Even Now (25 page)

I turned on the television, whose single snowy channel reported nothing but the weather predictions. I flicked it off and
pulled aside the heavy curtain to study the weighted skies. I knew about watching for snow. It required dedicated staring
at a dark, nearby backdrop— magnolias, pines, a rooftop. As a child I was superstitiously convinced that if I looked away
even once, dropped my guard or lessened the wanting for an instant, the snow wouldn’t fall from sheer spite.

As the daylight drains you check for cars, you check for snow, you check your watch. You fret, begin to doubt yourself and
him. You wait. For a knock, for a noise, for your lover. For the snow, for the phone, for your heart to stop hammering.
“Just remember A for aorta, V for ventricle, A comes before V in the alphabet, so you can remember the blood from the aorta
goes into the V for ventricle and—”

“Right or left? I’ll never remember.”

“All you have to do is remember it once, Hannah. You’ll never need to know how the heart works again. Ever.”
She’d been so sure. And still I’d failed the test.

I looked in the mirror. And do any of these lovers who were wanted, who agreed and arranged, do any of them ever realize,
ever admit, as they wait with quiet terror and thumping desire—that sometimes it’s not attraction, or proximity, or timing?
Sometimes it’s as simple as the fact that the one they wait for belongs to somebody else. Do they look in the mirror and see
this stark, dark truth: retaliation? Was I sleeping with Peter Whicker to punish Daintry O’Connor?

I picked up the phone and dialed not Peter, not the church, but home. I punched in the message code. Surely he’d never be
so foolish, but—

“Mom, answer,” the thin voice sobbed, clotted with crying. “Mom, pick up, where are you?”
Click.
A whirred silence and another message: “Mom. Dad’s already gone. So are Ben and Ceel. Mom? I’m not spending the night with
Jennifer anymore. Mommy, I’m at school and I want to come home. She cheated off my paper and got in trouble and we’re not—
Mommy, please . . .” The trailing despair. “Mommy, she took my underpants from my cubby during gym and showed everybody. They
laughed.” A choked and pleading finale: “Where
are
you, Mommy? Please.”

That swiftly, that simply, it’s over. Love and duty and a new fear intervene, collide and conspire to save you from yourself.
Or maybe it was God. Perhaps love and duty and fear are all one and the same with Him. I left the key in the motel door.

“I’ve come for Ellen Marsh. She’s waiting for me.”

“Yes, there was some mix-up about whom she was supposed to leave with. A change of plans, apparently. But even for faculty
children we have to have a note, Mrs. Marsh—”

“I understand.”

“Before we—”

“Where’s Ellen?”

“She tried to call.”

“I know. I’ve just gotten the message.”

“That was some time ago, she was quite upset. I—”

“Which building is she in? The library? Where does the after-school care meet?”

“Everyone’s gone now, they—”

“Where is she? Did she go home with another friend?”

“She tried to call Mrs. Carlson, but no one answered there, either. And with your husband away with Mr. Carlson, we didn’t
have another emergency number.”

“Where is my daughter?”

“She said she knew someone who could look after her until you came home. A woman, a friend of yours, she said, Irish name.
O’Brien?”

“Daintry?”

“Yes, I believe that’s what Ellen called her. The phone number is right here—”

“She went home with Daintry?” Another child, another night. The same savior and captor.

“We couldn’t find you, Mrs. Marsh. Ms. O’Connor was home and picked Ellen up.” The woman straightened pink phone slips and
called after me, “Ellen seemed very glad to see her.”

The door’s brass knob was frigid. This time I didn’t wait for it to open. “Ellen?” The foyer was empty. “Ellen!”

“Mom!” Not a plea for help, but a squeal of pleasure as she bounded barefoot down the stairs, her hair in a dozen cornrow
plaits. My knees buckled with relief, and I stooped to meet her, hold her, enfold her.

“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”

“Why, are you okay?”

“’Course! Look, but don’t touch. It’s not dry yet.” She displayed her fingernails, ten small ovals lacquered with pink stripes
and red polka dots. “You can’t do this to yourself. Daintry painted them for me.”

