Текст книги "This is What Happy Looks Like"
Автор книги: Jennifer E. Smith
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
From: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, July 4, 2013 7:38 PM
Subject: (no subject)
I’ve been officially reunited with my phone. Again, really sorry that yours is on the bottom of the ocean. I’ll make sure you have a new one first thing tomorrow. Or you can just take mine, and I’ll happily put you in charge of fielding calls from Harry, which has apparently become a full-time job…
The Quinn who awaited Ellie at the edge of the green was not the same one she’d met along the harbor road this morning. And it certainly wasn’t the same one she’d been tiptoeing around for the past few weeks. Even from a distance, Ellie could see it in her posture, a mix of anxiety and concern; she stood slightly apart from the rest of the crowd, glancing at her phone, her whole body practically vibrating with impatience.
The sun was starting to slope toward the tops of the trees on the other side of town, and the band had taken a break, the brassy sound of their instruments replaced by the uneven hum of voices. Ellie had been looking for her mom. Her thoughts were still spinning like tires over the events of the day, and she wanted nothing more than for the two of them to fill a couple of paper plates and collapse onto a picnic blanket, to spend the rest of the evening talking about anything but her father, anything but Graham, just eating and laughing until the sky fell dark and the fireworks took the place of the stars.
But there was Quinn—this oddly unsettling version of Quinn—pacing at the edges of the party, and when her eyes found Ellie’s, she went still.
And just like that, Ellie knew.
“Want to take a walk?” Quinn asked, and Ellie nodded, allowing herself to be steered away from the many people who fanned out in rings around the gazebo, away from the shops and the food and the noise. She felt oddly numb, her thoughts slow and fumbling as she tried to absorb what she knew to be true. She didn’t need to hear Quinn say it; it was there all over her face, her mouth set in a thin line, her eyes full of concern.
To her surprise, they arrived at Sprinkles, having taken the long way around the backs of the shops that bordered the green. Quinn dug a key from the pocket of her shorts and they slipped inside without a word. The shop was officially closed for the day, though for the festivities they’d donated enormous tubs of ice cream, which were lined up along with everything else on the picnic tables outside. But inside, the store was cool and quiet, the sun coming through the windows at a slant, leaving rectangular stamps across the tiled floor. Ellie followed Quinn into the back, where a small table with a few folding chairs was set up in the storage area, surrounded by cardboard boxes like the start of an igloo, all of them filled with ice-cream toppings and various kinds of candy.
They sat down, and Ellie leaned heavily on the table, a wave of exhaustion sweeping over her. “So it’s out there?” she asked. “My name?”
“It is,” Quinn said with a matter-of-fact nod, and Ellie realized how relieved she was to be hearing this news from her friend. Quinn had always been unflinchingly honest; it was one of the things Ellie loved most about her. Even now, when they hadn’t talked for weeks, when Quinn must have a thousand other questions she wanted to ask, a thousand other things she wanted to say, she seemed to instinctively know what part of the equation Ellie would be most worried about, and she was almost businesslike in her assessment of the situation.
“It also mentions your father,” she said, and her eyes filled with understanding, though she couldn’t possibly have understood any of this. When they were kids, Ellie had told Quinn that her parents were divorced, which somehow sounded better than the truth, even if she’d been allowed to tell it. “He’s out of the picture,” she’d explained, parroting back the words she’d overheard her mom say in the coffee shop when asked by one of the women in town. And just like that, he really was out of the picture, at least between Ellie and Quinn.
Ellie never knew whether Quinn’s mother had forbade her highly inquisitive daughter from asking too many questions, or whether Quinn, even when she was little, saw a warning in Ellie’s eyes whenever the subject came up. But either way, they’d spent the past twelve years dancing around the idea of Ellie’s father, and now—when Quinn had every right to be angry or confused about this gaping hole in their friendship, this enormous secret between them—she instead emanated a kind of quiet capability. They’d fought about far less, and Ellie wouldn’t have blamed her for being upset about this. But that was the thing about best friends; all the petty grievances and minor complaints were left behind as soon as something more important came along, and Ellie was grateful for that.
“It’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking,” Quinn was saying. “Really.”
Still, Ellie’s heart had plummeted at the mention of her father. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her trembling hands. She’d known this would happen ever since she saw the first article this morning, ever since last night, when she’d watched Graham draw his fist back, maybe even since the moment he walked up the steps of their porch that first night. But she still didn’t feel quite prepared.
