Jane (6 page)

“Thornfield Park?” He looked at me quizzically. “You live at Thornfield Park?”

Of course,
I thought. He’s like the Waldorf mothers, wondering what someone like me is doing living in a celebrity’s mansion. For a moment, I wished I were dressed the part, in thigh-high boots and a silver lamé dress, or whatever it was a rock goddess would wear. Then I imagined myself struggling up the hill in three-inch heels. “That’s right,” I said, “I’m the nanny.”

“The nanny.” His mouth twitched in that wry, one-sided smile I’d seen earlier. “Of course you are.”

“So I’ll be perfectly fine,” I told him, not liking to be smiled at
in that mocking way. “You don’t need to worry.” And I spun again and walked off, as fast and as purposefully as I could.

“For God’s sake, stay out of the road!” he shouted after me, but I kept on walking, determined to salvage the rest of my afternoon. After about a mile or so, I found a field with a long view of a horse farm in the distance and a stump perfect for sitting on. I spread my coat across it and set about trying to paint. But my hands were unsteady; I had been more shaken up by the accident and subsequent encounter than I realized. My mind raced too; I had difficulty concentrating on the pad in front of me. After a few false starts, I packed up my paints. The sun was getting lower in the sky, the air unusually chilly for June. I pulled on my coat and headed for Thornfield Park.

Lucia met me at the door, as if she’d been on the lookout for me. “Is everything all right?” I asked her.

She motioned me to hurry in. “Nico’s back,” she told me, sotto voce. “Usually he lets us know when he’s coming home. This time… total surprise!” She looked and sounded flustered. “Usually I have days to make sure the house is in order. The cook isn’t even here.”

Can’t he make himself a sandwich?
I wanted to ask. “It’ll be all right,” I told her, but she looked at me strangely. “Right. I don’t know the first thing about him — but until now you’ve made him sound like a pretty understanding boss.”

“I know it’s your day off, and I’ll really owe you one, but can you please take care of Maddy so I can track down the cook?”

“Of course, no problem. Where is she?”

“In her bedroom. If you could dress her in clean clothes, the nicest ones you can find…” Lucia’s voice trailed off, and she darted toward her office.

“Consider it done,” I called after her.

I found Maddy almost as worked up as Lucia, jumping on her bed and shrieking with laughter.

“Miss Maddy, you’ll hurt yourself like that,” I scolded her. “Put your feet on the floor right now.”

“Daddy’s here,” she told me, getting in one last bounce for good measure. “He always brings me presents.”

I made a quick assessment of the closet’s contents. “And you want to look your best for Daddy, don’t you? Let’s see. What color should we choose: pale pink, poodle pink, pig pink, or hot pink?”

“Hot pink!” she squealed.

I handed her a flouncy skirt and a polka-dotted T-shirt. “Here, let me help you get that over your pigtails.”

Once dressed, Maddy paced the room in circles. “When am I going to see Daddy?”

“Soon.” I tried pressing the intercom to contact Lucia. Should we wait until Maddy was called for, I wanted to ask, or should we just come out? But Lucia seemed to be elsewhere. We waited a few minutes, and I tried again. Nothing.

This is crazy,
I thought.
He’s her father. She shouldn’t have to wait here like a servant until he summons her
.

I grabbed Maddy’s hand. “You ready, kid?”

She held my hand almost all the way downstairs and then tugged free. “Daddy? Daddy?” She broke into a run into the living
room, where a fire roared in a fireplace big enough to roast a wild boar on a spit.

“Is that my girl?” The voice came from the high-backed armchair closest to the fire. From behind, I could see the silhouette of a man — my employer — start to rise, but Maddy tackled him and he sat back down, laughing. Of course his voice was familiar; I’d been listening to his music for a month… no, most of my life.

“You’re here!” Maddy shrieked.

I stood in the doorway, hands clasped before me, wondering whether I should stay or go. I was still wearing the grubby clothes I’d hiked in — a pine green T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I’d just about decided to slip back to my room when Maddy’s voice rang out again. “Daddy, guess what? I have a new nanny. Her name’s Miss Jane.”

“Is that right? Is she good to you? Do you like her?”

“I like her better than Miss Bridget,” Maddy told him.

