“Cornelia…,” Teo began, sounding wary.
“Viviana’s traveling. Clare’s staying with me until she gets back. That’s our story. It works. If people get wind of the real situation. Well, think about it, Teo.”
Clare tried to think about it, but she wasn’t sure what she or Teo was supposed to be coming up with. She waited to see what Teo would say next.
“Cornelia, maybe it’s time to get the police involved.” A chill traveled over Clare.
“No,” said Cornelia. “No, no, no. How could you suggest that?”
Clare didn’t know how he could either. Teo didn’t say anything.
“Teo, we sit here discussing Clare’s life. Deciding her fate like those fat old ladies with their thread and scissors.”
Clare had no idea what this might mean. Fat old ladies?
“Fat old ladies?” said Teo.
“I always picture them as fat. Probably, they’re not fat. Forget it. What I’m saying is, let’s include Clare. Let’s call her in here right now.”
Clare remembered what Teo had said about her being made of good material. Was it good to spy on people who cared about you? She took a deep breath and stepped out of the bedroom. Teo and Cornelia stared at her.
“I was spying. Not spying, but I was listening to your conversation, which I guess is—spying.” She paused, feeling her heartbeat in her temples. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid of not knowing what’s going on.”
“Of course, you are,” Cornelia said gently. “We should have had you in here all along. I think we were afraid we’d have to say things that might be hard for you to hear.”
Clare walked over to the sofa and smoothed her hand over the embroidered shawl draped over its back. She hated to sit against something so beautiful without at least touching it first, letting it know she’d noticed it.
Cornelia stood and, with a swift motion, lifted the shawl off the sofa, set it floating in the air like a great butterfly, and then let it alight on Clare’s shoulders.
“Will you forgive us?” asked Cornelia. Clare didn’t know what to say; she couldn’t quite figure out what Cornelia and Teo would need to be forgiven for. She just nodded, then sat down on the sofa and tucked her feet underneath her. Cornelia smiled and did the same.
“Teo thinks we should consider calling the police. Get them to help find your mother.”
“I don’t want police,” said Clare. She didn’t like how she sounded, like a baby who might stomp her feet and throw a tantrum. But she didn’t want police. The thought of police made her feel sick.
“Teo?” said Cornelia. Teo flushed and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“As far as I can tell,” he said in his steadiest manner, “the system is designed to help families. To keep families together. When they find your mother, they’ll help her in the ways she needs to be helped so that she can take care of you the way she always did.”
“I want her to be the way she used to be. I don’t…” Clare hesitated. “I can’t go back to, to living with her when she’s sick. But…”
She looked from Cornelia to Teo. “But if we call the police, will I be able to stay with Cornelia while they look for my mom? Will I be able to stay here while they’re making her well?”
Cornelia picked up Clare’s hand and squeezed it. Clare saw that her eyes were wet.
“Maybe,” said Teo. “I think they try to keep kids with people they know.”
“Maybe, but maybe not,” Clare said bleakly. “Right? Maybe not.” She pictured Anne Shirley in the orphan asylum and the mean woman she’d lived with before ending up there. There’d been one sad tree in the yard of the asylum, and Anne’s only friends had been imaginary girls. Clare felt stricken.
“I think I’ll just wait here until my mom comes back,” she said faintly. “And then, maybe you can help her find a doctor.”
Teo rubbed his eyes with both hands, then looked at Cornelia.
“Clare’s been through too much upheaval already,” said Cornelia decisively. But Clare saw that the expression in her eyes was far less certain. “You have to see that.”
“Of course, I see that,” Teo said, frustration edging his voice, “but have you thought about…” He shut his eyes for a few seconds. Then he put his elbows on his knees and leaned toward Clare.
“I’m sorry, Clare, but I have to say this,” he said.
“Don’t,” Cornelia said bitterly. “Just don’t. This insistence on the truth, it’s brutal, do you know that? Who are you, Atticus Finch? Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Just accept it!”
