The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  My heart was beating a staccato rhythm. Why, oh why, had I thought it would be a good idea to come and pester Felix? I had walked right on top of a landmine and now there was no turning back. Tim’s directness with me was full of so much conviction that Felix had stopped inking and was looking at me, confused, for answers.

  This is really messed up, God, I scolded the Lord in my own head. You are just hilarious.

  “You’re crazy,” I insisted, scratching my head as casually as I could manage. “If I was some rich guy’s kid I sure as hell wouldn’t be hanging out in a tattoo parlor on Avenue A.”

  “No, really!” Tim exclaimed excitedly. “You have a doppelganger or something. You look just like the daughter of that evangelist guy, the one whose son knocked up that chick in Vermont. I met his daughter in Colombia last summer. Her name is… Gee something or other. Grace!”

  It was Massachusetts, not Vermont, I corrected him in my thoughts.

  “Please calm down,” Felix commanded Tim, realizing that I was seriously stressing out. “If you don’t hold still I’m going to make a mistake.”

  The pain was back beneath my chest. The knife was stabbing, it was painful to inhale. My breath became short quickly, and I felt like the walls were closing in on me, like I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs to keep my brain operating.

  “Listen, pal, if you mess up, my friends over there are going to kick your ass back to Kazakhstan or wherever you’re from,” Tim said, sounding uglier and drunker by the second.

  Just then, a shadow fell across the studio.

  “What’s the problem, gentlemen?” Andy asked, his huge body appearing in the doorway and blocking out fluorescent light from the hallway.

  I cringed. I didn’t want to have Tim and his buddies thrown out and scrap Felix’s arm band job, but I also desperately didn’t want Tim blowing my cover. Or worse, saying the name my ears dreaded to hear. A name that surely Felix would go home and google, and I had no doubts that he was smart enough to put the pieces together on his own if he got that far.

  “It’s all under control,” Felix assured Andy, never taking his eyes off of Tim’s arm.

  I followed Andy out of the studio and cowered in the back room until I heard Tim and his friends leaving over an hour later. It took a long time for the sharp pangs in my chest to fade. I was starting to wonder if I had some kind of serious medical condition from all of the stress I was under. Smokestack finished with his last customer of the night and joined me in the back room. He cracked open the window that faced the alley and lit up a cigarette, blowing smoke out through the screen.

  “Sounded like you guys had a troublemaker tonight,” he said, looking me up and down.

  “I guess we did,” I agreed.

  “Is there some kind of trouble between you two lovebirds?”

  I shrugged and picked dirt out from beneath my fingernails. “Have you ever told a lie and then had it just grow, and grow?”

  “Story of my life, sister,” Smokestack told me. “You know, those are panic attacks you’re having.”

  I looked at him like he was crazy.

  “The sharp jabbing under your rib cage, the hyperventilating,” he continued, putting his own hand over his chest. “I used to have them myself all the time when I was detoxing. There’s medication you can take to control those, but you’d be wise to look into meditation as a means of making them stop. You can do breathing exercises when you feel one coming on.”

  He mashed out his cigarette and left me alone in the back room, wondering how in the world a kooky ex-junkie tattoo artist had managed to diagnose the pain I had been enduring for several weeks without me even bringing it up as a topic of conversation.

  Outside after Andy pulled down the gate on the front of the store and we declined a ride home from him, Felix took my hand without saying a word.

  “Are you going to tell me what that was about?” he asked.

  The time had come. I had been stupidly hoping that there would be some kind of resolution on my parents’ situation before I would have to come clean with Felix about who I was. I was old enough to realize that everything Aaron and I had brought about for ourselves could be snatched away in a heartbeat. Aaron was eighteen, but I was still a minor. It wouldn’t matter to any court that I was earning my high school diploma, paying rent, working almost forty hours a week and had established a whole life for myself. There was still a part of me that woke up every morning expecting my entire new world to break into pieces.

  We went up to the roof at my building rather than into the apartment. Once we were on the roof at two in the morning and sleepiness was settling in upon me, I wasn’t sure where to begin my story, so I went to the very beginning.

  “I was born Grace Ann Mathison in Little Rock, Arkansas,” I said. “My father is a Christian evangelist. He was the pastor of our church in Arkansas and when I was two years old, we moved to Arizona. He runs a cable network, and a magazine. And he’s very, very rich.”

  I looked up to check Felix’s reaction, and he was watching me, expressionlessly, listening.

  I told him everything that had happened since October, about my brother, Heather, my parents’ fraud scandal, Tony Michaels… everything. It probably took an hour for all of it to come out, some of it sounding so ugly and deceitful that I had kept it a secret, that I hated myself.

  Felix had given me every part of his life over the two months since we had started dating. He had welcomed me into his art, his work, his circle of friends, his family. He kept nothing from me. He had even told me that he had never yet visited his dad’s grave at the cemetery where he was buried in Brooklyn, but one day when he felt ready to do so, he wanted me to accompany him. In return, I’d let him believe in assumptions he’d made about me. I’d even intentionally led him to assume false things about me, like that I had dropped out of public high school in California.

