Every Secret Thing Page 11

  “Not always,” an old man muttered. “In California last week…” But no one wanted to listen to him.

  The police took their time getting there. They still had not arrived when Jake had the idea of searching the lower level, used primarily for storage and the board’s monthly meetings. “There’s nothing scheduled down there today,” the children’s librarian said, “and the room is usually locked when it’s not in use.” But it was something to do, a way to keep moving forward, a way to still the doleful voices in Miriam’s head, the ones predicting the end of life as she knew it.

  The three Rosens descended the stairs together, mother in the center, hand in hand. In the time it took to walk to the lower floor, Miriam saw every assumption she had made about her life torn from her. Twenty minutes ago, asked what she feared, she might have said that she hoped her children stayed away from drugs, that they would be spared cruelty, that they would go to good colleges and make happy marriages. Pressed to the outer limits of her imagination, she could have envisioned the horror of a sick child, or an injured one. But not a missing one and certainly not—but she couldn’t say it, even to herself. Don’t do this to me, she instructed God. Don’t you dare. Her nonobservant life—her so-so Seders, her refusal to fast on Yom Kippur—came back to haunt her. But even in utter despair, she could not vow to change, to love God more if he would bring her daughter back. She didn’t want to make a promise she knew she would forget to keep.

  “Mom—” It was Jake, his voice careful. “You’re muttering.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves in a small foyer. Miriam reached out and placed a palm on the double doors that faced them, the way you were supposed to do in a fire. The doors were cool to the touch. She pulled and they balked, seemingly locked. But she yanked on them again, and the sticky lock disengaged, opening to reveal an empty meeting space.

  Adrien was sitting quietly on the floor in a corner of the room, a picture book in her lap, other books scattered around her in a haphazard semicircle.

  “Baby,” Miriam said, running toward her, arms outstretched.

  Adrien frowned and sat where she was. “Not baby,” she corrected.

  “Why are you down here? How did you get here?” Miriam had pressed the girl so hard to her shoulder that she couldn’t answer until she wiggled around, freeing her mouth.

  “Lady said.”

  “What lady? One of the librarians?” Miriam indicated the staff members who had crept down the stairs behind her.

  Adrien studied them gravely, then shook her head. Because of her long amber curls and green eyes, she was used to admiring glances, but she had never had so many people watching her at once. She seemed to like it.

  “Gone,” she said, with a dramatic sweep of her chubby little arm. “Lady gone.”

  The police arrived as the Rosens were gathering their things. Miriam made a report only because she felt so sheepish. If she didn’t make a report, then she was a silly hysteric who had acted on groundless fears. A report made it true. She told the officer that she had left the baby under Sascha’s supervision—not to blame Sascha, she told herself, but to establish a record, in case it happened again. Someone had lured her daughter to that basement room, probably some dotty old lady. Still, she wouldn’t want another family to experience the panic she had just known. And there was the question of how the room had come to be unlocked, which seemed to bother the library staff even more than Adrien’s disappearance.

  “It hasn’t been used since the library board met there yesterday,” the children’s librarian kept saying, “and the library board is not inclined to be careless about such things.”

  “All’s well that ends well,” Miriam said, unashamed of the cliché. “I just want it on the record in case anything like this happens again.”

  The young officer studied Adrien for a few seconds.

  “Her shirt,” he said, “was it always on inside out?”

  It was only then that Miriam noticed the seams, visible on the shoulders of the long-sleeved T-shirt that Adrien had insisted on wearing despite the day’s heat. Yes, there were the grass-green machine stitches, which looked like little surgical scars. The pink plaid pants were on right side out, though, and the shoes were still tied in Miriam’s distinctive rabbit ear. She was glad, looking at those shoes, that she had developed this silly way of tying shoes. If her daughter’s shoes had not been removed, then her pants had not come off. If the pants had not come off…then Miriam never had to think of this again.

  Only she did. And when she did, she thought of the day as the knot on a piece of embroidery thread. The needle had poked through the muslin and was anchored in place by a strong knot, tight as a fist. But until it poked back through, creating that first small stitch, there could be no pattern. There was only a knot, a beginning, hidden on the other side of the cloth.

  Saturday,

  June 27

  11.

  “Where’s the baby, Mom?” Alice asked Helen at breakfast. She had the “Lifestyles” section of the Beacon-Light propped up on the sugar dispenser, turned to the comics and horoscope.

  “What?” Helen’s voice was sharp, her morning tone. “What baby? What are you talking about?”

  “The doll’s head, the one that used to sit in the middle of your cut-glass saltcellars. I just noticed it’s not on the shelf anymore.” Alice pointed her forkful of fried egg at the wall next to the kitchen window, where painted shelves held the things Helen had started and stopped collecting over the years—saltcellars, vintage salt and pepper shakers, cobalt blue glassware.

  “Oh.” Helen had a habit of touching her own face, her hair, her neck—not the usual pats and rubs that people used to put things back in place, but lingering strokes with her fingertips. She drew the skin of her forehead up and into her hairline, smoothing the furrows in her brow. “I got tired of it. It was too…precious. Like the time I nailed the old wedding dress to the wall. Remember that? The wedding dress on one wall, the black cocktail dress on the other.”

