Scene 3
Maxine & Lydia
The mansion in the Californian countryside was always quiet, even when the landscapers toiled in the gardens and housekeeping vacuumed floors and beat rugs on the balconies. But when Lydia woke up Christmas Eve and rolled over to find the other side of the bed empty, she decided it was the quietest the big house had ever been.
Most of the staff was gone for Christmas. Only a bare-bones security force patrolled the perimeter and kept watch at the gates. Agnes the head maid was in Redmond visiting her family. Carlos the chief landscaper had peaced out over a week ago, his Christmas bonus deep in his pocket. The assortment of couriers, assistants, cooks and maids who came and went as they pleased in Woodward Manor were gone until New Year’s.
Usually, Maxine left as well. It was the perfect time to visit friends or have a solitary journey across the world. All she needed was one or two bodyguards to have a pleasant enough vacation. There was always someone, she said, willing to take on extra Christmas pay to work.
This year was different. Today, Maxine was staying home for the first time since she first married her ex-wife Penelope.
It had been Lydia’s idea. Her mother and stepfather wanted to celebrate Christmas with them, but Maxine had rolled her eyes at the thought of spending the holidays at some ostentatious house in LA. “I’d rather they come here than go down to that mess.” So Lydia, assuming her girlfriend was not being facetious, asked her mother what she thought of the idea. Turned out, her parents had been waiting for their first official invitation to Woodward Manor. Presents for everyone on the Californian coast!
Still, none of this explained why Lydia woke up alone.
She rolled over and grabbed her phone off the nightstand. She had forgotten that it was still plugged into the wall and almost smacked herself in the face with the white charger. Lydia resigned herself to the depths of her pillow and sighed.
When she opened her blurry eyes, she found a text message on her phone.
“Don’t get out of bed if you can help it,” Maxine wrote half an hour ago. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
A surprise? A surprise!
Lydia propped herself up and jammed her thumbs against her phone screen. “What is it??? I just woke up.”
No response.
Well, this wouldn’t do. For one thing, Lydia really needed to use the bathroom. Really. What did Maxine expect? Unwavering loyalty after a girl first wakes up? Lydia was old enough that her bladder had begun dictating what the first thing they should do every morning. Maxine may have other ideas – God knew she was dehydrated half the time – but Lydia had taken growing up in California quite seriously. Drink eight glasses of water a day, drought or no drought! Speaking of droughts, was that rain outside?
Wow. She really needed to go to the bathroom.
Lydia turned it into a half-sleep game. Could she run into the massive master bath, do her business, and get back in bed before Maxine returned? In any other house, she could have. But Maxine’s bathroom was so hilariously huge that Lydia had to run through two other rooms before finally entering the 20x20 closet that housed a damned toilet.
She ran back into the bedroom to find it as quiet and lonely as when she left it. Too bad. Lydia kinda hoped she would discover her girlfriend impatiently waiting for her. Maxine was always hottest when slightly annoyed – and Lydia truly lived to fuck with her.
“Where’s my surprise?” she texted. “I’m waiting!”
Naturally, Maxine did not indulge her with answers.
So Lydia curled up beneath the covers and responded to a few texts from her mother and the friends currently enjoying their own Christmas vacations. Then the Animal Crossing app caught her attention for an ungodly amount of time. (Seriously, how much wood could these pixelated animals give her? She needed cotton to build tents, damnit!) Then she finally checked her email, only to be inundated with e-cards, last minute Christmas deals, and a personalized email from her boss Francis. “Have a wonderful Christmas, Lydia. Tell Maxine I said hi. And let me know if she tells you hi for me… because I emailed her too!”
Lydia had just hit REPLY when the bedroom door swung open.
“Good!” Maxine stumbled in, a covered silver platter balanced precariously between her hands. “I was almost afraid you had fallen comatose. I didn’t keep you up that late last night.”
Lydia couldn’t think up a response. She was too busy keeping tabs on that silver platter. It was the same one Agnes used whenever she brought meals to the master suite.
