We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(31)
I add my number, but Kingsley answers me fifteen minutes later with an email.
Matilda, Sadly, I am getting on a plane to Italy right now. My work there will take some time and I will have bad cell service. I hate the phone anyway, so it would be better to write.
I’m very glad you’re here at Hidden Beach. So glad! Really. Please stay as long as you can. Meer loves having you. /K
He’s a busy man, I guess. Artists have to travel—I know that from having lived with so many of them. But couldn’t he spare a day, at least, to come back and meet his daughter before going to Italy?
I want to plead with him, but I’ve already done that. More begging won’t make a difference. He absolutely knows what I want and he’s choosing not to give it.
But I also know he cares, or he wouldn’t have made a portrait of me. He wouldn’t have offered me that painting.
What was it my mother said about him? Strange. Obsessive. Wounded.
The only thing I can think to do is try to make him want to come back even more than he wants to go to Italy. Kingsley speaks in images, not in emails or phone conversations, so I photograph a page in my sketchbook.
It’s my design for the tentacled chandelier that comes to life to battle Hamlet—the one based on the chandelier in the dining room here at Hidden Beach. In the drawing, the monster is throwing a chair across the room with one arm, wrapping another arm around a table leg, and, with a third, threatening a small female warrior with a mane of dark curls.
Will Kingsley think I’m a terrible artist?
Sure. He might think a thousand rotten things, but he didn’t become a famous artist by being afraid to show people his sketchbook. And I shouldn’t be afraid to show people mine, either. After all, he might look at what I’ve drawn and see his daughter, in his dining room, working her imagination on the world he’s built. A person with a mind that’s alive.
That might be enough to bring him back to Hidden Beach.
I send my father the picture.
31
“I got divorced from my parents,” says Brock. “When I was fourteen. It was beyond ugly.”
Meer has gotten us up ridiculously early to go clamming. He’s got a set of car keys hidden in the garage, plus a set of house keys in the box marked Spoils of War in the mudroom. “That way I can open the office. I mostly respect my mom’s suggestions, but we do watch movies or whatever, when she’s not around. Except that these days, she’s always around.” Basically, today he stole the Mercedes before June could wake up and say no.
Now Brock and I squat at the edge of Lake Tashmoo, which is really a cove. It’s low tide. In the water, Meer and Tatum stand with a pair of long rakes. They have a kids’ blow-up floatie, and inside the floatie is a mesh bag where they put their catch.
Brock and I have smaller rakes and a bucket. He’s shown me how to look for depressions in the sand that suggest a clam is underneath, then rake through to dig it up. “My parents had a vicious divorce,” he says. “They lost their minds and spent most of the money from Men and Other Critters—on drugs, in my dad’s case. And on lawyers. And it freaking wrecked me, ’cause I realized there was literally nobody capable of taking care of me. In fact, I had been taking care of them for years. I was making all the money, and they were just spending it.”
“What made you decide to come here?” I ask.
“I got legally emancipated and lived with a nanny the studio set up for me ’cause I was still working. I didn’t see my parents anymore. I wouldn’t even speak to them on the phone. I was so full of rage—just absolute fury. I honestly felt like I’d do something terrible to them if I saw them, so I didn’t. I still won’t. I just stuffed all that rage inside and did my job all day, grinning and cracking jokes.”
He says he worked for two more years like that. And in that time, he was essentially raised by the coke-snorting comedians whose charm kept Men and Other Critters renewed season after season. Those guys taught Brock many disgusting and illegal things, but at least they paid attention to him.
When the show was canceled, he rented a house in a small town on Cape Cod and planned to finish school there. He was sixteen. He liked the idea of being far away from Hollywood and being a regular kid. But fame didn’t make him popular. “Those kids could smell the Hollywood on me,” he says, digging with his shovel in search of clams. “They hated everything about me that had made me so much money—how I looked, my hair, the way I laughed, everything.”
At first he got beaten up. Then he got ignored. Sometimes he’d get tired of being ignored and he’d run his mouth. Then he’d get beaten up again.
“My skin broke out. I had a growth spurt. I couldn’t get work on TV. By the time I graduated high school, I was washed up and had no reason to be anywhere on the planet. After a few months of absolute insanity in New York, I was high all the time and I had to check into rehab.”
“What did you take?” I ask.
“Ritalin, mostly. And cocaine. I would just go, go, go. It made me feel important. But then one of my guys from Critters, he had gotten sober. When he saw me like that in New York, he told me I had to get off it all. Immediately. And he was right.”
I look over at Brock. His blondish hair is lit up by the sun. He’s wearing a bright green fleece and board shorts decorated with SpongeBob. There’s a Meer Sharpie drawing of a dolphin on one side of his neck. He looks like he’s never worked a day in his life, like he’s never had a problem.