Skygods (Hydraulic #2) (14 page)

“Didn’t Alonso do his undergrad at Harvard?”

“Yes, and my father. They were extremely brilliant, close.”

My fingers skimmed along his jaw until I found his mouth. To my surprise, it curled into a smile. He kissed my fingers.

“My father met my mother at a punk rock concert in an underground bar, of all places. While the rest of the country was crazy for KC and the Sunshine Band, they were Ramones fans.”

Fitting, I mused, though I didn’t voice it. Perhaps obsession with punk music was genetic, after all. That would explain his undying love for The Clash.

“Was Alonso a punk rocker, too?” I asked. I laughed a little—I couldn’t help it. The image of straight-laced Señor Cabral as an androgynous sex fiend in a ripped Johnny Rotten T-shirt and safety-pinned pants was irrepressible.

Samuel laughed a bit, too, as if he could see straight into my head. “No,
Papá
has always been a José José fan.”

“So they were punk rockers—and embraced the whole nihilist, anti-establishment identity. Isn’t that odd, considering your mother was a socialite and your father was an immigrant lawyer who rooted for the Red Sox?”

He hummed. “I’ve reflected on it, what caused them to swing so extremely. A lot of it is due to their respective illnesses, I’m sure. But they were just two very lost people, Kaye. They let undercurrents toss them around and sweep them away instead of fighting for their own path. And when they found each other, they found another person who was willing to justify their behavior, no matter how they lived or what choices they made.”

“Is that why your father was disbarred?” I asked.

He gave my hand a small squeeze. “I’m getting there. They eloped two months after they met, and my father gained citizenship. The Caulfields, surprisingly, welcomed the match. Mr. Caulfield immediately took him under his wing with promises of a place at the law firm once he finished law school and passed the bar. I think they believed marriage would calm my mother, and they could keep the pair under their thumbs. The Cabrals were shocked, of course, but they accepted the marriage. All except Dad—Alonso.

“My mother was extremely charismatic, understand—she charmed the Cabrals on holidays, but it was really only Alonso who spent any time around her. He didn’t trust her smiles or frivolity, and it caused a rift. He hated that his brother turned his back on their heritage for ‘gringo ways.’ For a long time, Alonso blamed the change in his brother’s behavior on my mother’s influence, but since then, he’s come to recognize it might have been early symptoms of clinical depression.”

“What do you think?” I murmured.

“I think it was the latter, though my mother didn’t help. His grades began to slip, and it was only through Mr. Caulfield’s influence that he was able to graduate from law school at all.”

“But he still passed the bar.”

“Oh yes, exceptionally. Intelligence was never my father’s problem. It was dropping the ball. Which is what led to his disbarment.

“For three years, Antonio and Rachel Cabral played the happy newlyweds, but I think depression, combined with the backlogging casework, my birth, and the responsibility of becoming a new father finally broke him. The state discovered he was using Caulfield family money—the stockpiles of ‘good behavior’ cash paid to Rachel—to bribe prosecution witnesses and bring about swifter resolutions to his cases. He was immediately fired, of course. The Caulfield Law Firm was thrown into the newspapers, a multitude of their court cases were reexamined, and disbarment proceedings began. But he was never actually disbarred.”

A lump formed in my throat as I realized what he meant. “Because he killed himself first,” I whispered.

“In a closed garage with a running Chrysler.”

“Oh my God.” I gingerly touched his face and discovered that it was wet. It disturbed me as much as his story, because the Samuel I remembered hardly ever cried. Not the day we married, not the day he left. Until recently, I couldn’t think of a single instance. His quaking hand wrapped around mine and pulled it from his face, returning it to his waist.

