“Hey!” I yelped.
Mom banged the window shut. “Go to bed, Valli,” she said. “NOW.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”
Mom went into her bedroom and slammed the door. After a second, I heard her crying quietly behind it.
I tiptoed to the living room window and eased it open, hoping to spot the silver glove down in the courtyard for later retrieval. It wasn’t there. It was hovering in the air outside the window, fingers spread. Floating.
I snatched the glove out of the air and rolled it up and stuffed it back into my pocket. Then I went to bed.
2
Brightner
THE NEXT MORNING I stayed in bed until I heard Mom leave, even though that meant I would have to rush like crazy to get to school on time. Mom didn’t come and roust me out, either. One of the things that happened when she came around to calling me Val or Valli instead of Tina is that she began to insist on my being responsible for running more of my own life, which was actually not so bad.
The thing was, I really did not want to face her that morning. Her trying to throw away Gran’s glove had been a pretty good indication that she was too upset to even talk to. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to avoid more talk for a while.
In fact Mom had been moody and irritable a lot lately, ever since she’d quit her editor job and turned herself into a literary agent. What with checkbook struggles and friendships changing and the hassles in getting used to the new people at the office where Mom now rented space, we had both been under a lot of extra strain before the problem of Gran’s disappearance ever came up.
I had developed certain strategies for avoiding the worst of the fallout, one of them being hanging out in bed until Mom was gone instead of having breakfast with her. That’s the one I used today.
So when I heard the locks click, I leaped out of bed and made record time for school, which turned out not to be necessary at all. We had an assembly first thing, which was welcome only because it was possible to slip in a little late, as I did that morning, in all the bustle and fuss of a whole school settling into the auditorium seats.
The assembly started out the same boring way they all do. To keep my mind off my troubles, I read more of The Count of Monte Cristo, the big, fat, unabridged edition which is good for weeks even if you are a fast reader.
My friend Barbara, who sat next to me, jogged my elbow to let me know that Mr. Rudd was getting set to launch. If he noticed you weren’t paying attention, he tended to take it personally. Mr. Rudd proceeded to present the new school psychologist (the old one had married some kind of therapist and moved to California).
The replacement shrink made an entrance. He walked out of the wings and stood next to Rudd, looking down at us all. And right then I knew I was in for something, though I didn’t have a clue as to what.
Mr. Rudd was an ordinary-sized person who wore dull clothes and bright-colored ties and a nervous, plastic smile to fool people into thinking he was dumb, which he was not. Nobody liked him much but he was okay, and he usually looked like a regular, boring, old grown-up person.
Usually. Next to this psychologist, whose name was Dr. Brightner, Mr. Rudd looked like a jerky little wooden puppet, a sort of bad try at Pinocchio.
Dr. Brightner was big, and sort of smooth and strong-looking. He had a thick paunch and broad shoulders, and he was a little bowlegged but stood very easily, as if he could move fast if he had to. He had a blobby nose, jowls hanging over his collar, and a pouty sort of mouth with a droopy lower lip. At first glance his face reminded me of Snoopy’s.
Not the eyes, though. His eyes were small, bright, and quick. He kept his hands folded in front of him, and I had a funny feeling that he held them that way to keep the fingers from getting him in trouble by doing something clever and full of mischief while he wasn’t looking.
“Well, boys and girls,” he drawled in this husky, juicy voice, “here I am, take a good look. I’m older than some of your parents, and in some ways a lot more experienced. I come from a family of truckers, not a family of doctors or professors. In fact I used to be a cop.”
That got him some buzzing all right.
He smiled, and it was amazing how wide and toothy that pursed-up, droopy mouth got. “Now you know the worst, right? It gets better. I didn’t like being a cop, I got bored being a cop. So I went back to school to make myself into something else: a sort of minor-league shrink. My job is to be around when you need to talk to somebody besides the kid sitting next to you, somebody who hasn’t spent his whole life in school. I’ve been outside, I know a few things. Try me.”
My friend Barb jogged me again and whispered, “Better than old Matthews, anyway.”
To tell the truth, Dr. Brightner did seem pretty okay. Interesting, at least. But this alarm kept dinging way back in my head someplace, warning me. Of something.
“I’m going to start out,” he said, “by asking a few of you to come by my office and spend a little of your free time talking to me so I can get a feel for this place. I need to know the kinds of things that are on people’s minds. And I’d like something to do until somebody flips out and really needs my attention.”
He took a piece of yellow paper out of his pocket. “I’ve got a list here,” he said, “which I will not read out loud. The people I’ve selected to be my first contacts on this planet—” Laughs. “—will get a note from me in the next day or two, inviting them to drop by.”
Clang. I knew I was going to be one of those kids.
Sure enough, after lunch I got a printed form delivered to me in French class. It read, “Please come to my office at for a talk at today. Brightner.” He had filled in the hour that my free period started that afternoon.
Phooey, I thought; that’s all I need, a friendly chat with a nosy stranger. I only had one thing on my mind, naturally, but you don’t go and discuss your magic grandmother with anybody at school. I hadn’t said anything to Barb, even.
