“Same here, Your Majesty,” I said, curtsying for her benefit and hoping I’d got the form of address right; no point in me messing her up with misinformation before she’d even started her new life. “But I’ll visit one day, if you’ll invite me.”
And, somehow, I really did know I would see her again.
On the other hand, it was harder saying goodbye to Lars Aquavit and Mrs. Fairly, to Gina and Britta, than I would have imagined.
I didn’t know when I’d see any of them again or even if.
Gina and Britta said they might come see me in New York sometime, but I expressed my doubts.
“Of course we will come!” said Britta.
“Perhaps in summer,” added Gina, “so we can avoid the unbearable heat here.”
Unbear…?
Whatever. I could explain the difference between an Icelandic summer and a Manhattan summer to them at a later date.
Mrs. Fairly and Lars Aquavit were remaining in Iceland for the time being. Well, of course Lars was—he lived there. But they were both remaining at the embassy because Edgar himself would be remaining until he’d finished his service there.
“I’m still a good ambassador, right?” he’d said ruefully. “I mean, it’s not like I have to do much here.”
That was true enough.
But he’d also wanted a commitment from me regarding the future and this I wouldn’t make. I was too angry with him for all the deceptions.
“But I had to protect Annette!” he objected.
“But you let me fall in love with you!” I objected. “And you knew you were married!”
“But I couldn’t tell you that!” he objected. “Annette wasn’t supposed to know the truth! No one was supposed to know!”
“But you could have trusted me!” I objected. “If you loved me so much, you should have trusted me!”
We were both full of buts, full of objections, full of exclamation points. I didn’t care if some of mine were unreasonable, given the facts. I’d been hurt, hurt too often and too deeply, and if holding on to my outrage protected me from further hurt, so be it.
“What will it take, Charlotte?” he’d asked, resigned. “What will it take to win you back?”
“Give me space and get your divorce,” I’d said. “Then come to me with the papers. If you’re lucky, I’ll let you court me.”
“Court you?”
“Yes,” I said, “dammit, court me.”
“Okay,” he agreed, “if that’s what it takes.”
There was one last thing I’d needed to do before leaving Iceland, but I’d put it off until I got to Keflavik Airport, having made Lars Aquavit stop at the drugstore on the way there.
For a while now, I’d been ignoring the nausea. Further, I’d ignored having missed one period and what that might mean, telling myself that it was just another one of those déjà vus all over again that seemed to keep happening to me. Surely it would turn out the same way it had with Buster: a false alarm, no child on the way. I’d put taking the test off until I’d safely left Edgar behind, because on the tiny off-chance that it should prove positive, I just wanted to deal with the news first on my own without it getting clouded by anyone else’s feelings. Maybe that was selfish, but I’d been given to servitude for too many years. It was time, if only occasionally, to put myself first.
So, before boarding the plane, I’d gone to the bathroom, hoping my flight didn’t leave without me as I peed on the wand, waited the requisite few minutes for the results to come through, feeling unaccountably giddy at the thought that my life was finally about to change.
Of course, I was pregnant.
epilogue
Reader, please believe me when I say, I soooo didn’t marry him.
What Would Nancy Drew Do?
I know, those words have endlessly haunted this narrative. But they really are, when you think about it, the ultimate light and guide to reason.
So, then, one last time, What Would Nancy Drew Do?
I had learned, by hard lesson, that it would be easier to say what Nancy Drew would not do.
She wouldn’t have gotten involved with Buster in the first place.
She wouldn’t have tried to write a book, probably because she was too busy solving a new mystery every six days.
She wouldn’t have gone to Iceland without researching the place first.
She wouldn’t have driven a car when she didn’t know how to drive. Well, okay, in an emergency, she would have driven anything.
She wouldn’t have been short or dark or Jewish, just because.
But, above all else, she would not, not ever, not even for a second, have gotten involved with Ambassador Edgar Rawlings.
Why not?
Because she would have known, instinctively, that there was something more there than what met the eye, she would have been instinctively suspicious. And, being suspicious, she would not have allowed her heart to become engaged.
And if she did by some insane stretch of the imagination fall in love with a man with a small child, whose absent wife had some kind of air of mystery about her? If she had then learned what I had learned about what was really going on?
She would not compound her previous errors by going on loving a man so obviously wrong for her. She would believe in her own self-worth enough to just walk away.
Even if she believed, with all her heart, that the man in question had really loved her more than he’d ever loved any other woman, still loved her.
She’d still walk away.
I was still walking, too.
But there was a slight hitch here, for I’d come to realize that it didn’t really matter a damn what Nancy Drew would or wouldn’t do, despite how much she’d taught me—about the importance of making friends; about the importance of searching for the truth, facing things. It mattered what I would do.
All along, through the various nanny jobs, through my whole life, really, I’d been searching for an identity. Well, I wasn’t going to find it with married ambassadors and I wasn’t going to find it by becoming Nancy Drew; being Nancy Drew, unless a person really was Nancy Drew, could get a girl killed. So I’d need to keep searching, I thought, but at least I now knew I was brave…sometimes. It was a start.
And what was growing inside me, the life, was a start, too.
As soon as I knew I was pregnant, I realized it was what I’d wanted all along, a child, so I could really do over the past, loving that child as I hadn’t been loved. Previously, I’d settled for other people’s children, with the safe buffer of their parents to keep me from loving them too much, hurting too much. But now, at last, I was ready to have my own. It might not be what every woman wanted most, but it was for me. The next child I would raise would be my own, for I could not leave any more behind.
And now for the most important, to me, question of all: What Would Charlotte Bell Do?
She’d wait and she’d go on believing. And one day, when the time was right, she’d risk walking out on that wire again. Because she believed, in spite of Buster, in spite of all the problems with Edgar, she still believed in the ultimate power of love between two human beings. And, just because it had never worked out right before, it didn’t mean that it would never happen.
She’d tell Edgar about the baby, because he had a right to know, but she wouldn’t let her decisions hinge on his feelings.
One day, one incredibly fine day, true love would happen for Charlotte Bell.
And when that day came, she would be ready for it.
Maybe it would be with Edgar—she kind of thought it would—and maybe it wouldn’t. Only time would tell.
But Charlotte Bell still believed.
Against all odds, she still believed.
About the Author
Family legend has it that the first time Lauren read anything, she was two and a half, and that it was the headlines of the New York Times. Implausible? Perhaps. But she's notorious in the city of Danbury for reading while walking—outside—so perhaps
the legend has merit.
The world got its first inkling that Lauren was going to be a professional writer when she was 12 years old. Her poem, which began, "When we made love, I felt I was on fire," terrified the teachers in her private school, but they agreed she had a weird talent.
Lauren graduated from the University of Connecticut with a Bachelors degree in psychology, which she did absolutely nothing with, other than psychoanalyze her friends and family. Having been a donut salesperson during college, she then became a bookseller for 11 years, a book reviewer, a freelance editor and writer and a sort-of librarian.
In 1999, having been married for 10 years and having been sure she would never be pregnant, Lauren became pregnant. While home sick the first two months, the thought occurred to her: What if some insane person was making up all of these symptoms—the whole pregnancy, even? Thus was born The Thin Pink Line, a novel about a woman who makes the whole thing up. As Lauren so delicately puts it, "One trip to the bathroom with a pregnancy wand and I came out with two miracles: a book and Jackie."
Lauren still lives with her husband and daughter in Danbury, Connecticut, where she still writes and still reads.
HOW NANCY DREW SAVED MY LIFE
A Red Dress Ink novel
ISBN: 978-1-4592-4637-9
© 2006 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted.
NANCY DREW is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc., used with permission.
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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