Starlight on Willow Lake

by Susan Wiggs

  Milo regarded her placidly, seemingly unmoved by her bullying. He turned the information sheet toward her. “Kittens and puppies?”

  She glared at the display of large-eyed adorableness. “Take a card from the hall table on your way out. Blaine Hopper, my business manager. Tell him to make a fifty-dollar donation.”

  “We’re looking for a commitment of three-fifty,” Milo said. “That gets you a plaque on a cat cage at the shelter.”

  “I don’t need a plaque. One hundred dollars.”

  “Two-fifty.” He didn’t waver. “And we’ll put your name on the Happy Helpers donor wall.”

  “Two hundred,” she snapped. “And you can find your own way out.”

  Milo grinned from ear to ear. For a moment he didn’t look so insufferably dorky. He just looked...clever and smart. “That’s awesome, Mrs. Bellamy. You’ll be glad to know a donation at that level gets you a plaque on a dog food bin.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I don’t need—” She interrupted herself and rotated toward Ruby. “Put the child’s name on the plaque.”

  Ruby lit up. “My name? Really? Cool.”

  “Will do, Mrs. B.”

  “Please don’t call me Mrs. B. I am not Mrs. anything. My name is Alice.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Can we call you Alice, too?” asked Ruby.

  Mrs. Bellamy aimed a monstrous glare at her.

  “Ma’am?” Ruby added meekly.

  “That would be fine. Alice it is. It’s better that way. ‘Mrs.’ implies I’m married, which I’m not. I’m a widow, and I must say I don’t happen to be fond of the designation.”

  “Thanks from the animals, Alice,” said Milo. “And remember, there are always pets in need of homes. So if you ever—”

  “Highly doubtful,” said Alice.

  “I understand. I’ll see myself out.” Milo grinned at Cara. “I guess we can look at your Justin Bieber collection later.”

  “Cara can’t stand Justin Bieber,” Ruby said.

  “It’s all a front. She’s obsessed with the guy.” And with that, Milo was gone.

  “Cheeky young man,” said Alice with a sniff.

  “He’s all right,” Cara said, surprising herself by defending him. Milo was known to be a loner at school, not really a part of any group. She found herself wondering if he chose to be friendless, or if he just ended up that way. She wondered if sometimes he felt so lonely he wanted to scream. It was a feeling she could relate to, although at Avalon High and at the bakery, she had made some good friends. Thank God they were staying here another year or more.

  “Are you taking piano lessons?” Alice asked Ruby.

  “No,” said Ruby. “I don’t know how to play.”

  “Well, this is a fine instrument. It’s not a toy.”

  “Then why is it called playing?”

  That made Alice pause. Cara could see Ruby bracing herself for the dragon lady to roar. Instead, Alice remarked, “That’s a good question. It’s simply a manner of speaking.”

  “Oh.” Ruby looked mystified. She dangled her feet, swinging herself back and forth on the piano stool.

  Alice moved the wheelchair closer. “First things first. You have to sit at the proper height. You’re too low. Cara, help your sister adjust the seat. It needs to be about four inches higher.”

  Cara was as startled as Ruby looked. Neither asked questions, though. She used the lever under the seat to raise it.

  “Your arms should form an L shape when you rest your hands on the keyboard,” Alice explained.

  Ruby placed both hands on the shiny keys. “Like this?”

  “Yes. Now, think about your posture. Sit up straight, shoulders back and down. Good. The way you hold your hands is very important, too. Pretend you’re picking up a tennis ball with a loose grip. Roll your thumbs over just a bit—yes. And there you have it.”

  Ruby looked delighted to be sitting there, poised to begin playing. “Now what?” she asked. “When do I get to make music?”

  “How about now?” asked Alice. “I started all my children with a simple little song. Touch that white key, right there. No, the one next to it. That’s middle C. Memorize it. That key is your home base.”

  Ruby played the note. Cara moved quietly away, gobsmacked by what she was seeing. This was the longest Alice had ever gone without getting cranky or having a hissy fit about something or other. She wasn’t smiling or anything like that, but she was acting kind of...well, almost pleasant. Maybe she was coming around.

  She explained to Ruby how to play three simple two-note intervals. After a few false starts, Ruby got the hang of it, and before long, the notes came together in a simple song that actually sounded like music. The first time she got through it smoothly, she looked over at Alice with her eyes full of wonder.

  “Can you show me more?” she asked softly.

  “Of course I can. But not yet. You must practice this piece until it’s automatic. It’s based on a simple theme by Mozart, but we’ll keep adding to it until you have the whole piece down.”

  They worked together on some other things. Cara stuck around, fascinated by the shift in dynamics. She picked up a coffee-table book, a heavy, oversize one with crisp photos, and started paging through it. She could understand the appeal of coffee-table books. They were colorful and didn’t require you to think or judge or read too many words. You just had to flip through the pages and enjoy the show.

  Cara herself didn’t care for coffee-table books. They were big and unwieldy and they took up space. Besides, they portrayed everything in such a totally unrealistic bullshit way. The books always seemed to display things like food a regular person would never be able to prepare, clothes no real-shaped woman would ever actually wear and beautiful places in the world she would never be able to travel.

