Surprises
“How was it?” Maggie’s voice was sleepy; she had been waiting up for my call.
“It was good,” I said, watching the taillights from Kimmy’s car retreat back down the driveway. “Really good.”
I heard rustling on the phone line, as if Maggie were moving to a more discreet location. “Did you guys kiss?” she asked.
I smiled, knowing my answer would madden her. “Not really,” I said.
“Not really?” asked Maggie impatiently. “What is that? What is ‘not really’?”
Not really was the honest answer. Bobby had walked me to the door and we could see the bluish flashes from the TV through the transom above. Kimmy was just inside, watching a show full of beautiful young kids with dramatic and tortured relationships, a contemporary version of the sort of thing I used to watch when I was her age. And Bobby and I both just stood there, not wanting to break the seal of the night, not wanting to open the door.
“I had a good time,” I said to him. But he didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for my hand and rested it on his lower back, pulling me into him. I looked up at him, our faces inches apart, our hips angled toward each other. But when he leaned in, his lips landed lightly on my forehead, resting there until I closed my eyes and felt my heart become still.
“He kissed me on the forehead,” I said to Maggie.
“Your forehead?” asked Maggie, with disbelief and worry, afraid that all my protests about my evening with Bobby not being a date were well-founded. You kiss your sister on the forehead, I imagined her thinking. But it was actually that moment, standing on my doorstep with his hand gently holding mine in place on his back, when I knew that I was, in fact, on a date with Bobby Vanni.
“It was actually really . . . nice.”
Maggie asked me a few more questions, but I found myself volunteering the answers, glad to talk about the evening I had spent with a man I liked very much. “What did you guys talk about?” she asked.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Lots of stuff.” I thought about the way my laughter had seemed magnified by his, my concerns diminished by sharing them. In fact, the only subject we avoided was Mia. And Duncan.
The phone rang just after six thirty the next morning. I sat up with a sudden breath and fumbled for the receiver, wanting to silence it but fearing what I was about to hear; good news never came this early.
“Hello?” I said.
There was a brief delay.
“Jenna!” It was Duncan’s voice.
I closed my eyes and sank back in bed. “Hi, Duncan,” I said unenthusiastically.
“What time is it there?” he asked.
I lifted my hand and let it fall back down on the bed in exasperation, letting it make a muffled thump on my soft, white comforter. “It’s not even seven, Dunc.”
“Hey, listen,” he said, without an apology. “I wanted to talk to you about some stuff.” I remained silent, knowing that the “stuff” he wanted to talk to me about was his move back to the States. The one Miriam had mentioned weeks ago. The one that he had been planning for who knew how long. “Jenna,” he said. “Are you there?”
I took a breath, letting my head sink into my pillow. “Yup,” I said. “I’m here.” I’ve been here all along.
• • •
“Hey, Rosie,” I said as I stirred brown sugar into her oatmeal. “Would you like it if you got to see your daddy more often?”
I kept my eyes on my task as I waited for her response. “Yeah,” she said lightly, as if I’d just offered her something moderately tasty. Something like oatmeal. “I’d like it.”
I nodded and set her big red bowl down in front of her. My conversation with Duncan had become strained rather quickly. As I had anticipated, he’d announced that he was moving back to New York.
“When?” I’d asked.
“In about a week. I’m going to spend a couple of days in L.A. on my way back.”
“That’ll be nice,” I said, and I wondered if he detected the resentment in my voice.
“So anyway,” he began, “I was thinking that it would be cool to spend Christmas with Rose. Up at my parents’ place.”
“You were thinking that would be cool,” I said flatly.
“Yeah, I mean, she’s my daughter.” It was clear that he intended to hit the tricky spot between indignant and contrite.
Oh, now she’s your daughter?
Sensing the trajectory our call was taking, I ended it quickly after that. I told him that I had to go, but that I’d think about it. Then I congratulated him on his move. I had promised myself that when it came to Rose’s relationship with Duncan, I would always put her interests before my own. But as I stared at her now, as she lifted her nose and looked down into her bowl to search for the very best bite, the one that promised to hold a treasure trove of barely dissolved brown sugar, I realized that her best interests might not always be so easy to determine.
“Hey, can we go see Uncle Warren later?” asked Rose suddenly, her legs starting to kick under the table, the spoon erect in her hand.
I chuckled. “We actually do need to go out there today.”
Rose’s eyes widened gleefully. I watched her for a moment. “You like your uncle Warren, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Rose, with a cool shrug, an affectation she may have gotten from Kimmy. “Uncle Warren is awesome.”
