“I mean,” she said, “you guys spend so much time together. You see him every afternoon, or every night, almost. Where do you go? To his house?”
Kristin could feel the stars jumping inside her. She reached for her glass, which still had a little wine in it. “He takes me to museums. Or up to Fiesole. Out to dinner. The movies. Sometimes we go for walks.”
“So why hasn’t anyone met him? I don’t get it.” Mary Louise put her fork down and reached for her own glass, which was empty. “I have more in my room,” she said. She left the table and came back with a second bottle of red wine. “I mean, you know, when I was with Brad, I wanted everyone to meet him. I thought he was so fantastic, I wanted everyone to agree with me.”
“You will,” Kristin said suddenly. “Meet him. At my party.”
Mary Louise turned around. She was standing at the sink, messing with the corkscrew. “He’s coming?”
Kristin nodded. “I gave him an invitation the other night.”
“Wow.” Mary Louise sat back down. She poured them both more wine. “Well, cheers,” she said, raising her glass and clinking it to Kristin’s. “To you and Dante. He’s older, right?”
“Yeah.” Kristin felt a twinge. She was very careful. With the computer. With the napkin she’d kept from the fancy place they went, even with the rose. Especially with the rose. “How did you know?”
Mary Louise shrugged. “If he was our age, you’d bring him around. And he couldn’t afford to take you out all the time, to places where you wear heels. I mean, will your parents care? How old is he, anyway?”
Kristin felt herself giggle. “A little younger than my dad. They even have the same car.”
Mary Louise looked over the rim of her glass. “And he, what? Works, lives here, in the city? Or is he a prince or something? Does he have some awesome place in the hills? A palazzo?”
Kristin realized they were both drunk. She thought that was funny. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s really private.” She pulled the raspberry cake toward her and plucked the raspberry off the top. “He’s a man of mystery.” She grinned at Mary Louise.
“You mean you really don’t know where he lives? Seriously? Jesus, Kris! You’ve been with him for, like, months, and you’ve never been to his house?”
Kristin thought this was funny, too. She started to giggle.
“So where do you guys—” Mary Louise put her fork down. She picked up the remaining piece of cake. “Where do you go?” she asked, putting the whole thing into her mouth at once. “His office? A hotel?” She licked her fingers, just the tips of them, one at a time like a cat. “I mean, where do you have sex if you don’t go to his house? The Boboli Gardens?” She snorted. “The backseat of his car?”
“The Seventh Circle of Hell,” Kristin said. And they both howled with laughter.
* * *
It was the next day that Kristin asked her.
Even if she hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself, Mary Louise had kind of known she would. She wasn’t stupid. However many Kristins there were fluttering around like moths inside that blond, blue-eyed glass, one of them, the biggest, was always and indelibly Kristin Carson. And when people like Kristin Carson were nice to you—especially if the “you” was someone like Mary Louise—it meant they wanted something. She’d felt it, hovering just out of sight, the night before. So even though it made her sad, she couldn’t honestly say she was surprised.
They’d gone to bed late, dousing the candles one by one, those that had not guttered out, leaving bumpy little spires and colored blobs of wax in virtually all their saucers. Mary Louise’s mother always warned about candles. Some friend of hers had burned her house down because she’d thought it would be romantic to have real flames in the wall sconces, until one gusted and caught the curtains. Whoosh! That’s how Mary Louise’s mother always said it. Whoosh! Throwing her hands up in the air.
Well, the apartment had not gone whoosh, exactly. But it was a mess. Oily bits of cheese, bread crumbs, and hardened blobs of frosting spackled the table. An olive was mushed in the rug. One of the empty wine bottles had tipped over and dribbled. In the daylight the carnations looked brittle and strange, like a kindergarten project made of toilet paper. As she sipped coffee, Mary Louise rubbed one of the petals between finger and thumb to see if any dye would come off, and thought about Kristin.
