The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Page 18

  I looked away from her toward the screen. There was a red dot on the upper right corner, indicating the reel would need to be changed soon. It struck me as fitting, the movie was reaching its turning point.

  “And what if we’re caught?” Matilda asked. “Have you thought that through? Or are we being impetuous?”

  “Yes, we’re being impetuous, but no, we won’t be caught. And if we are, you’ll end up where you started. That’s our worst outcome.”

  “The worst outcome is I end up back where I started,” Matilda repeated to herself. “That doesn’t sound like poor odds.”

  “All reward, no risk,” I said, thinking my odds weren’t so favorable. “And just think, the upside is the world.”

  “The upside is the world.” Matilda smiled. “Well, that seems a bet I should throw my chips on, shouldn’t I?”

  Just then, the reel snapped off the projector and the screen went black. We stood under the chandelier for one last moment. It cast stars on the floor below us, and we were surrounded by so much velvet I felt like a diamond nestled in a jewel box. But the stars weren’t real, and I wasn’t a gem. In fact, it was only then that I realized that pretty much everything about the gilded life of Matilda Duplaine was make-believe.

  * * *

  We were outside, a mere three acres from freedom. I grabbed Matilda’s hand, and we sprinted along the side of the wall. When we reached the tennis court, I saw it on the driveway, in the distance. There was a hulk of an SUV with a man disembarking from it.

  David was home.

  I wondered how he had got back so quickly. David Duplaine was the only man somehow able to make a six-hour cross-country plane ride into four. I envisioned him prodding his pilot faster, to step on the gas because he had someplace to be.

  When I saw him I surveyed our surroundings, quickly formulating an escape plan. The only ways in and out of the estate were the garden, the oak tree and the front gate. It took me a split second to realize that the oak tree was our only option, which was fine, because we were almost there.

  “Come on.” I prodded Matilda. “Let’s go.”

  There is a difference between pausing and stopping, and in this case, Matilda stopped. She didn’t move. Ironically, we were on the tennis court when David reached us. The only thing separating us was the net, erected to the exact regulation height. The large oak tree reached out over us like an umbrella, and I longed to grab Matilda and bring her with me, hoist her onto its branches. But instead, I stood still, beside her.

  David was the one who spoke first—to me.

  “I suggest you leave here immediately,” David said. “Or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without Matilda,” I replied with a strength I didn’t know I had. “I love her, and I want to take her away with me, to allow her to experience the world. Like you should have done years ago.”

  “Let me remind you that a few months ago you were covering freeway expansion plans, and before that you were run out of Manhattan because you were a disgrace, a cheater who stole another man’s words,” David said. “It is solely because of our generosity that you are where you are. And all it takes is one phone call to change that. So I’m suggesting you leave, right now, and alone, or I’ll have the FBI on your tail for kidnapping by the time you reach Sunset Boulevard.”

  “You will do none of those things,” Matilda demanded. “Because I’m leaving on my own volition. For twenty years I’ve been trapped here because of something that happened a long time ago, for reasons you’ve kept from me all this time. But I can’t stay here anymore.”

  Matilda stepped closer to her father. She was taller than he, blonde to his brown hair, light-complexioned to his olive tone and just plain softer. From their appearance, you would never know she was his daughter. I couldn’t imagine all this sweetness being created by this unscrupulous man. I would have said her mother must have been the sweet one, but then again, she had abandoned her daughter to rot in captivity.

  “I’ve given you a good life here, Matilda,” David said. “You’ve had the best tutors, everything you ever wanted. I know you’ve been confined here—and that it hasn’t been easy. And that’s why I’ve done everything in my power to make you happy.”

  “I’m grateful for what you’ve given me—incredibly grateful. You’ve raised me alone, as a single dad, without a mom. I know you’ve sacrificed so much for me—I’m sure a love of your own, which is the supreme sacrifice—and if it weren’t for you I shudder to think what may have happened to me. But I need more than you can give me now. There’s a whole world out there I’ve never seen.”

  “This is an acute case of the ‘grass is always greener,’” David said. “And I guarantee you if you leave you’ll not find greener grass than this.”

  “Maybe not.” Matilda scanned the lawn around her. “Maybe it will be brown and dying and infested with weeds and bugs, but it will be grass I’ve never seen before. I’m a grown woman now, and you have no right to keep me a prisoner here anymore. I will keep your secret. No one will know you’re my father, where I have grown up—the odd circumstances of my upbringing. But I am leaving.”

  “If you leave, you may never come back.” David’s tone was even, and I thought I caught the slightest bit of impatience in his voice, as if he had somewhere else to be. “Think about the consequences before you make your decision.”

  There was a moment of hesitation. If Matilda and her father shared one gene in common it was stubbornness.

  “Come, Thomas,” Matilda said. “We have a plane to catch.”

  She held my hand as we walked away from David, and I could feel his eyes burning a hole through my back. She led me through the rolling hills of the estate to the driveway. Now that this moment was here, I was terrified. My heart beat so intensely I could feel it in my wrist.

