Unstoppable (Fierce) (32 page)

I waited until she had retired to her dressing room before I sought her out. She hesitated only slightly when I knocked, then finally permitted me to enter.

I shut the door behind me. “I think we should talk.”

Her smile was weak and humorless. “The time to have that talk would have been a year ago, in Los Angeles,” she corrected.

“You’re right,” I conceded. “But I’d like to have it now anyway.”

She shrugged and indicated to the chair. “I just wanted to say that I’m so sorry, Shelby. I’ve been selfish and secretive and dishonest. You deserved a better friend. I’m sorry I didn’t give that to you.”

Her blue eyes were steely as she stared at me. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I let you in, Jordi. I told you about everything. You know about everything. But you couldn’t treat me with the same respect.”

“You’re right,” I said again.

“You knew I loved him,” she went on softly. “You knew and you let me make a fool out of myself anyway. I would have never done that to you.”

There was nothing I could say. She was absolutely right and there was no excuse for what I had done, even with Eddie’s blatant blackmail. I chose to carry the burden alone, even though it hurt more people. “Tell me what I can do.”

“You can get the hell out of my dressing room,” she said in a deathly quiet voice. “You are not my friend. You were never my friend. There is nothing more to say.”

I dropped my eyes from hers as I nodded, then I turned and walked out the door.

I retreated back to the hotel room. I didn’t think I could feel any lower or any shittier, but that was before I got
the call at 10:03 that evening.

Shelby had been found unconscious
in her dressing room after collapsing from an apparent heart attack.

I rushed to the hospital, where Jace already waited. He had gone to check on her before he left for the night. That was when he found her. She had been unresponsive, so he
performed CPR and revived her, then rode with her to the hospital where they began immediate life-saving procedures.

She was in critical condition.

Jace was beside himself when I got to the hospital lobby where he waited. “I did this,” he kept saying over and over. I took him into my arms.

“Jace, no.”

“She was in distress. Why didn’t I see that?”

“She had serious problems that she hid for years. It wasn’t just you. It was all of us.”

He kept shaking his head. His beautiful eyes were bloodshot. We stayed there the entire night, along with a distraught Randy, who had harbored a secret crush on Shelby for a year and no one even knew.

Maggie joined us the following morning, and unfortunately the
Goddards got to the hospital shortly after that. Coy advanced on both Jace and me. “You did this!” he exploded. “She put her faith in you and you both squandered it.”

Jace took the hit because he felt so guilty. I, on the other hand, knew how far back Shelby’s problems reached. I didn’t make a scene, but I didn’t accept his blame, either.

PING was all over it.

FIERCE SWEETHEART COLLAPSES
UNDER STRESS AND HEARTBREAK!

FIERCE HERO LIVES UP TO HIS
REP, SAVES COSTAR!

TOUR NEARLY CLAIMS THE LIFE OF FRAGILE STAR!

Maggie, as usual, was the voice of reason. She sat next to us, her hands cupping Jace’s, as she tried to explain that Shelby had been in trouble long before the recent revelations. “Unfortunately, cardiac arrest can be a fatal complication of bulimia. The electrolytes get out of balance due to constant purging, which can result in irregular heart rhythm. Honestly, Jace, you probably saved her life. Sudden cardiac arrest can kill someone even as young and vibrant as Shelby, who has obviously been fighting this battle for years. Your quick thinking may have given her a second chance.”

He shook his head. “I knew she was in trouble, Maggie. And I did nothing. I should have done something.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said as she pulled him into a strong hug. “You cannot live your life beating yourself up for things you ‘should’ have done. You did the best you could with what you knew. That’s all any one of us can do.”

Maggie Fowler was truly our nurturer. Maybe if Shelby had trusted her with her secret, we wouldn’t be sitting in that hospital right that moment.

There were so many secrets around the
Fierce
family. And it had nearly cost us everything.

Once Coy and Sherry Goddard arrived at the hospital, they had anyone involved with the tour removed. As guilty as I felt for her condition, I was equally as livid that Coy could be so sanctimonious about it, as if we were the ones who caused his daughter to binge and purge in the first place.

I wanted to point out that she had been hospitalized once before on his watch, but I knew it wasn’t the time or the place. It was just misplaced anger talking. When a young person nearly dies, the first instinct is to assess blame.

It just wasn’t natural for a beautiful and successful young woman to knock that hard on death’s door.

Worst of all, had she passed she would have died thinking that no one loved her. Yet the entire crew and a growing group of fans had been holding vigil at the hospital, praying for her to get better because we just weren’t ready to let her go yet.

And yet, that was exactly what we had to do. Coy had stepped in and immediately, and decisively, cut all ties with Shelby’s
Fierce
family. Even if she recovered to full health, he made it clear she would not be joining us on the tour or in any future endeavor.

When we returned to the venue that Friday afternoon, we scrambled to fill this now gaping hole in our
program.

I got my set back, but I no longer wanted to perform it. I felt like I was stripping her bones clean by doing the very thing that made her feel so inferior in the first place.

But there was no time to make sweeping changes.

In deference to the somber occasion, though, we opted to play several slower, acoustic versions of our songs. There were no pyrotechnics or thundering beats and gyrating front men. There were simply the three of us, Vanni, Jace and myself, sitting on three stools with the band backing us up as we sang songs that meant something to the journey.

