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"I think so," said Ella. "Make sure," said Mrs. Lefkowitz. "You know about Florence Goodstein, right?' Ella shook her head. "Well," Mrs. Lefkowitz began, "she and Abe Meltzer were keeping company. They'd go to movies, and dinner, and Flo would drive Abe to his doctors' appointments. One day his kids called her to check up on their father, see how he was doing, and Flo happened to mention that she was tired. Well, they heard 'tired' and thought she didn't want to take care of him anymore. And the very next day," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, pausing as the story reached its crescendo, "they flew down here, packed up his apartment, and moved him to assisted living in New York." "Oh, my," said Ella. "Flo was beside herself," said Mrs. Lefkowitz. "It was like the raid on Entebbe." "I'm sorry for her. Keep walking," Ella said. Mrs. Lefkowitz lifted her sunglasses and peered at Ella. "Are you ready to hear my proposal?" "Sure," said Ella. "What's it about?" "Your granddaughters," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, and resumed her shuffling walk. Ella groaned inwardly. She couldn't believe she'd told Mrs. Lefkowitz about her lost granddaughters. Then again, a year ago she'd never have believed she'd be able to tell the story to anyone. Now, it seemed, she couldn't keep her mouth shut. "Do they have the Emil?" Mrs. Lefkowitz asked. "Emil?" Ella repeated. "Emil, Emil," said Mrs. Lefkowitz impatiently. "On the computer." "Oh, e-mail," said Ella. "What I said," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, with a long-suffering sigh. "I don't know." "Well, we could find out. On the Internet. We could find out all kinds of things about them."
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Ella's heart lurched. "Do you have a computer?" she asked, barely daring to hope. Mrs. Lefkowitz gave a dismissive wave with her good hand. "Sure, who doesn't?" she asked. "My son got me an iMac for my birthday. Tangerine. Guilt," she said, apparently in response to Ella's unspoken questions of What color? and Why? "He doesn't visit too much, so he sends the computer, e-mails me pictures of my grandbabies. You want we should go back and look up your granddaughters?" she asked hopefully. Ella bit her lip. She could hear the voice inside of her crying, Look them up! at war with the much more familiar, much more insistent voice that said, Let them go, could feel anticipation and fragile hope shot through with pure terror. "Let me think about it," she finally said. "Don't think," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, drawing herself up to her four feet eleven inches and whacking at the ground with her cane, narrowly missing Ella's left foot. "There is no think, only do." "What?" "Yoda," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, and began the laborious process of turning herself around. "Let's go."
THIRTY'THREE
"Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog," said a guy in a rumpled white linen shirt, as Maggie walked through Firestone Library's doors at ten o'clock on a not-at-all foggy morning. Maggie looked at him as he fell into step beside her, his own backpack slung loosely—slung stylishly, somehow—over his shoulders. He had a long, pale face, brown hair curling past his ears, and what he wore—the linen shirt with pressed oatmeal-colored linen pants—was a significant deviation from the unofficial campus uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. "It's not foggy out," she said. "And isn't that from a song?" "Notwithstanding," he said. He pointed at the copy of My Antonia that Maggie had tucked under 4ier arm. "Women in Literature?" Maggie gave a shrug that could have been either a yes or a no, figuring the less she said, the better. In her weeks on campus, excepting her first night at the party, she hadn't been saying much more than "Thank you" or "Excuse me" to the other students. Which was fine, Maggie thought. She had Corinne to talk to. She had books. She had a comfortable chair in the library's sunny reading room staked out, a favorite little table in the Student Center when she felt like a change of scenery. She'd finished the Zora Neale
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Hurston, finished Great Expectations, and was now working her way through A Tale of Two Cities, rereading My Antonia, and plowing through Romeo and Juliet, which was much harder going than the Baz Luhrmann movie had made it out to be. Conversation with students could only lead to questions, and questions could only lead to trouble. "I'll walk you," said the guy. "That's okay," said Maggie, and tried to edge away. "Not a problem," the guy said cheerfully. "It's in McCosh, right?" Maggie had no idea where Women in Literature met or where McCosh might be located, but she nodded again, and picked up her pace. The guy kept up with her easily. Long legs, Maggie observed with dismay. "I'm Charles," said the guy. "I'm sorry," she finally said, "I'm not interested, okay?" Charles stopped and smiled at her. He looked a little bit like a picture of Lord Byron that Maggie'd seen in one of her