Escaping Perfect

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For Mama Bean

Chapter One

“Senator Montgomery! Senator Montgomery!
Roll down the window! Just for a second! Senator Montgomery!”

There was a bang and a shout—some photog getting so close to the limo that he tripped and slammed his camera into the side of the car—and so the most hellish part of my day from hell truly began.

The rest of the paparazzi crowded around the limousine's tinted windows as it eased through the wrought-iron gates of the South Palm Memorial Cemetery. They couldn't see me or my mom and dad, would only go home with pictures of their own cameras' reflections. But that didn't stop them. Nothing ever stopped them. Some people made a living just by selling whatever pictures they could get of our family. And now the one unfamous person in my world had died, and of course
the photographers were still here, clamoring for shots of the living.

Sometimes I really wished their cameras would spontaneously combust in their faces. But only when I was feeling truly pissed at the world. Like now.

“Five minutes, Cecilia,” my mother said tersely, glancing up from her tablet to check her Cartier watch. “We have to get this show on the road. I have a briefing at three.”

I felt my father's body go rigid, even with him sitting clear on the other side of the limo.

It's Gigi's funeral,
I thought bitterly.
You couldn't take one day off?

What I said was, “Yes, ma'am.”

Outside the windows, rows of white and gray headstones stretched into the distance for what seemed like miles. It was all so anonymous. My grandmother didn't belong here, camou­flaged by the dreary sameness. She belonged someplace special.

My mom's eyes narrowed. “Don't take that tone with your mother.”

The great Rebecca Montgomery, aka dear old Mom, loved to refer to herself in the third person. Ever since I was a toddler, it was:

Look, Cecilia, Mommy's on TV!

Mommy will only be gone for three weeks, but don't worry. Miss Jessica will take care of you!

No, no! Mommy can't hug you right now. This suit is couture.

Yeah. The word “maternal” was not in her vocabulary.

“It's not as if I can take the time off right now,” she added, reading my mind. “Not when there's so much work to do.”

Of course there was. It was an election year. Nothing was more all-consuming for my mother than an election year.

She huffed out a breath and placed the tablet aside, opening a compact to check her perfectly bobbed chestnut-brown hair.

“I still don't understand why we had to fly all the way down here to this godforsaken swamp for her funeral when we have a perfectly beautiful burial plot back in Beacon Hill.”

“Because my mother lived
here
,” my father said, still staring out the window. “She wanted to be buried
here
. You never gave her anything she wanted in life, Rebecca; you'd think you could at least give her this.”

“Oh. So I see everyone's ganging up on me today.” My mother clicked the compact closed and shoved it back into her black Birkin bag. She had a right to be surprised. My father, a high-powered defense attorney for Boston's wealthiest residents, usually saved all argumentative tones for the courtroom. I hardly ever heard him raise his voice or even
snipe at my mom, unless it was from behind very firmly closed doors. “It wasn't entirely my fault that Maura and I didn't get along. She did play a hand in it, you know.”

“But she's still Dad's mom,” I said quietly. “And my grandmother. And we're never going to see her again.”

You could at least pretend to be sad.

My mother sighed her impatient sigh. “Cecilia . . .”

“Mom, please,” I said, my voice shaky. “Could you maybe not be a bitch right now? Just for today?”

My left cheek exploded in pain. I didn't even see my mother move until she was settling back into her seat across from mine, tucking the hand that had just slapped me into her purse.

My left eye prickled over with purple and gray spots. I brought my quaking fingers to my cheek.

“Was that really necessary?” my father asked.

I blinked, surprised he'd even bothered. He'd never said anything to her the many other times she'd smacked me.

“Stay out of it,” she growled at him.

My father clenched his jaw and looked out the window. Mother tugged down on her suit jacket and glared at me. “How dare you?”

It had been a long time since she'd hit me. Possibly because I had hardly seen her for more than an hour or two
here and there over the past two years. Maybe I hadn't had time to piss her off enough. But now? On the day we were burying my grandmother?

