Breach of Promise (6 page)
Authors: James Scott Bell
Oh God, give that hurt to me! T ake it away from Maddie and let me take it instead, please please.
I stroked her hair and told her to lie still.
“I want to dig,” she said.
“We will. Later. We’ll go to the ocean and dig up the whole beach, would you like that?”
“Yes.”
And we stayed like that for about ten minutes until the ambulance came. A nice paramedic checked her out, and decided Maddie could be driven to the hospital—there was one about a mile away—and she wouldn’t have to be taken in the ambulance.
I picked Maddie up and carried her out of the park, sure that the eyes of every parent there were on me.
There goes the guy who was so into trying to schmooze a gig that he lost track of his daughter. There goes a guy who doesn’t deserve to be a father.
The drive to the hospital was bad, Maddie moaning all the way, tears falling. But the waiting in the emergency room for a doctor was worse. I had to go muck around with the desk over insurance, Maddie screaming at me not to leave her alone.
When I got back to her bed, a doctor was there. He looked like a humorless Bob Newhart. He spoke in a monotone and only registered an expression when I told him what happened. The expression was a raising of the eyebrows.
He asked Maddie some questions, looked in her eyes with a light, touched her head in a couple of places. Maddie, my little trooper, hung in there, and I was proud of her.
“Mild concussion,” the doctor told me. “Should be okay. Watch her for a couple of days—” like I wouldn’t—“limit TV and reading. If she gets nauseous or vomits or gets numbness in her arms or legs, bring her back in. And no physical activity for at least two days. Any questions?”
Yeah, where do I go to get flogged?
“No. Thanks.”
When we got back to the apartment I told Maddie to lie down, but she wanted me with her. Truth to tell, I wanted to be with her just as much. I flopped on the sofa and she got on top of me, resting her head on the soft spot underneath my shoulder. I stroked her hair. And as I did, I silently thanked God that it hadn’t been any worse.
Even as I did, though, I had the strangest feeling, really weird, that
worse
was about to make a great, big entrance.
1
Paula came back on August 3, my birthday.
She did not come home.
Over the previous month I had tried everything to remain sane.
Paula and I had talked on the phone, and she said she wanted to get together as soon as possible. I asked her if she wanted to see Maddie. She said, “After the meeting.”
Meeting.
It sounded like a Hollywood deal. I knew it was going to be bad. Just how bad I couldn’t have known.
She chose a sidewalk café in Beverly Hills, just off Rodeo Drive no less. Why here? Probably many reasons. It was public, so I couldn’t make a spectacle of myself. It was social, to soften the blow she was no doubt going to deliver. And it was Beverly Hills. Paula’s new stomping ground, after her meteoric rise to stardom.
Feeling out of place, I parked my Accord in a lot next to a Bentley and a Mercedes and walked to the place.
Paula was already there.
Sitting outside, she had sunglasses on and wore a red and gold scarf around her neck that complemented perfectly her coat and blouse. She looked like a catalog model, only better because she breathed.
What hit me then, like a doctor telling me I had only three months to live, was this thought:
She is out of your league now. She has left you behind.
“Mark.” Paula waved her hand at me like I was a waiter. I entered through the black, iron gate that separated the pedestrians from the diners. As I did I saw Goldie Hawn at a table, yakking it up with another woman. Beverly Hills indeed.
There was a lily in a vase on the table where Paula sat. Aren’t those what the cartoons always have on dead people?
Paula did not smile as I sat in the other chair, also made of iron.
“You look good,” Paula said. It was a lie. I didn’t look anything like good.
“You look great.” That was
not
a lie.
She did not remove her sunglasses. “It’s good to be back. It was a tough shoot.”
“But worth it, I guess, huh?”
“The dailies were spectacular. Tony is such a—” She let her voice trail off in a self-conscious Doppler effect.
“Yeah,” I said. “He sure is.”
A waiter younger than myself, and twice as good looking, presented his million-dollar teeth to us and asked if he could bring us a drink. I almost ordered a double shot of tequila, but in keeping with the atmosphere made it a San Pellegrino. Paula ordered chai tea.
“I don’t think I’ll be eating anything,” I said. “But you go ahead.”
“No, I don’t think so either.”
“Your stomach bothering you too?”
“This isn’t easy for me.”
“Why should it be?” I let more acid drip from my words than I’d intended.
Paula took a deep breath. “I thought it might be a little easier than this. I didn’t intend this to happen.”
