My “Hi Mom” comes out with a resigned sigh.
“Hi Mom?” There is half a beat of silence while I wait for the onslaught. “You disappear in the middle of a party, leave your car with a stranger, ignore hundreds or maybe thousands of comments and DMs after that disastrous photo from yesterday, and you can’t be bothered to make a phone call explaining yourself. Honestly, Indigo.”
“Mom, I needed to get away. This stuff is killing me.” I think about the embarrassing photo, the things Miles said, the way he spoke to me, and the full picture of my suffocating, artificial life. A boulder-sized lump forms in my throat.Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry...
She sighs and the line goes silent. “I understand that you need a break from work. Yesterday was… not good. We took the picture down as soon as we saw it.” She knows as well as I do that nothing online is ever truly deleted. My anger flares as she goes on. “But running away only confirms what everyone is assuming. You should have talked to me instead of taking off.”
She isn’t wrong and I hate that. “I needed more than a break from work. My life is my work. How do I ever get any real rest when I live in a fishbowl? There is no rest from it. I had to get away.” I squeeze my burning eyes closed.
“Where are you, anyway?”
“I drove for a while and ended up in Utah.” A few tears trickle down my cheeks and I hope she can’t hear them in my voice.
“Utah?” She says the word like I told her I ended up in the ball pit of a McDonald’s Playplace. She is clearly unimpressed with my choice of destination, probably because it would be difficult for her to monetize. “Well, unfortunately for you we have contracts and obligations to fulfill that make our lives possible. The team and I can cover for you, but it can’t go on forever. We all live in this fishbowl. How long do you need?”
“Um… can I take a month?” This is a stretch. I know that, but I also know how to negotiate terms with my boss-mother.
Is it possible to hear an eye roll? I think I just heard one. “I haven’t taken a month off since the nineties, Indie, and that was maternity leave when I was still with Neiman Marcus. How about two weeks?”
“Three.”
“Fine, three.” She sighs again and I can picture her posture: Hand on hip, phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, and the other hand pinching the bridge of her nose. “What are you going to do for three weeks inUtah?”
“I’m figuring it out as I go." Figuring myself out.
“Well, enjoy your little walkabout. Send pictures. We can try to turn your trip into something. Give us something to work with while we clean up this mess.”
I cover my face with my hands, even though I am in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight but shrubs and rocks. Heat crawlsup my neck and over my face. “Is it bad?” It comes out like a statement. I do not want to know exactly how bad it is.
My mother sighs again. This is going to be a ten sigh conversation. “It’s not great, Indie. You can look at the numbers, and the comments aren’t flattering to either of us, but so far we haven’t lost any partnerships. So far.”
My mother, the nurturer, folks. I have a humiliating personal crisis on a national scale and it is about the numbers and the partnerships and not about my mental health or well-being. I guess that’s what happens when your life and your daughter turn into a product. I can’t handle this. I tell her my battery is almost dead and hang up as quickly as I can.
Chapter 3
Iwant to hurl my phone as deep into the desert as I can throw it, but I jam it into the glove box and slam it shut instead. I jump out of the van and storm down the road. The sky is cloudless and bright as I stomp through the orange sand in my crinkled dress and stupid heels, getting angrier and angrier the closer I get to the red cliffs. Sometimes the contents of a conversation don’t fully register until later. Well, that’s happening now. The rage is growing inside me like a wildfire. I spot what looks like the beginning of a hiking trail and march down the path into the morning shade of the cliffs, ruining my strappy Louboutins in the rocky sand.
My mother isthe worst. I’m deeply humiliated and she is worried about what it is doing to her follower count. I need my phone and air pods so I can turn on my Angry 80s Workout playlist and do the usual cathartic cardio that I do when my mother and I butt heads over work. I settle for scream-singing a Billy Joel song at the top of my lungs while I stalk through the bushes. There are perks to being in the middle of nowhere with no one around.
I kick a scrubby little sagebrush as I scream out the first verse. I gasp for breath and kick at another bush, but don’t quite connect. This dress isn’t designed for kickboxing shrubbery.
My “singing” bounces off the canyon walls as I march and kick my way down the trail. I can’t remember the entire song, so when I get to the chorus I holler it on repeat. Jackrabbits run for cover when I vocalize the epic saxophone solo. These bushes don’t stand a chance. I lose track of how long I’m stomping through the desert, shouting the chorus over and over, and leaving a path of mangled shrubs in my wake. But now I’m having a harder time catching my breath and I’m running out of rage to fuel my destruction.
I wind up for one last, soul-cleansing kick, but when my foot connects with the bush, pain shoots into my foot and knocks me on my butt. I scream and it bounces back at me from the canyon wall.
Is my leg on fire?Burning pain runs from my ankle to my knee. Blood drips down my foot from a large gash. White spots flash in my eyes as pain radiates up my leg. I try to scramble to my feet, but the effort makes my stomach turn. I’m going to bleed to death out here, alone in the desert like one of those old cartoons where the cow skull was baked in the sun.
I register a streak of tan skin and dark hair in my periphery, and a man runs toward me out of nowhere, dropping his backpack and metal water bottle to the ground. “What happened?” He crouches in front of my bloody leg to inspect.
“Don’t touch it!” I am grateful to be found, but everything hurts and my fight or flight response is definitely engaged.
He settles his deep brown eyes on mine.Zing!If I wasn’t already knocked on my behind, his eyes would have done the job. His breath is heavy from running to me, but his voice is calm. Reassuring. “I can help you if you let me take a look. I promise I’ll be gentle.”
His dark gaze shoots down to my leg and back up to my eyes, looking for approval. I nod, squeezing my eyes shut and his big, calloused hands run over my ankle.
“Take slow, deep breaths.” His fingers brush across my other leg, checking for damage. “Where does it hurt the most?”
I peek through one eye and point to a spot above my right foot, to the epicenter of the scorching pain. “There. It feels like it’s” — deep breath -– “on fire.” I close my eyes and try to slow my breaths while he examines my ankle. I do my yoga breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth. It doesn’t help much.
