Girls Who Travel (6 page)

11

T
AKING
ADVANTAGE
OF
my newfound open schedule, I spent the rest of the week with Madison, which did little to lift my mood. I peeled off the lid of my third pudding cup, feeling vaguely ashamed. At least I had the decency to save one for Madison's lunch box tomorrow—I wasn't an animal.

I licked the buttery chocolate lid as Madison played with her high-end American Girl doll, every upper-middle-class kid's prized possession. Madison was less interested in the pudding and more interested in Kirsten Larson (the doll) and her inadvertently chic Peter Pan–collar dress.

Raiding the snack cupboards was one of the unspoken perks of babysitting. I unabashedly stuck my tongue into the pudding cup to lick out the last bit, and Madison gaped up at me with her long-lashed doe eyes.

“Don't judge me. You don't know my journey!” I told her.

She just stood there. “Kika, can I cowor?”

“Of course you can color, Madison.” I couldn't help but grin at her adorable lisp.

I pulled down her craft box crammed with construction paper, markers, and that white glue that looked like marshmallow fluff—no wonder kids were always trying to eat it. My cell phone rang just as I plunked her at the kitchen table with a sheet of fresh white paper.

A strange number with far too many digits flashed on my phone. My heart pounced:
It's an international number; it must be Lochlon.

After Lochlon told me about his candy pop past, we became closer than ever. Still, I wasn't prepared for what would happen once we parted ways: We actually kept in touch.

Lochlon emailed and called me from all corners of the globe.

“I don't get it,” I asked him recently when he was calling me from Cambodia. I clarified over the dodgy phone line, “I mean, you're off living the dream. Why are you wasting your time calling me? I love hearing from you, I just don't . . . get it.”

I was scared of what his answer would be, but I was more scared of not knowing.

“You don't get it?” he mimicked back, entertained. In the background, I heard horns of tuk-tuks beeping and children shrieking with delight—his world was still uproarious; his life still crackled with wonder.

“Gorgeous,” he said almost shyly. “I want you in my life. I want you in my life in any way I can get it. And right now, if that means just over the phone, then I'll take it.”

Even though he couldn't see me, I smiled then.

“But with any luck at all it won't always be like this. And if I'm to have anything to do with it, I'll make sure of it,” he told me. I knew then that we were both invested.

Madison snapped me back into the present moment: “Your phone's winging, Kika.”

“Thanks, doll face,” I told her as I pressed my phone to my cheek. “Hello?” I asked, my voice hopeful and urgent. According to his last email, Lochlon should be in Indonesia by now. “Lochlon?” I asked into the phone, already dreaming up the interior of the Southeast Asian Internet café he'd be calling me from—sticky keyboards, plastic palm trees, bad electronic dance music.

But it wasn't Lochlon.

Instead, a high-pitched female voice pummeled through the phone and into my ear: “Lamb!”

There was only one woman it could be: Elsbeth Darling. And to her, everyone—from her husband to her spinning instructor—was dubbed “lamb.” Before I could respond, she plowed on: “Why, oh, why didn't your mother tell me you were babysitting again?”

“Um, hi? Elsbeth?”

“Of course it's me, Kika. Can you hear me okay? I'm calling from London.”

I heaved myself onto the kitchen countertop. “My mom told me you guys moved there. How is it?” I kicked my dangling legs. “That's why she didn't tell you I was babysitting, I guess. Besides, I'm not
really
babysitting.” I instantly regretted saying that.

As if Elsbeth picked up on this, she said, “I know you're
not
really
babysitting. You have that job at VoyageCorp that Mr. Darling got you. As if I could forget.”

Elsbeth's husband, Prescott Darling, was the financial advisor to Richie Rich who passed on my résumé to VoyageCorp. So, in effect, the Darlings got me the job from which I had just been fired.

“Right,” I said. I didn't have the heart to tell her I got sacked, knowing it would get back to Mr. Darling and he would think I was an incompetent free spirit (but wasn't I, though?).

“How are things going over there? Mr. Darling and I were wondering about that . . .”

“Um, good. Fine,” I fibbed.

“Oh.” She sounded dissatisfied.

“I mean, it's
great
. I'm getting a big promotion soon.” I squirmed at the lie and willed my mouth to stop moving, but it was no use. “You know, just clocking in my face time, doing due diligence, going big or going home. Total win-win scenario!”

I blathered out clichéd business jargon in the hopes of confusing her into silence. “I'm just babysitting during my downtime to make some extra money, you know,” I said in conclusion.

But Elsbeth Darling didn't know, because her whole world consisted of downtime and she certainly never had a need for money. I visualized her life as a looped Parisian perfume commercial. I imagined she spent lots of time kittening about on chaise longues and whispering.

“Of course, of course.” Her voice surged emotionally. “Oh, Kika, the girls and I miss you
terribly
.”

Elsbeth used to take yoga classes with my mom, and, oddly enough, the two of them became friendly. Because of their
friendship, Elsbeth took me on as a babysitter and I got to spend whole summers bonding with the Darling girls, Willamina (Mina) and Gwendolyn (Gwen), and their aquamarine inground swimming pool. But my sunscreen-scented memory suddenly vanished when my eye caught Madison.

