Mean Season (7 page)

“How should I know?” he snapped.

“Is that you, Leanne?” The voice came from behind me.

I turned around and said hello to Mr. Pearson. Grant Pearson had been my gym teacher during high school, and I still saw him around Pinecob every so often. He always seemed too thin to be a gym teacher, but that was probably just compared to Coach Frawley, who was gigantic.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. It made sense enough to see him at the school, but not on a summer evening.

Mr. Pearson eyed me like he wasn't sure I'd meant to ask that question. He nodded good evening to a woman just coming in.

“I'm a group leader,” he said. “For the Tuesday-Thursday meetings.”

“I'm not, I mean, I had to bring,” I said, knowing I wasn't making sense.

Mr. Pearson smiled at me. “I understand,” he said. Then he turned to Joshua. “We were told to expect you,” he said. “Grant Pearson. Welcome.”

Joshua looked up and shook his hand.

“I'll have a couple of forms for you to sign at the end of things tonight.” Mr. Pearson turned back to me. “This isn't an open meeting,” he said. “The second and fourth Thurs
days of each month are open, and you're welcome—in fact, encouraged—to take part then.”

I nodded. He told me I should come back at nine to pick up Joshua.

“I guess I'll see you then,” I told Joshua. He didn't look up.

Mr. Pearson smiled again. “Good to see you, Leanne,” he said.

 

On Friday, day five of Joshua Reed's stay, I got mad. What happened was this: I'd been down in the basement trying to organize my fan club materials. I'd gotten a little lazy in the previous few weeks, with all the other stuff going on, and the Ping-Pong table had turned into a sort of staging area, covered with different piles of papers I hadn't filed. I was determined to clear it off, for neatness sake mostly, since we hadn't used it in ages. So I'd been working on that for a while, and was bringing upstairs an overdue library book of Beau Ray's when I heard Joshua on the kitchen phone. I don't know who he was talking to—I still don't—but I heard him say, “surviving, barely.” And then he laughed.

I remember pretty much to the word what he said next.

He said, “No man. No way… I don't know, she's twenty-five, I think. Something like that.”

I thought, he's talking about me.

And then he said, “Because she's a fucking hick for one… And it's not like I could leave before she woke up, if you catch my drift. Maybe she's got some decent friends, but I haven't met them… And Jesus, you should see the room they've got me in. It's like a fucking all-American shrine…very funny, not
that
All-American… No, like trophies and shit… No, that's the one who hit his head. This one disappeared or something… How should I know?”

I stopped listening after that. My cheeks were hot, and I felt this little, dull pain in my stomach. I went back down to the basement and stared for a minute at all my fan club files.
Then I found a box, and before I'd really thought about it, I had pulled out all of my out-of-date headshots of Joshua—the ones from the Colin Ashcroft days and the ones from the Stormy days and from when he was Nate. I threw them into the box, and also extra copies of old newsletters, printouts of e-mails I'd been sent, and a whole stack of news clippings that dated back nearly eight years.

I clomped up the stairs so that he could hear me coming, and kicked open the basement door. By then Joshua was off the phone and reading a script at the kitchen table. He watched me without saying anything.

“I don't know if you want any of this, but I'm throwing it out,” I told him.

Joshua shrugged. “Probably not,” he said, but he glanced over at the box, and he must have seen some corner of a photograph, or something else that caught his eye, because he sat up taller. “What's in there?”

“Garbage,” I said.

He got up from the table. “Like what? Hey, I haven't seen that picture in years. What's…oh my God, that's my first
Teen People
interview!”

“You want it?” I asked him. “Take it.”

He started to dig through the box. “You're throwing this out? Oh my God—look at me, I was so young!”

I did look at him. I looked at him looking at the picture of himself, five years earlier.

“Wait, wait, look at this one—this is that article where the guy compared me to Gregory Peck.” He pulled out another clipping. “I loved this article,” he said. He sounded almost sad. “I can't believe you have all these. Leanne, this is great!”

“Part of the job,” I said. I pushed the box at him. “Take it if you want. Like I said, it's garbage to me.”