purloined books—a long blade of a nose, an amused curl to his lips. No six-pack, she was sure, no biceps to hang on to. Not her type. "You haven't even heard my pitch yet," he said. "There's a pitch?" asked Maggie unhappily. "Absolutely," said Charles. "I. Um. This is awkward. But it happens that I have need of a woman." "Don't you all," said Maggie, slowing her pace so that her feet were practically dragging, figuring that if she couldn't run away from him, she could perhaps make him hurry away from her and off to his own class. "No, no, not like that," he said, smiling and matching her pace again. "I'm in a play writing class, and we have to present scenes, and I need a woman—an ingenue type—to do my scene for me." Maggie looked at him. "You mean acting?" She stopped walking and stared up at him. He was tall, she saw. With nice gray eyes, too. Charles nodded. "The very thing. I'm hoping," he said, as he and Maggie continued toward McCosh Hall, "to do a one-act at
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Theatre Intime in the spring." He pronounced it Ohn-Team, and for a moment Maggie wasn't sure what he meant. She'd walked by that building a hundred times and she'd always figured it sounded like it was spelled: In Time. Which scared her—how many other things had she been getting wrong, even if she was only getting them wrong in the privacy of her own head? "So if the scene goes well, it'll be, you know, a good first step. So," he concluded, "want to help a brother out?" "You're not my brother," said Maggie. "And how do you even know that I can act?" "You can, though, can't you?" asked Charles. "You have that look." "What look is that?" "Dramatic," he said promptly. "But I'm getting ahead of myself. I don't even know your name." "It's Maggie," said Maggie, momentarily forgetting her desire to be known as M. "I'm Charles Vilinch. And I'm right, aren't I?" asked the guy. "You're an actress, right?" Maggie simply nodded, hoping he wouldn't ask for specifics, as she didn't think that either her stint singing backup for Whiskered Biscuit or her hip's appearance in the Will Smith video would impress him much. "Look, I'd like to help you, but . . . well, I don't think I can," said Maggie, with real regret, because starring in a play—even if it was just some lousy student one-act—was extremely appealing. It could, she thought? be a start. Princeton wasn't that far from New York. Maybe word of the play, and its star, would reach the city. Maybe a casting agent or director would take a train down for a look. Maybe . . . "Why don't you take today to think about it?" said Charles. "I'll call you tonight." "No," said Maggie, thinking quickly. "No, um, my phone's not working." "Then meet me for coffee," he said easily. "I can't ..."
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"Decaffeinated tea, then," said Charles. "Nine o'clock in the Student Center. I'll see you there." And he loped off, leaving Maggie at the entrance to the lecture hall, where students—women, mostly, with a few holding her very same My Antonia—were streaming through the doors. Maggie stood for a minute, thinking Why not? as the bodies poured around her. It would be more trouble to turn around than to simply follow the crowd inside. She'd sit in the back, she figured. Nobody would notice. Plus, she was curious as to what the professor would say about the book. Maybe she'd even learn something.
THIRTY'FOUR
"Are you doing okay?" Amy had asked Rose one morning over blueberry pancakes at the Morning Glory Diner. Amy, in fitted black pants and a midnight-blue blouse, was on her way to the airport and a business trip that would take her to rural Georgia and deepest Kentucky, where she'd be lecturing at waste-water treatment facilities ("which smell," she'd told Rose, "about how you'd imagine they would"). Rose, in her now-customary loose-fitting Army-Navy surplus khaki pants, was on her way to take ten recently read romances to the Book Trader, in exchange for ten more, and then walk a schipperke named Skip. Rose chewed and thought about it. "I'm good," she answered slowly, as Amy's spidery fingers snagged a piece of bacon off her plate. "You don't miss work?" "I miss Maggie," Rose mumbled into a mouthful of pancake. It was the truth. The Morning Glory was in Maggie's old neighborhood, right around the corner from the apartment she'd been kicked out of just before she'd moved in with Rose. While Rose was in college, and then in law school, Maggie would come to stay for a weekend once or twice a semester, and then, once Rose started working, she'd come to South Philadelphia and meet Maggie for
