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The piece of information doesn't actually surprise her. But it hurts in a way and with an intensity she hadn't expected.
Deborah scrolls through the remainder of Jimmy's e-mail, nearly zoning out but managing to read through the whole thing.
She hears Ava pad around in the foyer with the dogs, playing fetch, stops herself from calling out to her to stop running in her dock martens across her marble floors.
Instead, her stomach clenches, and for the first time in her life she has trouble identifying the emotion that caused it. Usually it's anger, resentment or just pure hatred. She thinks this may be sorrow. It's the worst feeling yet.
As she faces her vanity, she feels her throat close up at the sight of herself so open and vulnerable, the new Deborah Vance she'd become around the younger woman so visible in more rounded facial features, a soft glint in her eyes. Before she registers the fact that the glint is in fact a tear, she gets up, gets her Birkin ready.
‘‘Deborah, come on, we're gonna be late! Marcus is gonna flip his lid, and I'm the one that's gonna be bearing the brunt of that anger, remember what happened last time?’’
She swallows hard, completely unaware of what to do next. However, improv was sometimes a go-to, back in the day, and she is sure she could make the best of those tools again.
‘‘For the last time, he didn't trip you, you tripped yourself because your feet are as gigantic as your hands, now let it go and go wait in the car, I'll be right there.’’
The rivalry of her two closest employees gives her a headache most days, especially now that Marcus is very much peeved she hadn't fired her. Right now though, it’s a welcome reprieve having to separate them like siblings on a road trip. She takes another gulp of soda before she shoulders her purse and steps out.
She knows it the moment Deborah enters the car, realizes Jimmy’s finally had no option but to tell her. The writers were going to use what she gave them. Jimmy tried everything he could, Ava knew it, but apparently, it didn’t work.
In a way, she is glad it’s all out now, the two weeks in between leaving home for Vegas with Deborah and prepping for the big tour were hell, and she kept flinching at every step of the way.
And yet, even now, she is still too chickenshit to do anything about it but wait.
The lightness with which Deborah breezes through conversation with Marcus in the car then makes her think that maybe she’s wrong, but no…Deborah acknowledges her only once, and that’s only to tell her to scoot over so the dogs can get on the seat between them. The dogs weren’t even supposed to come to a gallery opening with them, that should have been the first tipoff, really, the need of a buffer.
She realizes she’s going to have to talk to Deborah about the fucking email, about the fact that she can’t get a grip on her anger for five minutes to think rationally, that she knows that her outburst probably just made not only Deborah’s but DJs life worse, too, and that relationship was only just starting to get better.
She feels like curling up and sobbing into the expensive leather, but instead, she starts drafting another email on her laptop. If Deborah hasn’t killed her by the end of the day (or fired her, which, somehow, made Ava feel like it’s the worse option of the two), hopefully a well-written letter would explain, or at least try to explain, the amount of fucked up she was but also why Deborah shouldn’t let her go. Please, not now, not when her life is starting to feel like living.
She steals a glance sideways and she is yet again struck by the woman’s beauty. She had styled her hair with just a few extensions to make her natural blonde fuller, and her outfit is a perfectly tailored cream colored power suit finished off with sky high red bottoms.
Ava knows Deborah feels her watching, the purse of peach-colored lips tells her so.
She loses any and all bravado and turns back to her laptop screen.
Marty being there sort of makes her feel less like shit on the bottom of someone’s shoe, even though she’d made it very clear that the last thing she needs in her life is the sight of a man who’d stabbed her in the back too many times to count.
Because for all the shady dealings she’d had to put up with over the years, he never once made it out to seem like he was anything but the slimeball she somehow kept ending up under, not when you got to the core of it all.
The thought makes her nauseous because it causes an image of a certain redhead to pop up in her mind uninvited, so she redirects herself, starts working the room, as she is apt to do when everything else in her personal life turns sideways – which is to say, always.
‘‘Senator. I didn’t know you were coming.’’
As she accepts the clammy handshake of yet another middle-aged politician looking to get that sweaty hand on another part of her body altogether, she spots the silhouette of Ava disappearing into the wings, Marcus close behind.
