“Sorry. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“Where are you?”
“Just up the street at Cupcake Royale.”
“Stay there,” Hal said. “I’ll come get you.”
“No, don’t,” she protested, her voice almost pleading. “I don’t want the whole crew invading the place.”
“Just me. Don’t move.”
Hal jogged two and a half blocks south to Cupcake Royale, his tennis shoes splashing over the wet sidewalk. Inside, he found Avery sitting slumped in a pink painted chair.
“Where’s your cupcake?”
“Cupcakes make you fat.” She sniffled.
Her eyes were red and puffy from crying. He felt like hugging her, but settled for a squeeze on the shoulder.
“Something happen with you and Owen?”
Avery shook her head. “Nothing’s happening with me and Owen. Or anything else in my life. I don’t have a boyfriend, or a job, or plan, or enough cash in my pocket to buy a cupcake. Everything sucks right now, Hal. Really sucks. I just . . .” She propped her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. “I don’t think I can deal with the cameras today.”
Hal looked at her. Avery was emotionally vulnerable, wounded and raw. In his experience, that kind of vulnerability generally made for compelling, sometimes dramatic video. And though she’d been holding back so far, Hal knew that Avery was a verbal processor. Talking aloud was how she sorted out her feelings.
Avery was open, trusting, and eager to please, which was why she’d gotten her heart stomped on. After watching her with Owen over the last few weeks, observing how much more engaged Owen was when Avery was in mermaid mode than when she was trying to be herself, he could have predicted that this would happen. Just as he could predict that if he pushed a little harder, she’d let him bring in the camera and tell him everything....
He sighed inwardly. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to be that guy.
“Okay, sure. I get it. You need a break.”
Avery lifted her head, swiped at her nose. Hal took his phone from his pocket.
“Who are you calling?”
“The crew. They can head over to Asher’s place. He said he’s installing some cabinets in the spec house today. They can get some B-roll of him working.”
“Aren’t you going with them?”
“Naw, they don’t need me for that. You hungry?”
Four cupcakes—whiskey maple bacon and tiramisu for Avery, salted caramel and triple-threat chocolate for himself—set Hal back $17.04, including tax. After taking a bite of the salted caramel confection, he decided four bucks was a bargain.
“Oh, wow. This is just . . . Wow. But gourmet cupcakes? These are a thing now?”
Avery nodded. “Oh, yeah. For years and years.”
He took a smaller but no less appreciative bite of the triple-threat cupcake and groaned with pleasure. “Oh, man.”
“I know, right?” Avery wiped a smear of whiskey bacon frosting from her lip and looked at him. “Hal? I’m really sorry about backing out today.”
He waved off her apology. “We had to get some B-roll of Asher at some point. We’ll pick up with you tomorrow. What will you be doing?”
“Probably still looking for a job,” she sighed. “Can I ask you something? Why do you have to spend so much time following us? It’s not like we’re doing anything interesting. What are you going to do with ten hours of video of Meg painting? Or Joanie weeding and sewing buttonholes? Or me filling out job applications?”
“Throw it away mostly. I’ll probably end up using fifteen minutes of the stuff we’ve filmed in the last three weeks.”
“That’s crazy. Why not just do some interviews, set up some scenes in interesting locations, and focus on the highlights? Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“Sure,” he said, pausing to lick the edge of his cupcake, making the frosting even. “I could do that. Come in with some preconceived idea of what I want to have happen and the story I want to tell, ask preprogrammed questions to get the answers I’m looking for. But that’s not how I work.
“I don’t make a movie because I have answers, but because I’m searching for them. Remember, I started life as a mathematician. In a lot of ways, I approach a movie the same way I would an equation. I begin with a theory, but consider all the variables, all the possible combinations and proofs. That’s what I’m interested in: proof. And facts. Not what looks real, but what is real—the truth.”
“Okay. But why?”
“Why the truth?” He raised his brows, surprised by the question.