Clare knew who Atticus Finch was. Scout and Jem’s father. A hero. And Bob Ewell. Clare remembered how he’d chased the kids, how Scout had bounced around, befuddled inside her turkey costume. Or was it a ham? And how did Atticus and Bob fit in to what she and Teo and Cornelia were discussing, anyway? To her own amazement, Clare laughed.
“Clare?” Cornelia turned toward her, big-eyed.
“I’m sorry, but—Atticus Finch? I’m just so confused.” She laughed again. What could be wrong with her all of a sudden? The laughter took over her whole body; she gave in.
“It’s you,” Teo said coolly to Cornelia. “You’re just so weird.”
Cornelia lowered her brows, but the corner of her mouth tweaked upward. The wire of tension between Cornelia and Teo had snapped. Clare let her laugh run its course, like a fever; afterward she breathed raggedly, wrung out, but ready. The shawl had slipped off her shoulders; now, she pulled it up and held on to it with both hands.
“I know what you were going to say, Teo,” Clare said quietly, at long last. That’s how it seemed, at long last. At long last, these words, this moment.
Teo kept his eyes on her. His clear, kind, green gaze made her feel strong. He loved her; she knew that with a sudden certainty. Her heart leaped up.
“What if my mother never comes home,” Clare said and wondered how she could say it. The worst—the poisonous, nightmarish worst. She’d finally said the worst out loud.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Cornelia’s voice shook with compassion, but with something else, as well. Cornelia sounded proud of her.
“Yes, we have to consider that possibility, as remote as it is.” Teo gestured around the room after he said it, gestured to the three of them. “This isn’t something we could keep up forever.” Clare liked it that he said “we.”
“You’re right.” Cornelia nodded. “But we can keep it up for a little while, can’t we?”
“What if we wait until school starts?” Clare could be decisive now. She felt years older. “Once school starts, it will get too hard. It’s too far to drive there from here every day, and my teacher Ms. Packer, she already suspected something was wrong. When she sees Cornelia instead of my mom…”
“When does school start?” asked Teo resignedly.
“People go all these fancy places for break, so it’s long. We go back the tenth.”
“That’s ten days from now,” Cornelia said. “If she hasn’t come home in ten days, we’ll take other measures to find her.”
“Other measures?” said Teo skeptically. “Sounds like a euphemism for you scouring the country in a trench coat and an El Camino.”
“Very funny,” said Cornelia. “As if I’d be caught dead in an El Camino.”
“What’s an El Camino?” Clare asked Cornelia, who began taking sudden notice of her fingernails.
“She has no idea,” said Teo. “If Viviana isn’t home in ten days…”
“We’ll call the police,” Clare pronounced firmly. She had a sudden thought, “Hey, it’s New Year’s Eve.”
“You’re right! I hadn’t noticed. No champagne for you, missy, not even a soupçon!” Cornelia pretended to scold. Then she got serious. “There’s one wonderful year ahead of you, Clare. Wonderful, filled with wonders. Mark my words!” Cornelia sounded so fierce, as though she would will Clare’s wonderful year into existence whatever it took. If anyone could do it, she could, Clare believed, this small woman next to her w
ho wasn’t really small at all.
It dawned on Clare with the colors and the glowing sky of a real dawn: Cornelia loves me too.
21
Cornelia
It happened. To me.
Soon after Martin’s death, it happened, as it happens to most people at some point or another, if they’re lucky enough or maybe unlucky enough depending on how you look at it and the circumstances surrounding it. But I don’t really believe that, do I? And you don’t, either. We don’t really believe that such a turn of events (because it’s a turn, if anything is, a dizzying, whip-lashing, astonishing turn) could ever be unlucky. When it happens—the great sea change, the alteration of one’s life into something rich and strange—when it singles one out, one is always lucky, lucky automatically. I’m talking about transformation, and the transformation I’m talking about is always a gift. A blessing.
As I was saying, it happened to me, soon after Martin’s death. Some might say too soon, but it’s not as though I were in charge of the timing. I wasn’t the director of this particular scene. I don’t know who was, but I know it wasn’t Cornelia Brown. She wasn’t the writer, either. She played the role she was given to play.
