The Secret Life of Prince Charming (20 page)

The beach made me brave, the night did. His skin lying against mine did too. “Are you speaking from experience? Bad enough to be bad?”

Jake laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Me? Can’t even take two cookies instead of one without a guilty conscience.”

“No way,” I said. It sounded like me. Just like me.

“I think you’ve been making assumptions about me,” he said.

“Wild women and parties,” I joked, but didn’t joke. “Or is that, wild parties and women?”

“I’m not sure who you’re describing. Maybe a couple of friends of mine.” He laughed, but I could tell he meant it.

“Tell me then. What I should know,” I said.

“I wore a dress shirt once to a wedding when I was six and never did again. Music makes me feel alive. I can’t watch anyone drink the milk from their cereal bowl—”

“I hate that too.”

“I don’t know why, it makes my stomach…Bleh. I was
voted ‘nicest boy’ in junior high, don’t laugh. ‘Most likely to join a commune’ in high school, though I still am not quite sure what they meant by that. I like to go fishing but don’t like to catch the fish, and can’t stand public displays of cheery, all-in-fun humiliation—anything involving me wearing a costume, no way. I wear my Hawaiian shirt on the inside. Your turn.”

He sounded kind. He sounded shy. He sounded like the Daniel I thought Daniel might be but wasn’t. Nothing like I guessed he’d be. “Okay,” I said. I thought for a moment. “I love the smell of a new eraser, those pink ones. I once ate half a can of Play-Doh, when I was three. I love Tator Tots and hate Christmas carols.”

“‘Jingle Bells’?”

“
Hate.
Nicest? Everyone says I’m
too
nice. My niceness is almost a bad habit. Someone could hit me and I’d worry they’d hurt their hand.”

Jake laughed. “Oh man.”

“I know,” I said. “And math. I love it. Especially the Fibonacci series, the golden ratio…”

“Sound like fantasy books,” Jake said.

“No…How do you explain? They’re math sequences, sort of, equations discovered long ago, that have been found in nature and art and all kinds of places.”

“They don’t have anything to do with those awful story problems, right? ‘Uncle Ted is on a train going twelve thousand miles for sixty-five minutes. If he travels for three more hours, what did he have for breakfast?’”

I laughed. “No. Just a series of numbers, a pattern, that appears in nature all the time. A weird amount of all the time.
An it-can’t-be-an-accident all the time. The number of flower petals in all varieties of flowers will be a Fibonacci number. Those little sections in the spirals of pinecones and pineapples and sunflowers—a Fibonacci number. Shells. Even the numbers in DNA.”

“That’s amazing.”

“And the golden ratio—it’s an equation, a proportion, that’s seen everywhere. The solar system, the pyramids, Renaissance art, the rise and fall of the stock market, and the growth of populations. The human body. It’s almost eerie.”

“Some kind of proof of the God-nature-universe mystery, maybe. Discovery of some truth.”

“Exactly—that’s exactly what I like about it.” I felt so pleased, my insides glowed. “There can be a mystery, but then there’s good reason behind it. Evidence for belief.”

Jake reached down into the sand. “Look,” he said. He set a shell in his open palm, traced the spiral with the tip of his finger. He handed it to me. “Memories of the Sandy Beach Resort and the search for truth.”

I took the shell, held it tight in my hand. I could have kissed him then, I wanted to. He was so close; his lips were so near mine. The skin of his shoulder was against my own.

“Look at you, now you
are
cold,” he said. He was right—I hadn’t even noticed. Goose bumps ran up and down my arms. I hadn’t noticed, but he had. He stood. Held his hand out to help me up. I took it, stood too.

“I’ve been hurt by girls. I’m not really hot to have it happen again,” he said.

“I get that,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I got that. I didn’t know
exactly what he was telling me. I wished I had Aunt Annie around to ask.

We made our way back to the cottage. On the porch, under the yellow light, Jake whispered my name. “Quinn? The thing you most need to know about me? You’re not the only one looking for something true,” he said.

