It was six in the morning when I was awakened by my cell phone buzzing on the nightstand. I groaned. Lauren pulled the blanket up over her ear to block the sound out. “Fucking phone,” I groaned louder.
“Make it shut up,” Lauren whined.
I swatted my hand at it ‘til I managed to wrap my fingers around it. It was Jack, my PR agent. “Jack,” I mumbled at the phone without actually answering, simply sending it to mute with a swipe of my thumb.
“Why is Jack calling you at this ungodly hour?” Lauren whimpered against my chest.
“Because he’s a minion of Satan,” I murmured back, and I closed my eyes, letting the phone drop onto the pillow beside me and feeling myself start to fall back to sleep. I was just about there when it started buzzing again.
“No,” Lauren whined, “No.”
I muted the phone again.
We layed there in silence for a few moments. And then it started again.
Lauren sat up and grabbed the phone from my pillow. “Do you know what time it is?” she hissed in a voice that would’ve stopped me from challenging her if I was on the other end of the line. She was quiet a second then she shoved the phone at me, “He says it’s an emergency,” she said. She groaned and rolled out of the bed, walking into the bathroom and closing the door.
I raised the phone to my ear. “This better be good.”
“Nick,” Jack said, “How do you not know why I’m calling already?”
“It’s called sleep, Jack,” I said, “You should try it some time.”
“Can I assume your lack of knowledge of what I’m speaking of means it’s not real?” Jack asked haughtily.
“Uh… sure,” I answered, confused and groggy, “Whatever will make you hang up faster.”
Jack took a deep breath, “Do you know who Ethan Paulson is, Nick?”
I rubbed my eyes, “Uh… yeah. Kinda. He’s this kid I’ve been kinda helping out while his dad’s in re--”
“Fuck. So it is real.” Jack’s voice was defeated. “God damn it. Nick. You have to tell me this stuff, you can’t go having secret lives off the clock and expect it not to come back to me. Who’s the mother? Does Lauren know? Maybe we could spin this into a second season of I Heart Nick Carter somehow --”
“What?” I sat up. “What’re you talking about? Ethan’s just some kid from around town I’ve been helping out.”
“He isn’t your kid?” Jack asked.
“No! He’s like fifteen --”
“You were old enough to have kids in 1999,” Jack said pointedly, “And if I’m not mistaken you were boinking anything that had two legs and a set of breasts back then, so I’m sorry if I questioned the validity of the rumor.”
“What rumor?” I asked. I would’ve defended myself against the accusation but -- yeah, kinda, he was right there. Just not about the Ethan being mine part.
Jack took a deep breath, “There’s a rumor going around the kid is yours,” he answered, “That he’s the product of a quickie backstage with a groupie back in the late 90’s. They’re saying your baby mama caused a ruckus between you and Lauren and that’s what was with the sharp no on the radio in Tennessee was when they asked you if you were trying to have kids.”
I stared at my knees, unable to process everything he was saying. “But how’d anybody even find out about Ethan?” I asked.
Another deep breath from Jack and I knew, beyond a doubt, that I wasn’t going to like the answer at all. “Well, apparently somebody saw you springing him out of a mall security office yesterday after he was caught shoplifting in a Macy’s. TMZ has footage and everything.”
“How in fuck --”
“I don’t know how, Nick, I just know that they do. So I need the details right now. Who is this kid, why’s he with you, what’s the deal with the shoplifting, and what’re we doing to fix this? ‘Cos right now, you come off looking like a complete asshole. There’s got to be a way to spin this out to the positive. Just tell me everything.”
After I’d told Jack everything, we hung up so he could go work his PR magic and I held my forehead in my hands and growled in frustration. I wished I’d never picked that kid up from the sidewalk that night… or even if we’d just let the little bastard walk back to his freakin’ grain mill and never run after him in the woods… this wouldn’t be happening to me. I looked over at Lauren to complain about juju and what a fat lot of good it’d done us, and that’s when I realized she’d never come back from the bathroom.
