Get to Corinne’s, she thought. Get to Corinne’s and think of something that will make her let me in, even though it’s the middle of the night and I’m not supposed to be there until the morning. She sat back in the seat and squeezed her eyes shut, thinking that she was in a box, another box, same as when she’d started out here, and she’d have to think her way out of it, same as she had before. Then she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, swallowed hard, and dialed her sister’s number. It was late. It was a school night. Rose would be home. She’d know what to do.
Except Rose wasn’t home. “Hello, you’ve reached Rose Feller, and Feller Pet Care,” said the machine. What? “Please leave me a message with your name, number, the name of your pet, and the dates you require service, and I will return your call as soon as possible.” Wrong number, Maggie thought. It had to be. She dialed again and got the same thing, only this time after the beep she opened her mouth. “Rose,” she croaked. “I’m . . .” I’m what? I’m in trouble—again? I need you to bail me out—again? Maggie closed her eyes and her telephone. She’d figure it out herself.
“Maggie?” asked Corinne, looking off-balance as she stood at her door. “What time is it? What are you doing here?”
“It’s late,” said Maggie. “There’s been . . . I have . . .” She took a deep breath. “I was wondering if I could stay for a few days. I’ll pay you rent, or I’ll clean for you for free . . .”
Corinne held the door open with her hip. “What happened?”
Maggie ran through the possibilities. Could she tell Corinne she’d had a fight with a roommate? Had she told Corinne that she had roommates? She couldn’t remember. And what if the terrible boy had followed her here? If he knew she was staying in the library, maybe he knew she was working here, too.
“Maggie?” Corinne’s forehead was wrinkled. She didn’t have her sunglasses on, and Maggie could see her blue eyes darting back and forth like lost fish.
“Something happened,” Maggie said.
“I think we’ve established that,” said Corinne, letting Maggie in and walking toward the kitchen with her fingertips brushing along the wall. Maggie sat at the table while Corinne filled the kettle, flicked on the gas, took two mugs and two tea bags down from the shelf beside the stove. “Can you tell me what?”
Maggie bowed her head. “Not really,” she whispered.
“Is it drugs?” Corinne asked sharply, and Maggie was so startled that she laughed.
“No,” she said. “Not drugs. I just need to lay low for a while.” Which, she realized, made her sound like a complete criminal, but it was all she could think of on short notice. “I’m just kind of stressed,” she added lamely. “And it’s so peaceful here.”
Clearly, she’d said the magic words. Corinne beamed. She spooned sugar into the tea and brought the cups to the table. “Finals are hard, aren’t they?” she said. “I remember trying to study for mine. The dorms were so noisy, and the library got so crowded! Don’t worry,” she told Maggie. “You can stay in any of the rooms on the third floor. They’re all clean, right?”
“Right,” said Maggie. She’d cleaned them herself. She sipped her tea and tried to stop her heart from racing. Plan. Plan. She needed another plan. She’d stay here a few days. She’d have to buy herself some new things; she had a change of clothes and some underwear in her backpack, but the rest of her stuff was in the library and she couldn’t go get it. And then where? Could she go back to her father, back to Rose? Would they take her back? Would she want to go?
She closed her eyes and saw herself sitting in the back row of the poetry class, telling the professor what “One Art” meant. She saw Charles’s face, his hair falling over his forehead as he talked about Shakespeare and Strindberg and how he’d seen John Malkovich on stage once. Nobody at Princeton had known she was a failure or a fuckup, her family’s shame, the black mark on their report card. Nobody at Princeton knew she was any different than they were. Until the boy in the library. Until now.
She blinked hard. She wouldn’t cry. She’d figure this out. Lay low, she thought. Then get out. She couldn’t stay here while that guy was still on campus, and after the students went home, she wouldn’t be able to stay, because there’d be no one left for her to blend in with. So then what?
“Maggie?” Corinne asked. Maggie stared at her. “Do you have family? Is there someone I should call?”
