Double Eclipse

by Melissa de la Cruz

  After her morning workout and fan stuff, Mum practiced tennis. Fair Haven was from “that generation of mansions,” as Mum put it, that had a clay tennis court, which is a perfectly fine kind of tennis court, but it’s more European than American, and besides, the clay court season was over, and it was time for hard courts, so Mum drove to the North Hampton Tennis Club to practice there. I didn’t even know there was a North Hampton Tennis Club, although it made sense—there was a North Hampton Yacht Club, a North Hampton Polo Club, and a North Hampton Water Polo Club, so of course there would be a tennis club too. It wasn’t big, only twelve courts, but even so, Mum didn’t want anyone watching her practice, so she made arrangements for the club to close each day between 10:00 and 1:00 so she could practice in private, which is to say, she basically rented all twelve courts at a premium fee, because the just-before lunch slot was by far the most popular time for the North Hampton set to get their game in, since their hour on court was really just an excuse for them to spend another hour in the day spa getting a massage and pedicure and facial, followed by another two hours dining on a liquid lunch. I assumed it must be costing Mum a fortune to get the club to turn away so much business, but it turned out Mum’s apparel sponsor was this cool Australian sportswear brand called Lorna Jane, which was trying to break into the American market. LJ of course had a Janet Steele line of tennis clothes, and in exchange for allowing a photographer to snap pics of Mum working out in her own line, the company picked up the bill for her practices. This is why the rich get richer: because half the time, they don’t actually pay for anything.

  So anyway, 10:00–1:00 tennis practice, and of course I went with Mum the first couple of times because, one, I loved tennis, and she was Janet Steele, and of course I was going to watch her at a private practice, and two, she was my mum, and I wanted to spend every minute with her to make up for lost time.

  What I didn’t realize I’d be doing, though, was not just watching, but playing tennis with her.

  “Uh-uh,” she said the first day we went to the club. “No daughter of Janet Steele’s is going to sit on the sidelines while Mum’s on the court.”

  I think I mentioned that I’d played tennis a little. I mean, you’re a girl growing up on the Upper East Side, you’re going to take tennis lessons, along with ballet, piano, conversational French, dressage, and cotillion. (Seriously. People still do that.) So yeah, I could swing a racket. But with Janet Steele?

  “Uh, that’s okay, Mum. I’m happy to just watch and tweet a few pictures for you.”

  Mum didn’t say anything. All she did was toss me a racket. Since her Wilson Pro Staff rackets cost $2,000 each (they stopped making them in the 1980s, but Mum swears by them), I figured I’d better catch it before it clattered to the ground, and more on reflex than anything, my right hand shot out and snatched it from the air. My palm stung from the impact. Turned out Mum threw a racket just like she hit a tennis ball: hard.

  “Nice reflexes,” she said. “Let’s see how you serve.”

  I tossed the ball up in the air a couple of times to see how the breeze affected it. Then I held the ball up.

  “Ready?”

  I tossed the ball in the air. I smashed the racket into it. It shot away from me, skimming a half inch over the top of the net and slicing deep into the service box. Mum actually had to jump the get the ball, and for one brief moment, I thought she might actually miss. Then the ball was whizzing back at me faster than I would have believed possible. I was still unwinding from my serve as the ball bounced off the baseline and smashed into the fence behind me.

  I turned and saw that Mum had hit it so hard that the ball stuck in the chain link. When I turned back to Mum, a broad smile was plastered on her face.

  “Mooi,” she said proudly, “that was one hell of a serve.” Her face set in a determined line. “Again.”

