Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  She started to cry. How stupid she had been to dare to imagine she could have been pregnant, that she could be so lucky. She grabbed for a tissue, waking Scott. Alarmed, he wrapped himself about her. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  “I got my period,” she said, and he whooped and hugged her, “Thank God!” he exulted, and then he saw her face and his own fell. “Oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry, honey.” Wrapping her in his arms, he rocked her, he soothed, but all she could feel was his relief, rising up off him like a wave of heat, and all she could wonder about was how anybody could ever feel this empty, this absolutely alone.

  She threw herself back into her work, coming up with two hundred names for a new line of cosmetics for Madame, a name they wanted to sound Italian but not really be Italian. “Fienello,” she said out loud. “Plississamo.” She did the catalog for the spring line of shoes, which went over so well, that later, they let her do the one for the fall boots. The babies she had seen on the street, sprouting like seedlings, the expectant mothers, vanished as suddenly as they had appeared, and all she saw now were the well-heeled working women, the snazzy polished shoes of the young and dating and working. She joined the gym down the street so that nights, when Scott was working, she grabbed for her sweats and went to the track, running off her tension until she was bathed in sweat and felt more hopeful.

  One night, when she was in bed, she reached for Scott, she stroked his belly, wanting him, and he kept sleeping. Rubbing against him, like a cat, she whispered his name. She saw his head lift from the pillow.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m so tired,” he said. “Tomorrow.” He groaned, yawning, ruffling her hair affectionately. “I promise.”

  She cuddled against him, wanting to be cradled in his arms as they slept, the way they usually did. “Can I have a bit more room?” he said, rolling from her so her hand slipped off his shoulder.

  “Has something happened to us?” she asked. “Is it because of the pregnancy scare?”

  He turned around to look at her. “You think needing more room in bed means I don’t love you?” he said. He kissed her so tenderly she forgot she had ever felt slighted. Desire flared in her belly, but when she stroked his face, he was already sleeping.

  The next morning, when they were walking to breakfast, she found herself looking at all the other couples who were holding hands, who were walking close together, and she felt empty, yearning, and reached for his hand, which he held for a few seconds and then let go. “I love you,” she said, and he nodded happily at her. He craned his head to look at a building. “You love me?” she asked him, and he suddenly frowned. “What’s going on with you now? Why do you have to ask me this all the time?” he said. “Of course I love you. Don’t you know that? I’m comfortable with you. I don’t have to always paw you to show it.” It was her turn to get silent. Paw, she thought. Like an animal. Paw.

  But the more comfortable he became, the more he didn’t seem to see her. On their walks, he zoomed ahead, cutting across traffic, leaving her stranded on the other side. “Hey!” she shouted. He looked at her, surprised. “How’d you get all the wav over there?” he called. She reached for his hand and grabbed it.

  It was Monday and Sara was back home in her parents’ living room, her heels propped up on the coffee table. It was a spur-of-the-moment visit, a few days because Scott had had to go upstate to try and talk some people into putting more windows into a prison he was designing. “These guys need more light,” Scott had said. Three days without Scott, and every nerve inside of her was longing for him, pulling like little magnets.

  At night, she bunched up the pillow, like a body beside her, flinging her arm about it, drawing it close. She knew it was impossible, but she was so used to having him by her that she kept thinking she heard him coming up the walk, moving in the kitchen, just out of her sight. Sara stood up, so restless she couldn’t stand being in her own skin.

  A bow of fruit sat on the dining room table. There was raisin bread from the bakery, but she was still feeling stuffed from the blinis she had had last night at the Russian restaurant Abby and Jack had taken her to. She had talked about Scott all through dinner.

  “Well, he seems wonderful,” Abby had said, lifting her wineglass and clicking it against Jack’s, and then against Sara’s. But her voice sounded flat, and Sara could tell that Abby was thinking that even the dearest man wasn’t the same as a graduate degree.

  And then, to Sara’s surprise, Jack had reached across the table and taken her hand in the two of his. “I hope he’s taking good care of you,” he said.

  That night, Sara had picked up the phone and called Scott at his hotel. His machine had answered after two rings, but she still left a message, the same one she had for the last two days. “God, do I miss you.”

  She wished Scott would call her back because the day was stretching out in front of her like a plain white sheet. She plopped on the couch and read two magazines. She finished a novel she had brought, about a man whose amnesia saves him from grieving his dead wife, then she got herself a bowl of red grapes and sat and watched Blade Runner on cable. The gorgeous android Sean Young wouldn’t believe she wasn’t human. “I have photos!” she insisted, taking them from a drawer, showing Harrison Ford all these terrific color pictures of her and her mother, a woman who had died ten years ago. She told him how she still missed her mother’s warmth and good humor, and all Harrison Ford could do was repeat, “The photos were doctored. They were created. Those moments never happened,” while Sean Young stared uncomprehendingly at him.

