A/N: Sorry for the length but I wanted to get to a certain point before I launched into Chapter 3. Yes, I take a few potshots, but I also like creamed corn (that will make more sense after you read the chapter). Helena and Myka will start taking center stage, but we're not through with hearing from the girls - maybe even Christina (if I think I can find the right voice for her). Updates are running about eight weeks out if you're wondering when I'll have Chapter 3 up.
Fate Brought Us Together
Maybe. That had been her response. Christina had caught no fire from Maddie's excitement. Scratching her ankle with her other foot, Christina had considered it for a moment before saying, "Maybe. My mom's had a lot of girlfriends," and then running and shimmying up the bed frame to the top bunk. Adding insult to indifference, if not injury, she had hollered, "How long are you going to be out there? I want to turn off the light."
Staring at the bed above her, listening to Christina's slightly adenoidal breathing, which wasn't a snore but a growly inhalation that was perilously close to one, Maddie was appalled that Christina could take such a revelation so casually. How could she be so . . . so Christina-ish about it? Wasn't she amazed at the coincidence? Wasn't she curious? "My mom's had a lot of girlfriends." Christina wouldn't have tossed off a comment like that one if Myka Bering were her mother. But that was it - Myka Bering wasn't her mother. She didn't know Myka Bering, which meant she couldn't know "having a lot of girlfriends" was simply not something Myka Bering did, or had ever done, as far as Maddie knew. Most of all, Christina hadn't seen what she had witnessed, and had she, she would be wide awake, too.
Maddie had seen the photo of Helena Wells when her mom had been obsessed with cleaning their house from top to bottom. Her mom was neat by nature, but when she was upset about something she could go into ultra-cleaning mode. She had been really upset when she had broken up with Michelle for the second time, more with herself than with Michelle. Between directing Maddie to straighten her room and then asking her in the next breath to bring her a bucket of warm, soapy water and rubber gloves, her mom had been muttering, "Stupid . . . stupid. I should've known she would go back to Gwen. And what do I care, anyway? It's not like she's the love of my life." She had quieted down when Maddie, slopping only a little of the water out of the bucket, brought it into the main floor office. "Sorry, honey. You shouldn't have to listen to this. If I can't say anything pleasant, maybe we should just listen to some music, okay?"
Her mom had had already emptied the desk drawers, piling their contents in a corner of the room. She was hovering over a laptop, bringing up Spotify. Maddie knew the "sad Myka" playlist - Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, and a bunch of other singers singing songs that would make her mother only sadder - she would rather listen to her mother's complaints. "It's okay, Mom. I know that you really liked Michelle." Her mom smiled wanly at her and took the bucket and moved it closer to the file cabinet. Maddie had left unsaid and she hoped, unperceived, that she wasn't nearly as sad as her mom that Michelle had gone back to her old girlfriend.
It wasn't that Michelle wasn't nice. Michelle was nice to a fault, always wanting to reach a consensus about what to have for dinner or what TV show to watch. She and Maddie's mom would defer to each other's opinion - and to their respective child's opinion - so often that dinner was sometimes an inedible mishmash of the few foods that Ethan, Michelle's son, would eat (applesauce, tofu, organic macaroni and cheese,) and the stir-fry or oven-baked chicken breasts that Myka had been planning to make. Maddie would frequently go up to her bedroom and watch TV on her computer since Michelle and her mom wouldn't decide on a show before her bedtime. They even sort of looked alike, her mom and Michelle, both with long, curly brown hair and green eyes, although Maddie, naturally, thought her mother was prettier. Michelle thought Maddie's mom was pretty too, which, like many things Michelle did, grated on Maddie, though she earnestly reminded herself that she shouldn't resent the fact that Michelle found her mom attractive. Maybe it was nothing more than overhearing the two arguing one late afternoon about an event they were planning to attend on campus that evening, Michelle taking exception to Myka's decision to wear make-up, chiding her for "pandering to heterosexist expectations" and Myka responding with irritation, "Does everything have to be a message? I want to wear make-up. People, even old-school feminists, Michelle, dress up for a performance like this." That was as heated as their arguments ever became and they typically ended as this one had ended, with the two calling each other "Sweetie" and then giggling, as it was clear from the sounds accompanying the giggles that they were kissing. Granted, the kissing sounds were kind of disgusting, but Maddie thought she should be happy that her mom had found someone so . . . compatible. That was the word her Grandmother Bering used when she was advising Maddie on what to look for when she was old enough to date. Cute, smart, funny, none of it mattered if you didn't have interests in common, her grandmother would avow. Maddie couldn't think of a thing that Michelle and her mom fundamentally disagreed on, except Gwen.
Gwen was Michelle's former partner and, as her mom always seemed to need to remind Aunt Tracy, "Gwen's the primary caregiver for their son, Trace," to which Aunt Tracy invariably replied, "I bet Michelle never lets you forget it either." Her mom wouldn't acknowledge the dig, but Maddie had overheard her say to Michelle more than once with the strained patience she would use with Maddie, "You don't have to go over there every single time she calls. I know she thinks this is a crisis with Ethan, but everything can't be a crisis with him." Ethan had a cold or he refused to ride the school bus or he was hiding under his bed because he was frightened of thunderstorms. There was always something new with Ethan and it was always something awful. The first time her mom and Michelle dated, they broke up after four months because, as Maddie's mom explained it, "Michelle and Gwen still needed to work some things out." Her mom played her sad songs and watched an old black and white movie a zillion times and recited the dialogue right along with the actors, and then she was okay with the break-up, and Maddie could consign the past four months to the place in her memory where she put all the stuff she had no intention of remembering. But less than a year later, her mom and Michelle started dating again because, it seemed, all those things that Michelle and Gwen had needed to work out had been worked out. Michelle was eating dinner with them now and staying over on the weekends that Maddie wasn't spending at her Aunt Tracy's or (more rarely) with her dad. Dinner was late again or was the same inedible mishmash (with creamed corn being added to the mix for Ethan, much to Maddie's disgust), and she went back to watching TV on her computer while Michelle and her mom endlessly debated whether one night of watching The Voice was a concession to the "intellectually stunting effect of family-oriented network programming." Her mom was happy, and that was important, although sometimes Maddie wondered just how happy her mom was with Michelle. She smiled more and laughed harder with Aunt Tracy or Pete Lattimer when shouldn't it have been the other way around?
