The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  I turned back around. Who cared what she was writing? And just like keep-away, when you walked away from the game is when someone would decide to give you the ball. “I’m writing down some things about our trip. To remember,” Sprout said.

  “Cool,” Frances Lee said. “Great idea.” I felt some twist, a sense of being shoved into my place, which was a different place than I’d ever been. I looked around from the new ground I was standing on, and wasn’t sure I liked what I saw.

  I snuck a glance back at Sprout for any sense of smugness, but she just wore the same little smile she had before as she bent over that pad of paper. We drove with the windows down, passing outlet malls and lumberyards, and the yellow and green fields of the Skagit Valley. Frances Lee made fun of passing cars. “‘I’m proud of my honor-roll student’? Why don’t you ever see ones that say, ‘I’m proud of my C-plus student’?” And made her feelings clear about a few things. “How can they undo a planet? Pluto’s been a planet for, like, ever. All those Styrofoam models you made as a kid? And now it’s a great big ‘never mind, you idiot suckers.’” After a while, Jake click-clicked the clasps of his instrument case, lifted out the guitar, and began playing. I watched him as my hair blew around my face; I saw his long fingers bending to the neck, strong fingers strumming. I thought about hands, all that they do in a lifetime—plant seeds in dirt, grasp hammers, hold babies, give pills to a loved one. I thought about Jake’s own hands, what they’d already touched—beach sand, number 2 pencils, cool sheets, sudsy shampoo, steering wheels, and Christmas wrapping. And what they might one day touch. A hand, the curved space of a hip, smooth hair warmed by sun.

  Jake whistled. “This place must have some views.”

  “She’s a doctor,” Frances Lee said. She turned off the truck, jammed down the parking brake with her left foot. The address had led us to a glassy, angled condominium building at the top of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. We climbed out of the truck. You could see the city stretched below from the street. Big Bob had the best view from up there.

  “Did I tell you I’m giving up music to go to med school?” Jake said.

  Sprout carried the mask, and we walked through the doors of the building. There was a small TV set in one wall that was part of a security system. We all crowded in so that we could fit on the screen. Sprout held the mask up to her face. She was a very short medicine man with braids.

  “Hooga-hooga,” she said. Jake gave her rabbit ears.

  “Okay, troops, disperse,” Frances Lee said, and we did. She pushed the bell to Olivia Thornton’s apartment, and in a moment, the door buzzed and we entered the lobby. We took the elevator up to the seventh floor; when we got off, there were four identical doors around a square floor.

  “Let’s all knock on a different one,” Sprout said, but before we could cause any more trouble, door number two opened and a woman with shoulder-length blond hair appeared. She wore tight jogging shorts and a tank top and held a bottle of water in one hand.

  “Barry’s kids?” she said.

  “That’s us,” Frances Lee said. “We spoke on the phone.”

  “I just got in. The place is a bit of a mess…”

  The apartment stretched out in front of tall glass windows that looked across at the city, framing the Space Needle artfully just to the left of center. The furniture was creamy beige on white carpets, and tan marble blocks held other African art—tightly woven baskets, sculptures of tribal figures in black stone. Mom would love to have the “mess” she meant—a few envelopes and magazines on a counter where she’d dumped the mail, a couple of suits in thin dry-cleaning bags over the couch. She picked these up, moved them to a dining-room chair upholstered in tight black leather, and before she’d even set them down, her mind caught up to what her eyes saw.

  “My mask,” she said.

  Sprout handed it to her and she held it, looking down at it as it looked up at her. And then, in this clean and ordered place, a messy, unorderly thing happened. Olivia Thornton started to cry.

  ABIGAIL RENFREW:

  Yes, love is a danger, a drug, and Trent, Haden’s father, became dangerous when I first began experiencing success with my art. His refusal to come to my first show was akin to throwing shards of glass into a garden. He said he didn’t know what I expected of him. What, after all, was he supposed to say about statues? They looked like statues, what else was there? A week later, he punched his fist through a wall, just to the side of my face. The next time, it was not the wall.

