For months I carried that suitcase with me everywhere, even though my sisters ridiculed me endlessly about it. I even insisted on taking it to school, and my teacher, Mrs. Hornsby, let me keep it by my desk, instead of among the jumble of overcoats and rubber boots and mittens dripping snow by the radiators in the back.
One night, I came out from the bath and found my sisters in my bedroom. They’d broken the lock, just snapped it in half, opened the suitcase, and laid everything out on the rug. Their fingerprints were all over the snow globe. Poor Amelia was discarded facedown on the floor. They were laughing hysterically.
I lunged at Olivia, my middle sister, first. She’d had bad pneumonia as a kid and was weaker than Delilah. I managed to wrestle her to the ground before she kneed me in the stomach and Delilah hauled me backward. She pinned me and sat on my chest.
“You know why Mom and Dad bought you that stupid suitcase, don’t you?” Delilah leaned forward so that her hair tented around me. Her face, mean and gloating, was all I could see. “They want you to run away.”
“You’re a liar.” I was doing a bad job of trying not to cry.
“They told us so,” Delilah said. “They never wanted you in the first place.”
I spit at her. She slapped my face, hard, and finally I couldn’t swallow back the tears anymore, and I started to cry, huge heaving sobs that nearly made me throw up. Later, they must have felt badly; Olivia made me warm milk with honey and Delilah braided and pinned my hair so it would curl in the morning. But I didn’t forgive them.
I had my revenge. The next day, a Sunday, I snuck away through the crowd congregating after church and circled back around to the stairs that led into the basement, where the church held socials and doled out soup on Easter. It was colder than I’d expected, and darker. For hours I shivered alone, listening to the distant echo of voices, praying both that I wouldn’t be discovered and that I would.
Eventually, when I couldn’t feel my fingers and my toes had gone numb in my boots, I went home. The sun had set, and I remember the strangeness of the streets in the dark: the gray crust of snow over everything, the rutted sidewalks, the Christmas displays behind vividly lit windows.
I saw my sisters even before I pushed open the gate: both of them pressed face and palm to our front windows, the glass fogging with their breath, watching for me. Behind them, my father was pacing and my mother was sitting on our small cream-and-yellow-striped sofa, white-faced, with her hands in her lap.
Standing in the dark, knowing that I would go inside and everyone would fuss over me, was one of the happiest moments of my life. It was like staring into a snow globe and knowing I could shrink down and pass through the glass, that we would all remain forever suspended, safe, even as the world continued, dark and vast, outside our little boundary.
My sisters squeezed me until I thought my breath would run out. My mother cried and called me darling even as my father made me lie over his legs so he could spank me. I went to bed with a backside red as an apple, but my mother brought me soup so I wouldn’t catch pneumonia, and Olivia and Delilah piled in bed with me and read from my favorite book, The Wind in the Willows.
Thomas and I should have had an ending like that. We were to take his car to New York City, and from there a bus to Chicago, where Thomas had a cousin who would help us get set up. I imagined several jewel-colored rooms filled with books, a fire in the grate, and snow falling softly on dark streets outside our windows. I imagined lying with Thomas under a blanket filled with down, talking late into the night, waking up with the tips of our noses cold and the windows patterned with frost.
I imagined that we would be happy together, that together, we would be home.
CAROLINE
Caroline had now learned how to make a lemon tart, and that you should never actually boil an egg. She couldn’t stop reading Adrienne’s blog, TheGoldenSpoon, and refreshing the page in the hopes that more pictures would appear.
And yesterday, due to some happy accident, a series of maneuvers that she would never be able to replicate, she had found a profile that listed a hometown and even a zip code; and then, from there, after paying the ridiculous sum of $14.95, she had a telephone number. She had stared at it, stunned, for a good five minutes. She almost wished she could tell Trenton, who was always accusing her of being hopeless at computers. Trenton and Richard were amazingly alike, for people who had spent hardly any time together.
Look what I did, she wanted to say.
She told herself that she only wanted to hear the woman’s voice. Just once. She felt she would know then; she felt everything would become clear. Whether or not she was the one. Why Richard had done it. Why he’d done all the things he had done.
She picked up the phone and listened for a moment to the dial tone. How many times in her life had she reached Richard here, in this house, on that number? She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didn’t fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts.
Caroline’s hands were shaking so much that she misdialed the number the first time, reached an Italian restaurant, and had to hang up and start over. The second time, she managed it.
The phone only rang once before it was snatched up. “Don’t tell me you’ve gotten on going west,” a woman said, her voice hurried, impatient, and lower than Caroline had expected from the photographs.
Caroline was seized with sudden panic. She had not expected the woman to pick up so soon—or even at all. She had not thought of what she would say. But she needed Adrienne to speak again. Was she the one? Caroline didn’t know, couldn’t decide.
Too many seconds had elapsed. “Hello?” Adrienne said—it was Adrienne, that Caroline knew—dragging out the last syllable already. “Are you still there?”
“Hello,” Caroline croaked out.
Instantly, Adrienne’s tone changed. “Who is this?” she said carefully.
Caroline didn’t answer. One second, two seconds.
“Who is this?” Adrienne repeated. “Hello?”
“Wrong number,” Caroline said and hung up. The blood was thundering in her ears, and the room was spinning. She tried to think herself down the phone line, into the kitchen—because she was sure Adrienne had answered in the kitchen, no doubt interrupted in the middle of making lemon soufflé or chicken soup from scratch—tried to imagine the mouth pressed to the phone, the hands with their neat nails, the jeans dusted with flour. Had she and Richard met in hotel rooms? Had he gone to visit her and sat with his shoes and socks off at her kitchen table, shirt unbuttoned, drinking wine, laughing, eating the food she had cooked him?