Like when my mother had had her breakdown. That was the first time I remembered guys popping out of alleyways with cameras, when my mother and the rest of her Upper East Side clique had discovered my father had had an out-of-wedlock lovechild. She’d taken to wearing large dark Jackie O sunglasses even around the house and started jumping with fright anytime anyone entered a room.
“Leave us alone!” I remembered my mother shouting, mascara-drenched tears staining her cheeks as she battered some camera hound with her Chanel handbag. I’d only been nine at the time, too young to understand fully what was going on. Then the cameras had come back a year and a half ago, after dad had died, honing in on his funeral with telescopic zoom lenses.
Now they were outside my cabin in Vermont. Was Ash in town for a visit?
I grabbed my phone from my back pocket. I’d shoved it in there, but hadn’t checked. Must have had my ringer off. I saw I had five text messages and four missed calls, about a week’s worth from just this morning. Huh.
Before I could click on any of them, my phone rang right in my hand. It was Nelson, the Kavanaugh family attorney. That never meant anything good.
“What’s up, Nelson?” I asked, getting right to it. Had someone died?
“We have a situation,” he began. I sat down. Situations that required explanations from family attorneys were best taken sitting with a drink in hand. I didn’t have a drink, but I did have a chair.
“Tell me.” I didn’t want him to mince words.
“It seems a TV network has plans to feature you in an exposé. They ran a promo earlier today.”
“Huh.” I still didn’t connect the dots. My mind was moving too slowly.
“They’re known as the Fame! Network?”
“What?” I stood up.
“They’ve run a 30-second promotional video. You may as well view it. I’ve texted it to you.” I scrolled over to my text messages and clicked on the video he’d sent.
A voiceover began with a montage of footage, blending shots of me in my workshop with photos of my family, from my past. “Hot Off The Grid,” the cheesy narrator voice began, flashing footage of me wielding a blowtorch, or shirtless and sweaty from a workout. “Heathcliff Kavanaugh. Heir to billions. Royalty. Brother of rockstar Ash Black.”
I swore and wanted to throw the phone across the room and smash it into bits, but that wouldn’t change any of this. And I needed to watch it and see just how bad it was.
“He’s hidden himself away in a tiny town in Vermont. What does he have to hide?” The promo continued with a few images from Ash’s scandal days, and then the real kicker: the headline from a newspaper announcing my father’s death. Implying I was somehow linked to his untimely passing. From stomach cancer.
I wasn’t holding a drink, but if I had been I would have smashed it to the ground. As it was, I banged my fist so hard on the table I heard a crack. Might have splintered one of the legs. I’d deal with that later.
First I had to Hulk smash whoever was responsible for this shit. It couldn’t be Violet. Could it? Fuck all, this was a fucking mess.
“Get it the fuck down!” I yelled, kicking the wall for good measure.
“Yes, I filed a cease and desist approximately two minutes after the video was brought to my attention.”
I nodded. Good man.
“But apparently you’ve signed a consent form,” Nelson added. “So it’s going to be somewhat more difficult.”
“I what?”
“You’ve signed a consent form for them to do the show.”
“No!” My voice thundered out in protest. I’d never head of such bullshit. I’d never have done that.
“I’ve scanned and sent the image of that as well,” Nelson added calmly, apparently having anticipated my response.
I clicked to open and damned if I didn’t see the fucking papers fucking Violet had fucking given to me the night before she’d flown back to L.A. The papers she’d told me the Fame! Network needed to air footage of the shop downtown. They wanted to feature the local artwork, she’d told me. I roared like a lion shot with a gun.
“I’m assuming from your reaction that this was not your intent when you signed the papers.” Nelson was British, through and through, and as such he kept calm and carried on even in the face of violent outbursts.
“I had no idea I was giving them consent to film me,” I growled.
“Yes, I assumed as much.” Nelson gave a slightly disapproving tut tut. “I must urge you, Heathcliff. Never sign any documents without giving them to me first for a thorough review.”
“It wasn’t…I didn’t…” I rubbed my forehead in my hands, knowing I had only myself to blame. I’d let myself get sucker-punched. There was no other way of looking at it.
“Never fear, I will find a way,” Nelson assured me, unflagging in his placid determination. “There’s absolutely no question of them filming that exposé. As for the promo video…” I could almost picture him giving a subdued shrug of his British shoulders. “That is out in the world. I can get them to remove it from the network’s website, but it’s making its rounds through social media and there’s no stopping it now.”
“Fuck!” I drove my palm into the wooden wall, making a couple of books fall off of a shelf.
“Yes, well. I’ll leave you to it,” Nelson prepared to sign off. “Speak to no one. Sign nothing. And call your mother.”
The first two directives I had no problem with. It was the third that got me. I winced. If anyone hated the spotlight more than me, it was my mother. Publicity had been the straw that broke her back, the cause of her midlife breakdown. Without the paparazzi, she would have simply had a broken heart when news of her husband’s infidelity broke. Caught in the spotlight, her sadness blew up into full-scale nuclear meltdown. Unable to even parent her children, she’d sent us all off to our grandmother in England for two years. She hated, absolutely loathed, how Ash had turned that spotlight back onto our family. Now I’d done it, too.
“I’ll be in touch by the end of the day,” Nelson said, ending our call.
Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck. I checked my call log. I’d missed one from Ash, one from my mother. One from Dave, which might be about the upcoming hockey game but probably wasn’t. Word was probably getting around town even out here in the wilderness. Someone had seen that promo and sent it to someone else and the news was passing, growing, multiplying like a disease.
The fourth and final call, just twenty minutes ago, was from Violet. And my phone went sailing across the room. It crash-landed on the couch cushions and I guessed maybe later I’d be happy I didn’t break it, but just then I wanted the satisfaction of it bursting apart into tiny splinters.
I’d trusted her. I’d let her in. I’d held her and loved her and had been counting the days until I could see her again, either me visiting her or her coming back to me.
Guess she had plans now to come back to Watson, Vermont. So she could exploit my family, somehow try to implicate me in my father’s death, and completely ruin the life I’d taken years to build here. Hot Off the Grid. Apparently I was what was being served up hot on a platter. As for off the grid? Not so much anymore. I had guys with cameras waiting for me outside my front door. Nothing would be the same again.
I grabbed a drinking glass near me and hurled it at the wall. There, that smashed and crashed the way I wanted. But it didn’t make me feel any better.
§
I didn’t go out the whole day. Instead, I played an endless game of twenty questions. No one had any fun at all.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” Dave kicked things off, arriving at my doorstep, wondering who the hell I really was. I hauled him inside before the cameramen feasted on him like tigers on a wounded gazelle.
“Can I get you a beer?” I asked, figuring most conversations went better with one in your hand.
“No Dom Perignon?”
Ah, so it was going to go down that way, was it? I grabbed us both beers, but Dave didn’t stop looking
at me like I was an alien. I did the best I could to explain it to him, but he still left looking as confused as when he’d first arrived. I couldn’t tell him any of the shit he’d seen on that promo wasn’t true. I was the heir of the late billionaire Richard Kavanaugh. My British grandmother did have a title. My brother Ash was a world-famous rockstar. All of my protests about how it didn’t matter to me and wasn’t who I really was just made me sound more like a grade-A twit.
Minutes after he left, my phone rang with Harriet wondering where that free PR windfall she’d thought had come her way had gone to.