Royal Pain (8 page)

She stepped quietly out into the small garden and rested her cheek against his back as she snaked her arms around his bare waist. He slipped his phone down into his front pocket, then covered Bronte’s hands with his own. It seemed like a long time that Bronte just stood there, relishing the feel of the warm strength of his back against her cool cheek. She could have stood there forever.

“I won’t pick a fight. I promise,” she whispered.

“My father is about to die.”

“Oh, Max,” she gulped. “I’m so sorry.”

He turned slowly into her arms and kissed her so tenderly, so deeply, so completely, her knees were useless.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I don’t know… there is going to be so much familial turmoil. This is not how I wanted this to happen with you and me. I thought we’d have so much more time… I don’t know if you should come with me now or in a few weeks.”

Sweet Jesus. Bronte thought she could help him finish packing up his apartment for fuck’s sake. Why the hell was he talking about her going to England? He was obviously in shock. He didn’t know what he was saying.

“First things first, Max. Where do you need to be in two hours? Where are you meeting your mother tomorrow?”

“I need to be at a private airfield near O’Hare in two hours. A car is coming to pick me up at my place. Will you come help me get my shit together?”

“Of course. Let’s grab whatever you have here and we’ll head over to your apartment.”

“Maybe you should pack a bag and just come with me now, Bron… I think I want you with me,” he stated matter-of-factly, his spine going slightly rigid beneath her palm. This wasn’t going in the order he had intended, but his feelings were the same: they were meant to be together.

“Max… you don’t want me there…”

“Of course, I want you there, Bron.” His voice was still gentle, but there was also an edge of rising impatience. “My father had a massive coronary less than an hour ago and my mother is virtually incoherent. One of my sisters is backpacking around Australia; the other is on vacation in Prague with her useless husband. My younger brother, Devon, is alone and trying to keep his shit together until I get there.”

“Max… I wish I could, but please… I can’t just
not
show up at work tomorrow… I can’t just drop everything and wander off…”

“Bronte!” His voice exploded. “It is not wandering off! This is important. You’re my—” He paused, as if he couldn’t complete the sentence. “I guess I am not used to having to ask for things in this way—maybe I am not doing it right—but I really need you right now… I am asking you…” His voice quieted as he looked at her.

She tilted her head and gave him a questioning look.

“All right”—his frustration was palpable now—“I am not asking you. I am telling you. I need you. You need to come with me. This is so much more important than showing up at your job tomorrow.”

Wrong answer. She felt the hairs on her neck bristle. Even if he was right—and boy, did that romantic side of her want to dive right in: he wants you! he is begging you to go with him! he needs you by his side!—it was still all wrong. Because she knew (or thought she knew) where those eager cravings of hers led.

To perdition.

She could not, she
would
not
, let herself be stirred by the promise or threat of so-called once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

She looked down at the slate of the garden floor and loosened her hold around his waist.

“I just can’t, Max,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. You’ll see, you have your family there, you will want your space, you won’t want me underfoot—”

“Stop it!” he shouted with uncharacteristic brutality.

She felt it like a punch in her stomach. He never lost his temper. That was her job.

His arms fell from her waist and he walked back into the apartment. He continued speaking, without looking at her, while he began to gather up his things.

“You might not have wanted to pick a fight, but you got one.” He wasn’t yelling, but the steady, controlled anger was almost worse. “Don’t you
dare
tell me what I want or don’t want. You are the one who doesn’t want to be there with all that messy emotional distress and all those uncontrollable feelings flying everywhere and all that godforsaken
not
knowing
. If—no!
when
my father dies, probably while I am completely and utterly alone on a plane over the Atlantic Ocean trying to get to him, I will become responsible for all of them. And all of his business dealings. And my mother’s grief. And the grief of every other person who has come to rely on my father’s kindness and generosity over the past sixty-four years.”

Max finished putting on a clean button-down shirt, slipped on his shoes, and stuffed the last of his things into his overnight bag.

“Spare me your cool distance and emotional fortitude for now, okay, Bron? I’ve had quite enough of you thinking you know what’s best for
us
.” He spit out the last word. “If I wanted space, you would know it. Because I would tell you
I
needed
space
.” His teeth were clenched through the final syllables. “Because that’s what intelligent, mature adults do, Bronte. They say what they mean to say.” Max tried to control his breathing, but she could see that his chest was heaving despite the effort.

In the face of her continued silence, he began again, more calmly. “I’m going to leave now. Are you coming with me or not?”

Even though he was on the other side of the apartment, she felt like he was physically pummeling her with every word.

