I began feeling guilty about my reluctance to go to Colombia to do charity work. If it was God’s will that I accompany my mother, then I should have felt obligated to go with an open heart. My entire childhood had been a lesson in not questioning what God had in store for me, and I took a deep breath and resolved to go to Colombia with my mother and assist to the best of my ability.
My father sent me an e-mail intended to be inspirational right before my mid-terms began. He included a passage from Deuteronomy 15:11, “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.”
For a split second I thought sinisterly that my land was Treadwell and there were no poor and needy in attendance, to the best of my knowledge.
My mid-terms were a blur. Throughout my entire academic career I’ve been a great test taker, but the distractions of Juliette’s absence and my unanticipated trip out of the country threw me. My lackluster performance all semester was put on full display as I sat, stupefied, staring at my exams for biology and trigonometry. On my Spanish II test, I was having such difficulty staying focused, I forgot how to properly construct the sentence, “I went to Spain two years ago,” which was especially infuriating because I have actually used that exact sentence before in conversation.
Nightly I sat on my bed, hoping that inspiration would strike so that I could begin my sketch for the Empire State Emerging Artists contest. But inspiration never struck, and I was feeling guilty about how many sheets of paper I crumpled and tossed in the trash. Daddy had always preached that wasting time is like wasting God’s attention; any time in this life spent idly is a decision to do nothing instead of doing God’s work. I was very antsy to leave campus and become occupied with God’s work, because despite my best efforts, I was completely unable to concentrate on productive projects in my dorm room.
On my last night at Treadwell, I could barely sleep. The uncommon silence of the dorm on that Thursday night, after many of my classmates had already departed for the break, was deafening. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff, about to fall off. This feeling of being on the brink of something enormous and strange was totally odd to me; it was not at all uncommon for me to fly home alone, or even travel overseas with my parents, so I wasn’t sure why this time it all felt so overwhelmingly monumental. But it did. I felt with certainty that my life was about to change drastically.
Friday morning after my mid-terms were over, I headed to the airport with a throbbing headache. I was convinced on the limo drive to Logan Airport that I had failed, or at best barely passed my mid-terms. As I was checking in at the airline counter, I felt like I was totally going to pass out. The round-cheeked stewardess reviewing my ID looked me up and down skeptically.
“Are you flying alone today, dear?” she asked.
I blushed furiously. I knew I looked young for my age but it really was starting to get embarrassing at age fifteen when adults thought I was more like eleven or twelve. There were times when I had taken the bus into Boston with Juliette and had been given the kids’ menu at restaurants. So embarrassing.
“Yes,” I huffed, handing her my Treadwell student ID that gave my correct age.
“And will someone be meeting you in Arizona?” she asked.
“Yes, my chauffeur,” I said haughtily. I was in a big hurry to go sit at the gate with the largest coffee I could find, my new book of inspirational short stories for teens, and a pack of cherry Twizzlers, my favorite airport snack.
At the gate, I couldn’t ignore the local news playing on the overhead television. Juliette’s father was being arraigned that day in lower Manhattan. Legal experts were telling the newscaster on New York 1 that they were expecting Mr. Santangello would be facing several consecutive life sentences. I was so caught up in the coverage that I didn’t even notice when I spilled coffee down my chin and all over my white leather fall jacket.
Juliette’s father was going to jail. Aside from the shame that I could imagine she was feeling, she was probably terrified and heartbroken, too. I tried to imagine if my father had to live out the rest of his life behind bars. The mere thought made my chest tighten. In my head, I reached out to God and reminded him that Mr. Santangello couldn’t be all bad, because he had fathered a wonderful person like Juliette. But I had a sinking feeling that no amount of prayer or hopefulness was going to get Mr. Santangello out of this jam.
“It’s just unconscionable,” an older woman with enormous diamond earrings and white hair was saying on the news, as she was being interviewed in the studio by the newscaster. “What this man did violates not only all of the professional ethics of the finance industry, but the fundamental moral code of society. People have lost their entire life savings. They’re trying to determine now how they’re going to pay their mortgages and send their children to college. The futures that they worked for are now just dashed.”
“And you, Ms. Nelson? Are you at liberty to disclose how much of your investment with Mr. Santangello was lost?” the newscaster probed.
The older woman looked uncomfortable and bit her lower lip. “Well, I’m not at liberty to say because all of the funds have been seized by the federal government. So right now it’s safe to assume I’ve lost every penny I invested until a settlement is reached to pay back all of the investors. And in terms of the amount that I entrusted to Mr. Santangello, let’s just say it was sizeable. Fortunately it wasn’t my entire net worth. But it was a significant amount of money, and it should suffice to say that my attorneys will be working tirelessly until a settlement is reached.”
Thankfully, the news coverage switched to a story about a beautiful young R&B star, Tawny, celebrating her 20 birthday at a nightclub in London with a star-studded guest list. Tawny was the toast of the music scene, standing over six feet tall, with a model’s physique and a voice like velvet. I couldn’t help but notice Isaiah Thompson, Ameerah’s dad, in one of the pictures, holding up a flute of champagne. I sighed. Sometimes it felt like the whole universe revolved around the parents of the students at Treadwell. The culture was inescapable.
