Five for Forever

by Ames, Alex

  fifteen

  Clues

  Rick

  Over the weeks Hal and Rick pieced together the history of the unknown boat in their yard. Josh came in one afternoon for an update.

  “Your boat has a name now,” Hal opened the briefing.

  “What’s its name?”

  “It’s a her, and her name is Vera.”

  “Vera! After Vera Folsom?” Josh exclaimed and pushed back his chair.

  Rick put his head on the desk, and Hal stared at Josh. “You knew? Why do you let us dig for weeks?”

  Josh looked agitated but sat down again “Sorry, guys. I had no idea that the boat was named Vera. But there is a Vera Folsom in my old coach’s past.”

  Hal sighed and continued. “The son and granddaughter of your old coach were able to provide us with copies of old diaries. John Scott was born in the 1930s to Irish immigrants. In the late fifties, he worked as an engineer and designer for one of the small shipyards along the Maine coast—Folsom Boats—his first job after university. And he met a girl.”

  “A romantic start,” Rick commented.

  “Her name was Vera Folsom, and she was the daughter of the shipyard owner. They fell in love, and John Scott became infatuated with her. We don’t know her side of the story, but after a year or so, she married someone else. It broke John’s heart.”

  “When I was coached by John Scott, he was married—that much I remember—to some Norwegian lady,” Josh said.

  “His son told me that he was actually married four times. But let’s continue. He left Folsom Boats in the early sixties and became a sought-after boat designer for other shipbuilders, specializing in racing boats and yachts, always under the names of the yards. He never opened his own shop, never became a brand name himself. It appears he built the Vera in the middle of the sixties, an uncompromising boat named for a woman who was no longer his. I quote John Scott’s diary here: ‘A racing yacht like a wild stallion, dancing on the waves.’” Hal looked at Rick. “That’s what you said when we saw pictures of the Vera for the first time.”

  “I also said difficult to sail.” Rick nodded.

  “And that’s about what we could draw from the diaries. With the information we had, I tried to contact various harbors on the Maine coast, but no one remembered a spectacular boat named Vera.”

  “Aren’t there historical societies on the East Coast that could help?” Josh asked.

  “Yes, but they concentrate on the immigration period and the time of the whalers. They don’t care about regattas of the swinging sixties, where everyone was busy getting laid or high. So the trail ends.”

  “That’s a pity,” Josh said.

  “However, what we do know after some Internet research is that the boat’s namesake, Vera Folsom, is still alive, living in Nantucket. Same address as a schoolteacher named Vicky Wallace.”

  Josh said nothing, color moving from his face.

  “Should we make a follow-up with Vera Folsom in Nantucket? We have the story but no photos or design documents yet,” Rick said.

  Josh became nervous. “Absolutely not, I forbid it. I . . . I trust you guys to come up with an equally brilliant design. No need to waste time hunting down an old lady.”

  “But we still don’t know what the Vera deck, mast, and rigging looked like. I can make it up, of course, and I trust my abilities. But we have the real chance to make it look like the original.”

  “No. That’s the end of this. I want design options from your own pencil.”

  With that, he got up and left the two boatbuilders in their office.

  “Now that’s what I call serious issues with a rotten boat,” Hal muttered.

  “Or with something in his own past,” Rick said.

  Rick told Louise about the conversation when they prepared dinner that night. “It was as if he had some personal beef with the visit.”

  Louise looked up from her tomato slicing. “Maybe there is an angle we don’t know about. From Josh’s past, before he became a movie star. Something he doesn’t want to become public.”

  “But all I want to know is whether an old lady remembers an old lover and a wooden boat. I don’t care about drunk-driving accidents, secret abortions, or whatever else might fall out of the closet.”

  “Us superstars are peculiar about what is private and what is not.”

  “Do you have skeletons in your closet?” Rick asked, not really serious.

  To his surprise, Louise again stopped the slicing and cocked her head. “My life has been investigated and written about over and over again. But still, yes. There are things I am not proud of from my early days that mercifully have not appeared. Not appeared yet!”

  “You have my interest,” said Rick, but Louise remained serious.

  She cleaned her hands and looked Rick in the eye. “We are together, and I trust you enormously. But relationships break. In my position, I never really open up completely, to no one. There are events and decisions in my past that will remain unspoken between us. For better or for worse. This is something you will need to accept.”

  “You actors are surely a complicated bunch,” Rick said and tested the pasta. “Done! You may bring in the crowd.”

  sixteen

  The Newsbreak

  Louise

  In late May, Ivana Voda died on a Saturday night while going out to the movies with the Flint family. It was the latest Pixar movie, to make the trip Dana-compatible, and the gang queued up to buy popcorn. Louise in her Ivana disguise was arguing with Britta over whether to get one small salty and one small sweet or go for a large sweet instead, as only Louise and Charles were the salt types.

  They did not notice that a fifteen-year-old girl named Emma McDonald with braces and a Miley Cyrus–like upper-arm tattoo was thinking that this lady with the straight black hair and the big glasses looked a bit fake and then found the skin of the woman much too good and her voice much too artificial. Her mother was a failed actress who had become a real-estate agent in Oxnard but still used her stage skills to reel in clients, so Emma could spot fake from real. She took out her phone and did one candid video and some photos of the family in front of her. Twenty megapixels zoomed-in exposed the real facial features of this lady. OMG! Louise Waters! No doubt!

