Lucky(45)

“Exactly. We got her directly from a breeder in Germany.”

Later, by the pool, when everyone was gone and the sun was peeking over the horizon, Cary was jubilant rather than tired. “You did it, babe. You were the perfect sidekick. They thought you were a blast. You’re so good at this. Didn’t you have fun?”

She leaned her head into his chest so she wouldn’t have to look at him. He had always said they could lie to other people, but never to each other. Still, she said, “Yes, it was a great time.”

“That could be us, you know. It’s going to be us. One day, we won’t be pretending.”



* * *




Lucky’s first year of college drew to a close, and they flew to Madrid to spend the summer with Magnolia and Aaron; Aaron’s parents had a house there.

At dinner the first night, in a yard lined with olive trees and hung with lanterns, Cary planted the first seed with their friends: the mansion they lived in was going to be repossessed (this was true, actually) because Alaina’s parents had had some bad debts before they died. It was easy. By summer’s end, Cary and Lucky had a new place to live: a coach house on Hugh’s family’s property in Alamo. They promised to pay rent—Cary even went as far as to write checks Lucky knew would bounce, but they were never cashed, always ripped up or tossed aside.

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll find out?” Lucky whispered to him one night in bed.

“Find out what?”

“Who we really are.”

“Isn’t this who we really are?”

Lucky found she didn’t know anymore. She pretended to be one person at school—and she had to be careful never to get too close to anyone, no matter how much she longed for real friends, and no matter how often she was asked to meet for drinks or join others to study. She was someone else with Cary’s Stanford crowd, and someone else still once a month when she went to visit her father at San Quentin, where he had been sentenced to twenty-five years. Cary didn’t know she went to the prison at all, didn’t know about the fake ID she had bought with money stolen out of their safe so she could pretend to be Sarah Armstrong, John’s niece, and still see her dad.

“You want this—don’t you, Lucky? To leave who we were behind and become great?”

“Of course I do,” she said. But she actually wanted to ask him what he meant by great—if great meant rich at any cost; if great meant morally bankrupt. But she didn’t, because she had her own plan. She needed to stay the course, that was all. He would understand eventually that there was a better way to build a life, one that didn’t involve cheating and lying.

Time passed, and Cary pretended to drop out of school. He told their friends that he had to because they could only afford one tuition. “And Alaina is the genius, so of course it has to be her school we pay for.”

Their rich friends offered loans so he could keep going to college, but he refused, said he didn’t want handouts. He wanted to work for any money he received. And school wasn’t his thing, anyway. What Jonas, Cary’s alter ego, really wanted was to open a club.

“Dude, you throw the best parties. Doesn’t Jonas throw the best parties?” Aaron said. They were at Hugh’s; it was his birthday, and Cary had organized the whole thing: a Matrix-themed rave. Everyone was dressed in black leather and sunglasses; techno was blaring; the caterers had made “really good noodles” and “chicken tastes like everything” kebabs; there was a laser tag zone inside the house. “Guys, we have to make this happen,” Aaron said. “Jonas wants to open a club. We need financial backers!”

All their friends invested in the venture, which Cary said had to be taken slowly. First, he had to find the perfect location—which took ages, and got Lucky to the start of her final year of school. Then “Jonas” had to travel the globe looking for the right furniture, had to visit vineyards and distilleries all around Europe. Soon, everyone in San Francisco was talking about Jonas Weston’s new club—he’d decided to name it Lucky. But Cary was using hardly any of the investment money for the actual club, instead using some to pay for Lucky’s tuition and squirrelling the rest of it away.

“What do they care who I really am?” Cary said when Lucky continued to voice her fears. “They’re having the time of their lives. And the worst thing that’s going to happen? We’re going to disappear the day after you graduate, and there will be no club. They’ll realize they’ve been duped, and they’ll get over it in about five minutes. What they’re investing in this is chump change, not even enough for their parents to notice. This is just fun for them. You need to have some fun with it, too.”



* * *




The night Lucky graduated from SFU, in June 2003, Cary was sitting in the front row, holding a massive bouquet of red roses. There was an empty seat beside him at the beginning of the ceremony, but when Lucky moved across the stage to collect her diploma, Priscilla was sitting in it. Lucky faltered halfway but forced herself to keep moving.

“What is she doing here?” she hissed after the ceremony. Priscilla was off getting them drinks.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Cary said, and he really did appear to be agitated. “I was so distracted by everything we’ve been doing, I stopped keeping track of her—but she’s out of prison and she just showed up at our house—and you were already gone, getting your cap and gown. I don’t know how she figured out where we were living.”