“Wait ’til you’re my age,” she said. “You’ll have four dead bolts on your door, and you won’t trust anybody.”
Marla had five. Three dead bolts seemed like too few, and I’d wanted an odd number for good luck.
Louise said, “Didn’t mean to make a big deal out of my age like that. You probably think I’m a sympathy vulture.”
I smiled a little. “Never.”
She came out from behind the counter and gave me a quick hug. Her skin was dry and cool and smelled of flour. If I closed my eyes, it was exactly like hugging my grandmother. “Take good care of that man of yours,” she said. “We need him around to protect us.”
I arrived at Sunny Side to find Veronica standing in front of my classroom. “Hi,” I said.
She held something out to me—a small, sealed red envelope. Another note? Does this guy ever give up?
I took the envelope from Veronica, and when I looked at the pattern that had been embossed into it, my breath suddenly got shallow. Dozens and dozens of Valentine hearts. “I…don’t want to open this.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course not.”
“Can I have it then?”
I squinted at her. Why in a million years would she want a note from someone else’s stalker?
Her cheeks went inexplicably pink. “Never mind.” She began to move away, but I grabbed her arm.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“No need to get all cussy.”
“Well, come on,” I said. “You yourself said you thought he was lascivious and up to no good, and—”
“Oh, no, no, no.” She started laughing, which, as far as I was concerned, was the whipped cream and cherry on top of a banana split of bizarre behavior.
“Uh…Veronica?”
Finally she caught her breath enough to speak. “It’s not from that Arabian fellow. It’s from Nate Gundersen.”
I grimaced.
“He said he had an early call at the studio and just wanted to stop by. I love the way these actors talk, with their early calls. It’s so glamorous, don’t you think?”
I turned the envelope over and noticed silver cursive words nestled among the hearts. Nate Gundersen Fan Club.
As I opened it, Veronica kept talking, her voice higher and faster, as if she had just sucked up a dose of helium or had suddenly reverted to puberty. “He was really so nice, and I know that was silly of me to ask for the note, but my mother, she’s a huge Live and Let Live fan, and Lucas is her favorite character….”
Inside, matching red stationery with more of those cursed hearts. The initials NGFC, again in silver, were positioned in the top left-hand corner, where the return address should be.
“I thought I could just snip out the part where he signed the note, if it’s okay with you….”
I started to read:
Dear Samantha,
Please come see me. I need to talk to you.
XO, Nate
Folded up in the red paper was an official studio pass, admitting me onto the Live and Let Live set on West Seventy-seventh Street.
Every housewife’s dream.
I ripped XO, Nate from the note and gave it to Veronica, along with the pass. “Tell your mom to knock herself out.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Samantha!”
As soon as I got into my classroom, I threw the rest of Nate’s note in the trash and yelled, “Leave me alone!” at it.
Okay, focus. You’ve got a class to prepare for. I fished around in my stuffed purse for the key to the art supplies closet. I felt my box-office keys, my apartment keys, my classroom keys, the keys to Yale and Peter’s new apartment on Twenty-eighth Street, my wallet, three boxes of crayons, the newspapers I’d bought from Louise, my halfread copy of The Art of Caring, a six-month-old pack of gum…and the triangular note. I was going to throw this away. Didn’t I?
I put the note on top of the desk, while hearing Ezra’s voice in my mind: “Is that your fortune?” But that thought was interrupted—not by actual movement or sound—but by a sudden slithering feeling.
I was being watched.
I glanced at the classroom door—shut. Then I crept toward the large, street-facing window, slow and tentative as a child sneaking up on a butterfly. I know you’re out there; I can feel your eyes….
I put my face right up to the window, making myself skim the clusters of people hurrying down the sidewalk. I searched the inching morning traffic, peered into the backseats of cabs. No one looked back.
Still…
I looked across the street at the Gap, at the headless mannequins in the window, lined up like the hearts on Nate’s note—all of them in neon-colored tank tops, all of them stiff and white as corpses.
I could see part of the pay phone on the corner; I let my eyes travel back down the street and up. Next to the Gap was a narrow five-story walk-up. In the second-floor window, someone—barely a shadow from this distance and through that thick, dirty window—was holding one of the curtains open.
I held up my hand and waved. The curtains swung shut.
Now who’s paranoid?
At least the drapes were closed now. Whoever had been watching me had been scared enough to back away. I squinted up at the window, trying to discern a shadow behind the white cloth but, with no lights on in the apartment, that was impossible.
I shut my venetian blinds. It was best to be cautious. It was always best to be cautious.
But even with them shut, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone was watching me. Closely.
I kept the blinds shut most of the way through class, even though the theme of the day was “Things you see on the street.”
“Miss Leiffer, how can I draw a stoplight when I can’t see one?” said Abraham.
“Use your imagination.”
“But there’s a stoplight right outside the wind—”
“Don’t draw a stoplight, then. Draw a sidewalk. Or a tree, or some pigeons or whatever else you can remember seeing on the street when you came to school. Do I have to explain everything to you guys? Do you always have to be so…so…literal?”
