Local Girl Swept Away

  At the moment, however, the thing I was most afraid of was spending the next two hours sitting at a table filled with people to whom I couldn’t tell the truth. Elsie didn’t know about Cooper. Finn didn’t know about Lorna. Well, no one knew about Lorna, except Charlotte, and she was silently furious about it. Each bite of food I put in my mouth would be seasoned with deception.

  But what could I do? I pulled out a smile from the place I apparently kept all my other lies. “Well, then, thank you Rudolph. Dinner sounds great!”

  24.

  I couldn’t believe the way Finn muscled Cooper out of the way so he could sit next to me in the restaurant. Why tonight of all nights, when I wanted to stay far away from him? The whole dysfunctional bunch of us were stuffed into a corner table in Ciro’s candlelit basement, me sandwiched between Finn and Rudy, Cooper across the table between Elsie and Tess. Charlotte was there too, huddled next to Lucas at the far end of the table, looking as if she’d rather be just about anyplace else. I wasn’t going to be able to swallow a bite.

  Rudolph threw both arms up into the air. “Champagne for everyone!”

  “Rudy, there are only three of us at the table old enough to drink champagne,” Elsie said, shaking her head at her indulgent husband.

  “Oh, come on. Who’ll know?”

  “They won’t serve the kids. Especially Tessie.”

  Tess grabbed at her napkin and the silverware on top of it clanged to the floor. “Why do you always have to say stuff like that, Mom? Like I’m such a baby!”

  “Because you are—”

  Rudolph interrupted his wife. “Now, now. No fighting. This is a celebration. If we can’t have champagne, we’ll all have filet mignon or something.”

  “Very Lord-of-the-Manor of you, Rudy,” Cooper said.

  My eyes fell to half-mast and I let my head drop into the palm of one hand. If only I’d sneaked out with my mother and gone home to bed. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep, of course, but at least I wouldn’t be sitting here next to Finn, Lorna’s for-God’s-sake boyfriend, holding onto a secret that would change his life.

  “Are you okay?” Finn leaned over and put a hand on my leg, which jerked involuntarily at his touch. I’m sure he felt it.

  “I have a headache,” I said, wishing he’d lift his hand.

  “Hard being a star, huh?” he mocked me gently.

  “I’m not a star.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I should have said, ‘Diva.’” He removed his hand and I immediately missed it.

  “Sorry,” I said, giving him a sideways glance. “I’m tired. I probably should have gone home with my mother.”

  Rudolph overheard me. “What? And go against an age-old tradition? When an artist has an opening, he or she is required to go out and get smashed afterward!”

  “Rudy!” Elsie shook her head.

  “You know what I mean. Celebrate! Enjoy the moment! Successes don’t come around all that often.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’ve had your share,” Cooper said, perusing the menu.

  “My share?” A shadow crossed Rudolph’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean? You think I’ve had too many? I’m not allowed any more?”

  “That isn’t what he meant,” Elsie said.

  “How do you know what he meant?” Rudy huffed. “Are you his interpreter? He can speak for himself.”

  “All I meant was you’ve had many successes,” Cooper said, calmly. “No offense intended, Rudy. I don’t know why you insist on thinking I’m defaming you.”

  Rudolph held his menu in front of his face. “Well, perhaps because that seems to be your favorite pastime lately.”

  Finn leaned over and whispered to me, “This should be worth the price of admission. Rudy’s been itching to lay into Thorne ever since that radio interview.” His breath on my ear, his mouth against my hair, made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair.

  “Forgetting to mention your name on NPR is not ‘defaming you,’” Cooper said, rolling his eyes.

  Rudolph slapped the menu on the table. “Of course it is! Everyone knows you’ve been my protégé for the past eight years. For you not to mention me—”

  “Everyone?” Cooper gave a scornful laugh. “I don’t think most people give a damn about either one of us.”

  Rudolph’s face turned crimson and the volume of his voice increased. “It was a slap in the face and you know it. You meant it to be. You were interviewed for half an hour, and in all that time you didn’t once mention either me or Jasper Street!”

