Double Eclipse Read online

  I found myself at the door of the ballroom. I’d never paid attention to the ornately inlaid panels before, but as I examined them, I realized they corresponded exactly to what I’d seen in my dream. I even recognized one little scratch that I hadn’t paid any attention to in the dream—I mean, the door was so damaged that one scratch out of hundreds was hardly noticeable—yet now it popped right out at me, as if to tell me that the doors I’d seen in my dream had really been these doors, and not just something my imagination had made up. Eerie.

  Unlike the dream doors, however, these were still mounted on perfectly oiled hinges, and they swung open at a touch. The current of energy grew instantly stronger, so much so that I wondered if perhaps the pattern on the doors wasn’t some kind of hex holding it in check, or disguising it from immortal beings who could sense these things. Whatever it was, the sense of . . . something trying to push its way into this room—this world—was so distinct that my skin immediately goose-pimpled, a sensation I’d read about but never actually felt before, since I’m immune to temperatures that fall within the normal range of weather. I rubbed my hands over my arms to warm them, wondering if maybe the Gardiners had been using their magic to keep this energy in check, or if it was just more noticeable with nothing else in the room. The only things left in the tennis court–sized room were its three chandeliers: two good-sized ones at either end, and one massive one in the center.

  “I’m gonna swing from the chandelier,” I sang. “From the cha-hand-e-lier.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. That ceiling’s older than this country. Who knows how much weight it can support.”

  I whirled around. Mum was standing in the doorway, dressed in light gray wrap skirt and a skintight midriff-baring top that showed off her toned abs.

  “Mum!” I yelled, and ran into her arms.

  I hit her so hard that anyone else would have been knocked over, but Janet Steele just threw her arms around me, picked me up, and whirled me around as if I were a five-year-old.

  “Welcome back! Congratulations! I’m so glad you’re home. And oh, my gods, you won Wimbledon. That match was awesome! I missed you so much!”

  “Slow down, slow down,” she said. “One thing at a time. First of all, let me get a good look at you.” She took a step back and ran her eyes over me, then smiled proudly. “I have to hand it to myself, I gave you some good genes.” She pursed her lips. “But there’s something different about you.”

  My mind immediately flashed on my conversation with Freya at the North Inn a few days ago. How she’d been able to tell that Rocky and I were virgins just by looking at us. Could Mum do the same thing?

  “Midgard to Mooi,” I heard Mum’s voice. “Come in, Mooi.”

  “Sorry, I spaced out there. What did you say?”

  “I said it looks like you found the clothes I had Ivan pick out for you. Even so, there’s something I’ve always wanted to do with my daughter.”

  My heart was still beating over my fears that Mum had figured out I’d had sex, and it was all I could do stammer out, “Wh-what’s that?”

  Mum flashed her best smile.

  “Take her shopping.”

  I knew I shouldn’t let it be so easy to buy my affections, but I couldn’t help it. And hey, it’s not going to be that easy. I have expensive taste.

  “If this is your way of making up for lost time,” I said, “you’re doing a fantastic job.” I gave the chandelier a parting glance, then headed for the door. “Let’s go buy my love.”

  • • •

  There are a couple of nice shops in North Hampton, but Mum decided to drive us to East Hampton, where there’s a Blue & Cream and BCBG and Theory and even Lilly Pulitzer. (Yes, I admit it. I like Lilly Pulitzer. Every girl should have at least one pair of short shorts that looks like it was made from the curtains in The Sound of Music.) We grabbed coffee and croissants at a café before we started, and by the time we finished, it was nearly three, and we went to the Clam Bar near Montauk, which is simply the 3:00 P.M. place on the East End. Fancy European cars (almost every one of them a convertible) lined the highway for a quarter mile in either direction because, in the classic Hamptons WASPy manner, everything has to be a little bit inconvenient or else it’s déclassé or—gasp!—nouveau riche. But luck was with us as we pulled up: a Porsche was backing out of a space right in front of the restaurant.

  We hopped out of the car, and even though there was a line of about fifty people, the maître d’ took one look at Mum, then called over a couple of busboys.

  “Pull out a table for Ms. Steele. Dune view, but make sure she can still see everyone.”

  I’d gone there a couple of times with Rocky, and I was a little afraid the maître d’ was going to say something, but all her attention was focused on Mum—I could’ve been Mum’s assistant for all she noticed me.

  Less than a minute later, we were ensconced at a table on the far edge of the terrace, shielded from the sound and smell of the highway but still offering a view of the entire dining area. Mum had said hi to no fewer than six people as the maître d’ led us to our table, but when one woman in an East Hampton Tennis Club polo asked for a picture, she just smiled and said, “I’ve got a starving daughter here. Look for me when I head out.”

  The woman looked at me with pure envy. “Your mother,” she said rapturously, “is a goddess.”

  Janet laughed loudly. “I’m just a tennis player,” she said. “It’s Molly who’s the goddess.”

  The maître d’ asked if she could start us with anything, and Mum looked at me.

