Stalker Girl (15 page)

“Damn it!” Sheryl threw her wicker basket to the ground and dropped to her knees.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look at this.” She held up a heart-shaped leaf with holes and ragged edges. “Goddamn beetles!”

Kneeling in the dirt next to the bean poles, Sheryl examined each vine, inch by inch. “Okay, where are you guys hiding? You may as well give up now, because you
know
I’m going to find you. Do you hear me?”

“I think they probably do,” Carly said.

Sheryl laughed without looking up. “Yeah. Listen to me. I’ve become one of those crazy gardening ladies.”

Before marrying Brian’s father, Sheryl had lived her whole life in Brooklyn. “My mother grew a few tomato plants in the little space we had behind our house, but nothing like this. This is like having a grocery in your backyard.”

When she and the boys moved upstate, Ernestine put her to work getting the garden ready for winter.

“God, she was a smart one, that Ernestine. She was just as torn up as I was. But in a different way, because Sean was her child. Her firstborn. But she kept me from completely falling apart. Put me to work harvesting the fall stuff, getting the garden ready for winter. And then there was all the canning. She wasn’t trying to get my mind off Sean. We talked about him the whole time. But in the midst of all that death, she made it so I was up to my elbows in life. Now I’m totally hooked. Just like her, I’m trying something new every year.”

Over the summer, listening to Sheryl talk about her life, Carly had fallen half in love with her, too. Also with Ernestine, even though she was dead, and the generation back in Ireland—Nellie, Ernestine’s mother; Auntie Maureen; and Cousin Patrick—whom she had never met, never would meet.

She was half in love with “the whole lot of them,” which is one of the expressions she heard a lot hanging around the Quinns. They called those expressions Ernestineisms, little phrases Ernestine brought with her when she came to America as a teenager and passed on to her kids and grandkids along with all the stories.

How Ernestine’s cousin Patrick got kicked in the head when he turned his back on a newborn calf, or how her Auntie Maureen’s fiancé died when his bicycle was hit by a bus three days before the wedding, and she never recovered. How Nellie, Ernestine’s mother, took her brother’s place on the family fishing boat when all the boys in the village went off to fight in World War I.

“Aha.” Sheryl held out her palm for Carly’s inspection. In it was a small bug. Yellow, with black spots.

“I thought ladybugs were good for gardens.”

“Oh, these aren’t ladybugs. They’re Mexican bean beetles. Distant cousin of the ladybug. The nasty branch of the family,” she said to the bug before dropping it. She took a flip-flop off her foot and squashed the bug into the ground. “Last summer, they ruined my beans.” She leaned over and yelled into the plant. “That is
not
happening this year.”

 

Two hours later, they were all crowded around Ernestine’s creaky kitchen table, brainstorming band names. A thunderstorm had driven them inside. A platter piled high with empty corncobs and bare chicken bones sat next to another with a pinkish-gold puddle of olive oil dotted with tomato seeds.

The booking agent who signed the band wanted them to come up with a new name. Something with a ring to it. Something people would pay attention to and remember. The one simple word “Quinn” wouldn’t do.

The boys were reluctant. They all felt loyal to Ernestine for getting them started and defending them to their parents. They didn’t want to lose the name she’d given them. But the guy was adamant. They’d decided that they wouldn’t get up from the dinner table until they’d found a new name.

“Dingwall Scotty?” Liam had Ernestine’s seed catalogue out, convinced that the perfect name could be found among the weird names of tomato varieties. And since the book was Ernestine’s, a tomato band name would still be a tribute to her.

Brian and Avery shook their heads.

“Abraham Lincoln?”

Avery scoffed. Brian scowled.

“Box Car Willy? ”

Carly tuned them out and looked around, wondering how it could be possible to miss a person she’d never met.

Because she was already missing Ernestine.

She understood what Brian meant when he explained why they’d always call the house Ernestine’s. Everywhere you looked, you’d see her. Every chair, couch, and bed had a crocheted afghan. The week before, Sheryl had gathered them all up and arranged them by decade. Wild, fluorescent colors from the sixties, earth tones from the seventies, mauves and purples from the eighties. Then it started all over again with the wild colors in the nineties.