“My mother was devastated. She may have been self-centered, but she loved my father very much. Toss in her sudden status as a single mom to a baby she’d only ever thought of as a toy, and you can see how her illness spiraled out of control. Alonso tried to visit, but she threw him out and forbade him, or any of the Cabrals, from seeing me. They were so overcome with grief themselves that they easily gave in to her requests. Alonso took a job in Colorado as his escape from the pain. The Caulfields threw more money at my mother to satisfy their grandparent duties,” he said bitterly. “You know most of what follows from the book.”

“Some.” I knew about her late night clubbing and drinking binges while her son waited in the car. Her frequent vacations, when she left Samuel with a babysitter for days at a time. The ridiculously expensive shopping sprees and the bills that piled up—there was plenty of money in the bank, but she never bothered to make credit card payments, Samuel explained. She’d put her son in a ritzy prep school not because she wanted the best for him, but because a neighbor had a child who also attended, and offered to drive Samuel as well. I knew Rachel had slapped Samuel and spewed vitriol, which only made him try harder to please her.

“Just after New Year’s, the wild lifestyle stopped. It was around this time that my prep school shrink had a talk with me about what I could and couldn’t say. For a five-year-old, apparently I was very cavalier about things like drug use and raucous sex. The shrink gave my mother a stern warning. After that, she didn’t go out anymore.”

“So she must have at least tried to be a good mom,” I said hopefully.

I felt him shake his head. “No, Kaye. She stopped because she was sliding into a deep depression. She couldn’t have cared less whether a social worker came knocking and took me away. My mother shut herself in her room all day, all night. Occasionally she’d leave and I never knew where she went, though I have my suspicions.”

“Where?”

“Fenway Park. She’d leave the house with my father’s urn because she had this crazy idea that she was supposed to dump his ashes there. She fixated on getting into Fenway with the urn, mumbled about it all the time. She stopped eating, stopped buying food. That’s when I started sneaking food home from kindergarten.”

I frowned. “Why didn’t your neighbors contact anybody?”

“I really can’t say,” he replied, too nonchalant for my peace of mind. “Maybe they just didn’t want to get involved. Or maybe they did say something, but there were road blocks. I was too young to comprehend what was going on. You know what happened next.”

“Your mother jumped.” I brushed a lock of now dry hair from his furrowed forehead. “And you came home to Colorado. To me.”

He exhaled.

The storm chose that moment to unleash its fury on our flimsy tent. Another gust of wind shook the tent walls and one corner, then two, snapped loose. The entire thing collapsed. Canvas tumbled over our heads with the wind, wrapping us, our belongings, and our sleeping gear in miserably cold wetness.

I yelled, my hands flying over my head, struggling to push the pile of slick material off of me. Samuel did the same, and I even heard him loose a startled laugh at our predicament. Together, we fumbled for the wall that was still partially standing and found the tent zipper. Samuel pulled me outside after him, shielding my body from the wind.

I tossed up my hands. It would take work to re-stake the tent in the dark.

“Roadside Motel?” Samuel asked. I saw his face a little better now, outside. The corner of his mouth turned up in that oh-so-familiar grin. But his eyes. His eyes were unreadable.

I shook my head. “No way, Cabral. If you were in the wilderness, there’d be no Roadside Motel three miles back. We’re staying here.”

He shrugged “whatever” and followed my lead. Before long, we’d managed to pound the stakes firmly into the ground and re-pitched the tent, though the inside of it was now as wet and wretched as the outside. I resigned myself to a soggy sleeping bag and pillow.

We stayed outside for a ridiculous amount of time, heedless of the pelting rain, the twigs and leaves flailing in the air, smacking and stinging our skin. His arms tightened around me and I hugged him hard, trying to squeeze all of the hurtful memories out of him like toothpaste from a tube. A plethora of questions raced through my head. Had he seen a therapist as a child? Why had the fact that he was a Boston Caulfield never become public? But none of them were so important they couldn’t wait. Finally, his hold on me loosened and I sensed a change in his demeanor. He wanted to move on.

I tugged his hand. “Hey,” I said, attempting a grin but failing miserably. “Let’s save our pillows before they float away.”

