Bursting Bubbles

by Dyan Sheldon

  “What about her dad?” asks Marigold. “Mrs Hawkle doesn’t think maybe Sadie went to her dad?”

  “Her dad?” Bonnie couldn’t sound more surprised if Marigold had asked if Sadie could have gone back to her home planet. “But, Marigold, Sadie doesn’t have a dad.”

  Yes, she does. He’s a New York City policeman and he lives in Brooklyn. Marigold laughs nervously. “Everybody has a dad.”

  “Not one that’s alive,” says Bonnie.

  “Her dad’s dead?” That’s not impossible. City cops are always being killed. “I had no idea.” Marigold’s voice is its own ghost.

  Bonnie sighs. “Did Sadie tell you that her dad’s alive?”

  “I–I guess I misunderstood.” How could Sadie make her father so believable? So completely real? It’s not as if she’s bent under the weight of a great imagination. “I just thought…”

  “I didn’t think she even remembered him. She was very young when he was killed.”

  And Marigold, convinced that Sadie’s story must be based on truth, says, “Killed? You mean in New York? In a robbery or something?”

  “New York? A robbery? No, of course not. Sadie’s father was blown up in Afghanistan.”

  “Afghanistan? You mean he wasn’t … you mean he was a soldier?”

  “It was a terrible tragedy. He was a week away from coming home. Can you imagine? It was six years ago, but Justine still hasn’t recovered. That’s why I try to cut her slack with her timekeeping and … and other stuff.”

  “I’m so sorry. That’s awful. I—”

  “Yeah, well, that’s life,” says Bonnie.

  Marigold can’t concentrate. She doesn’t want to hang out. She doesn’t want to do homework. She doesn’t want to watch TV. She doesn’t want to play cards with her mother and Mrs Besterman. She doesn’t even want to read. Where could Sadie be? But to ask that question is to start her mind picturing dozens of places where Sadie might be – and none of them are safe and warm and full of sunshine and laughter. To ask that question is to start her mind constructing dozens of stories about what’s happened – and none of them have happy endings. Marigold has completely run out of silver linings.

  Because her rainbow has vanished, instead of going to her room where there would be nothing to distract her dark imaginings, she sits on the sofa in the living room where she can put the TV on for company and hear the women talking in the sun porch. She puts her phone down on the coffee table next to the stacks of old magazines and TV guides, turns on the set and sits back.

  She puts on a movie – a comedy that she remembers liking a lot the first time she saw it, but now it just annoys her. It’s silly. It’s shallow. Even if she hadn’t already seen it, she’d know exactly how it would end. Happily. All problems solved. All bad things banished into someone else’s film.

  Restless, Marigold picks up a TV guide and flicks through it. She tosses it aside and picks up another. In the third one she happens on an interview with one of the stars of Justice for All, Harlan Colt.

  Marigold has never seen this show, and has no interest in it, but because it is Sadie’s favourite she starts to read. Harlan Colt plays Detective Fabio Ramirez. Harlan likes Ramirez because instead of being one of these hard-drinking loners, he’s divorced and is very involved with his little girl. Harlan Colt feels that this gives Ramirez an added dimension and a greater ability to empathize with others. Marigold is about to close the magazine when she sees that Detective Fabio Ramirez lives in Brooklyn.

  No wonder the stories about Sadie’s dad didn’t sound like something she could make up.

  Marigold has to trawl through several weeks before she finds the episode she’s looking for: the one where Detective Ramirez finds the boy who has run away.

  Marigold is on her feet and in her boots and jacket before she actually thinks about what she’s doing. She stands outside the coat closet for a few minutes. She can hear her mother and Mrs Besterman talking and laughing in the sun porch. Her mother’s bag is on the hallway table. Marigold has never gone out without telling her mother where she’s going; and she has never taken her mother’s car without permission. But to do either of those things would entail a lot of explanations, and she doesn’t have the time right now. She can’t even imagine where she’d begin. Her mother has never heard of Sadie Hawkle; she still thinks Marigold’s working at the library.