Then it went bad again, because of Gwen again, although after Michelle hadn't come over one weekend because Gwen's nerves were "shot" dealing with Ethan's latest misfortune and Michelle had wanted to provide her support because Gwen wasn't just Ethan's other mom but because they had a history that it wouldn't be fair to deny, Maddie's mom had said, "It's pretty clear that your history with her is more important than your relationship with me, so let's make it a clean break this time." Or that's what Maddie's mom told Aunt Tracy when she thought Maddie was up in her bedroom. "I didn't let Michelle drag it out. I saw what was happening, and I ended it. I was strong, Trace, aren't you proud of me?" She had sounded composed and okay with the break-up while Aunt Tracy was there, but once Aunt Tracy had left, the hyper-cleaning had begun. Which was why Maddie was in her mother's office with her mom and a bucket of water and gloves and watching her mom take everything out of the file cabinet preparatory to cleaning it. And who cleaned their desk drawers and file cabinets with soap and water? Wouldn't it be a better use of her time to be cleaning the oven or the downstairs windows as her mom had been muttering that she needed to do for weeks? But Maddie understood that no matter how much her mom said she valued a logical, practical approach to life, reminding her that cleaning the file cabinet wasn't the most logical, practical thing to do wouldn't be appreciated.
It was among the file cabinet's old file folders, binders, and piles of paper held together with rubber bands that Maddie had seen a picture of Helena Wells. A picture, not the picture, because there was a ton of pictures of her spilling out from a cardboard box whose sides were becoming unglued from each other. Her mom had almost frantically swept the pictures together on the floor, as if she were afraid she might lose some of them if she didn't. If she hadn't been so unMom-like, so unglued about it, Maddie wouldn't have been so keen to look at the pictures. She was always embarrassed when her mom brought out the album with her baby pictures or played the video of her dressing up for her first day of school, and while pictures of her mom when she was a little girl were mildly interesting for their dork factor, she didn't look at them all the time or anything like that. Maybe these pictures had something sexy, for adults only because there was no other reason for her mom to act as if the pictures were worth a million dollars. But when Maddie said, "I'll get it," and went to pick up the one that had slid under the desk, her mom wasn't saying "No, honey, don't bother" like she had when Maddie had taken a pair of thong panties from the laundry basket and turned them back and forth trying to figure how to fold them. Her mom wasn't blushing like she had then; instead she sounded grateful, "Thanks, Maddie."
The picture was of her mom and another woman sitting on a step in a wide sweep of concrete steps ending at a row of columns, which fronted a building that looked old and official at the same time. It looked like the kind of building that you would see in a movie or TV show, maybe a courthouse or city hall. Her mom and the woman were really young, and they had their arms around each other's shoulders and their heads were so close together they were almost touching as they looked at the camera. The other woman was looking at the camera, Maddie's mom was looking at the woman. The only time Maddie had ever seen an expression like that on her mother's face was in her own baby pictures, when her mom was holding her, so gooey-eyed with love she was on the verge of tears. Maddie had to put those pictures face down she was so embarrassed by that look. But that was how her mom was looking at her friend, except no one looked at a friend like that. That was the "I don't know how I could love you any more than I do" look, which was always how Myka explained those baby pictures that it killed Maddie (but not really) to see, the way Maddie could already guess that her mom had never looked at her dad, the way she knew that her mom had never looked at Michelle.
The fact that a young Myka Bering had been head over heels for a young Helena Wells was, yes, astonishing in its own way, but it wasn't enough to keep Maddie up all night and staring at the bunk above and listening to its occupant sleep as if she were muttering, not words but a string of nonsense syllables, under her breath. Not awake all night with excitement, anyway, maybe a weirdly shared sense of shame, because there was something so hopeful, so happy in her mom's face that it just wasn't right - hope like that was bound to be disappointed. Even Maddie was old enough to know that. But in the middle of all those pieces of elbows and shirts and jeans and guitars and other people as the pictures Maddie's mom wasn't even bothering to try to put into order slipped over and under each other, cutting off Maddie's view of any one picture in its entirety, she saw what amounted to three-quarters of a picture, her mom and the other woman together on a really ratty couch in someone's apartment. Her mom was asleep, her head on the other woman's lap, and the woman was looking down at Maddie's mom, which made it kind of hard to see her expression, but what Maddie could make out looked similarly dazed, like What do I do with all this . . . love?
Helena Wells, despite the picture of her on Future Image's website that suggested there was nothing that could overwhelm her, was as ridiculous as Maddie's mom. She probably had her own black-and-white movie whose dialogue she could recite word for word and a break-up playlist as well. Maybe it had been a hundred years ago, but these two had loved each other, deeply, truly. Of course, when Maddie had asked her mom, very tentatively, about who the woman was, because if Michelle could make Myka Bering watch old movies and play sad songs and give the house a spring cleaning when it was the middle of winter, who knew what talking about this other woman might do to her, Maddie's mom had only laughed this weird-sounding laugh and said, "An old friend from college, I can barely remember her name." Then she had hurried out of the office only to return with a plastic storage container, slim enough to fit into a file cabinet drawer, and she had put the pictures in it without saying another word about who the woman was or what had become of their "friendship." They hadn't cleaned the file cabinet that day or the office; in fact, her mom's desire to clean the house completely vanished and, instead, she called Aunt Tracy to come over and watch with her the episodes she had missed of The Voice.
As she lay in her bunk, sleepless, Maddie felt the stirrings of an idea, as if all the stray bits of information filling her head - her knowledge of who Christina was, who the woman in her mother's photographs was, how her mom and Helena Wells had felt about each other when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (one of her Grandmother Bering's favorite sayings), how much Christina didn't like her mom's fiancé, how much she feared that Michelle and her mom might get back together for a third time - were being blown like leaves into a pile. She didn't even have to work to collect them; they were already there. When, after dinner the next day, she read her mother's text message, it was too fitting, as if the course of the universe, which she usually believed was set to painfully collide with her, was running parallel with her. She and the universe were in sync because her mother's text said, "Hey, honey, a quick note to say 'I love you' because I'm meeting Michelle for breakfast. DON'T WORRY [then there was a smiley face emoji], we're just friends now." When she talked to her mom, her mind busily working over her options if, regardless of what her mom said, she and Michelle were becoming more than friends (again), Maddie trotted out the phrases that would make any mother pleased that she had decided to send her daughter to summer camp – "I'm having a great time with the other girls" and "I spiked the ball over the net to win the match" and "I could name three berries and four flowers on our hike today." After she and her mom said goodnight, Maddie didn't have to think about it; Aunt Tracy was on her speed dial. She had ten minutes left in which to maintain contact with the outside world.
"Hey, Mads, what's up?" Aunt Tracy always sounded glad to hear from her, even if, as Maddie sometimes suspected, she wasn't calling at the best time.
Despite the fact that Aunt Tracy frequently came over whenever Maddie's mom called or invited Maddie to spend the weekend with her, she did have Uncle Kevin, who would want her attention, too. Just because he seemed more spectral than really, truly present, offering a distant "Hi" to Maddie before disappearing into his TV room or office for hours didn't mean Aunt Tracy saw him that way. While Maddie wasn't sure that if he ever vanished she would be able to provide a detailed description of him, unable to recall any distinguishing feature except that he was tall and wore glasses, Aunt Tracy could probably identify every mole on his body. It wasn't going to be just Aunt Tracy and Uncle Kevin for much longer either. Aunt Tracy was going to have a baby, "my first and last," she maintained. Having been "the child of my heart" all these years for her aunt - and even though Aunt Tracy would clasp her hands over her heart and give Maddie a goofy grin as she said it, Maddie knew she meant it - Maddie was going to be dislodged come December.
