Kim Kowalski, meanwhile, had been going through her own legal quagmire as a result of that night. Her lawyer was not of the same caliber as Perceville Maywood, but he did have the benefit of Perceville's investigators' statements from the next door neighbor and the household staff. She was eventually offered a plea bargain in which she pled guilty to one count of resisting arrest and one count of battery on a peace officer. She was placed on one year of probation and given no jail time at all.
"A fuckin' happy ending," Matt said, raising a beer in the Flamingo Club for the first time since being arrested. "I love happy endings."
"So the tour is on?" Kim asked him, raising her Long Island Ice Tea in return.
"The tour is on," he said.
She nodded and finished her drink. They left early that night and spent two hours having sex in Matt's living room.
The next morning Jake, Helen, Nerdly, Sharon, and Pauline boarded a commercial airliner at LAX so they could fly to Heritage for Christmas with their families. This would be the first time that Helen and Sharon were introduced to their respective partner's parents and both of the women were a little nervous at the prospect.
"Nothing to be worried about," Jake told Helen as they cruised thirty-five thousand feet above the Central Valley. They were sitting in the first row of the first class section. "My parents are pretty normal people."
"Then what happened to you?" she asked him.
He chuckled, shaking his head a little. "Are we using derogatory humor to detract from our feelings of anxiety?" he asked.
"Are we imitating Nerdly?" she shot right back.
"Wow," he said. "I guess I was. Sometimes it creeps up on you unexpected."
They sat in silence for a few minutes, Jake staring out the window at the landscape below, Helen sipping from a cup of coffee.
"Do you think they'll like me?" Helen finally asked.
"They liked Mindy Snow," Jake told her. "And you're much nicer than she was."
This didn't seem to make her feel much better. It only seemed to shift her anxiety in a different direction. "You and Mindy... uh... broke up right before you went out on tour, didn't you?" she asked.
"Yeah," Jake said. "We did."
"And that other woman you were dating... that first one you told me about..."
"Angie," Jake said.
"Right. Angie. You broke up with her right before you went out on tour too, didn't you?"
"Well... there was never an official break up there," Jake said. "But... yeah. I never saw her again after we left on tour."
She nodded thoughtfully and took a small sip of her coffee. "Jake... this is probably not the time to bring this up, since it's Christmas and I'm going to meet your parents and all, but... well..."
"You're worried about what's going to become of us when I go out on tour."
"You have to admit, it's a valid worry. Your relationships don't tend to survive the experience."
"That's true," Jake said. "They don't."
"I know that we've been just sort of... you know... going along with this thing we have between us. And I know I told you back in the beginning, back in Omaha, that I was just in it for the sex and that I wasn't holding you to any sort of commitment or anything, but... well... I've really grown to like you a lot, Jake."
"I know," he said. "And I've grown to be quite fond of you as well."
"This is really hard for me, Jake. I'm not really sure how to even say what's on my mind." She took a deep breath. "You've told me what kinds of things go on when you're out on tour. The things with the groupies?"
He nodded. "Yes. There are a lot of groupies at every stop."
"Are you going to... you know... have sex with them while you're out there?" she asked. "I'm not here telling you not to or anything... but..." She shook her head in frustration. "I'm not sure how I'll feel about it if I know you're out there... doing those things while I'm here. I mean, maybe we could agree to see other people while you're gone. I've heard that can work and that people can get back together afterward."
"Is that what you want?" he asked.
"I would agree to it," she said. "There's really nothing I could do to stop you. I'm just... just not sure if I would want to be with you anymore once you came back. I don't know this for sure, Jake, but I'm trying to be honest."
"I know what you're saying," Jake told her. "And I don't blame you for feeling that way."
"So... what are we going to do? I won't ask you to be celibate while you're out there. I couldn't ask that of you. I know how hard it would be and even if you did it... you'd resent me and I'd always worry that you were really screwing your brains out and just telling me you weren't. And then there's..."
"Helen," he said, stopping her. "There is a solution to this problem."
"There is?" she asked. "What is it?"
He took a deep breath and looked in her eyes. "What would you think about coming with us when we go?"
Her mouth dropped open in surprise. Whatever she had been expecting to hear out of this conversation, that certainly hadn't been on her list of possibilities.
Chapter 11a
South Island of New Zealand
January 24, 1989
10:24 AM, local time
The rented Cessna 172 leveled off at thirteen thousand feet above mean sea level, just five hundred feet below the maximum operational ceiling of the aircraft. Jake was a little nervous. He had never flown this high before and he didn't like the sluggish way the plane responded to the controls in this thin air.
"You're doing just fine," Helen told him. She was sitting in the seat next to him, handling all of the navigation tasks.
"It's hard to breathe this high," Jake said. The plane was not pressurized, so its occupants were subjected to the outside atmospheric pressure. "It feels like no matter how many breaths I take, I'm not getting enough."
"You'll get used to it," she said. "If you start to get a headache, let me know."
"Why?" he asked. "Do you have to take over if that happens?"
"No," she said with a smile. "I have some Tylenol in my bag. That would probably get rid of it."
"Oh," he said, giving her a slight smile. She returned it, only a little slighter. She hadn't been smiling much the past three hours.
The reason they were flying so high was because they were over the Southern Alps, the mountain range that ran along the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. Less than twenty miles in front of them was Mount Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. It's jagged, snow-capped triple peak rose 12,316 feet above sea level. All around it were the other, lesser peaks of the Southern Alps range, with jagged gorges and valleys in between.
"Isn't that beautiful?" Jake asked, staring at the majestic scenery around them now that the plane was finally level and he wasn't looking primarily upward. "I really love this place."
He was not speaking figuratively. He had literally fallen in love with everything about the country of New Zealand, but particularly with the Southern Island. The tour had arrived on January 16, landing in Auckland on the Northern Island. They did three shows there and then three more in Wellington. After Wellington, they'd been flown to Christchurch on the Southern Island. They had four days off in Christchurch while they waited for their equipment — which was traveling by ship — to catch up to them.
This was day three of the break, their first of the tour. For the first two days Jake and Helen had explored the area around Christchurch and that was when Jake fell truly and completely in love. The Southern Island was beautiful in every way. The weather was warm but not hot. The scenery was some of the most spectacular on Earth. Christchurch itself was a clean, modern city of moderate size with very little in the way of slums or ghettos. The people in Christchurch were friendly and tended to mind their own business (as much as such a thing was possible when rock stars were in town). In a way, Christchurch reminded Jake of a Utopian version of Heritage.