“Don’t apologize,” I said. “It’s going to be different now that Eddie’s back.”
“It’s already different,” he agreed in a weary voice. He sounded as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. In his head. In his soul.
After another long moment of silence he sighed and asked, “Where’s Frida?”
“At the lodge.”
“I got used to seeing her funny face here. That’s another thing that’s happened over the past couple of weeks. No Frida in my bed.”
“And I had a period.”
His brow lifted slowly.
I shrugged. “At least I’m not pregnant. Not that I was really worried, since we’ve been safe. But still. Whew.” I pretended to wipe my brow.
“Here’s an idea,” he said, a little spark in his eye. “Wanna take a shower together and get in bed?”
I nodded several times. I really would. I wanted to erase everything that had happened the past couple of weeks. Serj’s heart attack. Eddie coming back from the Philippines.
I wanted to go back to our happy bubble.
But things were changing. I knew it, and he did too.
Track [27] “Mystery Achievement”/The Pretenders
Jane
The weeks between the Serj’srelease from the hospital and the festival were tough. Fen told me countless times that he didn’t know how he’d survive reacclimating into his family without me, and I do think I helped—at least, as much as I could. He was on his own journey, and I supported him as best I knew how.
It felt a little like my aphasia, though. If you weren’t going through it, there wasn’t much you could do to help, unless you were a doctor. I remembered watching the helplessness on my dad’s face after the incident at the dam two years ago; back then, I knew Dad wanted to help me and was hurting, but I just couldn’t deal with him.
NowIwas my dad, helpless to do much for Fen, and I saw him looking back at me like I’d looked at my father: appreciative of me, but he didn’t have the energy to tell me how to help him.
So when he needed to spend nights at the villa because his father was having a bad time with his cardiac rehabilitation program and Jasmine wanted Fen at home for the twins, I just nodded, even though it hollowed me out inside. Fen was being stretched thin, and we all wanted a piece of him.
Even the press.
Between Serj’s hospital release and the festival, they stuck around the lake, snapping photos of the lodge. Of Velvet. Of the Fintail every time Mad Dog rode into town. And of the Sarafians coming and going from their villa. I was used to this back in L.A. But Mad Dog had people who dealt with it—my dad, Kamal and his father, and lawyers if it went too far—and for the most part, it was pretty low-key. Mad Dog wasn’t out destroying hotel rooms and dominating the tabloid headlines, so there wasn’t much more than “producer caught dropping a box of doughnuts in Sherman Oaks.”
Fen wasn’t used to it, though, and it was making him cranky. Jasmine hired a security guard for the villa, which was an extra stress. In fact, all of this gathered into one big stress snowball for Eddie and Fen, who seemed to be slowly, slowly reverting to their old ways. Picking on each other. Little digs. Snide comments. Tiny treacheries.
I prayed they weren’t about me, but deep inside, I feared they were.
But the weight of an impending standoff lifted for a minute, and strangely enough, it lifted when Eddie and Velvet started hanging out together. I didn’t even know they had been friendly until the Fourth of July, when Mad Dog and Rosa invited the Sarafians over to the lodge for a cookout—it was so much food, Exie had to hire two people from town to help her set up grills outside. And when we were all watching fireworks by the dock, Eddie and Velvet were laughing their heads off, telling a story about something they did the night before.
Together. As in, Eddie and Velvet went out together.
“We’re just friends,” Velvet told me as I tried to calm down Frida, who hated fireworks with the trembling rage that only a small dog could muster.
“I honestly do not care,” I said. Much. I mean, itwasa little weird to think of them together. But whatever. “More concerned about the sober issue for both of you. I saw Eddie drinking when his dad was in the hospital.”
“It’s a holiday weekend,” she told me. “Everyone’s drinking. But no one’s gone buck wild. And personally, I haven’t seen Erika Jones since that night at Betty’s, don’t worry.”
I was afraid this just made things more complicated than they needed to be. I even wondered if Eddie was in a mentally bad place this weekend. A couple hours ago, Jasmine had announced that even though Serj was resting back at the villa—holiday fireworks were too much for his heart—they’d come to a decision about the future of the festival.
And it wasn’t exactly great for Eddie.
“Starting next year, we’re going to scale back our hands-on production and coproduce the festival with Denis Oglethorpe,” Jasmine told us that night by Mad Dog’s pool. “He’s already running a fifty-person events operation out of Oakland, and they’re putting on two festivals in San Francisco without national equity.”
