Inside Out Girl Page 22

  Piper leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment. “Oh dear, you stay then. God knows I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Then she reached out to pat Shannon’s hand. “Just promise when the ambulance arrives—tell the attendants I’m allergic to Erythromycin.”

  Shannon snatched the money, pressed a few buttons on the phone, and headed for the door.

  The moment the girl had gone, Piper jumped up and returned to the red-coded files. She ran her finger along the shelf, and slowed when she reached the DEs. There were several files with the code DEA, and Piper pulled them out, one after another. Deacon, Deakos, two Deans, Deangelis, Deangelo, Deappollonia, Dear—Piper stopped, sucked in a breath, scanning the file to make sure it wasn’t an abbreviation for Dearborn. It wasn’t. Dearden-Myers. Wait—she’d gone too far. She pulled them out again, rifling through the contents of each, then pushed them back into place, her heart thumping.

  The file was gone.

  Now, Rachel just shook her head in disbelief. So many emotions were doing battle inside her, she could barely breathe. That her mother—Piper Dearborn—had gone from pretending Hannah didn’t exist to trying to steal her file was incomprehensible. Through a fainting caper, no less. It had been Rachel’s one and only shot at finding her lost daughter, and by some barbed twist of fate, the file wasn’t even there.

  “What made you do it?” Rachel asked quietly. “After all this time…why?”

  Piper pulled a burger out of the bag and unwrapped it. “My silence about Hannah wasn’t born of cruelty, despite what you might think. You’d just been so quiet about her until this Olivia came into your life. I thought it best not to stir it up.”

  Rachel said nothing.

  “I regret it now.”

  “It’s all right, Mom. You tried today.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that. I regret forcing you to give her up.”

  Rachel looked up. “What?”

  “You were nearly eighteen. Almost a woman. I should never have interfered.” Piper balanced her burger on her knees and reached out to pat Rachel’s arm. Then, as if not knowing what to do with her hand, she went back to her Quarter Pounder.

  “But…how long have you felt this way?” asked Rachel.

  “Since Janie was born.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and exhaled.

  “It was Janie…holding my own grandchild for the first time.”

  “Mom, that was fourteen years ago. Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  Piper pulled out a compact to check her teeth for sesame seeds. “I regret that too. I’m actually considering hiring a therapist. Stifling one’s emotions is very unhealthy.”

  Rachel laughed.

  “That’s so funny?”

  “Just that you regret it for your sake. Not mine.”

  “What? Loving one’s grandchildren is suddenly reprehensible? Unforgivable?” Piper blinked at her daughter. The thing about Rachel’s mother was, no matter how misguided, how insensitive she may have been when it came to Hannah, she truly loved her grandchildren. And if Hannah was now being considered one of her grandchildren, well, it was a considerable evolution.

  “No, Mother,” Rachel said, lips twitching. “It’s sweet.” She reached for her ringing phone. “Rachel Berman.”

  “It’s Len.” He sounded exhausted.

  Rachel felt a muscle in her back tighten. Since the night in the dark parking lot, she’d only spoken to him once—when he picked up Olivia after school. His meeting with Tammy and Philip’s families had gone even better than he’d hoped and today, Tammy and Philip were to go to Len’s office early that afternoon to meet Olivia—who was being allowed to skip school for the day—and, ultimately, sign papers.

  Olivia’s future would be secure. And Len’s future, well…she couldn’t think about that right now. She’d just lost her daughter all over again. “Hey. How did your meet—”

  “Rachel.” She could hear busy office sounds behind him. Phones ringing, people’s voices. “Rachel?”

  “I’m here, Len. What is it?”

  “Write down these directions.”

  As she scrawled down his instructions, a prickly chill spread down her shoulders, her arms, her chest. Her eyes darted up to her mother’s and she mouthed, “Get your purse.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Through the Chain-link Fence

  Most of all, there will be moments to treasure. No matter how brief, how seemingly insignificant, some of these moments will feed you forever.

