Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town
Page 25
The screened door slammed as Nanny went inside.
Mitchell said, “Let it rest, Snyder.”
But Snyder ignored his friend’s advice and turned to me. “What about you, sweet pea?”
“What about me?” I asked, the words catching in my throat.
“You happy with what they offered you?”
Was he talking about our homestead? The opportunity to live on a farm? The money we might win?
“I guess so.”
“She guesses so,” Snyder said, tilting back his head to take a swig from the canteen. “You like deer?”
“Deer?”
“Seen any in your garden lately?” He laughed.
The desserts in my stomach churned into a hard clump. The only music now was the sound of Mrs. Miller’s violin. Nanny came back onto the porch with Wendell and Prudence behind her.
“What’s going on?” Wendell asked, standing next to me. Prudence stayed hidden behind the two of us.
“Nothing,” Mitchell said, moving away from Snyder, leaving him sitting on the porch swing alone.
Snyder said, “I’m just curious as to why you all get to live in your pretty mansions, have parties, get to be the center of attention, and we fix a damn roof in exchange for crap food. I never signed up to be a Confederate soldier. Shit. My family comes from Boston. We would have fought on the Union side.” He laughed again, and this time spit flew out of his mouth.
Had I ever looked that disgusting when I got drunk back in Modern Land? I prayed that I had not.
Snyder leaned to the right and saw Prudence. “Hey there, sweetheart. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
Snyder’s lame attempt at hooking up with Prudence in front of all these people disgusted me.
“Okay, guys,” Wendell said. “You both are wallpapered. Maybe you should skedaddle.”
Snyder glared at Wendell. “Wallpapered? Skedaddle? That your way of saying I’m too drunk to sit here on this porch? You telling me what to do, you little blowhard?”
The violin music and laughter from inside the house had stopped. Dad stood in the doorway. Everyone except the little kids gathered around him.
“If you leave now,” Rusty said, “we’ll pretend this never happened.”
“Your union can’t tell my union what to do,” Snyder told Rusty. “Actors have more clout than a stupid cameraman.”
“You’re an actor?” I asked Snyder, trying to decipher the difference between a reenactor and a real actor.
“Trained in London for three years. Did more Shakespeare than Shakespeare.” His hand moved through the air. “Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, full of sound and fury, blah blah blah. I worked in New York and Hollywood. Music videos. Commercials.” He pointed at Prudence who stood just behind my shoulder and shouted, “I remember you! Sarah! You do any of those Honda commercials lately, honey? I like the one where you’re sitting on the beach with your surfboard on top of the car. You look awesome in a bikini.”
Prudence gasped in my ear. “Well, I never.”
Dad stepped onto the porch, followed by Carl and Jackie Chan, whose cameras were still rolling. He said, “It’s getting late, everyone. Maybe we should start cleaning up…”
Snyder tried to get off the porch swing but fell to the floor on his knees. The canteen dropped from his hand and fell on its side. He grunted like a bull as Mitchell pulled him up by the arm.
“Let’s get you home,” Mitchell said, slinging the canteen’s leather strap over his shoulder.
“Home!” Snyder said, stumbling toward the stairs. “We sleep in a barn! With mice and mosquitoes and manure!” He swung a fist at Carl’s camera, but missed it by a foot. “This isn’t my home. This is hell!”
As Mitchell nearly carried him down the porch steps, Snyder kept rambling. “I didn’t study at the Academy for nothing! I can talk like a top rail soldier who speaks real good chin music. I’m fit as a fiddle from eating my goober peas. Everything is hunkey dorey, you bunch of pie eaters. See? That’s why I’m union! I’m a professional actor!”
They disappeared down the hill with Jackie Chan on their tail as the rest of us went back inside. No one mentioned what had just happened on the porch. No one said a word as we stacked dirty dishes on trays. All I could think about were Snyder’s final words: “I’m a professional actor…”
After I carried a tray into the kitchen and placed it on the butcher block, I headed toward the back door. Rusty saw me and turned his camera in my direction.
“Rusty,” I said, covering the camera’s eye with the palm of my hand. “You don’t need to film every little thing.”
He pushed my hand from his lens.
“Please,” I said. “At least let me go to the outhouse by myself. I’ve been holding it in for two hours.”
Rusty sulked, but finally walked the camera over to Rebecca Lynn, who was playing a game of marbles in the hallway with the Miller boys, totally unaware that anything unusual had just occurred on the front porch.
I went out through the kitchen door where a collection of kerosene lamps hung from wrought iron hooks. Carl stood smoking a cigarette by the back door, the camera resting at his feet. I grabbed one of the lanterns and followed the stony path to the outhouse. It was incredibly clean inside, with a stack of white pressed linens sitting on a shelf. After I came back out, I looked toward the house. Carl was gone.
From where I stood on the path, the house really did seem to belong in a different era. In the downstairs rooms, my dad and sister and other guests milled about, and I could hear their faint voices floating from the kitchen into the backyard. The interior pre-Victorian oil lamps made the rooms behind the wavy glass seem romantic and mysterious, just like a movie.