She thought of her father, with his bright polo and even brighter smile, the feel of his hand as he shook hers, and she was suddenly relieved that she’d lost her nerve earlier. It was better this way. After all, he couldn’t be angry with her if he didn’t know her. If everything had gone according to plan this morning—if she’d knocked on his door and he’d let her in, ushered her over to a table where they could sit and talk, the years between them melting away, if she’d walked out of there with not just a check but also a phone number and a memory and a promise of something more to come—then it would have all dissolved now anyway, as flimsy and fragile as a soap bubble. This would have been all it took for everything to fall apart again: the moment when an unidentified girl was, quite suddenly, identified.
Maybe later—today or tomorrow or the next day—he’d study one of the pictures that would no doubt accompany the articles, and something in his mind would click with the faintest recognition. He’d puzzle over her face, the face of the daughter he’d never reached out to, wondering whether it was familiar because she belonged to him, or because of something else. He’d try to catalog all the smiles he’d seen and the hands he’d shaken, flipping through the images to locate the girl with the red hair and freckles who had stared back at him with unspoken urgency at the clambake that day, willing him to make the connection, to figure it out, to open his eyes. But even then, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Quinn said, leaning over to open one of the boxes that were strewn all around them. She wrinkled her nose at whatever was inside, and moved on to the next one, pulling out a bag of saltwater taffy. “As soon as I saw the news, I wanted to make sure you knew. Where have you been anyway?”
“My phone’s… broken,” Ellie mumbled, accepting a piece of green taffy from Quinn, then twisting it in her hands. “My mom. Is she…?” She wanted to say mad or angry or upset, but she was sure that her mother would be all of those things, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to complete the sentence. Her stomach lurched when she tried to picture it: her mother picking up a newspaper, or opening up her e-mail, or being stopped by someone on the street in town. They might ask about her daughter, or about the man she’d had an affair with, or they might just ask about Graham and the cameras, the biggest scandal this sleepy town had probably ever seen. There were so many things she could be mad about, it was almost hard to focus on just one.
“I think she’s just worried about you,” Quinn said. “I was too.”
Ellie had closed her eyes, but now she looked up again. “Thanks,” she said, biting her lip. She felt her shoulders relax, just slightly; of all the many things she was still toting around with her—the broken news story and all it would mean for her mother, the polite handshake with a father she’d never get to know, the disappointment of missing the Harvard program, the looming and inevitable good-bye to Graham (a thought that squeezed at her heart and took the breath right out of her when she thought about it too hard)—it was a relief to have one of them slip away. Whatever had passed between her and Quinn this summer—the hurt feelings and jealousy and misunderstandings—all of it now seemed to have been forgotten. It was a little bit like the taffy, this friendship of theirs; you could stretch and pull and bend it all out of shape, but it was no easy thing to break it entirely.
“I’m sorry I never told you about my father,” Ellie said. “I wanted to. You have no idea. But Mom was always worried this would happen.”
Quinn tilted her head. “What?”
“That the news would get out and everyone would know the truth,” she explained. “About who we are. And who he is. And where we came from.”
“Ellie, come on,” Quinn said with a small smile. “Nobody here cares about that. You’ve lived here how long? You think anyone who knows you would care about some scandal that happened a million years ago?”
“Well, they do now,” Ellie pointed out. “You said the word’s out there. All those articles…”
Quinn laughed. “That’s practically a footnote,” she said. “Really. All anyone cares about is Graham.”
Ellie stared at her. “What?”
“Do you think people would rather read about Paul Whitman’s daughter or Graham Larkin’s girlfriend?”
“I’m not his—”
“Trust me,” Quinn said, popping a piece of taffy in her mouth. “You are.”
Ellie leaned back in her chair and shook her head in wonderment. Her father had always loomed large against the background of her life, his absence so big it almost felt like a presence. Now, the idea that Graham—who she’d only just met—could somehow turn out to overshadow him struck her as amazing. All this time, she thought Graham’s fame would be the thing to tip her off balance. But he’d managed to salvage the whole situation simply by being himself. To almost everyone else in the world, he was far more important than Ellie’s father. And it took her only a moment to catch up to them, to realize—with a little shock—that he was more important to her too.
Quinn sent another piece of taffy sailing across the wooden table in her direction, and Ellie reached out to stop it. “My mom’s still gonna kill me.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said merrily, now fully back to her old self. “But once she’s done with that, how about we grab some sparklers and head down to the beach? You can even bring your boyfriend, now that you guys have been outed.”
“Only if you bring yours too,” Ellie said, and Quinn’s smile broadened.
