All that must be done was to fool everyone—her neighbors, the school, and her sister, Diane, the only other family she had left. An eyelash circled in her coffee cup. She rubbed her palms over the tablecloth, straightening wrinkles visible only to the touch. “It is too hot in here,” she said, though no one else was there. Opening a window, she heard crying in the air, the lonesome sound of one who should not have wintered over, but she could not find the peregrine all morning long. Nothing in the sky but blue brightness.
8
The interview with the principal took place in his cramped and humid office, the heart of the old Craftsman-style building tottering toward extinction. Atop the filing cabinets, a fern hung limply, fronds crisping to brown. Spangled on the walls, a gallery of photographs and banners marked the passage of his time at Friendship Elementary—the oldest sign, from 1970, welcomed him “on board.” Despite the constant blowing heat from the furnace, he seemed frigid beneath his baby blue sweater, out of which peeped a yellow striped shirt and a navy tie with a pattern of repeating anchors. Principal Taylor read part of Mrs. Quinn's letter, glanced up at the girl across from him, who smiled every time their eyes met, and then searched for his place in the text. At last he reached the ending, his lips twisted into befuddlement as he muttered the phrase “crosses to bear.” Norah hooked her wilting hair behind her ears and lifted an eyebrow when he turned his attention to her.
“Very curious.”
“About what part?”
“About the whole thing. Your notorious mother. Your grandmother, Mrs. Quinn. Why didn't she just bring you in herself today?”
Prepared for the question, she told her first lie. “She is something of an invalid.”
“An invalid? How can someone be somewhat an invalid? Do you even know the meaning of the word ‘invalid’?”
Norah lowered her voice, spoke slowly. “Agoraphobia, I'm afraid.” Seeing that her meaning was lost on the man, she restated. “A fear of the out of doors. Doesn't leave the house if she can help it.”
“I know perfectly well, young lady, what agro—”
“She can't quite shake it. I'm a godsend, really. You can't imagine the strain of the simplest things. Groceries, taking out the trash, fetching the mail.”
“And you are her granddaughter. What about your parents?”
“It says right there in the letter, Mr. Taylor. Are you going to make me say it out loud?”
“Yes, but—”
“Neither one of them really wants me, simple as that, I'm sorry to report.” She looked directly at his eyes.
He dug into his desk for the proper forms, flipping through a multicolored stack of papers. “I suppose we can accommodate you, Miss …”
“Quinn.” She leaned forward and laid her fingertips along the edge of his desk. Her nails were bitten to the quick.
“Right. Have your grandmother fill these out and sign them, and once your grades are transferred, you'll be official.”
Norah sighed and bowed her head. “I've never been to another school before. Have you ever heard of John Holt and Teach Your Own?. Homeschooling?”
Mr. Taylor looked up from the folder he had been inspecting. “You mean, your mother never sent you to school? Did she teach you at home enough so that you're even ready?”
He studied her eager, expectant face and then bent to his papers, brushing her away with a hastily scribbled note to the teacher. She could be the third grade's problem that day. In the margins, he jotted a reminder to call Mrs. Quinn, and then he added the letter to his overflowing in-box.
Norah flew down the hallway to her classroom, coat trailing like a windblown sheet, her sole-thin shoes squealing on the linoleum with every triumphant step. Catching her breath outside Room 9, Norah peered through the rectangular aperture cut into the door, as narrow as a window in a castle wall. Sean Fallon sat in the second row, fourth seat, and the nearest empty desk was in the third row, fifth seat, close enough for direct observation of him, far enough for her to go undetected. None of the other children spotted her face framed in the casement, for, scrupulous at their cursive penmanship, they watched their hands roll right-leaning spirals favored by practitioners of the Palmer method. Eight boys and twelve girls, and if no child was absent or out at the restroom, she would be number twenty-one, not as good as a prime, but a multiple of three and seven, two lucky numbers indeed. With these auguries in mind, she opened the door and marched directly to the teacher, presented her with the note from the principal, and stood like a willow hanging over her shoulder to read along silently. All of the children had stopped in their strokes. The teacher corrected her posture and stuck out her hand. “How do you do, Norah Quinn,” she stage-whispered. “I'm Mrs. Patterson.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Norah whispered back, and shook her hand, pumping her wiry arm like a piston.
