Out of the Pocket

2. The Lost Ironwright

The Lost Ironwright

The worst part of talking someone into something is that you can’t ask them to talk you into it when you start getting cold feet.

The nerves hit me while flying over some middle part of the continent, full of a nothing that made Teardrop look like civilization. I’d never been so high off the ground. I’d never been so far from home. Hell, I’d never been as far as Blythe Airport before today. I’d never seen so many people I didn’t know in one place as there were in the first class cabin alone.

Suddenly, Mom’s warnings about Ironwright funeral proceedings sounded almost as intimidating as she’d meant them to. I was about to meet Mom’s mysterious family, and I was going to have to sit through one of the most formal events imaginable with them.

Whatever Aunt Isabel had left us other than a trip through the sky in comfortable chairs (admittedly amazing as that part was), there were probably a million ways I could mess up and get it taken back.

Still, when we touched down in Hartford, the promise of Connecticut and the ocean and Green Beach waiting right outside made me dash along the walkway to the terminal ahead of Mom, just to look out of a real window.

Already there was more grass in sight than probably grew in all of Teardrop, lining all the roads in neat, thick borders, and water. Not the ocean yet, but a shimmering river winding right past the tarmac, leading the way down to the coast, to Green Beach. I felt like jumping in the air like a little kid, just to see a little farther for a fraction of a second, but I reined it in when I heard Mom, fighting exhaustion from the flight, introducing herself to someone.

I turned to see the woman, mid-fifties, hair pulled back in a bun so tidy it looked like it must have been arranged by machine, holding a whiteboard with the words “Elizabeth and Angela Ironwright,” and reminded myself that we were here for a funeral, after all.

“Hi.” I went over to join her and my mother, solemn as I could, and held out my hand, expecting to meet an aunt or cousin, maybe even my grandmother, before realizing that her tailored black suit looked a lot more uniform-y than funeral-y.

Right. They were “sending a car.”

“My condolences,” the valet answered when she shook my hand, energetically. Her face wasn’t made for sorrow, but she did her best. “I’m Mrs. Currie. Did you check any baggage?”

We shook our heads, indicating the carry-on bags over our shoulders, which Mrs. Currie instantly attempted to confiscate from us, starting with me. This led to an exchange that went something like,

“I’ve got it.”

“I insist.”

“I insist more.”

“You’ve had a long trip.”

“I didn’t carry it here.”

“Please.”

“No.”

I knew that conceding on this subject was probably some great violation of the valet code, but Mrs. Currie was more than three times my age and half my size. It wasn’t going to happen.

Eventually, she turned to Mom for an easier sell, but I knew by the way Mom was smirking to herself while watching us that she wasn’t going to let herself be left out. “It seems we’re being chivalrous today,” she said.

When Mrs. Currie finally gave up and redirected her efforts to leading us to the promised car — which, in spite of my best efforts at not hoping, did in fact turn out to be a limousine — Mom gave me a look, half warning, half eye-roll, like,

Yeah, we’re in for a lot of that kind of thing.

The highway followed close beside the river for most of the way down toward the coast, passing birch forests and old farm houses that looked like they should have had people sitting on their porches in hoop skirts and ruffled shirts, instead of hurrying about their days in jeans and t-shirts and ordinary business clothes, like this was a normal piece of now.

There was so much green.

Different as everything was from home, I could tell, right before Mrs. Currie announced that we were officially in Green Beach, that the scenery had changed.

The few newer style houses sprinkled along the way were gone. For that matter, the newer old-style houses were gone too. Everything here looked like it had been here forever, the green regrowing around and over it. Huge, old trees stood wherever they’d decided to spring up, maybe hundreds of years ago. Some of the houses looked as I imagined they must have when they were first built, repainted in the same muted colors. Others showed every day of their age in their bowing beams and flaking paint, utilitarian security bars screwed protectively over every window, but their intended grandness could still be seen.

Mrs. Currie almost unconsciously checked the limo’s door locks.

The houses got bigger and better kept, the hedges and fences around them taller, the air damper and saltier, until we finally turned onto a private driveway that wove through trees and fountains and topiary.

The Ironwright Estate was at least as big as all of Teardrop High, with paneled, cream colored walls and steep, shingled roofs, ivy and bougainvillea clinging to its sides. Most of it was two stories, but a third s********m jutted upward from one of the near corners like a tower.

