Angelina's Oak Read online

Chapter 4

  Angelina had prepared dinner. She had also done a full house cleaning, including reorganizing the furniture in her own room, something she did as a habit every so many months. She said this kept her mind occupied and raised her morale. Angelina wasn’t a good stay-in-doors-and-watch-TV or read-all-day girl. She usually found things to do that kept her productive or was outside hiking, babysitting or volunteering for some cause. Paula loved this about her girl. Her school encouraged this behavior, which Paula found set her and the other girls in it at a par well above the average.

  “I want you to go to school tomorrow, is that okay?” Paula asked as they sat together at the dinner table eating curried chicken.

  “I don’t have a problem with that,” Angelina said. “A couple of my friends called me this afternoon, challenging me because I don’t sound sick to them, so I can’t keep that up for long. I think I’m more likely to go crazy sitting around here than in school, where I can hang out with my friends and keep myself occupied.”

  “Exactly. And there is one other reason as well, honey.”

  “What’s that?” Angelina asked, suspicious.

  “Well, you see. I sent that coin in to be evaluated and it supposedly caused a stir. Apparently now some people are looking into it and they are going to want to ask you some questions as to when and where you found it. I’d rather you be in school where they can’t reach you, than hanging around here while I’m away, know what I mean?”

  “What sort of people?” Angelina asked, her face having turned ashen.

  “A couple people who investigate counterfeit coins and things like that. Nothing to be terribly worried about — we just need to agree on something to tell them.”

  “And just what am I supposed to tell them? It’s all a nightmare to me.”

  “Tell them you were up at the oak tree and pulled back some rocks for a science experiment for school or something and found the coin.”

  “You said this coin was from 1832. Are these guys going to believe that it sat under a rock for possibly 180 years? Does it look like a coin that sat under a rock for 180 years Mom?”

  Angelina was smart. “No honey, it probably doesn’t.”

  “So what do I say then?” Angelina challenged, her eyes watering up.

  “Well, let’s start by seeing if there is anything else you can recall about how that coin could have gotten into your backpack.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it nonstop for the past two days! There is nothing else about it I can recall.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks again.

  “Well, at least we can agree that you climbed the tree, felt faint and somehow woke up with the coin in your backpack.”

  “That solves nothing Mom!”

  Paula realized she was going to go nowhere pushing her daughter like this and would only make things worse for her. She decided on a new tactic as she handed her daughter a tissue. “Okay Angel, let’s not go there again with this. We’ve had a long day. How about I call and arrange for you to spend the day with Sam tomorrow and I’ll call you in sick again at school. We’ll give this one more day to let you settle down.”

  Angelina nodded her head and the tears stopped. A day with Sam would sure take things off her mind.

  ◊

  The next morning a large SUV entered through the mansion gates, passing perfectly manicured hedges. It circled a fountain and went up a gravel driveway, stopping under a large marble columned portico. Angelina emerged from the vehicle and its driver continued around to the multiple garages at the side of the house.

  The ever-cheerful butler, Charles Tompkins, opened the front door for Angelina with a lavish bow and arm gesture, knowing that treating her as royalty always got a laugh.

  She stuck her nose in the air, puckered her mouth and swayed her hips as she climbed the marble stairs, mocking his affected mannerisms. Upon reaching the top and giving him a feigned curtsey, she pointed to his shirt and in a pompous and demeaning tone said, “Charles, you have a spot on your Tux.”

  Charles looked down at his immaculately pressed shirt with a frown and Angelina reached out and flicked his nose. She burst out laughing and ran into the house, through the marble and glass paneled lobby and down the hall, nearly bowling over a housecleaner as she burst around a corner.

  “Watch your back young lady!” Charles called after her with a laugh.

  At the end of a hall she reached a door and knocked loudly as she entered, yelling out, “I’m here!”

  “Angie!” came the response in enthusiasm.

  Little Sam Curry stepped down from his voice-activated computer and padded over to the entrance in his pajamas and slippers. His blond hair was like a mop on his forehead, sticking out in various directions, obviously uncombed by his nanny this morning. His big blue eyes never made contact as he stared forward in her direction. He knew where she was from her voice. He wrapped his small arms around her in a big hug and then pulled back. With a mischievous smile, he placed one hand on her left breast and gave it a light squeeze.

  “Sam!” she scolded. “I’ve told you not to do that.”

  “Just checking to be sure it’s you!” he said with a giggle. “They’re getting bigger you know?”

  “You can tell by my voice it’s me. You don’t have to feel my tits.”

  “I know, but I can get away with it, can’t I?” he said with a smile, his eyes moving back and forth.

  “You’ve been listening to too much TV — that’s what I say.”

