Girls in Trouble (44 page)

“You sound like my parents.”

“Well, good. I would hope so. They must be fine people, then.” He studied her and bit into his burger, chewing thoughtfully. “Why Pittsburgh?”

“My father is there.”

Grabbing his napkin, he swiped it across his mouth. “Your father,” he said. His brow furrowed. “How come your father didn’t send you money to take a bus?”

“I want to surprise him. I can’t do that if I ask him to pay.”

“What about your mother? She in on this surprise?”

Anne played with the salt shaker. “She doesn’t want me seeing him. They’re not together anymore.”

“Ah—I see. That’s the way it is, then.” The trucker took another bite
of his burger, considering her. “I’m going to Pittsburgh,” he said finally. “I’ll take you.”

“Really? You will?” Anne brightened.

His truck was shiny and red, with “Orson’s Sausages, The Links You Love!” scribbled on the side in bright yellow letters. “Up you go,” he said, taking her hand, helping her step up into the truck. There was a compartment in the back, with a pillow and a soft red blanket. She intended to stay awake, to talk to him, to tell him stories she’d make up so he’d be glad of the company, but as soon as she sat on the seat, her head lolled, and the next thing she knew he was gently shaking her. “We’re here, sleepyhead,” he said.

And then she was there. Dropped off in the center of town, by the university, in the middle of a bright day, students spilling all around her. Pittsburgh wasn’t anything like she expected, not grey and unfriendly looking, not with a cloud cover of smoke. No, the city was green and leafy and sparkling, and there was a crunchy apple smell to the air. Anne strode down the street and two people passed her and gave her smiles so friendly, she had to turn around to make sure those smiles were really directed at her. Amazing, she thought. A good omen if her father lived in such a nice place.

She stopped at a phone booth and called information for Danny’s address. “It’s 5525 Howe Street,” said a voice. She could find it.

She started walking, stopping a woman to ask for directions. She reached in her pocket to check how much money she had left. Five. No six dollars. But there was something else. Three twenties and a scrap of paper. A phone number scribbled down. “You call if you need to,” it said. “Charlie.”

Anne carefully tucked the bills and the number back in her pocket. He was a nice man. She bet his daughters didn’t realize how lucky they were to have a father like that.

She turned down Negley and walked a few blocks. Howe. The street was lined with trees. There were a few people milling around, talking, walking dogs, riding bikes. A jump rope lay curled on the lawn of one house, a red tricycle was parked on a front stoop. She shivered. She hadn’t dressed warmly enough. And she was starving again.

Anne’s father’s house was brick with a sort of ramshackle garden in the front, and a gold door knocker in the shape of a lion. Anne stopped in front, heart hammering. She wasn’t going to throw herself on these people the way Sara had with her parents.
We’re not alike,
she thought. /
was wrong.
She was going to scope these people out, figure what to do. She stood in front of his house and then the door opened and a woman with cropped yellow hair came out, a tiny baby, bottom heavy with diapers, held against her chest in a Snugli, and she opened the mailbox by the door, riffling for the mail. The woman hummed.

Anne froze. A baby. She didn’t know there was a baby. She stared in wonder. She couldn’t tell if it was her half brother or her half sister, but it didn’t matter. It was incredible that such a person existed. And then, she stared at the woman. Her father’s wife. The woman he preferred to Sara, and that seemed impossible to her, too, because this woman wasn’t as pretty or cool as Sara. This woman was wearing a frumpy floral dress and had a faceful of freckles. And then suddenly, this woman was looking at Anne.

“Are you lost?” the woman said. “Can I help you?”

This was it. All Anne had to do was say who she was. All she had to do was ask to see her father, but she couldn’t do it. She lost her nerve. “Looking for Rushmore Street,” she blurted, feeling suddenly ridiculous.

“Rushmore? Can’t say that I know that street,” the woman said. “But if you go up there, that’s the main drag. I’m sure someone could help you there.”

Anne nodded. She walked to the end of the street and then turned around. The woman was gone. Anne circled back around, standing in front of the house again. All she had to do was walk up four stairs and press her finger to the bell. All she had to do was open her mouth and say her name. What was the matter with her that she couldn’t?

She walked to the side of the house and sat down, circling her knees with her arms, resting her head. The grass was cool and green. There was shade from a maple. Inside the house, she could hear music, a swell of piano notes that made her shut her eyes for a moment. Drifting, she was half-asleep, the occasional insect a kind of lullaby.

