9. Shane
Shane
The Los Angeles building on a Saturday night has no sound in it at all. No air handling, no phones, no floor above us. Just the elevator settling somewhere in the shaft and my sister’s boots on the carpet. Ron lets us up without asking anything. He doesn’t even look surprised.
Mitch is in his office with the lamp on and his jacket over the back of the chair, and a legal pad in front of him with nothing on it. He doesn’t stand.
“Figured you’d want to know tonight.”
Monica goes straight past him to the credenza. She’s got the mailroom scan pulled up on her phone and she’s not interested in talking to him.
“Where is it?” she demands.
“Bottom left. It isn’t locked.”
She stops with her hand on the drawer.
“It isn’t locked,” he says again. “I’ve never hidden a thing from that man in seventeen years. I’ve just never put it on his desk.”
She opens it. It’s one of the cheap accordion files and there’s a lot in it, and she starts laying it out across the credenza in rows the way you’d deal cards.
The ultrasound. A strip of four, glossy, curled at one edge from an envelope.
The profile with the hand up beside the face. brODERICK, T. printed in the corner.
Three emails printed out, each with a sticky note on it in his writing.
The stickies say things like sent to Dale, and no reply, ok, and one that just says stop.
A photocopy of a green return receipt with his signature on it.
A draft of the letter from Dale’s office with a line struck through in pen and MN in the margin.
The struck line contains the word pregnancy.
Somebody decided it shouldn’t be in there.
And underneath all of it, a plain white envelope, unopened, with my name on the front in her handwriting. I don’t touch that one for a long time.
“Say it.”
“You’ve got it in front of you.”
“Say it out loud. I’m not going to fill in the fucking blanks for you.”
He puts both hands flat on the desk.
“She called this office in March and told me she was pregnant. You were four weeks off the biggest on-sale of your life, the tour was bonded at a hundred and ten million, and there’s a conduct clause in the sponsorship.”
Mitch says it evenly, all of it, no wobble anywhere.
“I told her you knew and didn’t care. I took delivery of correspondence addressed to you. I answered a telephone that was yours. And when Dale drafted that letter, I told him to take the word out.”
Monica’s got the ultrasound in her hand.
“You had this in a drawer.”
“I had a business to manage. I had your reputation to think about.”
“That’s my niece,” Monica exclaims.
“That’s a photograph sent by a woman your brother told me to handle.”
She lunges at him, I grab her arm.
“He’s right,” I say. “I told him to deal with it.”
“He’s an asshole,” she says, glaring at Mitch.
“He’s not the asshole.” My voice comes out strained. “I am. This is on me.”
Mitch watches me without any triumph in it. He looks tired.
“But Mitch, you’re not off the hook on this. You told me she wanted money.”
“She mentioned bills,” he replies.
“Where?” I point at the three printed emails. “Show me which one she mentions bills or money.”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply.
“You also told me she was threatening to go public.”
“I believed she would eventually.”
“But she never actually fucking said it.”
“No,” he admits.
That answer is too small for what it does. It takes about four seconds to get all the way through me.
“This isn’t business now, Mitch. You’re done.”
“I know.”
“Tonight. No transition, no thirty days, no statement about a new chapter. Security walks you out.”
“Alright.”
“And I’ll pay whatever the contract says, because I’m not giving you a lawsuit to stand behind.”
He nods.
“Can I say one thing to you as a person?” he asks.
“No. I’m not in the right frame of mind to hear it.”
He sits back and folds his hands, and something happens in his face that I’d rather not have seen, he looks broken.
And I think about Mitch and all he’s done for me and my career.
He was there in the beginning when I was busking to pay for a new alternator for my van.
He’d called me the next Ed Sheeran and then made good on his word, making me even bigger.
He’d signed for my first apartment because I had no credit.
For thirteen years, Mitch had been more than my manager. He had been family. But there was no way to excuse this.
“I’m not a monster,” he says. “I’m a man who was very good at his job.”
Monica is still standing at the credenza with one hand pressed over the ultrasound, as if Mitch might try to take it from her. She looks down at that small gray shape, then at me.
“Before we go, you need to hear the voicemail,” Mitch says.
My stomach tightens. “What voicemail?”
“The one she left on your private line. It’s archived under your login.”
“You kept it?”
“I didn’t delete anything.”
“Why?”
His face barely changes. “Because I’m not a monster.”
He forwards me the voicemail and Monica and I leave after security has cleared Mitch out of the building.
We listen to the it in the parking garage.
I sit behind the wheel of my car with the engine off while Monica waits in the passenger seat. The recording comes through the car speakers thin and distorted, with wind rushing over Tess’s voice.
She sounds nervous. Not like the woman who stood at the end of her bed and told me she was tired of being kept in the dark.
Not like the woman who could silence me with one look over the top of her camera.
She sounds like someone trying very hard not to frighten a man who has already frightened her.
“Hi. It’s me.”
A pause. Wind. A car passing somewhere near her.
“I don’t know if Mitch gave you my messages. I hope he did. I need you to know I’m pregnant.”
Her breath catches, but she keeps going.
“It’s yours. And it’s a girl. I’m not asking you for anything. I just need you to know, so that one day you can’t say nobody told you.”
She says goodbye.
Then there are several seconds of nothing. I think the recording is over until her voice comes back, softer and faster.
“She kicks when your song comes on. Not the single. The other one. Every time, Shane. I tested it.”
The message ends.
I play it again.
The second time, I hear what she does not say. She never asks me to come home. She never tells me she loves me. She does not beg or threaten or mention money. She asks for one thing.
She asks me to know my daughter exists.
I make it as far as the part about the song before I fold over the steering wheel. The sound that comes out of me doesn’t feel human. Monica stays where she is. She doesn’t touch me or tell me it’s going to be alright. She rests one hand on the console between us and lets me break.
When I can finally speak, I try to explain what the message did to me.
“It’s not even the…”
The rest won’t come.
I try again and get no further.
“I know,” Monica says.
She can’t know. I let her say it anyway.
After a while, she asks, “What are you going to do?”
I call Janelle. She answers on the second ring.
“I need a camera.”
“Give me an hour and I’ll write something.”
“No.”
“Shane, you should not improvise this.”
“If you write it, I’ll hide in it.” I wipe my face on my sleeve. “That’s what I do. Somebody hands me the right words, and I make them sound like the truth.”
She goes quiet.
“Set up a phone,” I say. “No interviewer. No audience. No one feeding me lines.”
“When?”
“Now.”