Maybe This Time

  Tauruses like things, Flo had said, and even though astrology was a crock, Andie thought, Books.

  “I’m going out to shop,” she told him. “Want to come along? There’s a bookstore.”

  “There’s no bookstore in New Essex,” he said without looking up.

  “Is that the little town at the end of this road? There was a shopping center I passed on the highway about half an hour before I got to New Essex. It had a bookstore.”

  He stopped reading. “Grandville?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and went back to his book, and Andie took that for assent and went upstairs to find Alice, wondering what sequined promise would lure a little Scorpio out of the house.

  Alice was in the nursery with her Walkman, dancing and singing “Gloria” at the top of her voice. She caught Andie watching and stopped, her colorless skin and straight white-blond hair making her look like a little ghost herself, almost translucent in the morning sun.

  “I’m going to town to shop,” Andie said. “If you come along, I’ll get you a new bedspread. With sequins.”

  “No,” Alice said automatically.

  “Carter’s coming.”

  “No he’s not. We don’t leave here.”

  Andie came into the nursery and sat down on the ancient rocker near the TV. “Why?”

  “We belong here.”

  “Alice, it’s just for the day. We’ll be back for dinner.”

  “That’s what she said,” Alice snapped, her stolid little face growing grimmer.

  “She who?”

  “Nanny Joy. She said we’d just go for the day and then she kept driving and driving and driving, and when Carter said where are we going, she said we were going to a new home.” Alice’s hands were curled into fists now, her face even whiter than before. “I’m not going. I’m not going! I’m NOT GOING! NO NO NO NO NO NO—”

  Andie said calmly, “Alice, all my stuff is here. I wouldn’t leave my stuff.”

  “NO NO NO NO NO NO—”

  “All my clothes are in my room,” Andie went on. “Boxes of your school supplies. My sewing stuff. I didn’t bring all of that here yesterday to leave it today.”

  Alice closed her mouth and regarded Andie darkly.

  “Do you want to see the boxes?”

  Alice thought about it and nodded.

  “Okay then.” Andie stood up and held out her hand to the little girl who ignored it to march toward the door to Andie’s room. She wrenched open the door and stalked in, and Andie followed her in and opened the closet door. Alice came closer to stare inside, suspicion in every cell of her body. “I’m unpacked,” Andie told her. “Why would I do that if I was going to take you away?”

  Alice ignored her to kick the sewing box.

  “So do you want to come with Carter and me to go shopping?”

  Alice set her lower teeth in her upper lip, thinking hard. Then she turned and marched back into the nursery.

  Andie grabbed her purse and keys and followed her into the nursery in time to see Alice go out of the nursery and slam the door. “Wonderful,” she said, and was trying to think of something else to bribe the girl with when Alice came out with her blue Jessica doll under her arm.

  “I want a blue bedspread with sparkles,” she said, “and it should flutter. Like butterflies. Or dancing.” She headed for the door out of the nursery and onto the gallery and beyond that, presumably, the stairs and Carter.

  “Hold it,” Andie said, and Alice turned around, a dark look on her face. “We have to comb your hair.”

  If possible, untangling Alice’s hair was worse than Andie had anticipated since Alice screamed through the whole thing, loud enough that Carter came up to see what Andie was doing to her. “You’re next,” Andie told him over a shrieking Alice, and he left and came back five minutes later with his hair combed, in time to see Andie pull Alice’s hair up into a topknot and tie it with one of her scrunchies.

  Andie sat back to survey her work. Except for the fact that Alice was still screaming, tears streaking down her contorted, red face, she looked pretty good. “Alice, I’m not doing anything to you. Stop screaming and go look at yourself. You look cute.”

  Alice screamed louder, directing the volume directly at Andie, so Andie went into her room and got a hand mirror and brought it out to her. “Look.”

  Alice stopped in mid-scream, possibly because she realized she looked god-awful with her mouth open like that, possibly because it had been so long since she’d seen her face without hair sticking out all around it. “I hate it,” she said, but she said it instead of screaming it, so Andie counted it as progress.

  “That’s my girl,” she said, standing up.

  “I’m not your girl,” Alice said, and stalked out the door past Carter, clearly fed up with Andie and life in general, although she gave grudging approval to Andie’s yellow Mustang when she saw it.

  The ride to Grandville was uneventful except for the one bad moment when Andie drove through New Essex and turned onto the highway, and Alice thought she was being kidnapped again. She screamed until Carter, sitting beside her in the back seat, said, “Chill, it’s the next town,” without taking his eyes off his comic book. Alice stopped. Evidently if Carter said it, it was fact.

  “Thank you,” Andie said to him, looking in the rearview mirror to see his face.

  He ignored her.

