Society Girl (Animos Society)

by Alys Murray

  “Hey, kiddo.”

  Silence. Nothing but the crackling of flames growing in the rubbish bin in front of him. Then, more crunching leaves and a tentative, female hand on his shoulder.

  “Daniel?”

  If it was possible for him to say even less nothing, he did. Angie’s nerves rolled off of her in waves, striking him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He ripped another page out of the notebook in his hands and tossed it into the conflagration. She walked around to the other side of the can, trying to catch his eye. It didn’t work. He was too focused on the crumpling, burning, disintegrating piece of paper as it was eaten alive by the orange flames.

  “Burning shit,” he muttered, barely opening his mouth.

  “I hope it’s not important.”

  “It’s not. Not anymore.”

  If he’d found Angie doing something like this, he’d laugh and make fun of her for the melodrama. Heartbreak, he used to think, was nothing more than a temporary stumbling block, a funny toast to tell at your future wedding to the love of your life. Get over it and keep looking toward the future. Something better is out there. You have to keep trying. He knew better now. Maybe there wasn’t anything better out there. Maybe everything was like this. At this moment, he couldn’t imagine a world less cold and dark as his felt.

  “So…” Angie stayed a much safer distance from the fire than he did. He wanted to feel the flames dance around his face. “What is it?”

  “My songs.”

  “You have more songs?”

  Don’t you cry, you asshole. Don’t you fucking dare. He murdered the urge by ripping another page. Watching it turn to ash.

  “I wrote one every time I saw her.”

  Every time he left her, music poured out of him, chords matching the tune of her pulse and lyrics she wrote with her secretive eyes. Every song every bit as beautiful as those songs he’d listened to on repeat his entire life, but more true and real because he thought she was true and real.

  Bullshit. All bullshit.

  “I heard about what happened,” Angie said, worry tensing her face.

  “Everyone did. Nan loves an I told you so almost as much as you do.”

  This was part of the reason he’d been hiding, really. The heartbreak was only part of it. The other was shame. For so long, he’d told everyone love and romance were just around the corner. That music and love could change the world. He was the romantic poet of Oxford. The last loving person in the world. And he was wrong.

  “Listen…”

  “I don’t think listening to you is going to make this better.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  In his bathrobe, he was standing in his garden, burning songs he’d only, a few days ago, thought could be better than the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.”

  “Does it look like I want to talk about it?”

  “Do you want to talk about something else?”

  “Nope.”

  Angie grasped at straws, her voice straining with effort. Daniel could see why this was important to her, why his sudden change in demeanor was troubling. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to rip his heart again and expose himself to make her feel a little better. No one else had such consideration for him.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Alcohol dependence is a huge problem in this country and emotional drinking is where it starts,” he deadpanned.

  “Great to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Angie grumbled. “Are you ready to call her a bitch yet?”

  “No. I really loved her.” Rip. Toss. Burn. “And now none of it matters.”

  “Don’t say things you don’t mean.”

  “What else am I supposed to say?” Rip. Toss. Burn. “I believed her. I believed everything.”

  “She was good.”

  “No,” Daniel snapped, the first flicker of himself. “I believed everything.”

  “About what?”

  “Love.”

  “Believing in love is not a bad thing.”

  Tell that to my heart.

  “You can’t let one bad rap ruin your life. You just…” She struggled for words. The sweet, sappy shit was not Angie’s strong suit. If he had been in any kind of mood to think about anyone but himself, he would have been touched by the fact she tried at all. “Bet on the wrong horse.”

  She wasn’t a horse. She was a woman. A beautiful woman he thought he was going to be truly, madly, deeply in love with. The one in whom he placed his every hope and trust and was rewarded with a wasted month and a pile of ash-burned love ditties.

  “If you’re going to be optimistic, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “But—”

  “You can sit here in silence or you can go,” Rip. Rip. Rip. Toss. Burn. “Your call.”

  Angie shoved her hands in her pockets and dug her heels into the soft ground. She entertained herself by looking between the fires and her friend for all of seventy seconds before her patience wore out.

  “I heard you canceled your trip to London. To sing for Icon. Are you sure you want to do that?”

  He had. And he was.

  “I thought we discussed silence,” Daniel intoned.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  He gave up ripping individual pages and tossed the entire notebook into the flames. The fake leather binding melted in the heat.

  “I don’t think I really like music anymore.”

  …

  Since that day in her father’s office, Sam wandered the halls of Ashbrooke with all the life of a half-awake ghost. She did a few things that the living would do—asked her family to start calling her Samantha instead of Sam, threw out all of her Animos stuff—but beyond that, she pursued the motions of existence (school, showers, even a meal or two when she wasn’t sick to her stomach with herself) without any of its spark, any of its joy. It was hard to see the point. Daniel showed her so much of what life could be. She couldn’t look at something as simple as a record player without hurtling back to the worst night of her life.

