Love Walked In (27 page)

“Clare started talking about Swedish pancakes in the kind of voice people use to talk about Mount Everest or the moon, and before she’d finished, Ingrid was measuring out the flour,” said my mother. Then she came over to where I was sitting and first touched the cuff of my sweater, then circled my wrist with her fingers. She smiled at me. “She’s a nice girl, baby. And she worships the ground you walk on.”

“It’s mutual,” I said.

“Yes, I can tell,” said my mother. She let go of my wrist, smiled again, and then left to go perform some task or other, to work out her fury and worry about Ollie and Teo by beating rugs or changing sheets or scrubbing nonexistent mildew from the bathroom tile. If it weren’t so well on its way to being dark outside, I knew she’d be in her garden, torturing some plant into good behavior, into a future of breathtaking blooms.

I’m
not much of a sitter and thinker either. I don’t hack away at poor, innocent shrubbery but, especially in times of stress, I think things out by talking, as you may have observed, and I would have done just that, had there been the proper listener anywhere nearby. Linny was who I wanted. I could have picked up the phone, but Linny’s a person who conveys half of what she means through little twitches of her mouth, finger flutters, shrugs, and almost imperceptible widenings and narrowings of her keen, keen eyes. I wanted her in person or not at all and, besides, even I can do with short bouts of tranquil contemplation now and then. Although, in this instance, the tranquility was a bit forced, which I guess means it wasn’t tranquility at all.

After my mother left, I sat and thought. Thought about Teo, how he felt as lost to me as ever or nearly as lost.
“They’re writing songs of love, but not for me.”
That kind of thing. But mostly, I thought about Clare, about the nuts and bolts of how she and I would be OK. My mother was on the board of the private school we’d all gone to and, middle of the year or not, she’d pull strings and get Clare in. There was money enough from Martin, who had left everything to Clare, a fact that had surprised me, although it shouldn’t have. Martin’s blind spots had been large and appalling, but when he could see the right thing to do, he’d almost always done it. I was sure Martin’s attorney, Woods Rawlings, would get Clare money if she needed it. But I hoped she wouldn’t need it. I’d get a job, something real, and maybe take graduate courses as well.

I was no nearer to knowing what I wanted to spend my life doing than I’d ever been, apart from knowing I wanted to parent Clare—which was no small thing to know—and apart from knowing I wanted to grow old with Teo, which wasn’t in the cards. But I thought about what Ollie had said about marriage, how you could jump in and learn later how to love. This had been a complete washout of course, but it was a philosophy I thought might be more ably applied to an occupation. I could read and write and speak well enough. Why not get a job in a library or a hospital or a museum or a law firm and then try sincerely and mightily to love it or at least like it a lot?

I had just conjured up a Goya-esque picture of myself working in a law firm and was in the process of crossing law firm off my list with the thick black marker I carry around in my head for just such a purpose when I heard a car in the driveway. Cam and Toby probably, coming back from whatever twentysomething boy movie in which they’d tried, no doubt successfully, to drown their troubles. To be fair, their hurt for Teo was real, and because, despite their requisite display of male loyalty back in the kitchen, they loved Ollie, too, they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. They’d be fine, though, eventually, as both of them could only sustain anger or concern for so long before becoming distracted by a soccer ball or a pretty girl or a movie with aliens and car chases. I’m not being mean. My little brothers are resilient, weatherproof. The world needs its Tobys and Cams, and I need mine.

The front doorbell rang. Not Toby and Cam after all. I opened the door to see a woman standing there, a very thin woman wearing a lovely camel coat that was much too big for her. Under the porch light, the color of the coat almost precisely matched her hair.

“Yes?” I said.

And then she inhaled deeply, as though she were about to dive into water, and her jaw tightened and something flinty entered her eyes. I knew I was watching a woman gather herself, and before she said anything, I knew who she was. Beneath the taut face with its sharply articulated bones, its red lipsticked mouth like a swagger, I saw another face, delicately beautiful and luminous with love: the mother in the photograph watching a girl watching a butterfly.

My mother came up behind me. Suddenly, I felt dizzy and hot. Without thinking, I clasped my mother’s hand between both of mine and hung on.

“Cornelia. Honey.” Puzzled, my mother looked over my shoulder, “Who is it, Cornelia?” she asked.

“Viviana,” I said, hoarsely. “Clare’s mother.”

