My backpack jostled against my lower back, and my toes prickled with the cold, shielded only by a thin strip of flimsy loafer leather. People streamed past, none of them her. I walked under the Grand Army Plaza arch and crossed the street to the park.
‘Summer?’
I stopped, my heart speeding up. But it was Claire Ryan across the road, standing at the park’s entrance. She was smoking a cigarette. Her red jacket and jeans were enormous.
I crossed the street slowly, in a daze. ‘What are you doing here?’ Claire demanded.
‘What are you doing here?’ I shot back.
She shrugged, turning her palms to the sky. ‘I don’t know. It’s snowing.’
An old man in a shiny red jogging suit stamped through the thin layer of snow. A runner stooped to tie his shoe. He was wearing shorts. It was 30°F out. ‘You don’t go to school,’ I pointed out to Claire, as if solving a mystery, even though, in hindsight, it was painfully obvious.
‘Yeah.’ Claire looked down. ‘So?’
‘So, wait. You get off the train and, instead of coming to school, you come up here?’
‘Uh huh.’ She sucked so hard on the cigarette, it crackled.
I blinked furiously. ‘And the office hasn’t called your parents?’
The smoke mixed with the falling snowflakes. ‘That’s something I missed about you,’ she said. ‘You’re always worrying about that stuff.’
‘But…I mean…’
‘They might have called. My mother hasn’t said anything. Or maybe they haven’t. Perhaps I’m invisible. Although, I’m not sure how I could be invisible.’ She let out a bitter laugh, spreading out her arms, showing off her size. I recoiled, shocked by her candidness.
We were quiet for a moment, breathing out cottony puffs. Then Claire said, ‘Do you remember when we had that Mega Man tournament at the beach? You did that victory dance?’
‘I don’t know. Sort of.’
Claire pushed her sneaker into the dried grass. ‘I guess life isn’t so simple anymore.’
I stiffened. ‘What you mean?’
Claire looked at me out of the corner of her eye. My mind started to churn. It was odd that Claire wasn’t pushing to know why I’d left school. She knew I was too anal and ruleabiding to ditch, that something must have been really wrong. And yet she hadn’t asked.
The realization trickled in. I looked at her sharply, enraged. ‘Whatever you think you know isn’t true.’
Claire stepped back, startled.
‘And anyway, you shouldn’t talk.’ The words spilled out before I could harness them. ‘I know about that French guy and your mom.’
Claire’s mouth made a small o.
‘I know about her affair,’ I went on. ‘She ruined a perfectly good marriage.’
Claire slowly shook her head, then ran her hands through her hair. It took her a while to respond. ‘My mom didn’t have an affair with anyone,’ she said, speaking into her chest. ‘It was my father. He had an affair with a girl. Like, a teenager. She was barely older than me. But my mother’s too proud to take his money, which is why we’re basically living in a crack house.’
A garbage truck circling Grand Army Plaza blew its horn. Another runner passed, making crisp footprints in the dusting of snow. I thought about how Mrs Ryan had looked so crumpled and defeated at our house the other day. But I didn’t want Mrs Ryan to be the victim. She couldn’t be. Mrs Ryan and I are kind of in the same position, my father had told me last night, when I was starting on the Christmas cards.
‘Why did he do that?’ I managed.
‘I don’t know.’ Claire flicked her ashes. An ember landed on her coat and she brushed it off. ‘Who knows why anyone does anything? Do you know why your mom left?’
‘My mom’s on a trip,’ I said fast.
Claire scoffed. ‘Then why did she resign from her job?’
I stared at her.
‘That’s why my mom initially came to see your dad. She called her old boss at Mandrake & Hester, to see if he could get her back her old job. And her boss goes, ‘Did you hear about Meredith? She resigned. She didn’t even leave a forwarding number.’
I took an elephant-like step back.
Claire lowered her shoulders, a look of realization passing over her face. ‘Your father didn’t tell you this?’
I concentrated hard on the yellow stitches running down the legs of Claire’s jeans. Such petite little Vs, for such a wide swathe of fabric.
Claire let out a breath. Her face softened even more. It reminded me of the expression she had two years ago, when she’d come upon me on the bus and realized she’d walked right by without noticing I was there. ‘God, Summer. I’m so sorry. But we can talk about this together. About…the stuff that’s happening to both of us. We need each other.’
I thought of the second-to-last day before my mother left. I’d gotten up in the middle of the night and found her sitting in the living room, staring at the bare Christmas tree she and my father had picked out that morning. She had a nervous look on her face, almost as if she was going to throw up. ‘Mom?’ I said weakly.
She turned to me slowly and slumped. ‘What are you doing awake?’
I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Tears started rolling down my face. It wasn’t hard to sense something was going on with her. Admitting it, however, was something else entirely.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
My mother looked exasperated. ‘Go back to bed, Summer.’
‘Can’t I help?’ My voice was so squeaky, so pathetic. ‘Can’t you tell me?’
‘Just go back to bed. Please.’ She didn’t get up to touch me or guide me back or give me a hug. She just sat there, wringing her hands. Two days later she was gone.
It was all there, on the surface, waiting. But I stopped it before it could escape out of me. ‘She’s away on a trip,’ I said to Claire. ‘She’ll be back.’
A long beat passed. The wind picked up, making the snow swirl. ‘Oh,’ Claire said softly. ‘Okay.’ She waited a few more moments, then turned and started walking into the center of the great lawn. Halfway across, she stopped and looked over her shoulder, pausing, maybe giving me another opportunity to say what she knew I needed to say. I stared at a fixed point on the ground, an ember from Claire’s cigarette.
When I finally lifted my head, Claire was all the way across the lawn, heading for the snow-dusted trees. The ache inside me was cruel and precise. I stood there for a while, my toes stiffening with cold. The church bell near
