by Gina Sorell
“I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have.…”
“Why? There has to be a first time sometime.”
“Yes. But.…”
“What?”
He turned me to face him. “But…but I hope it’s not the last time,” he said quietly, his forehead against mine. It wasn’t a question, it held no promise of anything, and yet something inside me told me that whatever this was, it wasn’t over.
CHAPTER NINE
The doorbell rang and I nearly jumped out of my chair, dropping Shadow out of my lap in the process. I needed to post a sign somewhere that read, I’ve just been through a traumatic experience, please exercise caution with loud noises and sudden movements. It was probably Ted, coming by to check up on me. I’d gotten him worrying again, although I’m not sure that he ever stopped. The ringing continued, and I wondered why he didn’t just use his key to the front door to come inside. I looked out the window, but it gave me only a view to the side and back of the house. I waited for the ringing to stop and when it didn’t, I went downstairs.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Elspeth? Elspeth Brennan?”
I froze. Someone had my first name right, but I had stopped using Ted’s last name when we got divorced.
“Are you Elspeth Brennan?”
“Who wants to know?” I asked, my shaky voice betraying my nerves.
“Your taxi’s here.”
I opened the door a crack, wishing it had a peep hole, and peeked through, keeping the chain on. A man in a dark wool hat stood on the front step, and a yellow cab was parked in front of the house.
“I didn’t call a taxi.”
“Well somebody named Elspeth Brennan did. I just go where the dispatch tells me.” He shrugged his shoulders, keeping his head tilted downward.
“You’ve got the wrong person and the wrong house.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. It’s probably just a stupid prank. Could I come in and use your phone for a second?” He moved toward the door, and I could make out the color of his pale skin and his sharp chin and cheekbones.
“Sorry, but I can’t let you in.”
“Please, it’s freezing out here. I’ll just be a minute.” He smiled widely, placing his gloved hand in the doorframe. “If I don’t call dispatch, they’ll kill me.”
“Why can’t you call from your car?”
“Radio’s broken.”
Our eyes met, and the smile slipped off his face. If it was broken, how could he get the call with my address? He shot his gloved hand through the door and up toward the chain, but I slammed it hard and heard him scream. I slammed it again and again, and when he pulled it out, I bolted the door and ran upstairs to call the police, my whole body shaking as I asked for Officer Dixon.
“We won’t find any prints, ’cause he was wearing gloves,” said Officer Dixon after taking my statement, “but we got a pretty good description, so we’ll do our best.”
“It doesn’t sound promising,” I said, standing in the doorway to see him out.
“It’s not. But the good news is, not only did you see his face but you crushed his hand, so it’s unlikely he’ll be back.”
“You think the two incidents are connected?”
“Don’t you?”
I nodded.
“It seems to me that someone is looking for something…do you have any idea what it could be?”
I shook my head. What could I say? That there was a box of secrets, and apparently my mother had died not once but twice, the first time in a fire? Or should I tell him about the ring that was appraised for $150,000? If it really was a family heirloom, I didn’t want to risk having to give it up.
“You might feel better if you have someone come and stay with you. Is there anyone you can call?”
Ten minutes later I was dialing Ted’s home number. I told myself that I wasn’t just calling about me; someone had tried to break into his home, and I was sure he’d want to know.
“Hello? Anyone there?” I asked.
Somebody had picked up the receiver but hadn’t said anything. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was past 1:00 a.m.; too late to call, but I needed to talk to him.
“Stop it.” Julie’s voice came in a whisper.
“Julie? It’s me, Elspeth. I need to talk to Ted, someone—”
“I said, stop it.” She spoke slowly, her voice stern. “Do you have any idea how long it took him to get over you? Years. Not weeks, not months, years. He’s finally getting on with his life, we’re finally moving forward, and then you reappear and act like you need him. And just like that, he’s back where he was, wondering if he made a mistake letting you go.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Honey, who is it?”
I heard Ted in the background, his voice groggy and far away.
“It’s no one. Go back to bed babe, I’ll be there in a minute.” She was silent for a moment. “You can’t do it to him again, Elspeth. You can’t,” she said and hung up.
Until recently Ted and I had only stayed in touch with the occasional letter and well-timed phone call that would go straight to our answering machines. I’d talked to him more in the last few weeks than I had in the last few years. My mother’s death had opened up the floodgates that I was normally able to keep closed and, with them, the door to my heart that I had shut when we broke up. I missed him. But Julie was right, it wasn’t fair to come back into Ted’s life.
I put on the kettle and picked the sympathy card off the top of the fridge that Arden had dropped off at Dalewood for me. We hadn’t been in touch in decades, but she had seen the obituary notice in the paper and wanted to extend her sympathies. She knew how hard it was to lose a parent, no matter what the relationship. Her own mother had died of pancreatic cancer when she was seventeen, and Arden had never stopped missing her. She wrote in the card that I was in her thoughts and signed it with love. There was no phone number to call her if I wanted to talk, no false insistence that we should get together when I was in town, and I was grateful. Although I would have loved to talk to the Arden that was my best friend the summer I turned sixteen when we planned to run away, I was smart to enough to know that those days were long gone. Too much had happened on that tour to pretend we could ever go back. And too much had happened to me since.
