Good fortune, p.31
Good Fortune, page 31
Elizabeth dodged her mother’s quick hands and her sisters’ nosiness on her way into the bathroom, kicking the door shut behind her and sitting on the edge of the tub. “What kind of contract?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
The producer meeting, it turned out, was real enough, though the man was less connected, less powerful, and less familiar with Ray than he had promised. Lydia admitted as much to taking the photos—“Which she said are very tasteful, whatever that’s worth . . .”—and Ray to their existence, so the question was of their ownership.
“The only way we can keep Lydia safe is to make sure those photos stay in our possession,” Randall sighed.
“Have you seen them?” Elizabeth asked.
“LB, I don’t want to see that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“If they’re Ray’s, we’ll see how much he wants for them. If they’re the producer’s, we’ll see if there’s any room in the contract to void it. She’s under eighteen, so anything she signed shouldn’t count. But I don’t know what I’m doing, LB. Your dad doesn’t either. We probably need to hire a lawyer.”
She groaned. “We can’t afford one. You know that.”
“It’s that or . . .”
The bathroom door squealed open, revealing Jane and Amelia in the doorway.
She nodded at them to come inside.
“Anyway, we’re going to see what can be done and then we’ll be back. Don’t wait up for us, and please don’t worry.”
“Thank you, Great Uncle,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t know what we would do without you.”
He sighed. “Tell your mother to calm down,” he said. “We’ll let you know more when we have it.”
Lydia alive! Lydia safe and unharmed! Lydia left to sort out the consequences of a bad contract with an even worse man, with nothing to show for it but nude photos.
“Thank god she’s all right,” Amelia cried.
No matter how relieved she felt, Elizabeth couldn’t feel as satisfied as everyone else seemed to be. All she could consider was how it could have been worse.
Amelia turned to look into the hallway where Kitty lurked, chewing on a nail. “Come on. You girls might as well try to eat something. What do you say to some soy-sauce noodles?”
Kitty lifted her head. “God, yes, please.”
Walking into the kitchen, Amelia unpacked their oven of all of its pots and pans and rummaged for a wide-bottomed pot. “Whatever happens, your uncle and I will do our best to help. We’ll help to pay, even if it means moving some money around. This is an emergency.”
“Aunty, no,” Elizabeth insisted. “The two of you have done more than enough.”
Jade thumped her hand hard on the tabletop. “And why not! Isn’t Lydia my older brother’s niece? Isn’t it right that he should care what happens to her?”
Elizabeth pulled another pot from the oven and gathered water to boil the noodles. “Ma! We can’t take their money.”
Jade hip-checked her from the sink, snatching the handle of the pot from her. “Of course we can. Give me that, la,” she cried. “You’re going to burn the bottom of the pot.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes.
Water ran noisily into the pot. “It’s the same as if he had to take care of me. And you know he hasn’t ever taken any serious interest in you girls apart from some little gifts now and again . . .”
“Mother, please,” Elizabeth said.
Jade harrumphed and switched the burner on, shoving the pot on top of the lit flame. “Elizabeth, did we ask? Did we show up with our hands out and beg for him to pay? Or did he offer?”
To Jade, it was only good and right and proper that her own family should do anything it could to save Lydia from a humiliating future and them from public embarrassment, never mind how unlikely it would be that they’d ever return the gesture.
But at least it was done.
And now that it was next to impossible that she and Darcy would ever have anything to do with each other again, she could admit the truth. Maybe she had wanted something more. Maybe they’d had a chance before any of this happened. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.
But now she’d never know.
49
They prepared for a homecoming, and expected an episode of Jerry Springer—crying and screaming, name-calling, furniture-throwing, chaos. They were sorely disappointed on all fronts. Lydia returned to the apartment without handcuffs, dramatics, or tears, marshaled on one side by Vincent and on the other by Randall. It was Lydia who stayed the same, as unbothered as she’d been the day she left. Tanned and well rested, she twirled into the apartment in a slinky dress with a broad-brimmed sun hat and greeted them all with chic kisses against their cheeks. “Wasn’t it awful here without me?”
Elizabeth resisted the impulse to chuck a pillow at her face.
And if the apartment seemed sterner, quieter, and more somber than usual, Lydia didn’t notice. Lydia was her own hype man and game show host. She crowed over her victories and her adventures, unpacking unwanted gifts onto the kitchen table. None were chosen for quality or with care. She bought them whenever she happened to remember, and her memory wasn’t very good. Paper-thin flip-flops and boardwalk sarongs, slap bracelets and superballs, and a novelty T-shirt for Dad—wasn’t that thoughtful? Wasn’t she a wonderful sister, a delightful daughter?
“I wish you all could have been there,” she sighed. “But it’s probably better you weren’t. You wouldn’t have let me try half the things that I got to do!”
She didn’t know the half of it.
She thought it an exciting detour, her brief touch of imagined fame and grandeur—a Hollywood producer, being discovered on the beach, a very adult photo shoot—and wasn’t it only natural that everyone lived to hear every detail? What else did they have going on? There were so many amazing things that she’d done and seen, so many crazy people on the boardwalk, and she didn’t know where to start.
