Zoe
Philadelphia, 2005
For the first days and weeks after Russell’s death, had been too numb with disbelief, and then too full of anger and sorrow, to do more than keep herself upright and breathing.
She didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, barely spoke.
She let other people make decisions, letting herself be just a body to be moved and directed, as the world went on around her.
The rest of the tour had been canceled, of course.
The label had made an announcement; refunds had been issued.
Russell’s funeral had been arranged, in Massachusetts.
had attended—or, really, had permitted herself to be moved by people who were capable of action, from the hotel in Detroit to the airport to a hotel in Boston and, finally, on a gray Thursday morning, to a church in Medford, Massachusetts, where Russell had grown up.
Cassie wasn’t there.
hadn’t seen Cassie since that morning in Detroit.
She supposed that her sister had gone home, to Philadelphia, and their parents, but no one had said anything about where Cassie was, and hadn’t asked.
There were clothes waiting in the hotel room in Boston: a black satin dress, a hat with a black lace veil.
Black shoes with a modest heel and sheer black hose.
stood in the shower with the lights out, her forehead resting on the marble wall, letting the water beat down, feeling nothing.
There was something awful waiting for her, on the other side of the numbness.
There were wild animals, huge and heavy-hooved, sharp-toothed, waiting to run her down, to trample her, until she was just a bunch of bloodied rags on the ground.
Cassie had once talked about a crowd that way when they’d been backstage, listening to the restless murmurings of three thousand people on the other side of the curtains.
“It sounds like a monster, doesn’t it?”
Cassie had asked, and gestured toward the crowd.
“Like something that wants to eat us up.”
remembered shaking her head, then, when she’d realized Cassie was serious, taking her hands and reassuring Cassie that there was no monster, that they’d both be fine.
Now she thought that her sister had been right.
That night, the name of the monster had been Fame.
This night, it was a different monster, one named Grief.
Grief waited on the other side of the wall, pacing and panting, waiting to swarm her, to stomp her, to break her bones and tear her to pieces with its sharp-edged hooves.
The wall had built would not hold forever.
Eventually, the monster would break through and be upon her ...
but in that moment, in the water, was still numb, and still safe.
In her Boston hotel room, she wrapped herself in a towel and went to the bed, where she lay on her back, open-eyed and sleepless.
Around midnight, she heard knocking, and Tommy calling her name.
She ignored him.
She stared at the ceiling, hands laced over her belly, and thought, I want to die.
Except death would have required action, movement, a series of choices: Knife or gun? Pills or falling? couldn’t act, couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
Her brain was circling in an endless loop of grief and guilt, each lap digging the ruts deeper, chanting, this is all my fault.
In the morning, she got up, feeling her stomach lurching, as it had, every morning, for the past week.
She hurried to the bathroom and crouched in front of the toilet, the tiles cold against her knees, vomiting up stringy bile until it felt like she was turning herself inside out.
She brushed her teeth, pulled on the clothes they’d sent, and waited to be collected and moved to the next place.
CJ knocked on her door, and brought her down to the lobby, then out to the limousine.
He helped her into the back seat, where she sat, motionless and mute as a doll, between Cam and Tommy, ignoring Tommy’s kicked-puppy look, declining Cam’s offer of a pill from the little bottle in his pocket.
A fusillade of camera flashes greeted them as they pulled up to the church.
As soon as the car’s door was open, could hear the paps shouting her name.
“! , over here! , this way, please! , who told you Russell was dead? How did it feel when you found out?”
How did it feel, repeated to herself.
She was shivering, her shoulders shaking involuntary.
“Don’t listen to them,”
Tommy had muttered.
“Fucking animals.”
had barely spoken to Tommy since the night Russell died.
She knew Tommy was, still, so angry.
He’d begged and cajoled and all but ordered her to tell Russell that it was over, that they were together, that she loved him, not Russell, but she hadn’t.
And now, as far as the media and the photographers and the whole wide world knew, had been Russell’s one true love, and he hers, right up until the moment the car sent him flying and the impact of his body against the pavement snapped his spine.
To the world, was now the grieving widow.
Tommy was just the band’s drummer, her sister’s former classmate, nothing to at all.
At the last minute, Tommy had pulled off his black leather jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
CJ extended his hand to help her out of the car, then handed her a bouquet of roses to lay on Russell’s coffin, and he and Cam and Tommy formed a kind of scrum around as she made her way up the church’s stone steps.
The leather was stiff and heavy, and could feel sweat trickling down the small of her back, the insides of her thighs, as she kept her head up, eyes forward.
One of the photographers had snapped what would become the iconic image that appeared on the covers of People and Us and inside the New York Times: , framed by the men, with the black lace veil covering her eyes and the black leather jacket hanging from her narrow shoulders.
with her head bent and her arms full of roses and her wedding band hanging loosely on her left ring finger.