  • • •

  And that’s how the next ten days passed. Mum dragged me to the club every morning (although dragged makes it sound like she forced me when I wanted to go), and we played for two, three, sometimes four hours a day, then lunched on tuna niçoise salads or ostrich burgers. When word got out that Janet Steele was playing tennis with her daughter every morning at the North Hampton Tennis Club, people began to show up to watch. Since Mum had rented the place out, the club left it up to her to let the spectators in or not. At first, she said no, thinking the crowd would make me self-conscious, but when I told her I didn’t mind, she gave the okay. By the end of the week, it was all over the Twitterverse and the blogosphere and the gossip mill, there were more than a hundred people in the tiny bleachers each morning. And the crazy thing was, most of them were there for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they never would have come if Janet Steele hadn’t been on the court. But everyone knew who Janet was, and how she played. I was the unknown commodity, and they all wanted to see what I could do. And it turned out what I could do is play tennis.

  Even today I couldn’t tell you if magic was involved. I mean, I know objectively that it had to be. I only ever played tennis in seventh and eighth grade, and here I was holding my own with the number one tennis player in the world. That couldn’t just be good genes, right? But I certainly never thought about magic when I was on the court. There were a dozen pretty simple spells I could have cast that would have improved my performance and made Mum’s worse—hexes I could have cast on my racket or the balls or, say, Mum’s shoes (I will admit that the idea of making each of her shoes weigh ten pounds appealed to the practical joker in me), but once I stepped on the court, all those fantasies disappeared and all I wanted was to hit a tennis ball with my mum. Never mind that she was Janet Steele. Never mind that I was the goddess of strength. I was a teenage girl with a mother, and we had this interest in common. I wanted to milk it as much as possible, as long as possible.

  But each night as I made my way through my social media feeds, checking out what people had to say about me, I knew that wasn’t all that was going on. I scanned through the thousands of comments, always looking for one name that never showed up. Mardi’s. I knew she had to be seeing the pictures—despite the obscurity spells Joanna had cast around North Hampton, they were still showing up everywhere, from TMZ to Dlisted to Radar. I thought that if she could see how much fun Mum was, how normal she was, she would realize that we weren’t sitting around scheming about killing Dad or casting Ingrid and Freya into some dark corner of Hel. But if Mardi was indeed seeing all the pictures and stories about me and Mum, she gave no indication.

  And of course there was Rocky too. The couple of weeks I’d spent with him had been like a dream, and after a day of missing him, and another day of being pissed at him, and then a third day of being pissed at myself for missing him, he started to fade away from my mind. Screw him, I told myself (no pun intended). If he can’t take a modern woman, it’s his loss. Of course a part of me knew I was just covering up my real feelings with anger, it was easier to be mad than to be hurt. Between Rocky this summer and Alberich last summer, I was starting to think that boys weren’t worth the trouble.

  • • •

  Almost two weeks had gone by and I felt like a junkie desperate for a fix. I needed to see my sister—to talk to her, punch her, fight with her, make up with her, gossip with her, steal clothes from her, get makeup tips from her. (Okay, not that last thing. If I want raccoon eyes, I’ll walk into a door or something. But everything else.) And so anyway, Mum must’ve read my mind, because on Friday afternoon, as we were munching on Caprese salads made from heirloom tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, and olive oil infused with Thai basil, she said:

  “So you know tomorrow I have to fly down to the Bahamas for the Nassau Open. It’s one of the mandatory tournaments on the pro tour, and as much as I’d like to skip it and hang out here with my daughter, I’m the defending champion, and my ranking will take a big hit if I don’t play.”

  Of course I knew the tournament was coming up and
that Mum was the defending champion. I’d watched on TV last year as she beat Aga Radwanska for the title. But I wasn’t expecting what came out of her mouth next.

  “I’m hoping you’ll come and sit in my player’s box. And I’m hoping you can talk Magdi into coming too.”

  My heart flipped in my chest when she said that she was hoping I’d come, and then it did a backflip with a triple twist and, I don’t know, a half gainer, when she said she was hoping Mardi would come too.

  “Oh, it’s perfect!” I said. “There’s no way she could say no to an invitation like that!” Which didn’t really make sense, since Mardi cared about tennis about as much as she cared about, oh, Ariana Grande, which is to say: not at all.

  “My fingers are crossed,” Mum said. “But even so, I think it’d be better if you asked her. Phrase it as a sister-sister thing, not a mother-daughter thing.”

