Chapter 25 – Mila Out

Just outside Ohio – Friday, October 3, 2014

Lance was jostled from his relaxing conversation with Justin in the lounge area of the bus when he felt a hand grab a thick chunk of his hair, pulling upward.

“You're coming with me,” Adeline said.

He winced as she pulled hard enough to lift him up and out of the seat, as Justin only watched.

“Yow, okay coming...Justin, I'll be...OW!...I'll be back.”

Justin, seemingly unaffected, watched as Adeline pulled Lance out of the lounge and to the front area of the bus, closing the door behind them.

Lance rubbed his sore scalp as he followed his wife to the kitchenette until she stopped and turned to him, crossing her arms across her chest.

“You needed something, sweetheart?” he said sweetly, trying to cover up his sarcasm.

“Get rid of her,” she simply said.

“Done and done,” he said, “except I'm going to need a few more details. You know, like, a name.”

“I'm serious,” she said. “Get rid of her or I will. I will kill her.”

“Usually when you threaten homicide, I go to Stephanie first,” he said. “But you and Steph have been thick as thieves lately, so I don't know who you're talking about.”

“Mila.”

All at once, he was not at all surprised.

“I will kill her. I will stab her, claw out her eyes with a back scratcher, dump her body on the side of the road somewhere in backwoods Ohio, and you will never see her pretty little face again, Lance,” she said.

“Well, baby, it sounds like you have a solid plan, so why do you need me?” he asked.

She put her hand to her rounded stomach, already getting in her way at five months.

“Do you want your daughter born in a jail?” she asked.

He sighed. The feud between Adeline, Stephanie, and Mila had been going on for the past two weeks at least, ever since Mila had come on tour with them. No one knew exactly why she was there, only that she was there because Chris wanted her there, but nobody was stupid enough to question why as long as Chris was getting by and the show was going on.

“Okay, what do you want me to do?” he asked. “Seriously. Tell me what to do about it.”

“Get rid of her,” she said. “Get her off this bus.”

“There's no room on the other bus,” he said. “Besides, Stephanie is on the other bus and as much as you make threats, she really will kill Mila.”

“Great, move her to the other bus then,” Adeline said.

“Adeline,” he said, chastising. “I'm sorry you don't get along with Mila. There's only two months left on the tour, and there's a distinct possibility that Mila won't even last another two days. Can't you manage?”

“There's a distinct possibility that in those two days, something will happen to you, and it will be much worse than the guys screwing with your shampoo and dyeing your hair blue.”

“I love you too, honey!” he called out as she stormed away angrily. He sighed as she went into their small bedroom area, slamming the door behind her.

“Hello, hormones.”

Lance turned, not noticing that Justin had walked into the kitchenette.

“She scares me,” Lance said. “Don't get me wrong, I love her, but she's scaring the crap out of me. Somebody will leave this tour in a body bag, and J – I'm not sure at this point whether it will be Mila or me.”

“She has a point, though,” Justin said, grabbing a soda out of the fridge. “Man, I did Friends With Benefits with that girl and she was not like that. She was sweet and funny. I don't know who this she-devil that replaced Mila is.”

“I know,” Lance said, frustrated. “But Chris is never going to go for throwing her out.”

The two of them slid into the kitchen table together, Justin bringing Lance a soda.

“Think of how he would feel,” Lance continued. “First the love of his life disappears in the middle of the night and never comes back, then we throw the only girl he's taken an interest in since Melissa off the tour bus because we don't like her. Meanwhile, all four of us have our wives or girlfriends and families on tour with us either all the time or part of the time.”

Justin nodded. “He's surrounded by happy couples twenty-four-seven and when he finds someone who makes him half as happy, we tell him he can't have it and tell her to hit the road.”

“Yeah,” Lance said. “Exactly.”

“You don't think he's dating her, do you?” Justin asked, his nose scrunching in disapproval.

“God, I hope not,” Lance responded.

