Read All You Never Wanted Online

Authors: Adele Griffin

All You Never Wanted (4 page)

BOOK: All You Never Wanted
5.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

He’d fallen asleep with his arm encompassing her shoulders, as if protecting her from a storm.

His words had devastated her. Still do. But not enough.

Intake = Excrement. Excrement = Animal
.

She’d never actively decided to disappear. She’s just colluding in the decision. She has ground the gears of her brain so many times that the machine is stripped, but she is still stuck in the same pit. Some nights she thinks it will bury her alive.

Thursday, crazy late
THEA

When Mom took us to meet Arthur, we knew it was Big. Since the divorce from Dad, Mom hadn’t gone on more than a loose handful of dates, but she’d made up this rule that every potential candidate had to do kitchen time so that Alex and I could give her our “starter opinion.”

Translation: ten minutes of eyeballing Mr. Maybe as he nursed his club soda or can of beer while Mom dashed around, getting ready.

Strange to think how Mom was always in a rush those days. Especially for Date Nights. Peeling off her work clothes and hopping in the shower, then reemerging in her wrong-for-all-seasons navy shirtdress. Leaving us to wander with her date through a dreary forest of topics like
Will it rain Saturday?
and
Have you seen this movie?
and
What are you up to this weekend?

But Arthur was different. No kitchen purgatory for him. Instead, he sent stealthy town cars to pick up Mom and
Pretty Woman
her off to the city for dinner or live theater. Weeks went by where Alex and I only knew Arthur as a Google search that showed his one professional photo, round-faced with steel glasses to match his iron-gray hair. The head shot was usually paired with stern quotes from
Forbes
and
The Wall Street Journal
.

“The McDaddy of Sugar Daddies,” Alex had decreed. We
kind of started making fun of him right away—like, we’d chant old rap songs about him being a pimp and whatever. The money fascinated us, but it also freaked us out. We didn’t have a plan for how to react to it. Maybe we should have. Maybe that’s when you pay someone to help you talk through things? Because nobody was talking about it. Somehow, it was rude to discuss the money. The all-powerful, life-changing, soul-stealing money.

Of course, money wasn’t why Mom married Arthur. She’d have re-hitched to any warm and decent guy. Mom didn’t like being single, and wasn’t the type to play the game. To be flattered by some overeager bachelor calling her a cougar or a milf. Mom was too gentle, too modest—still is—to put the spotlight on herself. Even now. Even though she could be a horrible bitch any day of the week and people would still have to bow and scrape and hold the door.

Arthur picked Mom pretty quick. Sealing it with a splashy wedding and a family honeymoon in the Turks and Caicos. Pretty funsies. In fact, he turned out to be a perfectly cool guy all around. The problem was that the day I met Arthur was the same day I met Camelot, so it’s hard to recall my first impression of him. I was on overload. Kind of like my first trip to Disneyland.

What I do remember was the holy shit of it all.

I was manic, running up and down Arthur’s staircase and discovering his oak-paneled bar, where I immediately switched on all three flat screens and sampled every exotic beery beverage on tap. Then I’d sped outside. The joy had been so animal pure. Plunging through his topiary to his ivy-covered guest cottage. Then cutting, guerrilla warfare–style, through the bushes to the
pool house with its solar-heated pool. That pool. Mouthwash aqua and possibly offering unworldly pleasures. Eternal youth, maybe. Eternal bliss, for sure.

Sometimes, when it’s crazy late at night like now, when I’m prowling the house as quiet as a burglar, slipping in and out of guest rooms and down the hall to Mom and Arthur’s bedroom suite, I relive that first white-gold rush of the money all over again.

The thrill. The gasp.

Maybe that was the best reason of all to have a party. As a chance to see Camelot fresh. Through other people’s awe. Maybe it would bring back that happiness for me, too.

“Oh, this house?” I whispered, imploring my reflection in their bathroom mirror. “It keeps the roof over our head.” That was Arthur’s host-with-the-most line at dinner parties. But it sounded off-tune from my mouth. I needed a better story.

Mom and Arthur’s bathroom was outrageous. Complete with a wet bar, because Arthur liked a cold one in the sauna. The marble was imported from Carrara and the fixtures were platinum. Touch-screens and mirrors that reflected you so beautifully you never wanted to say goodbye to yourself. You could tap-change the light gels of the vanity bank to “Home,” “Day,” “Garden,” “Office,” “Evening,” “Dinner,” and “Opera.”

