Bursting Bubbles (27 page)

Which is, of course, a polite way of saying,
Mind your own business
.

“But I have such a strong feeling—”

“Marigold, really. You should go, or your mom will be worrying about you next.”

Marigold sighs. The habit of obedience is also a hard one to break. She goes back down the steps and returns to the car. She gets in, and sits staring out at 116. Justine Hawkle closes the curtains of the room at the front; the light goes off in the hall. The falling rain blurs the edges of the house … of the street … of the world. People die in storms. Marigold gets out of the car.

The good thing about the rain is that almost everyone is inside, not driving around, or walking along the sidewalks, or gazing out of their windows. There is no one to see Marigold shuffle through the rain, up one path and down another, crouching down as she circles each verandah. Looking for breaks in the latticework that surrounds the spaces beneath them. Calling, “Sadie! Sadie!” and shining her flashlight into the depths.

She does every house on the block, but with no success. There are other blocks and other porches, but there is no way she can do any more now. The night and the weather are against her. Justine Hawkle was right: it’s a job for the real cops.

Finally defeated, Marigold kneels down next to the last house on the street. “Oh, Sadie, where are you?!” It’s almost a wail.

And then she hears it, not beside her, but from behind her, a small voice that sounds as frightened as Marigold feels. “I’m here. Marigold! Marigold, I can’t get out.”

Marigold scrabbles to her feet. “I’m coming!” she calls as she races around the house. “I’m coming!” And there it is, a back porch! It never occurred to her to check if there were back porches as well as front ones.

The other miracle, of course, is that Sadie ever managed to find a way in. There is a broken panel, but it’s so blocked by a close-growing shrub that you could only see it if you knew it was there. And even if you do know it’s there, if you’ve been cowering in the dark for hours, it’s easy to forget where it is.

Marigold rips out the panel with her gloved hands. She holds the Maglite in her teeth as she reaches in and pulls the shivering child into her arms.

Both of them are crying as Marigold carries Sadie back up the street.

“Is my mom going to be really mad at me?” whispers Sadie as they near her house.

Justine must have been watching out of the living-room window because the front door opens before they even turn off the sidewalk. Coatless, she races into the rain.

“No,” Marigold whispers back. “She’s not going to be mad at all.”

Who says there is never a happy ending?

Mr
Papazoglakis says that they’ll be growing lettuce on the moon before he’ll allow Mrs Kilgour to travel all the way to New York City in her condition. Though he doesn’t phrase it in quite that way, of course. What he says in so many words is, “I’m very sorry, Georgiana, but, as I told Mrs Kilgour only yesterday – and, I believe several times before – I’m afraid it’s completely out of the question. She can’t go into the city by herself.”

This happens to be precisely what Mr Papazoglakis did tell Mrs Kilgour. Mrs Kilgour said he made her feel like a captured lion in a zoo in Wisconsin, trapped in a cage thousands of miles from the savanna, forced to forget it ever had another home and waiting to die. “You make sure you live your life while you can, Georgiana Shiller,” warned Mrs Kilgour. “They can mess with your present and your future, but they can’t do anything about the past.” It was the part about living your life that sent Georgiana to talk to Mr Papazoglakis herself.

“But she really wants to go,” she argues now. “It’s really important to her.” It’s all she’s talked about since they looked at the pictures together. She wants to ride the Staten Island Ferry one more time, just as she did when she was young and in love. “And she won’t be by herself, either.” When she stands up very straight Georgiana is almost as tall as the administrator. If she’d known he was going to be so unreasonable she would have worn her highest heels. And looked down on him. “I’ll be with her.”

“Unless I’m very mistaken, Miss Shiller, you don’t actually have any medical qualifications.” His mouth shifts into one of his choose-your-coffin smiles. “Unless you’ve been holding out on me.” Anyone who didn’t know better would think he was making a joke.

I have been holding out on you
, thinks Georgiana.
I’m really a brain surgeon disguised as a high-school student. Gotcha!

“We’re only going for a few hours,” Georgiana explains with the patience a sanctity of saints might hope to copy. “We’ll be back before it gets dark. And I’ll drive. And she’ll have her wheelchair.”