At the airport in Phoenix, my mother was waiting for me with her personal driver, Griffin, and Karl, her personal body guard, near the baggage claim. She was blonder than she had been when I had last seen her in the same place at the end of August, and a little softer around the edges. Even though it was late October, it was still over a hundred degrees in Phoenix, and my mother was wearing a pink cashmere tank-top and heavy denim designer jeans. Women in Arizona do not leave the house without full make-up, and even though my mother was devoutly religious, she was no exception. Her eyelashes were crusty with mascara and cheeks were smeared with hot azalea cream blush even though her face was naturally flushed from the hazy morning heat outside.
“Hi, Mama,” I said, suddenly wanting to cry for no reason at all just at the sight of her. Sometimes my love for my parents would almost knock me out, especially when it had been a few months since I had last seen them.
“Hi there, honey bun,” she cooed, scooping me into her arms and crushing me into her perfumed bosom. “Are you eating enough up North? You look like skin and bones.”
This was far from the truth; I had probably gained at least five pounds since the start of classes because I had regularly missed track practice at least once a week. But my parents were from the Deep South, and they thought everyone on earth could stand to gain a little weight. I genuinely felt pity for girls at school like Emma Jeffries who I would see eating next to nothing in the cafeteria because their parents pressured them to look good in the public eye. My own parents were constantly trying to stuff me full of waffles and bacon.
On the drive home in the backseat of our SUV, I spilled my guts to my mother. We had only spoken on the phone twice since August due to her hectic schedule with the network and her events. All of the things I hadn’t wanted to relay to her through her team of personal assistants or Marguerite, or type into an e-ma
il, came pouring out of me. I told her about Alyssa surpassing me on the track team, and about what an absolute wash my mid-terms had been. I told her about Juliette’s father and how vicious all of the girls on campus had been, including girls like Giovanna who was our mutual friend.
“Oh, that poor girl,” my mother said in reference to Juliette. She made the sign of the cross. “May God shelter her during this difficult time.”
When we arrived back at the ranch, my father wasn’t home yet from the television studio. He taped his nightly television broadcast in the afternoon down at the cathedral outside Phoenix so that he could wake up daily at four a.m. to broadcast his radio show live. I was anxious to spend time with him before my mother and I departed for Colombia the next day. I was also eager to go check on the horses once my mother mentioned that True Heart, the white horse I had received as a birthday present when I was eight, had recently been sick.
Our Porsche SUV passed through the security gate at the front entrance to our property. Two armed guards stepped aside so that our SUV could pass, and the burly bearded guard I remembered from the summer nodded at Griffin and allowed us to continue through the second set of gates. I took in the familiar sight of the soaring beige and rust-colored mountains in the distance. The morning sky was leaning into a perfect Arizona day – cloudless, deep blue. While I enjoyed the leafy green seasons of New England, I was always grateful when I came home to Arizona that my parents had moved The Church of the Spirit from Arkansas out west when I was a baby. I was a desert girl at heart, and was never happier than when I was under the beating sun, inhaling dusty air.
We drove up the long, paved road toward our house, past the gardening staff’s headquarters, the small chapel where my father sometimes preached for private groups, and the guest house, where our nanny Nora used to live when Aaron and I were younger. I had a fleeting thought about Colby McKay, Griffin’s son, who every so often appeared around the compound. Colby was a year ahead of me in school at the local public high school in Goodyear, Arizona. He was tall, lifted weights and played football on the local varsity team. I knew this only by spying on him via the local newspaper’s website while I was away at Treadwell, and from the slim few comments he had made in my presence over the years we had known each other. Colby McKay had wavy black hair and hazel eyes with impossibly white teeth. It was quite possible he was the most handsome high school student in the world, and I got butterflies in my stomach wondering if we would meet during my brief time at home.
Behind our house, there was a small complex of condominiums where a number of the staff members and their families lived. I guess compared to how many of my classmates at Treadwell lived, our arrangement of living on such a sprawled-out piece of land with so many other families could be perceived as a little odd. But my parents owned 75 acres of ranch land that had to be maintained, not to mention a facility just outside the gates of our property where they offered low-cost day-care to low-income families and managed a soup kitchen. Add our stables to that mix, usually boarding more than twenty horses in addition to our four, and then it made a little more sense that we would need an entire community of people nearby at all times.
It never bothered me at all that there were always so many people around, in our house and on our land. I had never known any other life. Imagining a life in a normal small suburban house without a team of gardeners out front maintaining the flora or without a staff of housekeepers constantly vacuuming, polishing, and dusting was like imagining a life without having a horse to ride across the plains covered in saguaros, or a life without an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the back, heated at night so that it was bearable after the sun went down. Before leaving home for Treadwell when I was thirteen, I had never even toasted bread for myself before. There had always been someone around to do it for me.
