Danielle Steel - The Ranch

“Don't you think you could come, Zoe? Maybe just for a weekend?”

“I wish I could. I don't have anyone working with me right now. I'd have to leave a call group covering me, and my patients really hate it. Most of them are so sick they want to know I'm going to be here.”

“Don't you ever take time off?” Tanya said in amazement, not that she took much time off either. But what she did was a lot less rigorous than caring for dying patients.

“Not very often,” Zoe confessed. “In fact,” she said apologetically, “I'd better get back to work now, or they're going to break my office door down and lynch me. I'll call you sometime. Don't let the assholes get you down, Tan. They're all lesser beings, and it's just not worth it.”

“I try to remember that most of the time, but they get you anyway. Somehow they always win, in this town anyway, or at least in this business,”

“You don't deserve that,” Zoe said in her gentle voice, and Tanya smiled broadly for the first time that morning.

“Thanks. Oh, I saw Mary Stuart the other day, by the way.”

“How is she?” Zoe sounded tense when she asked, but it was still the same old thing, and Tanya never paid any attention to it. She had continued to give each of them news of the other over the years, and she still had fantasies about getting them back together, like the old days.

“She's all right, more or less. Her son died last year, I don't think any of them have recovered. I think right now everything is still a little shaky.”

“Tell her I'm sorry,” Zoe said softly, and she was. “What did he die of? An accident?”

“I think so,” Tanya said vaguely, she didn't want to tell her it was a suicide. She knew how private and pained Mary Stuart felt about it. “He was at Princeton. He was twenty.”

“That's a shame.” She dealt with death so constantly, but she had never grown blasé about it. It was a defeat she still hated, and knew she would never accept with grace. Every time she lost a patient, she felt cheated.

“I know, you have to go… but think about Wyoming, if you can. It would be fun, wouldn't it?” It was a crazy dream, but it appealed to Tanya, and Zoe smiled at the thought. For her, it wasn't even a dream. She hadn't had a vacation in eleven years now. “Call me sometime.” She sounded wistful and lonely, and Zoe wished that she could reach out to her and hold her. It was odd to think that someone with so much could be so vulnerable and unhappy. For those who didn't know her life, they would never have believed the beatings Tanya and people like her had taken, and the price Tanya's fame had cost her.

“I'll send pictures of Jade, I promise!” she said before she hung up, and as soon as she did, three nurses descended on her, complaining about the crowds in the waiting room, but the one who had taken the call looked at her with amazement.

“I couldn't believe that was really her. What's she like?” Everyone always asked, but it was such a dumb question.

“She's one of the nicest women I know, the most decent. She works like a dog, and she's so talented she doesn't even realize it. She deserves a much better shake than she's had in life. Maybe one day she'll get it,” Zoe said wisely, as she followed them out of her office, but the nurse who had taken the call couldn't understand what Zoe was saying.

“She's won Grammys, Academy awards, platinum records, they say she makes ten million dollars when she does a concert tour, and a million bucks a concert when she doesn't. What else is there?”

“A whole lot, Annalee, believe me. You and I have more in our lives than she does.” It was heartbreaking to think that she had to call a friend from college to find someone to go on vacation with. At least Zoe had her baby.

“I don't get it,” the nurse said, shaking her head, as Zoe disappeared into a treatment room. And in Los Angeles, Tanya sat staring at the photograph of Zoe in the paper. And then, just for the hell of it, she decided to call Mary Stuart.

“Hi there, guess who I just talked to five minutes ago?”

“The president,” Mary Stuart teased, happy to hear her voice again. Ever since she'd come through New York, she'd missed her.

“No. Zoe. She's running an AIDS clinic in San Francisco. There was a big article about it in this morning's L.A. Times, and she adopted a baby. She's almost two, her name is Jade, and she's half Korean.”

“That's sweet,” Mary Stuart said, trying to feel generous about her old friend, but even after more than twenty years, some of the old wounds still smarted. “I'm happy for her,” she said, and meant it. “It's so typical of her, isn't it? Adopting, I mean, and an Asian child. She really turned out to be just who she started out to be. And the AIDS clinic doesn't surprise me either. Is she married?”

