Chapter 94

The return trip to Tennessee Regional Medical Center started out benignly enough. I got up, washed and dressed without incident.

Liz and Mom were accompanying me, of course, but they laid down the law to the others. Skye and Jill were given the day off to do as they wish. Ryan, Dom, Brian were told not to come out. Rick was told to stay at the house.

Melissa had departed for her Texas home midway through the week – and I don’t think Lynwood or Juliet was interested in coming with us.

Liz had acquired a van. I didn’t know when (or really even why) but she told me she’d purchased it and I let it go. She had far more money than sense and if she wanted a van she could have a van. I hoped that my trip to and from the hospital would be the last time I ever stepped foot in it (but I had to admit that the sliding side door and the roomy interior made it far easier for my ingress and egress).

Sean and his advanced team were still handling Liz’s personal security. Sean drove the van with Mom beside him in the passenger seat. Liz and I sat in the chairs in the second row. The one I sat in had even been modified so the seatbelt posed no issue. I wondered how much that had cost and then said nothing about it at all.

We made it all the way to Liz’s front gate before things got silly.

“Jesus Christ,” Liz muttered when Sean slowed to a stop behind the lead vehicle. There were perhaps a hundred people standing along the road with handmade signs wishing me everything from good luck to a speedy recovery.

“Have they been there all week?” I asked.

“No, thank God,” Liz said. She shook her head and pulled out her phone. I waved to the people that had nothing better to do on a Monday morning than stake out Liz’s house – since many of them were young, attractive and female.

“Can you meet us at the hospital?” Liz asked an unknown (to me at least; I assume Liz knew who she called) person on the other end. “Good.”

Liz didn’t wave to anybody. She just listened and scowled.

“This is ridiculous,” she grumbled into the phone. She listened and shook her head. “No. We did not mention this to anybody. It had to come from there. I’m sick of this and I want it stopped.”

That was the last word she spoke. She ended the call with a touch of her finger.

“Problems?” I asked.

Liz gave me a look of incredulity and gestured to the people still clogging the roadway.

“You get this all the time,” I said, figuring that with school out for the summer that people came to see where she lived.

“If I got this all the time, I’d have a hunting rifle at the house,” Liz said. “I live where I live so I can have a little bit of time away from this. This is all for you.”

I think my mother understood Liz’s unhappiness far better than I did. She turned around in the seat.

“Somebody at the hospital has been giving the media every morsel of information about you,” Mom explained. “I expressly told an administrator that I wanted no public release about your condition, your prognosis or even your presence. And yet the news would get out sometimes before Liz or I could be told. It was a constant problem.”

“I thought I put an end to it,” Liz said. “I ... I had your phone. OK?”

“OK,” I said, shrugging the best as I could.

“I had your professor’s number,” she amended. “I asked him to have somebody investigate who might be providing information. He found three likely sources: A nurse whose brother works at the newspaper; a med student that is dating a blogger; a security guard that was fired from a previous job for doing something similar. The med student got sent to another hospital; the nurse got pulled aside, reminded of patient confidentiality laws and moved off the ICU floor; the security guard was through an agency so they sent him someplace else.”

“I figure this was out before all of that,” I noted. I, perhaps better than anybody in the van, understood how the information cycle worked. You kept the information close the vest and fed the media only tidbits to keep the payday going as long as you could.

“It wasn’t,” Mom said. “Yes, the doctors knew. Liz and her people knew. We kept it from everybody else. The hospital gave you a pseudonym to schedule your appointments. You’re Steve Nixon.”

“He’s a baseball umpire,” I said. “He’s known as the ‘Singing Cowboy’ because he has a couple of country music albums out.”

“What?” Liz asked.

“The name you gave me,” I said. “It belongs to an actual guy that probably lives in Nashville when he’s not calling Major League Baseball games. Anybody that’s a fan of both is going to know who he is. He’s probably in Seattle or Tampa right now. It wouldn’t be hard to put it together with me.”

“It was just a name,” Liz said. “We didn’t choose it specifically for you.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, although I didn’t understand why everybody was so angry. Once again my mother gave me the answer without me having to ask.

“The problem was that most of what they said was ... incomplete,” Mom told me. “Nobody had the whole picture – not even us. That’s why we’re headed back to the hospital – to get answers to some of the questions that still remain. The fact the media didn’t have all the facts didn’t keep a lot of people from speculating. They filled in the blanks and – because of their audience – they pandered to the worst-case scenario. There were stories that you ... had died. There are stories that you were in an irreversible coma. There were stories that you had suffered traumatic brain injury. I’m not talking about rinky-dink web sites. Major news organizations were caught up in the sensationalism.”

I looked over at Liz.

“It’s why we’ve kept you away from TV and the Internet,” she said. “I didn’t want you to ... see any of that bullshit. It died down a little bit when you left the hospital under your own power but now it’ll be just the same. I promise you: I will find who is leaking things and I will crucify them in public.”

I nodded slightly. A thought hit my brain but I let it go for a moment.

“It just seems like ... a little much,” I said.

“If the situations were reversed and it was me ... you’d tear the hospital to the ground with your bare hands,” Liz said.

“Well, yeah,” I agreed. “I meant that ... it’s me. It’s not you. This is the sort of reaction a celebrity gets.”

I caught Sean’s glance in the mirror and I wondered if my first thought had been accurate.

