The Promise Girls

by Marie Bostwick

  Trina bent down low and adjusted the telescope lens, bringing everything into focus—stars, planets, and constellations. She began searching for Cassiopeia, moving the scope very slowly, a fraction of a degree at a time, in the direction where she thought it ought to be.

  Why did they have to start fighting again?

  Trina had thought her mother was going to die when she was in the hospital. It was awful and scary, especially when she then recalled all the times she had thought about, not exactly in a wishing sort of way but more just considering, what life would be like if she didn’t have a mother. At least not her mother.

  But when Meg came home, it seemed like the thing Trina never quite dared to wish for had actually come true—she had a new mother. One she liked a lot more.

  This mother listened, laughed, painted, and understood. She was fun, cool, and available. The way her dad looked at this mother made Trina know that he was happy now, too, and that everything was good, for all of them.

  But after a couple of weeks, it occurred to Trina that this wasn’t a new mother after all.

  As Meg regained memories, so did Trina. She remembered the mother she had adored, her best friend, the mother who had organized art projects, games nights, and camping trips. The mother who listened, laughed, painted, and understood. She remembered the way that her mother and father used to look at each other, like they were sharing a secret without uttering a word. She remembered the sounds, late at night, when they thought she was asleep, coming from their room, sounds of soft laughter and whispered words, of unintelligible urgencies that Trina could paraphrase but not translate, not understanding the details, only knowing it meant that her parents loved each other, and her by extension, and that everything was safe and she could count on them always.

  In the last few weeks, it seemed that they were headed back to that safe place, that everyone was where and how they were supposed to be—her mother, her father, herself.

  Where had they been before that? She couldn’t say. Maybe nowhere. Maybe it was like the stars, more visible on some days than others, but always, always there. She liked that theory best. It was comforting, for a time.

  But now they were fighting again. And she couldn’t find Cassiopeia.

  Trina stood up, straightening her spine and lifting her face to the night, searching the skies and blinking back tears. She couldn’t see it.

  She heard something, a squeal followed by laughter. It was coming from her mother’s house. Lamplight on the shades backlit the windows of Meg’s tiny house like a scrim, illuminating a crazy pantomime of female figures, dancing, twisting, and leaping like witches roiling round a caldron.

  As that first squeal and ripple of laughter was followed by others, becoming louder and more sustained, voices separate in cadence and pitch overlapping into a single hysterical howl, Trina walked toward the house, drawn by curiosity and her inability to picture what was going on behind the curtain.

  No one answered Trina’s knock. There was so much noise coming from inside that probably they hadn’t heard her. She opened the door a few inches and stuck her head inside, jaw dropping at what she saw.

  The walls were covered with paintings, at least a dozen of them. These weren’t her mother’s canvases but big rectangles of white butcher paper covered with pictures of birds and bunnies, owls and alligators, flowers, squiggles, and shooting stars, all executed with quick, broad swipes of paint in bold, vibrant colors—red, blue, yellow, pink, purple, and neon green—the same colors she now saw on her mother’s and aunts’ fingers, faces, and even their clothes. Crazy!

  But not as crazy as the way that Meg and the others were chasing one another around that tiny room, dodging and weaving around chairs and tables, sometimes knocking them over, roaring with laughter in a raucous game of tag that had no discernible rules and only one goal, to catch somebody and mark their face or body with streaks of paint without being marked yourself, like a pack of preschoolers counting coup.

  “Mom?” Trina called as her mother pirouetted past the door with Avery in hot pursuit, too bent on escape to see or hear her daughter. Trina tried again. “Mom!”

  Still no response.

  Trina opened the door completely, stepped into the room and into the path of her aunt Joanie, who leapt off the window seat, howling a war cry as she attempted to ambush her sisters. She landed on Trina instead, leaving a big pink handprint on Trina’s T-shirt.

  “Aunt Joanie! Are you insane? I just bought this!”

  The sound of Trina’s indignant cry startled the sisters, freezing them into momentary silence and immobility as they stared at Joanie’s pink handprint on the belly of Trina’s Forever 21 tee, before collapsing into gales of hysterical laughter and one another’s arms.

  “What is wrong with you guys? Didn’t you hear me say this was a new shirt?”

  Trina spun around to face her mother. “Mom, seriously! What’s going on? Have you guys been smoking weed or something?”

  This question brought forth a fresh wave of hysteria. Meg, one hand covered with orange paint and the other with green, approached her daughter, gasping to catch her breath even as she blinked tears of laughter from her eyes.

  “Oh, honey! No weed. Just wine. A couple of bottles. That’s all. We’re finger painting.”

  “Finger painting?”

  Avery started to giggle. Meg pressed her lips together, struggling to regain her composure. “Yes. But . . . well . . . things kind of got out of control.”

  “You think?” Trina threw out her arms and looked down at her stomach. “I paid sixteen bucks for this shirt!”

  “I’m sorry,” Joanie said, grinning even as she apologized. “I’ll get you a new shirt. Although, personally, I think it looks better this way.” She started to laugh again, giving herself up to it so thoroughly that she could barely choke out her words.

