Just One Wish (19 page)

“You’d better be. It’s our day to spend with Jeremy.”

He didn’t need to remind me about that. We were all taking off from school and work to spend the last day before surgery with Jeremy. “I’ll be there,” I told him, “and I’ll bring him his special surprise.”

 

The trip to the Raleighs’ house was uneventful. I sat in the car wishing we weren’t backtracking on I-15. Steve and Adam talked, getting caught up with one another, but in a stiff manner. I didn’t quite know what to make of Adam. He seemed to both resent and admire his brother, and I didn’t know how such contradictory emotions could fit together.

Finally, as the clock crept toward eleven, we pulled up to a large stucco and stone house flanked on either side by spindly Palo Verdes. The porch light shone dimly against the front door, dwarfed by the interior lights. Adam pulled into the four-car garage, got out, and retrieved Steve’s bag. “Looks like someone is up, after all.” Adam tried to feign surprise but didn’t really do a good job of it. I knew he’d brought us here because he wanted Steve and his parents to meet. Adam swung Steve’s bag over his shoulder and walked inside without giving either of us a backward glance.

Steve and I dragged ourselves out of the car. He put his hand on my back, guiding me to the door, but he did it so tensely I wondered whether he was using me as a shield.

We walked through a laundry room and into a sprawling kitchen. A stone floor spread out before us. Nothing cluttered up the black marble countertops—a kitchen clearly not frequented by six-year-olds. I took it all in for a moment, then turned to Steve’s parents. They sat at an elegant table waiting for us.

I don’t know what I had expected. Perhaps people who looked glamorous enough to give birth to a TV star. They looked like regular parents, though. Mr. Raleigh was tall and still fairly fit, with a receding hairline. He smiled at us, but his wrinkles gave him a stern expression. Mrs. Raleigh had blond hair that still looked perfectly coiffed this late at night, and she wore traces of makeup. Only the extra weight she carried saved her from looking immaculate. It softened her and made her look huggable. Steve just nodded in their direction, though. “Mom. Dad.”

His mother stood and walked toward us, her glance switching back and forth between Steve and me. She seemed not to know what to do with her hands. “Hello, Steven.” Her glance settled on me. “Are you going to introduce us to your friend?”

Even though I could sense the tension in his body, Steve’s voice came out casual. “This is Annika Truman. We were driving to her home in Nevada when we ran into car problems. . . .”

His gaze turned to his brother, who leaned up against the kitchen counter. “I called Adam, and he insisted we come here for the night.”

Mrs. Raleigh forced a smile. “Oh, you’re meeting her parents. It must be serious, then.” She examined me more thoroughly. “Well, it’s nice we get to meet her too, even if it only was because your car broke down—”

“It’s not like that,” Steve said.

I quickly added, “He’s not going to my house to meet my parents. He’s going to meet my little brother. Jeremy is a big fan of the show, and he’s having surgery on Friday. Steve agreed to come and talk to him for a while.”

“Oh.” Her tone was so gentle you almost missed the edge to it. “You’re going to go spend time with Annika’s brother. How nice.” She cast a glance back in Adam’s direction, I presume to see if he felt slighted by this snub.

“My brother is six years old,” I said. It felt as though I was inserting random facts into the conversation, but I wanted to make it clear he couldn’t possibly be Adam’s rival.

Then no one said anything. I could nearly taste the tension in the room. Mr. Raleigh sat silently at the table, one hand clenched, watching his son. Adam split his gazes between his father and his brother, looking at them with equal parts hope and reproach. He wanted something to happen; I didn’t know what. Steve’s mom didn’t watch him at all—she kept examining me. She hadn’t decided whether to like or resent me.

I couldn’t see Steve’s facial expression because he stood behind me, but I silently cursed him for not giving me any warning as to what I should say and how I should act. I’d expected him to tell his parents we’d just met, but he didn’t offer any further details about me. In fact, he didn’t say anything else.

