Olivia (141 page)

She was like this more and more often these days, whether or not anyone was around to see her. Usually Mara was content to let important matters slide until her mother felt like being lucid, but tonight she was jet-lagged and worn out, so she reached in and gave the blackness inside her mother’s head a light slap. Her mom jerked hard, spilling wine over her chest. In the darkness, the spreading stain looked uncomfortably like blood. Immediately, a feeling that was not guilt but probably should have been welled up and Mara thought, ‘There might have been a better way to handle that.’

But it worked. Color and life came slowly up from wherever they’d been buried. Caroline Warner looked dully around and thought, ‘Such a strange child.’

There was no love in the thought. Mara couldn’t remember if there ever had been.

“I have a letter?” she prompted.

“Are you home?”

“Yes. You got a letter for me?”

“I dreamed about you…I think.” She was fading out, thinking of the past, but in ways so blurred, even Mara couldn’t be sure if the things she saw had really happened. “Did you…take care of things?”

“Not yet, but I put the money in the bank in Nevada. I can call the firm tomorrow. My little friend…?”

“Your little friend sent a letter. I had to…I had to pay the postage due.”

“I’m sorry,” Mara said patiently. “Where is it?”

Her mother drank wine and thought, ‘Those aren’t my eyes. Those aren’t Cade’s eyes. Where did those awful, awful eyes come from? Jeepers creepers, just like the song. Where did she get those eyes?’

Christ, she could be at this all night. Mara ignored her mother’s mental ramblings and started looking for the damn thing herself.

The kitchen was trashed, and unless the care service had just up and quit while Mara was away, all this mess had happened after the girl left for the day at six. She’d be tempted to make some angry midnight phone calls, except that Jenny’s cheerfully illegible handwriting was down in the log:
good apetite for din., quiet to-day but active!!
Active, right. It looked like her mom had just opened up every Lunchsnax in the fridge, taken one bite, dropped it, and opened up the next. When did this happen? When did her austere, somewhat brittle mother turn into a crazy person? How did a woman go from a little chronic depression to…to wallowing in her own frigging Lunchsnax?

She needed to hire a live-in, that was all there was to it. Another damn brain in the house, one that wasn’t prone to peaceful lapses into nothing. God damn it.

Caroline appeared in the doorway, lightly swaying on her feet. She wasn’t drunk. “Is your father home?”

“He died two years ago, Mom. Where did you put my letter?” Mara dragged the garbage bin over and started gathering up wrappers and food indiscriminately, her lips pressed tight together, seething as she stared at the undeniable clarity in her mother’s mind. It was laziness, pure and simple. Caroline wasn’t crazy any more than she was drunk, she just wanted to be. Being crazy was easier than picking up after herself, easier than living life and doing things. Who wouldn’t want to be crazy and just let someone else pay all your bills?

“When…When is he coming back?” Her mother’s voice shook. She was thinking of the girls. There had been a lot of girls. “I need to call him.”

“He’s dead, Mom.” The hell with it, she’d leave the mess for Jenny, along with another hundred bucks. Two hundred, and orders for a refrigerator lock. And if Jenny pocketed the change, as Jenny so often did (in her cheerfully dishonest way), so be it. Mara was not in the mood to deal with it, and throwing money at the things one was not in the mood to handle was the Warner way. “He’s not coming back. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Oh no.” Caroline Warner began to cry. Amazing that she could do that and drink at the same time. She cried and wished she were back in Venice, back on her honeymoon when Cade still loved her. She wished she were back in a time before this horrible, ice-eyed person ever existed.

“I missed you too,” Mara muttered, and shoved herself into her mother’s head.

‘Postage due’ meant the post office, so Mara started there, calling up an image of the quaint little brick building to see what resonated. She thumbed through half a dozen memories before she found one in the right time frame (or at least, one with her mother in a stained blouse and uneven hair, looking vague as she walked with fat, happy Rosalie up to the glass doors. Rosalie made this a Monday or a Wednesday.), and pulled it open for closer inspection. The letter was a big manila envelope. The amount due was $18.03. Seemed excessive.

