The Secret Life of Prince Charming (13 page)

I lay in bed reading
Catch-22
, Daniel’s favorite book, a copy he’d given to me on my birthday. I didn’t bother to read it before; I didn’t know why exactly I was reading it then. Maybe now that Daniel was gone, it seemed more important to understand him than it had when we were together. I guess this was proving Mom right again, because she always made the point that you’d better get to know someone really well at first, or else you’d be spending huge amounts of time trying to figure him out later. Anyway, I don’t know if what I was doing could be called reading, anyway. More like, Eyes Moving Across Words. I’d been over the last few sentences at least seven or eight times, and still, no part of what was written had made the full trip to my brain. I’d even turned the page once, as if the rest of the body parts were doing the reading thing without the participation of my mind. It was like those times you drive somewhere and after arriving, realize you don’t remember a single part of the trip.

The problem was, I was having a weird sense of unreality about what was happening. Had I really called Frances Lee, a sister who wasn’t a sister? Did she really suggest taking things from my father’s house and visiting the women from his past? Had I really agreed? Two days before, if anyone told me this would happen, I would say that they were crazy. But now this
was my life, and this was what was happening in it. Two days can change a life. Hours can, a minute.

There was a tap at my door. “Quinn?” Mom.

“Come in,” I said.

She was in her robe—a thin blue one with white clouds on it. Her hair was pulled back and her face was washed clean of makeup. She smelled like soap. “I was just thinking about you,” she said. She sat down by me on the bed. Her toenails were painted orangey-pink, as usual, but she never painted her fingernails. She always said that toes needed all the help they could get. “What’re you reading?”

I showed her the cover. The title seemed suddenly like a little fate-joke. Like the times you turn on the radio and there’s a little musical message, like God might be a part-time DJ. You just did horribly on a final, bringing you down a full grade, and there’s some old song going, “
You can’t always get what you wa-ant
” and you just go, Ha, real funny.

“Didn’t Daniel give you that book?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She was quiet. “Are you doing okay with all that?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “It wasn’t exactly meant to be.”

“Still,” she said. She looked down, made the ends of her robe tie meet. “I was thinking, too, that maybe it’s getting harder for you, to look after Sprout in the summer. You’d probably like to get a regular job. Have more time with friends.”

“It’s okay. I really don’t mind.” Hey, if I worked at Red Robin, I’d never be able to just take off on a trip and steal things from my own father.

“I really appreciate you, do you know that? I don’t tell you
that enough.” She leaned over to hug me. Her face was glowy from being just washed, and maybe from something else.

“You seem happy,” I said. “Different happy.”

“Do I?” She got this little tweak at the corners of her mouth, the way she did when she’d been caught. I don’t know if this was how it was with other families, but it was how it was with ours. A tweak, a twitch, a slight smile. You knew each other so well that you heard the paragraphs that lay behind small movements.

I nodded.

“Things are good,” she said. “I got a couple of new clients today, and it’s summer. Everything’s hopeful, you know?” She shoved her hands into her cloud-robe pockets.

“Which new clients?” I asked. I sat cross-legged.

“I came in here to ask about you,” she said.

“Huh,” I said. “Hmm.”

“Don’t ‘huh’ me,” she said. “I had a good day at work. Period.” A lawn mower revved to life outside, probably Tony’s, our neighbor. “Okay,” she sighed. Mom kissed my forehead, got up to leave. Her robe, her painted toenails, her clean, happy face—they made me pause for some reason before I asked what I did next. Soap smells and happy toes—they were calm and present. Maybe it seemed a little unfair to drag them and her back to a place she’d come a long way from.

“Did Dad ever take anything from you?”

Mom stopped. She was in the doorway of my room—right between there and here. “He took a lot of things from me,” she said.

“Like an object,” I said.

“An object? Why do you ask? Does he have something of mine?”

“No, he just had this thing of Brie’s. It got me wondering, you know, like maybe there were things of yours he had too.”

“A few things went missing when we split up. A person moves out, it gets confusing, what’s coming and going.”

“I was just wondering,” I said.

“It’s a funny thing to wonder, isn’t it, Quinn?”

I kept silent. I could see her weigh this, whether to pursue, the decision to let it go.

“All right. I’m heading to bed,” she said. “Good night, sweetie.”

“Good night.”

“Quinn?” Mom said. She turned back around. She bit at the soft part of her index finger. Tony’s lawn mower sounded suddenly loud, practically under my window, then retreated again. “About the stuff going missing? I didn’t spend a lot of energy over it. It seemed the least of the heartbreak at the time, you know?”

“I guess,” I said.

Mom wrapped her arms around herself. “The most important things? He had already taken those.”

“Elizabeth is Elizabeth Bennett, Barry’s high school girlfriend,” Frances Lee said. “Mom’s sure of it. She said it was always, ‘I should have just stayed with Elizabeth and saved myself a lot of trouble.’ Elizabeth this, Elizabeth that…Love of his life bullshit. Supposedly they dated throughout high school and she left him when she went away to college where he met Mom not long after.”