“Uh… Max?” Lydia grabbed the edge of the bed, her tangled hair draping close to the platter’s edge. She smelled something. Something slightly food-like. “What is this? Please don’t tell me you…”
Maxine placed the platter on a tray and brought it over to the bed. “Would you sit back, please? Otherwise I’ll have to put this on your back.”
Lydia obeyed, but only because curiosity killed her. “This isn’t going to be something I regret, right?”
“How could you ask me that?” Maxine snapped the tray to the bed with such severe purpose that Lydia was afraid everything would spill out from beneath the hood. “I woke up two hours ago to put this together! Hmph.” She lifted the lid to reveal four plates full of food and a glass of splashing orange juice. “Merry fucking Christmas.”
“You, uh… cooked?” Maxine. Cooking. Those were not two words that went together. Not only was Maxine such a spoiled woman who never had to cook in her life, there was also never any inclination that she had a natural interest in what went on in a kitchen. Did she even know where her kitchen was? This seemed like a giant trick. A camera crew was about to swing through the windows and yell gotcha! If Lydia started praying right now, she might be able to avoid a heart attack.
“What?” Maxine interrupted her girlfriend’s morbid thoughts. “You don’t like eggs and stuff? You eat it all the time!”
It was almost adorable watching her huff over Lydia’s lack of a reaction. Not only was this such a strange occurrence, however, but Lydia was pretty sure this food was not…
Edible.
The eggs were scrambled, yet somewhat runny and containing what looked like huge chunks of sliced bell pepper and pockets full of black pepper. The toast was burnt to a blackened crisp, as if Maxine had jammed the toaster onto its highest setting – Lydia was definitely going to need the ten packets of blackberry jam to make this edible. And what the fuck was that on the side? No. No, it couldn’t possibly be bacon. That was not bacon. That was blackened pork crisps, so charred that they lost all remnants of what once made them delicious and so not nutritious bacon.
Lydia was scared.
“Well?” Maxine made sure to stand behind the half-wilted rose that had been left to die beneath the silver lid. “What do you think? First time I’ve cooked in, uh…” She counted on her fingers. “Five years? Not too bad if I do say so myself.”
“What… did you cook last time?”
“Oatmeal.”
Somehow, Lydia knew her girlfriend had found a way to mess that up too.
“Here.” Maxine jammed a fork into the pile of runny eggs and offered them up as if Lydia should think they were ambrosia. “At least try it, would you? It took me an hour to make this stuff.”
“It did?” How? How had it taken her an hour to make this? “All right.” She closed her eyes. Lydia wanted to pinch her nose as well, but knew that it wouldn’t look good.
Maxine jammed the fork into her girlfriend’s mouth. While Lydia gagged on runny eggs packed with black pepper, Maxine said, “I had to go looking for ingredients to use. It’s the first time I’ve been in that pantry since like three years ago. Then I remembered, duh, they put eggs in the fridge! Sure enough, I found three dozen eggs in the fridge. I didn’t know how many to make, though. So I made three. Is three enough?”
Lydia spat out the fork and willed herself to not make the sign of the cross. Only God could save her from salmonella now.
“How hard is bacon and toast supposed to be? You put the toast in the toaster and push the knob. Down, though. I had to remind myself it was down and not far to the right.”
I knew it. You had the toaster on the highest setting. Lydia’s sinuses cleared from all the pepper now swimming in her system.
“Bacon… you just throw that shit in a pan and turn on the stove! I think I forgot some oil or something though. Do you put oil in the pan to make bacon?”
Lydia flung herself back onto her pillow. “I dunno, hon, you try the bacon. I know you like it crispy.”
“So do you!”
“Does that look like normal bacon to you?”
Maxine picked up a piece and sniffed it. “Carbon’s good for you. Everyone needs more carbon in their diet.” She broke off the end and offered it to her girlfriend. “Humor me, Liddie.”
She didn’t want to. She really, really didn’t want to.
But she would. Because she loved her girlfriend and didn’t want to hurt her feelings on Christmas Eve.
