The Royal We (25 page)

He met my eyes. They were red-rimmed and wet with tears. “I don’t regret it,” he said brokenly. “I regret that we’re standing here, right now, doing this, in the stupidest location in the world.”

That got a laugh out of me, halting though it was.

“But I don’t regret trying,” he said. “I just wish we’d tried harder.”

“Not harder,” I said. “Just better. We tried hard enough.”

On the last word, I lost it. I heard him crying, too, so I turned away to give us each a moment and blotted my tears with my wrist. “There isn’t even enough cloth on this stupid shirt to use it as a Kleenex.”

It was his turn to laugh. He pushed off the wall and picked up the helmet, then juggled it between his hands before putting it down again.

“I don’t want to go,” he said. “Because if I walk out of here, I don’t know when I’ll get to touch you ever again, or even talk to you the same way, and I…” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “I don’t know what that life looks like,” he said, his voice tinny and strained.

I nodded, over and over, for lack of knowing what else to say.

“I love you,” he said, picking up the helmet again and walking to the door.

“I love you, too,” I said as he walked through it.

But it hadn’t been enough.

T
he night we split was the last I saw of Nick for months—at least, in the flesh—and the pain from the hole he left consumed me. Our fight had been inevitable, and I’d gone cruising for it. I knew that. But I hadn’t thought ahead to
after
I picked it, when, like a scab, it would fall away and expose whatever hid beneath. I hadn’t even stopped to wonder what that would be. I certainly hadn’t imagined a mutual surrender. Maybe I should have gone after him when he walked out of that trailer, but there was nothing more to say—we’d carved each other up enough as it was—and so in his wake I found myself glued to that cold metal floor, knowing my next step would be the first in a string of them that would take us further and further away from each other. We’d had our last lazy Sunday morning. We’d had our last laugh. We’d had our last kiss—a hurried peck on the corner of my mouth on his way out the door. If only I’d known, I’d have appreciated the casual intimacy. Or turned my face an inch to the right.

The trailer door banged open as Lacey and Cilla barged in, armed with water bottles and Kleenex.

“Blistering hell,” Cilla said as soon as she saw my sodden face. Lacey said nothing; she simply snapped to my side and wrapped me in her arms.

“Someone has to check on Nick.” I hiccupped. “He’s upset, he’s on that motorcycle—”

“Bea and Clive went after him,” Cilla said, smoothing my hair. “He’ll be all right.”

I gulped the water, then slowly found my feet and glanced through the chipped window. Misery was so packed that the crowd had overflowed outside. People sat slumped on the stoops of the crumbling converted tenement, or leaned against the carbon-crusted burnt-out walls, all nodding in deep existential appreciation of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “Now our great memories of this place are ruined.”

They just looked at me, sad and sympathetic and worried.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” I said, my voice cracking on the last word. “I don’t know what to do. This whole country feels like Nick to me.”

Lacey stood decisively. “Then maybe it’s time to go home,” she said.

I’d expected to touch down in the States and feel healed—by the familiar territory, the beautiful sunsets, the cozy embrace of our two-story converted farmhouse. Mom and Dad sold their starter home once the Coucherator took off, swapping it for a larger, rural spread with a basement for his tinkering and enough bathrooms that Lacey could play with makeup for hours without me banging on the door. In typical Lacey fashion, she’d taken one look at the biggest of our two bedrooms, clasped her hands and spun around in it, and then spent the rest of our tour helpfully exclaiming over how the smaller one simply radiated me. And in typical me fashion, I didn’t care enough to stoke the squabble, so I’d expressed an agreeable passion for the garret-like room with the sloped ceiling and the bay window. I painted the walls a funky gunmetal color, positioned my bed so that the angled wall hovered over me when I slept, and hung posters on it of Cubs greats like Ryne Sandberg, Greg Maddux, and Mark Grace (and a small picture of Derek Jeter; it appalled my father to have a Yankee on my wall, but some forces of nature are too powerful to be denied). Art supplies littered the floor as I sat in the window and drew, tapping my foot to music, relishing my refuge—in a way, Lacey had been right—even as Lacey habitually insisted I crash for the night in hers. But now, the old watercolors and pencil sketches were stacked neatly atop a high shelf in my closet, next to a box of trophies and faded team photos. My old quilt with the softballs all over it had been boxed up when I left and replaced with an itchy, girly Laura Ashley floral that gave me metaphysical hay fever, and Mark Grace and Ryne Sandberg and Greg Maddux were, as in life, warped and curling at the edges. (Derek Jeter, also as in life, still looked perfect.) I’d wanted to return to Muscatine to feel like myself again, but instead I felt like a tourist.

