The Promise Girls

by Marie Bostwick

  “Uh-uh. This is the project. I’m not interested in making another movie about another child prodigy lab rat running the maze of academia. I want to make a movie about the aftermath, about what happens when the child prodigy isn’t a child anymore and their accomplishments don’t seem quite so prodigious.”

  “I know. But if she won’t talk to you . . .”

  The traffic started to move, at a crawl.

  “What if you interviewed the mother instead?” Lynn asked hopefully. “That’d be a fresh angle, wouldn’t it? Trying to understand what motivates a parent to push her kids like that? And not only to push them, but to choose donor sperm from extremely high achievers because she wanted to raise a pianist, painter, and writer—that could be really interesting.”

  “Could be. Won’t be. I already talked to her. I’d have a better chance of getting a straight answer from a six-term member of Congress than from Minerva Promise. A great documentary is about those rare, intimate, honest moments when the subject finally drops the veil, gazes into the camera, and says, ‘Take a good, long look. Because this is who I am. And this is who you are too. This is who we all are.’ ”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Minerva wants it too much. She sees the whole thing as a commercial, a chance to rehabilitate her public image. Plus, she might be crazy.”

  “Okay,” Lynn conceded, “but if Joanie won’t talk to you . . . And, anyway, how do you know that she’s not crazy too? How do you know all three of them aren’t?”

  “Because I’m not that lucky.” Hal lifted his sunglasses up a couple of inches, exposing his brown eyes. “Can you imagine? Three crazy failed genius test tube babies and their crazy, narcissistic mother? Now that’d be a movie. We’d win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Come to think of it, forget Cannes. I’d sell it as a series to HBO, buy a Porsche, move to Malibu, and spend my life surfing and chasing women.”

  “Sure you would,” Lynn deadpanned. “Because you’re a thirty-eight-year-old frat boy. Seriously, Hal. What are you going to do if she won’t talk to you? Sit on her doorstep until she does?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if she’s crazy?”

  “She’s not.” He crossed his arms again and faced the windshield. “I met her once.”

  “Joanie Promise? You did? You never told me that.”

  “Well, I didn’t meet her so much as I was in the same room with her. We were on the same talk show about child prodigies. They had me, the math whiz, as well as a fifteen-year-old girl who was already working as a programmer at Google, a thirteen-year-old boy who parlayed five hundred dollars of lawn-mowing money into one hundred and fifty thousand in the stock market, and the Promise Girls, Joanie, Meg, and Avery. And Minerva. The girls never went anywhere without her. She did all the talking.”

  “Hold on . . . You don’t mean you were there that day, do you? The day of the meltdown?”

  Hal bobbed his head, his lips a line. “That’s how I know she’s not crazy. At least Joanie’s not. Can’t vouch for the other two. There we all were, dressed up in the clothes we’d been told to wear, smiling the smiles we’d been told to smile, saying and doing the things we’d been told to say and do. Good little lab rats. Except for her,” he said, admiration creeping into his voice.

  “She made a break for freedom, right there on national television. In front of millions of people. She was the only one brave enough to try. It was a failed attempt and awkward as hell. But who gets it right on the first try? At least she did try. I was so jealous of her,” he said softly. “And I felt so sorry for her.”

  Lynn let out a big breath. She was about to say something, but the traffic started to move a little and she turned her attention back to the road. A moment later Hal sat up straight, suddenly alert, and pulled off his sunglasses.

  “Hey! Get off here!”

  “Where?”

  “Here,” he said urgently, pointing down the freeway. “Exit 42.”

  Lynn looked up at a green sign. “Exit 42 is half a mile away.”

  “But the shoulder is clear all the way. Drive up there and drop me off. La Cienega will be a parking lot, but at least I can walk from there.”

  “Walk?” Lynn choked out her incredulity. “The airport is probably two or three miles from there.”

  “No, it’s only one point six.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I do. I used to be a genius, remember?”

