New Year's Eve (15 page)

“Listening to resolutions.”

“Yeah, they're great, aren't they? What was your resolution, Molly?”

“I didn't get one yet.”

“Oh, here, I'll reach one for you.”

You do that, Molly thought. She ignored him and focused on Anne's purse. Impossible for now. Con was too present. Two out of three though, accomplished in a mere five minutes. That was good. And people would be over this silly mood shortly, and they'd dance again. Lee wouldn't let Anne dance with Con, would he? No. Lee would do the dancing himself. Anne would be taken out from under Con's eyes, off into the dark, and Molly could follow.

“I'm taking a second resolution,” Beth Rose said.

“I resolve not to steal chocolate dipped cherries from my neighbors.”

What a dumb one, Molly thought. Suits Beth fine.

“So you're the criminal,” George teased. His long elbows poked out for a nudge, but he got Molly as well as Beth.

Does he know? Molly thought, fear hitting her spine.

Beth Rose giggled.

Christopher handed Molly a scroll. She unrolled her resolution and shouted out, “I resolve not to date any more of those boring old billionaires!”

She waited for the shouts of laughter.

Nobody looked at her.

Even Christopher wasn't looking. He was reaching into the Santa bag to get his own resolution. Lee and Anne were making camel jokes. Con was pretending to laugh with them. Beth Rose and her stupid fifteen-year-old were bouncing dinosaurs in each other's faces. The room was full of laughing people.

And nobody was laughing with Molly Nelmes.

Molly was trembling with hatred. It coated her with slime. She stared at Anne: elegant worthless snobby Anne, in her sophisticated black gown, Lee holding her elbow like a king with his queen. Over her shoulder, dangling by a tiny black cord, hung a tiny black velvet purse. Probably held a mirror, a lipstick, a comb, and an aspirin.

Well, very soon, it would hold something else, too.

Con stuck close to Anne and Lee. He didn't mention Jade again and they didn't ask.

Con was not as tall as Lee, so he had to look up when they talked. His fine gold-coin profile became even more haughty because he was nervous. He ran his fingers through his hair and tilted his chin back.

The camel jokes stopped. The band played again. The bright lights were turned off: even the sparkling mini-lights on the walls were dimmed down. The silly crazy atmosphere swiftly returned to darkly romantic.

Lee chose a safe masculine topic. Cars. The subject petered out. Silence became awkward.

“May I have this dance?” Con asked stiffly. He looked at Anne.

Beneath Lee's arm, Anne trembled. It annoyed Lee. There was no need to quiver like some sort of rabbit. Con's asking you, Anne, you dummy, Lee thought. Answer the question. You wanna dance, dance. You don't wanna dance, don't dance.

Anne continued trembling.

Lee removed his arm from her shoulder. “Sure,” he said, giving them the old-fashioned permission they seemed to require. “Have fun.”

Anne and Con touched each other hesitantly. Then more firmly. Then with both hands. Then both dropped their faces, so that their foreheads touched. After a moment of silent communion, they drew slowly back. And then they kissed.

Beth Rose, watching, thought it was incredibly romantic.

Lee thought it was incredibly stupid. He watched as they blended together. Good thing it was dark on this side of the room.

They might at least say good-bye to me, he thought. Or Happy New Year. But no, those two, they like their emotions up to the eyeballs.

Lee wondered for a moment if there was something seriously wrong with him. The one girl he loved—Kip—had stayed with that jerk Mike. The next girl he dated—Anne—never loved him for a moment but kept right on loving that jerk Con.

Perhaps there was something in the water in Westerly.

Infecting all lovers with the wrong perspective.

Or perhaps he, Lee, was unlovable.

The elevator doors opened one more time.

Molly had an eye on everything. Christopher thought she was dancing, but she was not: she was jerking from side to side, watching, waiting, rejoicing. But it was not what she expected, rounding the hall and coming into the ballroom.

Three little boys.

One was slightly cloudy, dusting where he walked.

One wore a safari jacket that reached his knees.