She couldn’t remember everything they’d said. As they’d gotten drunker it had come in bursts, the words rattling out in fragments that flared and died. They’d talked about their schools, and about what they liked to eat. And their favorite movies. And pets. And the other girls.
It had been sometime around then—after they’d howled over Clarissa Hines’s flowered bag dresses that now that it was cold had given way to huge furred sweaters—that Kristin, who had been playing with the wax drips from one of the candles, had stopped talking. Mary Louise had just asked her—or, not really asked, but said, “You don’t like anyone here very much, do you?” because Kristin never went anywhere, to the movies or shopping, or did anything, like going to get gelato, or playing what-pair-of-earrings-would-you-have-if-you-could-have-any with them as they wandered along the Ponte Vecchio on Saturday afternoons huffing dragon breath into the frost and jostling each other in front of the jewelry sellers’ windows.
“It’s not that.” Kristin had spoken slowly, each word swinging like a pendulum. “It’s just—”
She’d looked up at Mary Louise, and blinked. And Mary Louise had held her breath, her fingers wrapped around the stem of her wineglass, because Kristin’s eyes were very blue in the candle light and her hand had stopped moving, pinching the wax, and suddenly Mary Louise knew that Kristin was going to tell her something completely true.
“It’s just,” she said. “It’s just that, sometimes—I mean, most of the time, it’s safer to be mean to people than to let them like you. You know?”
And Mary Louise had nodded. Because in that moment, sitting across the table from Kristin with the ghost of whatever it was Kristin wanted from her floating at her shoulder, she had known. That you peeled the scab. You wore the belt. You did what you had to do to keep the hurt alive, not just because it held whoever had left you close—locked them in a private place where only you could be with them—but also because it kept the world out. Kept you alone. And alone was safe.
“How fucked is that?” Kristin had asked. Then she’d laughed, and looked back down at the piece of wax she’d rolled into a little figure.
Now she came into the kitchen, sheepish. Or as close to sheepish as Mary Louise suspected Kristin Carson ever got.
“Shit,” she said, hugging her bathrobe around her. “Looks like we had a party.” Her hair was lank, as though she’d been sweating in her sleep, and her skin looked kind of shiny. “Is that coffee?” Kristin asked.
Mary Louise nodded. She started to ask if Kristin was OK, but she knew the question wouldn’t be welcome, so she just got a mug and poured some coffee from the pot and handed it to Kristin, who held it with both hands like a little kid, then went and sat on the couch, one leg tucked underneath her.
“What time is our first class?” she asked.
Mary Louise frowned. “We don’t have any. Today is Saturday.”
“Oh, right,” Kristin said. “Right.” But she didn’t look like she remembered. Which was unusual, because while Kristin could be mean—or at least one of the Kristins could be—none of them were disorganized. It was one of the reasons Mary Louise was pretty sure she’d been kicked out of all those schools because she’d wanted to be, not because she couldn’t figure out what was going on or couldn’t get to classes on time. She started to ask again if Kristin was OK, but before she could say anything, Kristin, who had been studying the rim of her mug, looked up at her.
“That was fun last night,” she said. Then, very quickly, “ML, there’s something I need to ask you. It’s kind of important.”
Mary Louise felt the ghost put its hand on her shoulder. “Sure,”
she said, sitting down. “What is it?”
Four hundred euros was not a lot. It hadn’t taken Mary Louise’s breath away or anything. But it was enough. Her mom had set up a fund for her. She paid into the account every month, and she was always emailing Mary Louise and telling her to go out and have a good time. But, on the whole, Mary Louise had been saving it for their trip in the summer.
“I can’t—I mean, I don’t want my parents—my father and Anna, to know,” Kristin had said. “And if I use my card for that kind of cash withdrawal, they’ll ask and—”
Mary Louise nodded. She was holding her mug, gripping it hard, and she realized that she both wanted to ask Kristin what the money was for, and why she needed it in cash, and didn’t want to know the answer. If that was possible. Which it was. Because if she knew the answer, and it was what she was pretty sure it was, then she would have to do something about it. At the very least, she would have to go with Kristin. And probably she would have to tell Ms. Hines. And probably that would mean that Kristin would get thrown out of the program, and if that happened, she wouldn’t get the credits and she wouldn’t be able to apply to college.