Her first thought is of having to referee an argument between the two, convinces herself that all she’s doing is preventing another public scandal slash outburst to add to her list and follows them to the little dressing room the venue provided her with.
It was supposed to be yet another defeat to put up with, like her mother going stark raving mad, like the fact she missed her father’s last breath, the shattered career she left behind in Vegas after her ‘‘dignified’’ rant at two misogynists.
And then she’d become one of them because she was unable to have a normal discussion, unable to function like a proper human.
Her thoughts run rampant and wild, her stomach suddenly prickly, like it was being turned inside out, her hands cold and itchy. The feeling rises up her arms, into her neck, suffocating like the mesh choker she wore that one summer every day when she was a teenager.
She runs into the side hallway, shutting her eyes against the onslaught of the bright lights and searches blindly for the door handle. She manages to open it just in time to slide in and shut the door in front of Marcus’s stupid face.
He’ll judge and hate her even more and then Deborah will make her leave and she doesn’t want to leave and that’s all she can think of as she hyperventilates into her palms, the floor coming to meet her body at an alarming speed. When everything goes black, she’s glad she thinks she’s dead.
‘‘Ava. Ava, open the door, what’s happening?’’
Deborah rushes down the hall faster than she thought possible in the fucking death heels because something tells her that what she is seeing isn’t the tail end of the usual irritable banter between Marcus and Ava.
‘‘She’s locked in, I saw she wasn’t looking too good and I think I heard a thud, she might have fainted.’’
‘‘Break it down.’’, she orders, and Marcus just stares at her.
‘‘Deborah, I bruise like a peach, you know that.’’
She sees red and before she can slap him senseless, she hears herself bellow.
‘‘BREAK. THE FUCKING DOOR DOWN. NOW!’’
The ambulance ride is foggy, Deborah does her best to stay sane for the duration of it, watching as the EMTs hook Ava to an IV, the heart rate sounding from the monitor dangerously high and too shrill.
‘‘Ma’am, has she had any food today?’’, the woman checking Ava’s saturation asks.
Deborah thinks back to the morning, the hours before she read Jimmy’s e-mail. She can recall Ava playing with the fruit and waffles on her plate, but never really eating a single bite. The image does something to Deborah’s insides, like somehow inserting a puzzle piece that was missing. Ava never says no to food.
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Drugs?’’
‘‘Not for two whole weeks, she’s my live-in co-writer, I should know, she’s been with me the whole time prepping for a tour. But, she did have an emergency surgery some time ago, an ovarian cyst that burst. She was supposed to schedule a check up, I’m sure, but…I don’t know if she ever got round to it.’’
She reprimands herself for not following up with Ava’s doctor. The bile of sorrow from that morning threatens to come back and she swallows past it, reaches out, almost on autopilot, for Ava’s free hand, wrapping her warm fingers around the pale, freezing limb.
‘‘What’s wrong with her?’’, she asks, not daring to speak above a whisper for fear of sobbing.
‘‘Her blood pressure is dangerously low and her abdomen is slightly rigid, we won’t know until we get to the hospital, but I think there was maybe another cyst that was left undrained, or perhaps the other ovary had one as well.
She is going to kill that doctor when she lays her eyes on him.
‘‘But, she’s going to be alright?’’, she asks, petrified of the answer.
‘‘Like I said, we can’t say anything for sure until a doctor can examine her. As EMTs we can only speculate.’’
Deborah closes her eyes and feels a tear slip out. She quickly wipes it away with the back of her hand, before grasping Ava’s again.
The taste at the back of her mouth is vile and she tries to swallow, but that only makes it worse. She hears her own heartbeat and panics further, clawing at the fabric covering her, trying to get into an upright position.
Her eye lids feel heavy and she struggles to open them, feels a warm presence in the room, gravitates to her left, to what seems to be the source of it.
‘‘Sleep, Ava, it’s okay. Sleep.’’
She does as she’s told because Deborah’s there, and Deborah knows what to do. She feels safer than she’s ever felt in her entire life.