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brunch, or drinks, or pick her sister up for a trip to the King of Prussia Mall. Rose had fond memories of Maggie's series of apartments. No matter where she was living, the walls would wind up painted pink, and Maggie would park her antique hair dryer in the corner, set up a makeshift bar somewhere, with a thrift-shop martini shaker standing perpetually at the ready. "So where is she?" asked Amy, wiping a butter knife with a napkin and using it to inspect her lipstick. Rose shook her head, feeling the familiar Maggie-induced sensations of anger, frustration, fury, and sympathy rising up in her throat. "I don't know," she said. "I don't know if I want to know." "Well, knowing Maggie, she'll turn up," said Amy. "She'll need money, or a car, or a car full of money. Your phone will ring and there she'll be." "I know," said Rose, and sighed. She did miss her sister . . . except miss wasn't quite the right word. Sure, she missed having a companion, having someone to share breakfasts and pedicures and trips to the mall with. She even found that she missed Maggie's noise, Maggie's clutter, the way she'd turned the thermostat up to eighty degrees, until her apartment felt like a trip to the tropics, and how, in Maggie's hands, even the most mundane story would turn into a three-act adventure. She remembered Maggie trying to flush a wad of makeup-caked Kleenex down Rose's recalcitrant toilet, yelling, "Take it all, bitch!" at the bowl; Maggie throwing a fit in the Shampoo and Soap aisle of the drugstore because they were out of her particular-colored-hair-specific brand of conditioner; the flicking, go-away motion she'd make with her fingertips when she wanted Rose to give her more room on the couch; the song her sister would sing in the shower. "It had to be me . . . it had to be me ..." Amy drummed her knife impatiently on the edge of her plate. "Earth to Rose." "Right here," said Rose, and waved weakly. Later that morning, she pulled her bike up to a pay phone, dug a fistful of change out of
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her pocket, and dialed her sister's cell phone again. One ring, then
two. "Hello?" Maggie demanded, her voice brash and bossy. "Hello,
who's this?" Rose hung up, wondering if Maggie would see the 215 area
code and wonder if it was her, and if she'd care.
THIRTY'FIVE
If Maggie Feller had learned one thing in her fourteen years of dealing with members of the opposite sex, it was this: your bad hookups will always come back to haunt you. There could be a guy you'd never seen before in your life, and all you had to do in order to guarantee that you'd be seeing him everywhere was spend a few quality minutes alone with him in the backseat, the bedroom, or behind a locked bathroom door. Then he'd be popping up in the cafeteria, in the halls, sitting behind the counter of the diner where you'd just started work, and holding some other girl's hand at the next Friday night party. It was the Murphy's Law of relationships— the guy you never want to see again was the guy you'd never be able to avoid. And Josh, from her first night on campus, was, unfortunately, no exception. She wasn't sure he'd even recognize her—he'd been so completely drunk, and it had been late, and she'd been fresh off the train, without a chance to perfect her Princeton camouflage. But Josh was everywhere, looking as if he was just on the verge of attaching her face to his missing money, sleeping bag, camping lantern, and clothes. She'd look up from her book in the library and catch a glimpse of his sweatshirt, and the side of his face. She'd be refilling her mug
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with coffee in the dining hall and he'd be standing behind the salad bar, studying her. He actually started talking to her the Saturday night she dragged a stolen pillowcase full of her laundry into the laundry room, operating under the mistaken assumption that absolutely nobody would be doing their laundry on a Saturday night. "Hey," he said casually, while peering at her bras and panties as she stuffed them into the machine. "Hi," she said, keeping her head down. "What's going on?" he asked. Maggie gave a small shrug, dumping detergent on top of the laundry from one of those little cardboard packets she'd bought from the vending machine. "You want some fabric softener?" He lofted his jug at her, and smiled. But his eyes weren't smiling. His eyes were taking a careful inventory of her face, her hair, her body, measuring what he saw against what he remembered from that one night in his bed. "No thanks. I'm fine," she said. She pushed her quarters into the slot. Just then, her cell phone rang. Her father, she figured— he'd called before, and she'd never answered, but now she grabbed at the phone as if it were a life buoy and she was drowning. "Hello!" she said cheerfully, turning her face and her body away from Josh's scrutiny. There was no answer, just breathing. "Hello!" Maggie said again, hurrying up the stairs, past a group of students who were passing around a bottle of champagne artd singing some kind of football fight song. "Who's this?" No answer. Just a click, then silence. She shrugged, put the phone in her pocket, and hurried out into the cool spring air. There were lamps illuminating the path at regular intervals, and there were carved wooden benches along the path and alongside the buildings. Maggie selected a bench away from the light, and sat down in a corner. Time to go, she was thinking. It's not a big campus, and you're seeing that guy everywhere, and it's only a matter of time before he figures out who you are and what you did, if he hasn't figured it out already. Time to cash in