I smiled and took a sip of my coffee. During our recent visits to Royal Court, I had seen the affection Rose and Warren were developing for each other. And I often heard them engaged in the sort of animated conversations that I used to have with him when I was younger, when I used to sneak into his room at night and lie next to him on his bed. He’d tell me wonderful, fantastical things. Talking and talking, he would move his hands with his words, and his mind would skip from thought to thought, following a fluid path that made me feel as though I were on a ride. Did you know that the Milky Way is spinning? he’d ask me, not waiting for my answer. It’s moving at something like—he’d lift his hand, as if he were about to make a random guess, as if he were about to estimate the number of candy corns in a jar—two hundred twenty-five kilometers per second. I’d ask him if that was fast. He’d think about it and tell me that depended on what you meant by fast. Then he’d tell me that not only is the galaxy spinning, but it’s also traveling through space as it spins. And then, if you factor in the rotation of the earth. He’d rest his hands under his head and laugh softly, having officially blown his own mind.
“I’m surprised we’re not all dizzy all the time,” I’d say.
Warren would look up at his ceiling, as if he could see the cosmos through it, spinning and rotating and orbiting in a most miraculous dance. “We’re all moving even when we’re standing still.”
And I would close my eyes and almost feel it: the universe’s teacup ride.
But such conversations had grown more infrequent as I had aged and become less and less able to see the things that Warren did. As I became less and less able to let myself.
Rose was about to dig into her breakfast, her spoon cocked, when she looked up at me. “Hey, did you know that I’m an Aurotite?” she asked.
I looked at her with mock skepticism. “Says who?” as if I didn’t know.
“Uncle Warren. He says you can tell by my spot.” She pointed at her birthmark. “I told him that Tucker said it was ugly, but Uncle Warren says it shows that I’m an Aurotite and that only Aurotite princesses have spots.” Her eyes grew wide with delight as she declared her royalty.
And at that moment, I couldn’t have loved my brother more.
• • •
I felt Rose’s feet kicking the back of my seat as we sped down the highway toward Harwick. Maggie and I had had a rare unproductive day at Wonderlux, one in which we each kept our respective files open, but would constantly call over our shoulders to each other with confessions and observations and questions. She had asked me more about my date with Bobby. “You really like him,” she said.
I do. Whatever was between Bobby and me was too vulnerable and new to speak about freely. Like something beautiful and wild, something I might spook and send running. I cleared my throat, acquiescing in my silence. I did it again now as I looked back at Gordo, who was panting and taking in the view.
“Did you know that Uncle Warren is making me a plane?” asked Rose. She had been talking nonstop during the drive, and I had been enjoying a lull in the conversation.
“He is?” I said casually, unsure of the veracity of the claim.
“Yeah,” she said. “He asked me what color I wanted and I told him red.”
“Red looks nice on planes.”
“Me and Uncle Warren are on the same team,” she said. Rose had just learned about the concept of teams in her weeklong soccer peewee day camp this summer.
“What team is that?”
“The Good Team,” she said. “You can be on it, too.”
Glancing at her in the rearview mirror, I smiled. “Thanks, Rose.”
“Uncle Warren is the leader, though,” she said, as if breaking difficult news.
“Okay.”
“But that means if you need him, all you have to do is rub your ear and say his name and he’ll come.”
Again I looked in the rearview mirror, more alert this time. “Did he tell you that?” I asked, remembering all the times I had needed him. All the times he had come running.
• • •
As I turned into King’s Knoll, I glanced at the sky through the windshield. The clouds looked as though they had been raked across the faded blue, leaving long wisps as they hurried to some great meteorological disturbance, some churning of air hundreds and hundreds of miles away. The high tomorrow was supposed to be only in the low forties, and it was going to get progressively colder after that. It never used to get this cold this early, I thought. And I wondered how much of adulthood was spent benchmarking the present against the past. Thinking about how things were so very different from what you remembered, so very different from what you’d expected.
I let my eyes flitter only briefly to Lydia’s lawn signs. When I was a child, I never ever imagined that Lydia Stroppe would be my stepmother. And yet she was. I never imagined that my parents would be divorced or that I would be a single mother or that Warren would come home one night, his nose broken and face cut. But I had also never imagined that I would have Rose. Or Gordo. Or that one day, I’d turn onto Royal Court and see Bobby Vanni standing on a stepladder on my mother’s front porch with a paintbrush in his hand.
And yet he was.
I felt a sudden surge in my chest, an overflowing.
“Who’s that?” asked Rose, aware of my attention. He wasn’t dressed as usual, in his jacket and jeans. Instead, he was wearing a pair of battered khakis and a sweatshirt, the hood of which was pulled over the thin wool cap on his head. He had a paint bucket at his feet, and his arm was lifted above his head, the brush concentrated on a spot on the column.
I swallowed and then opened my mouth to speak, my smile shaky and unsure, like something just born. “That’s Gabby’s daddy,” I said.