“Uh, I don’t mean to intrude but ... you are a celebrity now,” he said.

Liz nodded gravely when I glanced in her direction.

“The visuals were pretty compelling,” Sean continued. “In a digital age ... having a video of exactly what you did ... it made you into...”

He fell silent for a minute.

“It let everybody see you like the people that know you see you,” he finished. “Right now ... you’re the guy every father hopes his daughter brings home one day.”

“And the daughters think that’s a fine idea, too,” Liz added with a slight frown.

“Your life has been ... dissected,” Mom said, shaking her head. “You know that some segments of the media love to tear people down. Oh, they tried. The most damning thing anybody could find was that your grades in college weren’t the best.”

“I did OK in college,” I lied. I hadn’t done OK. I had done just enough to remain eligible to play baseball.

“You did fine,” Liz said. “But your GPA at Texas was a point lower than your high school GPA.”

“And you weren’t exactly taking astrophysics,” Mom noted.

“UCSD and Texas are both claiming you as an alumnus,” Sean said, laughing slightly.

“The reckless driving thing got a little bit of play, too,” Mom said.

“I was 22 years old and dumb as shit,” I muttered.

“Well, yeah,” Mom said, smiling at me. “There is a guy on one of the stations that really harped on it. Then somebody released that he was busted for DUI when he was in his 20s. He shut up pretty quickly. It’s the old glass houses and stones thing. But the point isn’t what you did or didn’t do. It’s that you’ve become a pretty big media darling right now.”

“You were always popular with ... my fans, I guess,” Liz noted. “And a lot of people knew who you were even before everything happened. Now ... unless somebody has been in an igloo in Antarctica, they know who you are.”

I wondered how much my increase in visibility had bothered Liz. I knew how much she valued her fame. And I knew her ego was pretty inflated sometimes. It crossed my mind that her insistence that I step away from my job as her spokesman might be predicated on making me invisible again so we didn’t have to compete for the spotlight.

“It’ll pass,” I said. “My fifteen minutes are almost up. I promise you that.”

“Probably not,” Liz said. “You’re telegenic and you’re fun. You already had a pretty big cult following even before this. Add in that we’re together and I’m not sure it’s going to go away quickly – or even ever.”

“It will,” I said, nodding. “I’m not going to be vying for attention. I’m not going to be showing up on reality TV shows or news programs unless it’s to talk about your career. People will get tired of hearing me tell them no and go away.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell them no,” Liz said.

Her reply confused me slightly.

“It’ll give people a chance to know you outside of me,” she continued.

“I don’t want to be known outside of you,” I answered. “I’m perfectly happy being your boyfriend and your employee.”

“Are you?” Liz asked, turning in the seat to face me. “Sarah and I had a talk about ... you.”

I shook my head quickly and felt a sting when I jostled my arm against the back of the seat.

“That’s what I thought I wanted,” I cut in. “Turns out that I was wrong. I was defensive when I was talking to Sarah. I’m sure you recall the context. That’s when she was ... trying to talk me out of dating you.”

“I know when it happened,” Liz said. “And she wasn’t trying to talk you out of anything. She was making sure you understood the situation. There is a difference.”

“I suppose,” I said. “My point is that I’m not interested in courting fame. I’m happy to be beside you as you conquer the world. I don’t need to be leading the charge.”

The only problem with the van that I could see was the distance between the seats. I had to reach across to put my hand on Liz’s arm.

“It’s OK if you do,” she told me as she squeezed my hand. “We’re going to be OK either way.”

Liz’s buzzing cell phone brought our conversation to a halt. She looked at the screen and answered.

“We haven’t made it there yet so I don’t have any answers,” she said. She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “Let me put you on speaker.”

“Hey, Travis,” I heard Ryan say through Liz’s phone.

“Hey,” I said. I had just seen him the day before. He was getting along pretty well – as were Dom and Brian.

“Hey, Mrs. Blakely,” he added. My mom offered a greeting before Liz cut in.

“Tell them what you told me,” she said.

“The hospital is an absolute zoo,” he announced. “There must be a thousand people waiting outside. The news vans are there. We could barely get through the entrance.”

“Shit,” I mumbled.

“What are you doing at the hospital?” Liz asked.

“My wife works here,” Ryan answered. “I thought I’d like to visit her and take her to lunch later.”

“It’s barely after nine,” Liz noted.

“I haven’t seen her much,” Ryan replied.

“Uh-huh,” Liz said. “And let me guess: Dom and Skye and Jill and Brian are going to lunch with you so they tagged along.”

“Are you a psychic?” Ryan inquired.

Liz let out a long breath.

“We wanted to offer our moral support,” Ryan said.

“Or immoral support in Jill’s case,” I said, trying to lighten the conversation.

“That, too,” Ryan said, laughing along. My mom shook her head but Sean and Liz were still stone faced. “She said something about having to restock her supply of yoga pants to help with your rehab.”

The van was silent for a moment.

“I didn’t want you walking into something,” Ryan said.

I saw Liz set her jaw in frustration and anger. She wasn’t dressed for a media outing. She had worn an old pair of loose jeans (her Mom Jeans, she called them, though not in front of my mother), a plain blue T-shirt and tennis shoes. She hadn’t styled her hair. She wasn’t carrying a clutch purse that had cost $4,000. Her entire outfit probably hadn’t cost $150. The celebrity watchers would eat her alive.