Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  “They can’t do that!”

  “Happens all the time.” He had designed an office for this production company, he had had months of meetings with them, he had been on top of everything, from the conceptional design to the schematics to the design development. “I was just wiped out from overseeing the construction every day, from dealing with the permits, but when it was finished, it all seemed worth it. I just loved the space. But my client took one look and said it was like dating a beautiful girl and finding out she’s wearing dirty underwear.” Scott stood up and began pacing. “The closets weren’t big enough for him. He didn’t like the high ceilings because he said it would cost more than they wanted to heat them. ‘Form has got to follow function,’ he said. Like I don’t know that. Like any architect doesn’t know that. But beauty counts, too.” He threw up his hands.

  “This was a great job. I could use it to get more, and he won’t let me in to photograph it. I’d sneak in when he wasn’t there, but even security knows my face.”

  Sara suddenly laughed.

  “What?” he said. “This is serious.”

  “They don’t know my face,” she said. “I’ll do it for you.”

  She wore a jacket with pockets, a camera tucked into one of them. “I spy,” she said.

  “If anyone asks, say you’re looking for Meyers’ Candies,” Scott told her. “It’s the previous tenant. I’ll be waiting around the corner.”

  Scott waited for her a block away, and she strode into the building, walking as if she belonged there, as if she had done this a hundred times before. She swung her arms, she kept her head up. A security guard in a blue uniform was dozing over his newspaper and he gazed up at her. Sara averted her eyes and riffled in her purse. “Oh, great, I forgot my ID card again!” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  He drummed fingers on the table, considering. “I only have to run upstairs and get something, I’ll be right down—” Sara said. “I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to be a pain to you.”

  The guard considered her and then he pushed a paper toward her. “Sign,” he said, and she did, in a big loopy scrawl, Betty Lou Leverbrothers.

  She rode the elevator up two floors, and as soon as she saw the glass doors, she took the camera out. Her pulse was beating in her throat and she was sweating, so her shirt felt pasted to her back. No one was in the office, and each step she took echoed.

  Scott was right, this place was beautiful. One curving wall separated the space, a high ceiling made it feel light and airy, and for the first time she understood what he meant by the quality of a space. She felt good in this room. Whisking out the camera, she began snapping away. She was almost to her last picture when a voice behind her said, “Do you need help?” and Sara quickly hid the camera in her pocket. A man in a dark suit was frowning at her. “What are you doing? Did I see you taking pictures?”

  “Are you Mr. Meyers?” she blurted and his frown deepened. “Meyers’ Candies?”

  “Why, they moved,” he said, folding his arms, puzzling over her. His eyes slid over her. “Who are you?” he asked, and then Sara backed out.

  “Wait!” he called, coming toward her, but Sara was running, past the elevator to the stairwell. Two flights and she took the steps two at a time the whole way down. When she got to the first floor, she was panting so hard, the guard looked at her with concern. “Told you I’d be just a minute. I can’t thank you enough,” she said, and he smiled at her.

  “It’s okay, Ms. Leverbrothers,” he said.

  She ran outside to Scott, who was pacing anxiously by the next building. She dug out the camera and placed it in his hands. “Evidence!” she said gleefully.

  He looked at her, delighted.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You’re really as happy about this as I am.”

  “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be? You and me—we’re like the united front.”

  Grabbing her, he kissed her full on the mouth.

  She woke in the middle of the night. She had been dreaming she was building a house herself, and suddenly, everywhere she looked there were secret compartments. She blinked and there he was, sitting up, watching her, a funny smile playing on his mouth. “What happened?” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “You were singing in your sleep,” he said. “I never knew anyone who did that.”

  She laughed. “What was I singing?”

  He hummed a bar or two, something jazzy she couldn’t recognize.

  “Was I in tune?”

  His face grew grave.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. He picked up a section of her hair and let it fall through his fingers. “Is this too fast?” she asked hesitantly. “Is it because of what I told you? Do you need to press the pause button for a while?”

  “I love you,” he said.

  chapter

  eleven

  They started looking for a place to live together, traipsing about the city. They saw brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. They looked in Hoboken and Jersey City and Manhattan. They saw a beautiful old two-bedroom on West Eighty-eighth Street, four large rooms, wood floors, and big, bright windows, but it wasn’t until they got outside the building again that Scott shook his head. “What’s wrong with it?” Sara said, mystified.

  “It’s not the apartment. I can’t move into this building. It’s ugly. Look how mottled those bricks are. You can tell they were painted, that someone sandblasted the paint off.”

  Dumbfounded, Sara looked at the building. She traced her hand along the rough red bricks. She studied the black door, the row of cement steps. It all looked okay to her. “But who cares about the building?”

  “I do. It’s part of the whole space.”

  “Architects,” she teased, but she turned around and looked at the building again. Would she have even noticed the flaw if he hadn’t pointed it out? “You’re sure?”

  “We’ll find something. It’s got to be just perfect.”

  They also began going to realtors, who were usually brisk young women, pushing expensive spaces at them. “You like lofts?” one realtor asked. “I can show vou a loft to die for right in SoHo. Great block, too.”