If Maddie were being honest, Aunt Tracy sounded a little tired, ready to have a chat if Maddie needed it but tired all the same. Maddie wanted to take pity on her, but she couldn't; this was too important. Even though she also wanted to know if her mom was doing "just friends" things with Michelle or if more was going on than her mom wanted to admit, Maddie had under nine minutes before she had to surrender her phone, and the mystery of Helena Wells took precedence over the nightmare of Michelle. On her bunk, Christina was loudly, and atonally, singing a Taylor Swift song that she was listening to through her headphones, but Maddie still lowered her voice as she asked, "Did my mom go out with a woman named Helena Wells?"
Aunt Tracy whistled softly. "That's a blast from the past. How did you come up with her name?"
"Her daughter has the bunk above me." Aunt Tracy laughed or maybe she choked. It was hard for Maddie to tell over the phone. Precious seconds, however, were being eaten up by her aunt's coughing and gasping for breath. "Just tell me, how does my mom know Helena Wells?" Maddie pressed.
"Whoa, hold on there. Piece of advice, don't ever say that name around your mother. Remember your Harry Potter, Helena Wells is She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."
"She's Voldemort?" There was the picture of her as a vampire, but in the pictures of her from the depths of the file cabinet, Helena Wells had looked like a normal girl, not one planning to exercise her dominion over the universe. And while Christina could be annoying and smug and - well, she wasn't mean or bad. So her mom couldn't be absolutely horrible, could she?
"Your mom might like to think so, but Helena's worst sin was that she was young. They both were." Aunt Tracy's voice became gentle, as if she were ready to dispense some grown-up wisdom. "I'm just trying to say that her name holds a lot of power for your mom." Maddie waited for the inevitable "Someday you'll know exactly what I'm talking about," but Aunt Tracy had already moved on. "If you're going to ask her about Helena Wells, all I'm saying is, go easy."
"That's why I'm asking you. Mom came across some old pictures of her after she and Michelle broke up, you know, the second time -"
"Oh my God," Tracy interrupted with a dramatic sigh. "That was the time she had me come over and watch The Voice, Casablanca, and Love Actually with her all in one night."
The minutes were ticking away and Maddie still hadn't gotten an answer to her question. Instead she had heard her aunt practically choke to death, compare Helena Wells to Voldemort, caution her to "go easy," and complain about a night of binge watching TV. Sometimes it was all too easy to remember that Aunt Tracy and her mom were sisters. "Christina says she's never heard of a Myka Bering."
"Who's Christina - never mind," Aunt Tracy said, answering her own question, "she must be her kid." That she was frowning was apparent in her tone. "Don't go telling your mother that Helena's never mentioned her, I'm not up for another go-around of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman." An even more dramatic sigh. "You also can't tell your mother this, but if gay marriage had been the law almost 20 years ago, she would have been dragging Helena to the altar. That's what Helena Wells meant to your mom."
…
Maddie said she had a plan, but she didn't really. It was what she needed to say to attract Christina's interest. Christina wasn't into the actual planning part of plans; she liked the concept of them. Plans, schemes, covert missions - anything that involved secrecy, code words, disguises, deception, Christina was all for it. In theory. When it came to thinking through a mission, identifying the steps to be taken, that was when she lost interest. It explained why Christina was crawling out on a tree limb to work open a window into the counselors' office to steal back her phone, and why Maddie, in planning for all the emergencies that might happen at a summer camp, had decided upon a more efficient method, secreting a second one. Maddie might have waited another day or she might have chosen, albeit reluctantly, not to say anything more about their mothers because she didn't have an idea, let alone a plan. She had only names (Myka, Helena, Michelle, Nate), anxieties about a future in which Michelle and Ethan were fixtures in her and her mother's lives, and a growing belief that her mother and Helena Wells were inextricably and eternally linked (like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, only much less tragically, she hoped). Then there was another text from her mom, saying she was excited to be bringing her home from camp in a few days and suggesting that they could take in a movie . . . one that she and Michelle had already seen with Ethan. Her mom was sure she would love it.
Maddie had no choice after reading the text. Waiting until after the counselors had collected their phones for the evening, Maddie tugged at the leg that Christina was dangling over the side of her bunk. "Hey," another tug when Christina's head didn't pop up, "hey, how badly do you want Nate out of your mom's life? Because I've got a plan."
The leg was retracted, and Maddie had a moment to consider whether she had gone about it all wrong before Christina hung her head over the bed, eyeing Maddie intently. "Unless it's hiring a hit man or something else that'll get us thrown in prison, I'm in."
"Get him out of her life, not get rid of him," Maddie said in exasperation.
Christina shrugged, unfazed by Maddie's annoyance, just as she was unfazed when Maddie would cough very loudly and pick up a t-shirt or a damp towel from the floor where someone had dropped it. Christina would shrug and advise her, "Toss it in the corner if it's in the way." Being unfazed wasn't responsive, wasn't helpful, wasn't . . . listening to her. Maddie swallowed a sigh; she wished she could so negligently lift a shoulder like that. But there were those who shrugged their shoulders, and there were those who put their shoulders to the wheel. She had a potentially balky wheel to turn, and its name was Christina. She needed to move to the next step, which was to come up with a plan, and to do that, she needed to confirm that Helena Wells also had a box of old pictures stuck in the back of a file drawer. "We need to talk to your Uncle Charles tonight."
When Christina flopped back onto her pillow in her own demonstration of annoyance, Maddie recognized she had lost some ground when she explained that they needed to ask Charles Wells about her mother. "So what if our moms went out? What's that got to do with breaking up my mom and Nate?" Scornfully Christina added, "My uncle Charles has probably never heard of Myka Bering."
"Trust me, he has." Maddie mustered all the nonchalance she had within her and spent it on those four words. She desperately hoped that tonight wouldn't be the night the counselors would greet them outside the office, training flashlights on them like they were convicts caught in a prison break, because she would crumble. She was out on a limb with this plan-that-wasn't-even-a-plan, and not the limb they used to get in and out of the office, a really small, weak limb that was like a thousand feet above the ground. All her daring was bound up in it. If they were caught tonight, she would fall shamelessly at the counselors' feet and weep and plead for mercy.
Seeing that Christina had yet to move from her pillow, Maddie dispensed with nonchalance and tried persuasion. "I mean your mom and your uncle are close, right? They run that company together. I bet she tells him a bunch of stuff she wouldn't think to tell you." Then, fearing that her words had sounded neither nice nor persuasive and might have suggested, instead, a suspicion that Christina's mother never told her daughter anything, she added, "You know, things that happened before you were born."
