Love Walked In (13 page)

“She doesn’t want me,” he said. “She’s asking for you. She wants you.”

I don’t think she did, not particularly, but she didn’t want him, I knew that much.

“Go. Go on. Go home. It’s OK. Call me in the morning,” I told him.

He took my face between his hands, kissed me, and left.

So
for the second time in one day, I put my arms around a child while she cried her heart out. I stroked her hair and said “Shh, shh,” and what was amazing is that this seemed to help. Holding Clare, whispering soothing words, this seemed to make her feel better. Maybe that’s just how children are. But, what was more amazing is that it felt pretty good to me, too. Twelve hours ago, I’d never seen this girl. I could count the number of words we had said to each other. She did not belong to me. But she fit inside my arms; she fit. I didn’t love her. But, I suddenly understood, to my bewilderment, it wouldn’t take much.

There’s
a kind of ease in darkness, a soft, blurring quiet that smudges the lines between one person and another. The broad light of a kitchen is quite a different matter. When Clare stopped crying and we walked out and stood among shiny surfaces and sharp edges, I suddenly felt charged with prickly nervousness, like static electricity; if I touched Clare, I believed we’d both get a shock. So I stood, looking at her, waiting to know what to do. Her face had that clean, almost incandescent look children get after they cry, and this glow seemed to place her further out of my reach, as though she were half-angel, hallowed by sadness. Tell me what to do, I thought, and in a few seconds, and in a reassuringly human voice, Clare did.

“My stomach’s growling,” she said. “I think I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

“Famished,” I said.

I had made some chicken soup the day before, and I heated up two bowls full of it. While we ate, I told Clare that her father had not called the police but had hired someone very smart to help find her mother. I asked her if she wanted to stay with me, and she nodded. I didn’t tell her that her father had not left the note as I’d promised he would, but I did say he was going to her house tomorrow to pick up some things, whatever she wanted. I had a thought.

“Clare,” I said, “when I was a kid, I loved to make lists. Do you ever make lists?”

And I’m almost positive that when I asked her this, Clare smiled.

Clare
sat at a table in Café Dora watching two men play chess. One of the men was tall with a crooked nose and blue eyes, and he wore a red shirt with white piping and pearly snaps all down the front and on the pocket flaps. A boy in Clare’s class a couple of years ago had dressed as a cowboy for Halloween and worn a similar shirt to the class party, and Clare found it interesting that they made such shirts for adult men. The other man had a head of thick, black, springy curls, sad eyes like a basset hound, and a smile that surprised you—a big girly movie-star smile with corners that turned up and dimples on either side. Once, the cowboy startled Clare by clapping his hands and shouting, “Yee-haw, Josie, you caught me nappin’!” to which the other man, whose name was evidently Josie, responded by shaking his head, the curls bouncing much more wildly than you would expect, as though they were alive, and letting the smile spread slowly across his face.

When this happened, Clare glanced over the counter to meet Cornelia’s eyes. Cornelia’s eyes were wide and turned up a little at the corners like cats’ eyes, but they weren’t gold or green or blue, as cats’ eyes tended to be; they were medium-brown, with maybe a smidge of hazel, but mostly just brown. Cornelia’s nose was nice, slightly tip-tilted; her smile was rectangular so that you saw her bottom teeth as well as her top, and her chin was pointed. In fact, her face was shaped very much like the pictures of Anne and Sara and Mary that Clare used to draw in her notebook. An orphan face, although Clare didn’t know if Cornelia was an orphan. When Clare looked at Cornelia over the coffee bar, Cornelia rolled her tilted brown eyes at the cowboy’s loudness and, though she didn’t quite smile, Clare rolled her eyes in return.

More than ever, more than when she was living in her house with her erratic and unrecognizable mother, Clare’s fears were a roaring, blinding storm that could lift her up and suck her in before she knew it was happening. “My mother might be dead,” shrieked the storm, and in that second Clare would be overtaken, lost, whisked out of the sunlit world in which other people lived.

The night before, as she’d sat eating chicken soup—rich and delicious soup with little fat dumplings—and buttered toast in Cornelia’s apartment, Clare had discovered a way to keep this from happening. She found that if she paid extremely careful attention to what was around her, really concentrating, and noticing every detail, the terror would fall back.

Clare had observed the gold-flecked sheen of the soup’s surface, the rippled edge of the glass plate on which her toast sat, the peacock-blue-and-gold embroidered shawl draped over the back of Cornelia’s velvet couch and, on one wall, a grouping of small antique paintings, all portraits of women. Looking closely, Clare noticed that there was something quirky in each painting: an ugly lap dog with an almost-human face, a cracked brown egg in an eggcup, a flock of pecking chickens and a pig outside a window. One woman had tight bunches of curls on either side of her face that dangled like clusters of grapes and around her was an arbor with twisting grapevines hung with clusters of grapes. Clare had thought at first that these women might be Cornelia’s ancestors, but after noticing these funny details, she imagined Cornelia’s happening upon them over the years and just liking them.

