Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [52]
—Hold on, I say.
I’ve shut Sam off and I’m trying to help Thad. I tell him we’re going to wear sleep masks today, and put one of Allison’s blue silk ones on him. I worry that once we pull out of the drive all the flashes going off will send him into convulsions. It’s a steady stream of blinding wattage now as Allison backs up. I’m reminded that when you see a picture of a celebrity on TV or in a magazine, grinning to their gums, they aren’t smiling at anyone, because they can’t see anyone. They’re smiling into a wall of painful light.
Allison hits the switch, the gates open, and the car inches forward. The photographers push against our car doors now. They angle across the windshield and throw themselves at our rear window. I won’t let Thad take the mask off until we’re headed into Boston.
—Please drown them out, I say.
Allison reaches over and blasts a morning show on the radio. The weather will be fair, not too hot, not too cool.
—Not too hot, not too cool, Thad says.
A few dirty jokes, money giveaways, the traffic blocked up at the Lever Connector, talk and laughter, and we’ve finally pulled away. I get out of my seat belt for a moment, stretch into the front seat, and push the CD button. Mozart’s Così fan tutte fills the car.
Although she and my succession of fathers have drawn varying degrees of attention from the media, this level of interest is different. Every time they shout their questions at me, about whether or not I’m going to marry my father’s murderer, I feel like someone who’s been shot up in a mall or wedged into a well unable to move, without a rescue crew—somewhere between dead and stuck. I can’t tell exactly how Allison feels about the fact that the focus has shifted to me because she has her personality face on, that expression that lets the media know she’s self-possessed and plans to stay that way. In either case, she’s dropped the topic of Uber for now.
I never know how she does it, but Allison is pretty good at sloughing off the paparazzi when she’s determined to get her car through physical space—though I’m certain she rolled over a photographer’s foot getting out—and eventually we’re moving toward downtown, with only a few cars and motorcycles tailing us. As we enter Storrow Drive, one of them pulls up alongside the car. Questions are screamed at me, mouthed, pantomimed. My name is called. My name, my name, my name. Tommy’s name. Uber’s blessed name.
I wait for Allison to go into that tenuous place where she could be one way but she could just as quickly be another. She might suddenly realize, as we slip over the BU Bridge, that there’s money to be made in writing her autobiography. And this could trigger an anxiety that she’ll get a contract but that writer’s block will set in. And then she’ll start to think that if she suicides, someone will write a biography instead and screw it up, screw her up, her children. Ever since Tommy told me about her faux deaths, I’ve chronically looked for the warning signs.
I wait to see if Allison will crash us just to get the pressure off. But maybe she’s okay.
She turns off Mozart and the soft voice of the GPS kicks on. I take the sleeping mask off Thad, who loves that voice and sometimes repeats everything she says. For several miles this dial-up woman tells us how to steer around bridges, neighborhoods, derailed trains. Tommy bought it a few months ago for Allison’s birthday and mounted it in the dashboard to make it look factory built. It has kept us from dead-ending or taking the wrong road I don’t know how many times.
—Where are we going? I ask.
—You’ll see, she says.
I whisper to Thad, telling him we’re playing a guessing game today—It’s called: What’s Our Destination?
I make up random bits to the game as we go because I have to do something.
I tell him, —Where we’re going there will be a long beach with sparkling clean water, big soft lounge