She’d looked fragile and lovely and devastated, a broken flower in a rainstorm.
A victim of a tragedy, and not its perpetrator.
Good, she’d thought, when she’d seen the picture.
I can work with this.
Tommy had found her, in her hotel room, after the funeral, which had endured, sitting motionless, with her father on her left side and her mom on her right, patting her back.
“God, what a mess,”
Tommy had said, raking his fingers through his hair.
“But, ...it’s okay now.”
He’d knelt down before her and taken her hand.
“We can be together.”
In that instant, was given a gift: a flash of perfect clarity.
She saw all the possibilities in front of her, as clearly as if someone had handed her a road map, and, with that vision, she understood a number of things.
The first was that a young woman whose bandmate-husband had died and who went on to date someone else in the band was a far less compelling figure than a grieving young widow who stayed single, or who had her dead beloved’s baby on her own.
The fans would not want her to move on.
They’d hate her for desecrating Russell’s memory.
They would see ’s decision to love again as a betrayal, especially if it was with Tommy.
And Tommy might have been twenty-three in calendar years but was closer to thirteen in terms of actual maturity.
He was sweet, not too smart, talented, but not a person with whom she wanted to have a baby and build a life, even if he claimed to love her.
Even if she was absolutely certain that the baby was his, instead of just ninety percent sure.
Even if she could trust him when he told her that he loved her.
couldn’t be with Tommy.
Not if she ever hoped to keep the public’s attention and maintain her reputation—her brand, as CJ and Jerry called it, an odious word, but a useful one.
And as for a baby . . .
She pictured the spread in People magazine, a gauzy, soft-focus shot of her cradling her little bundle of joy.
Maybe the magazine would pose them in a field of wildflowers, or under a magnolia tree, the baby pink and tiny, draped in something flowy and forgiving.
She imagined how she’d tell the reporter how overjoyed she was, that there was still this piece of Russell for her to love.
And then she imagined more reporters, less-friendly questions.
Who’s with the baby while you’re on tour? Nobody ever seemed to ask new fathers that one, but new mothers got it all the time.
They had to account for themselves, for their choices, and woe betide them if they didn’t have a good answer, even though no answer could make everyone happy.
She knew that the world, and the fans, would treat her kindly as a grieving widow.
They’d be even more generous with their sympathies if she was both a grieving widow and a single mother.
But knew that sympathy would lessen, if not vanish outright, for a single mother who’d gone back on the road to perform, who’d left her baby with a grandmother or, worse, paid help.
Even bringing the baby with her would be wrong, because babies needed routines and schedules.
They were not meant to be carted around the country like luggage while their mothers worked nights.
Men were supposed to be providers and breadwinners.
Mothers were supposed to be mothers.
Mothers were supposed to stay home.
Maybe that would be different, someday, but it would take women braver than to be at the vanguard of that change.
When Tommy reached up to touch her cheek, leaned back, turning her face away.
“I’m sorry,”
she’d said, her voice cracking.
“I can’t.
I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
Tommy asked, looking bewildered.
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t be with you.”
He’d looked at her, lips trembling.
“What do you mean?”
didn’t answer.
“Where will you go? What will you do?”
had made up her mind, right on the spot, coming up with an answer to the first question, if not the second.
“I’m going home.”
Tommy kept talking, but didn’t listen, and, finally, he’d left.
She’d watched the hotel door swing closed, and then she watched her body moving, her hands gathering her clothing from the closet, unzipping her suitcase, putting the clothes inside; her feet, walking along another hotel hall.
She’d found CJ in his room, and she told him what she’d decided.
CJ hadn’t seemed especially upset when she’d given him the news ...
or, at least, not more upset than he’d been since Russell’s death and Cassie’s disappearance.
Cassie and Russell were the important ones, and with one of them dead and the other missing, there would be—could be—no more Griffin Sisters.
Tommy and Cam could join another band.
There’d be other girls, coming down the pike, girls for David to discover and Jerry to sign and CJ to manage and all of them to profit from.
Another bunch of innocents, lining up at the mouth of the cave, eager to offer themselves to the dragon, or the troll beneath the bridge.
She, Griffin, now Grossberg again, was done.
She let her parents bring her back to Philadelphia.
The house hadn’t changed.
The narrow staircase was still lined with school pictures: twelve years of smiling brightly and Cassie looking like she wished she could disappear.
It had been less than two years since she’d left, but it felt like an entire lifetime had elapsed between David Katz coming to the house over Christmas break and returning with a suitcase in her hand and a baby in her belly.
Her father had given her a single, hard hug.
“Love you, kiddo,”
he’d said, and then he’d gone off to work.