Mrs. Patterson unclenched and stood beside the girl, facing the twenty curious pairs of eyes peering out as if hidden inside twenty firkins. “Class, this is Norah Quinn, and she will be joining us, starting today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Norah?”
Curious and ready to judge, the children straightened in their chairs, awaiting word from the new creature flung into their midst.
“I am almost nine. I like birds—anything that flies really—and leopards. I don't like Brussels sprouts. The last time someone gave me Brussels sprouts, I dumped them behind the radiator when nobody was looking.”
The boys and girls laughed, but Mrs. Patterson's withering glare reproached them at once. “Where are you from, Norah?”
“Oh, I've lived all over, here and there. Right now, I live with Mrs. Quinn. My grandmother.”
The second outburst of gasps and giggles could not be suppressed by a mere stare. Mrs. Patterson rapped her knuckles upon the desktop. “Class, plenty of children live with their grandparents, so I don't think that's any excuse—”
Two boys in the back pointed at Norah's old shoes and enjoyed a conspiratorial laugh. Sensing her control of the entire day ebbing, the teacher cut short the introduction. “All right, class, back to your circles. Norah, there's a nice seat over there by the window.”
“If it's all the same to you, Mrs. Patterson, I would prefer that one in the back.”
“Sit where you please, child. I expect the rest of you to introduce yourselves to Norah during recess, and I'm sure you'll all become fast friends. We won't be going outside today, as it is entirely too cold.”
On her way to the fifth seat of the third row, she stopped to wink at Sean Fallon, and turning to the girl across from him, she asked, “Do you have an extra pen and paper, Sharon?” Without thinking, the girl held down her papers and opened the lid to her desk, and only when she had handed over the pen did she wonder how the stranger knew her name.
“I can read upside down,” Norah said, and put her finger on the Sharon in the upper right corner of the page.
The morning passed quietly until the bell signaled lunch. Mrs. Quinn had neglected to pack a meal, so Sean Fallon gave Norah half of his sandwich, apple butter on white bread. Counting out her pretzel sticks, Sharon Hopper divided and handed over half. Gail Watts offered her a small carton of milk that she bought at her mother's insistence and threw away unopened every day. Mark Bellagio presented the greater part of a tangerine. Dori Tilghman, a shortbread cookie in the shape of a keystone. “They're called Pennsylvanians,” she informed Norah, as if speaking to a student from some foreign land.
In the elementary school hierarchy, their table was far from the circle of popularity, though they were not the shunned freaks, merely the forgotten and the overlooked. The cafeteria hummed with the fall and rise of one hundred voices. Laughter rolled and slipped away. A shout rang out from a far corner, prelude to a chase around a table. Chair legs yelped across the linoleum, and a red-haired boy carried his tray to the trashcan, pulled out a paperback novel from his pocket, and leaned against the wall to read. At another table, a middle-aged lothario in a brown cordu
roy sports coat begged for potato chips from a gaggle of admiring girls. In a third direction, Norah spotted twin sisters licking pudding from plastic spoons, perfect mirrors of one another. All around her, the third graders traded stories about their friends and classmates, but she could not follow the gist of their gossip.
When the feast was over, Norah slapped her hands on the tabletop and thanked her tablemates for their generosity. Tearing a section from a brown paper bag, she folded the square into an intricate pattern, and taking care to tuck corners into fabricated openings, she blew into a tiny hole. Like an inflated balloon, the paper expanded into a hollow cube, which she served into the air with a pat of her palm. Sean watched the progress of the creation, hypnotized by the play of the trick. The children took turns batting it across the table like a volleyball, and when the cube came back round to Norah, she captured it in flight, brought it to her lips, leaned back her head, and with a steady puff of breath, kept blowing, spinning the box on one corner like a dreidel, until Mr. Taylor came along to snatch it midair and confiscate their fun. The children all cheered for her when, the moment his back was turned, she stuck out her tongue like a battle flag.
