In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  The woman stared at her, then shrugged. “I guess we could give it a try. It doesn’t look like I’ve got anything to lose. And you did find this one.” She gave Rose her card and directed Rose to the copy shop on the corner to make up a few signs with her name and her rates and the services she offered.

  Rose went to the copy shop, dropped a freshly printed flyer at the Elegant Paw, then hurried home, where she changed her outgoing voice mail message to say, “You’ve reached Rose Feller at Rose’s Pet Care. Please leave me a message, including your name, number, pet’s name, and the dates you’ll require service, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.” Taking a break, she told herself, listening to the message again. She felt as though her life had turned into a movie, with a stranger playing the part of her. Taking a break, she repeated sternly. She’d never taken off more than a week at a time. She’d gone straight from college to law school with barely time to do her laundry in between. She was due, she decided.

  Next stop, the law firm. First thing Monday morning, Rose sat on the couch, took a deep breath, and dialed not Lisa but Don Dommel himself. His secretary put her right through. Rose wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a very bad one. She braced herself for his bluster, for the suggestions he was bound to have: Drink wheat grass! Toss a medicine ball around! Take up BMX biking!

  “Rose!” said Don heartily. “How are you feeling?”

  “Actually, much better,” she said. She sat on the couch, pushing the stack of Dog Fancy magazine and Dogs for Dummies aside and realizing how empty the apartment felt without Petunia. “Listen, I’m wondering . . . I’m going through some personal difficulties right now ...”

  “Would you like to take a leave of absence?” Don asked, so hastily that Rose was sure he’d been thinking about it since the first day when Jim had shown up for work and she hadn’t. “The firm’s got a very flexible policy . . . unpaid leave, of course, but you’ll keep all of your benefits, and you’ll be free to pick up right where you left off. When you feel ready, of course. Or if not ...” His voice trailed off. Rose could read volumes into the short silence that ensued. Go away, Don Dommel was thinking, so hard she could practically hear the words. You’re a problem, you’re a scandal, you’re a piece of juicy gossip, you’re egg yolk on our collective tie. Go away and don’t come back.

  “Six months?” she asked, figuring that in six months she’d have her head on straight, and she’d be ready to pick up where she’d left off.

  “Excellent!” Don agreed. “Now, you should certainly feel free to get in touch should you need references . . .”

  “Of course,” said Rose. She was astonished at how easy this was, how easy it was to let go once she’d made up her mind. All the work she’d been obsessed with . . . reassigned, she supposed, to some other hungry young associate. It was completely unfair. Jim was as much to blame as she was. She knew that. But Jim would stay; he’d get his equity, his raises, his holiday bonus, his corner office with a view of City Hall. And she would get unpaid leave and pro forma letters of recommendation. Whatever, she thought. Fine. She’d be fine. Somehow, she would.

  “. . . happens,” said Don, who was, evidently, not through with her.

  “I’m sorry?” said Rose.

  “It happens,” said Don, and now he’d dropped the bluster and bombast of the pep rallies, and his voice was actually kind. “Not every firm is a perfect fit.”

  “That’s very true,” Rose said gravely.

  “Keep in touch,” said Don. Rose promised she would, and hung up the phone. Then she sat back and considered. No more law, she thought. “At least for now,” she said out loud, and found that the words didn’t even cause her a momentary pang of unhappiness. “Pets,” she said, and laughed a little, because it was strange to think of herself this way—Rose Feller, a creature of pure ambition, Rose Feller, the eternal striver, bypassing the fast track for a pooperscooper. “I’m just taking a break,” she told herself. Then she put on a pot of water for tea, settled herself on the couch, closed her eyes, and wondered what on earth she’d done.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Maggie remembered once overhearing her sister on the telephone when she’d come back from college for Thanksgiving. “I live at the library,” she’d declared melodramatically. Well, Rose should get a look at her little sister now.

