How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (15 page)

His yank revealed a glass ashtray, half filled with butts.

“When I fell asleep,” he said, “one of them must not have been completely out. I've always been too lazy about such things—a bad habit, I know.”

“Dangerous is more like it,” I said severely.

I was almost sorry I had saved him now, seeing as it had been his own stupid fault.

Then I wondered: Why had no one else rushed in here to save him? Even if they had not smelled the smoke, I had certainly screamed loud enough.

When I said as much, he merely shrugged.

“The one, Mrs. Fairly, is too old to be troubled by the odd noise in the night. The other, Annette, is too young to have her sleep troubled by anything.”

Well, he was neither too old nor too young. So why had he not wakened sooner himself?

He indicated with a nod of his head a nearly empty brandy snifter on his bedside table.

“Too much of that before retiring, I'm afraid,” he said. “It's probably why I was so careless with the cigarette, too.”

So it was all his own fault, after all.

“You seem to be safe now,” I said, moving to take my leave. “And I'm sure you can find yourself some clean bedding…”

“Stay a minute, Miss Bell.” He reverted to how we had been before. And yet his actions belied the distancing of his address, because as he spoke to me, he reached out and grabbed my hand.

His fingers sent a shock through me. It had been months since any man had touched me, other than to formally shake hands.

“I am tired, sir,” I resisted halfheartedly, with what little strength was left in me. “It has been an unimaginably long day.”

“Then I will not keep you too much longer,” he spoke softly. “But I must say, I am surprised.”

“How ‘surprised,' sir?”

“That you saved me,” he said. “You thought I was in danger, you even thought some madwoman—” I could see it was a struggle for him not to start laughing again at that “—was responsible, and yet, rather than running away from danger or depending upon someone else to take the risk, you rushed in and saved me.”

His eyes were all wonder, like an infant looking up at the night sky and discovering the moon for the first time.

I was sure it was all an act.

“Oh,” I said.
“That.”

“Yes,” he said, dark eyes still wondering. “
That.
It's quite a big that. You must care for me, Miss Bell.”

I absolutely could not let him go on making sport of me, not like
that.

I withdrew my hand from his, finally having to yank it to get him to free the last pinkie.

“You must have a strange notion of
care,
Ambassador Rawlings.” I laughed with what I hoped sounded like a harsh laugh, moving toward the open door to the hall.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

If he had been standing, I was sure he would have had his hands on his hips, belligerently.

Good,
I thought.
Let him return to being that harsh man I first met on the pony path. There was nothing tender about that man. I don't have to like that man.

“It means,” I said over my shoulder, “that in the same circumstances, I would have rushed to save Captain. And I don't even like dogs!”

Then I slammed his door behind me.

Okay, so I caught the bottom of my white nightgown in the door when I slammed it, causing me to have to open the door just wide enough to remove it, thus making my exit something less than smooth, but still…

And thus rang down the curtain, ending the longest day of my life.

O
ne is required by some unnameable law to live each day of one's life, the boring ones as well as the extraordinary ones. But when one is telling another the story or stories of one's life, there is no similar requirement to give a narration that spans the arc between brushing one's teeth in the morning and brushing them again at night.

This is to say that the minute treatment I gave to my first full day in Iceland will not be repeated in kind for the subsequent days. On my second day, there was no rising to a perfect day, no shopping, no sunshine, I didn't discover a previously unseen cat, didn't fall off a horse, didn't make an ass of myself in front of my new employer for the first time without realizing who he was, didn't get scared of a dog, didn't start writing a new novel, didn't spill spaghetti sauce all over myself, didn't officially meet my new employer for the first time and realize that it was he in front of whom I'd made an ass of myself earlier, when I'd fallen off the horse, didn't have a fire break out, didn't save anyone's life, didn't go to bed excited or exhausted.

What I did do on the second day was wake up to Mrs. Fairly searching all around the house for the master's favorite blue blazer. Apparently, he had somehow managed to misplace it from his own closet.

Of course, I knew where it was: it was in the bottom of my own closet now, a sodden and ashy thing, since I'd beat the smoldering sparks on his bed to death with it the night before.

How was I to know it was his favorite blazer?

I was trying to save the stupid man's life!

Well, I certainly wasn't going to hand over the blazer now. Surely he could afford a new one. After all, the stupid man was an ambassador.

What I also did do on the second day was I began my duties with my new charge.

