Brando 2 Read online

  “You don’t know?” I say, through sobs.

  “Know what?”

  “What happened on the tour.”

  “I know everything that happened on the tour!” she smiles, nodding toward the stack of newspapers and magazines on the coffee table, the scissors and glue she uses to cut and paste clippings set neatly beside them. That’s when I realize she wouldn’t know about the Rex Bentley leak anyway – she doesn’t use the internet, barely turns the TV on – and when I think about having to tell her everything that happened, I break down again, folding into my lap.

  “Haley, shhh. Come on now,” she says, pulling me to her and stroking my back. “You’re gonna have to tell me what it is if you want me to help, baby.”

  The crying subsides, more from the fact that I have no more energy to cry than that I’m over it, and I sit back up and stare blankly at the switched-off TV.

  “They know about…about Rex Bentley,” I say, sniffing.

  “Who knows?”

  I grit my teeth and force the ugly answer out. “Everyone.”

  Her brow furrows in concern. “How? Did you tell them?”

  “I told…someone. Someone I thought I could trust.”

  There’s a pause so silent I feel like I can hear the dust moving in the sunlight.

  “Brando?” my mom says, and even from her, even in that gentle, sing-song voice, it makes my stomach feel acidic.

  “What?” I say, jumping up from the couch. “When did you— wait. Wait. Who— when—”

  “He called me.” The look on her face is pure confusion, pure innocence. And I’m livid.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God! No!” I shout, ignoring the dull ache that still lingers in my throat. I pace up and down the living room, my fingers furiously rubbing my frown. Infinite sadness turning into blinding rage in seconds. “No! This is … whoa! That is too far. That is way too far. First he violates my life. Then he sells me out. Now he’s trying to turn you against me?! This is…oh my God! I’m so pissed right now!”

  “Haley! Calm down, it was just—”

  “Who does he think he is? I mean, who does that? My own mother!? It’s one thing to mess with me, but this is over the line.” I clench my fist and jab it into my palm as I continue to pace even faster. “He’s going to pay for this, I swear. I don’t know how, I don’t know… He’s going to pay! Ragh! I could strangle him!”

  “Haley! Listen to me!” I glance over at my mom. “And stop pacing!” I stop and stand there, chest heaving, fists clenched, my blood boiling. “He called me weeks ago. He just wanted to offer me tickets to the first show on the tour. He said if I wanted to come he would make sure I had the best seats in the house.”

  I stand there, still furious, but my anger a little less focused.

  “What? That’s all?”

  “Well,” Mom says with a strange, sly grin, “we did talk a little bit.”

  “About … what?” I say, putting a huge pause in the middle of the words. I sit on the lounge chair beside the couch and lean forward to express my deep interest in whatever the fuck happened between Brando and my mother.

  “Nothing important. Don’t worry,” she says, way too casually. “I asked him about you. He told me you were doing just great. That your music was really striking a chord with people. He seems to be a very competent manager. Very invested in you. And…”

  “And?”

  My mom smiles warmly as she relives the conversation. “And he mentioned that you told him about my own music. The album I recorded in seventy-eight. He said he’d love to hear it. I told him if he ever found a copy to be sure to make me a copy, since they only printed five hundred of them.”

  “Mom!” I say, when I notice how happy she looks. “Don’t look so pleased when you’re talking about him! He’s a … he’s an asshole.”

  “He can’t be that bad,” she says. “He promised to find that record and let me know as soon as he did.”

  I groan with every fiber of my being.

  “Wait,” I say, holding a palm up. “I don’t understand. How did you get from that conversation that he was the one I told about…the secret.”

  “Sweetie,” my mom says in a way that makes me feel thirteen again, “I might be old but some things don’t change. The sound of a man’s voice when he’s talking about a girl he’s infatuated with is one of them.”

  “Mom! He’s just my manager!” But the lie comes out sounding defensive and weak, and I know I’m not convincing her.

  She smiles gently. “I’m not judging.”

  “Fine. But still…”

  “Listen, Haley, the kind of man who would look for a rare, limited edition record for a girl’s mother is also the kind of guy who would go to the ends of the earth for that girl – young woman, I mean – and her secrets.”

  “And is apparently also the kind of man who would spill those secrets to the whole world?” I say, slumping back against the chair in exhausted defeat.

  “Are you sure about that?” my mom asks.

  “Yes! It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do. Probably for publicity or something.”

  Mom’s expression remains skeptical. “Did he tell you that?”

  “Of course not. He said he didn’t tell anyone.”

  “So why do you think it was him?”

  “Because…he was the only one who knew! And he’s lied to me before.”

  My mom gives me the same sigh-and-critical-look combination that she gives her music students who skip their homework.

  “Haley…”

  “Mom…” I say, in the same voice I used when I wanted to skip school. “The whole music thing…it just sucks. Someone messed up my guitar before a gig. And way before that, Brando made a bet with some douche bag that he would make my song a hit. One minute the label won’t give us a video budget, the next they send me on tour with Lexi. They basically forced me to sign with Majestic by throwing a bunch of lawyers at us saying I’d have to repay the studio time back myself if I didn’t. This business is just full of snakes and lies and people playing fucked up games. It’s not as simple as it looks. You don’t understand.”