  —RACHEL BERMAN, Perfect Parent magazine

  They parked the car under the shadow of a mature elm in front of the fenced playground. Brighton wasn’t a particularly large high school, just the original red brick building, about seventy or eighty years old, with a long, low stucco addition that ran around the back of the playground. A school janitor stood in the center of the grassy field beside a cement shed, painting over masterful graffitied prose that read, “Brighton can bite my hairy…”

  The recipient of Brighton’s bicuspids, mercifully, had been covered over and would, from that moment forward, remain a mystery.

  Opening the paper bag, which she’d grabbed from Rachel’s desk at the last minute, Piper pulled out a handful of cold fries. “You should eat now, before the recess bell rings. Your food’s cold, but soon it’ll be soggy, too.”

  Rachel shook her head, unable to take her eyes off the front doors.

  From two sets of double doors, teenage girls spilled out onto the school grounds. As soon as she saw them, Rachel realized picking Hannah out from this sea of white blouses, tartan skirts, knee socks, and clunky black shoes wasn’t going to be simple. Girls of every height, width, hair color, and ethnicity broke into clusters, where they stood around laughing and whispering. Gone were the carefree days of playing tag or four-square on the tarmac. That clearly went out in grade school. These girls were working hard to achieve a look that was both cool and poised beyond their years.

  That was it.

  That was how she’d know Hannah. Hannah wouldn’t care much about how thin her legs looked in her hiked-up skirt. Nor would she care about being seen talking to the right kids at lunchtime. Hannah would be a free spirit, her movements more childlike and uninhibited. Rachel squinted her eyes and tried not to focus.

  Then she saw it. The loose fluid movements of a much younger spirit, jogging across the lawn. Rachel focused her eyes and saw a girl with long, curly, very nearly black hair, more animated and smaller than most of the others, looking back and waving for someone to join her.

  Her cheeks were rounder than Janie’s, but her mouth was the same tight little red rose just beginning to bud. Rachel’s breath caught in her throat as she somehow got out of the car. Suddenly her face felt the cool chain links of the fence and she sensed Piper close by, on her right.

  Two other girls, both of them with Down’s syndrome, joined the dark-haired girl, racing her across the grass but stopping just short of the tarmac and letting her win.

  She had friends.

  The image of Olivia sneezing into the measuring cup flashed before her.

  A teacher walked over to the grass and called out, “Chloe!” The girl’s face lit up and she raced toward the older woman, who put something in the girl’s hands.

  Rachel glanced at Piper for a moment. They both had to be thinking the same thing. The girl was happy. Loved. Safe. She was brimming with joy, overflowing with people who cared.

  Something struck the fence at Rachel’s feet. She looked down to see a small turquoise ball lying in the grass. The dark-haired girl ran after it, dropping onto her hands and knees in the grass. Rachel sank to the sidewalk, her face just above the girl’s, and threaded her fingers through the cool links of the fence. As the girl scooped up the ball, she rose up on her knees and stared at Rachel.

  Chills spread across Rachel’s body. Tears stung her eyes. Her breath came in ragged gasps, but she smiled. The face looking back at her, the silver, almond-shaped eyes that looked like shards of burni
shed steel, the dark lashes—double thick—the upturned nose…it was Hannah.

  “Hi,” said Hannah, grinning shyly.

  Rachel smiled, silently sobbing at the same time. Her body shook as she laughed, cried, whispered, “Hi.”

  A wisp of hair blew across Hannah’s eyes. Narrow fingers, like Janie’s, pushed it away.

  Rachel squeezed the chain links and moved closer. She almost blurted out the truth. Said, “I gave birth to you and don’t for one second ever believe I didn’t want you, didn’t love you,” but stopped herself. Olivia was wrong. Hannah didn’t need to hear it. It was Rachel who needed to say it.

  Hannah rose to her feet and was gone. She disappeared into the sea of uniforms, followed by a group of friends. As hard as Rachel tried, she couldn’t find her. She and Piper walked the length of the fence and back again several times without luck. There were simply too many girls, too many white blouses.

  For a long while, Rachel didn’t move. The bell rang and the girls filed back inside, not one of them possessing Hannah’s life force. Just before the doors closed, something blue rolled through them and down two cement steps. Hannah burst back outside, picked up the ball, and glanced at Rachel. She waved and dashed back in.

