Be Strong & Curvaceous (10 page)
There was no reply I could possibly make to this, so this time I kept my mouth shut. Just as well. I needed to swallow the tears that swelled in my throat.
“And I want you and Alana to be my bridesmaids.”
“What?”
“Of course. Who else? As soon as we have a wedding date and decide whether it’s going to be in Veracruz or Santa Fe, I’ll let you know. It will be such fun, choosing dresses and colors and things together.”
I clamped my lips on the urge to ask her if she still had the dress she married Papa in. And the veil, and the something borrowed, something blue. “I don’t want to, Mama.”
A flood of chatter about Nile green versus salmon pink stopped in midstream.
“¿Qué?”
“I’m not going to stand up with you. I don’t like the guy, and I hate what you’re doing to Papa.”
“This has nothing to do with him.”
“Yes, it does. This will kill him.”
“Nonsense. Once he got over the surprise, he was delighted for me.”
“He was lying, Mama. You know he’d never do anything to make you mad at him.”
“Shows what you know. Even if he was, that’s none of your business, Carolina. He’s your father and you love him, and that’s as it should be. But my life is my own now, and I choose to spend it with a man who worships me and who will support my art, not get in its way.”
“Whatever. But I still don’t want to be a bridesmaid.”
I heard a hitch in her breath. “What’s gotten into you,
poquita?
You never used to be so unkind.”
I ignored the prickle in my conscience that told me the fruit of the Spirit—namely, love, joy, and peace—were withering on the vine here. But this
hurt
. I wanted to hit back at the thing that hurt me, like a little kid. “You and Papa never got divorced before. You never picked a guy in a turquoise shirt and a leather tie before.”
The line clicked loudly in my ear. I threw my cell phone at the laundry basket.
How could she do this? How could she plow ahead, giggling and tossing her glossy long hair and pushing her ring into people’s faces, while leaving the rest of the family miserable? Had my mother always been this self-centered? Was that what had made her leave us, not something we kids or my dad had done?
At that point I noticed Mac, leaning on one elbow and watching me. “That sounded interesting,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.” I yanked my blankets over my head and burrowed deep under them, hoping they’d muffle the sounds of my misery as it rose up in a flash flood, sweeping away everything good I’d ever known.
From: [email protected]
Date: April 21, 2009
Re: Mama
The future Mrs. Vigil called this morning to tell me the happy news. Are you going to be a bridesmaid? I’m not. This is horrible. I don’t know how I’m going to face Papa.
I don’t have anyone but you to talk to. Antony is too little. I’d never bring it up with Papa—it would wreck him. And I can’t tell my friends—it wouldn’t be right to blab family business to them, even if they’re the best friends in the world.
Richard Vigil. I can’t stand it. That hair! What does he do—watch his Duran Duran music videos in his spare time? How can our mother be this desperate?
Call me asap. I’m not available during class or between 4 and 8 pm but any other time is good.
Love, Carly
I hit Send and looked up as Mac came in. She dumped her backpack, which was army-surplus khaki and almost as beat-up as Gillian’s, on the bed and pulled her laptop over without a word to me.
Which was fine. I was so not in the mood to make small talk when my family was being sucked into a black hole.
The way our room was set up, each of us could see the other while we were on our computers. Now, normally I’m all about keeping my head down and giving a person her privacy, but for some reason, while I was skimming my e-mail and trying to ignore her and all my other problems, I looked up.
Mac was checking e-mail too, but wow. Being a recent expert in bad news, I could tell when someone else was getting some. Her face was flushed, and she had that fragile look around the eyes that meant she was holding back tears.
She’d sworn at me this morning.
I’d shut her down.
Both of us were hurting, and I could do one of two things. I could leave her to it, and kiss good-bye any chance of finding a friend in her. Or I could swallow my pride and my fear of being flattened and reach out.
As Professor Dumbledore would say, sometimes you have to decide between what’s right and what’s easy.
“Is—is everything okay?”
She jumped and stared at me. “What’s it to you?”
That was probably my cue to leave her to it, but that would have been too easy. “You look like you got e-mail as crappy as the phone call I got this morning.”
Whatever blistering reply she’d been about to make about me minding my own business dissipated on a long breath. “Yeah, you could say so. Look, about this morning. I couldn’t help but overhear.”
“I’m sorry about that. My mother can never get the time difference right between here and Veracruz.”
“Where?”
“It’s a resort town on the Caribbean side of Mexico. She got engaged on the weekend.”
“And you think it’s pants?”
“If that’s Scottish for
garbage
, then yeah. The guy is a relic from the eighties, and it’s way too soon.”
“For her or for you?”
I blinked. That was a weird way of putting it. “For her, of course.” But that was dumb. Obviously it wasn’t, or she wouldn’t have sounded so bubbly and excited. And deluded, but that was just my opinion. “For me.” With a sigh, I added, “Even though they’re divorced, I guess I was hoping that someday she’d get back together with my father.”
“Take it from me,” Mac said. “The only person who hopes that is you. And you’re the only person it hurts, too.”
“Is this the voice of experience?”
She nodded. “My parents split up a couple of years ago. Mummy got the townhouse on Eaton Square, and Dad kept the ancestral pile in Scotland, of course. So I live with her and go to school in London and spend the hols with him at Strathcairn.”