“Gigi was my best friend,” I muttered to the door, turning the stinging side of my face away from her. “Just leave me alone.”

“What was that? If you're going to speak, at least enunciate,” my mother said.

I sat up straight, trying very hard not to tremble. “I said, Gigi was my best friend. And she was more like a mother to me than you've
ever
been.”

My mom made an indignant noise at the back of her throat. “I should throw you right out of this car, young lady.”

“Like you'd ever do that,” I shot back. “You'd rather die than let me see the light of day.”

I hadn't even been allowed to go out for my eighteenth birthday last month. Instead my mother—or rather, her assistant, Tash—had sent me a gift at boarding school, but she hadn't otherwise acknowledged it. No call, no text, no e-mail. Just a hand-delivered box from Tiffany containing an ugly ladybug pendant I immediately donated to my graduating class's silent charity auction.

I crossed my arms and sat back, but the huge bun her stylist had fashioned out of my mane of curls held my skull
away from the headrest at an uncomfortable angle. My irritation spiked. Even though I was sitting here declaring my ability to be my own person, I'd spent the entire day letting her order me around as always.

I said the Kenneth Cole, Cecilia, not the Calvin Klein.

Take off that god-awful lip color. Did you pick that yourself? When was the last time we had your eyes checked?

And then, when she'd seen my hair hanging loose around my shoulders:
I'll have Felicia come take care of you next. How you deal with all that hair, I have no idea.

And what had I said all morning long? “Yes, ma'am.”

Sometimes I really loathed myself. I should have asked her how she dealt with having a stick up her butt all the time.

Of course, my hair wasn't the only thing about me that my mother couldn't wrap her brain around, but it wasn't surprising, considering her hair had always been tame and shiny and cut above the chin. I had inherited her skinny bones and angular face, and my dad's extreme height and dark curly hair—though he kept his almost entirely shaved. My skin color was all my own, somewhere between his dark chocolate and her milky white. I pushed my butt all the way back so I could straighten my posture, barely containing the urge to rip out the three hundred bobby pins stabbing me in the skull.

“Please, Cecilia,” my mother said with a derisive chuckle.
“If you want us to treat you like an adult, you should stop moping like a child.”

My face burned.

“We're here,” my father said gruffly. “Five minutes, Cecilia.”

Of course he was agreeing with her timeline. He always agreed with everything she said. Which is how I'd ended up with her last name instead of his. But I felt suddenly too exhausted to argue anymore.

The mound of dirt and the casket on its metal lift were situated about three rows in from the car. My grandmother's grave site sat beneath the shade of a huge weeping willow. She would have loved it, and the thought brought fresh tears to my eyes.

I stepped shakily out of the car. It was stiflingly hot and humid.

My mother's security team sat on alert in the Town Car behind ours along with Tim “the Tank” Thompson, the former pro wrestler who had followed me around for the past ten years. I sensed their eyes on me as I slipped my sunglasses on and walked over to the grave site, alone, feeling oddly exposed without Tim there as my shadow. But he'd been told, I was sure, that I was to have these five minutes.

Because my mother refused to let anyone ever get a glimpse of me, I would not be allowed out of the limo during
the actual service and burial later. Ever since I was eight years old and a man named Scott Smith had attempted to kidnap me for ransom, my mother had kept me on a short leash. Well, more like locked up in a cage and transported from place to place only by heavily armed professionals.

It was why I had spent the past ten years cloistered behind the brick walls of the Worthington School, where no camera phones were allowed and every student signed a confidentiality clause. Why I'd never seen the inside of a movie theater or a Starbucks or a commercial airport. Why I'd spent every summer trapped in our house on Martha's Vineyard with a team of tennis coaches, academic tutors, and etiquette experts grooming me for the day I'd emerge from the suffocating cocoon in which I'd spent most of my life.

