Epic (Fierce) Page 5

  We ordered room service because neither of us felt up to going out. It wasn’t like we could go hang out at a fast food restaurant or peruse the buffets. Jace and I were still a hot item for the tabloids, and fans had already tweeted that Jace was in town and spotted at our particular hotel. It was only a matter of time before we were approached, and by “we” I mean Jace. I was still invisible when it came to his many fawning groupies. They didn’t even spare me a glance as they pulled him aside for pictures and autographs.

  This limited our choices to those restaurants that catered to the rich and famous, which – for better or worse – we now were. Neither Jace nor I could face anyone trained to treat us with special regard because of our celebrity, not after what we learned that afternoon.

  Even gambling seemed like an enormous waste of resources. The laughter and boisterous cheering that took place at the tables seemed outrageously out of place in a world that could see such poverty and misfortune.

  We needed four walls and a private room to process it all.

  Of course, Jace understood the ills of the world far better than I ever could. I never enlisted in the military, or was shipped off to a foreign, war-torn land. I didn’t understand the horrors that he had experienced overseas, that culminated in his losing his leg to a bomb.

  No. My disheartening discovery digging around in my family tree couldn’t hold a candle to what he had experienced. And it made me feel even guiltier that I needed to pout about it.

  My eyes lingered on the dessert menu for room service a few seconds longer than it should have. I guzzled from my nearby six-dollar bottle of water to quell the cravings. “I’m not hungry,” I repeated to myself. “I’m feeling. It’s OK to feel.”

  Jace placed our order and then walked over to where I sat in the living room of our suite. The cream-colored sofa faced the window, so I peered wordlessly out over the grid of lights illuminating the inky darkness. That was Las Vegas, I realized. It was a real town, where real people lived. They drove to boring 9-to-5 jobs, bitched about traffic, complained about the weather, waited in line at the market, or joined the PTA. They fell in love, got married, had babies, got sick, got rich, lost fortunes and breathed their last breath just beyond this opulent hotel suite.

  It was life. It was uglier than a fairytale, more complicated than a TV show. It was all we had. And it was imperfect and messy and disappointing.

  But it was also wonderful and unexpected and flawlessly poetic. Each step built upon itself, so that each generation could evolve beyond the limitations of the one before it. I was living proof of that. Maya understood on some level she would never be able to give me the life she wanted for me. She made her sacrifices accordingly, inevitably putting me in the position that I could help her if I wanted to.

  And God help me, I did.

  Jace rubbed my shoulders. “You OK?” He bent down to kiss the top of my head.

  I nodded, but I didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking. He had already cautioned me against trusting anyone new, given our current notoriety. Vanni had issued the same warning, using his own experience with a couple of grifters as an example of what can happen when someone like us buys into the sob stories of those who want what we have.

  “Don’t give them any money upfront,” Vanni had cautioned. “Not until you know for sure what they want from you.”

  Like any of us could ever be sure.

  Jace rounded the sofa and sat next to me, taking me into his strong arms. “I know that wasn’t what you wanted to find,” he said as he cuddled me close. “I’m sorry, baby.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” I corrected. “I have everything I could possibly want or need.”

  “You worked hard for that,” he asserted. “Don’t feel guilty just because you’re successful. You fought nearly everyone every step of the way. Your triumph is hard-won.”

  I nodded. He was right. I had taken my lumps and paid my dues, just like anyone else in this business. Hell, I was still paying them, especially after the debacle of the tour. My career was seriously compromised by how badly I had been skewered in the press. As far as PING and Miles O’Rourke were concerned, I was this heartless, selfish man-eater, who had tread Shelby and Eddie underfoot to get what I wanted. I could just imagine what they would do if they found out about Maya and Diego.

  “You know what it’s like to have nothing,” he continued as he brushed my hair from my eyes. “And you pulled yourself up out of that with nothing more than your indomitable will and your amazing talent.”

  “I was lucky,” I corrected. My voice had opened doors for me and I knew it. If I had been in Maya’s shoes, who could say how I would have ended up? I might have found my own Ronald on the downward spiral. God knows I found an Eddie, and that had been bad enough.

  Jace sighed. “It makes me crazy when you say that. It’s like you don’t feel you deserve your success.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” I muttered.

  He took my chin in his hand. “You may have gotten a better hand than some in life, but it’s not just what you’re given. It’s about what you do with it. You work harder than anyone I know, Jordi. That’s the reason you made it.”

  I wasn’t convinced. It all seemed a bit random to me after hearing Maya’s story.

  But, then again, that could have been the point.

  As we waited for room service, Jace and I discussed the particulars of her story, and he voiced his skepticism. He pointed out that it was all a little too pathetic, and a little too detailed. He pointed out that if she really didn’t want money, she wouldn’t have let us seen how in need she really was.

  I wasn’t sure about that, either. Obviously she was in very poor health. Walking the two feet from the recliner to the bookshelf winded her. From her pallor, I suspected she didn’t even go outside.

