Maddy shook her head, and looked at him like he’d mistaken her for someone else.
“How would I know that?”
Jack snapped his fingers. “Lobot! You know, he just stands there, stands still, when Lando needs him, the big ear muff things turn on, just-“ he made the appropriate bippity-bippity sound to accompany a bunch flashing colors and lights, “-and Lobot just, bammo, moves into action.”
“Bammo?” asked Maddy.
“Bammo.”
“Nerd.”
He grinned at her.
“Maddy?” Aster stood, the iPad in one hand, the other holding in place the device plugged into the right side of her head.
Maddy sighed. “What?”
“Nawzat says Horace changed his schedule slightly. His meeting in Seattle was cancelled so he’ll actually be arriving here earlier tomorrow.”
“How much earlier?”
“Nawzat?” Aster looked ceiling ward as she spoke. “What’s Horace’s ETA for Eaton?” She nodded. Looked at Maddy. “Probably 1, maybe 2 pm.”
Maddy shrugged.
“Whatever.” She looked at Dad. “What do you think? You think you could be accommodating to Horace Walton if he shows up here tomorrow?”
“Um…”
“I know you don’t like him, Dad. I know you don’t, but if you could just…”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him.”
“You don’t know him. Once you know him, you know he’s a good guy. I trust him. I trust him as much as I trust Jack.” And a moment later, as an afterthought, like through some invisible device plugged into her head she’d been advised to add it, she said, “As much as I trust you and Lucy. Or Mom.”
Dad stared at her. He made a fist and just as quickly released it.
“I told you before,” he said, “I’m happy to welcome you and everything attached to the movie star life while you’re in town. If that means, whatever that means, whatever that entails, I’m happy to do it, Madeline.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Jack and I shared a look. He looked uncomfortable like he’d just witnessed the countdown on a bomb with the timer frozen a second shy of detonation.
A snort sounded from the living room.
Aster still on the line with Nawzat. Her shoulders hitched and a breathy laughter sounded.
Her arms were preternaturally skinny. A long slender hand rest at the base of her throat, the chain on the bracelet with the luminous blue ‘L’ dangling down her forearm towards the elbow.
Maddy didn’t wear a bracelet or necklace like that. Neither did Jack. I wondered why, but didn’t ask. Probably because they were the walking talking advertisement for the movement. Any jewelry would be overkill.
At the issuance of more breathy Aster laughter, Maddy sighed.
“Assistant humor.” Then to Jack, “They’re probably talking about you.”
“No when it’s about me Aster snorts.”
As if on cue Aster snorted.
Jack clapped his hands, dimples deepening, perfect white teeth on display.
Everyone smiled, too, even Dad, but it didn’t creep up toward his eyes. Not even close. A wall repelled it, but I seemed the only one who could tell.
Chapter 17
Jack said he’d make dinner.
Out camping with his father and a brother and an uncle, a young Jack hadn’t quite taken to shooting animals, but he still made himself useful. He learned how to make eggs a variety of ways and how to make soup from nothing but potatoes and celery and best of all, ‘drop biscuits’ (called drop because it looks like the dough was thrown on the ceiling and then dropped down onto the pan – out of the oven the surface of a drop biscuit wasn’t necessarily pretty, but your stomach didn’t mind).
Pretty quickly after my arrival from school we’d determined that trying to go into town for dinner would cause headaches. Accidents even.
“Carla helped me get some groceries today,” said Dad. “Right after work I ran to the grocery store and she showed me what a fella with visitors ought to stock up on.”
“Who’s that?” asked Maddy.
“Just a…A lady I know. She was that friend of your mom’s. Works at The Nookery.”
I was mystified how Dad could be getting help with groceries from Carla so soon after the contempt he’d shown her brownies if not the woman herself the other night.
“Wait,” said Maddy. “Is she the one that brought the preacher with her every time she came to visit Mom at the hospital?”
Dad sighed the sigh of a man that knew the sign of incoming artillery fire.
Aster was outside, wandering the backyard and smoking. Jack was just getting fresh air before hitting dinner. He’d giggled before going out, telling us he was going to see how far along he could string Dina, make her believe he totally intended on crossing East Jennings and wading into the ocean of fans and protesters.
Amongst his staff Jack was notorious for doing the unexpected, sometimes showing up and shaking hands and signing autographs out of the blue. He’d walked up and down the line of moviegoers in Westwood Village for the Thursday midnight sneak showing of his recent hit film Quantum 2. Maddy said the staff called such heart stopping unpredictable quirkiness from Jack ‘Going Bono’, after the U2 lead singer’s penchant for similar rubbing-shoulders-with-the-fans behavior.
Maddy gave up on Dad’s silence.
“Am I right, Lucy? This Carla?” she asked. “Is that who we’re talking about?”
I nodded.
Maddy leaned against a kitchen counter. She tipped her head down and pressed her index fingers into her forehead.
“Are you dating her?”
Dad said, “Maddy.”
“Are you dating her?”
“No.”
She looked up. Looked at me and asked, “Is he dating her?”
“He just told you, Maddy.”