  There was something about the way Mum said this. It seemed a little dishonest. A little sneaky. But I also suspected she was right.

  “I’ll do it!”

  “Marvy,” Mum said. She reached into her bag and tossed me the car keys. “Take the Maserati. I’ll have Ivan pick me up in the Maybach.”

  • • •

  After almost two weeks of being driven around, it was fun to be back behind the wheel, especially of a Maserati. That seat—I mean I know it was the same shape as the one on the passenger side, but somehow, with one hand curled around the gear stick and the other dangling off the leather-clad steering wheel, the fit just seemed so much tighter.

  This feeling of rightness was amplified by, like, a hundred when I pressed the ignition and the car roared into life. The sound was so full of adrenaline that I didn’t even think about turning the stereo on. The engine was its own music, and I thrilled along to it for the twenty minutes it took me to drive from the tennis club to the Cheesemonger. I had a brief flash of Marshall/Alberich, but pushed it out of my mind and marched up to the door of the shop.

  I stopped just before I pushed it open, however, because when I looked through the glass and past the ten-dollar stone-ground ancient-grain flatbreads and fifteen-dollar mochi cookies, I saw that Mardi wasn’t working alone.

  She was with Rocky McLaughlin.

  There they were, in matching seersucker aprons with the Cheesemonger logo embroidered on the chest (say what you want about Alberich, he had surprisingly good taste in food and clothes for a dark elf), hanging out behind the counter. Rocky was making a sandwich for a short, portly man while Mardi sat on the counter sipping some kind of boutique soda in a bottle shaped like a brandy snifter, and both were laughing at something with a kind of private look on their faces—as though they’d developed a special code so they could crack each other up without upsetting their customers. That look told me that this arrangement wasn’t a new thing. That they’d been working together for a while.

  Then it happened.

  Rocky turned around to get something. He leaned over Mardi, deliberately getting in her space, and she was smiling up at him. Nothing was happening, it looked innocent, but something about it seemed a little too intimate, a little too close for my comfort.

  I shoved the door open hard enough that all three of the store’s occupants jumped, but my voice was all sweetness and light.

  “Hey! So this is where you’ve been keeping each other!”

  Mardi’s eyes shifted nervously between me and Rocky.

  “Hey, Molly,” she said uncertainly. “Yeah, I’m working here, just like I said I was.”

  “And you too!” I said, turning toward Rocky with what I could tell was an insane smile on my face. “Who would’ve guessed you’d end up here too, working with my sister!”

  Rocky’s expression was a little confused, a lot more guilty. “Uh, yeah. I mean, Sal owns the shop and everything, and he’d been wanting me to work here. Keeps me off the streets and all that,” he said to the customer as he handed him his sandwich. “Will there be anything else?”

  The man shook his head, and Rocky rang him up while Mardi and I glared at each other without speaking.

  “How lucky for you!” I said too loudly as soon as the man had walked out the door. “How lucky for both of you!”

  “Molly, please,” Mardi said. “It’s not what you think.”

  The truth is, I don’t know what I’d been thinking. Only that it was really strange my sister and my boyfriend had both dropped off the face of the planet (or at least my planet). But here they were together, smiling and laughing; I felt sick.

  I took a deep breath, concentrating on controlling my emotions. I wasn’t going to give Mardi the satisfaction of knowing I was jealous, plus it wouldn’t do to put on another display of errant magic in front of Rocky or I might have to kill him.

  “So,” I said when I was sure I could speak without screaming. “Mum’s having a party this evening, and she needs some finger food. I was just going to go to Dispirito’s, but of course I should totally be loyal to Sal, shouldn’t I?

  “I was thinking the Orson Welles,” I said to Rocky, ignoring Mardi. The Orson Welles was a sandwich Marshall (when I still thought he was Marshall) and I had come up with one day last summer to pass the time. We tried to think of the grossest, most-impossible-to-eat sandwich possible—pesto, anchovies, and gorgonzola served between two slices of inch-thick pumpernickel slathered in pickled bitter melon–aji mayonnaise—which, for reasons that are more mysterious than the origin of magic, turned out to be a hit. What can I say? WASPs will eat, wear, or drive anything, as long as it’s expensive enough.