The kettle boiled, and Shadow hissed at the noise and jumped out of my arms. I made myself a cup of instant cocoa with marshmallows from a packet that I found at the bottom of a tea tin and sat in the chair by the window. It was snowing again, and everything was covered in a soft blue-white blanket that glowed in the dark under the city’s lights. I tried to imagine what Arden might look like now, but I couldn’t. I’d even stopped myself from asking Vincent, deciding it was better to remember her the way she was that morning she picked me up. The morning we left Toronto with the intention of starting our lives over together.
Arden got herself a boyfriend within the first week of our tour. And although she always tried to include me in their late-night drink fests back at his room with the other dancers, I’d excuse myself and stay up late writing to Henri. I’d started writing him wherever I went. Nothing much at first, just little postcards I picked up in the lobby of whatever motel we were staying at. I found myself thinking about him, about the night we had spent together, about how much he was able to say and how few words it had taken him to do so. In the silences we shared, I felt as if full conversations existed that neither of us needed to voice.
I’d look for the cheesiest postcards, pictures of the cities we were in with rainbow writing on the front that said things like “Greetings from Sunny Buffalo,” and on the back I’d write something like It really is the sunniest! Until next time.… Cheers, E. The only problem was that I had no address to send them to. Like me, Henri was on the road, traveling with his father. But that didn’t stop me from buying them and writing on them, and soon I had a little collection that I tied with an elastic band and kept at the bottom of my suitcase. After the first
few weeks of touring, the postcards turned into letters, and it wasn’t long until I was using up all the cheap stationery found in every room.
The boys on the tour were fun, but there was something about Henri that was different, older, sadder—something in him I recognized as being the same as me, that I didn’t see in the other boys. Arden was like us too, but she seemed determined to drink and fuck the sadness over losing her mother out of herself, and who was I to tell her not to? I wished I could, but something in me was different now, and besides, drinking too much always gave me the blues the next day. Under the polyester coverlets that were on the bed of every budget motel, I’d sit with my knees to my chest and pour my heart out on paper. I wrote to Henri about my mother, how I wished I knew who my father was, how I was excited to be running away, and scared, and how one day I wanted to have my own dance company and be a choreographer. And after every show I’d give him a review of our performance. His letters became my unofficial diary, and I often caught myself simultaneously experiencing something and crafting a sentence in my head about it that I could use later.
“We’re at the halfway mark, can you believe it?” said Arden, grabbing one of the little bottles from the minibar.
“No, I can’t,” I lied. It felt longer than halfway. I looked around the motel room and was reminded once again of how they all looked the same: cheap wall-to-wall carpeting, multicolored polyester bedspreads, and poorly framed pictures of sunsets and flower arrangements. I’d planned to use my mother’s camera to take pictures of the places we stayed, but one room began to blur into another, so I documented the theaters instead. I thought Arden and I could frame them and hang them in our first apartment, when we got one.
I couldn’t wait until we had a place of our own. Living out of a suitcase and sleeping in lumpy beds with scratchy sheets had lost its charm quicker than I thought it would. It wasn’t that I wanted to go home, it’s just I never felt settled in any bed and had begun to wonder if I would ever feel at home anywhere. It was an anxiety that was starting to grow in me, and I didn’t dare share it with Arden, who was having the time of her life and already mourning the end of the tour, which was still a month away. I didn’t want to do or say anything to jeopardize our plan of running away.
“Soon, we’ll be starting our own tour,” I said, peeling off my leotard and tights and heading for the bath. “Mind if I go first?”
“No, go ahead, I need a drink. My ankle is killing me.”
I looked at Arden’s ankle, which was still twice the size it normally was. Three nights earlier she’d gone over on it and there had been a loud snap. I’d watched her face turn white and beads of sweat form on her upper lip. She had kept dancing, and at the end of the performance, after taking her bow, she had hurried offstage and thrown up in the wings. She’d been icing it whenever she was offstage, but the swelling kept returning, and I worried she may have fractured it.
“You still don’t want to get it checked out?” I asked while running the bathtub and filling it with Epsom salts.
“Nah, fuck it. It’ll heal, just a pulled tendon, I’m sure. Besides, there isn’t any time. We don’t get another break for a week.”
“You could take a night off and just rest it. Let me step in.”
“Sorry, but I’m not giving up my solo,” she said, downing the little bottle of vodka and going for another.
“It’s just one night; if you don’t take care of it, it could get worse,” I said while easing my bruised body into the hot tub. It wasn’t just that I was Arden’s understudy and would love a chance to dance her part. I really was worried that she was going to do some serious damage.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, standing in the doorway. She leaned against the frame, picking at the label.
“What is it?”
“I called my dad today.”
“And?”
“And I could hear Marla in the background calling him to come watch some stupid show.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
“I know. Bitch really lives there now,” she said, coming into the bathroom and sitting with her back against the opposite wall. “My mother would roll over in her grave if she knew Dad had shacked up with the neighborhood hussy.” She took a swig out of the little bottle, nearly finishing it. “They should make these bigger.”
