The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  “He’s there for me,” I said. Sparks could fly, sparks could catch on things and destroy them. Veins of the earth could open and crumble buildings with the force.

  “You want to know what I hate? Do you?” Sprout’s voice rose. “I hate the way he’s been to Mom. I hate the way he’s been to me. But what I really hate? I hate the way he’s been to you.”

  “He’s good to me.” I spit the words.

  “You try to talk to him and tell him about your life, and he changes the topic back to him. You say, ‘Here’s what happened at school,’ and he says, ‘When I was in school, I was the most popular kid…’ blah, blah. You say, ‘I scored seventy on the math PSAT,’ and he says, ‘I never used anything I learned in math in real life.’ He treats you like a servant. ‘Quinn get my this, get my that…’ And you just do what he asks. He cuts you down all the time. All the time. ‘Well, you have brains, Quinn, that’s the important thing. Anyone can have beauty.’”

  “That’s sick,” Frances Lee said. “Fucking sick.”

  “I’m not listening to this.” Goddamn her!

  “‘Maybe you’re just a late bloomer, Quinn.’ ‘Your mom never was that good looking, either.’”

  I hated her then. Hated. I felt a fury I didn’t even know I could feel. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I yelled.

  “I hate that the most, because you just take it,” Sprout said. “Like you don’t even hear it. Like you don’t even feel.”

  “Get away from me,” I said. “Get away.” I made a lunge for her, and she ducked. I ended up with one of her braids in my hand. She yelled out in sudden pain.

  “You’re beautiful, and he doesn’t even know it!” she cried.

  I let go then. I felt as if my heart stopped. I’m not sure I was breathing; I think the cracked earth stopped spinning. If there were diamonds below the ground, or only the fury of molten rock, I couldn’t tell. There was just stillness and darkness. “He doesn’t even see how beautiful you are,” she whispered.

  I went to the only place I could go to escape. Into the bedroom of Riley, some guy I didn’t know, who had a picture of a basketball player on his wall and a box of Cheerios by his bed, the flaps open. A pile of guy stuff in a tumbled ball on the floor—athletic socks, jockeys, a towel and a bathing suit with Hawaiian flowers on it, both likely still damp; there was the smell of damp things left too long with other damp things. I laid down on Riley’s bed, put my face into Riley’s pillow with the green pillowcase. I could hear the sound of a baseball game from the park across the street—the pink! of a ball against a metal bat, a crowd cheering. I was there for a long time, until there was a tap at the door, and Frances Lee ducked her head in.

  I kept my head there, on Riley’s pillow. I shut my eyes tight against her words. Frances Lee came and kneeled beside me. She put her hand on my hair. She had opened the Coors—her breath had the bright-sour-yellow of just swallowed beer. She stroked my hair.

  “He has given me things,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  I sat up, because I remembered something. Frances Lee sat cross-legged, the tattoo of the mermaid facing upward. I’d remembered my ring, given in a small white box on my sixteenth birthday. He’d made a cake, with Snow White on it. I held up my hand, to show her. “He gave me this,” I said. “When I turned sixteen.”

  Frances Lee sighed. “Oh, Quinn,” she said. And then she held up her own hand, pointed to a ring in a stack of others, a gold ring with a small garnet in it. “My sixteenth birthday.” And I couldn’t help myself, then. I saw and I saw and I saw clearly, but I hated that I did. I hated it, and I started to cry, and I hated that I did that, too. Tears gathered out of nowhere, a sudden monsoon. It may have been years and years worth of tears. Tears from a whole life, there all at once, after waiting so long.

  I laid down on that bed and cried, as Frances Lee rested her cheek on my back, staying there beside me until I was through.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jake came back with two big square boxes of pizza, with a stack of napkins balanced on top, and a bottle of Coke.

  “Everybody is friends?” Jake asked, and I nodded, but my insides still felt hollowed out. I was exhausted in a way that felt like years and years exhausted. Eons exhausted. It hurt too much to look at Sprout. She knew the worst things, and that somehow made me feel ashamed. We sat in a circle on the floor, pizza slices in front of us on the pizza-box-top table.

