Kevin, being only six, made many mistakes even playing Crazy Eights, and listening to Gypsy patiently explain one point for the umpteenth time, Lance’s conscience smote him. If a total stranger could take such an interest in his child, what was the matter with that him that he did less? Pushing his chair back, he stood and walked around the table to stand behind Kevin, intending to help him play the hand. As he reached over the child’s shoulder to point out the card which should next be played, Kevin ducked again as if expecting to be hit. Lance, good intentions flying from him like water from a shaking dog, saw red.
“Oh, stop that!” he snapped. “I wasn’t going to hit you, Kevin. I never hit you. No one ever hits you. I know you know all your numbers, but look now. This is a queen… This is a king… And this is a jack.” He impatiently flicked the finger against the top of each card as he said its name. “Look at the different shapes of each letter, at the pictures, too. Gypsy played a king of spades. You can play this king if you want, or this spade. Get it?”
Kevin nodded miserably. “I… think so, Daddy.”
“Good. If you want to play cards with Gypsy, pay attention to what she tells you.”
His anger increased as he noticed the trembling in the little hands which dropped cards on the table, tried and failed to put them back into some semblance of order and heard the timorous little voice say, “ “I don’t think I want to play cards anymore, Gypsy. May I go to bed, now, please?”
“Sure, honey,” she replied, hugging him tightly, loathing Lance more in that moment then she had believed yourself capable of despising anyone. She glanced over the child at the man.
“Satisfied?” he asked. He spun on his heel and left the cabin.
One step forward, half a step back, she thought philosophically as she helped Kevin get ready for bed, tucked him in and told him a story. He’d long been asleep when she opened the door and went out to use the bathroom. She returned to find Lance sitting on the bottom step, his long legs thrust out in front of him, his elbows on the stair behind him. She’d have preferred to ignore him, but there was only one way into the cabin.
“Gypsy, could we talk?”
She hesitated. The glow through the window cast a halo behind him, leaving his face in dark shadow. “I guess so,” she said.
“Will you sit down, please?”
She perched herself on the same stair, taking a position similar to his. Overhead, the clouds broke, permitting a shaft of light to flood across the water as the moon rose. It shone on the grass, on the trees, and on his face, which he kept mostly averted.
“What kind of childhood did you have?”
The question surprised a laugh out of her. “Heavens! I thought for sure you were going to tell me to wait for a fair tide, grab a chunk of wood for extra floatation and start swimming for the next inhabited island. Or maybe not even wait for the tide.”
He turned his face toward her. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you obviously see me as an interfering busybody who should keep her opinions to herself and stop all and any attempts to find some common ground between you and your son. Seems all I’ve done so far is create friction.”
“The friction was there long before you came on the scene. I apologize for my attitude.”
She just looked at him.
He blew out a huffy breath. “Where I come from”—he paused, quirked a half smile at her—“or maybe I should say where I came from, if an apology is offered, is normally accepted graciously or refused outright, not brushed off.”
“Good memory for words,” she commented.
“Only for words that strike home, and yours did.”
“All right,” she said. “Apology accepted. Now, if that was all, I’d like to get some sleep.”
He laid a hand on her wrist. Gently, his fingers wrapped around it. “It’s not all. I was an only child of parents who never expected to have one. My dad was a businessman, a good one. A successful one. My mother kept the books, did the payroll, and managed the entire office for the business. They both traveled a lot.”
She waited. He said nothing more.
She slid her wrist out of his warm clasp. “So, you were left to your own devices?”
“Pretty much. Oh, there were housekeepers, of course. But the thing is, I don’t think I ever really learned how to be a parent, so I wondered what kind of childhood you had because you seem to have a much stronger grasp of how to do it. I guess yours was pretty standard, huh? Milk and cookies mom, nine-to-five dad, camping vacations, maybe the odd trip to Disneyland, Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa, on one side, Easter with the other side?”