  Still clutching the TV guide, Marigold opens the bag, takes the car keys and slips out the front door. She starts the engine and backs out of the garage. She isn’t halfway down the driveway when her mother comes charging through the front door with a coat flung over her head and shoulders and a face like the Day of Judgement.

  “Marigold! Marigold!” she shrieks. “Marigold! What are you doing? Where do you think you’re going?”

  Marigold’s automatic response on seeing her mother is to stop the car and start apologizing. She locks her door but opens the window. “I have to go, Mom,” she calls as Eveline skitters down the walk. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Don’t you dare leave!” Eveline’s screams are sharp as a siren. “You hear me, Marigold? You promised. After you took those books! You swore! How can you do this to me!”

  “I’m not doing anything to you. It’s not about you. There’s this little girl who’s lost. I have to find her. It’s really important.”

  “More important than your mother?”

  “Mom, please. I’ll explain everything later.”

  Eveline’s reached the driveway and is about to grab for the car when Mrs Besterman appears at the front door. “Eveline!” she shouts. “Is everything all right?”

  Distracted, Marigold’s mother turns.

  Marigold puts the car into gear and goes. Her phone rings even before she’s out of the driveway. As soon as she’s out of sight of the house she pulls over and takes it from her pocket. One missed call: Mom. She turns it off.

  Marigold has hardly driven a car in sunshine since she killed that pigeon, never mind heavy rain, but she is too focused on finding Sadie to worry about a detail like that. Visibility is poor, and in the battle between Nature (in the form of the storm) and Man (in the form of the windshield wipers), Nature has the slight advantage. Marigold keeps all her attention on the road, looking out for kamikaze pigeons in the curtained dark and concentrating so hard that she is nearly out of Half Hollow before she realizes she’s even in it.

  She turns into Clarendon Road and parks in front of 116. She doesn’t even stop to lock the car but runs to the house and rings the bell. Almost instantly, the door to apartment 1a opens and Justine Hawkle comes running down the hall and pulls open the front door. Her hair isn’t brushed, she’s wearing no make-up and she looks as though she’s been crying. It’s obvious from her expression that Marigold isn’t the person she was expecting, and definitely not the person she was hoping for. “Marigold? What is it?” Her voice sounds like a snapping pencil. “Have you heard from Sadie?”

  “No, no I haven’t, but I—”

  She breathes heavily. “Look, I’m sorry. I appreciate you coming over, but I really don’t have time for this now. I’m waiting to hear from the police.” She starts to shut the door.

  “But, Mrs Hawkle, I think I know where Sadie might be.”

  Hope is the sudden light in Justine Hawkle’s eyes. “What? Where?”

  “It’s only a guess. And it is kind of a long story…”

  “Oh, a guess. And a long story.” She smiles sourly. “It would be with you.” The door moves forward again. “I told you, I don’t have time for this now.”

  But Marigold hasn’t come all this way in this weather to give up now. “Please, Mrs Hawkle. Just let me explain.” And Marigold begins, talking so quickly that her words fall over one another like people escaping from a burning building. Sadie’s stories about her dad being a cop. How he found a boy who had run away. How it all came from her favourite police show.

  “So you what?” If Justine Hawkle could laugh right now, this probably w
ould be the moment. “You think she’s in the cellar? Is that what you think? Well, she isn’t. The basement’s practically the first place I searched.”

  “Not the basement. Under the porch. The little boy in the show was hiding in the crawl space under the porch.”

  Justine Hawkle looks at the floor under Marigold’s feet, as if she can see there is nothing under it. “So you think that’s where Sadie is. Because she saw it on TV.”

  “It’s worth looking,” insists Marigold. “There’s nothing to lose.”

  Sadie’s mother doesn’t seem convinced, but she does know she has nothing to lose. “You need a flashlight?”

  “I have one.” Marigold holds up a Maglite.

  Justine Hawkle steps out onto the porch. “You’re a regular Girl Scout.”

  “It’s my mother’s. She keeps it in the glove compartment.”

  Justine wraps her arms around herself and watches as Marigold steps back into the downpour.

  “Sadie?” she calls. “Sadie, it’s me, Marigold. Sadie, are you there?”

  The space under the porch of 116 Clarendon Road is small, even if you’re crawling, and there is no one in it with less than four feet.

  Sadie’s mother leans over the railing. “You satisfied now?”

  But Marigold can’t believe she’s made a mistake about this. She has to be right. Anything else would be so wrong.

  “OK, Sadie’s not under your porch,” reasons Marigold, “but every house in this neighbourhood has one. She could be under any of them. We have to keep looking. She can’t stay out all night in this.”

  “And she could be under none of them,” says Justine. “Why don’t you leave this to the real cops? I’ll tell them your idea, all right? I promise. You better go home now, Marigold.”

  Which is, of course, a polite way of saying, Mind your own business.

  “But I have such a strong feeling—”

  “Marigold, really. You should go, or your mom will be worrying about you next.”

  Marigold sighs. The habit of obedience is also a hard one to break. She goes back down the steps and returns to the car. She gets in, and sits staring out at 116. Justine Hawkle closes the curtains of the room at the front; the light goes off in the hall. The falling rain blurs the edges of the house … of the street … of the world. People die in storms. Marigold gets out of the car.

  The good thing about the rain is that almost everyone is inside, not driving around, or walking along the sidewalks, or gazing out of their windows. There is no one to see Marigold shuffle through the rain, up one path and down another, crouching down as she circles each verandah. Looking for breaks in the latticework that surrounds the spaces beneath them. Calling, “Sadie! Sadie!” and shining her flashlight into the depths.

  She does every house on the block, but with no success. There are other blocks and other porches, but there is no way she can do any more now. The night and the weather are against her. Justine Hawkle was right: it’s a job for the real cops.

  Finally defeated, Marigold kneels down next to the last house on the street. “Oh, Sadie, where are you?!” It’s almost a wail.

  And then she hears it, not beside her, but from behind her, a small voice that sounds as frightened as Marigold feels. “I’m here. Marigold! Marigold, I can’t get out.”

  Marigold scrabbles to her feet. “I’m coming!” she calls as she races around the house. “I’m coming!” And there it is, a back porch! It never occurred to her to check if there were back porches as well as front ones.

  The other miracle, of course, is that Sadie ever managed to find a way in. There is a broken panel, but it’s so blocked by a close-growing shrub that you could only see it if you knew it was there. And even if you do know it’s there, if you’ve been cowering in the dark for hours, it’s easy to forget where it is.

  Marigold rips out the panel with her gloved hands. She holds the Maglite in her teeth as she reaches in and pulls the shivering child into her arms.

  Both of them are crying as Marigold carries Sadie back up the street.

  “Is my mom going to be really mad at me?” whispers Sadie as they near her house.

  Justine must have been watching out of the living-room window because the front door opens before they even turn off the sidewalk. Coatless, she races into the rain.

  “No,” Marigold whispers back. “She’s not going to be mad at all.”

  Who says there is never a happy ending?

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  A Short Cruise, a Long Journey

  Mr Papazoglakis says that they’ll be growing lettuce on the moon before he’ll allow Mrs Kilgour to travel all the way to New York City in her condition. Though he doesn’t phrase it in quite that way, of course. What he says in so many words is, “I’m very sorry, Georgiana, but, as I told Mrs Kilgour only yesterday – and, I believe several times before – I’m afraid it’s completely out of the question. She can’t go into the city by herself.”

  This happens to be precisely what Mr Papazoglakis did tell Mrs Kilgour. Mrs Kilgour said he made her feel like a captured lion in a zoo in Wisconsin, trapped in a cage thousands of miles from the savanna, forced to forget it ever had another home and waiting to die. “You make sure you live your life while you can, Georgiana Shiller,” warned Mrs Kilgour. “They can mess with your present and your future, but they can’t do anything about the past.” It was the part about living your life that sent Georgiana to talk to Mr Papazoglakis herself.

  “But she really wants to go,” she argues now. “It’s really important to her.” It’s all she’s talked about since they looked at the pictures together. She wants to ride the Staten Island Ferry one more time, just as she did when she was young and in love. “And she won’t be by herself, either.” When she stands up very straight Georgiana is almost as tall as the administrator. If she’d known he was going to be so unreasonable she would have worn her highest heels. And looked down on him. “I’ll be with her.”

