Wild Open (14 page)

“I’d be happy to,” Leah said. “What do I do?”

“Smile and hug people, basically,” Rushani said. “It can get a little weird, I think. If you’re not comfortable—”

“It’s fine,” Leah said firmly. “It sounds fun.” It didn’t sound fun, but she didn’t want to be a party pooper. If the fans wanted to meet her, she would smile and kiss babies and whatever it took. She wanted everyone to like her; and she especially wanted O’Connor to approve of her, to think that she was a team player and pulling her weight.

The meet-and-greet took place just after soundcheck. The fans were corralled in a sort of holding area, and then dispensed in small groups by the arena’s security guards. They screamed and squealed, and some of them cried. Most of them wanted to hug Andrew. Nobody tried to hug Leah; they wanted her autograph, and to tell her that they thought she was doing a great job. Leah smiled, and signed her name, and thanked them.

“That was sort of weird,” she said to O’Connor, after it was over.

He nodded. “It’s a trip, isn’t it? But I was the same way—there were bands I
worshiped
as a teenager. I had their albums memorized. Every one of their songs spoke to my deep, mysterious teenage soul. And I think if I had ever met any of them, I would have pissed myself and fainted. So it’s pretty weird that now I
am
one of those bands. These kids act like we’re—well. You know. It’s weird.”

“Like you’re the second coming of Christ,” Leah said. “Yeah. I know. You’re a real-deal rock star.” It was weird for her, too, thinking about all of the magazines that O’Connor’s face had been plastered on, all of the people who eagerly gobbled up every scrap of gossip about his personal life. He was a public figure in a way that was hard to fully grasp.

Even that wasn’t the strangest part of the meet-and-greet. That honor went to Andrew’s interactions with the fans. James and O’Connor had sworn up and down that Andrew was great with the fans, they adored him, et cetera, but Leah hadn’t really believed it until she’d seen it with her own two eyes. Andrew was
charming
. He laughed, he hugged people with no sign of hesitation, he gently teased a crying girl until she was all smiles. He even remembered a fan from a previous meet-and-greet a year ago and addressed her by name. It was, all in all, an impressive bit of work.

And then, once it was over, Andrew was back to his sullen self, hunched in a corner of the dressing room with his notebook. He didn’t say a word to anyone until they went on stage for the night’s show.

It was just weird. That was all. Andrew was a puzzle, and Leah was curious and nosy; she didn’t like mysteries. She wanted to know what Andrew’s deal was. But he was almost impossible to have a conversation with—surly and uncommunicative—and everyone else on the tour got a pinched look when she mentioned him. So there was no telling.

They had a day off in Vancouver, the day after the show. Leah always thought she slept fine on the bus until she spent a night in a real bed, and then she remembered how much sleeping on the bus sucked. She drew the curtains and slept without dreaming or moving for a solid ten hours. She woke close to noon, feeling incredibly refreshed, and texted O’Connor.

Getting coffee with James,
he replied.
Want me to bring you some?

Omg yes please,
she said, and got in the shower.

By the time O’Connor knocked on her door, she had showered and gotten dressed, and was midway through blow-drying her hair. She opened the door and he grinned and handed her a paper cup of coffee, and said, “I like the hair.”

“It’s a work in progress, smartass,” Leah said, and pushed up onto her toes, greatly daring, to kiss him on the cheek. “Thanks for the coffee.”

He sat on her bed and looked at his phone while she finished drying her hair. The blow dryer was too loud for conversation. When she finished and switched it off, he said, “What are we doing today?”

The
we
made her stomach flip over. How had this happened so quickly, that they both assumed they were spending the day together, with such certainty that it didn’t require any discussion or planning? But there it was; this was her life now. She wasn’t going to give him up.

“I haven’t thought about it,” she said, swiftly winding the cord around the dryer. “We could just walk around and see what looks cool.”