To my amazement, my mother’s whole body stiffened, and when she spoke next, her voice—the voice of a woman whose cardinal rule was “everyone who comes to the door is a guest,” who routinely asked the UPS delivery man if he’d had his lunch, how he took his coffee—her voice was ice, needle-sharp splinters of ice. “I hope you don’t think you can just pack her up and take her home. You must know it won’t be that simple.”

I stood there aghast, sputtering. Without thinking, I lifted my hand as though to touch Viviana. My hand hung in the air for a few seconds before I dropped it, but I don’t think she even saw. Her eyes, two gray wells of grief, all the flintiness gone, stared into my mother’s face.

“Nothing.” Her voice was as broken and lonely a sound as I have ever heard. “Nothing is simple.”

Back
home, where Clare had lived with her mother, the houses were like secrets, set far apart from one another, each with its long drive, its buffer of trees. Clare had liked that, the big spread of lawn and then the trees beyond, all around. Like living in a basket, she’d thought. Walking from one house to the next meant shortcutting through stands of evergreens or hardwoods because the main road that connected them all was narrow, winding, and without sidewalks. People did walk on the road, sometimes, or ride their bikes, but Clare’s mother rarely allowed this and, although she begged to do it from time to time, Clare’s awareness of the danger was sharp and took the fun out of it. Certainly, she’d never walked on the road after dark.

But as Clare made her way from the Sandovals’ house to the Browns’, she wasn’t scared at all. There were streetlamps—a few—and every house was bathed in mild light, porch lights and driveway lights and little garden lights among the bushes. She didn’t even need the flashlight that Ingrid had given her to carry, although she wouldn’t have switched it off for the world.

“It’s what we always did when Cornelia or one of the others headed home after dark,” Ingrid had told her, in her remarkable voice. “The Browns did the same for our kids, flashlights going back and forth between us for years. Goodness, it seems like yesterday.” So having that flashlight filled Clare with the sense that she was part of the present and the past too, that she, Teo, Cornelia, Cam, Toby, and even Ollie and Teo’s sister, Star, who lived in England, were all kids together, playmates. As she swept her beam of light across the houses and lawns, across the trunks of the sycamores she walked under or through their branches, she felt snug and proprietary, as though the neighborhood belonged to her, and she were one of its children.

She saw the car first. The car and then the people on the porch. Cornelia, Ellie, and someone else. She saw them before they saw her. Before Clare knew she’d recognized her mother, she recognized her, her body did. It must have, because suddenly she was running across the grass and the air she ran through was singing in her ears, louder and louder. About thirty feet from the porch, she stopped short and stood as though frozen. There seemed to be no breath in her body.

“Mommy,” she whispered.

She lifted her gloved hands to the sides of her mouth, like someone calling across a great distance. “Mommy,” again a whisper.

Just as she was about to try again, her mother turned and saw her.

“Mommy!” Clare shouted. She wanted to run toward her, but she couldn’t move.

Clare’s mother clapped a hand over her mouth, then flew across the grass to Clare. When she was surrounded by her mother’s arms, an emotion like nothing she’d felt before filled Clare, a complicated emotion—elation, dread dropping off of her like a heavy, smothering coat, and a high, thin, burning feeling almost like sadness—but when her mother pressed Clare’s head against her body, when her mother leaned down so that Clare felt her mother’s breath on her cheek, on top of the strange, new emotion or weaving itself around it was something else: a familiar peace, the stuff of the universe settling into its proper place. So familiar was the feeling that this was the first time she’d understood it
as
a feeling; for her whole life, it had simply been part of the condition of living, like her heart beating or her eyes dilating in sunlight.

“Clarey.” Her mother whispered it into her hair. “Clarey. Oh, my girl, my girl, my girl.”

After a while, her mother pulled away, just slightly, and looked at Clare’s face for a long time.

“Your hair,” her mother said at last. Then she smiled. “Oh, the sight of you. The sight of you, beautiful girl.”

“The sight of you, too,” said Clare simply, and her mother started to cry silently, the tears just sliding down her face.

It hurt to watch her mother cry like that, so Clare looked past her to Cornelia, standing on the front porch. Ellie stood behind her and, as Clare watched, Ellie put her arm across Cornelia’s chest, a protective hug that Cornelia leaned back into.

“Mom?” said Clare softly. “Please don’t cry. I want you to meet my friend Cornelia.”

Her mother nodded, wiping tears away with both hands.

As they walked to the porch, another car pulled into the driveway—a long, low, red, peculiar car, the back half of which was a kind of shallow truck bed. It stopped and a woman and a man got out. The woman ran straight to Cornelia and cradled Cornelia’s face between her hands. From the back, Clare recognized the woman’s long, purplish coat. Linny.

