Night Owls (23 page)

A woman’s voice floated out from behind the counter. “Hello. Would you be Beatrix?”

Her gray hair was loosely clipped behind her head. Long strings of wooden beads dangled over a flowing caftan.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you Mary?”

She nodded. “And I have someone here who wanted to see you. I really hope you don’t mind the subterfuge too much.”

Before I could unravel what that meant, she gestured to someone behind a carved Japanese screen, and out stepped the man who’d ruined my family.

My father had changed his hair. Grown it out from his old, boring VP crew cut so that silver-streaked locks of brown now curled around the collar of his expensive sport coat. His face was a lot
tanner than I remembered, and crow’s-feet now furrowed the outer corners of his eyes. But his wire-framed glasses were the same, and so was the way he stood: head high, chin up, back made of
steel—and a look on his face like someone had just shoved a big, fat stick up his butt.

Yep. He’d looked at me exactly the same way the last time I’d seen him. When he’d told me that the separation had nothing to do with me, and that nothing would change between
us.

The biggest lie of all.

“Beatrix,” he said in a low voice.

I couldn’t even answer him. I just turned and stormed out the door. “Please, take me home,” I managed to say to Jack, who stuck to me like a shadow while I started down the
sidewalk. That stupid blonde in the Jaguar was still staring at us from the curb.

“Beatrix!”

My father had followed us outside, and he was angry now. Big surprise. I swung around so fast he had to jerk himself backward not to run into me. “How dare you,” I said to him.

“If she’d said I wanted to meet you, you wouldn’t have come.”

“No, probably not. But that’s my decision, not yours.”

“What could I do? Your mother wouldn’t let me see you.”

“So you sent me the artist’s mannequin to lure me here, like some creepy old man in a white van?”

His face looked pinched. “No, I sent it because I wanted to give you something that would make you happy. I knew you would like it.”

“Because you know me so well.”

The depressing thing was, he’d gotten it right. He, not Mom, was the one who’d actually sparked my interest in anatomy. When I was a kid, he had these big pull-down diagram charts of
the human body hanging on the wall in the home office of our old house. The brightly colored muscles and organs were endlessly fascinating to my ten-year-old brain, and after school he’d
spend hours answering all my questions about bones and arteries and blood. Of course, he didn’t know half of what Mom knew about anatomy, so when he didn’t know the answer, he’d
make something silly up.

He’d always had a knack for lying.

I started to walk away again, but he held his hands out as if to show me he wasn’t armed.

“Please, just hear me out for one minute.” His arms slowly dropped to his sides. “Let me look at you. My God, you’re practically a woman. I haven’t seen
you—”

“In three years,” I finished. “Been too busy banging your strip-club-owning wife to bother communicating with your own children until now?”

Jack made a small noise at my side, but he said nothing. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I’d be sorry later that he’d witnessed this messiness, but right now I was too angry
to care.

My father’s nose wrinkled. “Strip club? What in the world are you talking about? Suzi owned a cabaret in Santa Monica.”

“Cabaret?” What in the world was that?

“A piano bar,” he elaborated. “Singers, not strippers.”

That’s not what Mom had told us. But who was I going to believe? The woman who worked her ass off to keep a roof over our heads, or the man who abandoned us for a newer model?

“Strip club.” He said this like he was spitting out rancid food, shaking his head. It took me a second to realize he had darted a look toward the Jaguar.
That
was
“Suzi”? No wonder Mom had gone ballistic. Suzi couldn’t have been that much older than I was! And by then she was standing outside the Jag, arms crossed over her breasts. Wearing
designer clothes, which my father had probably paid for.

I wanted to vomit.

My father just shook his head and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “And I haven’t been too busy to see you. Your mother won’t let me near you or Heath.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re too
broke
to pay child support.” I used finger quotes on “broke” and crossed my arms over my chest, mimicking his new
wife’s stance. “Guess those car payments are more important than our utility bill.”

