Every Wild Heart Page 2

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “Starts with a five,” Shayne said. She sounded like she was having trouble refraining from bursting into song.

  “And ends with?”

  “A million! Five million dollars. And that’s just the starting offer.”

  “Holy shit,” I breathed.

  “Specifically, ZoneTV would like you to . . .” There was a moment of muffled sound as Shayne searched for something, and then she began to read, “‘. . . share the no-nonsense, tough-love wisdom and humor and heart of Gail Gideon’s beloved, lightning-rod radio show with a wider television audience.’ Geej, this would be like your radio show on steroids.” She hesitated. “They’re thinking the show’s tagline could be ‘Fall in love with the single you!’”

  I felt myself grimace. Roy veered the car onto the freeway exit at Cesar Chavez and then made a quick turn down Alabama Street. I’d driven this route so many times that I could have closed my eyes and still known exactly where we were.

  “We can work on the tagline. Nothing’s set in stone,” Shayne said, reading my silence. “They want a six-week trial this summer with syndication following in the fall.”

  “This summer! Where?”

  “The Hollywood lot,” Shayne answered. “We can finally get you girls out of the fog and into the sun.”

  “Nic just started high school—”

  “The schools here are great. They’re the best. She’ll love it. It will be just like San Francisco except much, much better. Moving is the easy part.”

  But moving wasn’t easy for a girl like Nic. It took her ages to find her footing in new situations. Though she had shed her stutter years earlier, she continued to be extremely self-conscious and uncomfortable at school. It was nearly a month into her freshman year and still each morning as we neared the Kirke School she grew quiet, her cheerful smile weakening mile by mile. Inevitably, by the time I pulled the car into the school’s entrance, her lips were pressed into a tight, quivering line. And yet, I knew that by the end of the school year, Kirke would seem familiar to Nic and she would take her version of comfort in that. Could I deny her that promise of familiarity when I knew how much it meant to her? Could I ask her to start all over again as a sophomore at a new school in a new city?

  “We’ll find a barn for her horse,” added Shayne.

  Shit. Nic loved Corcoran Stables. I was pretty sure she loved it more than our house, that she’d probably sleep there if she could. It was at Corcoran Stables that Nic truly blossomed.

  And then of course there was Tyler, my ex-husband. Nic spent every other weekend with him and his not-so-new wife and their two sons in Marin, a short drive from our house in the city.

  “I have to say I expected a little more excitement, G.G.!” Shayne said. “Your contract with Hawke Media is coming up for renewal, so this is perfect timing.”

  “What about Simone?” I asked. “She got a good offer, too, right?”

  There was a second of silence. My stomach dropped.

  “The deal is just for you.”

  “No,” I said firmly. I glanced up at Roy just in time to see his eyes slide back to the road ahead. “Simone is my producer.” She had also, after nine years of working together, become my closest friend.

  “She’s your producer on your radio show. We’re talking about your television show.” Shayne was quiet for a moment. “Simone is radio. That’s where she thrives. You made her a ton of money and now she gets to keep on doing what she does best. You don’t need to worry about Simone.”

  At that moment, I noticed my reflection in the car window and was startled by how worried I looked, and how small. I found it nearly impossible to remember that I was short; it always surprised me when people described me as petite. I straightened in the seat and cleared my throat.

  “Simone,” I said into the phone, “is nonnegotiable.”

  “Okay, Geej. I hear you,” Shayne said smoothly. “I’ll see what I can do. But if we get her on board, are you in?”

  I could tell that Shayne was truly baffled by my hesitation; when she sent a new opportunity my way, I usually grabbed it by the lapels and kissed it. But as intrigued as I was by the idea of shaking up my career and embarking on a new adventure, my decision would upend my daughter’s life. I couldn’t make it hastily.

  “Give me time to think about it,” I said.

  Shayne sighed, her mood deflating; the call had not gone as she’d planned.