  And if someone had told her it would be her father who would snap her out of her misery, she would have laughed in their face. Since losing Daniel, he’d been more of a father than he’d ever been, though the bar was so low as to mean very little.

  One afternoon, Samantha was flopped on a sitting room settee, scanning blindly through a gossip magazine stolen from Mrs. Long’s office when the old man strode in, dressed like a cartoon version of a British lord. With a red hunting coat and one of those pith helmets made famous by every colonial army ever, he had one rifle slung over either shoulder, intentionally broken at the loading chamber for easier transport. Sam might have laughed if she felt like laughing.

  “All right, get up.” He nodded to her.

  “I’m busy.”

  “No, you’re not. We’re going shooting.”

  Samantha raised an eyebrow at him over the edge of her magazine.

  “Isn’t it illegal to own guns in the UK?” she asked.

  “It’s legal if they’re licensed.”

  “Are these licensed?”

  “Laws are for poor people.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s part of our problem.”

  “Come along. It will make you feel better.” When Samantha hesitated, her father started for the exit. “Don’t start acting like a moody teenager now.”

  The options were limited at best; she could stay inside and mope, or she could watch her father shoot a gun for an hour. And she’d given everything to be in his good graces. She might as well not waste them now.

  “Fine.”

  Ten minutes later they were set up in the back forty, a wide swath of empty acreage behind their house. Besides the two members of the Ashbrooke line, an aging, stone-faced butler in a crisp uniform and protective World War I helmet stood beside a mechanical pulling mechanism and a stack of fine china.

  “Is this…” Samantha narrowed her eyes at the plates
and their telltale gilt engraving of the letters AM for Ashbrooke Manor. “Our china?”

  “Spare china. Have to get rid of it anyway. Cluttering up the damned attic.” He slapped his rifle on his shoulder, spotting the air through his scope. “Pull!”

  Pop… Snap… Crash. The plate flew through the air, only to be intercepted and shattered by one of her father’s bullets. Samantha’s gun lay at her feet, having been dropped there a few minutes ago when the man sidled up to the makeshift gun range. She stared at it, conflicted. She’d gotten what she wanted. She got her father. But it wasn’t the relationship she wanted.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking my daughter out for an old-fashioned shoot. It’ll cheer you up.”

  He reloaded the weapon, clearly better at spotting airborne targets than his own flaws. After months of ignoring her, he was just going to swoop in and play her father? Hearing him call her daughter was moving, a moment she’d clutched to her heart every time she thought it would fall apart again. But still.

  “You”—she poked him in the shoulder, not caring this was as many words as they’d ever spoken to one another at one time—“are the most blind old man I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m barely forty-seven, Samantha. Don’t call me old.”

  The dam holding her back didn’t break. It shattered, rushing all of her blood and pain straight to her temples before exploding from between her lips. Thomas always told her not to air the dirty laundry in front of anyone—not their father and certainly not any servants—and Sam was tired of following protocols. Raging floods didn’t follow the orders of anyone.

  “You’re infuriating! I did all of this for you and now you want me to sit here and shoot plates and talk about my feelings when a month ago you didn’t want to remember I was in the house? How dare you!”

  “You did what now?”

  “I only joined the Animos Society for you. I wanted you to see me. And I lost Daniel.” Even saying his name cracked her breastbone. Rivulets of pain clattered in her ribs. “Because I wanted my father to acknowledge my existence. Because I wanted to be someone he could be proud of. Because I wanted to be with someone he would be proud of. I loved him. And I gave him up so you would finally see me, and now that you have, you can’t even do that right!”

  She had so much more to say. She held back. Let the old man figure it out for himself. She couldn’t spell everything out for him.

  “That’s why you’ve been so upset? Not because you didn’t get in, but because…” He put the pieces together. “You thought you’d lost me and this boy in one night?”

  Well, maybe she didn’t have so much more to say. He’d pretty much summed it up.

  “Basically. Yeah.”

  The pair shuffled their feet for a moment, neither being too comfortable with any kind of emotion, much less the ones they shared now. Sam spent her entire life wanting to confront her father. Now she was here, she felt small in the face of it.

  “I did not grow up with a warm father,” he conceded. “I didn’t learn how to be one.”

  “It’s no excuse for ignoring me until I joined your stupid club,” Sam snapped.

  Her father took exception.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t deny it. You didn’t give a shit until you realized I wasn’t a complete stain on your house.”

  “That’s not fair.” He picked his rifle back up and pointed it toward the sky, intent on changing the subject or at least distracting himself. He didn’t want to feel that he’d contributed to her joining the Animos Society. If he was the cause of that, then he would have to own up to being the cause of her suffering. His refusal to see her side of things pushed Samantha to new heights of indignation, even as he continued shooting. “Pull!”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” Just because something wasn’t fair didn’t mean it wasn’t true. “Ever since I got here, you have done nothing but ignore me and belittle me and—”

  “—And given you a better life!”

  “After leaving me in a shitty one for twenty years.”