  For her first week at Princeton, Maggie slept in different places—snatching a few hours’ shut-eye on a couch in a dorm’s common room, a bench in a basement laundry room—while carefully casing the lower levels of Firestone Library, looking for more permanent accommodations. She found them on C floor, the third level down, in the far southeast corner, a place Maggie came to think of as the Hurt Book Room. These were books with torn pages and broken bindings, books whose spines had snapped and whose glue had given way, a stack of ancient National Geographics in one corner, a pile of books written in some curlicued alphabet she’d never seen before, and three chemistry textbooks in which the tables appeared to be missing a few of the more recently discovered elements. Over an afternoon, Maggie watched the door carefully. As far as she could tell, no book ever left the Hurt Book Room . . . and no new books came in. Even better, there was a hardly used ladies’ room right around the corner, which boasted not only toilets and sinks, but a shower. The marble tiles were coated in dust, but when Maggie eased the taps open, the water ran clear.

  And so, on her seventh day on campus, in the windowless room of forgotten books, Maggie set up her base camp. She hid in the bathroom’s handicapped stall until the last student had been shooed out of the library, and the doors were locked behind them. Then she crept into the room, spread her sleeping bag between two tall shelves of dusty old books, flicked on the stolen lantern, and lay down on top of the bag. There. Cozy. And safe, too, with the door locked, and with all of her stuff stowed neatly under one of the bookshelves. Casual passers-by wouldn’t even know that anyone was there, unless they knew exactly where to look, and what to look for. It was exactly the effect that Maggie was seeking for herself. To be there, but not really there, to be present but invisible at the same time.

  She reached into the pocket of the jeans she’d been wearing since she arrived. There was the wad of bills, the three different student IDs she’d acquired during her days of sticky-fingered scavenging in the library. There were Josh’s credit cards, and one of Rose’s, too, a key she’d found and kept even though she’d probably never know what door it unlocked. And an old birthday card. Wishing you a very happy day, she read, and then she set the card on a shelf where she’d be able to see it.

  She crossed her arms over her chest, and breathed in the darkness. It was quiet down there, three floors below the ground, beneath the weight of thousands of books, quiet as she imagined a tomb would be. She could hear every click of her tongue against her teeth, the rustle of the sleeping bag every time she moved.

  Well, she thought, at least she’d be able to sleep. But she wasn’t tired yet. She rifled through her backpack until she found the paperback she’d picked up after someone had left it unfolded across an armchair. Their Eyes Were Watching God, it said, but the drawing on the cover didn’t make it look like a religious book. It was a picture of a black woman (actually, she was sort of purplish on the cover, but Maggie assumed she was meant to be black), and she was lying on her back under a green tree, looking up at it with a pleased, dreamy expression. Not as good as People, she figured, but certainly better than those legal magazines Rose had lying around, or the antiquated medical textbooks on the shelf closest to her sleeping bag. Maggie opened the book up and started to read.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Ella?” Lewis asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” she said, and nodded for emphasis.

  “You got kind of quiet,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and smiled at him. They were sitting together on Ella’s screened-in porch, listening to the crickets chirp and the frogs croak and Mavis Gold discussing last night’s episode
of Everybody Loves Raymond.

  “So tell me this,” Lewis began. “What do you regret?”

  “That’s a strange question,” said Ella.

  “That’s not an answer,” Lewis replied.

  Ella thought about it. Where could she start? Not with the real regrets, she decided. “You know what I regret? I’ve never been swimming in the ocean.”

  “Really? Never?”

  “Not since I’ve moved here. Not since I was a little girl. I went one day, I had my towel and my bathing cap and everything, but it just seemed too ...” It had taken her half an hour just to find a parking space, and the beach had been crowded with girls in shockingly small bikinis and boys in brightly colored bathing trunks. There’d been a dozen different songs blaring from a dozen different radios, and the air was full with loud teenager voices, and the sun seemed too bright, and the ocean seemed too big, and she’d turned around and gotten back in her car before even setting foot on the sand. “I think I’m too old,” she said.

  He got to his feet, shaking his head. “No such thing. Let’s go.”

  “Lewis! Now? But it’s so late!”