This was the kind of house that should have ghosts. The kind of ghosts that made rooms turn cold and left hints to the tragic stories of their time among the living. There should have been fairies dancing in this garden and mermaids… I didn’t know where the mermaids would fit in, but after the drive along the river, it felt like there should be mermaids somewhere.

This was where I was supposed to grow up.

No, that was mean. What mattered was that I was here now.

Several other cars were parked along the drive near the front steps, while others spilled out of the garage off to the far side of the house. Mourners? Well-wishers? Family?

I was really here.

It took Mom ringing the doorbell, introducing herself to the housekeeper, being instantly accosted with a hug and a breathless shout of “Lizzie!” from a man about her age, and then beckoning impatiently over her shoulder for me, before I rediscovered the courage to start up those steps after her.

“Lizzie’s here?” more people asked each other, crowding around the entrance from within.

“Did you bring along little Angela?” asked a woman.

I stepped up to the threshold of the very tall doorway to see into the foyer, which had its own chandelier, a small table with a floral arrangement, and the bottom of a winding staircase. People milled about in the rooms beyond, most with drinks in hand. Already I was trying to match their features to Mom’s, finding a chin here, a pair of eyebrows there.

The woman who’d asked about me noticed me there, and though her face was stiff and plasticky under all her makeup, I could see both the way her eyes matched the gray of mine and Mom’s and the way she struggled to keep her painted-on smile when she saw me.

“This is Angela?” she asked too brightly.

“Hi,” I answered.

“I’m your Aunt Moira. I’m sure Lizzie’s told you lots about me.”

“Lots,” I lied, with a sideways look at Mom. “It’s great to meet you.”

“You’ll be so glad you came home,” she said, and for a flicker, at the word home, I thought I might have misread the hesitation on her starched face. Maybe this was a welcome. “I told Lizzie that middle-of-nowhere food would be junk! She told me it would be different in California, but… well, wait until you try a real salad with real fresh crab.”

And just like that, I was back in Teardrop, plane ride or not, with Lisa Parsons and her friends giggling not-so-softly behind my back. The country, the world, wasn’t big enough to get away in.

It took one glance across what I could see of the gathering to know that I was the only person there, except a few of the older men, who was even a pound overweight, let alone forty-odd.

I was pretty good at forgetting what I looked like for short periods of time, but sooner or later, someone always reminded me.

“Moira!” the man who had hugged Mom scolded her.

“What?” said Moira. “It’s not her fault she had to grow up in one of those sad little truck stop islands-”

“I’m Eddie,” he introduced himself before I could decide whether I felt like saying something on behalf of Mom, maybe even on behalf of Teardrop. He extended a hand to me. He had my strawberry-blondish-brownish hair, cut too short for me to tell if was curly like mine. His face was abnormally clean, not a hint of old acne scars or freckles, but at least it was shaped like a face, unlike Moira’s. “I’m sort of your uncle, for all intents and purposes.”

“Cousin once removed,” said my mom, tonelessly. “If you want to get technical.”

“Oh yes, let’s get technical,” said Moira, grabbing a hand I didn’t exactly decide to give her and pulling me forward into a very large living room full of uncomfortable-looking couches, which might have been part of why almost everyone was standing. “That’s your cousin Stephanie, your second cousin John…”

She walked me around, pointing people out to me, pointing me out to them. I smiled and waved, and over and over I had to watch it, each person’s anticipation of meeting… I don’t know, whatever a mysterious, long lost illicit baby girl is supposed to look like sixteen years later, and then their disappointment at seeing me instead.

Some of the guests looked a lot more like me than others. There was one guy leaning against the mantle of an unlit fireplace, tall and muscled, dark hair grown out just the right length to frame his face, who I hoped very much was not a relative. I hoped even more that Moira wouldn’t force me to stumble through funeral smalltalk with him. He was on his own, watching the crowd, and when his eyes ambled in my direction, I quickly looked away.

Thankfully, Moira steered me toward the couches instead.

“That’s your grandmother,” she pointed, and my stomach knotted up. My grandmother. An actual ancestor. “Mom, look, Lizzie and Angela are here!” Moira waved to one of the only people making use of the seating, an older woman with not-quite-natural red-brown hair, who apparently hadn’t found the return of her daughter for the first time in almost seventeen years adequate reason to get up.

