She sat in complete silence at the long, crowded dinner table while all around her people laughed and talked, mostly about the night that lay ahead. Some of the amusement, of course, came from Sawyer’s animated retelling of the brooch and the monkey incident. As it turned out, news didn’t travel nearly as fast as Annis had expected and there were several people who had not yet heard the escapades of Jacob the monkey featuring Babe’s brooch and Annis’s leftover hotcake. Among them was Goldilocks. Annis noticed a slight chug at his jaw every time he heard the monkey’s name. She assumed he felt some bitterness about the fact the monkey had won the name game, leaving him to move forward in life known by the same name as a fair-haired fairy tale character with a knack for breaking in and stealing porridge from a family of bears. She could certainly see how he might feel slighted.
“You’re dirty,” Maude said to Annis, interrupting her silent observations. Maude’s lip curled in a sneer, but her eyes were smiling. She bumped her hip to Homer’s shoulder, nudging him to move over so she and Mabel could have a seat across from Annis. Homer obliged and slid closer to his wife, never breaking their conversation about recent attempts to juggle a combination of flaming rings and pointed daggers while Caroline, suspended by her mouth, formed a hoop with her body for Homer to throw his array of weapons through. Neither of them seemed to mind being mashed together so closely that they appeared nearly as attached as Maude and Mabel.
“I’ve been doing dirty things,” Annis answered when the sisters were finally seated and ready to eat.
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Maude murmured, casting a suggestive glance toward Sequoyah, who, thankfully, was busy being entertained by Homer and his inexplicable skill of avoiding self-mutilation or manslaughter on a regular basis.
“You’re terrible,” Annis scolded, tossing a green bean over the table at her. “I was doing actual dirty things. With dirt!”
“Oh, God,” Mabel gasped, a mixture of pity and horror wrapped into her outburst. “Why?”
“Because I was helping with the mustangs today. Do you know horses literally take dirt baths? Which then become mud baths after you give them an actual bath with soap and water. It was quite the mess.”
Maude shrugged and picked up the green bean, which had landed right beside her plate, and ate it. “Elephants don’t do that.”
“Don’t get me started on what elephants do and don’t do,” Sawyer snarled from three seats down.
“Are you really still on about that?” Mabel asked. “I don’t see how it was any worse than that time you thought it’d be a good idea to join Homer and Caroline in their act.”
“Yeah, well, had I known he’d wind up tossing me, I’d hardly have volunteered.”
“What else would I have done? Tossing things is what I do,” Homer said, matter-of-fact. “Especially things most people wouldn’t toss.”
“Most people definitely wouldn’t toss you,” Maude agreed, nodding at Sawyer. “Unless it was out on your arse.”
The laughter nearly drowned out Sawyer’s grumbling. “When did today become torture Sawyer day?”
“Right around the time you started volunteering other people to dig through monkey poo,” Mabel chirped.
“Oh, yes,” Maude concurred, swiping a gleeful tear from her eye. “We heard about that.”
“Really, Sawyer,” Mabel chided. “I’d have expected better from you.”
“Sorry,” he said with a careless shrug that suggested the opposite of his words. “Monkey poo was the best I could do on a moment’s notice. But if you can ever get one of your girls to swallow something of value, elephant poo would be a much grander prank next go around.”
Annis made a disgusted face. “I don’t think I’ll be falling for that again.” She pointed an accusatory green bean at Sawyer. “Besides, I thought we had a truce!”
“What, you think you’re the last person to ever run off and join the circus? There’ll be a new newbie soon enough.” He smirked, snatched the bean from her fingers, and popped it into his mouth.
“You know, I thought you were so nice when I first met you,” she said, shaking her head as she examined the food still left on her plate. She’d already eaten more than half of her helping and wasn’t close to feeling sated yet.
He winked at her, his expression drenched in mischief. “I told you you’d know better.”
He had.
“You said it’d take a week,” she reminded him.
