Tainted Love

by Melody Mayer

  Tarshea was so stunned and pleased that Esme had to answer for her. “Okay,” Esme said, committing the number to memory.

  The sooner, the better.

  Anya and Kat stood by the kitchen counter and nodded with approval as they watched Martina hoist a heaping serving of broiled tofu and grilled vegetables onto her plate. Meanwhile, Jimmy stared aghast at his sister.

  “Are you feeling okay?” He shook his head in disbelief.

  Martina took a big bite, chewed thoroughly, and washed it all down with a large gulp of Rice Dream dairy-free milk. “Sure.”

  “But you hate tofu, you hate vegetables, and you're not big on Rice Dream, either,” Jimmy reminded her. “What are you doing?”

  “It's okay. I'm kind of hungry. You ought to eat more. It's really good.”

  Her eyes met Lydia's, who did her best to hide her grin lest the moms figure out that something was up. So far, Martina was living up to her side of the bargain. She was eating three meals a day of the allegedly good-for-you health crap that Paisley was preparing.

  “This is last meal for Jimmy on low fat,” Anya declared, with an authority that brooked no opposition. “Now that he is golfer he must create muscle mass. I will leave instructions for cook.”

  Lydia sensed a bonding opportunity. “You really should see Jimmy out there on the driving range. He has a lot of talent.”

  Anya nodded. “This is not surprise. His father was champion—”

  “Anya, please.”

  Kat, who almost never interrupted her partner, cut off Anya's sentence. Lydia knew why. Though Jimmy and Martina had the same sperm donor, there was never discussion in the household of his identity. In an uncharacteristically sloppy move, Anya had been about to spill the beans.

  “Our dad was a champion what?” Jimmy was on it immediately.

  “Never mind,” Anya replied. “I have not said anything.”

  “Was he a golfer?” Jimmy pressed. “Tiger Woods? Phil Mickelson? Sergio Garcia? Jack Nicklaus?”

  “Jack Nicklaus is old man,” Anya scoffed.

  “They can freeze sperm. I read it on the Internet.”

  “Jimmy,” Anya chided. “Enough. No sperm talk at dinner table.”

  Jimmy frowned, and then mashed a fork into a square of tofu on his plate. “I don't see why everyone else gets a mom and a dad and I can't even know who my dad is.”

  “It's not important. You have your mother and me.”

  Lydia felt for the kid. It wasn't exactly true that everyone he knew had both a mom and a dad. Many of the kids at the country club had single moms, since single momhood had become a very Hollywood thing. A few had single dads. More than a few had two moms or two dads. One kid lived in something called a polyamorous household—Lydia still couldn't figure out the mechanics of that arrangement. Still, she could understand how a boy in middle school would want to know about his father.

  “Now we talk about training for Jimmy,” Anya announced.

  Training for Jimmy? He was a nonathletic kid who had finally found a sport he enjoyed. There was no need for him to treat golf like an Olympic event.

  “Oh, I think the walking and swimming we do is probably enough,” Lydia opined, then forked a mushroom slice into her mouth. Jimmy was right. This food made the roasted and salted earthworms of the Amazon seem tasty.

  Anya gave Lydia the evil eye as only she could. “You are professional athlete now? You know correct training routine?”

  “No,” Lydia admitted.

  “Anya is famous for her training regimens,” Kat put in helpfully. “But …I think we can let Jimmy just enjoy golf, sweetie.”

  Anya sucked in her cheeks, clearly annoyed. “You are siding with nanny?”

  “She's my niece,” Kat said mildly. She stepped over toward the sink and took one of the glasses of iced green tea that Paisley had left out on a silver serving tray.

  “Your niece lived in jungle. Here she is nanny. I am fitness expert,” Anya insisted.

  God, Anya was such a control freak. Back when she and Kat were rivals on the court, Anya had been famous for a training routine that put most male athletes to shame. She'd been interviewed on 60 Minutes following her retirement, and had brought with her for show-and-tell a five-hundred-page looseleaf binder. Each of her opponents since the age of fourteen was listed behind a separate tab, with entries consisting of her recollection of each match, the player's strengths and weaknesses, and a written game plan to insure her defeat. There was even one for Kat.