  All I could do was promise that I wouldn’t make any decisions until I got more information. I even fired off an email to my investigator to confirm her story as best that he could. After that, Jace and I retired to the bedroom, cuddling together as we watched a comedy on pay-per-view to take our mind off of things.

  It wasn’t until we were settling down to sleep when I finally said, “I want to stay a few more days, Jace.”

  He had me cuddled in the crook of his arm, his thumb brushing rhythmically brushing against my bare shoulder. The minute the sentence was out of my mouth, his hand flattened against my back. “Jordi…”

  “I know what you’re going to say. But I need to find out more. I can’t just leave. Not like this.”

  He sighed. There was a long pause before he spoke again. “OK,” he finally relented. “But I have to go back,” he reminded. “Are you going to be OK if I leave tomorrow?”

  I nodded, though I knew I was lying through my teeth. I just held him tight as we drifted off to sleep, drawing on his strength while he was still close enough to touch.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  May 28, 2012

  The next day Jace left by noon, our original checkout date. I extended my stay, and my car rental, for a week. That would give me enough time to get to know Maya, to peer through any holes in her story firsthand if there were any. It also gave me a little wiggle room to hear back from my private investigator. By then I would know what I could or be willing to do for my birth mother and half-sibling.

  I employed sunglasses and hats if I had to get around in public, which I had been able to avoid thanks to a dedicated concierge who would get anything for me I couldn’t get for myself… including said hat and sunglasses. This disguise allowed me to escape beyond the glitz and commotion of the Strip. By the time I reached Maya’s house that afternoon, I was laden with a few bags that might have been inadvisable for me to bring, but I couldn’t go back to that run-down little house in that scary neighborhood without doing something, anything, to alleviate the suffering.

  Maya was surprised that I returned. She happily folded me into a hug as I stepped over
the threshold. She wore the same dirty housecoat. Many of the containers that littered her coffee table were the same ones I had seen the day before. It was all I could do not to clear the mess. Instead I insisted that Maya sit so I could give her my gifts.

  “Jordana!” she admonished at once. “You didn’t need to bring me anything.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I wanted to.”

  She smiled as she took the first bag into her lap. She pulled out a cheerful yellow robe made of soft fleece, with embroidered roses on the yoke. “Oh, Jordana,” she breathed as she stroked the fabric. “This is so lovely.”

  She dug a little deeper in the bag to find a pair of matching slippers and pajamas. “I had to guess at your size,” I told her. “If they don’t fit, I can take them back.”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were filled with tears as she looked up at me. “It’s the most perfect gift I ever got. Besides you showing up on my door yesterday, that is,” she added.

  It was what I had hoped my mother would always say to me. Tears sprang into my eyes but I blinked them away. I knew it was a bad idea to get emotionally invested in this woman before I knew for sure what she wanted from me. Instead, I turned to another bag. It was from a grocery store. “I didn’t know what you needed,” I said as she unpacked a half-gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, some bread, some cheese, a box of teabags, a jar of sauce, a bag of pasta and some tomato, lettuce and cucumber for a side salad to the meal. It would get her through the next twenty-four hours, and that seemed like a safe enough investment for the time being.

  I put her groceries away while she changed into her new clothes. The kitchen was in even worse shape than the living room. It was a tiny, dingy room with one dinky window that looked out over the equally depressing back yard. The dining table had two chairs, but it was clear no one actually sat there. Bills, phone books, junk mail and electronic parts filled the Formica surface that was small enough to fit into one corner of the room. The countertops were covered with old takeout containers and dirty dishes, which also stacked haphazardly in a sink that hadn’t been used for washing these dishes in a very long time.

  Worse, there was no dishwasher.

  Instead there was one corner of the stained, cracked sink that she used for her coffee. Everything else was set aside and forgotten.

  The smell from the fridge nearly knocked me down as I opened it. There was a 24-pack of beer, an empty milk carton, and a few plastic containers with black lumps that had surely been food once. It was as good a place to start as any. I opened up the cabinet under the sink to get some cleaning solution, but that was empty, too. She didn’t even have paper towels. With a sigh, I turned back to the refrigerator and did the best I could. I threw away the empty carton, replacing it with the new.

  I couldn’t do the dishes without any dish soap, either. It was clear I was going to have to go back out to store if I wanted to get the kitchen in any kind of shape to cook anything.

  When I joined Maya in the living room, she looked so pretty in her new clothes that I was immediately happy I bought them for her. How could it be a bad idea to do something nice for someone? Clearly the gesture made her day. After the life she had, she deserved someone being nice to her for no reason.

  I told her that I was going to have to head back out to the store, that I forgot a few things. She waved her hand away immediately. “I can’t let you do that. You’ve done too much already.”

  “You need to eat,” I pointed out.

  “Sonny will bring me food when he gets off work,” she assured.

  “Who is Sonny?” I asked.

  “My friend,” she answered vaguely. “We met many years ago, when Diego was small. He’s helped me out as my health failed. Without his income, Diego and I would be out in the street. My social security disability payments just won’t cover it.”

  “So he brings you food,” I surmised as I looked at the cluttered coffee table.

