Ivy Secrets (28 page)

“What are you talking about?” Dell asked.

“I told Willie where to find Charlie. I wanted him to torment her. I was so angry with her.”

“About Peter?” Dell asked.

“You were angry with me about Peter?” Charlie echoed.

Tess sniffed back her tears.

“Dear God.” It was Marina’s voice.

“You should have left me in my room,” Tess said. “You should have left me there to die.”

Someone sat on the bed. Tess felt the weight sag the mattress. She wanted to push her legs back, to kick whoever it was off the bed.

“You were angry with me because of Peter so you told Willie where to find me?” It was Charlie’s voice again, but it
sounded so far away, as though she were outside, as though she were talking through a wall.

“Yes,” Tess replied. “He thought you were so pretty. I only wanted him to torment you. I wanted you to feel scared.”

There was silence in the room. Then Tess felt a hand on her back. The hand began to rub. “Oh, God, Tess, we really hurt you, didn’t we?”

“Not as much as I hurt you,” Tess said. “Not as much as Willie Benson hurt you.”

“Willie didn’t hurt me,” Charlie said. “It was an accident. I fell, remember?”

Tess dug her fingers into the stocking-stuffed body of the pliable doll and sobbed loudly, sobbed uncontrollably, as two years of guilt exploded into tears, two years of pain finally found its way out.

“I cannot believe you did that.” It was Marina’s voice this time. The accent was thick, the tone stern. “I cannot believe you did that to a friend.”

Tess heard angry footsteps leave the room. She heard the outer door bang. She heard the tiny stomps of the tiny princess as she descended the front stairs of the small apartment above Dell’s bookshop.

Charlie rubbed her back again. “It’s okay, Tess,” she said. “Pay no attention to Marina. I probably would have done just what you did. That’s no reason to try to kill yourself.” Then Charlie pulled Tess close to her. “I need you,” she said. “I need you to stay alive.”

“Why? Why the hell would you need me?”

“Because I love you, Tess. When I first came here, you were the first friend I had. You were the only one who bothered with me. I’m not like the other girls here, you know that. But you didn’t care. You liked me anyway.”

Their sobs blended into one another, their tears melted into each other’s.

“Will you be my friend?” Charlie pleaded. “Will you please stay alive?”

Tess nodded. “Will you forgive me?” she asked weakly.

“Of course I forgive you,” she said.

“Marina won’t.”

“Marina is a princess,” Charlie said. “She lives by different rules.”

Marina ordered Nicholas to leave her alone. She marched down the street toward campus, her wool coat flapping open, the winter’s cold stinging through her clothes. It did not matter. The only thing that mattered was that a friend had betrayed a friend, and betrayal was something that, from birth, a princess learned to fear.

She did not bother to take the clear, winding sidewalks. Instead, she crossed the snow-covered ground in a direct path toward Morris House. When she reached the old building, Marina looked up to the fourth floor, to the window of Tess’s room. She was filled with raw disgust for the girl who had nearly had a friend killed because of her own self-serving motives; the girl who had now used her friends to assuage her guilt by sucking their sympathy into her sick web of self-pity.

Marina turned from Morris House and trudged through the snow toward the library, wishing she and Charlie had left Tess to die.

Inside the wood-lined entrance to the Neilson Library there was silence, blessed silence, which would help her think. Marina wound her way down the stairs and headed for the archive room, where few students went, where she might find some peace.

She opened the door and made her way to a small wooden table. She sat in the hard chair, put her hands in her pockets, and stared at the wall of books in front of her.

She could not believe that Tess had set Charlie up. She could not believe that Tess—dependable, jovial, always-there-for-them
Tess—had become a traitor to one of her two best friends. A traitor, in the name of love.

Would she have done the same if Charlie had stolen Viktor? Marina closed her eyes. It was hard to picture Viktor in her mind now, it had been so long. And yet she had loved him, hadn’t she? She opened her eyes again and focused on the rows of leather-bound volumes. Viktor, too, had become a traitor. Not just to her love, but to her country. Hiding out in the mountains now, plotting against the king, against Marina, against all of Novokia, his homeland.
Traitors
, she thought,
come in many disguises.

“Marina?” A man’s voice called softly behind her.

Marina turned and saw Edward James, her freshman government professor, standing there, a plaid wool scarf draped around his neck, a touch of snow on his now white-flecked mustache.

“Oh, my,” he said, as he sat in an empty chair beside her without waiting for an invitation. “I think the world would be surprised to know that a princess had real tears.”

Marina quickly wiped her cheeks. She did not know where the tears had come from; she had not known they were there.

“Can I help?” the professor asked.

She shook her head. She did not like knowing that he, or anyone, had seen her cry. She looked back to the rows of books, wondering how she could politely stand up and leave. He had never been one of her favorite instructors, and the last thing she wanted now was an interloper to her confusion.

“Are you having a problem with one of your classes?” he pressed.

She shook her head again, afraid that if she spoke, the tears would come again. She wished he would go away.

“Well, you’re a long way from home. Perhaps you’re having a touch of homesickness.” He propped his elbow on the table and leaned his cheek against his palm. Marina could smell the icy chill of outside emanate from his ruddy skin. “Is everything all right in your country?”

She nodded. Outside of class, Marina had never heard him speak. She was surprised at his easy manner, his sincere tone. Then another thought flashed into her mind:
traitors
.
They’re everywhere.
She turned her head from him and stared at the bookshelves again.

“Well, then,” Professor James said with gentle concern, “that suggests the problem must lie in the opposite sex. Boy trouble, no doubt.”