The surgery lasts three hours. The ruptured secondary cyst on the first ovary and two on the other one have Deborah plotting a major malpractice suit against the incompetent doctors and the hospital that first treated Ava. As she tries to calm herself, she scrolls through her phone, messages from Kiki, Marcus and even DJ asking about Ava flooding her apps. As she answers the texts, she switches to her email inbox, hoping her absence from the rest of the opening was not too noticeable, especially since the event was almost done and the EMTs arrived and picked Ava up through the back door.
And there, among the piles of spam and Marcus’s forwarded email from sponsors, she sees a single item from Ava. She looks away, puts the phone on the coffee table, fingernails digging into the palms of her hands. Suddenly cold, she grabs a blanket and wraps it around her shoulders, but realizes she’s just delaying reading the damn thing.
Soon enough though, curiosity gets the better of her, so she clicks on the letter, her gut still a tangle of nerves seemingly only Ava could create.
From: [email protected]
Subject: The End?
I know, I know, you’re gonna call me dramatic as soon as you see the first two words. Well, it does, it feels like an ending, to me. Because I know you know what I did. And hey, the best thing I can hope for is you not wanting to run me over with your car. Never forgive, never forget, right?
Still, I hope I don’t quite fall under the exact same category of betrayal as Cathy, though I do know I’m a very close second. I’m waving down at Marty who’s at number three. We should start a club, right?
I know how much you prefer a punch line, but this time in particular, I don’t have it.
This was an Ava Daniels trademark dick move that became the ultimate fuckup. I could say the nicotine laced with a dubious, lint-coated Xanax I found in my backpack contributed to what I did, but the truth is I was just being a spoiled LA brat, and you clocked me as one the moment you saw me. Not an iota of common sense or decency in my body.
However – and I realize that I am asking for a lot – please try and not hate me. I don’t think I could take it. I know, I know, big words for a little girl like me, dehydration, summer dresses with boots and all but - not to put a too dramatic point on it - you changed me, Deborah. Clearly, I wasn’t fully aware of this before the… incident…but you did.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I tried to reason some of the things I feel for you away. They’re not set in stone nor do they even have edges yet, they’re more like a misty specter, just waiting for me to grasp it, but always slipping through my fingers just as I’m about to nail what it is about you that is so magnetic and keeps me tethered.
Maybe it’s not just one thing, maybe it’s the sum of your parts. The way you are with your employees. Name one other boss who gives their black jack dealer a Rolls Royce? The careful, loving way you make dinner for the dogs. The fact you would do anything for your daughter, even though you don’t let anyone else see just how much you love her. The list goes on but the clock is ticking so I’m gonna start wrapping this up. And also, you’re in the car with me as I type this so it’s a little distracting.
The Strip sunlight just hit your eyes so perfectly I think I may have seen a new shade of blue in them and that in and of itself is a weird as fuck thing for me to notice. Yet I seem to notice everything about you.
Love,
Ava.
Deborah sits by her side when they bring her out of surgery, telling everyone to keep going about business as usual, that Ava and her would be back as soon as she’s recovered.
She can’t imagine leaving her alone in this room, the drab white of the walls and the neon lighting too much for a healthy person to bear, let alone a girl who’s had life-saving surgery twice in one month.
She has drank what feels like gallons of Diet Coke, and eaten precisely two mouthfuls of bland rice before she decided her stomach couldn’t handle more.
And when Ava stirred from her anesthesia induced fog, Deborah tucked her back in, hand going to a sweaty forehead, brushing away the wayward strands softly, sitting back in the chair but scooting it closer to the side of the bed.
When Ava wakes fully the second time around, she is met with a sight she’d never be able to forget if she wanted to. Deborah is sat in a recliner next to her bed, half of her body laid out across Ava’s covers, sound asleep. Ava takes a moment to note the dark circles under her eyes, a slight trickle of mascara on the woman’s right cheek, as if she’d been crying. God, how many times is she going to nearly die on her? Cutting out molly and coke seems like the first order of business, though, she is really not as young as she thought she was.
Then, she remembers. The look on Deborah’s face in the car, the certainty with which Ava knew she was done for.
Her eyes well up and a loud sob escapes her before she’s able to hold it back.