Christina sat up, shrugged again, this time in dismissal of the importance of anything that occurred before she was born, and then jumped to the floor. "They're not lovey-dovey, if that's what you're getting at. He always says he wouldn't turn his back on her or meet her in a dark alley without carrying a weapon, but he's just kidding." She rooted around in Maddie's backpack for her other phone. "I'm pretty sure he's kidding, anyway." She handed the phone to Maddie. "I'm bored. Let's play some games on it before we call him."
And with that Christina had apparently decided, regardless of her doubts about the utility of it, to talk to her Uncle Charles, leaving Maddie to conclude that, on some level, her cabin mate would always remain a mystery to her.
Christina was no mystery to her Uncle Charles, whose booming laugh some two and a half hours later, practically rattled the walls of the office, which had Maddie jumping up and casting anxious looks at the door. Recovering from his initial surprise at getting a call from his niece at 7:30 in the morning London time, Uncle Charles, once he confirmed that there was no emergency (although Maddie would beg to differ), exploded in laughter when Christina described how she came to be calling him. "A Wells will always find his - or her - way around a rule. Initiative, ingenuity, and more than a dash of fearlessness - good show, Christina." He sounded as proud as if she had won an award for Best Camper or aced a quiz on poisonous plants.
As Maddie tried to wrap her mind around being praised for being bad, Christina explained, "Uncle Charles, it's really my, um, friend Maddie who had the idea about unlocking the safe. It was because the counselors discovered that I was picking the cabinet lock that all our phones and stuff were put into the safe in the first place."
There was silence in the office and silence on the phone as Maddie and, apparently, Uncle Charles needed some time to absorb Christina's disclosure. Maddie wasn't sure what shocked her more, that Christina had called her a friend or that she hadn't taken all the credit, although "credit" was a weird word to use when it came to trespassing, breaking and entering, and what some might consider stealing. With a gruff clearing of his throat, Uncle Charles said cajolingly, as though he felt Christina might have taken his silence as a sign of his disappointment, "It's also showing initiative when you're smart enough to identify who has the skill set you need. Good thinking, Christina, and tell your friend that with a memory for information like that, well, she'll end up a master criminal or Jeopardy champion."
"She's here with me, Uncle Charles. Actually it's sort of why we want to speak with you -"
The booming laugh had grown uneasy. "You'll forget, won't you, ah, Maddie, is it? You'll forget my comment about becoming a master criminal because breaking curfew and stealing phones from a safe, while they may be all right as an occasional prank, they shouldn't become habits. I wouldn't you want you to think I'm encouraging my niece to become a juvenile delinquent. No, no, staying in school, applying yourself to your studies, learning to be productive, law-abiding citizens . . . ."
Christina giggled. "Don't worry. Maddie could break into a million safes and she'd still be the most honest person ever."
Maddie wasn't going to dispute the truth of it, but did Christina have to act as though the thought of her as a master criminal was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard of? Uncle Charles was mumbling, "Glad to hear it, glad to hear it." Then he asked briskly, leaving behind the awkwardness of seeming to have encouraged two eleven-year-old girls to adopt a life of crime, "What is it that I can help you with? Don't want you staying up too late, you know."
"Maddie wants to know if you knew her mom way back when, like before she was born."
There was another silence and another strained laugh. "You should keep in mind, girls, that's rather a loaded question to be asking a bachelor in his 40s." And again there was the briskness, as if another pitfall were narrowly being avoided. "What makes you think I might know your mother, Maddie?"
"Because she was . . . uh . . . friends with Christina's mom. I thought you might know her too. Her name is Myka Bering."
"Myka Bering . . . Myka Bering . . . . . . Myka Bering." The more Uncle Charles repeated the name the more his voice began to resemble Helena Wells's smile in her Future Image photograph, a little wicked and more than a little pleased with his wickedness. "I knew of her, Maddie, although I never had the pleasure of meeting her. She and my sister were very close friends when they were in college. Very close."
Christina and Maddie spoke simultaneously.
"Very close as in girlfriend close? Because Mom never said anything about dating a Myka - "
"You can say they were girlfriends, Mr. Wells. My mom says she doesn't believe in labels, but she's pretty gay. My Aunt Tracy says my dad was the exception that proves the rule, and I guess -"
Uncle Charles's sigh was loud too. It was gusty, gusty enough that Maddie automatically slammed her hand down on some stray paper on the desk. "Let me address your comments by saying this. Christina, there are many things concerning your mother about which you know nothing, nor should you, until you reach a certain age. Among those are certain amours, affairs of the heart," he immediately translated, although Maddie wanted to assure him that no such translation had been necessary for her. "Ms. Bering was such a one, and I fear I'm being indiscreet even in revealing that." Once more Uncle Charles sounded rather pleased with himself, leaving Maddie with the impression that he would like nothing better than for Helena Wells to have to talk about Myka Bering.
"Shades of Hayley Mills," he exclaimed, "the daughters of Myka Bering and Helena Wells meeting at summer camp. Who could have possibly imagined this happening? Christina, how did your mother happen upon the marvelous idea of sending you to camp? And it just happens to be the very same camp to which Myka Bering sends her daughter. What a stunning coincidence." It seemed that Uncle Charles was changing the subject, a little, but there was something about the smug amusement in his chuckle that suggested he didn't think the unlikeliness of their meeting all that unlikely. Maddie knew he was saying something if only she were smart enough - old enough - to understand what it was.
"She sent me to camp because I told her I didn't want her to marry Nate," Christina growled.
Maddie needed to get the Wellses to refocus on what was important. "My Aunt Tracy said that my mom and your sister, Mr. Wells, were serious about each other, that my mom would've married her if she could have." At that, Christina spun her head toward Maddie, her mouth dropping into an O of surprise. "Is that true?"
"That's a story you should hear from your mother, Maddie." Uncle Charles said it gently, seriously. His voice wasn't booming or sighing, and Maddie thought that this might be how he talked when he wasn't playacting for the benefit of two kids.
After sternly encouraging them to go to bed and quit tempting fate by sneaking into the office - Maddie was pretty sure there was a big wink in that last piece of advice - Uncle Charles wished them a goodnight and ended the call. Christina put her phone back into the safe and shut the door. "You were right, as usual," she conceded. "But what does it matter when it happened so long ago?"
"Because, to my mom, it didn't happen long ago, not really, and I bet the same is true for your mom."
Maddie had been hoping that Christina would magically divine the plan that was still basically a muddle of stray thoughts and wishes. That way she wouldn't have to try and explain it to her, but Christina remained stubbornly fixated on why something that began and ended long before they were born mattered now. Why would Maddie believe that two people who hadn't seen each other in years and years and years could still be having a love affair?
"Not a love affair, in love."
Christina didn't find the clarification clarifying. "How can you be in love with somebody who doesn't know or care where you are, who forgot about you a long time ago?"