“Nope. I guess she's smarter than we are. Has Bill left for London yet?”

“Yesterday.” She was suddenly silent then, as she thought about what she'd done the night before, and she knew Tanya would think she had done the right thing, although it had been very painful. “I put Todd's things away last night. I guess it was long overdue, but I just wasn't ready before this.”

“No one's keeping score,” Tanya said gently. “You do what you have to do to survive around here.” And then she told Mary Stuart about Nancy not letting her take the kids to Wyoming. She was bitterly disappointed about it, and Mary Stuart could hear it. She knew how much those children meant to her. In some ways, they had been the best part of her marriage.

“That's rotten,” she said with feeling.

“What isn't? I just agreed to pay half a million dollars to that blackmailer who sold his ass and mine to the tabloids.”

“God, that's awful. Why so much?”

“Because everyone's scared. My lawyers are terrified of juries. They figure they could never win a jury trial. The other side would make me look like a monster rolling in money. There's no way to portray anything good or wholesome to them. Celebrity equals slut, or at the very least a person who deserves to cough up large sums of money to those either less fortunate, less honest, or extremely lazy. They ought to put that definition in the dictionary,” she said, munching on a piece of toast, and Mary Stuart smiled. Tanya sounded upset, but not as devastated as she could have, considering everything that was happening to her. She could have been in bed with the covers over her head, and she wasn't. Tanya always had a lot of guts. Mary Stuart admired that about her. Whatever life did to her, she picked herself up, and went on her way again, dented, scratched, with broken corners here and there, but she was back on her feet, with a big smile, singing her heart out. “Have you heard from Bill since he left?” Tanya asked, thinking about what Mary Stuart had told her. She still found it remarkable that he didn't want his wife with him in London. And from what Mary Stuart said, she didn't even think he was cheating on her. He just didn't want her with him.

“Not yet. Alyssa called yesterday though. Our trip has been canceled.”

“It has?” Tanya sounded stunned. “What happened?”

“She got a better offer. With a boy in tow.” Mary Stuart smiled, but her voice sounded disappointed. “You can't beat that at her age.”

“Or mine either,” Tanya laughed, thinking about it. “So where does that leave you?”

“Pretty much beached, I guess, I'm trying to figure out what to do for the next two months. Bill and I talked about it again before he left, but he's adamant about not wanting me to come over. He thinks it would be ‘distracting.’ To tell you the truth, I was thinking of coming out to visit you for a few days, if you have time. I can stay at a hotel. New York is just so awful in July and August, and we didn't do anything about a summer house this year because we knew Bill would be gone all summer.”

“What about Wyoming?” Tanya's face lit up as she asked her. At least half the dream could come true. Even if Zoe couldn't come, she and Mary Stuart could go to Wyoming for two weeks and play cowgirls. “Would you come with me? I have a cabin on this great ranch. It's supposed to be the height of luxury, Western style, and I can't see myself going alone. I've got the time blocked out, and I was going to give it away to someone else today, my secretary probably, or someone I work with.”

Mary Stuart looked pensive, as she sat in her kitchen, thinking about it. “It sounds like fun. I don't have anything else to do. I'm not sure what a great rider I am anymore, although I'm certainly well padded.”

“Don't give me that, you're fifteen pounds underweight. But who cares if we never ride? Who'll know? We can stare at the mountains and drink coffee, or champagne, or chase wranglers,”

“Oh, great. Here come the tabloids. I'm not going anywhere with you if you're going to trash my reputation.” But Mary Stuart was laughing at her. She loved the idea of going to a ranch with Tanya. Before, when Tanya had mentioned it, she hadn't even thought about it, because she was going to Europe to meet Alyssa, and Tanya was going to Wyoming with Tony's children.

“I promise, I'll behave. Just come. I'd love it.” Tanya's eyes were shining as she said it. “Will you, Stu?”