  “And you don’t think I feel terrible about it?”

  His question was louder than the smashing of his bullets, louder than the gunpowder explosions he triggered, but Samantha didn’t know how to answer it. It left her disoriented. Her ears rang.

  “What?”

  “Has it crossed your mind for even a moment that I didn’t…” He cleared his throat. “I left you alone because…” He fiddled with his rifle. “You know why.”

  She scrambled and unscrambled the events of her life, trying to fit them into a new picture. She always assumed he’d hated her. He ignored her because she was a remnant of a shameful past he couldn’t escape. She never dreamed the shame he felt wasn’t toward her, but rather because of the way he’d treated her.

  “You felt guilty?”

  Speaking it into existence felt as ridiculous as declaring Santa Claus was real, but the longer her father busied his hands and paced, the more certain she was. It was the only real explanation.

  “I abandoned you because I was afraid. And you’ve spent your life paying for my mistakes. How do you move on? How do you look at your child and tell them you were too selfish to be a father?”

  “Maybe you could start by apologizing and make better choices now?”

  “Don’t you think you should take your own advice?”

  Nice try, but we aren’t turning the tables back on me.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She shouted back at the butler silently waiting with plates, “Pull!” Two could play at the diversion game.

  Her father twisted in time to catch the plate in midair. Any hopes he’d stop his rally against her in favor of congratulating himself on the excellent shot vanished when he tossed the gun at her. She only narrowly caught it.

  “You have sat in the house feeling sorry for yourself for a week. If you’re really worried about this young man, you have to know you’ll never get him back this way.” Was that concern in his eyes or was she imagining it? “Now, shoot. Pull!”

  Pop. But there was no snap or crash. Samantha didn’t raise her weapon. She would rather have listened to music nonstop for the rest of her life than hear her father try to push her back toward Daniel. Their love was over. She’d ruined everything, and she would bear it for the rest of her life, like Thomas did. In her relentless pursuit of love, she’d given up any hope it.

  She wanted to. Desperately. Her knees twitched to run to Daniel and fall at his feet and beg his forgiveness.

  “Shoot the gun,” her father said.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Take a shot, Samantha. Pull!”

  Daniel. Thomas. Father. Captain. The Animos. Thomas. Father. Captain. Daniel. Daniel. Daniel. Her resolve buckled under the weight of the people she’d wronged and been wronged by. Her father’s command sent her hands flying to the gun and peering through the scope. In less than a second, the plate exploded into a firework of porcelain.

  “There. Don’t you feel better?” he asked.

  Samantha couldn’t help tugging her lips upward. It was satisfying, in a way. Nothing was fixed, not in her life and certainly not in the relationship with her father, but at least she’d gotten to harmlessly break some shit. For what it was worth, at least she was just breaking a plate and not breaking someone’s heart. If she was really interested in changing herself, that was a step in the right direction.

  “Sort of.” She handed the gun back to him. “But nothing’s changed.”

  “Then you have to go out and make the change, don’t you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Samantha hated to say it (Shit, how she hated to say it!), but her father was right. And if the most emotionally blind man in England could be right about something, it meant she had to get off of her ass and get to work. She had to pick her heart up off the mat and fight for Daniel. Change wasn’t going to happen overnight. Restorations didn’t materialize. She had to work for
it.

  Samantha and her father still had their own issues to sort out. Her bitterness and distrust fueled her desire to be close to him, which only complicated matters. Though Thomas still avoided her like the plague, her father took bizarre measures to keep her company. They shared breakfast and dinner together almost every day. He asked her opinions on politics and her studies. They even talked about her mother once or twice, something she never expected. The sudden interest didn’t erase twenty years, nor did it always proceed smoothly, but things were beginning to change.

  It would be the same way with Daniel. She couldn’t expect him to forgive her at all, much less quickly. The possibility that he would take her back was even more ridiculous. But the tiny, wavering hope wasn’t even possible if she sat on her ass and didn’t take this chance. The chance began with Angie. She’d never get anywhere near Daniel if she didn’t get through his best friend first. This was the necessary first step, no matter how much of her pride she had to swallow to be there.

  “You look like shit.”

  Not an auspicious beginning, but Samantha expected as much. After days of begging over the phone, Angie finally agreed to meet her in a park near her home so long as she brought two apple crumbles from the “posh bakery near your uni” as tribute. Upon her arrival, Samantha handed over the two boxes. Angie opened the bakery box and began digging in with a fork pulled from her pocket. Without the conventions of plate or napkin, she helped herself to the caramel-sweet filling beneath the sugar crust.

  “Yeah, I haven’t been sleeping well,” Samantha admitted, running a hand through her greasy hair.

  “Guilty conscience?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no point in hiding it. She was here to beg for Angie’s help. She would grovel and admit her every sin if it meant getting it.

  “Cut to the chase.” Angie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve, showing her distaste for Samantha in a single gesture. “Why are you here?”