Of course Christina wouldn't understand; she had never been invisible. Maddie knew she was invisible to J.P. Lattimer, invisible to him as a girl anyway, but it didn't change the fact that someday she was going to marry him. It was okay that in his mind, if he thought about her at all, she was still the clumsy little girl on the soccer team his dad had coached because one day she was going to exist for him as a girl he found pretty, whom he could love. Maddie absolutely believed that her mother could be in love with Helena Wells, even after all these years, even if she had never heard from Helena since they had broken up. It was the Berings' lot, mother and daughter, to pine, and Maddie suspected that it was the Wellses' lot, mother and daughter, to be the pinee.
"Let's pretend that our moms still care about each other. Think what might happen if we find ways of putting them together. Maybe Nate won't look so great in your mom's eyes, and maybe my mom won't keep trying to make things work with her ex, Michelle."
"How are we going to do that? Once we leave camp, we'll probably never see other again."
That was all too likely, which meant that she and Christina would need to invent reasons to continue to see each other. They didn't have much time since the end of camp was fast approaching. Maddie had come up with one reason, a fabrication to a large extent and at odds with Christina's butterfly-like approach to social relationships, but short of discovering that they were twins separated at birth, it was their best bet. "We're going to tell our moms that we became best friends, and that we want to hang out together, like all the time."
Christina made a face and then, catching herself, blushed. "Sorry. I mean you're okay and everything. Like I said before, you're more interesting than the other kids here, but I don't do the best friend thing, share lunches and all that stuff. It makes me itch." She started scratching her forearm, as if she were emphasizing her point.
"I've already got a best friend," Maddie said, thinking of Sophie and cringing at having to tell her that they couldn't read the Divergent series all the way through again or finish the Raven Cycle together because she was too busy spending her free time with Christina.
"Besides, no offense, if my mom's going to get back together with someone, I want it to be Gigi, not your mom."
She wasn't offended, but Maddie was irked. Sure, her mom was a dork most of the time, and she didn't do anything as cool as run a company, but Christina was rejecting her without having met her. "No offense, but your mom sounds like a bit of a drama queen, and I've had enough of that with Michelle."
Christina nodded, a thoughtful expression on her face. "I get that. My mom is kind of a drama queen."
"If we do this, it's not because we're really going to be best friends or because we're trying to put our moms together. We're doing it because we don't like the people they're with. As soon as your mom breaks up with Nate and my mom gives up for good on Michelle, we're done." Maddie held out her hand. "Agreed?"
Christina scratched violently at her arm before saying in resignation, "I don't have a better plan." She shook Maddie's hand. "Agreed."
The crucial step in their plan, because everything would follow from it or, in the event that it turned out to be an utter disaster, would fail to follow from it, was their mothers' reunion. Christina entertained the simple idea of having their mothers run into each other as they lugged their daughters' suitcases and other belongings to their respective cars on the day camp ended. "You know, a 'Hey, how are you,' low-key kind of thing, no pressure," she recommended from her bunk the next morning.
Maddie was aghast, mainly because Christina seemed to have no thought of setting up the reunion for maximum impact but also because they had only five minutes before they were due on the beach where the canoes were stored and Christina was still in her pajamas. "This is Edward and Bella - you don't have them seeing each other for the first time in forever at their kids' summer camp. They can't suspect, they can't know they're going to meet. It's their surprise that's going to tell us whether any of this has a chance of working. It has to be like a thunderclap."
Christina reasonably pointed out, as Maddie had to admit, that they couldn't hide their mothers' identities for very long. "My mom's going to want to know what your mother's name is if we'll be spending all this time together. I can't keep telling her 'Maddie's mom' this and 'Maddie's mom' that. They'll be doing that parenty thing. 'Where did you meet her?' 'Who's her mom?' 'Is she okay with this?'"
After a half-hour of paddling their canoe in circles and, at one point, nearly driving it across the bow of another canoe - which earned them demerits they would have to work off by undergoing additional water safety instruction in the afternoon - Maddie and Christina had settled upon how they were going to reintroduce their mothers. Maddie didn't like it because it wasn't sufficiently dramatic and Christina didn't like it because it required too much work, but Maddie sagely advised her that it was probably the best idea of the ones they had considered because it left each of them wishing she had come up with something better.
"Compromises aren't perfect. It's okay that we're disappointed with it."
"That's why my mom says 'compromise' is a nice word for settling. Instead you've got to make sure you're getting what you want while you're letting the other person believe they're getting what they want."
It was sayings of Helena Wells like that one which had Maddie wondering about the wisdom of what they were doing. Sometimes Christina's mom seemed too clever, too sophisticated for honest-as-the-day-is-long Myka Bering. A long time had elapsed since they had been in love, and Maddie worried that they might have grown into people who weren't in the least compatible, who would meet, exchange a few polite remarks, and have no further interest in seeing each other. It was possible that the woman her mom still mooned about no longer existed. It's not about true love, it's about Michelle, she counseled herself, it's about wishy-washy, Gwen-dependent Michelle. "Remember you're telling your mom that my mom and I are taking you home because we can't bear to say good-bye to each other so soon. You have to sell that we're best friends, Christina," she ended warningly.
Christina patted her mouth as she fake-covered a fake yawn. "Listen and learn."
As the counselors came into the cabin and gave them their phones, Maddie pictured Christina's mom flying from their house to greet her daughter and stopping suddenly at the sight of Myka Bering lifting Christina's suitcase from the back of the Subaru. Helena Wells's hands hovered over her heart in shock as she croaked disbelievingly, "Myka?" And Myka whirled away from the Subaru gracefully, like a deer, and cried just as incredulously, "Helena?" Tears were streaming down their faces as they embraced, and Maddie felt her own eyes begin to well at the reconciliation. She heard Christina enthuse about her new friend Maddie and how they couldn't bear to be separated. She was good, and the tears that threatened at the little movie of their mothers' reunion that Maddie was playing in her head began to trickle down her face as Christina painted days of sharing meals in the dining hall and telling each other their secrets after dark. Maddie surreptitiously flicked the tears away as Christina exclaimed with what sounded like genuine excitement, "Mom, we live in the same city and we didn't know it. We've got all sorts of plans for the school year, and Maddie's mom said she could take me home when camp ends this weekend –"
"Maybe I should speak with Maddie's mother directly, darling."
Despite the panic that surged through Maddie as she heard the request issue from the phone's speaker, a part of her mind - the one that wasn't screaming "No!" - noted how strange it was that Christina could sound so American when her Uncle Charles and her mom sounded so British. "That's going to be a little hard, Mom," Christina said smoothly, the flat "ahm" of "Mom" coming from her so naturally. "Maddie's mom is out of the country on business until just before she's supposed to come get us."
"Really." Dry, disbelieving. "And what business is it that's taking Maddie's mum out of the country?"
Christina's eyes grew big at the question and she mouthed at Maddie "What do I say?"