Our house was a seven-bedroom sprawling Southwestern estate with reclaimed wooden floors throughout, and skylights in every room. My father had always been fascinated with the Wild West when he was a little boy in Arkansas, and some of the fixtures in the house had been salvaged from places and events associated with Jesse James’ and Billy The Kid. The ceilings were high and airy, and the house had been built in three parts – the main center, and east and west wings that were both accessible via outdoor vestibules. Both courtyards along the vestibules were fully gardened, and it was a rarity in the Southwest to see patches of such lush grass and bright flowers.
It wasn’t very humble of me to think this, but I was sure that my house was more luxurious and majestic than the houses of any one of my classmates at Treadwell. I had been to Juliette’s house in Long Island, and it was by no means small or shabby, but she herself had told me when she stayed with us that our house reminded her of a resort. My mother worked tirelessly alongside the staff to make sure that our home was beautiful all the time. There were always fresh Hawaiian flower arrangements in the entryway. Every wall, from floor to ceiling, was freshly painted each May.
The SUV pulled into the six-car garage attached to our house, and parked right next to a red Corvette I had never seen before.
“Your father’s birthday present,” my mother told me before I even asked where it had come from.
“Nice,” I said, wondering where on earth my father was going to drive such a car. To the cathedral for Sunday services? Not likely.
“What do you want to do first, honey bun?” my mother asked, as Griffin took my suitcase out of the back of the SUV. “Are you hungry? Did you eat before your flight?”
I was starving, but anxious to spend as much time with True as possible. Once I was on the ranch, Treadwell and its catty gossip machine seemed unreal, as if it all existed in another universe that I didn’t have to think about anymore. I could completely be myself at home. I didn’t have to try to be anything I wasn’t while on the ranch; I could just be a red-haired freckle-faced daughter of parents who happened to be very religious, and not give any of those facts a second thought.
“Grace, why don’t you go take a nap for a while before you run the horses? You look like you’re about to fall over,” my mother suggested. “Then when you wake up, I’ll have Anna pull a frittata together for you. You look like you could use some protein.”
I was reluctant to spend any of my precious time at the ranch sleeping, but my mother was right; I had barely slept the night before and hadn’t been able to sleep at all on my flight. I marched up the long stone staircase of our living room to the second floor, and walked around the corner of the long hallway that overlooked the living room to my bedroom.
My bedroom at home made my dorm room at Treadwell look like a shabby matchbox. I had a private balcony with a sliding door that overlooked Black Mountain to the west, and in the afternoon when the sun was high, a rainbow variety of little lizards would stretch out on the hot rocks and wooden chairs out there to sun themselves. Attached to my room was a private bathroom, with movie star globe lights over the mirror, a switch to heat the toilet seat (a very nice luxury when you live in the desert and keep your air conditioning on full-blast all year), and a glass-enclosed shower. My bedroom and Aaron’s were the only two rooms in the house with carpeting, because we both insisted that we liked how soft carpeting felt beneath bare feet. I had an antique canopy bed, and my mother had finally let me dispose of my little girl bedding (pink with rosebuds) the previous summer and replace it with bold Indian-patterned bedding from Urban Outfitters. Living with Juliette at Treadwell had influenced my style.
I stretched out on my bed, grateful to be home, and just before drifting off to sleep into a deep nap, an uneasy sensation swept over me. It was fleeting but certain: this would be the last time I would sleep so carelessly in my bedroom in Arizona for a very long time.
When I woke up, I pulled on my riding pants and drove a golf cart across our property to the stables. As I approached, I could see True in the fenced pen lounging around with the other horses. At seven, he was still a young horse, and still every bit as beautiful as he was the
day Daddy picked him up from the airport for me, after having had him shipped from South America. He was half-Appaloosa but his coat was mostly white, with some black dots near his rump and dark tail. This may sound crazy, but I truly shared a special connection with True. As a little girl, I visited him in the stables every day that we were at home on the ranch. I even fed him from a giant plastic bottle full of synthetic horse milk when he was still a foal.
Just like I knew he would, as soon as he saw me approaching in the golf cart he let out a loud neigh and strode over to the edge of the fence to greet me. I ran from where I parked the golf cart and climbed the fence to throw my arms around his neck.
“That horse sure does love you, Gracie,” Paul, our head stable keeper called out from across the yard. “I had no idea you were comin’ home today, but True sure did; he’s been acting strangely since this morning.”
“I’m home now, boy,” I whispered to True. “I missed you so much.”
True’s the main reason why I was so reluctant to go to Treadwell. When it came time for Aaron to start high school, he argued with my parents for weeks about how much he wanted to go to a real school with other kids. He finally convinced them to send him to St. John’s by playing the college card; insisting that Ivy League schools would never even look at his application if he had been home-schooled his whole life. Unfortunately for me, he did such a good job of convincing them, that when I was done with my eighth grade lessons, my parents decided on Treadwell for me. My first few days on campus in Massachusetts, I truly thought I might die of a broken heart because I missed my horse so much.
“Would you like me to saddle him up for ya, Gracie?” Paul asked.
“Thank you, Paul,” I said.
Paul had run our stables for as long as I had been alive. I observed that he was looking noticeably older than when I had left for school at the end of the summer; his hair was more silver now than black, and there were deep wrinkles around his happy black eyes from spending so many days out in the blinding Arizona sun.
The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02] Page 3