The kitchen drawers were full of her handmade pot-holders, and all over the house you’d find framed needlepoint prayers and inspirational phrases about life, lemons and lemonade, God at your side and the wind at your back. If you picked a book up off the shelf, chances are some little bit of paper would fall out, with a note about what she needed at the store, or a question about a recipe. Sometimes it was a passage she’d copied out from the book, or notes to herself ranging from the mundane—“call carpet cleaner” and “check with Michael about Monday”—to the utterly mysterious: “seventeen silver birds’ nests.”

They called these Ernestineabilia, and had been taping them to the wall next to the refrigerator as they appeared. It was covered in scraps of paper in varying colors and sizes, all with Ernestine’s neat, schoolteacherish handwriting.

Carly didn’t mean to suggest a band name when she said “Ernestine is everywhere.”

But as soon as she said it, everyone stopped talking and looked at her.

Brian repeated it slowly. “Ernestine . . . is . . . Everywhere.”

Liam said it faster, “ErnestineisEverywhere.”

“EiE for short,” Avery said.

Sheryl smacked the table. “Of course! That’s brilliant, Carly. Brilliant.”

CARLY’SWEEK
in Ohio was spent helping her father transform what had been the guest room into a pink paradise for the baby. Carly had to sleep on a pullout couch in the study her father and Ann shared. The room was crammed with cases of diapers and other assorted baby gear.

She returned to New York, where home was now a fifth-floor walk-up in an uptown neighborhood, a part of town so indistinct it didn’t have a name. Not even one of those that real estate agents make up to make nowhere sound like somewhere. Carly’s mother tried, though. For a while she called it the “Outer Upper West Side.” Then it was “Almost Morningside Heights.”

Carly called it “West End of the Earth.”

The only store within five blocks was a little bodega with a huge selection of chips, candy, tropical fruit juices, and beer, but little in the way of real food.

For groceries, they had to walk ten blocks to a D’Agostino on Broadway. The building had no laundry room. Washing clothes required a four-block walk, an hour and a half of sitting (longer if you had to wait for a machine), and at least ten dollars’ worth of quarters.

The apartment had two small rooms: the bedroom, where her mother and Jess slept, was big enough for a bed and a small bedside table. The second room contained everything else—living room, kitchen, and Carly’s room, which wasn’t really a room but a corner closed off by a pair of dark blue drapes hanging by a piece of rope nailed to the wall on each end. Carly’s mother got the idea from the IKEA catalogue, which was full of impossibly happy people living in impossibly small places.

The first weekend Carly was back in the city, Jess went to Nick’s, and Carly went to IKEA with her mother. They bought shelves and brackets, under-the-bed drawers and hooks in almost every size the store carried.

The hooks made Isabelle optimistic about the apartment.

“We can do this,” she kept saying. “A hook for everything and everything on its hook.”

And, “I promise this is just temporary. I’ll find us a better place.”

 

When Nick dropped Jess off on Sunday morning, he offered to help put the stuff together and mount the hooks on the walls for them. He seemed happy when Isabelle accepted his offer, and he said he’d come back that afternoon with his tools. Carly was relieved to see that they were being civil with each other. Kind of almost even friendly.

But then after he left, her mother asked Jess about her weekend, and Jess told them about how much fun she had with Nick and his friend Chantal, how they watched a movie that included a scene with a man and a woman taking a bath together and splashing a lot of water on the floor.

Isabelle’s face went white. She sat there for a second, her lips scrunched tight. Like she was deciding whether or not to ask the question. Finally she did.

“Did Chantal sleep over?”

Jess giggled. “No!”

Isabelle closed her eyes and took a long, relieved breath.

“But she came back for breakfast in the morning. She brought pastries—corrsants and—”

Before Jess could finish, Isabelle stood up, grabbed her phone, and disappeared into the bedroom. After the first “How could you?” Carly whisked Jess outside, promising a trip to the playground in Riverside Park and her choice of chips at Nuevo Mundo.