Joshua took the box and wandered back to the kitchen table. I went upstairs, opened the door to his room, and walked in without hollering down to ask permission. One by one, I
took all Vince's trophies from the shelves. I took his cleats and his football helmet. I took his shoulder pads and his yearbooks.

“Hey, Leanne!” Joshua called up from the kitchen. “You've got to come down and see this one! Oh, my God—it's hilarious!”

“In a minute,” I yelled back. But I knew that I wouldn't. I heard my voice crack when I said it, and then I was crying. There in Vince's room, with his trophies poking into my arms. I made it as far as my own room, then sat on my bed and really started to bawl. After a while, my hands hurt from holding on so tight, and I dropped Vince's stuff to the floor and kicked it under my bed. That was day five. I remember wondering how I was going to get through the next eighty-five days. I hated him.

The Press

L
ike the press wasn't going to find him. I mean, Joshua Reed got stories written about him when he was sitting still, when he was eating fried chicken or showing up at some new club in New York or L.A. I would know—I searched fan magazines and newspapers and the Internet for stories like that each week. And whenever there were good pictures or sticky situations, the same stories would usually end up in
People
and
Teen People,
so I'd read about him there, too.

Starting a few days after Joshua's run-in with the cow, Judy's phone started ringing practically nonstop. She said mostly it was people wondering why they hadn't heard from her, or hadn't heard about Joshua in almost a week. Sometimes, people called who'd heard a rumor having to do with him. Sometimes, she'd say “No comment” or “Honey, you know I'm not going to get into that,” when she knew the person doing the asking. Sometimes she'd say, “Don't you
want to ask me about
Musket Fire?
” But in that first week, no one was asking about a film that hadn't even started shooting yet. It was like they could sense that she was hiding something.

A few days before the big meeting between Judge Weintraub and Lars and the lawyers from both sides, when it was clear that a plea bargain for house arrest would likely work out, Judy sat me and Momma down and talked to us about what to expect if everything did happen as planned.

“To be honest,” she said, “I'm not quite sure what to expect. I've been through a few scrapes with J.P. before, but we've usually been in L.A. and known people to go to and could head off the press. Or we pretended that there wasn't anything to say. But this is different. This is going on his record, and that's going to become common knowledge before you know it. We've been lucky so far—and I've been promising exclusive interviews, you know, down the road, and that's kept the dogs at bay. Plus, we're in West Virginia. Can you believe that neither of the arresting officers recognized him? That works out great for us, but sheesh! They gotta get out more!”

I saw Momma frown. It was clear to me that she didn't much cotton to Judy.

“Anyway,” Judy went on, “once the real story breaks and people know that he's holed up in your house for the summer, someone's bound to try to get in there to interview him—”

“You're saying people's gonna break into our house?” Momma asked.

“Oh, no. But that reminds me—I'll tell the police to keep a closer eye on your street, to be sure. I'm only saying that people can get weird. You know, if they can't get to him, sometimes they can go a little crazy.”

“What sort of crazy?” Momma asked.

Judy turned to me. “I don't know. Like climbing up to his
bedroom window to get pictures of him sleeping. Leanne's guess is as good as anyone's. She's been sending me stories and rumors about J.P. for years now. What do they tend to focus on?”

I tried to remember. “Who he's dating, mostly. Whether he showed up drunk somewhere. Girls trying to break into his hotel room. Whether he's gay. There was that rumor about him having the snake tattoo that turned out to be ring-worm. And there was the one about him getting into a bar fight in Houston,” I said.

“Unfortunately, that one wasn't a rumor,” Judy said.

I frowned because I remembered clear as day her telling me that it had been someone who only looked like Joshua. I said as much.

“Right. I did say that. Repeatedly,” Judy admitted. “I told a lot of people that story. Luckily, most everyone at the bar was seeing double.”

I was surprised to hear that. I thought back to when it happened. Lots of people had written to ask about it, and Judy sent me a paragraph to post in the newsletter as an explanation. The paragraph said that Joshua Reed had been at a friend's house in Dallas at the time of the alleged incident. I'd taken her at her word.

