When Stars Align

Nine Sicily

Nine

Sicily

2008

Hugo’s lawsuit hits Sicily like an incoming missile.

She rereads the papers on the floor of her bedroom, panic growing with every line until it feels like it will break her apart.

She’s an unfit mother, he claims. Little Noah is being dragged from country to country, from hotel to hotel, with no stability in his life, just so Sicily can keep acting the fame whore. A good family would provide a permanent home for their baby, but Sicily has been on the road for 257 days out of the past year.

Worse still, he’s using her own words against her. Someone told him about a joke she used to make—an anonymous source; Sicily has combed through the documents, but there’s no indication of who—about giving any future baby up for adoption.

That’s all it was. A joke—right? The fact that Sicily was afraid of her parents stealing Noah away in the heat of labor doesn’t matter. Maybe not the healthiest fear to have, sure, but she wasn’t thinking straight.

All families have issues. This is what Sicily has always told herself. But Hugo seems to think the Bells are beyond repair—and he’s using her joke to form an argument that she knew her family was unhealthy. That she’s deliberately keeping Noah in that environment. Hugo thinks they’re all grifters, and this along with the thorough foundation he’s laying of her wild days as a 3AM Girl is the foundation of his case.

“None of it is airtight,” the family lawyer had said. “But he’s certainly bringing a lot of ammunition. And press leverage.”

Sicily’s whole body is trembling, but she manages to read what he proposes. Hugo wants custody of Noah for at least half the year, when the boy will live with him and his parents. They’ve just moved from England to LA to make it as straightforward as possible. Even if Hugo has tour dates, his parents will be home all the time to look after Noah—unlike Sicily’s family, who tour the world with her, concerned only with selling more merchandise.

Sicily takes a deep breath and leans back, her head thudding against the wall behind her. There’s a crack in the paint on the ceiling and some kind of stain; she wonders how long it’s been there, whether it’s water damage.

Of course, the move to LA will also be very convenient for Hugo’s budding solo-artist recording career, but that doesn’t get mentioned anywhere. No, everyone just sees how he’s crossing oceans and continents for the sake of his baby boy. All because he doesn’t trust Sicily or her family.

Kendra’s daily roundups have always been bad, but lately Sicily has found them unbearable. She’s used to criticism. But the publicity around the court case has made the scathing articles skyrocket.

She’s a sweet girl, said one “friend” of Hugo’s, words that had been circulating around several outlets. But her focus is on stardom, not motherhood, and her family enables that. She’s their meal ticket. They never wanted her to have the baby.

That may be true, but neither did Hugo. Neither did he! Sicily doesn’t understand where this is coming from. She wanted to reach out to Hugo to see whether they could settle things out of court, but Day admonished her.

“Let the lawyers handle it,” he said. “This is no time for emotions to get involved.”

Then, when Hugo’s little press tour didn’t let up, she wanted to publish the messages he’d sent her, imploring her to rethink the pregnancy and reiterating the distance he wanted to keep. But she was met with another no. A good mother wouldn’t publicly lash out at her baby’s father. A good mother isn’t bitter; she’s demure, and she takes bad news on the chin.

“No sob stories yet,” Uncle Henry had said. “We’re keeping the high ground as long as we can. Save that ammo for when things get nasty.”

And when it can be sold at a higher price, Sicily had thought. But she wasn’t sure how much more she could handle.

Her family’s prayers of thanks at the dinner table—for tour bookings, for Sicily’s quick bounce back after Noah’s birth, for their growing fortune—are beginning to get on Sicily’s nerves. They sound hollower with every deposited check.

All families have issues.

Things should be calm for the moment, at least. She’s home now—or what home became after the Blast Off! Network: the huge Bel Air house that she shares with Day, Carole, Uncle Henry, Kendra, and various other relatives on the payroll. Hugo should be thrilled she’s introducing some stability into poor neglected Noah’s life.