After dinner, Cornelia had asked Clare if she might like to take a bath. Clare almost never took baths anymore, just showers, but she was still tired and didn’t want the commotion of a shower, so she’d agreed. For a few seconds, she’d gripped the lapels of the mink coat, reluctant to take it off, until Cornelia said, “Let me show you something,” and Clare had followed her into the bedroom. Next to the bed was a coatrack hung with hats, scarves, shawls, a little fur stole, and a couple of jackets; Cornelia showed Clare a bare place on the rack.

“We’ll hang it here and, that way, if you want it during the night, you’ll just grab. You won’t even have to get out of bed.”

Clare had taken the coat off, then, and immediately wished she hadn’t. She liked the way it made her feel part-bear, on the verge of being something other than herself, and she liked that it made her feel large, as though she took up a great deal of space and, especially, she liked that it made her feel held. Also, of course, it belonged to her mother, but that was not something Clare wanted to think about just then. Clare had looked at Cornelia, who nodded encouragingly, and Clare had hung the coat up.

After the bath, Clare put on the pajamas Cornelia had left for her—pajamas so pretty they seemed to be something else. Everything in Clare’s apartment is like this, Clare had thought as she looked in the mirror at herself. Peculiar and pretty and so obviously
chosen
. Cornelia had stood in a store, letting the white, gliding fabric cool her hands. “I won’t take those, but I’ll take these,” she’d said. “Elegant,” Clare said to her reflection. “I am elegant.” She noticed the mirror’s carved edges, the flower-shaped buttons on the pajamas, the way the pajamas themselves caught the light.

In this way, Clare anchored herself in the moment, the here-and-now, and kept the future, the unknown, the worst-case scenarios at bay. So, the next morning, when Cornelia told Clare she would take the day off, Clare had thought about it, and then asked, “Do you think you could take me to work with you? I’ll stay out of everybody’s way. I promise. You won’t even know I’m there.” Because being out in the ordinary, busy world, in a place with new things and people to look at sounded good to Clare. When Clare asked this, Cornelia wanted to hug her; Clare wasn’t sure why, but she could tell this by the look Cornelia gave her. Cornelia didn’t hug her, but she did say, “You know what? We’ll go to the café, but only if you promise to get in the way as much as you want to.”

Clare’s father had stopped by after that to pick up the list Clare had made—a detailed list. With some adults, Clare could just write “clothes” and rely on them to find what she needed, but not with her father. Her father had kissed Cornelia, called Clare “Sparrow,” and asked her if she’d eaten dinner, if she’d slept more, and if there was anything special he could get Clare from the house, even though he held her list in his hand as he’d asked the question.

After he left, neither she nor Cornelia talked about him at all. Instead, Cornelia had turned to Clare, smiled, and said, “How about I lend you some clothes?”

Cornelia had let Clare choose, and Clare ended up in a thick, soft, powder-blue sweater, chocolate brown corduroy pants, and brown boots, all of which fit to a T, and all of which made Clare feel sophisticated and adult. She’d even let Cornelia talk her into leaving the mink hanging on its wooden hook and into wearing an amazingly lightweight brown shearling jacket instead.

“You look wonderful,” said Cornelia.

“I feel like I’m wearing a costume,” said Clare, adding quickly, “but I like it.”

As
Clare looked around the café, it seemed to her that
everyone
was wearing a costume or part of a costume. There was the cowboy. There was a man with an Amish beard in a gas-station-attendant shirt with “Bub” stitched on it. There was a man with a goatee and a black beret; a fragile blond girl in immense black, square glasses; and a beautiful auburn-haired woman in a blue silk cheongsam (Clare knew what a cheongsam was from multicultural week at her school) with jeans underneath. The cheongsam woman kept popping pieces of pastry into the mouth of her tiny, red-haired daughter who sat on her lap in a wool sailor dress and cap and red shoes, waving imperiously at people and blowing the occasional kiss.

Cornelia sat down at the table with Clare. As the black-beret man at the next table took out a cigarette and prepared to light it, Cornelia tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“No, Egon,” said Cornelia, shaking a finger at him. “Children on board. You know the rules.”

Egon growled like a vicious dog, then turned to Clare. “Watch out for this one. She’s a dictator. She rules with an iron fist.”

Clare gave him a very serious look and said in a very serious voice, “I will. I’ll watch out for her. Thank you very much.” Egon threw back his head and laughed uproariously, then shrugged on his coat and went outside to smoke.

“Was I that funny?” whispered Clare to Cornelia.

“No offense, but no. You were funny, but not that funny. It’s unclear that anything in the history of the world has ever been that funny. However, if Egon just laughed like a normal human being, would the whole roomful of people turn to stare at him and wonder what joke they were missing?”

“No?” said Clare.

“No,” affirmed Cornelia. “Are you dying of boredom?”

“I like it here,” said Clare, “But does everyone always look like this?”