“Okay,” I said. I made a pace-loop around my room. Sprout sat on the floor in my room, arms around her knees, rocking back and forth. Mom and Aunt Annie were at work, but Grandma was in the office, and I was nervous about getting caught. Sprout’s back-and-forth was as irritating as some wide-load truck driving fifteen miles an hour in front of you when you’re already late.

“Apparently she’s a writer or something. Lives in Vancouver, Canada, last time Mom heard. Barry visited her once when he was still married to Mom, so this is something she has a pretty good memory of.”

“Vancouver,” I said. I threw a pillow at Sprout and she stopped.

“Right.”

“Okay.” Three hours north of here, while Portland was three hours south. The thing about starting things is that you never know how big they’ll get once you do.

“Mom didn’t know who Olivia Thornton was. Her knowledge of his romantic life post your Mom is pretty hazy, so she’s guessing this was sometime after her. But I did some checking, and there’s a Dr. Olivia Thornton in Seattle. Orthopedics, and Barry had that back thing from performing.”

I didn’t know about his “back thing.” I didn’t know that there was a “love of his life.”

“That’s probably her, then,” I said. I thought about the objects and their owners—Joelle’s painting, Abigail Renfrew’s bust, Brie’s glass statue. A clock, a vase, a mask. I thought about all of the other objects in that room—an Oriental carpet, a footstool that was needlepointed with a hunting scene. A music box, an old Victrola, an antique black phone with a dial, a Royal typewriter with ivory keys, a globe. Was one of these things Mom’s? Did they all belong to women with broken hearts?

“No luck with ‘Jane, age six,’” Frances Lee said. “So, for now, how about we pick up the stuff in Portland, swing back here to give Mom her painting. We’ll pick up Jake to take him to his gig, head to Vancouver to see Elizabeth Bennett. Down to Seattle for Olivia Thornton. Back to Portland for the Cheese and Abigail Renfrew, voilà. The whole thing is done in four-five days, and we can rest in our good deeds.”

“Great,” I said. Four or five days. Sprout and I were going to have to go on a “trip with Dad.” I tried not to show my panic. I was still nervous with Frances Lee. Riding along with her ideas was a bit like getting into a rubber boat and riding down rapids. I just held on and tried not to seem afraid.

“Too bad about ‘Jane, age six,’” she said. “Maybe your Mom knows.”

“I’ll find out,” I lied.

“Perfect,” she said. “Over and out.”

The lies were accumulating, same as the
Warning!
items on Mom’s list. After dinner that night, Sprout and I joined Mom outside in the warm, summery night; Mom stabbed the point of
a gardening shovel into the spiky stem of a dandelion and pulled, tossing it onto a pile of already limp weeds that lay on the walkway toward the door. A game of kickball was going on down the street. The mean boys, Sprout called them. You could hear the yells of “Move in! Move in! Easy out!” which might have proved her right. Ivar sprawled on his side on the lawn, his tongue lolling out. One ear was flipped back accidentally, and the whole picture made him look sort of crazy and incapable and not fit for regular society.

Sprout was laying it on too thick before we’d even opened our mouths—she’d hauled the garden hose over to a small hibiscus that Mom had just planted, watering without asking, then offered to get Mom some iced tea. When I told Mom about the trip, her shovel froze midway. She stopped kneeling, set the shovel down, sat flat on her butt on the grass. Ivar took this as his cue to come over and smell her garden gloves. “You’re kidding,” she said.

“This is a good thing, Mom,” I said.

She shook her head, did a little eye roll that meant
You have no idea.
“This really concerns me,” she said. “I hate to say it.” Which is something people say when they don’t hate to say it at all.

“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

“We’ll be fine,” Sprout said. She was drowning that plant.

“I can just see you both wandering around lost while he’s on the pirate ride,” Mom said. “Honey, that’s enough water.”

Sprout moved the hose to a juniper, stood above it, and let the water spill on top. She stopped a minute to water her own knees and her feet in her sandals. “We’re not going to be
wandering around lost,” I said. “We’ll stick together.”

“I need to call him and discuss this,” she said.

“No!” I thought fast. I faked outrage. Maybe I really did feel a little outrage, for me and for Sprout and for Dad and the trip we might have taken if he
had
wanted to. Which, of course, he hadn’t. “I can handle this. I’m almost seventeen. In a year I’ll be going to
college.
” Might be going to college. If I could find a way to pay for it.

“Charlotte is not seventeen,” Mom said.

Sprout stopped watering her toes. “I’m not a baby,” she said.

“He’s our
father,
” I said. “He just wants to take us on a trip. He didn’t exactly get to do that when we were little.”

I could feel it, the slide down a steep, gravelly trail, the way your shoes start to skitter and then you have to run, even if you don’t want to run. Sometimes when you ran, you ended up safely at the bottom, but sometimes your feet came out from under you and you landed hard.

