‘So what do we do?’
‘We hit the press with it now. Or there’ll be too many unanswerables.’
‘And say what?’
Jacqueline hesitated. ‘Two words,’ she said. ‘Maximo Diaz.’
Maximo Diaz was an unthinkable option. And yet it was the only one they had. It made sense. Lori had been dating him, they’d been photographed together; he’d been harping on in the press—at least before last month’s encounter—about how much he admired her. Was it so out of the question that he’d been the man to at last claim her virginity? If they spun it right, it was the perfect story. Girl from the wrong side of the tracks weds (for there would have to be a wedding) into aristocracy when finally she meets her prince, and he was worth waiting every second for, because everyone knows a prince doesn’t accept sullied goods. It was a lesson for young girls everywhere. Lori shuddered to acknowledge its farce.
How could she confide in Jacqueline—in anyone?—the humiliation of what had happened at Maximo’s apartment? In any context, let alone the one she found herself in after the debacle with JB? There was no way. She detested Maximo and yet acknowledged he was the only one who could save them from the questions that would arrive at her door. She was at his mercy.
And so she was forced to go along with it, hands tied,
belly swelling, like a witch led head-bowed to the river. She found herself swept along in a plan she had no alternative but to follow, a scandalous, fraudulent plan born out of sheer desolation.
JB had put her in that position. She despised him for it.
Tony had been attempting to get in touch. She didn’t want to hear from him. It was too little, too late. At the point she had needed her father’s support he had turned her away. She would do this by herself. It was her body, her child and her decision. She had become a fortress, gale-beaten on an outcrop, standing resolute, old as time. She’d need to be for what lay ahead.
In bed, at night, Lori felt the scale of the mansion, vast and open with emptiness. She pictured herself inside its floating space, as her baby was now inside hers, a being within a being within a being, like she was trapped inside a Russian doll and running out of air.
Late March, Lori gave birth to a boy. She named him Omar.
Everyone told her that all babies had blue eyes in their first months of life but she knew this type of blue like the back of her hand. Pale, silvery: the eyes of JB Moreau.
‘He’s beautiful,’ they crooned, and she and Maximo Diaz, proud parents, showed him to magazines and TV cameras and all the while Lori wished she had no part in this parade.
Maximo had taken the bait. He couldn’t believe his luck. For a while he’d feared Lori would do something stupid like go to the cops—he’d never known a woman to react so unreasonably to his advances—so to have her come crawling with such an epic request was deeply rewarding. He was told the father was an ex-boyfriend, someone Lori had made a mistake in sleeping with, and that the man was happy to stay out of the child’s life.
For Maximo, the offer was the answer to his prayers. It meant he no longer had to prowl the beds of single actresses and see on their faces, regular as clockwork, the disappointment and disgust when finally he unveiled his shrivelled member. It was also a dream move for his career. Who knew, maybe he’d get bored in a couple years’ time and sack her and the kid off, but for now he was on the threshold of the big league. Stepping into Lori’s world was all it took.
Lori could neither love nor respect him. She refused to leave Omar with him for even one second. She existed, numb to the pain. She got through one day and then the next. It was enough. It had to be.
How she wished she could close her heart to JB Moreau. She loathed him, yet she needed him. She hated him, yet she could not let him go. She wanted to hit him till her fists bled, yet she wanted to kiss him more.
How could she abandon the man who was half the child she adored?
Motherhood propelled Lori to megastar status. Having a child qualified her to enter a community of women interested in more than just fashion and glamour.
‘A woman in your line of work must feel pressure to shed the baby weight.’ Petra Houston, queen of the talk show, was chatting to her on the
Saturday Fix
sofa. Petra was known for her incisive lines of questioning.
‘I’m realistic. Health is the most important thing.’
‘How’s Maximo as a father?’
‘Great.’ As
a
father, not necessarily Omar’s, he was fine. ‘We’re settling into it well.’
‘People were surprised by the pregnancy,’ Petra suggested.
‘None more than us. It happened quickly but it felt so right.’
‘Was it love at first sight?’ She raised an eyebrow. Cynically, Lori thought.