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Adeline sighed after slamming the door, not even caring that Liam was asleep in the pop-up crib in the room and she could wake him. She waited a moment with bated breath, hoping not to hear a small body stir or start crying, and after several seconds of not hearing things, she released it and walked over to the bed, plopping onto it.

She was instantly regretting blowing up on Lance; after all, she was hormonal and upset and it wasn't his fault. But she couldn't help it; it was Mila's fault. Damn Mila. She had put up with this for the past two weeks, and it wasn't getting any better. If none of them did anything, it wouldn't get better.

She reached over to the small table by her side and grabbed the iPhone from the top of a stack of books she was currently reading. Her current wallpaper, the boys' Rolling Stones “Glitter Factory” photo from so many years ago, popped up quickly when she swiped her finger across the screen.

She dialed the number she knew by heart now and put the phone up to her ear, and it only rang a couple of times before it picked up.

“Whatever he did,” Stephanie answered, “stuff him at the bottom of the pile of his laundry and leave him there. I'll take care of it in the morning.”

“Why do you assume it's a 'he'?” Adeline asked.

“Christ,” Stephanie said. “What'd she do now?”

Adeline groaned. “What hasn't she done? She's filthy to live with. She leaves half-empty bottles of sparkling water all over the place and never picks them up or throws them away. Speaking of sparkling water, that's all she will drink. No soda, she's watching her figure. No coffee, the caffeine makes her jittery. No tap water – 'it has germs'.”

“She's a germ.”

“She's more than a germ, she's a virus,” Addy said, standing up to pace around the room. “She's physically painful, unpleasant to live with, she's killing me, and I can't get rid of her no matter what I do.”

“I'm surprised she hasn't made you her live-in maid by now,” Stephanie said.

“Oh, but she has,” Adeline responded. “She has absolutely no concept of what living life on a tour bus is like. This morning she wanted me to make her a frittata. She was absolutely dumbfounded when I told her that a moving tour bus has no eggs, no cooking pans, and most of all, no stove to cook on.”

“Her first clue wasn't the amount of take-out wrappers and drink cups laying around?”

“She's too busy bitching to notice things like that. I keep hoping that because she's watching her calorie intake, she'll refuse to eat McDonald's and Taco Bell every morning, noon, and night and eventually, she'll starve herself to death. Unfortunately, it's taking way too long.”

“Should we talk to Chris?”

Adeline sighed.

“No,” she said. As much as she hated Mila, she knew Lance was right; telling Chris that Mila was unanimously voted off their little 'island' would break his heart all over again. “We can't kick her off the tour; it'd hurt Chris too much. I'm not adverse to sprinkling a little insulation underneath her bed sheets, though, and watching her scratch herself to insanity.”

“She wouldn't have far to scratch,” Stephanie said. “Forget Chris; what about you? You know what the doctor said, sweetie – even though your pregnancy with Liam was okay, you're still a high-risk category because of your hypertension. You have to relax and keep your stress levels down.”

Adeline stood by the small window and peeked out to the road and scenery whipping by them at sixty-five miles per hour. As if she needed to be reminded; she was allowed to go on tour with the boys still with careful monitoring, but she wasn't allowed the extra stress of continuing as their psuedo tour manager and Johnny's assistant. She had to resign, and fortunately Stephanie was available to take over.

“Don't worry about me,” she said. “Worry about Mila's safety if she continues to bunk on this bus.”

“Well I'd do that, but frankly honey, I don't care what happens to her as long as you clean up after yourself.”

“We have to get her out of here somehow without hurting Chris,” Addy said. “But how do we do that?”

“We run her out.”

Addy could almost hear the smile across Stephanie's face, even though they were in completely separate buses.

“Run her out?” she asked. “How do you suggest we do that when she's doing her best to run us out?”

“Take a page from her book,” Stephanie said. “Do anything we can to piss her off. No holds barred, all-out bitchiness.”