I got up and went over to the door and knocked. It wasn’t shut all the way so when I rapped on it, the door started to swing open, just as Lauren yelled, “I’ll be out in a minute!” She was sitting on the toilet seat, the lid closed, staring at the sink. On the sink counter was a pregnancy test stick.
I stared from her to the sink.
She looked up at me, “I said I’d be out in a minute!” she said anxiously.
“The door was open,” I breathed.
She bit her lip.
“What’d it say?”
“Hasn’t yet,” she answered. “What’d Jack say?”
“The internet thinks Ethan’s my shoplifting lovechild from 1999.”
Lauren took a deep breath, “God bless the internet. They never get anything right.” She turned back to the pee stick. She looked positively terrified.
“How long?” I asked.
“However long you were talking to Jack, give or take a second or two to open the box and actually take the pee on it,” she answered with a shrug.
I rubbed my hands together. “After everything yesterday… do you still want a kid with me?” I asked her, “Considering I’m officially the worst parent ever according to both my supposed lovechild and what Jack made sound like the entire internet?”
“The internet is stupid and Ethan doesn’t think you’re the worst parent ever, you aren’t even his parent,” Lauren answered, “You just had a really bad miscommunication is all.”
“He said he wouldn’t want me to be his father if I was the last father on the planet,” I told her.
“He didn’t mean it, I’m sure, it was just the heat of the moment.”
I shrugged.
“Nick, Ethan just wanted someone to stand up for him and to believe in him. That’s all.” Lauren looked up at me, “He needed somebody who was going to protect him. He was let down.” She shook her head, “That’s all those words were. They were disappointment lashing out in the only way that he knew how to do.”
I looked down at my feet, “But shouldn’t my natural instinct be to protect my kid?” I asked, “Not get angry at them? I said the worst thing I could possibly say to anybody in the whole world to him.”
“Did you mean it?” Lauren asked.
I thought about it. “Yeah,” I answered. “I did… because if he does keep stealing and all that, eventually he will be like his father. He’ll be like my father, like hundreds of fathers who just waste their lives away drinking and regretting. He’d be like me that way. He could do so much with himself --”
“You’ve done so much, Nick,” Lauren interjected. “Just think about all the plaques on the wall out there. All the awards on the shelves downstairs. You’ve done a lot.”
“But I mean like, I could be smarter and I could have better patience and be less apt to blow my temper and I could be a better man most of the times,” I said. “That’s the stuff I regret. And it’s the stuff he’s got a real potential for if he doesn’t end up throwing it all out. He needs to get it together and go back to school and learn and become something great.” I shook my head. “I don’t want him to become like Otis and be livin’ in an RV as though it’s a home. It’s not a home. I want better for him than he’s giving himself.”
“Because you care about him,” Lauren supplemented.
I nodded.
“That’s all he wanted,” she said. “That’s all anyone wants, really. To be cared about.”
My throat burned.
“And that’s all it really takes to be a good parent, Nick,” Lauren added, “Caring about someone.” She was quiet for a moment.
In the other room, my phone started vibing loudly on the nightstand.
“Are you gonna get that?” she asked.
“It’s probably just Jack, it can wait.”
Lauren shook her head, “No it’s okay. You go answer that and I’ll let you know about… this.”
I hesitated. “Okay,” I said, and with that I went back to the bedroom and picked up the phone again. “This better be good, Jack,” I said without even looking at the call ID.
“Comin’ back to bite, is he now?” Jordan’s drawl filled my ear. “I just can’t help but wonder why you didn’t call me before now. I just saw the news. You seen it right?”
I sighed, “Jordan. Hi. Yeah, my publicist called already.”
“His job’s gonna be a bitch today,” he laughed. “So - how’s it goin’ with the kid?”
I looked back at the bathroom door longingly. I wanted to hear a shout of jubilation from in there. A whee-hee of excitement, a yahooey of joy. Something. Anything. But it was silent. “He went back to live with his dad,” I replied.
“The rehab guy?” Jordan asked.