  “You’ll never make it.”

  “I won’t if you keep sitting here and arguing with me,” he said. “Just drive.”

  Lynn pulled onto the shoulder and started driving. Hal unbuckled his seat belt and turned around to face the back, knees on the passenger seat, butt toward the windshield.

  “What are you doing?” Lynn protested.

  “Packing.” He opened his suitcase, pulled out two pairs of boxers, two pairs of socks, a clean shirt, toothbrush, and razor, and stuffed them into his computer bag. “I’m going to have to run and I won’t have time to check a bag.”

  “What are you going to do for clothes?”

  “I’ll figure it out when I get there.” He zipped his computer bag closed and turned around just as the car reached the exit ramp. “And if she won’t talk to me, then I’ll figure that out too. Let me out over there.”

  Lynn pulled over at the corner and Hal climbed out of the car, then leaned down and looked at her through the open door.

  “I’ll call you when I get there.”

  The “good luck” she wished him was interrupted by the sound of the car door slamming, but Lynn knew he didn’t need it. She watched him run down the street knowing that somehow he would make his flight, and his movie.

  When Hal said that he would sit on Joanie’s front doorstep until she agreed to talk to him, he wasn’t kidding. If Joanie Promise and her sisters weren’t willing to cooperate with a documentary about their lives right at this moment, it didn’t matter.

  Eventually, one way or another, the movie would be made. Because Hal Seeger had decided to make it.

  Chapter 6

  There was no baby. There never had been. Joanie was relieved.

  Meg’s face was purple with bruises. Her ribs were broken and her lung had collapsed. Any child Meg had been carrying could not have survived the crash and that would have been more tragedy than they could bear. Definitely more than Asher could bear. He looked terrible. Worried and lost and so very tired.

  For the first twenty-four hours, they’d all stayed round the clock, but then Joanie insisted that the others go home to sleep at night. There was no point in all of them staying. And Trina couldn’t continue missing school.

  “Aunt Joanie is right,” Asher said, his eyes rimmed in red, but dry. “If . . . when your mom wakes up and she finds out that you missed your midterms she’ll ground us both.” He wrapped his arms around Trina and squeezed. “Really, baby. You’ve got to go back to school.”

  It made sense. Meg’s most recent scan showed that the inflammation in her brain was beginning to decrease. There was every reason to hope Meg would waken and recover without surgery, but no one could predict exactly when that might happen.

  And though Asher objected at first, Joanie eventually made him see that he couldn’t afford to neglect his business. He was already behind schedule on his current build. If the work didn’t get finished, he wouldn’t get paid. Meg was unresponsive but stable. If anything happened, they could call Asher right away. They were good, logical arguments. And now, six days into Joanie’s vigil at Meg’s bedside, Avery turned around and used them on her.

  “Joanie, this is crazy. You’ve got a business to run. I don’t. Mermaid bookings are down right now. Why should you be the one to stay? Go home and get some work done. But first, get some sleep. You could pack clothes for a month into those bags under your eyes.”

  “Gee. Thanks, Avery.”

  Avery gave her a squeeze and shoved her out the door.

  After giving her phone numbers to e
very nurse on the floor, Joanie drove home, leaving the window open so she didn’t fall asleep behind the wheel. When she pulled into the driveway, a man dressed in jeans and a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves was sitting on her front porch. Though she didn’t remember ever seeing his face before, she was sure she knew who it was.

  Joanie peered at him through the car window. “Mr. Seeger?”

  He nodded. She got out of the car.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? My sisters and I have zero interest in participating in your documentary. Zero.”

  “Actually, you never said that. Mostly you just hung up on me. Then you quit answering my calls.”

  “And that didn’t give you a hint?”

  She pushed past him, yawning, relieved and a little surprised to see that the garden had not been completely taken over by weeds in her absence. The flowers were slow to bloom this spring, but the weeds were coming on hard and fast, which was starting to feel like a metaphor for everything. Weird that everything looked so good after nearly a week left untended. Maybe God was giving her a break.