Descending the carpeted risers, she looked scrubbed and girlish, hair pulled cleanly back from her face with a hairband. A
black-headed Alice in Wonderland dressed for lounging in a pale gray cashmere robe. The color of my sweet, dumb, clumsy doves.
The cat, still graceful despite the bulk of pregnancy, followed. Ellen left me and climbed the stairs again toward both of
them, sitting at Daintry’s bare feet to stroke the animal’s fur with a carefully flattened palm. I thought of my smilax cardinals.
Whenever I’d heard the baby birds’ frantic cheeps, I’d whispered,
“Don’t cry, don’t cry. A cat will hear you, find you, eat you.”

“Ellen, what happened?” Though clearly whatever had happened no longer worried her. Daintry had brought her around and made
it right and taken my place.

A tight frown pulled Ellen’s face. “She cheated.”

“Jennifer?”

“She looked at my paper during the
James and the Giant Peach
test. That’s cheating. So I told Mrs. Davidson. You’re supposed to tell, aren’t you? Daintry says so.”

“And. . . ”

“And Mrs. Davidson called Jennifer’s name and told her to stop. She didn’t even get punished. And that’s okay, I didn’t care,
but Mom, Mom, she got so mad at me and told everybody not to sit with me at lunch and not to play with me at recess and .
. .” She stood, her features crumpled and her voice cracking. “And she went to my cubby and took my—”

“Ssh, Ellen.” I stooped again to kiss her, kissed the brimming eyes. “I know, I know.”

“Seems Jennifer changed her mind about Ellen coming to spend the night,” Daintry interjected.

Ellen nodded, recovering. “And I didn’t have any friends all day long.” She blew on her nails, satisfied with her version.
“But I’d missed the carpool. And then you weren’t home for a long time.”

Daintry sat on a step, pulled the fabric over her knees. Waiting.

“Where were you? It was getting dark. I was afraid.”

“I was in the car. Running errands in case it snows. Then I had to wait, and—”

Daintry casually rested her chin in her palm. “You really should get a car phone, Hannah.” Telling me as she always had. “Take
your mother’s coat,” she said to Ellen, rising. “Take her near our fire.”
Our,
as though Ellen lived there, belonged there, intimately familiar with her rooms and closets and rituals. I took off my coat
with shaking hands that Daintry noticed. “Is it that cold out there?” she asked. “Has it started snowing?”

“Yeah,” Ellen said, “snow would make this whole night perfect.” She led me into the library, close with an embered fire. “Look,
Mom, just the kind of fire you like. No big high flames. We haven’t had a fire in
ages.”

There’d been no proper hearth at the O’Connors’ house. The chimney had been sealed by old Mrs. Payne.
“You’re so lucky,”
Daintry had said as we lazed before the flames,
“I wish we could have a fire.”
Backsides to the burning logs, we staged endurance tests, heated denim scorching our thighs with a cold-hot combination of
pleasure and pain, bearing it until the last moment until. . .
“I won,”
Daintry had said.
“I lasted the longest.”

Ellen held out a bowl of popcorn. “Daintry has Jiffy Pop, it’s so cool! A big shiny balloon on the stove. Better than ours.
Better than microwave.” She lowered her voice, looked around. “And she let me have a Coke since it’s not a school night.”

Daintry poured wine from a bottle on a chest. “Wine? Red wine just seems to go with fires and snow.”

“We stopped at the video place to get a movie, too,” Ellen said.

“She was very upset at”—Daintry seemed to choose her words carefully—“not being able to get in touch with you.”

“Look,” Ellen said, holding up the video box. “It’s
Ghost.
But we haven’t watched it yet because we’ve had such a good time. Daintry’s going to be my immigrant.”

The glass was halfway to my lips. “What?”

“Didn’t you know Ellen had a project on immigrants?”

“Yeah, Mom. I told you that.”

Daintry smiled indulgently at my daughter. “Seems I’m the closest thing to an actual immigrant Ellen can find. All those old
stories of living abroad you used to love.”

“And she’s going to take my wrapping paper form to her office and everyone who works there will buy some.”

I finally found my voice. “Yes,” I said. “She always took our Girl Scout cookies to her father’s office for his patients to
buy.”

Daintry’s eyes sparkled. “But your mother wouldn’t let you send yours to the factory with your father.”

In the fireplace a log shifted and collapsed into fiery chunks. “My mother didn’t want the employees to feel pressured to
buy. She thought it was an unfair advantage.”

Daintry laughed. “That’s all in the interpretation.”

