The Double Hearth smelled of bacon and coffee, and there was a fire going in the bigger of the two fireplaces when Carole got back. A group of girls was waiting at the long tables for the kitchen to open up. They stared when she walked by them. She looked like hell, and there was no mistaking that she’d been out all night. After she passed, they laughed.
Upstairs, all she could think was that she had to get into a shower, to wash every molecule belonging to Eddie Lindbaeck off herself and get rid of the smell and the taste in her mouth. She had to wash her hair, scrub her ears, and brush her teeth. Then she’d know what to do.
The bunk room was crowded with girls running around in long underwear and rollers, wriggling into stretch pants. Carole’s and Naomi’s bunks were the ones at the end. Both were untouched, the blankets and sheets still pulled tight over them. She peeled off her black slacks, her yellow sweater, and her underwear and stuffed them between her bunk bed and the wall so she wouldn’t have to see them again.
She rummaged around in her suitcase for her bathrobe, pulled it out. An envelope fluttered from the sleeve. Inside there was a ten-dollar bill and a note. “From Daddy and me,” it said. “A little fun money for you. Love, Mom.” Tears wet her face, and she crawled onto the lower bunk, her face to the wall, and sobbed, her whole body shaking. Somebody touched her shoulder, and she jumped.
“Sorry,” a voice said. A girl’s voice.
“Go away.” She was so afraid people already knew her secret.
“You homesick or something?” the girl asked.
Carole didn’t answer, and the girl left. She waited until the dorm quieted. It seemed like forever until everybody had gone downstairs to breakfast and she could sit up and look around. The place looked as if a bomb had hit it, stuff everywhere. She made her way down to the shower room, stepping over clothes, shoes, bedding. There were four shower stalls, each with a pink plastic curtain. A girl was toweling herself off. One of those slender girls she couldn’t stand, with their sleek, shiny hair.
“Hi there,” the girl said.
Carole glared.
“You feeling better?” It must have been the girl who saw her crying. Same voice. She was older than Carole, probably in college or something. “Look at this.” The girl hoisted her foot up onto the sink and motioned Carole to look at something. “Boot burn. Worst I ever had.” There was a chapped patch on the girl’s shin, just above her ankle, scabbed over. Carole couldn’t understand why it mattered about her shin. The girl put her foot down and stood there, hands on her hips. “You’ve been through the wringer, haven’t you?”
“I’m fine,” Carole said. Naomi would have done a job on this one. On the accent in particular, which was one of those top-drawer jobs that always sent them both right over the edge laughing. Her hair was auburn. “Please, just leave me alone,” Carole said. The color reminded her of Rita’s hair, the hardness of the skull beneath.
“Some of the guys up here can be real jerks,” the girl said. “Especially the ones from Dartmouth.”
“I’m sorry. I just—” Carole draped her robe and towel over the rod outside the shower stall, turned on the tap, and stepped in. It was a good strong shower with plenty of hot water and plenty of force. The girl was still talking as though she could be heard over the running water. Finally there was silence. Carole washed between her legs, trying to get the soap up into herself, to flush out Eddie Lindbaeck. The night had left her with stinging sores. Her mother always said if the cure didn’t hurt, it wasn’t a cure. She scrubbed with a washcloth until her skin was red. She washed her face, inside her mouth, then lathered her hair. When she got out of the shower, the girl was gone. She dried herself off hard with a rough towel. There was someone in one of the other shower stalls. She wrapped a towel around her hair, put her bathrobe on, and waited. Maybe Naomi. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten so far ahead of her on the road. “Is that you, Nay?”
Naomi peered out of the shower stall, holding the curtain up. Her bony face was white and her eyes oddly small without makeup. “Boo.”
“That’s not funny.”
Naomi shrugged.
“Oh, Nay. What if anybody saw?”
“We could hardly see each other, for Christ’s sake.” Naomi came out of the shower, toweling off. Carole was surprised by how angular and small her body was and looked away. She didn’t want to think about bodies.
“What if they find her?”
“How can they? Eddie said she doesn’t have any family. He knew her from before, from other times he’s come up here. She lives by herself. He says there’s no way anybody can connect you with her.”
“Him either,” Carole said. “Or you.”
Naomi bent over to dry her hair. “I’m not exactly the one who got rough, Carole. Not that I won’t stick up for you or anything, but come on.”
