Matt & Zoe (20 page)

What kind of a guardian am I going to be? When I can’t even think of the most obvious problem?

Matt, twisted around in his seat, reaches back and takes her hand. “Kiddo, we would never let them take you away,” he says. “Not even if dinosaurs were chasing us down and chomping on our feet.”

It seems this is just the right thing to say, because she smirks. Then she asks, “what about spiders?”

“Not even spiders.”

Now she has one eye closed, and a furrow appearing between her eyebrows. “What about… rats?”

“Rats don’t bother me.” He looks serene as he says the words.

“Snakes?”

“I eat snakes for dinner.”

She giggles. “Beatles?”

Matt twists his mouth, and pauses, then gets a sly grin on his face. He shrugs. “Beatles, you’re on your own.”

Jasmine laughs.

In a more serious voice, but still warm, he asks, “You didn’t like that shelter, did you?”

“I hated it. It’s stupid.”

Matt nods soberly. “I think so too. They should have let you sleep in the barn.”

Traffic is moving now, so I have to look at the road. I can almost hear her eyes roll. She says, “That would have been fine. I could have slept with Mono.”

He smiles and says, “You are a smart girl, Jasmine.”

Chapter Thirteen

Come with Me. (Matt)

By the time I was in high school I’d filled out—I was no longer the scrawny runt who had jumped 500 times into the net as punishment for my father. The summer before my junior year, after a year of intense upper body training supervised by Papa, I’d begun catching. Well, in practice—I wouldn’t start catching in the show until my senior year.

I should explain some things about being a catcher. It’s not like being a catcher in baseball, where if you fail to catch the ball then you grab it and toss it back to the pitcher. If the catcher in a trapeze act misses, there’s a good chance somebody’s going to get hurt or killed.

The catcher is the base of the team… The person who everyone depends on for their very lives. The catcher has to be absolutely trustworthy. Not someone who screws around, or drinks, or goofs off on the ropes. Some of the most intense parts of my training to become a catcher weren’t in the ropes at all—they were sitting at the kitchen table while Papa paced back and forth lecturing. His hair was growing gray in those days, but his teeth remained the same gleaming white exposed by his grin whenever he jumped. During his night lectures, he had an intense energy about him—it was impossible to look away.

“Your brother might have been a catcher, if he wasn’t so scrawny. And if he didn’t screw around so much. Not you—you, Matty—you will be the catcher of the family.”

And so, the spring and summer before my junior year in high school we toured. For the first time I had an actual role in the family’s act. Papa had put me in a real role, a role of intense responsibility. We practiced every morning for hours, breaking in the early afternoon to rest up before we went in the ring. Then I performed with the family. If I continued to do well in the ring, and in practice, then I would begin catching during the show the year after.

I hadn’t spoken with Carlina since that awful day in Middle School—not until three days before my 16th birthday.

It was August and we were somewhere in Tennessee. Jackson I think. I’m not ashamed to say I was hiding out—that morning I’d received an intense tongue-lashing from my father for some offense or other, and I’d taken my Nintendo DS—I’d won it in a raffle—to go sit in the very top of the stands, alone. I slumped down into the seat and stayed out of sight.

I might have missed the sound if I hadn’t lost my earbuds a few days earlier. As it was, I just kept the volume down low so no one would notice me up there. In the center ring, Frank and Marina Kurtz were practicing the partner adagio. Along with the Flying Paladinos, they were one of the star acts, and the audience always hushed in awe at the beautiful dance.

During practice it wasn’t so beautiful. With no music playing, and the sound of their coach simultaneously counting and clapping his hands in rhythm, it was clear that this was a grueling, difficult act. I’d seen it hundreds of times, but even I paused the game to watch as they began their final round of practice.

That’s when I heard the sound of someone crying. Muffled, but clear enough to identify.

I sat up in my seat and looked around. I couldn’t see anyone nearby. So I stood, stretching up on my toes. Then I saw her.