My first full day home, news broke that Nick had jetted off for a hunting weekend with Gemma, and it became obvious that I had underestimated the international appeal of my perceived role in this intrigue. The
Mirror
reported I’d flown home in a jealous tizzy;
The Sun
believed Nick and Gemma had been having an affair for years but were afraid to tell me because I am so unpredictably violent. And they all—in a move I knew had to have Nick spitting nails—quoted an anonymous source saying Emma had expressed her distaste for the bawdy American with unrefined hair. Lacey and I used to wonder how it felt for celebrities who couldn’t dash out for toilet paper and ice cream without being surrounded by magazine stories about their fictional Baby Joy or their ex frisking someone new. That was now my life, and it was worse than I’d imagined. Two high-school-age girls at the local market started whispering and pointing as they pored through an
Enquirer
story titled
JILTED BEX: “I’M KEEPING THE BABY
,” to the point where I excused myself from the checkout line to grab the largest box of tampons I could find. A girl from Lacey’s cheerleading squad pretended not to see me at a gas station, then took a photo of my L.L.Bean duck boots that showed up later in a
Glamour
slideshow about shlubby breakup fashion. The anonymity I’d hoped to find in Muscatine proved as elusive as a warm hug from Barnes.

And Gemma’s face haunted me. Of course
she
was the first place he ran. I knew tabloid appearances could be deceiving, but not all of them, not always, and those pictures with Gemma made me feel like the four years Nick spent with me might as well have been forty-five minutes. I wrote him a hundred frustrated emails I never sent. I couldn’t eat. I barely slept. I did nothing but go on long predawn runs and then sack out in front of the television, pretending I wasn’t Googling Nick and then secretly bingeing on whatever rumors I could find about him and the irresistible, illustrious, insidious Gemma Sands. By the time Lacey came home for Thanksgiving and marched into my room holding an open laptop, I was a stringy-haired wreck.

“Crikey, you look awful, Killer.”

Freddie’s voice and image burst out of her computer. It was jarring that he should be so much the same when nothing else was.

“For your information, I’ve been sick,” I lied.

“If it helps, Knickers was in a complete glump before he went back down to the base,” Freddie said. “I couldn’t jolly him out of it. He didn’t tease me about my new girlfriend Persimmon. I faxed a photocopy of my bum to Marj, and put her on speaker when she called to scream at me about pornography, and then I prank-called Barnes, pretending to be the Royal College of Taxidermy inquiring about his new hairpiece. Nothing.”

That got a laugh out of me, at least. “Aren’t you supposed to be on Team Nick?”

“He knows I am,” Freddie said. “But he’s also not in London, so get your arse back home and let me help with the healing process. I am unofficially a PhD in Medicinal Misbehavior.”

In fact, other than one Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe—whose investment in me did not seem to extend past her sense of aristocratic duty—my English friends all tried to jolt my flatlining spirits. Cilla and Gaz gave raucous, amusingly divergent accounts of his attempts to give her cooking lessons; Joss shared that Tom Huntington-Jones wanted to bankroll an entire Soj store after the paps identified me wearing one of her shirts (I’d forgotten to button my peacoat when I ran out for cheese puffs). Clive gossiped that Prince Edwin ran over an endangered gopher on a golf outing, and Penelope Six-Names now hosted a children’s TV show called
Morning Zoo
that involved her dressing up as animals and visiting them in their habitats to promote better interspecies relations. Apparently, a certain group of hens hadn’t liked the cut of her jib
at all
. It was heartening to be included even though I’d decamped to American soil, but all I wanted was to laugh at those dishy stories with Nick. After all, he had been my best friend out of all of them.

Three days before Christmas, with no end to my sloth in sight, my parents decided it was their turn to intervene. I was digging around in the Coucherator for a Diet Coke when the two of them descended, Dad parking on the coffee table, and Mom to my right.

“Bex,” Mom began. “Honey, this has gotten—”

“You are a disaster, Bex,” Dad interrupted, patting my knee.

“Earl!” Mom hissed. “We rehearsed this.”

“Well, rehearsal was sort of boring,” Dad admitted. “Let’s just give it to her straight.”

“Give what to me?” I asked.

“It’s in the script,” Mom said huffily. “You’d know by now if he’d just stuck to it.”

