Unleashed #4 (18 page)

It was genius, really.
Mandy had obviously known I was going to break up with her. She’d
realized she’d milked all of the press she could out of our
relationship. So she’d decided to go out with a bang. She had a new
album coming out filled with love songs and this would give her just
the boost she needed to score a few out-of-the-gate chart-toppers.
Hats off to her.

“Mandy Monroe is
America’s sweetheart,” my agent told me. Like it was news.

“I know.” I rubbed
my brow.

“You just broke her
heart.”

“Yup.”

“You tore it up and
threw it in her face. And it’s all on video. This is bad, Ash.”

“People love it when
I’m bad.” I tried to defend myself, but even to me it sounded
weak.

“Not this kind of
bad. This is not going to go over well.”

I had nothing to say to
that one. I could practically see Joel shaking his head in
frustration.

“You had to dump the
coalminer’s daughter. On YouTube.”

“Shit, you have to
put it like that?”

“Listen, there’s
going to be backlash. It’s going to be big. We have to figure a way
out of this one.”

“That’s what I pay
you the big bucks for, Joel.”

“You can’t make a
joke out of this, Ash. You fucked up good. Clean up, fly back and
meet me at five o’clock.”

“I’m supposed to
head to New York today.”

“Why? Your next show
isn’t until next week and it’s in L.A.”

“Family stuff.”
This coming weekend I had my family’s huge holiday party. It wasn’t
the kind of event I normally went in for. Black tie, so that was a
big strike against it. Plus it involved my family, which guaranteed
that it would suck. But my grandmother required mandatory attendance
at the annual Kavanaugh holiday party. Even a rule-breaker like me
had to comply. She might be the only person I really listened to. If
you met her, you’d get it.

“Well, come to S.F.
today, go to New York tomorrow. We have to get a plan in play. I’ll
have Lola and Nelson meet us and…aw shit.” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

“You’re the number
one hashtag trending on Twitter.”

This wasn’t going to
be good. “What is it?”

“#HatePlayerAsh.”

It wasn’t the first
time I’d inspired my own personal hashtag. #DoMeAsh #HotAsh,
#FuckMeAsh. I was used to those. But this, though? This was new. And
it was blowing up.

With a groan, I sank my
head into my hands. I didn’t mind making messes so long as I didn’t
have to clean them up. But now I stood with a sponge and a bucket and
knew I’d have to get down on my hands and knees and scrub.

Chapter
2

Ana

“Is this the one
where they fly? I really like it when they fly.” A little girl
wearing a giant snowflake sweater and fairy wings looked up at me.
She couldn’t be more than four years old and she couldn’t
pronounce her ‘r’s so “really” came out “weely.” She was
perfect.

Kneeling down, I
studied the book jacket.
Rudolph
the Red Nosed Reindeer
. “Well, the reindeers fly, if
that’s what you’re thinking about.”

“Are they mean?”
She turned to me with gravitas, the weight of the word “mean”
filling her brown eyes.

I could not tell a lie.
I nodded. “At first, the other reindeer are mean to Rudolph.” She
frowned in response. “But it ends happy.”

After another moment of
consideration, she grabbed it. “Yes,” she declared. “And the
fuff-flies.” I’d also helped her find a book about a family of
butterflies. She marched off in her boots to a young woman engrossed
in her cell phone. Her nanny, I assumed. In this part of SoHo I met a
lot more nannies than parents coming into the children’s wing of
the library. We were in an extremely affluent corner of the city,
tucked into an amazing brownstone with gargoyles and lions sculpted
into the edifice. Too bad our branch was so short on funds we were on
the chopping block to close.

I’d already been
furious over the cutbacks on our hours. How could a library with a
children’s wing not open until noon? Didn’t they know how early
in the morning little kids woke up? They started their days at six,
sometimes five a.m. The very latest we should open our doors was nine
o’clock. Even by then, I bet we’d have a few exhausted caregivers
standing outside with strollers desperate to come in and give the
kids something to keep them entertained.

