The Secret of Everything (38 page)

Tessa listened. “Yes,” she said, and laughed. “My single most annoying habit, by the way. Humming all the bloody time.”

“It’s kinda cute.”

“The first twelve thousand times, maybe.” She wiggled a little. “Sorry, I have to attend to Mother Nature. Be right back.”

For a second she dithered over whether she ought to put something on, and then she just let it go, dashing into the bathroom naked. She peed and looked at her face in the mirror, flushed and sweaty, and wished she could stay here, in this time, in this place, forever. From the counter in the kitchen, she grabbed her camera and carried it back into the bedroom.

“Do you mind?” she said, holding up the camera. “The light in here is beautiful and, really, you look great.”

He propped himself up on his elbow. “I wish I could take
your
picture right now. Naked woman with camera.”

“I’m not particularly shy about being naked, actually,” she said, and raised the camera. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“Go ahead.”

“Thank you. On your belly first, please.” Tessa looked at him through the lens, the soft gray rainlight pouring over his back. “You have very beautiful skin,” she said, shooting the long curve of his spine, the buttering of light along his shoulders, the biceps with the tattoo. Then buttocks and legs, those massive thighs. He turned over, winking at her, and she shot the frontal view, too, his broad chest and thick, lazy erection, and then zoomed in on his face, the dark-brown eyes and tousled hair and beautiful mouth. “Zeus,” she said, and laughed. “God, you are so gorgeous.”

He held out a hand. “My turn?”

“Are you going to sell them on the Internet?” she asked. “Pass them around to your friends?”

“I will if you will.”

“First this.” She fell down beside him, head to head on the
pillow, and held the camera up overhead. “Look up.” She clicked the shutter, shifted the camera, shot again, and then again. “Okay, it’s yours.”

“I’ve never taken a picture of someone naked before,” he said, standing up, and aimed the camera at her. Tessa played coy and covered bits and looked at him from under her hair and laughed until he came down beside her and put his hand around her breast and took a picture. And then he was over her, in her, and they were lost, the camera forgotten.

Before he left, he said, “Come have breakfast with us this weekend, at Vita’s.”

“Do you eat there every day?”

“Not usually. Usually we go only on the weekends, but it’s been a little unsettled.”

“It’s a bad idea, Vince.”

“One more time, and then you can be my secret lover until you go.”

“It just seems—”

He kissed her thoroughly. “Think about it. We’ll be there around ten on Saturday.”

She sat up. “Oh, I forgot—I meant to tell you that I was humming a song this afternoon, and Natalie heard it and said it was her mother’s song.” She sighed. “It really upset her, I think.” She shook her head, feeling the edge of that sucking depression creeping around her belly. “Makes me sad.”

“Hey, are you okay?”

“No, not really. I found out my father lied to me about a lot of stuff, and I’m pretty upset about it.”

“Lied about you? About him?”

“Lied,” she said. She took a breath and said it out loud for the first time. “He’s not my father. It seems I am one of Xander’s 476 children.”

“Ah.”

“Did you know that?”

“No. But you look like them, the commune kids.” He stayed where he was, one arm propped behind his head. With his other, he stroked a thumb over Tessa’s wrist. “What can I do to help?”

“You can’t, really. It’s just weird. The dude sounds weird as he can be, like Jim Jones or something.”

“No, I don’t think so. It was another time, Tessa. It wasn’t the same thing—it was a big social experiment, and it didn’t work out, exactly. But that doesn’t mean that all the children were a mistake.”

“I know.” She plucked at the bedspread. “The other thing is, I kept remembering a little girl with long blond hair. My sister.”

“There were a lot of kids out there.”

“I know, but I talked to Paula, and she remembered my actual sister. She drowned, along with my mother, at the same time I went into the river.” She twisted threads into a knot. “A twin sister, actually.”

He went still. “Guinnevere and Rhiannon were the twins.”

She nodded.

“Which one are you?”

“Guinnevere, evidently. Not that I remember. I still don’t.” She looked at him, shrugged. “Not completely.”

He had an odd expression on his face, both stricken and relieved. He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. “I’m so sorry.” He held her hand close to his face. “I have to go soon, but I don’t want to leave you at the moment of revelation.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It just came out.”

“It’s okay.” He kept her hand close. “I have a couple more minutes.”

Worried that he would remember that Tessa’s mother was a murderer, Tessa asked, “Do you know who killed Xander?”

“No. The few people who might are not ever going to talk. Somebody offered a $250,000 reward a few years ago, and there were no takers.”

“Thick as thieves,” she said.

“Yeah.” He sat up. “You okay?”

Tessa smiled, and it was genuine, if a little rueful. “Yes, I’m fine. It’s all water under the bridge—ha-ha.”

“Very funny.”

“Thanks for listening, Vince. Seriously. It’s a lot to process.”

“I wish I could stay. I have to go get my girls. Call me later and we can talk about this some more.”

“I understand.” She stood up and started to put on her own clothes. “Did you talk to the school counselor about Nat?”