His boldness startled her, yet his words weren’t unkind. She stole a quick look at him. He was smiling a warm, compassionate smile.

“No,” she answered clearly. “There is no boy problem.”

His gray eyes studied her. “Good. A woman as beautiful as you should have none.”

She shifted on her chair. She knew she should be uneasy, she knew she should not let down her guard. But the professor was charismatic.
Charismatic
, she warned herself,
and potentially dangerous.
Yet Marina felt strangely comfortable by his openness, his direct approach to communication.

“It’s about a friend,” she heard herself say. “I found out something about a friend tonight that makes me … unhappy.”

“Another student?”

“Yes.”

Edward James stood. “Then you’re in luck. I’m afraid I don’t have the resources to send you home for a homesick visit, nor would I be much good at handling that boy-girl stuff. I’ve been married way too long for that.”

Marina looked at him a moment, then smiled.

“But when it comes to Smithies,” he continued, “I could write a book. Several. How about if I buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk about this … this unhappiness your friend has caused you.”

Marina knew she should say no. She knew Nicholas would be concerned when he returned to his apartment on Green Street and saw her window shade still partially raised; she knew he expected her to return to the house and go to bed. She also knew she could be courting disaster. But something about Edward James’s manner right now seemed more important. After all, she hardly knew him. Maybe an objective person was just what Marina needed now, to help her figure out why a friend would betray another friend, when there was so much pain already in the world.

Besides, she thought as she looked into his amicable gray eyes again, Edward James was probably harmless.

She pushed back her chair. “I think I would like a cup of something warm,” Marina said. “I think I would like that very much.”

    They went to small coffeeshop on West Street, a place that Professor James said he frequented often for its quiet, and for the fact that the Smithies had dubbed it a “townie” hangout, and therefore would not lower themselves to patronize it. Marina, however, was familiar with its hard vinyl booths and Formica tables; she and Nicholas had long ago discovered the place’s appeal.

“I am surprised we have never seen each other here,” Marina said as he held the door open and she stepped inside.

“My misfortune, I’m sure,” he said, following her to an empty booth in the back.

After they sat down a waitress appeared with two plastic-covered handwritten menus.

“The beef stew’s gone, but we still have minestrone,” she told them.

“I will have hot chocolate,” Marina said.

Edward smiled. “I’ll just have coffee.”

Marina rubbed her hands together to warm them. A brief doubt fleeted through her. What was she doing here? What was she doing here with Edward James, the man who she had once thought was going to ruin her academic life? She pictured him delivering one of his grave, stern-faced lectures, then realized that the man across from her now seemed to be someone else.

“So tell me,” he said as he loosened his scarf and slipped out of his coat.

Marina was surprised to see that he wore a plaid flannel shirt—red, blue, and black. She wondered if his wife had picked it out for him. She wondered how old he was, and if he had any kids. Then she wondered why she was wondering these things.

“What did your friend do to make you so unhappy?”

His tone was neither grave nor stern. It was friendly, pleasant.

“I do not know if it is as much what she did as the fact that she covered it up for nearly two years,” Marina said.
“And I do not even know if that is what bothers me, or if it is simply the realization that one friend can betray another.”

“Did she betray you?”

Marina nodded. “Yes. Because she betrayed a friend, she betrayed me. She betrayed my trust in her.”

The waitress returned and placed two steamy mugs in front of them. When she had left, Edward spoke again.

“It is so sad,” he said. “The things we do to hurt one another.”

Marina was surprised that he put into words exactly what she had been thinking earlier.

“Is she an unhappy girl? Is she depressed?”

Marina studied the tiny lines around his warm gray eyes. Those lines, she thought, are what make Edward James so attractive. Those lines that so clearly reveal years of thinking, years of smiling, and perhaps, also years of pain. “I did not think she was unhappy,” Marina said. “Until tonight. Now, yes, I must say she is very unhappy.” She did not want to tell him about Tess’s suicide attempt; she did not know that she could trust him with that information.
Trust
, she thought.
There’s that word again.
She averted her eyes from him. As angry as she was with Tess, she did not want her to be expelled, or worse, institutionalized. Thought what difference any of that would make to her she didn’t know.

“You must care about your friend very much,” he said.

She took a sip of the hot chocolate and winced as it burned the tip of her tongue. She set down her mug and stared at her hands that cupped its sides, her hands that were now devoid of her sapphire and diamond ring—the ring she’d so readily relinquished in the name of friendship. To the friend who had been betrayed. Marina was now more glad than ever that she’d given the ring to Charlie’s family. But then she thought of Tess again, crumpled on the floor of her room, blood all around her. And she realized that perhaps Tess also had felt betrayed. Betrayed by Charlie, when Charlie began seeing Peter.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose I care about my friend very much. How did you guess?”

“Because nothing ever hurts unless we care.”

Marina smiled. “Maybe you should have been a philosophy professor.”

He laughed. His laugh was soft and warm, and something she’d never heard before.

“I have an ulterior motive for getting you alone,” he said so quickly that it surprised her. “I’ve been trying to get you alone for three years. I am dying to hear about Novokia. Philosophy aside, government is really my passion. Tell me about your country. I only know that it is a monarchy.”

Monarchy.
Suddenly Marina’s defenses came rushing back. She thought of Viktor, the traitor. Viktor had befriended Dell Brooks. Could he also have known Professor James? She took another sip of hot chocolate, trying to stall, trying to think. Then Marina remembered the group Viktor had belonged to here in Northampton. Socialists, he had said.
For the good of the people.