I slept badly. I was trying not to worry about Mom’s messages, which meant I was worrying a lot. And I was aware, too aware, of Jake’s presence. I had placed the shell under my pillow. I dreamed of a girl in a patchwork dress at a wedding. I dreamed that I was trying to get home on a plane, trying to get to the airport, but that I wasn’t going to make the plane because I was sitting in the audience of a circus, and the show wasn’t over yet. I dreamed that I couldn’t see because I was wearing sunglasses, but when I took them off, I still couldn’t see.

I was the first one awake. I lay there for a long time, the shell in my hand, until I couldn’t stand being the only one awake any longer. I threw my pillow at Sprout.

She opened her eyes. “You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” she said.

Frances Lee made coffee from one of the foil packs and picked at the frosting of the cake. “Olivia Thornton awaits, people. It’s tribal mask day. Get the lead out,” she said.

Jake brushed by me as he came out of the bathroom. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.”

He folded the bed away, and we all packed up. We snitched bits of cake and brushed our teeth and then we were ready. Jake opened the door and Sprout shoved her way outside.

“Oh no,” she said from the porch.

“What?”

“Ah shit,” Jake said.

I walked out to join them. “Goddamn it,” Frances Lee said.

Big Bob looked like an enormous mummy in the back of the truck, wrapped and covered in endless loops of toilet paper.

“Hoodlums,” Jake said.

Sprout took out her cell phone and flipped it open. She aimed, and then snapped a picture.

“Abominable Snowman, with Cheeseburger,” she said.

We stopped for breakfast on the way. The same sort of pancake house in which I had first (not first) met Frances Lee. She and Jake ate one of those breakfasts that have everything—bacon and sausage, pancakes and eggs. Sprout had a strawberry waffle with a snowplowed circle of whipped cream around its edge. I had French toast, decorated with a round glop of whipped butter and an orange slice. After breakfast we called Mom again. It was time for damage control. Sprout and I stood out front, where there was a newspaper stand, a cigarette machine, and a candy dispenser filled with some sort of bumpy red nut item. Sprout pushed the buttons for Camels and Marlboros and Salems.

“Your mom’s not here,” Aunt Annie said.
Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou,
I thought.

“Can you just give her the message that we’re doing great?” I couldn’t believe my luck. “She called three times yesterday. I was beginning to think she couldn’t let us out of her sight for five minutes.”

“I told her the same thing. She was freaking out about your dad changing into a bathing suit when your dad hates the water. ‘He doesn’t own a bathing suit. I know he doesn’t own a bathing suit.’ She wanted to call the place you were staying, but I told her she was acting like paranoid stalker parent.”

Shit, shit, shit.
I watched Sprout, Queen of Liars, over by the candy machine. She stuck her finger in and out, in and out, of the little silver door. “Tell her…”
Shit.
“We made him buy it. In the motel gift shop.” This sounded lame. You could feel the weird disbelief-hesitation pause that sat between Annie and me, the telltale hover that came post-lie. “For tanning purposes,” I added.

“Okeydokey,” she said. Now she sounded doubtful. “Will do.”

Change of topic, quick. “How’s everyone there?”

“Bizarro. I finally asked your grandma about all the time she’s spending on eBay, and she just stared at the bridge of my nose and said, ‘It’s none of your beeswax.’ Couldn’t even look me in the eye. And I hate when people say ‘beeswax.’ It makes me think of Kendall Greene from the fourth grade with that yellow stuff in his ears.” I could hear her shiver. “And then your mom. She’s just been sitting in the rocker by the window, listening to music. Shakes her head like she’s having some conversation with herself she just can’t believe. Ivar lays there at her feet…He still hasn’t been out.”

“Mom’s freaking needlessly,” I said. I watched Sprout turn the little silver handle of the candy dispenser. She didn’t put a quarter in but cupped her hand underneath the hole, just in case.

“No, this isn’t just you guys and your dad. She seems pleased with herself. I asked her what was up, and she just said, ‘Nothing. I already told you. Nothing.’ That kind of thing drives me crazy. She just sits and smiles and shakes her head.”

“She just sits and does nothing but listen to music and stare off?”

