Chapter One
“Your intractable independence is a state of heart and mind, I fear, Addie. Not something to be cured, but something to be endured.”
– Lady Margaret to Miss Adelaide Putnam, Manor of Dark Dreams, p. 3.
I learned a long time ago that the most insignificant-seeming thing may cause big change. The Butterfly Effect, it’s called, according to Mr. Heck, who taught ninth grade social studies like he knew every butterfly that ever broke out of a chrysalis, but only liked the really pretty ones (i.e. the brightly colored ones).
Me? I asked if there was any such thing as a black butterfly. He said, “Butterflies don’t do goth.” Naturally, the rest of the class laughed. I wanted to prove him wrong. But when I searched the internet, I only found a few ‘black’ butterflies with lots of yellow, green and white. Oh, and a music group and a movie. I guess I wasn’t the only one who wished there were some solid black butterflies in the world.
Whenever anyone asks me why I like to wear black, or calls me Goth Girl (I’m not), or tells me to get pierced (no extra holes needed, thankyouverymuch), I just shrug and say, “I like to be prepared. Black covers everything from a wedding to the end of the world.” Most people are wise enough to blink twice and move on.
Be prepared for the butterfly crap of life to drop on you at any moment is my motto, even though I’m no boy (or girl) scout. So when I dropped my backpack on the couch and saw the envelope with my name on it, Miss Philippa Munson, I picked it right up. Fancy crisp paper, my address in neat calligraphy. I stared at it, knowing that inside was either a job offer or a rejection. I ran my finger around the stiffness of the edge of the envelope, wanting to know what it said before I actually ripped the envelope open and read whatever the letter said.
No one who knows me would be surprised to hear me admit my major personality flaw. I always want to be where I’m going without actually having to ‘get’ there. You know, when we drove to Disneyland on my sixth birthday – a twenty-eight hour drive – I wanted to be there after the first ten minutes. My memory of that trip is a surreal blend of Mom endlessly promising that McDonalds was only a few miles away, and a marathon search for the signs for South of the Border as we slogged home to Maine through North Carolina, the longest state ever. And the teacups. I loved the teacups, whirling, spinning, my head snapping and my hair flying.
Mom used to try to help me with the ‘problem’ of my impatience with this sage advice: “Use your waiting time to enjoy the people show.” She was a pretty patient person herself. She was a history teacher who wanted to be a writer and I’d watched as she wrote a few pages a day for a year, stacking the paper up, making me wash my hands free of lollipop or peanut butter residue before I could pat and flip and sniff the freshly printed page in fascination as the stack grew fatter in very slow motion.
After she died, I got good at watching the people show. In the first days after the car accident it was all I did, to sit in my living room and watch the strangers who called themselves friends and family cry, laugh, cart dishes in and out. Most of them glanced at me, frowned, and then left me in my corner with my book. Some brought me food – chicken fingers from KFC, or home made macaroni and cheese. I learned there are as many ways to make macaroni and cheese as there are people in the world. I like the baked kind, with sharp cheese and fat soft noodles.
Some tried to get me to talk – or cry. But I found the great thing about people watching is that if you just look at people when they talk to you, absorbing the scent of their nervous sweat, watching the way their lipstick gets bitten off in interesting patterns, they eventually stop talking and move away.
Dad didn’t say a word when people whispered they thought I was taking it hard. That I needed help. I think he understood. When all the whirling teacups come to a stop, you have to give yourself a minute for the world to stop spinning. Sometimes, like at Disney, when that happens, I just want to stay where I am while the world rights itself. Disney staff never let us do that on the teacup ride – there were always other kids waiting to get on the ride and everything at Disney needs to move. We had to get back into line and wind around again. But life isn’t as well-organized as Disney, so my dad and I, we stayed still a long time after the crash.
When I opened this envelope in my hand I was either going to get on the teacup ride, figuratively speaking, or find that it wasn’t yet my turn. New job. No job. Already decided, but I wouldn’t know until I opened the envelope. I wanted Mom here. If she was here I could tell her to open it, and then only tell me if it was good news. That wasn’t going to happen, so I did the next best thing. I went upstairs to my room, reached under my pillow and took out the battered copy of Mom’s book, Manor of Dark Dreams. As I ripped the envelope open, I looked into the green eyes of the woman on the cover. They stood out in the shades of gray of the fog that reached for her, the stone manor house brooding in the distance. It was almost like Mom was with me. Except that Mom would have been laughing at me for being so impatient that I was unable to open the envelope.
I took the letter out and unfolded it, still looking at the woman on the book cover. Deliberately, I unfocused my eyes, until the cover was a blur of muted gray and green, the red of the woman’s billowing cloak only recognizable because I knew the cover so well. I looked at the letter without focusing. It was short. Three black paragraphs floating in a creamy paper sea.
