Stalker Girl (6 page)

“And you don’t hate it.”

“Yeah. I do. I’ve waited years for this trip.
Years
.”

“You can’t hold that against the kid.”

“Wanna bet?” Carly knew she wouldn’t, though, not once it was here. “And no way am I going there for the summer.”

“Of course not. But what are you going to do?”

Carly shrugged. “Maybe volunteer at the Brooklyn dig again.”

“Okay. Good. And you’ll work here nights.”

“Is your mother okay with that?”

“She will be. Hey,
mamá—
” Val’s mother was standing at a podium by the front door, going over the night’s reservations with Val’s uncle, Pedro. “Can Carly work here this summer?”

“I thought she was going to Greece.”

“Turkey,” Carly said. “The part that used to be Greece.” Like it mattered. “But now I’m not going anyway.”

“Why not? You were so excited.”

Val launched into rapid Spanish that, from the way Angela ran over to the bar and hugged her, Carly gathered contained her father’s news.

“You can work all the hours you need. Maybe even let you wait tables.” Angela clicked her way back to the podium.

There was good money to be made waiting tables. Val said waiters and waitresses made two hundred dollars some nights.

“We could indulge ourselves a little,” Val said. “Maybe go to some shows. Some nice restaurants.”

In the grand scheme of things, having your fabulous summer plans canceled for reasons beyond your control isn’t exactly tragic. Carly didn’t doubt her father’s promise to take her the following year. He wasn’t one of those fathers who went around making promises he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep. She knew she’d get there. And she didn’t really have any objections to a new sibling. She already had Jess. And Jess wasn’t bad. Kind of cool, actually. Her seven-year-old company was preferable to the company of many seventeen-year-olds.

Carly was sorry to lose the bragging rights, though. She’d no longer be able to say “I’m going on an archaeological dig in Turkey,” instead of “nothing” in the annual can-you-top-this buzz about fabulous summer plans at the Julia Bellwin School for Girls. For once she had been able to compete with her classmates’ internships at French
Vogue
, their sailing camps off the coast of Maine, their service trips to Guatemala (followed by recovery at a spa in Mexico). But she’d live.

She was disappointed about not going to Turkey. Very disappointed. But by the end of the night she’d started getting used to the idea of staying in the city for the summer. She and Val always had fun together. She could check out the Brooklyn dig.

College kids from all over the country headed to New York in the summer. People from all over the world came here.

So she was staying home in New York. There were worse things.

 

But soon after Carly absorbed her father’s news she got more bad news from her mother, news that would change everything.

Carly spent that night at Val’s, like she did whenever she worked late. The next morning, she called her mother to tell her about Ann’s pregnancy and the canceled trip.

After a strange silence, Isabelle said, “Well, that’s crap timing for us.”

“For us?”

“I mean for you. I know how much you were looking forward to the trip.”

“Yeah. Well, Dad says we’ll go next year.”

“Uh-huh.”

Carly thought her mother sounded weird. Like she had something to say but wasn’t saying it.

“Get this—he wants me to go there for the summer.”

When Carly heard her mother say “Might not be a bad idea,” she knew for sure that something was going on.

“What? This from Ms. Give Me Manhattan or Give Me Death?”

“Listen, Carly. I also have some news.”

“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant, too.”

Judging by the dead air on the other end of the phone, Isabelle didn’t find that funny.

“Can you meet me down here so we can talk in person?”

Carly’s mother often spent Sunday mornings in her office at Bellwin. She said she never got anything done during the regular school day, when she had back-to-back meetings and endless phone conversations with anxious parents, obsessed students, and admissions people. On Sundays she could get the quiet she needed for all the detail work—writing letters, reviewing applications—that went into her job.

When Carly arrived, Isabelle wasted no time getting her news out. After thirteen years and a child though no official marriage, she and Nick were splitting up.

Carly knew they’d had been having problems during the past year. She’d heard the fights, and the silence between them that often followed the fights. She didn’t understand it all, but she thought it had to do with careers and money.

On the surface things were good. Nick was starting to have some serious success as an artist. Museums were buying his giant, room-sized installations. Collectors were buying the smaller, individual sculptures. He’d even had a piece in a show at the Museum of Modern Art the year before.

Isabelle had plenty of success, too. But it wasn’t the kind of success she wanted. Working at Bellwin was never supposed to be a career. It was supposed to be a day job, the thing she did until she could make a living as a writer. But over the years, the day job turned into a day, night, and weekend job. Writing time was squeezed into summers. Once Jess came along, it got even harder for Isabelle to find time to write, and impossible to even think of quitting. The job came with free tuition for her daughters—and in New York, where the good public schools are almost as hard to get into as the private ones, this was huge.

In one of the fights Carly overheard, Nick offered to support Isabelle while she took time off to write. He said he’d pay tuition for both girls, but she wouldn’t let him. She said things were already uneven enough since he owned the loft. Plus she was so out of practice. And there were so many good, younger writers.

 

But that spring things had quieted down, and Carly took the quiet to mean Nick and her mother were working things out. She’d been babysitting for Jess on Monday nights while they went to see a counselor. And on one of those Monday nights after putting Jess to bed, Carly had accidentally walked in on Nick and Isabelle making out. She hadn’t heard them come home when she wandered into the dark kitchen looking for something to eat. She flipped on the light to find her mother up against the counter with her blouse half unbuttoned and Nick awkwardly adjusting his pants.

