Love Walked In (21 page)

The
next evening, while Clare and Cornelia were doing the dishes, the telephone rang, and Cornelia answered it. She carried the phone into the kitchen, tucked it against her shoulder, and began drying a plate with a towel.

“Yes, of course I remember you. How are you?” There was a long pause. “What are you saying?” said Cornelia, and Clare saw her put the plate down very carefully and saw her whole body begin to shake. Clare’s heart started to beat faster.
Mommy.
She mouthed the word, silently; inside her head, the word was a long, earsplitting shriek.

“He’s what? He can’t be,” said Cornelia. “No.”

He. Not Clare’s mother.
Mommy.
She could breathe again.
Mommy, you’re safe.
I’ll stay alive, then, Clare thought.

“Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no,” whispered Cornelia into the phone. She dropped her arms to her sides, the phone dangling from one hand. She stared at Clare without seeing her. Clare had never seen anyone’s eyes look like that. It’s something terrible, she thought. It’s not my mother, but it’s something terrible. Clare started to cry.

Cornelia brought the phone back to her ear. “I need—I need. Could you call me back in a little while? Yes. Thank you.” She pressed a button on the phone.

“Oh, Clare,” she said, brokenly, and as Clare waited for her to say more, the colors in the room got brighter, seemed to buzz with brightness. The only pale object in the room was Cornelia; even her lips were white.

“Teo,” gasped Clare. “What happened to Teo? Tell me.”

For an instant, Cornelia’s face cleared, then it grew strange again. “Not Teo, Clare. Martin. There was a car accident in London. Martin’s dead.”

Entirely without meaning to be, Clare was rocked by an immense relief. Not Teo! She clutched her stomach and bent over, and her sharp exhalation was an “Oh!” of gratitude. Then, as she realized what else Cornelia had said, she straightened and stared at her, dazed.

As though remembering herself, Cornelia rushed to Clare and took her in her arms. “Oh, Clare,” she cried. “Oh, Clare. I’m so sorry. Your father’s dead.”

Before
I say anything else, I need to say this: Martin’s death doesn’t belong to me.

It’s not that I wasn’t sad about it; I was. But the tragedy of his death isn’t my tragedy; it isn’t even Clare’s, although there’s enough in that story to break anybody’s heart. The fact that rises over every other fact: Martin’s death belongs to Martin. I knew him for an intense three months; he was himself for every second of forty-four years, and then he was taken away from himself. Martin was a baby, fresh inside the glove of his newness, turning his head toward his own name, and then he was a child learning the world, and then he was a man. Do you see what I mean? Forget about cosmic unity, an overarching plan into which every event on Earth fits: Martin lost his chance at life too soon. There’s the tragedy. Don’t think I believe I’m saying anything new. I just needed to say it.

But I also need to move on to me (there it goes, that “I, I, I” thrumming like an engine or a heart), to my story because it’s the only one that’s mine to tell.

Who was I in the days that followed that phone call? I can hardly say. Certainly not what most other people seemed to regard me as: a lost girl, a tiny almost-widow. I stood there at the funeral I’d planned with Martin’s secretary, Theresa Blum, and his lawyer, Woods Rawlings, holding Clare’s hand, imagining what the people around me, and there were a lot of them, saw when they saw me—a child-sized, straight-backed, black-clad figure, heartbroken but stoic, my little head held high on my little neck—and I wanted to throw up. Apart from a child, no one seems to invite pity more than a woman of small stature, and pity poured out of everyone’s eyes, pressed itself into my hand when it was shaken, and freighted down everyone’s voices, as they expressed their deepest sympathies. If I sound angry at them, I’m not. What I felt was mortification and a desire to set the record straight.

There are people whose deaths make you ache with sadness. And then there are people whose deaths prevent the sun from rising, deaths that turn the walls black in every room you walk through, deaths that send storm clouds and a wail swirling through your head so that you can’t hear music and you can’t recognize your furniture or your own face in the mirror. As for this second kind of grief, I never touched it, never even got close enough to brush it with my fingertips.