Gypsy leaned her head back and laughed. “Not exactly, though I did spend a lot of time, sometimes as much as a month or two with my paternal grandmother during my teens.”
She sobered. “Apart from that, my childhood was far from normal. When I was six months old, I started modeling baby clothes for department store catalogues and fliers. My mom had always wanted to be a model, but instead, she got pregnant at seventeen, married my dad—a rookie cop—and they had me. Money was scarce. The agency in charge of finding models held an open audition and she thought if I got the job, it would ease the financial burden they were under. I was selected, but by law, most of the money had to be put away for my future. Oh, as my agent, Mom collected a salary and as I grew older and took acting, voice and dancing lessons to increase my poise, that all came out of my earnings, but that was about it. When I was eight, my little brother came along and before he was a year old, they wanted him in the shots with me because a couple of look-alike, dark-haired, blue-eyed kids could be used in many different ways—especially when their mother had the same coloring and was equally loved by the cameras. At last, she realized her dream. She became a model, too. There were TV ads featuring the three of us, or just us kids, or Mom with one or the other of us. We even got jobs as movie extras. It was all good. Except… well, Dad left us and was granted custody of my three-year-old brother and ‘pulled him off the market’ as he put it, because he didn’t want his son used in that way. He—rightfully, I think—wanted a normal childhood for him. He was such a beautiful, happy little boy! I adored him.”
She wound her hands together, lacing her fingers so tightly her engagement ring bit into her flesh.
“Past tense?” Lance said.
“Dad and Kevin—”
“Kevin?”
“Kevin. Yes. He was just four. And yes, your Kevin is the image of my little brother. He and Dad were coming back from getting new tires on the car when a gang member spotted him, one he’d been instrumental in putting away for a couple of years. He’d sworn revenge when he got out. He took it. He killed them both.”
“Gypsy…” He pried her hands apart, held one in a firm, warm clasp.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Mom and I did all right. We… got through it. I kept working. She quit working as a photographer’s model and went on a husband hunt. A successful one, too.” She let a short laugh escape. “She was good at finding them, but at keeping them, no so much. Or, maybe, they weren’t very good at keeping her. At any rate, she continued to look after my affairs, my career, until I came of age and took charge of my own life.”
“When you were first here, you mentioned only your fiancé being frantic because you’d gone missing, would be presumed… gone. Not your mother.”
“I’m not sure she’ll have even heard. She’s on her honeymoon—her fourth—somewhere in South America, I think. Or was that the one before? My only other family was my grandma. She died last year.”
“I’m sorry.”
She pulled her hand free. “I am too. About the way you were raised. About your… situation. Your Kevin deserves the kind of father mine had. One who put him first, was willing to fight to give him what was best for him.”
“Did he fight for you? As in, what was right for you?”
“I don’t know.” She stood. “I liked what I did. I still do.”
She went inside and slipped behind her curtain, wondering not for the first time, if it was her mother’s insistence on turning Gypsy into a child model that had started her parents’ marriage crumbling, and if having Kevin had been a futile attempt at repairing a rupture. “I still do,” she’d told Lance about liking what she did. But did she? Wasn’t she ready for a change? Hadn’t that been her primary reason for accepting Tony’s proposal? Hadn’t she believed it would lead to an early marriage and soon after, a home and family? No, she argued with herself. Of course it hadn’t been her primary reason. She wouldn’t have accepted him, at the age of twenty, if she hadn’t loved him. The question was, though, did she still? How ironic, the home and family—well, child—she’d wanted, had been found here on this “uninhabited” island.
She and Tony had never even lived together. “Until we’re married, it wouldn’t look good,” he’d insisted. “I don’t want to be seen as a man of loose morals regardless of what ‘most people’ do. I want to be a politician people can trust to do the right thing, always.”
Hence, she lived alone, still, while her yearning for home and family never waned.