“He invited that woman. He knew her.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“No, but I thought we were only supposed to—”
“He told me what happened.” Naomi righted herself with a whip of wet hair. “He said you probably didn’t do it on purpose. It was just because you’re, you know, big and all. You must not have realized—”
“Not you too,” Carole moaned. “Please don’t say that.”
“He said you were all over her.”
“Naomi, I mean, did you know about her? Oh, Nay, he got all scary and he knew all that stuff about my family. How could he know all that? Oh, God, Nay, you didn’t tell him, did you?”
Naomi stuck out her lip and shook her head. “He said he kept trying to stop you, Carole. You were this crazy woman. You pushed her.”
“No. It didn’t happen that way.”
“What do you remember, then? You’ve got to remember. Like exactly. Every minute.”
“I only remember bits and pieces.”
“He said you were jealous.” Naomi made a face. “That when he wasn’t paying attention to you every minute of the time, you got mad. You were pretty drunk. Is that true?”
“No! I just—”
“I want to believe you. Honest. But, you know, you don’t remember,” Naomi said. “And he does.”
Carole moaned again. “Oh, Nay, if only I’d left when she came. If only I hadn’t ever come up here in the first place. Oh, God, what were we even thinking?”
Naomi looked at Carole’s reflection in the mirror. “If nobody talks, you don’t have anything to worry about. And nobody will. Eddie won’t. I won’t, and you sure as hell won’t. The end.”
“I’m going to ask the guy at the desk when the next train goes. We can get a taxi.”
Naomi turned. “We can’t just leave.”
“Just us. You and me. We’ll make up some excuse. Pretend to be sick or something. All I know is I have to get out of here.”
“Eddie said to act like everything is normal. Like nothing happened. We can’t all go checking out. It’ll look really weird.”
“Eddie isn’t the boss of us.”
“He’s a lot older than us,” Naomi said. “He knows things. Anyway, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Daddy and Elayne are away, and the little prick at the door is under orders not to let me in. They said.”
“You could stay at my apartment.” Carole noticed something in the way Naomi wouldn’t meet her eyes. She remembered again the way Eddie’s and Naomi’s shadows had come together in front of the cabin. “Are you going to see him?”
“Maybe.” Naomi looked back into the mirror.
Carole felt a spasm in her gut. It had been a kiss.
Until yesterday she would never have considered getting on that train and leaving Naomi behind. But yesterday was already a million miles away. Now she was alone.
On the train from Stowe back to New York, a man named Tom sat down next to her and started talking. He was divorced, he said, and he went to Stowe all the time. How about that skiing? He jabbed her in the side. Carole let him talk. She barely answered any of his questions, but it didn’t seem to matter. He went on about his job. He worked on Park Avenue in the Fifties, something also about the window washers that he thought was funny or frightening. He wanted to know things about her too. What year in school she was. She said she was at Vassar. And what was she studying? She made it up as she went along. Medieval history. Maybe pre-med. She had another year to decide. She gave little fragments of answers here and there that kept him going on and on about himself. A week ago she would have given real answers to all those questions. She would have felt an obligation to explain things carefully. But everything was different. Now it seemed important not to let anyone know who she really was, and the only way to do that was to lie about everything.
The ride went by like that, a blur of fatigue, bad dreams, and Tom suggesting maybe they could get together sometime for a drink. Did she ever get away from school during the week? In New York? She said her name was Celia and gave him a phony telephone number. For the first time lying wasn’t hard at all, and he believed everything she said.
As the train came in to Grand Central, she pulled her suitcase from under the seat and righted it, handle up, and ready to go. “I’d like to see you,” Tom said.
“Okay.” He’d never find her. She could say anything.
“Great.” He put a hand on her knee and patted it.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I was just—”
“I said don’t.” Her voice was way too loud. People stopped what they were doing and turned to look. Calm down, she thought. Nobody knows. Tom held up his hands in surrender. He was looking around at people on the train as if to say, “Beats me. I didn’t do anything.” The train lurched to a halt, and Carole bolted, pushing past Tom, through people in the aisle. Somebody lost his balance. Somebody swore at her.
