“I have never seen improv that intense,” Daisy said, “and I dated a woman who was a member of three experimental comedy theaters.”
“Did you feed her any of this material?” Nick asked June. “Like in the car?”
“The only thing I told her,” June said over FaceTime, putting her hands up defensively, “was that she had to keep him completely occupied until his appointment showed up and he went back to the office. Everything else was just Ginger’s genius in full flower.”
“The real question,” Laurie said, “is what the hell Matt gave him that convinced him this was real. He found something I didn’t, maybe. Some record, or some evidence, something.”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Remember, he faked up an appraisal for you, so he could have faked this up, too. For all I know he’s got a letter from Richard Nixon about what a completely real Kittery duck this is, but he made it in Microsoft Paint and misspelled ‘Richard Nixon.’？”
“But he gave him something,” Laurie said. “He definitely gave him something.”
At the end of the debriefing, Nick turned to Laurie and took a breath. “So,” he said. “What now?”
Laurie swirled the red wine in the bottom of her glass and tapped her finger against the side. “I’m starting to put something together in my head. Just starting. But as good as all of you are, I think I need a little bit more help.”
“What kind of help?” Daisy asked.
“The kind I’m related to.”
Chapter Fifteen
Laurie was one sister to four brothers, and she believed that made her position among her siblings the worst. But Ryan had always insisted that, actually, being the youngest was the worst. At least she was smack in the middle, where she had siblings she outranked instead of exclusively people who outranked her. “I was on the end,” he’d once told her. And she asked on the end of what, and he said on the end of everything.
Their house had had only three real bedrooms, so for a good stretch of Laurie’s childhood, all four boys had shared a large room with two sets of bunk beds, and Laurie had one all to herself. This engendered no shortage of resentment on the part of her brothers until an attic room was added for Patrick and Scott, and then eventually, the basement was （mostly） finished and Ryan moved down there. But the truth was that when they were young, she would sit in her reading chair or lie in bed at night and hear the four of them talking, or playing Uno, or playing with the handheld games they fought over constantly, and she would desperately want to block out all the noise while simultaneously wondering what it would be like to be in the middle of all that. She rarely got to spend a lot of time with any of her brothers by themselves; so much of the time, they traveled in pairs, or in a pack, when they weren’t running in or out the door with friends or dates or hockey sticks.
But all the kids used one bathroom, sat around one table, fought over one set of leftovers, and sometimes rode in one minivan. Four boys were an often unmanageable cacophony for a girl who was mostly an enthusiastic reader. Scott’s mood was unpredictable because of what their mother called his “temperament,” which Laurie now knew had more to do with depression and ADHD and some other things it had taken until adulthood for him to treat. He never hurt anybody except himself, but he would rage and cry and with some of his first full sentences tell people he hated them. Patrick was the oldest; he tried to be in charge. Joey was between Laurie and Ryan; he tried to be charming. Ryan just tried not to be last all the time.
He was pursuing a girl in tenth grade when he tried out for the high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. He thought it would be fun to be part of a group, part of a dancing crowd onstage in matching costumes, and maybe to spend a lot of extra time around Lorelai Page, the killer mezzo-soprano of Calcasset High. From when he was little, singing Christmas carols in the backseat of his parents’ car, Ryan had been told that he had a very nice singing voice. And from when he was a little older, doing puppet shows behind the couch with socks on his hands, he had been told that he was a ham. And so, only partly because trying to get teenage boys at small schools in some communities to audition for musicals can be a grind on par with climbing K2, Ryan found himself cast as Conrad Birdie, the Elvis-like figure who hypnotizes a small town with his rock-and-roll stylings and brings down the house—pretty much always—singing “Honestly Sincere.”
One of the mothers—someone’s wonderful mother, they didn’t remember anymore whose mother—sewed him a jumpsuit out of shiny gold fabric that gave him a pronounced ass and a bit of a rash. But it didn’t matter. He had scraggly grunge hair then, and one of the girls in the chorus helped put gel in it until it stood up six inches. He learned how to throw his hip out to the side when he said, “Suffer!,” and all the parents laughed, and the girls screamed, and it was only partly a bit. When the song was over, the entire cast playing the townspeople would be flat on their backs on the stage, having fainted from Conrad’s sheer charisma. And at every one of the three performances—Friday night, Saturday night, and a Sunday matinee—the ovation was so overwhelming that it took quite a while to get the show back on track. At least this was how Laurie’s entire family remembered it.