Maggie sniffed and bit her lip. She wanted to cry, but what good would crying do? “No,” she said. Her voice was wobbly. “I don’t. I don’t have anyone.”
Corinne cocked her head. “Are you sure?”
Maggie thought of her backpack, the money she kept wrapped in a rubber band, snug in one of the inside zippered pockets. She heard Josh’s voice. I went through your backpack. She grabbed for it, yanking it open. The money was gone. Her IDs and credit cards were gone. There was nothing except clothes, and books, and . . . Her fingers brushed the softened paper of the birthday card. She pulled it out, opened it up, reading it for the hundredth time, the birthday greetings, and the signature, and the phone number.
“A grandmother,” she said, in a quivery voice. “I have a grandmother.”
Corinne gave a well-that’s-settled nod. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Take whichever bedroom you want. You can call her in the morning.”
And so, the next morning, Maggie stood in the center of Corinne’s sun-washed kitchen, with her cell phone in her hand, and dialed the number that the grandmother had written on the card almost twenty years before. The phone rang and rang. Maggie crossed the fingers of both hands. Please, she thought, unsure of what she wishing for, except for someone to answer.
And somebody did.
Rose Feller woke up at five in the morning in a strange bed with her heart pounding. Maggie, she thought. She’d been dreaming of Maggie.
“Maggie,” she said out loud, but even as she was saying it, even as she was swimming up through sleep toward wakefulness, she wasn’t sure that it was Maggie she’d seen. A woman running through a forest. That had been all. A woman with terrified eyes, her mouth stretched into a scream, running through green branches that reached out like arms to trap her.
“Maggie,” she said again. Petunia stared up at Rose, before deciding that there was neither an emergency nor food at hand, and closed her eyes again. Rose swung her legs out of the bed. Simon put his hand on her hip.
“Shh,” he said, pulling her back toward him, curling his body around hers and kissing the back of her neck. “What’s wrong?” He nuzzled her, and she felt the crisp curls of his hair brush against her neck. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“I dreamed about my mother,” said Rose, in a low voice, slower and deeper than her own, an underwater sleeping voice. But was that right, either? Her mother. Maggie. Or maybe it was here, running through those trees, tripping over roots, falling down on her knees and splayed hands, then getting up, running some more. But running from whom? And toward what? “My mother’s dead, you know. Did I tell you that? I can’t remember. She died when I was little.”
“I’ll be right back,” Simon whispered, and got up from the bed. She heard him padding through the kitchen, returning in his silly striped pajamas a minute later with a glass of water in his hand. She drank it gratefully as he got back into bed and turned off the lights. Then he curled around her again, with one hand snug across her forehead and the other cupping the base of her head as if she were something delicate and rare.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Rose shook her head.
“You can tell me anything,” said Simon. “I’ll take care of you. I promise.” But Rose told him nothing that night. She just closed her eyes, let herself lean against him, and let herself fall into asleep.
Ella was sitting at her table, staring at her notebook, working on compiling a list of free health screenings for the upcoming week’s Golden Acres Gazette when the telephone rang.
“Hello?” sh
e said.
No answer . . . just breathing.
“Hello,” she repeated. “Mrs. Lefkowitz, is that you? Are you all right?”
A young woman’s voice answered her question. “Is this Ella Hirsch?”
Telemarketer, thought Ella. “Yes, it is.”
The voice paused. “Did you have a daughter named Caroline?”
Ella drew a breath. “I do,” she said without thinking. “That is, I did.”
“Well,” said the young woman. “You don’t know me. My name is Maggie Feller.”
“Maggie,” Ella said instantly, feeling the familiar mixture of hope and relief and exhilaration and terror flooding through her as she said her granddaughter’s name again. “Maggie. I called. That is, I called your sister . . . did she get my message? Did she tell you?”
“No,” said Maggie, and paused. “Look,” she started again. “You don’t know me, and you don’t have any reason to help me out, but I’m in trouble right now, I’m in a lot of trouble . . .”
