The Drifter by Christine Lennon
PROLOGUE
September 9, 2010
From her perch on the brownstone stoop, Elizabeth lifts up her sunglasses, runs her ring finger along her lower lashes to flick away the welling tears, and glances at her phone to check the time. 9:25. She shifts her weight to her left hip and stretches out her other leg to let the blood circulate to her toes, then sits backs against the iron railing and scans the street.
As nonchalantly as possible, doing her best impression of a person who isn’t entirely unhinged, she scrolls through her emails, keeping her peripheral vision trained on the front door of the tan brick building across the street. Several times a minute, her eyes dart back to the entrance.
By now, she knows the morning rhythms of the block by heart. The middle-aged silver fox in Italian loafers who catches a cab on the corner of Fifth Avenue. The pair of Caribbean nurses who swap comic insults as they walk to the radiology clinic down the street. The twentysomething who stumbles out of her apartment in pricey yoga wear at the same time every morning but never makes it further than the corner for a coffee. Their familiarity has become a comfort to Elizabeth. It’s the new faces, like the driver of the black sedan who seemed to stare at her from behind his mirrored glasses while he waited for his fare, that unnerve her.
Today, a quick study of the scene reveals a FedEx delivery truck, two tattooed bike messengers, a few flustered parents dragging their children to school. Elizabeth eyes these women with a bit of envy and suspicion; perversely, she wishes that her own daughter would put up more of a fight each morning at drop-off. Back in July, on the first day of the weeklong “transition” period, Remi was the child in her classroom to wander over, tug at her mother’s hand, and say, “Mommy? It’s OK if you want to go now.” Elizabeth had tried not to look as stricken as she felt. “Alright, sweetie,” she said, forcing a smile. She’d lingered for a while in the other room, out of her daughter’s sight, sipping weak coffee from a thin paper cup, waiting for the school’s beatific director, Elodie, a woman whose chipper condescension she found impossibly irritating, to come in, pull her aside, and whisper gravely, “Elizabeth, can you come back in for a minute? Remi needs you.” It never happened.
“I guess that’s the one good thing about waiting to send your child to preschool until she’s nearly five years old!” Elodie had said to Elizabeth on the morning of Remi’s first full day of school. Elodie rarely missed an opportunity to remind Elizabeth that her daughter was starting preschool unusually late for a sophisticated city kid. “Is Remi ever ready to be here with us!” Elodie would say in front of the other moms at drop-off. “It’s like she was shot out of a cannon.”
ELIZABETH KNEW SHE had started off on the wrong foot with Elodie during the parent interview many months ago. Things started heading south right in the middle of Elizabeth’s grand inquisition about teacher background checks. She grilled Elodie about how frequently the school changed the code to the keypad at the door, whether the strike plates on the door locks were kick resistant, and what the school’s disaster preparedness plans were. But then, just as Elodie looked really disturbed and on the verge of showing them the door, Elizabeth’s husband, Gavin, leaped to her rescue. He put his arm around his wife, flashed the preschool director his trademark grin, and saved the day with his relaxed charm, as he so often did whenever Elizabeth got carried away.
“Well, when I was about Remi’s age, I found an alligator paddling around in our pool, and my mom came out to take a picture before she called the fish and game department,” he said, using his best syrupy drawl. “So I guess danger is fairly relative.” They all laughed. The ice broken, the conversation turned more benign, to childhoods spent in Florida and the weather. Crisis averted.
Still, before they left, Elodie had asked offhandedly if there had been anything unusual about Remi’s birth or infancy, anything at all that would impact her ability to thrive in a new environment. Elizabeth and Gavin had avoided each other’s eyes as Elizabeth explained that Remi came more than a month early and had stayed in the NICU for two weeks.
“We can be a bit . . . overprotective, as a result, I guess,” Gavin said. “She was just so . . . fragile for so long.” Elizabeth blinked hard and pretended to examine her wedding ring, a simple, gold band they’d bought in the men’s section at Cartier. There was so much more to the story than Elodie could ever guess. The real story was something she would never begin to understand.
“I’m sure Remi will be just fine,” Elodie said as she stood up to escort them out to the school’s cheerful foyer. “Children are so much more resilient than we are.”
JUST AS ELODIE predicted, every morning since school started, Remi bounds in as if she is on the payroll, and Elodie has to shepherd Elizabeth out the front door.
“Elizabeth, your daughter is not the least bit fragile anymore. Look at that happy smile. You have to relax,” Elodie insisted earlier that morning, not unkindly. “Let her go.”
Let her go. Elizabeth shuddered. I’ll never be able to do that.
Elizabeth had knelt down in the doorway to the classroom so Remi could wrap her arms around her neck. “Have a great day, sweet girl,” Elizabeth whispered, smoothing Remi’s unruly hair behind her ears. Remi gave her mother a quick air peck near her cheek, then hurried across the room to study the “jobs” that lined the wall. She picked up a small bowl of plastic animals and carried it to a mat on the floor. Watching as her daughter lined up the figurines by size, Elizabeth arranged her face into a smile. Elodie was right, her daughter was fine. Look at her, so happy to be out in the world, making friends. Elizabeth was holding her back.