Chapter Twenty
twenty
Ridley
Ridley was at the door as soon as he heard Bea’s key in the lock, opening it before Gavin had the opportunity to run away.
“Dad,” Bea said brightly, rising to her toes to kiss Ridley on the cheek. “Welcome back!”
“Thank you, Bean,” Ridley said, barely able to pull his eyes away from Gavin long enough to acknowledge her.
“Uh, okay,” Gavin signed off, flustered, throwing a three-fingered salute at Bea. “This was fun, Trixie.”
Ridley blinked. “Trixie? Who’s Trixie?”
Both Bea and Gavin paused as if caught red-handed.
“Well, uh,” Gavin started but Ridley turned to Bea standing next to him in the doorway.
“Gavin asked what he could call me and I told him ‘Trixie.’”
“Since when? Who calls you Trixie?” Ridley asked with irritation.
“I know but—”
“No one calls you Trixie.”
“I asked her if I could call her something no one else calls her,” Gavin said, straightening to his full height.
Ridley’s eyebrow rose. Gavin had an inch or two on him but he had at least forty pounds of muscle on Gavin. “Bea, hon, can I have a moment to talk with Gavin alone?”
“Dad.” Bea’s voice had a shade of warning in it.
“Go on. I’m sure you weren’t doing any homework while you were out. Head on upstairs.” Ridley matched her tone and she understood it was an order, not a request.
Bea sighed and headed toward the stairs. “’Night, Gavin, thanks.”
“’Night, Trix.” Gavin waved and Bea waved back.
Ridley glared at the man. He waited until he could tell Bea was on the landing of the upper floor before starting.
“Look—” Gavin tried to preempt him.
In a single word, there went all the cool and calm he thought he was going to exhibit when they finally arrived. Late! On top of everything else.
“No, you look,” Ridley growled in the lowest registers of his voice, but still clear enough for Gavin to hear from a foot away. “You call me before you even think about seeing my daughter, you understand? You do not come within fifty meters of her without clearing it with me.”
Gavin’s eyes widened, genuinely surprised. “Mate—”
“You and I know I’m not your fuckin’ mate. You let me know beforehand if you want to have contact with Bea. We agreed to that. Your solicitors agreed to that.”
“Yes, although in my defense, I did try to call you this morning.” Gavin held his palms up in surrender like Ridley was a volatile substance he was shielding himself from. “Your phone kept going to voicemail.”
Ridley paused for a second, the glacier of ice-cold anger that had formed in his chest cracking. “I didn’t hear any messages from you.”
“Then I called your office. Your assistant, Therese, said you were due in from New York by the late morning. So, I called again later.”
Ridley gritted his teeth, remembering the call from Gavin he ignored while he and Lanie were talking about her cousin’s wedding.
“At that point, I just decided to meet you there and ask. I came early but you didn’t show up.” Gavin let the unspoken accusation sit there between them.
“Oh.” Ridley felt about a foot tall.
“Aronsen, mate—” Gavin self-corrected. “Ah, Aronsen. I had no intention of taking Bea anywhere today. The opportunity just presented itself. Frankly, I’d think you’d be glad someone was there for her. She did really well. Third place overall.”
Ridley hadn’t thought he could feel lower, and yet there it was, a subbasement of self-loathing, courtesy of Gavin Dorrence. The fight went out of him.
“I am.” He was certain he’d choke on the next few words but they came out surprisingly unencumbered. “Thank you.”
“It was no problem. When I’m here, I’d love to be another person in Bea’s phone tree.”
“Phone tree?”
“Of emergency contacts. People she can call if she needs help.”
Ridley’s heart skipped a beat. He nearly clutched his chest those words frightened him so much. “I, um...” The last time Ridley could recall being this tongue-tied was when he asked Thyra to marry him.
“Just think about it. If I’m around I want Trix—I mean, Bea—to feel like she can call on me.”
Ridley laughed humorlessly. “When you’re around. You heard yourself, right?”
“That’s rather unfair, Aronsen, when you’re frequently on a different continent yourself.”
“Yes, well.” Ridley didn’t need a reminder of his hypocrisy. “Her name is Beatrix or Bea. No one calls her ‘Trixie.’” The words were snide and filled with the irritation Ridley really felt for himself. “And you won’t be the first. Understand?”
