Chapter 16
Honeymoon Stage Season Three was only five episodes long, as opposed to the ten each of the first two seasons.
To its bitter end, the show insisted that Maggie and Jason were as in love several years into their very public marriage as they had been on the day they first met.
Never mind that they started to say babe like the word was a knife, that she spent weeks on the road and then went to Palm Springs for the weekend instead of coming home to Calabasas, that the tabloids continued their relentless speculation.
On Honeymoon Stage, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
I didn’t know what happened behind the scenes, what sort of cajoling came from Lauren and the other producers. Maggie had sworn to me that she couldn’t exist without Jason, but immediately following the third-season finale, she filed for divorce.
Speculation was everywhere. She was cheating on him.
He was jealous of her career. He’d found someone younger.
She’d broken his heart. A paparazzi shot of Maggie trying not to be photographed was worth thousands of dollars.
She’d walk with her head down, one hand up to cover her face, and the headline would read What’s Maggie Hiding?
Jason gave an interview to Esquire not long after they officially separated, ostensibly to promote the new line of sports drinks he’d given his name to, but mostly to whine about how Maggie had ruined him.
“I was totally blindsided,” he told the reporter. “I had no idea she was unhappy. I thought it was something we could work on, but she just went straight to divorce.”
Maggie McKee, somehow both savvy Jezebel and idiot who still couldn’t spell Mississippi.
I watched the whole thing happen from my childhood bedroom in Pennsylvania.
I was still on the lease for our apartment in LA and had been planning to go back there once I was done licking my wounds, but the months passed, and Jen and Celia found a subletter, and I did copywriting for a neighbor and helped my stepdad do work around the house.
I wasn’t done with TV, not entirely. I wasn’t going to be one of those girls who let the city chew me up and spit me out. I just needed some time.
On late-night TV, Maggie McKee became synonymous with slutty ex-girlfriend.
She was the butt of every joke for at least the first two months after announcing the divorce, and a swell of fan support for Jason led to rumors he’d be the next star of a well-known Reality dating franchise.
Nothing came out about his drug and alcohol abuse or the chaos immediately following his injury.
If she’d wanted to, Maggie could have smeared him. But she didn’t.
Every so often, Gabe would appear on the list of men she was supposedly running wild with around Hollywood.
Each time I saw his name or photo, I felt a splinter in my heart.
I hadn’t told him I was back in Pennsylvania.
There he was, carrying a guitar case through a parking lot, Maggie beside him.
There he was, in the pictures of a restaurant opening, clinking glasses with a slew of B-list stars.
A photo ran in Star of him snuggled up to Maggie, his head on her shoulder, their arms laced.
The night after it showed up on the Wawa magazine rack, Gabe called me.
I was still awake, but I let him go to voicemail.
“Cassidy.” He’d clearly been drinking, my name long in his mouth. “I think about you constantly. There’s nothing with Maggie but the music. I promise. If you care.” A pause, a breath. “You should delete this. This is dumb. Is there a button to delete this?”
I didn’t call back, but I kept the voicemail. I’d play it late at night, phone cradled by my pillow, as if I had him there with me.
June turned to September. My brother, Andrew, had matched at his top hospital residency, and my mom threw him a massive party, renting out a room at her favorite restaurant for all my relatives to come congratulate her on making a doctor.
“And what are you doing, Cassidy, dear?” my great-aunt asked me. I was between projects, I said, stuffing myself with breadsticks to avoid elaboration.
Gabe had a radio single that seemed to be following me everywhere.
It was a song I’d heard him play when I’d been out in California.
There wasn’t much story to it—boy in love with girl—but it had a catchy chorus and some interesting riffs.
Watch me / Want you / I’ll wait / Stay true.
Lyrically not one of his best, but that was likely why it made pop radio.
When I asked Celia on the phone if she’d heard it, she didn’t even know what I was talking about.
But I heard it often enough to think that fate was laughing at me.
Often enough that Gabe was never too far from my mind.
I wrote Mr. Pichietti’s weekly newsletters.
Babysat my mom’s coworkers’ kids. Watched seasons of old television with Ron, popping the Netflix envelopes in the mail when he forgot, so we could get the next few episodes.
I became especially adept at pulling weeds from the cracks in the sidewalk.
An expert in Beverly Hills 90210 fan fiction.
