Jane (27 page)

His grip tightened. Then, suddenly, he released me.

“You’re leaving me?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t care how much you’re hurting me?”

“I do care,” I said, and stood on tiptoe to smooth his hair and kiss his cheek. Then I walked straight to my room and locked the door behind me.

After a night of strange and vivid dreams, I woke just before dawn. I had packed before I went to bed: a few changes of clothes, my pearl earrings, the passbook to my savings account, my paints and brushes. I left behind the clothes Nico had bought me, the paintings I had done at Thornfield Park, and my small collection of books; these were luxuries I didn’t have room for in the small suitcase I was taking with me. On my way out the door, I stopped in the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of water, and made myself a sandwich for the journey.

I slipped out of the house quietly. The lawn was wet with dew, and as I hurried downhill, I found myself immersed in morning fog. The grounds smelled like fresh air, newly mowed grass, and the first hint of autumn. At the bottom of the hill stood the guardhouse. I dreaded the thought of passing it; what if Nico had
ordered the guard not to let me leave the grounds? The guard on duty was the same one who had smiled at me the day I first met Nico. He gave me a questioning look as I approached but pushed the button that opened the gate, saying only “Good morning, miss.”

It was a very long walk into town, so I planned to call a cab once I’d gotten off the road that led to Thornfield Park. If Nico had wanted to find me, it wouldn’t have been hard; he’d simply have to go in one direction and send someone else in the opposite. I didn’t think he would hunt me down and drag me back. Still, I was troubled by the violent anger he’d shown me — if only for a moment — the night before. How strange it was to fear being forcibly returned to Thornfield Park, the place in the world I loved most. But I
was
afraid, as though my will were a very high, thin branch from which I was dangling, a branch that could snap at any moment.

My head down, I hurried toward town. Eventually I came to a cross street and turned off the main road, zigzagging into the heart of a housing development I’d never seen before. There I found a street corner — Hyacinth Avenue and Rising Sun Drive — and called information on my cell phone for a cab company. The dispatcher promised to send someone right over. The cash I had in my wallet — several twenty dollar bills — seemed like enough to cover the cab fare with a bit left over.

The morning was colder than I had expected. I dug a sweater out of my suitcase and jogged in place awhile to keep warm. It took almost half an hour for the cab to arrive, long enough for me to second-guess my decision to leave and to have qualms about head
ing out into a world where nobody, not one soul, cared about me. I thought of Nico, angry and sad and possibly desperate, and of how easy it would be to turn around and go to him. But then I thought of the sound of Bibi’s voice when she had called his name, like someone happy to see a dear, old friend, and how gently Nico had covered her with the blanket when she’d succumbed to the hypodermic. Something in me froze at these recollections. Was I jealous? Maybe, but as I waited on Hyacinth Avenue in the morning chill, it felt like more than that, as though the higher part of my nature was telling me to walk away from something that could do me harm, something that could erode my soul and my sense of self. It felt like I was doing the right thing, and maybe I was.

When the cab pulled up, its driver was in no mood to speak. Once I’d told him to take me to New Haven, he turned up his talk-radio station, which was fine with me. My hastily conceived plan was to lose myself someplace anonymous and urban. I didn’t know much about New Haven except that Yale was there and a good portion of the city was poor. Somewhere between the wealthy students and the poor townies, I hoped I could blend in and find work.

Beyond New Haven loomed New York City. If all else failed, I could take a Greyhound from the smaller city to the larger one. For the time being, though, Manhattan was out of my reach. Rent there was exorbitant, and I couldn’t turn up on my sister’s doorstep. Even if I convinced her to take me in, I could be tracked down there too easily, and I knew my sister couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret from someone as rich and famous as Nico. Also, the obvious way to find a new job — Discriminating Nannies, Inc. — was out
of the question. They would want a reference from my previous employer, for one thing. For another, their office was the only one on the planet through which Nico would be fairly certain to find me, if he wanted to. I had to start fresh somewhere. New Haven would be the place.