“That was when I thought you were sweet and naïve and needed that long.” He tipped his head to the side and back. “Now I know better.”
Annis grinned. “Fair enough.” The raucous noise lulled as Annis saw Hugh and Babe join their table.
“We really don’t require near this much attention when we join a party,” Babe mused, having a seat beside Annis, who found herself scooting closer to Sequoyah and unexpectedly touching his thigh with hers. Even less expected was the way he stayed in place, keeping their legs close enough to touch. She told herself he must be used to close dining quarters, but part of her hoped desperately it wasn’t true.
“Also, it makes Poppy here very suspicious,” Babe added, making her best attempt at sounding and looking stern, but failing on both counts.
“Think we’re scheming over dinner?” Sequoyah asked, leaning forward to have a better view of his parents down the table.
“Personally, I prefer to do my scheming at night, when there’s peace and quiet and no one around to interrupt my thoughts,” Mabel said with a pointed glare at her sister, who ignored her entirely.
“I’m more of a spur-of-the-moment schemer,” Sawyer said, stabbing a chunk of potato with his fork. “You never know when the monkey poo will strike, you know?”
Annis laughed, but she did her best to muffle the sound behind her napkin. She wasn’t sure if Babe was prepared to find the brooch incident humorous just yet.
“Well, at least you all admit it,” Hugh said with a sigh, picking up his silverware and examining his plate of roasted pork, potatoes, and green beans. “You’re all schemers.”
Sequoyah slid his empty plate to the center of the table and rested his elbows on the cleared space in front of him. “...Says the master schemer.”
Hugh said nothing at first. Wholly dedicated to his dinner, he took several bites and chewed thoroughly as everyone else watched in silence, waiting for his response.
At last, he paused, his hand and fork beside his plate. “You don’t expect an argument from me, do you?”
“It’s not the scheming he minds,” Babe chimed in, with her attention on her food as she stacked the perfect bite upon the prongs of her fork. “It’s the being left out of it.”
“You should have just said, Poppy,” Homer said, far too excited, in Annis’s opinion, for a man whose schemes usually involved blind juggling of deadly weapons and small humans. “I was just telling August I want to try standing on his shoulders for tossing daggers. What do you think?”
“I think you don’t know how high you toss your damn daggers. Or where the ceiling is. Or how tall August is. Or how close you’ll be to the ceiling once you’re standing on his shoulders. And I think I’d rather not have you slice holes into the top of my tent, which would undoubtedly be part of the learning curve.” Hugh turned his head slightly, moving his gaze to Bess. “You’re next. What crazy ideas are you cooking?”
Bess cast a furtive glance around the table as though she were hoping someone would interrupt and steal her spotlight. When no one did, she pursed her lips briefly and then began speaking. “I don’t know if I would call it crazy, really.” Sawyer let out a snort. Bess shot him a glare that pierced as one of Homer’s daggers might. “Maude and I have been talking. What if we had Millie and Edi hold a rope with their trunks, standing on opposite ends of the ring, and I could walk across it from one elephant to the other? That’d be pretty brilliant wouldn’t it?”
Hugh swallowed his previous bite. “I think maybe you don’t know the meaning of the word brillia
nt.” He cleared his throat. “I’m well aware we’ve all convinced ourselves you can tread wherever you choose and never lose your footing, but I reckon even you couldn’t make it across what would likely become a game of tug-o-war between two elephants the second you hand each cow a rope to hold onto. They’re elephants, Bess. And moody ones at that.” His eyes moved over each person sitting around the table. “Come on, someone’s gotta have an idea I can say yes to.” He paused, hovering on Sawyer, and then shook his head and mumbled, “Never mind,” before moving along to his son, who instantly held up his hands in surrender to indicate he had nothing to offer.
“Annis, love, give me something good.”
Annis could feel the pressure of every eyeball staring back at her and was certain the heat of a hundred spotlights couldn’t be hotter.