Abraham looked at me, a promise of tears seeping into his huge brown eyes, and I felt like a heel. An actual heel—the thickest part of the foot, capable of grinding small, fragile things into the ground. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “Guess I had a little too much coffee this morning, huh?”
“My mom puts this cream on her legs to stop cellulife,” said Ida. “And it’s made out of coffee beans.”
“What’s cellulife?” Ezra asked her.
“It’s lumpy things that grow under your skin when you grow up.”
“Ewwwww,” said at least three of the kids in unison, Abraham being one of them, and I was grateful, at least, that someone had broken the tension.
“How big do they grow?” said Charlotte.
“Big,” said Ida. “My mom hates cellulife and so she vanquishes them with the cream.”
“That’s scary.”
“Yeah. But—”
“I think my dad has that.”
“Ewww!”
As subtly as a person could in front of eight preschoolers, I walked up to the window, flattened myself against the wall and peered behind the blinds like a B-movie fugitive. I was thankful everyone was too busy talking about their parents’ thighs to notice what I was doing, even when I shimmied down the wall in order to see the walk-up better.
“My mom doesn’t have lumps on the tops of her legs,” said Ezra.
Harry W. replied, “Bet she does.”
“No, she doesn’t. Stars don’t have lumpy legs.”
“Ezra’s mommy has lumpy legs! Ezra’s mommy has lumpy legs!”
I found the building and glanced up at the second-floor window. I saw the closed draperies, and I was about to head back for the front of the classroom when I noticed sunlight glinting off two tiny glass circles poking out between them. Binoculars.
I jumped away from th
e blinds.
Meanwhile, my class was starting to sound like a session of the Taiwanese parliament.
“My mom does not have bumps!” Ezra yelled.
“She does! She does! She does!” the Weiss twins chanted.
“No!”
“She’s got bumps! She’s got bumps!”
“She does not because she is a great big TV star and your mommy isn’t so shut up!”
I came up fast behind Ezra and put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s enough!”
My “voice of authority,” as Yale called it. Practiced at home in front of the mirror and honed to back-straightening perfection over four years, it was guaranteed to suck the sound out of any preschool classroom in seconds—and it didn’t fail me now. Even I was a little stunned.
“But Ms. Leiffer, I was just—”
“I said that’s enough. No more talking about cellulite ever, anymore, for the rest of the year. Is that clear?”
Ezra nodded.
For the rest of this class, I would forget the freak across the street and his binoculars (Looking at what? Venetian blinds?). I would not think about valentine hearts—lined up on Nate’s fan club stationary, scrawled in blood on an exposed brick wall. I would not be a receiver of vague warnings folded up into triangles. I would not be afraid.
“Okay, then,” I said. “Can anybody name one thing they might see on a street?”
“A stoplight,” said Abraham.
I drew a reasonable approximation of a traffic signal on the blackboard, using green, yellow and red chalk to make the circular lights.
“What else? Charlotte?”
“A girl walking a dog.”
“You got it.”
“Ezra.”
“Ummm…a limo?”
“Beautiful.”
I’d always been pretty good at drawing; now I felt like an artist. And the more confident I became, the faster and more detailed I got with the chalk. I drew everything the kids told me to draw—buildings, pigeons, cars, blooming window boxes, a group of stick-figure kids kicking a soccer ball. Suggestions flew at me.
“Draw Toys ‘R’ Us!” shouted Ida.
“Draw a basketball hoop!” Harry S. said.
“How about a hot-dog guy?”
“Garbage cans!”
“Fire truck! Fire truck!”
With every new class, I hoped for that one moment when I stopped being a stranger or even a teacher and started being a friend. It didn’t always happen—never as early as the second day—but here it was, way ahead of schedule. I could work birthday parties.
If I hadn’t been facing those closed venetian blinds, this would easily have been the highlight of my career.
“More birdies!”
“A policeman holding a kitty cat!”
“A boy with another dog, and the dog is going poop!”
“Yeah!”
When the suggestions stopped coming, we all sat there admiring the blackboard street…so crowded and colorful. So safe.
“I wish I lived there,” said Charlotte.
“Me too,” I said.
When parents started showing up, I knocked on Veronica’s door and got one of her assistants to watch my class while I rushed to the pay phone and called Krull’s cell phone. I got his voice mail, then phoned the Sixth Precinct and had him paged. Krull wasn’t around—nobody knew where he was—so Gayle Cruz connected me with Amanda Patton instead. After I told her that someone had been spying on me from the second-story apartment across the street, she said she’d be right over, with her other partner, Art Boyle.
“You really think this is a two-person job?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said. “Art just wants to check out that new Gap.”
By the time I got back to my classroom, most of the kids had left already—save Ida, who was loudly protesting her mother’s plans for the rest of her day (“I’m not going to violin lessons and you can’t make me!”) and Ezra, still in the same chair, paging through the class’s worn, five-year-old copy of The Runaway Bunny.
“Ezra,” I said. “Is your nanny supposed to pick you up again today?”
“Mommy’s getting me. We’re gonna see the new IMAX picture.”
“That sounds like fun.”
Finally, Ida and her exhausted-looking mother reached a compromise involving mint-chocolatechip ice cream.