  There was nothing ambiguous in his message. In order to get what you want from me—love, decent treatment, my financial support—you must do what I want. And not do what I don’t want.

  There was no room for me with Trent to be successful, intelligent, vibrant. I made a statue, then, of a woman with her mouth gagged and her eyes blindfolded and her hands behind her back. But I destroyed it. Even I could not bear to look at it. Even through art, I could not tell this secret.

  “I hate to cry,” Olivia Thornton said once she stopped, once she’d gotten herself a cup of tea, and us a drink from her refrigerator, which was stocked with so many bottles of juice and soda and water that they were a glass-bottle forest on the shelf. I could see the rest of the food (a pair of grapefruits, anyway) shoved to the back. She confessed that she’d been so nervous to meet us, she bought a little of everything so we’d have something we liked. I could picture her in the store, her cart so full that the bottles shuddered like wind chimes when she turned a corner.

  I knew what she meant about crying. I hated it too. I always worried that if I started I might never stop. Like maybe tears were a separate thing from me with a power of their own—to bring me to some dark place I’d never make it home from.

  We sat down on the creamy leather couch, and Sprout sat on a window seat with the Space Needle and the curved arc of the sound behind her. A ferry was crossing, making a ballroom glide across the water. A schooner passed, with proud double masts.

  “I don’t usually fall apart in front of strangers,” Olivia Thornton said. She smiled, and little wrinkles appeared by her eyes. I decided I liked Olivia Thornton. She had a direct gaze and kind hands and vacuum-cleaner tracks on the carpet that made you feel like she was someone who tried very hard to be the best person she could be.

  “Here we come, a bunch of people you don’t know, handing you some object from a past life,” Frances Lee said.

  “It was a bad time in my life,” she said. “I’ve got to confess, this is a little strange for me. Barry’s kids and all. And you said you were half sisters? I thought Barry said he’d been married once before.”

  “Once?” Frances Lee said.

  “Maybe I made a mistake,” Olivia Thornton said.

  “Twice. My mom before that,” Frances Lee said. She wove her fingers together, looked down at them. “He said once?”

  Olivia Thornton rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “I must have made a mistake,” she said. But you could tell Olivia Thornton was not the type to be careless with details. “Can I ask, what made you decide to do this? To find the owners of these things? All these women?”

  “It’s a little strange,” I said.

  “It’s a little…” Olivia Thornton paused. “I don’t know what it is, actually.”

  “Karma,” Frances Lee said. “Doing the right thing, et cetera, et cetera,” Frances Lee said.

  “Information,” Sprout said.

  Olivia Thornton looked at me, and I nodded.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you called. But this is something”—she held up the mask—“this is something that means a lot to me. I got it on a trip to Africa with a humanitarian group when I was twenty years old. When I got home from that trip, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. Barry always denied he had it. He told me I must have lost it when I moved. I was always losing things, forgetting things, remember?” She cleared her throat. “The mask—it was a symbol for me. My own strength and purpose. That thing I’d grab, if there ever w
as a fire.”

  I looked at the bookshelf on the wall across from where I sat. Medical books, spy thrillers. A photo in a frame—Olivia Thornton and a boy with her smile, wearing a blue cap and gown. Another photo—a baby on a blanket, with a goofy smile, a diaper on his head. It occurred to me about Dad, that the women in his life were very nice people.

  Jake sat forward. “So, I don’t get how he always knows,” he said. “He takes the thing that means the most.”

  “Believe me, Barry would know,” Frances Lee said. “Just like he knows what to say to really jab you.”

  “Oh, and I’m sure I told him about the mask,” Olivia Thornton said. “You’ve got a lot of material things. But there’s only those few you have an actual relationship with. They’re the ones that have a story.”

  “You hold them more carefully, too,” I said. I thought of my own ring, weirdly. The way I set it in a safe place whenever I had to take it off.

  “True, I guess,” Jake said. “My mom saves all of her old house keys in a box. Back from when she was a kid, even,” Jake said.

