Finding Forever (35 page)

Feeling like she simultaneously survived a near-death experience and won the lottery all within the last hour, Brooklyn stepped down the driveway and out the gate, where Tamara waited in her car.

The moment Brooklyn landed in the passenger's seat, Tamara snapped, “Why did you tell me to go home, then tell me to come right back, then just go totally MIA? I was already halfway back to Twin Oaks, you little ginger queen!”

“I'm so sorry. Things got weird.”

Tamara pulled a U-turn and drove down the winding canyon road toward the 101. “I'm just glad you're okay. Can't have bitches dying on me. Especially you. Your mom already thinks I am the Great Satan.”

A few minutes up the freeway, the radio blaring KIIS-FM pop, Brooklyn reached to the control panel and turned down the volume.

“Tamara, do you think I'm crazy?” Brooklyn asked.

“Duh, yeah. Now turn the radio back up.”

“No, I'm being serious. Do you think I am mental?”

Tamara kept her eyes on the road. “We're all mental, Brooklyn. It's part of being human. We all just have different issues.”

“What's yours?”

“I think mine are rather obvious.”

“That you're the funniest person I know?”

“Honestly, that's my issue. I need to make people laugh because I want everyone to be happy. I want to be a comedian, but comedians aren't born. They're made. Do you even know why I started telling jokes?”

“Because you like to make people laugh?”

“No. Well, yeah, but more of what started it was my parents fighting all the time. They would argue over the dumbest crap, constantly. So when I was a kid, I would tell jokes to make them laugh, hoping they would just shut up and get along.”

“You were a laugh doctor,” Brooklyn said.

“More like a scared kid trying to make peace.”

“Well, you helped me. When my dad died, you were the only person in the neighborhood who didn't walk on eggshells around me. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, poor, Brooklyn Brant.' They would either talk to me like a baby or just avoid me all together. But do you remember what you said to me at his funeral?”

Eyes glued on the road ahead, Tamara nodded.

Brooklyn swallowed back the lump in her throat. “You said, ‘Hey, your dad's lucky. He didn't have to listen to that priest for the last hour.'”

“So inappropriate.”

“Death is inappropriate. Police coming to your house in the middle of the night to tell you and your mom that your father is dead is inappropriate. Never finding his body is inappropriate. Never finding out what happened to him is inappropriate. Not sharing everything they knew about the circumstances of his
death is inappropriate. But cracking a joke to make a twelve-year-old kid feel better?
That
was appropriate. It was healing.”

“I have a whole philosophy about that,” Tamara said.

“About my boogers bubbling out of my nose when I cry?”

“No, I'm being serious. People do different things to heal themselves, to help them cope with life. It's like a survival instinct. I make people laugh so that I don't feel so sad. A writer might tell a story to gain a greater understanding of a problem that bothers them. Some pray. A lot of singers want to perform so they can escape their own sad reality. You do the same, Brant.”

“I'm definitely not a singer. There goes that theory.”

“No, but you're a reporter. By finding stuff out, you're healing that part of you that hurts because you never found out what exactly happened to your dad.”

Brooklyn let the truth of Tamara's observation soak in to the whir of the tires on the freeway pavement.

“Pretty wise stuff from a seventeen-year-old dropout comedian,” Brooklyn said.

“I might be school stupid, but I'm life smart. And don't believe it when someone says age is only a number, because that's not true. We are students in the school of life, and time is the greatest teacher of them all.”

Thirty minutes. That's how long Kensington members could spend in the garden with an “approved” visitor once a week.

Taylor had asked for Simone to visit. Peter claimed that Simone could not be located by any of his staff. Taylor had then requested her mother, but Peter explained her mother would only be allowed on “Family Day” on the last day of treatment, in three weeks. He promised her a “special visitor” instead.

Standing next to a rock-walled waterfall in the palm-shrouded garden outside the back of the center, Taylor sipped from her always-present bottle of coconut-infused mineral water, an intake carefully monitored for a daily dose of 64 ounces.