“And where is Miss Jane now?” he asked, peeking around the corner of the chair. Behind him, I heard the jangle of dog tags and saw a long shape stretched out on the rug before the fire.

I took a step forward and froze. It was the man who had swerved to miss me and sideswiped the guardrail. He looked more natural than on his album covers and was younger-looking than I’d expected, but, still, he was unmistakably Nico Rathburn. How had I not recognized his face? In the many photos I’d seen of him, he had always seemed so removed from the world I lived in that now it was hard to believe he was standing a few feet away and looking right back at me.

Lucia chose that moment to sweep into the room. She glanced
at me, quickly registering disapproval of my sweaty and disheveled state before passing me by to address our employer. “I see you’ve met the new nanny,” she said brightly, then slipped back out the door.

“Not exactly,” Mr. Rathburn said, looking right into my eyes, “not officially.”

I stepped up to him and extended my hand. He held it a moment and then gave it a brisk shake. “Welcome to Thornfield Park.”

I wondered again how I had failed to recognize him on the side of the road. True, his dark hair was shorter now than on his album covers. The clothes he was wearing earlier camouflaged his wiry physique and made him look more like a businessman than the front man of a band. And he’d sounded educated, not like I’d imagined Nico Rathburn would sound. But now that he’d taken off that stockbroker’s jacket, I could see the familiar serpent tattoo on his left forearm. He wore a silver hoop in each ear — how had I missed that? — and what looked like a shark’s tooth hung from a leather cord around his neck. His smoke-gray eyes bored into me, taking my measure. I tried to think of something sensible to say and could not.

“What did you bring me, Daddy?” Maddy’s voice rang out.

Mr. Rathburn turned back around in his chair. “There’s a box in my suitcase. Why don’t you go take a look? It’s in my bedroom.”

Maddy jumped down from his lap and took off running. A second later, she was back in the doorway. “Did you bring a present for Miss Jane?”

“For Miss Jane?” he repeated, laughing. “Miss Jane, did you expect a present?”

“Of course not,” I replied.

“Why don’t you come in and sit down,” Mr. Rathburn said, “so I don’t have to keep twisting around in my chair to look at you?”

The room contained a number of armchairs. I chose one in a corner.

“Not there,” he said. “Come and sit by the fire so I don’t have to shout across the room. Despite how it must have seemed to you this afternoon, I won’t bite your head off.” I shifted to the chair beside his. He rubbed his temples. “Copilot seems fine, in case you were wondering.”

At the sound of his name, the large black Labrador lifted his boxy head and looked up expectantly.

“You see,” Mr. Rathburn said, “he wants a present too.”

Not knowing what to say, I said nothing.

“So where are you from, Miss Jane?” He spoke my name with a trace of mockery.

“Just outside of Philadelphia originally. I was in my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence until last month.”

“Sarah Lawrence. And you dropped out to work for me?”

I recalled one of the interviews I’d read, in which he’d been asked about his own refusal to go to college. “I thought I didn’t need college,” he’d said. “Whatever I needed to know I could learn on the road. But it turned out I was wrong, so I’ve spent all these years reading books, trying to catch up.”

“No,” I said. “I came to work for you because I dropped out.”

“Why did you leave school? You don’t look like my idea of a dropout. You look studious.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment; he may have meant to be
insulting, but I knew it was true. With my thin lips and my hair pulled back, I must have looked like a caricature of a spinster librarian, minus the glasses. “You can’t tell if I’m studious by looking at me,” I said finally. “I didn’t choose to drop out. And I plan to go back someday.”

“You just got here, and you’re already planning to leave?” he said. “We’ll get used to you, and you’ll take off?”

“Maddy’s already used to me,” I told him. “And I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon.”

Just then, Maddy ran back into the room dressed in a sequined ballerina costume, a tutu rustling around her waist. “I’m a ballerina,” she declared, whirling around in circles. A tiara hung at a precarious angle in her hair. She came to a stop at her father’s knees. “I love it, Daddy.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “I knew you would.” She beamed.

“Did you say thank you?” I asked her.

“Thank you,” Maddy said dutifully. “I’m going to go show Lucia.” On tiptoes, she danced out of the room.

“Sequins,” Mr. Rathburn said to me. “Can’t go wrong with sequins and tiaras. There’s nothing she loves more. Just like her mother.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Do you think she’ll ever outgrow it?”