  “Champagne seemed to go over well the last time I saw you,” she said, “but I’m thinking today is more of a mojito kind of day. What do you say, Mooi?”

  I blinked a little in surprise. Mum’s joke about me being a goddess was one thing, but using my real name? She liked to push the envelope.

  “Mojitos sound great.”

  “Two mojitos, please. Don Q Cristal if you’ve got it.”

  “Coming right up.”

  The maître d’ walked away, and Mum turned to me. “What?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t quite believe I’m here. Like I’m going to wake up from this amazing dream where Janet Steele was my mother and she took me shopping and bought me mojitos with premium rum and told autograph hounds to wait until she’d fed her daughter. You’re just, well, fabulous, aren’t you?”

  Mum smiled brightly. “I do my best with what nature gave me. And this is no dream. We’re really here, and later you’re going to use that divine metabolism of yours to sober up and drive your mother home while she sleeps it off in the passenger seat.”

  I had to shake my head in wonder. It was impossible to believe my mum was this cool, but she really was.

  Our drinks came then, and Mum took a sip of the cool minty sweetness before speaking. “I couldn’t help noticing that you put nearly five hundred miles on the odometer in the last two weeks. So tell me: what’s his name?”

  “Wh-what?” I stammered, caught off guard.

  “You said yourself that you prefer to be driven than to drive. So I’m assuming you didn’t put all those miles on the car yourself, and if you did, it wasn’t for your own benefit. Plus I’ve seen you check your phone about twenty times.”

  In fact, I’d driven all over the East End with Rocky, showing him the sights, but I had no idea the miles had added up so much—or that I should have worried about them. And I had checked my phone several times that day, but Rocky hadn’t texted or called even once. Nor had Mardi, for that matter.

  “I, um,” I started, then gave up any pretense of lying. “His name’s Rocky—Rocco. His dad owns the North Inn, where Freya works.”

  Mum frowned. “Rocco. That doesn’t sound very Norse.”

  I knew what she meant by Norse.

  “He’s not a go
d, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Mooi!” Mum said, her voice soft but sharp. “A mortal!”

  She said it the way some people use racial epithets, which was weird, to say the least, since she didn’t know anything about Rocky, not to mention the fact that she was a mortal herself.

  “I guess it runs in the family,” I said, trying to joke it off.

  Mum blinked her eyes in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “You and Dad?” I said. Who else could I have meant?

  Mum frowned at the thought of Dad. “What your father and I had was very different,” she said. “My family’s connection to Aesir goes back generations. But you are a new goddess. You need to set your sights higher.”

  I really didn’t want to get into the whole new gods thing.

  “Whatever,” I said. “He’s just here for the summer. It’s not a big deal.”

  Mum continued to frown for a moment longer, then suddenly smiled. “My first taste of a sulky teenager! How exciting!”

  “I said it’s nothing—”

  “And I trust you,” Mum said. “I’m sorry I overreacted. I’ve got seventeen years of parenting to catch up on. Truce?” she said, raising her glass.

  I clinked mine against hers. “Truce,” I said, and we drank on it. “So, uh, speaking of Dad,” I began.

  “Why, what a seamless transition,” Mum joked, and we both laughed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s totally nosy, but, well, I’m dying to know.”

  “To know what?” she said, her voice so level that I couldn’t tell if she was being coy or serious.

  “Everything!” I blurted out. “I mean, mostly about how you met Dad and all that. You didn’t just . . . seduce him, did you? You loved him, right? At least a little?”

  Mum softened, and had a faraway look in her eyes, and ever so slowly a little, whimsical smile appeared on her face. She reached out and took my hand in one of hers and gave it a squeeze.

  “Yes, Mooi, I did love your father. Very much. And it might surprise you to know that he seduced me.”

  I laughed. “Don’t forget, I’ve spent the past seventeen years with Troy Overbrook. I’ve seen all his moves. So what did he do? Send you a drink at a bar, or just saunter up and use that million-dollar smile of his?”

  Mum shook her head. “He bought out an entire stadium.”

  “He what?”

  “It was 1996. I’d made it to the quarterfinals of the US Open that year, which had helped get my name out there, but I was still working my way up the rankings. I was playing in a little tournament in Adelaide, Australia, of all places, just to get some practice time before the Australian Open, and when I walked out on court for my first round match, there was no one there except for the umpire and linesmen and four or five people in the players’ boxes—and your father. Of course I didn’t know then that he was only twenty-two years into a new body. All I knew was that there was this insanely cute boy sitting all by himself in the middle of the stands, and he only clapped when I made a point. My poor opponent was so flustered she could hardly hit the ball, and, well, she was playing me too. I ended beating her 6–0, 6–1 in forty-two minutes. Your dad told me later he spent ninety-eight thousand dollars to buy up all the tickets, plus another twenty grand or so on a private jet from New York, which comes out to almost three thousand dollars a minute. That’s a pretty expensive blind date.”

  “And? Did you go up to him? Did he come up to you?”

