Trust Exercise(42)
Close to midnight, she definitively wanted David to answer, she didn’t care if he had Lilly on his lap, but again he did not. Perhaps now he was asleep. Perhaps now everyone was asleep. Her mother in her lonely bed; her mother’s car, which Sarah still felt might appear—willed to join her like a loyal animal—in its carport. Mr. Kingsley’s Tim, who had not been feeling well at the opera, was asleep, and Liam whose incursion she still felt as a damp dull soreness between her legs was asleep. Mr. Kingsley and Martin—where were they? Had they placed silence and contempt between themselves, retreated to opposite ends of the house? And where was Karen? Never until this moment had Sarah considered that she might after all have to spend the night with Karen. She had expected Martin and Liam, whose idea it had been to spirit her away, to bear responsibility for the impulse as if it weren’t an impulse at all but a rational plan—as if, like CAPA hosting the troupe, Martin and Liam would host her, safeguard her welfare and put her up—in a hotel?—and buy her breakfast and drop her off on time at school in the morning. She had expected this because they were adults. Yet she’d gone off with them because they didn’t behave like adults, so that she couldn’t understand, now, whether they’d deserted her or whether she’d been stupid to expect otherwise.
There were five Wurtzels in the phone book but only one in a familiar zip code. Sarah dialed the number and despite the late hour a smoky drawling voice answered, sounding not unpleasantly surprised.
“Karen?”
“This is Elli. I think Karen’s already asleep. Can I give her a message?”
This Sarah had not been prepared for. She demurred, apologized, managed not to cry, and yet failed to hang up on the unsurprised voice. “Sarah,” Elli Wurtzel’s voice said after Sarah had choked out her location and situation, “I want you to stay standing there at the phone until a taxi pulls up. It’s going to be an orange-and-blue taxi that says Metro Cab. It might take a while but it’ll definitely come. It’ll bring you to my house and I’ll be waiting up for you. Don’t disappear on me or I’ll have to call your mom, and the cops. Okay? Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“Are you drunk, honey?”
“No.”
“High?”
“No.”
“It’s okay if you are; I just want to be sure you don’t leave there before the cab comes.”
“I won’t.”
“I want you to wait inside, honey. Don’t stand outside in the lot by yourself.”
On this one point she disobeyed. She waited outside in the lot, out of sight of the waiters she felt must be watching and talking about her. Close to one in the morning an orange-and-blue car that said Metro Cab entered the lot, driven by a man with a brown beard and longish brown hair who asked, “Sarah?” then gestured her in. He found her gaze in the rearview mirror. “Hi, I’m Richard. I’m not running the meter ’cause Elli’ll settle up with me direct. She’s a friend.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. She’d never ridden in a taxi in her life. She hadn’t even realized her city had taxis. In her childhood she’d watched a television show about New York cab drivers. The meter had something to do with the way that you paid.
They drove back down the boulevard, all the dead grass, crushed glass, strewn litter, cracked pavement, inexhaustibly vivid granular variety on which Sarah had trod exhausted in an instant. The cab climbed onto the freeway and whistled through the night, dismounting two exits west of Sarah’s neighborhood among slightly dilapidated single-story brick ranch-style houses like those the city over except in neighborhoods of the wealthy, like David’s and Mr. Kingsley’s, or in poor neighborhoods, like Sarah and her mother’s, or in the neighborhoods of people even poorer than Sarah and her mother; everyone else, in Sarah’s experience, lived in houses like these. Even Sarah and her mother had once lived in a house just like these, when Sarah’s parents were still together. Richard pulled into the driveway of a darkened house on the front step of which a petite woman with long brown hair was sitting in a frilly bathrobe, smoking a cigarette. As the car turned in, the woman stood quickly and came to meet it. “Thanks,” she said to Richard, leaning one elbow on the sill of the open driver’s-side window, as if it were the middle of the day. “I owe you one.”
“You’ll get my bill,” Sarah heard Richard say, and Elli and Richard both laughed. Sarah got out of the car on the opposite side from where Elli was standing, and the car drove away.
Inside the house the air seemed made of sleep. All was warm, stale, damp. Sarah could hear the heavy inhalations and exhalations of sleepers; following Elli through a shag-carpeted living room dimly lit by the glow of a VCR’s digital clock Sarah saw that a sleeper facedown on a couch, one long leg and one arm dangling onto the floor, was Liam.
“In here,” Elli whispered, coming back to where Sarah stood rooted to the floor and taking her hand as if Sarah had perhaps lost her way in the dark. They left the twilight of the living room, passed through the near-complete darkness of a hallway with many closed doors, and entered the last door, from under which glowed a thread of gold light. “It’s a full house tonight,” Elli said when the door had been closed behind them. Her drawl was husky and bemused, as if no circumstance could distress it. They stood together in her densely cluttered bedroom, clothes and teddy bears and pillows heaped in such quantity that the underlying furniture could barely be seen. A lamp with a tasseled shawl pinned to the shade cast dim light on framed pictures of a much younger, rounder-cheeked Karen and a chubby little boy with the same face as Karen. Dolls and knickknacks and books were crammed into the overtaxed shelves: Star Signs; The Complete Tarot; Recipes for Nutritional Health. “This should fit you,” Elli said, with effort tugging a pajama set loose from a drawer that was too full to be properly opened. When the set was uprooted Sarah could see that it was ruffled and trimmed with little marble-size pom-poms. “I got it for Karen but she won’t be caught dead wearing it, and it’s too big for me. I’m a two. Oh, honey. What is it? Is it a guy? You are so pretty. Karen never talks about you; I can guess why. You’re gonna get in the shower—use the body wash.”