Where It Began

Vivian has left the room and gone home on the thankless quest for beauty sleep. I have progressed to the point that I can reach over and pick up the phone without throwing up or falling off the electric bed, big whoop, but the sides are locked in their full upright position 100% of the time. If I want to get out of that bed, I have to buzz the nurse.

I am so bored, I am thinking about pressing the buzzer. I am thinking about reaching over and phoning some random person, some late-night wrong number, just to hear a voice.

When Billy calls.

It is such a shock, it is so hard to breathe, that it hits me that in the back of my so-called mind, I really was hanging onto the idea that he was actually dead, that I actually killed him, the eucalyptus tree crushed him, only everyone is keeping it from me, like mirrors and friends.

“Babe,” he says. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.” Tears start pouring down my cheeks and rolling into my ears and soaking the pillow behind my head. “God, Billy, where are you?”

Billy says, “Shhhhhh, Gabs, don’t say my name.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to you right now.”

I have this sudden reprise of the Agnes Nash vision, the one with the horns and the pitchfork and the little cloven hooves.

“Jesus, Billy,” I say. “I know Agnes hates me, but I’m in the hospital. My head got smashed. Aren’t you even allowed to show up and go ‘hey, get well soon’ and be somewhat polite?” I am, I admit, somewhat shouting by then, unhinged, I guess, by the mashed head and the weird drugs in the drip bags and my general state of brainlessness.

“Shhhh, poor baby girl, poor Gabs,” Billy whispers in his beautiful, gravelly voice. “Are you all right?”

“No. I’m not all right. I look like an ad for fastening your seat belt and I can’t even believe this! You aren’t supposed to talk to me! Your mom—”

You could hear Billy’s jaw snapping shut, like it does when he is trying to gain control over things so dire that a person just can’t get through them with his mouth hanging open.

“It’s not my mom,” he says. And in the three-second pause I think: Oh my God, if it’s not Agnes, it’s HIM. He’s calling to break up with me. Probably he isn’t here because he already broke up with me and I’m such an idiot I didn’t notice. My life is officially over.

“It’s my probation,” he says. “You know how I’m not supposed to drink or be around drinking or go to parties with drinking, right? This is major. Major like I could go to jail. I have to lie low until we see how this shakes out.”

No doubt my mouth would have snapped shut too had any part of my body been capable of fast action, if there was one single part of me that didn’t go mushy and stupid as soon as I heard Billy Nash breathe.

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“I could end up in really deep shit here, Gabs. I have to be careful.”

“I don’t understand. Why can’t you talk to me?”

“Gabby, you’re the one they caught. With the car.”

“So?”

“Babe. I am on serious probation and my PO could yank it. Remember? I can’t go near drinking. Just thinking about you violates half my conditions of probation.”

“Billy—”

“Come on. The underage person I was consuming alcohol with way after six p.m. outside my domicile when I was supposed to be serving bedtime snacks to the homeless downtown and then driving straight home. I’m dead. And what happened to the Beemer was not in compliance with the California motor vehicle code either.”

“You think?” And I know which condition of probation it is, too, it’s Condition #6, the one about associating with minors who use alcohol and a vast array of legal and illegal and semi-legal drugs. The one we joked about because it leaves out crack whores, street corner pushers, and the entire Cali drug cartel as long as the whores, pushers, and international drug lords are over twenty-one.

Which I, on the other hand, am not.

And I think, Why me? Why me? Why me?

And then I think, I’m really screwed.

I say, “What are we going to do? I mean, this is actually kind of insane if you think about it.”

You can hear Billy breathing into the receiver, that’s how quiet it is.

“Gabs, did you talk to your lawyer yet?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jesus, Gabs, didn’t your mom get you a lawyer yet?”

“Please. Vivian is sitting around reading Vogue and complaining about the bad coffee and how jaundiced she looks in the fluorescent light.”

“You have to tell her that before you talk to the police or anyone, you need a lawyer. Do you . . . do you even know what you’re going to say?”

This is the exact moment in the conversation when it occurs to me that as much trouble as Billy says he might be in, I am the one who got drunk and crashed the car and I am no doubt going to have to do something about this unfortunate turn of events or God knows what is going to happen to me.

But I am too happy to care.

All I really care about is how to get Billy to forgive me and how to get things back to how they were.

You can call me a bad girlfriend all you want. You can call me a blue-ribbon, certified bad person. But I am actually glad about Billy’s probation. I am over-the-moon about Billy’s probation. Because: Godawful as it is, it means there is an explanation for him not hovering at my bedside wiping the sweat off my brow. Other than the explanation that he doesn’t like me anymore.

I am actually somewhat happy.

“I’m sorry about your car,” I say, bracing myself for him to get mad.

“Just a car. No worries.”

“You are so nice, Billy.”

“Don’t cry, Gabs. Shhhh. Shhhh. Don’t. I’m sorry about everything.”

I say, “It’s not like it’s your fault. How are we going to be together if you can’t even talk to me?”

“I’ll think of something. Gabs, I will. How soon do you go home?”

“I don’t know. How can I even see you?”

“Babygirl, we have to keep this private. It’s not just Princeton. I could end up locked in California Youth Authority somewhere. Somewhere bad, Gabs. Jesus, I do not want to be rehabilitated again.”

“I am so sorry.”

“So what did you say?”

“What do you mean? What did I say to who?”

“To the police, to everybody,” Billy says. “It’s not like any of this is your fault.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

Billy says, “Come again?”

Why is it that nobody gets this? It’s not that complicated.

“So far, all I’ve said is I don’t remember anything.”

“Really,” Billy says.

“Yeah. What else am I go

“Really,” Billy says.

“Yeah. So?”

Sound of Billy breathing in a huge breath. Sound of Billy sighing. Sound of Billy going mmmmmmm. “Oh, Baby! You are amazing. That is so totally helpful.”

As if I would tell some random law enforcement drone that Billy got drunk even if I did remember.

As if I couldn’t figure out that getting Billy Nash locked up with the Mexican Mafia is not a stellar plan.

His whole tone of voice changes, as if things were sort of normal again, kind of, and he says, “Hey, Gabs, are you wearing one of those little hospital gowns?”

I say, “Yeah . . . so?”

“The kind that’s all kind of open in back and it ties with flimsy little bows?”

I say, “What do you think, Nash?”

And it is almost as if, sour and dizzy as I am, I am back to being myself. All right, so it’s a barely recognizable self. Sinking up to my held-together-by-stitches chin in unfathomably deep shit myself. Myself who has to get out of trouble and get Billy back.

XX

“VIVIAN,” I SAY WHEN SHE COMES WANDERING BACK in, dressed in her dowager-queen-in-mourning mauve outfit again and offering up People, Us, Cosmo, Glamour, and a paperback novel in which some teen bimbo overcomes her drinking problem. “What do you know about me having to talk to the police? And do I have a lawyer?”