So, really, when you think about it, the only thing the two days had in common was that at either end of each, I did in point of fact brush my teeth.

It has been said that having the care of a small child is something akin to watching paint dry. I do not doubt the boredom of the task for many. I can only say that for me, perhaps because I had never had a child of my own, it was more a delight than a burden to see the changes, the growth, in one who looked to me to help with her interpretation of the world.

And Annette was a good child, none better that I had known, for unlike Stevie and Kim, who had already had something of the skeptic bred into their small lives, whatever unhappy event had rendered Annette the sole property of her papa had failed to similarly make her jaded. She was more like a sun that would never burn out.

Still, though, as enjoyable and fulfilling as her company was for me, as dutiful day piled upon dutiful day, I yet found I had a need for adult company.

And Mrs. Fairly, pleasant as she was to me, just wouldn't do.

Since I had been told repeatedly that I could go out anytime at night once Annette had finished with her supper, my duties for the day discharged, I at last took advantage of this generosity.

I had heard that Broadway at Hotel Island was the largest restaurant and dance hall in Iceland, capable of holding more than one thousand guests at a time. It seemed like a good place for me to go in order to get lost. It offered a great advantage, in that I could be among a large quantity of people, giving the illusion of company, and I might yet remain alone.

As an aside, I had become aware of a change in my own tone of voice, even the tone I thought in, since coming to Iceland, specifically since my first disastrous meeting with Ambassador Rawlings. I was much more formal, more stiff than I had ever been in New York. I suppose it should have puzzled me more, troubled me even, but I guess I've always been something of a chameleon. Too many Southern novels in a row and my vowels always had a tendency to soften. Read too many hard-boiled mysteries and I'd start to swear. I guessed that now, so much in the company of stilted Annette who had got it from her stilted papa, I'd gone a bit European.

Or maybe I was just changing, just becoming possessed by the place.

No, too fanciful.

Enough.

Ever since my arrival in Iceland, I had been trying to figure the place out; more specifically, the people. I, of course, remembered what I had read about Icelanders being the longest-lived people on the planet, but that wasn't the most salient feature about them. Having come into contact with many of them during my daily outings with Annette—through wind and rain, we must always go out, at least once every day—I had noticed that there was something different about them than the people I had come into contact with back home: they were more placid and laid-back. It was almost as though, having to contend with a geology that meant that at any given moment a volcano or geyser might erupt, that geological uncertainty had instilled in them a calm that was the emotional embodiment of laissez-faire.

I had also read somewhere that the vast majority of Icelanders, when polled, admitted to believing in “hill people,” or, to put it another way, trolls.

This little bit of whimsy pleased me greatly, leading me to think, however erroneously, that if they could believe in trolls, and some of them obviously put great faith in Nancy Drew by reading her books, then they might also one day be persuaded to believe in the worth of one governess from New York.

One could only hope.

If my intention in going to Broadway at Hotel Island had been to hide in plain sight, I couldn't have made a worse decision. No sooner did I enter the place, and hear the loud music all around me, than I found myself flanked on both sides by blond giantesses, determined that they would become my dear friends.

Their names were Britta and Gina.

And they refused to believe me when I said that I had come there, essentially, to be alone.

“Nobody comes to Broadway to be alone!” laughed Britta.

“You need us!” said Gina.

I asked them if they were sure they were Icelanders.

Almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. What Would Nancy Drew Do, in similar circumstances, were she to find herself alone in a bar in Iceland?

She'd make a couple of friends, of course. Nancy Drew always had friends.

Wasn't it high time that I, essentially friendless for so long, should at last make some friends?

Not that Britta and Gina gave me much choice in the matter.

No one had ever found me exotic before, except perhaps for Annette—and Buster Keating had seemed to, but I knew now that was just part of his seductive act.

But Britta and Gina certainly found me exotic—was it my dark coloring? My lack of any significant height?—and it soon became apparent that nothing would do but for me to spend the evening at the bar, letting them buy me round after round of these drinks that seemed harmlessly fruity enough but that I fast suspected were strong enough to make a sailor walk funny.

I suspected that because they were making me very drunk.

And, as I got drunk, my tongue got looser.

At first, I had played it safe, letting them do all the talking.

If I asked them what they did for a living, they were happy to oblige me at length:

Something to do with working at the library, but nothing so basic as standing at the circ desk punching out summer-reading lists. I don't know. I think it might have had something to do with translating ancient texts that had already been translated many times before, in the hopes of either deconstructing them or reconstructing their original meaning and intent. Like I say, it was confusing to me.