Maddie sat down on the loveseat next to Christina and leaned toward the phone Christina was holding out to her, the part of her mind screaming "No!" joined by all the other parts, but she was in too deep to panic. She could handle this, she could handle this, she could - "Hi, Ms. Wells, I'm Maddie Martino, Christina's friend. My mom is in Sydney, Australia, visiting a sister school. She's the vice president of external affairs for a university, so she goes on lots of trips out of town." Well, not really, and hardly ever out of the country, but stretching the truth for everyone's greater happiness - that wasn't so horrible, was it?
"Hi, Maddie. Thank you so much for explaining. Do you think if I left your mother a voice mail that she would call me back?" The voice was softer, the skepticism that had colored it when she had been speaking with her daughter absent, and Maddie was instinctively drawn to it, so much so that she was on the verge of saying, "Oh, yes, she's wanted to talk to you for a long time," when Christina yanked back the phone so violently that she nearly fell against the opposite arm of the loveseat.
"Mom, Mrs. Martino's worked it out with the camp counselors. They're going to wait with us until she drives up from the airport. You don't have to believe me, and you don't have to call Maddie's mom in the middle of the night, you can talk to one of them." Christina said it with the perfect combination of exasperation, injured pride, and practicality.
Suddenly there was another voice in the background, rumbling, male, and Maddie heard Christina's mom say, "I'll be with you in a minute, Nate." Then, sounding distracted, she was talking to her daughter again, "I'm running late, darling, for a charity event that Nate is hosting, but I'll definitely want to talk to one of the counselors and Maddie's mom, too, if I can. It's not that I don't trust you, darling, it's just that . . . I don't trust you." Christina didn't seem upset, in fact quite the opposite, she was grinning, and her mom's voice had become even softer than it had been when she spoke to Maddie, and it was loving, especially when she repeated, "I don't trust you."
"Love you too, Mom." Christina sighed and put the phone on the rickety end table. Not two seconds later, there was a rapping on the screen door, and a counselor entered to collect their phones. She was one of the younger counselors, still in college, and she was the one of all of them who was the most willing to let her charges bend the rules.
"Hey, Erin," Christina said lazily, glancing at her as she bent and scooped up their phones and put them in the tote bag she was carrying. "Did I hear you say you were trying to get tickets to Beyoncé's show at the Pfeiffer Center?"
"It's sold out." Erin said with a sense of gloom more appropriate for announcing a death in the family. "Better luck next time, right?"
"Maybe I can do something about that. Let's talk at breakfast tomorrow." Christina was as offhand and as casually dismissive as, well, the senior vice president of a company might be to one of her assistants.
Maddie continued to look blankly at her after Erin had left the cabin. Christina said slowly, deliberately, letting the words fall around Maddie like they were grand pianos plunging out of windows or boulders tumbling off cliffs, "Erin doesn't know it yet, but she's going to tell my mom that your mom squared everything with the counselors about taking me home from camp - right before she left the country for Australia." Despite the scornful slow-motion explanation, which had Maddie staring mutinously at her, a glimmer of admiration flashed in Christina's eyes. "That was nice, saying your mom was a VP of Exterior Affairs or whatever."
"She is," Maddie said, "I didn't make that part up." Suddenly understanding the connection between Erin and Beyoncé tickets, she demanded, "How are you going to get the Beyoncé tickets to bribe her? You're not that good." Maybe it was kind of snide, but Maddie wasn't going to let anyone, especially a girl who couldn't tell the difference between "exterior" and "external" think she could get away with insulting her intelligence.
"I don't have to be," Christina said smugly. "I can score a couple from Nate. His company always has tickets to big shows, and he still thinks he can buy my affection." Smugness gave way to a resigned sigh. "I had been planning to spend those tickets on getting out of our final hike. So this plan of yours better work."
Setting up this reunion between their mothers was becoming more complicated than Maddie had anticipated. Now they were bribing camp counselors, which just seemed wrong. On the other hand, they couldn't have their mothers speaking to each other for the first time in almost 20 years over the phone. Having heard Helena Wells on the phone with her daughter, Maddie no longer feared that she was a vampire or Voldemort or someone you wouldn't want to meet unarmed in a dark alley. She had sounded like a mom, not unlike her own mother.
The next night when Maddie called her mom to ask her if they could give Christina a ride home "because her mom's got this really nasty flu or something," she expected an immediate and unhesitating yes. Because her mom was always giving students caught in the rain a ride home and buying extra groceries to donate to the food shelf and buying cookie dough and magazines from kids fundraising for their sports teams. Her mom liked to help. But this time her mom hesitated and said she wanted to talk to Christina's mom, if at all possible.
"A mother always wants to know where her children are and I don't want to take Christina home from camp without confirming that it's okay with her mom." A pause and then Myka Bering muttered, "The last thing my life needs is a kidnapping charge."
Maddie looked at Christina, who theatrically grabbed at her throat. "That's going to be a little difficult, Mom, because Christina's mom, she has, uh, laryngitis on top of her flu. But, uh, she's contacted the counselors, so they all know what's going on. How about if one of them talks to you?"
Erin demanded two additional tickets to reassure Maddie's mom that taking Christina home would not be risking imprisonment.
The Saturday camp ended was beautiful, sunny, not too humid, with a gentle breeze stirring the curtains at their cabin's windows. It was a good omen, if you took weather as an omen. Maddie wasn't so confident of their plan's success that she could ignore the promise of the day. The final hike hiked - Christina, grabbing at her ankles midway through, made it to the end supported by two other campers - their suitcases packed and promises made to a glowering Erin that the Beyoncé tickets would soon be in the mail, she and Christina waited for her mom to arrive.
Of course when her mom did arrive, she had to do something dorky and call to her through the screen door, "Is my own Bear Grylls ready to go home?" Then she acted even dorkier by hugging her in front of Christina and exclaiming with almost giddy relief, "Nope, still my girl. Your Aunt Tracy kept telling me that when I saw you next, you'd be three inches taller and filling out college applications."
Despite the fact that she couldn't be more embarrassed than if her mom had fallen to her knees in a paroxysm of tears over seeing her "baby" again, Maddie hugged her mother back and pushed up her t-shirt sleeves to show off her biceps. "I got these paddling canoes."
"Impressive," her mom said with the appropriate amount of awe, squeezing Maddie's muscle. She smiled at Christina, who was observing them with mild curiosity from the loveseat. "Hi, I'm Myka. If there's a leaf collection or first place ribbons for swimming that you're dying to bring out, I'm here to admire."
Maddie expected Christina to ignore her mom's overture, which, as usual, had strained too hard to be funny, but, after giving her a questioning look that attempted to plumb the sincerity of her interest, Christina unzipped her backpack and took out a few folded pieces of paper. "I painted pictures of the lake."
Myka carefully unfolded watercolors of the lake at sunset and under a bright summer sun. "These are very good, Christina."