“What street?” the cabbie asked as we entered the city. The best answer I could come up with was Yale University, anywhere on campus. Fall semester had apparently begun; students swarmed across the road at every crosswalk. He pulled over on a tree-lined avenue and let me out. I stood for a long time, clutching the handle of my suitcase, while students my age walked past talking animatedly, backpacks slung over their shoulders, looking as if they had never in their lives experienced a moment of not knowing exactly where they were headed.

I spent that afternoon trying to set up interviews for apartments I had found through Yale’s off-campus housing service. It was discouraging work. For one thing, rents were higher than I expected. I left voice-mail messages at five of the six group houses that were more or less in my price range; an actual human being picked up the phone at the sixth house and told me tersely that the room had already been rented. I was beginning to see how naive I’d been to think I might have a place to sleep lined up by nightfall. Even if someone had wanted to speak with me, how attractive a housemate would I be with no job and no money other than what was in my measly savings account?

By midafternoon it occurred to me that what I should have done first was line up a job. I found my way to a main drag near campus and began going door to door. The first
HELP WANTED
sign
I ran across was in the window of a pizza parlor. A bored-looking counter girl gave me an application to fill out. I stared at it a long time, realizing the obvious: I had no address to put down, no experience in food service, no references except for a couple of teachers back at college and the families I used to babysit for, and no way to account for the hole in my résumé where Nico Rathburn had been. I did have a phone number, but as I wrote it in, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d paid my phone bill, which probably meant the bill was on its way to me at Thornfield Park. Before long my payment would be past due and I wouldn’t be able to use my cell phone.

By the time I handed in the application and the counter girl assured me the manager would call if he was interested, I could feel panic beginning to set in. As badly as I needed an apartment and a job, what I needed most of all was someplace to sleep that night. Back out on the street, I found a bench outside a grocery store and sat down to call information on my cell phone. I found a Motel 6 in the New Haven area, although its distance from where I was standing was a mystery I’d have to solve later. The cost of a one-night stay brought me up short. At that rate, it wouldn’t take long for me to burn through most of my savings. Then where would I get the money for a deposit on a place to live?

I had eaten the sandwich I’d packed for the road long ago. It tasted like home, and as I swallowed the last few bites I had felt like crying. Walter’s sourdough bread seemed like my last link to safety, comfort, dignity, and people who cared about me. As miserable as I was beginning to feel, I realized that worries about where
I would sleep and how I would earn money had so far that day driven out the pain of missing Nico. I was almost out of cash and would have to find an ATM soon — one that would probably have a huge withdrawal fee — but I resolved to use the last of the money I had with me to buy something to eat.

At a nearby deli I ordered the cheapest meal I could find — a bagel with cream cheese and a glass of ice water. The sweet-faced college-age waitress wore a crisp blue uniform and smiled as she took my order; I wanted to throw my arms around her as though she were a long-lost friend. Instead, I asked if the restaurant had a phone book I could look at. She brought it with my bagel. “Here you go. Take as long as you want.”

I turned to the Yellow Pages and looked up
youth hostel,
finding not one entry. Next, I tried
boardinghouses
. There were five of those, but none in New Haven proper. I looked up
motels
and found pages of listings, but a few phone calls reinforced my earlier notion that the cost of a few nights in one of them would devour my whole bank account.

By then, I’d exhausted every idea I could think of except one. I looked up
homeless shelter
and came up with nothing but a low-income housing complex — maybe useful for the future but not much help for the quickly approaching night. So I tried
human service organizations.
If that failed me, the next best options on my shrinking list of possibilities would be sneaking into a campus library to sleep sitting up in a study carrel or maybe stretching out under some shrubbery. Or crawling back to Thornfield Park, returning to Nico out of need and desperation. No, it would have
to be the library or the shrubbery, unless I could find one helpful agency in the long list of soup kitchens and Head Start programs. But the list yielded nothing that sounded remotely like a shelter.

As I sat in the booth clutching my phone, a new worry occurred to me. Could Nico use my cell phone to track my whereabouts? Since we’d been in each other’s company almost the whole time that we’d been a couple, I’d never had a reason to give him my phone number, but my phone bill was on its way to Thornfield Park and might be in the mailbox there already. Even if Nico couldn’t track me down, he could call me once the bill arrived and he had my number. Would I really have the strength not to go back to him if he called? Especially if I were sleeping among the homeless? No, I would have to ditch my phone somewhere. But then how would I ever get a job?