  Joanie’s laughter was a contagion. Her sisters quickly succumbed. Trina, hungry for justice but surrounded by madwomen and derision, stamped her foot impotently and started toward the door.

  “Trina! Don’t go! We’re sorry.” Meg walked toward her daughter, arms open wide. “Don’t go away mad, honey. Let me make it up to you. Come on and paint with us.”

  “Paint with you?” Trina gasped. “Are you kidding? I’d rather—”

  Before Trina could finish, Meg clasped her in her arms and held her close, leaving two more handprints, one orange and one green, on the back of Trina’s shirt.

  She squealed and wriggled from her mother’s grasp, mouth gaping as she realized her mother had done it on purpose. Avery, with tears tracking down her cheeks, swept her arm to the right, dipped her fingers into blue paint, and wiped a line down Trina’s nose and twin thunderbolts on her left and right cheeks.

  “War paint!” she cackled.

  Trina howled, thrust her fingers into a pie pan of purple, and chased Avery around the table and into the kitchen. Meg and Joanie came right behind them, laughing.

  * * *

  The noise from the tiny house was loud enough that Asher heard it over the baseball game he’d put on for company while paying bills. He went outside to make sure everything was okay.

  Standing just a few steps from the back door, he looked across the yard, saw shadows projected onto the window shades, heard the hoots of laughter. He couldn’t see precisely what was happening but he understood what it meant.

  His wife was making memories, new ones, to replace the lost and augment the found, something to share with people she loved. What a good idea.

  He stood there for some long minutes, looking toward Meg’s house, picking out his wife’s and daughter’s voices from the rest, letting the sound wash over him, and thinking.

  When he made up his mind, Asher put his hands in his pockets and hinged his head high, his face bathed in starshine. He turned his gaze to the northern sky, searching the heavens for something familiar.

  There it was. Cassiopeia.

  He lifted his hand skyward and traced the co
nstellation’s distinctive “w” shape, touching each star with the tip of his finger, then went inside.

  It was past midnight when Meg finally padded quietly across the lawn toward the darkened house and her husband’s bed. When she got inside she found the bedroom door was locked. She jiggled the knob and called Asher’s name, but softly so as not to wake Trina. When he didn’t answer, she gave up and went home, supposing he must have fallen asleep after all.

  Alone in her tiny house, her narrow bed, Meg tried to sleep, but couldn’t. A piece of her was missing. And so she lay there for a long time, staring into the darkness, waiting for morning.

  Chapter 33

  Until it started to buzz in the dark, Hal didn’t realize he’d forgotten to turn off his cell phone. He cursed groggily as his hand explored the nightstand, then put the phone to his ear.

  “Who and what?” he growled.

  “It’s Lynn. Did I wake you?”

  “It’s okay,” he said sarcastically. “I had to get up to answer the phone. What time is it?”

  “Oops. Only five-thirty your time. I forgot about the time difference. Sorry.”

  He rolled to his side and lifted the shade on the bedroom window. It was just as dark outside as in. “You are not forgiven. Ever.”

  “Think of it this way, you’ve got a jump on the day. The early bird and all.”

  “Lynn. You know the only thing worse than being woken from a sound sleep by a phone call at five-thirty?”

  “When the person calling is a morning person and you’re a night person?”

  “Bingo.” He dropped the shade, rested his head back on the pillow, the phone still held to his ear, eyes still closed. “So? What’s wrong?”

  “How do you know something is wrong?”

  “Because you never call with good news.”

  “That’s not true. I told you last month that my mechanic replaced my bad muffler for free. And the last time we talked I told you that the guy I met down in Venice Beach called and invited me to go to see Eli Young at the House of Blues when I get back to LA.”

  “I meant good news for me.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Hal yawned. “So? What’s the disaster du jour?”

  “Well, it’s not a disaster exactly. And it’s not just one thing. Hang on, let me get my list.”

  He clapped his hand over his eyes. She had a list. A list of not exactly disasters. And she wanted to discuss them before the sun was up.

  “Okay. Got it,” she said. “First, have you looked at the bills lately? Or the books?”

  Of course he hadn’t. That was part of why he’d hired Lynn in the first place, because the sound of calculator keys clicking was music to her ears and a well-balanced budget made her go weak in the knees. Which was great. Every small business needs that person. As long as it didn’t have to be him.

  “Nope. How bad are they?”

  “Bad enough that you’d better have a movie in the can by the end of the year. And it better be good enough that somebody will pay to watch it.”

  For all the urgency in Lynn’s voice and message, Hal wasn’t overly concerned. She could have been describing their financial position in any given year. Stunted Genius frequently teetered on the brink of financial ruin. Then they’d finish the project, enter some film festival, build the buzz, find a distributor, and everything would be fine. Until the next time it wasn’t. Lynn was a worrywart. What she was describing was just the normal business cycle, at least for them.

  “So, we’ll finish the movie by the end of the year. Next?”

  “Are you sure? Because that brings me to my second point. After you’ve exhausted the barbecue and mini-golf options, there’s not a whole lot to do in rural Georgia after the sun goes down. So I’ve been spending my nights with my computer, looking over the footage you shot so far. I’m just not seeing it, Hal.”