“Can we play Clue now?” Ellen asked. She lifted a battered box and looked at me apologetically. “We were just getting ready
to play before you came.”

“A closet upstairs is full of old board games,” Daintry explained. “Some priest with children, no doubt. I don’t know, though,
Ellen. Your mother was always terrible at Clue.”

“She never wins any games with Daddy, either. What about cards? We could all play cards. I’ve learned how to knock.”

“Only two can play gin, El,” Daintry said, winking.

I rose and picked up my coat. “Let’s go home, Ellen.”

“Daintry invited me to spend the night. She’s going to do my hair again. I told her about when you rolled up my hair in those
awful Velcro curlers and had to cut them out!”

“Because you—” I stopped. Why was I justifying some past accident to a ten-year-old? Because of Daintry. “No sleep-overs tonight.”

“I want to.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Yes, stay.” Daintry tilted her glass, staring at me through its ruby glow. “Peter should be here any minute.” I hadn’t let
myself wonder and now forced my fingers to keep buttoning. “He—” she laughed. “I’m not sure where he is, to tell you the truth.
The minister’s wife is always the last to know. He said something about preparing a couple for a reaffirmation service. I’d
never heard of such. But you know Peter, always on to the new thing. The next thing.”

Ellen sat stubbornly on the floor, surrounded by video and popcorn and nail polish and Clue. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” she countered. “Yes yes yes yes yes.”

God help me.
“Don’t you want to be at home when it snows?”

“If,” Daintry said. “Probably won’t.” She shook her head, a sage old owl.

“Tomorrow we can do snow angels, Ellen,” I said. “And make snow cream. We’ll save some in the freezer for summertime. And
you have those new snow paint pens from Christmas.” The warring factions in Ellen’s head were nearly as visible as the warring
factions standing on either side of her.

“Okay . . .” She sighed and began lacing her hiking boots over the thin ankles bound in zigzag leggings.

Daintry set down her glass, followed us to the door, and gazed mildly up into the black sky. “Still no snow. Too bad.” She
pulled the limp belt of the robe more tightly about her waist and tweaked one of Ellen’s tiny braids. “I’ll give you a rain
check, El.”

I turned up my collar and reached for the handrail, afraid of what I might say. Then my daughter did it for me.

“Only Mommy calls me El,” she told Daintry solemnly.

I listened as Ellen told Hal everything. He was attentive to the cheating issue, angry about the gym scene, less interested
in Ellen’s tales of the wondrous Daintry. He was tired, had driven five hours since three that afternoon. “Attendance was
low because of the forecast, some speakers had canceled. And it’s not even going to snow. A waste all around.”

Not a waste, no. Not in my version of the day.

“What’s your take on what happened to Ellen?” he asked me after she’d gone to bed.

“Someone was vicious to her.”

“Vicious?”

“Boys don’t do it. They don’t count their slights and advantages, their grades and their girlfriends and their talents. They
don’t tally and compare. But girls have a god-awful history of it, right there alongside the history of nurturing and sacrifice
and soldiering on. A history of doing each other in.”

Lacking siblings or sisters, Hal was perplexed. “How?”

“Bloodless battles.”

“But not you,” he said. “Not grown women.”

Oh, that certainty, that rock-solid sureness. “Me too, Hal. I’ve done it, too.” He showed no surprise, and I was grateful.
“And Mark’s already in bed? I thought he was going out after they got back from the match.”

“Well, that’s the damnedest thing. He just
chose
to come home. Found himself with a bunch of people drinking and driving. He told me that he had them drop him off here, said
something about blaming it on you. You ought to leave him a note next time you’re going to be gone like that. Maybe you should
get a cell phone if you’re going to spend so much time at the columbarium, or with Daintry, or whatever.”

“I don’t need a phone. It’s finished.”

He seemed not to have heard me. “You know, I’m not sure I much approve of your friend Daintry. Ellen told me they’d rented
Ghost.
Isn’t that rated R?”

And even then there was the instant impulse of defending her, no differently from the way I had with Mother. Protecting her,
preserving something. “It’s not the movie. You don’t like her, do you?”

“There’s something. . . unpredictable about her.” He pulled back the blanket and climbed into bed. “I guess she just doesn’t
seem like much of a girl’s girl.”

I tried to laugh. “Hal. What would you know about girl’s girls?”