“Happy Birthday,” he said, soft.
My eyes met his. There were a thousand and one things I could have said, but none of them would have been quite right. And so I wrapped my arms around his neck and held him, close. For a very long time.
When we finally parted, I saw it—just beyond his shoulder, and in every corner of the room. Us, multiplied.
malibu
It was not supposed to happen this way. Our dalliance was supposed to be easy and casual andfun. It was not supposed to entail me wringing my hands about how and when exactly to break my daughter’s heart. But that is how I spent most of November. When the group’s first single from the new album was released and it felt as if suddenly they were everywhere. On the radio, on the TV, on a massive billboard on Sunset that made me simultaneously giddy and nauseated every time I drove past. Hayes, six stories high. When Isabelle was listening to “Sorrowed Talk” on repeat and Icould not share with her that Hayes had given me six additional tracks fromWise or Nakedfor fear that she would tell her friends and somehow they might be leaked. Apparently this—leaking an album—was athing. And I could not share withanyonehow somehow their songs had gone from feeling like harmless pop ditties to inspired, earnest compositions. His words, his voice, affecting me in ways I could not have foreseen, profound. None of this was supposed to happen.
They were performing at the American Music Awards. They were scheduled for several days of press leading up to the show, and Hayes arranged to arrive earlier than the rest of the group and rent a house in Malibu for a few days before heading down to the Chateau Marmont to stay with the others.
I’d had every intention of breaking the news to Isabelle before then, but at each turn my attempts were thwarted.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” I said. We were hiking in Temescal Canyon the Sunday before Hayes’s arrival. She was leading.
“Me, too.” She smiled back at me, eyes alight.
“You wanna go first?”
“I kind of like this guy, but he barely knows I exist.” The words spilled out of her mouth so quickly, it took me a second to register.
And then I panicked. She’d been raving about him since theSea Changeopening. “Who?”
“Avi Goldman. He’s a senior. He’s on the soccer team. He’s like perfect.”
Oh, sweet relief. “That’s great, Izz.”
“It’s not great, Mom. He sees me, but he looks right through me.” She was walking faster now, the narrow path winding. “It’s like I don’t even register.”
“That’s likely in your head, peanut. You can always introduce yourself, say hi.”
“It won’t matter. He only dates cool, pretty, popular girls. And I’m like…” She shook her head, trailing off.
“You’re what?”
“I’m an eighth-grade fencer with braces.”
“Are you trying to tell me that’s not cool?” I smiled up at her.
She stopped walking suddenly, her eyes welling with tears.
“Oh, Izz, I’m sorry… It’s not going to always be this way. I promise you. You will not always feel this way.”
“You can say that, because look at you.”
I hesitated then. I did not want her making comparisons. “What is he, Avi? Seventeen? Eighteen? Boys that age don’t always have the best judgment. They don’t necessarily know what they want or what’s best for them. And even if he did, Izz, he’s not exactly age appropriate. Your father and I would never agree to that.” The irony of this was not lost on me.
“I know. I just hate feeling invisible.”
I hugged her then, close. “You will not always feel invisible, peanut. I promise.”
She calmed down, and after sometime we began walking again. “So what’s your news?”
“You know what? It can wait.”
And so it was that Hayes was coming to Los Angeles and I had failed him in the first thing he’d asked me to do. And then I failed in the second.
He was flying in on Sunday and picking me up en route to the house in Malibu, and we were going to shack up there for the next three days, cut off from the rest of the world.