She took the subway to Fifty-ninth Street and walked three blocks to her building, skis and poles clattering and shifting. She hadn’t let her parents know she was coming home. She hadn’t dared. She’d decided to wait until after she got to New York, thinking it would be easier then, but here she was, coming into the lobby, getting on the elevator, where she experienced a brand-new horror. She’d only that moment remembered that she was going to need a reason for being home so early. She might have walked in the door, and they would have asked right away why and she wouldn’t have been prepared. How could she not have thought of this until now? Until she was almost there. It was terrifying. There she’d been lying through her teeth to that guy on the train without a single thought as to what she was going to say when she walked in the door.
Naomi always said the deal with lying was to keep it simple. It was scary, though, because Carole had never lied to her parents. She’d fudged plenty, but that was different. Like broaching the subject of going to Stowe, how she’d told about the ski lodge and how it catered to high school kids and ran a shuttle bus to the mountain every day. Her mother checked it out. She called the Double Hearth and found out that no liquor was allowed, that they locked the doors at night, and that there were dorms on separate floors. One for boys and one for girls. Her mother just assumed the rest—that Carole was going to be on that bus, asleep in the dorm at night, and learning to ski during the day. Just thinking about the Double Hearth made her all weak again. She stood in the vestibule. Diarrhea, she decided.
When she opened the door, there were voices. Many of them. She left her skis and suitcase in the hall. In the living room her parents were having cocktails with people. She knew the sounds by heart. They’d been the background noise of a lifetime, her parents’ cocktail parties. Without even looking, she knew the women would all be sitting on the low living-room furniture, their legs elegantly crossed, the men standing and talking in little clusters. But she was glad. Her mother would be too busy, too distracted, to grill her about what had happened. She hesitated long enough to find her mother in the crowd. Her back, exposed almost to the waist in her black dress, was to Carole, and she was leaning in to some man with an intimacy that said she’d had a little too much to drink. Good, Carole thought as she slipped down the corridor to her room. They’d put fur coats on her bed. There was a pile of them, black and gleaming. She lay down, feeling the soft, perfumed fur against her face, breathing in the smoky scent. She listened to the distant sounds, the bursts of laughter. She knew who the people were. The partners in her father’s law firm, their expensive wives. The Iveys, the Morrises, the Whites, all tuxedoed and slick, the women in their stiff coifs. Probably some of the clients too. It was the usual crowd of important people tonight, people her father needed to impress.
There was a metal tick of high heels on the marble floor. The door cracked open, and her mother was there. She was large and soft-looking, her plump cleavage showing in the black dress. She stood in the door staring, uncomprehending. “What on earth? What in the world? Carole!”
Carole buried her face in the fur.
“What on earth?” her mother said again. The bright inflection of her voice, like an actress’s in a TV comedy, was more evidence that she was on her way to being drunk.
“I got diarrhea up there,” Carole said. “Bad.”
“Oh.” Her squeamish mother was clearly taken aback by the suddenness of the word. “And you just came home? My lord, Carole.” Her mother sat on the side of the bed, leaned over, and put a cool hand on Carole’s forehead. “Do you have a temperature?” She paused a moment and withdrew her hand. She opened a blanket, shook it out, and stood to spread it over Carole, a gesture that must have happened hundreds of times before, her mother, smelling of liquor, covering her with a blanket, stroking her hair. It used to feel so safe.
“I might barf,” Carole said.
Her mother made a sudden gesture to save the furs, reaching around and under Carole, gathering them up in her arms. She stood in the doorway, the furs spilling over. “I can tell them something’s come up.” She hoisted the furs to indicate the people out in the living room.
“I’ll be fine,” Carole said. Her mother’s pretty face soured with indecision. “Really. If I need you, I can call the restaurant. Where are you going?”
“The Sign of the Dove.” It was the restaurant Eddie had mentioned, and Carole shuddered at the memory of all he knew. “Oh, my. Chills?” her mother said.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Well, if you think …” Her mother’s voice trailed off.
“I think.”
The sounds rose and fell as people put on their coats, used the powder room in the hall, and finally left. Carole took a shower in her parents’ bathroom, with her mother’s tough little nailbrush, which she used to scrub and scrape her skin almost raw. She let the hot water sluice over her. Her skin was chapped, the pain comforting. When she finished, she dried herself and didn’t put lotion on. She wanted her skin and everything that might be on it to dry and flake. It was something she’d learned in biology in the tenth grade. That the body creates all new cells every seven years. At some point there wouldn’t be a single cell in her that was there right now. Already there were new ones forming. Old ones dying and falling away. Already she was becoming someone else.