  I tried to eat. Jake was telling the story of when he and Gavin were seven and ten and staged a death scene for his mother to find. They had sprawled out in twisted poses on Gavin’s bed, with ketchup splurted all around. The only problem was, she was late coming home. They had to keep popping up to look out the living room window to see if she was coming yet, and they made a mess in the hall. She got mad at them and made them clean everything up and told them that death was not a joking matter.

  “Which of course we say now every time anything gets too serious. ‘Death is not a joking matter,’” Jake said.

  “I’m going to try that when I get home,” Sprout said. “Freak out Mom.” She wasn’t looking at me, either.

  Frances Lee lifted up another piece of pizza with a long string of cheese still stuck to the cardboard box, and that’s when my brain did that amazing thing brains do—made some kind of connection that it must have been working hard on without my knowledge. “Jane,” I said suddenly.

  “Jane?” Frances Lee said.

  “She said, ‘Jane.’ Remember? Dr. Thornton. What she heard on the phone, ‘Jane, no.’ Jane, age six.”

  “It’s not a woman…,” Frances Lee said slowly. “It’s her kid.”

  “Okay, wait,” I said. My brain was doing the other thing brains do—once they get going, they don’t stop. Put the right nickel in, and you get a thousand others, pouring down Las Vegas riches. “I know who this is. I know who the vase belongs to. We met her.” I snapped my fingers, trying to make the name come. I looked at Sprout for help. “Woman with a kid? We went to the zoo with them. The girl wet her pants and we gave her an extra pair of yours that Mom had packed in case you got cold. God, what was her name?”

  “I don’t remember this,” Sprout said.

  “It was probably when Mom and Barry weren’t speaking, because I don’t remember a woman with a daughter,” Frances Lee said.

  “Heather,” I said. Jackpot. “Heather something.”

  “Heather Grove,” Sprout said.

  “Oh my God, how did you remember that?” Frances Lee asked.

  “I thought it was the most beautiful name I ever heard,” Sprout said.

  “That’s amazing,” I agreed.

  “I named my sock monkey Heather Grove. That one Grandma made,” Sprout said. “With the red butt.”

  Jake cracked up. I didn’t feel like smiling, but my smile didn’t seem to know that.

  “What are we waiting for?” Frances Lee said. “World Wide Web, watch out.”

  HEATHER GROVE:

  Boy crazy, is what my ma called me. Friends at school too. I was. Chris Vallarta, fourth grade—from that point on, boys were what you might call the color and excitement in life for me. Fifth grade, Brian Robinson. Sixth grade, Gary Andresen. I’d choose one to be interested in the first few days of class. Usually just the cutest.

  I want to say I grew out of that, but I didn’t, not for a long time. If there wasn’t a guy to like, a guy on the scene, I felt bored and restless. It made things way more fun and interesting. And when I had someone to like, things felt like I could settle back a little. Safe, maybe. Boyfriend, yeah, I had one, even if that meant I might be always on the lookout for someone better to come along. I’m not gonna lie, I was.

  I always had someone. Always. I think now that maybe boys, men, were some sort of putty in my own cracked cement, so to speak. They filled in gaps. My own gaps, gaps of time and…in-between-ness? Gaps of aloneness. Gaps of same-old, same-old. I had “friends” around, guys, to fill in for the times I wasn’t “in love.” I didn�
��t even like them all that much sometimes. It was just a person who was there to be the focus of the moment. Having a “relationship” made me feel better. It wasn’t so much about the actual person, but about feeling more alive and okay.

  After I got divorced, and then after Barry, it was like I got hit on the head. I could see suddenly how there was this chain of relationships, and how they hurt my daughter and me. I brought bad people into our lives. I hadn’t brought the right people in, I brought whoever was around in. I have a lot of regrets. You got to be careful, where you go to fill need, where you go for safety. What looks safe can be very unsafe. When you ask people to rescue you, you just give them an invitation for them to control you. I finally decided that there would be no one else unless it was a good thing for my daughter and me and not about empty places.

