Nineteen
I EXPECTED EVERYTHING to blow up pretty fast after the scene at the hospital.
For days, we waited for photos of Jack and Hank in the waiting room to surface online.
But they didn’t.
Every day that passed I breathed a little easier—though, even the possibility of the photos turning up meant we were more trapped on the ranch than ever—because now we really had to lie low.
Here was the problem: It was fun to be on the ranch.
In theory, I knew to be on alert. But, in practice, it really was a forced vacation.
And there’s a reason people take vacations, I guess.
They work.
Slowly, unintentionally, and fully against my will … I relaxed.
A bit.
We fell into a rhythm. Connie returned with an official diagnosis of dehydration-induced vertigo, and she made a new commitment to hydrating. Doc clucked and fussed over her, bringing blankets and fixing cups of herbal tea. Hank and Jack kept a wary truce—not wanting to upset either of their parents. And I made myself useful by cooking all the meals, watering Connie’s garden, and collecting bouquets of flowers to place around the house. It was a pleasant, sunny, rural way of life that made the real world feel like a different universe entirely. In a really good way.
Hank redeemed himself a little bit by bringing in broccoli, brussels sprouts, and squash from the garden—and washing it for me in the sink. As mean as he was to Jack, he was never mean to me—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had to work to hold onto that anger.
Like it maybe wasn’t natural to him.
Both of the boys, for example, went out of their way to look after Connie—checking on her in a way that felt almost competitive, like some unspoken Best Son competition.
She was definitely not neglected.
As time went by, she got better.
After a checkup in town, she got the news that the site was healing well.
She still wore her robe every day—saying she might never go back to real clothes—but she spent less and less time in her room, and less and less time napping.
The less sick she felt, the more of her personality came out. I learned, for example, that she liked to hook rag rugs out of old clothing. She was a lightning-fast reader and could finish an entire book in a day. And apparently, last summer, she’d ripped something in her knee when she’d gotten overenthusiastic listening to music while doing housework and had started doing the cancan. She now referred to it as her “cancan injury,” and it still acted up sometimes.
Connie also had four hundred pairs of reading glasses. They were everywhere. In the cupboards, between sofa pillows, in bowls on the screen porch, on the kitchen table. She kept one pair on a chain around her neck and had at least two on her head at any given time.
“This is who I am now,” she explained. “There are worse fates.”
She also had an astonishing hobby. She refurbished old dolls and gave them to the local women’s shelter. She had a whole collection of creepy ones she’d rescued from thrift shops—dolls that looked almost like Barbie had undergone extreme plastic surgery: overly made-up cat eyes, and giant, swollen lips. They were supposed to be “teenagers,” and they were marketed toward little girls, but they really looked more like mutant porn stars.
But guess what Connie did with them? She took their faces off.
She wiped the faces with acetone until they were completely blank and then started from scratch repainting them to look, this time, like normal kids. Big eyes. Sweet smiles. Freckles. She braided their hair and sewed little play clothes for them. She gave them a second chance at a new life.
How could I not love her?
Doc was utterly lovable, too, by the way.
He took to sitting at the far end of the kitchen, deejaying songs for me from the Stapleton family record collection while I made dinner, and singing along to oldies with Doc Stapleton became my favorite time of day.
Add to that: Jack Stapleton knew how to dance. You saw American Rhythm, right? Where he played a ballroom dancer? That was no body double. He learned all the dances himself. So when he’d hear Sam Cooke on the turntable, or Rosemary Clooney, or Harry Belafonte, he’d show up in the kitchen, and pull me out into a spin.
Jack insisted it was essential for the fake relationship. “That’s totally what I’d do with a real girlfriend,” he promised.
The point is, I didn’t resist.
If Jack Stapleton just had to make me jitterbug with him every time he heard “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”—and spin me around and dip me and put his hands all over me?
Fine.
It was fake. It was fake. It was all fake.
But it felt so real.
It wasn’t just Jack. Hank gruffly helped me turn the compost. Doc nicknamed me Desperado and let me help him groom the horses. And Connie took to hugging me … and I didn’t stop her.
It made me miss my mom in a way I never expected. Or maybe not her, exactly—but the person she could have been. The relationship we could have had.
I’d always wondered if other people’s mothers were as good as they seemed.
In Connie’s case, I had my answer.
Yes.
It didn’t take long for me to feel a part of that family.
And, despite all its tensions and sorrows, I’d forgotten how good it felt to be surrounded by all those overlapping bonds—of affection, of memory, even of frustration. Sometimes I’d watch Connie swat at Doc for some snarky remark to Jack, and I’d positively ache with longing for more of whatever that was.