But how would she ever survive what was happening now in her mind? Now that she was home, there was nothing to keep the million nonstop memory fragments from eating her alive, the images and sounds from the night before, a constant screen of moving darkness shot through with atrocious pale scenes of snow, of night, of Rita’s slick skin. She’d killed her. She’d broken her neck. The cold certainty shocked her time after time, and she wondered how she would ever quiet her thoughts enough to go forward. She would have to believe whatever she said, even if it was a lie. She understood that implicitly. If she didn’t believe it herself, nobody would. Diarrhea. It was simple and familiar. It was a subject her mother would not press for details about. She clutched at her abdomen, willing herself to remember the train ride differently. I sat in the row next to the toilet. The smell was awful, but I didn’t dare get too far. The train rocked a lot. The door kept banging.
She backed up, dispatching the night in Stowe in case they asked. I had the lower bunk in the dorm, next to the wall. I hardly slept because I felt so bad. The story was effective because she needed to generate nothing more. The man at the morning desk helped me get a taxi to the train. Naomi wanted to stay and ski. And anyway, her daddy and Elayne are out of town. It was amazing how easily you could fit lies into the truth, the truth into lies.
In the morning her mother came bustling in, sat on the bed, and put a cool hand to Carole’s forehead. “You feel okay, but do you feel okay?” Her mother frowned and then laughed, her soft face lighting up with her own little joke.
Carole sat up. “Yes.”
“I don’t think we need to call doctor, do you? Just a little bit of rest should do it?”
“The doctor.” It drove her crazy, the affectations her mother had picked up, as though they made her sound more cultured or something.
“So you’ll be what, staying in bed today? Do you think?”
“I guess,” Carole said. “Did the paper come?”
“Your father’s reading it.” Her mother’s hands fidgeted in her lap. “I’ve made some plans for this week,” she said. “I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you would be here.” She rolled her eyes. “Luncheons. Shopping.” She sighed. “I’d give my eyeteeth to be staying home with you.”
“It’s fine, Mom.” Carole was grateful that her mother had no spine. It was safer to be alone. There was less chance that she’d slip and say something.
Left alone in the apartment, she padded around barefoot, from her bedroom and into the wide dark foyer with the gloomy ancestor prints. Four bigger-than-life old men with wispy beards and faded ceremonial robes peered down at her without expression. Her mother was so proud of them. She had bought them at auction for a fraction of what they were worth, and if she ever decided to sell them again, she’d make a killing. They were always a conversation piece, and Carole was sure her mother had talked about them last night to whoever would listen. “So stately,” her mother liked to say. “So inscrutable.” Carole winced every time.
At the end of the foyer was the living room. It had dark Persian rugs laid out across the floor, left over from the people who had owned the place before. “Exquisite taste,” Carole’s mother liked to say of them. “Very cultured people.” They’d also left some of their mahogany furniture and the heavy drapes along the wall of windows. Against this stuff, their own furniture stood out like a sore thumb. Naomi could tell the difference the first time she’d seen it. She’d picked out every piece that they’d had in Ridgewood. “Yours is the country stuff,” she had said.
Carole glided around the room, touching things, trailing her fingers across the tabletops, and sitting in the chairs and couches. She almost never came in here. It was the formal room, used for parties, and she hadn’t ever sat in some of the furniture. She liked the den better. Small and cozy, it had only the furniture from Ridgewood—the big leather chair her father liked and the couch covered brightly in red and yellow. The newspaper lay on the table beside his chair. She spread it out on the coffee table and went through it page by page, her hands trembling as she searched for items from Vermont. But there was nothing. Emboldened, she went through it again, this time studying the weather map, which showed cold and snow in Vermont, a drop in temperature. She refolded the paper and replaced it on the table.
She headed down the other corridor, to her parents’ bedroom. It had the same dark paneling as the rest of the rooms, but it got more sun and the drapes were always pulled, so it seemed lighter. She lay down on her parents’ bed. She’d been in this room the night she got her acceptance to Vassar. They all had. But she’d been sitting in the armchair, and her parents had sat side by side at the end of the bed, facing her.