  “Don’t I?”

  I look at her soft face, barely able to conceal the hurt she feels.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  She shrugs it off and smiles. “It sounds to me like the music industry hasn’t changed one bit, honestly.”

  I let out a little laugh, but the smile disappears quickly when I remember. “The point is, Brando probably did this. And he probably thought he was doing me a favor, that it would help my career.”

  “Haley,” my mom says with an air of finality, “the - ‘secret’ – as you call it, was never going to stay secret for long once you got your name out there. Do you know how many people found out about me and Rex at the time? How many of his biographers I’ve had to fend off insinuating questions from? What about the strange letters I get from his insane fans that think they’ve made some connection between us? You’re right. I don’t know this Brando, but I do know people. And it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt every once in a while.”

  I nod slowly, taking in her words, wishing I believed them. “I’d like to say thanks for the support, Mom. But the truth is that I’m more confused than ever right now.”

  “So listen to your heart instead of your head,” she says simply. As if it’s that easy. “Now sit tight and let me make you some tea.”

  Chapter 13

  Brando

  Her house is exactly how I imagined it would look. On the outskirts of a quiet hippie town near the beach, at the end of a quiet road that winds slowly up a hill, surrounded by a few quiet clusters of shady trees. It’s no wonder she enjoys making noise.

  I step through the worn, wooden gate and knock on the door, shaking my arms and stretching my neck like I’m bracing for a fight. The door opens slowly, but the person who opens it is anything but confrontational.

  “So you must be Brando,” says the strikin
g woman in the doorframe.

  She’s tall and slim, a flowing dress hanging from softly-curved shoulders. Her angular bone structure seems to catch and hold the light like a supermodel. Though she’s got the comfortable smile and glinting eyes of someone in their fifties, something about her makes everything else seem a little less physical.

  “Ms. Cooke,” I say, quickly suppressing the guilty pang of finding Haley’s mom kinda hot.

  She smiles, and it’s like the sun is shining directly at me. “Call me Wanda. Come on in,” she says, standing aside. I step through the doorway, looking around the room like a detective scanning for clues. “She’s not here,” Wanda says, noticing my tensed muscles. “She’s out in the shed.”

  “The shed?”

  “It’s where she likes to record and play. Me too, sometimes,” she says, as she leads me through the house toward the back door. “It’s a kind of studio. And a guest room.”

  She pushes open the kitchen door to the long lawn of neatly-cut bright-green grass, colored blooms and bushes lining it all the way to the end, where a ramshackle wooden structure sits amid the greenery like some miniature English cottage that time forgot.

  “Look. Wanda,” I say, turning back after she holds the door open once again for me to step past. “Thanks for telling me she was here. I know she probably told you not to.”

  “You’d have found her here eventually. Better sooner rather than later.” Wanda looks down sadly. “Haley’s like a wild flame: Quick to start, and quick to calm. But if you leave her to herself, she can burn everything around her.”

  I know Wanda’s right, but something about the way she says it makes me feel like I’m hearing a secret.

  “I can see where she got her poetic side.”

  Wanda takes my hand in hers and looks at me with mint-blue eyes. It feels like she can read my mind.

  “I hope she didn’t inherit my taste in men.”

  As soon as she says it, she drops my hand and steps back into the house, closing the door. The message is clear: You’re on your own, buddy. I spin around to face the shed across the lawn, which seems a thousand miles long now, and start walking.

  By the time I get close to the shed door, my head’s swirling with so many thoughts, so many emotions, so many memories, that I can’t tell if the sound I’m hearing is real or imagined. It’s only when I get close enough to put a hand against the deeply-grained wood that I know it’s really her. She’s singing. Low and long, a sad song. She stops every few lines, then starts back up again, the same way she always does when she’s writing.

  I listen for a while, taking deep breaths, and then brace myself once again. I glance back toward the house and see Wanda looking through the glass pane of the door. She offers me a gentle look of sympathy before turning away and heading back into the house.

  I knock.

  Haley calls out something that gets muffled through the wall, then gets back to playing. I knock again. This time I hear her stop, and the thud of what’s probably her guitar being put down. I take a step back from the door.

  “What the fuck?” she snarls, her face twisting with uncontrolled anger as soon as she sees me. “No! Go away!”

  As she screams this last word she puts her hand on my chest and shoves me as violently as she can. I stumble back, and she storms toward me.

  “Just fucking leave already! Get out of my life!” she screams, her voice breaking up with how loud she’s screaming. She shoves me again, putting all of her strength into it.

  “Don’t you fucking get it already? I don’t want anything to do with you!”

  This time I grab her biceps and hold her before she can shove me again.

  “Stop it!” I shout, my voice so loud it seems to swallow hers, to boom off the surrounding mountains. “For fuck’s sake, Haley! Stop.”

  We glare at each other, chests heaving, jaws clenching. Two animals in a fight to the death.

  “I’ll never forgive you for what you did,” Haley hisses, her voice as sharp as a blade.

