How Nancy Drew Saved My Life

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Wouldn’t it be great if Papa married her?

  I couldn’t get those words out of my head. They taunted my every second.

  Would it be great if Edgar Rawlings married Bebe Iversdottir?

  Annette would finally have a mother then, a beautiful blond mother who would undoubtedly be an asset to her husband’s diplomatic career. After all, hadn’t Robert Miller said she was the daughter of a dignitary?

  But I didn’t like Bebe Iversdottir. To me, there had seemed to be something…evil about her.

  Then I told myself that was my imagination going into overdrive. But Nancy Drew also had an overactive imagination, I’d remarked on more than one occasion. Every time something happened that would impress most normal human beings as being not such a much, like a car driving by too quickly, Nancy would conclude something outrageous like, “I’ll bet that driver is a jewel thief!” Of course, she was always right.

  But what had Bebe done, really, to arouse my suspicions?

  Sure, there was that whole thing with her suggesting Ambassador Rawlings send Annette away to boarding school. But was that really so awful? Maybe she’d been at boarding school herself. Maybe she was suggesting it, not because she was so selfish that she wanted the ambassador all to herself, but because she was really selfless and wanted what she thought was in the best interests of the child. It was possible.

  Okay, so maybe it didn’t seem likely, but it was possible.

  And if she was really not evil, if she was really just some nice, blond, beautiful woman who happened to be in love with the ambassador, then what did that make me?

  I saw what it made me.

  It made me jealous.

  Worse, it made me in love with him.

  For the first time, I saw that Gina was right in what she’d suspected and I saw the extent of her insight: somehow, without realizing it, or at least without admitting it to myself, I’d fallen in love with Edgar Rawlings, deeper than I’d ever been with anybody.

  What had my subconscious mind been thinking?

  I knew what it had been thinking. It had been thinking that I could do over the past, exchange the mistakes I’d made with Buster for a success story with Edgar Rawlings.

  I saw the futility of it.

  Why in the world would he ever pick someone like me, whose sole claim to fame in life was as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, over someone like Bebe Iversdottir?

  The answer was simple: he wouldn’t.

  Whatever I’d been dreaming of, a world in which I became Mrs. Ambassador, suddenly beautiful and dancing my life away in the arms of a man who loved me, a world in which, petty as it might sound, I would be on an equal footing with Buster and Alissa Keating, only I would be on an even better footing, since my love would be real and true while theirs would only ever be false and false—whatever that foolish dream was, it was just that and would only ever be that: a foolish dream.

  It was enough to make me cry.

  But I couldn’t cry. I needed to remain calm, do my job, I needed to be Annette’s competent governess, the woman who would turn her over to her new mother when the time came.

  I decided to drown my sorrows by learning how to drive.

  I know that might not be the solution most people would choose. But I was responsible, to a certain extent, for a young child, so it wasn’t as if drinking in the afternoon was an option.

  Besides, Lars Aquavit had been after me for a long time to teach me.

  “How is it possible for a person not to drive?” He would laugh at me often.

  “Well,” I’d say, “it’s not like it’s every person’s calling, in the way that it’s yours. I suppose I could just as easily say to you, ‘How can you not be a governess?’”

  “Because I am the driver,” he would say quite reasonably.

  “Well, there you go,” I’d say.

  On that day, however, I said something different.

  “Today’s your lucky day, Lars,” I informed him.

  His eyebrows rose.

  “I’m going to finally let you teach me to drive,” I said.

  “God bless the trolls,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  I wish I could say it went well.

  The way I’d figured it, if I could just be competent at this one thing that most adults in the world were reasonably competent at, it would restore my sense of confidence.

  But such was not to be.

  In the Nancy Drew stories, the young sleuth/girl detective had been a great driver, zipping around in her convertible. Of course, in the Nancy Drew stories, the cars of other drivers often functioned as weapons. One time, someone even hit Nancy’s frisky terrier, Togo! (Of course he was okay.) And even sleuthing around Amish country, Nancy’s horse and buggy were run off the road by another horse and buggy! Still, despite averaging one near-death close call for each of the fifty-six stories, she never once hesitated to get behind the wheel or pick up the reins again. She was just unstoppable.

  Now here was I, who had never had any appellation attached to my name, unless it was that of the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, hoping to become equally competent behind the wheel, so that, should it ever become necessary, I’d be able to give all the bad guys a run for their money.

  Of course, Nancy and her friends always gave cute yet important-sounding names to anything they did that smacked of mystery or danger. Need to get an owl out of a friend’s house? Dub the mission Operation Owl!

  Maybe, I thought, if I could find something cute yet important sounding to call my learning to drive, my mission would be a similar success.

  “Ready for Operation Cruise Control?” I said with forced cheer, placing my hands on the wheel in the ten and two positions I’d seen other drivers adopt; well, the careful ones.

  “What?” For the first time since I’d known him, Lars Aquavit looked at me with scorn; well, except for every time he teased me about being the only adult in the world who couldn’t drive.

  “Ready to teach me to drive?” I amended meekly, already starting to feel dejected about the whole thing.