Janice followed her upstairs, never meeting ’s gaze, behaving like her older daughter was a ghost who’d vanish if Janice looked at her directly, or for too long.
“Is—is Cassie coming?”
her mother had finally asked.
, who’d been considering asking her mom the same thing, had shrugged, and Janice must have seen something in her daughter’s face that forestalled additional questions.
had wandered through the house.
Nothing had changed, but everything was different.
All the furniture—the off-white love seat, her dad’s ancient recliner, the coffee table with a chip at its corner, where the wood veneer had peeled away—seemed to have shrunk, like it had been reduced by some small but meaningful percentage.
When their first big check from the label had arrived, and Cassie, giddy at the prospect of what seemed like a fairy-tale sum of money, had agreed to send their parents a portion of it.
guessed that Sam and Janice had put the money in their savings account instead of spending it on lavish vacations or home improvements.
Maybe they’d wisely figured that the band’s success would not last, that the money the girls had sent them would be all the money they’d get.
felt her sister’s absence in the empty bed in the bedroom, the empty seat at the kitchen table, the empty space at the piano’s bench where Cassie should have been.
She felt it, most of all, in the quiet.
She’d gotten so used to the house being full of music, the sound of Cassie practicing, for four or five or six hours a day, difficult, dense pieces without any fun, hummable bits.
She never thought she’d miss it, only without her sister, the silence seemed as loud as an explosion.
She’d braced herself for questions from her parents—Where is your sister? What happened, exactly? Are you okay? So far, though, they’d barely spoken to her, and they’d looked at her like she’d become someone else.
A stranger.
supposed that, in a way, that was exactly what had happened.
She’d had her picture in magazines; she’d been on TV.
She’d become, at once, larger than life, and smaller; thinner, flatter, less real.
took to her bed.
She barely spoke to her parents and, when her friends called, she wouldn’t pick up her cell phone or come downstairs to talk on the landline.
She slept eighteen hours a day, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was listening to music, lying in bed with headphones on and her eyes closed.
She played her sister’s CDs, stared at her sister’s empty bed, and let the songs pile up, like snowflakes, until they formed a cool drift in her brain.
It wouldn’t fill her empty places—not for long—but listened, and listening kept her from thinking.
When she did think, the guilt and the shame of what she’d done, of what she’d caused to happen, clung to her like a second skin, oily and gritty, heavy and invisible, impossible to shed.
The mirror showed her the same pretty face, but knew the truth of it ...
that, inside, she was as ugly as anyone could be.
Finally, one morning in October, she knew she couldn’t delay the inevitable any longer.
In the bathroom, she’d shucked off the pajama pants and sweatshirt she’d been wearing for days, and took a shower, washing her greasy hair, carefully combing out the tangles.
She applied moisturizer and put on her makeup.
Back in her bedroom, she found jeans and skirts and sweaters in a dresser drawer, but nothing fit.
She had to go into Cassie’s drawers for leggings and a loose button-down plaid shirt.
When she came downstairs, barefoot, her mother’s eyes widened. “,”
Janice said, “are you . . .”
followed her mother’s gaze down to where the swell of her belly pushed at the shirt. “Oh,”
she said.
In all the weeks she’d been in bed, she’d forgotten about the pregnancy.
Or, not forgotten, exactly, but she’d managed not to think of it.
To put it on hold.
When she’d come home she’d planned on ending it, on arranging and getting an abortion at some point.
From the look on her mother’s face, suspected that “some point”
had come and gone.
“,”
Janice had whispered, wide-eyed, one hand splayed against her chest.
realized she’d need to be careful.
She said the words in her head, testing them out, tasting them, before she spoke them out loud, in her mother’s kitchen.
“I don’t want anyone to know.”
Janice gawped at her, mouth hanging open, giving a view of the fillings in her mother’s back teeth.
“So you want to, what? Keep it a secret?”
Janice shook her head.
“It won’t work.
People will know.
Your doctor ...
everyone in the doctor’s office...
everyone in the hospital . . .”
“They won’t tell,”
said, with a confidence she did not feel.
“It’s, like, an ethical thing.
Medical ethics.
They’re not supposed to talk about private health .
. . stuff.”
Even as she spoke, she was thinking.
The paparazzi and the gossip blogs knew to watch hospitals in Beverly Hills and New York City when they were expecting famous people to give birth, but Philadelphia was a blessedly celebrity-free city, a place where the romantic lives of the local newscasters and meteorologists were as avidly chronicled as the lives of movie stars were in New York and LA ...
and no one knew she was here.
Of course, that didn’t mean some unscrupulous roommate or nurse or orderly or janitor wouldn’t recognize her and tip off the press.
But there was a way to limit the number of people who’d know about the blessed event.
“A home birth,”
announced.