“This is it,” he said with deadly precision. “This is not some cooked-up emotional test or scheme for me to manipulate you. My dad is going to die. I have to go. I want you with me. I can’t make it any clearer than that. It’s now or never, Bron. Is it all… or not at all?”

Bronte blanched at the oddly familiar ultimatum, then realized it reminded her, for a terrifying second, of her father. She knew it wasn’t Max’s fault, necessarily, but the damage was done: there was no way in hell she was ever going to be propelled into action by the demanding threats of a man who thought he knew what was best for her. Lionel Talbott had spent too many years making her feel like she wasn’t entitled to her own opinions… to her own mind. Even the vaguest hint of Max trying to wield the same arrogant power made her withdraw. She shook her head in a slow, silent no.

“No? Fine then. But just so we are clear, this is all you, Bron. I am not being overly demanding or cruel, or any of that. You know you can do whatever you set your mind to. You of all people. You know. This is the fork in the road and you are walking away from me… not the other way around.”

Max turned toward the door and dragged one hand through his thick hair. Reluctantly turning back toward Bronte, his expression defeated, his voice empty, he said, “You know what? You are probably right. Clean break and all that. That is what you wanted all along, right? No muss. No fuss.”

She was frozen to the spot where she stood, standing there in the middle of the room like an idiot in nothing but his oversized T-shirt. She wanted to pull him into her arms so badly, but it felt impossible. She knew she was watching him slip away, and she was utterly paralyzed to do anything to stop it.

He took a deep, long breath, deciding whether or not to speak, then continued, almost against his will: “I love—I loved you, Bronte. I mean, flat-out loved you. Wasn’t it obvious?”

And with that fucking neutron bomb, he walked out of the lower-ground-floor flat and out of Bronte’s life.

Bronte stood in the center of her living room until her legs were too tired to hold her any longer, and then she sort of crumpled into a heap on the carpet, curled up like a baby right there in the middle of the floor, with his T-shirt stretched over her knees in a little cocoon. How the fuck did she go from the eternal optimist to the woman who just let the best man, who loved her—who actually really
meant
he loved her when he said he loved her—walk out her door?

As she faded in and out of a half-conscious, dismal approximation of sleep, her mind tripped haltingly back, conjuring a confrontation from nearly a decade before.

***

Spring had tried to come early. It was barely April in New Jersey. Bronte always recalled how the bright-yellow buds of forsythia outside the kitchen window were so idiotically cheerful in the midst of all those grim, bare branches. She stood in the kitchen with her mother’s hand resting lightly on her shoulder as the two of them stared at the piece of paper on the worn Formica counter.

The ivory vellum with the embossed orange and black logo may as well have been radioactive. Bronte didn’t want to actually touch it.

“I never thought I would really get in,” Bronte said quietly.

“It’s so exciting, Bronte! We are so proud of you!”

Bronte despised when her mother used the royal
we
. Her father rarely left his home office upstairs, and when he did, it certainly wasn’t to show any team spirit with his wife. As far as Bronte was concerned, her parents were not a
we
.

“Mom. I don’t want to go to Princeton. I want to go to the University of California at Berkeley.”

“Oh, honey, you are just saying that to be… contrary.”

“No, I promise, I’m not being contradictory. I just can’t stay in New Jersey. I can’t. I only applied because I knew how much it meant to you, and Dad, I guess. But”—she shook her long hair, trying to shake off the whole situation—“I never, ever thought I would get in.”

“Bronte. Please. You have straight As and nearly perfect SAT scores. Why would you be so down on yourself?”

She turned to look at her mother.

“I am not down on myself, Mom.” Bronte almost laughed at the irony. “I—I’m embarrassed to tell you, but at this point, I guess it doesn’t really matter… I wrote my entire application essay about how much I disrespect my father and the entire world of East Coast academia, how hypocritical, arrogant, out of touch—you name it—all those ivory-tower assholes are. Completely removed from the rest of the world, creating Central American nations with their rich friends. Washed-up spies and politicians grazing off the fat of ill-gotten endowments.”

“Oh, Bronte, you didn’t.” Her mother brought her hand to cover her mouth in near-horror.

Bronte barked a sardonic laugh at her mother’s dramatic response, then picked up the piece of paper with her thumb and index finger as if it smelled.

“And look what they do? I insult them, ridicule them—
hate
them!—and they want me! Do you see how perverse this all is?! I can’t, Mom; I just can’t. Not to mention the goddamned money.”

“Please don’t swear, dear.”

“Oh, Mom. You have no idea. I curse more than you will ever know. I swear almost every other word. I love swearing. That ‘goddamn’ is the least of your worries. Mom, Princeton will cost a fortune. I don’t want you to have that kind of debt… financial or otherwise…” Bronte added.

