Skygods (Hydraulic #2) (5 page)

“I know.”

“And do you realize Hector kept me from tanking when you left me? Kind of like Caroline did for you.”

He paused, and I pictured him running a hand through his hair, or squinting, or another one of his exasperated quirks. “I know. I just…I want to be the one you come to first. I don’t want Hector involved in our relationship. That’s all I ask. Can you do that for me?”

It clicked. He wasn’t asking me to give up my friendships. He just wanted reassurance that I’d turn to him before I turned to Hector—an establishment of boundaries. It was still difficult to think of the godlike Samuel Caulfield Cabral suffering from such fallible human qualities as jealousy. Perhaps, by pushing the line with Hector, I was pinching Samuel to ensure he was flesh and blood.

“I can do that, Samuel.”

He sighed. “Good. Thank you.”

At Friday lunch, when Hector asked me to a movie, my argument with Samuel was fresh in my mind. Sooner or later, we’d have to clear the air about our romantic entanglements during our seven-year separation before someone was hurt. The specters of those nameless, faceless women ate at my peace, but I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to let them remain nameless.

Everyone else in our small circle of friends was busy—Hector’s brother Santiago Valdez was taking a new bluegrass chick to dinner. Cassady was returning from a hiking expedition, so Molly had him penciled in. And the new Mr. and Mrs. Angel Valdez were still “penciled in” long after their return from Maui. So I called someone I’d never considered socializing with other than to plot the downfall of Caroline Ortega. To my shock, Jaime said yes (on the condition she didn’t have to sit next to the “caveman”). I was happy she’d joined us, but I had ulterior motives—to ask her about something that Samuel’s memoir had brought to light.

I sat in the middle of a dark theater, Hector on one side, loaded with popcorn, soda, and chocolate, and Jaime on the other side, arms crossed over her chest. Previews rolled—some romantic comedy that caused Jaime to snort derisively every five seconds.

“Jaime,” I whispered above the preview, “when you went through all of our financial information during the divorce, did you ever run across a three-million dollar trust fund?”

She turned, her mouth hanging open. Snapping it shut, she threw her arms up and abruptly tore into me. “Did you even
read
the paperwork I gave you? Did you even
listen
to me as I walked you through it? I distinctly told you that Samuel was the beneficiary of a trust fund established by his parents, naming Alonso Cabral as the controlling third party until Samuel turned eighteen. Whatever estate money he inherited went into that fund. It was considered separate property and therefore, untouchable in the settlement. Not that you would’ve let me go after it, anyway. I can’t
believe
you operate your own business…”

I’d known Samuel had a trust fund, but had believed it to be an insignificant amount. Rather, he’d been a millionaire at the age of eighteen. I tuned out Jaime’s huffing rambles and arm jabs as something in my memory was jogged. Samuel had told me weeks ago that using his mother’s money for his own self-destruction seemed “fitting.” This trust fund must have been the account Samuel once used for drug money.

Another preview rolled, yanking us to attention. A sweeping view of the Rocky Mountains filled the screen as haunting music wailed from the speakers. A shot of a sinister old Main Street rippled into view and blurred into a city sign…
Welcome to Bear Creek, Colorado
. The theater audience erupted into shouts and cheers as they realized which movie trailer rolled.

Hector laughed and poked me in the ribs. Jaime laughed too, but more at my discomfort. I sank into my chair, praying they would lay off the Neelie Nixie jokes. Then the woman herself appeared as a camera panned around and captured her rappelling down a mountainside, her blond braid swinging.

“In the West, legend tells of an ordinary girl…”

I groaned while Hector shook my shoulders, forcing my eyes to the screen. I peeked through my fingers in time to see Neelie take a spill as she leaped across a creek.

“…who went to extraordinary lengths for the ones she loved.”

The picture slowed as a dreamy Nicodemus reached down and grabbed Neelie’s hand, pulling her from the creek. Ha! If only Samuel’s readers knew that “Nicodemus” had biked off in a hissy-fit after getting tackled by a girl.

The audience ooohed and aaahed as a quick montage flashed across the screen, detailing the rise of the nixie clan and their archenemy, the Others. The music and drums spiraled out of control and then the screen went black and silent as the words
Water Sirens
flared bright and bold, followed by
November 26
.

I frowned. Wasn’t the release date initially scheduled for early November? This meant that
Water Sirens
would hit theaters Thanksgiving Day, which foretold good, good things for Samuel’s franchise. I tried to be happy for him, but it also meant that Samuel would be gone for Thanksgiving, and it stung.

Later that night, I dug through my divorce papers, looking for the information Jaime insisted was already in my possession. I had to admit, I’d never read through the financial stuff because I’d assumed there was nothing to discuss. Actually, I barely glanced at anything, too wrapped up in my pain to care about the details…guarding my heart. Sure enough, there was the spreadsheet Jaime had referred to—a breakdown of Samuel’s inheritance after his parents’ estate had been settled. Three million dollars.

What else had escaped my foggy brain during divorce proceedings?

“After all that rain, we need to embrace those blue skies,
mamacita
,” a brown, bare-chested Hector cajoled. “Put that thing away and jump out of a plane with me again.” The “thing” Hector referred to was the hard copy of Samuel’s manuscript, which I’d carried like a security blanket since receiving it in the mail.