Apparently I was the only one here who wasn’t somehow emotionally charged, which meant I should be the one to speak next. “Thank you for letting us stay here,” I said. “We appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” Mrs. Raleigh said. “Our home is always open to you.” She smiled as she said it, but I could tell her words were an accusation, not an invitation. She was hurt he hadn’t come of his own free will. “So how long have the two of you been dating?”

Steve said, “Not long,” then put his hand on my back again. “Look, it’s late and Annika is tired. Why don’t you give her the guest room, and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

Mr. Raleigh finally spoke. “We haven’t seen you for three years and you want to rush off to bed?”

Steve let out a slow breath. “You have to work in the morning. I figured you’d rather sleep, but if you want to talk—fine. What did you want to talk about?”

Mrs. Raleigh took a step toward her husband. “We’re all tired. We’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.” She turned back to me. “I’ll show you the bathroom, and you can change into your pajamas.”

“Actually, I don’t have any.”

Mrs. Raleigh’s eyebrows shot up, so I added, “We planned on reaching my house before nighttime. I have clothes there.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Raleigh let out a relieved breath. “I have a nightgown you can borrow, then. Why don’t you give me your clothes and I’ll wash them so they’ll be clean for tomorrow.” She ran a critical eye over my outfit, and her gaze stopped on Steve’s shirt. She stared at it, puzzled, and I wondered if she recognized it.

“Actually, these aren’t my clothes. I just borrowed them from Steve.” Which was the wrong thing to say to a guy’s mother. Her eyebrows shot back up. “But only because I was a nun. And . . . and I couldn’t really go home in a nun’s habit—”

Mrs. Raleigh’s eyebrows stayed up. “I suppose not.”

Adam looked at Steve in astonishment. “You’re corrupting nuns?”

“She’s not a real nun,” Steve said. “She played one on the show.”

“We left for Nevada really suddenly,” I added, “and the costume department had sent my clothes out to be cleaned.”

“You’re an actress, then?” Mrs. Raleigh asked.

“No, not really. Well, sort of. I was a temporary extra.” At this point, I figured it would not reassure her if I said I was a high school student who had snuck on the set to stalk her son, so I didn’t volunteer that information.

She didn’t press the point. Instead she smiled and motioned me to follow her. “I’ll get you something to wear now. We’ll have time in the morning to talk. Then you can tell me how you and Steve met.”

I followed her out of the kitchen but flung a worried look back at Steve. I was not about to tell his mother how we met, and I didn’t want him to, either.

Steve shrugged and grinned at me, which was not encouraging.

I trailed Mrs. Raleigh through the house and stood in the doorway of her bedroom while she sifted through a dresser drawer murmuring, “Not that one . . . you’d freeze in that. . . .”

As Mrs. Raleigh rifled through her nightgowns, I looked at the things on her dresser: a golden-framed picture of Adam, a flower arrangement, a jeweled bowl, and ornate candleholders. At my house, the only candles we own are shoved in a drawer in case the electricity goes out.

Finally Mrs. Raleigh found a nightgown she deemed suitable. She took a folded flannel garment from her drawer and walked it over to me. “This will be perfect for you. Grandma Nora made it for me years ago, but I’ve never worn it.”

And as soon as I unfolded it, the reason became clear. Not only was it made with industrial-strength flannel—I mean, honestly, it could have been used to line sleeping bags—lacy ruffles ran up and down the front. Ruffles also ringed the high collar and the sleeves. It looked like something a pioneer schoolmarm would wear.

Next, Mrs. Raleigh found a toothbrush for me, showed me to the bathroom, and then waited out in the hallway for me to change so she could wash my clothes. “I can find something from my wardrobe for you to wear tomorrow if you’d rather,” she said.

I handed her the pile of clothes. “That’s okay. Steve’s stuff is fine.” After seeing her choice of nightgown, I was not about to trust her to pick out clothes for me.

I crawled into the bed in the guest room and tried to sleep, but my mind kept replaying the scene in the kitchen, reexamining the conversation. I thought about how sad it would be if I came home and didn’t feel welcome.

I heard voices coming from the master bedroom. Even hushed, I could pick out the notes of harshness in the conversation. Steve’s parents weren’t happy. Had seeing Steve upset them, or were they just hurt he hadn’t greeted them more warmly?

