Inside (7 page)

They finally settled on chocolate, and Anne followed them, leaving her own purchase behind, back to the apartment. She waited five minutes, then went inside.

Hilary glanced up, her expression blinkered, unrepentant. “This is Alan,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

Anne said nothing, just sat down on the couch and watched them. She hoped this would make them so uncomfortable that the guy would leave, but it didn’t seem to. They stood at the counter eating ice cream and teasing each other, and Anne’s presence didn’t even seem to have registered. Their dialogue was like the worst play she’d ever seen.

“You’re a messy eater.”

“I am not.”

“You have chocolate on your chin.”

“So do you.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

And so on and so on. She was the audience, which she hated being. After a while she went into the bedroom and closed the door, her emotions feeding on themselves: she was upset because she was mad, and that made her even angrier. She took deep breaths and counted to a hundred, then left the apartment without a word and spent two
hours at yoga. They were gone when she got back, their bowls washed and drying by the sink.

Even by herself, her apartment felt different, the air contaminated by someone else’s sexual energies, someone else’s flirt. What was happening?

She slept uneasily that night, waiting for Hilary to come back. Somehow she missed her reentry, but when she woke up at three in the morning, they were both in the living room—Hilary on the couch, Alan on the floor. He was sleeping on a pad made of blankets they must have scavenged, and his pillow was a bundled square of clothes.

She stood in the doorway watching them. The shadows were tinted blue from a neon sign across the street. Hilary turned over on the couch, her movements slow, labored, her body huge. She opened her eyes and looked right at Anne with no expression at all. Vacancy didn’t begin to describe it. Standing there in her tank top and pajama pants, the hair rising on her arms, Anne felt sticklike, insubstantial, and for the first time she could remember she wished she were bigger, stronger, heavier. Now she felt like the one who could be crushed. Without saying anything, Hilary closed her eyes and seemed to fall back asleep.

What would you say to the police? There’s someone in my apartment—no, it wasn’t a break-in, more of a slow slide-in. Or, I’m under attack by a fat teenage girl and her pimple-faced boyfriend? What was the crime here, exactly? She stewed over these questions in the night, cooked them to an angry boil. She decided that in the morning she’d tell Hilary the boy had to go, or else she’d call the police. A runaway is a runaway. Maybe Hilary’s face was on a milk carton somewhere. Maybe her parents would be thankful.

In the morning, in fact, the boy
was
gone. Anne made coffee and waited for Hilary to wake up, wondering what she was going to say. They had no language, the two of them, for the kind of conversation
she needed to have. They’d never exchanged any confidences, romantic or otherwise, and it was too late now to establish that kind of base. She couldn’t ask Hilary who the boy was, because she’d never asked who
Hilary
was.

When Hilary finally woke up and saw Anne watching her, she didn’t look startled. Even in her sleep she seemed to have been preparing for the confrontation. Her languid cow’s eyes were ready. “Listen,” she said, “thanks for letting us stay.”

“Us?”
Anne said.

“Me and Alan. We were desperate before. You’re really saving our asses.”

“I didn’t realize I was saving both your asses.”

“Yeah, well, for a while Alan was up in Syracuse working construction. But now he’s back.”

For the life of her, Anne couldn’t picture that scrawny punk lifting a hammer or a two-by-four. Surely he’d snag the tools on his eyebrow rings. As these thoughts piled up, she realized she had become just like her mother, and she could also blame Hilary for putting her on the wrong side of a generational divide. “You can’t both stay here,” she said.

Hilary nodded as if she’d been expecting this. “Okay, I figured. But can we stay until the baby comes?”

Until the baby comes
. Anne had to repeat the words in her mind several times before they made any sense. “Jesus,” she said. “You’re pregnant.”

The looks passing across Hilary’s face—understanding, disgust, slight amusement—were subtle, brief, and controlled. “I’m not due for three months,” she said. “Alan’s going to get us a place by then. He knows some people squatting in Jersey City.”

Anne couldn’t think of what to say, despite knowing that her silence would be taken for acquiescence. She felt like an idiot.

“Don’t worry,” Hilary added kindly, as if to a child. “It’ll be okay.”

For the first time in ages, Anne didn’t know what to do; she wished she had a friend to ask for advice. She’d left home when she wasn’t much older than Hilary, and since then had kept herself aloof, especially from women, who tended to dive into confidences as if they
were salvation. Being alone and being aloof were the same as being superior. But maybe this wasn’t the best system.

Out of respect or, more likely, a calculated desire not to provoke her, Alan didn’t return that morning. After breakfast, Anne said, “Let’s go for a walk,” and Hilary nodded.

They headed toward Tompkins Square Park, the spring wind lashing their faces, and Anne pulled her hat down over her ears. Despite the cool weather, all around the park people were having brunch, shopping, walking dogs. The girls wore frayed cords, the boys plaid shirts. From an open window came the smell of pot. In the park kids were playing kickball, and under an enormous elm tree Hare Krishnas were chanting and singing.

Hilary walked along beside her, matching her stride like a dog on a leash.

Now that Anne recognized the girl’s bulk for what it was, her every bodily sign seemed to broadcast pregnancy: hands resting on her stomach, her cheeks even broader, her calm eyes hoarding all internal energy. Things Anne hadn’t even realized were confusing suddenly made sense, which maddened and embarrassed her because actresses were supposed to be observant. So as they walked she asked Hilary every question she could think of. Where was she from, exactly? Why had she left home? Did her parents know where she was? Did they know she was pregnant? Was Alan from her hometown? When exactly was the baby due? How long had she been living on the street before ending up downstairs? What were her
plans
?