9
While the foundling was off in school, Mrs. Quinn wandered among the carousels of clothing in the girls’ department at G. C. Murphy's. Winter coats had already been marked down after the holidays, even though the brunt of the season remained in prospect, and she chose a gray parka with faux rabbit fur trim for Norah. After selecting the coat, she was at a loss for what else to buy her, and wistfully fingered the corduroy jumpers and flannel nightgowns, remembering. Two decades had passed since she had brought Erica to Murphy's; 1965, simpler then, clothes, girls, everything. Her daughter's shade trailed her along the aisles—how she had loved shopping in those days. Taking her mother's hand, Erica had danced from display to display, coveting every bright color and wild design.
Lost in the past, Margaret did not notice the man in the camel hair coat who followed her around the store, stopping a few racks away when she paused to guess at sizes. He switched his fedora from hand to hand, anxious to be under the brim again. Whenever she looked in his direction, he stiffened like a mannequin and remained motionless until some other bright thing caught her eye. Conspicuous by his mere presence, he became inconspicuous by dint of will. He merged into the general background and disappeared in the thickets of hanging clothes.
The few other shoppers were women like herself. Widows, perhaps, but grandmothers surely, out hunting for birthday gifts or bargains to store away for next winter. They shuffled in a daze from bin to bin, and Margaret read in every face some suffering or disappointment, their hopes and dreams marked down, 40 percent off. She wondered if others saw the shame written in her eyes and scratched across her brow. The others, if they noticed her at all, must have recognized her as that woman whose daughter had run away from home, gotten into trouble, and never returned. Photographs of Erica had been in the papers and on television when the story broke, and even Margaret and Paul had once been on the front page of the local newspaper. If the women didn't remember the exact circumstances, they knew instinctively that she shared their heartbreak over irredeemable losses. But the little girl was her secret, and she clung to it with all the ferocity of untrammeled happiness. Margaret gathered in the parka, quickly chose a watch cap, scarf, and mittens in complementary red, and paid her way out of the store. She thought of crossing over to the Rosa Rossa Flower Shop to see her neighbor, but decided she did not feel like talking to anyone after all.
To get to her car on Robinson Street, she had to pass the diner where she and Erica had often stopped for an ice cream or to split a slice of chocolate cake. The air bit at her cheeks, and she felt hopelessly tired again. No harm, she thought, to step inside for a cup of coffee and warm up before heading home. At eleven o'clock, the place was nearly empty, so she picked a booth out of the draft. The decor had not changed from the 1970s, the same cracked vinyl flooring, burgundy booths, chrome fading to the sheen of silvered mirror, and the laminated menus offered the same choices—only the prices differed from her last visit. A waitress arrived as Margaret read from the selections, trying to decide if a piece of pie would upset her stomach. She could sense the young woman's presence, a dark mustard-colored uniform, glass of water set down with a thunk, silverware wrapped in a paper napkin dropped unceremoniously on the placemat. Margaret looked up just far enough to see the name tag: Joyce.
“What can I getcha, hon?”
Bring me my daughter at nine years old.
“Just coffee,” Margaret said. “And—oh, I don't know—what pie is good today?”
“We have apple, blueberry, cherry, sour cherry, peach, pumpkin, lemon meringue, banana cream, coconut cream, though that's been here over two days. Nobody gets the coconut. None of the fruit is fresh this time of year, but the apples in the apple pie are real.”
Echoing across the years, the girl's voice finally registered in her memory. Margaret had known her once upon a time, and instantly she averted her eyes, studied her fingernails. “Sour cherry, thank you. A small slice.”