  “I don’t think the beach has hours,” he said.

  She’d stared up at him, a million reasons why not to go running through her head. It was late, she had an early-morning appointment, it was dark, and who knew who they’d find out there? Midnight drives to the beach were something for teenagers or newlyweds, not senior citizens with arthritis and hearing aids.

  “Come on,” he said, tugging at her hands. “You’ll like it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Another time, maybe.” But somehow she was on her feet, and out the door, and the two of them were tiptoeing past Mavis Gold’s quiet apartment like coconspirators, or kids on a dare.

  The beach was just ten minutes away. Lewis pulled into a spot right by the sandy edge, held her door, and helped her out of the car. “Leave your shoes,” he said.

  And there it was, the water that she’d seen a hundred times, from her car, from his high windows, from the postcards and the glossy brochures that had lured her to Golden Acres in the first place. There it was, moving restlessly, with waves swelling and foaming and running up onto the sand, close enough to tickle her bare feet.

  “Oh!” she said, and jumped a little. “It’s cold!”

  Lewis bent down and rolled up his cuffs, and then rolled hers. He held her hand and they waded out until the water was past their ankles, almost at their knees. Ella held still, feeling the pull and suck of the water as the waves rearranged the sand. She could hear the roar of the waves, and she could smell smoke from a fisherman’s bonfire, far off down the beach. She let go of Lewis’s hand.

  “Ella?” he asked.

  She waded out further, two steps, then three, and the water was past her knees, past her thighs. Her loose cotton shirt floated out around her, billowing each time the waves rolled in. The water was shockingly cold, colder than the lakes of her girlhood, and her teeth chattered until her body adjusted to the temperature.

  “Hey, be careful!” he called.

  “I will,” she called back. Suddenly, she was afraid. Did she even remember how to swim? Was it the kind of thing you could forget? Oh, she should have waited until daytime, or at least brought a towel . . .

  No more, she thought. No more. She’d been afraid for twenty years—longer even, if you counted all of those terrible nights when Caroline was out and she didn’t know where—but she didn’t want to be afraid here. Not now. And swimming had been her favorite thing for years of her girlhood, her young-woman-hood. She’d felt invincible in the water, and free, as if she could do anything, as if she could go forever, could swim to China. No more, she thought again, and pushed off with her feet, propelling herself forward. A wave hit her full in the face. She spluttered, spat out salt water, and moved through it, her hands reaching through the dark water, feet churning unsteadily before finding their rhythm. And there it was. The water held her, and she was swimming again.

  “Hey!” Lewis called. Ella half expected to turn around and see her little sister, Emily, standing at the edge of the water, pale and goose-pimpled, crying, “Ella! You’re out too far! Ella, come back!”

  She turned, and almost laughed to see Lewis paddling after her, his teeth clenched and head held high (to protect his hearing aid, she figured). She floated on her back, her hair streaming out with each wave until he’d caught up with her, and then she’d reached for him, brushing his hand with her fingertips and setting her feet back on the sand.

  “If I’d known we were going to be swimming,” he panted, “I would have worn my trunks.”

  “I didn’t know!” she said. “It was an impulse!”

  “Well, have you had enough?”

  She lifted her feet, tucked her legs against her chest, and let the water hold her. She felt like an egg in a pot of warm water, buoyed and surrounded entirely. “Yes,” she finally said, and paddled with her arms until she’d turned around, and by Lewis’s side she paddled back toward the shore.

  Later, sitting on top of a picnic table on the beach, wrapped in a musty blanket Lewis had unearthed from the trunk of his car, she said, “You asked me before what I regret.”

  “This was before our dip?” he asked, as if the salt water had obliterated his memory.

  “Yes,” said Ella. “Before. But I want to tell you the truth now.” She breathed deeply, remembering the feeling of the water all around her, holding her up, making her brave. She remembered being a little girl and swimming out farther then any of the other kids, farther than any of the grownups, so far that Emily would later swear that she was barely a speck in the water. “I regret that my granddaughters are lost to me.”