And since Veronica’s aide had long ago returned to her classroom, that left only Ezra and me. I watched him, gazing at the picture of Mommy Bunny as wind, blowing her sailboat baby to safety. Should I call your mom? I wanted to say. But I knew better. It sucked to be the one kid left waiting—the kid whose mother had better things to do than pick him up on time. I knew, because I had been that kid.
In seventh grade, I’d waited in the school parking lot for three hours because Sydney had agreed to do a last-minute talk-show appearance without making any other arrangements.
It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, but it was the worst. I could still remember sitting on that splintery bench, saying good-bye to my friends one by one, acting as if nothing were wrong and hating…not my mother, but my dad. For leaving me with her.
“You sure you don’t want a ride?” said Jessica, my lab partner from biology class. “It’s really getting late.”
“No, my mom’s coming. She just had to…pick up some groceries.”
Teachers started leaving. Then the janitor.
When Sydney finally arrived, I was long past anger. The sun was beginning to set, and I fell into her arms weeping, just because she was alive. “Oh, honey,” she said as she held me. “What’s wrong?”
I watched Ezra, wondering if he hated his father, too. “The Runaway Bunny is one of my favorites. Would you like me to read it to you?”
He looked up from the book, raising his pale eyebrows in a way that made his face seem weirdly mature. I half expected him to say, “Oh, pardon me! I thought you were talking to someone else.”
But what he actually said was, “My uncle Nate has sleepovers with my mom.”
“That’s nice.” Just keep him away from your nanny, and your dad and your dog and your goldfish.
“Do you have sleepovers with him too?” Ezra asked.
I sighed. “We used to be friends, but it was a very, very long time ago. The last time I talked to your uncle Nate was before you were born.”
“Sorry I’m late,” said a voice behind me. I turned and looked up at a tall, slender woman who could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five years old. Jenna Sargent. Finally.
“I was just about to call you,” I said.
“Well, here I am.” Jenna’s features were symmetrical and motionless, coated in a thick layer of what had to be her TV makeup. She wore dark pressed jeans, a white tank top and a red silk scarf, with matching chopsticks jammed into the golden chignon on top of her head. Her eyes were a rich, Caribbean blue, and her teeth were whiter than the mannequins in the window of the Gap. She said, “Do you always call parents when they’re just half an hour late?”
“Well…yes, actually.” “It’s a preschool, not a cocktail party,” I wanted to say. But I stopped myself. I never argued with parents or guardians, because Terry always took their side.
But more than that, I was intimidated. Jenna Sargent wasn’t so much beautiful as she was spotless, poreless—a perfect image peeled off a TV screen. I couldn’t believe she was screwing a sex addict.
“I’d asked Soccoro to come,” she said. “But apparently she didn’t get my message.”
How can she wear that much lipstick and not get it all over her teeth?
“Please don’t let it happen again,” I said. “Ezra was here all by himself and we were worried. But…these things happen.”
“I wasn’t worried,” said Ezra. “Mommy, can we go to IMAX now?”
Jenna was glaring into my trash can, at the crushed remnants of Nate’s note. “I know that stationery,” she said.
I shrugged. “Every day is Va
lentine’s Day for Nate Gundersen fans.”
She shifted her gaze from the trash can to me. “So,” she said. “The famous Samantha Leiffer.”
I was trying to figure out how to respond to that when Amanda Patton and Art Boyle showed up. They were a highly disparate pair—Patton impeccably dressed, especially for a cop, with her lean, aerobics-toned body and wholesome good looks; Boyle rumpled, meaty, florid. Krull seemed to balance them out, somehow. But with him missing, they turned into a sight gag.
“Hi, there, kiddo,” Amanda said to Ezra. “You know, I have a son who’s just about three years younger than you.”
Jenna smirked. “And we’re supposed to care about that because…?”
“Sam, who is this nasty—”
“Jesus, Patton, don’t you ever watch TV?” said Boyle. “She’s been nominated for a Daytime Emmy at least twelve times.” He stuck out his hand. “Detective Art Boyle, Ms. Sargent. Don’t mind my partner; she’s kind of a cultural snob.”
“Can we get ice cream after the movie? Ida’s mommy is taking her—”
“Don’t interrupt, Ezra.” Jenna glared at me. “Why the hell did you call the police?”
“Ummm…”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you.” Patton stared at her for a few seconds before adding, rather pointedly, “Ma’am.”
Boyle stepped in front of his partner. “My wife would kill me if I didn’t get an autograph.” He threw a crayon and construction paper at the actress.
“Mom, can I—”
“Don’t interrupt, Ezra.”
“You can make it out to Roselle.”
Jenna aimed her chlorine-colored eyes at me. “Was Nate here today?”
“Nate? No. I mean, he left that note, but I wasn’t here when he—”
“He’s faithful now, you know,” she said. “He’s getting help.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.
“Are you? Are you really?”
“Well, to be totally honest, I don’t give a rat’s…” Stop it, stop it…. I cleared my throat. “I’ll tell you what I do care about, though—Ezra is such a talented boy, and he did some wonderful artwork today!”
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