Finally he emerged, listing to the left with a duffel bag. He set it on the floor by the door and held out his hand. “On behalf of my family,” he said, “I thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Wait a minute,” Anne said. “Can I have your contact information?”
He looked at her blankly.
“Your address and phone number,” she said. “So I can get in touch with Hilary.”
His eyes skidded away from hers, around the apartment, then at the door, weighing his options. For the first time, his ordinary-guyness — plaid shirt, khaki pants, tidy haircut — started to look ominous in its very neatness. “I don’t know about that, miss,” he said. “You see, it would just encourage Hilary to think about coming back here. And she’s got to give up on that. She’s got to accept that being with her family is the right thing. It’s not just about her and Alan. It’s about that little baby.”
That bit about the baby was, Anne thought, what a certain kind of person would consider a trump card in an argument. She moved between him and the door. “They lived here for almost six months,” she said, and stopped herself from adding, they’re my family too. She hadn’t realized until the words nearly came out that she felt this way, and she was momentarily shocked into silence. But it was true.
Instead she — what else? — acted a part. She moved into his territory by making herself a substitute parent, a concerned citizen, older and more tired and folksy than she really was. “I did a lot for those kids,” she said. “I fed them and gave them a roof over their heads. I gave up my own bed. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask, Mr. Halverson, considering everything I’ve done.”
He put his hands on his hips, appraising her, then relented. “All righty,” he said. “You got a pen?”
She watched him write down the address — a rural route upstate — and phone number. It occurred to her that he could be making it all up, like she gave out fake numbers to guys in bars. Hilary was his niece, after all; lying probably ran in the family, as it did in her own.
She took the piece of paper out of his hand. “I’ll be calling to check in,” she said.
Halverson’s eyes grew steely. “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.
He had taken all their clothes and shoes, Alan’s barbells, Hilary’s magazines, and the tiny apartment yawned with emptiness. She paced for a while in her living room, distracted and confused, until an image came to her — as vivid as a visitation — of her mother sitting hunched in a white-carpeted living room, picking at her nails. Crying in powerless grief.
This thought ought to have softened and saddened her, but instead it made her hard. For the rest of the day, her mission was to remove all traces of the past six months. She rearranged the furniture, cleaned out the refrigerator, changed the sheets, moved the bed against the far wall, filled three enormous Hefty bags with garbage and lugged them down to the street. By then it was nine o’clock and she was so tired that she tripped on the stairs going back up to the apartment. She sat there on the dirty landing and shuddered with tears. She let herself cry to the count of ten, then stood up and went inside.
So this was how it ended, she thought. It wasn’t what she’d expected.
She could have gone up there to make sure they were all right. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. But she didn’t. She was sure that Halverson, notwithstanding his air of domination and control, would take good care of the baby-to-be. She pictured a nursery — Hilary’s old room? — with a crib, pastel wallpaper, teddy bears. She doubted Hilary would get in touch when the baby was born. Anne wouldn’t have, if she were Hilary.
Anne didn’t believe in fate or the universe sending you signals and signs. She believed in making your own luck. So the day after Halverson’s visit, she put on a low-cut top, had a date with a director, and left with the names of three theater companies that were about to go on the road. And systematically she made dates with men in those companies until she had an offer to travel to Scotland on a festival tour. By Friday she was packed and at the airport, proud of herself for having taken charge. Of Alan and Hilary, she would have said, had there been anyone in her life to ask, that she could barely remember their names.
It was the first time she’d ever been to Europe, and she hadn’t been on a plane in over a decade. The security arrangements astounded her; she remembered as a child breezing through airports only minutes before departure, but that was over now. On board, she sat next to a sophisticated, sarcastic actress named Elizabeth who spent the whole flight gossiping about other members of the troupe, explaining which was a sex addict, an anorexic, an adulterer. Anne found all this helpful in terms of navigating the vipers’ nest that a group of actors often amounted to, and she had no problem with the calculating, temporary alliance being offered to her. But she wasn’t interested in sharing stories of her own. So when her seatmate began to press her, at first gently, then more forcefully, for details of her life, she held back. To win her confidence Elizabeth told a long story, maybe true, maybe false, about her affair with a married man, followed by depression, alcohol abuse, heroin, rehab, and “a current infatuation with coke and my nicotine patch.” It was all designed to bring out Anne’s own confession. In this kind of conversation, you had to give up something.
“Where did you grow up?” Elizabeth persisted, digging.
“On a farm,” Anne said. “In upstate New York.”
“You on a farm? I can’t even picture it.”
Anne nodded, gazing through the part in the curtain that showed a slice of first class. “I looked after the chickens.”
“Now I’m imagining you in pigtails, collecting eggs and putting them in a straw basket.”
“I used to gather the chickens for slaughter,” Anne said, calling up stories Hilary and Alan had told her. “I picked them up and held them in my arms to calm them down. I could feel their little hearts beating like crazy. They’d run away when they saw me coming. But I always caught them. I’d grab them by the legs and turn them upside down so the blood drained to their heads and they’d go limp. Then we killed them.”
“I could never do that,” Elizabeth said.
Anne shrugged. “You get used to it.”
Edinburgh was gray, gothic, and awash with actors. She’d had no idea of the scope of the festival, which thickened the streets with hordes of people handing out leaflets for performances and plastering posters on walls. There were Norwegian dancers, Japanese mimes, performances in churches and street corners; it was a planet of actors, and God only knew if there were enough people around to actually attend the hundreds of shows. In the evening the sound of the crowds outside filtered through the walls of their hotel, and between the noise and her excitement Anne barely slept.
In the morning they held a quick dress rehearsal in the back room of the pub where they’d be performing. Though it was August, the weather was cold and the room unheated, and she shivered throughout the warm-up. Most of the others had performed the play for a solid month in Soho and she felt she wasn’t fitting in, a discordant note in the song they’d learned to sing without her. The awkwardness made her nervous, and the nervousness made her even more awkward.
She thought she saw them raising an eyebrow at the director, and Elizabeth abandoned her when it came time for lunch, briskly walking off with the male lead, Tony. Anne went back to the hotel, where they were sharing a room, for a short, furious cry. Then she wiped her tears and worked on her lines for an hour.
Though it was only early afternoon, it already felt like evening; not having slept the night before, she could feel dryness and exhaustion creasing her face, and regretted having come. Her nerves were jangled, raw. She blamed the director for not giving her enough time and guidance, and Elizabeth, that snake, for rattling her even before the first show. She’d done them a favor by stepping in at the last minute, and in return she was getting absolutely no gratitude whatsoever.