I headed down Echo Park Avenue on foot, phone to my ear.
“Are you in the house?” I asked as I pushed the gate open.
“Just got dressed,” Darren said.
“I’m on my way. No, wait, I’m on your patio. Are you alone?”
He opened the door in jeans and his red Music Store polo. “Yes. How was the trip home?”
“I really, really like that plane.” I pocketed my phone.
He stepped aside, and I entered. My stuff was all over the living room, neatly piled, but the room still looked as if someone had been crashing on his couch without paying rent.
“Did the police question you?” he asked.
I was a little taken aback, and it must have been all over my face. “How did you know?”
“It’s all over the society pages. And the LA Times, you know... It’s news if it’s about rich people beating their wives.”
“She’s not his wife, and he didn’t beat her.” I defended him and his word, knowing that the truth and Jonathan had a passing, convenient acquaintance.
“Not in the conventional sense.” He placed his laptop on the kitchen bar and spun it so I could see the screen. Then he set about making coffee as if he didn’t want to look at my reaction.
The Celebrity section. A section I ignored because Gabby had always read, assimilated, and digested the entire thing every morning, distilling it for me over breakfast. I was grateful I wasn’t in the habit of looking at it because the day after Jonathan was arrested at Santa Monica airport, a picture of him and his ex-wife appeared in Rumors Bureau column. It was the only mention of his arrest anywhere in the news, and it was short, with little but a wedding picture of two people happy to commit to each other. The burning jealousy that bubbled from my gut left an awful taste on the back of my tongue. He was mine. I owned him. Those pictures were lies.
“Monica?” Darren watched me as he filled the pot with water.
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
“It barely says anything. Arrested at the airport on domestic abuse charges brought by his ex-wife. History of kinky activity. Wife declines comment because she’s ‘too upset,’ Oh, and I’m an unidentified female passenger. His little trick fuck whore. Remind me never to look at the internet again.” I pushed the laptop away and turned to my pile of crap. I could have stalled and pretended to rummage through my stuff, but I knew exactly where that manila envelope was. I ran my hands over it, the aged edges, the curled flap.
“That what I think it is?” Darren asked.
“Yeah. Did you open it?”
“It’s long and involved, so I just put it back.” He looked at me over the edge of his coffee cup.
“Great. Long and involved.” I slid out the contents. Eight and a half by eleven printed pages, stapled. About twenty pages, pure text. Double-spaced with wide margins. Markings all over it in red pencil. Lines. Scribblings. Hash marks. Slashes. Across the top: Lloyd Willman/Evert Toth, ed.
“It looks like someone’s term paper.”
He looked over my shoulder. “I think the ed. means editor. My first assumption was that it was a newspaper article.”
“Fan-freaking-tastic.”
“And unpublished, looks like. Or it wouldn’t look like something someone handed in for eleventh grade finals. My sister was a scary girl. I think digging dirt on people was more fun for her than actually trying to get them to sign her.”
“When do you have to leave?” I asked.
“Fifteen minutes.”
I threw myself on the couch. I flipped through. All words and marks. I looked up at Darren, who was wiping down the counter. I cleared my throat.
He didn’t look up when he said, “You’re stalling.”
“Why would I stall?”
“You tell me.”
I had a hundred answers.
Because I know half-truths and pieces of a story.
Because I’m committed to a man who is still a mystery to me.
Because I love him, and I will stand by him, no matter what the papers say.
Because Jonathan lies.
So I didn’t answer but tilted my head down and read.