Maybe This Time (8 page)

Then she went to Alice's room, knocked on the door, and said, “Alice, I have your comforter.”

“Come in,” Alice said, suspicion heavy in her voice, and Andie opened the door and went in.

Alice watched critically as Andie pulled the old pink bedspread off and shook the glittery blue comforter out, snapping it over her bed and making the chiffon strips flutter and gleam as it settled. Alice looked closer at it. “It should have swirls,” she told Andie.

“Swirls.”

“Like dancing. I'll do it with my marker.” Alice narrowed her eyes.
“Okay?”

“Okay,” Andie said. “You do that, and I'll go make dinner.”

Alice got the blue marker out of her new set, put the headphones to her Walkman back on, and began to draw swirls on the chiffon.

Half an hour later, Andie came back with two bowls of tomato soup, two grilled cheese sandwiches, and two glasses of milk, and put half on Alice's bedside table. Alice ignored her and kept making swirls. Then Andie took the rest of the tray in to Carter, who ignored her knock and glared when she came in, closing the new sketchbook he'd been drawing in.

“Dinner,” she said, and put the tray on the table beside his bed.

He looked over at it, picked up a wedge of cheese sandwich, bit into it, and opened the sketchbook again, careful to shield it so she couldn't see what he was doing.

“You're welcome,” she said, and went back to her bedroom to work on the curriculum since she was going to start beating education into them the next day.

At eight o'clock, she went to collect their dishes and call bedtime.
Alice was sitting on her bedspread, her dinner gone, staring at the sequins and the swirls she'd marked all over the chiffon. “It's bee-you-tee-ful,” she was saying when Andie walked in.

“Yes, it is,” Andie said, and Alice looked up surprised, as if she hadn't noticed she was there.

“Brush your teeth,” Andie said, prepared for a fight, but Alice went off to the little bathroom on her own. When she came out, changed into her too-big Bad Witch T-shirt, Andie said, “Bedtime,” and Alice picked up her Jessica doll, got into bed, and smoothed the comforter under her hands after Andie pulled it up over her knees. “Let me get the scrunchie out of your hair.”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOO,”
Alice began, and Andie said, “We'll put another one in tomorrow,” and pulled the scrunchie out while Alice was taking a breath to scream again.

Her white-blond hair dropped around her ears, smooth and silky now. Alice scratched the top of her head and said, “Okay,” in a normal voice and slid down under the covers.

So far, so good,
Andie thought, blessing her mother for the tip on the sequins.

Now maybe if they started a bedtime ritual, Alice would start talking to her.

“So this bedtime thing,” she told Alice. “Is there anything I should be doing for you?”

Alice looked down at the rocker at the end of the bed.

“Get you a glass of water?” Andie said. “Read you a story?”

“
Tell
me a story,” Alice said, and Andie thought,
Oh, hell,
and sat down in the rocker.

Alice froze.

“What's wrong?” Andie said, looking around.

“Don't sit there,” Alice said, and Andie moved over to the foot of the bed, and Alice relaxed. “Okay. Tell me the story.”

“Okay.” Andie thought fast. “Once upon a time, there was a princess named Alice who lived in a big stone castle.”

“Was there a dungeon?”

“No, but there was a moat,” Andie said, thinking of the ugly water that surrounded the place. Their very own mosquito breeding ground.

“Okay,” Alice said.

“She lived there with her brother and her nanny and a cook,” Andie went on, thinking,
This story sucks.

“The nanny was a Bad Witch,” Alice said, ignoring the message on her nightgown.

“And everybody,” Andie went on, ignoring Alice, “loved Alice.”

“That's right.” Alice sat back against her pillows, still clutching Jessica. “Because Alice was very beautiful.”

Andie looked at the plain little girl in front of her, white-blond hair and skin as pale as her pillows. “Yes.”

“What did she look like?”

“She had beautiful blond hair,” Andie said, almost reaching out to smooth the wisps away from Alice's face, but stopping just in time. Alice would not like it. “And big blue eyes.”

“Blue?” Alice said, frowning again.