They were good, Maddie had to admit. During most afternoons, the campers had had their choice of drawing, making jewelry, composing "nature" music, and creating scrapbooks of their time at camp. Christina had always chosen to draw, collecting watercolors and a sketchpad and taking them to a picnic table that had been dragged to the grassy margins of the beach. It was the one activity that she had appeared to enjoy. Holding out one of the pictures, her mom was asking Christina what colors she had mixed to capture the tint of the lake and why she had chosen to represent her swimmers and canoers as geometrical shapes . . . and Christina was eating it up, pointing at an effect she had tried for here and one she had tried for there. Maddie's mom was nodding, as intently viewing the watercolor as if she were in front of a painting at a museum. When you had Myka Bering's attention, you had all of it, and Maddie couldn't decide whether she was more pleased that her mom was treating Christina as a person and not just as a kid or jealous that she wasn't the object of all that earnest interest.
Christina carefully returned the pictures to her backpack, and Myka scanned the cabin to make sure they weren't leaving behind anything obviously valuable. She urged them to shrug on their backpacks and get ready to go, and Christina scampered, actually scampered, over to her bags. As her mom picked up the largest of their suitcases and arched an eyebrow at her daughter, demanding, "What's in this? A family of bears? All the rocks from the lakebed? Your favorite camp counselor?", Maddie was struck by how pretty her mother was. She didn't have Helena Wells's dramatic coloring or her wicked smile, but today was both a good hair day and a good wardrobe day for Myka Bering, and that couldn't always be said.
Her hair was up, but her mom had gathered and bound it with more care than usual; sometimes she just twisted it into a rough knot and stuck a pencil through it. Really. While her clothes were summer casual, shorts and a short-sleeved blouse, they were free of the odd drips of paint or wood stain - and sawdust - that were the markers of how she frequently spent her weekends, stripping some 90-odd years' worth of improvements and renovations from their 1920s two-story. "We're giving it back its original luster" her mom would say brightly, and generally right after she had accidentally jammed a splinter of wood under her skin or tapped a hammer too close to her thumb. But today, today she was far too pretty for the likes of Michelle and more than pretty enough for the likes of Helena Wells.
Christina was already at the door, eager to leave camp behind her, and as Maddie and her mom plodded to join her, weighed down by bags and suitcases (somehow Maddie had ended up carrying one of Christina's bags in addition to her own backpack), she impatiently flicked a strand of hair behind her ear. "C'mon, slowpokes, the world's our taxi and the meter's running."
Did Christina even know what a "meter" was? And wasn't Uber replacing taxis? Where did she get such a strange, old-fashioned saying? Maddie turned to her mother for explanation, but Myka had dropped one of the suitcases and was staring at Christina. Not in a "What kind of child are you to be calling me a slowpoke?" kind of way, which Maddie would have expected more from her Grandmother Bering, anyway, but in a way that Maddie couldn't define, except that she recognized it threatened the reunion she and Christina had planned. "You remind me of someone," her mom was saying quietly, too quietly. "What's your mother's -"
"We're going to be late for checkout," Maddie shouted, barreling for the door and practically pushing Christina through it.
"Maddie," her mom said, annoyed, but Maddie had grabbed Christina's hand and was pulling her out of range of that odd, piercing stare.
Disaster narrowly averted, Maddie gulped down air. It wasn't easy running with two bags and yanking along a bewildered Christina. Christina shook her hand loose and gave Maddie an "Are you crazy?" scowl before readjusting her backpack. Checkout, once they made it through checkout, everything would be back on plan, back on schedule. Maddie began to trudge toward one of the older counselors, who was waving good-bye to a group of campers and their parents, but she shook her head as Maddie approached her and pointed to another counselor on the path, Erin. All three conspirators were gathering together, her, Christina, Erin; this did not bode well. If this were one of the old black and white movies her mom liked to watch, one of them would start sweating and cry out, "I can't take it anymore! I gotta tell the truth!"
Yet Erin was the perfect junior counselor, calmly working down a list of questions on her clipboard, which were on the order of "Do you have all of your electronic devices?" and "Did you clear all foodstuffs from the cabin?" Maddie fumed at the duh-ness of it. Like they hadn't been using their electronic devices day and night. Like they hadn't had enough creepy-crawlies in the cabin as it was. After she and Christina had answered all the questions, her mom, being her mom had to express her appreciation for Erin's help in ensuring that Christina had a ride home. "I'm sure the kids learned a lot but probably not enough to survive on their own in the woods," Myka joked (and Maddie rolled her eyes), "so I thank you and I'm sure Christina's mom does too."
"Sure thing, Ms. Bering," Erin said, "I spoke to Ms. W-"
"Bianchi," Christina cut in swiftly, firmly. "My mom prefers Bianchi."
Erin clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and narrowed her eyes at Christina. "I spoke to Ms. Bi-an-chi," she continued, with deliberate emphasis, "and, as I told you earlier, she's absolutely fine with you picking Christina up." She bestowed upon Maddie's mom a smile so sweet that Maddie feared her mom would suspect something was up, because no one ever smiled that sweetly and meant it, but her mom was busy searching her shoulder bag for her car keys and so missed out on Erin's insulin-proof display of teeth. Taking advantage of her distraction, Erin mouthed the words "Four tickets" and flashed four fingers at Christina.
Maddie didn't begin to relax until her mom drove their Subaru past the camp's entrance gates, and she looked through the rear window until the dark green of the forest and the turn-off for the state park, which led straight into the center of the forest, were out of view. Christina, naturally, wasn't burdened by any leftover anxiety from their near-misses, sitting shotgun (how had she managed that?) and chatting with her mom about going to art camp next summer.
The trip back to the city was a long one, so there were stops for lunch and unaccountably, given her mom's position on sugar, for ice cream at a Tasty Treat in one of the endless small towns along the highway. Her mom had even suggested that they could all go to the Post-Impressionism exhibit at the art museum, and Christina, not needing to be prompted by a poke from Maddie, had suggested that her mom might want to go, "as long as she's over her flu and everything." When Maddie impressed upon her mom that she and Christina, having become the best of friends at camp, would want to have sleepovers and after-school study sessions, would, in fact, want to spend "tons and tons of time together" - which had Christina widening her eyes but, thankfully, resisting from pretending to gag at the prospect of such togetherness - her mom said only, "Okay, I guess Christina's mother and I will have to work out a schedule."
Maddie could have hugged her mother then if she hadn't been in the backseat and her mom driving and if she weren't trying to reduce the hugging and other displays of affection, which, since she was entering middle school in the fall, she was getting too old for. She almost didn't feel guilty about the surprise they were about to spring; her mom was falling into step so perfectly with their plan that Maddie might have believed a part of her mom had already divined what they were up to and approved of it. Her uneasiness didn't return until Christina directed them to take a turn north of the city "'cause my mom and I have been pretty much living at her fiancé's lately."
They weren't out in the country anymore, not where there were farms and cows and dogs about as silly as Remy, making the skittish kind of feints that suggested they might hurl themselves into traffic at any minute, but they weren't out in the suburbs either. The houses were big and getting bigger, retreating farther and farther from the road as if it were a source of infection, and the fences and no trespassing signs on them weren't only announcing ownership but imposing a quarantine. Maddie felt that she wasn't an intruder so much as a germ. Her mom seemed to share her discomfort but tried to disguise it with a nervous laugh. "It's lovely here, Christina, but I imagine it's very quiet. Do you like it?"