  His parents were in Europe where Lucy Curry had the lead role in a romantic comedy for Warner Brothers that took her all over France. Her high-powered celebrity actor spouse, Thane Curry, was in England making his debut in producing the next 007 movie.

  Sam had been born blind and raised under the full-time care of a middle-aged nanny and a teacher and no other kid his age to play with. The Currys didn’t particularly want someone to babysit Sam — they wanted someone they could trust to be his friend and play with him. The Currys were under the tabloid microscope ever since their highly glamorized marriage ten years ago and had kept their first child out of the public eye. They had released only baby photos after his birth and otherwise he hadn’t been seen, which became the subject of even more tabloid scrutiny and rumors.

  Six years earlier, when Angelina was ten, she happened to be hanging out in her mother’s jewelry store on the weekend when Lucy walked in and stumbled upon a little Angelina doing handstands in her mother’s office. After short introductions she ended up being invited to spend the weekend at their mansion to babysit their infant son. Turns out it wasn’t the usual show-up-at-the-house-and-the-parents-leave-you-with-the-keys-and-say-they’ll-be-back-at-midnight type of job. That weekend she and her mother were escorted to the house in a limo, interviewed by an attorney like she was accused and on trial and who had she and her mother sign some long and confusing papers. Having passed that, she received a briefing by the Currys’ personal assistant, a Harvard graduate in a tailored suit named Tyra Powers, who was friendlier than the attorney, but still made Angelina feel like this job was going to be harder than anything she had ever done. Still, she had passed the test and since the age of ten, had a well paying weekend job that helped her build a healthy college tuition fund.

  Sam was five and had a beginning command of Braille when Angelina met him for the first time. They hit it off immediately and she couldn’t think of a more enjoyable and well paying job. For thirty bucks an hour she had the run of the mansion — access to the gym, pool, sauna, theatre, lounge and a children’s playroom larger than her own house and stuffed with toys.

  The Currys adopted two other children over the years Angelina worked for them, now aged three and four and they were with them in Europe. Their goings-on were continual front-cover tabloid stories with all sorts of bizarre and outlandish rumors that sometimes made Angelina laugh and other times annoyed her. Her mother instructed her to ignore such trash journalism and to believe none of it. Angelina somet
imes wondered who were all are these “pal says” or “friend reveals” and “source leaked” that they so often quoted with no names. Having spent a couple weekend days a month on average over the years at the Currys’ home and now knowing the family, relatives and house workers, she couldn’t figure out who it was that said these bizarre things. Paula told her they were made up or someone gets hired to clean out the pool, for example, and Thane happens to nod and tell the man he is doing a good job and he becomes a “pal” and an “insider” who can concoct some bull story about the marriage being on the rocks that he can sell to a tabloid for the same wages he would make in a single year cleaning pools. Angelina cherished the trust she had with the Currys and vowed to never become one of these “sources”.

  “Did you bring your bathing suit?” Sam asked “We’re going swimming today.”

  “I sure did. Sounds like fun.” Angelina was impressed with Sam’s intelligence and carefree attitude. He had loving parents who provided him with anything he needs and did all they could to enable him to have sight — arguably the most precious thing someone could own. Being with him and seeing the stark contradiction of someone who had all the material pleasures and yet couldn’t do something as seemingly simple as see, brought Angelina down to earth and kept things in perspective for her. She didn’t have the luxurious lifestyle he had, but she had sight and this, she was constantly reminded, made life’s simple joys more valuable than any wealth.

  “You don’t have to wear your bathing suit, you know. You could go skinny dipping in the pool. I won’t look,” he joked.

  “Very funny. You might close your eyes, but I doubt Charles would.”

  Holding his hand, she led him down the hall towards the kitchen where they would eat lunch, prepared by an employed professional chef. The hallway was a long gallery displaying framed entertainment and fashion magazine covers documenting Lucy and Thane’s careers from their start as child TV stars to today’s Hollywood heavyweights.

  “Angie — Nanny says you are very pretty. I know I’m supposedly too young to care about that sort of thing, but I don’t think age is going to matter anyway with me as how am I ever to tell whether someone is pretty or not?”

  “That’s very nice of Nanny to say that,” Angelina said, blushing slightly.

  “So what makes you pretty?”

  “Come on Sam, you should know by now not to ask a girl that kind of question. I don’t know why people would think I’m pretty. I don’t think I’m that pretty. My mom is prettier than me. It is like my Daddy used to say, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Someone from a different country might think I’m ugly because I am very different from the way their people look.”

  “Well, when I get married it has to be to someone pretty, like my mom is.” He was enjoying the chance to take exaggeratedly carefree steps in his walk now that someone was guiding him, slapping each slipper down on the tile. “But how am I to know if she is pretty to me?”