It was after they’d come home from Giovanni’s. Her parents were both sort of drunk, and her father had gotten all grandiose and said that when it came time for her to go to Vassar, he would have his secretary, Miss Palmer, establish an account. He would fund the account, and Miss Palmer would send the invoices directly to Carole at school, and she’d be responsible for paying her own bills.
None of the girls at Spence handled money. It was almost unseemly. But that was where her father broke with those other people, he explained. He wanted to teach her the value of a dollar, and this was the way he would do it. Carole remembered how he’d taken her mother’s hand. “We have every faith in your ability to manage very well,” he’d said. He’d brought out the family checkbook, a big ledger with three checks to the page, and showed her how they entered each check on the little stub at the side, how they made a notation about its purpose. He showed her bank statements, how they reconciled the statement against the stubs in the book. She’d been floored by the amount of money passing through the account. She’d had no idea.
The room was warm, and she fell asleep only to be startled awake by a dream. A large coyote dug in the snow exposing a dark mouth and eyes, a patch of hair, attracting other animals that circled and ripped at Rita’s body, darkening the snow with blood, dragging a thigh here, part of the torso there.
She sat up, disoriented and sweating, to the distant sounds of her parents’ voices from the kitchen. She tiptoed through the apartment to see if they were talking about her. From the dark dining room she could see into the kitchen through the pane of glass in the door. Her father sat with his drink and the evening paper, and her mother stood at the stove. Carole sat down at the dining room table, which was already set for dinner, and strained to hear. What if they knew everything and were just waiting for her to confess? But it was quiet except for the sounds of pots and pans. The door flew open, and her mother called “Dinner” before she saw Carole sitting in the dark. “What on earth?” she said.
“I was just coming,” Carole said.
The dining room table had also been left by the previous owner. The son had done his homework on it or something and pressed down too hard with a ballpoint pen so it had marks on the surface, and the people hadn’t wanted to take it with them. Her father sat at one end and her mother at the other, like people in a New Yorker cartoon, and she was in the middle. She was expected to pass the butter and salad by getting up and bringing it to one of them or the other instead of scooting it down or even handing it across like anybody normal would do. Her mother had made the corn and tomato casserole with hot dogs on top baked to explosion and then cheddar cheese dribbled over it. Usually Carole would eat three hot dogs, but tonight the first bite stuck in her throat.
I killed a woman.
Her father was talking about his day. He always talked about his day. Rattling off the names of people he’d seen and where he’d had lunch. She used to wish he’d talk about the trials. About the people he represented. She always wanted to know about that, even if it was just corporate law. But he said it was unethical to reveal certain details, so it was just better not to speak of it at all. That was the family philosophy on most things. They were bores. He told Carole and her mother about a house that Carl Morris had bought outside the city. Eighteen rooms on forty acres in Mamaroneck.
Her name was Rita.
Her mother envied people who had houses in the country. The only reason they didn’t was because they needed the money for Carole’s education. After Carole graduated from Vassar, they could spend their money how they wanted. Only four years from now. And anyway, those other people had family money, her father said. Inheritance. That’s what kept all those other people afloat. Not hard work like Conrad Mason.
I slept with that guy from Grand Central and then I slept with him and her both.
The conversation swirled around her. Did they always compare themselves to other people this way?
I’m a very big girl. Three hot dogs a night. I broke her neck.
“Now you take the Macys,” her father was saying. “They lived just the way we do until her father died and then they moved to that duplex.”
They must not have found her. If they had, the police would break down your door and take me away. Your precious Macys and Morrises would find out. You’d be ruined.
“Carole?”
She must be frozen solid by now.
“Are you all right?”
From their seats miles to either side of her, both of them were looking at her. Pig in the middle trying so hard to act normal, but not remembering what normal was anymore. “Just a little bit weak,” she said. “Think I’ll excuse myself.”
There would be no sleeping that night or any other, she would find out. Her mother came in to check on her, and she said she was fine, still a little wrung out, which seemed to satisfy her mother. After her mother left, Carole lay there. Rita’s warm body would have melted the snow at first and then frozen, would be welded solid to the ice sheath around her ice body by now. It would stay like that until April or even May, frozen solid, so the animals would leave it alone and nobody would find it. And then the terror of these thoughts overtook her, and she broke into an icy sweat and had to get up.