Suffocating like the starched jacket of the black suit I'd been forced to wear, which now itched at the back of my neck under the glare of the sun as I approached the grave. The length of the pencil skirt—just above the knee—clamped my legs together and made my steps small and awkward in my black kitten heels. I finally came up alongside the white coffin and lost my breath, imagining Gigi inside. Instead I trained my eyes on the sky as blue as cornflower and dotted with white clouds. I wanted to say the right thing. Tell her how
much she'd meant to me. But she knew all that. And the first words that came spilling out of my mouth weren't so much a grateful homage as a selfish plea.

“How am I supposed to do this?” I asked, my voice cracking. Sudden, hot tears streamed from the corners of my eyes. “How am I supposed to do this without you?”

It was all I could think to say. Then I bowed my head forward, covered my face with my hands, and wept.

*  *  *

An hour later, it was all over. At least a hundred friends and family members stood alongside her grave while the pastor spoke and my father and his sister cried and my mother's lip wobbled dramatically.

Our driver stood under the shade of a palm tree alongside the car, which was parked at the front of a winding line of limos and Town Cars awaiting their passengers. He watched the proceedings while I stared through the window, open half a centimeter so that I might catch a stray word. My face and eyes were dry, my skin itching from the tears I'd shed earlier. And the longer I watched, the angrier I felt.

The whole thing was a sham. My parents hadn't even told my grandmother's real friends where she was being buried. This was not about her. It was about my mother. The senator. The glamorous Senator Montgomery, fourth child of Jack
and Marianne Montgomery and niece of former vice president Frederick Montgomery. Currently, my mother was the highest-profile Montgomery in the country with her ascension to the US Senate, and she had no intention of stopping there. She had turned my grandmother's funeral into a networking party.

Finally the flowers were strewn, the dirt was tossed, and those in attendance were saying their good-byes. I sat up straighter as my parents approached the waiting cars, my father supporting my mother as if she were the one suffering.

I steeled myself for round two, but my parents and their entourage of bodyguards slipped between parked cars and walked up a slight incline on the other side of the roadway. I had to turn around and crane my neck to see where they were going. The driver moved away from the car to join the rest of the security team. They stopped at a spot atop a grassy knoll near the brick fence that surrounded the cemetery grounds. I saw Tim find a position midway up the hill. My father stood just behind my mother's right shoulder. Always, always, he stood behind her.

“We'd like to thank you all for coming and showing your respect for my husband's late mother,
our
late mother, really,” my mom began, her hair shimmering in the sun. “One of the great matriarchs of our family.”

Bile. I tasted actual bile. Matriarch?
Our
mother? My mother had treated Gigi like crap. Any overtures from my father's mother were swept under the rug. Any offers of advice or assistance were scoffed at. How dare she get up there and act like Gigi had meant something to her?

“Maura also meant a good deal to our daughter, Cecilia,” my mother continued, gazing down at the car. “The two of them had a special relationship, and for that we will always be grateful.”

My fingernails dug into the flesh of my palms. I was sweating under my arms and along my upper lip. She was such a liar. Such a fraud. And I hated her. I hated what she'd done to my life. I'd never had a boyfriend or even a real friend. Never been allowed to invite anyone to my house, go to a regular party or out to a concert. I was hardly even a functioning human being.

Heat crept up my neck as my heart pounded out of control. I unbuttoned the suit jacket and yanked the tight sleeves from my arms, straining my shoulder muscles in the process. It didn't help. I couldn't breathe. I needed air. I had to get out of there. I had to.

My hand fumbled for the door handle, but then I froze. If just one member of the paparazzi happened to turn their head, they would be on me like starving crows on roadkill. I
wouldn't get two feet from the car before the security detail easily caught up with me and tossed me back inside.

My eyes darted around the confines of the limo as my pulse raced and raced and raced. Suddenly I felt a cool breeze on my ankles and realized that the air-conditioning was blowing. The car was running. I turned and glanced at the ignition. There dangled the keys.