that beneath all that auburn-haired glamor was a messy patchwork of scars, despair and addiction. Mina had already been discarded by three husbands who were glad enough to open up their checkbooks and purchase their freedom.
Shortly after I was swept into her care we left the country. We didn’t return for over a decade.
Those years were pretty good for me; a sequence of posh boarding schools and fantastic adventures throughout old Europe. Americans always seemed to be everywhere so it was easy to believe we were in some floating version of our homeland.
Believe it or not, failed politicians, woeful ex-movie stars and a packs of disgraced corporate elites tend to run amok in international lands. Think of it as a contemporary version of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.
Still, I remain grateful to Mina for paying attention to my education, even though she seemed to forget my existence for large swaths of time. Whether she’d stashed me in the picturesque Alps or deep in the fabled moors of Yorkshire, I could always count on her to eventually show up in a perfumed cloud and rediscover her motherhood.
I remember being happy to see her. Happy, even though I knew I’d be yanked from yet another cozy situation and taken on a frenetic holiday until Mina found a different cure for her loneliness. Then she would deposit me in another luxurious setting thickly populated with more American castoff kids.
Mina was a hell of a parent when she made the effort. After all, it was Mina who showed me the Ufizzi and the Louvre, Mina who photographed me standing proudly in front of the Colosseum, and Mina who arranged for a tour of the caves of France’s Dordogne region when I mentioned learning all about the Lascaux cave in school.
She didn’t talk about her family, the Savages. Movie stars and sad stories. All I ever knew of them were the things I had read. The fact that I had aunts, uncles and cousins seemed irrelevant. It didn’t occur to me to want to be around them. In fact I didn’t give them much thought at all until Mina, bedraggled and exhausted from another heartbreak, dragged me out of a converted castle in the Scottish Highlands and announced we were going ‘home’.
I can remember objecting, sputtering something like “Shit, now? Really? I’ll be a senior.”
But when Mina got an idea into her head – adopting a kid, marrying a sheik, dragging a teenager back to the Home of the Brave – there was no getting rid of it.
I found myself riding over an ocean in the private plane belonging to one of Mina’s old friends as I moodily destroyed tins of caviar and pouted about the fact that I’d been this fucking close to porking the new girl in school, a Russian beauty distantly related to some royal family that’d been shot a hundred years ago in Siberia.
Everything was different that time. But I didn’t realize it until Mina left me on her brother’s doorstep somewhere in the Arizona desert and then ducked back into the luxury Town Car for the ride to Scottsdale’s finest rehab facility.
Two months later I learned the hard way that Mina’s failures were much worse than I’d ever suspected.
“Oz?” calls Brock and he’s got the Concerned Friend grimace on his face again.
I realize that I’ve been nervously clicking a pen while my thoughts strayed. I haven’t spent too much time thinking about Mina over the past five years. She was a fickle woman with her own set of demons. There’s not much point in trying to understand her now.
“I need to get on the road.” I reluctantly set the pen down on Brock’s desk.
If I push it I can reach western Arizona in two days. Surely they’re all there already. Surely she’s there already. Gary had assured me she would be, even though I hadn’t asked, not specifically, not about her. Like I said, Gary must know a few things already. He wouldn’t have called me in the first place if he didn’t.
After bending down and giving Brock an awkward man-hug in his wheelchair, I notice that he’s staring at me with a worried frown.
“You remember who you are, Oz-man” he says, nodding. “Don’t let them edit you into something else.”
“I will. And I won’t.”
Flimsy promises. I don’t give a god almighty fuck what they do with the footage. They could cast me as King Kong With Testicular Scabies and it would bother me as much as a paper cut.
There’s only one