The Summer of No Regrets (24 page)

I had imagined my mug shot next to Luke’s in the
Indianapolis
Star
, but miraculously, Chuck Polzin did not press charges.

Valéry, Luke’s father, invited Dad and me to stay at his house for a few days until his pilot could fly us home—which, on a cosmic level, was realy outrageous, considering what I, as a near-felon, deserved.

Dad was quiet—out of place in a house like this. Luke’s dad showed him his art colection and gave him a book on the cave paintings of Lascaux. Gradualy Dad began to relax.

It didn’t seem to be going as easily for Luke, who would emerge sad but determined from Valéry’s study, folowing regular bouts of shouting in French.

“Am I adding to your problems by being here?” I asked him after Luke had given me my third riding lesson on his horse, Olivier.

“It’s not you, Brigitta. Papa’s just making up for lost time.” Luke ran a currycomb over his horse, Charlot. Both horses were Arabians—Olivier, pearl white, Charlot, the color of rich earth.

“Watch his feet.” Luke guided me to the safer end of the horse, and I picked up another comb. Charlot nosed Luke’s pockets and came up with a hidden apple.

I ran the comb through Charlot’s sleek hair. “Can you realy sword fight on horseback, or was that a stunt double?”

“Hey, I’m hurt. Of course it was me. That’s my trademark.”

“But you’re not going to show me in the arena?” Luke combed Charlot’s neck and moved closer. “The horses are tired,” he said. He plucked the comb from my hand.

“Besides,” he whispered, “who would I fight?” He turned me around and wove his fingers through mine, pressing me against around and wove his fingers through mine, pressing me against Charlot’s shoulder. “I don’t want to fight with you, Brigitta.” His mouth swooped down on mine—a perfect capture. I reached up to touch his hair. Charlot swung his head. My feet came out from under me, landing me on my butt in the straw. Luke reached his hand down, laughing. “Are you okay?”

I took his hand, remembering how I’d refused it in the arcade.

I’m sure I was a lovely shade of rose. I dusted myself off and tossed the currycombs into their bucket. “How about a Trent Yves film festival? I’ll watch the movies, you do the commentary.”

Luke looked surprised. “You sure? I thought you didn’t like Trent.”

I touched his cheek. “He’s growing on me.”

It took hours. We watched
Rocket
,
Le Petit Chose
(subtitled),
Imlandria
,
Sparrowtree
, and even
Spookville
.

“What about your first one? Wasn’t it caled
A
Capella
?” I asked him as we did the dinner dishes. Dad and Valéry had cooked moussaka with lots of mushrooms and were now out drinking wine on the screened-in porch.

Luke handed me a plate to load. (Somehow it delighted me that he did his own dishes.) “I can’t watch that one.”

“Why?”

“Have you seen it?” He rinsed out four tumblers before setting them in the top rack. I bit my tongue to keep from chiding him about overuse of water.

“No. Weren’t you about five?”

Luke nodded. “We were still in England then. It was about a priest who molests choirboys. I was the choirboy.” I blanched. “Do you mean they…I mean, how did they set that up?”

Luke chuckled at my horrified expression. “Wel, nobody molested me if that’s what you’re asking. But they had to scare me enough to make me scream with terror.”

“How?” I dropped the forks into the basket one by one.

“How?” I dropped the forks into the basket one by one.

Luke shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m teling you this.”

“You don’t have to.”

Luke grinned. “I think you’re entitled to my private childhood nightmares.”

I stuck the platter into the dishwasher.

Luke puled it out again, scrubbed it within an inch of its life, and stuck it back in.

“Wel, Alan Markham was the priest. I liked him when we started filming. He played with me, told me jokes. But they had to make me not trust him for the last half. So they shot this scene in a dark chapel—only enough light for the shot—stood me in the aisle, alone, and had him climb in a window wearing a clown mask. They got their terror.” Luke closed the dishwasher.

I put my hand on his. “They didn’t realy do that! To a little kid?”

He lifted my hand up and kissed it. “Trust me, it gets worse.” He began drying the counter, wiping under a bowl of pomegranates. “The film was released, and we began getting all these phone cals. Private number, you know, with someone just laughing. After the first one, Mum wouldn’t let me near the phone. And then we’re at a petrol station one day, and this guy in a clown mask sticks his face through the open car window. He knew who I was. I mean, he caled me Michael. It completely panicked Mum.”

“Didn’t it completely panic you?”