‘If you believe in it,’ she replied, ‘yes.’
‘So you always wanted kids.’
‘I did after I met Max.’
She found the deception astonishingly straightforward. If anything, it was easier to read a script, play a part, than it was to be real. For the public, it was nothing. None of these people, these millions of viewers, knew anything about her. She was a product, an idea.
After the show, Lori was obliged to mix with Petra and several TV notables before making her excuses. All she could think of was returning home and seeing her baby, looking in on him while he was sleeping and marvelling over his tiny parted lips and soft dark sweep of hair. Every night the nanny spent with him was one she missed.
Maximo was out of town on a junket and the mansion was quiet when she returned. The nanny updated her in hushed whispers and exited the house with practised gentleness.
Upstairs, Lori stood at the door to her son’s nursery, the light from the hall illuminating his cradle. His tiny head was turned to one side, fists curled by his ears like sea-shells. Her heart ached with love, pure and uncomplicated. She watched him till she began to feel sleepy herself.
It was only when Lori went to fix a drink that the envelope
caught her eye, propped up in the hall by the nanny. It must have been delivered while she was out.
Plain white, like the others.
Opening it with care, she peeled out the paper inside.
N O
T L O
N
G
I’
M
C O MI N G F OR
Y
O U
Lori stood, mind ticking over while she held it, until she reached a conclusion.
Slowly, she folded the note back and pressed down the seal.
It was obvious.
How could she have missed something that was staring her in the face? Her obsession, her single-mindedness, her devotion to the wrong man.
There was only one person who could hate her this much.
They had given themselves away. She knew exactly who it was.
53
Aurora
The trouble with a grounding sentence was that the instant normal life resumed, she hit it like there was no tomorrow.
As far as Aurora was concerned, there wasn’t. Hours merged into days, days into weeks, a glass-eyed paralysis that had her living for the brief respite of night when she would hook up with people she disliked and get high with them and have sex in somebody’s apartment who she didn’t know and wake up the next afternoon before she did it all again. Paparazzi chased her wherever she went, incessant bulbs snapping like jaws at a piece of meat. Her image was plastered across the tabloids, synonymous with everything wrong with Hollywood kids: proof that it was only a matter of time before the evils of excess spat out the monsters they had made, and the world looked on in smug complacency as their theories about the corruption of money were gratified and they were able to think,
I might be poor but at least my kid’s not like that
.
Rita Clay did everything to try and get through to her.
Aurora, you’re losing control. Aurora, this isn’t what you wanted. Aurora, don’t let it happen to you
.
But the point was she wasn’t letting anything happen. Life had happened to her and there was fuck all she could do about it.
She woke in a house in Malibu. Couldn’t remember how she got there.
The room was shrouded in semi-darkness and she was lying on the floor, her head on someone’s crumpled-up sweatshirt. When she sat up, a sliver of acute, disabling pain splintered behind her eyes.
Casey Amos was on the couch, asleep with his shirt and pants off but with a grubby sneaker slung off one foot. A blonde not dissimilar in appearance to Aurora was sprawled across him, naked from the waist down.
She took a cab back to Tom and Sherilyn’s. She didn’t care that the driver spent the entire journey ogling her in the rear-view mirror and absorbing every detail so he could cough it up in a magazine deal, like a cat with a hairball, soon as she was out. Whatever turned him on.
‘Roadblock up ahead,’ he informed her as they turned into the street.
Aurora tossed a wodge of dollar bills into the front of the cab and opened the door. It was hot, the sun blinding, and she realised she hadn’t properly seen daylight in a while. She groped around in her bag for her Ray-Bans but couldn’t find them.
As she got closer to the mansion it became clear what the roadblock was.
A barrier of cop cars was wedged together, front wheels
up on the sidewalk, their blue and red lights pulsing. Cops were talking urgently into their radios; one, thriving on the drama, stood with his foot resting inside the passenger door, a lean, tanned elbow on the roof of the car.
Up ahead, the flash of an ambulance.
The ambulance was right outside her house.
