Chapter 38
The elevators were back in service, and Tessa had to wait two cycles to crowd onto one of them, crammed beside weary and cranky hotel guests heading back to their floors. The aluminum rectangle smelled of sweat and shampoo and marijuana.
“So that’s it?” someone complained. “‘Sorry for your inconvenience, we’ve gotten the all clear’? Like we’re supposed to say, oh, no problem.”
“Better to be safe,” someone said.
“Better to get a good night’s sleep.”
A woman in a flowered flannel nightgown reached past her to poke the elevator button for her floor, and Tessa saw the whole bank of numbers now lighted green.
They were going to stop on every floor, releasing the false-alarm hostages one by one, back to what was left of their night.
Not much of it, at now past five in the morning, and if she went to sleep—the doors closed her into the shoulder-to-shoulder elevator—she’d be beyond groggy and hopelessly disoriented, and no amount of caffeine or adrenaline could make up for it.
“They should give us our money back,” Harvard T-shirt said.
“They should give us our two hours back,” Flannel Nightgown retorted.
Tessa remembered a TV show she used to watch with her parents, she might have been eight, younger than Linny certainly, where performers would spin china plates on tall wooden sticks, one plate on each stick, a dozen plates at a time, racing back and forth to keep the fragile dishes from crashing to the ground.
Tessa had tried it once, using one saucer on a pencil, with no success, and was sent to her room.
Now she was better at it, metaphorically at least. She watched the numbers on the elevator climb.
But today might be the day all her plates crashed to the floor.
The doors finally opened on floor ten, and Tessa scrabbled for her room card. Why did they make these things small and flat and losable? But she found it, first try, and clicked open the door to her room.
Everything was as it had been before. She consulted her watch, trying to do math.
Her plane to San Diego was at nine forty-five, she had to be at the airport at seven forty-five.
It might take an hour in the Uber, but to be safe, she should leave at 6:00 a.m. Which meant get ready at 5:00 a.m. Which meant she was, as of now, late.
She pulled open the gauzy curtains of the window, watching the glare of the rising sun on a tall mirrored building outside, saw the battalions of emergency vehicles, lights off now, still gathered ten floors below. But she had to get ready.
“I know, I know, ‘you can sleep on the plane,’” she replied out loud as if to everyone who would surely advise her of that. Those people, DJ and Olivette and even Henry, still cozy in their East Coast beds, weren’t the ones who had to do it.
And now she had no idea how the shower worked, a twist of mysterious chrome and spigot on the white tile wall. She envisioned water spewing, dousing her hair. She yanked the handle, and stepped out of the way.
Out the corner of her eye she noticed a reflection in the bathroom mirror.
A flash of metal.
Of gold… what?
The metallic box of Hammond’s candy was now on the bathroom drainboard.
The red ribbon was missing. The top was off, and upside down on the counter.
Printed inside was an annotated diagram of where each piece was located in the box.
Cream, caramel, toffee, nougat. Chocolate-covered cherries; their fragrance unmistakable.
She stared at the candies, the water spraying out behind her, and felt her back get wet, but did not move.
Every one of the chocolates had been stabbed. Or smashed. Or pounded, as if someone had taken a knife or a fist or a hammer and intentionally, intently, destroyed them all. Ruined them, one by one.
And left them for her to see.
There were moments, Tessa knew they happened, pivotal moments, when some line was crossed, those never-going-back, indelible, life-altering moments when choices were offered and decisions were made, and the road she’d travel by was selected.
She knew that now. But not back then. So long ago, but always so nearby.
The two girls had been alone in the house that afternoon. Even then, Tessa understood her mother was trying to bond them; to connect Theresa, her “misfit,” with the only daughter of her mother’s newest boyfriend.
Make her like you, Tessa’s mother had instructed, leaning toward her lighted mirror, applying her mascara.
If she likes you and her father likes me , our future is secure again.
He needs a wife now, remember. It had felt wrong, that kind of adult talk, but even then Tessa had felt her mother’s loneliness and fear, her antipathy to being a single woman struggling with the burden of a preteen child.
And Tessa did honestly admire the mayor’s daughter, a high school sophomore, who didn’t complain about babysitting for her, who seemed fearless and brave and beautiful, and was kind, even to the younger awkward Tessa.