“He’s the one who’s poor,” Sicily murmurs to Noah in the playpen next to her, pressing a finger to the mesh and touching his little hand. “Your daddy can’t handle the consequences of his own decisions, huh, Noe?”

Sicily wipes her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt, watching Noah babble in response. His crib is right next to her bed so she can wake at the slightest noise of discomfort, the earliest sign that he’s hungry. They had on-and-off luck with the latching, but she’s supplemented with pumping and formula, and he’s doing okay. They’re doing okay.

She’s already started introducing baby food. Soon he’ll be able to move on to solids, and it will break her heart.

None of that matters, though, because LA is a snake pit of people who make money off the misfortunes of celebrities. It’s gotten harder and harder to go anywhere. Every time she leaves the house with Noah, someone is lying in wait to take compromising photographs. Kendra just has to google sicily bell bad mother and there are dozens of shots: Noah sipping from her glass of soda, Noah baking in the sun without a hat, Noah wailing his lungs out in the car while Sicily talks on the phone or buys herself an iced coffee. She’s criticized for holding Noah the “wrong” way, for wearing UGGs while she’s driving. There’s even a site that keeps track of how many times she goes out without her baby and mocks her for going to the gym more than she goes to playgrounds or parks.

She wants to scream at them, tell them that he’s too little for playgrounds, that she would never leave him home alone, that he loves feeling the sun on his face, he just cries when he’s tired and cranky. Like all babies do. Like she constantly wants to—but then she would be hysterical. They’d say she was a basket case.

“Don’t act all crazy, now,” Uncle Henry has said, one too many times. He’s been watching her even closer, ever since a horrible day last week when Sicily dinged someone’s parked car in the Nordstrom lot. She’d rushed from her car with Noah, locking herself in the women’s bathroom while she called her father. Day had arranged for repairs, and Uncle Henry had tracked down one photographer who was lurking in a Starbucks across the street, paying him off.

“You need to be more careful,” Day said that night, rubbing his eyes after a call to insurance claims.

“I’m sorry,” Sicily said, but she couldn’t help feeling indignant. People got in fender benders all the time. She wished everyday errors didn’t feel so life-and-death. “It was just a mistake.”

“We can’t afford mistakes, especially not now,” Uncle Henry had cut in. “You have to take better care of yourself and your child. Noah could have gotten hurt.”

Sicily can’t win.

The weird thing: her parents don’t seem all that worried about Hugo’s claim on Noah.

“It might actually help us out,” Carole had the audacity to say. “Like a built-in babysitter.”

“I know it’s not an easy situation, honey,” Day had said. They had a family meeting about it just yesterday, with all of them gathered around the big dining room table. “But ... you didn’t make things easy in the first place. And, well, he is the boy’s father.”

“And he’s willing to sink a lot more money into this than we are, apparently ...,” Kendra muttered under her breath. Next to her, Emmylou snorted.

“Has he acted like a father?” Sicily said, seething. “Has he given a shit until now?”

“Language,” Uncle Henry said sternly.

“Noah doesn’t even know these people!” Sicily protested. “You’d be totally fine if he just spent half his life in an unfamiliar house? With people who are basically strangers to him?”

“All right, no need to raise your voice,” her mother said.

“He’s my child !” Sicily said, getting only louder. “If I’m not going to fight for him, who will? Apparently not you people!”

“Now that’s enough!” Uncle Henry barked. “Go take care of your son. The adults are going to talk about this.”

Sicily was too angry to stay, to say that she, too, was an adult.

Now Sicily bends over the playpen, kissing Noah on the top of his head. He’s oblivious to her, endlessly busy with whatever imaginary world he’s wrapped up in. He has a little wooden puzzle and is trying with all his might to figure out how to make the pieces fit.

“What are we going to do, huh, little bugaboo?” she says softly. “I’m not going anywhere for half a year, no way. We’re sticking together.”

It’s almost his lunchtime. She’s been keeping to herself as much as possible, grateful for a door that she can close to be alone with her son. But the formula is in the refrigerator downstairs.