“I don't want no people rooting through our garbage,” Momma said. “I won't stand for it. I don't want them kicking up our lawn. And I don't want them coming to our door, pretending like they've got some business being there.”

Judy nodded. “I'm going to do my utmost to see that none of that happens. But I did want to tell you what you might expect. We'll keep as low a profile as possible. And we're planning to spin it as part of a rehab deal, so they'll probably grant us some space. People hate when the press hounds someone who's trying to get his life back on track.”

“But you expect something?” I asked.

“I'm sure there will be something,” Judy said. “I imagine
we'll arrange an interview at some point, to open it up a little and cool things down. At the very least, since he'll be staying with you, people will want to know who you are. We'll probably say that you're old family friends. It'll be easy to link you to the fan club, but we can say you've been running that as a favor. Something like that.”

“I have,” I said.

“Oh, I know,” Judy said. “I'm only thinking out loud.”

“Anything else?” Momma asked. She looked at her watch. I could tell that she'd had about enough of “the California Crowd” as she called them, and this was before she'd even met Joshua.

“There'll be fans,” Judy said. “Sometimes, they're worse than the press. Again, I'm going to try to keep a low profile, keep your names out of it, your address hidden. But you know how it is. You live in a small town.”

“I don't want my son Beau Ray nowhere near this,” Momma said.

Judy nodded. “Although that could play pretty well, if they get along,” she said.

“Nowhere near, you hear me?” Momma said.

Judy sat up a little straighter. “I'll do my utmost,” she said.

 

Judy did do a lot, there's no question. I only saw two local journalists when Joshua went into the courthouse that day, and they were the same ones who always hung out there—bored-looking stringers for the
Charles Town Register.
Of course, the name on the notice was still Polichuk, and Judy had Joshua wear a mustache and glasses and then leave out the back door. I think Judge Weintraub helped—the day of the arraignment, he gave everyone who worked at the courthouse a refresher talk on privacy and what it meant to be a private citizen and how everyone deserved a little peace, especially people who were trying to get their lives straightened out. Still, someone must have recognized him or put
two and two together. There were three messages on our answering machine when we got back to the house, from people around town who'd heard a rumor that Joshua Reed got house arrest somewhere in the county. They figured that I'd know, if anyone did, whether the rumor was true.

I don't know who finally told whom. I'm not even sure that it wasn't Judy who tipped people off, tired of sticking to her official story, that Joshua had been remanded to a private home for ninety days and would be undergoing alcohol counseling. Maybe it was the announcement from Elise's publicist that the couple was no longer dating but had “nothing but deep respect and affection for one another.” Whatever the reason, the reprieve was over on Saturday morning, day six of Joshua Reed's house arrest.

When I raised my window shade that morning—around six—our driveway looked different. There were two white vans parked behind Momma's station wagon, with television station lettering along their sides and antennas and what looked like satellite dishes on their roofs. And there were cars, many more than usual, parked along Prospect Street.

I pulled my shade back down and got dressed as quick as I could. My mind was racing like I'd done something wrong, like my hobby had just spilled from the basement all over our lawn and neighborhood.

Even though I knew that Joshua was surely still asleep, I tapped lightly on the door before opening it. Joshua hadn't rearranged anything in Vince's room, hadn't moved a chair or a lamp or I doubt even a book. But for the first time since I could remember, the space no longer felt like my brother's.

Vince's room had always smelled like Vince, even as the years passed, a smell somewhere between leather and grass. Maybe I'd changed that by pulling his sports paraphernalia from the shelves. Maybe Joshua had changed it, in the way he piled his clothing around the room. However it came
about, the room now smelled only of Joshua, a mix of spicy aftershave and limes.

It was a surprisingly soft smell, and I stood at the threshold and breathed deep. The low sun through the window shade colored everything rosy, and in that early morning light, Joshua was unbelievably beautiful—with his eyes closed, it was hard to remember that he wasn't the sweetest soul in the world. I put my hand lightly on his shoulder—the first time I'd actually touched him since he kissed me on the cheek before the Harper's Ferry dinner—and he made a little purring noise. I shook him a bit and he opened his eyes. He looked up at me and gave a slight frown.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Sorry to wake you up,” I said.