I lost my nerve and closed my eyes without focusing. I resorted to doing something I hadn’t done since freshman year. I opened mom’s book, stuck my finger on the page, and read: Best to tread quickly over the less than sturdy boards of the rickety bridge. (p. 92, paragraph four).
I opened my eyes, focused them, and read the letter. I had the job. Teacups, commence your whirl. I flipped the pages of the book with my thumb, enjoying the sound and feel of the page edges too much to stop, even though this was my last copy and I knew I had to be careful with it.
The box that held two dozen copies of Mom’s new book came the day of her funeral. I took one to throw in the grave. The funeral director shooed me away, because I was only nine. I’d had to wait until he was turned away, whispering to my Dad, to drop it dead center on the shiny brown casket. For a minute, the woman on the cover seemed to look at me as if she disapproved of being buried alive when all she was trying to do was to escape the menace of the dark and brooding stone manor house behind her, but then the book slid down the shiny hump of the casket top and tucked itself between the sharp wall of dirt and the glossy glorified box.
Mom said once, when I was squishing the soap bubbles up between my fingers carefully so I could pat the pages, that a writer puts all her best lines in her first book. That if you read a writer’s first book, you’ll know who she is. She said that’s why a lot of writers can’t get their first books published – or don’t even try. Because they don’t want to edit themselves out, as much as they need to. She said that was silly, because even when you edit a lot of yourself out, the best remains and shines through.
I didn’t pay attention then because she was my mom and I was just a kid and she was alive. But now I know what she meant. Whenever I’m not sure what to do, I check out her book for advice. I’ve never told anyone this, because it’s no one else’s business. Besides, it’s not like anyone else cares what she had to say in her first and last novel, Manor of Dark Dreams. The book came out, Dad and I drove to the store and took pictures it front of it on the bookshelf, and then it disappeared. She was working on another book she called Manor of Dark Hope, but it died with her since the only copy was on her laptop that got destroyed in the crash.
Whenever I need to hear what my mom would have said, I close my eyes and stick my finger somewhere on the page and read. It may sound twisted, but I swear she hasn’t ever let me down. She really did put all the best of her in that book. I’d used it a lot when I was little – right through freshman year, where the advice kept me from betraying my best friend Sarah over some guy who was cuter
than sin and liked to play the girls like we were stones he could pick up and skip across a pond at will. He didn’t concern himself with the ripples, of course. Still didn’t, as of the end of junior year. But Sarah and I had avoided being rippled apart by his electric smile and careless ways.
Close call, though, and I’m not sure I’d have understood the sacrifice if I hadn’t read my mom’s wise words (p. 29, second paragraph): Friendship is a choice. More to the point, it is a series of ongoing choices, with consequences for each person. And thus I decided that I would not speak of Arabella’s hoarding of the dinner rolls. As her nanny, I could not precisely be her friend. But neither did I need to be her enemy.
So. I had a job. Now all I had to do was tell my Dad about it. There was at least a fifty-fifty chance he’d take it well. Better odds than last year, pre-Krystal.
The lady on the book cover stared at me so disapprovingly when I thought of Krystal, that I quickly stuck the book back under my pillow where it belonged. Those green eyes could be awfully judgmental. I didn’t know whether the judgment came from my opinion of Krystal – all negative, all the time – or the fact that I hadn’t noticed she was creeping into Dad’s heart before it was too late.
With Sarah as a friend, and the frenetic pace of high school, I’d fallen down a bit on my people watching time. I’m not sure how I missed that Dad was smiling, his lips curling upward and his eyes crinkling at me even when I was arguing with him. The arguments should have clued me in. For seven years, Dad hadn’t said a word about my clothes, or my hair morphing through the colors of the rainbow and every sharp spiky style possible. He’d bought whatever hair gel I’d asked him to, and hadn’t blinked when I dragged him into Hot Topic to pay for a new outfit.
I guess I thought the world’s worst teacup ride had stopped whirling for him, too, and he was beginning to remember that he was supposed to act like the kind of Cosby dad who gives advice and sets limits. Nothing I couldn’t handle, I reassured Sarah whenever I got grounded, or had my cell phone privileges revoked. I didn’t know how wrong I was until my dad and his girlfriend Krystal sat me down and told me they were getting married. Married. The big M – the two big Ms, marriage and mom.
So much for putting aside the people watching when I needed it most. I didn’t take the news as graciously as I could have. I suppose, to be fair, spoiled brat could apply to what I did next. I stood up and stared at my dad, seeing the smile, understanding the smile, hating the smile. Wanting to wipe the smile off his face. “I guess my opinion doesn’t count. After all, I only live here. But just in case you care – I vote no. We don’t need anyone else, Dad. We’re fine just the way we are.”