  Scott grew quiet. Wren, Sara thought, the one who had jilted him, lived in SoHo.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he told the realtor.

  Outside, Sara took his arm. “I thought you were over Wren,” she said.

  “Of course I am,” Scott said, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  Sara hesitated. She tugged at his sleeve. “Hey,” she said. “Remember that old joke about New York? It’s so big that you can live on the same block as your ex for years and never once run into each other.” She smiled hopefully.

  “It has nothing to do with Wren,” he said.

  “I met someone,” Sara told her parents on the phone.

  “Is he good enough for you?” Jack asked.

  “Better than I deserve,” Sara said.

  “Well, I’m just saying. Never be with anyone you couldn’t imagine yourself being able to live without,” Jack said. “That’ll get you through any rough patches.”

  “Good advice,” said Abby briskly. “And just remember, honey, the past is the past.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t you think we tell each other everything?”

  “Good Lord,” Abby said. “Is that going to make you happy?”

  Well, Sara was more than happy. Elated, she couldn’t believe her good fortune. Scott sent her a dozen yellow roses at work for her twenty-eighth birthday. He left sweet notes under her pillow and in the brown bag lunch she carried to work. “You are a treat. I love you.” They met each other’s parents, both sets beaming with sunny approval. And lately, he had begun looking at buildings differently. He didn’t talk so much about the structure of the windows, or the way the design let in light or hid it, anymore. Instead, he talked about whether Sara would like to live in that neighborhood, if she wanted a doorman or not. Sara took
his hand and kissed it. “I’d live anywhere with you,” she said.

  But the thing was, after a year, they were still living out of each other’s places. Her clothes were in his closet, her shoes under his bed, her name on his answering machine. After a while, Sara would stop at her place only for clean clothes or a book she might need, because most of her things were at Scott’s. Oh, they still looked for a place to live, but Scott always managed to find some mistake in the building that couldn’t be fixed without way too much effort or expense. The windows weren’t big enough, the floor had a tiny slant. Sara got used to walking into places she found wonderful, only to have Scott knock them out of the running. It became almost a joke, something they’d tease each other about. Five years and they still hadn’t found the right place. “Why don’t you two just get married?” Abby asked when she phoned. “What are you waiting for?”

  “The right moment,” Sara said with a half-smile.

  “So we don’t share a space yet, so what?” Scott said when Sara told him what Abby had said. “We spend more time together than most married people. And we’re twice as happy as any couple I know.”

  He nudged her toward him. “Oh, yes we are,” he said and kissed her forehead.

  It was Friday and she was taking antibiotics for a respiratory infection. She was also expecting her period, which, because she was on the pill, usually came like clockwork. It didn’t come Friday, or Saturday, or all that week, and when it was Monday, she began to feel a little light-headed, but she chalked it up to not eating, and popped her antibiotic. Four more to go and then she’d be done. But it wasn’t until she was eating a cheese sandwich at a local restaurant that she started to feel queasy.

  Half-dazed, she moved past the coffee bar, past the fried foods bar, to the bin of red apples and blue plums, to the whole grain muffins wrapped in cellophane. She stopped, bracing her hands on the counter. What was this feeling? It felt like moths trapped inside of her, crazy to get out.

  “Lady—” someone said, and she moved forward, headed for the phone in the corner.

  “I feel so nauseous,” she told the doctor.

  “Well, antibiotics can do that,” he said.

  “Maybe I’m just premenstrual,” she said hopefully. “It’s always worse when my period is late.”

  “It’s late? How late?”

  One of the moths in Sara’s belly careened past her ribs. “A week, but I’m on the pill!”

  “Well, antibiotics can affect the pill, though it’s not likely. You may want to double up on your birth control, just to be safe.”

  “Antibiotics can affect the pill?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me that when you prescribed them?”

  He cleared his throat. “It seldom happens. But call me next week,” he said.

  All that day, she couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t tell how she really felt about this. Being pregnant at sixteen was one thing, being pregnant when you were an adult, with a job and a man who loved you, was another. Did she want to do this? Would it feel like redemption, a second chance; or would it remind her instead of everything she had lost?

  Stop, she told herself. It was probably nothing. Her period wasn’t even all that late for her to be getting so worked up. Walking down the hall, she absently put one hand on her stomach when someone passing said, “Bellyache, Sara?” and she put her hand down.

  She walked home, trying to calm herself, to steady her nerves. She peeked at the windows of all the shops, catching glimpses of fancy silk shirts, leather boots, every item idly turning in her mind, turning to copy. Leather weather, she thought. Stay tuned for the leather report. She was about to cross the street, to cut over to Fifth Avenue, when her stomach roiled and she felt a dry heave. Walking over to the nearest shop window, she pressed her fingertips against the glass and squinched her eyes shut until it passed. What if, she thought. Oh God, what if. She opened her eyes and saw a row of yellow handbags.