A sea change. I adore that term. Shakespeare, again, of course. From The Tempest. Except that Ariel was singing about what happens to a drowned man’s body at the bottom of the sea, and while there was a kind of drowning involved, I was in a car and as alive as I had ever been. I was the body electric. I shimmered with life. I crackled.
What the hell am I getting at? “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” as the wise man wrote, and although I’m not rich or mighty, I am the one telling this story. Patience, friend. Trust me; I’ll get there. I’ve gotten us this far, haven’t I?
And I didn’t fall in love with Teo Sandoval, if that’s what you’re thinking.
It started with a phone call. Actually, it started in the primordial ooze at the dawn of time or even before that, but since you could say that for anything, that all moments were mere prelude to the one you’re describing, I’ll skip to the phone call. It was the second of two phone conversations with my mother, the first of which took place the night I heard about Martin’s death. As soon as I could punch buttons on a phone, I called her. What did you think? That I was different from the rest of humanity? When disaster strikes, I want my mother. I want her, I want her, I want her.
As she always does, she answered after the first ring. Rude to keep people waiting is what we grew up hearing, contemptibly rude, even if getting to the phone meant flying over furniture like something out of Cirque du Soleil. If every fourteen-year-old in America needs a cell phone strapped gleamingly to her or his body at all times, my mother is surely a candidate for one. However, she claims cell phones open up whole new avenues for rudeness (with which not a soul could argue), and besides, my parents don’t get reception on their particular street, for reasons no one can determine. Turns out we’d been living in a mild, magnolia-scented version of the Bermuda Triangle for all those years, which doesn’t surprise me a bit.
In any case, I’d called her out of wanting her in a large vague way and also in a large specific way. Specifically, I wanted her to tell me that I wasn’t responsible for Martin’s death. More specifically, I wanted her to tell me that I did not cause his death by refusing his (second; I hadn’t told her about the first) invitation to London, and that I did not cause his death by telling him I wasn’t in love with him, that my voice in his head saying I wasn’t in love with him did not cause whatever distraction or carelessness may have been his on that London street. I wanted her to tell me that beyond being unwarranted, feeling guilty was presumptuous, even arrogant, and utterly unproductive. Because shortly after hearing Martin was dead, guilt fell on me like a piano.
And she did, in a few tidy sentences, my mother did all of the above. And she did it with such patience, concern, and goodwill that I realized for the first time her real reason for running to the phone: She was the mother of four children. It took thirty-one years to realize this. Shame on me.
But the second phone call, the one I meant to describe, came later, a couple of days after Martin’s funeral. Teo had just gone back home to Brooklyn, and I could feel Clare’s missing him, could see a faintly unmoored expression on her face, even when she smiled at me, which she did fairly often, brave girl.
I can’t say I didn’t feel a bit lost myself. After all, as the Schoolhouse Rock song tells us, “It takes three legs to make a tripod or to make a table stand; it takes three wheels to make a ve-HI-cle called a tri-CY-cle.” Three is a magic number, especially when the third is Teo, whom Clare had called needable and spoken truth.
But after he left, after we watched him get into his car and drive away, I stood with Clare on the sidewalk and waited for panic to seize me in its icy fist, and here’s the thing: It never did. I was nervous, yes. Walking with Clare alone across the shifty terrain of Martin’s and Viviana’s absences would be tricky business, and I wasn’t at all sure I was up to the job. But when I looked at her with her hands in her pockets, tipping her head back for a moment, eyes closed against the winter sun, she seemed so firmly planted on the earth that I believed we would figure it out.
And we would have, too, if not for the second phone call, the one my mother made to me, the phone-call cum straw-that-broke-this-camel’s-back.
To put it simply, Mrs. Goldberg died.
To put it less simply and more stupidly, as did one obituary, she “succumbed to Alzheimer’s,” as though she could have done anything else, as though she’d given in, the weakling. She died in a nursing home, which, no matter how expensive, could not have been a home, not to Mrs. Goldberg, who knew, above all the things she knew, what a real home was.
“She’s in a better place now, love” was my mother’s—inevitable—summing up.