“Oh, Bronte, have I ever made you feel beholden?”

“No, Mom.” Bronte sighed and tried to ratchet her voice back to a normal level. “Because you are a saint. Because you work like a beast to make sure we can live in this sweet ranch house and I can go to the best school and that lazy son of a bitch can sit upstairs and write or do whatever it is he is supposedly doing in there—”

Bronte thought she must have blacked out for a second before she realized her mother had slapped her quickly and firmly across the cheek.

Tears sprang to both of their eyes: Bronte’s were tears of shock; her mother’s were tears of rage.

“Please don’t ever speak about your father in that way, Bronte. I won’t have it.”

Bronte felt her blood drain straight down to her toes.

“Mom…” The tears didn’t fall and her voice was even. “I love you so much. But I don’t love him.” She accidentally dropped the acceptance letter from Princeton onto the kitchen floor, her grip loosening in a moment of forgetting, but she didn’t bother to pick it up.

She stared down at the typed letter for a few seconds, then, when she looked up from the familiar, yet suddenly unrecognizable, faux-brick linoleum floor, she saw that her father was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, just over her mother’s shoulder.

Bronte’s mother turned swiftly to see her husband.

“How long have you been standing there, Lionel?”

“Long enough. She’s going to Princeton.”

Bronte laughed, softly at first, then to the point of hysteria. She watched as her mother fought the constant battle: stand by her man or soothe her frantic teenager.

Bronte often felt guilty for forcing her mother to have to make that choice, then she merely felt resentful that her father, the supposed grown-up, needed so much of her mother’s soothing. Lionel Talbott remained leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed in an arrogant posture that let Bronte know he was waiting for her histrionics to subside, but he wasn’t happy about it.

Bronte finally came back to herself from a few minutes of half laughing, half crying.

“Whatever, Lionel,” she said with a dismissiveness that only a petulant seventeen-year-old girl could muster. She loved how much he hated that she called him by his first name. “Are you going to put me on a leash and walk me over to campus? Sit next to me in my freshman English class and watch as I take notes on Chaucer? Correct my grammar? You know what Lionel? Fuck you.”

“Bronte!” her mother screamed.

“Mom, seriously. This is totally between him and me.” Bronte avoided referring to her father directly whenever possible. “He doesn’t give a crap about me or who I am or what I like—”

“The Royal Family and fashion magazines and shoes you can’t afford, Bronte? Are those aspirations?” He spoke as if she were bringing home the neighbors’ pets and dissecting them in the basement.

“No, they are not
aspirations
, Lionel. But they’re not despicable either! You are so lofty in your worldview, aren’t you? So far above the rest of us. Discussing Gilles Deleuze and the Lake Poets, the Bloomsbury Group and the Baroque. But you know what,
Lionel
? Those people had
lives!
They left their homes and did something, made something, had something to
show
for themselves. Other than a split-level ranch in New Jersey and a wife who did every
fucking
thing for them.”

“We will not pay for you to go anywhere but Princeton. Am I making myself clear?”

“Who’s ‘we’? You?” She laughed in disgust. “You haven’t earned a fucking penny in years.” She looked at her mother for confirmation, but Cathy was in some sort of shock, shaking her head and crying softly.

“I am going to get as far away from here as possible. I have three months left of high school, and if you want me to move out, I am sure Aunt Patty would take me in. Otherwise, back the fuck off.”

“Bronte”—his voice was just this side of rage, but perfectly controlled, as he moved across the small room and put one arm protectively around his wife’s shoulders—“you will devastate your mother if you turn down this opportunity.”

“Really?! How do you figure? The way I see it, the one who will be devastated is
you
! All that transference! All those
aspirations
!” She nearly spit the words at him. “Those are your aspirations, Lionel. Not mine! I love it down here with the television-watching, gum-chewing masses.”

She wished she could have controlled the volume of her voice, but she was nearly shrieking. She hated how he seemed to make her loss of temper his small victory.

Cathy was sobbing outright by that point.

Lionel had a strange, detached, bitter grimace playing across his face.

Bronte forced herself to calm down and decided to retreat from emotions and continue in the easier realm of practicalities.

“It’s better this way. I will defer my enrollment at Cal for a year.”

Her mother looked momentarily optimistic, then defeated as Bronte continued.

“I’ll find an apartment share and go live in San Francisco and wait tables for a year to establish California residency. Then I’ll go to Cal as an in-state student, so I can afford it without bankrupting you. And it will be mine. My education. Mine to use or squander.”

Lionel shook his head in disapproval.

