I didn’t hear the light pad of feet until whoever possessed those feet was nearly right there in the room with me. Without a second thought, I threw myself to the ground and rolled under the bed.
“Papa?”
I heard Annette’s voice sounding tired, confused.
Oh, no! This was the worst thing that could happen.
Okay, well, maybe it would be worse if Mrs. Fairly found me like this or, worse still, if it were the ambassador. Maybe if I just stayed quiet, she’d go away.
“Did you decide to come home early?” she asked.
Oh, shit! This was awful! I couldn’t leave her to think that maybe her father was here but was ignoring her. She’d feel unloved.
Feeling like the Grinch getting caught by Cindy Lou Who, I rolled out from my hiding place.
Annette’s eyes widened.
“Miss Bell?”
“Hi,” I said, and gave a little awkward wave.
“What are you doing in my father’s room in the middle of the night?”
“I came to steal the Christmas tree?” I gave an awkward laugh.
“What?”
“I heard a noise in the night,” I said, which wasn’t technically a lie since there had been a noise in the night, only it had been made by me, “and I came to investigate.”
“But why were you under Papa’s bed?”
“I lost an earring and was looking for it.”
“But you don’t have earrings.”
“That’s because I lost it.”
I couldn’t believe I was lying to this sweet child! But I was doing what I was doing in order to help her in the long run, right?
“Yes,” said Annette in a very precise way. “But you have no earrings on at all. If you lost one, wouldn’t you still have the other?”
“Oh,” I laughed nervously. “It’s an American custom—just one earring at a time.”
“Do you forget I’m American, too?” She was confused. “And I don’t remember any such custom…”
It took some more fancy footwork on my part, and anyone could see how good I was at that, before I finally convinced her to go back to bed.
I had found nothing. If there was a Mrs. Rawlings, if there ever had been a Mrs. Rawlings in the world, I’d found no evidence of her.
If I really were Nancy Drew, some kind of amazing epiphany would have occurred to me before drifting off to sleep, something that would explain either the truth about Mrs. Rawlings or the truth about that locked room.
But no such epiphanies were in sight.
Annette had decided to tell me the story of her mother.
I wasn’t sure if I should take as truth such a serious story told by such a small child, but then, why should she lie to me?
It was the next morning, the second day that the master was gone, and the house had finally settled down to its normal routines. As I sat down to the usual big breakfast spread, I marveled not for the first time at how much food there always was.
Back when I’d been doing my Nancy Drew marathon of reading, I’d been flat out amazed at how much food that girl could put away. On one memorable occasion, Hannah had served Nancy and her father an appetizer of orange and grapefruit slices in sorbet glasses, followed by a dinner of spring lamb, rice and mushrooms, fresh peas and chocolate angel cake with vanilla ice cream. Reading that, I’d felt like shouting, “Hel-lo! Don’t you ever have to worry about your waistline at all?” I’d wondered if Nancy might not just have a lit-tle bulimia problem on her hands. But then I realized that back then such things weren’t the issue they are now. Besides, she was just a character in a book. The dietary laws that applied to the rest of us didn’t apply to her. She could carb-out until the cows came home and still maintain that same slim silhouette.
I guess I should say it wasn’t so much that I was eating more as for the first time in my life I wasn’t worrying about it. Since I’d been here, I’d been so occupied with things outside of myself that I’d forgotten to be obsessive about eating and I’d also forgotten all about using food as either a comfort or an instrument of self-destruction. As a result, I tended to eat whatever I wanted to, whenever I was hungry, but stopped eating before I felt full. As a result of that, I’d slowly gained back the ten pounds I’d lost during my post-Buster devastation—I knew, not because I’d stepped on any scales like I used to do every morning, but because my clothes fit me differently and I no longer looked gaunt in the mirror. I realized I’d never win any bikini contests—Bebe Iversdottir was the one who would win those, the only part of getting slightly bigger that still bothered me—but I was comfortable with my reflected image. Maybe this was the way I was supposed to look.
I enjoyed some fresh fruit, toast and eggs, passed on Lars Aquavit’s usual offer to join him in coffee—wouldn’t he ever learn?
But first…
“Don’t you think it’s time you two went to church?” Mrs. Fairly prompted.
Oh, right. Church.
“You do remember that was supposed to be part of your job, don’t you?” she said.
“Of course,” I said, “but it’s not my fault that every weekend something else has seemed to come up. If you’re not having me take Annette on bracing hikes, then it’s the ambassador coming home unannounced and not caring if we go or not—”
“I’m not blaming you,” Mrs. Fairly cut me off. “But it’s Sunday and you both have a free morning. It’s time.”
And so I found myself a short time later walking with Annette up the steep Skolavoroustigur, thinking I’d much rather be ducking into one of the art galleries than going to the massive Hallgrimskirja, which looked more like a spaceship about to take off than anything else, even if it was made out of stone.
“You look very nice,” Annette told me as we entered, perhaps sensing I needed reassurance.