Carly and Isabelle didn’t see eye to eye on much those days, but she was with her mother on this one:

How
could
he? Wasn’t there, like, a mandatory waiting period before you were supposed to introduce your kid to your new girlfriend?

It wasn’t just the timing, though. When Isabelle and Nick first got together, they used to fake Carly out with the coming-over-for-breakfast trick. Nick would be there when she went to bed, but not when she woke up. Then, suspiciously soon after she’d gotten out of bed, he’d suddenly show up with the newspaper and bagels, pretending to “come over for breakfast” when what he’d really done was sneak out as soon as they heard Carly stir. When the truth finally dawned on Carly a few years later, they all laughed about it together. It was their family joke.

 

The IKEA stuff stayed in boxes.

Most of it, anyway. Carly put together this one piece they had bought for her “room”: a tall, narrow cubbyhole/ shelf thing “perfect for making the most of small urban spaces,” according to the catalogue.

It took her three hours. Four if she counted the ten-block search for a place to buy a screwdriver and wrench. She did her best to follow the nonverbal instructions, did everything the smiling cartoon IKEA man did, but something wasn’t right. She had to prop it in the corner to keep it from falling over. Despite her efforts to even it out with folded bits of cardboard, it wobbled every time she put something away or got something out.

 

Isabelle’s dreams of living large in small spaces seemed to fizzle after that incident. She stopped looking for apartments. She pretty much stopped cooking. And she didn’t do much talking, either.

Always the professional, she still managed to get up and go to work every day, driving all the Bellwin seniors about their applications and essays as hard as she’d always done.

That was the other thing.

As the daughter of the college-placement director at the Julia Bellwin School for Girls, Carly was quite familiar with the annual collective insanity that gripped 25 percent of the upper-school population and their parents every fall.

Even though most of them hired private consultants, and even though Isabelle had a staff of associates, Bellwin parents expected Isabelle Greene, placement counselor extraordinaire, to “be there for them” and their daughters during this trying time.

College-crazed parents were the reason they had an unlisted home number and the reason Carly was under strict orders
never
to give her mother’s cell number to anyone she hadn’t preauthorized. One Sunday morning about three years before, Carly, Jess, and Isabelle had been accosted by Lindsey Nakashima, her mother,
and
her father when they walked out of their building on their way to the park. They’d obviously been waiting a long time. Each held a different version of Lindsey’s personal statement for Harvard. The early-action deadline was the next day, and they couldn’t decide whether Lindsey should go with the one about how capoeira had changed her life, or the one about her homeless friend, Nadine, whose grit and determination had opened Lindsey’s eyes to the injustices of the world and the strength of the human spirit.

And yet, in spite of all she’d seen and heard over the years, Carly was still caught off guard in September when everyone around her turned into a freaked-out zombie, unable to talk about anything except “apps.”

Even Val. Even though she had always made fun of the craziness before.

Carly tried not to hold it against her. Val had more to worry about than most of the other Ivy League aspirers. She didn’t just need to get in; she needed financial aid. Because she would be the first generation of her family to go to college, Val was eligible for several special scholarships at the schools where she was applying. These programs often had their own separate, additional applications, so Val was doubly busy.

And then there was Jake. He was now at Cornell, but that didn’t necessarily free up time. When she wasn’t staring into her computer, working on the various versions of her personal statement, Val was staring at her phone, smiling at Jake’s nonstop texts.

Carly and Val never talked about it explicitly, but it was clear that their friendship was changing.

Val and Brian met twice, and neither time did anything to dispel Val’s assumptions about him or to convince her that he was the great, affectionate, level-headed guy Carly knew him to be.

The first time was when Carly dragged Val to a gig, one of the Thursday-night new-band showcases at Train. They could only stay until eleven, and EiE didn’t go on until ten thirty, which meant that the only opportunity for Carly to introduce them was before the show, and Brian was never at his interpersonal best before a show. The pressure of performing in New York had made this even worse, and when Carly brought Val backstage to introduce them, Brian barely looked up from his bass.