In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  She set the phone down.

  “What?” asked Maggie. “What?”

  “He’s out,” Rose said. “The lady she didn’t know when he’d be back.”

  “But he’ll be home for dinner. Right?” asked Maggie, her voice spiraling higher and higher and ending in a squeak. Her face was pale, her eyes were enormous, as if the prospect of having both parents go missing was more than she could take. “Right?”

  “Of course,” said Rose, and then did something that let Maggie know that there was really, actually something to be afraid of—she handed her sister the remote control and walked out of the room.

  Maggie trailed her.

  “Go away,” said Rose. “I have to think.”

  “I can think, too,” said Maggie. “I can help you think.”

  Rose took off her glasses and polished them on the edge of her shirt. “Maybe we should see if there’s anything missing.”

  “Like a suitcase?”

  Rose nodded. “Like that.”

  The girls hurried upstairs, opening their parents’ bedroom door, and looking inside. Rose braced herself for the usual wreckage—tangled sheets, pillows on the floor, a collection of half-empty glasses and half-eaten pieces of toast on the bedside table. But the bed was neatly made. The dresser drawers were all closed. On the bedside table, Rose found a pair of earrings, a bracelet, a watch, and a plain gold band. She shuddered, then slipped the ring in her pocket before Maggie could see, and could start asking questions about why their mother had cleaned her room and taken off her wedding ring.

  “Suitcase is here!” said Maggie, bounding happily out of the closet.

  “Good,” said Rose, through lips that felt frozen. She’d have to try calling her father again and telling him what she’d found, as soon as she could get her sister busy doing something else. “Come on,” she said, and led Maggie out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.

  Maggie worked the rolling pin back and forth over the plastic bag full of potato chips. Rose looked up at the clock for the third time in less than a minute. It was six o’clock. Rose was trying to pretend that everything was all right, even though nothing was all right at all. She hadn’t been able to get her father on the phone, and their mother still wasn’t home. Even if she’d forgotten about the early dismissal, she should have been home by three-thirty.

  Think! Rose thought to herself, as her sister ground the potato chips into shards, then into dust. She had already pretty much decided that their mother had gone AWAY again. She and Maggie weren’t supposed to know about AWAY—about where it was, about that her mother had been there. But Rose knew. Last summer, after their mother had come back from AWAY, Maggie had come to her with a crumpled brochure.

  “What’s this say?” she asked.

  Rose read it carefully. “‘Institute of Living’,” she said, staring at the drawing—a cupped palm holding the faces of a woman, a man, and a child.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rose. “Where did you find it?”

  “In Mom’s suitcase.”

  Rose hadn’t even asked what Maggie was doing looking in their mother’s suitcase—even at six, Maggie was a notorious snoop. A few weeks later, Rose had been driving home from a Hebrew school field trip with the Schoens when they’d passed a bunch of buildings with a sign in front, and the sign had had the exact same picture on it as the brochure—same faces, same cupped hands.

  “What’s that?” she’d asked, trying to be casual, because the car had sped past the sign too fast for her to try to puzzle out.

  Steven Schoen had snickered. “The loony bin,” he’d said, and his mother had whirled around so fast her hair whipped against her cheeks, and Rose could smell Aqua Net. “Steven!” she’d scolded, and then turned to Rose, her voice soft and syrupy sweet. “That’s a place called the Institute of Living,” she’d explained. “It’s a special kind of hospital for people who need help with their feelings.”

  So. That was AWAY. Rose wasn’t too surprised, because anyone could tell that their mom had needed some kind of help. But where was she now? Had she gone back there?

  Rose looked at the clock again. Five minutes past six. She called her father’s office again, but the phone just rang and rang. She set the receiver down and walked into the family room, where Maggie was now sitting on the couch, looking out the window. She sat down next to her sister.

  “Is it my fault?” Maggie whispered.

  “What?”

  “Is it my fault she went away? Did she get mad at me because I get in trouble at school?”