  “A jar is just a jar except when it was in your kitchen growing up. An umbrella is an umbrella, except when the man you love stood under it during a hailstorm when he asked you to marry him,” Olivia said, and sipped her tea.

  “How did you and Barry meet?” Frances Lee asked.

  “My office,” she said. “He came into my office. He’d injured his back. He asked me out, right there. He’s very charming, your father. I told him I’d have to cease seeing him as a patient, and he said it was easier to find a doctor than a woman you might want to spend the rest of your life with. That’s what he said, ‘a woman you might want to spend the rest of your life with.’”

  “Gag,” Sprout said.

  “Oh, exactly, but I fell right for it. He crooked his finger and I followed. I was such an idiot. God, I’m sorry—that sounds cruel.”

  “We want to know what happened,” I said.

  “There was always a little imbalance. Where you’re the one that loves more? Not a good thing. I gave the gifts, I said ‘I love you.’ But it was exciting for me. To be around the show, the performers, backstage. All the people he knew. He was playful and fun but had this certainty, this power. The limelight followed him wherever he went. Wherever. You just wanted to be around it.”

  I knew about that. It was true. You could go to the grocery store and feel proud of who you were because you were with him. Things were bigger with Dad. It felt so good. Somehow, you were never ordinary, the way you were in your regular life.

  I felt a pang, thinking about it. All that I could lose and didn’t want to lose, in spite of everything.

  “I took a summer off from my practice to go with him,” Olivia Thornton said. “I can’t believe I even did that. I should never have done that. But then the next year, he told me that the ‘brothers’ had decided against bringing partners—too distracting. No partners at rehearsals, either. He called me one night from rehearsal. But it sounded wrong. You know how different places sound the way they’re supposed to on the other end of a phone? A mall sounds like a mall. A party sounds like a party, a car, rehearsal…But this sounded like a house. A really quiet house. A trying-to-be-quiet house. And then, all at once, there was a shout, a woman’s voice, ‘Jane, no!’ and then a crash. I still remember that voice. And he told me Mike had just knocked over a ladder, but I knew Mike had not knocked over a ladder.”

  “And that was that,” Frances Lee said.

  “Oh, no, it was far from that. Far. I went into all-out panic. I convinced myself that maybe Mike’s wife was on the set. I couldn’t look at the truth. I did what I could to make him want me. He loved to tell people I was a doctor, but I think he hated that I was a doctor—he always complained that I was too serious about my work. It wasn’t feminine. So I took fewer patients. Cooked—I’m not a cook. Dressed the way he liked.”

  Frances Lee groaned.

  “Oh, I know. I do. This is not easy to confess. But I tell this story because there’s something I want everyone to be aware of. People need to understand this. I started getting headaches, migraines. A terrible pain in the base of my neck. Stomach problems. I got very sick. Listen, headaches, a ball in the pit of your stomach, tightness in your chest—these are not signs of true love, and if I’m being honest, I had those ‘symptoms’ from the beginning. I was always anxious with him. Here I am, a doctor, and I’d forgotten something hugely important.”

  Olivia Thornton took a sip of her tea then. She looked at us intently. “The body knows. Okay? Even when we don’t know, the body knows. And sometimes, often, its knowledge is superior to ours. It’s the one thing I’m completely sure of. Body knowledge—it’s the purest kind. It does not succumb to the mental edits and little erasings that the mind is so fond of. You want the truth, go to the body. Listen to the body. It screams, when necessary.”

  Frances Lee worked the key into the lock of the apartment. A brick building, in the University District of Seattle. We’d scraped the top of Bob’s head getting into the underground parking garage. Ouch, Frances Lee had said. Frances Lee went to school here, and we were spending the night at the apartment of her friend, Riley, who was away on vacation. As we stood at the door, I felt tiredness hit, as if it had waited politely for the right moment to show itself. God, I was tired—an inside sort of tired, where it’s not just your body that needs rest, but your mind and your thoughts and your feelings, too. “We’re supposed to feed the cat and water the plants,” Frances Lee said as she turned the key upside down and tried it that way.