  Joanie mounted the porch steps. Hal was still following her. She turned around to face him.

  “Go away.” She was too tired for the pretense of politeness.

  “I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “But I don’t want to talk to you. And even if I did, which I absolutely assure you I don’t,” she said, fumbling for her keys, “this isn’t a good time. I’ve spent the last six days at the hospital and I really, really need to sleep. So please. Go away.” She pulled her keys from her bag.

  “Why were you at the hospital?”

  The key wasn’t going into the lock. Joanie rubbed her eyes, turned it over, and tried again.

  “My sister was in a car accident.”

  “You’re kidding. I’m so sorry.”

  He sounded sincere and slightly embarrassed. Joanie’s irritation toward him wavered momentarily only to return full strength when he spoke again.

  “Minerva didn’t say anything about an accident. Was it Meg or Avery?”

  It bugged Joanie that this Hal Seeger, a man who didn’t know anything about her family except that he clearly thought they were ripe for exploitation, felt like he had the right to refer to her sisters by their first names. But that didn’t bother her half as much as the fact that Minerva had put him up to it, had doubtless given him her phone number in the first place.

  Was she surprised? No. Mad, but not surprised. Whenever anything of this nature materialized—Minerva was always involved in some way or other.

  Joanie tried the key again, shoving it in the keyhole even harder, as though the lock were a stubborn toddler and she a parent determined to wedge a spoonful of pureed peas between clamped lips.

  “Minerva didn’t tell you because she doesn’t know about it. We don’t talk to her.”

  She gritted her teeth, silently cursing the damned key that wouldn’t go into the damned lock so she could go inside the house and close the door in the face of this damned man.

  “We don’t talk to her henchman either,” she added.

  “Joanie, I don’t—”

  She felt his hand on her forearm and yanked away from his grasp, jumping back as if his touch had given her some sort of electrical jolt.

  “Are you deaf or something? How many times do I have to tell you—I don’t want to talk to you and we don’t want to be in your movie. Now go away!”

  He didn’t go away.

  Instead, he took a step closer and took the keys from her hand.

  “Try this one.”

  He returned her key ring, his fingers pinching a large, brass-colored key instead of the silver one Joanie had been using. It slid easily into the lock; she didn’t have to force it at all.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I . . .”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re tired. Get some sleep.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away.

  Joanie locked the door behind her. She found a note from Allison Gold stuck on the refrigerator door with a magnet.

  Joanie swiped at her eyes, thinking about her full freezer and weed-free flowerbeds. God hadn’t given her a break, but Allison had. Maybe that was the same thing. It was so good to have a girlfriend in the neighborhood. Joanie was close to Meg and Avery, of course, but her relationship with Allison was different. Less risky. She cared about Allison, but she didn’t feel responsible for her or to her in the same way she did with her sisters. Allison knew everything about her, things she’d never shared with her sisters, but still liked her and never judged. You couldn’t always say this about family.

  Joanie took the Jell-O salad into the living room and reclined on the couch, eating right from the bowl. Joanie loved to cook—and to eat—but she stayed away from processed foods, believing that fresh, preferably local ingredients were crucial to a flavorful dish. But today, for some reason, Allison’s salad, made with lime Jell-O, miniature marshmallows, canned pineapple, cream cheese, and Cool Whip, absolutely hit the spot.

  Too exhausted to move, Joanie left the bowl on the coffee table and covered herself with an afghan. She peeked out the window. Hal Seeger was leaning against the back bumper of her car, staring out at the street and smoking a cigar.

  A cigar? Yet another reason to dislike him, not that she needed one. She rolled onto her side and closed her eyes.

  Hal Seeger could hang around her house until hell froze over if he felt like it; she wouldn’t be in his movie. Neither would her sisters.