The third had on his entire wardrobe, including baseball cap and splotchy glasses.

For a moment Molly couldn't figure it out at all.

What were these little animals?

Whose
were they?

Why
were they?

Then she howled with laughter.

“Kip!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Kip Elliott! You stayed out past your bedtime! Your brothers have come to take you home!”

“O
KAY, OKAY, I UNDERSTAND
all your arguments. You don't have to go through them again.”

Emily had never put a knife into anybody before.

My parents were so mean to me, she thought, and I never was mean back. But Matt—Matt who loves me, Matt that I love—I put a knife in him.

He was like a popped balloon.

All sag, no air.

She said, “I love you. I do.”

He nodded. He was very pale. He stood out against his own black jacket like a white painting.

She said, “It's best this way, Matt.”

He nodded. Slowly, as if moving his head had become a difficult task.

She said, “Hug me, Matt. Please hug me and keep on loving me.”

He looked at her strangely.

“You can still love me, can't you, Matt?”

“Yes, Emily.” A voice that had been popped, too. None of his crazy tumbling thoughts. A voice that just spoke lying down, whipped.

She wanted desperately to go on up to the party. They could dance it off: fling themselves into music and stomping feet, jerking arm muscles and pounding hearts. A few hours of hard, hard dancing, and all this dreadful painful wrenching emotion would be gone.

She had never felt this way around Matt, and she didn't think he had ever felt this way in his life. The emotion was shredding them both like cabbage for salad.

She started to talk about the party and didn't. His proposal of marriage had just been refused, and she was going to ask him to dance? As if nothing had happened?

“So now what do we do, Emily?” he asked her. He had stopped staring at the ring, at least. Put it back in his pocket. She could see it in his shirt pocket: a tiny lump at the bottom.

She said, “We could join the others.”

They could hear a lot of partying: one big group in the cocktail lounge and another crowd whose noise and music wafted down the hall from a rented banquet room.

“I don't think I'm in the party mood, Emily.”

He'll never call me M&M again. Or taffy, or chocolate chip or Nutty Buddy. From now on I'll be Emily: the one who didn't want him.

She said, “Matt, if we got married at seventeen—”

“Emily, okay. No more explanations. I've got the picture.” He stood up. He stared at the windows. They were slabs of black, reflecting everything. Then a snow plow came down the road, and its headlights threw yellow into the glass.

She said, “Let's go on up to the party, Matt.”

“I don't feel like a New Year.”

“Funny. You don't look like one either,” she tried to joke.

He just sighed.

“We're kids,” she said desperately. “Kids. So we ought to introduce the new year that way. Like kids.”

He turned away, running his finger over the pocket where the ring lay. It was an unbearable gesture for both of them. She took his hand to stop him from doing it again. “Matt, it's because I love you that—”

“Emily, don't. I hate people who say they're hurting me because they love me.”

She hung onto his hand anyway. He just submitted to it, not holding her hand back. When she cried again, and the tears fell on his hand, he sighed and gave in. “All right,” he said. “We'll go to the dance. I think it'll be torture. What are we going to say to everybody? But if that's what you want….”

She might as well have kicked him.

“We don't have to say anything about it to anybody,” she said.

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?” he said. “Have the whole episode vanish.”

They got in the elevator. Twenty-two floors of silence. It was like being trapped in a coffin together.

“We don't have to,” she said. “We could go home.”

“You don't have a home. That was the point, Emily. I was going to give you one.”

She took a breath so deep it was a good thing the velvet dress was cut full. “You don't want to be married, Matt, you just want to rescue me,” she burst out. “I don't want a marriage that's a rescue operation in disguise! If you want to rescue people, then go join the Ambulance Squad!”

Kip did not think she could bear it.

Look at them.

Look at their clothes.

People would think they didn't have anything clean or decent to their names. People would think they routinely ran around cities barging in on parties. People would think nobody ever washed Jamie's glasses, or made Kevin shower after clay class. And their shoes! They were wearing their mud shoes: sneakers they were supposed to put on only when going out in bad weather so it would be okay to ruin them.