  “No, no,” Rose said. “It’s not your fault. She’s not away. She probably just got confused or something, or maybe she had car trouble. There’s lots of things it could be!” But even as she reassured Maggie, Rose slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the cold gold ring. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  “I’m scared,” Maggie whispered.

  “I know,” said Rose. “Me, too.” They sat on the couch, side by side, as the sun went down, waiting.

  Michael Feller pulled into the driveway at just after seven o’clock, and Rose and Maggie hurried out the door to meet him.

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Maggie said, catapulting herself toward her father’s legs. “Mom’s not here! She’s gone! She didn’t come back!”

  Michael turned to his oldest daughter. “Rose? What’s going on?”

  “We got home from school early . . . it’s a teachers in-service day, I brought home the notice about it last week . . .”

  “She didn’t leave a note?” asked their father, hurrying to the kitchen, so fast that Rose and Maggie had to run to keep up.

  “No,” said Rose.

  “Where is she?” asked Maggie. “Do you know?”

  Their father shook his head and reached for the red address book and the telephone. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

  Midnight. Rose had made Maggie eat some of the tuna noodle casserole, and tried to make their father eat some, too, but he’d waved her away, sitting hunched by the phone, making call after call after call. At ten, he’d noticed that they were still awake and he’d hurried them into their nightgowns and into their beds, forgetting to make them wash their faces or brush their teeth. “Go to sleep,” he said. For the last two hours they’d been lying side by side in Rose’s bed with their eyes wide open in the darkness. Rose had told Maggie stories—“Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” the story of the princess and the enchanted slippers who danced and danced and danced.

  The doorbell rang. Rose and Maggie sat straight up at the exact same instant.

  “We should get that,” said Maggie.

  “It might be her,” said Rose.

  They held hands as they ran down the stairs in bare feet. Their father was at the door already, and Rose could tell without even hearing a word that was said, that something very bad was happening, that their mother was not okay, that nothing would ever be okay again.

  A tall man was at the door, a man in a green uniform and a broad-brimmed brown hat. “Mr. Feller?” he was asking. “Is this the residence of Caroline Feller?”

  Her father swallowed hard and nodded. The tall man’s hat dripped rainwater onto the floor. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, sir,” he said.

  “Did you find our mother?” Maggie asked in a tiny gasping voice.

  The trooper looked at them sadly. His leather belt creaked as he reached to put his hand on their father’s shoulder. Raindrops fell on Maggie’s and Rose’s bare feet. He looked down at them, then back up at their father.

  “I think we should talk privately, sir,” he said. And Michael Feller, shoulder slumped, face broken, led him away.

  And after that . . .

  After that was their father with his Stonehenge face. After that was “car accident,” and packing up the house in Connecticut, leaving their school, their house, their friends, their familiar street. Their father piled their mother’s things in boxes
destined for Goodwill, and Rose and Maggie and their father got in a U-Haul truck and drove to New Jersey. “To start over,” their father had said. Like that could ever happen. Like the past was something you could leave behind like a candy bar wrapper or a pair of shoes you’d outgrown.

  In her bed in Philadelphia, Rose sat up in the darkness, knowing that she wouldn’t be doing any sleeping that night. She remembered the funeral. She remembered the navy blue dress she’d worn, purchased for the first day of school, nine months before, and how it was already too short, and the elastic of the puffed sleeves had left red welts on her arms. She remembered her father’s face over the grave, remote and distant, and an older woman with auburn hair, sitting in the back of the funeral parlor crying softly into a handkerchief. Her grandmother. Where had she gone? Rose didn’t know. After the funeral, they’d rarely talked about their grandmother, or their mother. They lived far away from the policeman in the hat full of rain, and the driveway he’d parked his cruiser in, with the blue lights still flashing mutely through the darkness, and the road that had brought him to their house. The slick, wet road with its treacherous curves, a ribbon of black, like a lying tongue. They’d gone far away from the road, and the house, and the cemetery where their mother was buried, beneath a blanket of raw-looking sod and a headstone that had her name, the years of her birth and her death, and the words Wife and Loving Mother chiseled into it. And Rose had never once been back.

