Page 35 of The Lost Heiress
A voice broke into Florence’s reverie, and she turned to see Grace, one of the kitchen maids, standing next to her on the terrace.
“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” the girl said, “but there’s been a mix-up in the kitchen. I think you better come down, straightaway.”
Florence sighed. The fireworks were about to start, and now she would surely miss them. But what was she to do about it? She lived her job; she never left it.
“Duty calls,” she said to Ransom and got up to follow the maid.
Ransom nodded at Florence. He always enjoyed her company, but tonight he was grateful for the solitude; it had been a long and trying day.
He watched Salvador standing a little way off, leaning against the railing, talking with Ana. She leaned her head back and laughed heartily. It was dark, but Ransom thought he saw Salvador lean toward her, his shoulder touching hers. Ransom had seen them whispering and laughing together at lunch. Perhaps they had grown a romantic attachment. He wouldn’t be surprised. Salvador was a ladies’ man. In college, he always had a different girlfriend hanging around him, though he would never call them that, because they weren’t permanentattachments. Ransom had never understood the appeal in that type of laissez-faire relationship. He himself had been involved with just one girl, the only girl he had ever been, and probably ever would be, in love with: Gabi Martin. Such a common, nondescript name. She had red hair and green eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose and on her shoulders. She had a lean, athletic frame and strong legs. She played on the Stanford girls’ soccer team and majored in English. She wanted to be a high school English teacher so she could read and talk about books the rest of her life.
They had met at a football game the fall semester of their freshman year. His friend Freddie Astor, whom he had known for four years at Andover, was dressed as a tree, and the girls in the row directly behind them complained that his branches were too tall to see over. Freddie, who had always had a short fuse, turned around, but—finding the central complainant to be short, cute, and blond—he became charming rather than combative. After several minutes of flirtatious teasing, it was decided by both parties that the only remedy for the situation was for Freddie to switch seats with the short blonde’s friend, and that is how Gabi came to be seated next to Ransom for the second half of the game. He offered to share his Cracker Jacks, which she accepted.
Gabi talked a lot, but Ransom liked that about her. There were no awkward silences that he had to stretch himself to fill. After the game, the newly assembled group walked to a diner for burgers and fries and then to the blonde’s dorm room, where they drank cheap beer and listened to records and passed around a joint. In the early predawn light, Ransom walked Gabi back to her dorm room across campus, and as he said good night to her on the limestone steps, he couldn’t help but find her inexplicably alluring, even though the cardinal red war paint she had streaked across her cheeks was now smudged and her hair was mussed from the hours they had spent in the beanbag chairs on the floor of the blonde’s room. She wasn’t shy or vain, self-deprecating or overly confident. She was just Gabi.
He went home with her one weekend a month after Christmas break. Her parents lived in San Francisco, in Haight-Ashbury, in an old Victorian that had been sectioned off into a duplex. They had the second floor, accessible through a single rickety staircase. He and Gabi kept their shoes on and piled their heavy coats and hats into the closet off the front hall. Gabi’s mother greeted them, her painter’s smock still on, bifocals on the bridge of her nose. She enveloped her daughter into a warm, full-bodied hug and gave Ransom the same, even though they had never met before. She ushered them down the hallway to the living room, talking a mile a minute (that must have been where Gabi got it from) about the project she was working on and asking about their trip (Was the bus on time? Had Gabi seen anyone she knew from the neighborhood on the walk from the bus stop?) and then about school (How had Gabi done on that paper on Chaucer she turned in last week?). Family photographs hung on the walls of the narrow hallway, and the floorboards were worn and squeaky. There were chips on the baseboards where Gabi had kicked her soccer ball around inside and smudges of fingerprints on the walls where her brothers had steadied their weight during impromptu hallway wrestling matches. There was a single bathroom off the hallway that they all shared and a damp towel on the handrail by the sink. The living room boasted two bay windows that let in enormous amounts of light, and her mother’s easel was set up there with a canvas, still wet with paint. There was a buttery leather couch—the seats worn in the middle, covered in hand-knit throws—and a television. Every inch of the room was taken up, every surface occupied with books and knitting needles and skeins of yarn; there were half-drunk mugs of cold tea on the coffee table and a puzzle of Versailles that was three-quarters done. The Christmas tree was still up in one corner of the room, even though it was three weeks past Christmas. The room smelled of evergreens, and there were pine needles collecting in heaps on the carpet that no one had bothered to sweep up. To Ransom, it was perfect. The house felt small and full and lived in. It felt like a home.
