Even once we’d reached the waiting room, she didn’t look around. Thirtieth Street Station is so enormous and echoing and high-ceilinged — a jolt after cozy Baltimore — that most people pause to take stock a moment, but not Sophia. She just went clicking along, with me a few yards to the rear.
At the Information island, only one person stood waiting. I spotted her from far across those acres of marble flooring: a girl in a denim jacket and jeans, with a billow of crinkly, electric red hair. It fanned straight out and stopped just above her shoulders. It was amazing hair. I was awestruck. Sophia, though, didn’t let on she had noticed her. She was walking more slowly now, downright sedately, placing her toes at a slight angle outward, the way women often do when they want to look composed and genteel. Actually, she was starting to get on my nerves. Didn’t that bun of hers just sum her up, I thought — the net that bound it in and the perfect, doughnut shape and the way it sat so low on her head, so matronly and drab! And Esther Brimm, meanwhile, stood burning like a candle on her stick-thin, blue-denim legs.
When we reached the island I veered right, toward a display of schedules on the counter. I heard Sophia’s heels stop in front of Esther. “Esther Brimm?” she asked.
“Ms. Maynard?”
Husky, throaty voice, the kind I like.
“Your father asked me to bring you something____”
I took a schedule from the rack and turned my face casually in their direction. Not till Esther said, “Right; my passport,” did Sophia slip the mailer from behind her book and hold it out.
“Thanks a million,” Esther said, accepting it, and Sophia said, “My pleasure. Have a good trip.” Then she turned away and clicked toward the Twenty-ninth Street exit.
Just like that, I forgot her. Now I was focused on Esther. Open it! I told her. Instead she picked up the army duffel lying at her feet and moved off toward the phones. I meandered after her, studying my schedule. I pretended I was hunting a train to Princeton.
The phones were the unprivate kind just out in the middle of everything, standing cheek to jowl. When Esther lifted a receiver off its hook, I was right there beside her, lifting a receiver of my own. I was so near I could have touched her duffel bag with the toe of my sneaker. I heard every word she said. “Dad?” she said.
I clamped my phone to my ear and held the schedule up between us so I could watch her. This close, she was less attractive. She had that fragile, sore-looking skin you often find on redheads. “Yes,” she was saying, “it’s here.” And then, “Sure! I guess so. I mean, it’s still stapled shut and all. Huh? Well, hang on.”
She put her receiver down and started yanking at the mailer’s top flap. When the staples tore loose, rat-a-tat, she pulled the edges apart and peered inside — practically stuck her little freckled nose inside. Then she picked up the phone again. “Yup,” she said. “Good as new.”
So I never got a chance to see for myself. It could have been anything: loose diamonds, crack cocaine … But somehow I didn’t think so. The phone call was what convinced me. She’d have had to be a criminal genius to fake that careless tone of voice, the easy offhandedness of a person who knows for a fact that she’s her parents’ pride and joy. “Well, listen,” she was saying. “Tell Mom I’ll call again from the airport, okay?” And she made a kissing sound and hung up. When she slung her duffel over her shoulder and started toward one of the gates, I didn’t even watch her go.
The drill for visiting my daughter was, I’d arrive about ten a.m. and take her on an outing. Nothing fancy. Maybe a trip to the drug store, or walking her little dog in the park. Then we’d grab a bite someplace, and I’d return her and leave. This happened exactly once a month — the last Saturday of the month. Her mother’s idea. To hear her mother tell it, Husband No. 2 was Superdad; but I had to stay in the picture to give Opal a sense of whatchamacallit. Connection.
But due to one thing and another — my car acting up, my alarm not going off — I was late as hell that day. It was close to noon, I figure, before I even left the station, and I didn’t want to spring for a cab after paying for a train ticket. Instead I more or less ran all the way to the apartment (they lived in one of those posh old buildings just off Rittenhouse Square), and by the time I pressed the buzzer, I was looking even scruffier than my usual self. I could tell as much from Natalie’s expression, the minute she opened the door. She let her eyes sort of drift up and down me, and, “Barnaby,” she said flatly. Opal’s little dog was dancing around my ankles — a dachshund, very quivery and high-strung.
“Yo. Natalie,” I said. I started swatting at my clothes to settle them a bit. Natalie, of course, was Miss Good Grooming. She wore a slim gray skirt-and-sweater set, and her hair was all of a piece — smooth, shiny brown — dipping in and then out again before it touched her shoulders. Oh, she had been a beauty for as long as I had known her; except now that I recalled, there’d always been something too placid about her. I should have picked it up from her dimples, which made a little dent in each cheek whether or not she was smiling. They gave her a look of self-satisfaction. What I’d thought when we first met was, how could she not be self-satisfied? And her vague, dreamy slowness used to seem sexy. Now it just made me impatient. I said, “Is Opal ready to go?” and Natalie took a full minute, I swear, to consider every aspect of the question. Then: “Opal is in her room,” she said finally. “Crying her eyes out.”
“Crying!”
“She thought you’d stood her up.”
“Well, I know I’m a little bit late—” I said.
She lifted an arm and contemplated the tiny watch face on the inner surface of her wrist.
“Things just seemed to conspire against me,” I said. “Can I see her?”
After she’d thought that over awhile, she turned and floated off, which I took to mean yes.
I made my own way to Opal’s bedroom, down a long hall lined with Oriental rugs. I waded through the dachshund and knocked on her door. “Opal?” I called. “You in there?”
No answer. I turned the knob and poked my head in.
You’d never guess this room belonged to a nine-year-old. The bedspread was appliquéd with ducklings, and the only posters were nursery-rhyme posters. By rights it should have been a baby’s room, or a toddler’s.
The bed was where I looked first, because that’s where I figured she would be if she was crying. But she was in the white rocker by the window. And she wasn’t crying, either. She was glaring at me reproachfully from underneath her eyebrows.
“Ope!” I said, all hearty.
Opal’s chin stayed buried inside her collar.
I knew I shouldn’t think this, but my daughter had never struck me as very appealing. She had all her life been a few pounds overweight, with a dish-shaped face and colorless hair and a soft, pink, half-open mouth, the upper lip short enough to expose her top front teeth. (I used to call her “Bunnikins” till Natalie asked me not to — and why would she have asked, if she herself hadn’t noticed Opal’s close resemblance to a rabbit?) It didn’t help that Natalie dressed her in the kind of clothes you see in Dick and Jane books — fussy and pastel, the smocked bodices bunching up on her chest and the puffed sleeves cutting into her arms. Me, I would have chosen something less constricting. But who was I to say? I hadn’t been much of a father.
I did want the best for her, though. I would never intentionally hurt her. I walked over to where she was sitting and squatted down in front of her. “Opal-dopal,” I said. “Sweetheart.”
“What.”
“Call off your dog. He’s eating my wallet.”