I preferred “Garden,” though the light seemed to stream straight off Pluto.

Eerie violet radiance bathed my face as I tried out some shockers.

“This house? Okay, if you can keep a secret. It’s got a past,” I muttered. “Did you know that Arthur’s only child was killed by an
intruder right here in the front hall? Point-blank. They had to replace that chandelier, since there was so much of his blood crusted in it. A boy. William, I think his name was? Sixteen. So sad.”

Ooh, that was a good one. The Unspeakably Tragic and Terrifying Angle.

“This house? I guess it’s okay. But Arthur can be kind of … oh, I don’t know. Like, if he’s had a bad day, he yells and breaks stuff. He busted a Korean chest that he’d paid thirty grand for. He’s been in counseling for his temper. Sometimes we worry that one night he’ll just … snap.” Eek, that was a good one, too. The Imminent Danger from an Abusive Raging Jerk Angle.

My voice was the stroke of a wand. My eyes were open violets. Sweet, folksy Arthur was too easy to turn into a beast. But I wasn’t thinking against Arthur so much as how I made the perfect victim. The frightened stepdaughter, the poor little rich girl. Maybe I was a good actress. Maybe Arthur had movie connections. He’d got Alex that job at
Haute
easy enough. It had been hers to sabotage. But I wouldn’t screw up my chance, no way. Not if Arthur threw a VIP Hollywood audition at me.

And in this flowing purple magic, I was almost Gia. I pressed a finger to my lips. “Oh, please, don’t tell anyone about me and Joshua,” I whispered. “We don’t want to hurt people. It just happened. A chemical thing. But it would crush my sister if any gossip got out. She’s so fragile.”

So not fragile. That first day at Camelot, I’d also found the downstairs Ivory Room that’s built off the library. Customized specifically to store all the treasures Arthur had collected from his globe-hopping travels. Skulls and tusks and Somalian war masks.
Enough ivory carvings to fill a tub. I’d also learned about the secret room behind the kitchen where Arthur’s servants could go. A hangout for servants! It seemed mondo bizarro at the time. Now I’m, like—well, where else would Hector and Lulette and Doris and Jorge-and-Ramon the landscape gardeners relax after cleaning and cooking and mowing and waxing Arthur’s antique car collection?

But the itchy part of that memory, in that otherwise excellent first day of my new life, was how painful Alex had been. She hadn’t bothered to explore the house with me. Just sat like a stone next to Mom. Speaking to Arthur in that formal voice. But hardly listening to him, I knew, because she was so distracted. Evaluating it. Trying to figure out if Arthur’s Spectacular Much-ness added up to any value at all.

Finally, she’d sort of given in and let me drag her off to the pantry. I’d loved the pantry most. That was where Arthur had skimmed the cream off the top of countries I’d never seen. Tins and jars and boxes and packets of anything you ever might want to eat from anywhere on the planet without leaving Greenwich.

I’d kept trying to entice her.

“Look, Al. Twelve cans of whole plums in honey syrup from Burgundy, France. And this jar, it’s chocked with truffles from Namibia. Remember that restaurant Mom and Dad took us to? Where half a truffle cost our whole dinner? But they let us sniff the jar?” The memory still chafed me. I’d almost poked a Namibia truffle in my mouth right there and then. Just to karma–pay back that old humiliation.

Alex had stared down the teas. Black, red, green, herb.
Arranged perfectly along one shelf, like a magician’s apothecary. She’d kept her fingers steepled below her chin.

“But how do you pick?” she’d asked me. “How do you know which tea you want, when there’s this many?”

Such an obvious question. So silly that I hadn’t answered.

Um, how about … you pick them
all
.

Alex had resisted that first day, and every day after. She’d become the girl in the one pair of jeans and T-shirt. The girl who only agreed to drive a new car because Mom had thrown such a weeper about it. I’d heard that conversation, listening in at Alex’s bedroom door.

“Do this for me, please,” Mom had begged. “It’s Arthur’s way of showing his love for this family.”

Alex hadn’t been one bit fragile till
Haute
. But when
Haute
broke her, it made me wonder if my sister had been secretly, invisibly fractured all along.

The deeper I stared into my violet-lit eyes, the less I could find myself. It was like the real me was unreachable. A poltergeist. Or maybe I was just in progress. Hatching another character for another extraordinary story, yet untold.