  “Seeing what?”

  “The movie. The only really interesting stuff is of Avery—can’t go wrong with a mermaid. Apart from that, you’ve got forty hours of tape and no story.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said in a sarcastically patient tone. “That’s why I suspended filming, remember? There was no point in going forward until I could convince Joanie to cooperate.”

  “And is she?”

  He draped it over his head and smiled, thinking about Joanie.

  “I’m making progress.”

  “How much progress?” she prodded.

  Hal hesitated, twisted his lips, thinking. “She’ll be ready to bring the cameras back in soon. Maybe another couple of weeks.”

  “Okay. Will you be ready to bring the cameras in by then?”

  He shifted himself up on the pillows. “Of course,” he said, a little annoyed and more awake now. “I’ve put years of my life and every dime I have into this project. Why would I want to keep the cameras away?”

  “Because this isn’t just another movie for you, Hal. I can tell by the way you’ve been talking about her since you sent the crew home. And not just Joanie—all the sisters. The son, too. You talk about them like they’re family.”

  “It’s just because I’m getting to know them better. But I’m not emotionally involved, if that’s what you’re asking. Not to that degree. I’m up here because I want to make a movie, not because I need new friends.”

  “Just wanted to make sure that we’re still on the same page. And we are,” she said, though she didn’t sound completely convinced. “We’re making this movie no matter what, documenting the facts and putting them on film without holding anything back. Because that’s what we do.”

  “Lynn, what are you talking about? It’s too early to be mysterious.”

  “Well, it’s like I told you before I flew out here—everything Minerva told you is sort of true—or at least has some seed of truth to it—but there’s always more to it than what she told you. Or less.”

  “Like what? Give me specifics.”

  “For example, her birth name was Melanie Ann Weldon, just like she told you. And, she was a singer. Apparently a pretty good one—sang solos in the school choir and such. But nobody remembers anything about her being discovered at a radio station talent show, or getting a scholarship to study voice in Atlanta and then taking Minerva Promise as her stage name. In a town this small, you’d think somebody would have remembered.

  “I could confirm that she was raised by a single mother, Betty Jean Weldon, but Betty Jean was a barmaid at the local nightclub, not a singer like Minerva said. Sounds like she might have done a little business after hours, if you know what I mean, but I can’t confirm that. People aren’t too keen to talk to strangers around here, especially if they’re from Los Angeles.

  “But I’ve combed through every issue of the local paper from the beginning of the Korean conflict to the end and couldn’t find an obit notice for a Daniel James Weldon, or anybody else with that last name.”

  “So,” Hal said. “Maybe Minerva invented a war hero father to cover up the fact that she was illegitimate? She wouldn’t have been the first one to do that, especially if she was born in the early 1950s.”

  “Which brings me to my next discovery. Minerva was born in 1959, not 1954. She’s five years younger than she claims to be.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “One hundred percent. The only person I was able to win over in this town was a lady named Nancy. She started working as a secretary at the elementary school when she was eighteen. Now she’s seventy, doesn’t ever plan to retire. She’s amazing, Hal, remembers every single student who ever came through the door, including Minerva, who started first grade in 1965. That was the same year Nancy started working at the school. Which means Minerva is only fifty-eight years old, not sixty-three like she’s been telling everyone.”

  “But why? Who tacks an extra five years to their age?”

  “Nobody I know,” Lynn said. “I’ve been celebrating the anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday for the last four years.”

  Lynn chuc
kled at her own joke, but Hal didn’t hear her. He was too busy trying to poke holes in Lynn’s theory. Nothing she was telling him made sense.

  “How can you be sure she didn’t mix up Minerva with somebody else?” he asked. “Or get the year wrong? Even if she’s as sharp as you say, who could remember every kid who came through the door for the last fifty-odd years?”

  “Nancy can,” Lynn said confidently. “I tested her. They didn’t start printing yearbooks at the school until about forty years ago, but I showed her pictures of a couple of dozen kids picked at random and she was able to name every one of them and tell me the year they started school. I’m telling you, Hal, she’s got a photographic memory.

  “And get this: I asked Nancy if I could see Minerva’s school records. She said she couldn’t let me see them personally or make any copies, but she said she’d take a look in the archives and tell me if she saw anything strange. But when she went to look, she couldn’t find Minerva’s records, not for 1965 or any other year.

  “Here’s something else that’s weird; Joanie was born in England in 1979, but I found a source that swears they saw Minerva on a street in Atlanta in 1978 and that she was very, very pregnant.”

  “Case of mistaken identity? A crowded street in a big city—could have been somebody who looked like her.”

  “I don’t think so. This person says they got close, maybe ten feet away, and that Minerva turned away and ducked into the nearest office building when she spotted her.”

  A sliver of sunlight was showing on the horizon. Hal stared out the window, trying to make sense of all this new information.

  “So, if she was pregnant a year before she had Joanie . . . That would mean there was a fourth Promise sister.”

  “Or brother,” Lynn offered. “It could have been a boy. The big question is, what happened to that baby?”