He pulled on his boxers, picked up his jeans from the floor. “She’s going to work with her.”

“Good. Poor baby.”

Vince nodded. He finished dressing, then kissed her. “I’ll call you this evening. If that’s okay.”

“Yes.”

The weather grew more cantankerous as Sam drove into the mountains, and by the time he reached Flagstaff, it was plain he would need to stop for the night. He found a motel that allowed dogs. He fed and watered them, then got Peaches settled in a comfy spot, covered with her little blanket, and took the other two out for a good long walk to shake out the kinks.

He’d come this way back then, too, riding a Kawasaki 400—which wasn’t exactly a big bike—across the desert with his hair blowing free, like in
Easy Rider
. Most of it was a blur, lost in
time and the general haze of drugs and drink that marked that era of his life.

As he walked the dogs tonight, whistling them into obedience when a car drove by, he breathed in the cool, crisp mountain air. Another life. In a way, it all seemed so innocent now, despite Vietnam and the acid trips and all the runaway kids that must have broken the hearts of their parents. All those kids qualified now for AARP, the generation that wouldn’t get old.

Not that they had grown old the same way. Whatever else had come from the psychedelic sixties, he knew that his generation of sixty-year-olds was not the same as that of the sixty-year-olds he’d known as a child, the bent grandmothers and snowy-haired sages in their pristine Buicks.

What would he find when he got to Los Ladrones? He was nervous about revisiting the town. Nervous about seeing the commune again, which he’d have to do, even if it was buried in rubble and yucca. It didn’t sound like that would be the case, though. Nervous that Tessa would never forgive him. Ever.

The dogs, soggy with the rain that kept falling, hustled him back to the motel. He dried them off, but the smell of damp dog still filled the room for the rest of the night. Sam ordered a pizza for delivery, drank some 7Up so caffeine wouldn’t keep him awake, and fell asleep before the news came on.

After work, Annie was determined to figure out how to make poached eggs. She bought a full dozen eggs at the supermarket. Vita had loaned her a heavy cast-iron skillet and a slotted spoon and walked her through the steps one more time before she left. “Practice makes perfect.”

And how. She was getting the hang of a lot of things at the
café, but poached eggs defeated her every time, the threads of white scattering in the water until the eggs looked like an amoeba or a jellyfish or something. Not like an egg.

She stopped by the cards, too, and picked a funny one to send to her brother. He’d written her a lot while she was in jail. He was actually her foster brother, a member of the family that had finally let her stay, when she was thirteen and worn out from going place to place to place whenever a family got tired of her or one of the siblings got mad at her. He’d joined the Army when he was eighteen and had traveled all over the world. Right now he was in Afghanistan, a sergeant.

When she got home, she fed Athena and then put all of her utensils and supplies on the counter. She started water simmering in the skillet, about two inches deep. It boiled too much at first, and she turned the heat down until it was a mild simmer. To the water she added a tablespoon of vinegar, which Vita told her helped keep the eggs in shape. She’d cracked two eggs into single dishes and had a wooden spoon at the ready. Holding her breath, she poured the first egg into the water, and the whites instantly spread into goopy strings, which she tried to catch and spoon gently over the yolk.

“Argh!”

Athena jumped up on a chair to watch. Annie spooned out the messed-up egg and put it in a bowl. She tried again. And again. At egg number four, she started to get the rhythm. At number six, she almost nailed it. At number nine, she poached an egg perfectly and reproduced the action for eggs number ten, eleven, and twelve.

“Guess what we’re eating for supper, cat?” she said, and laughed. Wiping her fingers on her apron, she kissed the kitten’s white nose and sat down to write out a note to her brother.

In the quiet of her little house, Tessa uploaded the photos she’d taken earlier of Vince, realizing only as she plugged the camera into the laptop that she’d never uploaded the flower photos, either. She forgot about Sam’s lies and the history of life and the mysteries clogging up her brain and fell into the pleasure of playing with line and shadow and color.

The series of flower stems through the bottom of the vase pleased her mightily, and she uploaded them to her Flickr groups, hungry for the feedback she knew she would receive.

Only then did she let herself open and admire the shots they’d taken naked. First Vince, then Tessa, and she liked the ones he’d taken of her but nowhere near as much as she liked the shots of him.

It was just that you never saw many good photos, art shots, of the male body, like you did of women. This was it. The light, hiding and revealing, washing over his beautiful skin with such softness, gave the photos an elegant mood. In one, the light caught on his jaw, the round of his shoulder, and his massive, muscular thigh. Everything else fell into shadow. In another, he looked directly at the camera, his belly and organ and thighs wide open to the viewer’s gaze. It gave her a shiver. Sexy, definitely, but not sleazy.

But her favorite was one he’d shot—of his hand around her
breast. It was in perfect focus, and the light was again very quiet, making it look nearly like a black-and-white photo or even perhaps a sepia. His giant hand, fingers curling gently, pressing into the flesh of her breast, the nipple aroused and framed by his thumb. She sent it to him in email, and within a few minutes he called her.