I tried really hard not to fall in love with them all, I swear.
But I failed most of the time.
With Jack most of all.
With unexpected things: The way he took every opportunity to shoot free throws at the kitchen garbage can—and missed every time. The way he was trying to make friends with a crow by setting popcorn out on the fence. The way he’d decided that the most sanitary way for everyone to sneeze was to put their face inside their shirt at the moment of impact.
“See?” he said one night, after sneezing into his shirt at dinner. “It totally contains the spray.”
We all stared at him. “But you just sneezed on yourself,” Hank pointed out.
Jack shrugged. “The shirt dries it off.”
“But now you’re walking around with snot on your stomach.”
“You’re missing the point. It reins in the germs.”
“But it’s gross.”
“I’d rather sneeze on myself than sneeze on someone else.”
“Are those the only options?”
Then Jack would look at me like we were the only sane people in the room. “Yeah. Actually. They are.”
The point is, the deck was stacked against me.
On a normal job, you were with the principals all day, too—but not like this. You were in the background. You were unnoticed—off at the side of the room. You were near them, but not with them. You weren’t chatting with them. Or getting teased by them. Or letting them give you noogies.
This was the opposite of a normal job.
Jack and I spent all day every day together. We fished in the pond stocked with bass. We explored the wilderness area around the oxbow lake. We walked the river beach almost every day. We played croquet in the yard. We threw horseshoes. We spun each other on the tire swing. We harvested pears, figs, and satsumas from the orchard.
My favorite thing was swinging in the hammock chairs outside the kitchen window. We’d swing side by side with our shoes off, feeling the grass blades brushing the soles of our feet, and I’d pass the time by asking him inane questions like, “What’s it like being famous?”
He liked that kind of question, though. “People are nice to you for no reason,” he answered. Then he turned to meet my eyes. “Not you, of course. You’re not nice.”
I pumped my legs to swing higher. “Not me,” I confirmed.
“But the weird thing is,” he went on, pumping to catch up, “it’s not you they’re being nice to. It’s the fame. They think they already know you, but you’ve literally never seen them before. So it’s very one-sided. You have to be careful not to disappoint them or offend them, so you wind up spending a lot of time being the most generic version of yourself. And smiling. Smiling just constantly. I’ve come home from doing meet and greets, and had to wait hours for the muscles in my face to stop twitching.”
“Huh,” I said.
“I’m not complaining,” Jack said then.
“I know.”
“It’s a great job. There’s freedom. And money. And clout. But it’s complicated.”
I nodded in agreement. “Like everything.”
“People who want to be famous think it’s the same thing as being loved, but it’s not. Strangers can only ever love a version of you. People loving you for your best qualities is not the same as people loving you despite your worst.”
“So,” I said, “until the whole nation has seen your boxer briefs on the bathroom floor…”
Jack gave a decisive nod. “Then it’s not true love.”
I relaxed for a minute and let my swing slow down.
Jack went on. “It skews your perspective, too. Everybody wants to be around you all the time, and they hang on your every word and laugh at everything even if it’s not funny, and you’re kind of the center of every situation you’re in.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad, though.”
“But then you get used to it. You start forgetting to notice other people or ask them about themselves. You start believing your own hype. Everybody treats you like you’re the only person that matters … and you just start thinking that’s true. And then you become a narcissistic asshole.”
“You didn’t do that.”
“I did, though. For a while. But I’m trying not to be like that anymore.”
“Is that why you took a break from acting?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “That. And my brother died.”
LOOK, I KNEW I was letting myself get confused.
I just didn’t know how to stop it.
And then one day, near the end of a late-morning jog we took to the river and back, Jack said—no joke: while jogging—“I found your song.”
“What song?” I asked.
“The one you’re always humming.” He took out his phone—still jogging—and pulled up a song on it.
“How did you find it?” I asked.
“I secretly recorded you,” Jack said.
“That’s not creepy,” I said.
“The point is, I solved the mystery,” Jack said. “You’re welcome.”
We were on a straightaway, in our last quarter mile, heading back to the house on the gravel road. Jack held the phone vaguely in my direction as he jogged along by my side.
But as soon as the song started playing, I slowed to a stop.
That song? That was the song I was always humming? I knew that song.
Jack stopped beside me, letting it play.
“Recognize it?” he asked after a bit, a little out of breath.
“Yes,” I said, not offering more.