  You see the personal ads, and all the match sites and singles groups—we hunt down another person like we’re in the wilds and it’s our food. Have to have it. Maybe we all get that anxious feeling that comes with in-between-ness. When we’re alone and drifting and things seem bland and gray, when we worry we’ll be alone forever. So, we fill the space with someone else, and with “love.” It’s a lousy job for love to do. Don’t get me wrong—a good relationship is a beautiful thing. When it’s right and you’re ready and it’s not some advertisement that keeps you busy until the real movie comes back on.

  Listen, when what you want is a relationship and not an actual person, get a dog.

  We found four Heather Groves. One owned a horse ranch in Montana. One was in Michigan, and she painted fantasy oils of wizards and dragons using lots of black and purple. She had written that she was “A Professional Role Player,” whatever that was, causing Frances Lee to say that she and Dad would be a perfect match. There was a Heather Grove selling her car in Tennessee, and another Heather Grove in St. Petersburg, who’d run a marathon, who’d been a member of the Franklin Elementary PTA, and who had a website of her jewelry design.

  “Try that one,” Frances Lee said. “He likes artist types. And runner-dancer-athletes.”

  Jake clicked. Enamel jewelry, et cetera, et cetera. Various pictures of necklaces and rings. Visit my website often! it said. As if the site were a living room no one had to clean. “Let’s read her bio,” Jake said.

  “That’s her,” I said. All you had to do was look at her picture.

  “That’s definitely her,” Frances Lee said.

  The woman was blond and pretty, the sort of woman with wrists as delicate as the handles of china cups. She’d have a leafy, whispered voice. “‘Heather Grove uses her training in the ancient art of jewelry…blah, blah, so on, so on…,” Frances Lee said.

  “Ha-ha. Look at this,” Sprout said. She wasn’t paying attention. She waved around some papers that were on Riley’s desk. “Oooh, Riley.”

  “Keep out of his things, Sprout,” I said.

  “Riley’s got a girlfriend,” she sang. “Riley’s got lots of girlfriends.”

  She stuck the papers in front of my face. Lots of small pictures of women, profiles of ages and places and interests. They were all mostly dressed and behaving reasonably well, so I didn’t snatch the sheets from Sprout. “Get those out of my face,” I said.

  “This has got to be her. Look, she grew up in the Northwest,” Frances Lee said.

  “We found her,” Jake said.

  “Check this one out,” Sprout said. “Oooh-la-la. Jeez, she’s as old as Mom. Maybe Riley likes older women. Check it out, Grand Canyon cleavage,” she said.

  We ignored her. “See if there’s contact information,” Frances Lee said to Jake.

  “Ah, ha-ha,” Sprout cackled. “Is this supposed to be a sexy look? Because she looks like she’s sleeping.” Sprout poked the paper right under my nose.

  “Sprout, knock it off,” I said.

  “What time is it?” Frances Lee said. “No, too late to call Florida now.”

  “We can call her in the morning,” I said. “We can’t meet her in person, but we can at least talk to her on the phone.”

  “We can mail her the vase, anyway. This is fantastic. I feel like we’ve done it. Found them all,” Frances Lee said. “Vic-to-ry.” She did a little dance.

  “Quinn?” Sprout said. Her voice was small. I was ready for some hilarious trick on her part, a sudden yell of “Riley’s soul mate!” or something else. Some great big funny joke to snap me back to a good mood.

  “Do not,” I warned. “I have no interest in seeing any more of Riley’s potential love interests.”

  “Quinn, you might want to see this one,” she said quietly.

  Maybe I was setting myself up, but something in Sprout’s voice made me turn from where I was bent over the desk and look down at the paper she held in her hand. My eyes followed to where the tip of her finger lay. “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Someone you know?” Jake said.

  “Oh my God,” I said again.

  It was Annie, in that photo Grandma must have found for her, Annie in the wet-look leather bikini on the beach. Annie was here, in some college kid’s apartment, taken from the same computer on which he’d probably written some Poly Sci 101 paper. Who knew where else she was. In some sixty-year-old’s basement, next to his Radio Shack computer and Playboys? On the hard drive of some freak who kissed only one girl—in the sixth grade—and who lives with his mother?

  “Who is it?” Frances Lee said.