If I asked them how old they were, they said things like:

“Older than you, to be sure!”—Britta.

“But not so old that we forget that girls just want to have fun!”—Gina, who kind of had a taller version of Cyndi Lauper-thing going on.

If I asked them where they lived:

Britta told me all about living with her parents, three brothers, two dogs and cat, and what each did for a living. Well, not the dogs and the cat.

Gina told me about how she missed living with her parents, two sisters, one dog and three cats, what everyone's main occupation was, including the pets—the dog was a big barker, the cats spent a lot of time sleeping. “Living alone can be too much like living without people,” she concluded wistfully.

They made me wonder just what exactly were these ancient texts they were working on and just what exactly awful kinds of things they were doing to them.

Not that I didn't like them, of course. What wasn't to like? For the first time in I couldn't say how long, someone was talking to me who was: 1) not my relative, 2) not my employer, 3) not my charge. And there were two of them! How lucky could a lonely girl get?

I'll tell you one thing: I swear, I did not bring up the topic of men.

“So,” said Britta, surveying the bar scene, “what do you think of the men?”

I shrugged noncommittally.

“They're not women,” I said.

“Ha!” Gina howled. “That is so good, it should be on a T-shirt! ‘Men: they're not women'—ha!”

“You have been…
burned,
” Britta said.

This was when I started feeling the non-fruity part of the fruity drinks kicking in.

“
Burned
is such a strong word,” I said. “And so limiting.”

“Then what would you say, if you wanted to be more accurate?” Britta led, clearly doing her best to get me to deconstruct myself.

“Objectively?” I asked.

They nodded.

“I would say,” I said reflectively, sucking on my straw, “that I had my heart stalked, then it was seduced, then, once the seducer had secured it, it was ripped out of my chest, thrown in the dust and stomped on until there was barely anything beating left.” I stopped, gave the matter one more moment's reflective thought, nodded, shrugged. “That's pretty much it, more or less.”

They shook their pretty, big heads in sympathy.

“Man,” said Britta, “men really aren't women, are they?”

This last made me feel uncomfortable. Even though I had been the originator of the whole “Men: they're not women” thing—destined for a T-shirt near you—I had never been one for the whole “women, yes; men, no” school of thought that filled so much of popular culture, in particular self-help books and daytime talk TV.

What can I say? In the Keating household, the wife had kept a lot of those kinds of books lying around the house; and when Stevie and Kim were in school, there wasn't much else to do, since I wasn't doing any writing, than to watch daytime television.

And what I'd seen, I'd never much liked. How can one gender blame another for all of its problems? It would be like me blaming Britta and Gina because they were blond and I was not.

Okay, so maybe it wouldn't be the same thing at all, but the fruity drinks persuaded me it was close enough, so still.

“I'm sure,” I sighed wearily, “that the other side could just as easily get T-shirts printed up that say, ‘Women—they're not men'.”

“Aha!” Gina snap-pointed at me. “Then you admit there is something that can be called ‘the other side'?”

“Who do you work for, really, Oprah?”

“The real question is,” said Gina, “who do
you
work for? As yet, all you have done is get us to talk about ourselves.”

“That's not exactly true,” said Britta. “She did tell us about her heart being ripped out and stomped on.”

“Yes,” said Gina, “but then she went ahead and defended the other side.”

“Whoa!” I put up my hands. “Who is this ‘she' you keep talking about? Am I even sitting here?”

They had the grace to look positively mortified at least.

“Sorry,” said Britta, looking into her drink and taking a sip. “Too many of these, perhaps.”

“We get carried away with curiosity sometimes,” Gina admitted. “It is a real treat for us to meet someone who is so…
foreign.
”

That was rich. Still…

“It is only natural,” said Britta, “that we would then want to learn everything we possibly can about you.”

Okay, maybe it was all kind of weird. But what person, unless the person has the personality of a turtle, doesn't relish having other people take an interest in the circumstances of their life and thoughts? I admit it: I was flattered. Here were these two gorgeous blond women, who surely had better things to do with their time—didn't they?—and all they wanted to do was hear about me. If I were a man, I would have been in heaven.

And so I caved. I, who had never really confided anything to anybody, caved to telling my story to interested ears.

I told them about my upbringing.

“You have overcome adversity,” said Britta.

“A less strong woman would not have become so strong,” said Gina.

I told them about my early job on TV.