It really is nice of her to cook breakfast for me. I mean, what gave her the idea? She had to go out of her way to think about it. Isn’t it sweet of her? Who else would cook breakfast for me? Not even my mom cooked if she could help it! Lydia had cooked for Maxine before. More than once. They were more likely to have someone cook for them, but Lydia wasn’t above baking cookies or bringing by sandwiches she made at home because she was feeling “domestic.” There was something about having a girlfriend that made her want to cook things full of love…
Oh, shit. That’s what this was, huh? Maxine turning into the Domestic Goddess from hell.
Well, Maxine was no Roseanne, that was for sure. Does she even know who Roseanne Barr is? Probably not. The only TV Maxine watched was the news, and it disgusted her so much that she stuck to the late shows when she was desperate for mindless entertainment at night.
“Thank you for breakfast,” Lydia said, even though her tongue burned from the crispy bacon. “It was really sweet of you to do this.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll have a proper dinner that’s already been prepared when your parents get here.”
Lydia had forgotten that a chef was coming in to fix them Christmas Eve dinner and prepare something for Christmas ahead of time. Whenever Maxine was stuck here by herself, her chefs tended to make easy-to-reheat items. Not that Lydia was inclined to trust Maxine with even that right now.
“I’m sure it will be fi…”
An alarm blared from Maxine’s nightstand. Both she and Lydia jumped out of their skin.
“What the fuck?” Maxine knocked over the runny eggs as she ran to the windows and pulled out her cell phone. The alarm continued to squeal. A chorus of masculine shouts exploded at the far end of the hall and outside the bedroom window. The bare bones security team left on the property assembled within five minutes.
Naturally, Maxine and Lydia had no idea why.
“What the fuck is going on?” Maxine yelled over the blaring siren. “You better tell me this is a false alarm!”
The alarm turned off. But the yelling and the barking of guard dogs continued outside the bedroom window.
Soon, Lydia saw why.
A man in all black had broken through the front gates and now ran for his life, bypassing the bedroom windows and meandering through dogs and security guards as if they were an obstacle course. Lydia pulled the bed covers up to her chin in the hopes it would somehow protect her from this relentless intruder. Maxine, on the other hand, took off down the hallway like a track star with a rocket up her ass.
So much for letting security take care of it.
More dogs joined in. Commands echoed through the gardens outside the bedroom window. One man stood within earshot of Lydia and claimed that the intruder was in custody out front. Once again curiosity took hold of Lydia Kellerman, and before anyone could tell her otherwise, she jogged down the hallway in nothing but her pajamas. (To be fair, Maxine was in yoga pants and a tight-fitting T-shirt. At least she had a bra on.)
Lydia had to head all the way to the grand foyer to find out what was going on. There, in the front yard, seven guards surrounded a young man. Three bare-teethed dogs strained against their leashes.
“Please step back.” A guard clamped his hands around Lydia’s arms and yanked her up the steps.
“What about Maxine?”
But Maxine didn’t tend to listen to her guards, especially if the suspect had been apprehended. She stood in the middle of the fray and faced the perp head-on. God help the man. If he thought growling guard dogs and big men with stun guns were scary? He had yet to see Maxine towering over him without any of her makeup on and bedhead gone awry.
“Who the fuck are you, and what are you doing trespassing on my property? Don’t you fucking know it’s Christmas Eve, you twit?”
He tried to reach into his pocket. Understandably, the guards were not happy about that.
“I’m a courier hired by a private contractor!” The man held his hands up in the air. He still did not appear disturbed that he could lose half his life at any moment, and Maxine was completely in her right to let it happen. Besides, she’s got the best lawyers in California to get her off the hook! Did this guy really wanna try it? “I’m under incredibly strict orders to get this letter to Ms. Woodward by Christmas, and your gatehouse was not letting it happen!”
The guard from the gatehouse said, “I offered to take it and deliver it myself once I went on break, but he refused to hand it over and then took off like a madman.”
“I am also under direct orders to not give this to anyone but Ms. Woodward herself. Personally.”
Maxine nodded. “Let me see it.”
The man slowly reached into his pocket. Mace and stun guns were at the ready.