  When they got to the mall in Grandville, he got out of the car and headed for the bookstore. Andie and a silent, glowering Alice went to a bedding store for a blue comforter for Alice and a red-striped one for Carter. When Alice objected to hers, saying, “It doesn’t have sparkles,” they went to a fabric store for some blue sequined chiffon and thread, and after that an office supply store where Alice picked out a sketchbook for Carter, and a set of markers, a big pad of quarter-inch grid paper, some pencils with skulls on them, and a pencil sharpener, all without interacting with Andie in any way until Andie offered her a set of Hello Kitty pencils. The scorn on Alice’s face was searing.

  They moved on and bought T-shirts and black-and-white-striped leggings and a stretchy black jersey flounced skirt for Alice who made gagging sounds, but once they began on Carter’s clothes, the little girl got serious, meticulously choosing what he needed. Shopping therapy, Andie thought, and dragged her to a home store where she bought white paint to take the pink out of Alice’s room. “I want black,” Alice said, the first thing she’d said since they’d left the car, and Andie said, “You can draw on the white with your markers,” and watched Alice almost smile. It was a little ghoulish. Then they went to the bookstore.

  “Is that your kid?” the store clerk said, when she walked in. He was pointing at Carter, so she said, “Yes.” “And you’re going to buy all these books?” the clerk said, pointing to the stacks on the counter. Andie sorted through them and saw comics and books on drawing and books on drawing comics. “Yes, I’m going to buy all these books,” Andie said, flashing North’s plastic, and a few minutes later Alice came up with two books on butterflies, and Andie added them to the pile.

  When they were done and had everything loaded into the car, Andie said, “Groceries,” and Alice started to scream, “No, no, no, NO, NO, NO,” until Carter said, “Chill. We have to eat.” Any illusion Andie had of them picking out meals together was dashed when Carter got in the car, and Alice followed him. Andie moved up and down the grocery aisles with speed and precision and was back in the car in half an hour.

  “Now,” she said when she got in the car. “Home.”

  She turned on the car and the tape player kicked in, startling her. She recognized the song and turned to the back seat as “Somebody’s Baby” bounced out of the speakers. “Did you put this tape in?”

  Carter shrugged.

  “There’s a whole thing of them,” Alice said, scowling. “Right here. Nobody was using them. I didn’t hurt anything. It’s your tape.”

  Andie craned her neck and saw an old box under Alice’s feet, the tape ca
se she’d shoved under the driver’s seat on a road trip a couple of years before and then forgotten about in favor of her CD player. Alice kicked it and then stared at her defiantly, and Andie hit eject and caught the tape as it slid into her hand. It had “Andie’s Music” written on it in North’s strong block caps.

  Mix tapes. They really had been young. Then it came back to her, he hadn’t given it to her, just slid it into his car player one night. “You made me a mix tape?” she’d said, and he said, “No, this is just songs you like.” She shook her head but Alice said, “Put that back in,” so she did, and Jackson Browne sang about the guys on the corner as Andie pulled out of the parking lot. He’d been singing about the guys on the corner when she’d first met North. Our song, she thought, and almost ejected it again. Avoiding old memories warred with avoiding Alice’s screams, and Alice won.

  “Why does he try to shut his eyes?” Alice asked.

  “Who?” Andie said.

  “Because she’s so pretty,” Carter said, deep in a book again, and Andie realized they were talking about Jackson Browne, singing his troubles on the tape.

  “Why wouldn’t he want to look at her if she’s pretty?” Alice said.

  “Because she’s going to make him feel like a dork and then dump him,” Carter said, still in his book.

  Whoa, Andie thought. That was pretty cynical for twelve.

  “She’s not nice,” Alice said.

  “He doesn’t know that,” Andie said. “He hasn’t asked her yet. If he asks her, maybe she’ll dance with him.” And maybe go home with him and marry him the next day. It happens.

  “He should ask her,” Alice said, and moved on to another topic.

  Andie listened to them, Alice asking questions and Carter answering them even though he was trying to read, talking to each other as they ignored her completely. They were a family of two, screwed up maybe, but not screwed up in their relationship with each other. Maybe that’s why they were still moderately sane in that creepy house with that wack-job housekeeper. They must have been miserable when Carter was sent away to school. A school that immediately turfed him . . .

  She looked at Carter in the rearview mirror. Carter was quiet but not quiescent. If the only way he could get back to Alice was to set fires . . . “Carter,” she said, and waited until he looked up, his brown hair flopping in his eyes. “I’ll make sure you’re not sent away from Alice again.”

  His blue eyes stayed as flat as ever, and then he went back to his book.

  Maybe she didn’t need them to like her. Maybe she just needed them to trust her for the next month. If she got them books and clothing and whatever else they needed, maybe they’d trust her enough to let her take them away from the hellhole they were living in. One step at a time.

  When they got to New Essex, she pulled into the Dairy Queen. “Hamburgers and ice cream for lunch,” she said, and when they were surrounded by food, she went to the pay phone and dialed.

  If she got Carter cable, he might even speak to her.

