Marooned in Manhattan (17 page)

Chapter 31

T
he next morning was my second last
day. Kylie came over to help me pack. I told her she didn’t have to, but she insisted.

‘I love a project,’ she told me.

She arrived with highlighters, stickers, and squares of soft, tissue packing paper, which she laid out carefully on my bed. I thought of my pair of grubby runners.

‘I’m not sure I need all this,’ I said.

‘Yes, you do,’ she said. ‘There’s an art to packing.’

‘I usually just open my suitcase, throw everything in, squeeze stuff in at the top and then sit on it to close it,’ I pointed out.

Kylie looked horrified.

‘It’s a crime to treat clothes like that, even clothes like yours. Now, pass me all your shoes first; they should go at the bottom.’

I complied listlessly.

‘This is the pile of the clothes that, trust me, you don’t want to keep. You can donate them to charity,’ she said, pointing at a heap on the bed at the top of which she had added my very scruffy denim shorts.

I began to sort through the pile, taking items out.

‘Will all of your friends be in school with you?’ she asked, putting my denim shorts very firmly back into the donation pile.

‘No, we’ll be starting secondary school now, which is like your high school, except we start when we are twelve or thirteen. Most of my old friends are going to an all-Irish school on the north side of Dublin, but Janet has moved in with Brendan in Bray, which is too far away, so I will go to the local secondary school there and I won’t know anyone.’

‘Not knowing anyone stinks. If you stayed here, you could go to school with Greg and me!’ exclaimed Kylie.

‘I’m used to starting new schools,’ I assured her.

‘Are you taking Sam on the plane with you?’ she asked.

I glanced over at Sam, happily sunning himself on the window ledge.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Scott doesn’t think that would be fair to him. We’re going to put him back in Turtle Pond in the Park in the morning.’

‘That’s so sad,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you have to leave?’

I nodded.

‘I can’t bear being a money-sucking leech, driving the clinic out of business.’

‘You should talk to Scott about it,’ she urged. ‘You’re such a big fan of using words. Why don’t you use your words now?’

‘Sometimes, there are no words,’ I said, feeling very grown up.

She looked doubtful.

‘Can I have the tape of Leela? Greg wants to hear it.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘We’re both coming with you and Scott to the airport tomorrow.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, giving her a big hug.

I ate lunch with Joanna on a bench in the Park, near the lake. We had sandwiches; a turkey club, easy on the mayo for me and a chicken salad wrap for her. We watched tourists clumsily rowing little boats on the lake. An old man and an old woman kissed and the man dropped one of the oars into the lake and the woman laughed.

‘I have an older sister and two older brothers. I always wanted a little sister,’ Joanna said. ‘And you are like a little sister to me.’

I felt tears pricking at the back of my eyelids and I sniffed and dashed them back.

‘For a long time, I couldn’t cry at all. Now I cry all the time,’ I said.

‘It gets worse when you get older,’ Joanna replied, ‘and it happens at the oddest times. Back in April, a cat died on the operating table, during a routine operation. I was devastated, but not as devastated as the owner. Poor Mrs Allingham, that cat was all she had. But I didn’t cry. I had to be professional. And later that night, the man behind me in the line at the drugstore snapped at me and said, “Hurry up, lady,” when I was struggling to find my purse in my bag and I just started crying. I dumped my stuff on the counter and I left.’

I nodded sympathetically.

‘You have to follow your heart, Evie,’ she said. ‘Is your heart telling you to go to Ireland?’

I thought about that. I didn’t want to hurt Scott by having him waste all his money on me, so I think that was coming from my heart.

‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.

‘We will miss you.’

‘And I’ll miss you, all of you. You have to take care of Scott. He falls asleep on the sofa watching TV and wakes up with a stiff neck if someone doesn’t wake him up and make him go to bed. And he never remembers to buy toilet paper so we are always running out and we have to use the cotton pads from the clinic, the ones for cleaning out the big dogs’ ears, so if you remind him about the toilet paper, that would help.’

‘Scott, get toilet paper? I can do that,’ said Joanna.

We strolled back through the Park, around the Great Lawn and past Turtle Pond and out the West 77
^th
Street entrance. As we waited to cross the street, we watched all the kids coming out of the Natural History Museum with their friends and their parents and they looked happy.

Joanna headed straight in to the clinic and I went up to the apartment.

‘Tomorrow’s the big day,’ said Frank in the lobby.

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘We’re going to miss you, Beautiful, and your real nice manners.’

‘I’ll miss you too,’ I said. I finished packing.

Ben sat on the floor with his head in his paws and watched me intently, following my every move. I couldn’t quite look him directly in the eyes.

At last, when everything was zipped up, I wandered out to the kitchen. Scott was sitting on one of the bar stools, tapping something small in his right fist against the glass table – clink, clink, clink.

‘Sit down, Evie,’ he said, patting the bar stool beside him.

I sat.

‘It’s the money. You’re worried about money. Leela convinced you that you are bankrupting me and the clinic.’

I looked up at him.

‘Well, em…’ I stuttered.

‘Evie,’ he said, looking excited, ‘you are being so dumb. The money is a non-issue. We’ll make it work. The clinic is getting busier all the time. Joanna and I want to expand it so we will have a bigger surgery and room for more surgical equipment. Then, we can carry out more operations. And I’m going to make Joanna a partner.’

He continued in a rush, ‘Evie, you are the only family that Ben and I have. What would we do without you? Who will remember about buying toilet paper?’

‘Are you sure about the money?’ I said. ‘It seems to be a lot cheaper to be a kid in Ireland.’

Scott laughed and grabbed my hands and pulled me up from my stool and swung me around.

‘Sure I’m sure,’ he said. ‘You’ll stay, won’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Come on, let’s go downstairs and tell Joanna the good news.’

