The Promise Girls

by Marie Bostwick

  Joanie put down her scissors and pressed a hand against her smiling lips.

  A baby! Why hadn’t they said anything?

  Meg had suffered two miscarriages in her twenties. So, perhaps she didn’t want to make an announcement until she was further along. Still, the idea that Meg would keep something so important from Joanie felt strange and a little hurtful.

  But a baby . . . That would make up for everything ten times over.

  What fun it would be to sew little dresses, and sunsuits, and hats again, to knit sweaters and bootees and blankets. Meg had been acting like a real pill since Christmas, meaning she should be through the first trimester.

  Joanie was almost tempted to drive over to their house and drop some hints to coax them into making an announcement. But, no. That would be too pushy and, in Meg’s current mood . . .

  She’d just have to bide her time for a few days. Meg would have to tell her soon, before she started to show. How was Asher feeling about having another baby? Probably over the moon. He loved kids and had always hoped for more. So had Meg. How great that they were finally getting their wish.

  Joanie finished cutting out a sleeve and rolled her shoulders, working out the kinks. The phone rang and she ran to pick it up, smiling when she saw the number on the screen.

  “Asher! I was just thinking about you guys. So how is everybody—”

  “Joanie, I . . . Oh, God.”

  Asher choked out a strangled sob. Joanie’s hand flew instinctively to her chest. Something bad had happened, she could tell. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the worst.

  “Asher? Asher, listen to me,” she said sternly. “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Tell me where you are and what happened.”

  “The hospital.” The sound of his breath was ragged. “There was an accident. Meg just . . . They just . . .”

  “They just what? Asher? Tell me what’s happening.”

  “The ambulance brought her in. There’s blood everywhere. She won’t wake up. Oh, Joanie.”

  He started to cry, to sob. Joanie hadn’t heard that sound in seventeen years.

  “They took her off somewhere. I don’t know what to do. What if she—”

  She interrupted him, her voice steady, trying to sound authoritative and calm even though her heart was hammering. “Asher, sit down and wait for me. I’ll be there as quick as I can. Do you hear me? Everything is going to be fine, I promise.”

  Chapter 4

  Avery opened her eyes a little after six and discovered she had no desire to close them again. Well, it just went to show you; even two weeks living under that Pavlovian instrument of minion mind control—the alarm clock—was enough to mess with your head.

  The sun took its time getting up and so did Avery. A sunbeam crawled slowly up the quilt from her feet, to her knees, to her waist as if it meant to capture her in its net and drag her forcibly from the contented indolence of her bed. Eventually, Avery threw back the covers and climbed down the ladder from her sleeping loft.

  Everything in Avery’s 240-square-foot house, from the pine paneling stained Newport White, to the bathroom mirror framed with a life ring that had seen service on an actual tugboat, to the blue throw pillows with white seashell appliqués, would not have looked out of place in a Nantucket beach cottage. This in spite of the fact that the backyard of Joanie’s bungalow, where Avery parked her tiny house, was more than a mile from Seattle’s Elliott Bay and more than one hundred miles from the open ocean.

  Avery carried her yogurt and granola to the window seat at the front of her seven-by-nine-foot “great room” and set her bowl down on a nearby stack of books. With her built-in shelves filled to overflowing, she’d taken to piling her books thirty inches high for use as coffee tables.

  Avery looked out the window toward Joanie’s garden. It had been damp and dreary all month. Nothing was blooming yet, but still, Joanie had been out there every damp, dank day, doggedly turning the old mulch, adding new, cutting back dead wood, raking out dead leaves.

  People said Joanie had a green thumb, a natural talent for gardening. But Avery knew there was nothing natural about it. Joanie undertook the cultivation of gardens the same way she did everything else, with passionate intensity. She didn’t know another way. Joanie’s motto was, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”

  Her sister might have been surprised to hear it, but Avery agreed. That was why she invested so much money into getting the most beautiful and authentic-looking mermaid tail available, and spent so much time studying mermaid lore and honing her mermaid persona, because it was the only thing she felt passionate about. So far. She was open to other possibilities. Avery wished Joanie understood that. When she returned her sister’s alarm clock yesterday, explaining that she didn’t need it because she’d quit her job, Joanie had not been happy.