  PART TWO

  Continuing

  Education

  TWENTY-FOUR

  What she needed, thought Maggie Feller, was a plan.

  She sat on a bench inside Thirtieth Street Station, a grand, cavernous room littered with old newspapers and fast-food wrappers, smelling of grease and sweat and winter coats. It was almost midnight. Harried-looking mothers dragged their children along by their arms. Homeless people slept splayed out on the carved wooden benches. I could be one of them, thought Maggie, panic rising inside of her.

  Think, she told herself. She had a garbage bag full of stuff, plus her purse, her backpack, and two hundred dollars, two crisp hundred-dollar bills Jim had given her before dropping her off. Can I help you? he’d asked, not unkindly, and she’d held out her hand without meeting his eyes. “I want two hundred dollars,” she told him. “That’s the going rate.” He’d dug the money out of his wallet without a word of protest. “I’m sorry,” he’d said . . . but sorry about what? And whom was he apologizing to? Not her. Maggie was sure of that. What she needed now was somewhere to stay . . . and then a job again, eventually.

  Rose was out of the question. So was her father. Maggie shuddered, imagined herself dragging her bags across the lawn as the idiot dog howled, imagined the look of fake-o sympathy and barely disguised disgust as Sydelle opened the door, and how her eyes would say, This is just what we expected of you, even if her mouth was saying something else. Sydelle would want details, would want to know what had happened with Rose and with her job. Sydelle would needle her with dozens of questions, and her father would sit there, his eyes soft and defeated, not asking anything at all.

  Where did that leave her? Maggie couldn’t see herself in a homeless shelter. All those women, all those failed lives. She wasn’t that way. She hadn’t failed. Not like that. She was a star, if only someone could see it!

  You’re not a star, whispered a voice in her head, and the voice sounded like Rose’s voice, only colder than Rose could ever sound. You’re not a star, you’re a slut, a stupid slut. You can’t even work the cash register! You can’t balance your checkbook! Evicted! Practically homeless! And you slept with my boyfriend!

  Think, thought Maggie fiercely, trying to drown out the voice. What did she have? Her body. There was that. Jim had turned over the two hundred dollars easily enough. There were men who would pay her to sleep with them, certainly, and men who would pay to watch her dance with her clothes off. At least that was entertaining, performing. And plenty of the rising stars who’d gone before her had done it as a last-ditch measure, a stopgap thing.

  So fine, Maggie thought, tightening her grip on her garbage bag as the homeless man two benches back moaned in his sleep. Stripping. Fine. It wasn’t the end of the world. But that didn’t solve the problem of where she’d stay. It was January, the cold, dead heart of winter. She’d planned on catching a SEPTA train to Trenton, then taking another train into New York City. But she wouldn’t get there until two in the morning, and then what would she do? Where would she go?

  She got to her feet, clutching her backpack tightly in one hand and her garbage bag in the other, and squinted at the New Jersey Transit board and the names of the towns the trains went to: Rahway. Westfield. Matawan. Metuchen. Red Bank. Little Silver. That one sounded nice, but what if it wasn’t? Newark. Too big. Elizabeth. The butt of Jersey jokes. Brick. Ugh. Princeton.

  She’d visited Rose at Princeton a few times, when she was sixteen and seventeen. She could picture it if she closed her eyes—buildings made of carved gray stone, covered in ivy, with gargoyles leering from the ledges. She remembered dorm rooms with fire-places in them, and wooden window seats that opened up to hold extra blankets and winter coats, and the many-paned leaded-glass windows. She remembered huge classrooms, sloping floors full of hard-edged wooden chairs with desks attached, and a party in a basement, with a keg of beer in the corner, and how vast the library had seemed—three floors up, and three floors down, each one long as a football field. The smell of burning wood and fall leaves, a borrowed red wool scarf warm around her neck, heading down one of the gray slate paths toward a party, knowing she’d never be able to find her way back by herself, because there were so many paths and all the buildings looked almost the same. “It’s easy to get lost here,” Rose had told her, so she wouldn’t feel bad. “It happened to me all the time my freshman year.”

