Maybe This Time

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Crumb said, but it was all bluster now.

  “Is it lunch yet?” Alice said from behind them. “Because I would like a cheese sandwich. But no tomato soup.”

  “How about chicken noodle?” Andie asked her.

  “No. NO NO NO NO NO—”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Alice, it’s soup, not poison.”

  Alice looked at her darkly. “Maybe.”

  “I’ll make it, you try it.”

  “No.”

  “I made cookies last night. Try the soup, you can have a cookie.”

  “No.”

  “I said try it. One spoonful.”

  “NO.”

  “Fine.” Andie turned back to Mrs. Crumb, who seemed distracted now, her eyes darting like a cornered rat’s, falling finally on Alice, slopping her cocoa onto the table.

  “You be careful,” she snapped at Alice, her eyes cold on the little girl. “You’re making a mess on my nice clean table.”

  “It’s not your table,” Alice said calmly. “It’s mine. Andie said so.”

  “We’ll clean it up later,” Andie said, taken aback by Alice’s use of her name.

  “This ain’t right,” Mrs. Crumb said, and Andie realized she was near tears. “I been here for sixty years. None of you was born yet but I was here. You don’t know this house. You’re stirring things up. You—”

  “Which brings us to my next point,” Andie said. “You will stop talking about ghosts. I have no idea why you thought that was a good idea, but from now on the official position in this house is that there are no ghosts.”

  Alice drained her cocoa cup. “I want my sandwich now.”

  Andie got out the whole wheat bread as Mrs. Crumb said, “I never said there were no ghosts.”

  “Yes you did,” Alice said, and Mrs. Crumb glared at her with absolutely no effect.

  “Even if there were,” Andie said, “I don’t see why a good housecleaning would upset them. They don’t live in the dust.”

  “Oh, they care,” Mrs. Crumb said to Andie, folding her arms over her orange-flowered apron. “You’ll see they care.”

  “For the last time, I do not believe in ghosts—” Andie began, and then Carter came into the kitchen with the box opened.

  “It’s computers,” he said, more confused than defiant, and Andie looked inside and saw two sleek Apple boxes holding Mac PowerBook 145s. She took the boxes out and put them on the table and found a note from Kristin that said, “Mr. Archer wanted to make sure the children had computers.”

  “Those are from your Uncle North,” Andie said, showing him the note, thinking, Thank you. North never missed on the details.

  “Who?” Alice said.

  “Bad Uncle,” Andie told her. “They come with a graphics program,” she told Carter.

  “What is it?” Alice said poking at her box. “Is it candy?”

  “Better,” Carter said, and left with his Mac, undoubtedly heading for the library.

  “You think you’re so smart, but you’re not,” Mrs. Crumb said. “All this change, all this stuff. It’s bad.”

  Andie gave up on the pity. “Mrs. Crumb, I do not want to have to fire you, but I will if you cause any more problems. You will keep the kitchen clean and you can supervise the Happy Whosis, but you will not tell any more stories about ghosts, and you will not make any more veiled threats, and you will either assist me with the cooking or get out of my way, and you will answer any questions I have without muttering. Is that clear?”

  Mrs. Crumb’s nostrils flared, but she said, “Yes.”

  “Good,” Andie said, and finished making Alice’s lunch.

  When she was done, she put the sandwich in front of Alice.

  “I think I’ll have cookies,” Alice said.

  “I think you won’t,” Andie said.

  Alice glared at her, and Andie glared back, and Alice put her headphones on and ate her sandwich, swathed in her pearls and her shells and her locket and her bat, pretending Andie didn’t exist.

  It’s only a month, Andie thought, and no matter what North thinks, I can make it a month easy.

  “It’s mean not to give me a cookie,” Alice said.

  Not that it mattered what North thought. He’d forgotten her already. He—

  The doorknocker thudded again.

  I’m going to get a scooter, she thought, as she race-walked across the Great Hall and opened the door.

  A deliveryman with a clipboard stood there. “We got a stove for a Mrs. Andromeda Archer.”

  “A stove,” Andie said.

  North had sent her a new stove.

  “This the place?” the guy said.