Randall excused himself with a claim of feeling unwell, Jane sank into a seat on the sofa without a word, and Vincent, usually so calm, usually so easygoing, paced the small square of the kitchen with his hands in his pockets, looking the most furious Elizabeth could ever remember.
And the more Lydia talked, the stormier his expression.
Lydia squealed. “Wait until Alexa sees me on Canal Street. She’s going to be sick!”
Elizabeth knew how she felt.
Lydia couldn’t see past what she did or what she wanted, and as long as she believed that she’d gotten the upper hand out of the situation, she wouldn’t see anything wrong with it either. She might with a little more time, Elizabeth hoped, or distance, but not now. And until then, it was impossible to escape her endless gloating—and what achievements she had! An interrupted modeling career, an undisclosed sum of money paid to make sure that she still had a life to reclaim when she came back, a panicked set of parents and sisters.
Lydia strutted through the kitchen to pull a can of soda from the fridge. “Don’t hate, girls,” she cooed. “After I make my first millions, I’ll make sure you guys get a little something out of it.”
“Now, Lydia,” Jade clucked. “Don’t pick on your sisters.”
Lydia rolled her eyes. “They’re the ones who are still going to be stuck at home when I’m rich and famous and traveling the world. Once that producer lines me up with an agent . . .”
Vincent filled a glass of water at the sink. “You’re not going to do any such thing.” His voice turned steely with suppressed rage. “You’re going to stop thinking about these ridiculous things and pay attention to your schoolbooks for a change.”
Lydia scoffed. “Come on, Dad. All I really need is my GED.”
He slammed the glass down hard against the counter, rattling the cabinet doors. Lydia jumped, Jade froze, and the rest of them slunk into the safety of the living room, watching the scene from behind the sofa.
“Careless, stupid girl! Use your head!” Vincent thundered. “Where do you think those pictures would have ended up? What do you think would have happened to you?”
Kitty slid from the sofa to the floor, wincing at every word.
Lydia’s smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“Husband, aa,” Jade said, scooping Lydia into her arms.
“The only thing that saved you was your uncle. Without him, you would have signed your whole life away.”
“Husband, try to be understanding, la,” Jade said. “Lydia’s so young, and she didn’t know what she was doing . . .”
Lydia tucked her head against Jade’s shoulder.
“Understanding,” he clucked. “We’ve been too understanding already. Too much freedom. And all she’s learned is how to take advantage.”
“Come on, Ba,” Lydia said.
He shook his head and snatched his apartment keys. “No more ‘come on,’” he said. “If you take one more step out of line, I will have nothing to do with you. You can find someplace else to live and somebody else to bother—and then you’ll see exactly how good you can do on your own.” He marched out the front door, letting it slam shut behind him.
For a moment, Lydia looked stricken, as if aware for the first time of what her own mistakes might have cost her.
Jade looked stunned. “Now, Vincent, you can’t mean that,” she called, running after him into the hallway. “This is your baby!”
Lydia took a hard breath, slowly shaking off the last of what Vincent had said to her. “He’ll come around,” she said. “He always does.”
Except this time, she didn’t sound so sure.
50
Lydia still insisted on celebrating. To take the sting out of what happened earlier that day, maybe, or to honor her homecoming and her accomplishments (such as they were). She insisted, she begged, she pleaded. After all, what good was having older sisters if they didn’t take your side at a time like this? Didn’t they think that Vincent was being too rigid, too uptight, too unfair? Didn’t they think she had a right to make her own decisions? Didn’t they think she deserved it?
Fine. If they didn’t want to appreciate her, she would go and find people who would.
Lydia did as Lydia would do, and stormed all the way out.
Elizabeth waited out the rest of the evening on the roof, hoping the air and a smoke would clear her head—and leave her enough space to avoid all human contact until it had. On a muggy summer night, there weren’t many others who preferred the still air and a haze of smog to air-conditioned comfort. Only a handful of teenage boys gathered on the opposite side of the roof, hidden by a large cloud of smoke, blasting the Beastie Boys.
They’d been cooped up together so long the last few days, the five of them, that it felt almost alien to hear her own thoughts.
It didn’t last long.
The fire escape shook as someone thundered onto the roof. “LB!”
Lydia skipped over to join her, pink-faced and beaming. Wherever she’d gone, she’d certainly managed to have a good enough time.
Lydia lifted a small set of colored gel bracelets. “You forgot your present,” she said, softly. Sinking onto her knees beside Elizabeth, Lydia pushed a handful of them past her wrist. Circling her arms around Elizabeth’s middle, she pressed her hot mouth to her neck. “You didn’t even tell me congratulations.”
She smelled like sweet alcohol and cotton candy.
Elizabeth scratched her head. “You’re unbelievable. Congratulations for what?”
Lydia snuggled tighter against her side. “You don’t want to hear about it?” she said, quietly. “How I was discovered?”
Elizabeth brushed Lydia’s hair, fingers tracing the base of her neck like she’d done for her thousands of bedtimes before. “No, Lyd,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
For all that Lydia fought to be seen as grown up, she could still be such a kid. All she ever wanted was to be told that things would be okay, that they could work out. Love, by any other name, might be called reassurance.