  Alice did remember. She had an even clearer memory of the shoes that Helen had nailed below the dresses, the white and black pumps. The white ones had been attached to the wall sole down, side by side, prim and proper. The black spike heels had been driven into the wall through the vamps, so the phantom wearer appeared to be spread-eagled. There had been a pair of long black gloves as well, thrown wide, as if a singer were finishing a song. Helen had told people it was an artwork titled Madonna versus Whore, Part I. Young as Alice must have been at the time—seven, maybe eight—she had understood there would never be a Part II.

  “Now that everyone else is doing stuff like that, it’s not so much fun,” Helen said on a yawn. She had slept late, as was her habit on Saturdays and Sundays, coming down at noon in her yellow silk robe, uncovered at the Dreamland vintage store years ago, back when most people were a little afraid to go down to that part of Baltimore. “I can’t run with the herd, you know.”

  Alice knew, for it was the type of thing her mother often said of herself, in different ways. Helen Manning’s interest in her own personality was inexhaustible. I am not a morning person, she might announce, almost startled by the insight. I have never liked sweet potatoes. I simply cannot wear that shade of off-green. But then, most people were like that. Alice was odd because she didn’t find her quirks interesting. She wasn’t even sure she had any.

  Still, she missed that doll’s head. It had been so unexpected, sitting there among Helen’s saltcellars. It was the old kind of baby doll, with lashed eyes and a rosebud mouth with a little hole, where a child could stick a bottle. Then, depending on how you held the doll, Helen had explained to Alice and her friends, the water-formula would flow out through the doll’s eyes or bottom. For a long time, Alice had assumed the head was one of the toys Helen had salvaged from her youth. Their house was full of Helen’s old playthings. But it turned out it was another flea market find, purchased because Helen found it interesting.

  �
��Anything in the paper?” Helen asked.

  “My horoscope says all eyes will be on me today—and that I’ll find something I misplaced.”

  Helen’s hand knocked her cup, and although it didn’t turn over, it sent a great slosh of coffee over the Formica table. Automatically Alice got up and grabbed a sponge from the sink, wiping up before the spill could lap the edges of the newspaper. As a child, Alice had found this table embarrassing, although her friend Wendy had insisted she considered it, and the entire kitchen, extremely cool. “It’s like the Silver Diner,” she had said approvingly, inspecting the old-fashioned sugar container, the tin signs advertising various ice creams, forgotten flavors such as Heavenly Hash and Holiday Pudding. “Or TGI Friday’s.”

  Wendy had not liked the living room, but then—neither had Alice. The furniture was fussy and uncomfortable, her grandparents’ castoffs. The walls had been kept a boring and now somewhat dingy white in order to showcase Helen’s real artwork, as she called it. These were bright oil paintings of animals doing housework. A dog making breakfast, a fox vacuuming, a duck changing a baby duck’s diaper. When visitors asked about the paintings, Helen always said they were ideas for a children’s book she had never gotten around to doing. Alice was glad the book never happened, because the paintings scared her. It was hard to explain why. Perhaps it was because the animals did not look happy as they went about their chores, and there were no human touches—no clothes, no bonnets. Alice thought the fox, for example, should be wearing an apron, a frilly one, and the dog should have a chef ’s hat.

  “No, you don’t get it,” Helen had said when Alice tried to explain why the paintings disturbed her. “I don’t want to celebrate housework. I don’t want to make it pretty. If I put clothes on them, the paintings would become too cozy, too safe.”

  Yet the baby duck was wearing a diaper, Alice noticed, although she didn’t point this out, for she knew her mother would say she was too literal. That was her mother’s primary complaint about Alice. She was too factual, too fond of numbers. “You’re a concrete thinker,” Helen had said once. Alice knew what this meant, more or less, but she couldn’t help imagining herself as a big blockhead, her head as square and hard as a rectangle of sidewalk.

  “If you’re going to read the newspaper,” Helen said now, inspecting her sleeve for coffee stains, “you might consider the want ads. You’ve been home for more than two months and you still don’t have a job.”

  “I’ve been going to places in person. I went to Westview Mall looking for a job. You told me I had to find a job, remember?”

  “What kind of job were you looking for at Westview?”

  “Clothing stores.”

  “Those are hard to get.”

  Hard for a fat girl, Alice thought, but said nothing.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t try the fast-food places. There are a dozen of those places on Route 40 alone, and you could walk to most of them, or take the bus.”

  “I said, I’m looking.”

  “But they’re always hiring.”

  “I’d rather not work at a fast-food place if I can find something else.”

  “Why?”

  Alice tried to think of a reason her mother might find acceptable.

  “I don’t approve of what they’re doing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Destroying the rain forest.”

  “And I don’t care for what Baltimore city schools do half the time, but a person has to work, baby.”

  “You won’t even eat at those places.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Helen reached for her bony hip, gave it a squeeze. “But you do. And if you eat it, you can’t then draw the line at working there for the rain forest’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s until you find something better.”

  “But when will I have time to find something better if I’m behind a fryer every day?”