I held up a finger as I finished my notation, knowing I wouldn’t be able to work much longer before we reached the dropzone. From the plane window, Boulder sprawled west and below. Saturday forecasts originally predicted an afternoon of strong winds and dust, but a late morning shower tamed the skies. The minute the weather shifted for the better, Hector called and told me to grab my gear so he could test the Birdman jumpsuit he’d acquired on a few diving runs. He also talked his older brother, Air Force Lieutenant Angel Valdez, into taking us up.

Hector yanked his arms through the sleeves of his new Birdman suit. He flapped his wings, an odd cross between Elvis and a bat.

“Kaye, are you in or not?”

“I dunno. If it starts to rain, it’ll leave welts.”

Honestly, I was ready to call it quits. Clouds had regathered, and only idiots and masochists skydived in rain. When your terminal velocity is about one hundred fifty miles faster than the speed of rainfall, those little suckers hurt like hell. But Hector was relentless, an unapologetic adrenaline junkie who ceaselessly strove to one-up his previous adventures. His technique was flawless and fluid in skiing, skydiving, and everything in between, and I often felt as though I was watching a bird slice through air instead of a man.

“Last call, Kaye.”

“Let me think a minute.” I waved him off and settled against the rumbling belly of Angel’s plane, attacking the manuscript with a red pen.

-You've got this scene with cherry ChapStick girl all wrong, Cabral. I wasn't angry because Jennifer was stealing my friend from me. I was ticked off because I had a gigantic little girl, starry-eyed crush on you, and I didn't want you dating ANYONE.

-Barnacle-brained wombat...I'd forgotten about that one! It was one of my favorites, along with bitsy blubber butt. Maybe you can work that one in, too?

-Okay, the Weeping Lady. Come on, Sam, I wasn't made of glass...but yeah, I admit I was happy to pretend she was real, even if we both knew the truth. Our avoidant coping mechanisms (there's some psychobabble) didn't do either of us any good...

If it was possible to fall in love with a book, I’d send flowers and sparkly things to Samuel’s beautiful body of writing. Then again, I’d never feared a book quite so much—reading about the decay festering beneath the surface of my first and only love, the overwhelming sadness, the lost childhood. I hadn’t realized how deep that cavity ran. But again, Samuel truly was a master of concealment.

Samuel’s writing was innocent and raw, and it seared my heart. His
Water Sirens
series displayed his talent, yet he never quite let his readers veer too close to his personal pain, instead wrapping his prose in a protective gauze of fine words. But in this memoir, he laid himself bare. Reading the stories of our childhood was like watching him take a scalpel to his chest and peel it back, declaring, “Here is my weakness…it is yours to explore.”

Above the roar of the engines, a stereo blared a mix of pure, happy summer music. Angel bobbed his head and flipped switches on his navigational panel. One raindrop, then two, then a dozen pattered against the plane’s thick windows. Aw, frickin’ hamsters. I’d come out of this dive looking like an acne-plagued teenager. I flipped the page.

When I read how Samuel’d slept with that silly fake bat on his pillow—a remnant of one of my more effective pranks—because it somehow brought him comfort, I had to break for fresh air before I became a blubbering mess. And his birth mother…no wonder Samuel nearly yakked up an intestine when, at the recent wedding, his great aunt compared him to that woman. It was amazing I didn’t break every plate in my kitchen when I read Samuel’s snippets of her. Even in this memoir, Samuel only hinted at the darkness that was his existence in Boston, but the tendrils that tethered him there were far-reaching.

I should have known how disturbing his early childhood had been when, so many years ago, he confided that his mother once left him alone at the ski lodge while she hit the Zermatt slopes. And this was
Camelot
to him, simply because Rachel Caulfield Cabral had bothered to take him along. Still a naïve child, I simply shrugged off the story and filed it away as another oddity in Samuel’s mysterious former life. But now, Rachel’s ghost lingered in every tragic snapshot of Samuel’s existence, waiting to drag her only son down with her.

Static blared over Angel’s radio, and he replied with some flight jargon that meant nothing to me, except for a warning about thunderstorms an hour out. He shouted back to us.

“Weather’s turning, you two. I think you could still do the dive, but it’ll sting. You sure?”

“No worse than a paintball hit,” Hector retorted.

“Hundreds of paintball hits.
Eres tan estupido como un perro
.”

“
Callate el osico gordota
,” Hector sniped back. Ah,
hombres
.

It would have been easy to furiously dwell on the things Samuel had shuttered from me—the inheritance, his abusive mother, the guilt, the undeserving loyalty he gave her. Yes, I was hurt that he’d never trusted me with these deeply personal things. But I couldn’t be angry with a child for wanting to avoid pain. Years later, I saw how he’d been robbed of his childhood and no matter how much I, Alonso and Sofia, or Danita and Angel tried to restore his innocence with love, there simply had been no going back for him. He was doomed to be a sad, six-year-old adult.

Yet our love had done him
some
good. He had a gentle, quiet heart that, as long as I’d known him, had never truly hardened. And in giving me this memoir, Samuel was now entrusting me with his darkest secrets. I loved him all the more for it. There was no way I’d sit through this green light—asking those tough questions about his life in Boston was long overdue. And I knew just where to start: Alonso Cabral, Antonio’s older brother.

“Kaye, if you’re going to jump again, it’s now or never,” Angel announced.

“My fingers are still numb,” I whined.

Hector snorted. “Oh please. You had more than enough downtime while you were playing with those papers. Don’t give me that ‘I’m cold’ excuse.”