“There is a script?” I was confused. “Wait. Is this an intervention?”

“No,” Mom said.

“Yes,” Dad said.

“Don’t take offense, but it’s not a very good one,” I said, folding my legs up under me.

“You’re loafing, Bex,” Dad said, smacking his lap. “All day, all night, you loaf. You loaf so much you’ve
become
a loaf. I could slice you up and use you for sandwiches.”

“What your father is trying to say is that we’re worried,” Mom translated, shooting him a dirty look.

“What I’m really trying to say is that you need to go back to England,” he said.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Mom said. “That boy ran roughshod all over her feelings, Earl.”

I put up my hand and wiggled it around. “Do I get a vote?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

“No,” Dad said. “You get to listen. Look, hon, I’m very sorry your relationship ended. But I don’t care if he was the Prince of England or the Prince of Persian Rugs down on the interstate. You can’t hide out here forever.”

I pulled a face. “That carpet guy is sort of cute, and in the commercials he does those one-armed push-ups. Maybe I should introduce myself.”

“He uses a body double. Costs them a fortune,” Dad said.

“What?” Mom and I were both unnaturally shocked.

Dad shrugged. “We all use the same camera-people. The things I know about Hardware Pete from Pete’s Hardware would make your toes curl.” He shook his head. “Don’t change the subject, Rebecca. You don’t get to become a mole-person. Pull yourself together and go back to London with your head held high.”

“I can’t,” I argued, faint with rising panic. “Everyone will be watching me, waiting to see if I’ll crack. I’m not making that up, Dad. The headline on
In Touch
this week was
WILL SHE CRACK?
”

“Honey, you said yourself that half the problem was Nick being afraid of the press,” Mom said gently, placing her hand over mine. “Don’t you make that same mistake.”

“Just go
be
, Bex,” Dad said. “And, go be Bex. Go find your life again. It’s not here anymore, and you know it.”

“But what if it’s not there, either?” I could barely do more than whisper. “Imagine what it’s like, living in the country he’s going to rule one day. He’s everywhere, Dad. And I don’t know if I’m strong enough.” A tear slid down my cheek. “It’s one thing to crack over here, but if I do it over there, everyone sees.
He
sees.”

Dad slid off the table and knelt down in front of me, putting his hands on my face. “The Bex who dumped her prom date into the garbage is strong enough,” he said. “The Bex who climbed over a barbwire fence is strong enough.”

“That report is still unconfirmed,” I muttered.

He kissed my forehead. “Sweetie, it all makes you who you are, which is someone real special, and also maybe a little crazy,” he said.

“But—”

My mother stopped me. “I have never worried about you,” she said. “Not really. We used to joke you could stand in the middle of a tornado and find a way to enjoy the breeze.”

I cracked a tiny smile.

“That’s a good thing, Bex,” she said. “But it doesn’t give you license to sit here and wait for life to find you. It just means you can survive whatever is out there.”

This is one of my favorite memories of my parents, because in their faces I saw the most naked love and concern and support—and faith. They believed that I was brave. They believed I was tough. They believed in me, period. The original Bex Brigade.

“You win,” I said. “I’ll go back.”

Dad stood with a groan. “Thank goodness. My knees couldn’t take much more.”

I scooted over so he could sit on my other side. “I just hope I don’t do anything stupid while I’m trying to reconnect with my inner awesomeness.”

“You won’t,” Mom said.

“You will,” Dad said.

“Earl,
really
.” That one was me.

“What? Everyone does stupid stuff,” Dad said. “The Cubs have a rich history of it. But they never stop playing, and I love them anyway.”

We heard a throat clearing. “I have an idea, if I may,” Lacey said from the stairwell. A thumping noise accompanied her hopping down the last few steps.

“Clive’s got a new girlfriend,” she began, coming around in front of us. “Her dad owns half the world, basically, and she’s throwing a New Year’s Eve party on their private island. Staying at their house is free, and he owns Luxe Airlines, so we can get there for like twenty bucks or something insane,” she said, at our mother’s expression. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “What do you say? Nick won’t be there. You can see everyone in a super-fun atmosphere and then we’ll all head back to England together.”

“Hell,
I’d
go, if I didn’t think you’d rather die than party with your old man,” Dad said.

I threw my arm around his neck and kissed his cheek. “You’d be great company, but I should probably brave this one on my own.”

Lacey’s eyes sparkled. “So you’re in?”

“I’m in.”

And that’s how the debauchery started.