3. Shane
Shane
The suite has a bad room tone. Some hum in the ceiling around sixty cycles that nobody else in here can hear and that I’ve been unable to stop hearing since two o’clock. That’s the joy of sensitive hearing, it’s a curse when it drives me mad but a blessing when I’m composing new music.
My manager, Mitch, has had the tablet since noon. He holds it tipped toward himself, like doctor examining a patient’s chart, and reads me a news piece in the voice he uses on promoters.
When he’s done he declares, “It’s a nothing website with a good SEO guy. By Thursday it’s a meme. Next Thursday, nobody will even remember.”
“Let me see them.”
“Shane.”
“Let me see them.”
He hands it over the way you hand a kid something breakable.
The website is splashed with photos. That’s the brown couch in Los Angeles.
I know the couch. I’m asleep on her with my boots still on because I told her ten minutes.
That’s the hallway outside it. That’s a shirt of hers that didn’t fit me and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor.
That’s her kitchen after midnight, and I’m looking up because she said my name low, like she was telling me something nobody else got to hear.
“These pics are real.”
“Nobody’s arguing the woman owned a phone.”
“You told me this morning they were doctored.”
“I said opportunistic.” He takes the tablet back.
“Opportunistic and real aren’t opposites, they’re not even in the same, look.
It doesn’t matter what the pictures are.
It matters what the pictures do. And right now, they’re doing nothing but create unnecessary drama that you don’t need to be exposed to. ”
Janelle’s been quiet in the corner behind her laptop, as my publicist, this makes me nervous. And then all of a sudden, she speaks up,“Can I say the obvious thing?”
“Sure.”
“The obvious thing is we don’t use the word no tonight.
Private matter, a child’s welfare is involved, we’re addressing it appropriately.
Then you get a test at a lab like a normal human and in a week you announce a daughter or you announce nothing.
” She looks up. “It’s not brave. It also can’t blow up. ”
Mitch laughs, one syllable, no music in it.
“And the insurer hears appropriately and calls the bond on Monday. Bond goes, the promoter moves the on-sale. On-sale moves, the record moves, and we’re out in March against three things that’ll bury us.
” He sets the tablet face-down. “That’s a hundred and ten million of exposure.
That’s a hundred and forty people on payroll. That’s Ricky’s kid’s insurance.”
“Or he has a daughter,” Janelle says.
“He doesn’t have a daughter. You want to know how I know?” He turns to me. “Because they come to you. Thirty years, every single time, they come to you. They don’t vanish for over a year and then surface with a photographer’s eye for a crop. She never called this office. Ask me again.”
“Did she call this office?”
“She did not.”
And I sit in a room with a bad hum in it and let two people tell me exactly how my own life was going to unfold.
And I think about what I’d take back, if I could.
The thing I’d do over. Thirteen months ago I’m in a car to an airport, and Mitch says, half into his own phone, that Tess has been calling.
That she’s upset. That there’s money in it and something about going public and do we want the lawyer, Dale, involved?
I’m hungover and I’m ashamed of the way I ended it and I don’t want her name in that car. I can’t handle the way she’s slow motion rejected me, stopped texting me back or ignoring my calls.
“Handle it.”
Two words. No follow-up. Not once, not in thirteen months, not what does she want, not is she alright. I didn’t lie about her. I did something quieter. I turned her into an issue that needs to get handled and then I never asked what happened to it.
Janelle stays in the room after Mitch goes down to the car. She’s got her laptop shut, which she never does.
“I’m going to ask you one thing and then I’ll do my job.”
“Ask it.”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
“Do I think what’s possible?”
“Shane, come on.” She waits. “The timing, it fits. Do you think it’s possible?”
And I stand in a hotel suite with a bad hum in the ceiling that slowly drives me mad, and I open my mouth and what comes out is, “Mitch says she never called.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I know what you asked me.”
“Okay,” she says, and opens the laptop.
That’s the last chance I have to give a different answer, before I know it, it’s gone.
Alana’s people call to confirm. I do it.
I sit in the chair and deliberately relax, run the smile, and when she asks whether Tess ever tried to reach me I look off camera before I can stop myself and Mitch gives me a quarter inch of a nod.
Not once. Then I say the sentence Janelle wrote earlier and asked me not to use.
Afterward everybody says it was great. They use that word. Somebody hands me a water, somebody says the room loved me, and I walk out past a woman on the sidewalk crying because she got to see me, and I get in the car and feel nothing at all, which should have told me something on its own.
Monica, my sister, calls before we’ve gone a block.
“Where are you?”
“In a car.”
“Get somewhere alone.”
“It’s been a long night, Mon.”
“Shane.” Her voice does the thing that Dad’s always did when he was catching us in a lie. “Alone.”
“I’ll call you when I get back to the hotel.”
“You’d better,” she warns me, and I know she means business if I don’t.
Back at the hotel, after signing a few albums and taking some photos with fans, I’m ready to shut the world out and ignore everything that happened today.
The truth is I can’t get Tess out of my head, and I haven’t been able to for months now. I’ve tried to have a few meaningless one nighters here and there, and it’s been okay but nothing like it was before I met her.
She’s gotten under my skin somehow, and now with this potential baby, she’s dug right in.
Could the baby be mine? It doesn’t add up though, and why wouldn’t she have told me?
Janelle takes one look at my dark face and carries her laptop out.
I flop onto the sofa and call my sister back.
“Okay. What is it? I’m alone.”
“I’m sending you something. Don’t talk while you look.”
It comes through via text. The market photo, cropped and blown up until it’s mostly grain, just the baby’s head in profile against the carrier strap. There’s a notch out of the top of her ear. Small. Like somebody took a bite out of the rim.
I’ve got it. Dad had it. Monica doesn’t, which was a whole war when we were kids, her yelling that we were the matching set and she got left out of it.
I draw in a breath.
“It could be pixel compression,” I say at last.
“It’s not compression.”
“Mon.”
“I sat with that picture for an hour before I called you.” She has to stop. “I wanted to be wrong, because this isn’t a good time for you to have a baby. I mean, you? A father? You’re so irresponsible.”
“Thanks, pal,” I reply and then nod my head even though she can’t see it. “But yeah, you’re right. Me? A fucking father? Come on.”
I stare out the wide, floor to ceiling windows and look at the city. New York’s going about its business down there, all those little lights, all those people going about their lives.
“There’s more. Are you sitting?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” I hear her steady herself, which is worse than anything she could say. “You know I’ve been going through the boxes from the Los Angeles office. The mail bin. Because you never open anything and I’ve been promising to do it for two years.”
“Monica.”
“There’s a delivery report in there. One of the printed ones from the post office, with the scanned signature on it, where they confirm somebody picked up a certified piece.”
“Signed by.”
“It’s a scan. It’s clear enough.”
“Signed by who?”
“Mitchell Noland,” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“Shane. The date on it is June.”
I get up suddenly, cross the room and do the arithmetic standing at the window, and it takes longer than it should, because some part of me is holding the pencil off the paper. Ten months ago. Four months before my daughter was born.
Mitch knew something had come for me, and didn’t bother to fucking let me know.
Am I a father?
The word loses all meaning as the city and its occupants keep living their lives below.
“Fuck,” I exhale and clench my fist. “Fuck.”