Romantic.
Mysterious.
Just like a movie…
At the end of the path, I stopped. In front of me loomed the back staircase, leading up to the second-floor hallway. In the dark, it matched the crooked stairs from Lemony Snicket’s house. With the lantern in my hand, I climbed the rickety steps, trying not to let the warped wood squeak under my shoes. At the top, the door knob turned easily under my hand. I hurried down the hall toward the playroom, and entered the dark cave. I turned up my lantern and shut the door.
With my heart pounding, I moved about the room, picking things up, peering underneath dolls in petticoats and fancy pillows and miniature china plates. I dug through the overflowing toy trunk and the wardrobe where a collection of gowns hung inside like ghosts. I moved to the daybed, leaned against it, and took a wide glance around the room.
I was paranoid. So that fake soldier was a real actor. So what? So there was a chance that Prudence had done some commercials. That’s probably how she and her family got picked to come out here, because she was pretty and talented. Maybe she ate up the camera like Beyoncé.
I sat on the edge of the daybed, chewing on a thumbnail, scolding myself for snooping. I’d been out here in the sticks too long, like that creepy Snyder guy. He was bonkers after only a few days, so I probably was as well. Living in the middle of nowhere in a time that no longer existed could do that to a person, couldn’t it?
The heel of my boot kicked the edge of something solid beneath the daybed. I bent down, lifted the bed skirt, and spotted a plastic box, the kind my mom once used for winter sweaters. I slid it out and took off the lid, figuring I’d find hats or gloves or bows. But I was wrong. Inside the box were gadgets from Modern Land. There was the cell phone I’d seen Prudence use, and a charger, though why she had one when there was no electricity was beyond me. There was an iPod, a newer version than my own. My hand burrowed beneath the gadgets and brought out a clear makeup bag, filled with Sephora products, nail polish bottles, makeup remover. My hand went even deeper and landed on something so familiar to the modern world, but so foreign to the mid-1800s, my mind had to work to distinguish between current and historic. I set the lantern next to the box and pulled out the object with two hands: a laptop.
With my heart threatening to jump out of my chest, I put the laptop on the floor and continued rooting through the box. I discovered a couple of Stephen King novels, a biography about some dead movie star, an itty-bitty black and white two-piece bathing suit, a bottle of Coppertone tanning oil, and a can of bug spray. How in heaven’s name could anyone have snuck in all this junk? Was there a fake bottom in the buggy? Did someone meet her out in the woods like a drug dealer makes a deal in an alley? Maybe she had the contraband brought down the river. After all, if you’re going to sneak in items from Modern Land to Yesterday World, you may as well keep the transportation old-school.
My fingers grabbed a hold of a sparkly picture frame with a photograph in the center. I squinted at the photo. It had been taken at Christmas time, and the people were dressed in red Santa hats and green sweaters. There was Prudence, with her parents, and a younger girl who looked like a miniature version of Prudence. I moved the lantern more closely to the photo, scrutinizing their faces better under the light. Something was wrong. Her parents. They didn’t look anything like—
“Don’t,” Prudence said from the doorway. In her hand she held a lantern larger than mine, and the light bore its way through the room like a headlight. She shut the door behind her, turning the skeleton key to lock it.
“Don’t what?” I asked.
“Don’t go through my things.”
“Too late.”
I threw the picture frame onto the pile and stood up. “Those aren’t your real parents downstairs, are they? Where’s the little girl from that photo? Is she your real sister? Who are those boys down there?”
“I can’t say anything.”
“Right.”
“It’s in my contract.”
“I don’t think we signed the same contract.”
She paused. “I know we didn’t.”
I was fearful, but not in the way a person gets when running into a bear in the woods. I was afraid the way a person gets when they realize everything they think they know is wrong. Like Mom getting cancer. That was wrong. All the long days and endless nights leading up to her death, sleeping on waiting room couches at the hospital, draining her tubes after she came home for good, saying goodbye, boxing up her clothes to bring to the homeless shelter—and everything since then—was all wrong, too.
I demanded answers. “Are there hidden cameras or microphones in here?”
“No.”
“Then tell me.”
“It could jeopardize everything.”
“Afraid you won’t win the People’s Choice Award?”
“I don’t mean me. I was talking about you. Your family.”
“My family?”
“Please, Brooke,” she begged. “Don’t ask me anything. This whole thing is almost over.”
“I gave up my life for four months. I gave up Junior Prom, field trips to colleges, working at the beach for the summer, hanging out with my best friend…my sister could have died…we killed our pig…” I held in the tears. I was not about to give Miss America the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
“I gave things up too,” Prudence said.
“Like your real family? Your real mother?”
She nodded.
“You chose to give them up,” I told her. “I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“I never asked you to.”
“Those soldiers…they’re actors?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“Yes.”
“Is your real name Prudence?”
“No.”
“Sarah?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“No.”