“Why us? What’s so interesting about our truth?”
Hal tilted his head to the side. “You know, I don’t really have a good answer to that. I mean it,” he said, responding to the look of doubt on her face. “Hey, just because I spend my time examining the lives and motivations of other people doesn’t mean I have a clue about my own. I’m sure it has something to do with my own experiences. But I’ve always been interested in prodigies. In genius.”
“But we’re failed geniuses.”
“Not the way I see it. I think people will find you inspiring.”
“Inspiring?” Avery choked out a laugh. “Joanie purposely flushed her whole career down the drain. She could have traveled the world, giving concerts and being famous. Instead, she sews uniforms for people who want to pretend the Civil War never ended. Is that your idea of success?
“Is Meg a success? Am I? Can’t even scrape up enough money to buy myself a lousy cupcake,” Avery said, sniffling as she peeled the paper off the tiramisu cake.
“Hey, now. I won’t sit here and listen to that kind of talk.” Hal frowned and Avery rolled her eyes. “I mean it,” he said, keeping his voice artificially low and stern. “That is a fantastic cupcake.”
Avery smiled weakly and shook her head.
“Really, Avery, I think you’re being too hard on yourself. I think you’re incredibly interesting. I mean it!” he protested when she shot him a look. “That first time we filmed you putting on your costume and you told that story . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. You made me believe you. You’re an artist. Maybe not in the conventional sense, but you’re one of the most creative people I’ve ever met.”
“It’s an escape,” she said. “That’s all.”
“From what?”
Avery pressed her lips together and looked at him, as if trying to decide how much she should say.
“Hey. This is just you and me talking. No cameras. I won’t bring it up again unless you do. Promise.”
After a moment of silence, she turned her head away and began to talk, as if telling her story came easier when she wasn’t looking him in the eye.
“Joanie and Meg are smarter than me. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that. I don’t know the name of the sperm donor Minerva picked when she decided to have me—I don’t think Minerva did either—but he was a writer, somebody famous, and had published a lot of books. And so, according to Minerva’s plan, I was supposed to become a writer too. She engineered the whole thing, decided our future before we were even conceived, like God. Or a god—little g. Minerva is the name of a goddess of Roman mythology.”
“The goddess of wisdom and patroness of the arts,” Hal replied.
Avery nodded. “Right. Anyway, she set out to live up to the name by hatching three little artists. It worked, for Joanie and Meg. I was supposed to be a writer. But it’s hard to write if you can’t read.”
Hal leaned closer. His brows drew together, becoming a line of doubt. “But you can read. You read to the kids at the hospital. You read all the time.”
“Now,” she said. “Not when I was a kid.”
“But Minerva’s book has stories that you wrote.”
“Minerva’s book has stories that I told her. It’s not the same thing.”
“But how old were you when Minerva’s book came out? Five? Nobody expects a five-year-old to be able to read and write.�
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“Minerva did. She spent hours and hours and hours showing me flashcards, making me copy letters. I hated it. Well, not all of it,” she admitted. “She read to me a lot, told me stories. After a while, I started telling stories back to her and she was thrilled. So I kept doing it. But I couldn’t read until I was nine.
“Once I was in the foster care system I went to public school. But it took a while before anybody realized I couldn’t read. I wasn’t causing any problems so they left me alone.”
“But one of them figured it out?”
“No, it was my foster mom, Lori Raisch. She was a retired teacher. Her husband, Keith, was a sailor. He retired from the Coast Guard and then captained a charter boat out of Long Beach, taking tourists on whale-watching tours. Captain Keith,” she said softly. “He was a good guy. They both were. And big into church. They didn’t do what they were doing out of obligation or anything. It was just who they were. They were the kind of people who are always looking for a chance to give back. When they retired, they started taking in foster kids. I was their last.”
“So Lori taught you to read? And Keith taught you about mermaids?”