  I tried to listen carefully as he patiently explained the controls of the car to me: brake, clutch, gas; first through fifth gears.

  Somewhere around clutch and second gear, I felt my brain shut down. I’d always had a mental block where geography was concerned, just couldn’t figure out where in the world anything was, and I’d long suspected that my aversion to driving was because I knew I’d have a similar block there and that even if I could learn how to drive, I’d never be able to find anything anyway.

  Still, how hard could it be? Sixteen-year-olds all over the United States learned how to drive every day. On farms, five-year-olds were probably learning to drive tractors. So, really, how hard could it be?

  And it wasn’t like I was going to need to know gears above first, certainly not right away. The main thing Lars Aquavit was going to teach me to do on the first day, I was sure of it, was how to go forward and how to reverse. Even an idiot could do that.

  “Okay,” he instructed, “slowly reverse the automobile out of the driveway.”

  I adjusted the gears and hit the gas.

  There was just one problem. I had somehow got the Drive and Reverse parts of the stick confused, so we surged forward instead.

  All right, two problems: I hit the gas really hard.

  “Brake!” Lars Aquavit yelled. “Hit the brake!”

  But my mind froze and I was unable to do anything but stare straight ahead, hands still at ten and two, as we hit the corner of the embassy. Lars Aquavit was quick. Seeing me freeze, he immediately reached downward and, with his fist, punched the brake.

  But not quick enough to prevent me from crumpling the front end of the car and putting a healthy dent in the structure of the building.

  “Reverse!” he yelled. “Put it in Reverse! Not the D! The R! Look for the P with a tail on it!”

  This time, with his explicit abecedarian instructions, I had no problem finding the appropriate gear. The problem wa
s that I still had what I would come to learn was known as a “lead foot” and I’d used that lead foot so strenuously while reversing that I literally flew us backward into an enormous bank of snow and dirt.

  “Stop,” he groaned. “Please stop. You are awful at this.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “Please turn off the car, Charlotte,” he begged, fist once again on the brake.

  Even I knew that driving, even learning to drive, wasn’t supposed to go like this.

  Meekly, I obeyed.

  Lars Aquavit took his fist off the brake, wiped a relieved hand across his brow. He was always so cool. I’d never seen him rattled like this before. He slowly pushed open the door, walked around to the back of the car. I got out my side, walked around to the back, as well.

  The back of the car really was buried.

  “Give me the keys,” he instructed.

  I handed them over.

  “At least,” he said, “if I can get the car out of that bank, I can see how bad the rear damage is.”

  “Damage?” I echoed. “I’d think an embassy car would be specially reinforced.”

  “It is,” he said, “but that’s against assassin’s bullets. It’s not reinforced against you.”

  Ouch!

  But try as he might, no matter how hard he hit the gas, even harder than I’d hit it when I’d hit the side of the embassy, he couldn’t get it out of the snowbank.

  He climbed out of the car, ran his hand through his hair.

  “There’s probably snow and debris caught in the tailpipe,” he said. “There’s probably so much…shit in there.”

  I’d never heard him swear before!

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “We?” he asked. “You’re going to go find me a shovel and then I’m going to spend the rest of the day shoveling all the snow away. Hopefully, if I relieve the outward pressure, I’ll be able to finally move the car, filled tailpipe or no filled tailpipe, and take it for repairs.”

  “I always thought my learning to drive was a bad idea,” I said.

  “Ha!” he laughed bitterly, surveying the work ahead of him. “Well, I guess you thought right.”

  At dinner, I was so subdued, even Annette commented upon it.

  Young children are supposed to be almost completely self-absorbed and yet, as with so many other things, she belied that stereotype.

  “Why so blue, Miss Bell?” she asked, a worried frown furrowing her pretty little brow. “You have barely eaten anything. Usually, you eat like Captain!”

  Nothing like having one’s appetite compared to that of a very large dog to cheer a girl’s spirits.

  “Thanks for your concern,” I said. “I’m fine, really. I guess I just lost my appetite a bit after the incident with the, um, car.”

  “Don’t give it a second thought,” said Lars Aquavit, who had regained his cheerful equilibrium since that afternoon. “As soon as we get the car back from the shop, we can resume lessons.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “I couldn’t be more serious,” he said. “I refuse to have you be my first failure as a driving instructor.”

  I suppose it should have cheered me, that Lars Aquavit refused to give up on me after what I’d put him through, but it did not.

  Pleading a slight headache—“Perhaps you injured yourself more than you thought!” Annette said, “Perhaps we should call the doctor!”—I assured them that I was otherwise fine and just needed an early night.

  I had not put in much time on my writing lately. Now I pulled out the short stack of sheets, looked to see where I’d left off. It was at the point where I was about to tell Buster I was pregnant, after which he would show his true colors. I started to write the scene, got halfway through it before realizing my heart wasn’t in it.

  Somehow, now, those events felt very far away, as though they’d happened to someone else. In the past, when I’d sat down to write my story, the pain had been fresh all over again. And, in a way, that had been cleansing. But now there was a new pain that eclipsed the past.

