How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (20 page)

But once I was beneath the sheets, sleep wouldn't come. I kept replaying the events of the evening, a different version than Annette's, the good and the bad. And if that weren't enough, the sound of loud music and increasingly boisterous merrymaking from down below would have kept me awake. Perhaps Annette could sleep through anything, including a fire, but I couldn't. Honestly, didn't these selfish people downstairs think of anyone but themselves?

I punched my pillow, tossed, turned. After counting enough sheep to fill both Australia and Argentina, I at last slept.

But my sleep was fitful.

First I dreamed that I was back with Buster Keating, but then he was replaced by Ambassador Rawlings. No sooner did I find myself in his arms than I was replaced in my own dream by Bebe Iversdottir, who was no longer wearing her red dress, but rather had on a long white Victorian wedding gown. I stood by Annette in the dream, throwing rice—the one thing that told my relieved unconscious mind that it was a dream, since I'd never throw rice in real life because of what it does to birds and all. I held Annette's hand as we waved the happy couple off, tears streaming down my face, not of joy, but of sadness.

I woke abruptly to the feel of wet tears streaming down my cheeks and a gentle tapping at my door. That tapping, growing more insistent, was the only sound in the now-quiet house.

“Yes?” I called, wiping at the tears.

The handle turned and then Ambassador Rawlings was in the room.

I saw that the tie of his tux had been undone, the shirt collar opened. His hair was disheveled and a scent of alcohol entered the room with him. I suppose that for the first time since I knew him, I could see that he was a bit drunk.

“As I came up the stairs,” he said, “I thought I heard someone crying.”

“Perhaps it was the madwoman,” I suggested, trying to make a joke of it.

“No—” he shook his head in earnest “—I could have sworn it was coming from in here.”

“Then you were mistaken,” I said, hoping the room was dark enough that he wouldn't see any remnant tears on my cheeks.

“Oh,” he said, sitting on the edge of my bed as though I were Annette and he were, well, me, “then I am relieved.”

“Relieved, sir?”

“Of course. Do you imagine that I wish you unhappy, Charlotte?”

I figured he must be very drunk to call me Charlotte again.

“No, of course not,” I said. “But I also wouldn't imagine you give my happiness any thought one way or another.” It didn't matter that he asked me about it every week; I hadn't believed his queries about my happiness were sincere.

“Then you must think me a very hard man.”

“Hard?” I echoed him again. “Not at all. I merely think you're my employer.”

“Meaning?”

“Why should my happiness matter to you in the slightest, so long as I do my job well enough?”

“I see,” he said, and then he just sat there for a moment.

His proximity was making me uncomfortable.

“Is there anything else, sir?” I asked

Now it was his turn to echo me. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Anything else. Now that you know that whatever sound you heard was not me crying, is there anything else?”

“No,” he said, rising slowly and heading for the door, “I suppose not.” Then he turned. “Did you enjoy yourself this evening?”

“I liked seeing Annette so happy,” I answered truthfully. I always liked seeing Annette happy.

“Yes, of course,” he said, “as do I. But did you enjoy dancing…with me?”

I couldn't lie.

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“Thank you,” he said. “Good night, Miss Bell.”

“Ambassador?”

“Yes?”

“You're not really going to send Annette away to boarding school, are you?”

“I'm certainly not going to do it tonight,” he said.

“Nor tomorrow?”

“Nor tomorrow, either. Sweet dreams, Miss Bell.”

“Good night, sir.”

No sooner had he closed the door than I heard that eerie laugh, that awful sound I hadn't heard in a long time. To me, it sounded as though someone was objecting to the closeness we had shared for a moment there.

N
ormally, if you get disturbed in mid-dream and want to return to it, it's impossible to do so. No matter how you try to retrieve the wonder, it evades you, your subconscious mocking you as if to say,
You want it so badly? Well, ha! I won't give it to you!
But have a screaming nightmare, as I'd had many over the years—the usual one where I'm too late to take an important final exam or the more troubling one in which my own father has a gun and is trying to kill me—and each time you try to raise yourself to consciousness in order to escape the horror, just as soon as you close your eyes again the same awful images come rushing back.

And so it had been the night before after Ambassador Rawlings had left me. No sooner did I close my eyes than the dreadful picture came back of Bebe Iversdottir as his grinning bride.

Abandoning sleep at dawn, I rejected the images. There had been real closeness between him and me the evening before, had there not? I refused to let myself imagine what this might mean, refused to let myself dwell on what my own feelings might be, but a hopeful feeling awoke in me coincident with my rising, even as that hope was at war with a vague uneasiness that my haunted dreams of the night before must surely function as an ill omen.