  Avery scraped the curved sides of the bowl with the edge of her spoon, gleaning enough for one last bite, and reached for a book. She was feeling the need for poetry, a few lines to calm the anxieties that were beginning to bubble up, and plucked a volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems from the stack.

  You see we’re tired, my heart and I.

  We dealt with books, we trusted men,

  And in our own blood drenched the pen,

  As if such colours could not fly.

  We walked too straight for fortune’s end,

  We loved too true to keep a friend;

  At last we’re tired, my heart and I.

  She slammed the cover closed—that wasn’t helping—and reached for a slim volume with a worn leather cover and pages as thin as tissue paper. It wasn’t a book Avery reached for often, but it had belonged to her foster mother, Lori, whom Avery called Mrs. Captain. Lori had been good to her. Just before they parted, she’d placed a book of the Psalms in Avery’s hands.

  Avery believed in God in the broad sense; creation was just too beautiful and intricate and interconnected for her to think it was all the result of some fortunate cosmic coincidence, the intergalactic equivalent of an infinite number of monkeys clattering away on typewriters until one of them, simply by virtue of sheer numbers, accidentally typed out the script of Hamlet. But she didn’t believe in the way Mrs. Captain did. Still, the old woman’s parting gift had become a kind of talisman for her, something to hold on to when she was feeling insecure about life.

  Avery opened the book. She liked the way the soft, worn leather felt in her hands. She read a few lines—“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him.”—and felt better. Why was she so anxious? Things weren’t really all that bad. She’d figure out a way to deal with everything and everyone, even Joanie.

  Joanie was bossy, but she bossed because she cared. Still, what she said about Avery not even trying to make a go of it at the coffee shop hurt because it wasn’t true.

  Sure, she’d only filled out the application because she was down to her last hundred dollars and needed work with tips, money she could put in her pocket right away. And no, she hadn’t truly gone into it thinking of making a career in coffee, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t open to the possibilities.

  A part of her had honestly hoped it might work out. A company whose logo included a Siren, the twin-tailed mermaid of Norse legend, seemed promising. Initially, Avery had taken it as a good omen. Besides, they were local . . . or had started out that way. Now they were a huge corporate chain, but it seemed unfair to hold their success against them.

  She’d never worked with adults and had been afraid that they wouldn’t like or understand her. But her coworkers were good people, funny and energetic and young, and her interactions with them made her aware of how much time she spent alone. She liked the customers too.

  There was something satisfying about seeing them come through the door, groggy and dour, some dreading the day to come, and being able to lift their spirits and eyelids simply by handing a paper cup of coffee across the counter. The transforma
tion that the first sip wrought to the countenance and carriage of even the most bleary-eyed patrons was a teeny bit magical.

  Avery made up a story in her head about a lost, sunken city that had been put under a spell by a Sea Witch. In this story she, Avery, was also a Sea Witch but a more benevolent sort, one who lifted the curse of her evil counterpart and released the citizens from their slumber by the administration of a magical black elixir.

  When she approached it that way, with imagination and a bit of mental improvisation, being a barista was way more interesting. But as she had recently been reminded, some people don’t appreciate the workings of an inventive mind.

  Nearing the end of an eight-hour day spent making the same mochas, lattes, and cappuccinos, Avery’s brain felt numb. When the shift supervisor departed for the grocery store in search of almond milk, Avery decided to liven things up a little.

  She erased the day’s trivia question from the blackboard: What character is the most frequently portrayed character in the history of horror movies? Like the previous day’s question, it was far too easy. Only two customers all day had answered The Mummy instead of Dracula. She picked up a thick piece of green chalk and wrote:

  * * *

  People were.