Gavin fell back a step on the front stairs, thrown by the abrupt subject change. “Well, she’s thirteen years old, I think she can make up her own mind. She told me Trixie—”
“She’s fourteen.”
“What?”
“She. Is. Fourteen. Her birthday was last month. You forgot those ridiculous London Eye tickets already?”
Gavin reddened. “She didn’t like them?”
At Gavin’s demoralized expression, Ridley was unexpectedly hit with a pang of remorse. He knew what it was to have no idea what a teen girl thinks is cool. He shook his head. “You want them back?” Ridley offered. “Maybe you could trade them in for concert tickets? She’s really into BLACKPINK right now.”
“BLACKPINK...so she does like K-pop?” Gavin nodded as if making a mental note. “Thanks. I’ll see what my assistant can do.”
Ridley bit his tongue...it was not his job to teach Gavin how to be a better father. In fact, as Ridley knew, when he let himself acknowledge it, it was against his best interests.
“I’m really sorry about today,” Gavin offered, more contrite than Ridley was accustomed to. “It was a miscommunication. Won’t happen again.”
“We’ll both work on that,” Ridley conceded.
Gavin held out his hand but Ridley just looked at it. “Germs,” Ridley said after searching for an excuse. “Nothing personal.”
“Right,” Gavin replied, sticking the hand in his pocket. “I’ll go now. ’Night.”
“’Night.” Ridley watched Gavin retreat down the walkway toward the small silver McLaren parked on the street.
“Oh yes, Aronsen,” Gavin called as Ridley was beginning to close the door. “Bea and I were talking and I want to extend an invitation for you to join us in Colorado for Christmas.”
If Ridley had been given dozens of guesses for what Gavin was going to say, none of them would’ve been that. “Uhhh...”
“Just think about it for now. I know Bea would really love it if you could come. And we have more than enough space.”
Ridley nodded as if he would actually consider it. “Gavin!” he called out a moment later, rolling his eyes as Gavin lifted open the butterfly door on the ridiculously expensive car. “What about the Eye tickets?” A whole pod could not have been cheap.
Gavin shrugged, stepping into the McLaren. “Keep them. You must know someone who’d enjoy it.”
Ridley had just reached the point where the TV was watching him instead of the other way around when he heard the refrigerator open and close. His eyes popped open immediately.
He sat up and looked over the back of the living room couch at Bea puttering around in the kitchen in her pajamas. He checked the time on his phone. After an initial message that read RU up? that received no response, Lanie had sent him a series of GIFs of sleeping animals, cartoons and children.
“It’s late.”
“Dad, we’re out of Wotsits,” Bea said, like they were already in the middle of a conversation. Coming around their large L-shaped couch, she collapsed heavily into it. Her fist contained a handful of gummy bears.
“Last I looked, in the larder there was a whole variety pack of crisps.”
“Yeah, because you keep getting the variety pack when I only like the cheese puffs.”
“Since when?” Ridley muted the television.
She gave him that incredulous look teenagers were experts at that wondered, nearly aloud, whether adults held even a single coherent thought in their minds ever. “Since always.”
“No,” he insisted. “We’ve always gotten the variety pack. You used to eat the other ones too.” He struggled for the type since that brand featured dozens of styles and flavors. “What about the...the prawn cocktail?”
“Yeah, when I was ten.”
Ridley gave an amused snort. So the other day. He almost said it out loud but caught himself, well aware of how important it was to Bea to feel far removed from age ten Bea. To feel like a proper teenager.
“Well, I only like the salt and vinegars,” he laughed. “So, someone must have been eating the res—” Ridley ran out of steam hearing his own words. Beside him Bea was completely silent, examining the colorful gummy bears in her palm.
Thyra’s name was not forbidden in the house. Pictures and totems of her and the three of them as a family covered many walls and most of the flat surfaces around them. Every door and table, wall and window was infused with Thyra’s energy and spirit. Little had even moved since her passing—less because Ridley kept the place like a shrine to her, and more because Thyra had already found the perfect place for everything and Ridley found it difficult to improve upon perfection. Still, the subject of Thyra—and more specifically, the agonizing absence of her—was something of a third rail in the house, zapping all who went near it.
“I’ll talk to Mrs. Handa,” Ridley said quietly, referring to their longtime housekeeper.