They swept the rest of the taffy into the cardboard box, then pushed back their chairs and walked out to the front of the store together. The sky was turning gold at the edges, the waning light glinting off the band’s instruments. Ellie could see Meg from the deli making snow cones just beside it, and farther down, Joe from the Lobster Pot was standing beside an oversize grill, a spatula in one hand and a chef’s hat perched at an angle on his head.
The whole town seemed to be out tonight, and the invisible boundaries of a dance floor had been loosely arranged, the first few brave couples out for a spin. Behind it all, the ocean was dark and glittery, and Ellie thought of the Go Fish, still docked in the town of Hamilton, and of those few quiet moments at the bow with Graham by her side before everything had gone wrong.
When she shifted her gaze back to the party, she saw her mom weaving past a line of children at the ice cream station. Ellie felt a hitch in her chest at the sight of her, and she turned to Quinn, who had fallen uncharacteristically silent.
“I should go talk to her,” Ellie said. “But we’ll meet up later.”
Quinn nodded. “We always do.”
Outside, Ellie hurried across the street before she had a chance to lose her nerve. Even as she walked, she found she was bracing herself against the stares that were sure to come her way. She’d seen how far and wide the story about Graham and the photographer had traveled in such a short time, and if her name was now out there too—not to mention the name of her father—then there was no reason not to think everyone in town already knew.
And it was clear that they did, their eyes tracking her progress across the lawn. But there was also something odd about the way they surveyed her as she walked past; it was like they weren’t looking at her so much as around her, their gazes skirting the edges of her, hopeful and searching. They were looking for someone else, she realized. They were looking for Graham.
Ellie felt like laughing. Quinn was right. Nobody cared about who her father was or why they’d come to this town in the first place. All they cared about was that the movie star in their midst had chosen one of them. And now they wanted to see for themselves.
Mom was standing at one of the tables, her back to Ellie as she refilled her glass of lemonade. When she turned around, the hand holding the pitcher trembled a bit, and though Ellie had expected her to be angry—and rightfully so—all she saw was the relief that was scrawled so plainly across her face.
“Where have you been?” she asked, setting down the pitcher. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Her eyes seemed to hold another question, but she didn’t ask it. Instead, she turned and peeled a star-spangled paper plate from the pile on the table. “Grab some food,” she said, handing it to Ellie. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”
Ellie’s stomach grumbled as she filled her plate with huge spoonfuls of potato salad and macaroni, topping it off with a hot dog and a cupcake, and then she balanced a glass of lemonade in the crook of her arm and followed her mother across the green to where she’d laid out the same plaid blanket they used every year.
“Where’s Bagel?” Ellie asked, sitting cross-legged, the food spread out in front of her.
“I took him home after he stole his second hamburger.”
Ellie laughed, picking up her cupcake, which had a tiny flag drawn on top of the white frosting. “Have you been here all day?”
Mom didn’t answer. She settled down across from Ellie, holding her blue cup of lemonade with two hands. “Have you checked your phone at all?” she asked, her expression serious.
Ellie shook her head. “I lost it.” She knew what was coming next, and she knew what she should say, but somehow I’m sorry didn’t seem like nearly enough. She’d given away the secret that had run like a thread throughout their lives. And now the whole thing had unraveled in exactly the way that Mom had said it would, and there was nothing that Ellie could do to change it. Maybe it would help that the focus seemed to be on Graham, and maybe it wouldn’t. But she knew that wasn’t the point, and she swallowed hard as she waited for Mom to continue, still holding the cupcake in midair.
“What happened last night,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “with Graham and the photographer. You know that’s been in the news, right?”
Ellie couldn’t look at her, but she nodded, her eyes on the cupcake, the smudged corner of the little frosted flag. She didn’t know exactly how to answer, but a flood of words had welled up inside of her anyway, and she felt exhausted by the effort of holding them back.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispered, and then a lump rose in her throat, and the rest of it came out thick and choked. “It’s my fault. You told me this would happen, but I just couldn’t—I couldn’t help it. It’s not like I was seeing him this whole time. I stopped. But it was awful, not seeing him. I was completely miserable. And then it just happened again. But the thing with the photographer wasn’t really his fault. He was trying to keep them away from me, and they were horrible. Just like you said they’d be.”
She was half crying now, fueled as much by exhaustion as emotion. Mom was sitting across from her, watching the words tumble out with a strained expression, and Ellie couldn’t tell if it was anger or worry or something else entirely. She sucked in a breath of air before continuing. “It was awful,” she told her. “He had no choice. And this morning, they still hadn’t figured out that it was me who was with him, and I thought it would be okay, but now it’s obviously not, and I’m sorry. I know this is a huge mess, and I’ve probably ruined everything, but I didn’t mean to, and I’m just so, so sorry.”
