The Jewels of Tessa Kent (34 page)

“Maggie—”

“How much did you pay them to keep me? It must have been a fortune to keep Madison halfway civil, no matter how miserly she is. But you would have paid anything, wouldn’t you, to keep from having to take care of me yourself? You can’t deny it, you don’t even try. You were too busy being a star, too busy being married to a rich man, too busy jaunting around the world, too busy living for Luke, too busy being the famous Tessa Kent. There was simply no room in your wonderful, brilliant life for a child, was there? You and Luke didn’t even want one of your own. I grew up without love, except the little bit you spared me when Luke was away and you allowed me to visit, allowed me to play with your jewels. Your jewels around my neck instead of your arms. Stories of how to clean pearls instead of stories about my grandparents, my family, my place in the world. I grew up with no one but you and the crumbs you gave me. My grandmother had relatives, and one of them might have loved me, who knows? I’m not that unlovable, although that’s the way I felt, so ashamed that no one loved me but afraid to tell you because I thought you’d be disappointed in me.”

“You should have said something!”

“I should have said something?”

“I thought you were happy with the Websters.”

“Even if I had been, they’re nothing to me. You’re my mother.
My mother!
How could you leave me with them? How could you pretend to be my sister? How could you spend so little time with me?”

“Luke didn’t know,” Tessa whispered. “He never knew.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What does that have to do with anything? Luke’s been dead for a year. Even if I believed you never told him, and I don’t believe it for a second, once he died you could have told me.”

“I couldn’t then,” Tessa cried. “It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”

“This is where I came in, Tessa,” Maggie said, taking off her pearls and putting them on a table. “I don’t want to see you again, ever. I don’t want anything from you, ever. I don’t want the money Luke left me, nothing will make me take it. Tell Madison I took her car and I’ll send her the claim check for it. And tell her to cancel the party, I won’t be going back there.”

She turned and walked toward the door as quickly as possible. It swung shut behind her as Tessa, immobile, was unable to try to follow her.

“I came here to tell her,” she told herself in a small voice, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. “I came here to tell her, but I couldn’t before, could I?
Could I?
”

A
few minutes later Maggie found herself sitting on a bench in Central Park, so drained by the revelations and emotions of the morning that she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever get up again. Her brain was as empty as an eggshell from which the yolk and white had been suctioned out.

Only the sight of a soft-pretzel vendor aroused her to action. After three pretzels and two orange drinks had restored her blood sugar level, she found the strength to take a ball that a little boy put in her lap and toss it for him to retrieve and gleefully give back to her for another go. She could have spent the afternoon absorbed in this game, but when his nanny dragged him, protesting, from his new friend, Maggie’s mind began to work, reluctantly but efficiently.

The past was entirely past: over, finished, dead. College was out, because that would mean having her bills paid by Tessa, and any future relationship with Tessa was unthinkable. Even as she thought of Tessa, she felt absolutely nothing, no sense of loss, not even a flicker of anger, just an empty blankness devoid of pain. She was somehow insulated from emotion, Maggie realized.
Her heart had withdrawn from her body and only clear facts were left.

The future was hers to invent. Her assets? The money, the eight hundred dollars she had planned to lend Barney, was still safe in her purse. She had a suitcase back in the car filled with whatever she’d packed this morning, she was dressed in her best light spring suit, and her shoes were beautifully polished. She had Barney’s address. All in all she was in a relatively rich position from which to begin a new life. She needed a job and a place to live.

Resolutely Maggie returned to the garage to get her suitcase, gratefully used their restroom, and took a taxi to Barney’s address, a brownstone converted into single rooms on a street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues on the Upper West Side. The street showed no sign of the gentrification that was taking place in the neighborhood. No tempting little shops, no cafés or enticing ethnic restaurants, no polished brass doorknobs, no pretty curtains hanging in the windows, Maggie noted. Some of the houses didn’t have panes in the windows, much less window boxes.