Linny turned and shook a playful finger at Clare’s mother. “You’re fast, lady,” she said.

Sitting in the Browns’ family room, warming her palms with the mug of hot chocolate Ellie had handed her almost as soon as she’d sat down, Clare felt very glad to have Linny there, glad for her chatty, effervescent presence. Although her mother sat next to Clare with one arm around her shoulders, in the indoor, evening light of the room, lamplight and firelight, Clare felt more separate from her mother than she had outside. And even though she knew everyone there, except for the man she recognized as Hayes, who sat in the corner of the room looking vaguely uncomfortable and, except for his boots, not much like a cowboy at all, Clare felt shy. I feel shy with all of them, she thought. Even Cornelia. And that struck her, the “even Cornelia” instead of “even my mom.” A tiny shiver ran through her.

But Linny was telling a story. Clare turned her attention like a flashlight, placing Linny in the center of her circle of light and leaving the rest in dimness.

“I came to water your plants, Cornelia, which come to think of it, I never did do, so they might all be dead in their pots when you get back,” said Linny.

“That’s OK,” said Cornelia. “I never liked those plants anyway.” Clare realized by the way Cornelia looked at Linny that she felt glad Linny was there too.

“And she was standing there, just kind of staring at the door like a person who’s tried knocking and is all knocked out and at loose ends.”

“An apt description,” said Clare’s mother quietly.

Oh, where have you been, Mommy, thought Clare. This question was right there in the room with them—other questions too, but Clare didn’t want to ask them. She didn’t want the answers, not just yet.

“Thank you. And I recognized you. I recognized Viviana. By her eyebrows. You know how I am about eyebrows, Cornelia,” said Linny.

“I do know, Linny. You collect eyebrows.”

“Oh,” said Clare. “Like Teo’s are accents.
Accent grave, accent aigue
.” She demonstrated on her own face with her fingers.

“Teo’s eyebrows,” declared Linny, with the air of one stating a gravely important fact, “are works of art. Poems. Sonnets!”

Clare glanced over at Hayes, who seemed to be Linny’s boyfriend, to see if this bothered him. He gave Clare a private smile and rolled his eyes as if to say, “Crazy old Linny.” Clare smiled back. Hayes was pretty handsome too, sparkly-eyed, his nose crooked in a way that made him more handsome rather than less, so maybe he didn’t mind what Linny said about Teo.

My mother is sitting here, and I’m thinking about the shape of Hayes’s nose, thought Clare.

“Viviana’s eyebrows are nice too, shapely, and they go farther past the outer corners of her eyes than your ordinary brow. Just like…” Linny turned to Clare.

“Mine,” said Clare.

“But our note,” said Cornelia, confused, to Viviana, “Clare and I taped a note to my door telling you my parents’ phone number and address. Oh, God, you didn’t get the note?”

“There was no note,” said Clare’s mother. She sounded tired, “I got the one at our house, so I called your apartment. When no one answered I went over there. Twice. Linny saw me the second time.”

“And I tried on the spot to call you on your cell, Cornelia, but couldn’t get you,” said Linny.

“The Bermuda Triangle,” groaned Cornelia. “When it comes to cell phones, my parents live in the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Your parents
live
on Pleasant Street,” corrected Linny. “Since that’s unforgettable, I didn’t forget it. I knew the town, too. But I didn’t have their number. And it’s not listed.”

Cornelia’s mother entered the room with a tray of coffee cups and plates of cookies. Clare noticed that she seemed tense. Back when they’d all stood on the porch, after Linny and Hayes had gotten there, Clare had seen Cornelia and Ellie exchange looks—brown eyes and blue eyes, the brown asking something and the blue answering—before Cornelia had turned and invited everyone in.

“Doctors,” said Ellie, her voice still not quite her voice. “They never list their numbers.”

“What could have happened to the note?” said Cornelia, a catch in her voice, “Viviana, I wouldn’t have just left. But I didn’t…” Cornelia stole a look at her mother, who was now pouring coffee from a silver pot. “I didn’t want to leave word with anyone. We’ve been trying to keep all that’s happened—private.”

“Thank you for that,” said Clare’s mother.

“The lady who cleans your building. I bet she took it. You know how she hates you,” said Linny.

“I know,” said Cornelia distractedly. She was looking at Clare’s mother.

“You’re small. And skittery. Probably, she thinks you’re a mouse.”