“No platitudes, Mom, please. She wasn’t a platitude person,” I said bitterly.
Silence, into which I sobbed.
Then my mother said, “I only meant she’s all right now. You just seem to be taking the news so—hard.” She sounded slightly put out.
Nowadays, everyone and their grandmother labels behaviors and responses and so forth as “inappropriate,” but my mother’s been using the word for years. And while for many people it’s just a means of feeling detached and intellectual while calling someone a jerk, as Eleanor Campbell Brown defines “inappropriate,” the word specifically describes behavior or even emotions that are “beyond that for which the occasion calls,” with slight connotations of jerkiness hovering around, so slight that she would probably say I’m imagining them altogether.
In any case, she finds my responses inappropriate with some regularity, and I’m sure she was biting her tongue not to say the word now. Because I was, I was taking the news so hard. I’d loved Mrs. Goldberg for most of my life. In addition, in recent days, I had been under no small amount of strain. If in crying for Mrs. Goldberg I was also crying for Martin (which I’d not yet done, not a single tear) and for Clare and for Viviana and for myself, perhaps I might be forgiven. Perhaps, if the crying was for all of us, its duration and intensity were precisely that for which the occasion called.
This crying, in all its unseemly, indecorous inappropriateness, may have gone on ad nauseam, if not ad infinitum, had I not caught sight of Clare standing in the doorway of my bedroom, white-faced, holding on to the doorjamb as though it were the mast of a storm-tossed ship, and staring at me with terror in her eyes.
“It’s OK, honey,” I gasped, beating the crying back like a brush fire. “Not Teo. No one you know. Everything’s OK.”
She just nodded, but I saw concern replace the fear, and she sat down on the floor, to watch over and abide with me, true friend that she was.
“Cornelia, there’s something else,” ventured my mother.
Oh, no more, not one thing more.
“What?” I asked.
“Ruth said her mother remembered you in her will.” My m
other sounded uncomfortable. Uh-oh, I thought. Mrs. Goldberg’s behaved inappropriately, even from her grave.
“She left me the pearl necklaces,” I guessed.
“In a way, yes. She left you her house and its entire contents.”
I was speechless.
“And she’s asked that you go through her belongings and give her children whatever you think they might want. The rest is yours.”
I plunged further into speechlessness.
“Ruth sounded fine. Apparently, apart from the house, Mrs. Goldberg’s estate was substantial. The value of the house is quite small in comparison. Still, it’s rather awkward, isn’t it?”
As stuffy as this sounded, I knew my mother’s disapproval came from a heartfelt concern for Mrs. Goldberg’s children. That a mother would risk hurting her children’s feelings as Mrs. Goldberg had, or as my mother thought she had, was unthinkable.
“Ruth and Bern are probably fine. They know she loved them,” I said, and this was true. When Mrs. Goldberg loved you, you knew it.
“The funeral is the day after tomorrow. I told Ruth you probably wouldn’t be able to come, with Clare there and everything. But once Clare’s mother’s back from her trip, you’ll need to come down and go through Mrs. Goldberg’s things.”
“OK, then,” I said blandly. “Thanks for calling, Mom.”
I hung up, and Clare was on her feet in an instant and sitting close to me on the bed, her face clouded with worry. When she put her arms around me, I heard Mrs. Goldberg’s voice saying, “child of my heart” as she had the last day we’d spent together in her house, and I couldn’t help it; I started crying again. Crying and telling Clare, as I’d once told her father in this same room, about Mrs. Goldberg—who she was and who she was to me, how I’d been expecting her to die and how I couldn’t bear it that she had.
While I can be a bit overdramatic at times—when my mother finds my emotional responses to be out of measure, sometimes, sometimes, she has a point—I wasn’t doing that now. I’d tipped over an edge and had fallen onto rocky, unfamiliar turf, into a place where I would turn for solace to a child of eleven who’d lost so much herself that just tallying it all would make anyone sick and weary. I didn’t mean to turn to her, but as she rubbed circles between my shoulder blades with her hand, I needed to be comforted in precisely that way; I couldn’t help needing it.