“Thank you.”
“You have a choice to make now.”
“I do?” Surely nothing pleasant. Hilary had learned that much, and she was always ready to defend herself against the miseries someone else wanted to inflict upon her. She had learned a lot since her first foster home, and her first days in juvie.
“Normally, our wards remain here until they reach eighteen, as you know, but in a case such as yours, when you graduate from high school before that date, you have the option of leaving as an emancipated minor.”
“Which means what?” Hilary gazed at her suspiciously from behind walls of steel. Her brilliant green eyes were her only peepholes.
“It means you're free, Hilary, if you want to be. Or you can stay here until you decide what you want to do after you leave here. Have you given it any thought?” Only four years' worth.
“Some.”
“And?” Talking to her was like pulling teeth but a lot of them were like that, too bruised by life to trust anyone. It was a tragedy, but there was no way to change that. “Want to tell me your plans?”
“Do I have to in order to get out?” like the parole she'd heard so much about. Everyone she knew in juvie had parents in jail, waiting to get out on parole. This was no different. But the caseworker shook her head.
“No, you don't, Hilary. But I'd like to help if I can.”
“I'll be all right.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“New York probably. It's where I'm from. It's what I know.” Although she had been gone from there for more than half her life, it still seemed like home to her. And, of course, there were her sisters….
“It's a big city. Do you have friends there?”
She shook her head. If she did, would she have spent four years in the Jacksonville juvenile hall? It was a stupid question. And at least she still had her ten thousand dollars. That was going to be her salvation. She didn't need friends. All she needed was a job and a place to stay. But one thing was for sure, she wasn't staying here. “I guess I'll be going pretty soon. How soon can I go?” Her eyes lit up for the first time at the prospect of leaving.
“We can have your release papers in order by next week. Soon enough for you?” The caseworker smiled with regret. They had failed dismally with her. It happened that way sometimes, it was rotten luck when it did, but it was hard to say who would survive the system and who wouldn't. She stood up and held out a hand which Hilary shook cautiously. She trusted nothing and no one. “We'll let you know as soon as you can go.”
“Thank you.” She left the room quietly and went to the single room she lived in. She no longer had to sleep in a dorm or share with anyone. She had long-term seniority, and in a few days she'd be leaving. She lay on her bed with a smile and stared up at the ceiling. It was all over, the agony, the pain, the humiliation, the horror of her life for the last eight years. She was going to be on her own now. She lay there smiling as she hadn't in years. And a week later, to the day, she was on a bus, no regrets, no sorrow, no friends to leave behind. Her eyes were cold and hard and green, dreaming of a world she did not know yet. And the past was a nightmare left behind her.
Chapter 9
The bus stopped in Savannah, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore, and took two days to reach New York, as Hilary sat staring soundlessly out the window. Other passengers had said a word or two when they stopped for lunch, or when they stretched at night, two sailors had even tried to pick her up, but she dealt with them in no uncertain terms, and after that, no one came near her. She was a solitary figure as she stepped down from the bus in New York, and in her heart she felt a terrifying trembling. She was home … after nine years … she had left here as a little girl, three days after her father committed suicide, to go to stay with her aunt in Boston. And it had taken all these years to come home, but she had done it.
The juvenile authorities of Florida had given her two hundred and eighty-seven dollars to start her life, and she had the ten thousand from Eileen. The first thing she did was go to a bank on Forty-second Street. The second thing she did was go to a hotel room. She took a room in a small, seedy hotel in the Thirties on the East Side, but her room was simple and spare and no one bothered her when she went in or out. She ate at a coffee shop on the corner, and read the want ads for jobs. She had taken a typing class in high school, but she had no other skills and she had no delusions about what lay ahead. She had to start at the bottom. But she had other plans as well. She wasn't going to stop there. The specters of the women she'd seen in the past nine years had left their mark. She was never going to be like them. She was going to work and go to college at night, and do everything she had to. And one day she was going to be important, she promised herself. One day she was going to be Someone.
On her second day in New York, she went to Alexander's department store on Lexington Avenue and spent five hundred dollars on clothes. It seemed like a terrifying portion of her fortune, but she knew she would have to look right if she was going to get a job. She selected dark colors, simple styles, a few skirts and blouses, and patent leather pumps and a matching bag. She looked like a pretty young girl as she tried her things on in her room downtown, and no one would have suspected the horrors she had endured since her parents died.
She went on her first job interview and was told she was too young, and then three more which required stenography skills she didn't have, and finally a job in an accountant's office where she was interviewed by a bald, obese man, perspiring profusely with a damp handkerchief clutched in one hand.
“You type?” He leered at her, as she sat watching him. She had dealt with worse than that and he didn't frighten her. And she also needed the job. She couldn't go on living forever on her dwindling funds. She had to find work pretty soon, and she would even have been willing to work for him, if he would behave himself. “Steno too?” She shook her head and he didn't seem to care. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” she lied. She had learned that much in the first interview. No one wanted to hire a seventeen-year-old girl. So she lied to them.