"I guess." Christina's shrug wasn't the casually dismissive one that Maddie so envied. It was defensive, and it finished by her drawing in her shoulders, as though she were hunching against the cold. "It's straight ahead." She pointed to where the road dead-ended in front of a narrow, albeit well paved, lane. "Follow it until you come to the gates."
"Gates?" Maddie and her mom repeated simultaneously.
"Yup." Christina's mouth was a sour line.
Maddie was expecting the gates to be like the portcullis of a castle or the outer walls of a fort, bristling with sharp points, and she expected that they would block the lane shortly after they turned onto it, but they drove and drove . . . and drove, passing between groves of trees and across a creek, the land either pressing in on them, all woodsy and wild, or sweeping away from them in great flat stretches of grass and summer flowers. Her mom slowed the car down as they approached a rambling stone fence, which in its center had two metal arms, and, set in one of its supports, an electronic sensor with a keypad underneath it.
"It opens by remote, but since we don't have a remote, I'll have to key in the code." Christina hopped out of the car and entered numbers on the keypad. The arms swung open and she flung herself into the backseat where she had been sitting since Maddie had reminded her at the Tasty Treat that "best friends sit together." "Better hurry through," Christina advised, "they don't stay open long."
The Subaru, older and cranky, never liked being rushed, and the arms nearly clipped its rear bumper as they swung closed. At the end of the lane, which was still a distance away, rose a mansion that could have come straight from one of those boring historical dramas on PBS. "Je-" Maddie's mom let the word die before it could become a swear word. She cleared her throat. "Is there a servants' entrance? Because I'm not sure I'd be let in through the front door."
"Nate doesn't have servants," Christina said, missing the joke. "He has a personal chef and a trainer, and there's a cleaning crew that comes once a week," she frowned, thinking, "oh, and there are guys who come and mow the lawn and stuff. But mainly it's just him and Adelaide and me and Mom."
"It's a wonder he can find room for all of you," Maddie's mom said with a disbelieving laugh. She tipped her sunglasses down and looked at Christina. "You said Nate. Your mom's fiancé isn't Nate Robinson, is he?"
Christina vigorously nodded. "Do you know him?"
"Know of him," Maddie's mom said grimly, and Maddie's unease was making her stomach gurgle. They weren't "I'm hungry" gurgles (they couldn't be after a real, non-turkey burger and a double-dip ice cream cone); they were gurgles making her regret the fries that had come with the burger and the second scoop of ice cream.
The lane widened as they neared the mansion, which had rows and rows of windows and light-colored stone. It looked like a pat of butter, Maddie decided, it was big and square and the stone had a creamy, faintly yellow color. On one end of the mansion was an archway and underneath it a sports car. Christina said, "That's my mom's car," and Maddie thought it was the perfect car for the vampirish Helena Wells or the Helena Wells of the wicked little smile. It was black and sleek, and it looked very fast, a poor mate for the Subaru, which was in need of a wash and carried old stickers of Maddie's short-lived athletic career ("Proud Mom of a Soccer Star" and "Go Wildcats!"). However, there was also the Helena Wells who was a mom, so maybe somewhere there was a minivan.
Maddie's mom looked about for somewhere to park, bewildered by the choices available - behind the sports car, in front of what appeared to be a six-car garage, by the fountain that resembled a series of overflowing punch bowls - eventually deciding to park the Subaru in front of the main entrance, which was set back beneath a line of arches. Christina was already out of the car, running along the brick walk and leaping up the shallow steps to the doors. She flung them open with the carelessness with which she had tended to burst into their cabin at camp. "Mom," she was shouting, and her voice sounded, even from outside the mansion, as though she were shouting from deep inside a cavern. Maddie dragged one of Christina's lighter bags from the Subaru. It might look like a mansion, she told herself, but it was just a big, big house, and somewhere in it, Christina's mom was doing the stuff her mom did on a Saturday, folding clothes from the dryer, giving Remy a bath, vacuuming.
Her mom winced when the end of the suitcase she was carrying banged into the door, and then she was too busy examining the panels for damage to marvel at the room she and Maddie were in, which wasn't a room so much as a giant foyer that traveled the length of the mansion. At the far end was another set of doors that let onto a terrace, and they were open, letting the sun warm the stone. A sparkly chandelier hung from the ceiling and stairs swept up to a second floor and a little balcony that overlooked the floor.
"Mom," Christina hollered again. She spun to face Maddie and her mother. "She must be by the pool."
"I thought she had the flu," Maddie's mom said suspiciously, and then more suspiciously, she said, "complicated by laryngitis." She looked hard at Christina, who escaped onto the terrace, and, as if she had to find someone to whom she could give the full measure of her disapproving mom look, she fixed it on Maddie. "I think you better tell me what's really going on," she said with the quietness that Maddie recognized as a sign that she was in trouble.
In the end, however, she didn't have to say anything because a few seconds later, a woman was walking through the ginormous foyer to greet them. Her hair was just as dark as in her picture, swirling, dancing over shoulders that were bare except for the thin straps of her bikini top. The bikini was a deep, rich red, which emphasized the fairness of her skin and brought to Maddie's mind Helena Wells-as-vampire in the photo on Christina's phone, dark and pale . . . and predatory. Involuntarily Maddie gulped.
Christina was leading her mother by the hand, yammering about ice cream and Post-Impressionists and "boring camp." Helena Wells continued to glide toward them, a sarong-like wrap tied around her waist, its thin fabric fluttering around her legs. She was glamorous and a little scary and not very Mom-like at all. Someone old, and old-fashioned, like Grandmother Bering would say Christina's mom had deviltry in her face. The dark curve of her brows and the bow of her lips gave her face a questioning, teasing cast, as if she would always be on the verge of challenging you to best her. The expression softened as her eyes fell on Maddie - for an instant there flashed in them something maternal and strangely tender - and then they were traveling to Maddie's mom and the devil was back in full force. "Myka," she said, and though her tone suggested surprise, her expression didn't, and Maddie wondered if, on some level, Christina's mom wasn't surprised at all to see them.
Glancing at her mom to discover whether she was betraying the same odd mix of surprise and expectation, Maddie realized that her mom's surprise was completely genuine. In fact, her mom's mouth was hanging open and her arms, suddenly free of Christina's bags, were fumbling to cross themselves over her stomach, Helena Wells's appearance seeming to have landed like a fist. "Helena," she wheezed.
Maddie had never seen her mother like this, and part of her was sorry for the tricks that she and Christina had played to get these two here, to this moment. But another part of her was thinking about those old pictures and Michelle and Nate, and while she felt bad for her mom, she didn't feel awful enough to wish that she and Christina hadn't set her plan into motion. It was for their own good, she began repeating to herself, it was for their own good.