I was not in love with Martin Grace. I was not. If it seems coldhearted to have held fast to that fact, to have repeated it inside my head even as Chopin’s funeral march filled the air around me, think of how much worse it would have been, at that moment especially, to pretend to anyone, especially to myself, that I was in love with him. To slip downward into that lie would have been obscene, unforgivable.

Martin loved me, though, and you mustn’t think I didn’t value that. Not to pontificate or anything, but this I know: There’s a kind of holiness to love, requited or not, and those people who don’t receive it with gratitude are arrogant beyond saving. At Martin’s funeral, I held fast to that fact too, held fast and then, in the last seconds, let it go. I released my thanks into the air like birds, with the hope that, if they didn’t find Martin, they’d at least add themselves to whatever accumulation of goodness might be out there.

I remember having these thoughts, feeling these emotions. I remember being cold and knotted, dry-eyed and dry-hearted. But so much of what happened smudged and muted in my head even as it was happening. It was, as they say, a blur. Although it was a blur punctuated by stark, staggeringly clear moments—Technicolor moments, so vivid they were almost cruel.

There
was the opulent conference room of Woods Rawlings’s opulent law firm, and his turning his round, robin’s-egg-blue eyes on me like two headlights and asking, across the glossy lake of table, why Clare had been staying with her father.

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it? An extended visit. Is Ms. Hobbes away? Not ill, I hope,” he said in his elegant voice with its Tidewater vowels cooing away.

“Not ill,” I replied, all tranquility. “She needed some time for herself, to travel and think. Replenish. Martin could hardly refuse, since she’s spent so many years raising Clare single-handedly. I’m not sure where she is just now, to tell you the truth, although she mentioned Spain as one of her destinations.” I didn’t look away. I didn’t even blink.

There
was Linny standing in my doorway in a red cowboy shirt.

“Cornelia,” she said neutrally, waiting for a cue from me. How are we handling this? I could hear her ask. What’s our angle? What do you need?

“So Hayes told you where to get one,” I said, flicking one of the pearl snaps with my finger.

“He did, but”—she winked—“this one’s his.” And she gave me a sly, coquettish grin, a smile so utterly Linny that I ate it up like a fresh pear, like manna from heaven, and it nourished my soul.

There
was Teo showing up as if by magic the morning of the funeral, wearing a navy jacket and khakis and smelling like rain.

There
was the ravishing redhead in a Chanel suit throwing herself into my arms after the funeral. “Forgive me,” she sobbed raggedly. “I shouldn’t even tell you this, and it ended ages ago but, God, I loved him. I was mad for him.”

There
was me making waffles for Clare and hearing Martin’s voice, warm and reverberant, behind me in the room. Heard it, as sometimes happened when he spoke to me, with my whole body, so that not only did the tiny bones in my ears vibrate, but also the bones of my spine, the nerve endings in my fingertips. His voice was so present and living that I whipped around to see him and dropped the carton of eggs on the floor. “Your stillnesses,” he said. “Those listening stillnesses.”

And
there was Clare, Clare who—surrounded by me, Teo, and Max (scrawny and ferocious in head-to-toe purple)—had glided through the funeral and through the reception afterward as serenely as a cloud, giving her hand to people who plainly, until that day, had not known she existed. Most of all, there was Clare—oh, sweet child—in the middle of the night, wild-eyed, asking, in a raw voice I will carry in my head forever, “Cornelia, am I an orphan now, Cornelia? Am I an orphan?”

“Did
you ever read
A Little Princess
?” asked Clare from under a pile of coats.

She and Teo were on assignment, shopping for a new winter coat for him. It was the day after her father’s funeral, a freezing, azure day with the kind of sun that is all blinding brilliance and no warmth. “A shrill sun,” Cornelia had said that morning as the three of them left her apartment building. “Like a soprano singing her head off in your ear.” Clare had found that interesting, but Teo had said, “Someone
really
needs to chunk a snowball at you,” even though there wasn’t any snow.