Mom didn’t say anything. I could almost read all of her possible responses right there, in the throbbing of that muscle in her cheek. A physical Morse code—throb, stop. Stop, throb, throb.

“I always wanted to go to Disneyland,” Sprout said. “Bad.”

Mom’s jaw tightened. “It’s a shame I always had to work all the time to keep the family going, or else I could have taken you,” she said.

I felt the clawing of guilt for this imaginary trip, and for the real Dad-bounty of Xboxes and a house on the river and dinners out; I felt the push/pull, light/heavy, play/serious of Dad versus Mom, which I knew did come in part because Mom was the one with all of the responsibilities (basically, the word “responsibilities”
meant Sprout and me). I knew that, I did. I knew it was easy to play for a weekend but not for days at a time, when you had to make sure Sprout got her math facts learned and we needed plates and cups for the orchestra party and the emergency forms needed to be filled out and the yard needed to be cleaned of dandelions. I knew that—I’m not stupid. But I just didn’t want to be reminded of it all the time, because there was nothing I could do about it, and it wasn’t my fault to begin with. The funny thing about divorced parents is, they’ll be the first to tell you it isn’t your fault and the first to make you feel like a lot of it is your fault.

Sprout just kept watering that juniper, and I know that it (and probably most junipers of the world) never got that kind of attention before. I followed a crack in the cement with the tip of my tennis shoe, and then did it over again.

Aunt Annie came down the steps, hurried past us in her heels and tight jeans. “Late, late for a very important date,” she said.

“You, Quentin, and the private investigator?” Mom said.

“I was being stupid. I completely trust Quentin. I’m a lucky woman.”

“Have fun,” I said.

Annie got in her car, beeped us a cheery horn good-bye. Mom sighed. “Look guys,” she said. “I’m sorry, okay? This is just a bit of a surprise. I can understand you want to go.” Mom’s knees were still bumpy from sidewalk impressions. “God, okay. Fine. A few days, right? It’s a few days. Nothing disastrous can happen in a few days, right?”

“We’ll have our phones,” I said. This always seemed to reas
sure her, which was kind of funny when you thought about it. That phone could be anywhere, for all she knew—a mountaintop, another state entirely—but if you had it, she felt better.

“You’ll have to get me all the information. A full itinerary.”

“No problem,” I said. That could be a problem.

Sprout, like me, had almost seemed to forget we weren’t actually going. “Teacup ride, teacup ride,” she said, and spun the water from the garden hose in a circle.

“She’s going to dump him. I give her three weeks,” Zaney said, and sipped her slushy iced coffee. Zaney, Liv, and me had just gone to the movies and were now squished around a table for two at Starbucks. The movie was one of those where the man and woman seem to hate each other, which supposedly means they’re actually in love. These were rival news anchors, and after doing every backstabbing thing possible, hurling every insult and plotting every evil, they fell into bed and discovered they belonged together. But Zaney wasn’t talking about the characters in the movie. She was talking about Daniel and his new girlfriend, whom we saw on the way out of the theater. They’d been sitting behind us the whole time, and now I imagined both of their eyes on me in the darkness as I shoved popcorn into my face, or did other humiliating things I would have been careful about had I known they were there. It was amazing, when you thought about it, how much of love, before and after, was about avoiding humiliation.

“Two to three weeks,” Liv agreed. “You can always tell who has the power by what movies they go to. If we’d seen them in some exploding bus thing, I’d have said he had a chance.”

“Did you see what she was wearing? Very dominatrix,” Zaney said. She took off the lid of her cup and stirred the slush with her straw. “A black laced-up vest?”

“Daniel plus slut equals bad combination. His parents will have a heart attack and have to give more money to the church,” Liv said. “God, we fucked up. Here we take you to a movie to get your mind off Daniel, and he’s right there sitting behind us.”

“How could he do that?” I said. “Just move on to someone else without so much as a good-bye?” I said. I was finding out something: You could feel jealous even if you didn’t even really like the guy.

“Someone shoves laced-up tits in your face, who has time for good-bye?” Zaney said.

“He doesn’t seem like the same person,” I said. Which was true. Which was maybe what happened after you broke up. Maybe he was the person he’d been all along and you never saw, or maybe he was becoming a new someone else, but either way, he was a stranger.

“How do you ever really know someone?” Liv said. She was eating the center out of a cinnamon roll and leaving the hard outside on her napkin, which just showed how smart she was.

“I hate that question,” Zaney said. “It makes me totally paranoid.”

“You’re supposed to trust, but how are you supposed to trust if you don’t know if someone’s trustworthy?” Liv said.

“Maybe there’s another way to get a full picture,” I said.

“Hire a private detective, like your aunt?” Liv said.

“Your aunt’s hiring a private detective? Cool,” Zaney said.

“Maybe the only way to get a full picture is to ask around.”
I was working my way toward confessing to them about my dad. “Ask a lot of people who know him.”