Lydia splayed her legs out wide. “God, it was so funny. I wish you could have been there.”
“I don’t think anything about what happened would be funny.”
“Oh, LB, you don’t even know. Great Uncle and Dad charged in like the FBI,” she said, snorting on a laugh. “It was like something out of TVB. Ray wasn’t even there so they were freaking out, yelling, and trying not to look like they were losing it. I told them I’d planned to call them after it was over, but they didn’t want to hear it.”
“You’re right. That sounds hilarious,” Elizabeth deadpanned.
Lydia nudged Elizabeth’s jaw with her head in protest. “Dad looked like he was going to throw a chair or something.”
“Funny.”
“They said they were going to take us out to lunch, but all they did was talk about paperwork for hours. So boring. And, you know, they didn’t say a single nice thing to me while we were there?” she said, rolling her eyes. “I was worried they’d ruin the whole thing after all my hard work, but nobody wanted to talk to me about it. Be quiet, Lydia. Stay in the hotel room, Lydia—which, please, it was a Holiday Inn—and don’t go anywhere. Like, where would I go? They didn’t even leave me a key! It was like being in jail.”
“I don’t think jail is like being at a Holiday Inn.”
Lydia rolled onto her back to peer up at the sky. The city never shone with stars, but sometimes they could mistake a passing helicopter for a shooting star. It was the thought that counted.
“Such a big deal about nothing,” Lydia whispered. “I already signed everything, which I told them, and we were figuring out the details. All they did was argue, and it didn’t even fucking matter anyway because Darcy showed up. What a waste of time.”
Elizabeth choked. “Darcy!”
Lydia brayed a laugh. “You should have seen his face. He looked like he was going to challenge Ray to a duel or something, but—oh, shit. I don’t think I was supposed to say anything.”
Lydia’s big mouth, for once, was a blessing.
“What was he even doing there?”
Trying to imagine Darcy in Atlantic City tested the limits of her imagination. Trying to imagine him in a Holiday Inn tested the limits of reality.
Lydia shrugged. “Don’t ask me. They made me leave the room as soon as they started talking.”
What Lydia knew didn’t amount to much, and still proved too much for her to understand.
“Well, don’t tell anyone, okay? Promise.”
“I promise,” she said. “I won’t say anything.”
Lydia leaned against her shoulder, blinking at her through a haze of alcohol and exhaustion. “LB?”
Her voice hadn’t sounded so small in years.
“Yeah?”
“You’re not mad at me too, are you?”
She wrapped an arm around her sister’s shoulders. “You did something really stupid, and you should have known better,” she said. “We were all really worried about you.”
“You think that because you can’t see the bigger picture.”
Elizabeth studied her. “What’s the big picture, Lyd?”
“I did it for me but I also did it for us. You get that, don’t you?”
She didn’t. But that didn’t matter to Lydia. It didn’t matter what their father and uncle had done to rescue her. It didn’t matter that she barely understood the risk she’d brought on her own future, because it was over—and they could finally go back to the tedium of their own lives. It didn’t matter at all, except that she was dying to find out how it all happened.
* * *
By the time they crawled back into their apartment, most of the others had gone to sleep. Randall and Amelia, in the “guest room” of their sofa bed, and the others in their beds.
Lydia collapsed immediately into the lower bunk beside Mary, who tried to kick and elbow her off.
Only Elizabeth was too wired to sleep.
Her mind scrambled for answers in the world’s worst game of Clue. So it had been Darcy Wong in New Jersey with the candlestick. But how had they found themselves in the same room together? How did Darcy find himself in New Jersey at all?
Elizabeth tiptoed to the kitchen for water and found her father still awake, paging through a newspaper with a steaming cup of tea beside him. The anger had faded into his usual tired resignation—but here he was, not sleeping. Like father, like favorite daughter.
“You should be asleep,” Vincent said.
Elizabeth took a seat beside him at the table. “So should you.”
Vincent pushed his mug of tea towards her.
While she (mostly) loved her mother, Elizabeth never felt more herself than when she spent time with Vincent. When she was younger, she’d been happy to sit with him for hours at Lulu’s, watching him read the newspaper or crack little observations about the customers that passed in and out throughout the day. It was his quickness and humor that she had inherited and relied on to navigate the chaos of their little world, and it was him that she most admired.
“Are you going to say ‘I told you so’?” he said, turning the page of his newspaper.
She tried a sip of his tea, bitter with something that looked like tree bark, and choked it down. “This is disgusting.”
Vincent smiled. “Good for your system.”
If that’s what it took to keep her system running, she’d learn to embrace the sludge.
“Try not to be so mad,” she said. “Lydia . . . doesn’t know how to say it, but she knows that she messed up.”
He shook his head and sighed. “She isn’t going to learn until we stop trying to clean things up for her,” he said. “You can’t run after your sister for the rest of your life, LB.”
“I can’t let anything happen to her either.”
“She’s almost an adult,” he said. “She needs to learn how to be one.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “But she’s still my baby sister.”
Vincent stole his mug back, drinking another sip of his tea. “So what are you doing up?” he said. “Can’t sleep?”
