“Mrs. Goldberg gave me those gloves,” I began. She was our neighbor, and although she was much too old to be my mother—I can’t remember a time when she didn’t seem old—she felt like my mother in ways my real one never did. There’s too much to tell about her and not enough. As I described her to Martin, my descriptions struck me as ordinary and flat, even clichéd, and Mrs. Goldberg and the feelings I had for her were none of these things. She fed me madeleines and fresh figs. She told me stories about her life in New York City and her husband, Gordon, with whom she’d fallen in love when she was eleven and he was seventeen.
We’d sit for hours in her bright attic looking at her carefully stored belongings, everything nestled in boxes or swathed in pieces of soft cloth. A painted fan, Venetian lace, four strings of luminous pearls, each with a clasp shaped like a different insect: a ladybeetle (her word), a dragonfly, a butterfly, and a bumblebee. She and her three sisters had each received one upon turning sixteen. There were albums of photographs and countless family portraits, some postage-stamp size, others larger than life. Mrs. Goldberg had magic in her hands, so that every object she touched was instantly rare and profound, an artifact from Atlantis or Troy.
And each object had a story attached—or not attached, but glowing delicately around it like a halo. Mrs. Goldberg’s stories were dense and rich with details, bristling with New York lights, wars, music and dance, travel, and even sex, although Mrs. Goldberg was not one of those adults who makes a big show of talking to children as though they were adults. When we talked, I felt singled-out and specific. “You see how this heel curves, Cornelia?” she’d say, placing a shoe in my hand. “Not made for hiking, certainly, but I walked for miles in these shoes, at Gordon’s sister Lizzie’s country house, the summer I turned nineteen.”
I’d never not known her, but my true friendship with Mrs. Goldberg began when I was eight, and even after I started college, I’d visit her once a month, at least. I loved her more than I needed her, but I did need her. Her life had been so splendid, so intensely and attentively lived, that connecting with it made me feel rich, excited, hopeful, even when I was at my most muddled and drifting.
The fog began to float in when I was in my last year of college—a barely perceptible haze, but it thickened over the years. Alzheimer’s, I guess, although no one, not my parents or either of her children ever said that word in my presence, and while I know how both futile and presumptuous it is to assign intent to nature, I envisioned the bad genes sitting on some remote arm of whatever tangled chromosome they called home and cursed them with all my strength. Impossible not to see malice in that particular disease attacking that particular woman, a person who was a receptacle, a living jewel box—if you’ll forgive the disconcerting metaphor—of so many memories, exquisite and surprising, regular Fabergé eggs of memory. Her children chose a perfectly nice assisted-living facility, tucked into a little bowl of a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains not far away, and because she couldn’t stand to sell her house, they didn’t. Her daughter Ruth called me in Philadelphia. “She wants you to help her choose some things to take with her. It can’t be much, though,” said Ruth. So I went.
It was a good day. Actually, it was a terrible day, but good insofar as Mrs. Goldberg’s illness seemed to recede a bit, enough so that we could glean from her Ali Baba’s cave, one terribly small box of treasure. She gave me the opera gloves just before I left. “They were my mother’s and then they were mine, and now they are yours, child of my heart,” she told me. A good day—a gift of a day—but brutal, brutal.
Martin patted my head. OK, he didn’t pat my head. A stroke is not a pat, and it was a stroke—two strokes actually, as though two were better than one, as though it were a two-stroke story. The truth is that, Project Drawing-Martin-Out notwithstanding, I’d almost forgotten he was there. So when I pulled away from him, really I jumped away from him, and stared at him. I was stung. Stung and desperate, even angry, and the three-headed, hangdog dog of a question just fell out.
“What breaks your heart? Has your heart been broken? Tell me. When has your heart been broken?”