Aurora increased her pace, held back momentarily by the cop, who was older in the face than he’d appeared from behind, and who didn’t realise, such was her shambolic appearance, who she was, before he told her to wait and stand back and not go any further, but she didn’t listen. The house and the ambulance came towards her in dislocated, shivering images, like an old movie. Her bag was thumping against her leg and she felt it drop to the ground.
Tom was there. A stretcher was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. Aurora caught a flash of white-blonde hair as the rear doors slammed shut.
‘Dad?’ The word she hadn’t spoken in months was the only logical thing to say.
‘Baby.’ Tom held her. ‘Baby, I’m sorry.’
‘What’s happened?’ Against his chest, her voice came out little more than a squeak.
Behind the ambulance, she saw a second raft of police cars. Beyond that, a crawling swarm of ravenous photographers clicked aimlessly, shouting things she couldn’t hear. Aurora in Tom’s arms sent them wild.
‘It’s bad news, honey,’ he said, stroking her hair as he had when she was little, ‘real bad news. It’s your mom.’
They had to wait hours at the hospital. Tom’s PR arrived on the scene, his management intermittently issuing statements to the press outside. Yes, Sherilyn Rose was still
alive. No, they had no further news. Yes, they were expecting confirmation of a suspected overdose.
Stuart Lovell, Head of Production at Strike Records, turned up. Aurora watched him shake Tom’s hand and the men pulled each other into a swift, efficient embrace.
Aurora wanted to brush her teeth. It was all she could think about to stop herself going crazy. The private clinic smelled of antiseptic masked with air freshener and the smell of it turned her gut. Voices, low and concerned, hummed meaningless as white noise.
Casey tried calling but the hospital didn’t allow cell phones. She noticed he didn’t bother coming in person.
‘Aurora?’ Rita Clay was crouching next to her, full of concern, and for a moment she felt like a kid at a party of grown-ups who were all too busy with themselves to take any notice of her, except one, and that person’s kindness made her cry. Rita gave her a hug. A tear spilled from her as if it had been wrung out, a wet towel twisted over an empty basin.
At last, the news came. A doctor with a grave, sympathetic expression, one well worn, approached the gathered party. She addressed Tom directly.
‘Mr Nash, we were unable to resuscitate Sherilyn,’ she said. ‘We did all we could. I’m sorry. Your wife is dead.’
Over the next seventy-two hours, Sherilyn Rose’s overdose dominated the media. Was it suicide? Speculation raged. The cocktail of drugs found in her body was certainly excessive by any normal person’s standards, but then this was LA, and, for a woman relying on prescription medication, accidents did happen. Moreover, there had been no suicide note.
At least not one that was ever made public.
Tom
It is over for me. It was over a long time ago
.
I cannot live this way
.
Tell her the truth—
I’m sorry I could not
.
Tom Nash had found it alongside his wife’s body. He had known at that moment that she would never pull through. Sherilyn had no intention of waking up.
Nash and Rose
. They had been married over twenty years. In happier times, in the beginning, they had been genuinely fond of each other, best friends, allies who had conquered the charts and reaped the fruits of their celebrity, their success ample antidote to the difficulties of their arrangement. For her, admittedly, it was harder. She took lovers, ever discreet, but she would never be able to live an ordinary life, with an ordinary family. For Tom, in the industry he had embraced, he accepted there would always be an element of sham. He did everything to throw them off the scent: the macho ranch, the overt lyrics about women, his vociferous political conservatism. But rumour was a persistent beast. It rumbled on, speculating over his hair, his clothes and the light surgery job he’d pursued in an ill-conceived moment of vanity.
It was harder these days than ever to conceal a secret.
Sherilyn had needed greater persuasion from the outset. It was easier for him, she had argued: he’d probably never have a kid of his own. She, in another life, with another man, a life where she hadn’t expectations to meet and records to sell, might have. For a while they’d discussed
either one of them being involved—neither had any desire to pool their genes, it felt too much like conceiving with a sibling—but in the end decided an equal share, a mutual disassociation, was the prudent route. Perhaps that was where they had gone wrong.