Mama found a pay phone and called a taxi. As they stood there waiting for it to arrive, the rain stopped.
A bright yellow cab pulled up to the dirty curb, splashing water on them. Leni followed her mama into the backseat, which smelled aggressively of pine. From here on, Leni saw the lights of the city through a window. With water everywhere, in drips and puddles, but no rain falling, the place had a jumbled, multicolored, carnival look.
They angled uphill. The old brick and low-rise part of the city—Pioneer Square—was apparently the pit people climbed out of when they got money. Downtown was a canyon of office buildings, skyscrapers, and stores, set on busy streets, with windows that looked like movie sets, inhabited by mannequins dressed in glitzy suits with exaggerated shoulder pads and cinched-in waists. At the top of the hill, the city gave way to a neighborhood of stately homes.
“There it is,” Mama said to the cabbie, giving him the last of their borrowed cash.
The house was bigger than Leni remembered. In the dark, it looked vaguely sinister, with its peaked roof pointing high into a black night sky and glowing diamond-paned windows. All of it was surrounded by an iron fence topped with heart-piercing spires.
“You sure?” Leni asked quietly.
Leni knew what this had cost her mother, coming home for help. She saw the impact of it in her mother’s eyes, in the slump of her shoulders, in the way her hands curled into fists. Mama felt like a failure coming back here. “It just proves they were right about him all along.”
“We could disappear from here, too. Start over by ourselves.”
“I might do that for myself, baby girl, but not for you. I was a crappy mother. I am going to be a good grandmother. Please. Don’t give me a way out.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
Leni took hold of Mama’s hand; they walked up the stone path together, where spotlights shone on bushes sculpted to look like animals and spiky rosebushes cut back for winter. At the ornate front door they paused. Waited. Then Mama knocked.
Moments later, the door opened and Grandma appeared.
The years had changed her, imprinted and pulled at her face. Her hair had gone gray. Or maybe it had always been gray and she’d stopped dyeing it. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, clamping a thin hand to her mouth.
“Hey, Mom,” Mama said, her voice unsteady.
Leni heard footsteps.
Grandma stepped aside; Grandpa moved in beside her. He was a big man—fat stomach straining at a blue cashmere sweater, big floppy jowls, white hair that was combed across his shiny head, the strands carefully tended. Baggy black polyester pants, cinched tight with a belt, suggested bird-thin legs underneath. He looked older than his seventy years.
“Hey,” Mama said.
Her grandparents stared at them, eyes narrowed, seeing the bruises on Leni’s and Mama’s faces, the swollen cheeks, the black eyes. “Son of a bitch,” Grandpa said.
“We need help,” Mama said, squeezing Leni’s hand.
“Where is he?” Grandpa wanted to know.
“We’ve left him,” Mama said.
“Thank God,” Grandma said.
“Do we need to worry about him coming to look for you, breaking down my door?” Grandpa asked.
Mama shook her head. “No. Never.”
Grandpa’s eyes narrowed. Did he understand what that meant? What they’d done? “What do you—”
“I’m pregnant,” Leni said. They had talked about this, she and Mama, and decided to say nothing about the pregnancy yet, but now that they were here, asking for help—begging—Leni couldn’t do it. She had kept enough secrets in her life. She didn’t want to live in the shadows of them anymore.
“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Mama said, trying to smile.
“We’ve been here before,” Grandpa said. “I seem to recall my advice to you.”
“You wanted me to give her up and come home and pretend I could be the girl I was before,” Mama said. “And I wanted you to say it was okay, that you loved me anyway.”
“What we said,” Grandma said softly, “was that there were women in our church who were unable to have children and would have given your baby a good home.”
“I’m keeping my baby,” Leni said. “If you don’t want to help us, it’s fine, but I’m keeping the baby.”
Mama squeezed her hand.
Silence followed Leni’s declaration. In it, Leni glimpsed the largeness of the world for her and Mama now, the ocean of troubles they faced on their own, and it frightened her, but not as much as the idea of the world she would inhabit if she gave up this baby. Some choices you didn’t recover from; she was old enough to know that.
Finally, after what felt like forever, Grandma turned to her husband. “Cecil, how many times have we talked about a second chance? This is it.”
“You won’t run off in the middle of the night again?” he said to Mama. “Your mother … barely survived it.”
In those few words, carefully chosen, Leni heard sorrow. There was hurt between these people and her mother, hurt and regret and mistrust, but something softer, too.
“No, sir. We won’t.”
At last, Grandpa smiled. “Welcome home, Coraline. Lenora. Let’s get some ice on those bruises. You both should see a doctor.”
Leni saw Mama’s reluctance to step into the house. She took Mama by the arm, steadied her.
“Don’t let go,” Mama whispered.
Inside, Leni noticed the smell of flowers. There were several large floral arrangements positioned artfully on gleaming wooden tables and gilt-edged mirrors on the walls.
Leni glanced into rooms and down hallways as they walked. She saw a dining room with a table that accommodated twelve, a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a living room in which there were two of everything, sofas, chairs, windows, lamps. A staircase with carpet so plush it felt like walking on muskeg in the summer led to an upstairs hallway that was paneled in mahogany and decorated with brass sconces and paintings of dogs and horses in ornate golden frames.
“Here,” Grandma said, finally stopping. Grandpa hung back, as if maybe doling out rooms was women’s work. “Lenora, you will sleep in Coraline’s old room. Cora, come this way.”
Leni stepped into her new room.
At first all she saw was lace. Not the cheap eyelet she was used to seeing at Goodwill; this was fine, almost like cobwebs strung together. Ivory lace curtains framed the windows. There was more ivory lace on the bedding and lampshades. On the floor, pale oatmeal-colored carpeting. Furniture that was ivory with gilt edges. A small kidney-shaped desk had an ivory-colored cushioned stool tucked up underneath.
The air felt stifling, unnatural, bathed in a false lavender scent.
She went to the window, lifted the heavy sash, and leaned out. The sweet night welcomed her, calmed her. The rain had stopped, leaving a glittering black night in its wake. Lights were on in all the houses up and down the street.
There was a small patch of wet roof in front of her. Below that, the well-tended yard, with an old maple tree tucked in close, its branches mostly bare, only a few red-gold leaves still hanging on.
Trees. Night air. Quiet.
Leni climbed out onto the shake-covered roof below her room. Although there were lights on in the house, and houses with lights on across the street, she felt safer out here. She smelled trees and greenery and even a distant tang of the sea.
The sky was unfamiliar. Black. In Alaska the night sky in winter was a deep velvet blue and when snow covered the ground and cloaked the trees, ambient light created a magical glow. And then, sometimes, the northern lights danced overhead. Still, she recognized the stars; they weren’t in the same place, but they were the same stars. The Big Dipper. Orion’s Belt. Constellations Matthew had shown her that night when they’d lain on the beach.
Her fingers closed around the heart necklace at her throat. She could wear it openly now and not worry about her father asking where she’d gotten it. She would never take it off again.
“You want some company?”