  But she and Kat were no longer rivals; they were life partners. So the question was, Lydia mused, why did Kat put up with it? Maybe Anya ordered her around in bed and Kat liked it. Now that Lydia knew how much fun sex really was, she could understand how a girl might make a compromise or two while vertical to enjoy something truly excellent while horizontal.

  Anya went into a monologue about the correct training regimen for a career in golf, which Lydia found beyond boring. Kat seemed to feel the same way, since she stared into her glass of iced tea as if it was some sort of oracle.

  “Kat!” Anya boomed.

  Lydia's aunt was so startled she almost dropped her tea. “What?”

  “I am trying to teach children about excellence. Where is your mind?”

  “Sorry,” Kat murmured.

  “Why must I be only parent who disciplines?”

  “I discipline,” Kat objected. “Maybe not the same way you do, but—”

  “Is only one way,” Anya insisted. “We are doubles team now, not hotshot singles.”

  Kat flushed. “Go on with what you were saying, Anya. I'm listening.”

  Lydia saw both kids slide down in their seats. They hated when the moms argued, and Anya was being particularly quarrelsome tonight. Then she remembered what Kat had said to her on the front porch: to please mention it to her if Anya did anything strange. Did this episode qualify? It didn't matter if it did, since it was happening not only in front of Kat but to Kat. Let her aunt deal with it.

  She eyed the remains of her tasteless dinner. Enough with setting a good example. There was no way she was going to eat another bite of that mess.

  “May I be excused?” she asked Anya. “There's an activity for Martina I need to prepare.”

  Anya tented her fingers. “What activity?”

  “Some … hand-eye coordination exercises that I think will really help her with her tennis game,” Lydia invented.

  “You see, Kat. Even Lydia is on board.” Anya nodded to Lydia. “Go ahead. I will send Martina out back when she has finished food on plate. Martina, sit up straight, no slouching!”

  Lydia went into the bedroom of her guesthouse and lifted the Compton luxury mattress that had been installed the week before. Yep. The long flat cardboard box was just where she'd left it.

  It hadn't been easy, organizing all the things she needed here in Beverly Hills. In the rain forest, you could find the stuff you needed just by scavenging in the jungle for a couple of hours. Anything else she could usually procure from the local shaman by trading him some of the precious cosmetics that she picked up in Manaus on her rare downriver trips to civilization. The shaman turned out to be a big fan of MAC lip gloss.

  Nonetheless, she'd persevered—a branch of Home Depot had proved a gold mine. Not that the shaman would have approved of her improvisation, but sometimes a girl had to do what a girl had to do.

  She carried the box into the living room just as she heard a knock on her front door.

  “Martina?” she called.

  “It's me!” the girl answered.

  “You alone?”

  “No!” Lydia recognized Jimmy's voice. “What are you doing?”

  No way was Lydia involving Jimmy in this.

  “It's a girl thing, Jimmy!”

  “Aw, man,” Jimmy moaned. “You and Martina are like this secret club. Why couldn't Momma Anya and Momma Kat have gotten me a guy nanny?”

  “Because you have a girl cousin, not a guy cousin.”

  �
��It still isn't fair, Lydia. And you know it.”

  Jimmy was right. It wasn't fair. But Lydia didn't know what to do about it. Except, maybe …

  “How about if I get one of my guy friends to hang out with you sometime, Jimmy? What would you think of that?”

  Too late. Jimmy was gone. Martina reported through the door that he had gone up to the main house.

  Lydia gathered the box up in her arms. Maybe she had lost her mind, agreeing to teach this to Martina. She was young, immature, insecure, and a whole list of other things that, from a logical point of view, made this venture less than wise. On the other hand, she was her cousin. There had to be some kick-ass genes in there somewhere.

  She stepped outside and pointed to the hillside thicket of trees behind the moms’ mansion. “Follow me.”

  For the next ten minutes, Lydia led Martina uphill into the woods.

  “Where are we going?” Martina puffed. She stepped on a dead branch that lay across the narrow path; it snapped cleanly in two with a loud crack. Then she stepped on another. And another. The path was well littered with branches. Lydia had seen to that.