  North looked up as Kristin came into the office. “I’ll see Mrs. Nash now.”

  Kristin closed the door. “Miss Miller is on the phone. I know she’s supposed to talk to me, but she insists on speaking with you.”

  Andie. Well, if he was going to act on stupid impulses, he was going to pay the price. “I’ll take the call. You stall Mrs. Nash.”

  Kristin nodded and faded out the door, and North thought, Make it quick and hang up fast, and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “You weren’t kidding about rural,” Andie said, her voice low, the laugh that was always there underneath making it richer. “I had to leave the house to make a phone call.”

  “Where are you?” North said, trying not to be seduced into prolonging things just to listen to her.

  “The Dairy Queen in New Essex. The kids are inhaling food at a picnic table over by the car, so I can talk. Have you been to that house? It’s like something out of Dickens.”

  “Because you had to leave to make this call?”

  “Because it’s bleak as hell. We need cable TV, North. I can’t believe Carter is surviving without it.”

  “Fine. Call the cable company.” Get off the phone, he told himself.

  “I just called them and they were unhelpful. The house is too far out. I need somebody with clout.”

  “I don’t know anybody at a cable company.” Get off the phone.

  “Well, you undoubtedly know somebody who does know somebody at a cable company. Put Kristin on it. She looks like she’d enjoy a challenge.”

  “I will do that,” North said. For Christ’s sake, get off the phone.

  “Also, have you been here lately?”

  “No. Is there a problem?”

  “The place is falling apart. The stone’s crumbling, there are weeds everywhere, anything that’s metal has rusted and run down the outside of the house, and the drive is a real hazard.”

  “Damn it,” North said. “I sent funds to fix all of that two years ago.”

  “To Mrs. Crumb?”

  North pictured the housekeeper. Elderly. Dyed red hair. Smelled like peppermint and rubbing alcohol. “Yes, I sent a check to Mrs. Crumb.”

  “Well, the funds stayed with Mrs. Crumb. I suggest you hire people directly this time.”

  “I’ll have a contractor come out and look at the place.”

  “Tell him to talk to me, not Mrs. Crumb. And to look at the inside, too. The kitchen is awful. I can’t even bake here.”

  He closed his eyes and remembered late afternoons, Andie home from teaching and doing the Four O’Clock Bake, the smell of banana bread or chocolate chip cookies or cinnamon rolls, dozens of different smells telling him the day was almost done—

  “North?”

  “Right,” North said. “Contractor. I’ll put Kristin on it.”

  “Also, if anybody calls from this end of the world, we’re still married.”

  North stopped looking at his watch. “What?”

  “It’s the only thing that gives me clout. They’re very impressed with you here. I figured, what could it hurt? You’re never coming down here. Will’s never coming down here. Nobody in Columbus will ever know. So I took back my married name.”

  “You didn’t take my name when we were married,” North said, trying to find his footing again.

  “I was going through an independent phase. Now I’m going through a practical phase. It’s a good thing to be an Archer down here. Come to think of it, it was probably a good thing to be an Archer up there. I should have taken your name just for the power. As your mother so often told me, I was an idiot.”

  So was I, North thought, and then shook his head before regret could set in. The past was gone and the present had Mrs. Nash in the waiting room. “I’ll get Kristin on the cable—”

  “That’ll be a help,” Andie said over him. “Because frankly I could use a bargaining chip with the kids, too. I made a hot breakfast this morning and Alice refused to eat it and went for the damn cereal anyway. Mrs. Crumb thinks she’s winning. According to her, the two of you are very close. You think of her as a mother.”

  “Is she delusional?”

  “Everybody here is delusional, including your nannies. Carter didn’t set fires because he’s crazy, he set them so he’d get kicked out of school and could come home to take care of Alice. He needs to be in a good public school where he can make friends and then see Alice every night. They’re really close, North. If you don’t separate them, I think he’d go to school without a fight.”

  “Damn.” North leaned back. “I knew boarding school was a bad idea. My mother tried to send me away when Southie was six, and I wouldn’t go. Kids need each other. But the last nanny kept telling me he needed discipline, so—”

  “He has discipline. He’s so self-disciplined he’s barely breathing. Alice, on the other hand, has no discipline at all. If something’s going on that she doesn’t like, she screams. But it’s not like a normal temper tantrum, there
’s something else going on there. Carter I can eventually reach, I think. Alice . . . I don’t know.”

  She sounded worried, and North tried to think of a way to make her feel better and then realized that was ridiculous. She was doing a job for him, she hadn’t called for comfort, they weren’t married anymore no matter what lies she was telling down there, he had Mrs. Nash waiting, and there was nothing he could do anyway . . . “Do you need me to come down there?”

  “No, I can handle this,” she said, her voice as confident as ever. “It’s the kids I’m worried about. I don’t know if I can make things normal for them. I think I can make things better.”