Mara let the memory spool out through her phantom hands, watching closely. Her mom came home, made poor Rosalie work too damn hard to make sure she got fed, and then went upstairs. She shuffled vapidly through the house and finally put the letter in the linen closet where she picked up some clean sheets. ‘That horrible person will be home soon,’ was the thought behind this lifeless act. ‘She’ll be home and tired. She should have fresh sheets to sleep in.’

As always when offered glimpses of her mother’s caring, however indistinct, Mara felt a surge of hopelessly mingled pity and anger, and something else, something that ought to have grown into some kind of tender feeling, if only it had known nurture. She closed herself out more gently than she’d torn her way in, and gave her mother a weary pat on the shoulder. “Go to bed, Mom,” she said, giving the words a push to make them root. “Don’t drink anymore tonight. Just go to bed.”

“I’m waiting up for your father. He’s…working late tonight. He works so…so hard for us.”

She could have told the truth again. She probably should. But her mother would take herself to bed as soon as she’d been ground down long enough by the command Mara had left inside her, and anyway, she’d bullied her mother’s muddled brains enough for one night. Mara left her bags where they were and went upstairs, rubbing her tired eyes.

She took the envelope from the linen closet into her room and sat down at the desk where she used to do homework, where she kept all their financial papers now. This was the only piece of personal correspondence she’d received in a long time. Two years, at least.

Mara Warner
, said the envelope, and it had to be a friend, all right. Her parents were not nickname people; the whole rest of this wide world knew her as Kimara. Her father had wanted a son. Her mother, thanks to a smudgy ultrasound, had expected to give him one, and so they had planned out only boy’s names. Malcolm Cade, she was supposed to have been. The delivering doctor’s name had been Jonif Kimara, and that was good enough for the likes of her. Malcolm Cade would be preserved for the next child, preserved forever as it turned out. Life was funny.

Mara Warner
, in the middle of the envelope. Neatly-lettered. She didn’t recognize the handwriting. Beneath it, her mom’s address. Mara’s address, since she’d never really lived anywhere else, unless you counted college. And in the upper left-hand corner, another name:
Connie Vitelli.

‘Your little friend,’ her mom had said, and God knew Mara only ever had the one—then, now, or anytime in between—but all the same, she hadn’t expected to see this. Connie was gone, run off to find some Romanian fairy tale from which there was only a slim chance of coming back and, one would assume, no mail service at all. Gone away with just six words left behind her and none of them goodbye. Gone away when Mara’s back was turned, just like the sixteen years between them never mattered.

Mara’s hand strayed up to her throat, touching the cheap gold-colored chain for a cheap, gold-colored locket. Her birthday present. The very best birthday.
Best Friends
it said on the outside. “Best friends,” Mara murmured, looking at her letter. “Right.”

*               *              *

The friendship was, like all the great ones, a total accident. Mara never would have met Connie if crusty old Mrs. Matsuo hadn’t forced her second-graders into alphabetized double-rows for every possible occasion, even the walk to the lunchroom. Every day, sometimes twice a day, Vitelli, Constance stood side by side with Warner, Kimara.

Mara, who had been living with the worst faces of humanity all the years of her young life, had already stopped trying to make friends and would have been content to stand and stare at the back of Underwood, Trevor’s blonde head without ever speaking, but Connie was lonely. Lonely was a bit of an understatement, really. Little Connie was one of those friendless and fundamentally forgettable people who are born under a cloud of gloom and are pretty much fated to go through life unloved because of it. It used to be that such people could at least join a monastery (or a convent, as the case may be) where personality didn’t much matter, but in these fine and enlightened modern times, little Connie suffered ostracism without end: shunned by her peers, misunderstood by her family and overlooked by teachers, with nothing to look forward to but cruel jokes in the high school crowd, dateless weekends rolling over into desperate sex with strangers, failed efforts at counseling, and ultimately, a one-room apartment and half a dozen cats. Connie Vitelli was one of Life’s Great Throwaways, even at the tender age of nine, and yet one day, this wretched creature glanced over and interrupted her own hazy funk of human misery to think, ‘She always looks so sad. I should sit with her today. Maybe she’ll be nice to me.’