Luke took a pomegranate, split it, and gave half to me. “Wel, yeah.” He put his foot on the rung of a stool and popped some red seeds out onto a spoon. “After we moved to LA, Mum never caled me anything but Trent in public. She even tried to get my real name taken off IMDB—like you can do that! She started to build a fence around our identity. She made sure Papa kept this place hidden—which suited him fine—and for a while we even kept our place in Malibu under wraps. That didn’t last we even kept our place in Malibu under wraps. That didn’t last long. It’s impossible to do that in California.” I fingered my pomegranate. “I guess it would be, when you’re so wel-known.”

Luke set his fruit down. “I’m not wel-known, Brigitta.”

“I don’t know what you call eight milion Google results.” He spun his spoon around on the countertop. “I call it fame.” I must have looked puzzled.

“Think about it.” He gave the spoon another twirl. “Why do people pay for entertainment? Because they believe that’s not a real human on the screen. Nobody wants to watch someone ordinary. So the industry takes ordinary people and decorates us. It makes us more than we realy are.”

“But you’re an amazing actor.” I burst some seeds open on my tongue.

“Sure I am. And you’re an amazing violinist. What’s the difference? Talent doesn’t give either one of us superpowers.”

“My dad says Holywood is like the modern version of the Greek gods.”

“He’s spot-on, Brigitta. But I don’t want to be anybody’s god.” He paused. “It’s not the same as being known.” I thought of the little boy in the picture, crossing swords with Johnny Depp. I thought of him even younger, standing in a dark chapel. I stopped his spoon spinning. “Thank you for your nightmares.”

This time I kissed him.

At Cherrywood, there was a crack in the front step that Opa never got around to fixing. I poked it with my foot as Dad rang the bell and waited for Chuck Polzin.

Dad had rented a car to make the drive back here. I knew what I was supposed to do—make a sincere and abject apology. And I had fuly intended to deliver it, had mentaly rehearsed it all the way here. But I wasn’t sorry. How could I be sorry for trying to reclaim what was mine?

Chuck appeared with a pitcher of iced tea in one hand and ushered us onto the screened-in porch. Dad steered me as if I didn’t know the way there.

A swalowtail butterfly clung to the screen, its dark blue wings dotted with orange. The yelow paint on the screen frames had been peeling at least five years.

Chuck set the pitcher on the glass tabletop. “Cookies?” He offered a box of flat, factory-baked gingersnaps.

I shook my head. I should feel bad that he was trying to be nice after what I’d done.

Dad puled out one of the wrought iron chairs and took a few cookies. “Chuck, I’m sure this is an inconvenience,” he began.

Obviously, my cue. I stayed standing, tracing the curlicues on the back of my chair. On the road, Dad had tried for the conversation we hadn’t had at Luke’s. I was so unused to him trying to talk to me—a thing we hadn’t done much since he stopped driving me to Youth Symphony. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead I had found the classical radio station, and we’d listened to a Metropolitan Opera broadcast of
The
Magic
Flute
.

Now that I was actualy standing here in Nonni and Opa’s screened-in porch, I had a tidal wave of thoughts, but no way to say them.

Chuck poured some iced tea into my glass, even though I hadn’t asked for any. “It’s no inconvenience, Paul.” I moved to the brick sill where the screen attached and I moved to the brick sill where the screen attached and perched there awkwardly, with my backpack in my lap. No one said anything.

Opa’s chaise lounge sat empty in the corner of the porch. He used to smoke a pipe out here in the evenings, until Nonni persuaded him to quit. Why could I bear it that Opa was gone? I loved Opa.

But Nonni had known the inside of me—sometimes before I even understood myself. And when Opa died, Nonni had told me where he was: he was dancing on the wals of heaven. I’d been so angry when she said that, but by saying it she’d offered me a map.

I had no map to her.

Dad had avoided this porch when we’d been here after Nonni’s stroke. Did he remember the last time he’d been out here—how he’d shattered Nonni’s heaven and stormed off into the night? Had he heard her crying?

I stood. “I need to, uh…”

Chuck gestured. “Down the hall and to the left.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I escaped into the house.

I wandered through the living room with its interloper furniture, the former study with its pool table, the kitchen, stripped of Nonni’s plates and kettles. She ought to be just through the next doorway—maybe ironing or at her sewing machine.

I heard the front door close and the slam of a car trunk. Dad?

He’d better not try to drag me out of here now.

The bedroom Nonni had shared with Opa was a bathroom now. I opened her ironing closet and found three vending machines—two for coffee and one for temporary tattoos. I slid down the wall to the carpet and put my head between my knees.

How could she not be here? This was her place. There couldn’t be a Cherrywood without Nonni. Couldn’t she have haunted it, just long enough to say good-bye?

