Love Walked In Read online

  She was there now, on the sofa, covered with the brown, fringed cashmere blanket they’d had forever, and curled in toward the sofa’s high back. Clare was glad she couldn’t see her face, but she stood looking at her mother’s hair falling over the edge of the sofa, honey-colored and gleaming like a waterfall even in the semidarkness. That was how her mother was, catching all the available light in any room and making it part of her. Grief was there suddenly, all around Clare; the room was filling up with it, so she held her breath like a person underwater and turned her attention to what she’d come for: her mother’s purse. It sat neatly on a bookshelf. Clare removed the wallet and took out her mother’s ATM card and then, without even a glance at the sleeping woman, she ran out of the room. When she had gulped in enough air to speak, Clare called herself a cab.

  She had the driver pick her up in her next-door neighbors’ driveway. The Cohens were a couple in their late sixties, who spent their winters on a Caribbean island the name of which they made a big deal about keeping secret, but which Mr. Cohen had once told Clare because he liked her so much. “Keep it under your hat, sis,” he’d said, winking. “If the whole town starts showing up, we’ll have to find a new place.” This made Clare wonder what the Cohens did down there that they didn’t want their neighbors to find out about. But, except for writing the name down in her notebook, Clare did keep it under her hat. The Cohens were away now, but there were some men replacing slate shingles on their roof. One of the men waved at Clare. He was young, with a tan face and yellow hair like a surfer, and Clare thought someone so summery looking must be especially cold up there on the roof. She waved back.

  The cab driver was a tiny person sitting in the center of an enormous puffed-up parka. He looked too young to be driving, but Clare saw his cabbie license posted on the little window that separated the back and front seats, so she asked him to take her to the bank downtown. During the drive they didn’t speak, but sat listening to a woman sing opera; Clare could tell by the way the woman’s voice soared and then dropped quite suddenly that, whatever had happened to the woman, she had started out angry and ended up sad.

  Clare’s mother usually bought things with credit cards, but when she and Clare were going someplace together, Clare’s mother would let Clare get cash with her ATM card because Clare was still young enough to find the process magical. The password was Clare’s own birthday. Clare entered the numbers and stopped cold, staring at the four Xs on the screen: 1202. December second; today was the third.

  Clare felt a pang of self-pity, then made herself shrug. “Whatever,” she told the four Xs—a word most kids said all the time and one that, for this reason, Clare chose never to use, but she felt the power of it now. Refusal, short, sharp, and hard, like a silver pin that could take the air out of anything; something to add to her arsenal. She pushed another button, and the four Xs disappeared. For most of her life, Clare hadn’t had much occasion to feel sorry for herself but, standing at the ATM, she realized that this feeling loomed huge and possible, like a forest she stood on the edge of. If she entered it, she might never be able to leave.

  When her mother’s name appeared on the little screen, Clare felt like a thief and an imposter, but she got the money out anyway, because she had to. Clare didn’t know much about being alone in the world, but she knew that people alone needed money. A hundred dollars. A lot of money—more than Clare had ever held in her hand before. Quickly she folded it into her change purse, dropped it deep inside her backpack, and started off down the street away from the bank.

  Clare’s downtown was really just one long street lined with pretty shops and restaurants. Even the hardware store was pretty, with its wooden sign shaped like a saw and gold lettering on the window. Clare hadn’t been to that many places, but she knew enough about downtowns to understand that this one wasn’t typical. The sidewalks were brick, for one thing, and there were giant stone planters here and there with plants that changed with the seasons. Today, they were full of greenery and tiny Christmas trees strung with lights.

  There was a toy store full of handmade wooden toys, astonishing old-fashioned Lionel trains, and dolls with smocked dresses and the faces of real children. There was a clothing boutique her mother called “Instant WASP” that sold crisp, expensive clothes in candy pink, daisy-eye yellow, tree-frog green, and also sold matching mother-daughter Lilly Pulitzer dresses that made Clare and her mother roll their eyes at each other and say, “I wouldn’t be caught dead!” There was a bakery with fragrant breads and the world’s best birthday cakes (Clare’s mother had once gotten her one shaped like a castle), and a real Italian gelateria featuring flavors like persimmon, cinnamon, espresso, and rose. You could get pepperoni at the pizza place, Pizza by Edie, but you could also get toppings like caramelized onions, prosciutto, shaved manchego, and a sauce made of yellow heirloom tomatoes.

