Read A Life More Complete Online

Authors: Nikki Young

A Life More Complete (4 page)

“At least it’s not on your butt this
time. You looked like you shit your pants,” Bob says smirking. “I got Trini. No
worries.” He leans down and kisses me good-bye.

Trini Walters is our cash cow, our
gold mine, the reason we earn the salary we do. The reason we amassed more
celebrity clients than Ellie Regan P.R. has ever seen. Trini was an adorable
twelve-year-old girl on the brink of stardom when she signed with Ellie. A tiny
little thing with chipped nail polish and an adorable smile, precocious and
endearing, but she could force your hand at anything. I loved her at first
sight. She could sing, dance and act. We got along famously. Her mother left
when she was a baby. She was being raised by her elderly father and series of
revolving nannies, leaving her on her own more often than not. Her father,
famous in his own right, was a musician, a bona fide 1950’s pop star, who fell
from grace and was now surviving on residuals and his daughter’s money. Trini
had just inked a deal with a children’s network starring on a show called
Trini Knows Best
. The show became wildly
popular in a matter of weeks and catapulted her into a world she was far too
young to ever know.

Trini is now eighteen and we still
remain close. Her show ended two years ago and in that short span of time she
recorded her second album and starred in four movies. I need to call her and
let her know that Bob will be meeting her at her interview this afternoon. I
mark that down in my endless list of things to do today.

We all head off in our respective directions knowing this day
will last forever. It will be one of those days when you glance at the clock
and an hour has passed; yet it feels like an eternity. We’ll work into the night,
tiring long before it will be over. There is no overtime pay in my job. I just
do it exhausted and defeated.

---Chapter 3---
   
 
 

The darkness has taken over as I pull
into Ben’s driveway, parking on the apron. I’ve missed dinner...again. My job
is my life. I don’t work nine to five like most of the population. My job is
unpredictable and demanding, it leaves little room for planning or scheduling. I
called Ben on my way back from Calabasas to let him know I’d be late. I could
hear the disappointment in his voice, but he never says it out loud.

I microwave a brick-sized piece of
lasagna and eat it standing at the counter in Ben’s kitchen. I haven’t eaten
all day. I inhale the lasagna and stare at the lone plate in the sink. I feel
guilty. I want to be with Ben. I want to wake up in the morning with him, eat
breakfast together, make his lunch and cook him dinner. I want to belong to him
and him to me, my day to begin and end with Ben, but it won’t happen. I will be
at work late for the rest of my life. I will fly across the country at
inopportune times and return on red-eyes only to leave the next day again. I
will attend an obscene amount of late night parties, award shows, press
releases, where I will wander with a fake pathetic smile, shaking hands and
kissing ass all the while wishing I was somewhere else. This is my life. I will
always belong to someone else, someone more important...my job.

I grab a Heineken out of the fridge,
remove the top and take a long deep swallow. It’s cold, too cold. It burns my
teeth and I feel it in my sinuses. I close my eyes and wait for the moments of
unshed tears to pass. I compose myself before I head out back to find Ben.

Ben’s backyard is out of a
Better Homes and Garden
magazine. The
picture of perfection, like a resort in the middle of suburbia. Lush tropical
plants grace the perimeter while flowers bloom effortlessly throughout. The
pool is unreal and fills most of the backyard; large and illuminated, flowing
organically as if it’s an extension of the house. A beautifully crafted wooden
arbor stands nearby covered in Dutchman’s pipe. All the plants native to
California, because that is what Ben does.

“Hi,” I whisper almost inaudibly as I
find him lying on a lounge chair staring up at the blackened sky, beer in hand.
Roxy is curled into a ball on the chair next to him.

“Hi,” he responds, sitting up to meet
my gaze as he adjusts the chair back. His voice is soft, but there’s a lonely,
sad quality to it.

I crawl onto the chair and into his
lap placing my head against his chest. He smells of soap, a manly smell, mixed
with beer. I’ve missed him terribly and I choke back the feeling of tears that
sting my eyes. It has been years since I’ve cried. I want to cry for the guilt
I feel, for the hatred of my job, for the loneliness I feel radiating from Ben.
But I can’t. I won’t.