The house is quiet, and Sicily wishes she could get there and back without running into anyone.

But no such luck—there are voices in the kitchen, speaking low.

“... not anything extreme, of course,” Sicily’s mother is saying, nearly whispering. Sicily stops at the bottom of the stairs.

“It’s been hard on all of us.” She can tell Day is covering his mouth, hands likely laced together at his chin in thought.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” says Uncle Henry. “She can’t deal with the pressure. She’s going to crack. Who wouldn’t?”

Sicily’s mother is starting to say something else, but Sicily goes up a few stairs and then stomps down them, loudly. She bustles into the kitchen in a huff, and they all turn to look at her. So inconspicuous.

“How are you feeling, sweetie?” Carole asks. The oversympathetic concern in her voice grates on Sicily’s nerves.

“I’m fine,” she says flatly, retrieving the formula from the fridge. “Just lunchtime.”

“We think you should take some time off,” Uncle Henry says. “Take a vacation or something. Kendra was talking about this spa—”

“And leave my baby?” Sicily’s voice is too high with mock hilarity. She can see the headlines now. “And go pamper myself while I’m embroiled in a tooth-and-nail fight for custody of my son? What a great idea! You really know how to call ’em, Uncle Henry. Sounds perfect.” She lets out a peal of laughter that does not reach her eyes, letting it get shrill and stale as she marches out of the room.

“Sicily!” Kendra trills as they pass in the upstairs hallway. “There you are. E! just had an interview with Hugo, and—”

“No, Kendra.” Sicily pushes past her without hesitating. “Not today.”

“You can’t shut it out,” Kendra calls. “We need to stay on top of his press, too.”

Sicily slams her bedroom door.

She can deal with pressure. All Sicily ever does is deal with pressure. It’s been a survival tactic since she started singing her heart out on Kidz Klub , performing for the whole world and becoming her family’s only source of income.

But nobody was worried about the pressure of an eleven-year-old girl back then, not when the checks started rolling in.

Sicily lifts Noah in her arms and cuddles him to her chest, filling up with pride when he grabs the bottle and drinks from it greedily.

They just need to get away. They just need a little time to themselves.

“Change of plans, bugaboo,” she coos. “You want to go on an adventure today?”

“I have to run some errands.” Sicily slings the baby carrier over her elbow and picks up her keys from the hook by the fridge, casting what she hopes is a casual glance at her mother. Day and Uncle Henry have disappeared somewhere, and Sicily is glad to find Carole alone.

She frowns. “Is that a good idea, sweetheart? Let’s just—”

“It’s just diapers, Mom. And pads. You want to come with?”

Carole frowns and gives a little shake of her head. “We can send Kendra for that. It’s not a good idea to be out right now—the whole thing last week, and with the case going on ...”

“How about I take your car? They won’t recognize that one.” Sicily sighs, trying to make herself look small and vulnerable. “I just need some fresh air, Mom.”

Carole purses her lips and looks uncertain, but she waves her hand. “Go then. Quick before the boys notice you’re gone.”

Sicily switches the keys and is out the door before Carole can change her mind.

She buckles Noah in his baby seat in the back seat of the hatchback, kissing his sweet nose. He is the only important one—Sicily needs to get away from everyone but him. Behind the wheel, she starts the engine and pulls out of the back driveway before deciding where to go. She has no definite plan in mind.

Is she an adult, like she wanted to blurt to Uncle Henry? She’s never had to make plans by herself, not once in her life. She’s never had to open a bank account or pay a bill or choose a phone service or call a cab. She’s never had to buy groceries. She’s never done the laundry.

Everyone has taken care of those things for her—has kept her too busy to ever learn how.

But she’s a mom. Aren’t moms supposed to be able to do that stuff? Sicily glances in the rearview at the baby seat, facing away from her. She’s there for Noah’s every cry, playing with him and singing to him and fumbling her way through changing his diaper. But when she throws his clothes in the hamper with hers and forgets about them, someone else takes care of it. When he grows up, she won’t be able to teach him how to fill out a college application or file his taxes.

