She was chattering away now, complaining about our passage. “—knew we should have taken the later boat. That would have brought us direct to Calais without this silly roundabout stop in England.”
I remained silent. One night in Southampton and then tomorrow straight on to Calais, where a train would take us to Switzerland. There was a clinic in Vevey where my mother had scheduled me for a certain discreet appointment. Be grateful, Charlie, I told myself for the thousandth time. She didn’t have to come with you at all. I could have been packed off to Switzerland with my father’s secretary or some other indifferent paid handler. My mother didn’t have to miss her usual vacation in Palm Beach just to bring me to my appointment herself. She’s here with you. She’s trying. I could appreciate that even in my stew of fogged, angry shame. It wasn’t as if she was wrong to be so furious with me, to think I was a troublemaking slut. That’s what girls were, if they got themselves in the fix I was in. I’d better get used to the label.
Maman was still talking, determinedly cheerful. “I thought we’d go to Paris after your Appointment.” Every time she said it, I heard the capital letter. “Get you some proper clothes, ma p’tite. Do something with your hair.”
What she was really saying was, You’ll come back to school in the fall with a chic new look, and no one will know about your Little Problem. “I really don’t see that equation balancing out, Maman.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
I sighed. “One college sophomore minus one small encumbrance, divided by six months’ passage of time, multiplied by ten Paris frocks and a new haircut will not magically equal one restored reputation.”
“Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.”
If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it. I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for. There was just the mess that was Charlie St. Clair, sitting at a table with her mother, with whom she had no common denominators.
Maman sipped her weak tea, smiling bright, hating me. “I shall inquire as to whether our rooms are ready. Don’t slouch! And do keep your case close by; you’ve got your grandmother’s pearls in there.”
She floated off toward the long marble counter and the bustling clerks, and I reached for my traveling case—square and battered; there had been no time to order me smart new luggage. I had half a pack of Gauloises tucked under the flat box with my pearls (only my mother would insist I pack pearls for a Swiss clinic). I’d happily leave the baggage and the pearls to get stolen if I could just step outside for a good smoke. My cousin Rose and I tried our first cigarette at the respective ages of thirteen and eleven, snitching a pack from my older brother and disappearing up a tree to try some grown-up vice. “Do I look like Bette Davis?” Rose had asked, trying to exhale smoke through her nose. I nearly fell out of the tree, laughing and coughing together after my single puff, and she stuck her tongue out at me. “Silly Charlie!” Rose was the only one to call me Charlie instead of Charlotte, giving it a soft French lilt. Shar-lee, emphasis on both syllables.
It was Rose, of course, who I saw gazing at me across the hotel court now. And it wasn’t Rose, it was just an English girl slouching beside a pile of luggage, but my brain stubbornly told me I was seeing my cousin: thirteen, blond, peach pretty. That was how old she’d been the last summer I saw her, sitting in that tree with her first cigarette.
She’d be older by now, twenty-one to my nineteen . . .
If she was still alive.
“Rose,” I whispered, knowing I should look away, but not doing it. “Oh, Rose.”
In my imagination, she gave an impish smile and a toss of her chin to the street outside. Go.
“Go where?” I said aloud. But I already knew. I thrust my hand into my pocket and felt the scrap of paper I’d been carrying for a month. It had been stiff and crinkly, but time had worn it soft and pliable. That piece of paper bore an address. I could—
Don’t be stupid. My conscience had a sharp, condemning voice that stung like a paper cut. You know you’re not going anywhere but upstairs. There was a hotel room waiting for me with crisp sheets, a room I wouldn’t have to share with my mother’s brittle fury. A balcony where I could smoke in peace. Another boat to catch tomorrow, and then the Appointment, as my parents euphemistically referred to it. The Appointment, which would take care of my Little Problem, and then things would be All Right.
Or I could admit that nothing was All Right, and nothing would be All Right. And I could just go, right now, down the path that started here in England.
You planned for this, Rose whispered. You know you did. And I had. Even in my passive, blunted misery of the last few weeks, I’d pushed for the boat that would take my mother and me the roundabout way through England, not the later passage that would have borne us right to France. I’d pushed for it without letting myself think about why I was pushing for it: because I had an English address in my pocket, and now, without an ocean in the way, all I lacked was the guts to go there.
The unknown English girl who wasn’t Rose had gone now, headed for the hotel stairs behind a bellboy laden with luggage. I looked at the empty place where Rose had been. I touched the scrap of paper in my pocket. Little jagged pieces of feeling poked me through my numbness. Fear? Hope? Resolve?
One scribbled address plus one dash of resolve multiplied to the power of ten. Work the equation, Charlie.
Break it down.
Solve for X.
Now or never.
I took a deep breath. I pulled out the scrap of paper, and with it came a crumpled pound note. Recklessly, I slapped it down on the table next to mine where the braying boys had left their measly tip, and I walked out of the hotel court clutching my traveling case and my French cigarettes. Straight out through the wide doors of the hotel, where I asked the doorman, “Excuse me, but can you direct me to the train station?”
Not the wisest idea I’ve ever had: strange city, girl on her own. I’d spent the last few weeks in such a daze from my endless bad luck—the Little Problem, the screaming in French from my mother, the icy silence from my father—I’d been willing to go anywhere I was led. Straight off a cliff I’d march, blank and obedient, and not wonder or care why I was falling till I was halfway down. I’d been halfway down the hole my life had become, turning endlessly in the air. But now I’d grabbed a handhold.