I quickly discovered that I wasn’t a celebrity at Seaside. The staff didn’t treat me like I was a god or like an idiot assigned to them by a judge or like anything other than a patient. My room had a window and my roommate, Nora, wasn’t famous—she was a hairdresser whose wealthy grandparents were paying for her to be here. When I introduced myself to her she’d cocked an eyebrow and bit her bottom lip before reaching out to take my hand.
“I’d hoped I wouldn’t get a roomie,” she’d said.
I’d smiled. “Sorry. You can pretend I don’t exist if you want,” I replied. She’d winked and stopped chewing her lip long enough to give me a half-smile.
“I was already planning on it.”
When I was given phone privileges two weeks after I arrived, and I called Cooper, I told him that Seaside was the baby bear of rehabs.
“I don’t get it, Wills,” he said, but I could tell he was smiling.
I slid down on one of the floral-printed couches in the empty common room. “They don’t have fables in Australia?” I teased, squeezing my eyes shut as I listened to the sound of his breathing. He’d sent letters—everyday—but parting with a voice I’d heard every day for months had been difficult.
He cleared his throat. “I was pretty sure the bear one was a fairytale.”
“Same difference,” I choked out.
His voice grew serious. “How are you holding up?”
So I told him, as fast as my fifteen minutes would allow. I told him about Nora. I didn’t add that she’d been in and out of rehab for the last 16years—since she was 18—or that she had a family who never wrote her. I’d started getting letters from my parents a week ago and I hid them under my pillowcase because I didn’t want to see the hurt look on her face.
“She’s good to you?”
“One of the sweetest people I’ve ever met,” I said honestly.
I heard noises in the background and then Paige’s voice came on the line. “I miss you, Avery!”
Swallowing hard, I said, “I miss you too. And Eric. Your piece of shit Grand Caravan still holding up?”
She made a noise that sounded like a hybrid of a laugh and a hiss. “You shut your dirty mouth.” Then she said. “Cooper’s flailing—and no I’m not even kidding—for the phone. We love you, Willow. Me and Eric and the boy with the coconut shampoo.”
I wasn’t used to friends telling me they loved me when we weren’t drunk, so when I said it back to her, it sounded awkward. “Love you too, Paige.”
It was the truth, so that was all that mattered.
I had three minutes left when I heard Cooper’s voice return to the line. We spent all of it talking about his surfing competition in October, the one he’d told me about earlier in the summer. As he gave me the dates, I felt something sink in the pit of my stomach.
He’d be in the Canary Islands from the seventeenth through the twenty-third. I was set to be released from Seaside on October 19.
“Why are you so quiet?” he whispered.
I rubbed my hand roughly across my chest. “Because I miss you,” I said. Then, in an attempt to lighten the conversation because it was all I could do not to breakdown, I added, “And because I think your accent is hot when your voice drops like that.”
I could hear a sound buzzing at the side of my ear, and it took me a long time to realize that a staff member was saying my name—my actual first name—in a soft voice to let me know my call was up. If I stayed on track, I’d get another next week.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll write, okay.”
“Mmhmm.” As I prepared to hang up he dropped his voice again and said softly, “Wills, I love you.”
I pushed past the lump in my throat to say, “You too.”
When I hit the round button to end the call, I gave the cordless phone back to the smiling woman waiting for it. “You’re on the schedule for a meeting with Doctor Nelson in ten minutes. Will you be—”
“Yes,” I answered, thinking of the man I’d just hung up from. Of his friends who’d been writing me just as much as he did and my bodyguard who’d become closer to me than any friend I’d made since becoming an actress. I thought of myself and how I’d spent my last session with Doctor Nelson in a puddle of tears as we talked about everything from the baby, to the lawsuits, to my parents.
We’d talked about Cooper.
I held up the gazillion-page book I’d been reading over the past couple days. “I’m just going to put this in my room before seeing Doctor Nelson,” I said. The book was the same one that had been passed around the last time I was in rehab.
It was so much better than the script for the movie had been.
***
The first time I realized that I no longer wanted Roxies or anything else to drown away the pain wasn’t until the end of September. I woke up at 6 a.m. after a bad dream and I didn’t want to black out the memory of it ever happening, of the baby ever happening. All I wanted to do was climb into the shower and then go to breakfast so I could start my day.
When I told Doctor Nelson about my epiphany at our session at the end of the week, he beamed, tapping the end of his pen against the corner of his desk. He gave me a pointed look before asking, “Does that mean you’re checking out early?”
Placing my elbows on the desk, I rested my forehead against my clenched hands. God, if this had been eight month ago, I would have checked myself out as soon as he asked me that, especially when I had Cooper waiting somewhere under a palm tree or on a paddleboard for me.