“I’m not the least bit skittery,” said Cornelia, turning her attention back to Linny. “And you know it.” Her voice faltered again. “But maybe. Maybe it was the cleaning lady.”

“The cleaning lady or the hand of fate,” Hayes piped up cheerfully.

“As soon as I could get Hayes to pick me up in his car, I came down. We were fast.”

“Eighty, eighty-five,” said Hayes, proudly. “Got here without a ticket by the grace of God.”

“But Viviana was faster. I remembered that circular drive and the mailbox shaped like a little house, but how…”

“Their name is on the box,” said Clare’s mother. She pulled Clare closer to her. Clare could see her mother’s pulse beat under the thin skin of her temple. Clare saw Ellie looking at her mother too.

“Viviana looks tired,” said Ellie to Cornelia. “I could call one of the hotels nearby for her or maybe the Calloway Inn?”

Cornelia’s face turned red. “Mom,” she began.

“Actually, I was hoping to have a word with you alone, Cornelia,” said Clare’s mother. “Could Clare stay here while we take a walk?” She turned to Ellie. “Thanks for your offer, but I saw a hotel on the way in.”

Linny stood up. “We’re staying at the inn, and we should head over there. I’m starving.” Hayes stood up too.

“You’ll go straight into my kitchen and let me warm something up for you, Linny-girl,” said Ellie. “You too, Hayes.”

“You don’t have to ask us twice,” chirped Linny. She gave Cornelia a long look. Cornelia pressed two fingers to her mouth and blew Linny a kiss.

When Clare, her mother, and Cornelia were alone, Cornelia said, “It’s too cold to talk outside, but I have a place we can go. I think, though…” She touched Clare’s hair for a second. “I think Clare should come along.”

Clare’s mother said, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” There was an edge in her voice.

Clare looked from one woman to the other. She saw Cornelia knit her brows for a moment, then saw her sigh and close her eyes, briefly. When she opened them, she looked tired too.

“It’s just that it’s Clare’s life. We decided that it’s better if she knows what’s happening.”

“You decided.” Clare’s mother said, flatly.

“Mom,” said Clare, a note of pleading in her voice, “I do. I need to know. So things just don’t happen
to
me.”

Clare’s mother seemed to consider this. Her eyes softened. “Yes, OK, then. You’ll know.”

In
Mrs. Goldberg’s parlor, with its rows of seashells glowing on their magical shelves, illuminated with hidden lights, Clare and Cornelia sat and listened as Clare’s mother told the story of where she’d been—told it in a calm, nearly uninflected voice, as though she wanted to say the words without really remembering what she was telling.

“I just drove. I thought about the airport and going to Barcelona, but when I found I was going in the wrong direction, I didn’t turn around. I had a handbag full of cash, and when I got low on gas, I stopped and got it and then kept going. For a long time, I didn’t stop or sleep. I just drove. I think”—she glanced at Clare, then continued—“I think I wanted to erase myself with driving.”

Clare saw that Cornelia was sitting still, watching her mother’s face, and listening. She admired Cornelia’s steadfast listening, how she didn’t fidget or look away. The quality of her attention, of her steady gaze wasn’t challenging, just—something else. Respectful was the word that came to mind, but that wasn’t exactly right. Friendlier than respectful. Clare tried to listen that way too.

The story wasn’t so terrible. That is, what made the story not so terrible, the only thing that made it not so terrible, was that it could have been so much worse.

Her mother had driven, stopping once at a dingy motel to sleep for a few hours, and she’d ended up in northern Michigan at a hotel which was really quite grand, although it had been much grander in the past.

“Leave it to me,” her mother said, her voice charged with irony, “to have a breakdown at two hundred dollars a night.”

She’d stayed there for days; how many exactly she didn’t know, and this was the point in her story where Clare understood that the bare facts were the least of what happened. When her mother described her stay at the hotel, her eyes changed, grew large and frightened and haunted.

“Bipolar,” said Clare’s mother. “The term doesn’t convey the half of it. I didn’t swing from one extreme to the next; I lived all kinds of extremes at the same time. Blackness and mania and a mind that wouldn’t stop.”

She reached over and tilted Clare’s chin up with a finger. “You’re sure? You want to hear it all?”

Clare turned the question over in her mind. She looked at Cornelia, who looked back with love on her face, but no answers. Cornelia would let her make up her own mind. She remembered Cornelia’s voice, telling her she was a brave girl. Be brave, Clare told herself. She nodded.