Mr Papazoglakis fingers the gold ring on his left hand. “You do realize how ill she is, don’t you? We’re talking about days here – weeks at the most – not months or years.”

And Georgiana, always so squeamish about the way life ends like a bubble popped by a pin, says, “Of course I know that.” She would like to drop buckets of ice water over him and his dark suit and his mortician’s compassion, but she beams back on him like a summer sun. “That’s the whole point, Mr P. New York’s where some of her best memories are. This is her last chance to see it again before she dies. So what’s the problem? If she’s going to die soon anyway, why not let her go? She doesn’t exactly have anything to lose.”

“But I do. The reputation of the centre,” purrs Mr Papazoglakis. And then, just when Georgiana has decided that he doesn’t have a heart, adds, “Surely she must have photographs of those days. She can look at them.”

Georgiana keeps smiling.
I’d like to photograph you
. “If a photograph was the same as being in a place,” she says, not only patient but sweet as well, “then nobody would ever go on vacation, would they? They’d just stay home and look at magazines.”

Mr Papazoglakis spreads his hands in the air, palms down. It’s not in his control. He’s running a business. There are rules. “Be that as it may, photographs are what Mrs Kilgour is going to have to be content with. She is not going to New York. And that, I’m afraid, is final.”

Georgiana shrugs as though conceding defeat.

But what she’s thinking is:
We’ll see about that
.

The weekend receptionist looks up as Georgiana pushes Mrs Kilgour into the foyer. “Why, don’t you look nice!” she exclaims. “Is this a special occasion?”

Mrs Kilgour does look nice. She’s wearing a floral skirt and jacket under a red coat and, although it’s not strictly the season for it yet, a jaunty panama hat. She has her old camera bag on her lap, and a silver star balloon tied to her chair bobs over her head.

“It’s my birthday,” says Mrs Kilgour. “Georgiana here is doing something special for me.”

As it happens, both of these statements are true. Mrs Kilgour is eighty-one today and Georgiana is going out of her way to make it an exceptional occasion.

Georgiana, who is wearing the wedding shirt Mrs Kilgour gave her and who also looks very nice, says, “My mom’s making a celebration lunch.”

This statement, as it happens, is not true. It was Georgiana who, pretending to be Adele Shiller, called to get permission for Mrs Kilgour to leave St Joan’s for the day. Her mother is in San Francisco with a client and has no idea what day this is or how she’s supposed to be spending it.

“Well, you have a wonderful birthday.” The receptionist smiles.
Since it’s your last
, “Both of you enjoy yourselves.”

They both assure her that they will.

In a historic moment of agreement, Georgiana and Mrs Kilgour came up with today’s master plan together.

“Our mistake was in telling Count Dracula and his acolytes what I wanted to do,” said Mrs Kilgour. “You’d think at my age I’d know better than that. My God, I’ve dealt with them all. From politicians and newspaper honchos to movie stars and generals. It’s always best to lie to people in authority. It’s only fair. They lie to us. What we have to do is tell them we’re doing what they’re happy for us to do, and then do what we want.”

Georgiana tilted her head to one side, with a look on her face that on a cow means nothing but on a human signifies thinking. “They loved it when you came to my house for Christmas. You could’ve dropped dead then and they wouldn’t’ve cared. They would’ve said at least you’d died happy.”

Mrs Kilgour rewarded her with a smile. “You know, I think you have something there!”

The idea was that Georgiana would arrange for Mrs Kilgour to have a day out, and pick her up from the nursing centre. They would drive to New York and have lunch in an Italian place the Kilgours used to go to so often when they lived in the city that they and the waiters knew each other by name. After lunch they’d make their way to the tip of the island and board the ferry. They would stay on the boat when it reached Staten Island and return to Manhattan and then drive back home. Mrs Kilgour would be back in her room at St Joan’s before nightfall, and no one would ever be any the wiser. As plans go, there have been a great many worse ones in human history.