“Yeah, he got out, got an RV. Ethan decided he wanted to go live with him instead of me and Lauren after I got pissed about -- something,” I said.
“The shoplifting,” Jordan supplied.
“Yeah,” I replied. “That.” I rubbed my forehead. Was there anything the Internet hadn’t told the world about the incident? I wondered.
“Probably for the best in the run of it,” Jordan said. “I know it blows right now, considering how hard y’all been tryin’ for a kid and all and it seemed like this one just kinda fell on your lap out of the blue or whatever, but really it’s a good thing. He sounds like he was trouble. Could’ve been some kind of con artist or somethin’,” he added.
I shook my head, “No, he just was a kid that needed someone to care about him” I paused, chewing my lower lip. I ran my hand across the top of the dresser as I walked around the room, pacing, staring back at the bathroom door, waiting for something from within. As though on cue, the door opened. “Look. Jordan, I gotta go.”
Before he could say a word, I hung up. I looked at Lauren.
She avoided my gaze.
“Laur?” I asked.
She took a deep breath, “I’m going to call Dr. Walden and get an appointment,” was all she said.
I dropped my phone onto the bed, disappointed. There’d been something in the air just then, when I’d walked in on the test, when she’d said all those words about caring being all it takes to be a good parent and all that… I’d really thought that would be it. That the universe would’ve given in at that moment if she was ever going to at all.
I was about to say something - something to cheer her up, to make it better - when my phone vibed again on the bed. I looked down. Now it really was Jack. “Babe,” I said, my voice sad, “I --”
“It’s okay. Take care of the PR mess and I’ll take care of this,” she answered, interrupting me. Without another word, Lauren grabbed her own phone and went back into the bathroom, closing the door firmly behind her this time.
Jack had me doing a shit ton of damage control over the next several hours. Lauren emerged from the bathroom and said she had an appointment at Vanderbilt with a local OB-GYN that Dr. Walden had recommended and no, she said, she didn’t need me to go. She left me at the house with the dogs to do the plethora of interviews that Jack had set up to try to undo all the Internet drama that had followed whoever it was leaking the information about Ethan.
I faced question after question about whether I felt like I was a bad parent for allowing this to happen. My stomach turned as time after time I reminded them that I wasn’t a parent at all. Each time the words stung, Ethan’s words echoing in my head, and the failure that was all of my attempts to become a parent glaring in my memory.
TMZ, E News, MTV, Yahoo, People Magazine, a handful of radio stations… one right after another, repeating the same stuff, hearing the same rumors, feeling the same shitty feelings over and over and over.
Even my mother had to get into the act via her Facebook page...
Nick is a father???? God bless the child. I always feared this would be truth one day because of all the women Nick was with in the 90s!!! I told him many times that he needed to be safer about sex but I wasn’t welcome on the tours with the Backstreet Boys after Nick turned 18 and I wasn’t there to protect him anymore. But this is terrible news!!! Nick can’t even love the family he has, how can he love another person as unselfishly as a parent must love a child???? I am just praying to every deity there is that this is a MISTAKE and also if it is not that my grandson will come to me if he needs anything that Nick and his wife can’t provide. GRAMMA will ALWAYS have OPEN ARMS FOR YOU.
I was to the point of not being able to handle one more thing when my phone went off yet again.
I closed my eyes.
“Now what?” I murmured by way of answering, assuming it was Jack on the other end. I fully expected him to launch into a tale of some new gorey details about what the Internet was saying now… but I was greeted by a strange sound instead. My brows creased together. “Hello?”
On the other end, there was a crashing sound.
“Hello?” I pulled the phone away from my ear to see who it was. It was an unknown caller from a local number. I pressed the phone to my ear once again. “Hello?” I tried again, listening closely to the noises, sounds I couldn’t quite distinguish.
I was about to hang up, assume it was a wrong number, a prank call, a pocket call, a fan who’d obtained my number God knows what way…
Then… clear as day…
“Nick, help me! Please!”
“Ethan?”
In response, the line went dead.