  “How much of this does Jacinda know?” Felix asked when I finally ran out of words to say.

  “None of it,” I said. “You have to believe me that I feel horrible having lied to you both. But under the circumstances… would you have ever talked to me if you knew my dad was being accused of such a terrible crime?”

  A strange smile crossed Felix’s lips and he leaned against the brick ledge of the roof, looking out over Baxter St. “I did know.”

  “Felix!” I exclaimed. “How did you know?”

  “There was an article about you and your brother online. The Associated Press picked it up. It was suggesting that your entire family had skipped the country to avoid the fraud charges,” Felix informed me.

  I was stupefied. “How long have you known who I am?”

  “Only a few weeks,” he said.

  “You weren’t going to say anything?”

  Far below us, several blocks away, the siren of an ambulance wailed.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Felix said over his shoulder. “You’re still you. I’m still me. I told you already that I’ll wait for you. I was waiting for you to tell me all of this when you were ready.”

  “OK,” I said. I took a step closer to him. “So now you know.”

  “Is that everything?” Felix asked.

  I didn’t want to talk any more. I just wanted him to kiss me and assure me that the dream was still on. We would still get married one day, still open our art gallery and design studio.

  “I think that’s everything,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s late. I might be forgetting something.”

  Then I realized I was forgetting something, a big thing.

  “Oh yeah. I’m only sixteen,” I said. “I don’t think I can take the state test to be licensed as a tattoo artist. The back of the study guide you gave me said the state mandates that licenses only be given to people eighteen and older.”

  Felix shrugged. “That’s only two years.”

  “You’re not freaked out that I’m so young?” I asked.

  “My father was eleven years older than my mother,” he in
formed me. “When I told you that they met at university, maybe I forgot to mention that he was her professor.”

  The next morning, Felix came with me to an internet café, and with his help, I composed an e-mail to both of my parents’ e-mail addresses. It was short, and to the point.

  Dear Daddy and Mama,

  I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write this e-mail. I have been struggling for weeks with what to put in this message. You taught me the difference between right and wrong at an early age. For all the good you’ve done in this world, hiding from the charges against you is making a bad situation worse. A very kind journalist has been helping me and Aaron, and he tells me there is a strong chance that federal prosecutors might subpoena me and make me disclose your location. Please don’t put me in the position of having to tell them. Please come back to the U.S.

  Love always,

  Grace Ann

  There was nothing to do at that point other than wait.

  The warm spell ended abruptly and another snow storm blanketed the city. Felix and I trudged over the snow mountains created on every corner by the snow plows on our way to have lunch at my brother’s restaurant. I wore my new winter coat, bought on sale since winter was practically over. The city had declared an official snow day, so kids were off from school even though the blizzard had stopped by nine that morning.

  Aaron was in a great mood now that he was working again. Working in restaurants suited him; he was charming, attentive, and so handsome that business ladies always flirted with him. He seated us in the back near the hall to the bathroom and even though I had already told him that we would pay for our meal, he told us he’d bring us appetizers on the house.

  Felix and I had found a clean brick wall on West St. in Tribeca. It was close to a construction site, and presumably once that project was done, anything we painted on the brick wall would no longer be visible. It didn’t bother Felix one bit that our efforts would only be temporary. He liked the idea of our painting being buried like a treasure between buildings, waiting for a future generation to tear down a wall and find it. We huddled closely together at our corner table, heads bent over our notepads, sketching furiously.

  I stood in line for the ladies’ room after we ate, not especially wanting to walk all the way to the tattoo parlor with a full bladder. When the door opened and the line inched forward, I was kind of zoning out, but gasped when I saw the face of the woman who had been taking so much time in the bathroom.

  It was Juliette’s mom.

  She looked right at me and smiled politely.

  She had no idea who I was.

  I had spent three days in her home, eating her food, sleeping on her sheets. We’d had countless lunches with Juliette on campus on parent weekends. I knew her name was Gabriella, she wore makeup around the clock, even to bed at night, and had liposuction during our freshman year at Treadwell. How was it possible that she hadn’t recognized me?

  I was baffled as I used the bathroom and washed my hands. Had I really changed so much that even people who knew me didn’t see a trace of Grace in me anymore?

  When I opened the door to leave the ladies’ room, I was in for another surprise. Juliette was standing in the line waiting for her turn, but this time, I was recognized.

  “Oh my god!” she screamed. “Grace!”

  The woman in line in front of her who stepped into the ladies’ room smiled at us and our unexpected reunion. Before I knew it, Juliette and I were hugging and jumping up and down, we were so happy to see each other.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked me at last. “You look so different!”

  “I left Treadwell with my brother,” I said, knowing that I probably only had time to give her the Cliff Notes’ version of the last few months of my life. I didn’t want her mom to know that I was in New York. There was still a danger of authorities finding out where Aaron and I were, and a very real possibility that they would subpoena us. Tony hadn’t been kidding. As a journalist he had a right to keep his sources confidential, but he had made it clear to me that we were being sought. “My parents are in so much trouble, Juliette. You wouldn’t even believe it.”