She looked once at me, up and down, then back at her drink, and said, “Why am I not surprised?”

Even Moira looked a little embarrassed at this.

“Greedy, lazy, pleasure-seeking-” my grandmother cut off her own mutterings when she noticed Mom following a few paces behind Moira and me, looking even more ready to disappear than I felt. “This is what it takes for you to come home, Elizabeth? This is what it takes for me to see my granddaughter?” She looked straight past me at the wall across from her. “A family tragedy?”

“Yeah, it’s really inspiring how loved my mom was, isn’t it?” Cousin-once-removed Eddie said pointedly. “I know you’re just torn up about it, Aunt Cathy,” he laid the sarcasm on my grandmother, who pretended not to hear him.

He turned and whispered to me, not quietly enough, “Don’t let her good sister act guilt you girls. Nothing brings a family together like a will reading.”

“You must be hungry!” Moira interrupted, waving us over to a table of food I couldn’t begin to identify.

I knew she’d be giving me more sideways looks for every bite I took; people always did after looking at me in the tape-measuring way she had for the first time, but I was hungry, and I took one of the little individual snacks off the nearest tray anyway, a roasted mushroom cap full of something creamy and herbal. It wasn’t bad.

I’d tried taking off the weight once, freshman year. According to the (“doctor approved and recommended!”) diet and exercise program I’d found, I should have been feeling satisfied and exhilarated and dropping two pounds a week. I was losing about half that much, and my grades had started slipping from being too hungry to concentrate most of the time, but I kept at it for four months, until people actually started to notice.

That was when Lisa started telling people I was bulimic and everyone started calling me Retch, or sometimes just the equivalent sound effect. For a year, I might as well not have had a real name at school. I could swear I’d once heard my math teacher start Angela with an R before correcting himself.

That was also when I realized that making friends, maybe even having a boyfriend, like I’d been fantasizing about on all my jogs to push myself another minute, another step, would be like winning the lottery for me, no matter how much I tortured myself over it. But a good book and a bowl of ice cream at the end of the day was a sure thing.

That wasn’t so bad either.

I took another mushroom cap.

“I hope you can keep your legs together while you’re here this time,” my grandmother was saying to Mom behind me. “But if you can’t, you could at least admit that you’re ashamed to introduce me to the father, or that you don’t know who he is.”

“I told you why I had to leave, Mom,” said my mother. “I’m not here to justify myself to you.”

“That looks heavy,” Cousin-once-removed Eddie said, nodding at my carry-on bag. Before I could agree, he called,

“Lizzie! You’re in Moira’s old room. Want me to come with?”

Without waiting for her acceptance of his excuse, Cousin-once-removed Eddie beckoned me back toward the foyer and the winding, polished wood staircase. Mom caught up to us halfway up and kept close as he led the way along a narrow upstairs hallway with a thin, paisley-patterned carpet down the middle.

So I wasn’t a fondly dreamt of lost granddaughter. I’d still get to explore the inside of this cool old mansion, get to stay in it for the weekend, and since Aunt Isabel had never actually seen me, and she didn’t seem to have gotten along too well with the rest of the family downstairs, maybe there was still a welcome in that will somewhere for me.

Mom nodded at the floor, at the gathering below it, and gave me a bedraggled, I-told-you-so shrug behind Cousin-once-removed Eddie’s back. When he opened a bedroom door for her, she stuck her head in but didn’t enter.

“I’ll just make sure Angie’s settled first,” she explained. Cousin-once-removed Eddie put a hand on her shoulder in a soothing gesture.

“She’ll be safe and sound in your old room,” he assured her. “I made sure it’s just the way you left it. All of it. Promise.”

After a few seconds, Mom relented with a tiny nod, dropping her bag and then herself exhaustedly on her assigned bed. Cousin-once-removed Eddie motioned for me to keep following him, up a second set of stairs into what must have been the sort of tower I’d seen from the outside.

There was a single room at the top.

When I turned on the desk lamp near the door and ran across to throw open the curtains on the far side, I utterly forgot the looks and snipes downstairs.