Feeling more upbeat than I had in a long time, I hummed as I prepared for the day, taking more time than usual with my dress. When I at last went down to breakfast, it was with the optimistic expectation that I would see him there. After the late night he'd had, surely he would be taking it at a slower pace this morning. How would he speak to me? I wondered. Would I be able to see evidence of the affection I'd felt between us?

But when I got to the table, there was only Mrs. Fairly and Annette, dining on pancakes and juice, and Lars Aquavit, finishing a last cup of coffee.

“Where's Ambassador Rawlings?” I couldn't stop myself from asking.

“What's it to you?” Mrs. Fairly asked with unusual tartness.

But then I noticed the bags under her eyes. Despite that she was usually a sound sleeper, and like Annette could sleep through a fire, the noise from downstairs on the previous evening must have kept her awake.

“I was only curious,” I said, “that's all.”

“Gone already,” Lars Aquavit said, taking another sip of his coffee. “I drove him and Miss Iversdottir to the airport earlier. They wanted to catch a plane to the Westman Islands.”

“The Westman Islands?” I echoed dumbly.

“Yes,” he said. “Miss Iversdottir said she wanted to do some rock-climbing there and the ambassador was only too happy to accompany her.”

How…outdoorsy of her, I thought. I hoped that, with the hangovers they must surely have, they didn't fall to their deaths. Or at least I hoped one of them wouldn't.

“Does that not sound romantic and adventurous?” Annette enthused.

I admitted that it did, thinking all the while that no one would ever catch me climbing rocks. I hate heights. Have I mentioned that already?

“They'll be back this evening?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Fairly spoke the words as though I were being incredibly silly. “They won't be back for at least a few days.”

“I see,” I said. “Annette, as soon as you finish your breakfast, we really should get down to work. What with all of the silly fuss and bother here the last few days, there's been precious little time to get anything serious accomplished.”

“Aren't you going to eat anything?” Lars Aquavit asked.

“I'm not hungry this morning,” I said.

 

Despite what I'd said to Annette about the need to get serious, I found myself unable to concentrate once we had her workbooks arranged on the table before us. Honestly, who cared if the letter S was made the way it was supposed to be or if it was a little backward? I could still read what she was trying to write: Bebe Iversdottir Rawlings.

“Why don't you get out your art things,” I suggested.

“But you don't usually let me paint until I have finished my lessons,” she objected.

“What,” I said, feeling unaccountably testy, “you're suddenly a stickler for rules? You'd rather work on your letters than draw a picture of, oh, I don't know, a cow?”

“I'll take the cow, please.” She smiled.

“That's what I thought.”

Once I had her squared away, enough black and white acrylics squeezed onto the palette, plus a dab of pink for the nose, her smock on, I excused myself to make a phone call.

I needed to talk to somebody, so I decided to call Gina.

“What a grand surprise!” she said, answering her work phone.

“Can you talk?” I asked. “You won't get in trouble with anybody there?”

“Trouble?” My question clearly puzzled her. “Oh, no. I was just retranslating a book by Czeslaw Milosz. In English, you would call it
The Captive Mind.
You know, it really is amazing, how much more you understand of totalitarianism when you translate this kind of thing repeatedly.”

“I'll bet,” I said, not really sure what I was agreeing with. “But I thought you worked on ancient texts?”

“Yes, but every now and then we get to play around a bit.”

“Well, it still sounds like pretty serious work. I suppose you must be anxious to get back to it.”

“A bit,” she confessed. “I was just getting to the exciting part.”

I was sure it would be a mistake for me to ask, so I didn't.

“That's okay,” I said. “I just wanted to talk about some silly stuff that's been going on over here in the ambassador's house.”

“Ooh!” she shouted. Then, in a hushed whisper that still somehow shouted her enthusiasm, “Political gossip!”

“Well, I don't know how political it is. And, anyway, I know you have to get back to—“

“Why don't you come to dinner tonight,” she suggested.

“But won't I be intruding on your family?” I asked.

“What family?” she said. Then, “Oh. You must be thinking of Britta. She's the one who still lives at home. I'm the one who lives by herself with a dog and three cats.”

“Of course,” I said, as if I'd known all along. “But wait a second—I thought they still lived with your family.”

“They took pity and gave the pets to me, but not the sisters. So, you see,” she said, “you'd be doing me a favor. This way, I won't have to dine alone. Well, except for the dog and three cats.”

I recalled her saying, on the first night we'd met, that living alone could be too much like living without people.

“Glad I can be of service, then,” I said.

 

Lars Aquavit offered to drive me, but I'd told him I wanted to walk. The address Gina had given me didn't look too far away on the map.

But as I trudged through the cold night, hostess gift of a bottle of wine in hand, I regretted my impulsiveness. Who was I trying to be, outdoorsy Bebe Iversdottir?