  Neither Piper nor Rachel spoke once they got in the car. They stared through the windshield for what seemed like hours, but could only have been a few minutes. “She’s beautiful, don’t you think?” asked Rachel.

  “Like Janie.”

  “And fine. More than fine. She looks like she’s thriving.”

  Piper, who had finished her own meal before the girls came outside, poured half of Rachel’s fries onto her lap. “If only I’d had it so good as a child,” she said. “I might have had the confidence to help run your father’s magazine instead of staying home, scooping up cat shit from your father’s Himalayans.”

  Rachel bit into a small fry. She half-smiled. “Please. Olivia prefers the word ‘droppings.’”

  Olivia.

  Since the Code Adam night, one of the worst nights of her life, she’d been haunted by two things. The guilt of being too distracted by her own fantasy to pay attention to the reality of the little girl in her care. And, in the pet store, the warmth of Olivia’s body bundled snugly around her own, that soft, fleshy cheek glued to Rachel’s neck, those dimpled hands clasped behind Rachel’s head, lost in the tangles of her fallen ponytail. She remembered the child’s hair tickling her cheek.

  God, Olivia had smelled good.

  The polarity of Hannah’s and Olivia’s worlds was almost too much to consider.

  Hannah had everyone. Olivia had…Olivia had the Peytons, or she would once Len was gone. Rachel checked her watch. They were probably signing right now.

  The child would be living in their condo. They planned to buy her a hamster.

  Rachel’s heartbeat quickened and the smell of Olivia’s shampoo filled her nostrils again.

  The girl’s words came back to her, from the breakfast-in-bed-for-dinner night. “Sometimes if you get so busy doing something else,” she’d said, “like sitting in the almost-dark, you think you’re pretty good. But really you want milk. You just don’t know it till you smell it.”

  “Oh my God,” Rachel said out loud. Her mouth went dry. “What have I done?”

  “What?”

  Rachel’s heart pounded as she fumbled through her purse.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Rachel pulled out her cell phone. It was dead. “Damn it!” she wailed, hurling it into her lap. “Give me your cell phone.”

  “I don’t have it. I left it—”

  “We have to get to Len’s office.”

  Piper started the car and pulled out into traffic, waving her arm out the window to mollify the honking drivers. “Rachel, what is going on?”

  Rachel stared through the windshield. In the tiniest movement, she shook her head. “I’ve been sitting in the almost-dark too long.”

  The elevator was taking too long. Rachel raced through Len’s lobby, the soles of her shoes slapping against the polished marble floors. She tugged open the heavy fire door that led to the stairwell and took the steps two at a time, barely noticing that she was gulping air, swallowing, and gasping instead of breathing.

  She burst onto the seventh floor and into the tranquility of Standish, Bean and Roche, her footsteps silent now. Marching past Len’s assistant, who was filing something in a drawer behind her desk, Rachel kept her eyes on Len’s closed door. Just as she reached for the handle, his secretary called out, “You just missed him. He finished early and went home for the night.”

  Somehow Rachel wasn’t prepared for Olivia to open the door. The whole way over, she’d rehearsed what she was going to say to Len. First, about his sudden decision to help her find Hannah. Second, about Olivia’s eventual guardians. She’d so perfectly blown her chances, for the zillionth time in her life, that she’d elevated lost opportunities to an art form. Still, she was hoping, praying, that maybe there’d be some way Len could work Rachel into the signed guardianship agreement, at the very least as someone with regular visits. Perhaps a feeble sort of too-little, too-late codicil that would never be good enough for Rachel, but would be a whole lot better than the alternative—never seeing Olivia again.

  It wasn’t even three o’clock in the afternoon, but Olivia was wearing bright red pajamas and matching slippers. Her hair was still wet from the bath, slicked back and brushed smoother than Rachel had ever seen.

  Olivia blinked fast when she saw Rachel.

  “Whoa.” Her right hand held Birthday Wishes Barbie by the foot. Her left fluttered up and pattered against her chest. “I didn’t even know you were coming over. Is it my birthday?”