“Thank you,” I said.
“That parka you have on entirely covers the wine stains on your dress,” she added.
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
Now even little children were aware of my fashion shortcomings. But what else could I do? I was sure religious services here would be more formal than back home, I wanted to show proper respect, and this was still the only dress I had, having retrieved it from the trash the morning after the night I threw it away.
The church was already nearly full as we took our seats, and I saw Gina and Britta, seated closer to the front, turn and wave excitedly.
I could almost hear their minds thinking: There is our weird American friend! And she has the handsome ambassador’s adorable daughter with her! I wonder if she’s made any progress in solving the mystery of his wife yet?
As a matter of fact, it felt as though everyone was paying undue attention to us. Well, I guess that, with our dark coloring, we did stand out; kind of like two blueberries in a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle where everything else was totally white.
“What kind of church is this again?” I whispered, trying not to notice the stares.
Mrs. Fairly had told me she’d brought Annette at least once herself before my arrival, so I figured she knew more about it than I did.
Annette shrugged now. “Lutheran?”
The preacher entered and started talking in a language I could not understand at all.
“Icelandic is a very difficult language to learn,” Annette whispered.
“Do you understand it at all?” I asked.
“Not a word.”
“So why are we here again?” I asked.
“Because Papa wants us to be,” she said.
Oh. Right.
“How tall do you think that organ is?” I asked, indicating the magnificent instrument with my chin.
“About fifty feet,” she guessed.
“And how many pipes do you think it has?”
“More than five thousand, looks like.”
“And how long to we have to stay here again?”
“Until the very end.”
“Even though we don’t understand a word?
”
“Exactly.” She smiled.
As we exited an hour later, the preacher thanked us for coming. Over his shoulder, I saw stairs winding upwards toward the bell tower and it occurred to me what a steep flight that must be and how I’d hate to be at the top of that church.
Back at the embassy, I at last got down to work with Annette, even if it was Sunday. Besides, the work I had in mind was the kind that would seem more fun to her than anything else.
A teacher’s book I’d purchased had suggested having kids make scrapbooks of their own life story. It would be a great way to work on memory, precision cutting with scissors and forming letters, all at the same time.
Annette was delighted with the idea of the project—“A book all about me!”—in the narcissistic way I’d anticipated. Children, I’d often found, can be great narcissists. Of course, adults can, too; we just camouflage it better. We keep journals or write memoirs. If we’re lucky, some publisher buys those memoirs. If we’re even luckier yet, we’re former presidents and someone advances us ten million dollars for our navel-gazing.
As I said, Annette was delighted…in the beginning.
She went straight to her father’s bedroom and started rooting around for old photograph albums and ticket stubs. It must be nice, I thought, to feel so free to look around to your heart’s content. But then I grew worried that Ambassador Rawlings might mind her going through his things in this way.
“Mind?” She didn’t understand. “Why should Papa mind? He lets me come and go as I please in here. He never minds anything I do.”
It was true, I realized. I had yet to see him ever be upset with anything she did. Well, why should he? She was an extraordinarily wonderful child, well mannered and precociously sympathetic to the feelings of others…even if she had brought up the shadowy wine stain on my dress earlier. Any parent would be proud to have her.
Carrying an album that was almost as big as she was, she led the way back to her own room to start working.
But when she started to remove some of the pictures that had carefully been placed in there by some unseen loving hand, preparatory to replacing them in the new book she was going to create, I felt a fresh objection. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea in the first place.
“Won’t your father mind us disrupting things this way?” I said.
“Mind?” she echoed again.
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t you think he’d prefer we kept the memories intact in this album?”
“No,” she laughed, “he won’t mind. When he sees we have created a new book about me, he’ll be thrilled!”
I found myself laughing with her.
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “What could be better than that?”
She started on the album in earnest, moving from back to front, explaining things to me all the while.
“Here is Papa and I at my last birthday,” she said. “It was before we met you. There was a clown and a huge cake.”
“I see that,” I said as she removed the picture from the album, taking great care to glue it onto the colored construction paper she was using for her scrapbook.
“The clown was behaving a little strange,” Annette said, “so Papa had Mr. Miller ask him to leave, but the cake was good.”
I ignored the non sequitur part of her statement. Of course the cake was good.
“Strange?” I asked. “How so?”
She shrugged, as though such minor details never bothered her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They never said. But Mr. Miller took care of it.”
“Mr. Miller was at your birthday party?” I asked.
“Yes. Look, here is a picture of Papa trying to teach me to ski. I wanted to learn, but he was worried. Finally, he agreed, but I wasn’t any good. Perhaps when I’m older.”
“But isn’t that odd, him being at your party?”
“Not really.” She shrugged again. “Mr. Miller is always somehow around. He comes, he goes. But he always comes back.”
“Really?
“He’s been at every birthday that I can remember. And whenever we go on vacation, he always shows up.” She shrugged. “He is nice enough. He is the only man Papa sees regularly. I suppose they are best friends.”