  Louise had already paid up at the concession stand and was walking over to the theater entrance. Emma gave up her place in line and hurried after the family, leaving her friends behind without comment. Her phone had a quick-shot function, and she simply pushed down the button to grab as many frames as possible. Mostly it was all backs but the man with Louise and one of the bigger girls each turned at least once. Then they vanished into the dark theater of the latest Pixar movie. Immediately Emma forwarded the material to her mom, who was home, preparing packets for a showing.

  Spotted Louise Waters in disguise with unknown boyfriend and a family. Think we can sell this somewhere?

  Emma’s mom looked at the images and agreed with her daughter’s assessment. She called up an old agent contact who dealt with this sort of material. The agent was excited and started offering the material. After short negotiations cable channel hot! paid $100,000. Emma’s college education was secured while the Flints were still watching their film.

  When Rick, Louise, and the kids arrived back home, Rick’s mobile phone rang.

  Hal, out of breath: “Go online, switch on the TV, you’re blown!” He hung up without further explanation.

  Rick looked at Louise, then went over to the windows and let down all shades. “Ivana got made.” He switched on the TV while Louise ceremoniously took the wig from the coat hanger and threw it in the trash. Then she called up Izzy.

  “Izzy? I am blown—the news is coming out now. If they did a half-decent job, they will be at Rick’s place within the hour.”

  “On it!” Izzy had prepared various statements and communications to handle the upcoming situation and had additional security on standby. “Hang in there, it will be a ride. You know it, but your deares
t won’t!” Even though Izzy hadn’t been happy about Louise’s decision, he was all on board for his client.

  Rick went upstairs to brief the kids about what was going on.

  “Will we become famous now?” Charles asked, his forehead knitted.

  “Yes and no. You will be famous because you are close to Louise, not because you did something great. Remember what you learned in the media training and you’ll be fine.”

  The entrepreneurial kids next door had the time of their lives tending for the media mob. By noon on Sunday they’d run out of the stock of ice-cold beverages, and their mother was hitting the supermarket to buy replacement cans and lots of ice. It was the first real hot day of the summer, a scorcher with temperatures hitting the midnineties, and the media people were being murdered by the climate. Izzy’s security service had been setting up a perimeter, and Oxnard police had two cruisers keeping an eye on things, and blocking the Flints’ road from both sides. All major outlets had sent camera crews over; the exclusivity of hot!’s asset had evaporated the second Izzy had started his media blitz. The reporters tried to interview the Flints’ neighbors and were received politely but left with relatively little information that they couldn’t have found on the family’s social-media sites. Only one neighbor, a little farther away, gave some details of how he remembered the Flint family moving in and the death of Isabella Flint a few years back.

  The media baked and camped until three p.m., and then, with morale and motivation at an all-time low, Izzy arrived. Everyone knew him to be Louise Waters’s long-time agent, and some of the old-timers remembered him from his prog-rock days in the late seventies. Izzy raised a lazy hand and then walked over to the house, rang the doorbell, and vanished inside. His thin assistant, Arielle, started making the round to prepare the sharks for the press conference, resulting in a buildup of microphone stands and cameras on the pavement before the Flint driveway.

  Izzy came out again and stepped in front of the mob. “People, calm down. You will get statements, you will get photos, you will get Q and A.”

  Adjustments and shuffles for best angles ensued.

  Izzy turned. “Here she is! Louise would like to say a few words to you.”

  Louise and Rick came down the driveway hand in hand, a perfect couple on a Sunday, with three of the kids—Britta had decided to stay out of this—in tow. Dana hid behind Agnes’s legs, and Charles nervously pushed his glasses back on top of his nose.

  Rick

  Since he’d been dating Louise, Rick had dreaded this moment most. The situation they were now facing was clearly his worst fear realized. About fifty reporters, cameramen, and technicians were waiting for them and already starting to shout questions at them. Cameras were clicking or zooming in on each and every one of them.

  Britta made the right decision to stay away from this, Rick thought. Holding Louise’s hand gave him some security.

  Louise stepped up to the forest of microphone stands. “Thanks for coming, everyone. I hope you’ve had a good day so far. Rick and I decided to give a short statement, to get most of your questions out of the way. Otherwise, we will make an appearance on Access Hollywood later this week. There will be no other interviews or exclusives, so you can save that call to my agent; the answer will be no. I am committed to starting a new life after a great ride in film. But over the last year I’ve started to feel like I wanted something more. Meeting Rick, and the kids, is by far the best thing that has ever happened to me. We would ask you to please respect our privacy, especially that of the kids. Rick?”

  Rick moved in Louise’s place. His heart was beating as if it were going to explode, and he felt sweaty all over, not only from the sun. He cleared his throat. He noticed that it had become so quiet that it was suddenly possible to hear a pin drop. Even the photographers stopped their clicking.

