What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [49]
“You want your ring back?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. All right.” He passed his hand slowly back over the box. “I am calling on all my powers,” he said, “to brrrriiiing back the rrriiiing.”
He opened the box, and there the ring was. I snatched it up, put it back on my finger, touched it once, twice. Then I asked, “Is this the same one?”
He nodded, lay down, closed his eyes.
I looked carefully. The ring was indeed the same one—there was the bent prong that my mother had said we needed to get fixed.
Now I was glad I’d kissed him; he was amazing; I wanted to kiss him again.
“How’d you do that?” I asked.
“Magic.”
“No, really. How did you do it?”
“I can’t tell you that, Ginny. It’s the magician’s code. But I can tell you I did it when you weren’t paying attention. That’s the first thing you learn, to distract the audience. Have them look away. Patter.”
“What’s patter?”
“It’s all the things you say. You know, you just talk, and people get distracted, they don’t see what’s happening right in front of them.”
“It seems too easy.”
“It is easy. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because people want to be fooled.”
I thought about this. I supposed it was true.
I lay down beside him, moved my hand to be closer to his, then closed my eyes, willing him to pick up that hand and hold it. I liked everything about this nearness to a boy, liked the foreign, lemony smell of him, the pitch of his voice, the comb lines in his hair, the blunt cut of his fingernails. Being with him, I was doing so many things I had never done before. I felt a jangly nervousness, as though I were at the starting block of a race going somewhere I knew absolutely nothing about. And yet I also felt at peace. Sure of something.
Wayne looked over at me. “Ginny? I need to tell you something. I want to. Jasmine? She’s my mother.”
I opened my eyes, stared at him. A clock inside me stopped ticking.
“Her real name is Carol MacAvoy.”
“Nuh-huh,” I said. People want to be fooled.
“Yes. It is. But you can’t tell anyone. She’s hiding from my father. He’s … It’s better if she’s not with him.”
“Why?”
“Oh, he … won’t let her do things. She has to stay in the house. And … Well, I’ve seen him hit her.”
“He hits her?”
Wayne nodded.
“You’re just kidding, right? You’re fooling me.”
“I’m not. He doesn’t do it all the time. Just sometimes.”
“He hits her?” I couldn’t imagine this. Like a boxer? Like a spanking? I envisioned my mother standing in her apron in the middle of her kitchen, her hand to her reddened cheek, her eyes wide and full of tears. But when I tried to imagine my father hitting her, I couldn’t. He would cry, too, should he ever do such a thing.
“But why would he hit her?”
“Oh, he just has this really bad temper, I don’t know. He’s a very powerful man. Very wealthy. Very powerful. And she just one day ran away, took a bunch of money and left. But she always tells me where she is; she tells one of her friends who tells me. She moves a lot. She won’t be here longer than six months or so.”
“How long ago did she leave?” I looked closely at him, checking his face for pain. But it was smooth and impassive, plain as a bar of soap.
“Two years now, a little over.”
“Does your father know you’re with her?”
“No.” He smiled. “No, he certainly does not.”
“How did you get here without him finding out?”
“Oh … Magic.”
“No, how?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ve told you too much already, I shouldn’t have said all this. Please don’t tell, Ginny. You could really get us in trouble.” Now he was not impassive. Now I could see the fear in his face. It made me want to build a house for him, just his size, then stand outside looking in the window at him sitting in his own chair by his own little fireplace. “There,” I would tell him. “You see? You’re fine.”
Something occurred to me. “Why don’t you just live with your mother?”
“Ginny. If I did that … Look, I can’t live with her. And you can’t tell anyone what I just said. Not even Sharla. Please.”
I sat up, stared straight ahead.
“Ginny?”
“I won’t,” I said. And I knew I wouldn’t.
“Okay,” he said. “Forget