  “Oh, good Lord, Rudy. I’m sorry. I’ve apologized six times. It was an oversight. What do you want me to do?”

  Rudolph jabbed his finger into Cooper’s face. “It was rude and embarrassing, and I’d be happy to tell you exactly what to do—”

  “Daddy!” Tess interrupted him. “People are staring at you.”

  “Rudy!” Elsie reached across the table to smack his arm. “The waiter’s here.”

  Rudolph looked up at the boy with the notepad and said, grumpily, “I’ll need another moment.”

  The waiter turned to the other side of the table where Cooper was grinning widely. “I’ll have a martini, please, and then the filet mignon.”

  • • •

  I kept spinning the spaghetti around and around on my fork, unable to lift it to my mouth. This evening was endless.

  Finn pointed to my plate. “On this planet, we actually eat the food.”

  I gave him a half-hearted smile. “I’m not that hungry.” I couldn’t believe how nice Finn was being to me tonight. If only I could fall against his shoulder and rest there a few minutes. I wished he’d allow it. I wished I deserved it.

  “Try some of my chicken Marsala,” Lucas said. “If you like it better than yours, I’ll switch with you.”

  Finn glowered at him. “Or you can have my Alfredo if you want.”

  Charlotte didn’t offer food or sympathy. I couldn’t even look at her for fear her eyes would scald me. What if she decided to blurt out the truth? What would I do? Better to keep my eyes on my plate.

  “No thanks, really,” I said. “The pesto’s good. I’m just tired from, you know, everything.” I managed to force a tiny bite of pasta between my teeth and gulp it down.

  Finn leaned close again. “Something’s wrong, Jackie. I can tell you’re upset. Did something happen tonight?”

  Oh, Finn, if only I could tell you! “Tonight? No, no. I’m just—”

  “Stop saying you’re tired. That’s not it.” He sounded worried. Would he be angry with me when he found out the truth? Probably. Probably he’d be furious.

  I tried to keep my eyes hooded so he couldn’t look into them and see the lies balanced on the lower lids, threatening to leap off in a fountain of tears. But they didn’t seem to be under my control. They drifted up until Finn caught them. We stared at each other, eye to naked eye, and I could feel myself drowning.

  Rudolph and Cooper had been chugging down martinis for forty-five minutes and were both the worse for it.

  “You know, Rudy,” Cooper said, stretching across the table and tapping his index finger against the side of Rudy’s plate, “Sometimes you remind me of my father.”

  Rudolph cut another piece of his steak and swirled it through the mashed potatoes. “Am I supposed to be flattered by that?”

  “Not at all. He was a jealous old bastard.”

  “Cooper!” Elsie’s mouth fell open.

  Rudolph drained his glass and said, “Thorne, are you trying to make me clock you? Is that your plan? Are you hoping someone will write it up in the New Yorker and you’ll get a little more free publicity at my expense?”

  Cooper smirked. “Oh, Rudy, you do think you’re Ernest Hemingway, don’t you?”

  “Stop it, both of you,” Elsie said. “You’re ruining the evening.”

  “I feel sorry for your poor father,” Rudy continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “If I had a son who turned out to be an ungrateful parasite like you, I’d
shoot myself.”

  “Funny, that’s just what he did,” Cooper said. “To no one’s regret.”

  The table went completely silent until Tess started to cry. Cooper and Rudolph stared at each other as if they were arm wrestling, and no one else knew where to look.

  My head had started to swirl like the inside of a tornado. I pulled my gaze away from Finn and stared at the wormy pasta on my plate, trying to bring it into focus. When I felt Finn slip his hand into mine, I jumped to my feet and launched myself back from the table, the screech of my chair against the wood floor ripping through the thick silence.

  “I should go,” I said, holding on to the table edge as the room spun around me. “I’m not feeling—”

  I think it was Charlotte who shouted, “Jackie!”

  And it might have been Finn who put his arms around me as I fell. But there was no time to appreciate it before I lost consciousness.

  25.