‘‘Ava?’’, Deborah jolts from her sleep, eyes immediately zeroing in on her tear-stricken face.
‘‘Are you in pain, should I call the nurse?’’, she asks as she gets to her feet but is stopped in her tracks by Ava’s hand circling her wrist.
‘‘No, come back. I’m fine I just…didn’t expect to see you here. I don’t…what happened?’’
‘‘You should be leaving this place some time tomorrow. I’ll explain everything later. For now, just…breathe’’, Deborah responds, and Ava watches her face shift. But it’s shifting into relief, not anger and…could it be she doesn’t know yet?
However, the fact that Deborah’s eyes are still on her, expression then changing from relief to sadness in a second, Ava lays back, eyes on the ceiling, unable to stand to look at what she’s done.
‘‘I just need a while to get my things from the mansion. I’ll uh…get out of your hair as soon as.’’, she manages, heart monitor racing, beeps filling up the room.
Deborah switches the monitor off, realizing the sound is only making the girl more agitated.
‘‘Look at me.’’, she demands and Ava is unable to resist obeying. Somewhere along the line, especially in the past two weeks, a notion has solidified in her mind that doing what the new and improved Deborah Vance told you to do could never be a bad thing. She hoped she was right.
‘‘You did it again, kid, huh?’’, Deborah chides, perfectly shaped eyebrows shooting upwards in mock inquiry.
‘‘Deborah, I-’‘
‘‘I’m gonna stop you right there. The writers have been paid off.’’
‘‘Wh…what?’’
Deborah scoffs and leans back in her seat, arms crossed in front of her.
‘‘I have money to burn, so I paid them off. For DJ’s sake, not mine. But then, when they least fucking expect it, I will do my best to make sure the fuckers never work again.’’
As Ava pulls her covers close to her body, Deborah almost laughs at the terrified look on her face. Well, it’s not like she didn’t deserve it.
‘‘I read your email.’’
Ava freezes, hands gripping the worn material so tightly her normally pale skin is almost translucent.
‘‘What did we say about breathing, don’t make me call the nurse in to horse tranq you.’’
Ava lets out a laugh and buries her head in her hands.
‘‘I feel like I’m Alice in Wonderland.’’
‘‘Well, it’s a desert in which oddities abound, complete with a multitude of hallucinogenic drugs offered up on platters throughout, so you’re not far off.’’
‘‘And who are you supposed to be, the Red Queen?’’
‘‘Oh, I don’t know, I always liked to think of myself as the Mad Hatter.’’
‘‘Stylish choice, if I may say so myself.’’
‘‘You may not.’’, Deborah says, voice serious, suddenly.
Ava’s face falls.
‘‘Now I want you to listen to me carefully.’’, Deborah continues.
‘‘This is the last time you’ve gone behind my back regarding anything. If you so much as breathe in the direction of a news outlet or think of becoming any type of source again…you won’t like me very much.’’
Ava nods so enthusiastically, Deborah feels like she’s looking at one of those ancient bobble heads people used to have in their cars in the eighties.
‘‘The email you sent me was not your best work, I’ll have to admit. But it did touch on a few points I myself would like to think about as we go forward. Okay?’’
She hopes she’d been clear enough, for as vague as she thinks she sounds. Ava’s words struck such a cord she has no idea what to do with herself. However, reading between the lines being a craft she’d perfected over the years, she thinks the tight rope they’re walking could broaden over time, becoming a safe space for both of them.
She rises from her seat, still staring at a compliant Ava, lungs filling with air now that the girl was out of the woods, medically speaking.
‘‘I’ll go get the doctor so he can check you over.’’
She places a hand on the headboard of the bed, leaning in.
‘‘Calm down now.’’, she says as she places a gentle kiss on Ava's forehead, and then, almost automatically, a chaste one across her lips.
Before Ava’s had time to respond Deborah is out of the room, trying to locate the nurses.
Feeling a huge grin split her entire face open, she lets Deborah’s perfume engulf her and she lays back.
‘‘No more BS, Daniels. You’ve got this.’’, she tells herself out loud as she hears the nurse's footsteps.
Tomorrow can’t come soon enough.