The voices from Adam’s room came in louder. He and Steve talked more naturally than they had in the car, perhaps because I wasn’t there. Every once in a while I heard Adam’s voice, pleading, but I couldn’t make out what he said, except once. Steve said, as though making a point, “I didn’t see any recent pictures of
me
hanging on the walls.”

“They don’t have to hang pictures of you on the walls,” Adam said. “You’re on reruns every night of the week. They never miss your show.”

Then the voices softened back into unrecognizable murmurs.

It’s hard to relax when you’re in the middle of someone else’s tension. And it’s even harder to sleep when you know the Grim Reaper might be waiting for you at the edge of consciousness.

I thought of my story for Jeremy and tried to come up with an ending he would like. How did one get out of the underworld? How did one outsmart death? I wandered around in my imagination, traveling to the cavernous gulf of the afterlife. I felt the walls, looking for cracks. I only had my bow and arrows, a flock of crows—which may or may not prove useful—and my wits. With this small arsenal, I had to figure out a way to bring Jeremy back home with me.

It was like one of those riddles you can’t quite bend your mind around to find the answer. Or maybe an answer didn’t exist at all. If death could be tricked, surely someone smarter than me would have figured out the way by now.

Then a worse thought came to me: How did anything we ever did in life matter when we all ended up dead anyway?

I would never fall asleep at this rate. I pulled myself out of bed. I might as well get a drink of water to clear my mind and try again.

The voices had stopped from both rooms, so I hadn’t expected to run into anyone in the hallway, but Steve emerged from the bathroom as I walked up.

He looked me up and down. “I see my mother tried to make you feel comfortable by providing you with a nun-approved nightgown.”

He turned to walk around me, so I stepped in front of him and lowered my voice. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to your family in the morning. In fact, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say at all.”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “We’ll leave early, and there won’t be time for a lot of conversation. I’ll get you up at five-thirty, okay?”

I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t. I only thought of the way Mrs. Raleigh’s eyes had reflected pain when she’d said “Our home is always open to you.”

“Your parents want to talk to you and you’re going to leave before they have a chance?”

“We need to make it to your house at a decent hour. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive.”

He made as if to go around me, and I shifted my position so he couldn’t. “Why don’t you want to talk to them?”

He faced me, his expression suddenly weary, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you already know? What did the internet say?”

“You petitioned the courts when you were sixteen to be made an adult because you didn’t want your parents spending your money.”

He let out a sigh, looked down the hallway toward his parents’ bedroom, then pulled me into the bathroom. Even after the door shut, he kept his voice low. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want them spending my money, it was just that—” He let out another sigh. “Do you remember how I told you I made a lot of money as a child?”

I nodded.

“I made over three million dollars by the time I reached sixteen, but my parents had spent almost all of it. They kept buying nicer houses, nicer cars. I said I wanted to invest it—so then they bought jewelry and artwork—which might have worked, if either of them had known anything about jewelry or artwork. They didn’t, though. They just liked living like millionaires.

“Child actors tend to have short careers. Robin Hood is popular now, but fads pass quickly, and there’s a good chance I’ll be a has-been by age twenty-one. When I landed the part of Robin Hood, I tried talking to them about managing my finances, but that didn’t change anything. So I talked to the show’s lawyers.”

He shook his head and grimaced. “If you ever want to take a bad situation and make it horrible, just add a couple of lawyers. I only wanted some control over how my money was being spent, but my parents didn’t see it like that. My dad told me if I felt that way, I could get out of his house and live on my own.” Steve leaned back against the counter and looked past me into nothing. “So I did. And they moved here, and we haven’t talked to each other since.”

“Have you tried to talk to them?”

He sent me a look to show me that I had clearly missed the point of his story.

I said, “So now you have your money, but you’ve lost your family?”

He straightened, reminding me with that simple movement how tall he was. “You think I should have let my parents spend it all?”

“No, but shouldn’t you try to mend fences? Don’t you still love them?”