He produced a small letter and handed it to Maxine. She borrowed a glove from one of her guards and took it without further hesitation.
“Interesting,” she said, once everyone concluded it was not laced with anything. “No return address. Who is this from?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”
“It must be someone even richer than me, if they can pay not only for your silence, but for you to also risk your life like a fucking dumbass.”
The man remained mum.
Lydia looked over her girlfriend’s shoulder as the invitation came out of its envelope.
“Ms. Woodward,
You and I are alike in many ways, but have never met under the best of conditions. I would like to reintroduce myself to you so we may become reacquainted once again. I am hosting a New Year’s party at the disclosed location below. Please bring yourself and your significant other at your leisure. I will certainly make it worth your while.”
Maxine checked the back of the invitation but found no writing there. “I see,” she said. “This place isn’t too far from here.” She turned to Lydia. “What do you make of this?”
Lydia shrugged. “It’s rather exciting.” Certainly more exciting than eating terrible food and waiting around for her mother and stepfather to arrive. “Do you have any idea who it’s from?”
“Not at all. Not like they gave me much to go on.” Maxine returned her attention to the courier. “Don’t suppose I could entice you to give up some information.”
He shook his head. “My employer would not appreciate that, ma’am.”
“And I don’t appreciate these shenanigans.” Maxine snapped her fingers. The courier was lifted to his feet and brought to Maxine’s eye level. Huh. He is pretty tall. Tall, muscular, and with dark hair to match his boyish good looks. Lydia had a feeling this man was no mere courier. “At least tell me your name.”
He shook his head again.
“This is ridiculous!” And more or less confirmed what Lydia had been figuring out. This man didn’t work for a courier company. He worked for some bigshot who had the power to order his – or her – own security team around to this extent. The man definitely was not afraid of the other security guards and their canine patrol – as if he were intimately familiar with how they operated and how far they would go. “You’re going to the box until I figure out what to do with you.”
The guards took him away. Maxine took Lydia by the hand and led her back into the house.
“Can you believe this?” She waved the invitation above their heads. “What kind of moronic shitbag pulls a stunt like this on Christmas Eve?”
As someone who had worked in event planning for half her adult life, Lydia had only one answer to provide. “Someone who is making big plans at the very last minute.”
“Definitely last minute.”
“Just when I think I’ve seen it all at your income level…”
“This is nothing. One time a whole squad parachuted down into my yard just to deliver me a…”
Lydia stopped listening.
***
“Goodness! This tree is amazing!” Lydia’s mother whipped out her phone and began taking pictures of Maxine’s Christmas tree. Golden lights and ribbon illuminated the family room. A humble mass of presents surrounded the trunk. Most of them were empty and purely for show. Lydia would know – she had tested all of them. “Come over here and look at this, Alfonso! Doesn’t it look like something straight out of Times Square?”
Lydia sat at the table near the tree. After endless fawning from her mother, Lydia was content to block her out and pretend it was another quiet night at home with the girlfriend. That included ignoring her mother’s questions about when Lydia was permanently moving into Woodward Manor and if they were yet engaged. One thing at a time, Mother. You’re talking about a woman who didn’t let anyone stay the night for years.
Maxine was busy on her phone. A call from security had come in a few minutes before, and the longer she stayed on the phone, the more irate she became.
“What do you mean he escaped?” Did that refer to the courier who had been taken into custody that morning? “What the hell am I paying you people for? I know there are only a few of you around for the holidays, but really? All of you couldn’t keep him in place? Where did he go? Don’t make me call the police.”
Lydia drummed her fingers on the table. She resisted the call of Animal Crossing and instead dreamed of a day when she could have a quiet Christmas with her family. Whenever the hell that could possibly be.
She had a feeling that spending the rest of her life with Maxine meant many, many noisy Christmases were ahead. Even if it were just the two of them.
In fact, the fewer people involved, the more complicated things became. Maybe it was best for them to drive down to this mysterious party and see what it was about. After all, if the courier was good enough to get past security both ways, then it could be only interesting things ahead. Or so Lydia hoped.