  Chapter 7

  Avery felt awkward sitting by Meg’s bed, having a one-sided conversation with her unconscious sister.

  But she couldn’t just sit there and say nothing, listening to the beep of the monitors and watching that little green line move across the screen, trying to decide if an upward movement was a good thing or a bad thing, wondering if her sister would be the same when she woke up, or if the crack in her skull had caused permanent damage. Wondering if Meg would wake up at all . . .

  She couldn’t think about that. Instead, she told Meg a story. She didn’t know if Meg could hear her, but it couldn’t hurt to try, and so Avery told her the story of a selkie.

  Selkies are mythical, seal-like creatures. According to Scottish lore, they occasionally leave the depths of the ocean and shed their skins to take on human form, wooing and sometimes even marrying humans. Because selkies are very careful to hide their sealskins, their land-born lovers might never know the truth of their identity.

  Avery told her sister about a male selkie who wooed a Highland lass, then returned to the sea. When the child of their union was born to the woman, the selkie came to claim his son and bring him back to the ocean, giving the mother a purse filled with gold in exchange for the child.

  Now selkies, as any Scotsman knows, possess the gift of clairvoyance. Before departing, the selkie was given a terrible vision of the future: The woman would live happily and make a good marriage, but her husband, a seal hunter, would fire the shot that ended the lives of the selkie and his son.

  It was a classic Scottish folktale, a poignantly beautiful romantic tragedy. Avery made it even more so, embellishing and expanding upon the ancient story, adding a depth of detail that brought the characters vividly to life. She found the poetry in each line, spoke them with passion and theatrical skill. Sometimes her voice rose to a dramatic crescendo, at other times it fell to a suspenseful whisper. Though she spun her yarn for an unresponsive audience of one, Avery gave a brilliant performance. Her voice was hoarse with longing as she described the final scene, painting a picture of the tearful and torn woman who stood on a rocky cliff over a troubled gray sea and threw a wreath of Highland heather into the churning waves.

  As Avery finished, someone behind her started to clap.

  She turned around and saw a man wearing green scrubs, with a shock of wavy brown hair flopped over the rim of his glasses, standing in the doorway. It was the guy from the coffee shop,
the one who liked her peppermint-pineapple latte invention.

  He continued clapping and Avery felt her cheeks color.

  “That was awesome. I only heard the last part, but you’re a great storyteller.”

  “Oh. Thanks. I’m not sure she can hear me, but you know . . .” Avery shrugged.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “I talk to patients all the time who wake up after days of unconsciousness and can repeat back everything that anybody said in their presence. I had one comatose patient whose wife thought he was dying and decided to tell him about all of the affairs she’d had during their marriage. Except he didn’t die. First thing he did when he woke up was call his lawyer.”

  Avery tucked her legs up onto her chair, hugging her knees to her chest so he could wheel a blood pressure cart past her to the side of the bed.

  “Really? Guess I’d better watch what I say.”

  He peeled back the Velcro from a blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around Meg’s arm, calling her by her name and explaining exactly what he was doing, just as if she’d been fully conscious. Avery liked that. It was respectful, considerate. When he finished, he recorded the results on a computer tablet.

  “So . . . you’re a nurse?”

  No, Avery. He’s a rodeo clown. Of course he’s a nurse! You couldn’t tell by the scrubs and the blood pressure cart? See? This is why you shouldn’t go out among regular people. Because you are hopelessly awkward in social situations.

  “Uh-huh. I normally work in pediatrics, but they had to move people around to cover some vacations.”

  “That must be fun—working with kids.”

  He nodded. “Most of the time. I’ve got a patient right now, a six-year-old girl. She was in a car accident, too. They brought her in on the same day as your sister.”

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  “She’s going to live. But she’ll never walk again. Six years old. Lilly Margolis. Cutest little thing you ever saw. And now . . .” He stopped in midsentence. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”