“I’ll help you,” Ella answered immediately, and squeezed her eyes shut, hoping fiercely as Maggie told her how.
PART THREE
I Carry Your Heart
FORTY-TWO
Rose Feller had never wished for a mother as much as she did during her engagement to Simon Stein. Their first date had been in April. By May they were seeing each other four and five days a week. By July Simon had all but moved into Rose’s apartment. And in September he’d taken her back to the Jerk Hut, ducked under the table, ostensibly to retrieve a dropped napkin, and reappeared with a black velvet box in his hand. “It’s too soon,” Rose had said, still not quite believing that this was happening, and Simon had looked at her steadily and said, “I’m sure about you.”
The wedding was set for May, and it was already October, which meant, as the salesladies this afternoon had been quick to point out, that Rose was late in selecting a wedding dress. “Do you know how long it takes for the dresses to arrive?” the woman at the first shop had asked. Rose had thought of retorting, “Do you know how long it took me to find a guy to marry?” but decided to keep her mouth shut.
“This is torture,” she said, struggling to haul up the panty hose that had developed an inch-thick run the instant she’d poked one foot inside.
“Shall I call Amnesty International?” Amy asked. Rose shook her head and tossed her sneakers into a corner of the peach-painted, lace-curtained dressing room of a bridal shop (or “shoppe,” as Rose had learned to think of them), where the air smelled like lavender potpourri and the Muzak played only love songs. She was strapped into a bustier that hoisted her breasts to practically chin level and, as she would later discover, left nasty welts in her side, plus a girdle that the saleslady had tried to tell her was really a “shaper brief,” except Rose knew a girdle when she saw one—and when she felt one cutting off her air supply. But the saleslady had insisted. “The proper foundation garments are crucial,” she’d said, looking at Rose as if to say, and the rest of my brides-to-be have already figured that out.
“You don’t know what I’m going through,” Rose moaned. The saleslady bundled a dress in her arms and held it open for Rose. “Dive,” she ordered. Rose tucked her arms by her sides, bent at the waist, wincing at the pinch of her double-barreled girdle, and shoved her head through the opening, groping. The dress’s full skirt fell down to her ankles as Rose poked her arms through the sleeves and the saleslady started attempting to work the zipper up her back.
“What are you going through?” asked Amy.
Rose closed her eyes and uttered the name that had haunted her during the two months of her engagement, and who would, she felt certain, continue to bedevil her as the wedding date drew closer. “Sydelle,” she said.
“Oy,” said Amy.
“Oy is not the half of it,” said Rose. “My wicked stepmother has now decided that she wants to be my best friend.” And it was true. When she and Simon had driven to New Jersey to tell Michael Feller and his wife the good news, Michael had hugged his daughter and clapped Simon on the back, while Sydelle sat on the couch looking stricken. “How wonderful,” she finally managed, the words squeezing through her thin, perfectly-painted lips while her jumbo nostrils flared as if she was trying to inhale the coffee table. “How wonderful for you both!” And the very next day she’d called Rose at home to insist that they have tea to celebrate, and to offer her services as a wedding planner. “Not to toot my own horn, dear, but people are still talking about My Marcia’s wedding,” she’d said. Rose thought that was understandable, given Sydelle’s penchant for mentioning Marcia’s wedding in every conversation, but she was caught so completely off guard by Sydelle’s doing something that didn’t involve criticism of her clothes, hair, or diet, that she agreed. With her brand-new ring still feeling strange on her finger, she’d gone off to the Ritz-Carlton to meet Sydelle for tea.
“It was wretched,” she remembered as Amy nodded and smoothed the elbow-length lace gloves she’d tried on. Rose had spotted her stepmother instantly. Sydelle sat alone at a table set with a teapot and two gold-rimmed cups. She looked as formidable as always. Her hair was blow-dried into immobility, and her skin looked as shiny and taut as shrink-wrap. She wore immaculate makeup, imposing gold accessories, and the brown leather jacket that Rose had ogled in the window of Joan Shepp on her way to the hotel.