Attention that had gone first to Gwynnie, and then to the phantom Jade, and then to the resolutions, turned to three strange looking little boys.

Kip closed her eyes.

She would have to take them home.

Her New Year's Eve party would be swallowed up in driving her brothers back home and putting them to bed.

Mike said, “I cannot believe it! They followed us here? They're
here
? Can't you Elliotts control yourselves for one single night?”

Kip would gladly have committed three homicides. But they were her brothers. If somebody killed them, she would do it. “I guess they really wanted to see me,” she said. “Come on, let's get this straightened out.” She started for the entrance.

Mike said, “I cannot believe I have to cope with your stupid little brothers on New Year's Eve of all nights. Do you know what I paid for the tickets to this dance? Do you know what it cost to rent this tuxedo? Do you know what the flowers came to? Do you know—”

Kip ran a tongue over her lips. Control, she reminded herself. Maturity is not smacking your boyfriend just because he deserves it.

Kip walked around Mike to get to her brothers.

Mike caught her arm. “Listen,” he said angrily.

She peeled his fingers away. “No.”

He grabbed her again. “Listen.”

“No!”

“Kip! Your brothers—”

“Mike, I see them. I'm going to handle it. I can't handle it from this side of the ballroom, can I?”

“She's going to handle it,” Mike intoned, as if he were a news commentator at eleven o'clock. “Miss Katharine Elliott steps into the crisis with her usual aplomb. Sometimes when there is no crisis, she manufactures one to suit, so she can demonstrate her crisis-handling ability. But tonight, America, as three filthy little urchins crash a New Year's Eve dance, we see Miss Katharine Elliott—”

“At her most violent,” Kip muttered, wrenching away from him. She did not kick him, although it was tempting, but stormed toward the boys.

She thought, I hate boys.

I hate the ones I date, I hate the ones who are related to me. I hate the cute ones who date other girls, and I hate the crummy ones who date other girls.

I hate boys.

I hate New Year's Eve.

She arrived in front of her brothers. Hands on her peach-pink hips, face fixed in a terrible glare, she said, “Well? What is it you have to see me about?”

“Nothing,” said Kevin. “We came to see Lee.”

Molly wondered if she was going to have to give up on Anne.

Anne and Con were not dancing so much as swaying. When they were not staring into each other's eyes they were kissing, and when they were not kissing they were whispering.

Molly swayed with Christopher. “I hate slow dances,” he complained. “Let's go see what's happening over at the door where everybody is.”

Molly nuzzled his throat. “Aw, Chrissie, dance with me.” She steered him toward Anne and Con. Anne and Con would not have seen the President and the First Lady if they'd been dancing there. The little envelope full of talc was as exciting to her as if it really had been drugs: she was high on the thought of revenge. She could not wait to slide the last envelope into place, and telephone the police and see Anne humbled, and Kip crying, and Beth Rose whining. Listen to them crying No, No, Not me! Listen to them saying, I don't know anything about it, I didn't put it there!

And most of all, watching other kids' faces. Seeing Anne fall from her pedestal that even an illegitimate baby could not knock her from. Seeing Kip afraid, Kip who thought she could control the world. Seeing at last Gary looking in contempt at a weeping, wailing druggie of a Beth Rose.

Con said quite audibly, “Oh, Anne, I still love you so much.”

Anne was weeping. Con kept both his large hands on her cheeks and with his thumbs he dried her cheeks, kissed her, and dried her cheeks again.

Molly hated them.

She wanted that kind of love and attention.

She thought, I'll get you, Anne.

She moved closer.

Christopher didn't follow her. “Come on, Moll,” he said. “Let's see what's happening.”

“Christopher, nobody cares,” she said sharply. “Dance over here.”

She was wrong about Con and Anne. They heard her clearly. And with distaste and dislike, they walked away.

You'll pay, she thought.

Both of you.

Kevin stood in his clay-dusty sweater and his hand-me-down ski jacket. The big kids awed him. So tall and shiny. So old.