Unruffled, undefensive, Hilary answered each question in turn. She was from a small town between Binghamton and Syracuse. Her mother worked in a grocery store. Her stepfather had sexually abused her and she had run away twice before. She went back because of Alan, who’d promised to protect her, and did. They’d come down to the city just before Christmas and stayed with Alan’s cousin in Brooklyn, where he had a one-bedroom apartment with two roommates, but he’d kicked them out after they had a fight. Then she found an NYU ID and key card on the street and managed to get
inside a dorm, where she set up a bed in an unused storage room and passed through the hallways without any trouble, everybody assuming she was a student. Once she was settled, Alan went up to Syracuse to make some money so that when the baby came they’d be ready with an apartment and “stuff like that.” From that melting phrase Anne could tell Hilary was both sentimental about the baby and clueless about what it would involve. During Alan’s absence, Hilary got evicted from the room and had to stay out of shelters, because the security guard was probably calling out a description and “with that Amber alert and everything, it was such a drag,” which is why she’d ended up downstairs. She was sick and tired and just needed to, you know, lie down inside and be warm for a few days. By the time Alan got back she was at Anne’s.

“I told him I’d be all right, and I was,” she finished. “I can take care of myself, but he worries a lot about me.”

“You should’ve told me,” Anne said.

“About what?”

“Everything.”

The girl stared at her. “You didn’t ask,” she pointed out.

“Didn’t ask what? ‘Oh, by the way, are you pregnant?’ ‘Oh, are you on the lam from the police?’ ‘Oh, will some snotty punk kid show up in my kitchen one day?’ ”

The Hare Krishnas turned around at the sound of Anne’s raised voice, and she glared at them until they went back to their routine.

Hilary shook her head angrily. “Alan’s not snotty. Look, we’re both real clean. We don’t make a mess. I keep the place okay, right? I know you’ve done a lot. You didn’t have to let me stay. But, I swear, eventually we’ll have a place and money and stuff, and I’ll pay you back, whatever you want.” For the first time, she sounded like a teenager. And once again, she had the knack of saying the right thing at the right time. “Anyway, Anne? Aren’t you a runaway too?”

And of course she was right. But there was no way she could have known it. She was a magician, a diviner. Anne was so freaked out that she shut up and let them stay.

In the weeks to come, Anne told Hilary her own story, how she’d left her home in Montreal at the age of sixteen. She’d met a guy who drove her to Burlington, Vermont, where she got a job waiting tables at a coffee shop and rented a room from the guy’s sister, who thought she was a college student. From Burlington she went to Vancouver; she didn’t like it, but while she was there she fell in with some theater people and decided she wanted to act. She stayed for a year before moving on: Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago. She lived for a year with a guy she’d met in a park, where he was feeding the ducks. He offered her a room if she’d cook his meals, and after six months he told her he loved her, and she believed him. He was a gentleman, and he said he knew she’d been through hard times, that he wanted to treat her with the respect and delicacy she deserved. This was how he talked, using words like
delicacy
. In all the time she lived with him he never touched her. At the end of the year he proposed, and she said she didn’t think she was ready for marriage yet. He nodded and said he understood, but at midnight he came into her room, got into her bed, and ran his hands up and down her bare back. She sat up and said, “Please don’t do that,” trying to keep her voice high and childish, frail with youth.

“I know your real self,” he said. “I know what you want.”

She ran from the house in her pajamas. It was the first night since she left home that she stayed in a shelter, and she vowed it would be the only one. From then on she never lived with a man. She used them for food, jobs, and transportation, but wouldn’t live with them. When she got to New York, she paid cash for a room at a hostel until the apartment deal with Larry came through. She never counted on anyone but herself.

In the six years she’d been gone, she’d written to her parents three times. The first was to tell them she was fine and not to try to find her. The second was a Christmas card she’d sent from Las Vegas, a drunken, sentimental mistake. The third was just last year. She had woken up in the middle of the night with the eeriest feeling about her mother; it was like having a scary dream that you couldn’t really remember. She was shaking and sweating. She didn’t believe in premonitions or portents, but she was rattled enough to write. She didn’t give a return address, and wasn’t thinking about going home.
Too much time had passed and she was a different person now, an adult of her own making. She simply wrote,
Mom. I love you. Annie
. It wasn’t what any mother would have wanted, but it was something, and it would have to be enough.

“So how come you left?” Hilary said. “I mean, in the first place.”

Anne shrugged.

“Did you ever go back?”

“No.”

The girl sat in the silence, patting her belly. Her eyes were drowsy, implacable.

“How did you know that I ran away?” Anne said.

Hilary lifted her hand and gestured around the apartment. “It’s empty,” she said. “On purpose empty.”

“I guess,” Anne said.

Hilary looked at her, and suddenly her eyes were sharp, gleaming. “Girls who look like you can have whatever they want,” she said. “You chose this.”

Anne held her gaze. “So did you,” she said.

THREE
 
 
Iqaluit, 2006

MARTINE, OF COURSE, didn’t want him to go. When he told her about the contract, she stood in the living room with her arms crossed, looking, with her thick-framed glasses and disapproving frown, more like a librarian than the lawyer she was. When she was hurt or vulnerable, she reacted with stern anger, and Mitch loved her for the transparency of this posture, almost as much as he loved the quiet, resigned way in which later, in bed, crying a little, she would set it aside.

“I don’t understand,” she said then. Her curly hair was a tangle of silver blond on the pillow. Her French accent, as always when she was upset, grew stronger. “It’s so far away.”

“The rotation’s only a few months,” he told her. “And the money’s great.”

“It’s depressing up there. You said so yourself.”

“That’s because the people are depressed.”

“So why do you need to go to a place like that?”