  “I’ve done a lot of dumb things, Haley. Made a lot of mistakes. But that wasn’t one of them.”

  “Fuck you!” Haley says, shrugging my hands off her, rage pouring off her in waves.

  Something in me snaps. “No, Haley. Fuck you! I didn’t come here to beg. I didn’t come here to apologize. I’m sick of fucking apologizing. This whole tour I’ve been twisting myself into knots over you. Praying you’d give me another chance. Wondering how fucking long you were going to stay mad at me. And then for a whole month before that I didn’t even leave the house. I felt like I’d give anything to see you again, and it still wasn’t enough.”

  Haley glares at me even more fiercely.

  “And for what, Haley? For what? A stupid bet that I didn't care about from the second I realized how good you really were. A stupid bet that I won, and still feel like I lost. A stupid bet that I'd make all over again, because it's the best damn thing that happened ever happened to me - and maybe to you, too. I'm not the one hung up on the bet, Haley, you are. You keep treating me like I’m an asshole – and maybe I am, but not for the reasons you think. The only mistake I made was feeling the way I do about you. But I’m done. I’m done being the nice guy. I didn’t come here to apologize. I didn’t come here to beg you for another chance. I came here to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Haley spits, her voice even harder and tighter.

  “That I fucking love you.”

  The words seem to light a fire in her face, her eyes flickering over mine, her lips opening in an angry scowl, trembling with anger. Her cheeks go hot red like I just slapped her in the face.

  She leaps at me again, even more aggressively, even more fueled by her hot-headed temper, even more out of control. Only this time it’s not to push me. It’s to kiss me.

  Chapter 14

  Haley

  On the drive back to LA I have to struggle to stop myself from smiling. I hang my arm out of the window and watch Brando as he focuses on the road, feeling weird in a happy kind of way. He notices me watching and laughs.

  “You look pretty happy to return to LA,” he says

  “I’m just happy right now. Take the 1.”

  “Why?” he says, frowning. “It’s longer.”

  “Yeah. But I like the ocean view.”

  I lean toward the window and let the wind caress my face, stroke my hair. When I open my eyes I see Brando, notice the lines of his arm muscles, the Italian nose in profile, the way he looks like he’s dreaming when his face is at rest.

  He glances over at me and notices me staring again.

  “I feel like I should be charging you when you look at me like that.”

  “I hope I can afford it,” I giggle, as I lean over to turn on the radio.

  We listen to the tail end of a half-decent song, both of us only half-listening, until the two DJs start talking.

  “…an interesting story. Rex Bentley – you like Rex Bentley, Sara?”

  “Who doesn’t? ‘Put on your red shoes…’”

  “Well his daughter, apparently. Haley Grace Cooke: The girl who just supported Lexi Dark on her tour and is set up to be even bigger.”

  “She’s his daughter?”

  “That’s what people are saying.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “What do you think? Is this just one of those publicity things? Or you think she really didn’t want people to know?”

  Brando presses the off button so hard he nearly breaks it. We drive on in silence for a few minutes, but the sense of something wrong hangs in the space between us.

  “What do I do?” I finally ask, turning to Brando. “What do I do about this?”

  Brando focuses on the road, sighing deeply before he speaks.

  “Rowland wants to use this, of course. Play up the connection. Milk the publicity, really drive home the ‘estranged daughter of the musical legend is just as talented’ angle. He’s already talking feature pieces about how you always knew the music
was in your blood. Me: I want this to go away. Disappear. You can stand on your own talent, you worked your ass off for this career, and you’ve got no reason to want to be associated with a scumbag like him. If it were up to me, this story would be dead and gone yesterday.”

  I nod. “Me too. But how? Is that even possible?”

  Brando’s lips press together as he thinks of how best to let me down.

  “I don’t know. Worst case scenario, this thing catches fire – more than it has – and the fans turn against you. They find out the truth, you get branded a wannabe who rode her daddy’s coattails, and nothing you ever do is judged fairly. If you even get the chance to make another record.”

  “And what’s the bad news?”

  Brando smiles.

  “Best case scenario: The story gets buried in all the other garbage people write about, and in a year or two is nothing but an urban myth. I’ll be honest, that one’s unlikely. This is the juiciest thing in the news right now. Unless the Pope decides to streak at the Cubs game tomorrow.”

  I look out at the view over the rocky cliffs, the ocean below looking a little more overwhelming than I remember it.

  “Do you have his number?”

  Brando drops me off at my apartment before zooming off to perform damage control. I check the time and groan when I realize Jenna is still on her shift and won’t be back for another four hours. When I get inside, I drop my duffle bag to the floor, toss my leather jacket to the side, and head straight for the refrigerator.

  I’m eighty percent of the way toward deciding I should order Chinese when there’s a knock at the door.

  “Who is it?” I shout, as I slam the refrigerator closed and walk over to the door.

  The knock comes again, loud and impatient. I swing it open.

  “Hey, babe!”

  “Lexi?”

  “The one and only,” she says as she strides right on past me into the apartment. Impossibly confident in just a pair of white cut-off jean shorts and a pink tank top.