  After we said goodbye, the quiet in the car grew thick, the tires whispering over the wet streets. I rubbed at my temples again. In my reflection, the worry moved back in, deepening the lines that had appeared around my mouth and eyes a few years earlier, surprising me. Teenage Me would never have believed that someday she’d be forty.

  Age awesomely, I mouthed to my reflection, a command.

  The car shuddered over a couple of little potholes.

  Roy glanced at me in the rearview mirror, his face like a stone. “It’s not my fault,” he said. “It’s the asphalt.” I’d heard this joke about four hundred times, but Roy broke into such a hopeful grin that I could not help but laugh.

  The car rolled to a stop in front of our house, which wasn’t much more than a bungalow, really. I could afford something larger now, and in a fancier neighborhood, but Tyler and I had bought this little house in Bernal Heights way back when, before we were even married, when we had to stretch to afford it and we stayed up at night worrying about how we’d pay the mortgage. It surprised people, that little house. Famous people weren’t supposed to live like this—I’d received the memo and had decided to ignore it. Nic and I didn’t need any more space. Besides, that house held good memories for both of us. It was hard to imagine living anywhere else.

  I was disappointed to see that Nic’s bedroom light was off. In fact, all of the lights that should have been visible from the street were dark, including the outside light that I asked Nic to always leave on. The house looked empty, vulnerable, and dreary in the rain, and I hated knowing that my daughter was inside, alone.

  A few weeks earlier, when Nic had entered her freshman year of high school, I’d finally agreed that she was old enough to not need a sitter on the nights—Monday through Friday—that I went to the studio. I still wasn’t entirely convinced that this was a good idea, but Nic—quiet, diligent Nic, who was probably the least demanding teenager in history; a hell of a lot better, anyway, than I’d been at her age—had, for once, put her foot down. In a calm voice, her words enunciated, she’d told me she was old enough to spend her weeknights at home unsupervised. I’d hoped for years that she would find her voice and stick up for herself, so even though it didn’t feel right to say yes, it felt more wrong to say no.

  Now, looking up at the little house being battered by rain, I was struck by a feeling of alarm that I knew would remain, prickling just under my skin, until I saw my daughter.

  “Thanks, Roy,” I said. I hopped out of the car before he could grab his umbrella and shepherd me to the door.

  “Goodnight!” he called. I felt his eyes on my back as I took the steps two at a time. I knew he would wait there, watching, until I’d shut the front door behind me.

  Inside, the house was cool and dark and still. I hurried up the staircase and flicked on the hall light. My bedroom was at the back of the house; Nic’s was at the front. I opened her door slowly, quietly, not wanting to wake her, but when the hall light fell onto her bed I saw only a blank white slash of pillow, the duvet tucked underneath it in the careful way that Nic always left her bed in the morning.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  I spun around. “Nic! You scared me half to death! Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. I was reading in the den.” When she held up a copy of Hamlet, her narrow wrist poked out from her flannel pajamas. She was outgrowing her clothes faster than I could replace them. I put my hand above my heart and felt it racing, still. For fourteen years now, I’d carried with me a fear that something bad would
happen to my daughter. I loved her too much; it tempted fate.

  She pulled back the covers of her bed and climbed in. There was a distant look in her green eyes. I’d seen this new expression of hers a few times recently. Each time I had the unsettling sense that her thoughts were focused intensely elsewhere; it seemed less like she was daydreaming than planning.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked. I’d already put a mental pin in Shayne’s news about the television show offer, deciding that I would discuss it with Nic on the weekend when the conversation wouldn’t feel rushed.

  “Nothing. School, I guess.” From her pillow, she looked up at me. A wayward strand of her hair snaked a dark line across her throat. I couldn’t resist reaching down and brushing it away. She didn’t flinch.

  “Do I have to go?” she asked.

  “To bed or to school?”

  “School.”

  “Well, I suppose I could homeschool you. We could start with seventies New Wave and be on nineties grunge by the end of the semester. I’ve always wanted to read an essay on Debbie Harry’s influence on Shirley Manson.”