“Well, alright then,” she said, clearing her throat and sitting up taller. “But, remember, you asked for it.” Though what had he asked for, exactly? A wild idea crazy enough to compete with all the other outrageous ideas at this table, but not so crazy that Hugh would shut it down. An idea that could actually work. But Annis had nothing. Not a single thought, crazy or sane. Which was a good thing because, truth be told, she could no longer be certain of the difference.
And then it struck her. One thought. Properly suited for a lunatic and yet brilliantly sound.
“I noticed last night there were some stragglers who wouldn’t leave when the show was over. I got to thinking that probably holds everyone up when you’re trying to break down and load up and there are still people who don’t feel the urge to leave.”
Hugh nodded. “I’m listening.”
“So, what if, at the end of each show, I stroll into the tent, walking through the rows of seating with Basileus attached to a thin silk lead. I could wear my hair in braids and put on a sweet white dress and just mosey along as though I’m walking around with my puppy. In fact, I should say something of the sort as I go by. I’d look certifiable. People’d be terrified. I don’t think anyone would stick around.”
Babe nearly choked on her dinner. Hugh just grinned in silence, still studying Annis long after she finished talking. No one else said anything. After what felt to Annis like a small eternity, Hugh pointed his fork at her and gave her a nod of approval before returning his attention to his food. “Good girl. That was a proper crazy idea, love,” he murmured, arranging his green beans in a heap before he stabbed them with the tines. “I’ve got bigger plans for you than scaring off the stragglers, though, so this one will have to be on hold a bit.”
Her mouth quirked. She was equally pleased as she was curious. The more she learned of everyone here and their various, at times inexplicable, talents, the more she wanted to know what she would be doing when the day came that she received an official act of her own.
She wiped her mouth one last time, and then crumpled her napkin, placing it beside her empty plate. “Figured you’d say something like that.” She sighed. “If I’m not going to be the secret finale after the finale, I suppose I better get back to helping Sequoyah finish up for the proper finale, which really is all the finale anyone should ever need, though I do see why people find it hard to leave after they’ve seen it,” she finished, realizing too late that she’d babbled on with everyone listening.
Sawyer, of course, was least forgiving. “Should we take offense to your obvious favoritism where our acts is concerned, or should we just assume your bias is directed more at the performer than the performance itself?”
“We should not take offense,” Maude said, settling the matter. “It’s clearly performer bias.”
Hugh’s brow shot up to meet his hairline while Babe’s eyes lit up. Annis, on the other hand, felt the heat in her cheeks reach a new record high and wished desperately for a monkey with a stolen brooch to come along and save her. Even the thought of digging through poo was more bearable than this.
“Am I to assume from this silence that this revelation comes as a surprise to some?” Homer said. “Should I also add that even a blind man can tell that the bias is entirely mutual?”
Annis felt her eyes dart toward Sequoyah before she could remind them of the pact she’d just made to stare down at the ground for all eternity now that he knew about her silly infatuation with him.
“I could have handled that part myself, Homer,” Sequoyah said with an ear-to-ear grin as his eyes met hers. “But thanks just the same. At least now we’ll know exactly what you’re all talking about even after we leave.” He stood up and held his hand out to her. “Come on. We have a finale to prepare for and these folks have at least an hour of gossip to cram into about fifteen minutes or so.”
Hesitation swarmed at the pit of her stomach, making her nauseated, and her heart and mind battled over the direction her hand was to move next. Neither considered her body, which decided without them.
All ill feelings faded the instant her palm landed in his.
Chapter Nine
A NEW BABY
Neither Annis nor Sequoyah said anything as they walked, nor did they release each other’s hands. Annis tried not to make any attempts to decipher the meaning of either, but she found it impossible not to question both from every angle imaginable. By the time they reached the horses, she was so buried in her thoughts that she didn’t notice they had come to a stop. A playful pinch at her waist startled her back to the present.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, dropping Sequoyah’s hand and stepping back.
“For what?” Sequoyah looked at her curiously.