It was an oldie by Mama Cass called “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” When the song started over, I sang along with the first line: “Stars shining bright above you…” When I was little, my mom used to sing it all the time—while doing dishes, while driving carpool, while tucking me into bed.
“So what’s the deal?” Jack asked.
“It’s just a song I know,” I said.
“How do you know it?”
“My mom used to sing it all the time when I was a kid. But I haven’t heard it in years and years.”
“Except for, like, every day, when you’re humming it.”
I didn’t argue.
When the song ended, Jack put his phone away. It suddenly seemed awfully quiet.
“I think she only sang that song when she was happy,” I said.
Jack just nodded.
“If I’m honest, I can’t remember her singing it—not even once—after my dad left.”’
Jack nodded again, and as I felt the tenderness in the way he was watching me, I also felt a rising pain in my chest—penetrating, like when your hands have gotten too cold and then you put them in hot water. A thawing pain that stung behind my ribcage and then climbed up into my throat.
And I guess the only way that pain could get itself out was to melt into tears.
I felt them sting my eyes.
I stayed very still, like if I didn’t move, Jack might not notice.
But of course he noticed. He was six inches away and staring right at me.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice soft.
I kept still.
“You can tell me,” he said again. “It’s okay.”
It’s okay. I don’t know what kind of magic he infused into those two words, but somehow, when he said them, I believed him. Everything I had ever told myself about being professional and staying on guard and maintaining boundaries just … fluttered off in the wind.
I blame the sunshine. And the long grass. And that endless, gentle breeze over the pasture. I gave in.
“My dad left when I was seven,” I said then, my voice shaking, “and my mom started dating a guy named Travis pretty soon after that, and he…” How to phrase it? “He wasn’t the nicest guy in the world.” I took a shaky breath. “He yelled at her a lot. He picked on her and told her she was ugly. He drank every night—and she started drinking, too.”
Quietly, without even shifting his gaze, Jack took one of my hands and wrapped it in his.
“On the night of my eighth birthday,” I said, taking a big, shaky breath, “he hit her.”
Jack kept his gaze steady.
“Those words are so tiny, when you say them. Three quick syllables, and it’s over. But I think, in a way, for me, it’s never been over.” I looked down, and more tears spilled over. “She was protecting me that night. We’d been supposed to go out for pizza and cake, but Travis decided at the last minute that we weren’t going. I was so outraged at the injustice that I slammed my bedroom door. He started to come after me. I’ll never forget the sound of his footsteps knocking the floor. But my mom blocked him. She stood in front of the door and wouldn’t move until he went after her instead. I hid in my closet, clamped down tight into a ball, but I could hear it. The scariest thing about the punches was how quiet they were. But her crying was loud. When she slammed back against the door, it was loud. When she hit the floor, it was loud.
“I stayed awake all night, curled as small as I could get in the closet, listening, at attention, trying to decide if my mother had lived. I never fell asleep. When the sun was up, she came to find me—and she had a split lip and a cracked tooth. As soon as I saw her face, I wanted to get us both out of there. Every atom in my body wanted to escape.
“But as I started to stand, she shook her head. She climbed into the closet with me and put her arms around me.
“‘We’re leaving, right?’ I asked.
“But she shook her head.
“‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t we?’
“‘Because he doesn’t want us to,’ she said.
“Then she put her arms around me and rocked me back and forth, in a way that always, before then, had made me feel safe. But I didn’t feel safe anymore. I don’t think I ever felt safe again after that, to be honest—not really. But guess what I still do even now when I feel scared?”
“What?” Jack asked.
“I sleep in the closet.”
Jack kept his eyes on mine.
“Remember my little safety pin with the beads on it? I’d made that pin for her that very same day. I never got a chance to give it to her. By the time that night was over, I’d lost it—or, I thought I had. After my mom died—not that long ago—I found it in her jewelry box. She’d kept it all those years. Finding it again felt like finding some little lost part of myself. I was going to wear it every day forever before I lost it on the beach that day. As a talisman for being okay.”
“But you’re okay, anyway.”
I looked down. “Am I? I don’t know. Up until I came out here, I’d been sleeping on the floor of my closet every night since my mom died.”
Jack lifted a nonsweaty part of his T-shirt to wipe my face. Had I just cried? Again? What was with me? Then Jack said, in a tender voice, “So sleeping on my floor is an improvement.”
I gave him a little shove and started walking again.
He fell into step beside me.
“Anyway,” I said, regrouping. “That’s the story of that song. I never heard my mom sing it again after that night. I forgot about it entirely.”
“Not entirely, though,” Jack said.
And then—even though there was nobody around to see—he pulled me into a hug.