“Anyone except her.”
Dad folded his arms over his chest in almost a perfect mimicry of his eldest daughter’s pose.
“’Anyone except her’ what?”
“She made Mom worse. I mean, Mom was so sick, so, so sick, and she just humored that lady. She just…”
“She meant well.”
“She shoved something into a sick and dying woman’s face that that woman – your wife, my mother – didn’t need.”
“Last time I checked, young lady, I’m well on my way towards 60. I can date or not date or go to the grocery store with anyone I feel like. Even people you disapprove of.”
“You have freedom,” said Maddy.
“Yes I do.”
“You want to talk to me about freedom, fine! That’s what my beliefs are all about. Let’s take her belief system and put it in the ring against mine. Christianity, Catholicism, it’s all about having a crutch and looking forward to life after death when you can throw the crutch aside. Me? My beliefs? Dad, it’s about freedom. The freedom to live life without being suffocated by self-doubt and depression. Freedom from psychiatrists. The addictions the pharmaceutical companies depend on. The freedom to think for myself – my true self – not the self that’s been mangled and maligned by doubt, not the self that gets off on the need to scare someone so they do something I want them to do.
“That woman – she basically told Mom she could convert or go to hell. She did it with a smile, but that’s what a manipulator does. He - or in this case she - dangles the goods in front of your face like a friend.”
Along the way Maddy had started jabbing her finger at Dad while making her points.
“Unbelievable.” Dad hit every syllable like he’d been getting coached on enunciation.
“What? What are you going to do? Tell me to go to my room? I have a room, Senate. I have an entire fucking mansion full of rooms, thank you very much.”
Unlike Nick Verney from earlier, Maddy had the option of a door to slam. An
d on her way out the back, she made use of it.
Dad kept still in the aftermath. I vibrated. Jack stood in the living room. He’d come back in at sound of the rising voices. He looked stunned. Maybe he’d never witnessed Maddy unleashed. Maybe the return to familiar territory stirred it up in her.
Dad wouldn’t meet our eyes.
I mumbled, “I’ll go see if she’s all right,” and gingerly pushed through the door onto the back porch, and gingerly closed it behind me, just in case the hinges needed time to heal from the slamming.
Trent didn’t acknowledge me. He remained motionless as I moved past.
I thought of Jack talking about Lobot, the half man and half machine perpetually in wait for the command to turn on and follow directives.
Maddy moved across the field in a southwest fashion, almost like she was checking out the route I’d taken to Uncle Bob’s the other day.
Aster looked towards Maddy and the field and the dead trees. I pulled up beside her. She turned and looked at me, a cigarette between her fingers. A light breeze tugged at the places where her long curly hair, pulled up into a bun, dangled from off her head.
“She told me to mind own my own fucking business.”
She said it with the same shock of a roly-poly puppy having just received the first nose smack of its otherwise perfectly roly-poly life.
“She got into a fight with my dad,” I said. “It was going to happen.”
The frown line in Aster’s forehead deepened.
“I’ll get her,” I said. “I’m used to her yelling.”
Aster looked back towards Maddy. I thought of patting her arm or otherwise consoling the personal assistant, but I thought it might bruise her she was so skinny.
Watching Maddy move through the field I wasn’t worried about losing sight of her. Given the difference between the length of her legs and mine and Maddy’s life long indifference to physical exercise, I had an inkling I’d catch up, no problem.
Not far from the snags of dead trees Maddy slowed down. She looked back and saw I was on her trail. I could see her smile just a little. She checked the ground like she was looking for the best spot to sit down on and she did exactly that.
Yelling at Dad she’d used words and phrases common to the Lucentology literature.
Freedom. Suffocation. Manipulator. Self-this. Self-that.
The man and wife that had formed the religion were both passed away. The wife had outlived the husband by a good quarter century. Horace Walton had been her right hand man for years and when she passed away, to no one’s surprise, Horace picked up the baton.
Younger - there were plenty of pictures of the one time aspiring actor on the Internet - he didn’t look weird or anything. I thought he looked a little like a real world version of Jimmy Olsen from Superman comics. Older now he looked a little too skull like. I thought it was kind of icky. But I didn’t know the man. Maybe he was awesome once you got to know him.
TMZ had gotten a hold of a motivational video available only to Lucentologists. It was part of The Program set I had stashed in my bedroom closet.
It featured Maddy talking about her life before and after joining the movement. She’d been caught up in ‘the lifestyle’ – partying, drinking, dabbling in drugs, and then after she met Jack and he introduced her to Horace she started to question, really seriously question what she wanted from life. Started to think about the fact that life was basically all those moments outside of the high points. You remember the high points – the good and the bad - but that was like 5% of life. The rest of it, most of it, was all the other…laundry, dishes, going to the bathroom, waiting in line…and there had to be a way to make even those most mundane moments matter. And having a head full of recreational drugs wasn’t going to help. Being hung over wasn’t going to help. Trying to fit notions from thousand year old texts into a modern context wasn’t going to help.
Lucentology was all about the now. About what happened five seconds ago. About this moment. And about what happened five seconds from now. Being aware and being aware of being aware.
