They aren’t the only ones battered here. I’ve made it through too.
Clara is not in the house. We were able to enroll her back in school once I legally got custody of her. The judge was initially suspicious of the circumstances we’d been living under. A ratty motel room and a job stripping didn’t exactly inspire confidence. But it turned out he had taken bribes from Byron back when he’d been in Tanglewood. Kip privately reminded him that some scandals were best swept under the rug.
And so Byron’s corruption actually helped us for once.
As I’ve done many times before, I flip to the beginning of the book and look at the poem inscribed there. The jungle is a scary place for those who wander in… Written by Kip’s mother, who loved poetry. There are a few notebooks full of scribbled thoughts—a stanza here, a phrase there. There aren’t many fully formed poems in verse, much less rhyme. This one is different.
The phrasing is simpler than her usual, less dense. Simpler. More childlike? The subject matter isn’t childlike, though. Life and death. Being lost and never found. So why write it in a book of stories for children? In this book she’d given her son?
It holds its secrets tightly furled, locking out the wind.
It wasn’t always there. I’d asked Kip about it. All the times he’d read the story as a child, this page had been blank. Only after his mother died, when he’d been paging through the book for memory’s sake, had he first seen the words.
The jungle is a scary place for those who wander in…
There’s something that brings me back to this poem, to this book. Like she’d left a message for Kip. Or me. As strange as it sounds, I feel like this poem is meant for me. I know how scary the jungle is. I know how it feels to wonder if death is the only way to get out.
I sigh and take a sip of my tea. Lukewarm. I’ve been sitting here a long time, staring. I run a finger over the ink, long dried. Her handwriting is sweetly slanted and looping. It makes me feel hopeful. From what Kip has told me about her, she was hopeful, despite what her husband had done, despite what Byron had become. So why write something so dire while her other son, Kip, was off fighting in the military?
I read through the poem again, lingering on the last line. The key is underground.
What if she had been talking about a literal key?
Everyone had thought my mother had the jewels. Or Kip’s father. But what if his mother had them all along? I feel a sort of kinship with this woman I’ve never met, enough to guess she wouldn’t have wanted to use what had come from her husband’s affair. She had remained in this modest house. Would she have been able to give up the jewels entirely, though? Would she have been able to throw them away, give it away, knowing her son might benefit from it someday? I’m not sure I could have done that, thinking about what Clara could do with that money. Just like I resorted to using Byron’s name with the judge to make sure Clara could stay with me. We’ll do anything for the people we love, even rely on the ones we hate.
Standing up, I gather the book in my arms and run outside. “Kip!”
And then immediately feel contrite when I see him on a ladder. What if I’d surprised him into falling? He doesn’t look surprised though, doesn’t wobble at all. Instead he leans against the metal ladder as casually as if it were a wall, as if he weren’t fifteen feet off the ground.
“Morning.” He is wearing those boots and those jeans that I love. His legs look impossibly lean and gorgeous.
I stop and ogle him for a moment, appreciative that he is mine. He is the one onstage now.
He notices, of course. His smile is small and smug and male. “Need something, honey?”
He likes to call me that when he has sex on his mind. The first time he watched me closely, thinking it might offend me. Watching that closely, he could see what the word did to me instead—it got me hot. What can I say? I’m an animal when it comes down to it, and I’ve been trained to like that word on his tongue, to like what he does to me when he says it.
But I can’t be distracted now. I hold up the book. “I need to go to the Grand.”
His expression darkens. “Why?”
“I think I know what the poem is about. I think I know where she put the jewels.”
* * *
We stand in front of the fountain. It had been cracked before, the statue missing with only a hole where it would be. A hole that someone could drop something into. It takes construction equipment to break it apart. The stone crumbles into pieces. It will never be rebuilt.
Both Candy and Lola are there, even though the Grand won’t open for another few hours. They’re here to see me off. It feels like the end.
It feels like the beginning.
I hug each of them. We are friends. That is one real thing that came out of this. It’s friendship born of survival and strength, of darkness and fire. We walked through that fire together. I came out alive but not unscathed. There are burns on my skin—some that are visible, like the dark red wound where the bullet went in. Some that you can’t see, only feel.
Lola’s lower lip is trembling, but I am the one who cries first. I am the one leaving. Even though I don’t want to go back, it’s still sad to say goodbye.
“Come visit me,” I say. There’s a part of me that wants to say come with me. Leave this place. But that would be a form of disrespect.
We all have our reasons for working at the Grand. Mine are gone now.