That day, she’d left Tessa downstairs to read on the living room couch while she went up to her room, silver Walkman in her ears; to plan her high school’s Women’s Equality Day, she’d explained.
“We can be whatever we want,” she’d pronounced.
“Never forget it.” Tessa hadn’t really understood that, but had pretended to, because she so yearned to be just like her someday.
But even right then, on their own but together in the mayor’s unfamiliar house, she felt like she’d been given the gift of a perfect older sister.
Tessa was a little hungry, because her mother had forgotten about lunch.
But Black Beauty, in her book, was hungry, too.
When the doorbell rang at the mayor’s house, Tessa, startled, had looked up from her reading.
Poor Ginger the mare had been telling Beauty how men are cruel and have no feeling, and “there is nothing that we can do, but just bear it.” And it seemed so real, like a movie, and so very sad.
She’d hesitated, waiting, but no footsteps came from upstairs.
She remembered the Walkman. Tessa trotted to the door, she remembered it so profoundly now that it made her heart clench to relive this, understanding the freedom she was about to lose.
Don’t open the door to strangers , how many times had her mother told her that?
And this wasn’t even Tessa’s own house. But as she looked through the peephole, she saw the man, in a tie and a suit, looking like somebody important.
She pulled open the door, but left the chain.
And then didn’t know what to say. She could almost hear her own tentative voice.
“Hi.” She’d been holding her book, one finger marking the page.
“Hi,” the man said. “You must be Theresa. Your mother told me you’d be here. And that you were reading Black Beauty .”
“Do I know you?”
“Of course,” the man said. “I work with your mother’s boyfriend. I’m what they call an advance man. I arrange events. Like the one the mayor is attending right now. With your mother? Did she tell you?”
“Yes,” Tessa had said. That seemed right.
“Good, good, good,” the man had said, nodding approval. He pointed past her. “I need to run upstairs,” he went on, “to the mayor’s desk, and get his folder with his speech in it. You can’t believe how angry he is at me, Theresa. I forgot his speech. So two seconds. I’ll go get it.”
Don’t open the door to strangers, her mother’s voice, so loud in her head. But this wasn’t a stranger. “I’m not supposed to open the door to strangers.”
“Of course,” the man said. “Absolutely true. Smart girl. But then, I’m not a stranger.”
Tessa had paused, considering this. That’s exactly what she’d thought, too.
She heard an ice-cream truck go by, the ice cream man, jingling out what she now recognized was ragtime.
She remembered the bright pink rhododendrons blooming in the mayor’s front yard, and on Buckeye Street a boy riding no-hands on a bicycle toward the ice cream man.
She remembered the birds, too—pretty-pretty-pretty, one was singing. Pretty-pretty-pretty.
That day had ruined cardinals for her.
“I… I suppose,” she’d said. But hadn’t opened the door. And was gratified when the man’s face seemed so approving. He looked nice, and had a briefcase.
“You’re so helpful,” he said. “You are such a good helper, Theresa. Thank you so much for helping me, because you know, it’s not good when the mayor is angry.”
Tessa didn’t, but she remembered how she felt when her mother was angry with her, and that was not good.
“In fact, why don’t you run and get a Popsicle,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “And then come right back, and by then I’ll be gone. If you let me in, I’ll give you the money to buy it.”
Was it okay, to let him in? But she was a little hungry. And all she wanted in the world was that Popsicle. She could imagine it, she could taste the sweet, cherry-red deliciousness, pretending that her Popsicle was lipstick, staining her lips and making her pretty-pretty-pretty, too.
The man pointed to the ice-cream truck. “Uh-oh. He’s getting ready to leave,” the man said. “Here. Better run.”
And he had given her five whole dollars.
She remembered that; the smooth promising touch of the crisp bill, and the clink of the chain as she opened the door, how she’d dropped Black Beauty onto the checkerboard hallway floor, and how the sun had hit her face as she ran down the front steps toward the tinkling music.
She’d returned, with half of her cherry Popsicle eaten and the rest melting, sticky red dripping on one tanned hand; her other hand holding a second Popsicle, an orange one, the one she’d bought for the mayor’s brilliant daughter.
But Annabelle—and the man—were gone.