Mary Stuart grinned when she heard her old college name. “I'd love it. When do we go?” She had the whole summer before her.

“Right after the Fourth. Go buy yourself some boots. I've still got my old ones.”

“I'll go shopping this afternoon. How do I get there?” She had so much to do, arrangements to make, cowboy boots to buy. All of a sudden she felt like a kid again, and the thought of spending two weeks with Tanya thrilled her. It was just what she needed.

“Why don't you come to L.A., and we'll ride my bus to Jackson Hole. We can do it in two days easy. We can sleep, eat, read, watch movies, whatever you want. My driver never even talks to me. You can do anything you want on the way to Wyoming.” She had a real rock-star bus, with two huge living rooms, hidden beds, a marble bathroom, and a full kitchen. It was perfect.

“I'll be there.”

“I'll pick you up at the airport.” Tanya gave her the dates, and Mary Stuart wrote them down carefully. This wasn't what she had expected to do by any means, but suddenly she realized that this was her ticket to freedom.

She sent Bill a fax as soon as she hung up, telling him that Alyssa had canceled their trip, and they would not be coming to London. Instead she and Tanya Thomas would be spending two weeks in Wyoming, and she promised to send him the details when she had them. She said that she hoped everything was going well, and that they were settling in at the hotel. She told him she'd be leaving for Los Angeles the following week, after the Fourth, and she'd fax him from there. She signed it love, but this time she didn't say that she missed him.

After she sent the fax to him, she picked up her handbag, and went out to buy cowboy boots at Billy Martin's.

And in California, Tanya was hopping around her kitchen like a kid, thinking about their trip. She and Mary Stuart were going to have a ball. She was in great spirits all day thinking about it, and that night at the benefit she looked spectacular in a black sequined dress that clung to her extraordinary figure, and everyone said her performance had never been better.

“You were hot!” Jean whispered as Tanya came off the stage, spent but pleased. It had been a great night, and the crowd had loved her. “You're the best!” There were curtain calls and encores, and people pressing around her everywhere. There were wild screams from the crowd, and flowers flung at her, and gifts pressed into her hands, and even someone's underwear flying through the air, but she dodged it. They adored her, and as the police whisked her away, she couldn't help thinking about the insanity of her life, the wild dichotomies of which celebrity was made, how passionately she was loved, how desperately she was hated.

The rest of Zoe Phillips's day, after Tanya called, went like all her days, it just flew by as she went diligently from patient to patient. Most of her patients were homosexual men, but in recent years, she was seeing more and more women and heterosexuals, who had contracted the disease either sexually, or with IV drugs, or transfusions. But the cases she hated most, and she had had many of them, were the children. It was like working in an underdeveloped country. She could offer them no cure, and there was so little she could do to help them. Sometimes only a gesture, a touch of the hand, a gift of time, a moment at their bedside before they died. She spent untold hours visiting her patients. She was tireless and had been for years, since the first cases were documented in the early eighties. In the years since, AIDS had become her nemesis, her obsession, and her passion. By the end of each day, she was drained of all energy and emotion. The only human being she could still think of offering anything to at all was her daughter. She tried to spend as much time as possible with her, she even went home for lunch sometimes, just to be with her. Early on she had brought her to work with her, and kept her in her office in a basket. But once Jade began to walk, it was all over. She was just getting ready to go home to her on the day Tanya called, when Sam Warner, her only relief doctor at the time, dropped by to see how things were going. He was a good doctor and a nice man. Zoe had known him for years professionally, and they had been good friends in medical school, when they'd gone to Stanford. They'd been inseparable for a while, and when they were young, Zoe had always suspected that Sam had a crush on her, but she'd been far too intent on her work to acknowledge it, and he'd never done anything about it. He moved to Chicago for his residency, and they had lost touch for a while, long enough for him to get married, and then divorced. And when he finally moved back to California, they eventually ran into each other again and resumed their old friendship. But it was nothing more than that now. They were buddies, and he loved doing relief work in her practice.