Barney’s name was scrawled next to one of the buttons on the downstairs panel, but when he didn’t answer she sat on the second step of the short flight of outside stairs and waited for him. She welcomed this opportunity to decide what to tell him. Not a word about Tessa, she concluded instantly. The story, with its all-but-gothic complications and recitals of a grandfather’s mortal sins—a grandfather she barely remembered—could only be explained in its entirety or it didn’t make sense. It had nothing to do with Barney or her new life.

Madison and Tyler. They were reason enough, Maggie thought, watching, in an increasingly dreamlike state, the lively action of the crowded, noisy, dirty, and almost certainly dangerous street. Eventually, as she clasped her handbag tightly in one arm and threw the other around her suitcase, her lids closed over her weary eyes.

“Maggie!” Barney scooped her up and held her tight. “Oh, my Maggie, I thought I’d never see you again! How could you abandon me like that? Oh, sweetheart—”

“Barney! Wait, please
wait
. Shut up and listen to me and try to understand. You’ve got the wrong idea, I know how it looks, but I haven’t come to be with you. I’ve run away. I’m never going back, I’m on my own now. If Elizabeth hadn’t given me your address I’d have gone to a hotel.”

“Run away? It’s your birthday, you can’t run away on your birthday,” he blurted, totally confused.

“It’s as good a day as any other.”

“Maggie, for Pete’s sake, what’s going on?”

“I’ve had it up to here with your folks. I know you probably love them, but I had to get out. Your mother and I have always had problems with each other and when I realized I was eighteen and legally free, I got out. I gave them your message, by the way. Your dad’s plenty pissed, your mother said you’d be back when you ran out of money.”

“The hell I will!”

“I didn’t argue with her,” Maggie grinned. “For a change.”

“Come upstairs, birthday girl, we can’t talk here,” Barney said, taking her suitcase and leading the way up two flights of stairs to the room he’d rented.

“It’s not a palace, but it’s home sweet home,” he said proudly, opening the door on a back room with one curtainless window looking out on a dusty tree. The walls were already all but concealed with bike posters, he had a futon on the floor partly covered by a threadbare rug, and a table held the essentials for living: a tape deck, a hot plate, and a can of insect spray. A tiny, ancient refrigerator hummed in the corner, and the sink on the wall had room for a soap dish and a toothbrush. A mirror hung above it. The room, even the window, looked clean if nothing else.

“There’s a closet, and a john down the hall. I can
cook and do my dishes, and my neighbor has a shower he’ll rent out for a quarter for five minutes,” Barney said proudly. “As they say in France, I have le tout confort.”

“No princess phone?”

“There’s a drugstore around the corner. So what do you think?”

“It’s perfect. I had no idea you were so neat. It’s you, Barney. The real you. Where’s your bike?”

“Safe in the shop. I got a job at a big Harley repair place, entry level but plenty of room to rise to the top. I already know more than most of the guys there but I’m playing it cool, not letting them know yet.”

“Wise,” Maggie said, reclining as sedately as possible on the improvised couch. “Are you liking it?”

“I love every second. And I’m a reformed character.”

“You? In one week?”

“Yeah, me. Joined the Y, lifting weights, no beer, no pot, early to bed, saving half my salary, no time to waste goofing off, and I figured out how to cook hamburger and scramble eggs. I can also open a can of tuna fish. Even got mayo. Want something to eat, my beautiful birthday girl?”

“I’m starving.”

“Listen, you take a nap, you’re half asleep already, and I’ll go get something for an early dinner. We’ll celebrate being free. I’ll get Twinkies, too, and birthday candles.”

“No, Barney, I have to get a place to live first,” Maggie said regretfully, gazing at him. He looked a year older than he had last week. And ten years more adorable. If only she could kiss him … she sat up quickly.