“It’s going to be a cold, wet night in that tent. Are you sure I can’t talk you into a room at that dumpy little motel outside the park entrance? I bet they even have a vibrating bed.” He forced a chuckle.

“No quarters. You can tough it out for one night, city mouse.”

“As long as you’re sleeping in frigid rain puddles next to me.” He squeezed my hand and crawled into the tent behind me, splashing through muddy water at the entrance.

And if I already hadn’t known, those words sealed it—I’d never be able to let him go back to New York. Not after tonight.

Chapter 5

Track

At the tail end of a dive, a skydiver sometimes
must track horizontally across the sky
to distance themselves from other divers
before they can deploy their canopy.

S
OAKED
, S
HIVERING
, A
ND
W
RETCHED
after our camping trip, we ended up heading back to Boulder a day early. The minute we turned on our cell phones again, all sorts of message alerts dinged and we knew vacation was over. I fielded calls from gossip reporters about the “Kingsley-Cabral-Neelie” love triangle (I finally pulled the plug on my landline), while Samuel poured through numerous voice mails from Caroline. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, my pet photogs, had returned and set up shop in the TrilbyJones parking lot. I even took them blueberry muffins and cups of coffee, much to Samuel’s annoyance.

Finally, the news we’d hoped for broke around seven thirty Friday evening—Indigo Kingsley confirmed she was in a long-term relationship with a man she’d met on the set of
Water Sirens
.

We lounged on the couch, Samuel’s arm casually draped over my shoulders as we watched the tail-end of some indie movie he’d found on IFC (I didn’t even know my cable package included IFC…huh). His cell phone blared, startling us both from the swampy Louisiana diner on television. I groaned. Caroline had already called six times today. But to my surprise, it wasn’t Caroline.

“Indigo!” Samuel’s face erupted into a grin.

The green-eyed monster hit my heart with a bull’s-eye shot as I pictured Indigo’s pouty lips whispering words on the other end of the line. But then I got over it just as quickly because: No. Freaking. Way. Indigo Kingsley called my apartment. Well, technically she called Samuel, but still, he was in
my
apartment. Molly would squeal. Samuel, however, saw the monster peek through and winked at me, planting a reassuring peck on my lips.

I barely heard the throaty lilt of Indigo’s familiar Aussie accent while Samuel nodded along, his fingers nervously pinching the ends of his hair.

“Flip the channel to E!,” he whispered.

Sure enough, stock footage of Samuel and Indigo at the Oscars rolled, followed by a series of clips from the
Water Sirens
movie.

“…
While rumors of the couple’s split have persisted for weeks, her announcement makes it official—no more nixie love for Indigo. ‘Ms. Kingsley and Mr. Cabral quietly parted company months ago,’ comments Kingsley’s long-time rep, Natalie O’Malley. ‘She and Mr. Caldo are very happy, and very much in love.’

“
And how is the playboy playwright handling the news of his former flame’s fling with the set caterer? Just fine, apparently. His rep tells us he’s taking a hard-earned breather in the midst of heavy book and movie promotions, spending time with friends in Colorado before he hits the West Coast…”

Indigo and the set caterer? I stifled an incredulous laugh, turning it into an unladylike snerk. Celeb gossips had to be doing back-flips over this. Mr. Playboy Playwright smiled again.

“Indigo, thank you so much,” he said. “I truly appreciate this…Yes, tell Nat thank you, too…” More throaty accent, then a muffled good-bye. Samuel snapped his phone shut and jumped onto the couch next to me. His arms snaked around my waist and I loosed an embarrassingly school-girlish giggle when he nuzzled my neck, the buzz of his breath tickling me.

“So, Indigo Kingsley jilted you for the caterer, huh? You failed to mention this bit of hilarity to me.”

“Marco is an extremely talented caterer.”

“Seriously, how does something like that even happen? It’s so bizarrely
Cinderfella
.”