“Rose,” she’d cooed, “you look marvelous.” The glance she gave to Rose’s khaki skirt and ponytail suggested otherwise. “Now,” she said, once they’d made a few minutes of small talk, “let’s get to the details. Do you have a color scheme in mind?”
“Um,” said Rose. Which was all the opening that Sydelle Feller required.
“Navy,” she decreed. “Navy’s the latest. Very, very chic. Very now. I’m seeing . . .” And she closed her eyes, allowing Rose a moment to marvel at the shades of brown, taupe, and putty eye-shadow cleverly blended on her lids. “. . . bridesmaids in simple navy sheaths . . .”
“I’m not having bridesmaids. Just Amy. She’ll be my maid of honor,” said Rose. Sydelle raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow.
“What about Maggie?”
Rose stared at the pink linen tablecloth. She’d gotten a very strange message from Maggie months before. A one-word message, consisting of only Rose’s name, and the word I’m. No word since then, although every few weeks Rose would call the cell phone and hang up after her sister had said “Hello.” “I’m not sure,” she said.
Sydelle sighed. “Let’s talk tables,” she said. “I’m seeing navy tablecloths with white napkins, very nautical, very crisp, and we’ll want delphiniums, of course, and those gorgeous gerbera daisies . . . or, no. No,” said Sydelle, shaking her head once, as if Rose had contradicted to her. “Pink roses. Can you see it? Masses and masses of pink roses, overflowing from silver bowls!” She smiled, looking pleased with herself. “Roses for Rose! Of course!”
“Sounds beautiful!” said Rose. And it did, she guessed. “But, um, with the bridesmaids . . .”
“And of course,” Sydelle continued, as if Rose hadn’t spoken, “you’ll want My Marcia, too.”
Rose gulped. She didn’t want My Marcia. At all.
“I know she’d be honored,” Sydelle said sweetly.
Rose bit her lip. “Um,” she began. “I really . . . I think . . .” Come on! she urged herself. “Just Amy, really. That’s all I want.”
Sydelle pursed her lips and flared her nostrils.
“Maybe Marcia could do a reading,” Rose said, groping desperately for a bone to throw her stepmother.
“Whatever you like, dear,” Sydelle said icily. “It’s your wedding, of course.” Which was the line Rose had repeated to Simon that night.
“It’s our wedding. Of course,” she said, and buried her head in her hands. “I just have this horrible feeling that I’m going to wind up with My Marcia and five of her best friends in matching navy sheaths walking me down the aisle.”
“You don’t want My Marc
ia?” Simon asked innocently. “But she’s so classy! You know, I heard that when she was married, she bought a size six Vera Wang and had it taken in.”
“I’ve heard that rumor, too,” Rose muttered.
Simon took her hands. “My beloved,” he said, “it’s our wedding. It will be just the way we want it. As many bridesmaids as you want. Or none at all.”
That night, Rose and Simon wrote out the short list of what they wanted (great food, a kick-ass band), and what they didn’t (“Celebration,” a garter toss, My Marcia).
“And no chicken dance!” Simon said the next morning.
“We’re having roses!” Rose yelled toward his departing blue-suited back. “Silver bowls overflowing with pink roses! Doesn’t that sound beautiful!”
Simon shouted a word that sounded alarmingly like “allergic” over his shoulder, and hurried toward the bus. Rose sighed, and went inside to call Sydelle. By the end of their conversation, she’d agreed to outfit her wedding party in navy, to dress the tables in white, to let My Marcia read a poem of her choosing, and to meet with Sydelle’s preferred florist the following week.
“What kind of women talk about ‘my florist’?” Rose asked Amy, as Amy cruised the glass case full of headpieces, finally selecting a pearl-studded pouf and plopping it on her own head.
In Her Shoes Page 29