“Like they’re on break from twenty different movie sets? Pretty much. That’s why my friend Linny never comes here. Also, she says she’d have to lose ten pounds, get cheekbone implants, and change her name to Luna before we’d let her in. But guess what?”

“She’s coming,” guessed Clare.

“She is, indeed,” said Cornelia. “And here’s my prediction. She’ll fall head over heels in love with…” Cornelia pointed to the cowboy.

“She’ll fall in love with the cowboy?” asked Clare.

“No, not with Hayes. His name’s Hayes, and he’s not a bad guy, all things considered, but no, the shirt. That god-awful, dingbat, nightmare of a shirt he’s got on. Linny will love it. She’ll covet it.”

“Thou shalt not covet,” recited Clare.

“You tell that to Linny,” said Cornelia.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Clare asked.

Cornelia gave her a rueful little smile. “That only seems fair,” she said. Clare didn’t quite understand what this meant, but she decided to go ahead and ask.

“You don’t have to answer, but I was wondering, did you go to college?”

“Yep,” said Cornelia. “College and two months of graduate school.”

“Because you seem really smart,” said Clare.

“I’m pretty smart. Not blisteringly, blindingly smart,” said Cornelia.

“That’s good. Who wants to be blistered and blinded? I wouldn’t,” said Clare. Talking this way with Cornelia felt easy and good. Maybe it was the grown-up clothes. Or maybe it was because she was keeping herself inside the moment and inside the conversation with all her might; she was saying things that she sometimes thought but didn’t say, or only thought of later when it was too late.

Cornelia laughed a real laugh.

“There’s another part of the question, but you really, really don’t have to answer this part,” said Clare.

“If I’m so smart, why do I work here, serving coffee to a bunch of pretentious, self-involved, Europhile maniacs?”

“I wasn’t going to say Europhile,” said Clare.

“Because you’re too polite,” said Cornelia.

“I don’t know what it means,” said Clare, and Cornelia laughed again, then got serious.

“When I was a few years older than you are, I fell in love with a movie.
The Philadelphia Story
?” Clare shook her head.

“Well, I guess we know what goes at the top of Clare’s must-see list. Anyway, that’s why I came to Philadelphia. Isn’t that silly?” asked Cornelia. Her tone was light, but Clare could tell that it was a real question.

“No. Probably you didn’t have reasons to go other places and since you had a reason to come here, you did,” said Clare.

“That’s exactly right. The movie’s not set in Philadelphia, really, more like out on the Main Line, but still. I thought I’d try it. After I left grad school, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be around interesting people who said interesting things in interesting ways about interesting subjects, but I was too chicken to go to New York or Paris, so I got a job in a place where everyone came from or appeared to come from or appeared to be on their way to someplace fascinating,” explained Cornelia.

“That makes sense,” said Clare.

“You are a very nice girl, Clare. I came here and eventually became a manager and eventually couldn’t think of anyplace else to go,” said Cornelia.

“Do you think you’ll stay?” asked Clare.

“No, I don’t. I’m not sure what I’ll do next, though. The problem with me is that I like to work; I like to do what I do well and completely; I just don’t have a calling. Not yet, anyway,” Cornelia puffed up her cheeks with air, then let the air out. “If you think of anything, though, let me know.”

“I will,” said Clare solemnly. Cornelia smiled, then jumped to her feet to wave at a woman who had just entered the café.

Clare turned and saw a woman in a long burgundy cocoon of a coat, a Sherlock Holmes hat, a rainbow striped wool scarf and the kind of high rubber boots men wear to go trout-fishing. The boots were neon yellow. She looked like she was on break from four different movie sets, not just one.

“Linny,” said Cornelia, “Speaking of blinding and blistering.”

From the doorway Linny looked around the room, then at Cornelia. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” she shouted across the room. Cornelia gestured for her to come in, come in. Linny came in and stamped across the floor, pausing once to give Hayes’s red-and-white shirt the once-over. Cornelia raised her eyebrows at Clare.

When Linny plopped down in the chair next to her, Cornelia said, “Don’t start. About the shirt.”

“Magnifique!”
said Linny. “Happy Trails to Me. You’re Clare.” Clare nodded.

“Nice Wellies. I have to get back,” said Cornelia. “But don’t you tell stories about me when I’m gone, Linny. And Clare, take everything she says with a grain of salt.” Linny pushed a big shaker of white stuff across the table to Clare.

“How’s that?” asked Linny, smiling sweetly at Cornelia.

“That would be sugar,” said Cornelia and started to turn away. Clare put a hand on Cornelia’s arm, and Cornelia looked down at her, then immediately crouched low so they were face-to-face.

“Barcelona,” said Clare, softly. “We were in the car, and she was crying, and she stopped to let me out. I walked for a long time, until it was dark. And some teenagers picked me up and drove me home. But she had two tickets. For Barcelona. She wanted to spend Christmas there. So maybe that’s where she went.” Cornelia was perfectly still, listening to Clare. Then she put her hands on the sides of Clare’s face and nodded.