Stalker Girl (7 page)

“You’ve already been looking for apartments?” Carly had to shout over the elevator’s clanking descent toward the lobby.

“This is not a sudden decision. Believe me.”

“But why didn’t you tell me? Give me some inkling?”

“I didn’t want to ruin your summer. I knew how much you were looking forward to that time with your father. I figured I’d find a place and get us all moved in while you were away.”

The elevator landed with a
thud
. Carly pulled the folding metal gate open. The industrial elevator was another leftover from the veal factory. Wide enough for a rolling rack of calf carcasses, its linoleum floor was stained brown with blood and who knew what else.

“You were just going to spring it on me when I landed at JFK? Bring me home to some strange place, not even let me pack my own stuff?”

Isabelle leaned against the graffiti-covered wall and let out one of her trademark groan-sighs. “You know, Carly, I really haven’t thought it all through. I’m kind of going by the seat of my pants here.”

Carly pulled the gate closed. “So what happens next?”

“That’s the other thing I need to tell you.”

 

The ride to the sixth floor was slow enough for Isabelle to tell Carly all about the “great opportunity” that had presented itself. Old friends of Isabelle’s sister, Nancy, owned a summer camp on a lake outside New Paltz. Their director had been in a rock-climbing accident the week before, and they needed someone who could step in and run the place for the summer.

Isabelle had convinced herself that filling in as director would solve all the problems.

“One, it gives me a place to stay for the time being, while I keep looking for an apartment. Two, I need the money. I’m going to need a security deposit and broker’s fee. And three, Jess can go to camp for free, which’ll be just what she needs this summer.”

“Does Jess even
know
?”

“Not yet. We’re waiting for the right time.”

Before Carly had a chance to ask what her mother meant by “right time,” the elevator opened into the middle of Nick’s studio. The air was thick with the acrid smell of burning metal, and the Ramones were blasting through the room. When Nick had a deadline, he’d play old-school punk on a nonstop loop. Jess stood off to the side in kid-sized safety goggles and grease-smeared apron, watching her father weld.

The goggles and apron used to be Carly’s.

Carly never knew how to refer to Nick with other people. “My mother’s boyfriend” made him sound inconsequential, like someone passing through her life. Isabelle sometimes used “partner” when she talked about Nick to other people, but Carly thought that sounded ridiculous, like they were accountants or lawyers. She’d settled on not explaining and just called him her stepfather.

Now what was she supposed to call him, her ex-stepfather? Her sister’s father? Her mother’s ex? What kind of relationship would they have after Carly moved away?

As soon as she saw them, Jess ran over and threw her arms around her mother’s waist. Isabelle hugged Jess, leaned down to kiss the top of her head and didn’t let go until Jess’s loud but muffled “I can’t breathe!”

Squirming out from under her mother’s arms, Jess pointed to a rusted bicycle wheel on the floor next to Nick. Various random metal things had been soldered to it: a fork, a spoon, a shiny sheriff’s badge.

“Look at my sculpture!”

With a weak smile Isabelle said, “Nice, honey,” and headed for the door to the living part of the loft.

Nick didn’t turn off the blowtorch or lift his goggles. He just waved in their general direction as they walked through the studio. Isabelle made a motion with her hand that somewhat resembled a wave back.

As they walked, Carly told her mother about her plan to work at SJNY for the summer and volunteer at the dig in Brooklyn.

“And stay where?”

“Can’t I stay here?”

Isabelle shook her head.

“Why not? Nick isn’t kicking us out, is he?”

“No. No. I’m sure it would be fine with him. It’s just—not a good idea.” Isabelle tossed her keys into the bowl on the counter between the kitchen and dining room, then continued down the hall to her and Nick’s bedroom.

“Why not?”

“I need a clean break. Or as clean as possible considering we have Jess. If you stay here while I’m away, it’ll just complicate things further.” She opened her closet door, kicked off her shoes, and stepped into her slippers.

“How? I don’t understand.”

Groan-sigh. “Because if you’re here, and I’m there, it’ll mean that Nick and I will have to talk about you and what you’re doing and I—I’m just not up for that right now. I want to work on healing, and I won’t be able to do that if I have to talk to him all the time.”

“Yeah, but aren’t you guys going to have to talk about Jess anyway?”

“We’ve already worked out the summer, so not really. He’ll come up to see Jess during the parents’ weekends. I don’t need to add you to the mix.”

“What does that mean, ‘add me to the mix’? What would you even need to talk about? I’m responsible; I can take care of myself. I totally
do
take care of myself now.”

“Carly, this isn’t open for discussion. You’re not eighteen yet, and I’m not going to let you run wild around the city. I’ve seen enough of that with the girls at Bellwin. You can go to your father’s, or, if you want I can probably get you a job at Stony Hollow. Though I’m not sure what jobs are left at this late date.”

“But—”

“Carly. I can’t talk about this right now. Can you understand? I’m just—I’m just exhausted. And I feel a migraine coming on. I need to get in bed.”

“What about dinner?”

“Could you order pizza? And see that Jess gets to bed at a decent hour? Nick’s in one of those oblivious-to-time-and-responsibility states.”

“I guess.”

“And please make sure she has a clean uniform for tomorrow?”

Carly let out a groan-sigh of her own. “Okay.”

“Thanks, honey. Really. I appreciate your help. I know this is has all got to be a shock. First your father flakes on you—”

“Mom—he’s having a baby. I wouldn’t exactly call that flaking.”

“No. Of course not. I just mean that’s how it must feel. It’s something you’ve been looking forward to for so long.”

Like losing the only home she’d known for the past twelve years was nothing, just an incidental change of scene.