Another troubling thought slapped me across the face. If I tried to withdraw money from my savings account back in Old Lyme, Nico might be able to track me down. Maybe this was a paranoid notion; I had no way of knowing for sure. I could close my account at the First National Bank of Old Lyme, but wouldn’t I have to go all the way back there to do it? Suddenly I felt exhausted by logistics. If I took another cab back toward Thornfield Park, I doubted I’d have the strength to leave again. I took out my wallet and thumbed through it. I had about twenty-seven dollars and change left, not enough for a night in even the cheapest hotel. And then I remembered my pearl earrings. My parents had given them to me on my sixteenth birthday. My father’s eyes had lit up when I kissed him on the cheek and thanked him, though as usual he’d been hard-pressed for words.

But I couldn’t think of that now. I looked up
pawn shops
in the Yellow Pages. There were hundreds, but I had no way of knowing which ones were within walking distance. I rifled through the pages, my eyes glazing over.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“Just the check, please,” I told the sweet-faced waitress. “But maybe you could help me?” I pushed the phone book toward her. “Do you recognize any of these addresses? Are any of these shops near here?”

“I’ll take this out back and ask the manager,” she said. “He’ll know.”

A few minutes later she came back with a list jotted in pencil on the back of a piece of scrap paper. “He says this one’s just a few blocks in that direction.” She pointed. “And these two aren’t much farther.”

I thanked her profusely, paid the check, left a tip, and started down the road. The gray-faced old man behind the counter of the dimly lit pawn shop offered me just fifty dollars for my earrings.

“But they’re worth much more than that,” I protested.

He shrugged. What could I do? I took the money. According to the slip he gave me, I had three months to come back and retrieve them. But when I tried to imagine where I would be living and what I would be doing in three months, my mind began spinning. The thought of my future made my limbs feel heavy and my mind numb. All I wanted was a quiet place to lie down.

As darkness fell that night, I kept to the edges of campus, trying to come up with a plan. One thing seemed certain: I couldn’t spend
the cash in my wallet until I’d figured out a way to bring in more; I would need that money to eat. As streetlights switched on, I walked across a well-tended lawn past a small stampede of young men playing touch football; just before me on the path, a trio of carefully dressed young women seemed headed somewhere festive. High heels clattering against the sidewalk, they shrieked with laughter and talked loudly about somebody named Smedley. At one point, caught up in their conversation, they stopped completely, blocking my way. As I walked around them, I felt invisible. Then I wished I were a ghost, able to walk through walls and get into the library — a warm, quiet place to hide until dawn. Entering through the front door was out of the question; when I tried, a guard asked me for my ID card, and I had to apologize and retreat. Similar guards sat stationed at the entrance of each dormitory I passed. I stood a moment before each welcoming facade, looking up at the brightly lit rooms above. Some windows were cheerily decorated. One had been strung with tiny lights shaped like red chili peppers; a rainbow banner hung from another. Music seeped from the closed windows — reggae from one, death metal from another. I hesitated a long moment. If I were a better liar, I could probably bluff my way in, but I’d never been able to lie without blushing and stammering. And even if I did get in, I’d have to sit up in the lounge, pretending to belong there all night long. The very idea exhausted me.

I kept walking, hoping for some opportunity for rest to present itself. The full moon had risen. Hanging just above the skyline, it looked enormous and pumpkin orange. I noticed a few benches I could stretch out on, but I didn’t want to be that obvious. Then
I passed a wall of shrubs with a person-sized space under the bottommost branches. Could I bring myself to sleep down there, and would darkness and those branches camouflage me from those who might want to do me harm or arrest me for vagrancy? I thought of the cobwebbed attic crawl space where my brother had forced me to spend that long and terrifying night. Though my shoes were chafing the backs of my heels, I kept slogging along, retracing my steps from earlier that day. I reached the edge of campus, crossed several streets, and wound up in front of the diner where I’d eaten earlier. This time, I noticed a small red neon sign that said
OPEN 24 HOURS.