“I snuck in an iPod and felt like a douche bag. You snuck in the freaking Apple Company.”
“I was allowed to.”
“Good for you. I was allowed to wear painful shoes that give me blisters and a corset that cuts through my ribs. Looks like I win.”
“This isn’t a contest.”
“Really? I thought that was the point of pretending—”
The doorknob jiggled.
“Go away,” Prudence called.
“It’s me, Carl. Let me in.” He knocked hard against the door.
“I’ll be out in a minute!”
The next idea hit the back of my head with such force, it nearly knocked me out of my leather boots. I don’t even know why it came to me at that moment. Maybe it was the loud knocking. Maybe it was the laughter and music from earlier that evening that would have woken anyone from a deep sleep. Anyway, there it was, smacking me in the head.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked.
“What?”
“Your new baby sister, Camellia. Where is she?”
“Sleeping.”
“Where?”
“In my parents’ room.”
But those people weren’t her parents.
“Why wasn’t your baby sister at the party? Why does she always stay hidden away?”
“I told you. The pollen—”
“I think I’ll pay her a visit.” I started across the room with my lantern swinging, forming crazy shadows on the storybook walls.
“No!” she shouted, jumping like a guard in front of the locked door.
“Why not, Sarah?”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Why can’t I see the baby?”
She squeezed her lips together and shook her head.
“She’s not real, is she?” I asked. “I saw her, but she’s not real. That’s why I haven’t seen her since that first day. What is she, one of those baby dolls that freaky women buy on Creepy Fake Babies dot com? My sister and I stayed up all night for you. We thought your mother might die. God, that’s sick. Pretending to have a baby. Pretending to have a family that isn’t yours.”
“It’s for the show.”
“What about the other families?” I asked. What about Wendell? my mind screamed. “Are they just like you?”
“I only know about our family. Our backstory. We aren’t allowed to discuss anything with anyone else.”
“What else does your backstory say? That you get to mess with anyone you want? How much are they paying you to be a bitch to Nanny and Josiah? How much are they paying you to mess with me?”
“Don’t…”
“My family has a backstory. A real one. We came out here to save our house. Did you know my mother passed away a year ago? Did you ever think for one second that I was a real person with a real life?”
“Of course. That’s why I’m here.”
“What do you mean, that’s why you’re here?”
Carl banged at the door again.
The thought of Prudence’s cell phone, her iPod, and that laptop wouldn’t leave my mind. I knew I should be asking important questions, questions about Wendell, the Duffys, the other families, the cameramen…so many I could have filled a book. But there was one question in particular that kept gnawing at me, and I needed to ask it: “How do you keep them charged? Your cell phone and stuff?”
She whispered, “Electricity.”
It occurred to me that the only upstairs room I’d seen was the playroom, except for the five seconds I had stood over the fake baby in the fake parents’ bedroom. I’d never taken a tour through the other bedrooms, or the bathrooms…
“You have indoor plumbing, don’t you? You’ve never even used your outhouse. That’s why it’s so clean.”
“Please, Brooke…”
The tremble in her voice was
both pathetic and satisfying. I almost wished for tears to roll down her cheeks, to glisten by the light of the lantern. But she didn’t cry.
“No more questions,” she said. “We can’t have another conversation like this one. Not until the end of the show.”
The show.
Prudence was awfully good at playing her part, but I would be better. From here on out, I would play the part of a girl who has learned to be autonomous. A role made just for me.
“Fine, Prudence,” I said, opening the door. Carl stood there, the camera on his shoulder like a scientist’s oversized rat. My voice was without emotion and my words were clear as I told Prudence, “Not having any more conversation with one another is the perfect way to end this venture.”
I stormed down the candlelit hallway and down the stairs. Carl came after me. On the porch, Wendell and his family were saying goodnight to the fake Mr. and Mrs. Miller. Both Carl and Rusty now pinned their cameras on me like they’d caught something extraordinary on their radar.
Wendell touched my arm. “Brooke?”
I yanked it away.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“I don’t know. Did you?”
“I don’t understand…”
Mrs. Murphy told Wendell’s younger brothers, “Get into the wagon, boys. Wendell, we’ll wait for you there.” She and Mr. Murphy and the boys walked over to the wagon.
The fake Miller parents went into the house and closed the door. The parlor curtains were pulled shut, leaving us in the dim light of the porch lanterns. I wondered what would happen behind those curtains. A special conference call with the producers on SKYPE?
“You know what, Wendell?” I said. “I don’t understand either. And what’s really funny is, I don’t want to.”
Dad came through the front door and onto the porch with my sister. “Brooke?”
I thumped down the porch steps and made my way down the path. Dad and Rebecca Lynn followed me, and Wendell followed them.
“Wait,” Wendell called.
I kept walking.
“Brooke. Please.”
Dad pulled Rebecca Lynn by the arm and led her down the driveway past me. She asked, “What’s wrong, Daddy?” and Dad responded with “Don’t worry about your sister. She can take care of herself.”