“This house?” I whispered, nearly kissing my lips to my reflection as my eyes pricked damp with an outsized emotion that I’m not sure I could have at that moment explained. “You don’t understand. I absolutely hate it here. This house is evil. This house has ruined us.”

Friday, daybreak
ALEX

When Joshua is sleeping, he looks impish. Like one of the higher angels—what are they called again? Seraphim? He’s got both pillows and a big wedge of bed, and he’s kept Alex awake on and off all night with his snoring.

Her own sleep fans back and forth. At dawn, she pulls on her shorts plus one of her dad’s old APEC Insurance T-shirts and steps outside for a run. She wants to sweat off her painkillers and fatigue, and even her hunger. If she pushes herself, she can propel mentally and physically into a new dimension. A place where emptiness becomes full again. Reborn in a spongy rush through her brain.

May means blooms. Bridal pinks and whites overloading the cherry and magnolia trees. The house she’d grown up in had been small. Its best room was the garden. As girls, she and Thea had spent weekends helping their father mulch and prune, tending his tomato plants, his sage and mint and rosemary, his prized Eskimo Sunset maple with its pinky-green leaves that flipped over to a speckled jelly-bean lavender.

Alex feels better knowing that if her dad had abandoned his Eskimo Sunset, nobody else had much chance, either.

But this morning, her feet beating the usual route and thinking of her father, her breath goes panicky. Her lungs are a fist, grabbing and regrabbing for air. What if she’s stuck on an irreversible
course with no choice but to turn into her father? What if everything stops mattering to her, too? Because to stay planted, to take root, to thrive and bloom in the world, things need to matter, don’t they?

Some things. A couple of things.

Cutting the loop—she hardly has the energy to run the sixteen-mile Round Hill Manor Estates complex, but she can handle three miles—Alex decides that she’ll get herself to school for morning classes. And then, somehow, she’ll find a way to get herself to Leonard, too.

Her mind needs to force the issue. Even if her body resists. She’ll write down a to-do list, like in the old days. She’ll burn through the fuse of these next hours on the strength of her intention.

She will make this day matter. She won’t give up on it.

Friday, morning
THEA

Ms. Grange was a total English teacher cliché. You totally know her, too—she’s the lady in the striped tights and downtown earrings herding her kids outside for class the minute it’s warm enough. The lady who does that annual trip across the Brooklyn Bridge to Fulton Ferry Landing as part of a feel-the-love for Walt Whitman and Hart Crane and Marianne Moore.

If you didn’t get Grange freshman year, you’d get her as a junior—but once she “discovered” you, Strange never let you go. Especially if she thought “you are coming to this from a deep place.”

Whatever that meant, it was trademark Grange.

I used to love Grange from the bottom of my high-honors heart. But lately I wished she’d retire, or go find a new school. She embarrassed me. This year for English I had Dr. Dandridge, who fetished the letter C worse than Cookie Monster. Who let everyone sleepwalk their way into average. But Grange, she was always careening at me in the hall, always loudly slipping me another novel or cornering me to pick up that discussion about Doris Lessing even though it had been two years since my last active thought on
The Grass Is Singing
.

Grange was a haunt from my past. From a time when I knew the difference between modal and transitive verbs. Now all she
did was stab me with that flickering nostalgia torch of what a teacher’s pet I’d been.

And right this minute, she was singing my name in wild octaves. “Thee-aaa-door-aaa.” Never mind that there were hundreds of other kids pushing out of morning assembly.

“Thee-aaa-door-aaa!”

Forcing me to look up from my guest list for my party. Grange could be horrifying. I sidelined her as smoothly as I could. “What’s up, Miz G?”

“I’ve got big news!” She clasped her hands, all those chunky rings on all the wrong fingers. My heart skipped not. Strange wasn’t someone who delivered the big news. All she had was mouse news. Tales from the fleabite newsroom.

“Cool.” Not asking what. Knowing it was coming anyway.

“School funding was approved for an end-of-year print on
The Impulse
.”

The Impulse
was the school’s online lit mag. I waited.

“Hard copies. And I want this issue to sizzle,” she continued, “since we’ll have this other dimension of aesthetic! The inks, the binding, the paper …”

Still waiting.

BOOK: All You Never Wanted
5.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
The Kissing Season by Rachael Johns
Forbidden Love by Vivian Leigh
Touch of Heaven by Maureen Smith
El retorno de los Dragones by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
No Mercy by L. Divine
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami