CHAPTER 57
NORA
Right away was an understatement. Nora flew to the car and backed out of the driveway so quickly that had something been in her path, well, good luck to that something. She was a warrior. She was a woman and she was a mother. Hear her roar.
Her baby, her Cecily. On the Golden Gate Bridge.
The sergeant had put her on the phone but all Nora had heard was crying, then four words.
Mommy, Cecily said. Mommy, come get me.
Easy peasy lemon squeezie Cecily. Cecily, falling at the feis. Cecily, working so hard on her landmark project. Cecily, the joy draining from her beautiful brown eyes. And Nora hadn’t really noticed. She’d been so wrapped up in Angela, and Maya, and Harvard, and her own idiotic troubles with the Watkins home and the Marin dwarf flax, that she hadn’t noticed. She thought she was on top of things but all along she wasn’t—all along she was watching, was worrying about, the wrong daughter.
And this was her penance.
Genie, I take back everything I’ve ever wished for in my whole life. That crap about putting the kids in mason jars? Forget I ever said that. The wish about wishing I’d never even heard of Harvard? Stupid. Stupid! I didn’t mean it, of course. All the way back to the chocolate appliances, the perms, the one time I wished (privately) that Marianne wouldn’t get invited to Lisa Reardon’s party along with me so I wouldn’t have to watch over her. There is only one wish now, there’s only ever been one wish that matters. Make Cecily okay. Genie? Are you hearing me? God? Are you out there?
To get to the security office she had to cross the bridge, just as the sergeant had told her. When traffic halted her progress for a minute she could see, on the east side, knots of pedestrians, a couple of runners. Hey! Nora wanted to call to all of them. Hey, guess what? I’ve been worrying about the wrong child!
Cecily and Pinkie were spending more time together than ever before this fall. Nora had attributed this to Cecily’s quitting Irish dance but really it was more: they were plotting something, they were plotting this.
Whatever this was.
Wrong child, wrong child. Nora had been worrying about the wrong child.
It was confusing, pulling off so close to the end of the bridge, and then squeezing into the small parking area that Sergeant Campbell had described. Nora had to ask a bridge patrol officer examining his bicycle where to go, and he answered her nonchalantly, like this was a regular day, a regular situation. Up a few steps, bridge traffic whooshing by just behind her. Another officer at the window of the security office, a voice that didn’t feel like hers asking where to go. Then down a corridor. And there was Cecily, sitting on a plastic chair and holding a cup of water. And Pinkie. And Cathy Moynihan.
Sergeant Stephen Campbell wore a tan uniform with a holster. No hat. Nora realized that on the drive over she had been picturing a hat. Wrong child, wrong child, I’ve been worrying about the wrong child. Probably he had one somewhere, he just wasn’t wearing it at the moment. There was a gold star above his front left pocket, and a blue patch on his right arm that made Nora think of the Girl Scout patches her mother spent many a painstaking hour stitching to Nora’s uniforms. Now they were all iron-on. Irrelevant fact. The sergeant’s tan pants had a blue and gold stripe running down the side. He was clean-cut, with hair going gray, about Nora’s age, although he could have been a bit younger or a bit older. Strong, square hands, deep wrinkles around his eyes, the kind common in avid skiers and hikers—people who summered and wintered near Tahoe. I’ve been worrying about the wrong child.
It was unthinkable, all of it.
That Cecily had gotten herself to the Golden Gate, and that Pinkie had too. (“Took the bus,” they said later, almost casually, as though they were talking about an after-school activity, like glee club or lacrosse. “Then the 10 and then the Muni.”)
It was unthinkable that the school had never called to inquire after their absences.
“They called themselves in sick,” said Cathy Moynihan, who somehow, unfairly, had gotten herself there before Nora. Cathy Moynihan looked as ill as Nora felt; her hair was unstyled and partially damp, as though she’d stepped right out of the shower and into the security office. She wore no makeup. Nora noted in a pocket of her mind reserved for incongruous, unimportant thoughts that she had never seen Cathy Moynihan without makeup.
All of it was unthinkable: Cecily and Pinkie standing on the Golden Gate—two ten-year-olds, by themselves—until Sergeant Stephen Campbell happened by on his regular bridge patrol, saw something amiss, and pulled over.
“Wait a second,” said Nora. She still didn’t understand. She hadn’t let go of Cecily since she’d arrived. She was kneeling in front of her, holding on now to the sleeve of her turquoise fleece, as though she might take flight without warning. “You were going to jump? They were going to jump off the bridge?”
“No! No, Mom, no.” Cecily looked horrified. “We were helping.”
“Helping what?” Cathy’s voice was carved straight out of ice.
“Whoever needed it,” said Pinkie. Her face was dead white; her freckles looked almost black against her skin. Her hand holding her water cup was shaking; some of the water sloshed over the edge and onto her jeans. “We learned about all those people who help people who want to jump. And we thought we could help. We thought we could save someone. And then we’d be…and then we’d be heroes.”
“Even if we couldn’t be heroes, we thought we could do something,” said Cecily. “I couldn’t do anything at home, I couldn’t help Angela with anything and everybody at home is so stressed out, and I heard you and Daddy fighting the other night and I don’t know, I thought I could do something here. Like, where people’s problems are sooooo bad.”
It’s official, thought Nora. Worst mother in the world, right here. Bring me the award and I’ll frame it and hang it in the office. There are no other contenders.
“But there was nobody to save,” said Cecily. “So we stood there for a long time, and waited. And talked about what it would be like, and why people jump. All those people we saw in the movie, and how they thought everything was hopeless…” She started to cry. “And it was so scary, looking down like that. Imagining. The water is black if you look straight down. It was so scary, Mom.”
“Then I came by,” said Sergeant Campbell. “On bridge patrol. We share that with the bridge patrol officers. We all work together. And I stopped, of course. Because one of them was starting to climb over the rail.”
Nora’s stomach dropped right out of her body. “Which one?”
“Me,” said Cecily. And she began to bawl, the way she used to when she didn’t get her way as a little girl—taking deep gulps of air, hyperventilating.
“I brought them here, and called you both. You know the rest.”
Nora looked at Cathy but Cathy wasn’t meeting her eyes. Nora looked at Cecily. Nora pictured her hiking a leg over the rail of the bridge. Her mind refused to accommodate the image.
“I just wanted to see what it was like,” cried Cecily, in between sobs. “I just wanted to see what it felt like.”
“I told her not to,” said Pinkie. “I told her not to climb over. She couldn’t anyway, it’s way too high.”
“But if you had!” said Nora. “One slip, one mistake, and you would have been dead. Oh my God, Cecily. You would have been dead.” She’d been worrying about the wrong child.
“Listen to me,” said Sergeant Campbell. He stood in front of the two girls and looked down at them. Nora, who suddenly felt in the way, released her grip on Cecily’s sleeve and moved behind her. Sergeant Campbell was stern but you could see that he was ultimately kind, the way Nora knew parents should strive to be. This was a nearly impossible balance to achieve—it was the hardest part about parenting—but Sergeant Campbell made it seem as easy as slipping on a sweater. Look at Pinkie and Cecily, giving him their full attention! “Listen to me, you two. Listen very carefully. We are trained especially to help people like that. You c
an’t just…you can’t just be a regular person, even a regular person who’s trying to do some good, and help anyone in that situation. You just can’t. People who consider suicide are desperate, and we have to be really, really careful about what we say to them. Now I understand that you were trying to help. But you scared a lot of people. And you weren’t ready to help anyone. You understand?” The girls nodded. Pinkie’s braces glinted in the overhead light. They were mute and obedient; they were practically Girl Scouts.
Sergeant Campbell turned his attention then to Nora and Cathy.
“I got kids of my own,” he said. “I know how it is, you try to keep up with everything. You can’t always. But you got to keep trying.”
“You’re right,” whispered Nora. She wanted to hug Sergeant Campbell. She wanted to lie down in bed and have Sergeant Campbell wrap a giant soft blanket around her and tiptoe out of the room so she could sleep for sixteen hours straight.
But there was nothing to do but the best thing in the world: gather up her child and go home.
—
In the car Cecily fell asleep. The promised fog hadn’t materialized; the bay was as calm and clear as a sheet of glass.
Nora used the rearview mirror to look at Cecily, who slept with her head leaning against the window and her mouth hanging slightly open. The posture reminded Nora of how Cecily used to sleep as a toddler, leaning to one side in her bulletproof car seat.
Poor Cecily. Of course she wasn’t immune to the stress in the house: how could she be? No doubt Cecily looked at Angela, even at her parents, and saw the same fate coming down the pike for her. The other members of the Hawthorne family weren’t exactly making it look attractive, growing up.
With one hand she dialed Gabe’s number again, then Angela’s. Again. Neither picked up. When Gabe turned on his phone he’d see sixteen missed calls and seven voice mails from Nora. When Angela turned on hers: probably twenty, twenty-five. Nora had lost count. Where was everybody?
When Nora pulled into the driveway she started to wake Cecily. But instead she climbed in the backseat. The back of the Audi was nice, spacious and comfortable, and still clean, the way she had to keep it to drive clients around. Nora allowed a lot of things in her household, but she didn’t allow snacking in the car. She moved a piece of Cecily’s hair out of her face and Cecily stirred but didn’t open her eyes.
One day Cecily would grow up and fall in love and have her heart broken and do stupid things she’d regret and wonderful things she’d remember for the rest of her life; there’d be a time when Nora might not know where Cecily was for days or even weeks at a time or what she was doing, or with whom. She’d get a job (or not); she’d love it (or not); she might get married and have kids of her own or be a single mother or not be a mother at all. She might be a lesbian or an archaeologist (obviously, Nora knew, you could be both of those at once) and she might hurt people and ache with regret or be hurt herself and ache with sadness. She might not always be safe but for now she was, she was right here with Nora, and she was sleeping, and nothing could get to her at this moment.
But where the hell was Angela?
CHAPTER 58
ANGELA
It was official. Angela Hawthorne was the stupidest smart person she knew.
She was stupid in too many ways to count but, okay, she’d give it a try.
Let me count the ways, said Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Fine, Elizabeth. Ms. Browning, if you prefer. Here we go.
First, she was stupid enough to think she was smart enough to get into Harvard. Which was the biggest mistake, and she’d been making it for years now. So sure of herself, so oblivious. Nobody got into Harvard. Well, people did, obviously, probably about eight hundred people had gotten in yesterday, when she’d been rejected, but nobody she knew. You could be valedictorian, you could be the smartest person in your school, you could be the person who worked the hardest and studied the longest and wanted it the most and ran the fastest and fluted the best and all that didn’t matter: nothing mattered. Nothing mattered.
Because there were so many high schools, and each one of them had a valedictorian, and there were so many families, and each of them had a smartest child. There were cross-country teams everywhere, and each of them had a fastest person. There were so many people who had already gone to Harvard, and those people all had children, or at least most of them did, and there wasn’t room for all of them to get in. So they did not all get in. Which was not breaking news, because she wasn’t stupid (see aforementioned), but still. Not everybody could be chosen. And she had not been chosen. So she was smart, sure. But she wasn’t smart enough. (See me, Ms. Simmons had written on her extended essay.) Angela didn’t even want to think about that essay. Of course Ms. Simmons had noticed, and had called her out on it, of course, and Angela had cried like a baby in front of her. She definitely didn’t want to think about that essay.
Second, she had no backup plan. Not one single backup plan. Every time in the past year, two years, five years, she’d started to think about this moment, and what would happen if it happened, if she got rejected, she hadn’t let herself get this far. Her mother had tried to get her to, but Angela had pushed her off with both hands. Ms. Vogel had tried to get her to too, but same deal. Double push.