She went to the window to watch the Home for Unwed Mothers. It was a Catholic place, and in the day she’d see nuns in billowing black wool habits strut about. Pregnant girls hung out in front of the building talking to one another and laughing and smoking all the time. The building was very old and low, only five stories and made of darkened brick. When they had moved into this apartment, the real estate agent had sworn up and down the home was going to be demolished because it was old and an eyesore, and when that happened their property value would go up. But it hadn’t happened yet, and Carole wasn’t sorry. She liked looking into the windows at night, seeing the girls in their rooms. She wondered who they were. Who their families were. Where they came from. She used to wonder about the boys who had gotten them pregnant. She used to be in awe. It was sad, of course, but impressive too.
Only one of the rooms over there was lit. The rest were dark. A girl in pink sponge rollers was leaning out the window, blowing smoke. Carole could see clearly into the room where another girl was sitting on a bed. The girl at the window dropped her cigarette and watched it fall to the street below, then shut the window. Carole went to the kitchen for a No-Cal, and when she came back, two rooms were lit. Good. The bedroom and the bathroom, which was all stark white. She’d seen girls go into the bathroom lots of times and hide things in the toilet tanks. Now the girl in the rollers did that while the other girl stood lookout at the door. Probably it was a liquor bottle.
They must have heard something because they both stopped to listen, made a dash for the door, and turned out the light. A few seconds later they were back in their room, doubled over laughing. The girl in the rollers threw open the window and leaned out of it again. At the same moment the light went on in the bathroom and a nun in a white gown and long white hair was standing there, her hands on her hips. She flung open one stall door after the other until she came to the one where the girls had stashed the bottle.
“Hey,” Carole yelled. The girl looked everywhere but up. “Up here,” Carole stage-whispered. She pointed to the bathroom. “She found it,” she called out. “That old nun!”
The girl ducked back into the room, and the lights went out. A few seconds later the light went on and the old nun was inside the room, flailing around, getting them out of bed. The girls knelt on the floor to pray, got up, put on their bathrobes, and left. As she walked out the door, the girl in the rollers waved behind her back, like Grace Kelly in Rear Window.
Carole stood watching after the lights went off, intrigued by what had just happened. She turned from the window and paced the darkened apartment. The corridor to the living room to the den and the foyer. Round and round she went, creeping silently through one room after another. She wondered what might be happening. Wondering how they punished pregnant girls.
All that week, she roamed the apartment at night and slept away the morning. She read the newspapers, searching for items about Vermont. Finding nothing encouraged her, and she would watch Queen for a Day, The Price Is Right, and Search for Tomorrow. When they were over, hours had gone by. Sometimes she would dial Naomi’s apartment, in case she’d come back, but the telephone just rang and rang. She didn’t dare call Stowe because the charge would appear on her parents’ phone bill.
Her mother came and went each day. Before she ducked out, she told Carole where she’d be, what was in the refrigerator, and when she’d be back. Right after her mother told her these things, Carole couldn’t remember what she had just said. When the telephone rang, Carole was never able to say when her mother would be home.
On the Friday before school was to start again, Carole heard voices and laughter in the foyer. She clicked off the TV and was trying to figure out who it was when her mother and Aunt Emily burst into the den. “Carole, darling.” Emily gave her two little air kisses. “I was devastated to hear what happened. You poor dear.”
Emily was their only relative. She lived in Tarrytown with Carole’s uncle Jack. Carole wasn’t supposed to know about Jack’s money, but she did. He bought food that couldn’t be sold in the United States and sold it to foreign countries. Substandard meat, corn with bugs in it. It was disgusting.
As usual, Emily was dressed to the nines. She had on a green hourglass suit and one of those little fox stoles where each fox had the tail of the one in front in its mouth. Emily and Carole’s mother looked alike in a way. Both of them had very white skin and glittery dark eyes. But Carole’s mother was the beauty—more shapely than Emily, with her hair in a soft bun at the back of her neck. Emily was reed thin, her black hair teased and sprayed into a helmet. She wore too much makeup too, fire-engine-red lips and rouged cheeks.
“I’m better now,” Carole said.
“Emily just ducked in to pick up the ski clothes. Are they in your room?”