  “Yeah, this is the place,” she said, and silently apologized to North as they wheeled in her new stove, the latest model of the stove he’d bought her ten years ago. She hadn’t asked then, but he knew. She hadn’t asked now, but—

  So he’s good with stoves, she thought, trying to dismiss the whole thing.

  But he hadn’t forgotten her.

  “It means nothing,” she said to nobody, and went back to the kitchen to feed Carter.

  Four

  That afternoon, while the cleaning crew worked around them, Andie sat the kids down in the library and explained their educational goals to them: They had to be up to their grade levels by January, and the only way she’d know that was if they took the achievement tests. Carter looked at his PowerBook with longing, and Andie handed him the curriculum. “Here’s what you need to know. The notes from your last nanny said you had all your textbooks. I can go over this with you, or you can look it up and ask me for help when you hit a snag.” Unless it’s math; then we’re both screwed. She went over everything with him and then said, “Can you do this on your own?” He nodded. “Yell if you need me,” she told him, and turned to Alice.

  “I’m not gonna do it,” Alice said, folding her arms.

  “Too hard, huh?” Andie said. “Poor baby. Here, you can start with the kindergarten workbook.”

  “I’m not in kindergarten!” Alice said, outraged.

  “Oh, sorry.” Andie handed her the first-grade workbook.

  “I’m not in first grade, either!”

  “Prove it. Do the final test at the back of the book. I bet you can’t.”

  Alice grabbed the book and started working, bitching the entire time. Andie went to see how the cleaners were doing on the second floor—“You’re going to need new linens everywhere,” one of the women told her, “this stuff is rotted through”—and checked to make sure the cable guy hadn’t fallen in the moat—“You’re ready to go,” he told her, “but it wasn’t easy, all this stone, and some of it’s loose”—and gave a glowering Mrs. Crumb instructions for dinner, and then went back to Alice and Carter.

  “You’ve got cable TV,” she told Carter, who said, “Cool,” the first positive word she’d had from him, and then she turned to Alice.

  Alice was working on the fourth-grade final test. Andie went back and checked the first-, second-, and third-grade tests. Perfect scores on first and second and near perfect on the third.

  “How is this possible?” she asked Carter, showing him.

  “The nannies weren’t dumb and neither is Alice.” He held up the curriculum. “You got a test for this?”

  “I can make one up,” she said, just as Alice pushed the fourth-grade final across to her.

  “Can I have candy now?” she said.

  “Candy?” Andie said, and Carter said, “They bribed her to work.” Andie shook her head at Alice. “No, no candy. Here’s what you missed on the third-grade test.” She shoved the workbook back to Alice who looked outraged again. Alice was looking outraged a lot today. Suck it up, Alice. “We’ll go over the questions you missed in a minute.” She looked back at Carter. “I’ll make up the test for you to see if you’ve got the curriculum down, and then we’ll figure out independent studies for you. I’m telling you now, I’m terrible at math, so we’ll have to get you outside help there
, but I’m a whiz at language skills, so there I’ve got you covered.” He gave her his usual blank stare, so she said, “I’ll give you something to read, and we can talk about it—or not—and then you’ll write a short paper on it. I’ll show you. It’s easy. You just think about what you read, organize your thoughts, and write it down. As long as your arguments are clear and make sense, you’re good. Math, of course, will still be math.”

  He went back to the computer.

  “These questions were wrong,” Alice announced, looking at the ones she’d missed.

  Andie sighed and sat down with her and went through everything, including the fourth-grade test, which Alice had done pretty well on, considering she was a third-grader. “This is what we’re going to be studying,” she told Alice. “Candy,” Alice said, and Andie worked out a series of rewards for her, including the right to pick out bedding for each of the ten bedrooms in the house and a dinner at Dairy Queen for every completed unit.

  “The stove is exactly right,” she told North when she called him to thank him after the kids were in bed. “I’m making banana bread tonight in celebration. And the computer for Carter was a genius move.”

  “Banana bread,” North said. “Send some of that up here, would you?”

  “Sure,” Andie said, surprised he was asking for something. He never asked for anything. “I’m going to teach Alice to make cookies tomorrow. You want some of those, too?”