  “You've never been up here?” Lydia looked over her shoulder at the struggling girl. Martina was in much better shape than she used to be, but she was still a big girl, clumsy with her size and shape, and she was still wearing one of her many oversized sweatshirts, which had to be hotter than hell. Lydia had on only cutoffs and a tank top as she scrambled up a path so narrow and twisting that a prize burro might have lost its footing.

  “No.”

  “But it's right behind your house! You didn't go exploring when you were younger?”

  Martina didn't respond this time, but just kept plodding along. “How much further?”

  They stepped into a small clearing. Lydia put the long box down. “We're here.”

  “Thank God.” Martina collapsed onto a bare log. “If you take me on this hike every day, I'll definitely lose more weight before school starts, even if I hate every minute of it.”

  “You can always come up here by yourself. Look around, sweet pea. What do you see?”

  They were at the top of the wooded hill directly behind Kat and Anya's mansion, but the terrain was so steep that they'd had to walk nearly a mile to get there, with switchback after switchback. The secluded clearing itself wasn't more than twenty yards in diameter, and offered no view.

  “Nothing,” Martina reported.

  Lydia nodded. She held her hair up and fanned the back of her neck. “Yep. Nothing. But if someone was coming up the path, you'd hear them long before they got here, because I put about a thousand branches down the last time I walked up here. Old Ama trick. Which makes this a perfect spot to explore the secrets of the rain forest. Open your box.”

  “Is it a blowgun?” Martina asked excitedly.

  “Just open it.”

  She did, and the disappointment on her face was obvious. Instead of the long wooden tube that she must have expected, she found instead three pieces of white PVC piping of the type that a plumber might use to replace the leaking underside of a garbage disposal.

  “That's not a blowgun.”

  Lydia had expected this reaction. “Wait and see,” she counseled as she took the two-foot-long sections out of the box and started fitting them together into one long tube. At Home Depot, they'd offered her piping that screwed together at the joints. This wasn't satisfactory for her purposes, so she'd special-ordered piping that fit together as seamlessly as a jigsaw puzzle.

  “Is that what you used in the Amazon?” Martina asked doubtfully.

  “Nope. We'd make ours out of this wood called pucuna caspi, which basically means good blowgun wood. It was a pain in the ass. You'd either have to hollow out a tube by burning it with a hot stake—that's a fun way to spend a week—or else go to the blowgun maker, who'd help you do it in sections and then glue and tie them together.”

  “Wow. You did that?” Martina's eyes were wide.

  “More than once. But I think this PVC is better. Know what happens when a four-hundred-pound wild boar steps on something made of pucuna caspi?”

  Martina moved her hands in a breaking motion.

  “You got it. A week's work right down the old latrine, so to speak.” Lydia held the PVC pipe up to her right eye and sighted straight down the line, imagining a fat squirrel monkey climbing one of the eucalyptus trees that circled the clearing. Yep. There were advantages to plastic, since it had none of the little imperfections, niches, and protrusions that almost always developed on a wooden blowgun no matter how meticulously it had been made. She tried to imagine what her Ama friends would think of a weapon made like this. Probably, they'd love it. Her shaman would probably embrace the thing and leave a MAC lip print on it.

  “How does it work?” Martina asked impatiently.

  “I'm getting to that.” There was a second level to the box. Lydia lifted out a sheet of cardboard. Underneath, nestled in bubble wrap so that they wouldn't bounce around, were about a dozen darts she'd made by hand. She'd actually started with top-quality dartboard darts from a game supply store, and then modified them.

  The darts once had stabilizing fins, but Lydia had removed them, since her goal was to have no air pass around the outside when she fired the weapon. After the fins were gone, she glued the dart tip to a thin twenty-inch dowel, also courtesy of Home Depot. Then she fashioned a card-stock paper cone, shaped it so that it would fit perfectly inside the tube, and attached it to the dowel with superglue. The cone would catch the shooter's breath so that the dart could fly at maximum speed.