My friend Lennie came drifting over as I left the classroom, and I put the summons in my pocket.
He said, “Hey, Val, could you do me a favor?”
“Sure, what?” I said.
He lowered his voice and moved a little closer to me, looking down at his shoes in embarrassment. “You know that thing I wrote for English? Petterick wants me to read it out loud to the class. I hate reading out loud. Could you read it for me?”
“Oh, come on,” I said, “you’re not that shy!”
He was, though. Lennie grew up with Spanish as his first language, and he had a little bit of an accent and would sometimes even stammer in English.
So I ended up reading his “Letters from Another World” (we were doing a unit on great travel-writing) for him in English. It was about some creatures called the wigpeople, and here’s a sample: “ ‘They sent her home from work because she said she was a wigman or wigwoman. There had been quite a problem in these parts about the wigpeople, did I ever tell you? Huge, huge wigs wandering under the copper beeches, and, Mabel, you can just see the funny toes in the striped socks sticking out through the ends of the hair.’ ”
The reading got started late, but it was a huge success and it actually took my mind off Gran and Mom. I really got into it and started clowning around and leaving room for the laughter, and what with one thing and another, I only got through about half of it.
Everybody wanted me to read the rest on Monday, and Mr. Petterick said he’d schedule it in. Lennie made me promise him personally that I would do it.
It was all very exciting and gratifying, and it was the last real fun I was to have for what felt like forever.
Time for my appointment with the shrink.
He sat in the old, oak swivel chair with scars all over the wood. His desk, more scarred oak, was piled with file folders in different colors. He had a couple of magazines open in front of him, as if he’d been reading two articles simultaneously.
He was wearing a very sleek gray suit. I couldn’t help noticing his socks,
which were gray with an electric blue stripe down them, and his black, shiny shoes. This was no ordinary, shabby, poverty-stricken school staffer. I was impressed.
I sat down, put my bookbag on the floor, and braced myself for the usual exploratory questions. He smiled at me and asked me how I was spending the money that I had been stealing from my mother.
My jaw dropped, leaving me literally speechless for about a minute. That’s a longer time than you’d think.
The thing was, he was right. Lately, just now and then, I would sneak a quarter or two, or maybe even a whole dollar, from my mom’s purse before she got up in the morning. I would tell myself that a, it was payment for extra chores and b, as soon as I could I would pay it back anyway. Mostly I did my best to forget it each time it happened, which was not easy. I mean, my mom and I get along a lot better than most kids and their mothers, so why was I taking this stupid risk of spoiling it all?
Mind you, in third grade I went through nearly a year of telling the most outrageous lies, and then it stopped; and I never figured that one out, either. I guess it was just a phase, and maybe that’s what this was, too.
Anyway, filching quarters was not what I had expected to discuss with this guy Brightner. For one thing, how the dickens did he even know about it?
Into the ringing silence in his office I said squeakily, “What money?”
“The money you take out of her wallet in the mornings before she wakes up.”
“She told you that?” I said, playing outraged innocence over the pure panic I actually felt.
I was sure Mom hadn’t said anything to this guy about my pilfering, because she didn’t know about it herself. When my mother knows something about me that’s bad and is supposed to be a secret, like that I’ve been to an all-night movie instead of sleeping over at Barb’s or Megan’s where I’m supposed to be, she gets this sad, tired look as if she’s discovered I’ve been selling military secrets to Russia. She sits me down and starts to discuss my little deception very calmly and openly, and then we scream at each other for a while about different interpretations of the words “trust” and “privacy.” In the end we work out some kind of return to normal.
There had been no such scene about missing money, though. Besides, Dr. Brightner was brand-new. There hadn’t been time for Mom to talk to him.
But if she hadn’t told him about the money, how did he know? My mind raced.
Dr. Brightner read it.
“No,” he said. “She didn’t tell me.” He let me think about that for a minute. I was feeling pretty sweaty by then.
“Have some candy,” he offered, leaning across the desk to shove a little plate of things that looked like tiny pink-, yellow-, and white-coated seeds at me. They smelled faintly like licorice. “You are kind of skinny for a girl your age. You’re not one of these self-starvers, are you?”
I shook my head wordlessly.
“I’m glad to hear that.” He sat back again comfortably and quirked his eyebrows up. “Are you saving up the stolen money to run away, by any chance?”
“Runaways screw up their lives,” I said with as much haughtiness as I could muster. “I’m not that dumb.”
“Of course not,” he said soothingly. “But you did run off once before. It’s in your school record.”
Well, I did once take a little time off for some urgent private business having to do with my grandmother and her magic. But nobody at school knew about that, and anyway, it was past and done with. What could it have to do with snitching change from Mom’s purse now?
He let me think some more, which I did, sort of. We are talking good and scared here. I had to stop looking at Dr. Brightner because I had this awful feeling that he was reading my brain through my eyes.
I glanced around desperately. On his wall was a poster, framed: one of those meatloaf cats sitting on a stool and strumming a guitar. The words underneath—with notes to show that the cat was singing them—were about how he loved to eat “mousies.”
I knew who today’s mousie was.