He clicked his tongue disapprovingly against the roof of his mouth. “’Just walk around’? Okay. We’re going downstairs to ask the nice lady at the front desk to point us toward the worst, tackiest tourist attraction in the city.”

Leah laughed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he said. “And if you’re very, very good and don’t complain,” and his voice dropped down into a register that made Leah’s spine tingle, “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

“How could I resist,” she said dryly, trying to mask the fact that she couldn’t resist him at all.

The nice lady at the front desk told them to go to a suspension bridge north of the city. “The bridge itself is very nice. There’s a whole network of paths through the trees. And you can also have your picture taken with someone wearing 1890s-style clothes.”

“The best of both worlds,” O’Connor said, grinning, and asked her where they could rent a car.

They drove north through the city and over a bridge across the harbor. O’Connor had rented a convertible and immediately put the top down, and Leah closed her eyes and felt the wind blowing through her hair and the sun warming her face. It was a beautiful day.

The suspension bridge was exactly what they had been promised: tacky, but also breathtakingly gorgeous. The bridge swung over a gorge with a stream at the bottom, and Leah and O’Connor gawked along with all of the other tourists, and took endless pictures with their phones. In a way, Leah was glad that it was a Saturday and the bridge was so crowded; it was easier for O’Connor to blend in. He kept his sunglasses on the whole time, though, and they had a few close calls with people who did double-takes but then seemed to decide they were imagining things.

At the other side of the gorge, a series of suspended walkways connected viewing platforms attached to enormous fir trees. It was quieter there as people dispersed into the trees, or decided they didn’t want to walk that much and went back to their cars. Leah walked slowly, gaping at the sheer size of the trees, and thinking of how old they must have been, of how many centuries they had grown in that soil, still and peaceful.

They walked to the very edge, as far as they could go, way out in the woods with nobody else in sight. Then O’Connor caught her hand and said, “Hey.”

“Uh, hey,” Leah said, hoping her palm wasn’t too clammy.

“Leah,” he said, and her heart beat a little faster, because what was he going to say? “Hey. I’m really into you.”

Oh, God. She was in so much trouble.

They kissed, standing there beneath the ancient trees, until a child appeared at the end of the walkway and they broke apart, laughing.

* * *

In Vancouver, Andrew trashed a hotel room.

O’Connor didn’t find out about it until much later, after he and Leah returned from the North Shore and he went up to his hotel room to pack his things before checkout. Rushani came to his door, her face very stiff, the way it was when she was angry or frightened, and said, “Did you know?”

“Did I know what?” O’Connor said, clutching a pair of boxer shorts in one hand.

She pushed past him into the room, and let the door swing shut behind her. “Andrew,” she said.

O’Connor closed his eyes briefly, centering himself. “What did he do?”

“That little friend of his,” Rushani said, and now O’Connor could hear the taut anger in her voice. “Isaac. He moved to Vancouver a few months ago, did you know that?”

“No,” O’Connor said. He sat on the bed and watched her pace back and forth, her eyes fixed on the carpet.

“I didn’t know, either,” she said. “Until I got a phone call from the front desk this morning. Housekeeping went in and found the two of them. Passed out. They destroyed the room. Totally destroyed it.”

“Fuck,” O’Connor said. He remembered Isaac all too well: a low-life, red-faced and loud, the sort of person Andrew never would have been friends with even two years ago. Isaac was the cousin of the lead singer of the band who opened for them on their last tour, a hanger-on, always around for some reason. Andrew and Isaac had hit it off, somehow, and the resultant partying had been the worst part of O’Connor’s life last autumn.

“This is unacceptable behavior,” Rushani said. “If it leaks to the press—”

“He’ll get some bad-boy accolades,” O’Connor said. “Big deal. I wouldn’t worry about that.” There were plenty of other things to worry about.

She pursed her mouth. “Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

“Have you told James?”

“He’s in Andrew’s hotel room right now,” she said. “Yelling at him, I think.”