  “Chocolate chip?” North said, sounding like a kid.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, please.” There was a pause, and when he spoke again, he was back to business. “So everything is going well there?”

  “Sort of. The kids have been through a lot, and this place is Amityville, the House of Usher, and Hill House combined, so their environment isn’t working in their favor, but they’re very bright and very tough and they’ve had each other. The worst mistake was sending Carter away to school. But if I can keep bribing Alice, and Carter will do the work, they’ll be ready to go back to school by January. The nannies did a good job educating them. From what I can tell, they were sensible, competent women except for the last one. Nanny Joy. Telling her to kidnap them and take them to Columbus was not a good idea. Alice calls you ‘Bad Uncle.’ ”

  “I did not tell her to kidnap them,” North said, sounding exasperated. “I told her to bring them to Columbus if she possibly could.”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t sure. You are sort of a hand-of-God, forget-the-feelings, don’t-bother-me-while-I’m-working kind of guy. And in your defense, it was a good idea, her execution of it just sucked. We have to find a way to get them to agree to go, not trick them into it.”

  “Well, you have a month,” North said, his voice suddenly cold, and she reacted to the undercurrent more than to the words.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That was our deal, a month.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, assuming you don’t bolt before then.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Never mind. Is there anything else you need?”

  Andie scowled at the phone. “Yeah, I need you to back off that bolting thing.” Or no cookies, you jackass.

  “Tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

  “I just got here,” Andie said, ignoring the sympathy she’d felt for the nannies who’d left. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Hand-of-God guy?” North said.

  “Well, you do like your distance. You like to do your caring from another room.”

  “Whereas you do limited engagements and then head for another state.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one taking care of Damian and the Bad Seed from a hundred miles away. I’m here.”

  “And at the end of the month, you won’t be taking care of them at all. You don’t stay.”

  “You don’t care, you don’t even see them.” There was a long silence, and Andie thought, This is stupid. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to have this dumb argument. Of course you care, you sent me down here.”

  “Fair enough,” North said, as distant as ever. “Is there anything else you need from me?”

  Not anymore, Andie thought. “No, we’re fine. Unless you’re willing to come out here and burn the place down for me so we have to leave.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the phone.

  Andie thought, That wasn’t North, somebody is listening in.

  It had to be Crumb; Carter wasn’t interested in anything but his books and his drawing, and Alice would have contributed to the conversation by now. “Well,” she said brightly. “I can’t wait to get home to you, baby. I really miss you.”

  “What?”

  “I know how hard this separation is on our marriage, but it’s worth it to see that the kids are safe.”

  “What?”

  “But I’ll be home in a couple of weeks,” Andie said. “I’ll send the cookies and banana bread tomorrow. Can’t wait to see you. Love you. Bye.”

  “Uh, good-bye,” North said, and Andie thought, Jesus, you suck at improv, as he hung up.

  She went downstairs and told Mrs. Crumb to stop eavesdropping—“I never!”—and that she’d be making her own tea from now on. She went into the pantry, a dark narrow little room off the back of the kitchen, and found a row of old glass decanters in a cabinet, most of the bottles empty except for one with peppermint schnapps and another that smelled like musty Amaretto and a third that was some kind of brandy. She made a cup of tea with a shot of Amaretto in it—one shot—and took the cup upstairs and sipped it in the warmth of her bed while looking over the kids’ schoolwork, which was really very good. When she was done, she put the empty cup on her bedside table, and slid down into the sheets, thinking about the kids. They had such potential if only they weren’t so . . .

  Her thoughts clouded, and she slipped into a deep tea-and-liquor-aided sleep. The whispers began again—Who do you love? Who do you want?—and she thought, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and when North showed up in her dreams, she thought, Bad Uncle, and refused to have anything to do with him.