“What time is it?”

I told him that it was early and he asked why I was there then, if it was so early. I told him about what I'd seen out of my window.

“Oh,” he said. “Huh.” He yawned.

“Momma doesn't want them messing with Beau Ray or going through our garbage or any of that. What should I do?”

“Did you call Judy?”

“It's three-thirty in the morning out there,” I told him.

“That's what she's paid for. Go and talk to them if you want, if you're so worried about the garbage.”

“But they want to talk to you,” I pointed out.

“But they don't get to. At least not until I've showered.” He squinted up at me. “You should shower, too. You don't want to look like that on television.”

 

So I did—shower, I mean. And then I made some coffee, and it was not yet seven. Out the kitchen window, I could see a few people milling around. Just beyond our driveway, I made out a police car, which probably had a hand in keep
ing people away from our doorbell. I took the pot of coffee with me when I walked out onto the porch. As soon as one person saw me, everybody did, and there was a clattering of sound—camera equipment, I guess, and microphones and car doors. I put a finger to my lips to say, hey, keep it down. I explained how my brother was still sleeping.

“Are you saying that Joshua Reed is your brother?” one of them asked me.

I almost laughed.

“No. Beau Ray. Beau Ray's my brother, and believe me, you don't want to mess with my mother if you wake him up.”

“But Joshua Reed is also inside, isn't he?”

I said that yes, he was. One of them asked if Joshua would be doing interviews. Another wanted to know which bedroom he was sleeping in. Another asked for “the real reason” he was there. They kept talking at me, asking questions, and every once in a while, a bright light would shine in my eyes, and awfully quick, I found I didn't like being the center of attention in that way.

So I offered to make more coffee, and I said I didn't know much, but that I would try to find out when Joshua might be available. I also told them to get in touch with Judy, and said that she'd be able to answer more of their questions than I could. Then I went back inside. I was glad that Momma had locked the shed where we kept our trash cans and that she'd nailed Posted: No Trespassing signs around our property, front to back. I realized that maybe she'd been right to be so cautious.

 

Judy called that afternoon. It was the first time we'd spoken since she and Lars had left West Virginia, and maybe even the first time she'd spoken to Joshua in that time. His cell phone didn't work at all in Pinecob and he never answered our home phone, so unless she'd called when I was at work,
they hadn't talked. Still, Judy seemed to know everything about the press, and even that Elise had come by the house a few days before.

“It was in her best interests to cool things off,” Judy said. “She's got her career to think of and her position in the industry.”

The way she said it made me wonder whether Judy had spoken to Elise before or after the breakup visit.

“How's he doing?” Judy asked.

“I guess fine,” I said. “He's been busy reading those scripts that Lars sent. I haven't talked to him that much,” I admitted. I didn't tell her that it was because Joshua seemed to be avoiding me.

“Good for you,” Judy said. “Don't let him charm you.”

I told her that he'd gone to AA. How Momma wouldn't let him install satellite TV. How Momma had refused to keep the phone's ringer on after 10:00 p.m. How I'd gotten a flurry of e-mails that day about the house arrest story.

“So the news is out,” I said.

“And people in town?” Judy asked.

I said that we hadn't told anyone about him being in the house, but now with the press vans clogging Prospect Street, a lot of people probably figured. When I'd gone to pick up Beau Ray from his class at the Y earlier in the day, the mother of one of his friends had asked me whether the rumors she'd heard were true. But Beau Ray had gotten a mini-seizure right after that, so I hadn't been forced to answer. It was the first time that one of his seizures could actually have been called convenient.

“Is he okay?” Judy asked.

“Joshua or Beau Ray?”

“Beau Ray. Is he going to be okay?”

“You know,” I said. “It happens. Ever since the fall. We don't really know. Sometimes, they're practically nothing
and he feels them coming on and has learned to lie down. A couple times, we've had to bring him to the hospital.”

“I didn't realize,” Judy said. “I didn't realize there were still…aftershocks.”

“That's why someone ought to be with him most of the time,” I said. “Actually, Beau Ray and Joshua are getting along fine, and he loves the television vans,” I said.