“He’s just mad because I’m making him shop,” Cornelia had said, putting her arm around Clare conspiratorially. “I’m depending on you, Clare. If he starts heading anywhere near Army/Navy surplus, you’re authorized to shoot him.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have shown up with a haircut,” groaned Teo. “Give her an inch, and she takes a mile.”

“Clare, could you please explain to Teo that with beauty comes a certain responsibility to that beauty? He’s never accepted that fact, not fully,” said Cornelia, shaking her head. Clare noticed faint, bruise-colored semicircles above the points of Cornelia’s cheekbones. It occurred to her that this playful back-and-forth with Teo only appeared effortless.

“With beauty comes responsibility, Teo,” said Clare sternly.

“And you might say a word or two about moth holes,” said Cornelia.

Clare had pointed solemnly to the holes in Teo’s peacoat. “Moth holes. You have some,” she said.

“That was three words,” grumbled Teo.

His choices had been a fancy men’s clothing boutique and a department store, and when Teo had mumbled something about allergies and cleaning fluid that made no sense to Clare, Cornelia had squeezed his arm sympathetically and written down the address of the boutique.

“A boutique,” Teo had intoned dully. But it wasn’t so bad, Clare thought. In fact, she liked it, the vast old building with its fancy moldings—flowers and grapes—and a painted mural aglow on the remote ceiling.

The salesman, a short, sleek, elegant man who reminded Clare of a seal, listened to her description of what they were looking for and then sized Teo up with his large, shiny black eyes. When Teo took off his coat to find the size inside, the man said, “Not necessary, but I would be happy to…” and he held his hand out with his fingers together (like a karate chop, thought Clare) so that Teo could hang the coat on it as though the man were a coatrack.

He’d stood Teo in front of a huge three-way mirror and then had left Teo and Clare alone with at least a dozen coats. Teo would try one on, get Clare’s opinion, and then toss the coat onto her lap.

Just as she was asking Teo about
A Little Princess,
the salesman glided up with an inscrutable smile.

“I’ve read it,” he said smoothly. “And how are we doing with the coats?”

“You’ve read it?” asked Clare with surprise.

“The monkey. A monkey comes to the attic to visit the little girl. I liked that monkey.” The salesman spoke dreamily, looking off into the distance. Then he glided away.

Teo and Clare stared at each other and burst out laughing, trying to stay quiet so as not to hurt the man’s feelings. Clare buried her face in the coats and laughed until her sides ached.

When they’d recovered, Teo said, “I didn’t read it. But I wish I had. I didn’t know it had a monkey in it.”

“This girl, Sara Crewe, her father dies,” said Clare.

Teo stood in a coffee-bean-colored coat that was shaped a lot like his old peacoat, looking at Clare in the mirror, waiting for more.

“And it’s terrible. The night after she hears, she lives through ‘a wild, unchildlike woe.’” Clare watched Teo’s face. “And there’s another word: anguish. ‘The anguish of her young mind.’ Doesn’t that word sound like what it is? Doesn’t it sound like the worst thing you could feel?”

“It really does,” said Teo after a pause. Clare loved this about Teo, the way he didn’t push or get impatient, but listened and let her make her own way to what she wanted to say.

“When Cornelia got that phone call, I was there, and I knew someone was dead, and I was afraid it was you. And I felt—anguish.” She had to get it out. “And when I found out it wasn’t you, I was so glad.”

She breathed and stared at him in the mirror, then she clenched her hands into two fists. Time to finish. “I felt sad when I found out who it really was. But I felt happy that you weren’t dead before I felt sad that he was. I felt happy
more
. So what that must mean is that even if I didn’t want him to die, I didn’t want you to die more. And he’s my father. That seems—evil.” She unclenched her fists and spread her fingers, letting go. Teo might hate her now, but she’d said what she needed to say.

Teo sat down next to her on the floor, and said, “Sometimes, you meet a person and, right away, it seems like you’ve known that person for a long time. I feel that way about you. Like I know you even better than people I’ve known for years.”