  After the first week, Andie kept pushing and the changes came fast. Alice worked her way through the third-grade workbooks, her tongue stuck between her teeth, her pearls, shells, locket, and bat swinging forward as she bent over her papers, her Walkman cast forlornly to one side so she could concentrate. It really was a miracle she hadn’t become hunchbacked from the weight around her neck. She’d decided she liked the black-and-white-striped leggings Andie had bought her, but they were too small, so when Andie went back and bought her the larger size, Alice cut the pants off the too-small ones and tied her topknot with one of the legs. She liked it so much she began ordering Andie to do her hair every morning, which was an annoying improvement. It took Andie a while to realize who Alice looked like: a very short Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, except Alice hadn’t discovered earrings and eye shadow yet. Well, it was only a matter of time.

  Alice cooperated with everything once she was bribed, earning many trips to the shopping center, which resulted in each of the bedrooms sporting different treatments: red and black paisleys, pumpkin-orange stripes, purple checks, a violent green leaf pattern, a multicolored dot extravaganza that made Andie dizzy when she looked at it, and a green Sesame Street comforter with Bert and Ernie waving on the top. “Bee-you-tee-ful,” Alice said with each one, and since Andie didn’t have to sleep in any of them, she said, “Yep,” and moved on. Alice and Andie painted Alice’s bedroom walls white, and Alice spent the ensuing days drawing pictures on her wall in marker. The black got quite a workout since that’s what she drew everything in, and the red was almost as bad since there was a lot of blood in Alice’s imagination, but the blue ran out first, used for many butterflies and a woman in a long blue dress. “Who is that?” Andie asked, and Alice said, “Dancing princess,” and drew on. She also badgered Andie to tell her the princess story every night and then critiqued it mercilessly as it evolved into a stor
y about a brave princess in a black ruffled skirt and striped stockings, and the Bad Witch who lived with her and tried to make her eat soup.

  But it wasn’t all Bad Witch. Alice also began to follow Andie around after school time, asking, “Whatcha doing?” and then criticizing whatever it was with great interest and enthusiasm, which evolved into the Three O’Clock Bake, when Andie would turn on the radio and they’d listen to the only station they could get—“All the Hits All the Time”—while Andie mixed up whatever she was making in time to the music, and Alice helped a little and danced around the kitchen a lot, belting out the hits with fervor if not technical accuracy.

  Alice was singing “I’m too sexy for my shirt” one afternoon as Andie began to make banana bread. “This is my specialty,” she told Alice as she got out her mixing bowl. “Do you want me to show you how to make it?”

  Alice said, “My specialty is dancing,” and kept hoochie-coochieing to Right Said Fred.

  My specialty used to be dancing, too, Andie thought, and began to peel bananas for banana bread.

  Alice stopped and peered over the bowl. “The bananas are yucky,” she said. “They are spotted and brown and dead.”

  “They’re supposed to be spotted and brown for banana bread,” Andie said, smooshing them up in the bowl with her fork. “That’s how you know they’re ready to make into banana bread. If they’re yellow, they’re no good for bread. Everything has a time, Alice, and it is time to make these bananas into bread. It’s very good.”

  “I do not like nuts,” Alice said, frowning at the bag of walnuts on the counter.

  “Then don’t eat the banana bread,” Andie said, and beat the banana bread in time to the music, bouncing while she stood at the counter and Alice danced around singing, “I don’t like nuts” to “Achy Breaky Heart” (“I do not like nuts, I really don’t like nuts”). Then Andie put the bread in the oven, and Alice went back to singing with the music.

  When the banana bread came out, Alice ate it.

  The next day she danced to “Everything Changes” while Andie made chocolate chip cookies with nuts—“I do not like nuts.” “Then don’t eat the cookies”—and ate the cookies. The day after that, she belted out “I Will Always Love You” as cupcakes came out of the oven—“I will eat these because there are no nuts”—and after the first two weeks and many Hits All the Time, she added waffles and pancakes and lasagna and spaghetti and whole wheat rolls to her menu—“I do not like whole wheat.” “Then don’t eat the rolls”—and began to put on ounces and bounce just from consuming Andie’s quality calories as she danced around the kitchen. After a while, Andie danced, too, which Alice, surprisingly, approved of. She was still pale as a little ghost, but she was a healthy little ghost. By the time the first three weeks were up, the only problems Alice still had were intractable stubbornness, occasional screaming, and nightmares.