“You’d think she was in love, but we know that can’t be it,” Annie said.

“She probably won the lottery and won’t tell any of us,” I said.

“No kidding,” Annie agreed.

Sprout made a little excited squeal. She turned to show me some disgusting bumpy red nuts in the palm of her hand. The candy people must have done a reasonable thing and were trying to give them away. I could see Frances Lee bend her head down on the steering wheel. She did this every time she started the truck since Jake had poured the Coke in. I think she was praying to the mechanic gods. “Well, can you just tell Mom that everything is fine? She doesn’t need to keep calling.”

“Will do,” Annie said.

“How’re things with Quentin Ferrell?” I asked.

“Quentin Ferrell is an asshole,” Aunt Annie said.

“Upside down,” Jake said.

“God,” I said. I turned the map around, studied it. “It’s a straight shot south.”

“Three hours to Seattle, this I know how to do,” Frances Lee said. She went to school at the University of Washington. “We’ll be at Olivia Thornton’s house by late afternoon. I’ve got to warn you, she didn’t exactly sound thrilled about this. I think the only reason she’s letting us come by is because she wants the mask back.”

“Hey, if she’s a bitch, we’ve got a ton of TP in the back,” Jake said.

“True,” Frances Lee said. “It’s just too bad we never found Jane, age six.”

“I know it,” I said.

“But tomorrow we get to see Brie,” Sprout said. Brie and Abigail Renfrew—the last two women on our list. I didn’t want to think about Abigail Renfrew. It was one thing for Dad to betray Mom with Abigail Renfrew. It was another thing for Sprout and I to do so. Besides, thinking about Abigail Renfrew now—I was sure it would send some sort of psychic informational waves to our mother, and we’d already had one near miss. I swear, Mom had some sort of batlike radar. You couldn’t get anything past her.

I looked in the side mirror at Sprout. She had a little pad of paper and was writing intently, her head down.

“What’re you doing back there?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She looked pleased with her own secret. Aunt Annie was right—that kind of thing
does
drive you crazy. When people say “nothing” when they’re obviously doing something, it makes you much more interested in finding out. Same as when a person starts to say something and thinks better of it. If you knew what the “nothing” or “never mind” was, you probably wouldn’t care less, but the not knowing made you care a great deal.

“What?” I asked. “What are you writing? Another story?”

“None of your beeswax,” she said.

I held back from leaping over the seat, grabbing up the paper, and reading it out loud, which is what I wanted to do. It was the sort of desperation-fury that came with a game of keep-away. This was how you could feel when things were held back, things you needed or just wanted.

I turned back around. Who cared what she was writing? And just like keep-away, when you walked away from the game is when someone would decide to give you the ball. “I’m writing down some things about our trip. To remember,” Sprout said.

“Cool,” Frances Lee said. “Great idea.” I felt some twist, a sense of being shoved into my place, which was a different place than I’d ever been. I looked around from the new ground I was standing on, and wasn’t sure I liked what I saw.

I snuck a glance back at Sprout for any sense of smugness, but she just wore the same little smile she had before as she bent over that pad of paper. We drove with the windows down, passing outlet malls and lumberyards, and the yellow and green fields of the Skagit Valley. Frances Lee made fun of passing cars.
“‘I’m proud of my honor-roll student’? Why don’t you ever see ones
that say, ‘I’m proud of my C-plus student’?”
And made her feelings clear about a few things.
“How can they undo a planet? Pluto’s been a planet for, like, ever. All those Styrofoam models you made as a kid? And now it’s a great big ‘never mind, you idiot suckers.’”
After a while, Jake
click-click
ed the clasps of his instrument case, lifted out the guitar, and began playing. I watched him as my hair blew around my face; I saw his long fingers bending to the neck, strong fingers strumming. I thought about hands, all that they do in a lifetime—plant seeds in dirt, grasp hammers, hold babies, give pills to a loved one. I thought about Jake’s own hands, what they’d already touched—beach sand, number 2 pencils, cool sheets, sudsy shampoo, steering wheels, and Christmas wrapping. And what they might one day touch. A hand, the curved space of a hip, smooth hair warmed by sun.