There was a lacy canopy bed, an antique wooden desk with lots of little drawers, a wardrobe (a real wardrobe, as in The Lion, the Witch and), a dresser with a curly-edged mirror that looked like it should have a music box on it somewhere, and a cushioned window seat.

It was as beautiful, as other-world, as far away from Teardrop as the landscape on the way down here. It was my mother’s, and just for the weekend, it was mine. I had a Poe collection and a Bronte sisters one in my bag that I’d brought just for Green Beach, and I couldn’t have designed a more perfect place to enjoy them.

“I’ll let you get settled,” Cousin-once-removed Eddie offered.

I thanked him and settled into that gorgeous window seat with my bag at my feet, trying to decide which one to start with and how long I could get away with hiding up here before I’d be missed.

Deciding to indulge in a stronger, more direct fix than Poe or the Brontes today, I dug past them for my diary at the bottom of the bag.

It was bound in dark brown faux leather, with a red-tinted heart embossed on the front, easily the nicest one I’d ever had. It had been my birthday present two years ago and was thick enough that I still had almost a third of the pages left. There was room in the curved spine to hold the plastic pen cozy that had come with it, which made the ballpoint inside look almost like an old fountain pen.

There was a lock, like on the kind of diary you’d give a ten-year-old. The key had been missing from the box when I’d opened it, but it jimmied open easily enough with the point of the pen. I knew there wasn’t much point in continuing to lock it at all, since Mom already knew how easy it was to open, plus I doubted she’d stoop to intruding on something that entertained me so safely in my room, and there was certainly no one else in the world who’d have a wisp of interest in what my darkest secrets were.

I always did though, just because it made the mortifyingly silly ramblings inside feel… not safer, but special. Important enough to need keeping safe.

I found the first blank page.

Dear Diary,

Mother and I arrived at the estate this morning. It’s every bit as grand as people say, but of course its grandness hardly matters. I could feel all their eyes on me from the moment we arrived, all branches of the family and their friends and associates, craning for a first look at the lost heiress, already marrying me off in their heads to their sons and grandsons and nephews, no doubt, planning out ten steps ahead to keep the precious fortune close to them.

I’d long ago rejected the ritual of using a diary to record the actual events of my day. Living the true details of most of my days once through was more than enough. My diary didn’t care what had really happened. My diary was where the details where what I made them.

The tower where they keep me until my fate is determined is cozy and welcoming, but I know better than to become too comfortable.

This was right about where I’d bring in the spice. Usually, fictional characters joined me in the world of the diary, and sometimes a few select boys from school. One time, I’d spent about a week of diary time as a time-displaced Arthur Dimmesdale’s psychotherapist. Then I’d helped Heathcliff escape from a secret pit fighting racket for the amusement of the Victorian elite. Lately, I’d been nursing a particular crush on a demon hunter guy on TV, but today the guy from downstairs, the one standing next to the mantelpiece, sprang to mind instead. Not knowing his name, I had to improvise.

The Ashworths have made their move.

Ashworth sounded like a family that might rub elbows with the Ironwrights, without actually being related. Not too related at least.

They’ve placed Julian, their eldest son, here at the estate.

I just liked the name Julian.

They claim to be interested in a position for him with the Ironwright firm, but no one could be fooled by that. We all know he’ll be expected to do all in his power to win my favor, and

No, that wouldn’t quite work. No matter what the guy was like, he could hardly help resenting even the desirable version of me who lived in the diary under those circumstances. I’d have to battle uphill to make him like me at all, which was unsatisfyingly reminiscent of reality. I crossed out everything after the Ashworths making their move.

They have invited me to stay with them, as a temporary companion to their daughter, but I know that’s not the reason. I can tell by the way Julian’s eyes linger on me that it’s more than the money he hopes to gain from me, and I’ve heard the whispers about that family. Once I pass their gates, there’s no telling if I will ever be allowed to leave again.

There, that worked, with a tiny prickle of goosebumps, even. My diary and I could spend a very happy evening, whisked away to fireplace guy’s mansion, so much like the one I was in now, with the crucial difference that in his, I was wanted.

To make the escape perfect, I reached up to open the window, to let in a breeze and a clearer view of the flowers, fountains, and downright greenness of the garden below, and realized someone had nailed it shut.

3.