In the silence, vague yips from the fox den at the back wall of the garden could be heard.
“Oh, the Tods are up for the night,” Ridley announced to which Bea rolled her eyes.
“Are you ever going to call someone?”
“Why? Those foxes aren’t hurting anyone.”
“They dig up Mum’s plant beds.”
“They did until we erected that little fence. Now we’re cool.”
Bea chuckled, like her father was decidedly not cool. “You built it.”
“You helped...a little.”
“Foxes need to be controlled. They carry roundworm.”
He nodded. “Yes, I know.”
Bea sighed. “But Mum said you’d never do it.”
“I know that too.” Ridley echoed Bea’s sigh in reply.
Cats carried roundworm too, yet Thyra had no problem letting Bea near her parents’ indoor-outdoor orange tabby, Sweetie Simpkins.
“Alright, fine. If Mr. Tod and his family are really cutting into your quality of life, I’ll call pest control in the morning.”
Bea popped the last gummy bear into her mouth and shifted closer to him. Ridley opened the afghan he’d had laid across his knees and Bea snuggled into his side.
“You don’t have to do that, Dad. Honestly, they upset Mum more than me. It was her tomatoes, carrots and strawberries—”
“What are you, rubbing it in? I said, I’d call.” Ridley laughed, pushing some of Bea’s frizzy hair off his shoulder so he could see her face resting there.
“Maybe a little bit.” She smiled mischievously, holding up a tiny space between her thumb and index finger.
Ridley pinched her nose between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers.
“Dad!” Bea screeched, swatting at his hand.
He stopped after a minute of rough-and-tumble where Bea tried to free herself and then there was silence between them. Only Bea’s labored breathing sounded in the room. But after a moment, Ridley realized her shoulders were shaking. She was crying.
“Bean?” He sat up from his semi-reclined position across the couch, causing her to sit straighter beside him. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head. “It’s stupid.”
“Nothing you say is stupid.”
“It’s awful then. I shouldn’t be thinking it.”
Ridley’s stomach rolled. “What? You know you can tell me anything.”
Fresh tears filled her eyes, coming even faster and harder than before.
“Bean? Did Gavin say something to you while you were out?” Ridley’s jaw set, ready to pull on his clothes, jump in a cab and go beat Gavin’s ass in his fancy fucking luxury apartment in the Shard.
“No.” She sniffled, taking the tissues Ridley offered. “He was fine. Nice, even.”
Ridley’s mouth twitched. Nice?
“I loved Mum.”
“I know you did, honey. You do.”
“I love her,” Bea corrected herself. “But...but if something happened to you...I don’t know what I would do!” She broke into a fresh set of tears. “It scares me.”
Ridley didn’t know what to do with that. His heart soared but so did his guilt. God. Every time he thought there were parameters or bounds to how much he could love this kid, she’d do something or say something and he’d realize he hadn’t even reached the threshold. That there were infinite expanses past which he could love her still.
“You would be taken care of. As always, you have your nan and granddad. If something had happened to me instead of Thyra, you’d still have your mom,” he said through the lump forming in his throat, remembering all the moments when he’d pled for the universe to somehow take him instead of his wife. Terrified over how Bea would take being left in his care instead of her mother’s. Frightened about what the world would look like with just him and Bea in it.
Bea shook her head. “No, but Mum wasn’t good at stuff like this. Hugs, and tea, and snuggles when I’m sick, and MCM Comic Con tickets, and Elephant Toothpaste. Mum didn’t do that. Mum packed me off to Lyndhurst.”
“We both did that.”
“No, it was her school. ‘Lyndhurst was some of the best years of my life,’” Bea parroted her mother’s familiar line.
Ridley took a breath, trying to gather his thoughts and his excuses. In truth, despite Ridley’s vehement objection, Thyra had unilaterally decided to send Bea away in the lead-up to the most serious turn in her lupus that she ultimately died from. At the time, she hadn’t even told Ridley she was getting sicker, feeling weaker, as always powering through the pain and fatigue. She just decided to send Bea off to the boarding school she’d spent years at herself. It was one of the worst disagreements he’d ever had with his wife—made worse when she pulled rank and reminded him that Beatrix was “her child.” It strained their relationship in a way that they never had a chance to recover from. And even now, Ridley had difficulty restraining his residual resentment toward Thyra for being forced to shoulder a portion of the blame for a decision that he wasn’t a part of.