O’Connor groaned and rubbed his hands over his face. “That never works.”

“Nothing works,” Rushani said. “Nothing we do. He doesn’t care about anything but money, and soon I’m afraid he won’t care about money, either, and then I’m going to have to find a new job.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” O’Connor said, although of course that was exactly the fear that kept him awake at night.

They went down the hall to Andrew’s room. The hotel had already sent people up to begin cleaning, and they were at work in the bathroom, two small and quiet men who turned to look at O’Connor as he came in. Their expressions were blank, almost bored. They had seen this before, maybe, or worse.

It was pretty bad. The drapes had been torn from their tracks, and one of the beds had been attacked with something sharp—a knife, a pair of scissors—and feathers and mattress batting were strewn over the foot of the bed and onto the floor. The sheets of the other bed were caked with dried vomit. A bottle of vodka lay on its side on the floor, the carpet beneath it damp with liquor.

Andrew was sitting on a chair in the corner, his head cradled in his hands. James stood near him, lecturing him in a low, angry voice. Neither of them looked up as O’Connor and Rushani entered the room.

O’Connor wondered why he was even there. What was he going to contribute to the situation? More heaping scorn piled upon Andrew’s guilty head? Andrew knew what he had done; James wasn’t going to wring out the confession he wanted, or a promise that Andrew wouldn’t do it again. Of course he would do it again. They all knew that. It was a farce, a pointless repetition of their well-worn roles: Andrew the penitent, James the disappointed father.

He turned to Rushani. “Where’s Isaac?”

“I had security escort him out,” she said. “He’s not a problem anymore.”

Rushani, O’Connor thought, would have made an excellent mob boss. “Okay,” he said. “James!”

James turned to look at him, frowning. “What?”

“There’s no point,” O’Connor said. “Come on. Leave him. Let’s go have a drink.”

He watched James mull it over, his face working through a series of expressions. James suffered from the understandable but misguided idea that he could somehow talk Andrew out of being such an asshole, like sheer logical force would show Andrew the error of his ways and the path back to truth and light. But there was no point. James needed a beer, and a new hobby.

“Okay,” James said at last. “You’re right.”

“You’re going to leave him with me?” Rushani asked.

O’Connor looked at her and shrugged. “Come with us. You don’t need to babysit him, Rushani. He knows when bus call is.”

Andrew, who hadn’t spoken a word the whole time, finally roused himself from his catatonia and whimpered, “Don’t leave me.”

O’Connor rolled his eyes. Rushani instantly rushed to Andrew’s side and knelt on the floor beside him, one hand on his arm, her face turned up to him, pleading, eternally hopeful.

Andrew turned his head slightly so that Rushani couldn’t see his face, and shot a look at O’Connor so full of smug victory that O’Connor experienced a vivid, three-dimensional fantasy of crossing the room and breaking Andrew’s nose.

James, who had seen it too, shook his head in disgust and turned away. “Let’s go,” he said. “You’re right. He isn’t worth it.”

O’Connor was still watching Andrew, and he saw that comment hit home. Andrew flinched, the smug look wiped from his face. He drew in on himself, curling closer to Rushani and the comfort she offered.

O’Connor snorted. Andrew didn’t deserve her.

They ran into Leah on their way to the hotel bar. She was carrying a clear plastic bag full of laundry. “Hey!” she said, cheerful, oblivious.

It took a moment for O’Connor to reset his brain from “furious about Andrew” to “chatting with Leah,” and in that time James said, “We’re going for a drink at the bar.”

“Sure,” she said, glancing at O’Connor, a look that asked if she was invited.

O’Connor licked his dry lips. “Andrew trashed his hotel room,” he said, and then was surprised at himself; he hadn’t mean to say that.

“Oh,” Leah said, with that uncertain look again.

“What a mess,” James said, drawing one hand across his face. “Fuck.”

“Well, it sounds like he’s living up to his full rock star potential,” Leah said.