  Sara shut the movie off, resting her head in her hands. She had come here because she felt as if she were mourning something. A pregnancy that wasn’t a pregnancy. Could you turn off your pain if you discovered the situation that caused it wasn’t the way you had thought it had been? She had read once that the brain didn’t even know the difference between what was real and what was imagined, that that was how hypnosis worked. Tell someone they were encased in ice and it could be 104 degrees outside and that person would shiver. Tell someone allergic to cats that a Persian was sitting on his lap and that person would sneeze. “Think of the happy things,” Abby used to tell Sara when she woke frightened from a dream filled with monsters. “Think about the beach.” Crowd one thought out with another because there were a thousand realities you could engage in, a thousand possibilities you could choose to believe.

  Sara prowled the house restlessly. Her parents wouldn’t be back for a while. Scott was out. She picked up the phone book and leafed through it, and then she saw the old names: her old friend Robin! She dialed but a strange voice answered. “No Robin here,” he said.

  Back when she lived here, when she felt like this, she used to walk for miles until she tired the anxiety out of her. She used to ride her bike from her house into Boston and back again. Her whole body yearned to move, so she went to get her old bike from the garage, and as soon as she was pedaling, she felt something start to uncurl deep within her.

  Her breath evened. The wind scooted past her and she lifted her face happily into it. It was a glorious spring day and she didn’t know where she was headed, but it didn’t matter. Winding in and out of the neighborhoods, she stopped thinking altogether, gliding, her feet popped out from the pedals, her arms straight up like “look ma no hands.” She laughed, giddy with pleasure, and then, without even meaning to, there she was in Danny’s old neighborhood. Her breath stopped and a wave of longing nearly doubled her over.

  People had it so wrong about missing. “It’s like a pie,” her mother had once told her. “The pie is your whole life, the pieces are the pain, and after a while, each piece gets smaller and smaller, and then you have your whole life back.” Her mother was so wrong. Maybe the pieces grew smaller, but your hunger for them didn’t, it was always there, real and immediate, like breathing, necessary and something you couldn’t control or stop, even if you wanted to. And like a pie, your past was something you were always hungry for.

  She wa
s rounding the corner. The day was heating up, the air growing golden with sun. Mosquitoes hummed about her. She took the tour. It comforted her to feel like a stranger here, to see that the blue house down the block was now white, that the woman who had kept twenty cats was gone, that even the school had been revamped. Different. Everything was different. Each new store, each strange face, she saw buoyed her.

  Every once in a while, when she came home, she rode past Danny’s block. Sometimes she thought she did it to see if he was there. Or if Frances, his mother was. Other times, she thought she was testing herself, seeing if she could do it and not feel anything about it one way or another, and then she’d know she was really healed. No one had ever been home, though sometimes there was a car in the driveway, a blue Honda, and then a dark green Ford, and each time she had felt unsettled. No, she wasn’t over this.

  Her legs pedaled harder.

  And then she turned the corner again and she saw his house, the third one in, painted yellow now, and there standing in front of it was Danny and he wasn’t alone. A woman was there, in a loose dress, her back to Sara, her hair yellow as a stick of butter, cropped close to her head. The woman lifted up a hand, smoothing the collar of Danny’s shirt. She leaned forward and said something to Danny, laughing, and then he burst into laughter, too. His whole body seemed to light up.

  Never had Sara expected to see him again. She hadn’t allowed herself to imagine it.

  It seemed like the most foolish thing she had ever done in her life, coming to this neighborhood again. She could turn around and pretend a million things, including that this was not happening, that she had never seen it. She could get to the nearest phone and call Scott and have all this zap right out of her life, and then the blonde turned and started lazily walking back toward the house, and Danny turned his whole body to watch her. The front door slapped shut, and Danny looked away from the blond woman, right at Sara, and the way he was looking at her froze her in place. The same way he had looked at her the day she had first met him.

  “Sara?” He breathed her name and she rode closer.

  His face was more weathered, as if he had been in the sun too long, and his hair was shorter, but looking at him, she felt electric current, and it was all she could do not to lay her head against his shoulder, the way she used to, and imagine that all those years between them had never taken place.

  “My God. What are you doing here?” Danny said.

  “Visiting. Same as you, probably, right?”

  He gave her a long slow look. “Look at you. You look exactly the same.”

  She flushed, and dipped her head, and then looked back at him. He lifted his hand to brush her hair from her face, and then she saw the wedding band, so thick it was a wonder he could bend his finger. “You got married,” she said.

  He looked down at his ring, as if just seeing it gave him a jolt of pleasure. “Three years this month,” he said. “I still can’t believe my luck.” He rolled the band about his finger. “Charlotte’s like you a little,” he said.

  “How?” As soon as she said it, she wanted to bite the words back, but he was smiling. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “She’s smart. She makes me think I can be better than I am.” He stopped rolling the ring. “After meeting her, I got into a training program at a bank. Regional manager now. In Pittsburgh.” His grin widened. “You must be a shrink, the way you always wanted.”

  “Copywriter.”

  He laughed. “Sara! You’re making me laugh.”

  “No, I’m not joking, Danny. I work for a catalog company. I do writing for them.”

  “You can’t fool me.” He kept his eyes on her. “You married?”

  Scott flickered in her mind. “There’s someone.”