The panic ricocheted. She hadn’t checked the clothes. The night she came home she’d taken them out of the suitcase and stuffed them away in the closet, where she wouldn’t have to see them. There could be stains. “I was going to wash them. And send them to you.”
“I rather thought you’d have already—” Emily said. “Oh, never mind.”
“So where will we find them, dear?” her mother said. She was already heading for Carole’s room.
Carole ran after them down the corridor, trying to think of a way to stop them, but her mother was already opening the closet and looking in. “Oh,” she said. She picked up the suitcase. Under it, the parka and ski pants were all bunched up. Carole’s mother lifted the pants and parka and shook them out, but it was obviously hopeless.
“Well, that’s hardly the way to treat clothing that’s been loaned to you,” Emily said. “Or your own clothing, for that matter.”
Carole watched the clothes pass from her mother’s hands to Emily’s. Emily laid them on the bed, smoothed them, and folded them into neat squares. Then she tucked them into a shopping bag.
“And you never even saw the mountain.” Emily looked her up and down. “What a shame. It would have done you so much good.”
That night Carole was still awake at four, drifting through each room, her steps creaking lightly. Across the street, all the lights were out in the Home for Unwed Mothers. Only the stairwell lights were burning.
If she could just talk to Naomi. She dialed Naomi’s apartment, but still no answer. So she dressed and left the apartment by the back stairs. When she reached street level, she left the big gates in the alley open to the sidewalk so she’d be able to get back into the building without disturbing the elevator man. It was something she’d done since moving here because she couldn’t bear to make him come all the way up to get her. It didn’t seem right. She was only a girl, and he was an old man. That is so public school, Naomi had said when she told her. But she didn’t care.
She’d never been outside on the street before dawn, so it was a surprise to her, another world. It was quiet and slow. The streetlights changed from green to yellow to red along Lexington even though no cars were there to stop and go. An occasional car passed, but there were no people on the streets, just dim burglar lights in the stores.
Grand Central was a tomb. The tunnel to the main concourse was dark and hushed. Bales of newspapers were stacked on the floor in front of gated doorways, but none of the stores was open. She prowled the corridors, her footsteps echoing loudly. A couple was asleep on one of the benches, lying head to head. A drunk watched her from another bench. Overhead, the Kodak sign showed a snow-covered mountain and a pair of skiers looking out over the valley below them. The woman was glamorous and thin, without a care in the world. Her mother had pointed to the picture when Eddie had asked where her daughter was going: “Just like that.” Carole had been so embarrassed. She was about as far from that woman as anybody could be, and Eddie knew it. Maybe Naomi looked like that, but not Carole.
Naomi. She had to talk to her right now.
It was four-thirty, according to the big clock over the information booth. At the Double Hearth, the kitchen help would be getting ready for early breakfast, and if she said it was an emergency, she was sure somebody would get Naomi to the phone. She found a bank of pay phones and put in a lot of change, asked for information, then dialed the Double Hearth. A woman answered.
“I need to talk to one of the girls there, please.”
“Nobody’s up,” the woman said. “Are you crazy?”
“There’s been an accident,” Carole said.
“You sure she’s here?” The woman still sounded irritated.
“I can tell you the exact bunk,” Carole said. “At the end of the dorm, the top one.”
The woman let the phone dangle. It banged against the wall. In a little while footsteps approached and the phone was picked up.
“Who is this?” Naomi said.
“It’s me.”
“Jesus, Carole. What happened? What accident?”
“I only said that so she’d get you. I had to talk to you. What’s going on?”
No answer.
“Is he still there? Have you seen him? Did anybody find anything?”
“It’s four in the bloody morning.”
“I can’t sleep. I go to sleep and then I wake up two hours later and I can’t get back to sleep. I keep dreaming about her. Oh, Christ, Nay, what are we going to do?”
“We?” The nearby sound of a steel shade rolling up the newsstand was as loud as a shot in the empty station. “Where the hell are you, anyway?” Naomi asked.
“Grand Central.”
“I need a newspaper.”
“You stupid idiot,” Naomi hissed at her. “Go home and go back to bed. And act normal, for Christ’s sake, if it’s even possible. Don’t you think people will ask questions if you go running around New York at four in the morning? Use your head for once.” There was a long pause. “By the way, we went back there, just to check. It’s fine.”