As if that made everything okay. “Well, it did. So what are you going to do now?”
“I think we have to start talking about divorce.”
“You
think?
“Mark, please, I’m trying to be very even about this.”
“So that’s it? The decision’s been made?”
Paula nodded slowly.
“Don’t I get a say in this?” I said.
“I wish it hadn’t happened the way it did.”
There’s a famous scene in the old James Cagney movie
The Public Enemy,
where his girlfriend wishes something. Cagney looks at her the way only he can and says, “I wish you was a wishin’ well. Then I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya.”
Then he pushes a half a grapefruit in her face.
That scene came to me in a flash, and I knew I could have played the Cagney role to the max right then.
The waiter returned with our drinks and asked if we would like to hear about the specials.
“No,” I said.
I didn’t like doing that to a fellow waiter, but there it was. He took the hint and said he’d check back with us in a few minutes.
“I don’t want a divorce,” I said. “I want you to get over this thing with Troncatti and come home to Maddie and me. I don’t like what you did and I want to have ten minutes alone with Troncatti. But I’m willing to forget the whole thing.”
Could I ever forget it?
“I’ve already made the decision,” Paula said.
“I’m trying to talk you out of it.”
“Don’t try.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” My voice was loud enough to make the couple at the next table glare at me.
“Because it will just make it harder.”
“I want it to be hard. I want it to be hard on
you.
”
“This is not helping.”
“I don’t want to help, either.”
“I was afraid you’d do this.”
I started to feel prickly heat on my neck, like a noose made of coarse rope had been thrown around it. Paula reached for her purse, which was hanging on the back of her chair.
“You’re leaving?” I said.
“I have a lawyer,” she said. “He told me not to talk to you, but I thought we could be nice about it.”
She stood up and, with a certain flair, dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table. It was crisp and new, just like Paula. And it sent me over the edge.
“Sit down!” I pounded my fists on the table.
Goldie Hawn looked at me, as did everyone else in the place.
”Don’t yell at me.” Paula slung the purse over her shoulder. “Don’t
ever
yell at me. I’ll be coming over to pick up Maddie tonight.”
She turned her back and walked out. I was so blinded by rage I couldn’t formulate any words. Picking up Maddie?
The San Pellegrino bottle sat openmouthed on the table. My hand grabbed it, lifted, and threw it down on the sidewalk where Paula was now walking. It shattered. Paula screamed.
In acting class, they teach you to go for the emotional moment. It’s safe to do in class, because there are no wrong answers. You go for it.
Sometimes actors forget they live in the real world and end up doing stupid things. Like I just did.
Paula’s look said to me that any hopes I had of stopping her from divorce were now shattered, just like the bottle on the sidewalk.
I found it hard to breathe on the way back to the Valley. It was like the car was one of those crushing chambers in the old horror movies, the walls slowly closing in. My chest felt knotted and hot.
When I got home and rounded up Maddie from Mrs. Williams, I knew I wasn’t going to let Paula waltz in and snatch Maddie away from me.
Maddie.
“Oh yeah! Can I wear my new swimsuit?”
Paula had bought Maddie this nice little blue-and-red suit right
before she’d left for Europe.
“Yeah,” I said. “New swimsuit and everything.”
“Is Mommy coming?”
Maddie knew Paula was supposed to be home soon. She’d been
pestering me about it for days. But I had mastered the art of being vague.
“Mommy won’t be coming just yet.”
“When will she?” Her little voice was pleading.
“Let’s pack,” I said.
Roland’s folks had a beach house in Ventura, about a forty-five minute drive north of LA. They used it as a vacation place. Roland liked to go up and pound the keys on the weekends.
I called and begged him to let me use it for a couple of days. I told him I’d explain when I got back. Roland, my buddy and pal, said okay. The only other thing I had to do was sweet-talk Shelly, the manager at Josephina’s, to give me the weekend off. Fortunately, one of the newer waiters wanted in for the weekend, and that was that.
We got up there by four o’clock, before sunset, in time to play a little on the beach.
Maddie shrieked with delight as she ran down toward the ocean. She loved the ocean. Loved to stand with her feet in the wet sand as the waves came up around her ankles then ebbed, sucking some of the sand with it. It tickled her feet. She would always laugh.
We played in the water. At one point I picked her up and waded out to chest level. Maddie held on to my neck tightly. She laughed every time a swell swept past us. When a wave came I’d jump up as it broke. It would splash us, and Maddie would laugh some more.