  “You said you were coming early.” Lorna left the door ajar so a little light could penetrate the dank room.

  “Sorry. I came as soon as I could. Here’s your jacket,” I said, tossing it to her. She hugged it to her chest.

  “Oh, I missed this!” She held the coat at arm’s length so she could study it. “It’s kind of a mess now, isn’t it?”

  “I tried to get the stains out, but I guess they were in too long.”

  She slipped her arms into the sleeves and tugged the jacket on, but it gaped wide over her belly. “Damn,” she said as she yanked on the lapels. “Reality check.”

  “You’re lucky I got here at all,” I said, as I unloaded the food I’d sneaked out of my mother’s kitchen, mostly day-old bread and pastry from the Portuguese Bakery. “My mom wanted me to stay in bed all day.”

  Lorna removed the jacket and threw it in a heap on the couch. “Why? Are you sick?”

  “I fainted last night. At a restaurant. In front of Finn and his parents and pretty much everybody I know.”

  She snorted. “Oh, my God. Because you were so nervous about the opening?”

  “That was part of it. I hadn’t eaten anything all day.” I put a bag of rolls on the table and a container of cream cheese. “I hope my mom doesn’t miss this stuff.”

  Lorna grabbed a roll from the bag. “I’m starving. I could eat three of these.”

  I found a bowl in a cupboard and arranged an apple, a banana, and an orange in it. I got a knife from a drawer and laid it on the table in front of her.

  “The thing is . . . ” I said, then stopped. Did I really want to get into this?

  “What? The thing is what?” She smeared a thick layer of cream cheese on a roll and closed her eyes as she took a bite. “Oh, this is good.” She reached for the apple.

  If only I could’ve opened a window, let in the morning sun. The cabin felt like a cave; the walls pulsed around me. The air, damp and musty, pressed against my chest and pushed out the words I’d been holding in.

  “It wasn’t just nerves about the opening,” I said. “It was you too. I mean, it was mostly you. God, Lorna, you blew my freaking mind showing up here yesterday! I couldn’t think about anything else. And I couldn’t talk to anybody about it, and I felt like I had this huge secret that I couldn’t tell the people who’d most want to know it. I felt like I was lying to them!” I fell into a kitchen chair across from her. “You wrecked me.”

  She crunched into the apple. “I appreciate it, Jackie, I really do. You know that.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this a secret. What are you waiting for, Lorna? How much longer are you planning to hide out?” It made me shiver to imagine curling up on a damp mattress in this lonely place.

  “Not much longer. I couldn’t . . . do what I needed to do last night. But I will tonight. And then I’ll come out of hiding. I promise. You can deal with it one more day, can’t you?”

  I wasn’t actually sure I could, but I didn’t say that. “I guess you’re afraid to see Carla too. That’ll be hard.”

  Lorna made a face like she’d just found a worm in her apple. “I’m not afraid of anything, Jackie, especially not my mother. You should know that.”

  “Well, maybe not afraid, but it’ll be hard, won’t it?”

  “Everything to do with my mother is hard.”

  “I saw her a few days ago out in front of Old Hat,” I said, remembering how that green scarf disconnected her head from her body.

  “They still let her work there?”

  “I don’t think she does much work. She’s . . . bad.”

  “Some things never change.”

  “No, I mean really bad. Like, crazy.”

  Lorna put the half-eaten apple on the table and stared at it. “That’s not new, Jackie. She just used to hide it better. I’ll probably end up like that too, eventually. One of the town crackpots. Like mother, like daughter.” She rubbed a circle on her belly, like she was apologizing to the baby.

  I didn’t remember ever hearing Lorna admit to a weakness before, especially one as awful as that. I reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “No you won’t. Don’t say that!”

  She pulled her hand away. “Crazy’s not the worst thing. Not for the crazy person, anyway. Of course, eventually the rest of you will get totally sick of my bullshit. You’ll wish I had drowned.”

  “Stop it! You’re nothing like your mother.”

  She shrugged. “I guess we’ll see.”