“Keith taught me about stories,” she corrected, turning toward him at last, her countenance brighter. “Oh, he had some good ones! Sailors have always been storytellers and Captain Keith was one of the best. It’s part of the maritime tradition. Back in the days when a sea voyage could take months, storytelling was a way for sailors to pass the time, and confront the things that frightened them.
“Stories of shipwrecks with tragic endings helped them come to grips with the possibility of death. Stories of miraculous and heroic rescues gave them courage to go on in the face of fear and the torment of a storm. Fantastical myths of gods, and monsters, and mermaids explained the unexplainable natural phenomena around them, strange animals, fish, and birds, hurricanes, the aurora borealis. Stories are how we make sense of a world that seems senseless, a way to protect ourselves from feeling overwhelmed by forces we can’t control. At first, I just listened to Captain Keith’s stories. After a while, I started to study the way he told them.
“I saw how he used just the right word at the right moment in the right way, turning a story about untangling a shark from a fishing net into poetry. I saw how he chose his themes, transforming a story of shanghaied sailors battling a storm into a tale of good versus evil, man versus nature, an epic drama. I paid attention to how he used his eyes and hands and voice to build the action, then dropped back and built it up again, like a pulsing tide, like music, until his listeners were on the edge of their seats.
“And then, when the tension was so tight it felt like they might snap in two, I saw how he brought the crisis crashing over them like a wave, a thing of power and beauty that knocked them back and made them gasp. And after it passed, they just stood there, shocked, shivering with cold, and strangely alive, tingling, trying to make sense of what just happened, to sort fact from fiction, watching the waters recede and grow calm. Waiting. Wishing the wave would return.”
Avery finished speaking. Hal looked at her for a long moment.
“And you say you’re not a writer?”
“Writing is different. I tell stories.”
“Better than anybody I ever heard.”
“That’s because you never met Captain Keith.”
“So if he wasn’t the reason, why did you get so interested in mermaids? What’s the attraction?”
“Because of Sarah, the little girl I babysat for. She was obsessed with mermaids. Only a few of Keith’s stories were about mermaids, though, so I started doing research so I could make up my own stories. Soon, I was just as obsessed with them as Sarah was. I didn’t just want to know about mermaids, I wanted to be one. Who wouldn’t?
“Mermaids are beautiful and magical, seductively feminine, but also powerful. Sailors are afraid of mermaids, even while they are drawn to them. If you study the body of mermaid myth and lore, you’ll see that many of the legends paint them as strong and potentially malevolent creatures, to be approached cautiously, with fascination as well as fear. Obviously, this was before Disney made them all perky and playful. Until then, mermaids were seen as mysterious and dangerous, witches of the sea. Scholars theorize that this is a result of the fear that men have when faced with powerful women, especially those who are comfortable with their sexuality. It gets back to what I was saying before, about how people use stories to frame their fears.”
“Hold on. There are mermaid scholars?”
“Oh, yeah,” Avery said earnestly. “Mermaids are a thing.”
“Like cupcakes?”
“No,” she said pointedly. “Not like cupcakes. You mess with a mermaid at your own peril. Mermaids are in control. And when I am dressed in my costume, inhabiting that persona, that’s how I feel—beautiful, powerful, mysterious, and in control of my destiny. Of everything.”
It all made sense to him now. As a helpless little girl, Avery had been torn from her family. Then she was shuttled between strange families and schools for years. And after she finally found a stable home with loving foster parents, she was bounced back to unstable Minerva. No wonder the idea of mystical creatures that controlled their own destiny was appealing.
“What happened to Captain Keith and Lori?”
Avery looked down at the table, examining the crumbs that clung to the white paper liner of her now-devoured cupcake.
“One Saturday, Captain Keith took me roller skating and had a heart attack. He died right there in the roller rink.”
Hal’s throat tightened.
“I’m so sorry, Avery. That must have been terrible.”