For a moment, there was no reaction at all. Mom simply sat there, staring at Ellie, the untouched plates of food on the blanket between them. Then she leaned forward. “You haven’t ruined anything,” she said quietly, and Ellie opened her mouth to protest, but Mom shook her head. “Would I rather this hadn’t gotten out? Of course. It’s a chapter of my life that I’m not particularly proud of, and when I left D.C.—when I left your father—I felt like I was running away, which is never a good thing.”
She paused, looking thoughtful. The sky had darkened several shades, and the orange streetlamps that lined the edges of the green winked on behind her.
“But look what happened,” she said, sweeping an arm out. “We landed here. And much more important, I got you out of the deal. How could I ever regret that?”
Ellie bit her lip. She’d spent the day in search of her father, like Ahab going after the whale. But she realized now that she’d been on the wrong quest all along. In the end, she was much more like Dorothy. In the end, what she’d been searching for was simply this: home.
She lowered her eyes, wondering whether she should admit where she’d been today; it would be so easy to pretend it had never happened, to block out the memory of her father entirely. It was painful to think about even now, and talking about it—being forced to examine it and analyze it and argue about it—was the last thing she wanted.
But there’d been so many lies already—about Graham and about Harvard and about the boat—and this one was far too big to hide, far too important to keep quiet. She ducked her head, examining the forgotten plate of food.
“I saw him today,” she said quietly. She was about to continue, to say who she meant by him, but it was clear by the look on Mom’s face that this wasn’t necessary. She was sitting cross-legged across from Ellie, a paper plate with a cob of corn on her lap, and it rolled onto the blanket as she straightened, her whole body going tense. When she made no move to pick it up, Ellie reached out and did it herself, brushing off the fuzz from the blanket and then putting it back onto Mom’s plate with an apologetic shrug.
“You saw him?” she repeated, her eyes glassy.
“That’s where I was today.”
“In Kennebunkport?”
Ellie sat back, stunned. She hadn’t ever considered the fact that Mom might keep tabs on him too, follow his progress the same way Ellie always had. She’d always assumed they never spoke of him because Mom didn’t want to talk about it. But now, for the first time, she realized she might have been wrong. Maybe it was because she did want to talk about him; maybe all the silence was just a way to stanch the flow of memories like a bandage.
Maybe she left him all those years ago not because she hated him, but because she loved him.
After a moment, Ellie nodded. “Graham went up there with me,” she said, leaving out the part about the boat for now. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to see him.”
Mom’s face was still oddly blank. “And you did?”
Ellie nodded again. “He was in town, meeting people for the campaign,” she said, and then, to her surprise, her voice broke. “He didn’t know it was me. He didn’t recognize me.”
“Oh, El,” Mom said, scooting closer, so that they were side by side. “I didn’t know. I had no idea you wanted to meet him.”
“I didn’t either,” Ellie said, feeling suddenly miserable. “Not really. I guess it was stupid to think he might know who I was.”
Across the lawn, the band finished their song with a trilling crescendo and then fell silent. There was an air of anticipation as people found their blankets. Pretty much everyone here had been coming to the festival for enough years to know that when the sky turned a soft denim blue, and the band finished their last number, and the clapping petered out in the warm evening air, the fireworks would soon begin.
“Do you know how I first started talking to him all those years ago?” Mom asked, and Ellie nodded.
“You were his waitress.”
“Right, and I always just took his order, and that was it,” she said. “But there was this one week when it rained every single day. He’d come in each morning with his coat dripping and his hair soaking wet, and slide into that booth that never seemed like it was big enough to fit those long legs of his. And then one morning, it just stopped.”
“The rain?”
She nodded. “As I was taking his order, I looked out the window and said something about how it was a miracle. And you know what he said?”
Ellie shook her head.
“He said, ‘There will be no miracles here.’ I remember we both looked around the table, and I was thinking he was right. I mean, it was a diner, and kind of a crummy one at that. We were surrounded by overcooked eggs and water stains and torn plastic seats and pies that had been sitting out for way too long. But when I asked what he meant, he told me a story about this town in France in the seventeenth century that was supposedly the site of all these miracles. When too many people started flocking there, all of them filled with hope, the authorities posted a sign: THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE.”
Overhead, the first firework went whistling past the roof of the hotel and into the night sky, a tiny bead of light; as it sailed higher, it grew quieter, and Ellie lost sight of it entirely. But a moment later it exploded into the air with a fizzle, its spidery golden legs arcing down toward the ground again.