Jake whistled. “This place must have some views.”

“She’s a doctor,” Frances Lee said. She turned off the truck, jammed down the parking brake with her left foot. The address had led us to a glassy, angled condominium building at the top of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. We climbed out of the truck. You could see the city stretched below from the street. Big Bob had the best view from up there.

“Did I tell you I’m giving up music to go to med school?” Jake said.

Sprout carried the mask, and we walked through the doors of the building. There was a small TV set in one wall that was part of a security system. We all crowded in so that we could fit on the screen. Sprout held the mask up to her face. She was a very short medicine man with braids.

“Hooga-hooga,” she said. Jake gave her rabbit ears.

“Okay, troops, disperse,” Frances Lee said, and we did. She pushed the bell to Olivia Thornton’s apartment, and in a moment, the door buzzed and we entered the lobby. We took the elevator up to the seventh floor; when we got off, there were four identical doors around a square floor.

“Let’s all knock on a different one,” Sprout said, but before we could cause any more trouble, door number two opened and a woman with shoulder-length blond hair appeared. She wore tight jogging shorts and a tank top and held a bottle of water in one hand.

“Barry’s kids?” she said.

“That’s us,” Frances Lee said. “We spoke on the phone.”

“I just got in. The place is a bit of a mess…”

The apartment stretched out in front of tall glass windows that looked across at the city, framing the Space Needle artfully just to the left of center. The furniture was creamy beige on white carpets, and tan marble blocks held other African art—tightly woven baskets, sculptures of tribal figures in black stone. Mom would love to have the “mess” she meant—a few envelopes and magazines on a counter where she’d dumped the mail, a couple of suits in thin dry-cleaning bags over the couch. She picked these up, moved them to a dining-room chair upholstered in tight black leather, and before she’d even set them down, her mind caught up to what her eyes saw.

“My mask,” she said.

Sprout handed it to her and she held it, looking down at it as it looked up at her. And then, in this clean and ordered place, a messy, unorderly thing happened. Olivia Thornton started to cry.

“I
hate
to cry,” Olivia Thornton said once she stopped, once she’d gotten herself a cup of tea, and us a drink from her refrigerator, which was stocked with so many bottles of juice and soda and water that they were a glass-bottle forest on the shelf. I could see the rest of the food (a pair of grapefruits, anyway) shoved to the back. She confessed that she’d been so nervous to meet us, she bought a little of everything so we’d have something we liked. I could picture her in the store, her cart so full that the bottles shuddered like wind chimes when she turned a corner.

I knew what she meant about crying. I hated it too. I always
worried that if I started I might never stop. Like maybe tears were a separate thing from me with a power of their own—to bring me to some dark place I’d never make it home from.

We sat down on the creamy leather couch, and Sprout sat on a window seat with the Space Needle and the curved arc of the sound behind her. A ferry was crossing, making a ballroom glide across the water. A schooner passed, with proud double masts.

“I don’t usually fall apart in front of strangers,” Olivia Thornton said. She smiled, and little wrinkles appeared by her eyes. I decided I liked Olivia Thornton. She had a direct gaze and kind hands and vacuum-cleaner tracks on the carpet that made you feel like she was someone who tried very hard to be the best person she could be.

“Here we come, a bunch of people you don’t know, handing you some object from a past life,” Frances Lee said.

“It was a bad time in my life,” she said. “I’ve got to confess, this is a little strange for me. Barry’s kids and all. And you said you were half sisters? I thought Barry said he’d been married once before.”

“Once?” Frances Lee said.

“Maybe I made a mistake,” Olivia Thornton said.

“Twice. My mom before that,” Frances Lee said. She wove her fingers together, looked down at them. “He said once?”

Olivia Thornton rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “I must have made a mistake,” she said. But you could tell Olivia Thornton was not the type to be careless with details. “Can I ask, what made you decide to do this? To find the owners of these things? All these women?”

“It’s a little strange,” I said.

“It’s a little…” Olivia Thornton paused. “I don’t know what it is, actually.”

