Undone, Volume 3 (19 page)

“S’all right,
sweetheart,” Connor’s slurred brogue wafted up from behind a
chair. I saw his feet sticking out. Apparently he was lying on the
floor behind it. “Marvin’s flying us back at three.”

“Cool.” I nodded,
grateful he’d made the arrangements. A flight would take an hour
where driving would take four or five, and even sitting in a car
seemed like too much effort to make at this point.

“Marvin?” Ana asked
me, sounding unsettled and unsure.

“Yeah, yeah.” I
waved away her misgivings. “He’s a good guy.”

She shook her head, as
if that hadn’t been what she’d been worried about, but honestly,
I needed to lie down again. Collapsing on a sofa, I did just that.

“So, we’re not
driving?” Ana stood tapping her toe in the middle of her room. I
swear, that toe tap echoed in my brain. I winced.

“C’mere, luv,”
Connor called out from the floor. “Come relax with your buddy
Connor.”

She spun off in a huff.
I should go after her, I recognized that, but the gulf between what
my brain told me to do and what my body could execute yawned wide.

“Gimme minute,” I
murmured, slipping off again into sleep.

I woke with someone
kicking my foot and yelling, “Pack it up! Ten minutes!”

Shit, I must have slept
longer than I’d intended. The house was all activity, people
scurrying back and forth, shoving things into bags. The kitchen was a
mess and Ana was in there doing dishes.

“You don’t have
to—” I called over to her as I headed into the bedroom.
“Someone’ll come by to clean up after us.”

She scowled, didn’t
look up at me and didn’t stop scrubbing. It looked like she was
still in the bad mood from last night. Right then, though, I needed
to pack.

Giant SUVs waited for
us outside the cabin and taxied us over to the small, private
airport.

“What about our
rental car?” Ana asked.

“Someone’ll take
care of it.” I hadn’t thought of it until she mentioned it, but I
knew what I said was true. Probably the caretaker for the cabin. He’d
find it sitting there, keys in the kitchen, and make sure it got
returned to the rental agency. I had people to clean up all my
messes. She just hadn’t realized that yet.

All of us wore dark
sunglasses except Ana. None of us said much during the flight,
including Ana. I tried to pull her over with me into my lap on the
couch, but she pulled away saying she had to use the bathroom. When
she came back she tucked into a seat by herself and closed her eyes.

“Arf,” Connor
barked in my ear.

“Fuck off.” I
swatted him, pushing him away.

“Looks like you’re
in the doghouse, mate. She’s pissed at you.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. I
was sure I’d done something, and almost equally sure that I
deserved her ire. But there wasn’t a damn I could do about it on a
small private plane with a bunch of people around us. Plus, I still
felt like shit. There had been a time when I’d bounced right back
from a heavy night. Now was not one of those times.

At the airstrip in
S.F., things took a turn for the worse. Ana gathered up her bags and
headed on her own to a car.

“Where are you
going?” I caught up to her, pulling at her elbow. “Don’t you
want to head back with me?”

“I’ve got a massive
headache,” she apologized, not meeting my eye. “I think I’ll
just go check into a hotel.”

“A hotel?” What was
she talking about? She needed to come back to my place so we could
sort things out and get back into our groove.

But just then, Connor
called out to me, “Remember, we’ve got that thing tonight. With
those guys.”

Fuck, I knew what he
was talking about. He and Johnny and I were supposed to meet with
Lola, Joel and a couple of people from the Super Bowl halftime gig.
Most of the arrangements would all get handled by other people, but
they wanted to talk us through some of it and discuss the short list
of possible guest appearances. Apparently for the biggest televised
event of the year, The Blacklist wasn’t enough on its own. We
needed some padding with other pop stars.

“Yeah, forgot about
that. Listen.” I tried to pull Ana into my arms and she didn’t
exactly wriggle away. Nor did she melt into my embrace. “Why don’t
you go relax. Take a nap. And we can hang out after I do this
meeting?”

“Sure.” Her
agreement inspired absolutely no assurance.

“I’ll call you,”
I lamely called after her as she climbed into a car. She didn’t
look up.

