At this, Anne’s eyes narrowed. “Give me the phone,” she said, then held it to her ear. There was breathing on the other end, and she felt like she was going to be sick when she heard a long, gentle sigh, like a sheet settling on a bed. “Hello?” she said.
There was no answer, just another sigh. It was like getting a crank call from a ghost.
“Well, talk to me if you’re going to call,” she said.
What came through the line was the sound of weeping, and this was so unexpected, so shocking, that she dropped the phone on the ground. “Whoops,” she said to the PA.
The girl instantly picked up the phone and held it to her ear.
From her expression Anne could tell that the call was still connected. “Damn,” she said under her breath, and held out her hand.
“Annie,” Hilary said all in a rush. “Please don’t hang up. I saw you on television, and we need help.”
Anne’s stomach twisted uneasily. “What’s going on?”
“Alan lost his job and then the baby got sick and we don’t have insurance, and now the hospital says we owe thousands of dollars, and our parents don’t have any money either.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re at home, we’re still right here.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Anne said, remembering the day in her apartment when Hilary’s uncle revealed all the lies Hilary had told, how Anne had heard nothing from her when the baby was born. Words came back to her from the long-ago past, not her mother’s hysterical voice but Grace’s calm, soothing, maddenly therapeutic one. You can be anything you want to be. You don’t have to be like them. “Don’t call here again,” she said, handing the phone to the PA, who took it back with an expressionless nod and went off to get her some coffee.
In New York, it was late fall. In the year she’d been gone she’d been back only once, for upfronts when the show was picked up, the visit a blur of luncheons and parties with press and execs, questions about how much was she like the character she played and did she enjoy the romantic scenes with the handsome guest star and did she have a boyfriend in real life and was he jealous. Each night she’d return to her room and tumble into bed, too tired even to watch TV, then she’d get up the next morning to face more of the same. She had barely been outside in the three days it lasted, and before she knew it she was leaving the hotel for the airport, hardly having set foot on a sidewalk or sat in a cab or seen anything of New York at all.
This time was different, the city colder and drabber than she remembered, void of the color that gave every day in California a sense of health and possibility. She was in town for some meetings and a magazine photo shoot, but she had a few hours to kill. Leaving her Midtown hotel, she walked south in a daze, not planning her route, trying only to avoid the worst of the crowds. She had always liked the big department stores on Fifth Avenue; they reminded her of old movies and the wholesome glamour of an easier time. Gradually she moved east, then south, past Union Square, not even tracking how many blocks she’d walked, and then she looked up and realized that she was staring at the windows of her old apartment.
Had she really allowed a grubby teenage runaway and her pimply, construction-worker boyfriend to live in her apartment and sleep in her bed? It felt like someone else’s life.
People were walking in and out of the building, all strangers, not a single one of the old ladies who’d once clustered there. Maybe the landlord had succeeded in replacing them all with higher-paying tenants, or had sold the building. There was no movement in the windows of her apartment. There was nothing to see.
The day was brisk, winter skidding leaves off trees, and she wasn’t dressed warmly enough. She wrapped her sweater around herself and walked on. Down the block, a baby was wailing miserably, and she saw the mother pushing a stroller toward her. For moment, she had the insane thought that it was Hilary; but this woman was older and looked wealthy, bundled in a cashmere scarf, her long hair a cascade of glossy curls. The baby had a big round head that rolled from side to side. The wind had whipped his cheeks to a rosy red, like children in old picture books. Jowly and fat, with a cascade of chins, he was a little clown in a big white suit. As they passed Anne, the baby stopped crying and stared at her, and she looked back into his bright blue eyes.
Farther down the block, he started crying again, and the mother took him out of the stroller and held him to her chest, kissing the top of his head. Anne studied the scene for a moment, thinking how strange it was that Hilary would be doing these same things — as if she’d stepped across a threshold into another country, and Anne couldn’t imagine what it was like to live there. Rarely, if ever, did she think about those weeks when she herself had been pregnant, or imagine how old that child would be now if she had decided to keep it. She remembered feeling no physical or emotional change back then, only the sheer sensation of panic, like a bird trapped in a house, flapping her wings in frenzy and desperation.
It all seemed so accidental, how lives were invented and chosen. A child enters the world. A child exits the world. Both for almost no reason at all.
Of the events leading to the pregnancy she thought even less. She had been hanging around at the Faubourg after school, doing homework and drinking coffee to avoid going home to her bickering parents. She used to tell them that she was at a friend’s or studying at the library or seeing Grace. In truth, all she wanted was this hour or two by herself, to drink bitter coffee and bum a cigarette from some guy and inhale until she could feel the smoke burning her lungs. Then she’d go into the washroom, her head buzzing from the caffeine and nicotine, and press those small, precise cuts into her skin. She called it surgery. She’d swipe a finger through the drops and lick the blood; the taste of it was like knowing herself, a confirmation that she existed. Then she’d go back out into the shopping center, feeling a little sticky, a little dirty. It was a trespass on the otherwise pristine routines of her life.
On one such day she came back out and cadged a cigarette off a French guy who was reading La Presse and drinking an allongé in the food court. He was old, wearing a suit, and had touches of gray at his temples, appraising her breasts with an old man’s smile.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais dans les toilettes?” he said.
“Sorry.” She shook her head as if she didn’t understand the question, although she did. He had been holding the cigarette out to her but now took it away, folding his arms with it clasped in his fist. She put her hand on her hip. Her coat was open and her school uniform visible beneath it, and she could see him looking at her pleated skirt, her wool tights. The schoolgirl thing was such a cliché. They all went for it.
“What you do in the bathrooms for so long?” he said. “You were in there a long time.”
“Makeup,” she said, licking her lips as he stared at her, hard. Suddenly, before she could react, he reached out and lifted up her shirt, then dropped it. In days to come she would wonder how he knew to look there, where the most recent cuts ran in three parallel lines to the left of her belly button. The square of paper towel she had pressed against them fell to the floor. His eyes flickered, and she knew that the blood excited him, even more than the wool skirt and the white button-down and her being sixteen. Before he had been playing, but now he was serious. He wanted something.