  “Unless I’m very mistaken, Miss Shiller, you don’t actually have any medical qualifications.” His mouth shifts into one of his choose-your-coffin smiles. “Unless you’ve been holding out on me.” Anyone who didn’t know better would think he was making a joke.

  I have been holding out on you, thinks Georgiana. I’m really a brain surgeon disguised as a high-school student. Gotcha!

  “We’re only going for a few hours,” Georgiana explains with the patience a sanctity of saints might hope to copy. “We’ll be back before it gets dark. And I’ll drive. And she’ll have her wheelchair.”

  Mr Papazoglakis fingers the gold ring on his left hand. “You do realize how ill she is, don’t you? We’re talking about days here – weeks at the most – not months or years.”

  And Georgiana, always so squeamish about the way life ends like a bubble popped by a pin, says, “Of course I know that.” She would like to drop buckets of ice water over him and his dark suit and his mortician’s compassion, but she beams back on him like a summer sun. “That’s the whole point, Mr P. New York’s where some of her best memories are. This is her last chance to see it again before she dies. So what’s the problem? If she’s going to die soon anyway, why not let her go? She doesn’t exactly have anything to lose.”

  “But I do. The reputation of the centre,” purrs Mr Papazoglakis. And then, just when Georgiana has decided that he doesn’t have a heart, adds, “Surely she must have photographs of those days. She can look at them.”

  Georgiana keeps smiling. I’d like to photograph you. “If a photograph was the same as being in a place,” she says, not only patient but sweet as well, “then nobody would ever go on vacation, would they? They’d just stay home and look at magazines.”

  Mr Papazoglakis spreads his hands in the air, palms down. It’s not in his control. He’s running a business. There are rules. “Be that as it may, photographs are what Mrs Kilgour is going to have to be content with. She is not going to New York. And that, I’m afraid, is final.”

  G
eorgiana shrugs as though conceding defeat.

  But what she’s thinking is: We’ll see about that.

  The weekend receptionist looks up as Georgiana pushes Mrs Kilgour into the foyer. “Why, don’t you look nice!” she exclaims. “Is this a special occasion?”

  Mrs Kilgour does look nice. She’s wearing a floral skirt and jacket under a red coat and, although it’s not strictly the season for it yet, a jaunty panama hat. She has her old camera bag on her lap, and a silver star balloon tied to her chair bobs over her head.

  “It’s my birthday,” says Mrs Kilgour. “Georgiana here is doing something special for me.”

  As it happens, both of these statements are true. Mrs Kilgour is eighty-one today and Georgiana is going out of her way to make it an exceptional occasion.

  Georgiana, who is wearing the wedding shirt Mrs Kilgour gave her and who also looks very nice, says, “My mom’s making a celebration lunch.”

  This statement, as it happens, is not true. It was Georgiana who, pretending to be Adele Shiller, called to get permission for Mrs Kilgour to leave St Joan’s for the day. Her mother is in San Francisco with a client and has no idea what day this is or how she’s supposed to be spending it.

  “Well, you have a wonderful birthday.” The receptionist smiles. Since it’s your last, “Both of you enjoy yourselves.”

  They both assure her that they will.

  In a historic moment of agreement, Georgiana and Mrs Kilgour came up with today’s master plan together.

  “Our mistake was in telling Count Dracula and his acolytes what I wanted to do,” said Mrs Kilgour. “You’d think at my age I’d know better than that. My God, I’ve dealt with them all. From politicians and newspaper honchos to movie stars and generals. It’s always best to lie to people in authority. It’s only fair. They lie to us. What we have to do is tell them we’re doing what they’re happy for us to do, and then do what we want.”

  Georgiana tilted her head to one side, with a look on her face that on a cow means nothing but on a human signifies thinking. “They loved it when you came to my house for Christmas. You could’ve dropped dead then and they wouldn’t’ve cared. They would’ve said at least you’d died happy.”