It was unmistakably Carlina, even though she was curled up in a seat, face to her knees, not many rows below and one section over from me. She must have come up here—like I had—to be alone, and almost certainly hadn’t seen me.

For almost two minutes I stood there frozen.

Normally my instinct if I saw any girl crying would be to offer help and assistance. But even though several years had passed, I still remembered the sting of being dumped for Red. I still remembered the misery of sitting at the diner during the dance. Carlina had been... cruel. Looking back, there’s no way she didn’t know how infatuated I had been with her. Why did she string me along for so long? Maybe if Red hadn’t shown up, it might have happened. No way to answer those questions. I didn’t know Carlina at all.

I wanted to believe that I was over her, but Carlina was the sun I revolved around through my adolescence.

I slipped through the stands until I came to a crouch next to the weeping girl. This was the closest I had been to her since middle school… Now she was seventeen and astonishingly beautiful. Without thinking I put my left hand on her knee and said, “Hey. What’s wrong?”

She jerked at the touch, raising her face up and staring at me wildly. “How did you know I was here? Were you spying on me?”

The question didn’t make any sense. Why would anyone be spying on her? I shrugged it off. “I was up here myself. Sometimes I need some quiet and to get away from my family.”

“Leave me alone,” she said. Tears were still streaming down her face.

Was I always going to let her stab me in the heart? “All right, if that’s what you want. I was just checking to see if you were alright.” I stood up, intending to walk away and never look back. I made it four steps.

“Matt. Please… I’m sorry. Don’t go.”

I didn’t turn around right away, because I didn’t dare let Carlina see my face. Because the rush of emotions that went through me was a storm of confusion, joy, vindication and hope. I took two seconds to compose myself and turned around.

I didn’t know what to make of her expression. Grief stricken? I took a step back toward her. “Tell me what’s wrong, Carlina.”

Her eyes started to water again. “Red… He…”

I tried to suppress the immediate feeling of anger and disgust.

“I broke up with him.”

I knelt back down, facing her next to the row of seats. “If you broke up with him, why are you crying?”

She shrugged, her face a picture of misery. “He’s an ass. I should have dumped him two years ago.”

I wasn’t going to argue with that. What did I know? I’d never had a girlfriend. I’d never kissed a girl. I’d never even been out on a date. This freakish life limited my circle of acquaintances to less than half a dozen girls even remotely near my age. None of them had ever interested me… except her. None of them meant anything. So I didn’t know anything about relationships, or why a girl might break up with a guy and cry about it the same day. I did know that I wasn’t going to let myself get sucked into her orbit again, only to flame out and crash. I’d be her friend if that’s what she needed, but nothing more.

So I did something that seemed the right thing to do. I reached out and took her hands, placing them between mine. Then I permanently put myself in the friend zone. “It’s okay. You can talk about it with me.”

With that, Carlina began to unravel a tale of white trash soap opera bullshit. She’d thrown herself at a bad boy, and he turned around and acted just like what he was. He’d slept around behind her back, and when she confronted him about it, he shoved her and walked away.

“I was such an idiot. I chased after him. I told him I forgave him. I made him promise to never do it again, but I knew in my heart that that’s who he is. He did it again, and I went back anyway.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why would you go back to somebody who treated you badly?”

She looked hopelessly confused at the question. She moaned the answer, “I don’t know.” Then she started to cry again.

I’m physically not capable of ignoring when a girl cries. My mother taught me to take care of women like they were more precious than diamonds. So I did the only thing I could. I put my arms around her and let her cry.

***

And that’s how my junior year of high school began. I promised myself I wouldn’t fall for Carlina again. All the same, I began to spend most of my non-working hours with her. I would meet her in the afternoons after practice, and we would sit near the paddock watching the trick riders practice under her father’s tutelage. For a while, Red kept his distance. I knew better than to think that problems with him were over. Three or four times over those few weeks, I saw him hanging around the lot glaring at Carlina and sometimes me. In mid-September we had a week long hiatus. At the time, we weren’t far from Louisville, Kentucky, though I can’t remember the name of the town. Being stopped in camp didn’t stop our normal practice hours, of course. However, it did mean we weren’t spending time setting up or breaking down camp, moving, or doing shows in the evenings. I found myself with an unusually large amount of free time.