Mary Louise started to say, “Why can’t he do it? Why can’t Dante do the right thing, for fucking once? Instead of just screwing you. He doesn’t even take you to his house.” But she didn’t. Because something, at some point last night, even though Kristin had been laughing about him, had given Mary Louise the idea that she was afraid of him. That—for all the talk of Dante and Beatrice, and love, and the rose—Kristin couldn’t tell him. Because if she told him, he would be angry, and if he was angry he would leave her. And that would be the worst.
A line of pink-brown scars ringing Kristin like a picket fence danced in front of Mary Louise’s eyes. She felt sick. Too much wine last night. No food. The coffee. Then she looked at Kristin, huddled on the couch, and remembered the scratchy feel of the little white bear she’d found on the pillow next to her cheek when she’d woken up crying because Brad now loved Tiffany, and nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “Sure, Kris. Of course.”
Kristin could have cheered. She wanted to jump up off the couch and spill her coffee. But she didn’t. Instead she looked at Mary Louise and blinked again. There was something about blinking. It made people think you were taking things very seriously, or at least thinking about them. Kind of like wringing your hands. Or biting your lip. Playing with your hair worked that way, too. But not as much.
“Thanks, ML,” she said after a second, being sure to look down into her mug. “Thanks,” she said again. “I knew—well, I knew I could ask you. That you’d understand. About my parents, not knowing, and stuff.”
“I won’t tell,” Mary Louise said. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
It was late. After they’d cleaned up and done the dishes, Mary Louise had gone out with some of the others, like she always did on Saturday, for shopping or to some pizza place or trattoria and a movie. Kristin, as usual, had said no thanks and, not as usual, had stayed in to study. He was taking her out to lunch tomorrow, and she didn’t actually want to fail everything.
She was lying on her bed, reading The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici with Mr. Ted, when she heard a slithering. The light was on in the hall. Mary Louise must have taken her shoes off and was sliding around in her socks, because Kristin hadn’t heard her come in. But she could see her, or at least see the shadow of two feet in the bar of light under the door. And she could see the envelope, which was yellow and had a flower on it.
Mary Louise nudged it farther into Kristin’s room with her toe. Then she stood there for a second. After that there was a rustling sound and the feet shadow vanished.
Kristin waited before she put the book down and got up. Turning her back on Mr. Ted, she picked up the envelope, slit it open, and fanned eight crisp new fifty-euro notes in her palm.
Wednesday, January 27
Kristin Carson folded the sweater and placed it in the suitcase. She ran her hand across the wool—lavender, her favorite color—and glanced in the mirror again. She hadn’t been sure about the highlights, but the woman in the salon had convinced her, promised the copper streaks would liven up everything, especially her eyes, which people called her best feature, but she’d always thought were kind of dull. Ordinary mid-sky blue. The woman had been right though. They did seem different now. Darker, deeper. Sparked with mystery. Or something.
She fingered her new bangs cautiously, as if the curls were spun glass and might break. It had taken her about an hour to style it this way. Kristin twisted her neck to look at the sides and back, at the strands she’d left rippling down the way the woman had showed her. Putting it up definitely made her look older. Now when people saw them, maybe they wouldn’t just assume she was his daughter.
She hadn’t seen him since Sunday, the first time since she’d arrived that it had been that long. But he’d been busy. Making special arrangements, he said. Kristin smiled. Already things were different. On Sunday he’d actually picked her up for lunch. He hadn’t come up to the apartment or anything radical like that. But he’d driven down the street, and parked right outside.