“Karma,” Frances Lee said. “Doing the right thing, et cetera, et cetera,” Frances Lee said.

“Information,”
Sprout said.

Olivia Thornton looked at me, and I nodded.

“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you called. But this is something”—she held up the mask—“this is something that means a lot to me. I got it on a trip to Africa with a humanitarian group when I was twenty years old. When I got home from that trip, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. Barry always denied he had it. He told me I must have lost it when I moved. I was always losing things, forgetting things, remember?” She cleared her throat. “The mask—it was a symbol for me. My own strength and purpose. That thing I’d grab, if there ever was a fire.”

I looked at the bookshelf on the wall across from where I sat. Medical books, spy thrillers. A photo in a frame—Olivia Thornton and a boy with her smile, wearing a blue cap and gown. Another photo—a baby on a blanket, with a goofy smile, a diaper on his head. It occurred to me about Dad, that the women in his life were very nice people.

Jake sat forward. “So, I don’t get how he always knows,” he said. “He takes the thing that means the most.”

“Believe me, Barry would know,” Frances Lee said. “Just like he knows what to say to really jab you.”

“Oh, and I’m sure I
told
him about the mask,” Olivia Thornton said. “You’ve got a lot of material things. But there’s only those few you have an actual
relationship
with. They’re the ones that have a story.”

“You hold them more carefully, too,” I said. I thought of my own ring, weirdly. The way I set it in a safe place whenever I had to take it off.

“True, I guess,” Jake said. “My mom saves all of her old house keys in a box. Back from when she was a kid, even,” Jake said.

“A jar is just a jar except when it was in your kitchen growing up. An umbrella is an umbrella, except when the man you love stood under it during a hailstorm when he asked you to marry him,” Olivia said, and sipped her tea.

“How did you and Barry meet?” Frances Lee asked.

“My office,” she said. “He came into my office. He’d injured his back. He asked me out, right there. He’s very charming, your father. I told him I’d have to cease seeing him as a patient, and he said it was easier to find a doctor than a woman you might want to spend the rest of your life with. That’s what he said, ‘a woman you might want to spend the rest of your life with.’”

“Gag,” Sprout said.

“Oh, exactly, but I fell right for it. He crooked his finger and I followed. I was such an
idiot.
God, I’m sorry—that sounds cruel.”

“We
want
to know what happened,” I said.

“There was always a little imbalance. Where you’re the one that loves more? Not a good thing. I gave the gifts, I said ‘I love you.’ But it was exciting for me. To be around the show, the performers, backstage. All the people he knew. He was playful and fun but had this certainty, this
power.
The limelight followed him wherever he went. Wherever. You just wanted to be around it.”

I knew about that. It was true. You could go to the grocery
store and feel proud of who you were because you were with him. Things were bigger with Dad. It felt so good. Somehow, you were never ordinary, the way you were in your regular life.

I felt a pang, thinking about it. All that I could lose and didn’t want to lose, in spite of everything.

“I took a summer off from my practice to go with him,” Olivia Thornton said. “I can’t believe I even did that. I should never have done that. But then the next year, he told me that the ‘brothers’ had decided against bringing partners—too distracting. No partners at rehearsals, either. He called me one night from rehearsal. But it sounded wrong. You know how different places sound the way they’re supposed to on the other end of a phone? A mall sounds like a mall. A party sounds like a party, a car, rehearsal…But this sounded like a house. A really quiet house. A trying-to-be-quiet house. And then, all at once, there was a shout, a woman’s voice,
‘Jane, no!’
and then a crash. I still remember that voice. And he told me Mike had just knocked over a ladder, but I knew Mike had not knocked over a ladder.”

“And that was that,” Frances Lee said.

“Oh, no, it was far from that. Far. I went into all-out panic. I convinced myself that maybe Mike’s wife
was
on the set. I couldn’t look at the truth. I did what I could to make him want me. He loved to tell people I was a doctor, but I think he hated that I was a doctor—he always complained that I was too serious about my work. It wasn’t
feminine.
So I took fewer patients. Cooked—I’m not a cook. Dressed the way he liked.”