  “You aren’t. When Carla sees you’re alive, maybe she’ll straighten out a little bit too.”

  A low growl rattled in Lorna’s throat as though she thought I’d said an incredibly stupid thing. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” She squared her jaw and I could see her fierce confidence return. In fact, she seemed tougher than ever—unbreakable. “I’d be happy if Carla never found out I was alive, but I suppose she has to. God, people are going to act like it’s such a big deal, aren’t they? Coming back from the dead is going to be a giant pain in the ass.”

  There was a long silence while I tried to beat back the anger that flared in my chest. It was going to irritate Lorna to deal with everyone’s happiness over her return? There was a taste in my mouth as if I’d been chewing on tin cans. I felt like my emotions had been squeezed into a spongy ball that Lorna kept lobbing into a wall with a tennis racket.

  Finally I couldn’t hold in the explosion any longer. “It was a big deal! How do you not get that? You died! And everybody who knew you was horrified and destroyed, including your mother. The entire town has been obsessed with your drowning.” My voice was getting louder and louder. “You can’t just show up all of a sudden and expect people to pretend it didn’t happen. ‘Oh, look, Lorna’s back. Isn’t that nice?’ No. They mourned you. They’ll be shocked, and some of them will be damn mad that you made fools of them!”

  Lorna raised her eyebrows. “You sound like you’re one of the damn mad ones.”

  “Well, maybe I am, a little bit. How could you do this to us?”

  Lorna kept her face blank as she closed up the cream cheese and cinched the plastic bag of rolls with a twist tie. “How could my father leave me when I was eight years old and never get in touch with me again? How could my mother be a drunken bitch who hates me? How could my baby’s father want me to—” She looked up at me. “Shit happens, Jackie. I’m sorry if I made you cry or whatever, but I had to do it this way.”

  I got up from the table and walked across the room, trying to calm down. “If that was an apology, it was a really crappy one.”

  Only somebody looking at her as closely as I was would have seen Lorna’s shoulders sag. “Is that what you want? An apology? You know me, Jackie, I’m not good at apologies.”

  “Try.”

  She took a deep breath and focused on a spot just over my head. “I’m sorry, okay? I know I probably should have told you or something, but I couldn’t. You can barely keep my secret for a day—how would you have kept it for four months?”

  “I could have helped y
ou find another way—”

  Lorna waved me off. “Okay, okay, whatever. Maybe I was wrong. And I apologize, but it’s over now. And I need you to help me come back home.”

  She’d finally said the right thing. She needed me. I couldn’t let her down. “Okay. God, I can’t believe you’re back and we’re fighting with each other. I don’t want to argue with you.”

  I would have gone to her and given her a hug then, but she walked away to stash the food in a cupboard. “Neither do I,” she said. “You can tell people soon. I promise. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “After you talk to him? The . . . father?”

  Her head bobbed, the briefest nod. “Then you can tell everybody. Announce it on the radio, put it in the newspaper. You can even tell my mother if you want to. Just don’t expect me to go over there and give her a big kiss.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry I got mad.”

  “You’re allowed to.” She smiled crookedly, then looked away. “So, give me some news. Tell me what went on while I was gone,” she said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Are you dating anybody? Are you madly in love by now?”

  Was I? “Sort of,” I said. “It’s still kind of a secret, but I really like him.”

  Lorna smirked. “Oh, so you’re keeping secrets too? It’s Finn, isn’t it? You can tell me. I knew once I got out of the way the two of you would get together. You were always crazy about him.”

  What? I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “No! Not Finn! No! I wouldn’t . . .” Oh, yes you would. “I mean, he wouldn’t . . .”

  “Oh, come on, Jackie. He cried on your shoulder and you loved it, didn’t you? I don’t blame you. You thought I was dead.”

  I put my hands over my face. The shame of that afternoon under the pier crawled back under my skin. The moment I’d made a fool of myself and betrayed my best friend. “I, I did kiss him. Once. But he didn’t kiss me back. It was terrible. It was stupid. I’m so sorry, Lorna!”