I hope my tone wasn’t challenging, but I can’t promise it wasn’t. Or petulant or demanding, although, a demand is a demand no matter how you slice it. I hope it didn’t have overtones of “tit for tat,” which would’ve been awful. Plaintive, I’m quite sure it was plaintive. There’s an old Sheila E. song—stay with me, here—in which a woman is shopping for if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it lingerie, and I’m not entirely sure why I bring that up and very obviously shouldn’t have, but it has something to do with my question(s) to Martin. Do you see what I mean at all? Questions the asking of which erases the reason for asking, yes? Something like, “If you have to ask, no way are you ever getting the answer you’re looking for.” Or maybe more like, “If you have to ask that question in order to keep him, girl, he’s already gone.”
After the barely-there exasperation left his face, Martin recovered. He smiled, cupped my face in his hands. Tenderly, all charm, laughter gilding the edges of his voice, he said to me, “I guess I’ve been keeping it in cold storage. Saving it for you, C. C. Brown.”
He was as sweet and as giving as he could be. I still believe that.
What followed Martin’s leaving the next morning—a blithe leaving on his part, as he never suspected a thing—was a miserable forty-eight hours. I wore my bathrobe and shuffled around my house crying and consuming tea and hot soup and other types of invalid food. I opened books and shut them. I lifted the phone receiver and put it down. I remembered his voice and all the extraordinary things it had said to me. I listed on the couch, blown sideways by my own unhappiness, and tried to watch Meet John Doe because, despite what anyone thinks, no one does dark the way Capra does dark, and tried to remind myself that compared to everyone’s disappointment and isolation, my disappointment and isolation were puny, not even garden variety. The movie backfired on me, though, because, as in all Capra films, love saves the day, and what I was pretty sure of was that it was not going to save mine, not this time.
On Saturday morning, very early almost-morning, I woke up to an unearthly glow coming from the window next to my bed. Snow. Snow under streetlamps and a lightening sky. Bluish and clean and muting every edge. A day had never looked so new. “Silly girl,” I whispered to myself. “What is the matter with you?” How had I convinced myself that everything hinged on a single question? I’d blindsided him, caught him off guard. Shame on me. All wasn’t lost. All? Had I really thought that? Nothing was lost, not one thing.
I stood at the window, letting the relief wash over me. Then I took a shower, devoured an enormous breakfast, and walked to work in the snow.
It was going to be busy at the café, busy with holiday shoppers and out-of-town guests, but it wasn’t busy yet. Jacques, the not-discernibly-French college kid I’d hired recently, was late, but I didn’t mind. I couldn’t have minded anything. Bathed in radiance, walking in beauty like the night, I did all the setup, breathing in the fragrance of cinnamon and chocolate, pouring the thick white cream into pitchers. I greeted Bob the pastry guy like a long-lost brother, sang an aria over the croissants and fruit tarts, and when Hayes and Jose showed up, I gave them both beatific smiles.
Ten minutes later I was slicing lemons, and I glanced up. In front of me stood Martin Grace, looking exactly like himself. And standing next to him was a tiny, chestnut-haired apparition in an antique floor-length mink coat.
I blinked and shook my head to clear it—I really did—and then I looked at the tiny woman again. A child, a pretty little girl. She had the most remarkable expression in her eyes: fierce and furious and terrified and bottomlessly sad. No one would need to ask this girl if her heart had been broken.
I noticed the expression in her eyes before I noticed the eyes themselves. When I noticed the eyes themselves, I knew them in an instant. An unmistakable resemblance.
“Cornelia, this is Clare,” said Martin, smiling a little. Th
e girl began to tremble, and she lifted her chin.
“Clare Hobbes,” she said in a clear, proud voice, and then she burst into tears—exploded into tears. Long wails and deep, tearing sobs. Martin took the smallest step away. Hayes got up, signaled to Jose, and they walked out, their coffees still steaming on the table. The three of us were alone, two adults and one child. And because somebody had to, I ran over to Clare Hobbes and took her in my arms—we were exactly the same height—and I held on as hard and as well as I knew how.