  All day long, since working with Annette on making the scrapbook, as I moved through my day, I’d pushed the memory of her words aside: that she wanted a new mother to fill up the vacant space in the family-album pictures of herself and her father, and that she hoped that new mother would be Bebe. As I put aside the book I no longer felt like working on, as I dressed for bed, I let the feelings of sadness and loss fill me; I no longer tried to fight it.

  If I were Nancy Drew, I thought, placing my head on the pillow, I’d be a lot more resilient. Nancy never gave up. No matter what outlandish thing happened, she bounced back, as if she had springs in her. One time, after the ceiling literally fell on her head, and after sweeping up the debris, she’d been filled with good cheer once again. Well, that was no surprise, since she came from such good and sturdy stock. Her father, Carson Drew, was a hero, too, after all.

  Maybe if my father had been more like Carson Drew, he’d never have left me with Aunt Bea in the first place. Maybe if my father had been more like Carson Drew, I’d have been more like Nancy. It seemed to me that there were times when a person should just give in to their feelings, let the tears flow. But I didn’t feel resilient like Nancy Drew.

  I tried to stop, tried to fall asleep, but it was no use. All I could remember was the dream I’d previously had, where first I was with Ambassador Rawlings and then my place was taken by Bebe Iversdottir as his bride.

  I had to move, had to get out of the bed. But I didn’t want to go downstairs. Even though it was the middle of the night now, I didn’t want to run the risk that someone else in the house might wake and run into me in my present condition. Even Steinway was nowhere in sight to offer comfort.

  Sliding into my slippers, I crossed to the chair in front of my writing desk, where I’d been sitting earlier. Positioning it so that it was under the trapdoor I hadn’t used since the day Mrs. Fairly showed it to me, I climbed on top, pulled the door down and ascended the stairs. At least the air would feel fresh up there.

  It was freezing!

  But who really cared?

  I could have gone back down and got a coat to warm me or at least a hat to protect my head from getting wet by the light snow that was falling, but it would have required more energy for self-preservation than I had at the moment.

  As I looked out at the night sights of the city, unseeing, tears blurring my vision, I remembered how even while hanging on for dear life on a steep roof, Nancy took the time to balance against a chimney, taking in the view of the surrounding countryside: the picturesque panorama, the lazy river sparkling in the sunlight, the white daisies sprinkling their way across the green fields.

  Wiping my nose on my sleeve, I was glad no one could see me. I could be as brash and intrepid as I was capable of being, I could be clearheaded enough to sit up here and, while miserable, count the stars in the sky or muse about what wonderful things might be going on in the tidy houses below me; it wasn’t going to change a thing. I would still have my heart broken.

  I couldn’t even drive a car.

  I heard the tread of slow steps on the pull-down stairs before I heard the voice.

  Who was it? I wondered, rubbing at the tears in my eyes. Mrs. Fairly, wanting who knew what in the middle of the night? Annette, needing comfort after a nightmare?

  “Miss Bell?”

  Oh no! That familiar deep voice was the last voice I’d expected to hear!

  And then he was there in the rectangle made by the open trapdoor. How handsome he looked to me. How just out of reach, no closer to me in spirit than the stars I’d been unable to care about a moment before.

  “When I called earlier in the day,” he said, sounding breathless, as though he’d been running for hours, “Mrs. Fairly told me you’d been in an accident with the car.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “You can take the repairs out of my pay.” I stopped, thinking of all the damage I’d done. It was a
lot of damage. “For however many weeks is necessary,” I added.

  I’d probably never see another cent of pay.

  “I don’t care about the stupid car!” he said.

  “You don’t?” I was surprised.

  “No,” he said. “I care about you.”

  “You do?” Now I was really surprised.

  “Yes,” he said. “I came rushing home because I was worried, took the first available flight, caught a cab from the airport, since, well, the car is in the shop.”

  He smiled ruefully at that last statement.

  “But didn’t Mrs. Fairly tell you I was fine?” I asked.

  “Of course she did,” he said. “But I was still worried. Mrs. Fairly always tells me that things are fine when I’m on the road, no matter what has happened. She has this bad habit of not wanting to concern me with things. Sometimes I think she thinks I’m incapable of doing my job properly, if I have too many things on my plate.”

  Now it was my turn to smile ruefully. I had often had the same instinct about Mrs. Fairly’s thought processes, only in relation to myself. Since coming to learn the truth of Annette’s mother, I had concluded that the only reason Mrs. Fairly had kept it from me was that she believed if I knew it, I would be too distracted with sympathy for Annette to ever discipline her properly. Not that needing to discipline Annette was ever an issue.

  “Well, sir,” I said, “now that you are here, you can see for yourself that things really are fine.”

  “But they are not fine, Miss Bell!”

  “How can you say that?”

  “I come rushing home, I run up to your room in the middle of the night, naturally expecting to find you sleeping safely in your bed. Instead, I find your bed empty, the trapdoor to the roof gaping open. And, as I start to come up here, I hear you.”

  He reached out then with one finger, gently traced the path of one dried tear down my cheek.

  “You were crying,” he said softly, “weren’t you?”

  It seemed ridiculous to lie, when the evidence was right at his fingertips.