  Clare knew that even ordinary downtowns almost didn’t exist anymore, that they stood around like abandoned movie sets, falling apart, and here it was as though someone had taken an ordinary downtown, waved a magic wand, and made everything a little bit or several times better-made, fresher, lovelier, costlier than ordinary. If Clare had been a few years older, she might have felt guilty about this. At newly eleven, she just felt lucky to live in such a nice place.

  Naturally the diner Clare went into, called Lorelei’s Down Home, served diner food made beautiful and interesting. Clare had been there many times with her mother for dinner. Her favorite was turkey meatloaf stuffed with sharp provolone and fresh basil served alongside potatoes smashed with garlic and cream. Today, it was Sunday—brunch served all day. Clare recognized one of the waitresses, who nodded at her and pointed toward a window table set for two. On the table was a cream pitcher, a sugar bowl full of pale brown chunks of raw sugar, and a vase of gerbera daisies.

  When the waitress came with two menus, Clare said in a clear voice, “It’s just me.” The waitress paused for a moment, a puzzled line between her eyes, and Clare started to make up an excuse in her head. “My mother’s shopping, and I got hungry” is what she was about to say, but the waitress smiled and said, “Good enough, love. Coffee? Hot chocolate?”

  Clare smiled, “Hot chocolate, please.”

  After the hot chocolate arrived and Clare had given her order, a “Farmer’s Frittata” with smoked ham and buffalo mozzarella, and after Clare had asked the waitress if buffalo really lived on farms and the waitress had laughed, Clare got out her notebook and began to make a list. CLARE’S TO-DO LIST she wrote in bold letters at the top of the page. Under it, she wrote:

  Call Josie’s mother. Ask for ride to and from school. Tell her M starting to work mornings. Tell her M not calling herself because she’s in the middle of cooking dinner. Be sure to call around dinnertime.

  Bring note to school giving permission for me to go home with Josie’s mother. Type note on computer so only have to forge signature.

  Call Jordan’s Grocery for delivery. Get pasta, sauce, canned vegetables, peanut butter, jam, butter, Quaker oats, things that won’t go bad. Get Parmalat milk in boxes. Can get bread and put in freezer. Maybe get cookies, too. Multivitamins to stay healthy. Ask them to deliver early in morning before I go to school. And before M wakes up.

  Call Max. Cancel again, so she won’t see M sleeping on sofa. Say going out of town. If she asks where, say New York City. Don’t say seeing show because Max might ask about it.

  Between bites of frittata and sips of hot chocolate, Clare broke her life into twenty-four hour pieces and drew up a plan that she hoped would get her from one day to the next.

  And it worked. It worked more or less. There were a few glitches. Once, Sissy Sheehan, who ran her mother’s business, worried that her mother had been out of touch and had failed to return the phone call of a client they’d worked with for years.

  “It’s so not like her, Clare, you know? Is there something going on with her I should know about? I mean, you’d tell me if she were sick, right?”

 
Yes, I know it’s not like the her that you know, but it’s exactly like the her she is now; yes, there’s something going on; no, you shouldn’t know about it; or, yes, maybe you should; yes, I’d tell you if she were some kinds of sick; no, I wouldn’t tell you if she were other kinds of sick; yes, yes, yes, she’s sick in a way you can’t even imagine. Clare stacked up these true answers and put them aside. There was no reason to be angry at Sissy, but Clare was angry. I’m eleven, she wanted to scream, I’m a kid. This is not my job. Look for answers someplace else.

  “Sissy,” Clare began carefully, “my mom’s fine, but I think she’s—she’s in transition.”

  “Transition? You mean, she’s thinking of selling the business?” Sissy sounded excited. Clare knew Sissy had wanted to buy her mother’s portion of the business for some time.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. She’s doing some—introspection.”