“Gray-blue. Like a stormy sky.”

“And did she have lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow?”

Andie looked at Alice's pale little face. “She had skin as white as snow because she didn't eat a good breakfast. If she'd had a hot breakfast instead of sugary cereal—”

“Princesses don't eat hot breakfasts,” Alice said, looking stormy again.

“They do if they want rosy cheeks.”

“
This
princess doesn't want rosy cheeks.”

“Fine. She had skin as white as snow.”

“And she wears a beautiful blue gown that flutters when she walks,” Alice said, kicking her comforter so the chiffon fluttered again. “Like wings or cobwebs or butterflies.”

“Sure,” Andie said, losing her place in the story.

“And she is very strong,” Alice went on, “and nobody can make her do anything, not even her Bad Uncle who tries to kidnap her.”

“
Hell-
o,” Andie said, pulling back a little.

“He does,” Alice said, very sure. “He is tall and he has white hair and he frowns and he says, ‘You must leave!' but Alice
shoves
him out the door”—Alice pushed her palms out in front of her—“and he has to let her stay in the castle.”

“Alice met her uncle?” Andie said, taken aback, and then remembered that North had said he'd gone to see the kids right after his cousin had died.

Alice nodded. “Nanny Joy said that Bad Uncle said they had to go away.”

“Nanny Joy, huh?”
Rotten bitch of a nanny.
Although it was possible North had said that. He wouldn't have known how upset they'd be since he'd have kept his distance.

“Nanny Joy was a bad fairy,” Alice was saying, warming now to her story. “She wasn't like the other princess.”

“There was another princess?”

“Yes. A blue princess. And she would dance all the time. Like this.” Alice pushed the Jessica doll away and slipped out of bed before Andie could stop her, her feet hitting the floor with a thunk, and began to dance, a kind of hoochie-coochie Kabuki glide that involved twitching hips and swaying hands, stopping for moments of tai chi. She hummed something as she moved, completely absorbed in herself, and then finished with a twirl, spreading her arms as she turned in a moment of absolute grace. “She was a very good dancer,” Alice said as she climbed back into bed. “Then what happened?”

“Uh,” Andie said, trying to figure out where Bad Uncle and the dancing princess fit with Alice in the castle. “Well. Alice lived in the castle with her brother and the cook and the, uh, dancing princess, and she was very happy except for one thing.”

Alice folded her arms, but it seemed to be more of a concentration thing than resistance.

“She was very lonely,” Andie ventured.

Alice frowned.

“She had her brother and the cook and the dancing princess,” Andie went on hastily, “but she wanted somebody her own age to . . . dance with.”

Alice frowned harder.

“So she decided to go on a quest.”

“What's a quest?”

“A trip to find something. Like to school, to find other children to play with. She went out to look for a school—”

“No she didn't.”

“Okay, what did she do?”

“I don't know,” Alice said, exasperated. “
You're
telling the story.”

“If I'm telling the story, why doesn't Princess Alice eat her hot breakfast and go on a quest for a school?”

“Because that's
wrong.
”

“Okay.” Andie gave up. “I have to think about this story for a while and then tell you more tomorrow.”

Alice sighed. “All right. But there should be more dancing.”

“More dancing. Got it. Anything else?”

Alice grew still, and her eyes seemed sadder suddenly, the shadows underneath them growing darker. “No,” she said, and rolled over, away from Andie, scooting down under the covers as she turned.

“Okay.” Andie got up, picked up the Jessica doll from where it had fallen to the floor, tucked it in beside Alice, and turned off her bedside light. “I'll be right across the nursery if you need me.”

“I won't,” Alice said, her voice muffled by the covers.

“Right.” Andie hesitated and then bent and kissed the top of Alice's head, and Alice batted her away. “Sleep tight, baby,” Andie said, and went across the hall to check on Carter.

He said, “Come in,” when she knocked, which she considered progress, and when she said, “Don't stay up too late, we have to start schoolwork tomorrow,” he nodded without looking up from his
book. Since saying “Stop reading so you can learn something tomorrow” seemed contradictory, Andie picked up his empty tray, said, “Good night,” and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Dancing princess,
she thought, and wondered which one of the nannies that had been.