“Brigitta?” I looked up.

“Brigitta?” I looked up.

Dad was standing at the end of the hal. He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, but instead held out his hand to me.

“We’re not leaving already!” I stayed rooted to the floor.

Dad shook his head. “Chuck thought you might want to walk in the woods.”

I brushed myself off and shouldered my pack. Maybe I wasn’t expected to apologize. The thought filed me with relief. I folowed Dad through the kitchen, out the back door, past the rail fence, straight to the line of sweet gum trees. Dad slipped between them and disappeared into the secret grove—
my
secret grove.

I stumbled momentarily, surprised to be surprised. Dad grew up here—why wouldn’t he know about the grove? Wordlessly, I folowed him in.

Sun filtered through the beech branches, dappling the ground.

The smell of warm soil and sweet gum leaves rose up to meet me.

“This was my hideout,” said Dad. “Back when I was ten or twelve. I’d forgotten about it.”

“Yours?”

Dad nodded. “Once I discovered skateboarding I had no interest in the woods until I was about twenty.” He settled himself between the roots of an oak tree.

I sat back on a pile of leaves, laying my pack beside me. “I cannot imagine you having no interest in the woods.”

“Imagine it,” he said. A vireo landed just above his head and gave a
seewee, seewit
before flitting away.

Unwittingly, my hand reached out to stroke the smooth circle of earth where I had buried Felix’s and Kalimar’s carved faces.

Dad leaned his head back against the oak trunk. For the first time I noticed gray hair at his temples. For a moment, he looked like Opa.

“Why were you so mad at them?” I said.

“Why were you so mad at them?” I said.

Dad blew air out his cheeks. “I thought they’d taught me to believe a fantasy,” he said. “And they were so…panicked all the time that I’d stopped believing in the fantasy and that meant the fantasy God was going to torture me for all eternity.” I gathered a few spiny sweet gum pods into my lap. “I don’t remember them being panicked.”

Dad raised his eyebrows wryly.

I lobbed one of the pods at the nearest tree trunk. “And I don’t remember Nonni mentioning torture.”

Dad didn’t answer.

An ant crawled onto my knee. I let it climb onto an oak leaf and gave it a ride to the ground. My stomach was starting to hurt again. I puled my pack into my lap and hugged it. “Do you still think God is a fantasy?”

Dad shook his head. “A shaman could hardly say that.”

“Then why does it always feel like we’re in a war over it?”

“A war?” Dad sat up. “Who says there’s a war?”

“What if I ended up a Christian?” I shot at him.

“Wel…” Dad shifted uncomfortably, as if I’d said, “What if I dumped toxic waste into the Olympic rain forest?”

“See?” I pushed harder. “But I like Nonni’s Jesus. I talk to him every day.” This wasn’t strictly true.

Dad plucked a cardinal feather from the dirt beside him.

“Wel,” he said slowly, “there’s a lot to like.” I looked up, startled to hear him say this. It drained the fight out of me.

I traced the veins on my oak leaf and didn’t look at him. “The thing is,” I said, “when I’m in the woods, the animals talk to me.” I glanced at him sideways. “At least they used to. Sometimes I feel like I’m right on the threshold of…somewhere else.” Dad leaned over and put the feather in my palm. “Maybe you are.” He closed my fingers around it.

“But it doesn’t matter.” My voice was ragged. “Because I can’t get there!” I brought up the fist with the feather in it and pressed it hard against my mouth. “I keep looking for her, and I can’t find her!”

Dad wrapped me up in his arms. “I know,” he said. “I know.” My shoulders were shaking again. It seemed like all I’d done since I got to Indiana was cry. I guess I was making up for lost time.

Finaly, Dad let go of me. He stood and leaned around the back of the oak tree. He emerged with his hands ful: my violin in his left, his flute in his right. He set the violin case in my lap.

I started to cry again. I leaned my cheek on the smooth leather and sobbed as Dad opened up his flute case and fit the pieces together. He played a tuning scale and then cupped my face with his hand. “Come on, Gidget.” His voice cracked. “You know what to do.”

We hit the
Pleni
straight on and wove around each other and on into the
Benedictus.
My bow remembered everything—even with so long away from the piece. A breeze swept through the trees, bringing the scent of honeysuckle. I had never heard Dad play with such power. He soared into the
Agnus
Dei,
and I echoed him, our notes floating back and forth to the final phrase:
Dona
nobis
pacem—
Give us peace, give us peace, give us peace.

Dad’s face was wet when we played the last notes. He gazed up through the trees for a long moment and then back at me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I think they heard,” he whispered.