Georgiana, of course, is a girl who has always specialized in seeing the downside of every situation. Had she been present when Jesus strolled across the Sea of Galilee, all she would have noticed was that his feet were getting wet. And yet it isn’t until they’re on the road that she starts to see the drawbacks to what she thought was a strategy without flaws.

As soon as they get on the Interstate Georgiana realizes how little like a good idea this was. She has been to New York City three times in her life, but she was never the person driving the car. Nor has she ever driven on the Interstate before. Traffic tends to travel faster on the highway than it does in and around Shell Harbour. She has, of course, heard the phrase “white-knuckle ride” before, but this is the first time she’s really understood what it meant.
My God
, she thinks as cars fly past,
it’s like we’re in a race
, And not a race she’s likely to win. When she drives around Shell Harbour other drivers – being friends and neighbours and in no particular hurry – often smile and wave. Even if she doesn’t know them personally, it’s such a friendly, laid-back community that no one makes a stink if you signal left when you want to go right or have to make a sudden stop or have a little trouble with your parallel parking. And if you’re lost or unsure of what to do at the next intersection you can always pull over and ask for directions. The Interstate is not so agreeable. Everyone seems either to be going to some serious emergency or going to save-the-world meetings for which they are already late. Instead of smiles and waves there are offensive (if descriptive) hand gestures and threatening scowls. If it were possible to stop suddenly without causing a major accident – which it isn’t – traffic would plough right through you. If you make a wrong signal horns shriek and you can tell what the driver behind you is shouting even if you don’t lip-read.

“You’ll be fine,” Mrs Kilgour assures her right before she falls asleep. “You have that satellite thing.”

While Mrs Kilgour snores away the miles, Georgiana hangs on to the steering wheel, afraid to take her eyes off the road for even half a nanosecond to check the exit signs or the image on the satnav. She might as well be driving through a minefield. She clenches her teeth to stop herself from gibbering. She has no idea where she wants to get off, and she isn’t convinced that the “satellite thing” does either.
Turn left
, it advises, where left is the divider.
Turn right
, it orders, where right is a wall of trees. If Georgiana could take a hand off the wheel long enough to fish her phone from her pocket she would call Claudelia or Will for moral support if not actual help, but doing that seems no less risky than hitting the divider would be. She could, of course, pull onto the shoulder and call from there, but this course of action has its own set of problems. She can’t figure out how she can slow down enough to pull over without being rear-ended by the car behind her. Were she able to pull over and stop she would never be able to rejoin the traffic again. If she didn’t rejoin the traffic she would be stuck on the shoulder until she was either rescued or (if you believe the stories Georgiana has seen on the news) hit by a very large truck.

When Mrs Kilgour wakes up, they are off the Interstate and parked on a wide and busy road. She rubs her eyes and looks over at Georgiana. “Where the hell are we?”

Georgiana, pale and perspiring more than she ever has in phys ed, is staring at the map in the hopeless way of someone who has just been dropped out of a helicopter into an unknown country and doesn’t speak the language in which the map is written. She and Claudelia have talked about doing a cross-country trip after graduation, but now she is doubting the wisdom of that project. They could spend the rest of their lives in Nebraska. Or never get past New York.

“I don’t know. I think I must have missed the exit.” Her voice is low and grudging because she’s trying not to cry. “But I kind of don’t think this is Lower Manhattan.”

“That’s a pretty good guess.” Mrs Kilgour peers out of the window. “From the licence plates alone I’d say you’ve managed to bypass New York and go straight to New Jersey. And from the fact that we’re on Kennedy Boulevard, I’d say we’re probably in Jersey City.” She points to the small and largely unhelpful screen. “See if that thing can figure out where the Holland Tunnel is.”

Mrs Kilgour dozes off again as soon as they see the sign for the tunnel.

Georgiana has never driven in a tunnel before, either. Gripping the wheel as though it’s a set of reins and she’s trying to stay on the horse, she follows the line of cars under the Hudson river, and, for some reason assuming that the car in front of her is going where she wants to go, drives out of the tunnel and over a bridge.

This time it is hitting a pothole that wakes up Mrs Kilgour. “Now where are we?” she wants to know.

“Brooklyn,” sighs Georgiana, and she pulls into the kerb.