Several on-line articles had argued that the more tangled up Maddy got in Lucentology the worse her movies had become. One had posted the oft-repeated rumor that any screenplay a Lucentologist agreed to make into a movie went through an assembly line of advisors, asking for changes until the finished film would adhere to church values.
Maddy sat waiting for me, knees bent, her arms wrapped around them.
“I think that was a record for me to start yelling at Dad.”
I sat down alongside her.
“I don’t know,” she muttered. “Maybe it’s a record.”
Her last visit home had been when Mom had finally lost the battle. We’d all been so thrashed by that there’d been no yelling at all.
I’d seen her sparingly since, the wedding, then visiting her on set for a few days while she’d been in Vancouver, B.C. shooting Panda. Her hair had been lopped off and turned a curly platinum blonde for the role. I’d lied to her at the time and told her she looked fine that way.
“Carla stopped by the other night, Maddy. She was trying to convince Dad that he ought to get you to talk to her preacher. She, um, she brought brownies with her. For some reason. Right after she left Dad threw them out.”
She smiled.
“He did?” Chuckling.
“Yep.”
She sighed. “Well why didn’t he tell me that?”
“I don’t know.”
“But then-“
“Why would he turn around and be grocery shopping with her?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“It’s a small town,” I said. “You know what it’s like. You’ve got to be civil most the time.”
She looked out towards the next field over, the slowly growing stands of wheat. Still looking away from me she asked, “Is he mad?”
“I don’t know. A little. I think we’re all stressed out. I am after today. Even before the whole thing with people trying to stop the bus, I mean, people have been asking about you and Jack, and I’ve been getting these stupid cartoons put on my locker everyday.”
“What cartoons?”
I sighed. Oops. She wasn’t going to like this. I described them. Watching her, the little frown point in between her eyebrows thinning, thinning, waiting for her to hit the point where she exploded. When I told her about the one where Jack was pregnant with a space alien baby she started laughing. She laughed until she almost cried. Maddy didn’t get going like that usually. When she did you couldn’t help but laugh with her.
Catching breath she continued to smile.
“Do you still have them?”
“No.”
She play slapped my leg. “Damnit, Luce.”
“Sorry. I just kept throwing them away. I know who did them. Sherman found out. Maybe we could get them to re-draw it for you.”
She nodded. She looked towards me, but not at me.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“What?”
Holding my eye now she said, “I’m pregnant. About a month.”
“Maddy. Wow. That’s awesome. Does-“
“Jack know? No. The space aliens do.“
The frowny face I made reignited her laughter.
“Sorry. Yes. Jack knows. Mr. Ford is well aware of what he did. And just a couple of other people know.”
“Aster?”
She put her head back and laughed kind of a sad note. “She made a face when I told her. I don’t think babies and Aster are a happy combination.”
“You’re going to tell Dad?”
“Yes. I’ll tell him. I think I have to pick a good moment to do it though. When there aren’t people around. I don’t know, but I think he might cry. I wouldn’t want him to get all embarrassed.”
“Just-“
“What?” asked Maddy. “Go for a
walk? Where?”
“Out here.”
She pointed back towards the house.
Trent watched us. You could barely see him for the hills decline, but it was his baldhead. He didn’t have a pair of binoculars on us, but for all I knew the inside of his sunglasses were chockablock with computer information kind of like what Tony Stark saw when he was flying around as Iron Man.
Maddy saw the look on my face.
“It’s what they’re paid to do, Lucy. I feel safer with them around.”
“Sure. I guess.”
By the time we crossed from the field to the backyard Trent had retreated to the back porch. Aster had gone inside or was smoking out on the front lawn maybe.
“I’m going to be an aunt,” I said.
I’d stopped walking. Maddy looked back at me. The look on her face put me to mind of Mom. Someone that would be there for you rain or shine, and might get pissed at you, but if that happened it was for a reason.
“Aunt Lucy. Pretty exciting, huh?”
I nodded.
Walking towards the house we heard Jack’s blast of laughter come through the window. Then another sound right after that. Probably Jack clapping his hands - really, really tickled by something yet again.
Maddy sighed at the sound of Jack’s hysterics.
“Man. I sure hope the baby isn’t going to as retarded as her dad.”
I stumbled over my feet, inelegant as ever.
Without missing a beat, Maddy said, “Or her aunt.”
She squeaked when I poked her in the ribs. Then she started to chase me around the backyard like the last few years of life and death and celebrity had all been a flight of imagination. I was 6 and she was 17 and when she caught me she was going to tickle me to the brink of peeing myself.
Whether Trent approved or disapproved I didn’t look and I didn’t care.
Chapter 18
Sherman had called my phone and left a couple messages. It was well after 9 before I called him back.
He’d seen me on the news again. Several of the people that had stormed East Jennings and surrounded the bus had been arrested. I told him about seeing Wilson Plass get grabbed and get his neck pinched.
“Nick hasn’t updated anything. Twitter. Facebook. Nada,” Sherman said. “That can’t be good.”