“They do.”
“Right.”
“Maybe he’s just really lonely, Arden. I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“We’re all lonely,” she said, tossing the empty bottle into the trash and pulling another out of her pocket. “What about you?”
“What about me?” I answered quickly, worried that she was going to mention Henri.
“You called your mom lately?”
“Nope.”
“You should. She might be a twat, but at least she’s still alive,” she said, steadying herself against the wall. “Hurry up—we’re all going out tonight and you’re coming with us.”
I ducked my head under the tub and groaned. I had told my mother I would call her every week on tour, but a week had quickly turned into two. I expected that I could go the whole tour without calling her and she wouldn’t care. Shit. I was going to have to call her now. Arden wanted me to feel bad and it worked. What if she was worried? It didn’t have to be a long conversation; I’d just call and let her know I was okay.
“Bathroom’s all yours,” I said, wrapping a towel around me and draining the tub.
I waited until Arden closed the door and I heard the water running before picking up the phone and dialing my mom.
“Hello?”
“Oh, sorry, I think I have the wrong number.”
“Elsie?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Philippe. How are you?”
Philippe. My skin turned cold, and I pulled my towel closer around me.
“Fine, I’m fine.” I could hear my mother in the background asking who he was talking to.
“It’s Elsie, darling.”
“What are you doing there?” I asked.
“I’m staying with your mother,” he said, and then he whispered, “Why, does that make you jealous?”
My jaw dropped, but nothing came out. After a moment I heard my mother enter the room and take the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Is everything all right?” She sounded irritated.
“Yes, I was just calling to check in.”
“Oh. I see. Well, if nothing is wrong I have to get going; we’re having a big meeting tonight with some new members.”
“I didn’t know Philippe was still in Toronto,” I said.
“Well, he just got back. We were in Montreal before then.”
“I didn’t know,” I repeated, realizing for the first time that my mother was off having adventures of her own while I was gone.
“Why would you?” She paused, leaving a silence that neither of us knew how to fill. “Well, we better go, we have to pick up Henri from the hotel.”
“What hotel?”
“The Hilton. Why does it…I really have to go now, Elspeth.”
“Sure, okay, well, take care.”
“Yes, you too,” she said, and hung up.
I sat on the bed, stunned. Jealous? What kind of game did he think he was playing? Jealous of my mother and Philippe playing house? The thought of it turned my stomach, and just for a brief moment I let myself wonder what it would be like if I was still there. Would he try to steal kisses when she wasn’t looking? Would he sneak into the shower and watch me wash? Would he pull back the curtain, place his hands on me, and demand that I kiss him? My face turned hot and my heart started to beat faster. He’d never get the chance to find out. I wasn’t going home. I was leaving them. If I was jealous, it was because my mother was acting like a teenager instead of a woman who was having an affair with a married man, when I was the one who was supposed to be having the adventure, not her.
I dialed the front desk and had the operator give
me the number for the Hilton Toronto. It was thirty minutes from my mother’s apartment; hopefully Henri was still in the room. I waited as the phone rang and rang and then just as I was about to hang up, he answered.
“Hello?”
“Henri, it’s me, Elsie.”
We talked right up until my mother and Philippe arrived and he had to go downstairs to meet them. He told me how the Seekers had been gathering new members and how his father was pleased with how much money the Toronto chapter had raised in donations and how he had insisted on returning, as there was more gold to mine. He said his father had found another girlfriend, a young one living in Montreal, and he was keeping her secret from my mother. He said he wondered if getting a real job wouldn’t have been easier after all and if he’d ever get back home to Paris. He sounded similar to the way he had when we’d chatted in the alley out behind the restaurant, only faster, his words fueled with an urgency I hadn’t heard before. He barely stopped to take a breath, and I wondered if he’d been drinking. I let him do all the talking, his angry rambling mirroring feelings of my own. There was company in our misery. I waited until he was done to tell him about the letters. He wanted to read them, and he told me to send them to a member of the Seekers, someone in charge of collecting Philippe’s letters and forwarding them to Henri. I’d mail them with no return address, because we were still on the road. It was a one-sided correspondence, but I didn’t think of it that way. As far as I was concerned, someone was out there, for a change, listening to me. I could pour my heart out without worrying how it was going to be received; there was no interruption, no fear of recrimination, just a journal that would be read by someone who I felt understood me. By the end of the conversation Henri’s anger had subsided and his tone was reassuring and comforting, and we decided that when we got to New York, he’d come and visit me.
By the time we reached Washington, Arden had practically moved into her boyfriend Ramon’s room. It wasn’t that she’d planned to, it was just where she passed out from partying after each performance. Every morning she’d sneak back down the hall to our room to shower and change, and we’d walk to rehearsals together. If the tour manager knew what was happening, she didn’t let on. It seemed everyone was expected to hook up with someone while on the road, and so far I seemed to be the only person who had chosen a one-sided relationship with a French pen pal who was roaming the continent. My alarm had just gone off when I heard Arden throwing up in the bathroom.
