But it’s massive in the heartland. Readership of eight million. They need fifteen hundred words by midnight.’

‘… Midnight?’ I said. ‘Today’s midnight? Mannix, give me the phone. Hi, Ruben, Stella here, have you any advice on how I should handle the Annabeth story in my blog?’

‘Annabeth who? That’s how you handle it.’

He went away. Mannix crafted some words, meant to have been written by me, for the blog and I started work on the piece for
Ladies Day
. Everything to do with my book happened at high speed, and I always felt like I was lagging far behind.

Both Mannix and I were clattering away at our laptops when the doorbell rang and jolted us from our concentration.

‘Gilda,’ Mannix said.

‘It’s ten p.m. already?’ Gilda came three nights a week to do Pilates with me.

‘You too tired? Will I cancel?’

‘No, it’s okay.’

‘Look at you.’ Mannix laughed. ‘All lit up by your girl crush. Should I be jealous?’

‘Should
I
be jealous?’

But I wasn’t worried that Mannix fancied Gilda. It’s not that I was naive – a bass note of low-level watchfulness hummed constantly in me – but there just wasn’t any spark between them. They were civil and friendly, and that was about it.

Jeffrey shouted, ‘Gilda’s here.’ Jeffrey, on the other hand, was mad about her.

Gilda stuck her head around the door. She was all smiley and rosy. ‘Hey, Mannix. All set, Stella?’

‘Just coming.’

I had my Pilates lesson in the hallway because there wasn’t any other room to do it in. But Gilda had said, ‘Some of my clients have a private gym in their own home and they don’t work as hard as you.’

We started and it was tough, like it always was. Halfway through a hundred pelvic thrusts, tumbling noises came from Betsy’s bedroom – clearly something had fallen, I was guessing it was one of her shelves – and she started yelling for Mannix. He came out of our bedroom and cut through the hallway.