  “Like I told you, Mooi: I never make the first move. Thor came up to me. He said he’d seen me play at the US Open the year before and he’d decided then and there that he had to meet me.”

  “But couldn’t he have just found you in New York?”

  “Oh, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Especially for a god. He wanted to impress me. And he said he was a little intimidated.”

  “Dad? I can’t believe it! No offense, but he’s a straight-up manwhore.”

  Mum laughed out loud. “Believe me, I had plenty of opportunities to find out. But I wasn’t another lingerie model or wannabe starlet. I was an athlete, somebody who had to work her ass off to get anything in life. And then I guess he sensed something about me. Something different. Unique. He wanted to do his research.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your father thought I might have been a Rhinemaiden.”

  I gasped. Alberich had said our mother was a Rhinemaiden! Maybe she wasn’t human after all. Maybe she would live forever, with me and Mardi.

  “Are you?” I asked eagerly.

  “I can tell by the look on your face that you wish the answer was yes, but unfortunately it’s no. My ten-times-removed great-grandmother was.”

  “But weren’t the Rhinemaidens goddesses? Or some kind of nature spirit that’s basically the same thing as a goddess?”

  Mum shook her head. “Legends portray them that way, but they were as mortal as me and the maître d’ and everyone else on this terrace—except you. But the bridge was destroyed and Odin was trapped in Asgard; the link between the maidens and the Rhinegold began to weaken. Thor was afraid that they would no longer be able to protect the gold, and so he stole it from them. The maidens died defending it, but my ancestral grandmother, Flosshilde, survived.”

  “Dad killed the Rhinemaidens? I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mooi, but it’s true.”

  “So what happened then? And why’d Dad spare your grandmother?”

  “Why else do men spare women? Because he loved her, of course. But Odin said he had to choose, the gold or the maiden. Thor agreed to let her go only if the gold could be secured with the most powerful spells to his prophesied children, Mooi and Magdi. Odin thought he had won, since the prophecies said that Magdi and Mooi’s mother was going to be a Jotun, and since Midgard was cut off from Jotunheim as well as Asgard, he assumed Thor’s children would never be born. But prophecies are written in symbolic language, and it seems they misinterpreted what the ancient oracles meant by ‘giantess.’ And here you are.”

  “But wait. Did Dad know all this when he saw you?”

  Mum shook her head. “He only suspected it. Apparently, I bear more than a passing likeness to my ancestral grandmother.”

  “And what about you? Did you know it?”

  Mum smiled and shook her head. “I suspected it, but I wasn’t sure.” Another smile, this one rueful and nostalgic and lovelorn all at the same time. “No, all he wanted to do was finally kiss his Rhinemaiden.”

  I reached for my drink, and was surprised to find it was empty. I’d hardly noticed drinking it. “So what happened when you met? You won your match, he came up to you, and . . . what?”

  Mum sipped at her own drink, her lips curled in a demure smile around her straw.

  “He shook my hand, and he said, ‘My name is Troy Overbrook. I enjoyed watching you play today, Ms. Stahl.’”

  “Stahl?”

  “German for ‘steel.’”

  “Oh! He was testing you! What did you say?”

  “Your father wasn’t finished yet. He said, ‘If you win the tournament, would it be okay if I took you out to dinner to celebrate?’”

  “Oh, my gods, Dad! Such a smoothie! What did you say?”

  Mum smiled wickedly.

  “I said, ‘My name is Steele, Mr. Overbrook, and I’m going to win this tournament, so you’d better make a reservation now.’”

  I clapped my hand over mouth. “And?” I said through my fingers.

  “And your father said, ‘I already did.’”

  20

  HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE

  Mardi-Overbrook-Journal.docx

  I thought Molly and I were back on track after we ran into each other in the Cheesemonger, but I guess not. I texted her the next morning when I woke up, and then again after I’d had a cu
p of coffee, and after I showered, I called her. The texts were unanswered, and the call went straight to voice mail, as if she’d shut her phone off. Which, if you know Molly—or, well, any teenage girl—you know it’s something she’d never do.

  Which meant my sister was ignoring me.

  Part of me thought that maybe she was hanging with Rocky, but another part of me knew that Janet was getting back from England today, and that Molly was probably with her. This was all but confirmed when Rocky showed up at the Cheesemonger a half hour after I opened the shop. From the look on his face, he was as happy to be there as I was.

  “Hey,” I said jokingly. “What can I get you?”

  Rocky shrugged unhappily. “An apron, I guess.”

  “What?” I pretended to be nonchalant, but inside I was thrilled. If I haven’t made this clear, making sandwiches is way overrated. “You’re here to work?”

  “Sal’s been wanting me to work here since I got to North Hampton, but I was hanging with Molly and I guess he let it go. But when she didn’t come over this morning, he was all like, Why don’t you head down to the Cheesemonger?”

  “So where is Molly? I thought you two were joined at the hip by this point.”

  Another shrug, even more dejected. “Dunno. I texted her a couple of times this morning and tried calling her too, but it went straight to voice mail. I guess she’s hanging with her mom or something?”