It had been just Dad and me for seven years, since I was nine. Those teacups had started whirling when I didn’t even know I was on the ride and it wasn’t a good feeling. But Krystal’s a psychiatrist, so she knew just what to say to stop the ride and move me off as efficiently as any Disney drone. “I understand how you feel. However, remember Philippa, that you only have one more year of high school left before you leave for college. Every girl has to grow up and move away from home sometime, you know. A wife is forever.” Warm and fuzzy, that’s Krystal. I can’t guess what my Dad sees in her. Well, yes I can. She makes him happy. He smiles when he sees her, when he hears her voice, when he says her name. Pathetic.
I didn’t bother to think about enemies. I said, “Until she dies. Then she becomes a picture on the mantel that someone forgets to dust.”
Before you think she’s some kind of step-monster, Krystal didn’t actually mean I should move away before I graduated high school. She was just ‘preparing’ me for the ‘inevitable.’ But I can read writing on the wall, especially when it’s written in neon yellow and signed by a stepmother determined to spin everything negative into a positive – including, I suppose, me.
My dad ignored the fact that I was being a spoiled brat and went on to cheerfully explain that the wedding would be the day after I graduated, and that he’d rented our house to summer faculty and that I was being given the choice…not!…of a wonderful opportunity to tag along on their three-month honeymoon cruise around the world, I consulted Mom, via her novel (p. 5, last paragraph).
Necessity provides the answer. If I had no home, then I must create my own with secure employment and a roof over my desolate head.
Spooky, how closely it echoed what Krystal had said. Me, on my own. Sure, I wanted to grow up, but no matter how close it came, it still seemed impossibly far away. For a minute I thought Mom had finally let me down. A job and a roof. Tricky that one. The job, sure, there are lots of those around. But a roof? Still, since Mom had never steered me wrong from the pages of her novel, I got out the want ads and started circling. Five ads in, I found it. A summer job that offered room and board – and no Krystal. Handwritten applications only. I was so mad at the world, that I was very eloquent about my abilities to take care of children full time in the summer. I probably padded the truth more than a little. And then went into the living room, apologized for my outburst to Dad and Krystal, and managed to slip the mailman my stamped application letter.
I’d thought maybe my Dad would object at the thought of my being a nanny in someone else’s house for the summer.
He’d been surprised when I’d come with the ad, the offer letter and the phone number to cinch the job in hand. “You’d rather work as a nanny than go on a cruise?” He’s a dad, and a man in love, so I forgave him the lame question and assured him I knew what I wanted – I didn’t tell him how I knew, of course. If he knew about me taking advice from Mom’s novel…well, let’s just say, I’d have been heading for shrink city because Krystal has seriously twisted his way of letting the world go by without interfering.
He’d talked to the guy who offered me the job, asked a few questioned, nodded a few times, and then gave me the thumbs up. “I think this will be great for you, Philippa. You’ll focus on something other than…sad things…for an entire summer.” Krystal’s words sounded soooo wrong coming out of Dad’s mouth, although she would have said ‘death and dying’ and Dad wasn’t quite there yet. Maybe by the time the honeymoon was over. Which would make my senior year in high school so much fun. Not.
Whatever. My dad had another wife. I had a summer job. The gardener at my new job was scheduled to pick me up hours after we threw the confetti – made from shredded recycled paper from Krystal’s office – at the wedding reception. Dad gave me a card with the ship’s phone number on it. “Call if this doesn’t work out, and I’ll get you a ticket to your aunt’s house for the rest of the summer.”
Krystal cupped his elbow with her hand and said with a little frown, “It can be difficult to reach the ship by phone for days at a time. Perhaps you should call your aunt directly?”
I might have said something impolite – I’d about exhausted my politeness quotient for the day, what with all the guests and relatives and cake. Not to mention all the pink we bridesmaids had been forced to wear.
Fortunately, a guy walked in who was clearly not dressed for a wedding – jeans and a goofy pullover collar shirt with a nametag that said “Welcome to Chrysalis Cliff, I’m Geoff.”
I made the guy wait while I hit the ladies room for a quick change. I didn’t even feel guilty when I saw he was still standing in the doorway looking uncomfortably out of place. “I’m ready.” Me, my duffel bag, my cell phone and my I-pod. I’d ditched the bridesmaid dress – pink makes me look sick – and resumed my trademark outfit: three layers of lacy-flowy tops, and a well worn pair of jeans. All in coordinated black, of course.
Maybe it was all the dancing we’d done. Maybe it was the dorky disco ball lighting they’d ordered for the dance floor. Whatever. I felt sick and dizzy as I said goodbye. I closed my eyes and hugged Dad tightly, but the world didn’t stop whirling, not even when I opened my eye and followed Geoff out.
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