  My daughter rolled onto her side. “Mom.”

  “What else am I qualified to teach? From an educational standpoint, I think you’re in better hands with the teachers at Kirke. But it’s up to you.”

  Nic released a stoic sigh. “Oh, fine.” She scrunched her body further under the covers so that only her face was visible above the white blanket. She reached out and touched my knee, exposed by a large hole in my jeans. “It might be time to retire those.”

  I feigned horror. “Never.”

  “Cut them into shorts then?”

  I looked down at the jeans. They were my favorite pair, more than a decade old, and worn to more concerts than I could count. My wardrobe was another thing I’d chosen not to upgrade after fame plumped up my bank account. I’d even worn a rotation of my favorite band T-shirts on my book tour a few years earlier, and had taken great delight in the baffled expressions of the bookstore managers who greeted me at each stop. The usual look of self-help speakers, I learned, entailed blazers and pumps and hair straighteners, none of which I owned or had any intention of purchasing.

  I bent to kiss Nic’s forehead. “Some things magically become more perfect over time.”

  She smiled, but as I shut the door behind me I saw her eyes blinking against the dark room.

  I waited for a few moments in the hall, listening. For what? I suppose Nic’s request to stay home alone while I was at work still sat uneasily with me. I was surprised to realize that I felt a twinge of suspicion regarding her motives. We’re all changing all the time. I, of all people, knew this: I’d practically staked my career on it. Nic was a freshman in high school now. She was growing up and she was changing, and I probably should have been happy about that, even if it meant that I might not know the new Nic as well as I knew the old Nic—even if it meant she might have secrets that I’d never learn.

  Chapter 2

  Nic’s day began in disappointment, the lush landscape of her dream wrenched aside like a curtain, leaving her blinking against the dull light of morning. Her heart pounded as though she were still riding a galloping horse through a field, electrified with a version of joy, or triumph, or maybe power, that she had never experienced in real life. The bedroom took shape around her, the alarm clock on her nightstand minutes away from ringing. As the silky threads of her dream slipped away, Nic remembered who she was, and who she was not.

  Her gaze roamed from the ceiling to the beautiful yellow dress in her closet, a birthday gift from her mother.

  “The color made me think of you,” her mother had said when Nic opened the box. Truly, the dress was more gold than yellow, the rich, warm color of the sun in a child’s imagination. Nic had lifted the dress from the box and awkwardly held it to her torso. She’d felt as though she were embracing a stranger. It was a simple shirt-dress . . . but that color. Regret flickered over her mother’s face—Nic saw it there, but she felt it, too, a ripple in the air between them.

  “Let’s return it,” her mother had said quickly. The large hammered metal cuff near the top of her ear appeared and disappeared as her wild auburn hair moved. “We’ll go together and you can pick out something else.”

  But Nic shook her head. She loved her mother with an intensity that she was never entirely sure was normal and she felt bad that her mother felt bad. Besides, the cotton was very soft and she was surprised to find herself clinging to it.

  The dress had hung in her closet ever since, a ribbon of light among her gray and brown shirts. That dress hung in her closet, not beckoning or taunting exactly, but just sort of breathing. Well, maybe taunting a little, too.

  A girl who wore a yellow dress to school didn’t sit in the back of the classroom. A girl in a yellow dress didn’t have a heartbeat that thudded in her ears every time a teacher called on her. That girl didn’t worry about her skin turning the color of an angry burn, or her mouth flooding with saliva at the very moment she was expected to speak, or her words piling up behind an unending stutter. A girl in a yellow dress didn’t move along the edges of halls, silent as a shadow, shackled by fears that she could not even name. She linked arms with her best friends and tossed her head back when she laughed. She was confident and brave and cool.

  Nic stepped out of her pajamas and pulled on the dress. She stood in front of the mirror and fastened its buttons. She tied the soft belt around her waist. She combed her dark hair around her shoulders and put on lip gloss. She threw her head back and laughed.