  The doctor was wrong. It didn’t feel too early for her. When she was sixteen and pregnant, she had glossed over her symptoms, had refused to notice what was happening to her body, but she wouldn’t make that mistake again. Sara straightened and headed for the nearest Rite-Aid. She went to the aisle where they had the pregnancy testing kits, the ones that would tell you twenty-four hours after your period hadn’t made its appearance. Two women came and stood beside her, both of them laughing. “Oh, I hope, I hope, I hope,” said one of the women, clutching one of the kits to her chest.

  Sara bought a kit, and went to Macy’s, to the fourth-floor bathroom, where the blowers were so loud you might think no one else was around. Please, she thought. Oh please. She hoisted her skirt and peed on the tube and three minutes later, there it was, a blue line so faint she wasn’t sure what it might mean. She stared at the package, trying to compare, but all she could discern was that it was a line and, as such, it meant something. Clutching the tube, she walked out of Macy’s and to Scott’s.

  She heard the music before she put the key in the door, Scott’s voice belting out “Good Day Sunshine” with the Beatles, slightly off-key, full of enthusiasm. When she opened the door, she saw him in the kitchen, cutting up salad greens. “Hey, sweetie,” he said to her and she anxiously smiled.

  “You look green about the gills,” he said. “You okay?” He picked up an uncut carrot and chomped, his teeth even and white as a rabbit’s. “You can tell a lot about a man from his teeth,” George used to tell Sara, but he never told her exactly what that was.

  “You want to lie down until dinner’s ready?” Scott asked.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” she whispered.

  He stopped chewing and put the carrot down. “You’re on the pill.”

  She shook her head. “The doctor said antibiotics can screw things up.”

  “Well, that’s nice of him to tell us that now,” Scott said. “Isn’t that something he should have told us before he put you on those horse pills?”

  Her legs buckled and she hinged down in one of the chairs. “I bought a kit. I took the test. There was a blue line.”

  He pulled out another chair and sat facing her. “Are you sure?”

  “What will we do?” she asked quietly.

  “Well, we’ll take care of it, of course.”

  “Of course?” Her voice sounded rougher than she expected. She suddenly thought of those billboards she used to see when she was pregnant with Anne. There was always a picture of a baby, six months big and rosy with health. “Kill her today it’s murder. Kill her yesterday it’s abortion.” Give her away, it’s death, Sara thought.

  “I thought you were prochoice—”

  “I am, but—”

  “But what? You wouldn’t want an abortion after what happened to you the last time you got pregnant?”

  “Why does one thing have anything to do with the other?” she said. “It’s not the same thing. I’m not sixteen. I have a job. We’re a couple.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t believe words could form in it. “Would it be the worst thing in the world if we had a child?” If we kept it, if we raised it, she thought.

  He looked at her, perplexed. “Sara, yes. It would. Kids shouldn’t be accidents. They should be planned and loved.”

  Sara drew back. “Who says it wouldn’t be loved!”

  Scott grabbed at her hands, making her focus on his face. “My parents didn’t plan for me. They used to have these great pictures of the two of them, holding hands, kissing, dancing in the moonlight, and I can’t remember them ever even touching, the whole time I lived in that house, and when I asked my mother about it, she started telling me how she had me six months after the wedding, and then all the dancing stopped.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  He held her face in his hands. “I love you. I’m not ready for kids now. I admit it. I’m selfish and I don’t want to share you with anyone. Not yet. Tell me that’s not so terrible.”

  “Of co
urse that’s not so terrible—but I can’t help feeling what I feel! I can’t help it. And sometimes things just happen, and you have to be open to them—”

  “I don’t want any of it to be the way it was for you before. Something you make the best of.” He leaned forward to kiss her. “Anyway, those kits aren’t infallible. Wait a bit, then call the doctor, and we’ll see.”

  “But what if I am pregnant—” she said, but he was ignoring her now, bending to kiss her, and she lowered her head so he was kissing her hair instead of her mouth.

  All that week, she saw pregnant women everywhere. In the supermarket, a hugely pregnant woman wandered with her cart in front of Sara, and no matter what aisle Sara turned down there she was, making Sara so frustrated, she finally abandoned her cart and fled the store. At lunch, Sara sat opposite a woman grimacing over her cottage cheese. “Calcium,” she said. “When this baby’s born, I’m never eating cottage cheese again.” At work, the dresses she was writing about were so full of fabric, Yvonne joked they should call them “the new maternity.” Every five minutes Sara went to the ladies’ room to check her panties for blood, and every time there was none, she braced her hands against the cool of the sink and tried to think what she felt.

  She and Scott had stopped talking about it, as if a light had switched off. But they didn’t have to talk for her to know how he felt. He walked gingerly around her as if the slightest word might send something off in her. At night, she tried to cuddle against him, wanting comfort, but he patted her shoulder in a fatherly way. “When you’re feeling better,” he told her and then turned over away from her, and in minutes she heard his faint snore, while she stayed awake, staring up at the ceiling.

  That night, Sara woke at four in the morning. Outside, a car honked. Someone screamed, “Lydia! I love you, Lydia!” Blue morning light poured into the room, but when she looked at the clock, she saw it was nearly four. Scott snored and turned in bed, pulling the blanket with him, lifting it up over the sheet, just enough so Sara, squinting in the dim light, could see the line of blood streaked on the sheet.