  “Oh, God, aren’t we all. Or shouldn’t we all, rather. Seth and I were just discussing that the other day. You just go on day after day, performing the—what?—the acts of your life, and you get caught up, and you lose track, don’t you? You lose track of your self, your needs, your—what’s the word…”

  “Priorities?”

  “Exactly! Jesus, Clare, sometimes you are truly not a child. You’re that prescient! You just know, you know?”

  “I know,” said Clare. So this is how you talk to adults, she thought, Just throw out a few vocabulary words, and let them do the rest.

  “So, OK then, tell her to take her time. Seth and I are holding down the fort, no problem. Give her my best. Godspeed and all that, OK?”

  “OK. She’ll be in touch, I’m sure,” said Clare, although that was the very last thing she was sure of.

  Clare’s own friends were not quite so easily satisfied. One afternoon, Josie and Marie, another girl from their class at school, showed up at Clare’s door unexpectedly. They’d ridden their bikes from Marie’s house, which was just down the road, but it was a curvy road and was still quite a long way for two eleven-year-olds to ride their bikes. As they stood there, red-faced and panting, Clare understood that they’d come for a specific reason, and she stepped outside, shutting the door behind her, and waited. She didn’t ask them to come in because, although her mother wasn’t home and hadn’t been home since early that morning, she might drive up at any moment. Josie and Marie couldn’t be there when she did.

  “Do you, like, not want to be friends with us anymore or what?” Marie was the one who asked, because that’s the kind of thing Marie did, even though she wasn’t especially good friends with either Clare or Josie. Clare thought of Marie as a girl who took up a lot of space, and she had a loud, throaty voice and T-shirts that already pulled tightly across her chest. She also phrased questions in such a way that no one was ever quite sure how to answer.

  “No.” Clare decided on “no,” but threw in, “I do still want to.”

  “Because you never invite Josie over to your house anymore,” said Marie. “And you’re at hers all the time? You, like, live there?”

  There was truth in this. Besides riding to and from school with Josie, Clare had begun doing her homework at Josie’s house after school sometimes. No one seemed to mind. In fact, Josie’s mother, Mrs. Arthur, was nicer to her than usual, bestowing upon her the kind of pitying looks and low, solicitous tones Clare imagined adults usually reserved for orphans and kids with cancer. Clare knew Mrs. Arthur didn’t suspect that Clare’s mother was going crazy or whatever she was doing; Mrs. Arthur just regarded Clare as the neglected child of a single mother.

  Once, as Clare sat at their kitchen table helping Josie with a worksheet, Mrs. Castleberry, who had older children at Clare’s and Josie’s school, stopped by and, because they were the kind of adults who know much less about children than they think they do, Clare was able to overhear much of their conversation about her.

  “Almost every day,” said Mrs. Arthur.

  “Her mother’s otherwise occupied?” asked Mrs. Castleberry, but as though she already knew what the answer was. Even though they were in the next room, Clare could just feel Mrs. Castleberry’s too-thin eyebrows going up as she said it.

  “Working,” sighed Mrs. Arthur. Like most of Clare’s friends’ mothers, Mrs. Arthur didn’t have a job.

  “She doesn’t have to, you know. She’s got more money than God. The only child of rich only children. Talk about silver spoons,” said Mrs. Castleberry. Jealous, thought Clare.

  “I just don’t know why she doesn’t get married. Lots of men would want her,” said Mrs. Arthur. Clare looked at Josie, who rolled her eyes and mouthed the word “bitch.”

  “Oh, there are men all right,” and then they dropped their voices. Clare’s face burned. She wanted to rush in, tell those women precisely what she thought of them in her coldest voice, and then slam the door on her way out, rattling the stupid framed family photos taken at some stupid photo studio that Mrs. Arthur had hung on every wall. But if she couldn’t be at Josie’s house, she’d have to be at her own instead, and she couldn’t face that, not every day. Besides, Josie’s mother was her only way home.

  “Sorry,” Josie leaned over and whispered, and because Clare knew Josie was a nice girl, and also knew better than most kids that daughters aren’t responsible for their mothers’ behavior, she shrugged and smiled and said, “That’s OK.”

