Her nose was stuffed with mucus, her face was a mess. She patted her pockets for a handkerchief, but she didn’t have one. She didn’t have anything, not even a comb. The realization — she was helpless, absolutely helpless, not even a comb—started her sobbing again and she couldn’t stop, her face buried in her hands and her shoulders heaving, all her misery boiling out of her and no one to see or care. Her mother was dead, dead, dead, and her step — father was a tyrant and her life was finished before it had begun, and so what was the use of anything?
And then something — a whisper in the grass, a murmur of voices? — made her glance up. Standing there before her was a young couple — very young, no more than four or five years older than she — looking alarmed. They were dressed beautifully, à la mode, the woman — girl — in a gauze veil and a high wide-brimmed hat crowned with aigrettes, and their faces were numb. She saw it all in an instant — they’d come here, to this bench sheltered in its bower of jasmine, to make love, and here she was, unkempt and unfashionable, in her homeliest shirtwaist and scuffed shoes, creating a scene. She was pitiable. Beneath contempt.
The man was saying something, asking if she needed help—assistance, that was the term he used, Do you need assistance? — but she was so mortified all she could do was shake her head. She watched them exchange a look, and why couldn’t they leave her alone, why couldn’t they find some other bench, some other hotel, why couldn’t they take a stroll along the beach or watch the boats from the pier like all the other tourists? Or vanish. Why couldn’t they just vanish?
The man tried again, leaning forward so that his shadow fell over her. “Are you certain? Isn’t there anything we can do?”
And now the woman spoke: “Anyone we might call? Your mother? Do you want us to fetch your mother?”
And the man: “Are you at the hotel?”
She was sobbing still — she couldn’t seem to stop — but she pushed herself up, turned her back on them without a word and made her way across the grounds and past the front entrance and out into the street, where she found herself running again, but this time she wasn’t running blindly. This time she had a purpose, a plan. She wasn’t helpless. She had money. A lot of money. Enough to get her far away from here if she had the courage to use it.
The streets were shabby, muddy. The sun mocked her. After a block or so she slowed to a brisk walk, her skirts fanning out behind her, her eyes locked straight ahead. In the drawer of the night table beside her bed was a letter from her mother, her mother’s last letter, written in a wavering hand the night before she died. It was all too short, just a paragraph telling her that she loved her and would be looking down on her from above and that her father would provide for her until she reached her maturity and then there would be an inheritance coming to her according to the terms of the will, though she — her mother — wished it were more. In the meanwhile, she enclosed a bracelet of precious stones her own mother had once worn and a twenty-dollar gold piece — a double eagle — for her to spend as she pleased. There was a single dried drop of blood on the envelope, and the valediction—With All My Love, Mother—trailed away till it was barely legible, and the thought of it made her want to break down all over again, but she didn’t, because she was calculating now. She would sit down to dinner as if nothing had happened and if her stepfather wanted to make small talk she would oblige him and she would smile when he wanted her to smile. And when he went to bed, when the house was still and Ida was asleep in her room and Adolph in his, she would pack the suitcase she’d brought with her, slip down the stairs and out the door and into the night, never to look back.
The Ticket
The man behind the ticket window at the steamship office said he couldn’t make change for a double eagle and so she had to wait for the bank to open and then the man at the bank wanted to know who she was and how she’d come by the coin. She didn’t see what business it was of his what she did with her own money or where she’d got it from, but she gave him her name and informed him that her mother had just died and she was taking the one o’clock steamer for San Francisco, where her school was, which would explain the suitcase at her feet. The man — he was wearing a green celluloid visor that took the luster out of his eyes — stared down at the coin where it lay on the counter between them. Then he glanced up at her again, considering, but he made no move to slide it across the counter and into the money drawer or to begin counting out bills. Or silver. Or asking which she preferred. “I’m a second-year student at Miss Everton’s Young Ladies’ Seminary,” she said, offering further evidence of her legitimacy — she was a schoolgirl, that was all, on her sad way back up the coast after burying her mother.
She tried to hold the man’s eyes, but she felt her confidence slipping, felt guilty, and she stole a glance at the window next to her, where an overdressed woman tottering under a hat the size of a birdbath stood chatting with the teller there. The woman gave a sidelong glance and Edith froze — she knew her, didn’t she? Wasn’t she one of the teachers at the high school? But now the woman had turned and was staring directly at her, and what was her name? It came to her in the moment she spoke it aloud: “Mrs. Parsons, how are you? Don’t you remember me — I was in Mrs. Sanders’ class the year before last? Edith Waters?”
Clearly the woman didn’t remember, but that didn’t stop her from chiming, “Yes, yes, of course. And how are you?”
The teller was watching her closely and so she just nodded her head, as if to say she was very well, thank you, then added, “I’m at Miss Everton’s Seminary now — up in San Francisco?”
“Oh, well… that must be quite a change from our humble little school.”
“It is,” she said, “yes,” and she was going to say how much she’d enjoyed the Santa Barbara school and how advanced it really was, but the teller was already counting out her change, so she merely smiled. She put the money carefully in her purse, taking up her suitcase and stepping aside for the man waiting behind her. “Remember me to Mrs. Sanders,” she said in her sweetest voice and made her way to the door.
She’d sat through dinner the night before and then breakfast in the morning, though she’d lain awake half the night, fighting with herself. As much as it appealed to her sense of drama to melt off into the night, an empty bed would have given her away and she couldn’t afford that, so she dressed and came down to breakfast. The parlor was quiet, the cat nowhere in sight. There was a vase of flowers on the dining room table, but they were wilted and they only reminded her of her mother. Her stepfather was already there, seated at the head of the table, a greasy plate with a half-gnawed bone on it set before him. He seemed bored and remote, hardly glancing up from the newspaper, his blunt battered fingers clumsy with the thin china handle of the teacup. He only brightened when Adolph came in, pushing back his chair to light a cigar and call out to the kitchen for more coffee.
All the while her suitcase was packed and hidden away in the back of her closet, the image of it glowing in her mind till it wasn’t a suitcase at all but a pair of wings, angel’s wings, to lift her up and out of this house and this life forever. Too wrought up to eat, she took only a bite or two of toast and a mouthful of scrambled eggs with catsup, sugaring her tea so heavily it was like a parfait and no one to notice or tell her different. She forced herself to bid good morning to Adolph, and even ventured a comment about the weather, but he just grunted and took his place beside her stepfather. Ida drifted in with the coffee pot and back out again and as soon as the door swung shut behind her, the two of them started in on the only subject that seemed to hold any interest for them: sheep. Sheep and the island, that is, and all the minutiae of their preparations for the move back. Adolph said it was a shame the way the Englishman was letting the place go to ruin and her stepfather just nodded his head and reiterated for the tenth time how now that poor Marantha was gone there was no sense in maintaining two separate establishments, no sense in the world. They barely noticed when she took up her plate and went out to the kitchen with it.