He runs his hand up and down my back
absentmindedly as if he knows to soothe me. I take another long drink of my
beer and place it on the ground next to the chair.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to be here with
you more than anything, but...” I can’t complete the thought because it always
comes back to the same thing. My job, my permanent excuse for everything. “Can
you do this?” I ask.

“Can I do what?”

“Can you be with me when I’m late and
gone and when I do get here I’m just done?” I inquire exasperated. It’s a
question I ask that I subconsciously hope pushes him away. It’s my excuse to
keep him from getting too close.

“If it means that when I do finally
see you, it ends like this, then yes. Absolutely. Yes. This is the best part of
my day.” He presses his lips into my hair and kisses me softly on the top of my
head. His words are my undoing. Why is he so unconditionally kind to me when I
offer him nothing but emptiness?

 
Tears begin to fall silently from my eyes.
Pouring down like waterfalls, years of unshed tears soaking Ben’s shirt. My
mother’s words slam into me.
“Save your
tears. There will be a day when you need them.”
This was said to me when
she found me crying in the bathroom after a particularly terrible high school
style break up with my then boyfriend, Tyler McCarthy. The words were repeated
several months later when I cried over the loss of my beloved cat Mitty and
again when I failed my drivers test. But the worst time was when my grandfather
died unexpectedly and suddenly. Ripping him from my life without warning, he
was gone without so much as a good-bye. I cried harder in those few weeks than
I had in my entire life, yet her face was absent and void of any feeling. She
never hugged me or attempted to calm me. This was her father, the man who
raised her, loved her, and took her in when she and her three small children
had nowhere else to go. Crying should have been a sign of respect and love, but
she couldn’t. And when I couldn’t gain my composure three weeks after his death
she smacked me so hard across the face that she left a handprint, a red, lumpy,
finger-shaped welt on my cheek, but still said nothing. I was stunned into
silence and knew when my grandmother died three weeks later I learned not to
grieve in any way that showed outwardly. When I walked out on my mother at
eighteen, I repeated these same words to her and left prefacing her statement
with,
“Is now a time to cry?”
She, of
course, said nothing. I was now crying for my job, my inability to let Ben in,
my lack of unconditional love, for Mitty and my grandparents and most of all
for all those moments I wanted to cry but couldn’t. My body racked with heaving
sobs.

 
Ben pulls me in tighter to him, his arms
wrap around me so tightly I can barely pull in a ragged breath. I hear him
shush into my hair and it only makes it worse. I can’t believe I’m letting him
see me this way, so vulnerable and open. This is far too intimate and I want to
shut down. Yet, I can’t control myself.

“I’m sorry,” I stutter through rough
uncontrolled sobs. “I just had a bad day at work.” As I speak I regain my
composure. I try to stand, but Ben won’t release me. His arms around me like a
straight jacket forcing me to stay. “Ben? Can I get up?” I ask quietly.

“No. This is the most real you have
been since I met you. I never want to let go of you.” He kisses my head softly and
I want to tell him everything.

“I haven’t cried in at least ten
years.” I quickly say before I can stop myself. “The last time I remember crying
was after my grandfather passed. After that—nothing.” I suddenly breathe
out, a long slow release and I realize I have been holding my breath awaiting
his response. He says nothing for several seconds.

“Why?”

I take a deep breath and prepare
myself for exposure. I haven’t spoken about my mother since I left home. “I don’t
know. I grew up in a house that was completely void of any emotion. My mother
was unable to deal with weakness or vulnerability, basically anything that
caused her to feel. She passed this on to my sisters and me. I don’t know if
she so much as passed it on or if it was forced upon us. We all became
self-soothers, finding ways to deal. My sister Rachel and I named our mother “Benign”
one night. It was the summer of ‘95. It was one of the hottest summers on
record. Our house had no central air because it was so old. Only two window
units. It really sucked. We sat on the roof outside my bedroom window because
the house was hotter than the air outside. We smoked a joint, laughing, we came
up with the nickname. Benign, like as in cancer. The kind that doesn’t kill
you, but still sucks really bad. That was our mother.” I shake my head against
Ben’s chest. “I guess we all deal with our demons in different ways, maybe some
less self-destructive than others. My repressed feelings manifest themself in
my OCD.” I sound like my therapist from my childhood and I pause wondering if
he’ll acknowledge what I just shared with him. He says nothing and I summon the
courage to continue. “I’m sure you’ve noticed my OCD. It’s hard to hide, kind
of embarrassing for the person who witnesses it.”