“I’ll have a home birth.”
The baby came on a cold spring morning, which felt fitting, somehow: like an echo of when she and Cassie had been discovered.
This time, instead of a record-label executive rushing to their house, eager to see something amazing, it was the midwife, a taciturn woman named Kayla who’d brought babies in the hundreds into the world and who knew not to hurry.
Kayla was perfect.
She wore teddy-bear-printed scrubs, only listened to sports radio, and had never heard of the Griffin Sisters.
Unlike David Katz, Kayla did not lavish her with praise, saying only, “big push,”
or “rest now,”
or, very occasionally, “good work.”
The only music was ’s moans, getting hoarser as the night went on.
“I can’t,”
she said, after some endless-seeming span of time.
“I can’t do it.
I can’t anymore.”
“You can,”
Kayla said, rubbing her back.
“And you don’t have much of a choice right now.”
had closed her eyes, had pushed with all her might, making a noise that felt like it would tear her in half.
The baby had slid out, into Kayla’s waiting hands.
“A girl,”
Kayla announced.
She clamped and cut the cord, bathed the baby in the basin of warm water Janice had prepared, swaddled the tiny body in a soft blanket, and handed the bundle to , who lay on her bed, sweaty and limp and bleeding.
“What are we calling her?”
Janice asked.
“You pick.”
felt bereft.
Bereft and empty, and confused, too, because who was she missing? Russell? Tommy? Her sister? The band? The person she’d been, who still believed in happily ever after?
“What do you think about Cheryl?”
Janice said, a little hesitantly.
Cheryl had been Janice’s aunt, one of Bess’s sisters.
She’d died years before.
“Nobody names babies Cheryl anymore,” said.
“How about Cherry?”
’s eyes were sliding shut.
She waved one hand. “Fine,”
she said, and closed her eyes, pretending that she couldn’t hear the baby crying, crying, crying.
Once they’d cleaned her up, the baby was beautiful, pink and small and sweet.
How could , as bad as she was, with all the ugliness she contained, have made something so lovely? And how could , as broken as she was, be a mother, and not infect this child with her darkness and her selfishness?
It all felt impossible.
As impossible as the fact that Russell D’Angelo was gone, forever.
That she’d never hear his voice again.
In the months since his death, she’d had plenty of time to think, and what she’d eventually realized was that she’d been wrong about fame.
Fame wasn’t a monster.
It was more like an animal.
A horse.
A wild horse could hurt you if you weren’t careful.
But horses could be tamed.
They could be broken.
You could train them to the saddle and the bridle, and they’d take you where you wanted to go.
That had been her mistake.
She’d let the horse ride her.
She’d been stupid and incautious, trusting and blind.
But now she knew better.
She’d be careful this time.
She’d make sure that she was the one holding the reins.
stayed with her parents as long as she could, as the baby got bigger, right up to the moment she’d sensed her mother’s patience fraying, and she could feel an ultimatum hanging in the air—, you’re a mother now.
You can’t stay here forever.
She thought about trying to explain her fears—that she was bad, that she was broken, that she was the last person who’d be able to raise a whole and happy daughter.
Except that would have involved telling Sam and Janice what had happened with Russell, how he’d died, and why Cassie had gone running, and knew she could never tell anyone that story. Not ever.
She made an appointment at a new hair salon to get her ends trimmed and her highlights refreshed.
At home, she unzipped the makeup bag that had come home with her and applied cosmetics carefully, wiping her face clean, starting over when she made mistakes, when the eyeliner looked crooked or she’d put on too much blush.
With the help of some shapewear and an underwire bra, she’d wriggled into a leather miniskirt and a white silk blouse.
Pregnancy had left her feet half a size larger than they’d been, and her shoes pinched viciously.
She told herself to just keep walking, and did her best to ignore the pain.
She’d taken a train to New York City, then walked toward Relic’s offices, trying to mimic her old swagger, feeling her hips swing and her hair bouncing on her back.
She could feel men’s eyes following her as she went.
Maybe they’d recognized her, or maybe they just thought she was pretty.
When they looked at her, they couldn’t see her tragic backstory.
No dead husband, no runaway sister, no unwanted baby at home; no big dream that had come true and then come crashing down to crush her.
Just a pretty young woman on a soft spring day, with the wind in her hair and her whole life ahead of her, walking like her feet did not hurt her.
At the label, the receptionist’s eyes got wide, and her mouth fell open a little when presented herself.
At least, thought , someone remembered who she was.
“Is Jerry available?”
asked sweetly.
“Do you have an appointment?”
the receptionist replied.
hadn’t imagined she would need one, but she was careful not to let her surprise register on her face.
Instead, she’d smiled.
“Tell him Griffin is here, please.
And that I’m ready to make music again.”