 

Andie put the dishes in the sink and then used the phone in the kitchen, now complete with dial tone, to call the Happy Housekeepers number she'd found at the Dairy Queen to set up a cleaning crew. Surprisingly, they said they'd come the next day. Something moved behind her as she hung up, and she turned around expecting to see Mrs. Crumb, but she was alone.
Weird,
she thought, but that was the least of her problems. She was making a difference with the kids, a small difference, but a start, but there was something just out of her reach, something about the place that she couldn't put her finger on yet. Mrs. Crumb might be up to something, the kids were probably always up to something, but there was something else.

Frustrated because she couldn't puzzle it out, she got out a bowl and cookie sheets and the baking supplies she'd stocked up on and made chocolate chip cookies. The oven was ancient, but chocolate chip cookies were hard to screw up. She hesitated before adding the almonds and cashews, pretty sure Alice would turn her nose up at nuts, and then decided that if Alice wanted cookies, she could damn well eat nuts. The measuring and the mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes—nothing was as calming as creaming butter—and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking chocolate, she took final stock of where she'd been and where she was going. Everything was fine. There was no reason to be uneasy. She was in a transition phase and so were the kids. In a month, the kids would go to Columbus together, where they'd start their life with North and she'd start hers with Will . . .

She went on planning, keeping a close eye on the cookies and
turning down the heat as they browned too fast. She pulled out the first tray of cookies and slid in the next unbaked tray, and by the time the whole batch was done—the oven really was a sadistic bastard, doing its damnedest to scorch everything she put in it—she was back to normal. Everything was fine. The former nannies had been idiots. It was going to be okay.

She left the cookies to cool and went back upstairs and got ready for bed. Then she climbed into the big four-poster with the third-and seventh-grade curriculums, along with a box of workbooks for grades one through ten since the nannies hadn't been able to pinpoint exactly where the kids were in their education. At ten, she heard somebody outside her door, but by the time she opened it, the only thing in the hall was a tray with a pot of liquor-laced tea and a striped cup, with two of her cookies on a plate beside it.

She crawled back into bed and sipped her tea—Mrs. Crumb still with the heavy hand with the schnapps—and ate her cookies, which were exceptional, as always.
God, I'm good at this,
she thought, and then put her mind back on the trouble at hand: Mrs. Crumb. They were going to talk about housekeeping and when that was over they were going to talk about ghosts. It was one thing for the housekeeper to have a few screws loose after living in the House of Usher for sixty years, another thing entirely to drive nannies away with ghost stories, especially when there were two kids who so desperately needed their help. Not that the kids looked like they wanted any help. In fact, they were downright hostile.
Maybe I shouldn't have come,
she thought, feeling the old urge to break and run to someplace better, but Alice and Carter needed her, North had been right about that, and she could last the month, get them back to Columbus where North could get them professional help. It was only a month.

She put her empty cup back on the bedside table, punched her pillow, slid down into bed, and turned out the light, her thoughts still racing even though the tea had made her groggy. She was going to
have to tell Mrs. Crumb to knock it off with the tea, she was going to have to tell Mrs. Crumb a lot of things. Mrs. Crumb was . . .

Who do you love?
She heard the whisper as the night grew chill and she drifted off.
Who do you want?

Not Mrs. Crumb,
she thought, but the whisper was insistent.
Who do you love?
And then North was there in her dreams again, turning toward her with his rare, slow smile—

Who is HE?

Andie roused and looked around, disoriented. That had been a real whisper, not a dream, and the room was cold, much colder than it had been when she'd turned out the light, it was always cold in her dreams—

The window across from her bed rattled, and she thought,
That's what I heard, the window's got a leak and it's letting in the cold air,
and got up to stick a piece of paper into it to stop the noise and pull the drapes against the cold. There were too many noises at night in this house, walls sighing and floors creaking and now this damn window . . .