  “I’m glad.” His face lit up. “Look at the two of us, standing here talking just like no time has passed at all. We should have dinner. Really talk. Are you here for a while?”

  She tried to speak and her throat felt as if it were closing up on her.

  He took another step closer to her. She could hear his watch ticking. And then she smelled something. Lime aftershave and it made her think of the patchouli he used to wear, a smell so intoxicating she’d dribble it on her clothes so she’d feel she was wearing him.

  She couldn’t stand it. “Danny,” she said abruptly. “You just disappeared on me.”

  “So did you,” he said slowly.

  “No, I didn’t. I never would have—” She blinked at him. “I was pregnant and you left.”

  Danny looked pained. “I fucked up. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You could have stayed—you could have helped me—”

  “I didn’t know how! I didn’t have any money. I knew I couldn’t ask my family. I knew yours would hate me, and all I kept thinking was that you’d end up hating me, too. And every time I looked at you, you were so scared and unhappy, that I just saw my own failure hammering me in the face.”

  “So you just left.”

  “I was a kid. I panicked. I was torn inside out with missing you and I finally came back. I didn’t care anymore what would happen. I just wanted to be with you. But you were already gone.”

  “What are you talking about? I wasn’t gone.”

  “Sara, you were. I came back because I was going crazy, because I didn’t care about anything but you. I was going to figure something out for us, and then my mother told me how you had come to the house.”

  “No, I didn’t come. I called. She said you were gone.”

  Danny shook his head. “She told me how furious you were with me, how you never wanted to see me again.”

  “What?” Sara said, astonished. “I never said that!”

  “She told me how you said you hated me and wouldn’t forgive me. She said you wrote me a letter so nasty, she ripped it up rather than give it to me.”

  “She told you what? That’s not what happened! I told you I loved you in that letter!”

  He frowned. “Sara, I couldn’t believe her. But I called your house, over and over, and your parents wouldn’t let me talk with you, they said you were too upset right now. I came to your house in the middle of the night, the way I used to. I even threw stones at your window, but you didn’t come to open it. And then one night I heard your window slam shut, I saw the curtains tugged closed.”

  “I never would have done that! I must not have been there that night!” Sara said. She tried to think where she had been all those nights that she didn’t see Danny outside her window, didn’t sense him the way she always had. Had he come for her the nights her mother had talked her into going out for a Dairy Queen? Was it when she was sprawled on her bed with the headphones on, trying to tune her life out?

  “My father must have slammed the window shut,” she said finally, but Danny shook his head.

  “Your father said you did. He came out. He said he was calling the cops. He said you were home and wouldn’t see me, that you hated me and that if I cared about you, I’d leave you alone.” He looked at her, pained. “He said you deserved better than me.”

  “Danny!”

  “My mother was treating me like I was the gum on the bottom of her shoe. All she said was how it would never work anyway, a smart irl from a good family and a shit like me. How I could never give you any of the things you’d need, how I’d never be rich or smart enough for you.”

  “That’s so ridiculous! I never thought that! I looked for you everywhere! Why didn’t you come back to school? You could have seen me, you could have talked to me!”

  “I did go to school, Sara. I tried to find you. I looked everywhere and finally some girl told me you were taking the day off, going to a college interview at Harvard. Sara, I hitched into Cambridge, I showed up on the campus and walked around looking for you. I was ready to just grab you and take off!”

  “I didn’t see you—” she started to say, and then she stopped. She remembered that one day when she had felt him nearby, the way she always did, like a current in the air, and she ha
d turned and it was only someone’s father.

  “I saw you. Standing in a group of kids, all of them so—so—privileged looking. So—so well fed. Well dressed. And one of them flirting with you, making you smile. All I could think about was everyone telling me you deserved better, my own family telling me how it could never work—you so smart and me barely passing. And then your group went into a building, and I came after them, and this security guard came over to me, and asked what I was doing there. Like he knew I didn’t belong on that campus. And he was right.”

  “Danny—”

  “It was like every door slamming shut on me. I just took off. This time for good. I drifted from place to place, taking on jobs just to have enough money to survive. Every once in a while I’d think, fuck it, who cares if you’re in college and I’m not, and I’d send a letter to your house, or I’d call you, just to hear your voice, but I never got you. You never wrote back. Finally, I just tried to put it all out of my mind. And I couldn’t. Not for a long, long time.”

  Sara stared. “I did come to your house once, Danny, months after you had left. Frances still didn’t know where you were.”

  “What are you talking about? She knew,” Danny said, startled. “Of course she knew. She was sending me money when she could.”

  “I don’t understand. But then you came home again—you still didn’t try to see me.”

  “I didn’t come home.”

  “Danny. You were home. I know you were home. You signed the papers.”

  He frowned. “What papers?”

  “The papers. The agency served you with papers to sign. You had to say you knew the baby was being put up for adoption, that you knew there would be a hearing. Not showing up for the hearing meant you didn’t want the baby, that you wouldn’t fight the adoption.”

  Danny looked suddenly dazed. He stepped back from Sara. “What are you talking about? What adoption? What papers? You had an abortion. My mother told me. That day you came to the house furious with me, blaming me, all upset because you had had one.”