But preserving Bea’s memory of Thyra is more important than pride or the correct assignment of blame. Ridley struggled to remember that himself sometimes. Bea needs to hold on to the best memories of her mom.
He’d decided that at Thyra’s deathbed when she chose to leave Bea in Sussex rather than allow her to come home. And nothing had changed.
“Lyndhurst School is one of the best schools in Britain. And you’re a legacy. Your granddad went—”
“I know.” She rolled her eyes. “I know. Mum went and so it was important that I go too. All the Baker-Smythes go to Lyndhurst. Just ’cos eighty billion years ago granddad’s granddad was the fourth son of a baron or something.” Bea pursed her lips in distaste. “Colonizers.”
Ridley stifled a snort, looking at his fawn-brown daughter being haunted by the ghosts of the very white peerage. Particularly since he was an American and almost all of Thyra’s family, besides her father, were Black people, the whole Lyndhurst School thing had seemed like class-conscious claptrap they were going to skip. Until Thyra suddenly decided not to. Still, he tried to remain respectful.
“There can be too many viewings of Black Panther , I’m realizing.”
“Dad, be serious.” Her tears had finally dried up.
“Sorry.”
Ridley gave Bea a squeeze. “Well, you don’t ever have to go back. I know how much you love Hillsleigh Girls’ School.”
“What if Gavin decided to send me back?” Bea’s eyes were platter-sized and beseeching. “He went to Lyndhurst too.”
In fact, it was where Gavin and Thyra first met, Ridley recalled bitterly.
“No, that’s not his...” He shook his head. Yet as he spoke, what must have been swirling in Bea’s head for months finally dawned on him. “Oh no, honey. I won’t allow that.”
“It may not be up to you.”
This plainly spoken truth ran through Ridley like a sharpened blade. Sometime soon, it might not be his decision. His sigh was so deep and long Bea shifted under his arm.
“Will you consider coming to Colorado for Christmas?”
“Huh? Absolutely not,” Ridley answered.
“It’s important that we play nice. You said that yourself.”
“I did.” Ridley didn’t like hearing his words turned on him.
“Maybe if you’re nice to him, he’ll stop taking you to court.”
“Bea, he doesn’t want me there. He was just being polite.”
“I don’t know, Dad.” She pulled out of his arms to turn to him fully. “I didn’t suggest it.”
Ridley frowned. “You didn’t?”
She shook her head. “He said he thought I’d be happier if you were there too, not just Nan and Granddad.”
Gavin wants me to come? Ridley didn’t know where to file that information away. “I have work.”
“Dad, please?” She drew out the words to give them eight extra syllables.
“I don’t think I can make it, honey.” He didn’t say that he wouldn’t want to, even if he didn’t have to work. “But I’ll think about it.”
Bea’s looked skeptical.
“We’ll see, okay?” His resolve to not go under any circumstances wavered under her pleading eyes. “Let me check my schedule. Talk with Therese.” He planned to have his assistant make up a conflict if she had to.
Bea nodded hopefully. “Okay.” She kissed him on the cheek as he gave her another hug.
“It’s super late.”
“I’m going.” Bea nodded, rising from the couch. “’Night.”
“’Night.”
Ridley saw her up the steps before picking up his phone. It was two a.m.
He could use someone to talk to. Not about this...not necessarily. He just needed to reach out.
RIDLEY:
You up?
LANIE:
It’s only 9:00. Do I seem like somebody’s grandma?
RIDLEY:
Definitely not. So good flight?
LANIE:
As well as can be expected. Seven hours in a 17 x 32 space can’t be good for you.
RIDLEY:
No it’s not. But you got home safely?
LANIE:
You sound like my mom. Since my responses aren’t coming from the bottom of the Atlantic, the answer is yes.
RIDLEY:
So snarky. Good
There was a pause Ridley didn’t know how to fill and for the briefest moment he second-guessed the impulse to reach out. He had just seen her earlier today, which was a little trippy to think about considering she was three thousand miles away now.
Ridley smiled to himself, settling back against the couch pillows and indulging in their conversation, breathing easily for the first time since...
It stunned him to realize this.
Since he’d seen Lanie that afternoon.