“It’s lessened over the last few
years. Hardly noticeable. If at all now.” I can’t gauge his emotions from his
voice or body, but he quickly changes the subject. “So, tell me about your
sisters,” he says smiling.

 
“My sisters and I are all very close in
age, Irish triplets, I guess. Rachel was born almost exactly one year after I
was and Courtney, who we call Maizey, eleven months after Rachel. My
relationship with Rachel is the best it’s ever been now that we’re adults, but
it’s nothing compared to some. When you grow up in a house void of love, you
don’t really develop close sibling relationships. We had the fact that we hated
our mother in common, but once that was gone there wasn’t much left. Rachel
lives in Santa Barbara, works as a massage therapist at the Four Seasons. She’s
three hours away and I see her maybe once a year. It’s sad.” I shrug my
shoulders as if I’m not sure what to say. “Courtney is the baby. My poor sister
Courtney was tagged with too many nicknames to count. She became Corny, which
turned to Corn, and after a watching an old movie on cable about Indians she
became Maizey, like maize, like corn. She’s been Maizey as long as I can
remember. She’s the one who I guess has fallen the hardest. She lives with her
drug dealer boyfriend and although she won’t admit it, she’s a drug addict. Cocaine,
just like our father. It’s ruined her life. I haven’t spoken to her in three
years. I don’t have any idea where she is or where she could possibly be.”

“Do you have any good memories of
your sisters?” Ben asks and seems intrigued by my openness.

“Of course I do. Not everything in my
life was a mess. I shared a room with them until I was twelve. Something funny
happened almost every night. One summer we broke my mom’s desk chair spinning
each other around in it. We didn’t tell her, we just left it like nothing
happened. And that night when she sat down to finish up some work, she leaned
back and the chair collapsed. It took everything in us not to burst out
laughing. That night when we were in bed we laughed so hard we cried, all three
of us. Rachel continued laughing long after Maizey and I stopped. She was quiet
about it, but I knew she was because the bunk bed was shaking and every once in
a while she’d giggle.” I laugh again as I recall the memory.

I fill the silence of the night with
all kinds of stories from my childhood as Ben sits with his legs crossed,
facing me and taking it all in. He smiles and laughs with me.

“How’d you end up here?” he asks,
eager for more information. I’ve always been a private person. It’s hard to
share your life when you don’t even know where to begin. Ben is one of the only
people in my life that I’m this honest with. Melinda and Bob know my story, but
they allow me to leave it behind. They understand the pain and take it for what
it’s worth. It doesn’t define me and I hope someday it will stop burdening my
future so entirely. “I’ve known you for six years and I have no idea how you ended
up in California.”

I smile at him. “Obviously, my
mother. I couldn’t get far enough away from her. But it really all came back to
a boy. My high school boyfriend, Tyler McCarthy. I applied to colleges with
absolutely no frame of reference, but knowing it was my only out. I picked
mostly based on their remote proximity to my mother. The University of
Washington, because of the movie
Singles
,
Arizona State because I love the heat, The University of Hawaii Maui because my
mother was exceptionally awful that day and California State University Long
Beach because of a boy.”

I remember at the time thinking my
decision wasn’t all that odd, but looking back it changed my life. It’s the
only choice I ever made that was off kilter and strange even for me. I’m not that
girl who does things just because of a boy and yet I applied to college just
because of a boy. My relationship with Tyler McCarthy was tumultuous and
obsessive the way young love is, but I didn’t think for a second that we would
last forever. He was my first love and when things ended, they ended badly. I
still have a hard time talking about Tyler.

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