It was the invitation to her party that had changed everything. The fact that she had given him “the honor,” as he called it, holding her hand over the table at the trattoria where they had had dinner, “of meeting her father and stepmother.” He made a point of referring to Anna that way, and had frowned when Kristin called her the Bitch, brushing her cheek with his fingers and saying, “Carina, you don’t have to be so angry. You’re not alone anymore.”
The memory of his voice crossed her like wind rippling grass. She thought about what would happen tonight. She hadn’t admitted to Tennyson-Like-the-P that they’d never actually slept together, not the whole thing, anyway. That would have been way too embarrassing—not to mention cramping her style as far as the cash went. Watching herself in the wardrobe door, Kristin wondered if she felt bad about that, and decided she didn’t. It wasn’t any of Mary Louise’s business, and anyway it wouldn’t be true for much longer. And as usual, he’d been right. It was more exciting, better, that they’d waited.
Kristin smoothed the sweater one last time and closed the suitcase. She lifted the coat off the bed, peeling back the plastic that covered it like a skin, and slipped it on. The idea of introducing him to her father and the—Anna—of walking into her party on his arm, flashed through her head as she did up the wide shiny buttons and ran her hand down the sleeve, stroking the silky nap. Her dad was always talking about how they wanted to meet her friends. Well, now they would. Despite herself, Kristin almost laughed out loud. Just the idea of it filled her with a sort of queasy glee, a high as bright and sharp as jagged glass.
Which was weird—that the idea of shocking them, of drawing blood, so to speak, was still so enticing. Because they weren’t bad people. It wasn’t as if her father and Anna had been mean to her. Or even unfair. On the contrary, as parents went, they’d been pretty good. Considerate, and generous. And way patient when she got kicked out of one school and suspended from the next. They hadn’t batted an eye, or argued or anything, when it came to paying for this year. Instead they’d just been thrilled. That she’d developed an interest in art. That she’d wanted to learn Italian, do something ambitious for once.
Before—she thought of it that way now, before and after him—she’d blamed them. For basically everything. But especially for Karen. And especially Anna. Which—not that it mattered—she knew made no sense at all because her dad hadn’t even met Anna until a year after the accident. That was what they called it, the accident, as though it had just happened. As though the basement door had slammed shut all on its own.
The thought still made her chest tight. She shrugged. Who cared what they called it? It didn’t matter. And anyway, it wasn’t true anymore—the blaming part. Every once in a while, though, she still needed the hurt. The widening of eyes. The tiny, all but inaudible gasp. The punch-in-the-gut dumb
surprise at what she had—or hadn’t—done. It was like throwing a ball, and having it bounce back.
Without thinking, Kristin ran a hand across her belly. She couldn’t feel them under all these clothes, but it was comforting to know they were there. Forevermore. Her little stick figures, dancing around her waist.
For a second she closed her eyes and imagined him kissing each one. Anointing them the way you anointed a baby’s head with oil. She’d be better, she thought. To her father and Anna. To Mary Louise. She’d be nicer. She would. It was easy, now that she had him.
Kristin glanced at her watch. Five minutes to five. She had to get going. If there was one thing he hated, it was being kept waiting. It would have been easier—duh—if he’d come and picked her up. He’d done it once already, on Sunday. She’d thought of asking, when he kept going over where he’d wait for her, but in the end she hadn’t bothered. Things would change, they would. They already were. Why ask for miracles?
Kristin lifted the suitcase off the bed. She looked around the room, checking to see if she’d forgotten anything, and came face to face with Mr. Ted. He felt warm and molded when she picked him up, like Silly Putty, or one of those old rubber Super Balls she used to love. Mr. Ted had gone everywhere important with her. To camp, and on vacations, and to boarding school. He’d stayed overnight to the hospital when she had her tonsils out. She’d always taken him on sleepovers when she was little. Kristin hesitated, then put him back on the pillow.
“Sorry, buddy,” she whispered. “Not this time. Somebody has to stay here and watch out for things. Make sure Tennyson-Like-the-P doesn’t go all gooey and start calling Brad.”
The Lost Daughter Page 4