  She immediately started selling Mystery Mochas to intrigued customers, refusing to tell them what she was going to put into their beverages because, until she started squirting and mixing randomly chosen combinations of flavoring into steaming cups of whatever type of foamed milk struck her fancy at the moment, she didn’t know herself. Some of her inventions weren’t as successful as others, it was true—key lime and cinnamon just don’t combine as well as you might think—but some were delicious.

  Customers definitely got into the spirit of the thing. One pointed out the similarities between Avery’s Mystery Mochas and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans from the Harry Potter books. Popping a Bott’s Bean into your mouth might release a delectable burst of raspberry or lemon custard or, if you were less fortunate, a gag-inducing flavor of earwax or vomit. That was part of the mystery—and the fun.

  Her supervisor hadn’t seen it that way. He fired her.

  He told her to hand over her apron and go home immediately, even though she still had two and a half hours left on her shift. For Joanie’s sake, Avery had made up the story that she’d quit because she was booked for a calendar photo shoot. She didn’t want her big sister to be worried and mad at her.

  Avery washed her bowl and placed it back on the shelf. She walked to the coat rack and got what was left of her tip money from her jacket pocket.

  That was Joanie’s problem; she worried too much. So did Meg. Though Meg seemed more unhappy than worried, at least for the last few months. But why? Like it said in the Psalm: What reason did they have to feel downcast or troubled? They were no more screwed up than your average, run-of-the-mill failed prodigies from your average, deeply dysfunctional family, were they? Well, not by much.

  Avery dumped her money onto the counter and then reached up to the top shelf where she kept the ceramic starfish that served as her bank. The pile of bills inside was smaller than she anticipated. Frowning, she separated the bills from the coins and counted them twice, then stood staring at the meager stack of bills and little towers of quarters and dimes.

  Reaching up to her forehead, Avery smoothed away the frown lines with one quick, deliberate swipe of her hand, as if literally wiping all worry and negative thoughts from her mind. She reminded herself that she would soon get a check for her two weeks of work. Of course, she’d only been working twenty-five hours a week and half of her earnings were already earmarked to pay for electricity, propane, two pairs of shoes and a skirt she’d charged because she was feeling flush, and that stack of books she’d moved off the window seat.

  Living in a tiny house imposed a necessary frugality on Avery. Anytime she bought something, she had to consider where she would store it. She had no problem with telling herself no when it came to clothes and the like, but self-discipline crumbled when it came to books. She could not walk past her favorite local bookstore, Bayside Books, without going inside. And she couldn’t seem to leave without buying a book. Or two. Or five.

  People sometimes suggested e-books as a solution to the storage problem. She did have a few on her tablet, but there was just something so delicious about the feel of pages between your fingers, the heft of a real book in your hand, covers that were works of art. She just couldn’t resist. There was always the library, but to Avery, buying books was one of life’s most pleasurable and affordable luxuries, one you could keep forever and enjoy over and over again. However, until she figured out how to replenish the starfish it was a luxury she’d have to forego. No more walking past Bayside until then. She’d just have to find another route to get to Capitol Hill’s commercial area. And something would turn up before she reached the end of her reserves. It always had before.

  She held the starfish beneath the lip of the countertop, pushed the money into it, placed it back on the top shelf, and started looking for something to do. Should she go for a run? Hop on the bus and go to the pier? Read something? She had plenty of books, but she wasn’t in the mood to sit still. Maybe she should paint? Work on the half-finished undersea landscape mural she was creating on the wall of the great room? Or glue some pieces onto the mosaic table she was making from bits of broken pottery? Or crochet some of the granny squares for the afghan she was making to give Joanie at Christmas? But she was too restless for any of that. Finally, she decided to clean the house.