  The one she was paging through now had a beautifully formed ocean wave on the cover, with a tiny figure of a girl on a surfboard in the tunnel of the wave. Inside, there were photos of a sun-gold young couple, holding hands and racing into the surf, looking impossibly flawless. They were lean and blond, laughing with abandon, as though they hadn’t a care in the world. The next few pages showed off the same couple in equally exciting settings—diving off a cliff into a pristine waterfall, skiing down a mountain with the distinctive crag of the Matterhorn in the background, riding horses in an emerald forest, walking through an ancient castle at sunset.

  They looked like the most perfect couple ever created, but Cara reminded herself they were models or actors. That was their job, to look perfect.

  She browsed through a few more pages of the book called Journey, noting the captions here and there—Cap d’Antibes, France. Bora Bora. Mount Rainier. There was a close-up of the perfect couple under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and that was when Cara finally realized what she was looking at.

  “These are pictures of you,” she said loudly.

  Alice’s chair careened away from the piano. The dragon lady stare was back. “I beg your pardon.”

  “These pictures in this book. They’re pictures of you.” She held up the cover. “I thought it was a celebrity thing.”

  “Oh,” said Alice, “that. My children had it made while I was in the hospital. A pictorial memoir of all the things I’ll never be able to do again.”

  Cara smoothed her hand down a double-page spread of Alice poised atop a mountain, draped in climbing gear, a grin of triumph on her face. “Yeah, but at least you got to do it.”

  “I want to see.” Ruby jumped up and came to peer over her shoulder. “Wow, look at you, Alice. You know how to do lots of cool stuff.”

  “Not anymore,” she stated.

  “But you still know how.”

  “And what possible good can that do for me?”

  One thing Alice m
ight not know yet about Ruby—she had an answer for everything. Now she looked the woman in the eye and said, “You get to remember what it was like. You get to tell people about it, if you want. Or you could teach us, like you’re teaching me piano. If you want,” she repeated emphatically.

  Alice looked as if she was going to spit out galvanized nails. “You’re very precocious, aren’t you?”

  Ruby ignored the look and the comment as she pointed out a picture of Alice swimming in the middle of a lake. “Do you get scared when your feet can’t touch the bottom?”

  “Of course not. That’s the whole point of swimming.” Alice drilled her with a stare. “Isn’t it?”

  Ruby shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I don’t know how to swim.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re eight years old. You should know how to swim.”

  Ruby folded her arms. “Well, I don’t.”

  Alice glared at Cara. “And you?”

  “Sure. I learned when I was little. My dad taught me. Ruby hasn’t learned because she’s scared of the water.”

  “You live next to a lake now, and there’s a pool on the property,” Alice said to Ruby. “You have to learn to swim, for safety’s sake.”

  “Will you teach me?” Ruby asked.

  “I can’t possibly—” Alice stopped. She stared fiercely at the kid. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Young lady, I don’t even have the use of my arms and legs anymore. If I can get in the water without fear, then so can you.”

  “But—”

  “No more buts. I said I would see what I can arrange. I’m through talking about it.”

  Mrs. Armentrout came in with the day’s mail. “Would you like to look through it now, or shall I put it in the study?”

  “These young ladies can help me go through it.”

  Cara tried not to feel annoyed by Alice’s assumption that she and Ruby had nothing better to do. But then again, they didn’t. Now that the school year was winding down, Cara barely had any homework; the teachers just seemed to be marking time until summer arrived in all its glory. She’d put in for more hours at the bakery, but at the moment, she had nothing better to do than to help out here.

  She took the stack of mail and held up each piece so Alice could see it. Most of it went to the recycle pile—catalogs and brochures, envelopes stuffed with coupons, special offers from credit card companies and postcards from grinning real-estate agents.

  The bills, bank statements and financial documents went into a stack for the bookkeeper, who came every Friday. There was some stuff for Cara’s mom—mostly bills, it looked like—and the other live-in help.

  “Look, it’s a postcard from Ivy.” Ruby held it up. “It’s a picture of the...” She frowned at the words. “Jar...din des...”

  “Jardin des Tuileries,” said Alice, the words rolling off her tongue. “That’s how the French say it.” She had Ruby repeat the pronunciation a few times. “There. You sound like a French girl.” She didn’t smile but there was a happy-sounding note in her voice. She said it in both French and English.

  “You’re really good at French,” Cara remarked. She had been taking it as an elective for the past three years, and it had become one of her favorite subjects in school.

  Alice’s expression turned sour. “Yes. Well. Not nearly as good as my late husband, as it happens.”

  “Why do you say late?” Ruby asked bluntly. “When he’s dead.”

  Cara was appalled. “Rube—”

  “That’s a fair question,” Alice said, and she didn’t seem mad anymore. “He’s not late, is he? He’s dead.”

  Cara diverted their attention to the rest of the mail, sorting it into stacks for the household. Bored, Ruby wandered off to play in the yard. Watching her through the window, Alice said, “The child needs a swing.”