  “I’m allergic to cats,” Sprout said.

  Frances Lee groaned.

  “Kidding,” Sprout said.

  Frances Lee opened the door, and the cat appeared, mrowing and winding itself around her legs. “Warning, I’m a dog lover,” she said to it. Riley’s apartment was absent of nearly everything but a pile of clothes and a big-screen TV. One couch. One bedroom with one bed and a computer on a desk, a muddle of papers around it.

  “Riley’s got his priorities straight,” Sprout said. She clicked on the television, and a bunch of guys in football uniforms had a beer at a bar as a table full of cheerleaders looked on. “Hussies,” she said, and clicked it off.

  “He said the couch makes into a bed,” Frances Lee said. She dropped her bag, looked in the fridge. “You guys aren’t going to believe this,” she said.

  “What?” I went into the kitchen, and Jake and Sprout came too. A single can of Coors sat in an otherwise empty refrigerator.

  “It’s a sign,” Sprout said.

  “I wish signs were easier to read,” Frances Lee said. “What do two cans of Coors mean? God sends signs in beer cans? Has it occurred to anyone else how Barry finds these really great women?”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Jake said.

  “And then proceeds to treat them like crapola,” Sprout said.

  Sprout flung herself on the couch, and just as she hit the cushions, something tipped over an edge inside of me. Just, over, like that. Maybe it was only because I had reached the overload mark—after being with each other for three days straight, packed in a car, in a bed, in elevators, in restaurant booths and gas station bathrooms, anyone who might have said anything might have been doomed, most especially someone as easy to flatten as a little sister. Or maybe, this image of my father—I kept trying and trying to hold it, to keep it real, but it was like a reflection on water, and Sprout kept running her hand through that water, breaking up the pattern, making it impossible to see. She kept on doing this, again and again, and I wanted her to stop. She really needed to stop that, though maybe, too, the vein of magma under the earth’s surface had just finally reached the point of boiling, the point where the earth rose and shifted and changed forever. I didn’t want Jake to see us argue, or even Frances Lee, but what came next was out of my mouth before the guards of self-control could step in.

  “Why do you hate
him so much?” My voice sounded tight as violin strings.

  She was like a happy little windup toy suddenly scooped up into someone’s palm. She stopped squirreling around on the couch. She beamed lasers from her eyes.

  “Why do you love him so much?”

  “He’s our father. He loves us.” She was an idiot if she couldn’t see this. Stupid and childish.

  “‘Father’ is a word. ‘Love’ is a word. It doesn’t mean that something actually is.”

  “Well it is. He’s not perfect, I know that. What have we seen? He’s not good with women. He’s not good at relationships. So?”

  Frances Lee made a little snort of disgust. “So? He eliminated my mother and me from his personal history. Olivia Thornton didn’t even know about us. You don’t eliminate people you love.”

  Jake slapped his thighs with his palms and stood. “O-kay. I’m outta here. Dinner. We need dinner. I’m going to go hunt a bison or something and drag it back to the cave.”

  “Make sure he has extra cheese on him,” Frances Lee said.

  There was silence. The door closed behind Jake.

  “He’s not good at any relationship,” Sprout said.

  “Maybe with his plants,” Frances Lee said.

  “Even his plants are just another way of showing off,” Sprout said.

  “Yeah, you’re right. He doesn’t have a relationship with them, either. Have you noticed that there’s no person-to-person thing here, only a person-to-object-that-makes-me-look-good?”

  I ignored her. I glared at Sprout. “You’re just protecting Mom. You sound just like her.”

  Sprout crossed her arms. “You sound like him. Why do you act like he’s been so good to you, when he hasn’t? You give him more loyalty than you give Mom, who’s always there for you.”

  The magma rose, rose. I could feel some crackling fire of anger inside, the kind that could spit sparks. The kind that could do something horrible if I let it out all the way—grab her and hit, pull her hair until she screamed. That anger was so deep it was the veins of the earth, hidden, but a real fact of its structure, capable of doing immense damage at the slightest quake.