“WHY’S EVERYBODY
so crabby?” Jess was gouging a piece of spinach out of her pizza with her finger. Her paper plate was dotted with dark green blobs of oily spinach she’d extracted, one by one.

The question hung there in the air above the worktable in Nick’s studio. Carly looked across at Nick, who looked down at his pizza. It was a veggie special from Salvatore’s. Nick and Carly’s favorite.

The two of them became vegetarians together one boiling hot day in the summer after she and her mother moved into the loft. They were walking by a warehouse just as a truck full of carcasses was being unloaded. Even though they were headless and hoofless and cut in half, they still looked more like animals than food as they hung from those giant hooks. And they were small. It would be a few months before Carly would be able to make out the writing on the side of the truck, but the smiling creature underneath “Valenzano’s Veal” with its big black happy eyes was clearly just a baby, and no way would it be smiling if it knew what was inside the truck.

One of the workers greeted Carly with a wink and a smile and a “Hey, sweetheart” as he hoisted one of the carcasses—a leg in each hand—onto a cart.

It was a strange experience for Carly, who was five at the time and in love with animals. The man seemed so nice. And yet he was swinging this dead animal around like it was nothing. Like it had never been anything.

She knew what “meatpacking” meant. She knew there were still working warehouses around. She’d been breathing in the tinny smell of blood and the stink of garbage trucks that collected the rotting discards, since moving in. But seeing that calf in that guy’s hands sent her over the edge, and Carly declared she would never again eat an animal.

Isabelle, concerned about protein, tried to convince Carly to keep chicken or at least fish in her diet. But not eating animals didn’t feel like a choice to Carly. Nick had been there. He’d seen how that dead calf had affected Carly, and he took her side. He said he didn’t mind cooking and eating vegetarian. It would be healthier, anyway. So from that day on, they were a mostly meatless (almost) family.

Carly hadn’t had a chance to talk to Nick alone since her mother dropped her news bomb, but they knew each other too well. From the guilty way he was avoiding eye contact, it was clear he knew that she knew.

When neither of them answered, Jess tried again. “Why’s everyone in a bad mood?”

“
I’m
not in a bad mood,” Carly said.

“Yes, you are. You’re not talking. Daddy’s not talking. Mama went to bed while it was still light out.”

“Your mother has a headache, Jess,” Nick said. “And I have this show coming up. I’m sorry I’ve been distracted.”

He looked up at Carly, like he was hoping for some help. But Carly didn’t offer any. She wasn’t going to take matters into her own hands and tell Jess herself, but she wasn’t going to pretend everything was just fine, either. She didn’t understand why Nick and her mother thought delaying the news was going to make it any easier for Jess. If anything, Carly thought, it was going to make things worse.

When it was clear that Carly wasn’t going to help, Nick reverted to the foolproof Jess-distracting method. “So tell us about the play.”

Jess was a budding playwright. She and her friend Rosie were hard at work on an original script for their second-grade class.

“Well,” she said, homing in on an errant artichoke. “It’s about these girls. Actually they’re princesses who are on an adventure. They were kidnapped by these witches, but they escape and they have to find their way back to their castle before their father dies of sadness. See, his wife—their mother—died already, and now his daughters have been taken, and he’s just too sad.”

“Wow. That does sound sad,” Carly said. Maybe Jess knew more than everyone thought. “What happened to their mother?”

“Oh, she had a heart attack because she ate too many french fries from McDonald’s.”

Carly laughed, relieved that the sad queen bore no resemblance to their mother. “They have McDonald’s in this kingdom?”

“Yeah. Well, we call it Ye Olde Royal McDonald’s, but it’s basically the same thing. Too much fat. And stress. She was very stressed.”

“Really? I didn’t think queens had that much stress in their lives. ’Cause of all the servants and stuff.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the stress was all about. Her servants were a lot to manage. And she was just—stressed. See, we’re trying to put in some positive messages.”

“Maybe she should have done yoga.”

“They didn’t have yoga back then.”

“But they had McDonald’s.”

“Yes. They did. In our version of back then, they did. We’re using our poetic licenses, okay? Do you think maybe you could just listen and not keep interrupting?”

As soon as Carly put Jess to bed, she went back to Nick’s studio. The music was blaring and the blowtorch burning again. He was welding a spiraled spool of metal, which looked something like a thick, rusty Slinky, along the edge of a large metal box. He held up a finger to tell Carly he’d stop in a minute.

She sat down on his wheeled stool to wait. She used to spin herself dizzy on that thing, or lie on her stomach and push herself across the length of the room as fast as she could. Once she’d smashed into the wall headfirst and gotten a huge bump on the top of her skull. She and Nick decided they wouldn’t tell Isabelle because she’d make Carly stop riding the stool, or want her to wear a helmet or something. They agreed they’d just be a lot more careful from then on.

That’s how they invented the DTM code for “Don’t tell Mom.” They never did it for really big stuff, but for the little things, where telling would serve no purpose except to get Isabelle all worked up. Like the time Carly skinned her knee when she and Nick were hunting at one of their favorite junkyards. At the time, Isabelle didn’t even know Nick sometimes took her along on his junkyard jaunts, so that was an obvious DTM. They attributed the bloody knee to a fall in the park.

“Hey,” Nick said, as he walked across the room.

Carly got right to it. “Mom told me.”

Nick took off the goggles and gloves, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and sat down on the wooden bench across from the stool.

“I gathered.”

“I can’t believe I’m not going to live here anymore.”

“Me neither.” He reached for a coffee mug on the table behind him. From the look of it—a skin of cream floated on top—it had been there for a while. “I wish your mother would reconsider my idea.”