  “That’d be fun, assuming it doesn’t scare her.”

  “I’ll have one hung from that nice big hickory tree over there.”

  “Sounds good.” The bottom two envelopes in the mail delivery were thick ones. When Cara saw what they were, her heart skipped a beat. A blush lit her cheeks on fire.

  “What’s that?” asked Alice. The woman didn’t miss much.

  “These two are addressed to me.” Apparently, Cara didn’t hide them quickly enough.

  “You have a letter from MIT?” asked Alice. “And is that one from Harvard?”

  Cara tossed them unopened into the recycle pile. Her heart seemed to go with them, hitting bottom with a paper thud. “Junk mail,” she stated. “I don’t need to open them.”

  “What do you suppose they say?”

  “Just the same as all the other junk mail. Computer-generated marketing.”

  “There have been others?”

  Cara nodded. She didn’t really want to talk about it.

  “What others?”

  “Columbia, Cornell, Rensselaer, NYU, Rutgers.” She counted them off on her fingers.

  “And what sort of marketing is this?”

  Cara shrugged her shoulders, wishing Alice would quit with the nosy questions. “I started getting stuff after we took a test at school. Waste of trees.”

  “Why do you say that? Aren’t you interested in going to college?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You strike me as a bright girl.”

  “Bright enough to know these colleges aren’t for people like me.”

  “And what sort of person might that be?”

  “People who can’t afford to spend four years studying stuff like ‘Zombies in Popular Culture’ and endlessly discussing ‘The Rape of the Lock.’”

  “I’ve always thought ‘The Rape of the Lock’ was a very good poem. Thank you for trivializing the entire academic experience.” Alice sniffed. “May I see one of those letters?”

  Cara shrugged again. “Which one?”

  “What about Harvard? That’s my alma mater.”

  “You went there?”

  “Don’t look so surprised. I think I’m insulted.”

  “You speak French, play the piano, have a bronze medal...and a Harvard degree? Most people would be satisfied just accomplishing one of those things.”

  “I’ve always liked a challenge.”

  Cara decided to be blunt. She nodded at the wheelchair. “Just not that challenge.”

  “You’re a smart aleck.”

  “So are you.”

  “Read the letter to me.”

  “They’re all starting to sound the same.” Cara heaved a sigh and tore open the envelope. She’d been over this several times with her mom. She didn’t need to go through it again with Alice. It was nice and flattering that the top colleges in the country had noticed her test scores. But she knew better than to believe a test score wrapped in wishful thinking could actually turn into a future.

  Still, the letterhead made her heart beat faster. She took the cover letter from the envelope. Even the thick, creamy stationery felt rich in her hands. She read the now-familiar text. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was interested in receiving her application, blah, blah, blah, and she was invited to attend an informational evening with alumni, learning what her life would be like as a student at the nation’s oldest and most venerated university...

  It was a marketing ploy. Nothing more. Still, she felt the most intense urge as she read the magic words. She wanted to go to college, wanted it so much that she felt a lump in her throat. Though she tried to keep a poker face while sharing the letter, she couldn’t quite manage, because Alice stared at her with a knowing light in her eyes.

  “This isn’t just something to be tossed aside,” Alice said. “They are seriously interested in you.”

  “Hello? Dirt-poor h
ere. We were one day away from being homeless when we came here.”

  “What?”

  Oops. “Nothing. Please don’t tell my mom I said anything.”

  “Now that you’ve said it, you’ll need to explain.”

  Cara set down the letter. “She ended up with massive bills after my dad died. Do you have any idea how much it costs to die of diabetes-related complications? And on top of that, he was being deported because he was Scottish and his time ran out and he didn’t have a green card. There’s probably more to the story, which my mom won’t tell me because she doesn’t want to worry me, but what the hell. I worry.” Tears pushed at the backs of her eyes, burning them. “After high school, I’m going to work. I’ll go part-time to community college at night or whatever and work my way through a degree program. But this stuff—this Harvard and MIT stuff—isn’t for me. I won’t waste my time even pretending it could happen.”

  “I’m sorry. But there’s something you should ask yourself.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you using your lack of financial resources as a legitimate roadblock, or is it an excuse to avoid doing something that scares you?”

  12

  Sometimes, Mason reflected as he sat at the head of the boardroom table in his Manhattan office, making a business deal was as satisfying as really good sex. Well, almost, he amended, checking out the rack on the woman who leaned over his shoulder to sign the agreement. Lisa Dorfman, his firm’s legal counsel, was the only person he knew who could make solar storage cells look sexy. Despite her name, she looked more like an NFL cheerleader—but with the best legal brain in the business. She had a disarming stare, which she used to good effect. Mason was one of the few who knew she had a glass eye. And one of the few who knew what had caused it.

  Ivan Bondi, the founder of the company, looked every bit as pleased as his investors as he went over to the sideboard and pulled a bottle of Dom Pérignon from an ice bucket. “I know it’s early in the day,” he said, “but I’d like to thank everyone. This technology is a game changer, and your commitment is enabling us to go forward.” The cork made a cheerful pop, and he poured a glass for everyone.