  The Orson Welles was also a particularly difficult sandwich to make, what with the number of ingredients and the generally disgusting odor most of them gave off, and Rocky made a bit of a face as he contemplated making them.

  “Uh, sure,” he said. “How many did you—”

  “I think fifty would do it.” I cut him off.

  “Wow, fifty. Not sure we have enough, uh, bitter melon–aji mayo on hand.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need them right now. You can make up a new batch of mayo and deliver the sandwiches to Fair Haven tomorrow. You know where Fair Haven is, right? It’s where Mardi’s boyfriend Trent used to live,” I said pointedly. “Where you and I watched the Wimbledon final together? And then hung out together after.”

  Rocky’s eyes dropped. “I don’t know why you’re mad at me,” he said under his breath. Then, shaking it off, he said, “I’m going down in the basement to see if we have any more pickled bitter melon.”

  “There’s a whole barrel of it in the back corner,” I said, waving my hand. “It’s the one with the Chinese writing on it.”

  I waited until Rocky had disappeared to confront my sister.

  “What is going on between you two?” I demanded.

  “Molly, nothing is going on. I swear. Come on.”

  We stared at each other. I believed her. She would never do this to me. “Fine, Mum has a message for you,” I said.

  “What message?” Mardi asked. She tried to sound nonchalant, but I could tell she was interested.

  “Mum’s playing in the Nassau Open starting tomorrow. She thought we could fly down with her and watch her play and do some of the touristy stuff afterward.”

  “Nassau?” Mardi said. “Like Nassau County, Long Island?”

  “No, you ignoramus. Like Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas.”

  “Oh!” Mardi’s eyes lit up. “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What time?”

  “Whenever. Mum chartered a plane.”

  Mardi’s eyes went wider. “For real?”

  I shrugged. “Janet Steele has some baller moves.”

  I could see Mardi fantasizing about the trip. On the plus side: champagne in the plane, chilling on the beach where the weather and the water would both be a good twenty deg
rees warmer than the still-tepid East End. On the minus side: hanging out with the sister whose boyfriend she’d apparently stolen.

  “I dunno,” she said finally. “I kind of committed to helping Sal out.”

  “Whatever,” I said in the most blasé tone I could muster. “The limo heads to the airport at ten tomorrow. Be at Fair Haven if you want to go,” I added as I walked out the door.

  I heard Mardi sigh, and then the door swung closed between us.

  22

  LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

  Mardi-Overbrook-Journal.docx

  Ivan answered the door the next morning before I’d even rung the doorbell.

  “Good morning, Magdi,” he said, bowing deeply. “If you want to wait in the breakfast room, Ms. Steele and Mooi will be with you shortly.”

  “It’s Mardi,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Mar-dy.”

  “As you wish, my lady,” Ivan said, and scurried away. It was only after he’d left that I realized he’d never said where the “breakfast room” was. The Gardiners were fancy people, but not quite so fancy that they’d ever set aside one of the twenty-five or thirty rooms in Fair Haven specifically for breakfast. If they took breakfast as a family, they ate in the dining room. Otherwise they scarfed down a bowl of cereal or some eggs in the kitchen, like normal people. I peeked into the dining room first, but not only was there nobody in there, there wasn’t any furniture either: just faded spots on the parquet and on the wallpaper where rugs and pictures used to be. Dust bunnies swirled in the corners, suggesting that Janet had no use for this room at all.

  I made my way to the kitchen then, but it was empty too, though filled with an intoxicating smell of fresh-baked pastries and coffee. Ingrid had of course made me breakfast before I left—you have to understand that that kind of thing is, like, part of her DNA—but whatever Ivan (or whoever cooked in Fair Haven) had made smelled so delicious that I was ready for round two.