Mara did not consider herself to be sad, but even then she knew she wasn’t happy. Who could be happy, living like this? Over nine hundred kids went to Frieda Kahlo Elementary School, along with sixty-plus adults. The little ones were nothing but nerves, afraid of teachers, afraid of schoolwork, afraid of the buses, the playground, the bigger kids. The older ones were already turning ugly on the inside, learning how to lie, how to cheat, how to dominate and feed off each other. The grown-ups were the worst of all, because even the ones who still loved you had enough reasons to hate the job that it stained everything they thought about you, and there weren’t too many left who loved you in the first place. All those minds in constant motion, and the Panic Room back then was still just concrete walls and one big-screen TV she couldn’t turn off. No, she wasn’t happy.

But sad?

Connie didn’t sit with her that day, but she wanted to. She sat at the other long table in the lunchroom and watched Mara eat her apple slices, wanting to be with her, wondering if she would be nice. Those thoughts had a cringing quality, all jumbled up with rejections both real and imagined, and yet Mara found herself starting to listen for them if they didn’t come in clear enough on their own. Through these slippery, frantic touches, she learned that Connie was in the middle of seven children, that they were not only Eye-talian but
very
Eye-talian, that the world at home was noise and shouting all the time, whether angry-shouts or happy ones, and everything was shared there, nothing new, nothing her own, nothing special and for only Connie. There was no niceness, in other words. There was love and there was family, there were hugs and kisses and cookies, but never niceness, and never (maybe) would there ever be.

Mara thought about this when she went home to her own big house behind the green gate. Her mother was arranging flowers, thinking only of flowers, unaware of Mara’s presence in the house even when Mara walked right by her. She thought about this when she passed her father on the stairs, saw him give her one of his distracted, polite nods, and heard him think, ‘Strange sort of child. Wonder where she gets it from? Intelligent enough, but look at those eyes…if it wasn’t for that nose, I’d wonder who’s been digging my potatoes,’ and then his mind would go off first in fuzzy waves of blame for Wife, who could not keep the babies he put in her except that one, the strange one, and never the son, never the Name, and then to even fuzzier thoughts of whoever the girl was at the moment and when he could get away, what reason he’d have to come up with this time, and such a fuss such a damned-awful
fuss
but better than a divorce by-God, and oh her thighs/hips/breasts, whatever. Mara’s room was always clean, always tucked away and tidy, and the house was distant enough than everyone else’s lives were only flashes of light and movement in her mind’s horizons, unless the Robbersons got very drunk or that-Kimmy-girl-next-door snuck in her boyfriend at night for the sexthing. Niceness was all around her, Mara thought, but it sure wasn’t very pleasant.

The next day, Connie didn’t sit with her either, and she was making her tummy cramp with the indecision of it all. Mara ate her school macaroni and drank her milk and just listened as Connie agonized. Would she be nice? There were mean kids on the bus, big kids who kept tugging on her braids and laughing and calling her names like wop, dirtywop, names she was afraid to ask Mama what they meant. She thought they would be nice once, too. No one was nice, that was the thing. Mama said just make friends, everyone wants to be friends with a pretty little girl like you, but no one wanted to be friends. No one thought she was pretty. No one was nice.

How true, Mara would think On the inside, no one was ever really nice. The best people in the world were ugly if you looked deep enough.

On the third day, Mara picked up her lunch tray and went over to Connie’s table. “Can I sit here?” she asked, and as Connie gaped at her with the shiver-wide eyes of a feral cat on a sidewalk, she added, “I like the way you wear those ribbons in your hair, all braided in,” because she knew about the mean kids and how Connie had to sit so still while Mama did the braiding and then cried in the bathroom because the mean kids would pull on them and it was dirtywop hair. “It’s very pretty,” Mara said, and that was all she had to say.

That was the beginning of sixteen years. She liked to think about that day—the way they’d traded bits of their lunches, those first hesitant Connie-smiles, the slow gentling of her frantic Connie-thoughts as she decided that maybe, just maybe, this was real and Mara was her friend—but she never dreamed of it. She could make herself dream it, she knew, but what was the point of that? She could have made Connie ask her to sit down, too (even at eight, she was already beginning to learn how to reach into someone’s head and make them think of things, although it would be four more years before she could do it every time), but that would have made everything that followed into a lie. Mara had been born psychic; she knew all about lies. Connie was the one person she wanted to be entirely honest with.