  She nodded. “When our food stamps run out at the end of the month, he brings food from the hotel where he works in the kitchen. That’s how we met,” she added. “I worked in housekeeping, and he was part of the kitchen staff.”

  She leaned back in the chair and reaffixed her oxygen tubes. “Unfortunately, Diego has never quite warmed to him. It causes a lot of conflict.”

  For some reason, my thoughts returned to Shane. After my dad died and my mother needed help, Shane moved into our house, seemingly like a knight riding in on his white stallion to save us. Only I knew the nefarious reasons behind his surface altruism, and hated him accordingly. Marianne had always written my reaction off as selfish and bratty behavior. How could I try to drive away the one person ready to bail us out of the trouble we were in?

  I had a damn good reason. And for a split second, I had to wonder if Diego did, too.

  “Where is Diego?” I asked.

  “He’s supposed to be at school,” she answered with a knowing smile. “This means he’s probably practicing with his band.”

  “Can you tell me about him?” I asked.

  She painfully and slowly retrieved another album from her bookshelf, this time featuring her second child, Joseph Diego Palermo. I choked up when I realized he had been named after my father, further proving to me that Maya had loved him as deeply as I had. He was her ideal lover, where he was my ideal father. In both our lives, he had been a stabilizing and positive influence. This was, in truth, our strongest common bond.

  Pictures of Ronald Diego had been carefully edited out of the photo album, which gave the illusion this child’s upbringing had been happier than it actually had been. I could tell by the increasingly somber expressions on his face as he grew older. By the time he was a teenager, he was openly hostile. “It’s not easy raising boys,” Maya mused as she looked down at her son flipping off the camera. “They definitely have minds of their own.”

  “So do girls,” I assured her, thinking of how I ditched my mother the very day I turned eighteen. This story she already knew, thanks to Fierce. I didn’t bother indulging any dirty, ugly details beyond that. With all she had suffered through, I couldn’t burden her with any guilt about her choice to let me go. She believed it had been worth the sacrifices she had made. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it hadn’t gone exactly as she had planned.

  “I suppose they do,” she said as she turned the page. Photo after photo showed Diego hunched over a guitar, his long, dark hair covering his face as he played. It reminded me of Yael. The world ceased to exist when he poured out his soul through his fingertips on those magical strings. The more that world sucked, the more he could get lost in the music. “I gave him his first guitar when he turned twelve. I was still working back then, and that was the gift he wanted more than anything. More than a bike. More than a video game. More than any token toy or movie. It was the first birthday that I remember he was very particular about the gift. I suggested the popular video game where he could simulate playing the guitar. Nope. I even told him that if I bought the guitar, I couldn’t afford lessons. Didn’t matter. For the first time in his life, he knew what he wanted. So I had to make that happen. Took me a year to save for the one he wanted. He got it a year late, but he got it.”

  She flipped the page. “He never took one lesson. He locked himself in his bedroom night after night and taught himself how to play. He’d check out books from the library, reading everything he could get his hands on about musicians and music. When he was a freshman, he found a few other kids who liked to play and they formed a band. They call themselves Catastrophe Rising. They even get a few gigs around town from time to time. It’s not a lot of money, of course. But it’s his passion. How can I discourage it?”

  How, indeed. I thought about Marianne and how she had all but beat my dreamy aspirations right out of my head, aiming me toward a more stable (and utterly boring) existence as a wage slave and a housewife. Mediocrity was easy to obtain and much safer than the alternatives, so she encouraged it at every opportunity. She had something
to say if I even let loose in the church choir. Despite all her discouragement, I still pursued my dream anyway. Maybe Maya understood that on some level that Marianne just couldn’t.

  “Do you play?” I asked. Or sing, or write… or draw…

  She shook her head. “I’m not artistic. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  I smiled. “Yes,” I agreed.

  “If it hadn’t been for Diego, I would have thought you got your musical ear from your dad. But he was relatively tone-deaf like me. Marianne was the singer in the family.”

  My eyes opened wide. “Really?” She never sang a note that I was aware of in all my eighteen years.

  Maya nodded. “She was in the church choir,” she added. “She doesn’t have your booming voice, of course. But who does?” She chuckled.

  “She never liked it when I showed off my voice,” I confided. “Said it was vain.”

  “That’s what she told her sister, too, when she tried to join the church choir.”

  “Jackie,” I interjected. My favorite aunt, who escaped Iowa and made her way to NYC.

  Maya nodded again. “After Jackie joined the choir, Marianne decided to have a baby, so she withdrew from several commitments to concentrate on getting pregnant. I don’t think it sat well with her that she couldn’t do that, either.”

  I said nothing. I already knew that Marianne had gone into the marriage aware she was infertile. This was yet another convenient ruse that made her look better, instead of jealous or envious or any other deadly sin.

  It explained her behavior while I was competing on Fierce.

  Actually it explained her behavior in all the years leading up to Fierce.

  Another coughing fit seized Maya, so I closed the photo album and insisted that she return to her recliner so she could dose with whatever was in her inhaler. I went to the kitchen to get her something to drink besides coffee, only to realize again there was nothing else for her to drink except the milk that I had purchased.