“What?!” Bronte fumed. “It’s not as if the University of California hasn’t produced its fair share of academic excellence. You are the worst kind of snob. You disgust me.”

With that, Bronte turned sideways to walk past her father without having to actually touch him.

She went up to her room, grabbed her backpack, threw in a couple of T-shirts and a pair of jeans, went into the bathroom to get her toothbrush and hairbrush, and walked back downstairs. She stood near the front door, watching across the living room as her parents spoke quietly in the kitchen, her father in the highly unusual role of comforter, gently stroking her mother’s arms.

“Mom. I’m going into the city for a couple of nights with Janice. I’ll be back for dinner Sunday night.”

She wasn’t waiting for her mother to give her permission—if Bronte was going to be this new independent, kick-ass woman of the world, she figured she had to start now—but she had hoped her mom would at least look up and nod that she had heard. Instead, Lionel turned to look at Bronte as her mother buried her face into the front of his shirt. His threat was no longer veiled.

“Be home by five o’clock on Sunday, Bronte.
Or
not
at
all
.”

Bronte wanted to stomp her feet and smash one of those hideous antique Meissen bird figurines that her grandmother had left to her mother. How did Lionel always end up making her sound like the moody, immature burden, and himself the wise protector?

Lies.

Bronte took a deep breath as the desire to break things abated. “I’ll see you Sunday then.” She turned, nearly composed—she congratulated herself—and walked out the front door.

No slamming.

Looking back, she thought that “or not at all” may have been the last thing Lionel Talbott had ever said to her directly.

For what turned out to be the remaining year and a half of his life, her father and Bronte tread a careful dance, avoiding one another across a continent and competing to see who could be kinder and more devoted to Cathy Talbott.

***

Sometime near three in the morning, back in the foggy present, Bronte was so cramped and cold there on the floor that she forced herself to get up and move into bed, pulling the neck of Max’s shirt up around the middle of her face, torturing herself with the intense smell of him.

She brought the covers over her head and wished for oblivion. When her alarm went off a few hours later, she mused that she now knew how it felt to be hit by a train.

She went into work armed with a triple-shot, twenty-ounce latte and tried to get her mind around the very sharp, very broken pieces of what the fuck had just happened. Unable to help herself, she decided to spend a little time Googling one Max Heyworth from England. In their frenzied courtship (of sorts), neither of them had given a damn about the “information,” as Max had so eloquently put it that day at the sidewalk café.

She didn’t care a fig what his family business was; he didn’t care what hip clients she was after. (She
did
land that new swanky hotel group she had been pursuing when they first met, she reminded herself, and she
was
on her way to landing a fabulously chic shoe store). But none of that had mattered. They had just wanted each other in the here and now (the here and
then
, she corrected), with none of the other supposedly pertinent details.

Now that he was totally AWOL, however, she felt starved for pertinent details. Maybe there would be a grainy black-and-white photo of his rugby team at Oxford. Maybe he had won a prize for the best sheep at the county fair when he was twelve… she would like to see what he looked like when he was twelve, come to think of it. She would like to see baby pictures of Max, come to think of it.

Oh for fuck’s sake, this was a veritable disaster.

A Google search on “Max Heyworth Yorkshire” brought up a fish-and-chips shop, an auto mechanic, and a list of self-catering cottages near Castle Heyworth, then a mishmash of everything from Yorkshire pudding recipes to ancestry links. All of a sudden, Bronte remembered the snippets of David’s drunken, incomprehensible recitation of Max’s bona fides. Just for the hell of it, she typed in “Maxwell Heyworth Anne Boleyn Nobel Prize”… and up popped several links to Sophia Heyworth and her second cousin, Anne Boleyn, and then links to a newspaper article about a political spat from a few months ago between one George Heyworth, the current Duke of Northrop, and a Nobel Prize–winning agronomist.

Farther down, there were seven links to a decade-old obituary of the seventeenth Duke of Northrop. Bronte felt the tingle of anticipation crawl up her spine, then took a fortifying slug of her latte and clicked on the
Times
of
London
link.

“Holy. Mother. Fucker.”

She had not meant to say that one aloud, but all of her work colleagues were now well acquainted with her guttersnipe vocabulary, so nobody much cared. The seventeenth Duke of Northrop was one major twentieth-century dude. Born during World War I, a major during World War II, he grew up in a large family in Yorkshire, had six brothers and four sisters, and was survived by three sons and four daughters—the eldest of whom, George Conrad Stanley blah-blah (seven middle names later) Fitzwilliam-Heyworth, the eighteenth Duke of Northrop, was fifty-four at the time of writing (ten years ago) and was the father of two sons, Maxwell and Devon, and two daughters, Claire and Abigail.