My father growled. “Oh, that’s rich. Is that what she’s telling you? She refused child support. It’s in the divorce papers, Beatrix. Go look at them. She had her lawyer
strike right over the payments. She said she wasn’t taking a dime from me—that she’d rather the three of you live at the YMCA than accept a ‘handout’ from me.”
He, too, used finger quotes. And his Dutch accent began creeping out of his Stanford-educated crisp words.

“A likely story,” I said. But if I was being honest with myself, it did sound a little like Mom. A
lot
, really. But, still, she wouldn’t have lied to us about
something that big. Maybe there was a misunderstanding about the so-called cabaret—maybe—but not this. Not when we lost the house in Cole Valley. Not when she struggled to work
twelve-hour graveyard shifts that barely kept us in generic shampoo and those weird-tasting tubes of discount ground beef.

“Not a story,” my father said firmly, hands on his waist, elbows pushing the tails of his sport coat back like angry wings. “Truth, Beatrix. It’s the goddamn
truth.”

“Truth is action, not words. Mom helps me with my homework. Mom cooks me dinner. Mom takes care of me when I’m sick.”

“I know she does.”

“Do you know? Really? Did you know Mom received a Distinguished Nurse award from the chancellor in May?”

“That’s wonderful.”

“
She
’s wonderful. And she’s there every day for us. But what have you done? Have you even tried to write me or Heath a single postcard?

“As a matter of fact—”

“Did you know I lost all my friends when we were forced to move and I had to change schools? Did you know I’m one of the poorest kids in my class, and I’ve had to work since I
was sixteen to pay my own cell phone bill and Muni pass? Did you know I can’t afford to go to the college I want, and that I’m spending my summer busting my ass for an art project
because the only way I can go to any school at all is to win a stupid scholarship in a competition? Did you know Heath has dropped out of two colleges and gotten in all kinds of trouble? You wanna
know why? Because
you fucking left us
.”

His face jerked back as if I’d slapped him, but the hurt left as quickly as it had appeared, and the calm and reasonable Vice President Van Asch got control over himself. “I
can’t apologize forever.”

“Forever? Try once!”

“I’m sorry, Beatrix. I should’ve done better. Tried harder. But I want to now. It’s one of the reasons I moved back—I took a provost position at Berkeley so I could
be closer to you and Heath. Just let me try. Come have coffee with me. Meet Suzi—”

“Never.”

He was livid. And for a second, I saw a familiar look on his face—the same one he’d given me when I spilled a bottle of drawing ink on his precious Moroccan rug. He wanted to take me
by the shoulders and shake me. His hand twitched, and he reached out as if he might just do it.

My shadow stepped between us.

Jack towered over Dad by a good head. And at that moment, with his face tight and his dark brows lowered, he looked like more of a man than my father.

“You don’t want to do that,” Jack said in a deep, scarily calm voice.

Oh, my father
did not like this
. Not at all. And for a moment they were two bulls, one young, one middle-aged. One wrong word and they’d be going at it,
mano a mano.

“Lars,” a feminine voice called from behind him. His new wife, Suzi. It was a plea and a gentle warning. And it was enough to break up the pinballing tension.

“Let’s go,” I said to Jack.

Without hesitation, he curled his arm around my shoulders and pulled me away from my father.

“Beatrix,” Dad said as we started to turn away from him. “Please contact me when you’re ready. My university email address is on the campus website. We can talk on your
terms.”

I stopped long enough to dig the artist’s mannequin from my bag. My father’s face twisted with hurt, eyes quietly pleading, and that made my throat catch. Just for a second. I
steeled my resolve and hurled the mannequin down on the sidewalk between us. The carved body cracked at his feet, splintering in half.

THE SKY DARKENED AS JACK AND I STRODE DOWN THE
sidewalk. Like the heavy clouds above us, I held myself together until we got back to Ghost. Both the
quiet side street and the cover provided by tree branches drooping over our parking space must’ve given my brain the illusion of shelter, because once I shut the Corvette’s door against
the sudden deluge of rain, I let go and broke down.

It wasn’t pretty.

The older, cooler fantasy me was horrified to be ugly-crying in front of Jack. But the present me was hurting too much to care. And when his hand warmed the back of my neck, it felt like
permission to sob even harder.