“Have you been to secretarial school?” She shook her head again and he shrugged, and then stood up, with a small stack of papers in one hand, and moved around the desk, as though to show them to her, but when he reached her side, he caressed her breast instead, and she was on her feet with lightning speed, the back of her hand across his face before she had thought of it, and they both gasped simultaneously as he stared at her.
“If you touch me again, I'll scream so loud I'll have the police up here,” she warned, her green eyes flashing at him, her whole body tense, her hands trembling as she looked at him. “How dare you do that?” Why did they all do things like that to her? … her uncle Jack … and the girls at the foster home … and the boys at Louise's place … it kept happening to her. She didn't understand that it was because she was beautiful. She thought of it as some kind of punishment, something she must have done as a child that she was being tortured for now. It didn't seem fair that it happened to her all the time, and she backed slowly toward the door, never taking her eyes off his face.
“Look, I'm sorry … no big deal … Miss … what's your name? … come on …” He waddled toward her hurriedly and she slammed the door in his face and ran down the stairs as fast as she could go. She walked all the way back to her hotel after that, feeling dirty and depressed, and wondering if she'd ever find a job.
But she finally did, at an employment agency, as a receptionist. They liked the way she looked, suspected she was younger than she said, but she was intelligent, neat and clean, typed halfway decently and could answer the phone, and that was enough for them. They offered her ninety-five dollars a week and it seemed like a windfall to her. She took the job and went flying back to her hotel to get ready for work the next day. She had her first job! And it would be a quick climb up from there. She didn't know what she wanted to do yet, but she already knew where she wanted to go to school. She'd been reading al
l the newspaper ads, and she made some calls. She had already applied, and she was waiting to hear from them, and then she'd really be on her way.
Now there was only one thing left to do, and she decided to tackle it that afternoon. After that, she didn't know when she'd have the time, and she didn't want to call him. She wanted to see him personally. Only once. She'd get the information from him and then all she had to do was call … the thought of it made her tremble as she changed her clothes again. She wore a simple navy blue dress, dark stockings, and her patent leather shoes. The dress was short, as was the style, but it was respectable. And she tied her hair in a simple knot that made her look older than she was. She washed her face, dried it on one of the hotel's little rough towels, and went downstairs again. And this time she didn't take a bus. She didn't want to waste time. She took a cab instead, and stood outside looking up when she arrived at Forty-eighth and Park Avenue. It was a glass building trimmed with chrome, and it seemed to stretch all the way to the sky as she looked up at it.
The elevator shuddered as it rose to the thirty-eighth floor, and she held her breath wondering if it would get stuck. She had never been anywhere like this before, not that she remembered anyway … there were other things she did remember, though … a trip with her parents to France on the Liberté … the apartment on Sutton Place … tea at the Plaza with Solange, with little cakes and hot chocolate with tons of whipped cream … and she remembered the night her mother died and the things she and Sam had said….
The elevator doors opened easily and she found herself in a reception area with thick green carpeting, and a young girl at a desk. She wore a pink linen suit and had short blond hair, and she had the pert look all receptionists were supposed to have. It reminded Hilary of the job she was starting the next day. But she knew she would never look like that. Her looks weren't “cute,” her hair wasn't blond, and she didn't look as though she'd bounce out of her seat if someone asked her to. Instead, Hilary looked quiet and serious as she approached, and looked straight into the girl's eyes.
“I'm here to see Mr. Patterson.”
“Is he expecting you?” She beamed, and Hilary did not smile in reply. She shook her head honestly, and spoke in a restrained voice. Inwardly, she was intimidated by the surroundings, but outwardly nothing showed. She looked perfectly at ease and totally in control.
“No, he's not. But I'd like to see him now.”
“Your name?” Little Miss Smile went into high beam.
“Hilary Walker.” And then she added, as though it would make a difference, “He's my godfather.”
“Oh. Of course,” the little blonde said, and then hit a series of buttons and picked up a phone, speaking inaudibly into it. That was another part of the job, speaking into phones so no one else could hear … Mr. So and So is here to see you, sir … oh, you're out? … tell him what? … it was an art Hilary would have to perfect at the employment agency. And then the girl astonished Hilary. She looked up at her with her perfect smile and waved to a door on her right. “You may go right in. Mr. Patterson's secretary will meet you to show you to his office.” She looked impressed. It wasn't easy to get in to see Arthur Patterson, but the girl was his goddaughter after all.
Hilary stepped inside and looked down a long carpeted corridor. The firm occupied the entire floor and she could see all the way down the hall up a corner office a block away from her. It was an impressive hallway lined with leather-bound legal books, and populated by secretaries at their desks outside the attorneys' offices. She had never been there before, even as a child, and they had moved since then anyway.