  “It’s our aunt. She lives with us. Annie,” I said.

  “That is too hilarious,” Frances Lee said. “What are the odds? Ah, ha-ha,” she laughed. Then she looked at us. She made her face serious. “Maybe not hilarious. Not at all funny. Zero funny.”

  I took the sheets from Sprout and flipped to the front. Riley had done a search for women ages eighteen to thirty, within twenty-five miles of his zip code. Personal ad, in Hot Singles Times. And God, there was Annie. Our Annie, right there with all of these women who didn’t seem like real women. Women who didn’t seem like they had jobs and favorite cereals and nieces. Women who made themselves pieces and parts, breasts and legs and invitations. Women who maybe kept the same secret Annie did, who didn’t let on when they gave you your change at the bank or made your nonfat vanilla latte or came home that they advertised themselves to anyone who’d look, because they were—

  “Desperate,” Sprout said. “It feels desperate.” She sounded sad. Like she might cry.

  “Lots of people do this, gang,” Frances Lee said. “So, she’s lonely and wants to meet someone. It’s not some sort of crime.”

  “My cousin met his wife on eLust,” Jake said. “They’re very happy.”

  “Anyway, it’s really hard to meet a nice prisoner these days,” Frances Lee said.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I had socked her arm, the same as I would have done to Sprout. She socked me back. Sprout socked both of us.

  “Watch who you’re socking, girly,” Frances Lee said. “Both of you girlies.”

  In spite of the bad feelings I was having right then, all the bad feelings of the last few hours, about Dad and Sprout and Annie, I felt this small twinge of…pleased. I knocked my shoulder into Sprout’s.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to her. She knocked her shoulder back into mine in reply. Forgiveness can be a long, complicated thing, involving confessions and Kleenex and promises. Or it can be this—simple, with the unspokens already known and understood.

  JOELLE GIOFRANCO:

  Can I just say one more thing? Ask for the best for yourself, ladies.

  It had gotten late, and the lights were all off in Riley’s apartment. Frances Lee claimed the bedroom since she was the oldest, and we didn’t argue. The cat, whose name we didn’t know but whom Sprout named Big Dust Bunny (or BDB, for short), slept in there too, with Frances Lee. Sprout and I shared the pull-out bed, and Jake had arranged the couch cushions on the floor; he balanced on those with one of Riley’s blankets. His feet dangled off the end.

  “I’ve never felt so tall. I
feel like a basketball player,” he said.

  It was dark, except for the circle of white from a streetlight outside. A siren screamed. A door slammed down the hall. Riley’s refrigerator made a steady appliance-snore.

  I lay awake. It was true, what Sprout had said, about not feeling. But something had changed, and the feelings arrived now the way a season does, with surprising suddenness, melting things and pushing up new growth. In some ways, I understood why they called it heartache, because your heart actually does ache, but then again, so does the rest of you. It perhaps should be called entire-person-ache. I felt the leaden sense of loss. I thought about objects, about what Olivia Thornton had said. About jars and umbrellas, about a certain umbrella in a certain hailstorm. I thought about rings on your sixteenth birthday and a shell given on a beach at midnight.

  Objects. Objects had weight. Memory and meaning could cling to them, like the smell of laundry soap to a pillowcase. That wooden bowl in your parents’ kitchen, the one where they put the keys and the single paperclip and the found marble—it’s the bowl that’s always held the keys and small lost things. It’s not just a bowl, it’s home, and so is that big platter edged with flowers that the turkey goes on. A dried corsage, brown and crunchy and past-tense except for the pin with its pearly tip still bright and sharp, stuck through a thick stem of green floral tape—it’s all of your junior-high years. A mask, a clock, a painting—all pieces of yourself that you most want to hold on to. Long-kept objects were past moments where things felt sweet and right—a shell, curved and white, so full of hope still that it almost feels warm to the touch. To take them would be an act of cruelty. A hunter’s trophies.

  Objects could be false reassurance, too, couldn’t they? Artificial proof of love, a memory that was maybe better than a reality—a ring, smooth against the base of your finger. In a white box on a small mattress of cotton. Handed over like diamonds.