  Helen didn’t answer. She had drifted back into her morning silence, her private thoughts. Alice’s words often seemed to reach Helen on a delay, like some of those talk radio shows whose callers misbehaved. Minutes would pass, and Helen would suddenly respond to a question that Alice no longer remembered asking.

  But when Helen spoke again this morning, it was all too clear she had heard every word Alice had spoken.

  “I ran into Ronnie Fuller’s mother at the Giant. She said Ronnie had gotten a job.”

  Ronnie Fuller’s mother. Alice tried to remember the woman, but she had been such a ghostly presence in the Fullers’ household, tiny and wan. She remembered the father and the brothers much better. She had always thought Matthew, Ronnie’s youngest oldest brother, liked her. He teased her a lot, pulling her braids and punching her.

  “Yes?”

  “At the Bagel Barn.”

  “I wouldn’t want to work there.”

  “No one wants you to work there. But the Bagel Barn happens to be next to Westview. Alice—what were you really doing over at Westview?”

  “Looking for work.”

  “Tell me the name of one place where you’ve put in an application.”

  “The Safeway.”

  “The Safeway’s at Ingleside.”

  “I started at Ingleside and then went to Westview. It’s right across the street.”

  “The Safeway’s union. They wouldn’t even let you apply.”

  “I know. I asked. I asked to put an application in and they said no, but it still counts.”

  “Alice—”

  “I did. CVS and Rite Aid, too. I’ve got no experience, and no one’s hiring. Except the convenience stores, and you said I couldn’t work there because they might put me on a night shift.”

  “Alice.” Helen grabbed her by the wrist. No lingering fingertip strokes for Alice, not in this situation.

  “I’m not doing anything.” But that sounded defensive, so she altered it. “I mean, I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t be doing.”

  “Alice, baby. Baby, baby, baby.”

  The old endearment felt ludicrous now that Alice was almost as tall as her mother and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds.

  “You’ve got to let things go, baby.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t undo what’s done, baby.”

  “I know.”

  “The past is the past, baby.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry I ever said anything. You ask me things, and I answer, I tell you the truth. I always did. Maybe that makes me a bad parent. But you’ve got to put everything behind you.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you, baby.”

  “I know.”

  Alice began to feel as if they were singing a song to each other, like one of the old R&B songs her mother used to put on the stereo late at night, sitting in the dark with a glass and a cigarette. Alice wasn’t supposed to know about the cigarette, but she did because the music always woke her up and she crept to the top of the stairs, listening, too. She knew that smoking was bad, really bad. They taught this in school every year, beginning in first grade. But she couldn’t begrudge her mother those middle-of-the-night cigarettes, not even when she finally figured out her mother was smoking dope, which was even worse than tobacco. The nuns said you should call the police if your parents used drugs, or talk to the priest. But Alice wasn’t falling for that.

  “I am really, truly looking for work, maybe not as hard as I could, but I am looking. It’s just—this is my first summer, my first real summer in so long. I want to have a little fun.”

  She felt guilty, guilt-tripping her mother. It was too easy. Besides, she didn’t want to dribble her power away, didn’t want to squander it on small things. She had always been a saver—Helen called it “hoarding”—the type of child who put away her Christmas and birthday checks until the small amounts became medium ones. She had saved for things her mother found ridiculous, items that Helen would not buy for Alice no matter how inexpensive. “I’d rather have one pair o
f well-made Italian shoes than twenty pairs of shoddy, so-called stylish ones.” Actually, Helen had been known to treat herself to both. “But I’m a grown-up,” she would remind Alice. “My feet have stopped growing.”

  Alice needed money to buy the things she knew would transform her. All she wanted was to be popular, and—slowly, surely—she had been inventing that girl. A girl who lived in a strange house, yes, with a strange mother, sure, but also a girl who was still cool enough to be friends with someone like Wendy. Helen’s approach to life, her preemptive disdain for the things that she could never have, was not Alice’s way. She would rather be a minor star in a major constellation than to be a lonely, mediocre sun in an inferior solar system. That was the only thing she remembered from the high school astronomy unit taught at Middlebrook. Their sun was average, mediocre.

  But it made her feel horrible, thinking such thoughts about Helen. Helen, who hadn’t had to be a mother, who truly chose to bring Alice into the world. She had been very candid with Alice about this, explaining how she had fallen in love with a man and they had rushed into things and the next thing Helen knew, she was pregnant and he was dead in a car crash. “Just like the president’s father,” she said, referring to the old president, the one who had been in charge when Alice went away. His father had died, too, before he was born. And his father was kind of a bum, too. Helen hadn’t made that connection, but Alice had figured it out. A good father didn’t die in a car crash before his baby was born. That only happened to a father who was out doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

  “Do you know what your horoscope says, Mom? ‘Aquarius: It’s time to see the world through fresh eyes. Be a friend to get a friend. Virgo, Pisces predominate.’ ”

  “Lots of eyes in the horoscope today.”

  “Do you know where that baby is?”

  “What?”

  “The doll’s head. Did you put it away in the basement or attic?”

  “Oh, gee, I don’t know, baby. Why do you want that old thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice said. “I miss it. I like things to stay the same.”