  Avery vacuumed, dusted, swept, mopped, and scrubbed every square inch of the house. But since 240 square feet doesn’t encompass that many square inches, the project didn’t take that long. After stowing the cleaning supplies, she perched herself once again on the window seat, surveying her sparkling surroundings. Her initial satisfaction faded quickly, leaving in its place an unfamiliar discomfiture.

  She sat there for a full two minutes trying to put a name to it. Finally, with a jolt of surprise, it hit her. She was bored.

  Bored? She’d never been bored in her life.

  Avery lifted her knees and tucked her body fully into the window seat, a needlepoint sea anemone throw pillow cushioning her back, wondering how this was possible.

  Maybe it was the job that had done it.

  Maybe, becoming accustomed to the camaraderie and conversation of her customers and coworkers, she had lost the ability to set her own agenda, think her own thoughts, and keep her own company.

  Or maybe . . . she was just lonely.

  Avery wondered what was going on at the coffee shop. Had Doyle decided to dump his girlfriend? Had Cecily passed her statistics exam? And what about the guy with the wavy brown hair that flopped over the rim of his glasses—the one who made the connection between Bertie Bott’s beans and her mystery mochas and said that the pineapple-peppermint latte she made for him was awesome? Had he come in for his usual three o’clock coffee fix? Had he asked where she was?

  Avery looked up and saw Joanie striding across the lawn toward the tiny house. She sprung up from the window seat, happy for someone to talk to, certain Joanie would forgive her for getting fired after hearing her side of the story.

  But when she opened the door and saw her sister’s face, her smile disappeared. Something was wrong and somehow, before Joanie said a word, she knew it involved Meg.

  Chapter 5

  “Oh, come on!” Hal Seeger smacked the dashboard and rocked his body forward sharply, as if the sudden shifting of his weight might somehow dislodge the line of stopped cars blocking their path.

  When it didn’t, he twisted toward Lynn, who was humming along with the radio, a placid expression on her face.

  “Can’t you do something? I’m going to miss my flight!!”

  Lynn Federer had worked with Hal for eight years. Starting as an intern, she worked her way up to production coordinator, but the scope of her responsibilities was basically the same as it had always been, to d
o whatever needed doing. Hal was the CEO of Stunted Genius Films, but they shared the same job description. Hal liked to say they ran a lean and mean, nimble organization, making it sound like operating on a shoestring budget was something they did by choice. But that was because one of Hal’s unofficial titles was Company Cheerleader. Lynn was the Company Realist, the one charged with reminding Hal how things are, as opposed to how he saw them.

  Lynn turned down the radio.

  “Do something? Pookie,” she said sweetly, “it’s LA. It’s the 405. And it’s four o’clock. What do you suggest?”

  Hal crossed his arms over his chest and slumped down in his seat.

  “If I’d stuck with mathematics, not only would I be able to afford a car that doesn’t break down every time I need to do something important, like go to the airport, but by now I’d have probably invented a retractable gyrocopter that would emerge from the sunroof at the push of a button and lift your car out of traffic jams. Straight up,” he said, flattening his palm and raising it toward the roof of Lynn’s car, like a rocket ship on liftoff.

  “Yeah, well. Since studying math sent you round the bend once before and since I’m pretty sure you’d have had to study aeronautical engineering to be inventing gyrocopters, I don’t see that working out. Would you just calm down?” she said when Hal craned his neck, searching the road ahead for signs of movement.

  “If you miss the flight, you’ll get the next one. There must be thirty flights a day from LAX to Seattle. Honestly, I don’t know why you’re going up there anyway.”

  “Because I’ve called ten times and she won’t talk to me. Keeps hanging up.”

  “And you think showing up on her doorstep unannounced will change that?”

  “Maybe.” Hal slumped down again and put on a pair of sunglasses.

  “Okay, but what if it doesn’t? It’s not too late to switch gears, pull together another project. There’s that kid from Chicago, Jeremy Lao. Seventeen years old and he’s starting his medical residency. I could give his parents a call. Just as a backup!” she said defensively when Hal shot her a look.