  Once we reached the iron gates to the estate, Matilda hit the red emergency release button, and they opened for us slowly. For a brief moment I thought David might follow us. But instead he let her leave.

  We walked out between the gates. They were timed to close quickly behind us—they had secrets to keep after all—and when they did I heard the rattle of iron.

  Then it went silent.

  Twenty

  The first thing she noticed about the real world, she said, was the feeling of the air on her face. She was slightly nauseous from driving at fifty miles an hour down Sunset Boulevard. I opened the passenger window. She stuck her face into the wind, and she commented that the air tasted different, that it was faster than she was used to.

  It was interesting to see what caught Matilda’s attention and what didn’t. For example, after we took a right onto Sunset Boulevard, we passed a sprawling college campus and Matilda looked at it with envy, watching girls her age play field hockey and peppering me with questions about the students who studied in its halls. Once the campus was in our rearview mirror, Matilda asked why Sunset Boulevard was so curvy. “Certainly” she said, “there must be a straighter means of getting to the end.” And it wasn’t the concept of automobiles that amazed her—an invention that still fascinated me, because I didn’t understand how gasoline and an engine caused steel to move at fifty-five miles per hour—but how many different models of cars there were.

  Matilda’s education had been limited to old movies and books. Some pertinent information could be gleaned from those sources, but they, like the estate, were microcosms of the world’s vastness. So Matilda sprayed me with questions, and I didn’t have the answers to most because they were things that I had long ago accepted and taken for granted. By the time we pulled into the airport parking lot—“All those cars arranged so symmetrically”—Matilda said her brain might burst open with all its new knowledge.

  We boarded the escalator to the gate, and while others hurried through the terminal, eage
r to make their flights, Matilda walked slowly, marveling at all of it. She had known what an escalator was but had never seen one. Ditto with the airport. Matilda had seen airports in movies of course, but in real life she was fascinated by the X-ray machine and the gates that led to faraway destinations like Tokyo and London. For the first time Matilda was realizing that life had unlimited choices. There were different types of everything, from newspapers to candies to bottled water, and she was being introduced to almost all of it for the first time.

  At the gate, Matilda couldn’t sit still. I lassoed her into a chair beside me, where she curled up, hugging her knees to her chest. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, before glancing around self-consciously.

  “Do people kiss in public?” she asked demurely. “Or did I just do something wrong?”

  “You did it right,” I said, rubbing my lips on her blond eyebrows and combing my fingers through her hair.

  “I want every last person to know you’re mine—that you belong to me,” she said.

  I smiled and pulled her closer, whispering in her ear, “I need you to understand that you can go home whenever you want.” I don’t know why I said it.

  “I know.” Matilda watched a plane lift into the sky through the terminal’s window. “One month, it’s already seeming too short, Thomas. I get you for every minute of it, right?”

  “It’s one month in Hawaii and we still have the rest of it—all ahead of us.”

  “The rest of it,” she said. “I forgot about that part.”

  I had first flown when I was two years old, and I remembered none of it. Now I reveled in my flight the way Matilda did in hers. The clouds, the seat belt, the safety information card, the bumps when the wind was wrong, the smooth ride when it wasn’t: I noticed it all as if this were the first time I was ever in the sky.

  Neither of us slept. I kept watch over Matilda, and she kept watch of the skies. She was remarkably quiet, and when we dipped below the dense clouds and descended toward earth, I heard a slight gasp as she saw Hawaii for the first time.

  As the plane gently rocked back and forth with the tropical winds, I closed my eyes and felt my equilibrium sway. I didn’t know how Matilda would assimilate into the real world. In fact, I knew very little—not even exactly where we were going. All I had was an address and a key. My whole life I had never been one who took risks. And here I was, abandoning my new editor position and betraying the most powerful man in Hollywood. I shivered when I reflected on my conversation with David, what could happen to me when I returned.

  The plane’s wheels dropped, and Matilda squeezed my arm.

  “That was the plane’s wheels. It means we’ll be landing soon,” I said.

  The landscape below was breathtaking. We descended over the volcanoes and the mountains, and swung around the ocean again, where people small as dots played on the shore and surfed the waves.

  “It fascinates me how a plane this big can land on wheels smaller than a truck’s,” Matilda said, pressing her fingertips on the window glass and smiling nervously. “I guess we just hope for the best. Generally when you hope for something, it comes true. Right?”

  As the plane touched down in Honolulu and the wheels met the pavement with a thud, I told myself Matilda was right—hope for the best and it’ll come true.

  * * *

  Joel Goldman’s vacation house was a rambling one-story midcentury estate perched on acres of cliffs overlooking the ocean. The roof hung low over the glass walls, and the house was sheltered from the street. Its seclusion seemed a particularly suited spot for hiding the most reclusive heiress in the world.

  Once glorious, the house and grounds had fallen into disrepair. The large gate to the property was so rusted it was stuck in a half-open state, and the metal mailbox must have lost a battle with a car, for it leaned at a forty-five-degree angle. Exotic and bright tropical flowers grew wild, and parts of the lawn were brown from being scorched by the sun. Other parts stayed green under the enormous parasols of Australian palms that were so densely planted they completely shielded the sky. There was a grass tennis court in the front yard, but its net sagged in the middle and its grass had overgrown its specifications.