  “Do you trust me Sam?” Angelina asked.

  “Of course. You’re my friend.”

  “Good. When you get a girlfriend in the future — not now, but some years from now I hope — I will tell you if she is pretty and you can take my word for it.”

  “I’d like that,” he said with a smile, looking up, his blank eyes searching in the direction her voice was coming from.

  They enjoyed roast turkey panini with lemonade for lunch and spent the early afternoon in the pool playing Marco Polo. Sam was a good swimmer and his hearing was so sharply attuned he won half the time, even when he gave her an advantage in not having to call out “Polo” to his “Marco” when it was his turn to find her. Angelina was on her school swimming team and a faster swimmer than him, but he knew where she was in the pool, able to hear the water drops from her hair to the pool’s surface or her deep breathing as she tried to keep her panting body as still as she could.

  Later in the afternoon she read a Harry Potter book aloud to him, dropping out or explaining the harder words she didn’t think he would know as she went. He loved when she read aloud to him and she did her best to mimic the characters with their English accents, as she had seen in the movies.

  After they had eaten dinner and he had beaten her in a few rounds of Battleship did she realize it was nearing time for her to leave and she had gone the entire afternoon without once thinking about the tree or the coin. She had been having such a good time playing around with Sam that she had lost track of the prior days’ events.

  Her silence was picked up. “What you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she responded, trying to sound upbeat.

  “I tell you what I’m thinking about when I think about something serious. Why don’t you tell me?” he asked again, not buying her no-answer.

  “Oh, just some stuff happening between mom and me and whatnot.”

  “I can tell you are trying to hide something from me,” he said with a cunning smile, mimicking her in the way she had said the same to him in the past.

  “Well, some things — like girl stuff — I don’t like talking about with men around,” trying to flatter him to get him to stop asking.

  “No — it’s not girl stuff.” He was beaming now, his eyes staring off in a trance, like he could read her every thought. “What is it?”

  She glared at him and stuck out her tongue, trying to think of something to say to get this kid off the subject.

  She gave in. “Okay, I’ll tell you. But you must promise to tell no one else or you will never be my friend ever again. Promise?”

  He went serious, reaching out his hand for hers. He loved secrets more than anything and loved when someone felt they could trust in him — it seemed to happen so infrequently. Most his life he was alone, with just himself or a boring adult as a companion. “I promise,” he whispered solemnly.

  “Okay,” she whispered back and began to talk quietly even though they were the only ones in the room. “Last week I found a gold coin in the park. But it wasn’t just any gold coin. It was one from 180 years ago and my mom says it is worth a…million…dollars.” She dragged out the words to emphasis their gravity, unsure herself what it all meant. “Now there are some people investigating and causing my mom trouble over it and they want to talk to me about it and I don’t want to talk to them.”

  “Wow!” Sam responded, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. He had been trusted with a deep secret and it made him feel strong and giddy inside. He opened his eyes wide and though to anyone else a blind person’s eyes are a source of lifelessness and revulsion, to Angelina they were wonderment and conveyed many meanings. She could see her secret was safe with him.

  He cocked his head in thought, “Angie, what does gold look like?”

  Angelina thought about it for a moment, unsure how to describe something like gold to someone who couldn’t see. “Um, you know how you told me when there is a bright light, like when you face the sun or a lamp is near you, you can see a strong whiteness instead of blackness?”

  He nodded his head, his eyes closed and brow puckered as he thought about it.

  “Well, imagine if that whiteness were more like a creamy yellow but still bright, which means it’s got a sort of softer, shinier look to it.”

  He nodded again.

  “Okay now take that brightness and place it on a single object like a ring or a coin or a pen and you have gold.”

  “WOW…!” A big smile formed on his face.

  Angelina wondered what picture she had painted in the little boy’s mind and whether it was anything like actual gold, but nevertheless, he was more than happy with it. It might be his first inkling of what color is. And, maybe he already knows what colors are, but doesn’t know he knows.

  She was glad he didn’t ask her questions about where she found the coin or what else she found where that coin came from. She thought that if she was delusional or straight insane, it was something she could keep a secret between herself and her mother. No one
else would ever find out. It was just that it seemed so real, that to decide it was delusion was insane. Like deciding her existence here and now was an illusion. That would be insane she thought. But it was feeling like the same thing. One has to be real and one has to be delusive. Or maybe they are both real. Or maybe they are both delusion. Her thoughts went round and round and she didn’t know what way to think was right and so pushed the thought away.

  She gave Sam a big hug goodbye, promising to come back to visit him next week and walked with Charles down the front steps to the waiting SUV. She said nothing the entire way home to her apartment, not looking forward to the return to her other normal life, now so filled with uncertainty.