I recalled Robert Miller saying he was Ambassador Rawlings’s boss. Would they really be best friends, too?
Annette spent the next half hour on her project, happily moving backward through the book. I was surprised at how many pictures there were of her and her father. Considering how busy he always was here, it was amazing to see how much time he’d made over the years for his little girl, and Annette was clearly thrilled to be given this opportunity to wax nostalgic over her short past.
“This is when Papa took me for a pony ride,” she would say. “Doesn’t he look handsome on his horse?”
I allowed that he did, unable to prevent myself from calling to mind the first time I’d met him and the equine connection between us. At the time, I’d thought him to be unattractive, but I realized now, looking at the picture of him, that my feelings had changed. It was surely a sign of something, although I refused to admit to myself that it was what Gina said, that I was in love with him.
“Oh, and these!” she said, holding up a narrow strip of four black-and-white photos of her and her father, faces pressed close together, mugging for the camera. “We had these taken in a booth at the mall!”
She had a lot of happy memories with her father. Suddenly, I envied her that.
Of particular interest to her were the pictures from her birthday parties. In addition to the clown one, as we moved backward through the album, she showed me pictures of herself at age five, at a circus party; at four, at a karate party (“I wanted to keep taking it, but Papa said it was too dangerous”); at a gymnastics party at three; at a family party at home at age two.
The album ended there.
Or, I suppose I should say more properly, the album began there, with no pictures coming before age two.
“Where are the rest?” I asked. “Another album?”
“No,” said Annette, looking puzzled herself. “This is the only one I’ve ever found.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, thinking it was odd. Most parents tended to take a gazillion pictures the first years of a child’s life, a half of a gazillion pictures the following year, and increasingly less each passing year after that. Even Aunt Bea, who I never considered to be the most natural of parents, had behaved so with her children. The Keatings certainly had, as well.
“I always thought so, too,” said Annette, her expression swiftly moving from puzzled to sad.
It was so strange to see her looking like this. Ever since I’d known her, she’d always been so sunny. Even the times of day when most small children acted up had never affected Annette. “The witching hour” was what 4:00 p.m. had been referred to in the Keating household, the time of day when you couldn’t make a phone call without there being screaming interruptions, and if you wanted to start dinner preparations, you could only do so with little people attached to your thighs. It took this moment of seeing Annette looking so starkly woebegone to recognize what a remarkably happy child she normally was.
Impulsively, I took her in my arms.
“What is it?” I asked, smelling the fresh-soap scent of her sweet head against my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
And it was then that I got one of the answers I’d been looking for.
Just when I’d been despairing that I was never going to learn the truth about Annette’s mother, she told me herself.
“All those pictures of me and Papa,” she said in a half sob.
“What’s wrong?” I asked again. “Don’t you like them? I think they’re perfectly marvelous pictures. He clearly loves you so much.”
“I know that,” she said in a voice that was eerily reminiscent of her father’s, the kind of voice that said I was an idiot for missing the forest for the trees. “But where is Mama?”
> “Where is Mama?” I asked quietly. I’d felt so close to the information for so long and yet it had always eluded me. I sensed I needed to be extra careful now.
Annette took a deep breath for such a little girl, as though bracing herself.
“She is dead,” she said at last.
Of all the things I’d imagined—that her parents were divorced, in the process of getting a divorce, that her mother had abandoned her, that her mother was a madwoman locked away in the secret room who made herself known by cackling maniacally every time I came close to a moment of happiness with her husband—I’d never imagined this.
“Yes,” Annette explained. She was tearful at first, but then grew stronger as she went on. “Mama died when I was born.”
“What?” I asked dumbly.
It was like hearing my own life story, except in my story, after that awful beginning, my father had left and I’d wound up having an awful middle story, too. In Annette’s lucky case, her father had stayed.
Thinking of him in this way only served to strengthen my feelings for him.
“I really do not mind that so much,” Annette said bravely. “I mean, of course I mind that Mama is dead. But since I never knew her, really, how much can I mind her not being here?”
She made sense, more sense than I usually made of the same topic.
“What I mind,” she went on, “is not having any mama at all. When I look at all these pictures—” she indicated the albums, her father’s and the one she’d just made “—I am of course happy that Papa is with me in the pictures. I only wish there were a mama, any mama, in the pictures with us, as well.”
That was when she told me her secret wish.
“When you first came to us,” she said, “I used to dream at night that somehow you and Papa would fall in love and then we would become a family.”
I said nothing.
“That was silly, wasn’t it?” she said with precocious wistfulness.
“It’s never silly to dream,” I said, taking her in my arms and hugging her close.
“Anyway—” she took in another big breath “—after I gave up on that silly fantasy, and I saw Miss Bebe for the first time, I began thinking…Wouldn’t it be great if Papa married her?”
How Nancy Drew Saved My Life Page 17