“Most girls do.”

He laughed again. “You haven’t met the crowd I hang out with.” Then his tone changed. “Maddy’s a handful,” he said. “Has she given you any trouble?”

“Hardly any. She just needs firmness and consistency.”

“So you won’t let her twist you around her little finger like she does me?”

I promised him I wouldn’t and stood to go.

“Where are you going?” He sounded surprised.

“I’d better get Maddy out of Lucia’s hair so that she can go home for the evening,” I replied. “Excuse me, Mr. Rathburn.”

His eyes widened. “Nobody calls me that. Call me Nico.”

I complied but felt strange addressing him by his first name.

“You make me feel about a hundred years old,” he told me. “How old are you, anyway? Seventeen and three quarters? Eighteen?”

“I’m nineteen.”

“You were a kid when my first album came out,” he said. “When I was your age, I was traveling the country, sleeping in a bus, playing dive bars, and getting into brawls. Shouldn’t you be off having adventures?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I told him.

“Backpack through Europe? Sit at a sidewalk café in Rome? Go clubbing in Stockholm? Ski in the Alps?”

I had always wanted to travel and couldn’t imagine being lucky enough to get the chance. “If I had the money to backpack across Europe, I wouldn’t be here right now,” I said. As soon as I said it, I realized how rude I must have sounded, but at least it was the truth.

His eyes held mine a second. “Huh.… Well, you’re right. You’d better go get Maddy. Feels like it’s almost bedtime.”

As anxious as I’d been to get away from Mr. Rathburn, as I fixed Maddy’s bath and laid out her pajamas, I found myself thinking back to our conversation. Though I was his paid help, he
had seemed truly interested in me for a moment, and that was rare in my life. When Maddy’s fingertips wrinkled, I wrapped an enormous fluffy pink towel around her and a smaller one on her hair like a turban.

“Daddy’s nice,” she told me as I felt around under her bed for her slippers.

“He loves you,” I assured her.

“I know,” she said. “But his job takes him away a lot.” For a moment, she sounded older than her years. “Daddy’s famous.”

“I know.”

“Mommy is too, but Daddy’s famouser.”

“More famous,” I corrected her.

“But Mommy wears shiny dresses and sings onstage. I’d rather wear shiny dresses than be more famous. I like to sing.”

“I thought you were going to be a ballerina.” I untied the towel on her head and used it to rub her hair dry.

“Ballerinas can wear shiny dresses,” she said. Then, matter-of-factly, she added, “I can’t see Mommy anymore. She lost custody. She sometimes would leave me alone in the hotel room, and I didn’t like it there.”

I bent to kiss her on the cheek. “You’re a sweet girl.”

I read her an extra story that night, in no great hurry to get back to my room.
Poor thing,
I thought.
Even a less-than-perfect mother would be better than none at all.
Before I’d finished reading, she fell asleep, mouth open, snoring gently. I set the book down and stretched out beside her for a moment. I must have fallen asleep. When I startled awake and slipped out into the hallway, the house seemed much quieter. I tiptoed downstairs, through the center of
the house and past the living room, to get a glass of water. As I approached the kitchen, I caught sight of someone walking my way from the opposite direction. In the faint glow of a small Tiffany lamp, left on as a nightlight, I could make out the bulky figure of Brenda, whose strange mirthless laughter I had heard ringing out in the otherwise quiet house. Could this middle-aged woman, her iron-gray hair tied back tightly in a bun, really have let loose that wild, cackling laugh?

I paused in the shadows, waiting for her to pass before I continued on, but she looked right at me. In her arm, she held a glass bottle of something clear, probably alcohol. Our eyes locked, and a long moment passed before either of us moved. Just as I was about to say something, she swept past me. “Good night, miss,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice as she disappeared around the corner and out of sight.

The next day, I asked Lucia about Brenda. “If she’s a housekeeper, why don’t I ever see her vacuuming or making beds?” I explained that I had run into her the night before, though I didn’t mention the bottle she had been carrying.

Lucia looked up from the sandwich she was making to bring back to her office. She’d worked the whole day without a break even for lunch, and I already missed the casual conversations we’d had before Mr. Rathburn had returned from his travels. “Brenda?” she asked absently.