I spent all of the time that I could with Carlina. I was stunned the first time I saw her jumping from one side of the horse, bouncing on the saddle, then down to the other side as the horse galloped at full speed. It looked terrifying.

That day she rode back up to the fence, reined her horse in and said, “You want to learn how?”

And that’s how I learned to ride. As the remainder of the fall continued, I spent afternoons learning how to saddle the horses, how to groom them, how to canter, trot and gallop.

It was a fantastic time. Carlina’s father Nick, who trained the trick riders, said I was a natural. He was helpful and seemed pleased by Red’s absence. “Call me Nick,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder on the third day I was around.

The next few weeks, every waking moment when I wasn’t practicing was spent with Carlina and Nick. I learned to ride, pleased by Nick’s encouragement and comments that I was a natural rider. By the end of the third week, he began to teach me some basic tricks—how to ride facing backward, how to drop to the ground while the horse was moving, then regain the saddle. It was exhilarating.

I’d been in the rigging all my life, and I’d been doing increasingly complicated stunts in the last year or two. But catching—it was …
boring.
Not like Papa, who was famous for being the first aerialist to ever perform a quadruple. He did it in 1982, and the feat had made headlines all over the world. And no one would ever let me forget that he’d done it when he was seventeen—the same age I was now. Papa had never suggested I even try such things. It was Tony and Messalina he taught the acrobatics—I was to be a catcher. No one ever asked if that’s what I wanted to do. He simply pronounced it one day, the way he pronounced everything as word from on high, not to be argued with or trifled with.

My whole childhood I’d dreamed of being like my father. And he wouldn’t even let me try.

So learning to ride was—fun. It was exciting. And, probably more than anything else, it wasn’t under Papa’s watchful eyes, it was free, it was something
I
was doing.

And there was Carlina.

I loved watching her. When she rode, the curve of her hips and butt, the arch of her back, her hair flying out behind her. I loved seeing her teeth shine when she smiled and looked over her shoulder at me. I loved when we laughed together. I loved every moment we spent together, so much so that I ignored all the warning signs.

I was as happy as I’d ever been. But it wasn’t to last.

It came to an end on a Sunday evening close to the end of the season.

The circus was nearly packed up, everything on the truck beds and ready to go first thing in the morning. Our last show had been at 5 p.m. that afternoon and we would be departing before sunrise.

That night, I had eaten dinner with Carlina and Nick. It was very different from dinner in our trailer. For one thing, Carlina and her dad had an entire trailer to themselves. It wasn’t as large as ours, but even so it was far less crowded. Carlina actually had her own bedroom. She cooked the dinner, a meaty lasagna. As we sat down to eat, her father had his first drink of the night—a straight up shot of gin. It wouldn’t be his last.

I found the drinking to be a little scandalous. Because timing and coordination were so important on the trapeze, no one in my family ever drank except on Christmas or other major holidays when there was no practice. Horror stories abounded of aerialists families who had suffered major tragedies because of a single drink.

Of course there was no reason for Nick not to drink… He was the trainer for the trick riders, but he would never get in the saddle again. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I could never get on the trapeze again… I couldn’t imagine. Plus, except for his daughter, he was alone—I never got the whole story of where Carlina’s mother was, because they didn’t know.

Maybe I would drink too much too, if I were in his shoes.

After dinner, we’d gone back out to the paddock. I didn’t have practice that night, so there was no reason I had to go right away. We rode for a solid hour, practicing dismounting and mounting while at a canter.

I was sweaty, exhausted and happy when we returned to the gate.

My father stood there, a storm on his face. The second I saw him, my stomach lurched.

“Matty. Come with me.” I felt queasy. I didn’t know what was wrong. The anger in his tone made me afraid.

I slid out of the saddle and to the ground. A small cloud of dust raised to the air when my feet touched down. “I need to help put the horses —“