Someone shook her. Anne’s lids fluttered and she looked up and there
was the blond woman, the baby in the crook of her arm. The woman stooped down, and as she did, the baby laughed and cooed. “You don’t live around here, do you?”

Anne started to lie, but the woman’s gaze was so clear and steady that she thought better of it. “And there’s no Rushmore Street, now is there?” the woman asked, and Anne dug her hands in her pockets.

“Well, you look harmless enough. I’m Charlotte. This little one’s name is Joseph. Why don’t you come inside and we’ll figure out what to do with you.”

Charlotte’s kitchen was bright and cheerful with a big green clock in the shape of a dinner plate, the numbers different foods, and the hands a fork, spoon, and knife. “Isn’t that clock fun?” Charlotte said, following Anne’s gaze. “My husband’s surprise.”

My husband,
Anne thought. She tried to imagine her father buying something for his wife, thinking: oh, she’ll love this. Meaning, oh, she’ll love me.

Clumsily, she sat at the Formica table. There was a big old-fashioned baby carriage in the corner and Charlotte gently lowered Joseph into it, and then wheeled it closer to Anne. “He likes to be part of things,” she said. She bustled around, opening cabinets, finally pulling out a can of Campbell’s soup. “Beef okay?” she said. Anne, whose mother never fixed soup that wasn’t made from scratch, nodded. She was so hungry she could have eaten the can.

The baby cooed, a peal of sound, and Charlotte turned to him and smiled. “You peach,” she said.

“Is that your baby?” Anne said carefully, and Charlotte burst into laughter.

“Now who else’s baby would it be?” Charlotte asked. She reached into the cupboard again. “And these,” she said, taking out oyster crackers.

The soup was hot and sugary tasting, the oyster crackers were too salty, but Anne ate every bit, scraping the bowl, not protesting when Charlotte filled up her bowl again.

“There’s thirds if you’re still hungry after this,” Charlotte said. And then she studied Anne. “What’s your name?” Charlotte asked.

* * *

Danny was in a meeting about ways to make the bank staff more efficient when someone came in and told him he had an urgent call. He didn’t like that word,
urgent.
It made his heart jump, his thoughts race.
Charlotte,
he thought.
Joseph.
If something happened to either one of them, he didn’t know what he’d do. He walked out of the meeting and strode into his office, picking up the phone. “Hello?” he said quickly, and then he heard his name, he knew the voice, and he had to sit down to hear it again.

“Sara,” he said, resting his forehead against the receiver. He sat down, trying to think what to do. “Sara,” he said again, trying to compose himself.

“I’m sorry to call you at work. I’m sorry to call you. Did Anne come there?” Her voice rushed over him like a tide.

“Anne? Who’s Anne?”

“Our daughter Anne.”

His mouth went dry. Anne. He thought of that day at his house when Sara had come by on her bike, a shock because he had never thought he’d see her again, he had never imagined she might want to see him, and for a moment, he had been so ridiculously happy. Sara! Sara was here! And then she had told him about Anne and then everything that he had struggled so hard to build up, to make right in his life, seemed to falter.

“Why would she come here?” he finally said.

“I found her, Danny. I went to Florida to find her. She knows about you. She ran away and we all think she might have come to your house.”

His house. Charlotte opened the door to everyone. She said even salespeople deserved common courtesy. How many times had he come home to find her with one of the runaways she helped at the church center? How many times would an extra place be set for dinner? Danny rubbed at his forehead. “I’m going home now to see,” he told her.

“Wait, wait, here’s a cell phone number. You’ll call, if she is?” she begged. Her voice cracked and he felt pulled toward it. “We can fly up if she’s there,” Sara said.

She waited. He knew she was expecting him to tell her to come to the
house, to stay if she needed, but how could he do that? The last time he had seen Sara he had told Charlotte they were friends from school and that was that, and Charlotte had believed him. They had gone out to dinner that evening, and when he hadn’t been able to eat a thing, Charlotte had asked him, her voice rich with concern, if he was coming down with the flu because he was acting so strange.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

He hung up the phone, trying to think what to say to Charlotte. Maybe the girl wouldn’t show up at his house at all and to warn Charlotte would just needlessly upset her. Why would Anne show up, anyway? He hadn’t ever tried to contact her. She hadn’t tried to contact him. And he had told Sara he couldn’t consider bringing Anne into his life; surely Sara must have explained that to Anne.

But if he didn’t tell her, and Anne arrived, Charlotte might never trust him again.