But last week our boss
had gathered all of us together to tell us that, no, we wouldn’t be
getting end-of-year bonuses. And, surprise, due to lack of funds we’d
been short-listed for closure. We’d find out for sure in January.

You’d think in a city
with this kind of money there’d be enough to keep the libraries
open!

I felt a small tug on
my sweater. A little boy with short, black curly hair looked up at
me.

“Hello, may I help
you find something?” I smiled down at him.

“This is my truck.”
He held up a green, plastic dump truck and demonstrated how it could
move. “His name is Oscar the Truck.”

I couldn’t stay
grumpy, not for long. I loved this job. It paid nothing. I got little
kids’ snot on me almost every day, especially now that it was
December. I spent a lot of time engaged in nonsensical exchanges
about random facts and made-up stories with preschoolers. But I loved
it. At least one thing, and sometimes a whole lot of things, made me
laugh every single day. And I never tired of seeing a little kid get
engrossed in turning pages, cuddled up in the cozy corner of pillows
I’d created, their little faces lighting up with delight.

My career choice had
left my parents underwhelmed. Here I was, 24 years old and already
resigned to a lifetime of obscurity and penury. They’d raised me
for much more, enduring great personal sacrifice, and they liked to
remind me of it. Also, they liked to remind me of the millions of my
ancestors who’d died under Stalin’s rule. But that was kind of a
given for Russian immigrants, the references to the homeland, the
starvation and freezing and hardship I’d never know because I was
such an American.

I knew my parents loved
me, their only child, born to them when they were already in their
40s. My mother liked to tell me that I was a miracle child. They’d
immigrated to upstate New York and toiled, year in and year out, to
make a better life for me. They’d poured their resources and
energies into training me as a classical pianist, paying for every
lesson, driving me to countless recitals, helping me prepare for
competitions and soloist showcases. When I’d started studying at
the local community college I’d declared music as my major and
they’d still kept the dream alive.

But it wasn’t my
dream. I loved music, but what I loved was the feel of it, the joy,
the rush. Not the rigid, relentless execution of a flawless classical
performance. I wasn’t knocking classical music—look at my
playlist and you’d find as much Stravinsky and Prokofiev as you
would Coldplay and Ash Black. But what I’d grown up with was cold
and sterile, not the beating, pulsing energy and passion that
breathed life into music.

The funny thing was,
though, I now got paid to be a demanding, rigorous piano teacher. I’d
earned my degree in library sciences and been working as a children’s
librarian for a year now, but to make ends meet I taught piano to the
sons and daughters of wealthy New Yorkers.

My shift ended at five
because the library closed at five. No money to stay open longer than
that. I pulled on my winter coat, hat, gloves and boots and headed
out into the subway system to the Upper East Side where families paid
me more for a half-hour’s piano lesson than I made in five hours as
a librarian.

“Hello!” I stomped
the slush off my boots and removed my coat, leaving them in the
mudroom of an austere penthouse apartment.

“Anika.” The
housekeeper stiffly greeted me.

“Please, call me
Ana.” We went through this every week. The formality of this and so
many of the families I worked for killed me.

“Colby is in the
music room.”

Imagine, New York City
real estate as expensive as it was, and this family was by no means
the only one I worked for with a music room. A whole room devoted to
a huge grand piano! Other families had it on display in their
gigantic living rooms. Not one of them had an upright pressed up
against a wall in a crowded corner, like I’d grown up playing.

I coached Colby through
her lesson, stopping her when she lacked technical precision,
encouraging her to add more feeling like we were following a recipe
for blueberry muffins and you could drop in a teaspoon more of
passion. I’ll tell you what this girl needed, and it wasn’t my
pushing her. She needed to zip up into a snowsuit, head over to
Central Park with some friends and have a good, old-fashioned messy
snowball fight. She needed to laugh until her belly ached.

Problem was, all of her
friends were busy doing exactly what she was, working with
highly-paid tutors and coaches and teachers grooming them to
perfection. And that’s what I was paid to do, too. So I did it,
pointing out a few passages where she could make improvements. But I
worried that after I left she’d stay up until three a.m. completing
her homework and then practicing and practicing some more.