Clare nodded.

“So, I hope it’s OK if I ask you to trust me about something, even though we haven’t known each other very long.”

Clare stared down at Teo’s long hands, then up at his green eyes. Without stopping to think, she’d trusted him from the first minute she’d met him. And even though she liked to understand everything, to ask questions and follow an idea through to its conclusion, she didn’t mind not understanding her faith in Teo.

“I trust you,” she said simply.

“Here’s what I think: You are a good person. You’re made of good materials. That’s just a fact. Ollie would say it’s in your cells, that it’s built into your DNA just like your brown eyes. Wherever it comes from, just being you is being good.”

Clare concentrated on the words, trying hard to press them into her memory and wishing they were solid objects that she could keep and carry around with her.

“I don’t mean you can’t make mistakes like the rest of us. But you’re luckier than the rest of us because if you just do what feels the most like you, you’ll be fine. And forget about evil. There’s just no way.”

Clare sat under the coats, next to the three gleaming rectangles of mirror, with the store’s mellow lights falling on her and the bright day outside, and she felt illuminated too. She thought relief and gratitude must be shining out of her skin.

“Thanks,” she said finally, hoping he could see how much she meant it.

Teo smiled and started to stand up, but Clare reached for his coat sleeve and held its unexpected buttery softness in her hand. Teo sat down again.

“You know what?” she said, nearly whispering. She cleared her throat and spoke up. “He didn’t love me.”

It was a fact, not a complaint. It felt important just to have it out there. She expected Teo to contradict her, even though she knew she was right. But he just said, “Then he missed out.”

Clare touched the sleeve of Teo’s coat again and said, “I like this one.”

Teo looked down at the coat and said, “Doesn’t itch. Will hide dirt. Might get Cornelia off my back, the little monkey.” He grinned at her. “We’ll take it.”

That
evening, after dinner, Clare went into Cornelia’s bedroom to write what Teo had said to her about being good in her journal. Getting the words right mattered, but so did describing his voice when he talked and capturing the feeling that filled her as he spoke and after he spoke. She thought about that word “capture,” how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer’s job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn’t kill what she caught, didn’t stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stories alive. She felt skeptical about this way of thinking about writing, she decided, but was glad to have considered it.

When she heard Teo and Cornelia move from the kitchen, where they’d been doing dishes, to the living room, putting down her notebook and stepping to the doorway of the bedroom to listen to them came automatically.

“I fired our friend Lloyd,” announced Cornelia, flopping onto the couch.

“You did?” asked Teo. Clare couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded odd, cautious maybe.

“He didn’t inspire confidence. Not in me, anyway. Did he in you?”

“Not especially. But Martin was pretty concerned with being discreet, not letting her friends and neighbors know what was up. Maybe if Lloyd had a longer leash?”

Cornelia sat up, suddenly full of fire.

“But don’t you see? A longer leash is the last thing we want right now. Discretion matters more than ever.” She spoke in a low, charged voice, like someone who would rather be yelling.

“Cornelia…,” Teo began, sounding wary.

“Viviana’s traveling. Clare’s staying with me until she gets back. That’s our story. It works. If people get wind of the real situation. Well, think about it, Teo.”

Clare tried to think about it, but she wasn’t sure what she or Teo was supposed to be coming up with. She waited to see what Teo would say next.

“Cornelia, maybe it’s time to get the police involved.” A chill traveled over Clare.

“No,” said Cornelia. “No, no, no. How could you suggest that?”

Clare didn’t know how he could either. Teo didn’t say anything.

“Teo, we sit here discussing Clare’s life. Deciding her fate like those fat old ladies with their thread and scissors.”

Clare had no idea what this might mean. Fat old ladies?

“Fat old ladies?” said Teo.

“I always picture them as fat. Probably, they’re not fat. Forget it. What I’m saying is, let’s include Clare. Let’s call her in here right now.”

Clare remembered what Teo had said about her being made of good material. Was it good to spy on people who cared about you? She took a deep breath and stepped out of the bedroom. Teo and Cornelia stared at her.

