The only time she wasn’t crying, or almost crying, or breathing between sobs, was at West Side Nannies, in the bathroom behind a closed door. I told Laura there was no way she was in there, because I didn’t hear sobbing.
But, lo and behold, Nicole was in there, not crying even though she was stick-dipped in her own feces.
It wasn’t because she was sick of crying. It was because of the woman with the snotty tissue and the rock-steady mood ring eyes. The nanny . . . who was, I was told . . .
“Unavailable,” Laura said. My dad grumbled disapproval and my mother tsked. They were really messing with my mojo. I couldn’t be a celebrity and that-no-good-Sinclair-boy-who-spilled-paint-on-my-lawn-now-who’s-gonna-pay-for-that at the same time.
“What’s that mean?” I objected. “She’s in the bathroom cleaning her up as we speak. What’s she doing tomorrow or the next day?”
“We just signed her to a family full time. We’ll find you someone, Mr. Sin—”
“I don’t know if you know this, Miss, but I don’t take no for an answer. That one in the bathroom is the one I want. She’s the only one who’s been able to stop that little girl from crying since she landed in my hands a week ago.”
I’d never wanted a woman so badly in my life, and though she was definitely hot, my dick wasn’t even involved.
I was going to have her. I needed her.
Two weeks earlier I’d been twenty-four hours into the most epic party of my life. My house was upside down, populated with a few hundred friends and a dozen security guys.
“Chill out, Gene,” I’d said over the music, walking away from him. No one walked away from Superagent Gene Testarossa. Except me. “This is the same runaround as that girl last March.”
“The one who said you gave her herpes?”
“Yeah. That one.”
“You gave her herpes.”
I spun on him. I poked at his Hugo Boss jacket with the beer bottle swinging between my thumb and the jabbing finger.
“The other girl gave her herpes, and it was oral herpes. I was clean. I’m still clean.”
He shook his fat, pink-gold watch until he could see the face.
“Ken’s on his way,” he mumbled.
Ken Braque. Damn. I couldn’t turn my back on my PR guy as easily as I turned my back on my agent.
I walked out to the pool. Everyone was dressed for summer except Gene, who always looked like a Wall Street banker.
“I have a month and a half off to do nothing but sit in this house and do what I want. I scheduled it. I made it happen. Moved heaven and earth. The mountain came to fucking Mohammed. And you’re crashing it with what? Who? A girl named Brenda? Brenda?”
“Look. She died in a car accident two weeks ago and I came here as soon as I knew. Don’t give me a hard time. If you’re the father, you’re the father.”
“I always use a condom.”
“You sure?”
“Because that’s something I’d forget?”
“Six years ago? When you got that little horror movie and you were over the fucking moon because you were a nobody working in a crystal store? Yeah. You’d forget.”
“This is serious,” a voice came from behind me. I spun around.
“Ken!” I hugged him. When I signed with him I knew I’d made it as an actor. I had a career to spin. Boom. I partied harder that night than when I was nominated for an Oscar. Which was cool, but too surreal to drink over.
“Can you put pants on?” he said. I was in a dress shirt with a towel around my waist. I had no recollection of how I’d gotten that way.
“Hey, it’s a party. I don’t like feeling restrained. Crotches restrain me.”
“You have a lot more to worry about than your pants.”
“Is it this Brenda thing?”
“Brenda isn’t a problem and she never was. This is deep and wide, Sinclair.”
My agent was a douchebag, but my PR guy was the real deal. So when he walked back into my house, I followed.
The party had drifted into all four bedrooms, living room, office, den, billiards room, and the whatever room that I never figured out what to do with. We ended up in the laundry room. I hadn’t even known I had a laundry room. Mom would be proud.
Gene had shuffled in. Ken closed the doors, then leaned on the washer and crossed his arms.
“Brenda Garcia. Remember anything about her?”
The question wasn’t rhetorical. He was actually asking.
“No.”
“You worked with her at a crystal store.”
“I remember the store.”
“Fine.” He moved off the washer and stood on his own feet as if changing gears. “I’m not asking you to remember her or her daughter. It’s irrelevant. I’m sure she was on a brain cell you killed already.”
“My brain is fine.”
I sounded defensive. Too many beers or too few.
“Right. Whatever. I don’t care. You know what I care about? I care about what people think of you.”
I took a mouthful of beer. Outside, someone was thrown into the pool. A woman, judging from the squeals. He might care what people thought of me, but I sure didn’t.
“Now,” Ken said. I listened to his voice, but not the words. What if I did have a kid? That made me a father. I’d played a father in Verity, but that was different than being a father. Right? I mean, that takes a ton of time, and time was one thing I didn’t have a hell of a lot of.
“What were you saying?” I asked.
Ken sighed and pulled a yellow four-by-six envelope out of the breast pocket of his jacket. He opened it by pinching the edges.
“DMZ already found out by following the child protection agent into Gene’s office and sitting next to her in the waiting room.”
“Not my fault,” Gene mumbled.
Ken continued. “Then they sent a middle-aged female reporter into the CPS office to pose as Brenda Garcia’s aunt. Apropos of nothing. Because this is still real.”
He took a picture out of the envelope.
It was a school photo of a girl. Maybe five? Six? Four? Who the fuck even knew? What was the age of maximum cuteness? Because that was how old she was. She had brown hair and huge, dark brown eyes. Big smile surrounded by dimples. Nose like a bell pepper.
I had blue eyes and light brown hair, but, despite that, the part of my brain that recognized faces calculated a visual equation and recognized hers. My mother’s eyes. My sister’s curls. My dad’s chin.
Me. She looked exactly like me.
“Oh. Shit,” I said. “No. Nononono. I wrap it up, Ken. You have to believe me.”
“Okay, I don’t know when you’re going to get this through your head,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. It matters what the public believes. I have your clone, right here.” He held up the picture. The more I looked at it, the more it sunk in. She was mine. “And Ms. Garcia put your name on the birth certificate as the father.”
“Fucking bitch.”