  I had to jiggle the key a few times before the lock turned. I pushed the door open, not knowing what we would find.

  By the decor, it seemed as if the estate had been frozen in the 1960s. White sheets covered furniture and crystal. The Hawaiian sun had penetrated the filmy white curtains, streaking the floors almost white. The walls were now bare, save for empty art hooks.

  There was something eerie about this timeworn house, and I was concerned Matilda would regret her decision to leave her father’s fastidiously maintained estate. But she had already disappeared through one of the back doors.

  I followed her outside. Webbed lawn chairs that hadn’t been replaced in years were stacked in a corner and tied together with rope. A large lagoon-shaped pool with a rusted-out diving board overlooked the roaring waters twenty feet below. The pool’s plaster was peeling, its coping cracked.

  Matilda stood at the edge of the cliffs, transfixed by the ocean. The sun glittered on the water the way stars twinkle in the sky, and the waves crashed into the beach, causing the air to fizzle with salt and humidity.

  “The ocean is so different in real life,” Matilda said. “It feels so fierce, so alive.”

  Matilda rubbed her arms with her hands. Specks of salt had settled in her wispy blond hairs.

  “I feel sticky—good sticky, but sticky.”

  “It’s the salt water,” I said.

  Down below was a private beach and cove, accessible by rickety wooden steps jutting out from the cliffs. The swirling, foaming water and crashing waves threatened to sweep us out to sea in their undertow.

  “Have you ever thought about how beaches are made up of the fossils of sea creatures?” Matilda said, staring down at the beach. “I had always thought of the beach as a graveyard, but now that I see it in person it seems to have nothing to do with death.” A sailboat rolled across the horizon. “Look, a sailboat. Let’s go on one.”

  “Someday.”

  “Someday is such a pretty thing.” Matilda leaned back into me, wrapping my arms around her. “Whose beach house is this?”

  “My friend’s father’s. His name was Joel.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He ran out of somedays,” I said, contemplating how one man’s death had changed my life. It was because of his obituary that I was here, more alive than I had felt in a long time.

  “What do you mean?” Matilda asked.

  “He died a few months ago.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder.

  “Some people think it’s wonderful, that we go someplace much better than this when we die,” I said. I thought of Lily’s version of Heaven, that place where we could live our lives all over, as a series of happy data points.

  “There is nothing better than this,” Matilda said, outstretching her arms toward the ocean. “The world is so beautiful it takes my breath away.”

  The sun had dipped below the horizon. The sky was red and purple and the moon and stars were out. It was the magic hour, as they said in the movies—that brief dramatic intersection of day and night.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I said, sweeping my gaze across our extraordinary surroundings. It was ironic, because the first time I had seen David’s estate it had taken my breath away, but Matilda was right. It was dull compared to the splendid world outside its gates. “I feel sorry for the rest of the world.”

  “Me, too. I feel sorry for anyone in the world who doesn’t have you.” Matilda said it with a flourish, as if she was a magician who’d just plucked a rabbit from a hat. “So that makes billions of people in the world to feel sorry for.”

  I kissed Ma
tilda on her forehead. “Let’s go inside and see where we’ll be living for the next month.”

  Darkness descended, and I picked Matilda up by her small waist and carried her inside. She laughed loudly, that idiosyncratic laugh I had first fallen in love with on her tennis court in Bel-Air.

  I peeled the sheets off the furniture, and Matilda followed my lead. Before we knew it, it was nine o’clock and we hadn’t eaten. Matilda was used to being served at exactly six o’clock every night.

  There was no food at the house, and we were on the outskirts of Honolulu by a few miles, too far to walk. I opened the door to the garage, on the off chance there might be a bicycle.

  Sure enough, the garage did house a bicycle, but there was also a car: a red Ferrari Dino convertible, vintage early 1970s. Even in its neglected, dust-covered state it was worth a quarter of a million dollars—more money than I would most likely accrue in my entire lifetime, and here it was, abandoned.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get this running tonight,” I said.

  “We don’t need it,” Matilda replied. “I have a wonderful idea for dinner. Follow me.”

  Matilda led me to the front yard, where she plucked an orange off a tree. She did the same for a grapefruit, then an avocado.

  We sat beside the run-down pool and ate freshly picked fruit, staring out at the ocean and up at the stars. Our fingers were sticky, our hair wet with humidity and our moods too buoyant for sleep. We listened to the flap of pelicans’ wings and the fizzle of the ocean’s surface. When we finally walked inside around midnight, our suitcases still sat near the front door where we had dropped them hours earlier.

  We headed to the back of the house, toward an ocean-view master suite. It was the prettiest room in the house—a grand room with a pitched ceiling and broad windows that felt like a picture frame for the astonishing view of the water and the glimmering lights of Honolulu beyond. There were his-and-her closets and a large bathroom with onyx walls, vanities with bronze faucets in the shape of swans and a shower big enough for two.