“I was spying. Not spying, but I was listening to your conversation, which I guess is—spying.” She paused, feeling her heartbeat in her temples. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid of not knowing what’s going on.”

“Of course, you are,” Cornelia said gently. “We should have had you in here all along. I think we were afraid we’d have to say things that might be hard for you to hear.”

Clare walked over to the sofa and smoothed her hand over the embroidered shawl draped over its back. She hated to sit against something so beautiful without at least touching it first, letting it know she’d noticed it.

Cornelia stood and, with a swift motion, lifted the shawl off the sofa, set it floating in the air like a great butterfly, and then let it alight on Clare’s shoulders.

“Will you forgive us?” asked Cornelia. Clare didn’t know what to say; she couldn’t quite figure out what Cornelia and Teo would need to be forgiven for. She just nodded, then sat down on the sofa and tucked her feet underneath her. Cornelia smiled and did the same.

“Teo thinks we should consider calling the police. Get them to help find your mother.”

“I don’t want police,” said Clare. She didn’t like how she sounded, like a baby who might stomp her feet and throw a tantrum. But she didn’t want police. The thought of police made her feel sick.

“Teo?” said Cornelia. Teo flushed and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“As far as I can tell,” he said in his steadiest manner, “the system is designed to help families. To keep families together. When they find your mother, they’ll help her in the ways she needs to be helped so that she can take care of you the way she always did.”

“I want her to be the way she used to be. I don’t…” Clare hesitated. “I can’t go back to, to living with her when she’s sick. But…”

She looked from Cornelia to Teo. “But if we call the police, will I be able to stay with Cornelia while they look for my mom? Will I be able to stay here while they’re making her well?”

Cornelia picked up Clare’s hand and squeezed it. Clare saw that her eyes were wet.

“Maybe,” said Teo. “I think they try to keep kids with people they know.”

“Maybe, but maybe not,” Clare said bleakly. “Right? Maybe not.” She pictured Anne Shirley in the orphan asylum and the mean woman she’d lived with before ending up there. There’d been one sad tree in the yard of the asylum, and Anne’s only friends had been imaginary girls. Clare felt stricken.

“I think I’ll just wait here until my mom comes back,” she said faintly. “And then, maybe you can help her find a doctor.”

Teo rubbed his eyes with both hands, then looked at Cornelia.

“Clare’s been through too much upheaval already,” said Cornelia decisively. But Clare saw that the expression in her eyes was far less certain. “You have to see that.”

“Of course, I see that,” Teo said, frustration edging his voice, “but have you thought about…” He shut his eyes for a few seconds. Then he put his elbows on his knees and leaned toward Clare.

“I’m sorry, Clare, but I have to say this,” he said.

“Don’t,” Cornelia said bitterly. “Just don’t. This insistence on the truth, it’s brutal, do you know that? Who are you, Atticus Finch? Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Just accept it!”

Clare knew who Atticus Finch was. Scout and Jem’s father. A hero. And Bob Ewell. Clare remembered how he’d chased the kids, how Scout had bounced around, befuddled inside her turkey costume. Or was it a ham? And how did Atticus and Bob fit in to what she and Teo and Cornelia were discussing, anyway? To her own amazement, Clare laughed.

“Clare?” Cornelia turned toward her, big-eyed.

“I’m sorry, but—Atticus Finch? I’m just so confused.” She laughed again. What could be wrong with her all of a sudden? The laughter took over her whole body; she gave in.

“It’s you,” Teo said coolly to Cornelia. “You’re just so weird.”

Cornelia lowered her brows, but the corner of her mouth tweaked upward. The wire of tension between Cornelia and Teo had snapped. Clare let her laugh run its course, like a fever; afterward she breathed raggedly, wrung out, but ready. The shawl had slipped off her shoulders; now, she pulled it up and held on to it with both hands.

“I know what you were going to say, Teo,” Clare said quietly, at long last. That’s how it seemed, at long last. At long last, these words, this moment.