  “Um, who ya telling?” Juliette asked, reminding me that her own dad was in his own heap of trouble. “I’m so sorry about the way I left school. I was really mean to you, and I didn’t mean to be. The day I left school, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to sleep in my own bed that night. We’ve lost everything. We’re living with my aunt in Oyster Bay.”

  We had so much to catch up on, too much. I told her that it was really important that she not mention to her mom that she’d seen me. We promised to e-mail and make plans to meet in the city that weekend to catch up on everything.

  “What took so long?” Felix asked when I sat back down at our table.

  “I just ran into an old friend,” I explained.

  Juliette and I smiled at each other when she passed through the restaurant on her way back to her mom’s table in the front. She noticed Felix and raised an eyebrow, surprised. Whoever would have guessed that Grace Mathison would find a cool boyfriend.

  Two days later, when I was getting ready to close out the drawer and run the daily sales report at the tattoo salon at one-thirty in the morning, I checked my e-mail and realized that I had received a reply from Mama.

  I held my breath and waited a good three minutes before clicking to open it. I really had no idea what kind of response awaited me.

  Oh, honey bun,

  You have no idea how wonderful it was to hear from you after all this time. Right now, your father and I can’t consider coming back to the US. Your father still has a lot of good work to do in his lifetime, and he can’t offer the world his charity if he’s behind bars. I hope you’ll understand and come visit us soon. It’s my dream that we will be a family again and that you and Aaron will find it in your hearts to understand our side of the events of the last few years.

  All the love in the world,

  Mama

  I sighed.

  I guessed my mother was either delusional if she thought my father was too good to go to jail, or he had been brainwashing her with that message. I had started to really put some thought into her role in everything. I mentioned before that my mother never finished high school; she got married when she was really young and probably believed that her husband would take care of her for the rest of her life. Without my father by her side, what would Mama do? How would she take care of herself?

  I wasn’t surprised that she had written back and Daddy hadn’t. But I was surprised that she had flat-out dismissed my request for her to do the right thing and come home. Maybe it was because I was still just a kid, really, pretending to be a grown-up, but reading in my mother’s own words that she had no intention of acknowledging her sins was shocking to me.

  I cut and pasted the content of the e-mail into a new message and sent it to Tony Michaels rather than forwarding the original e-mail to him. I knew how IP address look-up worked. I also knew that despite my carefulness, it was only a matter of time now before Mama and Daddy were found in Cordoba.

  Juliette and I met for coffee on Saturday morning. She had taken the train in from Long Island and had told her mother she was meeting friends from Treadwell for a movie. I didn’t tell my brother that I was meeting anyone from school. He would have certainly freaked out, because he thought all of my classmates were spoiled sluts who were wholly untrustworthy.

  As much as I loved Jacinda, spending time with Juliette was like reuniting with a sister. Her mom was having a horrible time with all of the charges against her father. Juliette’s dad was facing a life sentence in a federal prison, which meant, depending on which facility he ended up in and its level of security, that her mom and dad would probably not ever be allowed to even touch again. Juliette had visited her dad only once in prison so far, and she said that the whole experience had just been horrible. She cried the whole time, and then her dad cried, and he just kept saying he was sorry
and he didn’t want her to see him in that place ever again.

  “Oh, my god, Grace. Public school? So bad!”

  Juliette had been enrolled at the local public school with her cousins. The girls were really mean to her, even meaner than at Treadwell, and because the girls were mean, the boys were mean, too.

  “They’re like lemmings,” she complained. “Whatever the popular girls tell them to do is what high school boys do. If tomorrow they all decided they liked me, then all of the boys would ask me out. But since they call me “Poor Little Rich Girl,” all of the boys call me that, too.”

  She was already thinking about changing her name legally before applying to colleges. The notoriety of being a Santangello was just too much for her to handle.

  “I swear to God,” she said. “If I pay for my Starbucks with my gold card and the barista notices my last name, they’ll give me a dirty look.”

  I told her about Tony Michaels and how he wanted to write a story about both of us, the daughters of extremely rich people accused of fraud. She’d have to think about it, and ask her mom if it would be OK to talk to a journalist. Juliette was really worried about her mom. She was spaced out on Xanax all the time and kept talking about moving to Europe to get away from the press, which was impossible, because Juliette and her mom didn’t even have a single credit card that they could use. Her sister was going to have to drop out of college because they couldn’t even pay the next semester’s tuition.

  “I wish I’d done what you and Aaron did,” Juliette said wistfully. “You guys were so smart just to turn your backs on all of it. This is my dad’s problem, not mine, and now I’m going to be paying for it for the rest of my life.”

  The first week of March, Felix and I finished our observation period on the brick wall in Tribeca that we intended to paint, and we worked on our mural two nights in a row. We shook cans and sprayed as quietly as possible, working in silence due to the abundance of foot traffic in that neighborhood at night. When we were collaborating, it was like we shared the same brain. We handed each other cans without exchanging words, knowing intuitively what color the other sought next.