After several more
lessons much the same, I finally emerged out onto the city sidewalk
free at last. It was only around 20 degrees, but the wind wasn’t
blowing too hard so I decided to walk a few blocks. I lived in
Brooklyn so eventually I’d have to get onto the subway, but
Manhattan at night during the holiday season pulled at me like an
unopened Christmas present. All the lights and wreathes and garlands
beckoned, drawing me down toward the gleaming storefront displays
that started up as I walked south on Madison Avenue toward midtown.

I still couldn’t
believe I lived there. Growing up an hour and a half north of the
city, it had seemed a world away. My parents would take me in once or
twice a year, usually to see a Russian pianist perform, introducing
me to my heritage. And trying to hand off the baton.

Now I got to live
there! Well, in Brooklyn. And not Park Slope, mind you, prices there
had gone through the roof. I’d found a small three-bedroom
apartment in North-Central Brooklyn, east of Bed-Sty, south of
Prospect Heights. It wasn’t big enough for a piano, wasn’t really
big enough for much of anything, but I loved it.

I wondered if my
roommates would be home when I got back. Jillian liked to cook big,
fattening casseroles as if we were a large, Italian family instead of
three single women in their twenties. I didn’t complain. My
nighttime teaching schedule didn’t exactly permit me much time to
make dinner. My other roommate, Liv, would likely be out. She tended
to sleep until noon, then stay out all night. As an artist, her hours
worked for her. She was studying performance art at the Pratt
Institute, though I still hadn’t quite figured out exactly what
that meant. We’d all connected over the three-bedroom apartment
online, and though we had very little in common I loved the eclectic
mix, just like the city.

I drew my earbuds out
of my pocket and plugged them into my ears. Nothing like New York
City at night with a soundtrack. Time to fire up some Ash Black. My
boots powered down the sidewalk. With his deep, growling voice
stroking me through the chords, I felt powered up and ready for
anything.

That was what I loved
about music, the adrenaline, the freedom. That surge when you heard
the opening chords of your favorite song.

My ex-boyfriend Stan
had never understood that. Stable and level-headed, hardworking and
loyal, he had all the makings of a wonderful husband and father. My
parents had loved him. They were only getting older, already in their
mid-to-late-sixties. They wanted to know when I was going to give
them grandbabies. Stan had been ready to sign up for the job, buy the
house down the street from my parents and unfurl that future.

The only problem was
me. I knew plenty of other girls who would have loved the stabile,
predictability of Stan. He was a handsome guy, polite to my parents.
We ate spaghetti together every Monday night, take-out Chinese every
Wednesday and pizza on Fridays. Sundays we had dinner with my
parents. We went to the gym Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and had
sex Friday and Saturday nights. In his apartment, we’d turn out the
lights and have our five minutes in heaven missionary-style in his
bed. It wasn’t even long enough for me to work out my to-do list
for the next day or figure out what I needed at the grocery store,
though I usually got a good start on both while we did the deed.

Ultimately, I couldn’t
do it. Stan and I already had long stretches of silence, nothing to
say to each other while we sat on the couch in front of the TV. I
tried to tell myself that meant we were super, duper comfortable
together. But if we were already like an old, boring, married couple
before we even got engaged, what did that mean? How was that going to
play out?

I’d broken things off
a year ago. I’d heard from a friend back home that he was already
engaged to someone else, some girl I didn’t know whom he’d met
online. I wished them luck.

Who knew, it had
probably been a stupid mistake to end things. I was probably just a
ridiculous dreamer, holding on to fantasies in blatant defiance of
reality. The kind of guy I dreamed about probably didn’t even exist
in real life. I knew I’d read too many romance novels, grown all
too enchanted with the archetype of the strong, tough, sexy bad boy
with the heart of gold.

But I was only 24.
Wasn’t it a little too soon for me to turn up my hands and say
‘eh’, all right, I give up, I’ll settle. Couldn’t I be
allowed a little more time to dream?