  And as Josie stood next to Marie in Clare’s front yard, Clare could tell that Josie felt helpless and wished none of it were happening, that she’d said a few words to Marie and then had gotten swept up in indignation and a plan that didn’t really belong to her. Clare decided to forgive Josie, both because she knew Josie was weak, not bad, and because Clare needed her.

  “My mom’s just been really busy lately,” Clare said, looking Marie right in the eye.

  “Doing what?” asked Marie, for whom the concept “none of my business,” was nonexistent.

  “Working.”

  “Nobody has to work that much,” said Marie. “I bet she’s dating some guy she doesn’t want you to know about.”

  Clare thought how strange it was that everyone seemed to think the same thing about her mother. Maybe it was because her mother was beautiful in a way most mothers aren’t. Maybe being beautiful like that made people feel as though they knew all about your life. You don’t know anything, thought Clare, and she wanted to laugh a bitter laugh. What people assumed was nothing compared to what was actually happening.

  “Whenever she dates anyone, she tells me. I get to meet him, if I want,” and this was true, although Clare’s mother didn’t have boyfriends very often or for very long. What her mother had said in the restaurant about sex popped into Clare’s head, but she shook it away.

  “Whatever,” said Marie, which didn’t surprise Clare. This was the word all conversations with Marie came to sooner or later. Clare turned to Josie.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked, and Josie darted a glance at Marie, took a breath, and shook her head.

  “No, I’m not mad,” said Josie. Clare felt proud of her.

  “I have to go in, now,” said Clare.

  “Whatever,” Marie said again and, as they started to get on their bikes, Clare went back into her house. The visit had worked out in her favor, she decided, as she knew about Marie’s “whatevers.” Like a stone dropped into a pool, her “whatever” on the subject of Clare and her mother would ripple outward, until the worst any of her classmates would think is that Clare’s mother had a boyfriend—a mystery man. Clare didn’t love the idea of everyone believing this, but it would be convenient, an umbrella explanation for her mother’s absences or odd behavior. Besides, she knew Marie’s imagination to be narrow and sluggish, incapable of any kind of leaping. No one would end up thinking her mother was dating a serial killer or the president or an international spy. Clare found this thought both comforting and mildly disappointing.

  The final glitch in Clare’s plan was simply that Clare had neglected the nuts and bolts of how
she would go about being with her mother in the same house, as the mother she had always known slipped away more every day. She should have made lists of tones of voice, conversation topics, aspects of her mother’s behavior to ignore, places for Clare to rest her hands or eyes while she was busily ignoring these aspects, and lengths of time she could allow herself to look into her mother’s face to see what was or wasn’t there.

  For the first twenty-four hours or so, it didn’t matter. Their house had always been ridiculously large for just two people, full of rooms no one went into much except Max, who went into them to dust untouched furniture and vacuum un-stepped-upon rugs and to “chase out the ghosts.” Max played jokes on them sometimes, like hanging a painting upside down to see if anyone would notice. Now, with one occupant trying to be alone, and the other occupant spinning through days and rooms like a planet encircled by the atmosphere of her own distraction, the house was perfect. It colluded with Clare, who needed all the allies she could get, to keep them apart.

  But on Wednesday morning, as Clare was finishing her toast, her mother walked into the breakfast room with the newspaper and sat down across from Clare.

  “Morning, Clarey,” she said.

  Clare put her toast down and thought how everything had become a decision. The decision to put down her toast. The decision to look at her own mother. She looked. In her soft, fawn-colored sweater, no makeup, her hair in a ballerina knot at the nape of her neck, her mother looked totally normal. That is to say, she looked extraordinarily beautiful. But Clare wasn’t fooled. Prettiness could be a lie, like anything else, and hope was not a game Clare played anymore.

  She was right not to play it. Her mother began reading her bits of news from the paper, which seemed normal enough at first, and Clare responded with “ohs” and “reallys,” but, eventually, all the stories were sad or violent. Boy-soldiers in Africa. Suicide bombers. Snipers shooting people as they put gas in their cars or took their children to school. Clare’s mother would begin one story, break off mid-sentence, start another, her voice full of urgency, like a person crossing rushing water by jumping from stone to stone.