I dug out the song I sang for the finale, which Vanni accompanied on the piano. Jace sang my song for the first time, which choked him up. The words now had double meaning. He had loved a friend, who had no idea how much she meant to him, and how beautiful and perfect she was.

Despite the unplugged nature of the concert, the audience was with us every step of the way. We all wanted to be together. We wanted to let the music heal us.

And every single one of us sent those feelings to Shelby, to strengthen and renew her.

It ended up being a great lesson to me. Like Shelby, I had spent so many years focused inward. I was in pain. I was hiding. I was building a wall between me and the world. I thought I would get hurt if I dare
d to peek over. But the world wasn’t this scary place I had made it out to be. For every person who would throw a stuffed pig onstage to shame me, there were dozens more who cheered for me just the way that I was.

I had spent so many years focused on the wrong thing. And, like Shelby, it was killing me.

I told Maggie to set me up with a therapist when we got back to Los Angeles.

Given the next and final stop was my hometown stop i
n Iowa. I had a sneaking premonition I would need it.

I had finally broken free from Eddie.

It was time to face my mother – and Shane – once and for all.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Des Moines, Iowa

April 15, 2012

The entire crew got to Iowa by Sunday afternoon. We had a lot of work to do and not a whole lot of time to get it done. Shelby’s absence not only cast a pall on the tour itself, but it slashed open a wide hole in our lineup. We could either patch up the old tour, or work on something entirely new. Graham decided to shake things up with something new, changes meant to reclaim the heart and soul of the show.

He also decided this would be the one we’d record for a DVD release. Since Coy had terminated any relationship between
Baxter Mega-Worldwide Media Corporation and the smaller record label where Shelby had her contract, any previously recorded performances with Shelby had to be shelved anyway. This way we could get a full concert from start to finish, with a bunch of cool surprises for the fans.

This meant we were in rehearsal from sunup to sundown to perfect each and every performance.
Fortunately Jace and I were used to the hectic pace courtesy of our time on
Fierce
. That was the ultimate boot camp in learning, rehearsing and performing new songs in as little as a week.

We brought back the pyrotechnics and
Jace’s hero intro. After what happened in Colorado, it seemed especially apt. I wanted to open with my Christina Aguilera tune, in honor of Shelby and anyone who felt as though they were in any way inferior. Every single person had the right to celebrate that they are a beautiful original, completely unique in all the history of the world. The crime was when we thought we could rip that title from another person, as if it added value to us in any way.

I couldn’t save Shelby. But if I could reach just one person and give them cause to love themselves instead of hurt themselves, then maybe that was the point.

But I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Thanks to PING, that necessary evil of pop culture that derived great enjoyment out of taking people down, I had been cast as the literal and figurative heavy of the
Fierce
drama. Many of Shelby’s fans hated me now. A married woman “cheated” on her husband to steal their idol’s man, which led up to her near-demise at the tender age of 22. There was really no way to correct any of this without tearing Eddie, and Shelby, down in the process.

In the end it was easier to let them hate me.
It was my parting gift to her.

Coy Goddard got a lot of mileage out of this scenario. He told everyone who could
listen what a waste of skin both Jace and I were. He had been on national talk shows to talk about his daughter, and made it very clear he blamed us for what had happened to her.

“Celebrity is a ravenous beast,” he had told one interviewer on a slanted propaganda channel. “If you have any decency at all, it will just chew you up and spit you out. I would seriously question the moral fiber of anyone who could make a success out of themselves in that industry. Just look at who is left on the
Fierce
tour. You have a womanizing addict directly responsible for the death of a prostitute he had picked up off the streets. You have a liberal war vet who is too good to shoot a gun, but tossed my Shelby aside for his married lover. And you have a girl who clearly has a much more severe eating disorder than my daughter, who cheated on her husband with members of her own crew. Shelby got lost in the wreckage, so she gets to pay the price while they all play rock star for sold-out crowds.”

His disgust was palpable, even
through the TV screen.

With
one interview he became one of PING’s favorite people.

Jace would admonish me every time he caught me reading or watching anything about it. “Don’t put that shit in your head,” he’d say as he would close my laptop or wrestle my phone away. “It he
lps no one if you keep punishing yourself, least of all Shelby.”

I would nod, knowing he was right.
But it was inevitable. I couldn’t escape the critical commentary, it was everywhere I looked. The tabloids had been ruthless, especially since Jace and I were no longer hiding our relationship. This caused friction within our
Fierce
touring family. Whether it was right or wrong, warranted or not, the crew that we had all worked with and essentially lived with day after day, had become accustomed to a certain reality that we were now circumventing. I was no longer projecting this image of a happily married woman, and Jace was no longer the romantic hero of the tour. Instead we were treated as two privileged people who would screw over anyone to get what we wanted, no matter the cost.

We hadn’t changed, but the very rules we had set and lived with had. If we thought we could just scrap the past and have a do-over with everyone, we were sadly mistaken.

Randy, who had always been our friend before, was suddenly more sullen and withdrawn. His loyalty was with Shelby. Vanni, who knew more than anyone else about why we had done the things we had done, was far more sympathetic. Terrell was in a tizzy about all the changes that had to be made, which accommodated all these backstage dramas that were, in his mind, unnecessary. We all had a job to do. No one had time for a soap opera behind the scenes.

It seemed everyone had an opinion, and I couldn’t even really blame them. Why shouldn’t I take the hits? My stupid decisions had wrecked everything, from the moment I allowed Eddie and my mother to follow me to Los Angeles a year before.