‘How did you find out?’ I said.

He waved the tape around and put it in his pocket.

‘Finn gave this to me today.’

‘Finn! Finn Winters!’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t believe it! I can’t believe Greg gave the tape to him. We had an agreement, me, Kylie, Greg, everything stayed with us and just us.’

‘Don’t blame Greg,’ said Scott. ‘Finn told me he overheard Greg playing it and he stole it.’

‘He’s a smart kid,’ added Scott, and then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘Not that stealing is right!’

I didn’t know what to think, or to say.

‘I’m going over to see Leela tonight and she’s not going to be torturing any kids anymore. In fact, she will probably find herself out of a job,’ Scott added in his most serious voice, with the angriest look I have ever seen in his eyes.

I almost felt sorry for Leela.

I walked across the floor.

‘It’s such a huge thing that I’m staying, right, Scott?’

‘Huger than huge,’ he said.

‘So, it’s almost practically like an emergency situation,’ I said, looking longingly at the fireman’s pole.

He laughed.

‘Just this once, come over here, we’ll slide down together.’

I leaned forward in front of Scott and put both hands tightly
on the pole. He put his arms around me and the pole.

‘Ready?’

I nodded.

WHOOOOSSSSSSSH. It was brilliant fun although we scared the hell out of a nervous looking cat when we
crash-landed
at the bottom.

The noise drew Joanna out of the examining room and she observed Scott and me sprawled on the floor.

‘Hi, kids,’ she said, drily.

‘It’s an emergency,’ said Scott. ‘Evie, tell her the news!’

After we celebrated with Joanna, and I had called Kylie and Greg, we called Janet about me staying on in America and, once reassured that this is what I wanted, she was tearful, but happy for me. She said that she and Brendan would come to New York on a holiday at Christmas and that I could go visit them next year and go down to Dingle with them for the summer.

I called Deirdre and Cate as well and we agreed that we would always remain friends, no matter what.

Chapter 32

M
ost of the rest of the week was taken
up with doing interviews and placement tests for four different schools. It was nerve-racking and I hoped I got into the same school as Greg and Kylie. This morning, Scott got a letter from one of the schools offering me a place in the seventh grade, but still no word from St Sebastian’s.

‘You’re going to need tutoring to bring you up to speed on American history,’ Scott said, reading the letter from the first school.

‘Ok,’ I said.

‘And apparently you are way behind on social studies. How did that happen?’ he asked.

‘What are social studies?’ I asked.

‘And there is the answer,’ he said.

Kylie came over and we took Ben for a walk in Riverside Park for a change. We bumped into Tamara walking Patrick.

‘He’s gotten
so
big!’ I said.

She smiled.

‘He’s still not toilet trained. Last night, he did a big dump in one of my dad’s shoes and he had a fit.’

‘Evie sat the placement test for Sebs,’ announced Kylie.

‘Good luck!’ said Tamara. ‘Camille goes there too. She’s my cousin, but she can be such a brat sometimes.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kylie. ‘She told us that Finn said he doesn’t like Evie because she thinks too much.’

‘
Kylie
,’ I thundered, ‘that’s private; it’s nothing, Tamara.’

‘What are you guys talking about?’ Tamara said in a puzzled voice. ‘That’s not what Finn said. I remember it clearly because he got so mad; you guys know how he can lose it. We were hanging out at Aunt Joan’s pool in the Hamptons. Camille said something mean about Evie looking like a scrawny scarecrow… Oops, sorry, Evie, and Finn lashed out at her and said, “she’s a thinker”. Then Akono, who was Julius Caesar in his drama club last winter, said, “She has a lean and hungry look, she thinks too much, such women are dangerous …” or something like that. I’m not sure, but it was a quote, or he was paraphrasing, or something, and that was it. I guess Camille put her own, unique, dark twist on it.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Tamara smiled at me and said, ‘I’m sure Finn likes you, Evie. He thinks you are a sweet kid.’

‘And funny,’ she added.

I thought I would prefer if Finn didn’t like me at all rather than think I was a sweet, funny kid, but I just said, ‘thanks.’

‘Camille wasn’t always this bad’ said Tamara. ‘You guys know that Uncle Andre spent the whole summer in France and he’s divorcing Aunt Joan.’

‘No, we didn’t know,’ said Kylie.

I felt a ripple of sympathy for Camille.

‘I have to go,’ said Tamara. ‘Good luck with getting into Sebs, Evie. Call me if you need any help.’

The atmosphere in the clinic that afternoon was light and giddy and special, just like the last day of school before summer. Joanna and Scott were treating an anxious-looking roan and black Great Dane called Dodger. They teased one another and laughed a lot. I thought that we didn’t need the lights on because Joanna was so radiant that she could have powered the entire building.

Joanna held Dodger down while Scott swabbed his ears to test for infection. Karen walked in as I carefully carried the microscope from the side cabinet towards the table under the window.

‘There’s a man out there who wants to see Evie,’ she announced in a peculiar voice.

‘Who is he?’ Scott asked casually, pulling the swab of cotton wool out of Dodger’s left ear.

Karen hesitated.

‘Who is he?’ Scott repeated, looking up.

Karen looked confused.

‘He says he’s her father,’ she said slowly.

A heartbeat later, there was a massive commotion as Scott and Joanna both jumped forward at the same time to catch me before I hit the floor, managing to whack their heads together. The microscope crashed to the ground, sending a thousand shards of glass and metal flying through the air, and Dodger grabbed the opportunity to leap from the table in a
single bound, knock down a shelf containing fifty-five cans of dog food and dash out the exit.

But I only found out about all that later. I have never fainted before. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I can say it was a very interesting experience.