Shay waves her hand toward the bathroom. “Go ahead,” she says miserably. “I’ve vomited in it often enough the past couple months. Someone else ought to get a turn.”
As Geordie stumbles into their bathroom, I hear Carmen yell, “Yes, you do have to justify this! You’re going to be a father, Arturo! You have to justify everything you do that isn’t about taking care of that baby!”
I squeeze Shay’s hand. “I came here to help clean up. But what if I got Carmen out of the house instead?”
“Oh, God bless you.” Shay leans back on her pillows, gone limp with relief.
So I hurry downstairs, grab Carmen’s purse, then point to her. “You. Me. Brunch. Now.”
Carmen and Arturo freeze, midargument. It would be funny if I hadn’t seen Shay crying. Finally Carmen manages to say, “How can you think about brunch at a time like this?”
“On a weekend morning? It’s pretty easy. Come on.”
She doesn’t say a word as we leave, or on the drive to Magnolia Café. But while we wait in line outside, Carmen mutters, “You could have just told me to cool it.”
“Would it have worked?”
Carmen doesn’t answer. She just hugs herself more tightly against the chilly breeze.
“What were you freaking out about?”
“The way they spend money—”
“They threw one party, Carmen. Otherwise they’ve been more careful with their money than you or I have ever been.” Arturo is one of the genius-freaks who started an IRA at eighteen. “That’s not what’s actually bothering you.”
“How would you know? You can’t read my mind. You don’t have to ask yourself what it would be like if you had to help support your brother and his wife and a baby—”
“That’s not going to happen!” Even if I didn’t have so much faith in Shay and Arturo, the Ortiz family is reasonably well off. Carmen and Arturo’s parents aren’t rich, but they’re in a position to help out if the new baby needs anything.
Carmen hasn’t even heard me. “—you don’t have to ask yourself if you’re going to get derailed, because you don’t have any responsibilities like that. You can just keep working on your thesis, and going to the studio. You’re going to make it no matter what. It’s not like that for me.”
“Of course you’re going to make it. You’re a math genius.”
“No, I’m not.” Her voice breaks. “I was really smart on the high school level. And the undergrad level. But now? At this point? I’m falling behind—I can tell I’m falling behind, and my advisor says I have to buckle down or—”
Carmen starts to cry. A few people in the brunch line are staring. Well, let them stare. I hug her tightly. “You’re not scared for Arturo. You’re scared for yourself.”
“One of us has to make it,” she whispers as she hugs me back. “I don’t think it’s going to be me.”
Her behavior over the past several months finally makes sense. All this time, Carmen’s been dealing with this incredible anxiety by pushing her fears onto her brother. First she resented Shay for weighing Arturo down with responsibility so young; this morning, she turned on Arturo. But really she’s scared to death that she’ll fall and no one will be there to catch her.
“Listen to me, okay? You’re going to get through this. Yeah, graduate work is difficult. It’s supposed to be! But you were smart enough to get there, and you’re smart enough to make it through.”
Carmen shook her head against my shoulder. “I don’t know.”
“Sometimes life is like a video game. When things get harder, and the obstacles get tougher, it just means you leveled up.”
She laughs brokenly. “Except I suck at video games.”
“I know.” Carmen never even figured out how to steer her car in Grand Theft Auto. “But you don’t suck at math. Come on. Deep breaths.”
She keeps crying it out for a while, though, and is still teary when we finally get seated. Still, one of the great truths of life is that any situation can be improved with coffee. By her second cup, she’s perked up a little—and when her waffles arrive, she’s calm again, enough to notice my relatively empty plate. “Hey, why didn’t you order anything?”
“I got tea and toast.”
Carmen gives me a look, no doubt remembering my ability to slaughter a stack of pancakes.
“Well,” I admit, “Jonah might have made me breakfast this morning.”
“Oh, yeah? He stayed over?”
“I stayed over.”
Carmen’s eyes are still red from crying, but I can tell she’s glad to have something else to think about for a while. “You’ve been so quiet about this guy. When you first met Geordie, you told me everything.”
I’ll never be able to explain why I didn’t tell her about Jonah at first, or why so much of our relationship will remain secret. But if he’s going to be a bigger part of my life, I have to open up about him a little more. “Jonah’s a very private person,” I say. “I respect that.”
“Fine. Be mysterious. It doesn’t matter, because obviously this relationship is the definition of a whirlwind romance. And you’re totally into him. I mean, you went to Scotland with him! How much was that ticket at the last minute?”
She isn’t asking for real—just trying to get me to prove I’m head over heels for Jonah. Still, this might be the moment to be totally candid about the Scotland trip. “He got me the ticket.”
Her eyes go wide. “Jonah bought you a ticket to Scotland? Oh, my God, Vivienne. That’s huge!”
“Not really. His dad actually was one of the cofounders of Oceanic. So he’s got an in with the airline.”
This doesn’t have the effect I expected. Carmen frowns. “You said Oceanic?”
“Uh, yeah. Why?” Was there a crash today or something?
Instead Carmen says, “So . . . Jonah’s part of that screwed-up family in the tabloids.”
I gape at her. “How do you know that?”
“If his dad founded Oceanic, and his name is Jonah Marks, that means his dad was Alexander Marks, right?”
“Since when have you heard of any of these people?”
Carmen makes a face. “The usual! TMZ, sometimes the news, supermarket tabloids—I mean, come on, you have to read those once in a while, right? What else can you do while you’re waiting in line?”
“I check my phone and talk myself out of buying candy bars, like a normal person!” Great. Everyone in the whole world pays more attention to gossip than I do. So much for keeping Jonah’s secrets. Calming myself as best I can, I say, “I think Jonah tries to keep his distance from all that.”
“He didn’t even say anything about his mom this morning?” Carmen winces. “I bet he hadn’t heard yet.”
“Hadn’t heard what?”
Even the most serious news sources print sensational headlines for this story. There’s no way to describe it that isn’t lurid.
CHICAGO “MAD HEIRESS” ARRESTED FOR ASSAULT ON STEPSON
Everything from the Wall Street Journal to OhNoTheyDidn’t has differing accounts of what happened. A few blurry camera-phone videos have been posted to YouTube, but none of them reveal much beyond distant movement in the dark, and the sound of a woman shouting. As near as I can piece together, Jonah’s mother left Redgrave House—already unusual, for her—and went to The Orchid, a downtown club and restaurant so chic even I’ve heard of it. The Orchid’s owner turns out to be Maddox Hale, Jonah’s younger stepbrother. When Jonah’s mom accosted Maddox, an argument ensued, and apparently she hurt him—though nobody can agree whether she knifed Maddox through the hand, only slapped him, or something in between. I don’t get a good look at Jonah’s mother at any point on the videos, but I do hear a man saying, “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s all right. I don’t want to press charges.”
So Maddox would have let it go, whatever it was she did. The police feel differently.