“No, that won't work, she outranks us by leaps and bounds,” Addy said, still staring out the window. “What we need is to get Chris on our side, to want her out as much as we--”

Addy stopped, a tiny smile coming to her face. She had no idea where the idea came from, but it was the perfect plan.

“We get Mel.”

“Excuse me?” Stephanie said. “I don't think I heard you right.”

“Mel,” Addy said. “We bring Mel back here. Mel in, Mila out.”

“Oh, okay, now I understand,” Stephanie said sarcastically. “My plan was too difficult. This one's much easier. We just find a needle in a haystack, a needle that doesn't want to be found, and drag the needle back to the tour. Perfect plan, Ad.”

Addy smiled. “Just listen, I've got an idea...”

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In the quiet of the night, in the silence of the hotel room in Cincinnati, Lance laid against his bed working on his laptop. The only sounds he could hear were the rhythmic tapping of his fingers against the keys, the quiet hum of the air conditioner, and the almost-silent but yet present sound of traffic down in the streets below.

He paused a moment from typing to shut his eyes as the backlit screen started to make his eyes hurt, taking off the reading glasses he used when his eyes were especially tired and rubbing them with his fingers. He closed the temple pieces in on themselves, setting them on the table by his side of the bed.

“Liquid energy.”

He looked up to see Adeline holding two cups of coffee, one toward him.

“Oh, I didn't even hear you come in,” he said softly. It had taken far too long to get Liam down for bed, and he didn't want to do it all over again.

“You usually don't when you're working this hard,” she said.

She came to sit down in bed next to him, handing him the disposable coffee cup.

“Tired?” she asked.

“Exhausted,” he responded. “I forgot what this life is like. The last few months of a tour is insanity – you're tired, you're sore, you're busy every day in rehearsals and sound checks and performances and traveling, but your work never ends because in a few weeks you have a life to go back to, and you have to have work lined up.”

“I forgot,” she said. “You pretty much never take a break. Even when it looks like you aren't working, you're working.”

“I now understand where Chris is coming from,” he said. “I'm too old for this shit.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder, watching him as he typed.

“I have something to ask you,” she finally said. “Actually, an...idea to run by you.”

He stopped typing again, looking at her with a side eye. “For some reason, I don't like the sound of that.”

“I need a thousand dollars.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Not that I'm adverse to giving you money,” he said, “but what the hell for?”

“I have a plan to get Mel back,” she said. “All this time we've been waiting for her to come to us, but she hasn't – because she can't. She's stuck with an abusive man, working a job as a waitress. He probably doesn't give her money, in fact he probably makes sure she doesn't have access to any of the money so he knows she can't go anywhere.”

“So you want to send her money?”

“Too much risk of him finding out and making sure she doesn't get it,” she said. “Someone will have to go to her.”

“And that someone would be...”

“Me,” she said.

“Mmm-hmm,” he said, nodding his head. “And you propose to do this...how, Addy? Honey, I know your heart is in the right place, but you've already driven all the way to Arkansas once before to try to find her, and you never succeeded. That was several months ago. You're pregnant now. You can't drive over 500 miles out of your way to go on another wild goose chase.”

“That's why Stephanie will drive,” she said. “She can take a couple of days off from the tour without everything going haywire. This time, it will be an in-and-out thing, we'll just drive there, find her, give her the money, and leave. It'll be two, three days max.”

He sighed, tired and worn. He rubbed his hand over his tired eyes again, then against his neck.

“It's two in the morning, and you're going to outwit me anyway, aren't you?” he asked.

She chuckled.

“Addy, your heart is too good...” He reached for his wallet, extending it to her. “...and unfortunately, I love you for it.”

She smiled as she took the wallet from his hand.

“I don't keep that kind of cash on me,” he said. “You'll have to go to the ATM in the morning.”

“We're renting a car and leaving tomorrow,” she said. “And we're taking Liam along with us, so you won't have to worry about him.”

“Yeah, it's not him I'm all that worried about,” Lance said under his breath.