“But that’s the thing,” Mom said, her voice soft amid the noise. “There was a miracle. We just didn’t know it yet.” She smiled. “The miracle was you.”
“Mom—” Ellie said, but she was cut off.
“He might not have recognized you today,” she said, shaking her head. “But he loves you. I saw the way he looked at you when you were little. He always wanted a daughter.” She reached out and gave Ellie’s hand a squeeze. “And staying out of our lives? That wasn’t easy for him either. You have to know that. It was my decision—I was the one who cut it off. He was ready to go public about you, even though it might have ruined his career. But I wouldn’t let him do it.”
“Why not?”
“That wasn’t what I wanted for us,” she said. “Him with his wife and kids in Delaware, sending us checks while we were stuck in D.C. with all the press. I wanted you to have a real life. This kind of life.” She swept an arm around at their friends and neighbors, all of them cheering, and Ellie felt her chest swell at the sight of this town that she loved, and that she’d never trade for anything, especially life as a senator’s daughter.
All this time, she’d wondered if things would have been better if she were part of his family, but she understood now that it was the other way around. She wasn’t the one who’d missed out. Maybe she hadn’t grown up with money for summer camp or trips to Europe or a new car every year. But he’d never watched the sunset from the cove near their house. He’d never spent a winter’s morning at Happy Thoughts, warming his socks by the radiator. He’d never eaten at the Lobster Pot or tried the orange sherbet at Sprinkles. He’d never seen her win a soccer game or a spelling bee, and he’d never met Bagel. He’d never had dinner at Chez O’Neill.
“He didn’t abandon us,” Mom said. “He gave us a gift.”
“He let us go,” Ellie said quietly.
Mom nodded. “And we’ve been fine,” she said. “But believe me: he still loves you. I don’t have to be in touch with him to know something like that.”
It was getting harder to see, and the people still looking for places to sit were silhouetted against the streetlamps. A few kids with glow necklaces ran past, laughing, and Ellie squinted to make out the solitary form settling onto the grass not far from their own blanket. Her heart gave a little thump as she recognized him.
It was Graham.
He sat down alone on the grass, folding his legs beneath him and tipping his head back to look up at the sky, and she realized he had a phone pressed to his ear. She hoped he wasn’t talking to his manager or his lawyer or his publicist. Something about his posture, the relaxed expression on his face, made it seem like maybe he wasn’t. He was alone, as usual; he had a way of being in a crowd of people and still somehow apart from them, and tonight was no different.
As each firework exploded and then disappeared, she closed her eyes, preserving the memory in glowing lines on the backs of her eyelids, thinking about the day behind her, the memory of her dad’s hand in hers, the comfort of her mother’s presence, and mostly—mostly—the boy sitting not ten feet away, watching the very same sky.
She thought of the words her father had spoken all those years ago: There will be no miracles here.
He was wrong, she was thinking, the words arriving with a fierceness that surprised her. Even in that diner, there must have been a sense of possibility. You just had to know where to look. Even a dirty window or stale apple pie could be a kind of miracle.
“So what happens now?” Ellie asked. “If it’s all over the news, he has to know we’re here. Do you think he’ll try to find us?”
“Do you want him to?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Maybe someday. Or maybe not. I don’t know.”
“That’s okay,” Mom said. “We’ve got time to figure it out.”
“I’m really sorry,” Ellie said again. This time, she wasn’t exactly sure what she was apologizing for; there were so many things to choose from.
“Hey,” Mom said, reaching over to cup her chin. “It’ll be fine.”
“How?” Ellie asked, her voice very small.
“We’re lucky,” she said. “It seems like everyone’s more interested in the other part of the story. Apparently Graham Larkin’s a lot more fascinating than Paul Whitman.” She shook her head with a smile. “I definitely didn’t see that coming.”
Ellie’s eyes trailed over to Graham’s back again. He’d hung up the phone and his face was now angled toward the sky.
“It’s a good thing,” she said. “It takes away the focus.”
“Not while he’s in town, it doesn’t,” Mom said, leaning back. “But he’ll be gone in a couple of days, and then that will be that.”
Another firework exploded overhead, this one a ring of green and purple, but Ellie didn’t see it. She was too busy watching Graham, and when he turned around, his eyes caught hers immediately. They stayed there like that for a long moment while the sparks rained down overhead. Another explosion colored the night sky, and Ellie felt this one down to her toes, the heat and flame of it, like a candle, like a fever, like a burn.
That will be that, she was thinking, but she didn’t stop looking at Graham.