  Maybe she could get lost there now. She could take a train to Trenton, catch New Jersey Transit to Princeton, and stay there for a few days and regroup. Everyone always told her she looked younger than she was, and she had a backpack, the universal sign of students everywhere. “Princeton,” she said out loud, and walked to the ticket window, where she paid seven dollars for a one-way ticket. She’d always meant to go back to college, she thought, heading up the ramp toward the trains. So what if this wasn’t the most normal way to do it? When had she, Maggie Feller, ever been the most normal girl?

  At two in the morning Maggie made her way across the darkened Princeton University campus. Her shoulder muscles were cramping from the weight of her backpack, and her hands were numb from towing the trash bag full of clothes, but she tried to walk briskly as she joined the crowds of students moving along the sidewalk, with her shoulders back and her head up, as if she knew exactly where she was going.

  She’d gotten off the train at Princeton Junction in the middle of a vast parking lot, halogen lamps gleaming coldly in the dark. In an instant of panic, she turned around and sure enough, there were students—or at least people who looked like students—streaming across the platform, down into a tunnel below them. She followed them under the train tracks and then up the other side, where another, much smaller train waited. She bought a ticket on the train, and two minutes later arrived at the campus.

  As she walked up the hill, Maggie made a quick but careful study of her fellow travelers—kids coming back from Christmas break, she figured, judging from the conversations and the amounts of luggage. Evidently, she decided, grooming was not a priority for these women, while purchasing the fashions of Abercrombie & Fitch was. None wore much more than lip gloss, and they were arrayed in some version of washed-out jeans, sweaters or sweatshirts, camel-colored overcoats, plus layers upon layers of hats, scarves, mittens, and winter boots. Well, that explains Rose, she thought and began mentally editing her wardrobe. Little halter top, no. Leather pants, probably not. Cashmere sweater set? Sure, if only she had one, she thought, and shivered as the icy wind bit at her bare neck. She’d need a scarf. Also, she needed a cigarette, thou
gh it seemed that none of the girls were smoking. Maybe because it was too cold, but probably because they just didn’t. Probably because none of the girls in the Abercrombie & Fitch ads were smokers. Maggie sighed, and edged up as close as she could to a pack of chattering girls, looking for more information.

  “I don’t know,” one of them said, giggling, as they walked past bulletin boards covered with fliers advertising everything from movies and concerts to used guitars for sale. “I think he likes me, and I gave him my number, but so far, nothing.”

  Then he doesn’t like you, dummy, Maggie thought. If they liked you, they called. It was as simple as that. And these were supposed to be the smart girls?

  “Maybe you should call him,” one of her friends suggested. Sure, thought Maggie, who hadn’t telephoned a man since she gave up crank calls at age thirteen. And maybe you should wave a flag in front of his room, too, in case he misses the point.

  The pack pulled up in front of a four-story stone building with a heavy wood door. One of the girls pulled off her mittens and punched a code into the doorknob. The door swung open, and Maggie followed them inside.

  She was in some kind of common area. There were half a dozen couches covered in an indestructible industrial blue fabric, a few scarred coffee tables scattered with newspapers and magazines, a television set showing It’s a Wonderful Life—which it wasn’t, as far as Maggie was concerned. Beyond them was a staircase that led, presumably, to individual dorm rooms . . . and, from the sound of it, there were parties going on. Maggie set down her bags, and her fingers tingled as the blood started to come back. I’m in, she thought, feeling triumph mixed with anxiety at what it would take to pull off her next move.