She watched the waitress walk toward the kitchen, just as she stared at all young women, trying to discern some sign of her own daughter in their faces and figures, a clue as to what Erica might look like now, how she might act, what she might feel or think. Trying to draw the particulars of Erica's life from the surface of others’, she could not help but study them, their feathery haircuts, the fading fad for polyester disco clothing, the way they made older folks invisible. Young women had changed since the time she had been one of their tribe. More comfortable in their sexuality, hiding almost nothing, no garters, no wires or girdles, just open and brazen. The girl returned with a smile and set down the mug, milk and sugar, a forlorn slice of pie, the syrupy filling bright as blood.
“Excuse me,” the girl said, “but don't I know you? Aren't you Erica's mother?”
Mrs. Quinn assented by her silence. The high school girl had aged a decade, but of course she remembered her well. All of her friends had disappeared too, when Erica ran away. They stopped coming around the house, so their faces were locked in time as teenagers, but she could still see the giggly teen in the careworn features.
“I thought it was you. I'm Joyce. Joyce Waverly but you might remember me as a Green, my maiden name.” She held out a chapped red hand to show off the wedding band and matching engagement ring. “I went to high school with Erica.”
“Joyce Green.” She remembered.
“So good to see you. Mind if I take a load off?” She pushed aside the department store bags and scooted into the booth across from Margaret.
“I'm married now,” she said. “Seven years. One boy, and one on the way. His name is Jason, my son that is. I don't know what we'll call this one, maybe Mack Truck, ‘cause I never even saw him coming till he knocked me flat. How are you, Mrs. Quinn? How's Erica? Haven't heard from her in ages. She still out west? Arizona or New Mexico, was it? I can't imagine living in a foreign country like that.”
“She's still there,” Margaret lied. She had no idea where her daughter was at that moment. “Doing well.”
Her daughter's friend leaned across the table and whispered. “Did she ever get out of trouble? Is she married? Any kids?”
Mrs. Quinn sipped at her coffee. “Just the one. A girl. In fact, she's come to stay with me for a while.” She nodded at the shopping bags. “I was just after going to the store to buy the poor thing some decent winter clothes—”
“I love little girls’ things way better than boys’.” Joyce Waverly had already begun pulling out the items. She held up the gray parka and brushed the fake rabbit fur against her cheek. “They don't have much call for coats and mittens down in the desert, you know.”
“They're for my granddaughter,” Margaret said proudly. “Norah. Norah Quinn.”
THE STRANGER AT the booth nearest the door sat patiently until the waitress spotted him and wended her way. “Do you
mind if I ask who was that woman? The one who just left? The one you sat next to and chatted with?”
“Mrs. Quinn?” Joyce lowered her pencil and pad. The man at the table looked kind and respectable, a bit like her grandfather.
“I thought so,” he said. “It's been years since I've seen her.”
“I was surprised to see her myself. We go way back, her and me. I was friends with her daughter Erica, and ever since that whole incident, she's been something of a hermit.”
He fingered the brim of his hat resting near the sugar dispenser. “Ever since the incident.”
“You remember,” she said. “They thought that boy Wiley kidnapped her, but I say they ran off together. Everyone at school knew they were an item.”
“Right, the incident.”
The icy blueness of his eyes transfixed her, and she imagined how handsome he must have been as a young man. He kept his gaze fixed on her, and in her womb, the fetus kicked and fluttered. The man lifted his hand and held his palm over the hump of her abdomen. “May I?” he asked, and when she nodded, he laid his hand on the spot where the baby stirred, and Joyce shuddered with pleasure as the warmth radiated across her skin, a penetrating heat that spread into her body. The unborn child stilled as if he had soothed it to sleep. Withdrawing his hand, he leaned back into the booth. “So my old friend, Mrs. Quinn, was on a shopping spree?”
Flustered, Joyce kept on talking. “For her granddaughter, come to live with her for a while.”
“Granddaughter? There can be no child.”
“Oh, sure there is,” Joyce said. “She showed me a new hat and coat. For Norah.”
He chuckled to himself. “What a pretty name.”
The baby kicked again at the sound of his voice, and wicked desire filled Joyce with a guilty pleasure. She twisted her wedding ring and looked hopelessly at the front door, wondering if anyone would come in.
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