Much later, she heard Lance come in and saw the darkness grow to become all-encompassing as he turned off the lantern she had left burning for him. She sighed and turned her face to the wall, still sleepless, still wondering what would happen when she finally returned from this idyll and faced reality again. Her fingers running over the scar on her cheek, she would not, she knew, face it unchanged, and most of the changes would not be of a physical nature.
~ * ~
Since the drizzly day of the party, the sun had shone warmly down upon them, making the damp forest steam. On the fourth afternoon Gypsy decided that her next ploy would be a bonfire and cookout. She and Kevin worked hard and soon had a pile driftwood stacked on the little beach below the clearing, near where the wharf rose and fell with the tide. Despite the recent rain, she didn’t dare risk lighting a fire near the trees.
She handed Kevin a long, tapered twist of newspaper and said, “You can light the fire, love. It might flare up quickly with the bacon drippings I poured on the dry kindling in there, so be ready to hop back.”
Kevin’s eyes were round with awe. “You’re going to let me light it all by myself?”
“Yes. I know you’ll be careful.” She struck a wooden match on a nearby rock and set the end of the paper alight. He touched the burning brand to the kindling pile near the bottom and scrambled back as a proof of black smoke and curling tongues of orange flame leapt into being, crackling and snapping at the dry driftwood from high up the beach. They’d dragged down a large stack. Smoke curled and fled in streams and billowed upward and out over the water, carried on the normal evening off-shore breeze. In next to no time the entire pile was a light.
“Look at it go! Look at it go!” Kevin shouted, dancing around. “Can we put more wood on, Mother? Can we, please?”
Gypsy pulled him back to a safer location and replied, “No, that’s enough. By the time it’s night, the pile will have burnt down into that big dead stump we rolled down the bank. It will be one big glowing coal and that’s where were going to cook our dinner. We’ll roast potatoes wrapped in foil… And when they’re done we’ll roast wieners on sticks. That what I’ve been saving those cans of wien—Oh!”
The ejaculation was forced from her lungs as a large hand clamped onto her shoulder, jerking around to face the glowering, unnaturally pale countenance of Kevin’s father.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Kevin scooted out of reach near the fire, watching with wide, frightened eyes.
Gypsy reached up and peeled his fingers from her shoulder. “Having a beach-fire. What does it look like?”
Slowly, color came back to his face and he let his hands fall to his sides. Gypsy saw his fingers unclench as he forced himself to relax. He rubbed the muscles in the back of his neck. “I smelled the smoke—I thought—cabin…”
Gypsy was stricken. What a stupid thing to have done! “Oh, Lance! I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me not to warn you. I didn’t think. I should’ve known you’d be worried. Please forgive me…” She knew she was babbling, seemed as powerless against her words as she was against the urge to take his hand in hers to cling to it. He had been concerned! He cared! For Kevin, of course. But the knowledge was very good.
He flicked her hand off him and looked down at her with contempt she had not experienced since the day of her arrival, and said, “I wasn’t worried about your worthless hide, woman. There’s two-and-a-half weeks’ work in that cabin… Work I’d never be able to duplicate.” With that he stalked off, not looking back.
“Whew!” Gypsy said, blowing her hair out of her eyes. “I guess that put me in my place! Two-and-a-half weeks’ work indeed.”
“I guess we better put it out, huh, Mother? He’s pretty mad, isn’t he?” Kevin was at her side, touching her hand.
“No, we won’t put it out,” she declared firmly, still feeling highly incensed at Lance’s parting shot. “We’re going to cook our dinner out here remember? I was just telling you about the wieners, but I hadn’t gotten to the best part yet.” She perched on a beach log and pulled him into the circle of her arms, smiling at his funny, solemn expression as he listened intently, willing to be convinced. “In the back of a cupboard, where no one knew about them, I found a whole bag of marshmallows.”
His eyes opened wide “Do you think the shepherd left them?”
“No.” She gurgled, choking on laughter. “I think they were part of the stores that your daddy ordered.”
“Daddy bought marshmallows?”