  Does everyone think they’re going to start high school and become someone else? That it’s a chance to start over with a clean slate? To change? Nic had convinced herself it was possible, even giving herself a little pep talk on the subject as she’d approached the front doors of the Kirke School on her first day three weeks earlier. And then she’d walked through the formidable foyer of the school—once a railroad tycoon’s chateau-style mansion, black-and-white marble floors and all—and instantly felt an overwhelming desire to just . . . disappear. That’s when she realized that she’d known the truth all along, even through all of her fantasizing over the summer about the new life she’d have when she started at Kirke. She would always be exactly who she’d always been, except now she was in high school.

  And yet. For weeks, Nic had a sense of something swelling and then retreating inside of her. She felt it now, building, as she stood in her bedroom. In her ears that feeling became the sound of her own voice daring her to wear the dress to school.

  She touched the yellow collar, light against her neck. She felt wrapped in her mother’s love, the beautiful sunshine color that had made her mother think of her.

  “Nice dress, Nic!” her new classmates would say. Imagining the attention made her cheeks burn—more rash than blush. She had to turn away from her reflection in the mirror. The voice in her mind fell to deafening silence.

  She wore jeans and a gray T-shirt to school.

  And so of course that was the day that Lucas Holt started at Kirke. Nic could have been the girl in the yellow dress to Lucas, but instead she was just . . . herself. No, not even herself, because really, somewhere inside, she was someone else entirely. She just couldn’t seem to let the person she was on the inside, out.

  Nic knew Lucas was new that day because Kirke wasn’t very big. She was sure that she would have noticed him if he’d been going there since the school year had begun, even if he was a senior. Nic could have sworn the entire cafeteria got quiet when he walked in. He knew what to do with the attention, too. He didn’t turn red or drop his eyes (or dart out of the room—as Nic might have done in his place). He had the kind of self-possession that allowed him to be still. He stood there by the cafeteria doors, looking around the large room. She didn’t have the sense that he was looking for someone in particular; he was taking in the scene. There was a light within him, a glow that seemed to function like a magnet.

  His eyes connected with
Nic’s. She was sure that they did. He looked right at her and his eyes flickered with something that felt to Nic like acknowledgment. Time stopped. That feeling swelled in her again, became her voice in her ear telling her, goading her, to stand and wave to the boy, invite him to her table.

  Do it.

  She didn’t. She couldn’t. She sat, flooded with shame as the moment passed and Lucas’s eyes flicked away, moving along as if he hadn’t even seen her at all. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe she’d made the whole thing up. Her T-shirt was the same nothing color as the dust bunnies under her bed. She practically blended into the cafeteria’s walls.

  In the end, Lucas headed for the table reserved for the coolest and most beautiful of Kirke, a collection of seniors that, it seemed to Nic, held in common nothing more than a sense of confidence that each wielded like a superpower. Among them: Jasmine Cane, captain of the swim team and all-around Kirke golden girl; Emory Torres, star of the drama department; Simon Pinelli, a triple-threat of quarterback, school president, and industrious pot smoker; and Hunter Nolan, who with his cherubic blond curls and relentless menacing of the underclassmen had already earned himself the nickname Angel Bully in the privacy of Nic’s thoughts. These were the unique few that thrived in the thin air of Kirke; they bloomed colorful and bright, unabashed by their own beauty and talent.

  Not one of these seniors or the small crew that surrounded them waved Lucas to their table; he just walked up and sat down and they accepted him. It was as if everyone knew their table was where he belonged, like he’d telepathically revealed a password that made the doors of that world open and then shut behind him.

  Nic sometimes found herself staring at people, trying to determine how they were so comfortable in their own skin, imagining how it would feel to be them. She didn’t intend to stare, but it was hard for her to stop herself. When she was caught—and she was often caught—her embarrassment made her feel combustible, as though at any second she might explode. Sometimes she wished for this explosion. But it never came. Instead the heat inside of her, that spinning orb of humiliation, steadily grew.