  Jesus, they are waiting to hear me say a word. This is ridiculous.

  “Um, hello. Louise said her part. I am not as eloquent as she, but I would like to underscore that we are serious about the privacy of the kids. Don’t hunt them down because their dad is dating a movie star. Well, former movie star. Thank you.”

  Izzy came up. “Time for some questions, folks. Make it count and skip the stupidest ones, please! Yes, New York Times first.”

  “Are you in love?”

  Izzy laughed. “That’s the best the Times has? What part of ‘stupidest’ didn’t you understand? Fox next!”

  “Rick, will you continue to live in Oxnard?”

  Even though he was tempted to answer with a simple, lonely yes, he remembered the media training. Full simple sentences. “The kids are at home here, going to school and all; I have my company here. There is no reason to move because my new partner is an ex-movie superstar—she is actually willing to move here, too.”

  “I promise, I will learn to cook,” Louise chimed in, which brought some guffaws from the media.

  “Channel 8!” directed Izzy.

  “Any new projects for you Louise?”

  “Yes, pool cleaning once a week.” That drew a laugh from everyone. “Oh, you mean movies? I don’t know yet, but what I do know is: I will take it slow and seek no new engagements.

  The Q and A continued for ten minutes, and when Izzy thought the group had run out of steam, he cut it off.

  “Thanks everyone for coming, don’t forget to watch Access Hollywood!” Izzy closed the press conference and the Flint-Waters gang walked back into the house.

  The media people wrapped up their reporting with last-minute recorded statements with the Flint house in the background, packed up, and were gone half an hour later. A group of hard-core paparazzi remained and sweated in their cars. Any attempt to idle the motor to get the air-conditioning going was immediately prohibited by the police, which eventually dissuaded most of them from staying around much longer.

  “The Odd Couple,” “Notting Oxnard,” and “The Empress and the Sailor” were the headlines, and they all focused on the romantic aspect of Louise and Rick. The one Rick liked best was the headline on Entertainment Tonight’s website, which simply declared “Boatstruck!” Most media had cut the ten minutes of press conference down to fifteen seconds of sound bites. The family sans Britta was only shown for a brief moment. Izzy told them that it was far from over; this had only been the header. Deep dives and dirt digging would follow.

  Access Hollywood was taped at Universal City; Stephanie Bauer had landed the exclusive coup to interview the couple of the week and NBC had decided to make it a half hour special, kicking a rerun out of the prime time program. Rick had never been inside a TV studio and found it interesting and exciting, similar to his family’s visit to the Sell! Sell! Sell! set. So many things had happened in such a short time from when the limousine had dropped them off; all the handshaking, small talk, and makeup and then the recording itself—Rick’s head was reeling. Louise, the professional, gave Rick little cues of what was happening and how to behave. Then they were led to their places at the table that separated them from Stephanie. They did some small talk while the crew got ready. Then shooting started. The host gave some introductory remarks and advertised some upcoming features on the regular show. She then introduced her guests, gave a quick rundown of Louise’s bio, and then cut to the chase and Louise’s announced retirement.

  “Retiring at thirty-six after reigning in the movie industry for more than a decade. Giving up her crown for the love of a common man,” Stephanie read from a cue card and then cited some of the cheesiest headlines from earlier that week. “How romantic can it get?”

  Louise smiled, held Rick’s hand under the table, and patiently answered the questions about her state of mind, the chance that this love brought to her, and the movie obligations to come. Rick could feel one of the cameras sneaking up from the side to catch the hand-holding detail.

  “Rick, you are a boatbuilder, you run your own company in Oxnard, you’re a widower who’s raising four children. Now you are with one of the most recognized actresses o
n the planet. Isn’t this strange?”

  “Well, Stephanie, you make the now sound as if all the other stuff went away. It is more like on top of everything. I am indeed with a very famous woman. It is still so bizarre to me, same as sitting here with you. On the one hand, I have memories of going to Louise Waters movies or watching her on TV, and then at the same time, I see her getting integrated into our household, playing Barbies with my youngest, or helping my second oldest daughter with homework.”

  “You are still getting used to it?”

  “Still so fresh that every time I look at her I think, Pinch me, is this for real?”

  Louise patted his arm. “Usually that’s the point when I take a fork and poke him.”

  Rick nodded. “In all fairness, she first eats the food off it.”

  “Hollywood relationships are usually short-lived; breakups are feeding the tabloid industry. How long do you give yourselves? Rick first.”

  “You are asking the impossible. If this is a dream, I hope I sleep for a long, long time.”

  “Louise? Your early marriages lasted less than two years each. How long now?”

  “We aren’t married, so you can’t compare. I hope Rick and the kids will be five for forever to me.”

  “I will ask some of the typical tabloid questions. I’m keeping in mind that I’m the only interview you are planning to give before you wind down your career, so I have to make everyone happy. Marriage? Rick?”

  “I am a conservative guy, I guess. So for me a yes, in time.”

  Louise smiled at him and nodded. “Let’s first survive the media madness.”

  “Children of your own? Louise.”

  “Too early to tell. I am thirty-six, which gives me a few years to decide.”

  “The Flint kids?”