“Do you like it?”
With a lift of one shoulder, she said, “I live with it. She lunches with the ladies who still introduce her as the Countess, and Dad lets tour groups come through and gawk while he hides in the cellar, experimenting with terrible batches of whiskey. The only reason he could pay the taxes last year was because of your friend Lissa’s dad. They gave him a small fortune to use the place as a location for that movie.”
“I thought you were rolling in it.” I glanced at her closet. “You wear Chanel.”
“Mummy is rolling in it,” Mac said dryly. “It’s the classic setup—he’s got the title, she’s got the dosh. The perfect marriage. Only . . .” Her voice trailed away for a moment. “I think they really were happy. You know. Before. I just can’t get either of them to tell me what happened.”
“Neither can I. We had such a great life. Everyone always laughing, lots of family around. Tons of food, women yakking in the kitchen, telling stories about the men behind their backs. I learned more about life in Mama’s kitchen than in any sex ed class. And then it all just”—I waved my hands,
abracadabra—
“disappeared.” Mac nodded as if she could relate. “So when she called to say she was engaged and would I be her bridesmaid, all that played into it. I guess I was mean to her, but I couldn’t help it.”
“Understandable. She needs to give you a little time.”
“Knowing my mother, both of them will turn up here tomorrow to smooth things over.”
“I hope not.”
“Me, too.” I looked up. “So. Enough about me. What lovely piece of news did you get?”
She looked at her screen as if she’d managed to forget about it for five minutes. I was almost sorry I’d asked. “No news. Just . . . it’s odd.”
“What is?”
She turned the laptop in my direction. “What do you make of this?”
From: [email protected]
Date: April 20, 2009
Re: Found you
The beauty of the Net is that people are so easy to find. How come you didn’t tell me you were going to the States, Linds? If my friend hadn’t told me, I’d never have known you’d jetted off to San Francisco.
I wasn’t expecting the heat. And it’s not exactly England’s green and pleasant land, is it? I thought this place would be more glamorous, like in
The O.C.
Instead it just looks dry. How come you came here for your exchange term? I called and they told me you were doing that. Something else I had to find out from a stranger. I wish you’d write to me. I love you.
Anyway, I thought you’d like this for a souvenir. Or maybe the press will.
You know. After.
Drifter
Attached was an image file. When I clicked on it, the image filled the screen and I sucked in a breath. It was a picture of the two of us, half-turned away from the camera, an orange cab in the background. I wore a blue silk jacket and Mac wore her Prada dress. I looked up into Mac’s face. Her lips were pressed together, as if she was trying to keep them from trembling.
“This is from the night we went to TouTou’s,” I said. I wasn’t about to forget that dress, or how I’d felt coming second to her in it. “How did he get this? Who is this Drifter guy?” I studied the picture again. “Your boyfriend? Or, um, ex?”
“No!” She snatched the laptop away and closed it, as if something bad might jump out of the screen. “I don’t even know the silly nit. I delete his messages, but he just keeps on.”
I’d seen her deleting things, stabbing at them angrily, as if that would make them go away faster—or more permanently. “He seems to think he knows you, though. He must be one of the photographers that hang around here.” I tried to remember, but the events later had blanked out trivial things, like people taking pictures.
“He’s been sending me mail for months. I hate it. I wish he would stop. Or better yet, step in front of a train.” She looked close to tears.
She didn’t even know this person, and yet he’d said he loved her. That was weird. And scary. And there was a name for it.
“Along with Chanel Couture and the Balenciagas,” I said slowly, “it looks like you’ve got a stalker.”
Y
OU MUSTN’T TELL ANYONE.”
Why do people say stuff like this? Why does the girl in the horror movie always go down to the basement after she hears the window break? Or wait to call the police until
after
the bad guy is in the house?
“Mac, you can’t just let him do this to you. You have to report it. At least tell Ms. Curzon.”
“What’s she going to do?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a no-harassment rule here. The first thing they’d probably do is change your e-mail addy.”
“I never gave him the first one.” She stared at the sleeping laptop. “I’ve never even answered any of his messages.”
“But Curzon will tell the cops to go after his provider. They’ll give out his address and he’ll be arrested. End of stalk.”
“I doubt that. He hasn’t actually done anything to be arrested for.”
“How’d he get this picture? He’s hanging around here. There must be something they can pick him up for.”
Even though it was a warm afternoon in late April, Mac got up and shut the window. Maybe it made her feel safer. “It’s weird. But I mean what I say, Carly. This is off the grid.”
“Why? I don’t get you.”
“There will be a huge noise about it. And the tabs will print it, and whoever this guy is will know he’s freaked me out. He’ll probably get off on it, the sniveling numpty.”
Part of me admired her vocab while the rest of me just felt exasperated. “Or,” I said reasonably, “Ms. Curzon will do a confidential investigation, they’ll pull the guy’s plug, and off he’ll go to court or whatever, with no one the wiser.”
“Carly, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t even color my hair without some British tab shrieking about how awful it looks.”
“We’re not in Britain. All the tabs here care about is who Vanessa is wearing this week.”
“Yes, but all the paparazzi know each other. There are stringers for the British papers out front right now. How else does Vanessa get into
Hello!
?”