Maybe she is useless, like everyone has been trying to tell her. Maybe she’s an unfit mother.

Lost in thought, Sicily drifts a little too close to the next lane on the highway and is startled by a honk. She quickly corrects, pushing her sunglasses closer to her face and hunching down as a pickup truck passes her on the left, the driver peering into the car. She sneaks a glance; he’s wearing a baseball cap, and his eyes are narrowed.

She presses her foot to the gas to get ahead of him, but he speeds up with her. She slows down, and he does, too. He’s staying right next to her, trying to look in the car—he knows who she is.

Finally, Sicily drops her speed to thirty and puts her blinker on, slowly moving behind him. She exits as soon as she can, and he’s gone.

“We didn’t like him, did we, Noah?” she says in the rearview mirror. “No, sir.”

Sicily finds herself heading east on the 10 and realizes, after seeing signs for Malibu, that she’s instinctively driving toward Miranda’s beach house. For just a moment, she relaxes. How incredible would it be to see Miranda right now? She hasn’t met Noah yet, even though they’re both in the same city again. Just seeing her face would make Sicily feel grounded. She imagines opening a bottle of wine, having Noah play on the floor between them while they talk like they used to. Just talk, for hours on end, swapping stories and complaining about work and the men in their lives and how fast the world is moving, how hard it is to keep up.

But no—there could be no wine, no drinking at all. Sicily isn’t sure whether Miranda is even home right now, between the DUI, the arrest, and what’s rumored to be jail time due to poor behavior while on probation. It sounds like things really went downhill when her most recent guy dumped her. Miranda’s temper is not serving her well lately, and Sicily has been giving her space; not to mention that Sicily’s plate is now full with this court case.

Really, Sicily shouldn’t even be driving this way. It’s an obvious route to Malibu, and she shouldn’t give the paparazzi any opportunity to draw a link between her and Miranda and bring up the 3AM shit again. Sicily checks her mirrors; there’s a white Chevy that’s been behind her for a few miles. Is it following her? There’s no saying how quickly that man in the pickup might’ve called a press connection to let them know he’d seen her. A tip like that could get you some nice pocket change.

Who’s to say she isn’t being watched now, trailed by the cars around her, even in front? The paps could be ruthless. One of them risked getting T-boned by pulling out in front of her limo, forcing it to stop. Sicily suddenly feels claustrophobic on the open highway, wide but filled with cars and eyes that are craning to see her.

She swerves for the next exit without putting on her blinker. The Chevy follows, signaling right.

“Shit,” Sicily says under her breath. “Hang on back there, okay, bugaboo?”

There’s a yellow light at the end of the off-ramp, and she runs it, turning onto Lincoln Boulevard and then off down several side streets, twisting in an unpredictable route. At the end of every alley, she expects the white car to screech in front of her, trapping them. Her hands are like vise grips on the wheel. She needs to get out of the city, away from her family, away from these awful people.

At last she reaches Venice Boulevard and gets back on the 10, this time heading west and then exiting north. She drives as fast as legally possible, weaving around the cars so none of them get too good a look at her or Noah.

Where can she go? What can she do? Everybody in America knows her face. It was so much easier to disappear, Sicily thinks, in the days before social media. In Old Hollywood. If she’d lived back then, maybe she could have changed her hair, moved to Iowa, and worked at a diner somewhere. Paid a local retiree to babysit Noah during the day and spent her evenings watching him play in the fields. The vision feels so achingly beautiful to Sicily that all at once she feels like she could cry.

That won’t cut it nowadays. The media will find her, no matter where she goes—if her family doesn’t get to her first.

As if picking up on her panic, Noah fusses and begins to cry. Maybe it’s the way she’s driving, or the hot sun coming through the window, or maybe he needs a change. Whatever it is, Sicily can’t do anything about it just now. She turns on the radio, switching stations when she can take her eyes off the road for a second and trying to find one he likes. His whimpering pitches up into a scream.