“Hell, you could stay here for just one night,” he said indignantly. “I wouldn’t jump you.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Not ‘jump’… exactly. Maybe … more like a suggestion … a birthday commemoration? You’re only eighteen once.”

“Nope, no can do,” she said briskly, making herself stand. “Do you think there are any rooms to rent in this building?”

“It’s full up. This was the last room, a lucky break. But at the drugstore there’s a bulletin board for the whole neighborhood, people selling stuff, looking for soul mates, lost cats, even legit roommates. We could go look.”

“Forward, comrade. Do they make sodas in this drugstore?”

“Maybe they did, forty years ago.”

“Find anything yet?” Barney asked. He’d managed to get Maggie an ice cream cone and a Coke while she investigated the bulletin board.

“Lots of local color and one possible roommate. Listen to this. ‘Wanted, to share part of rent: female, open-minded, unshockable, immaculate, quiet, NON-SMOKER, no pets, no tattoos, no body piercing, no post-Beatles music. Private room and bath. P. Guildenstern.’ And it gives a phone number.”

“Sounds like a weirdo. ‘Immaculate
and
unshockable’—and what does ‘no tattoos’ mean?”

“It sort of sounds like me. I’m going to call her. What have I got to lose?”

“How do you know it’s a woman?”

“I don’t yet,” Maggie laughed, dialing the number on the wall phone.

“Hello,” said a deep, gruff voice.

“P. Guildenstern?”

“Herself,” the voice said, in its normal feminine tone.

“I saw your notice. My name is Maggie Horvath. No tattoos, unshockable, nonsmoker. Is the room still available?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether I think you seem like a suitable person.”

“I’m immaculate too.”

“That’s always a subjective judgment. Come on over and let me see for myself. It’s three blocks up, the house on the corner of Amsterdam, top floor. I have a German shepherd, trained to attack if you make a false move.”

“I’m harmless. All right if I bring my cousin to check you out?”

“Man or woman?”

“Man.”

“No, leave him one flight down. I’ll leave the door open so you can scream if you think it’s necessary.” P. Guildenstern’s voice trembled slightly.

“I’ll be right over.” Maggie put down the phone. “She’s ten times more scared of me than I am of her, Barney. I bet she doesn’t even have a tabby cat.” She finished her cone, looked at herself in the mirror of her compact, wiped a speck of chocolate ice cream off her lip, applied a little powder, and smoothed her hair. “Do I look nice and clean?”

“Distinctly nice, definitely clean,” Barney agreed, using all the verbal restraint at his command.

Breathless from the climb to the top of the six-story building, Maggie knocked at the bright blue door on which was tacked a tiny card engraved with the word “Miniatures.”

The door opened on a stout chain and P. Guildenstern looked up at her with wide gray eyes attempting a fierce stare. Maggie looked down at a dainty woman of perhaps five feet one inch, whose mass of curly red-blond hair was tied back from her neck with a black velvet ribbon. She had a charmingly delicate face with a small, piquant, pointed nose and Victorian rosebud lips. A German shepherd almost as tall as she stood at attention by her side, on a short leash.

“Good afternoon, Miss Guildenstern,” Maggie said gravely.

“Good afternoon,” she answered tentatively.

“I’m Maggie Horvath, I just called.”

“Oh, good. I couldn’t be sure. Sometimes strangers ring …” she said vaguely, while she inspected Maggie rapidly and keenly from head to toe. “Is your cousin downstairs?”

“Barney, give a yell,” Maggie called.

“I’m down here,” Barney called up from the fifth-floor landing.

“Tell him to stay there.”

“It’s okay, Barney, just stay put.”

“My name is Polly,” P. Guildenstern said, unlocking the door but keeping the dog on the leash. “Please come in.”

“Oh, how wonderful.” Maggie stood stock still, astonished by the large skylight that let a flood of late-afternoon sunshine into what was clearly a studio. “You’re an artist.”

“I paint miniature portraits.”

“I didn’t know anyone still did that.”