Later, when Gabi’s father and brothers were there, they ate crowded together in the small kitchen. Gabi’s father brought Chinese takeout,and they spooned the rice and noodles and garlic chicken onto plates and reached over each other for the sweet-and-sour packets, lost in a cacophony of three separate conversations all going on at once. Gabi’s father was a dentist, and she had two younger brothers still in high school—twins, redheaded like her. After dinner, they played the most spirited game of Yahtzee Ransom had ever participated in, with allegations of cheating dogging whoever might be ahead that round and rolls where one die landed off the table hotly contested. When the game was over, they curled up on the couch, which could just barely fit them all, and watched reruns ofHappy Daysthat Gabi’s mother had taped, until Mr. Martin fell asleep, his head cocked back on the couch, and Mrs. Martin chastised him for snoring too loudly for them to hear the show, and then she herded them all off to bed.
Ransom slept in Gabi’s brothers’ room on a makeshift bed of blankets and pillows on the floor. He lay awake for a long time in the dark, feeling strangely content and satiated, listening to the humming of the radiator and the whooshing of cars going by on the street below.
At school, Gabi slept over in his dorm room, the two of them wedged together in his single bed. She wore an oversize T-shirt, her hair still wet from the shower. She’d read aloud passages from Wordsworth or Austen or Byron—anything she found beautiful or profound—lying on her back in his bed, her bare feet propped up on his cinder block wall.
“Listen to this,” she’d say. And he would.
On Saturdays, they used the kitchen in the common room to make pancakes and ate them quickly, drowned in syrup. There was Frisbee golf to be played on the quad, and open mic poetry readings in the student center, and volunteer day trips for beach cleanups. Their days were alternately lazy and too full, filled with studying and drinking, sports practice and sleeping in.
The fall semester of his junior year, Ransom took Gabi as his date to a charity gala his parents threw every year for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They drove down the coast together in his convertible, Gabi’s feet on the dash. She fiddled with the radio dial every timea station grew fuzzy and pleaded with him several times to stop at Cliffhaven on the way. She wanted to see where he had grown up.
“There isn’t time,” Ransom told her.
When she pouted, he put her hand to his mouth and kissed it.
“On the way back, we’ll stop,” he said. “I promise.”
At the hotel in the city, they changed into their evening wear: Ransom a tux, and Gabi a long green sheath dress and heels. The limousine took them downtown to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where there was a line of cars waiting to let out the crème de la crème of LA society. When it was their turn, Ransom got out first, emerging into the blinding flashes of photographers’ cameras with a practiced smile and a steady gaze. He turned to give Gabi a hand and saw her dazed expression, the way she squinted into the bright lights, as if they were an unwelcome intrusion. Her heel caught in the hem of her dress as she exited, and there was a horrid ripping sound as part of her train tore. She winced and looked back to survey the damage as a flurry of cameras leaned in to capture the moment.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
They sounded like some sort of herd of hungry animals about to consume them.
Ransom slipped his arm around Gabi’s waist and leaned in toward her ear. “Just smile,” he whispered. “No one will notice about the dress.”
He held on to her hand tightly as he led her down the carpeted entrance. Near the doors, they had to stop and pose for pictures. Ransom stood with his shoulders back and a ready smile, while Gabi stood awkwardly next to him, seemingly unsure of how to position her hands or where exactly she should be looking when there were cameras in every direction. Someone asked for her name.
“Gabriella Martin,” Ransom said, even though he only ever called her Gabi.
“Who are you wearing, dear?” a woman asked.
Gabi glanced down vacantly at her dress, as if she had forgotten she had it on. “Oh, um, Sears, I think,” she’d said.
Inside, Ransom wished fervently that he could whisk her away to the quiet and safety of their seats in the theater, but it was still too early for that. He grabbed two champagne flutes from a passing tray and handed her one, hoping it would help calm her nerves. She clung to the glass with a viselike grip, as if it were a life raft and she were adrift in a turbulent sea, on the verge of drowning.
Ransom introduced her to some friends of his parents and tried to engage her in the conversation, but Gabi was quiet—so unlike herself—more of an observer of the conversation than a participant in it. Ransom was relieved when the lights in the foyer finally flashed and they could take their seats. In the theater, he placed his hand palm up on the armrest between them, but Gabi never reached for it.
They walked past a newsstand on their way to breakfast the next morning, and there, on the cover of one of the tabloids, Ransom saw a picture of them from the night before. In it, he looked steadily into the camera, smiling, while Gabi looked haplessly in the wrong direction.The Prince and the Pippi, the headline quipped. Ransom tried to turn his body slightly to shield Gabi from seeing it too, but when he glanced over at her and saw the hurt in her eyes, he realized he was already too late.
On their way back to school, Ransom kept his promise. Just south of San Luis Obispo, he turned down the drive to Cliffhaven. He looked over at Gabi as she took it all in and tried to see it through her eyes—the tall stone house in the distance, perched on the cliffside. They had lunch on the terrace, overlooking the ocean. But the day was cold and windy, and Gabi shivered in her sweater. A strong gust knocked over her half-empty water glass, wetting the tablecloth and the front of Gabi’s jeans. Afterward, Ransom gave her a tour of the grounds, and in the garden, under the hydrangeas that hung as big as church bells and swayed in the wind, Gabi started to cry.