“Hey, Noah, it’s your mama!” she says over the din when “So Bad, So Good” comes on. “Listen to Mama ...”

She sings the chorus when it comes around, hating the way her voice sounds. Tears come to her eyes, and Sicily brushes them away angrily.

When they reach the Los Angeles city limits, she keeps driving.

By the time Noah finally quiets, it’s getting dark. They’re in the desert—Sicily isn’t sure where. She’s never driven this far by herself, and she doesn’t have a GPS or a map, having shut her cell phone off and tossed it in the back when calls from Mom, Dad, Uncle Henry, and Kendra started rolling in. She wasn’t paying close enough attention to the road signs, either, while watching for cars that might be trailing them.

But maybe she’s close to Palm Springs. Maybe she could get to Vegas. Maybe she’ll just keep going until they find a new town of their very own, and she and Noah can just curl up to sleep in the back seat like two animals in a burrow, safe and sound.

Hours pass. Or maybe minutes. And then the engine starts to stall.

“Oh shit,” Sicily whispers to herself, looking at the fuel gauge. The dial has sunk below empty. She wasn’t watching it. This is all her fault. “No, no.”

She pumps the gas pedal as the car sputters and slows and finally grinds to a stop.

Then everything is silent.

Sicily remains frozen, staring at the horizon through the windshield as a heavy blanket of panic wraps around her. A long, lone road stretches out before the car with miles of desert scrub brush on either side. She’s facing east. The dusky light of the evening is slowly sinking into the foothills behind her.

Sicily unbuckles and gropes in the back seat for her cell phone; it’s there, fallen near the door. She still doesn’t want to talk to her family—and she’s starting to worry that Hugo has some good points about them—but maybe there’s someone else who can help her.

The phone still has a battery charge. But zero service.

“Come on,” Sicily says, holding it higher. She dials 911, once, twice, but the call won’t connect. At last she slumps back in her seat.

“We got our wish, huh, bugaboo?” she whispers. “No one out here to take our picture.”

Or to save their lives.

Sicily shakes herself. She has to move. She has to keep going or she’ll lose it. Doesn’t the desert get deathly cold at night? But they can’t stay here in the car; Sicily isn’t sure she wants to meet anyone who finds them on this road all alone.

It’s been miles since they passed any signs of civilization. By the odds of it, she figures, there should be something just ahead. The road slopes upward about a mile off—maybe there’s a gas station she can’t see, a little desert town just over the crest. People didn’t recognize the 3AM Girls in that bar on Miranda’s eighteenth birthday, so maybe they won’t recognize one former, miserable 3AM Girl here. She hopes.

Because she has to keep going forward. If she goes back, deep down, she knows that Noah is already lost.

He’s sleeping when she unbuckles him from the car seat, and she feels horrible for waking him up, horrible that he hasn’t eaten in hours.

“Let’s go for a little walk, huh, Noe?” She kisses his furrowed brow and hefts the baby bag over her shoulder. There’s just one bottle of formula in there—she hadn’t planned on being gone this long. She didn’t have a plan at all. Sicily presses the bottle to his lips as they walk, leaving the car dark and locked.

She sings him a lullaby, ignoring how heavy everything is in her arms.

The moon is coming up over the rise. She checks her phone again every few yards, but they’re in too much of a valley.

When Noah’s had half the formula, she stuffs it back in the bag and burps him while he fusses.

Sicily continues to hum, heart pounding as they reach the top of the slope, and she cranes her neck to see the road ahead.

Her stomach twists when the crest reveals nothing but more desert in front of them, black road cutting through the gray brushland like a snake.

“Just around the next rise, then, right, bugaboo? Just by those rocks?”

She keeps going. Her arms ache.

As the darkness deepens from navy blue to black, she catches sight of two pinpricks of light far behind her—a car.

Relief and terror mingle in her chest. It could be anyone. They could do anything to her and Noah.