“Sure. I guess he thought the two of you might want to roast them on a fire,” she said with a conviction she could not feel. It seemed more likely that Lance had merely ordered enough foodstuffs to last a man and a small boy for a month, and a tenderhearted clerk had added the marshmallows—as well as a couple of cake mixes.
“But he didn’t like us making the bonfire.” The frown between Kevin’s black brows almost obliterated his eyes. Gypsy smoothed it out with a gentle fingertip.
“Oh, Kevin, you’ve got it all wrong. You should’ve stayed closer and listened. When I explained that we were having a cookout on the beach, your dad told me he had smelled the smoke and thought the cabin was burning down. Sometimes, when a person has had a bad scare, when they see the people they were worried about are safe, they’re so relieved that they just have to get mad at first, to let off steam. Daddy will enjoy the cookout just as much as we will. You’ll see.” Although her words were reassuring to the child, Gypsy could only hope she was right.
Kevin cheered up somewhat and the tense, pinched look left his face as he scrubbed potatoes for her to wrap. Together they scraped holes in the ashes, buried the potatoes under glowing coals and returned to the cabin to get everything else ready. While Kevin scrubbed carrots, Gypsy tore off a sheet of paper from one of Lance’s sketch pads and began scribbling.
When she was finished, she told Kevin to stay in the cabin while she went to check the fire and turn the potatoes so they wouldn’t burn. Slipping a sharp knife into her pocket she picked up the note she had written and walked casually to the door but, once outside, flew into action. She hacked three long branches from a small alder tree at the clearing’s edge, quickly cleaned twigs from them and made splits in the ends. Then, leaning them against the door frame, and hanging her note to a nail in plain sight, she reentered the cabin to gather up the rest of the meal to transport it to the beach.
So keyed up was she listening for him, she heard his footsteps long before Kevin was aware of his father’s arrival. The child continue to gaze, mesmerized, into the flames, oblivious to the tension which held Gypsy in its grip as she listened to the crunch of Lance’s feet as he approached them across the thirty feet of broken shells, rocks and sand that made up the beach. She did not turn. She was totally rigid by the time he reached the other side of the fire and eyed her
strangely over top of it for a long silent minute.
He cleared his throat and rested his gaze on Kevin. “I cut some sticks for us to roast our wieners on. I’m sorry if I sounded mad when I came down here earlier, but sometimes when a person has had a bad scare, when he sees the people he has worried about are safe, he just, uh, sort of sounds mad. It’s the relief, I guess and… And… he just has to let off steam.”
Gypsy felt the stiffness leaving her limbs like water down a hole and she trembled as she swung around to catch the most beautiful expression on Kevin’s face. His eyes glowed up at his father and he said in an awed tone, “That’s exactly what Gypsy told me.” He ran to her. “Gee, you’re smart!”
“Not too smart, I hope,” said Lance quietly and Gypsy shot him a half angry glance. Was he going to spoil it all before it had even begun? But no. It seemed not. “When I walked down the path, I got a whiff of a delicious smell coming from around here Are you roasting potatoes, maybe?” He licked his lips, looking hungry.
“Yes, Daddy! I scrubbed and scrubbed with a brush and they’re all clean and Gypsy wrapped them up and we both buried them together, but you can take them out for us because Gypsy says that’s a daddy job. They’ll be too hot for us to handle.” He sucked in a long breath and then seemed to remember just to whom he was talking for he subsided onto a log he had helped drag near the fire and hung his head.
“Good!” Lance said heartily, almost too heartily, and Gypsy longed to be able to warn him not to overdo it. He must’ve seen the alarm in his eyes for he lowered his tone and went on, “I’m glad you saved a special daddy job for me.”
Kevin looked at him warily, then at Gypsy. “Can we cook the wieners now… On the sticks my dad brought us?” he asked, and she hoped Lance had been as aware as she had of the note of pride contained in those two words—my dad.
Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) Page 10