Dr. Brightner said, in that same rich, velvety drawl, “Maybe you were trying to get to Alaska that time, to see your father?”
I said, “My father? What for?”
“Do you miss your father?” Now he was starting to sound like a shrink, which was comforting, in a way.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not anymore. Not for a long time.”
“Sure you won’t have some candy?” he said. “Take two, they’re small. No calories. No? Suit yourself.” He grabbed the dish and popped a handful of the colored seeds into his own mouth. They crunched in his teeth. “A girl should have a father. Don’t you think so, Tina?”
My name is Valentine, or Val for short, and I did not appreciate this guy using my baby-name that I don’t use anymore. It didn’t seem worth the effort to make a fuss about it, though. I was in a lot more trouble than that here.
He went on, “I think you and I and some older member of your family need to sit down together and talk about what happened when your father left. Maybe someone who wasn’t directly involved but who was around and remembers how it was. Someone who could help us straighten things out.”
“What things?” I said.
“Oh, this and that.” He cocked his head consideringly. “You could bring your grandmother to see me. You do have a grandmother? I’m sure she knows as much as anybody about your family history. In fact, I bet she knows more than most people do about most things. I’d really enjoy the opportunity to have a chat with her.”
A quiver of irrational fear went through me. I mumbled, “I don’t know where she is.”
“Don’t you?” he said. “You’re sure?”
“Well, sure I’m sure! She was in a retirement home in New Jersey, but she ran away. Nobody knows where she is.”
“That’s a pity,” he said. He went very still, which felt weirdly menacing. Black darts seemed to flash out of his eyes at me. I had trouble breathing, as if his black looks were poisoning the air.
I couldn’t think. All I wanted to do was get out of there. I grabbed my books and gabbled something about having to go study for my next class.
He got up and walked around his desk and around me, and he opened his office door for me, very ceremoniously. “Of course; but you’ll let me know if you hear from your grandmother, won’t you?”
I sidled out past him, smelling the faint cloud of licorice that hung around him. All the way down the hall I could feel him gazing thoughtfully after me, and what he was thinking I didn’t want to know.
What had I ever done to this guy?
The rest of the day ground along the way a school day does. I convinced myself after a while that nothing special had happened, that I was under a strain and had sort of freaked, that’s all.
Still, I cut drama club—I’d had enough drama for one day, thanks—and went home fast instead of hanging around outside with my friends or going for a soda.
Mom wasn’t there. She’d left a message on the answering machine for me.
“Valli, I’ll be late for dinner. The school psychologist called and asked me to see him. I hope this isn’t going to lead to a showdown between you and me, which is the last thing either of us needs right now. Don’t forget to pick up the clothes at the cleaners.”
Dr. Brightner wanted to talk to my mom? About what? The stealing, of course! Good grief, as if she didn’t have enough on her mind already! I was stricken with guilt, not to mention sheer miserable embarrassment.
Maybe he would explain to her that lots of kids steal cash from their mothers at a certain stage. Maybe there was even a technical term for it among psychologists so they didn’t have to lay it out to each other all over again every time they got together to talk about their victims behind their backs.
Or maybe he and Mom knew each other already, somehow, and she had in fact told him about the stealing and now that he’d met me, he wanted to make a report. There was nothing so terrible about that. Why did the whole thing make me fe
el so itchy?
Because my instincts are good, that’s why, and in my heart I already knew that one way or another, this guy was bad, bad news.
3
The Claw
THROUGH THE WINDOW at Kress’s Old-Fashioned Cleaning I could see that the place was empty. There was just the long bare counter across the back half of the room, and the winding rack of clothes hanging in their plastic sleeves, and the old-fashioned cash register with the curlicues on it in polished brass, and an open copy of Vogue.
Probably Mr. Kress was in back. He prided himself on doing all his cleaning and pressing on the premises. There were prints of old New York on the walls. He kept the lighting low and mellow, which meant you had to squint to see that the Vogue was five months out of date, or that he hadn’t gotten the stain out of your skirt, or exactly what he was charging for not having gotten the stain out of your skirt. These days when I spilled something in my lap, it was a major economic crisis.
Mom was of the opinion that Mr. Kress kept a crew of illegal immigrants working in the back room under sweat-shop conditions. This, she liked to point out (to me, not to Mr. Kress), would be the one really honestly old-fashioned aspect of his operation, the rest being pure, trendy hype. She said Kress’s was an example of the galloping gentrification that was eating our neighborhood.
I felt grouchy and tired. I wished I was back in the noisy, plastic, fluorescent Eco-Wash Dry Cleaning Available on West 74th Street, where they farmed out your dry cleaning to some enormous central cleaning outfit and you took your chances on whether you’d ever see your clothes again. They had closed and opened up again as The Olde Salte Seller, a gourmet kitchen shop decked out like a ship-supply warehouse. So Kress’s it was.
I opened the door and went inside.
“Mr. Kress?” I said.
No answer. The radio was playing very softly. And out of it came a voice that rooted me to the spot, as they say.
Dr. Brightner’s ripe, rich tones said, “But you have to realize, Mrs. Marsh, that she’s never really made her peace with her father’s abandonment of you both.”