  “Lost to you,” Lewis repeated. “Why?”

  “When Caroline died, their father took them away. He moved them to New Jersey, and he didn’t want me to keep in touch. He was very angry . . . at me, at Ira, at everyone. Angry at Caroline, too, but she wasn’t there to be angry at, and we were. I was.” She wrapped the blanket around her more tightly. “I don’t blame him for that.” She looked down at her hands. “There was a part of me that was ...” She breathed again. “Relieved, I guess. Caroline was so hard to deal with, and Michael was so angry, and it just felt safer not to have to deal with any of them. So I took the easy way out. I stopped trying. Now they’re lost.”

  “Maybe you should try again,” said Lewis. “Maybe they’d be glad to hear from you. How old are they?”

  Ella didn’t respond, even though she knew the answer. Maggie would be twenty-eight, and Rose would be thirty. They could both be married, with husbands and children and different last names and no use for an old woman, a stranger, barging in with a heart full of sad memories, and their dead mother’s name on her lips. “Maybe,” she repeated, because Lewis was looking at her, sitting cross-legged on top of the picnic bench with his hair still damp from the water. And Lewis had nodded, and smiled at her, and she knew she wouldn’t have to answer any other questions that night.

  THIRTY

  Princeton was not going to be a problem. But money was. Maggie realized that her math skills weren’t the greatest, but two hundred bucks, minus the twenty or so she’d spent on food at the Wawa during the days she hadn’t been able to sneak into a dining hall or a study break offering free pizza or Thomas Sweet ice cream, plus stolen credit cards that she was too afraid to use, did not equal enough to fund a new life. It wouldn’t even be enough for a plane ticket to California, let alone a deposit on an apartment, and head shots.

  There must be more money, Maggie whispered to herself. It was a line from a short story she’d read in another abandoned book, a story about a little boy who could ride a rocking horse and see the winners of real horse races; and the more urgently he rode, the louder his house seemed to whisper. There must be more money.

  She considered her options as she sat inside the Student Center, nursing a ninety-cent cup of tea. She needed a job that paid cash, and
the only possibility she’d seen was printed on a flier that she’d pulled down from the library wall. She set her mug aside and carefully unfolded the sheet of yellowing paper. “Housekeeper Needed,” it read. “Light cleaning, some errands, once a week.” Then there was a telephone number starting with 609.

  Maggie pulled out her cell phone—the one her father had bought her, the one where the bills for the charges went directly to his office—and dialed. Yes, an old-woman-sounding voice informed her, the job was still open. Once a week, easy work, but if Maggie was interested, she’d have to provide her own transportation. “You could take the bus,” she said. “Right from Nassau Street.”

  “Would you mind paying me in cash?” asked Maggie. “It’s just that I haven’t gotten my checking account set up here. I’ve got an account at home . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “Cash will be fine,” the woman said crisply. “Assuming you work out.”

  So Thursday morning Maggie got up extra early, creeping like a mouse through the silence of the library before any of the lights came on, making sure her things were tucked out of sight. She hid in the first-floor bathroom and listened to the security guards unlock the front doors. Ten minutes after the library opened for business, she walked out the door, and was on her way to Nassau Street.

  “Hello there,” called the woman on the porch. She was short and thin with white hair flowing past her shoulders, and she wore what looked like a man’s oxford shirt with a pair of leggings underneath it, and sunglasses, even though it was cloudy outside.

  “You must be Maggie,” she said, tilting her head in Maggie’s direction. She put one hand on the railing for balance and held out the other one for Maggie to shake. Blind, Maggie realized, and shook the woman’s hand carefully. “I’m Corinne. Come on in,” she said, leading the way into a large Victorian house that already seemed scrupulously clean, and precisely organized. In the entryway hall, there was a stark wooden bench to the right and a series of cubbyholes hanging above it and a pair of shoes in each cubbyhole. A raincoat and a winter coat hung on adjoining hooks; an umbrella and hat and mittens were laid neatly on a shelf above them. And next to the empty coat rack was a white cane.