“What are you going to do?” My mother came in one night when I’d been home more than half a year, and sat down unceremoniously on the edge of my bed.
The room looked about the same as it had when I’d returned in the summers during college—I’d done nothing to rid it of the remnants of girlhood.
A poster of a palomino horse on one wall.
My high school desk, old textbooks peeling.
The duvet still pale pink with patterned white flowers.
“You’re welcome here for as long as you need us,” my mother said.
“But I suppose I’m wondering if you really need us.
” She had spent ages trying to get me to move back to the East Coast; the fact that she was now kicking me out, however passive-aggressively, was telling.
“I don’t think you’re happy here, Cassidy. ”
I didn’t think that I was happy either. That said, I wasn’t unhappy. I had a job, sort of, and I exercised.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard.” I wasn’t sure what “it” was.
Early adulthood? Sitting on information about a murder?
Knowing I was too soft for the life I’d thought I wanted.
Losing the person who’d helped me feel more like myself than I ever had and not knowing if that was my own fault or his.
My mother held my hand in hers, running a thumb along my knuckles the way she did when I was small and I would cry to her because some girl at school had been mean to me.
She had always been a good mother. She’d let me regrow my feathers for several long seasons, and now she was nudging me back out of the nest.
“I’ve always hoped you wouldn’t take the things that happened with your dad as a barometer,” she said. “Most people aren’t selfish pricks.” I laughed, but it hurt—the memory of my father forever the last vestige of a bad chest cold, the cough that lingers, the breath you can’t quite catch.
Although my stepfather treated my mother like a queen, my most formative childhood moments involved my parents’ disagreements.
My mom murmuring sharply to my father as he massaged his temples and said “I don’t know, Cheryl,” while clenching his can of O’Doul’s.
My dad parading us around his law firm’s family picnic—horseshoes and face painting and everybody grinning but my mother, her face drawn.
Try as I might to mine a memory of them happy, nuzzling or holding hands, I never could come up with anything but the vein in my mother’s forehead, how it pulsed the day she told us that he wasn’t coming home.
Once he was gone, my mother didn’t talk much about my dad.
She said she didn’t want to poison us against him, though he was already adept at that himself.
She never badgered him to see us. She never forced me to confess how deeply his leaving had hurt me.
We slapped Band-Aids on a gaping wound, out of sight out of mind.
It was always going to leave a hideous scar.
Now my mother sighed and rubbed at a little stain on the sleeve of her scrubs. She was only forty-eight. She’d been younger than I was now when she’d had me, younger still when Andrew was born. The thought was terrifying.
“I never wanted you to grow up thinking everybody had an angle,” she continued. “Your dad was always for himself. He wasn’t cut out for a family. I should have realized you kids would need more help processing than what’s her name that first year.”
“The lady with the orange couch,” I said.
“Yeah, her.” I remembered those few sessions with Dr. What’s Her Name—me and Andrew on that nappy couch, my mom kneeling next to us. The doctor was a couples therapist, mostly, which my mom must have found at least a little bit funny. I think she’d also been a friend of Aunt Dede’s.
“But we have Ron,” I reminded my mother.
“Thank god for Ron.” This was a common refrain throughout my late adolescence, when Ron offered me his IPAs and came to Andrew’s hockey games and talked Mom down from her initial reactions to our teenage shenanigans. “I wish I’d met him when you were younger.”
“He’s here now,” I said.
“He is.” My mother sighed. “I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have let you go stay with Dad in Virginia.
I should have known better. But I wanted to give you a chance.
You have to think the best of people, kiddo.
Even if it might be scary or make you feel silly for trying, you still have to try.
” I leaned into her, my head against her chest so I could feel her heartbeat, hear the breath move through her. She smelled like peppermint lotion.
“It is scary,” I mumbled.
“Don’t let what happened with your dad be the big story of your life,” my mother said.
I didn’t respond. If I made myself hard enough, I wouldn’t need him. But if I didn’t need him, he was absolved of having left me. He’d be the tragic hero in his own story, even if he was forever the villain in mine.
My mother held me and we listened to the birds in conversation just outside, twittering their song of manic happiness.
“Mr. Pichietti says you can keep doing his newsletter from Los Angeles,” my mother said finally. “While you get back on your feet, look for a more fulfilling job.”
She had been talking to Mr. Pichietti about my career trouble, probably also my love life. It was this as much as anything that told me it was time to return to LA.