Before I knew what was happening, Jack had leaned his seat back and pulled me sideways into his lap. I buried my face in the collar of his vintage bowling shirt and cried a little longer while
steady rain battered the convertible top.

His hands stroking down my back were soothing, and little by little, I pulled myself together.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my face.

His muscles flexed as he strained to reach across the seat. He retrieved a rumpled fast-food napkin from his glove box. “I don’t know why,” he said, handing it to me.
“Nothing to be sorry for.”

I turned my face away and blew my nose, then looked for a place to throw the napkin away.

“Go on,” he encouraged, cracking the window. “Berkeley’s too clean anyway.”

I croaked out a chuckle and tossed the napkin outside. He started to roll the window back up, but I stopped him; the rain smelled good, and I didn’t mind the occasional drop or three on
the back of my neck when the wind blew. It felt nice.

His thumb swiped beneath one eye, then the other. “Makeup goo,” he explained, cleaning up my running mascara. “Better?”

I nodded and let my head loll back against his shoulder. “I don’t know why my father got to me that way. It’s not like my family problems are anywhere near as epic as yours.
You must think I’m a whiner.”

“I think no such thing. You have every right to be upset. My family’s been through a lot, but I can’t imagine what it would be like if my dad left us. I love her, but my mom is
no Katherine the Great. She’s a cheerleader, not a provider.”

“Your mom’s fought her own battles,” I reminded him.

He grunted his agreement.

“What if my father wasn’t lying? Why would Mom turn down child support?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s too proud. Maybe it made her feel weak.”

“If that’s true, okay, but she lied to us. All this time, I thought he was this deadbeat dad. Why would she do that?”

“Because she’s human, and she makes mistakes? Or maybe your father wasn’t telling the truth, either. Maybe he’s feeling guilty and saying whatever it takes to win you
over. Confront your mom and ask her.”

“I can’t. Then she’ll know I lied about coming out here. And she’ll know I kept the artist’s mannequin from her. And she’ll feel betrayed.”

“Don’t
you?”

I thought about that for a second. “I’m not sure what I feel. All I know is that I’m tired of being the innocent bystander who gets punched in the gut. It’s their
fight—Mom and Dad’s. But how come Heath and I are the ones who end up bruised?”

He rearranged one of my braids and wound the loose tail around the tip of his index finger. “Because everything we do in life affects someone else. Buddhists say that inside and outside
are basically the same thing. It’s like we’re all trapped together in a small room. If someone pisses in the corner, we all have to worry about it trickling across the floor and getting
our shoes wet.”

I chuckled again. “Or clogging up the escalator.”

He smiled against my forehead. “Or someone painting a message on the escalator you don’t understand.”

“I don’t want my mistakes to affect everyone else in the room,” I said after a moment. “I want to keep to myself and do as little damage as possible.”

“That’s one way of living, sure. But it’s lonely, and doing nothing can cause as much damage as doing something. We’re part of a machine, whether we like it or not. If
one piston stops working, the engine will run poorly. And I for one would much rather that you piss on my shoe than that I watch you withdraw into the corner.”

“Gross.”

“What? It’s how you get rid of jellyfish stings.”

“That’s an old wives’ tale. If you ever pee on me, I’ll hurt you.”

“So violent.” His splayed fingers danced over my back like a spider.

I squealed as he attacked my side, tickling me with gusto. I couldn’t pry his fingers away from my ribs. “St-top!” I protested in the middle of a fit of laughter.

“Say the magic word.”

“Uncle!”

“That’s not it.”

I changed tactics and tickled him back. He jumped, lifting us both off the seat. “All right, girl,” he purred roughly. “You’re asking for it now.”

“Oh yeah? What are you going to do about it?”

He cradled the back of my head with his hand and reeled me closer. His mouth covered mine, strong and confident. I laughed against his lips, just for a second, and then gave in.

The kiss deepened, and his hand drifted down my neck to my side, tracing the curve of my waist, over my hip, and back up. Like he was trying to imagine what I looked like beneath my clothes.
That thought thrilled me almost as much as his roaming hand . . . until he boldly cupped my breast.