“Went back?”
“Go home.”
“Is it okay?”
“It’s so okay we couldn’t even find it.”
“We? You mean you went there with him?” She didn’t dare say the name.
“Go home, Carole,” Naomi said, and hung up.
She set the receiver back into its cradle and went to the newsstand, where she bought a New York Herald Tribune and a Daily Mirror. Then she walked across to the Lexington exit and headed back uptown.
It was a shade lighter, and the sky glowed with the approach of day. Traffic was heavier now, and fast. She felt disoriented in the dawn, like being late for school, at large when everyone else was where they were supposed to be. She ran toward home, hardly stopping to check the streets before crossing, half wanting to be hit.
At the apartment, someone had shut the iron gate tight. Probably it was one of the maids coming in early. She peered through to the steel door. That too was flush against the jamb. Somebody knew. She looked around to see if she was being watched. Lights were on in the apartments across the street, and traffic was thick. Her parents would be up any minute. She watched the street, where the traffic now was just a blur ripping uptown. She could step into the street and end everything. A minute from right now. An impact so hard it would knock the life out of her and not even hurt. The thought was a comfort. All her worry lifted, and she was clearheaded. She wouldn’t do it. At least not now. But she would save it as a possibility. It would always be there, an option nobody else ever needed to know existed.
She walked around the corner to the canopied entrance, rapped on the glass, and waited. Heney came out of the mailroom at the back and squinted across, trying to figure out who she was. Once he recognized her, he hustled up and unlocked the front door.
“What would you be doing outside at this hour, miss?” he said with his heavy accent.
“Walking.” She got into the elevator and watched while he drew the outside door across and then the brass gate.
“Didn’t see you go out,” he said. He kept his eyes on each floor marker as it went by. The elevator stopped at her floor, and Heney jockeyed it around so the elevator floor met the vestibule floor exactly. “The back door’s not for you.”
“I left it open,” she said. “When I came back, it was locked.”
“I know,” Heney said, still not looking at her. “I locked it myself.” He was waiting for her to get off the elevator.
“My parents would kill me,” she said. She stepped off into the little vestibule outside her apartment door and turned to look at him.
He looked her in the eye. “They’d be right to,” he said and pushed the brass gate across between them.
When she walked into the apartment, her father was in the dining room with papers spread out across the table, still in his pajamas and bathrobe. He looked up at her over the tops of black-rimmed half glasses. She hated those glasses because he looked so much more scolding in them. “Carole?” he said, rising and meeting her in the foyer. “You were outside?”
She had the newspapers in her arms. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, showing him the papers. “I went out to get a paper.” Stick to the true parts, Naomi once instructed her. And this part was true. She had gone out and she’d gotten a paper.
“We get the paper.”
“But not these.” She heard the indignation in her voice, as though it was perfectly normal to be outside getting newspapers at four in the morning, and who was he to challenge her. She’d never spoken to him that way, and he was really startled. He stood and took a step toward her. He smelled of bed, slightly stale and musty, his hair sticking up in back. “Just because I never went out for papers before doesn’t make it wrong,” she said, feeling reckless, challenging him in a way she never would have dared before.
He seemed about to speak and then changed his mind. “It’s dangerous out there at this hour,” he said.
“Well, I made it.” She turned and went to her room, where she spread the newspapers out on her desk and went through them page by page and item by item. When she was done, she did it again to make sure. There were stories about murders in lots of places, but none about a murder in Vermont. It hadn’t been discovered. It might never be discovered. If nobody had missed Rita yet, maybe they wouldn’t ever.
She hiked up her sweatshirt and turned sideways to the mirror. She always looked a little slimmer that way. She slid her fingers into the waistband and found that it was looser. She smiled at this, but only her mouth moved. Her eyes wouldn’t follow suit. The man on the train that day. Tom. He’d thought she was a girl named Celia, pre-med at Vassar. The memory of that lie pleased her unexpectedly now. She’d done it automatically, without agonizing at all because he was a total stranger and it didn’t matter if he believed her or not. So it was possible to lie. Easy, even. And nobody was the wiser. She saw her lie to Tom as a sort of test run. Telling her father she’d gone out to get papers when she’d really been at Grand Central calling Naomi, and having him believe her—that was the proof.