ten #2
“This better be worth it,” I mutter as I start up after her, going much more slowly. I’m not used to this side of Mabel. She’s never reckless, never overcome by emotional urges.
When I reach the platform and climb on, she’s sitting with her back to the trunk of the tree.
“You made it,” she says. “I didn’t know if the ladder would hold your weight.”
“So it was a trap,” I say, brushing off my hands. “Care to explain yourself?”
She shakes her head and uses her foot to push off some of the leaves wedged under a branch that’s grown against the platform. “This is where I’d meet her.”
“I don’t think my nanny would have hiked all the way out here,” I say, looking around at the decaying boards under us, some of them barely intact, all covered with a scummy layer of accumulated pollen, dirt, and patches of moss.
“Oh, she didn’t,” Mabel says. “And I wasn’t allowed to go into the woods alone because there are coyotes and bears and snakes.
But whenever my cousins came over to play with Colt, she had her hands full, so she didn’t miss me.
Or I’d tell the adults I was going to nap or read in my room, and then I’d sneak out. ”
She smiles at the memory, and I watch her, captivated by this tender side of her I haven’t seen since I was courting her the first time. I thought it was gone.
“So even then, you only pretended to be a good girl?”
“Sometimes we read,” she says with a smug little smile. “I’d bring a backpack with a picnic and books, and we’d sit on the blanket and eat pastries and read all day.”
“Why?” I ask, cocking my head. “Your room would be more comfortable, and you have a bathroom. You could have your cook make whatever you wanted to eat, your drinks would be cold, and you could get online if you got bored.”
She stares at me for a second. “The boredom was the point.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“If we finished our books or got tired of reading, we had to think of other things to do. I wasn’t good at that, so if it was my turn, we just told stories.
She knew all these Armenian fairytales from her grandma, and I knew the original versions of the ones she’d only seen on Disney—the evil queen who had to dance in the burning shoes until she died, the stepsisters who cut off their own toes to fit into the slipper, the Sleeping Beauty who was used by the king for years and only woke up after giving birth to his baby, when it sucked the splinter from her finger trying to nurse. ”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
She smiles a little. “Dahlia liked to play pretend. She played in the woods without me, but I didn’t like to get dirty, so when it was just us, we stayed up here.
We could be pirates, and the deck was our ship, or it would be the desert island we were stranded on.
Sometimes we’d braid our hair and hang it over the edge and pretend to be Rapunzel. ”
“Who would the other one pretend to be?”
“What?”
“There were two of you,” I point out. “So who was Rapunzel?”
“We were both Rapunzel,” she says, like that makes sense.
Like they were one person.
I remember her asking if she made it all up, and I start to wonder if she did.
Dahlia existed, but there’s no evidence they were friends.
Mabel said we made her think she was crazy and that she’d made it all up, but we never did that.
Her parents did. I have no love for any Darling except the one in front of me, but her parents aren’t that sort of cruel.
If they made her think Dahlia was an imaginary friend, then in all likelihood, she was.
Or maybe Mabel’s playing an angle even now, though I’m not sure what she hopes to gain from it.
The fact that I don’t know irritates me, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of knowing that.
There’s only one reason she’d want me to think Dahlia was imaginary, and that’s to protect her.
But that doesn’t make sense, since she’s already asked me to look into her.
I decide to watch Mabel even more closely.
She was born sneaky, and she hasn’t changed.
“I don’t get it, but okay,” I say, shrugging like I don’t care about her childhood memories.
She peels up a circle of lichen with her thumbnail. “You had your brothers to play with. You like them. I didn’t like my family, especially when we were staying here. That meant I was with my grandpa.”
I nod, finally making some sense of the picture she painted.
“Did you get in trouble?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” she says, straightening her legs on the floor and staring at her knees. “If I stayed out too long and they realized I was gone. Dahlia would lose track of time, but I never did. I just didn’t want to go home.”
We sit in silence for a while, each of us dwelling in our own thoughts. Then we climb down and go back to the house she avoided so much that she’d risk getting punished by her grandfather for it.
After our walk and a shower, we drive over to the Dolce house.
Devlin and Crystal live there now, right next door to the new house his parents built on the foundation of the one Duke burned down.
Our house—Hickory House, according to Mabel—is big enough that Royal and Harper can move in for the summer.
We could have moved back in too, but since Summer House stands empty, it made more sense for us to stay there.
Royal still hasn’t completely forgiven me, and I thought it would be better not to be under the same roof as Harper.
We find Duke sitting on the living room floor surrounded by a handful of kids. Crystal is lying on the couch with a towel over her eyes, one hand on her distended belly.
“What’s with her?” I ask Duke, nodding to our sister.
“Migraine,” he says. “Who knew teen pregnancy could be so hard?”
Crystal holds up one hand, middle finger raised. “I’m not a teenager anymore, asshole.”
“What your mouth, woman,” he says. “This asshole is watching your hoard of children.”
“Thank you,” she says, putting her hand back on her belly.
“Maybe if you spent more time with the kids you already have and less time making more, you wouldn’t be in this situation,” he says, but he smiles at Knight, who’s frowning at the brightly colored contraption they’re assembling.
Olive is coloring at the coffee table with Diamond, who’s just scribbling on her page, while Prince is hiding underneath, munching on a crayon.
“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing to a fat, generic-looking baby sitting in a swing. “Did you have another one that I missed?”
“Nah, that’s Preston’s spawn,” Duke says. “Good thing it came out with two eyes, right?”
He winks at Olive, who grins and goes back to coloring an intricate koala bear page.
“That’s not hereditary,” Mabel points out. “Baron took out his eye.”
“I’m joking, babe,” Duke says, snapping the next piece into place.
“Really?” Olive asks me with childish, demented delight. “You scooped out Preston’s eyeball?”
“No,” I say, frowning at her. “I burned it out.”
“Cool,” she whispers, gazing up at me with obvious awe. I bet she’d think all the things I did to her sister were cool too, if she didn’t let emotions cloud her judgment.
“We’re going to visit my stepmom,” Mabel says to Duke. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Will Colt be there?” he asks. “Or is he in rehab again?”
“He’s not in rehab,” Mabel says. “I’m not sure if he’ll be in or not.”
He laughs quietly and mutters under his breath, “What a pussy.”
“We’re not going to talk to Colt,” I point out. “She wants to talk to her parents. Why do you always bring him up?”
“I don’t,” he says, scowling at me. “I don’t give a fuck about him. I just think it’s funny.”
“Are you coming?” I ask.
“Why would I come?” he asks, his tone belligerent now. “I don’t care who’s there. I don’t need to see one more fucking Darling. They’re crawling all over this place already. Why do you think I’m not out back with Royal and Devlin and Preston?”
I have one of those moments of stark clarity where I’m reminded how much I missed when I left town. Then, it would’ve been unthinkable for Royal to willingly hang out with the Darling cousins. Apparently he can forgive them more easily than his own brother.
After a beat of silence, Prince’s voice rings out from under the coffee table. “Fucking Darling.”
“Great,” Crystal says. “Now he probably thinks that’s the name of his new sibling.”
Duke starts laughing louder than warranted. He doesn’t look up when Mabel and I excuse ourselves and leave. I can tell something is bothering him, but I won’t ask in front of the others and risk his fragile ego.