What was she so pissed
about? Was it how drunk I’d gotten last night? Was she still mad
that the other guys had come up and crashed our party?

I didn’t understand
what was going on, and in the past with women I hadn’t ever really
tried. Now in a situation where I wanted to unlock the secrets of the
female brain, I found myself completely unequipped.

“Woof,” Conner
barked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. He was right. She was pissed
at me. I was in the doghouse and like countless men before me, I
didn’t know why. Resigned, I climbed into a massive limo with
tinted windows. I didn’t have energy just then for anything other
than the path of least resistance.

My phone about had an
epileptic fit on the drive, erupting with texts and messages and
voicemails. Lola and Joel and a shit-ton of other people who’d been
wanting to get in touch with me the past couple of days all clamored
for my attention. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the
back of the seat. It had felt so good to unplug. I didn’t want to
be back on the grid, not yet.

But the Super Bowl
halftime show would not be denied. Even Connor spruced himself up a
bit for our meeting late that afternoon, with one of his pimped-out
jackets. His preferred look most resembled that of a Vegas brothel
owner circa 1979. Stylists had never been able to talk him out of it,
and it had become his trademark look with long, open-shirted
polyester collars and chains. I wondered, not for the first time, if
he ever tired of it. I would have by now. Black T-shirts and jeans
took a lot less effort.

But if he tired of it,
he never showed it. Connor was on all the time and before I knew it,
shots were flowing. Again. Turned out we all agreed on who’d be the
best special guests performing with us. Or, at least they all agreed
and I didn’t care.

Ana wasn’t responding
to any of my texts. I didn’t know if she had her phone turned off
or if she just didn’t want to talk to me. I wanted to go show up at
her hotel, but that was the problem. I didn’t know where she was
staying.

“You know where Ana
is tonight?” I resorted to asking Lola, there with us at dinner.

She shook her head, no.
“You’d better go home solo tonight. You’ve got until this
weekend. That’s five more days until she breaks up with you. Keep
it in your pants until then. Remember, you’ve got to look
devastated.”

I nodded, feeling kind
of devastated. But there, Lola had given me a good out.

“Think I’ll head
home.” I stood up, excusing myself. Johnny nodded affably as
always, but Connor balled up his napkin and threw it at me.

“Old man!” he
called after me.

“Yup.” I nodded and
headed toward the door. Paparazzi swarmed me as I made my way to a
car. I could see the headlines, “Ash heads home early!” How sad,
it was news that I wasn’t doing anything newsworthy.

Back at my place, I lay
awake in bed for a long time. I knew it was time to make some
changes, big ones in my life. I just wasn’t exactly sure how to go
about doing it. It felt a little like trying to get off a train while
it was still hurtling ahead full speed. The most prudent way to go
about things was talking to the conductor about the path ahead,
negotiating a rest stop, and checking in with your traveling
companions to figure out how they felt about slowing down as well.

But there was always
the other option. Hit the eject button and hurl yourself right off. I
knew there’d be a lot more fallout, pun intended. But I had to
admit, at three a.m. lying in bed awake alone in the moonlight it
seemed like the right thing to do.

I heard nothing from Ana until the
next morning. Early, I got a text message:

Let’s meet at noon at Crissy
Field. The warming hut?

I remembered taking her
there, had it just been a couple of weeks ago? It felt like we’d
known each other far longer. I texted her back right away, letting
her know I’d see her then. Earlier if she wanted. But noon it was
since I didn’t hear anything back from her.

She stood outside
looking so classically beautiful in jeans and a Fisherman’s knit
sweater, her natural curls tumbling down her shoulders. I wrapped her
in my arms with sheer relief at seeing her again. She let me hug her
more than hugged me back.

On her hand, I noticed
she was wearing the engagement ring I’d given her. I guess that
should have seemed like a good thing. But she hadn’t worn it a
single day in Mammoth. When had she put it back on? And why did it
give me a strange pit in my stomach?

“Thanks for meeting
me, Ash.” She greeted me with the gravitas of a nightly news
reporter. “We need to talk.”