“Miss Walker?” An elderly woman with short gray hair and a kindly smile stepped up to her and pointed into the distance down the hall.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Patterson is waiting for you.” As though it had been planned, as though he had known she would come, as though he had been waiting for nine years. But what could he possibly know, sitting here? What could he know of lives like Eileen and Jack's, of caring for her as she died, or fighting him off with a butcher knife, of nearly starving in their home for all those years, and the foster home in Jacksonville, and Maida and Georgine … and juvenile hall … and even the sweaty little man who had “interviewed” her only days ago. What did he know of any of it? And all she knew was that he had killed her mother, as surely as if he had done it with his own hands, and her father, too, eventually. And now here he sat, and she only wanted one thing from him, and then she would leave and never see him again. She never wanted to lay eyes on him again after today.
The secretary stopped at the doorway and knocked. A discreet brass and leather sign on the door said ARTHUR PATTERSON, and then she heard his voice. It was still familiar to her. She could still remember him lying to her eight years before … I'm just going to take them away for a little while, Hilary … I'll come back for you. He never did, and she didn't care, she hated him anyway. She could remember kneeling in the street after he drove off, calling her sisters' names and she had to fight back tears again, but it was almost over now … almost. It was almost exactly eight years since she had last seen them.
“You may come in.” The secretary smiled and stepped aside as she opened the door, and Hilary walked in quietly. She didn't see the desk at first, and then she saw it, a simple slab of glass and chrome, in front of a window offering a full view of New York, and there he sat, incongruous in the modern decor. He was fifty years old and he looked at least ten years older than that, tall, thin, balding, with sad eyes and a pale face. But he was even paler than usual now as he stood up and looked at her. It was as though he had seen a ghost, as she stood in front of him. She was beautiful and tall, with Sam's shiny black hair, but there the resemblance to him stopped … she had Solange's eyes … and the same way of moving her head … and she stood in front of him just as proudly now as Solange had once walked on the rue d'Arcole in Paris twenty-one years before. It was like seeing a ghost … if you changed the black hair to red … it was Solange again … but with angry, bitter eyes, with something fierce in her face that Solange had never had, something that said if you come near me I will kill you before I let you lay a hand on me, and Arthur instantly feared what might have happened to her, what could possibly have made her look like that? And yet she was safe and sound, obviously, and standing in front of him in his office, fully grown and very beautiful. It was a miracle, and he walked slowly toward her, holding out a hand, with dreams of recapturing the past. It was a way of having Sam and Solange back, of sharing once more in their magic. Hilary was going to bring it all back to him. But as he approached, he could sense the wall built around the girl, and she began to back away when he got close to her, and instinctively he stopped approaching.
“Hilary, are you all right?” It was a little late to ask, and she hated the weakness she saw in his eyes. She never understood till then how totally without courage he was. He had no balls, she realized now, that was why he had abandoned her, after betraying them … no guts … it was something Solange had accused him of a lifetime ago, although Hilary didn't know it.
“I'm fine.” She wasted no time with him. She had not come for a warm reunion with a family friend, she had come to ask him the only thing she cared about, the only thing she had cared about for eight years. “I want to know where my sisters are.” Her eyes were icy hard and neither of them moved as she watched his face, not sure of what she saw, terror or grief, and she waited with bated breath for what he would say next.
But whereas he was pale before, he looked ghostly now. He realized that he could not fob her off, that she wanted nothing to do with him. She only wanted them, and he could not give them to her, no matter how much he would have wanted to do so. “Hilary … why don't we sit down …” He waved toward a chair and she shook her head, her eyes riveted to his.
“I'm not interested in sitting down with you. You killed my parents, you destroyed my family. I have nothing to say to you. But I want to know where Alexandra and Megan are. Th
at's all I want. When you tell me that, I'll go.” She waited patiently, the same proud tilt of her head that had made Solange so unique … so extraordinary … he stared at her, seeing someone else, but there was no escaping Hilary. She was a force to be reckoned with, and he understood that fully now. He also sensed that she knew more than he had thought so long ago, but he didn't question her now. He told her the truth, his eyes filled with regret, and damp with tears for what had been and was no more. A family had died at his hands. She was right. And he had never gotten over it. He had started, no family of his own, and Marjorie had left him years before. The woman he loved was gone, her children cast to the winds. And he held himself responsible for what had happened to all of them, even Sam. But there was no way to explain that to this girl, or to excuse himself, least of all to her. God only knew what she had been through in the past eight years.
“I don't know where they are, Hilary. I don't even know where you've been. When I went to Boston to see you seven years ago, you were all gone … the Joneses had left no forwarding address with anyone. I was unable to find you …” His voice trailed off, filled with regret, because his own guilt had been so great, he had been secretly relieved not to have to face her again, and he suspected now that she knew that about him. She had all-seeing eyes, and she looked as though she had an unforgiving heart. There was nothing warm about this girl, nothing gentle, or kind. She was entirely made of granite and barbed wire, shafts of steel and broken glass. There were ugly things inside this girl, he could see it in her eyes, and for an instant he was afraid of her, as though, given the opportunity, she might harm him. And under the circumstances, he wasn't sure that he blamed her.
Kaleidoscope Page 13