Rejection. Not an SAT word. But such an awful word. Ugly and mean. Not deferred, as in wait until our regular admission time and we will reconsider your pathetic little application again, when we have not forty-five hundred people you are competing with, but more like thirty-five thousand people who all want exactly what you want, and who all think they deserve it as much as you do. Nope: just flat-out, don’t-bother-us-again, your application is going right in the trash or the recycling bin or wherever it is we put the real losers.
She must have blown it with that Susan Holloway way worse than she’d thought. That was all bullshit, Susan pretending to like her handshake, to like her honest answer about not having read a book for pleasure since she was a toddler. And for sure she never should have asked that question at the end. Susan Holloway had probably flagged her application. There was probably some special red flag, like a dark red, that meant: Stay really far away from this one. That flag meant: Don’t even think about it.
Third, she’d blown practically the entire gift certificate Aunt Marianne had given her on this one stupid, pointless, terrifying trip. She’d rented a car from a really shady place far from the airport because it was the only place that would rent to you when you were younger than twenty-five. And she still had to get home. Eventually.
Fourth, here she was, standing outside the Harvard admissions office, waiting for Timothy Valentine, admissions officer for the Northern California region.
I bow to him, she’d told Cecily. Like he’s Mecca. Well, maybe she should have.
The stupidest smart person in the world, right here. Angela Hawthorne. Allow me to shake your hand because I’ve been told I have a wonderful grip. Pleased to meet you.
But whatever flaws she had as a Harvard applicant, she was an excellent stalker. Because here he came now.
Timothy Valentine was a tall man, ginger-haired, thin, with a build similar to that of Angela’s cross-country coach, Mr. Bradshaw, which meant that he had a slight stoop to his shoulders that owed something to a deficit in upper-body fitness: the curse of the carb-gulping long-distance runner. Marathoner, thought Angela. Does Boston every April, I bet. How scary could this man be, if he was a marathoner? And yet he scared the crap out of her.
In one hand Angela clutched the printout of the email from Harvard, and in the other the keys to the dubiously obtained rental car.
Timothy Valentine, exiting the vaunted halls of 86 Brattle Street, didn’t look around to see if anyone might be following him. He didn’t walk particularly quickly, though his legs were long enough that Angela had to hurry to keep up with him. He seemed like a man who was out walking a dog, or strolling through a shopping mall. Timothy Valentine didn’t seem like a man with the
fate of thousands of high school seniors resting on his narrow shoulders.
Timothy Valentine crossed the street and arrived at a burnt-orange Prius with a Patriots sticker in the rear window. Fortuitously (SAT word, not that it mattered anymore), Angela had parked just a few spots away. Angela’s mother was big into the Patriots. She was always going on about Tom Brady, but in their house she may as well have been speaking to the deaf, because nobody else in the family cared about football. Her father watched tennis and golf, and they all followed the Giants.
Now that she had found Timothy Valentine, Angela noticed things about her surroundings that she hadn’t had a chance to notice when she’d arrived at 86 Brattle Street just a short time before, and at Logan before that. The evening felt different here than it did at home—it wasn’t just the chilly quality to the air, though that was part of it, but something was different about the sky, too, which Angela, if pressed, would have described as a heaviness. A gravity. Angela had once heard her mother, fueled by a couple of glasses of Cabernet, describe to dinner guests what she viewed as the essential difference between the East Coast and the West Coast: the East Coast had been settled by people who were escaping something (persecution) and the West Coast by people who were seeking something (gold). “I mean, come on,” Nora had said. “Doesn’t that just say it all, right there? Isn’t that the crux of everything?”
There had been an early snow in New England, and vestiges of it lingered in the parking lot in the form of dirty ice chunks and ugly piles pushed against light poles. Christmas was only—what? Nine days away.
Timothy Valentine’s Prius purred to life. What else was there for Angela to do? She had flown all the way here. She’d forked over a lot of money at Payless Car Rental. (Although, because of her age, she’d actually Paid Way More. She’d Paid a Lot.) Angela climbed into her rented Hyundai Accent and followed Timothy Valentine into the Cambridge twilight.
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