That pit in my stomach
widened up into a black hole. In my experience, prefacing talking
with the introduction ‘we need to’ always meant something bad. If
it was good, the person would just launch straight into talking.
‘Hey, let’s head to that party’ or ‘How about pizza?’ never
needed a ‘we need to talk’ before it.

“OK,” I managed.

“Here, I need to give
you this.” She slid off the engagement ring and held it up, giving
it back to me. I took it from her, dumb and wooden. Flashes went off,
exploding around us from behind every tree, even up in some limbs.
Paparazzi had clearly been waiting for this moment. But I still
didn’t understand what was happening.

“I’m calling it
off, Ash.”

To my left, I could see
a guy down on one knee, getting the right angle, capturing it all on
video. I knew I needed to keep my shit together. But what was
happening?

“Do you not like the
ring?” I held it, stupid, looking into her face. “I can get you
another one? Maybe something smaller?”

She shook her head no,
not a trace of her usual sweetness or humor. This Ana was all
business. “I’m done, Ash. I don’t love you.”

My mouth fell open. It
literally felt as if she’d taken a sharp knife and stabbed it
directly into my chest. What was this kind of pain?

“Is this because I
got drunk in Mammoth?” I tried. Was she jealous? “Nothing
happened with any of those girls.”

She shook her head,
dismissing me, refusing to engage. “I’d say I hope we can stay
friends. But we weren’t ever really friends anyway.” She gave me
a rueful glance, the first time she’d looked straight into my eyes.
It felt worse, like she’d twisted the knife. And I still could
think of nothing to say, standing there like a fish out of water
gaping in the air.

“Good luck with
everything.” She turned as if to start walking off.

“Wait!” I caught
the elbow of her sweater, taking a step closer to her. “Ana, can’t
we talk about this? Can we go somewhere more private?” Flashes
blasted off all around us as paparazzi captured every word, every
expression.

“What’s there to
say, Ash?”

“I don’t want you
to go.”

“You don’t get to
decide that. I do.”

“But…” More
flashes. Men clustered around us, one literally rolling along a huge
movie camera. The whole thing had clearly been staged. I just hadn’t
been in on it. Lola must have known. Was Lola behind all of this?

“Is this what you
want, Ana?” I tried, desperate.

“Yes, it is.” So
firm, so cold. I barely felt as if I knew her. Maybe she had been
pretending all along. Maybe this had just been a carnival ride for
her, a few weeks of backstage passes and a trip to Paris plus some
hot sex thrown in for kicks. Now if I could just pay for the library
and step out of her way, please.

“I’m…” I
swallowed. Even the breakup that we’d supposed to do in a few days
would have been better than this. That I would have expected, could
have prepared myself for. This? This felt like a swift kick in the
groin while the ref looked the other way.

“Let me go, Ash.”
She spoke quietly, just to me.

“If it’s what you
want.” I couldn’t help but look into her eyes, trying to get her
to meet my gaze. But she wouldn’t.

She steadfastly looked
down at the ground as she insisted, still emotionless, “It’s what
I want.”

Had she faltered, shown
any sign of confusion or wavering in her decision, I would have
pressed. Sensing a fault line, I would have tried to widen the crack,
break apart her certainty. But she didn’t show any sign of
weakness. She stayed clear, crisp and direct.

Then she walked off. I
stood there, a big jerk with the rejected engagement ring in my hand.
The thought occurred to me that I should pull myself together. I
shouldn’t stand there looking forlorn and dejected. But I felt
trapped in a movie I definitely would have changed the channel on,
the kind of melodramatic scene where it started to rain hard on the
leading man because his heart had just been broken. And damn if I
didn’t feel a drop on my shoulder, that San Francisco fog stewing
into something thicker. Had Lola arranged for that, too?

Ana walked right up to
the street and climbed into a waiting car. She’d planned all of
this, right down to the camera angle. I should feel betrayed, even
angry at her.

But all I could feel
right then was a fist of pain curled tight in my chest. That’s what
finally got me moving. Pain like this, it was mine, private, and I
finally gathered my wits about me enough to swear at them all,
shoving away a guy who’d come straight up into my face. Striding
toward the street, I found a taxi to climb into myself.