10
Clare
Clare lay on her side on the guestroom bed in her father’s apartment, not sleeping, trying to imagine herself as a piece of driftwood. She tucked in her knees and circled them with her arms, pulling in tight, making herself small. She wanted every part of her body to be touching another part of her body so that she was aware of all her edges, all the places Clare ended and the rest of the world began. Float, she thought, drift, although she wanted not to think at all. She looked at the lamp on the bedside table, an object that never had to think a thought, that only was. Thinking, imagining, deciding, worrying—Clare was through with all of that. Drift. She even rocked a little on the bed, letting waves and swells undulate beneath her, carrying her wherever they would.
But even as she lay there becoming an object, letting go of everything, she knew it wasn’t working. At that moment, true letting go would mean falling asleep, which her body wanted desperately to do. But as she began to blur and grow heavy, to sink away into sleep, the old human girl Clare was suddenly right there, saying, no—saying, last time, I said I would never sleep in this place again and I won’t. Never.
Who cares about that? She tried to tell herself. Who cares anymore? Drift. Float. Let what would happen, happen. It did anyway, didn’t it?
But there were those words in her head, insisting on themselves. “No. Never. No. No. No.” Reluctantly, Clare sat up, and as she did, what had been a kind of undefined rustling and hum in another room became voices. Her father and his friend, that very small woman with the boy’s haircut who had hugged Clare as Clare cried.
Clare hated having done that, having bawled out loud like a baby in front of her father, but she couldn’t help it. The crying had happened the way everything happened now, like weather—a thunderstorm that hit, then rushed away. The small woman had kept her skinny arms wrapped tightly around Clare, even as Clare sank to the floor. When the crying ended, the woman helped Clare into a chair and, never taking her hands from Clare’s shoulders, gave some calm instructions to a tall, astonished-looking, shaggy-haired boy who must have entered without Clare’s noticing. Then the woman had crouched in front of Clare, looking Clare in the eye. “Are you ready?” she’d asked. After a moment, Clare nodded, and without another word, not even to Clare’s father, the little woman led Clare out the door, down the street, through the square, to Clare’s father’s building, and finally into his apartment.
They’re talking about me, Clare thought. And even though she wanted so much not to do it or anything else, silently Clare slid off the bed and walked down the hallway to hear what they were saying. She sat on the floor and rested her chin on a chaise made of leather and metal, a piece of furniture that Clare remembered from last time she was there. Then, back when she was a child, she’d thought it resembled a caterpillar. Clare sat like that, not hiding really. Her father and the woman were at the dining room table, facing each other. Clare could see the woman’s face, but not her father’s. If the woman had glanced in the right direction, she’d have seen Clare.
“These past few months, I’ve been learning how to read your face, Cornelia. It speaks a subtle language, that face.”
Cornelia. The name took Clare by surprise. She hadn’t realized she’d been thinking about the small woman’s name at all, but as soon as her father said “Cornelia,” Clare knew she had been expecting something else: Meg. Kate. Jill. Something short, like the woman and her hair were short, something snappy and take-charge. Cornelia. Long—three syllables or even three and a half—and old-fashioned. There was a character in Anne’s House of Dreams named Cornelia. She was Anne’s friend. This Cornelia was her father’s friend, and Clare wasn’t sure she wanted to know her at all. But if Clare ever decided to call her anything, Cornelia was a name Clare could use.
“Martin,” the woman—Cornelia—tried to begin. Clare decided it was all right to use the woman’s name inside her own head, where no one would know she was doing it.
“I was getting it, though, I think I was getting it. But I must be reading it wrongly now because I can’t find any anger in it. You have to be angry at me. Anyone would be.” His voice was low and serious. Clare thought he was right: Cornelia’s face was something, but not angry.
“Angry.” Cornelia said the word neutrally, as though considering it. She sat very still.
“For showing up like that, with her. This situation, I don’t understand what it is yet, but I know it’s a mess. And I know it’s not your mess, and now you’re in it.” Clare’s father reached across the table and slid his palm under Cornelia’s hand. He examined the hand for a few seconds and then said, “You were good with her, you know. Thank you for that.”
“Don’t thank me.” Cornelia’s voice seemed strained and her face tightened. “Do you think I mind that? Helping a little girl? Your daughter.” Cornelia spoke the word “daughter” as though she had just learned it, as though it were a foreign word she was working to get right. Clare saw Cornelia look down at their hands on the table. Then Cornelia took her hand back and sat up a little straighter in her chair.