We built a sand castle. Maddie got sticks and beached kelp and did all the design work. I was the brawn, scooping up piles of wet sand and forming it into walls and turrets.
Must have been an hour that we worked on it. Maddie carefully placed her sticks in the mounds, making sure they were evenly spaced.
When it was all done both of us stood back and looked at it. Maddie took my hand.
“That’s the best castle ever,” she said.
And soon it would be washed away. Just like the marriage I once thought was the best ever.
“How about ice cream?” I said.
“Yes!” Maddie said, pumping her little fist.
We got some at a little snack cart by the public parking lot. We sat on a bench looking out at the blue Pacific. Way off in the distance we could see the outline of one of the Channel Islands.
“Pumpkin?”
Maddie looked at me, her mouth around an Eskimo Pie.
“Can I tell you something?”
She nodded.
“You know your friend Jenna?” Jenna lived in an apartment in our building. Maddie had been to her birthday parties for the last two years.
“Jenna’s six.”
“Yes, she is. Her mommy and daddy are divorced, aren’t they?”
Maddie shrugged.
“You know what divorce means?”
“Where a mommy and daddy don’t live in the same house.”
“Right. That’s what Jenna’s parents are, divorced. But Jenna gets to see them both, just not at the same time.”
“That’s weird.”
I had been rehearsing this little speech in my mind for the last five hours. The words were like heavy chunks of concrete in me.
“But Jenna is pretty happy, isn’t she?”
“She has five Barbies.”
“Yeah.” My own Eskimo Pie was melting on my hand. I took a big bite of the soft ice cream. Half of it fell on the ground.
“Oh, Daddy!” Maddie rebuked. Then she softened. “You can get another one if you want.”
I got up and threw what was left in a trash can. Then I sat down with her again.
“Maddie, if Mommy and I ever got a divorce, you’d be able to see us both, too.”
Her eyes clouded. If I’d thought I could soft-pedal this, I was sorely mistaken.
“Don’t do that, Daddy.”
“But sometimes it happens.”
“Uh-uh.”
“If
it happened, is all I’m saying. If it did, you’d be okay. You’d be with both of us.” The irony of my being here to keep her away from Paula was not lost on me. If we were going to share custody, it would be on my terms, not hers. She was the adulterer here, not me.
“No, Daddy. Promise me you won’t do it.”
“You’ve got to be okay if it happens.”
“No.”
How I hated Paula at that moment. For making me have to spoil the innocence of a five-year-old child. How I hated and longed for her at the same time.
I looked out at the ocean then. A pelican was skimming across the water, looking for lunch. When I turned to Maddie again she was starting to cry.
“Baby,” I said, picking her up and setting her on my lap. “Baby.” I held her close.
Who could that possibly be?
It was our third day. Afternoon. Maddie and I had done some beach time, and now she was taking a nap.
I’d been reading a David Morrell thriller, the perfect beach book, allowing myself escape from the nightmare down south.
The knock again, more insistent.
I got up and looked out the window.
A young man in a uniform looked right back at me. He was about twenty-five years old. His hair was short, like a Marine’s.
I unlatched the chain and opened the door.
“Mr. Gillen?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Deputy Tim Wise of the Ventura County Sheriff’s office. We got a report of a missing child.”
Stay cool. She’s your daughter.
“Nobody’s missing,” I said. “Maddie is right here taking a nap.”
“She’s with you?”
“Of course she’s with me. We came up here to spend some time at the beach. Who sent you?”
He pulled a folded document out of his rear pocket. “I have an order here demanding that you produce Madeleine Erica Gillen at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. In Los Angeles.”
My hands were shaking like leaves in the wind. The document was coldly official looking.
“This,” I said, “is unbelievable.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gillen.”
“How did she find me?”
Deputy Wise started to turn around.
“I’m her
father,
” I said. “She can’t
do
this.” I threw the order on the ground.
“I’d advise you to cooperate, Mr. Gillen.”
I kicked the document, sending it sliding off the front porch. The deputy closed the gate behind him.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Maddie was rubbing her eyes.
I looked at her, wanted to whisk her up in my arms and run away with her. Take off in a boat or something, sail to Iceland where Paula couldn’t find us, and I’d raise sheep and . . .
“I guess maybe it’s time for you to see Mommy,” I said.
“Cool!” Her face lit up and my body shook.