  She smiled, giving the child a gentle poke in the stomach. “No, sweetie. Not today.”

  “You could come in anyway. Even if you didn’t bring a present.” The door opened wider and, as the child looked past her, Rachel saw there were bubbles in her ear. She pulled out a Kleenex and wiped Olivia’s ear clean. The girl was surprisingly tolerant of all the fussing, and when Rachel finished, Olivia looked up. “Were you just taking care of me?”

  Rachel whispered, “I think I might have been.” She pulled Olivia into her arms and held her close enough to smell her shampoo. The girl’s stiff little body relaxed, and she allowed herself to be rocked from side to side. When Olivia’s hands came to rest on Rachel’s stomach, tapered fingers tapping the rhythm of maternal effervescence, Rachel closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry.

  CHAPTER 44

  “Anarchy for Sale”

  —DEAD KENNEDYS

  Janie sat cross-legged on the gritty wooden stage floor, eating a tuna sandwich. The heavy velvet curtain, the only thing separating her from the cafeteria, draped against her back like a hug. It seemed the entire school had divided itself into two teams: Team Carlisle and Team Berman. And Team Berman had substantially fewer members.

  Since her bus-stop fight with Tabitha the week prior, Janie had faked sick twice. Her mother took her to the pediatrician, who chalked it up to high-school-newbie stress—although he hadn’t quite used those words.

  One thing was certain. She had to do something. She’d been using her solitary lunch hours on the darkened stage to plan. Her first instinct was to destroy Tabitha’s Golden Girl reputation. But how? Send Tabitha’s best friend, Charlotte, a pair of lacy black panties by mail with an anonymous note saying “I found Tabitha with your boyfriend in the back of my garage. Be a doll, won’t you, and return these to her?”

  But that wouldn’t undo the crippling damage Janie’s reputation had suffered. No. She needed to focus on herself.

  Do something that would clear her name.

  In other words, she needed to lose the whole virginal debutante lesbian shit and fuck some guy’s brains out.

  She walked along the second-floor hallway, lunch bag pressed to her chest.

  “Don’t even think about it, Berman,” said Samantha Ewing as Janie passed. “I’m o
ff limits…to you!” As if Janie would ever, in a million trillion years, touch her twelfth-grade sack of bones. What kind of moron goes to L.A. for Christmas holidays, returns three cup sizes larger—with a note to excuse her from gym for the next month—and expects everyone to believe she had a “gush of hormones?”

  When Janie reached her locker, she stopped and stared. The words I LIKE GIRLZ were scrawled across the metal door. Janie quickly unlocked the door and with her face pushed inside, she wiped her teary eyes and took a few deep breaths. Then she slammed the door shut.

  Cody Donovan was on the other side, sucking on a marker. He smiled, pulled the pen out of his mouth, and flicked off the cap. He blacked over the graffiti and grinned. “Not everyone thinks it’s a bad thing,” he said, his breath stinking of cigarettes. “I’m all for girls on girls.” He put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Shut up, Donovan,” Janie said, trying to slip away.

  “Seriously. I’ll cheer you up.”

  “Thanks, but I’m doing fine.”

  He ran his finger down the neck of her blouse, laughing when she knocked it away. “Come on, Berman. You’re killing me here.”

  Maybe Cody was exactly what she needed. A guy who’d strut around with his feathers spread and blast his conquest to the whole school. Nobody would believe a real lesbian would sleep with a guy like him. People might think Tabitha made the whole kiss thing up.

  What other choice did Janie have? As terrible as it might be, she had to do it. “Okay,” she whispered.

  He tilted his head, opening his eyes wide. “What did you say?”

  “I said, okay,” she repeated, knocking his arms off and stepping backward.

  “Well, fuck me.”

  Exactly what I plan to do, thought Janie. Out loud, she said, “Saturday night. Midnight. You know where I live, right? Next door to Tabitha?”

  Cody nodded, speechless.

  “Good,” Janie said. “Meet me on the bluffs behind my garage.”