“We’re talking about the wrong things, Martin. We’ll have to talk about me and us and whether I’m angry and all of it, but not now. What happened? What happened to Clare?”
“I don’t know very much. A girl called me early this morning—a spitfire of a girl, mad as hell. At me, I think. About what, I’m not sure. She’d come to clean and found Clare alone. All Clare would say is that her mother left.”
“What do you mean, ‘left’?” asked Cornelia.
“That’s it. Left. Clare wouldn’t say anything more than that. When I got to the house, this girl—Max was her name—she was waiting with Clare. Clare was sitting next to her on the sofa in that coat with her backpack on her lap, just sort of staring into space. Max walked out to the car with us, and for a minute there, I didn’t think Clare would let go of her hand.”
Clare noticed that Cornelia’s eyes were full of tears. “Poor Clare. Poor little scared girl,” but in a way that didn’t make Clare feel mad at her, even though she didn’t want pity.
“Max whispered to Clare and put something in Clare’s coat pocket. After that, Clare let go. She got in the car.”
“And did she say anything more about her mother? About what happened?
“She didn’t speak at all, and I thought it best not to push her. When I asked her if she’d had breakfast, she shook her head.”
“So you brought her to the café. To eat breakfast,” For the first time, Cornelia’s voice sounded angry or accusing, maybe, just a tiny bit, but when Clare’s father spoke again, his voice was regular, as though he hadn’t noticed the change.
“Yes. I thought maybe she’d like a croissant, some hot chocolate.”
Cornelia stared up at the ceiling and let out a breath. “Never mind,” she said. “Can you think of why her mother would have done this? Has she ever done anything like this before?”
“I really can’t say for sure. I don’t think so, but Viviana’s always been—”
Clare hated hearing him say her name. She stood up, then, and shouted, “No! She wouldn’t leave me. She didn’t mean to. Something happened to her.”
Cornelia pushed away from the table and stood up, knocking over her chair. ‘We should call the police, Martin!” She turned to Clare, “Did someone come and take her? She’ll be OK, I know she will, but you have to tell us. Did she just go out and not come home? Was she in the car?”
Clare froze,
trying to figure out how much to tell. She’d been keeping the secret for so long, and she didn’t even know these people—not even her father. She couldn’t trust them. But she couldn’t let them call the police.
“Don’t call the police. You can’t do that. No one took her. She was sick. She wasn’t herself. And she left. And I don’t know if she’ll ever come back. But you can’t call the police because she didn’t mean to do anything she did.” The words came out in a rush, and Clare saw Cornelia begin to walk toward her. Clare held up her hand to stop her.
Clare looked right at her father, who was still sitting at the table. “She was sick,” Clare said in an icy, deliberate voice. Cornelia looked at Martin, waiting.
“I didn’t know,” he said to Cornelia, lifting his hands in the air, as if to demonstrate their emptiness. Clare listened to him say it. He didn’t matter. He had never mattered, and he didn’t now.
“I want to go home now,” said Clare to Cornelia. “She might come back.”
Cornelia said, gently, “Do you think she will?”
Clare remembered her mother in the Land Rover, saying she was sorry in that sad, sad, final voice. Clare shook her head. She felt tears sliding down her cheeks, so she covered her face with her hands.
“Your father will go back to the house, and he’ll leave your mom a note,” said Cornelia. She was standing close to Clare now, but not touching her. Clare didn’t want to be touched. “That way, she’ll know you’re here and she can find you. But even if she doesn’t come back, we’ll find her. We’ll find her and help her get well.”
For weeks, Clare had worked hard to let go of hope, had been very stern with herself about giving it up, so, although she was tempted, she didn’t allow Cornelia’s words to make her hopeful. Still, Clare was glad Cornelia was there, saying those words to her. If Cornelia weren’t there, Clare would be alone, so when Cornelia said, “OK?” Clare nodded.