“Fucking cold Iceland,” I muttered to myself as I trudged. “Can't somebody do something about this?”

“Your face is so red!” Gina observed, opening the door for me.

“That's because it's freezing cold outside!” I said, not wanting to remove my head scarf, not ever.

“It is?” she asked.

“Oh…never mind.”

Sullenly, I relinquished the scarf. She was never going to understand. We were at a cultural divide.

Gina was thrilled when she saw the wine.

“Wonderful!” she said. “We can bind some more!”

“Do you mean bond?”

As she went to open the bottle and get glasses, I took in my surroundings. They were charming, if a little sterile. The living room was painted a green that I instantly free-associated with hospital rooms, and my hand rose involuntarily to my absent tonsils. But that was made up for by the sweetness of the selection of items in the vitrine: tiny glass animals making up their own three-tiered menagerie. Who would have guessed Gina could be so wistfully girlish? On the walls, there were several photographs, all in matching teak frames. I looked at them more closely: everyone in the pictures was blond, not a dark head in sight. I realized they were all members of Gina's family; not looking just generally like Icelanders, they looked specifically like her. As she reentered the room, I was studying a particular one in which she looked to be about half the age she was now, with two much older women beside her.

“Your aunts?” I asked.

“My sisters,” she laughed, handing me a glass. “Lina is ten years older than me and Nina is twelve years older. My parents always said I was a delayed reaction. What about you, do you have sisters?”

I explained how I'd grown up in a household with my three younger cousins and how I'd never felt like siblings with them.

“Well, you might not be missing much,” she said.

“But I thought you missed them,” I said.

“Oh, I do, but the fighting used to make me crazy.”

“Fighting?”

“Oh, yes. They used to fight like crazy. And not just verbal, but physical, too.”

“They hit you?”

“Oh, never. I was too small. But they were always hitting each other and kicking, still do sometimes. Why, I remember one time, when Lina was breast-feeding her first baby—” she indicated a picture of one of the older girls with a tiny Icelander in her arms “—Nina said something to really piss her off.”

“So what happened?”

She giggled. “Lina pulled out her other breast and sprayed Nina with milk.”

“She didn't!” I wasn't sure if I was amused or horrified.

“Oh, yes…” She giggled some more. “Then she sprayed all the clothes in Nina's wardrobe—the family still laughs about it!”

“I'll bet,” I said.

“Women,” she said, at last controlling herself. “Put too many of them under one roof, and all hell breaks loose.”

As she spoke, for the first time I saw the three gray kittens curled up as a single mass on the beige sofa. They were girl kittens. I could tell from the way they were licking each other's genitals as the rather large dog looked on. I didn't even want to think about it.

“I think I see what you mean,” I said.

She brought out appetizers and then dinner—something vaguely fishy that I longed to decline, but knew etiquette dictated I must eat—and we talked about safe subjects, like deconstructing translations of ancient texts.

I tried to pretend that I didn't mind the fact that the fish still had its head attached to its body, and I'm fairly certain I failed miserably, but at least Gina didn't seem to notice. She was too busy getting a buzz off the wine and digging into her own fish head.

“So,” she said, her face taking on an expression of sheer pleasure as she put the first bite of flaky white flesh into her mouth. “You wanted to discuss the new doings in Ambassador Rawlings's house? You have some good gossip for me?”

I filled her in on everything since the last time I'd seen her: the house party, the advent of Bebe Iversdottir, the dance, the talk, the dream, the nightmare. And how Ambassador Rawlings had now gone off with Bebe to the Westman Islands.

Gina dropped her fork in the fish's belly.

“But wait a second,” she said, eyes wide, “what about his wife?”

“That's what I'm wondering, too,” I said. “If there's a Mrs. Rawlings, and he's a public figure, how can he just go off with this other woman? Doesn't he care what people think?”

She looked at me closely, then her eyes widened.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Charlotte!”

“What?” I asked, concerned.

“You are in love with him.”

“What?”
I shouted so loud, my uneaten fish jumped on the plate. Hey, wasn't that thing supposed to be dead?

“You're out of your tiny Icelandic mind!” I screamed.

“Perhaps,” she laughed, “but not over this. Why else would you be so concerned with Ambassador Rawlings's private affairs if you weren't in love with him?”

“I can think of a lot of reasons.”

“Oh?” She crossed her arms. “And they are?”

“I'm concerned about Annette. I'm worried how she'll take it.”

“From everything you tell me about Annette,” she spoke reasonably, “she is a remarkably well-adjusted and happy child.”

“Okay, then I'm worried about his reputation,” I said.

“His reputation doesn't appear to be suffering,” she said. “Did you see other people at the party running to get away from him?”

I admitted that I had not.

“Fine,” I finally said. “It's because I'm an American. We take a prurient interest in these kinds of things.”