She dipped her head, acknowledging his statement without expanding upon it. “Lori died a couple of years later, but I was back with Minerva by then. She regained custody when I was twelve. Joanie tried to get custody of me before that, but she was young and broke, plus she lived out of state, so the judge wouldn’t allow it.”
“So what was that like, living with Minerva again?”
“Not that bad. Joanie and Meg and I share the same mother but, in a lot of ways, our upbringings were totally different. When I came back she didn’t push as much. I think she was afraid they’d take me away again if she did. She was still Minerva—always cooking up some crazy plan. In a way, I actually liked that about her. Sure, she’s nuts. And completely unreliable. But she’s tough and resourceful. She truly believes that, someday, one of her schemes will pay off and we’ll all be propelled to fame and fortune. Look, Minerva screwed us up in all kinds of ways. I get that. But doesn’t every parent? There are worse fates than being raised by an overly optimistic mother who thinks you’re a genius.”
“But if you feel that way about her, why did you leave?”
“Because she’s toxic,” Avery replied regretfully, as if she hated to admit it but couldn’t deny the truth. “For every plus there’s a minus, a big one. Like so big it creates a vacuum. And if you stick around long enough, eventually you’ll get sucked into the void.”
“What do you mean? Give me an example.”
“Okay. So you remember how I said Minerva is resourceful?” Hal nodded. “That’s a plus, it’s what makes her a survivor. The minus is that she thought of her children as resources to be tapped.
“It sounds awful when I say it like that, but in a way, you can’t blame her. She was all on her own. Who else could she turn to? And no matter what people think, she wasn’t just out for herself. She was trying to make a life for us, an extraordinary life. That’s the thing about Minerva. She really wants the best for everybody. But, somehow, she always manages to go about it in the worst possible way. So, I left. I had to. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love her.”
He’d misjudged her. Until now, he thought of her as immature. But at twenty-five, she’d mastered a skill that a lot of people twice her age never would: the ability to step back emotionally and weigh people’s intentions alongside their actions, showing others compassion while still
protecting herself.
“You know something, Avery? I think there’s a lot of your mother in you. The good parts,” he assured her. “You’re tougher than you think you are, a survivor. You’re also optimistic, resourceful, and just crazy enough.”
“Crazy enough? For what?”
“To be interesting. To find your own path in life, and on your own terms.”
“Right now I’d settle for finding a job.”
“You will,” Hal said confidently. “You just haven’t found your niche yet. When you do, it’ll be something you love and that you’re really good at, something that’ll surprise even you. You’re going to be fine, Avery. You’ll see.”
“Yeah?” Avery smiled and glanced at her phone, checking the time. “Well, then I guess I’d better get on with it. Thanks for the cupcakes. And the pep talk.”
Hal was still eating, but when Avery stood up he did the same.
“Anytime. It was fun talking to you. And for the record? Owen is an idiot.”
Avery laughed, really laughed, and headed toward the door with a bit of a bounce in her step, the paper sack that contained her mermaid garb and cosmetics swinging at her side. But before she got halfway across the room she stopped and spun around to face him.
“Do you want to know how to get Joanie to talk to you? I mean, really talk?”
“Well . . . yes,” he stammered, surprised by the question and that Avery should be the one asking it.
“Do what you just did with me—turn off the cameras.”
Hal didn’t quite roll his eyes, but almost. Avery seemed to have forgotten that he was trying to make a movie. Heart-to-hearts were all well and good, and he was glad he’d been able to cheer her up, but he was a filmmaker, not a life coach. And for a filmmaker, anything that didn’t happen on film might as well not have happened at all.
“I know, I know,” she said. “You want to capture everything on tape, but stop and think about it. Cameras turned Joanie’s whole life upside down. She hates cameras. If you want her to open up to you when the cameras are rolling, you’ve got to show her that she can trust you when they’re not.”
The Promise Girls Page 19