It was beyond embarrassing but at the same time reassuring. Carly thought it meant things were going to be okay. If they couldn’t keep their hands off each other until they got to the bedroom, that had to mean something, right?

Plus hadn’t they gone away together just a few weeks before?

When she got to her mother’s office, Carly asked about that weekend getaway.

“Oh. Honey, that wasn’t a romantic thing,” Isabelle explained as she flipped through a pile of folders on her desk. “We went out of town so we could finally decide once and for all. We hashed it out and decided we were done. And now that we’ve decided, there’s no point in fighting.”

“But that was weeks ago,” Carly said, trying to get her mother to look at her. But Isabelle wouldn’t look up from her desk.

“We agreed to wait until the school year ended before taking any action.” She picked up the folders and rolled her chair over to the filing cabinet next to her desk. She placed the folders in the long drawer, closed it, and locked it.

“Mom, you’re acting like this is no big deal. Like you didn’t just spend thirteen years with this person. Aren’t you upset? Aren’t you sad? Is this what you want?”

Now Carly had her mother’s attention. Isabelle looked up her daughter. A hint of a tear glistened on the surface of one eye but then disappeared without falling.

“The question isn’t what I want, Carly. It’s just what is. I have to accept it. And move forward. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll take a cab. I’m too tired for the subway.”

 

Carly spent the whole cab ride staring out the window, wondering how she’d managed not to notice this pretty major thing happening right in front of her. Sure, she hadn’t seen them together a lot in the past month. But that wasn’t so unusual. Nick had a show coming up and was putting in long hours in his studio. He did that sometimes when he was under a deadline or caught up in an inspiration. He’d work through the night, taking power naps on the futon he kept in there.

Isabelle seemed to be her usual busy self, dealing with the last of the wait-listers, meeting with next year’s crop of demanding parents. She’d been spending a lot of time in her room reading, but Carly hadn’t thought much of it. She figured it was just the usual end-of-the-school-year exhaustion.

“Now I have to figure out the living situation.”

“The living situation?”

Carly turned to look at her mother but she was staring out the other cab window.

“The loft is Nick’s. We’re going to have to leave.”

When Carly and her mother moved in with Nick twelve years earlier, the Meatpacking District was still a place where they processed animals into meat, not the locale of hot clubs and designer boutiques. Nick’s huge loft was nothing but unfinished industrial space that still smelled slightly of the veal factory it once housed. There were no walls, no adequate heat, and not much in the way of plumbing except an old toilet and sink surrounded by plywood and a bathtub in the middle of the “kitchen,” which consisted of a hotplate and a microwave.

It took four years and a lot of sweat to turn it into the huge, light-filled space it now was—with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and a kitchen with all the latest appliances.

Though she’d never want to go back to those conditions, Carly looked back happily on the years of roughing it. Isabelle had her assistant’s job at Bellwin, but she kept a little desk set up in a corner of Nick’s studio, where she wrote at night and on the weekends. They had a circle of artist and writer friends who would come over for big, loud spaghetti dinners where the talking and laughing would last late into the night.

Nick worked nights tending bar and during the day worked on the loft renovations. So that they wouldn’t have to spend money on preschool, Carly stayed home with Nick while her mother worked. When other kids her age were gluing together popsicle-stick houses, she was sanding floors, installing drywall, and laying tile. Of course she mostly watched while Nick and a few hired guys did most of the real work, but Nick had always made her feel like she was a part of things. She’d fetch their tools, hold the measuring tape, vacuum sawdust.

Nick let her pick out the exact spot along the wall of windows where she liked the view the best and then built her room around it. From her bed she could see across the Hudson to Jersey City or watch the cruise ships and tour boats come and go in the harbor. She’d spent many hours of her life looking out at that view, losing herself in daydreams. Girls at school were always impressed with Carly’s address and the size of the loft. While it was nice to have a lot of space and a great view, for Carly it was never about status. It was about having a place where she belonged and that belonged to her.

The loft was home.

“Can’t we get a place here?” As Carly said this to her mother, the cab pulled up in front of their building. Their new neighbors, a German supermodel whose face had been on the cover of
Vogue
a month earlier and the famous French photographer who took the picture, emerged and signaled for the driver to wait.

Their clothes probably cost more than Carly’s mother could afford for a month’s rent. There wasn’t a unit in the building worth less than two million dollars, and the block was lined with galleries and designer clothing stores.

Isabelle didn’t bother answering the question, and Carly didn’t bother repeating it as they passed Gudrun and Jean-François, who nodded solemnly—or was it smugly?—while holding the cab door.

“The rental market is even worse than I thought,” Isabelle said, turning her key in the wall-mounted locking system.

The door clicked and buzzed. Carly pushed it open.

“I haven’t been able to find anything—anywhere in Manhattan—that we can afford with even half the space we’ll need.”

The lobby still looked like it had when they moved in twelve years before—except for the row of locked mailboxes along the back wall. The cracks and holes in the concrete floor hadn’t been filled, and no one had even tried to remove the graffiti. Carly used to wonder about that until she decided that people who could afford to live there liked it that way. It gave them the illusion of living on the edge.

She pushed the elevator button. Her mother leaned against the wall like she needed the support. Isabelle looked tired. More tired than usual. The circles under her eyes were showing despite the chalky-pink concealer.