But when the headlights stop at the dark, far-off shape of her parked car, blue and red police lights flicker on. Sicily has the urge to run as it approaches, but she can’t; there’s nowhere to go. And this particular mistake is really starting to feel like life or death.

The officer who pulls up on the shoulder is wearing a patch on his uniform that reads Nevada PD. Sicily didn’t even know they had left California.

“The hell do you think you’re doing, young lady?” he asks when he steps out of the car.

“We ran out of gas,” Sicily says in a small voice, clutching Noah closer. There’s still a chance he doesn’t know her, that he’s just a small-town cop from nearby.

“Sicily Bell, right?” he says, a little incredulous. “Your family is beside themselves, called every police station in the American Southwest. Goddamn celebrities. Do you have any idea what could have happened to you out here? With a baby?”

Sicily says nothing. She just lets out a long, desperate sigh that feels like her last breath.

By morning, they are back in LA. Sicily and Noah are picked up from the police station in a limo sent by the Bells’ lawyer. As she sits numbly in the back seat with Noah against her chest, Sicily realizes they are not en route to home.

“Where are we going?” she calls, knocking on the partition. The driver glances in the rearview but does not answer.

Instead, he eventually pulls up to what appears to be a medical facility in Thousand Oaks. Her mother, father, and Uncle Henry are waiting by the front door.

“What is this?” Sicily says when Carole opens the passenger door.

“We just think you need to take some time to relax,” her mother says.

“No.” Sicily tries to shrink back into the car even as Carole takes her by the arm. Despite the homey lobby and nurses’ uniforms that are simply embroidered with Sunnyvale , she knows what this is. It’s a private mental health facility—the kind you don’t check into voluntarily.

“It wasn’t cool, what you did last night,” Uncle Henry says, taking her other arm. “It wasn’t good for Noah.”

Sicily twists around, surprised at the strength of the two, trying to see what’s happening to her son in the back seat of the limo. Kendra is there, taking him out of the baby carrier and burping him over her shoulder.

“Kendra!” Sicily shouts. “Bring him over here!”

But Kendra only shoots a guilty-looking glance at Sicily and turns away, carrying Noah back toward the parking lot. Sicily feels something that has been growing tighter and tighter in her chest suddenly snap.

“Do you realize what could have happened, Sicily?” Her father is coming up to her now, a small paper cup in his hand. “If you and Noah had starved to death out there—if anyone with ill intentions had come across you—and worse, if they realized who you were ...” He shakes his head, hand trembling a little. “It’s over now. And it’s not going to happen again.”

“It won’t!” Sicily cries. “It won’t, Dad, I promise. Please—can we just go home?”

“Come on now, hun,” he says, lifting the cup. “These will help you calm down.”

Sicily screams and elbows the cup from his hand, sending pills clattering to the ground. She doesn’t need drugs. She needs to be alone with Noah. She lunges and kicks until two burly aides hurry over. It takes five people total to hold her back from running to her son.

Of that, at least, she will always feel a little proud.

The year ends with Sicily spending more time with the family lawyer and his associates than she’s ever spent with a boyfriend. Hugo easily wins the custody suit, moving Noah to his house in Pasadena.

And Sicily’s parents win a suit of their own, between the institutionalization, the court cases, and the tangle of legalities: a conservatorship, with Day and the family attorney being granted the right to oversee Sicily’s life. Along with Hugo’s case, which laid out the evidence of Sicily’s past life so eloquently—the drinking, the spending, the drugs, the parties that lasted into the early morning—how could any reasonable judge not see the need for some oversight? Sicily is an obvious mess.

This means that Day and the attorney are in charge not only of her finances, but of everything: the new apartment in a high-rise tower so she can’t slip away, the revoked license, the limited time with Noah. Sicily can leave the building only under supervision, usually straight to the rehearsal rooms where she’s learning routines for the new tour.

Because there’s always a tour. The family still needs her to make money, however low she feels, however much she misses her baby.

The show must go on.