  As Martina watched, fascinated, Lydia took one of the darts and inserted it into the blowgun, then tossed Martina an apple she'd stashed in the pocket of her cutoffs. “Put this on your head and go stand by that big tree.”

  Martina shook her head.

  “You mean … you want to shoot it off my head?” she squeaked. “No way!”

  “I'm just teasing you,” Lydia admitted, laughing, although she knew she really could make the shot. “Put it on that gray rock.”

  She pointed to a boulder protruding from the dirt about fifteen yards distant. Martina complied, then quickly moved out of the way.

  “When you aim, keep both your eyes open,” Lydia instructed. “That's a big ol’ beginner's goof. You can't hit anything sighting with just one eye.”

  Martina nodded solemnly. Lydia brought the blowgun to her lips and inhaled deeply. Then she blew out as fast and hard as she could. The dart whizzed out of the tub so fast it was nothing more than a blur.

  “Wow!” Martina ran over to the apple and lifted it up. The dart tip had smashed right through its center. “That is so cool! Can I try it?”

  Lydia felt a tingling of misgiving. “Only if you—”

  “Only if I do it with you and keep it a secret—cross my heart and hope to die,” Martina put in. “But can I please tell Kevin? Please, please, please?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Martina was crushed. “But that was the whole point.”

  “The point, sweetie, is for you to feel stronger and more powerful and more confident. If you aren't old enough to keep this secret then you aren't old enough to—”

  “I know, I know. I promise.”

  Lydia handed Martina the blowgun. For the next half hour Lydia offered expert instruction, guiding Martina's hands, showing her where to look, how to focus and aim. Martina took a number of shots, and the last one came within a few feet of the apple, which was a big improvement from where she had begun.

  “Okay. Gather your darts,” Lydia instructed.

  Martina scrambled around, looking for the darts. “But I want to practice more.”

  “Too dark. Time to go.”

  Her cousin protested, but when Lydia suggested how little fun it would be to negotiate the path down the hill in the dead of night, Martina moved swiftly. It didn't take long until they were back on home turf near the pool patio.

  “If Momma Anya asks what hand-eye exe
rcises we were doing, you're going to say we used magnetic darts and a dart-board,” Lydia explained.

  “Okay. This was the greatest, Lydia. I can't wait to go back and practice some more.”

  Lydia told Martina that it would be unfortunate if one of the maids was to uncover the weaponry in Martina's room during their daily cleaning. They wouldn't understand, and neither would Kat or Anya when the maid told them. Martina quickly saw the wisdom of what Lydia was saying, and was happy to relinquish custody of the box to her cousin. “But you'll let me take it out to practice?”

  “If you follow my rules. Strictly.”

  “Thanks.” Once again, Martina threw her arms around her cousin. “I love you, Lydia.”

  “Love you, too, sweet pea.”

  Lydia watched with a grin as Martina bounded off toward the main house, happier than she'd been all summer. Then she checked her watch: 9:15 p.m. Not too late. If Eduardo hadn't ruined Billy's evening by making him work late, there might still be time for him to pick her up for a hamburger and some extracurricular activities.

  She went back to her guesthouse to call him, but found the doorstep blocked by an enormous envelope—five feet wide, four feet high, with her name scrawled in elegant calligraphy on the outside.

  “Billy!” Lydia exclaimed.

  Did the boy rock, or what? She had to turn the envelope on its side in order to open it; it held a card that was equally elegant and equally huge.

  The presence of Miss Lydia Chandler

  is requested this evening at Eleven pm

  at the Buffalo Club

  for late supper and cocktails

  It was beautiful. It was romantic. It was thoughtful. Lydia would have been turning cartwheels of joy except for one thing.

  It was from Luis.

  “Hello. I'm Roger Goldman, and I'll be your scuba instructor here at the club for the next five days.” Roger was cut from the cloth of Hollywood central casting: tall, buff, and blond. He even wore a red bandanna pirate-style on his head.

  “Get ready for the time of your life,” he continued, running a tan hand over his ripped six-pack, as if to make certain it hadn't disappeared in the last five minutes. “ 'Cuz you're about to learn the greatest sport in the world that doesn't involve two people on a bed.” He winked. “Scuba diving!”