“I’m not really sure what comes next,” she said. The fierceness she’d begun to find since joining Brooks and Bennet faded from her voice.
He shrugged, leaning back against the wooden slats of the horse corral behind him. “The horses need brushed off one last time, then we paint them. Won’t take long.”
Her eyes narrowed, confused by the change in topic. Had he really misunderstood her? “I wasn’t talking about tasks for the show.”
His mouth curved gently on one side, giving proof of his beautiful smile even if it was only half visible. “I know, Annis,” he said, his voice the same deep, tender tone she had heard him whisper to the horses. “Whatever this is that’s happening between us, it’s okay to just let it be. It doesn’t have to be figured out tonight. So, let’s stick with taking things one step at a time. Starting with the horses.” He rolled his eyes upward, where Catori was busy nibbling on his hair. Annis giggled despite her nerves. What he was saying made sense, and yet something nagged at her. Something he wasn’t saying.
“You’re letting me down easy,” she whispered, trying her best to appear as if it mattered little either way, though even as the words passed her lips, she found it hard to keep smiling.
“Letting you down easy?” He laughed quietly though he hardly sounded amused. “I’m not the one who needs time, Annis. You are. I know you didn’t just walk out of some fairy tale and straight here to us two days ago. Something happened that made you run. Something bad. Something you haven’t even begun to heal from. And you’re in no frame of mind right now to take on anything else, even if it’s good.” He tilted his head, tugging his hair away from Catori’s muzzle. “Even if it’s us.” He stood up, moving toward her. When she didn’t evade him, he took both her hands in his. “Find yourself, Annis. And then find me.”
Her eyes stayed glued on their hands and how they fit together, on the tender way his fingers stroked the back of her hand. Could it really be possible she’d found something so beautiful in the rubble of her life’s most tragic turns?
She lifted her gaze, slowly, to meet the warmth of his. “Can I brush Catori?”
She felt him squeeze her hands one last time and then release them. He turned away and got to work. “I’d prefer it, to be honest. My hair could use a break from her teeth.” Annis laughed, falling into step behind him as though the last few minutes of her life had never happened, and nothing had changed. And yet, everything was different now.
T
hey worked together efficiently in quiet harmony, with the occasional exchanged murmurs as they finished their preparations. By the time they joined the others at the main tent, the audience was jammed into the stands and Hugh was already at the center of the ring.
This time, the show flew by and she was soon sending Sequoyah and the mustangs out to perform the finale. She held her breath as she watched him, flying from horse to horse, releasing blood-curdling howls into the night and bringing the audience to their feet with applause and loud whoops of enthusiasm. To the crowd he revealed the rawest parts of his nature, the gentle warrior within who would lie down his life for another, and who thus had a weapon more powerful than anyone expected: his heart.
She was standing there, clutching her hands to her chest, when she felt another presence move in beside her.
“The greatest joy of my life,” Babe said with her gaze on the man she called her son.
“You don’t sound joyful,” Annis observed. And then it dawned on her that she could be the reason.
“Whatever it was that brought you to us, Tulip,” she said quietly, her eyes never wavering from Sequoyah, who was introducing each horse in turn to the audience. “Will it take you away again?”
Annis felt a lump form in her throat. It hardened like a rock as she considered Babe’s question. “It could.” She turned toward her, desperate for her to understand even if Annis could never explain. “But I never want it to.”
Babe’s full focus shifted to her at last. “Then I suppose we’ll have to do whatever it takes to make sure it never does.”
Annis felt her chest swell. Babe wrapped an arm around Annis’s waist to bring her in closer and smacked a loud kiss on her cheek. And then Babe slipped away as quietly as she’d appeared, leaving behind only the grace she bestowed so easily on others—and, Annis was certain, the traces of sticky red lipstick on her cheek. She didn’t mind. Being branded by Babe’s affections was a far cry from the attempts others had made to claim her in the past and, unlike those, Annis was happy to be counted by Babe as one of her own.
The Wild in her Eyes Page 11