He phoned her, and as soon as he heard Charlotte’s voice, warm and welcoming, he relaxed. “We have some company,” she told him, and he shut his eyes.

“Who?” he said.

“Another runaway, it looks like. A little skittish, but she told me her name—Anne —and she ate three bowls of soup and then fell asleep in the den.” Her voice was sure and calm.

“I’ll be right home,” he said.

“Honey, you’re working! You don’t have to come home!” Charlotte said, surprised. “Anyway, I already called the church and as soon as she wakes up I’ll take her over there and we’ll figure out the best thing to do for her.”

“I’m coming home,” he repeated.

The whole way driving home, Danny felt panicked. Charlotte didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about any of this. Charlotte was so bighearted, she was just the kind to take Anne in, the same way she would any lost soul. The same way she had taken him when he was floundering
around, tense and miserable, his life feeling as if it were about to break into a thousand pieces. What would he say? What would he do? Danny swerved, beeping the horn at another driver. How could he ever explain it to Charlotte?

He parked the car. He used to hate dusk, used to think it was the loneliest time of the day and he’d do anything to avoid it. Go to the movies. Go take himself out to eat. Go pick up a woman and spend the night with her. Anything so he didn’t have to be by himself. So he didn’t have to think about the mess of his life. But then he had met Charlotte, he had married her, and the dusk had been his favorite time, because it was when he’d come home to his own family, when he’d see his house—his house!—the wooden plaque with “The Slades” handpainted across it in his own careful script, the flowers Charlotte had planted so there’d be a blaze of color about the house. And then he’d see Charlotte, beautiful and smiling, he’d smell the delicious dinner she had cooked, and there was never a moment when she wasn’t delighted to see him, when she didn’t make him feel that she was the lucky one to have him, instead of the other way around. He felt as if he had spent his whole life yearning for this and he hadn’t even known it, not until it was here, love and family and home, and maybe it was because it was such an unexpected gift to him that he couldn’t help worrying that any minute, like everything else in his life, it might be wrested away from him.

He walked inside, and there was light and warmth in the house, music playing from the radio, and now, the icing, he heard the baby. He looked at his boy and sometimes all he wanted to do in this life was make sure Joseph knew how much he was loved. His little boy. His baby.

Anne was his baby, too.

“I’m home—” he said tensely, but only Charlotte tiptoed out.

“The girl’s still sleeping,” she said in a low voice. “I already called the church and they said they can talk to her, get her to consider going back home with her family.”

She rested her head against his shoulder. “Know how I can tell we belong together?” she teased. “My head fits perfectly right here.”

He stroked her hair. “I just want to wash my hands,” he said.

He didn’t go into the bathroom. Instead, he walked to the den. His
blood felt as if it were thrumming inside of him.
Please,
he thought.
Please let it not be her,
and as soon as he opened the door and saw the spill of red hair on the pillow, the lopsided mouth, he braced one hand against the doorjamb. He was looking at Sara.

Slowly, he closed the door. He felt like crying. He walked heavily to the kitchen and there was Charlotte behind him, and she looked up at him. “What? What’s wrong?” she said. “Oh, honey, did you have a bad day at work?” And she placed one hand, warm, against his cheek, and then, because there was no longer any reason not to, he started talking, telling her, and she took her hand slowly from his face. She kept her eyes on him.

She was so still, he began to worry. He had seen her this upset only once before, the first time she had gotten pregnant, when she had been so happy that the obstetrician used to joke with her that she was the only one he knew who even liked morning sickness. And then one day, during a routine visit, when she was three and a half months along, they hadn’t found a heartbeat. The baby had quietly died inside of her. “It’s a blessing,” the doctor had told her. “Usually that happens when there’s something very wrong with the baby.” But it was the first and only time Danny had seen Charlotte doubt God, something he himself doubted from the time he was twelve, the one and only prickly difference between them. She believed and he did not, could not. She had taken to her bed, not being able to get up until, desperate, Danny had called the priest and begged him to come over and talk to Charlotte. He had stood in the doorway listening to the priest tell Charlotte this baloney, that it was God’s will, that no one could understand God but God himself, and it was prideful to even try, and then Charlotte had gotten up, and after that Danny never said one bad word about religion again to Charlotte. He never stopped her from going to church Sundays, never stopped her from trying to tease him into coming, too, and sometimes he did go, just so he could sit beside her and think how lucky he was, how his blessing was not from God, but from her.