She had uncapped every single one of her Mr. Sketch Scented Markers and was exuberantly huffing them like a practiced druggie.

I put the phone on speaker so I could wipe the rainbow colors off Madison's nose. Give them all the bourgeois names you want; all children will act like feral drunks when your back is turned.

“It's great to hear from you, Elsbeth. I really miss you guys, too,” I said truthfully. “How is London?”

“Well, that's actually why I'm calling, lamb,” she said. “Mr. Darling and I are
very
happy, and Mina's wonderful, too—you know Miss Popularity. She's the reigning queen of Harrington Gardens School for Girls.

“But Gwen isn't doing as marvelously. I think she's homesick. She doesn't speak to any of the British children in school, and she isn't clicking with any of the French au pairs we've hired.”

“Oh no,” I said. Gwen was a willful girl who was dazzled by her older sister; scarily skilled at karate; and harbored dreams of being a spy when she grew up. “Well, a spy or a ballerina,” was how she officially put it.

It was hard to remember a time when she wasn't so precocious. When I first started working for the Darlings, Gwendy was going on her tenth month of what her world-renowned child psychologists called “selective mutism.” She refused to talk to anyone outside of her immediate family and even stayed completely silent during kindergarten. The doctors blamed it
on social anxiety, but now that I knew Gwen, I like to think she was just bored of everyone babying her.

When Elsbeth hired me, she explained that I wasn't to take Gwen's silence personally. I didn't, but I still found myself chatting to her, even though her mother told me she wasn't paying any attention.

One day, while I was ranting about the creepy, babyish
Teletubbies
show that Elsbeth was always plopping her in front of, Gwen started giggling aloud. Shocked at the sudden sound coming out of her mouth, I asked her what she was laughing at.

“The bat-shit bonkers Teletubbies!” she said, repeating my words back verbatim. Ten months of not speaking and her first word was “bat-shit”—can you imagine?

But Elsbeth ignored the distasteful specifics and gave me all the credit for getting her to talk again. And from that day on, Elsbeth never reprimanded me for my foul mouth again.

Over the phone line, Elsbeth continued: “Mina was studying the French Revolution in school and had made a model guillotine for her European history presentation, and my little Gwendy took it upon herself to torture the au pair with it. The whole thing was getting very
Les Misérables
, so I've just had to let go of another au pair,” said Elsbeth in a blasé way.

She then added: “Of course, it wasn't just that they weren't getting along; I also found out that she was
fired
from her last job. Fired and she didn't even tell me! Can you imagine just omitting such an important detail like that from your future employer?”

The squirm-inducing scene from my own firing swirled in my mind's eye.

Then Elsbeth's voice rose in amusement: “But you should
have seen the ‘
Vive la Revolution!
' banner Mina and Gwen made when she left. Very creative.”

I laughed aloud at the image and felt a sudden twinge of sentimentality.

“Anyway, my point is we really need a nanny Gwen is comfortable with—someone who can make her transition smoother. In the end, she wasn't even speaking to the nanny; she was just chasing her around. We can't have Gwen regressing and refusing to speak again. Do you see?”

“Gotcha,” I said tentatively.
Why is she telling me all of this?

“We want you back, Kika. We want you here in London.”

Sure that I had just started to hallucinate, I didn't dare speak. But Elsbeth Darling continued, undeterred by my lack of reaction.

“Mr. Darling has already secured a visa. And we have plenty of room here at the town house. The house has a whole servants' quarters. Not that you'd be a servant or anything. Lord no, how very feudal, am I right? But what I'm saying is you'll have your own space and even your own entrance from the street so that you can come and go as you please.”

I shook my head.
Is this really happening?

“Kika, did the phone cut out?” Elsbeth heightened her octave and slowed her words. Sounding as if she was talking to an ancient great-aunt, she tried again: “What. I. Said. Was—”

I interrupted: “No, Elsbeth, I heard. I just . . . can't believe it.” I swallowed deeply and audibly. “Are you my fairy godmother or something?”

Elsbeth chuckled. “Oh, lamb, you'd be doing
us
the favor. You worked miracles on Gwen, and you're the only one we can trust her with.”

“Are you sure I don't have to, like, give you my firstborn? Because if so, you can definitely have it.”

Elsbeth laughed as if unsure I was joking. (I wasn't.)

“You're the first one we thought of for the job. Plus, I know moving here is a nonissue for you. You've always been the type of girl who loves a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants adventure, am I right? And, lamb, I know you have a job and a whole life over there. You can take your time deciding. I know you'd have to give up the VoyageCorp job, and that's a
major
career decision.”

Right then, I knew my chance had come to tell Elsbeth I'd been fired.
But will she still offer me the job if she knows?

I started rationalizing an omission:
If I moved to London, no one would know me, and no one would know I got fired from VoyageCorp.
The thought relieved me.
Elsbeth would never find out, so what was the point in risking it by telling her now?

Unaware of my inner struggle, Elsbeth went about convincing me. “Your job can't be paying you enough if you still have to babysit. And not to make it about money, but we'd offer you a very competitive salary in GBP . . .” Elsbeth Darling trailed off meaningfully. “Oh, Kika, say you'll come?”

“Christ on a bicycle. Are you kidding me? Of course I'll come!” I shot-putted my body off the kitchen counter.