Change Places with Me(30)

There was a photo in the living room of Clara’s real mother, her hair a mass of dark-brown curls, head tilted, crinkles at the corners of her eyes, laughing. She hadn’t been everlasting—she’d had thyroid cancer, one of the cancers with an incredibly high survival rate except for the few who were unlucky. Clara used to touch her throat, where the thyroid is, and hum, trying to feel this thing that had killed her mother. As for the thing that had killed her dad, all she had to do was hold her hand over her heart. But she didn’t do it.

“Plus,” her dad had said about her stepmother, “I saw something amazing in her right away. There’s a quality there—very unusual.”

Clara had never seen it, not a glimmer. Not then, not now.

“What’s her name?” Clara asked about the woman on-screen.

Evil Lynn kept her eyes on the TV and spoke. “She doesn’t have a name.”

“That’s not possible.”

“The movie is called Rebecca—”

Clara folded her arms. “Then her name is Rebecca.”

“Rebecca was the first wife, who died.”

“But everybody has a name!” Clara had moved closer to Evil Lynn, without thinking, and caught the smell of lavender.

“She has a name,” Evil Lynn said. “We just never learn what it is. Maybe because she lives in the shadow of a ghost, the ghost of Rebecca. The girl thinks Rebecca must’ve been the perfect wife, but it turns out Rebecca was vindictive and cruel and used people dreadfully, and the husband never loved her. In fact, it turns out he ended up killing Rebecca. In the movie it’s an accident. In the book it’s definitely murder. So you see, not everyone is what they seem. Sometimes you think somebody’s wonderful but she’s not, and the opposite can be true, too—”

“Does the new wife have a name in the book?” Clara didn’t care about any of the rest of it.

“No, she narrates and we never learn it there, either.”

But a name was—well, important. It gave you a place on earth that was yours alone. Clara stood there in the living room, watching and waiting and longing for someone to call this woman by her name, but no one ever did. There would have been so many just-right names for her—Rose, for instance, which was so simple but contained so much, beauty plus a thorn to protect her.





CHAPTER 18


There was a Post-it on the kitchen table the next morning: Don’t forget—appt. today.

Clara shook her head. When would Evil Lynn give up?

At lunch, the kid at the scanner remarked to her, “You used to be a friend of Kim’s,” and Clara heard herself say, “I am a friend of Kim’s,” and then caught sight of Kim, who had on a Mets jersey and turquoise harem pants, no doubt from Second Nature because no regular store had carried them in years. The old tug of their friendship pulled at her, the dumb things they’d done; in kindergarten they’d hidden in a storage closet during a fire drill, laughing their heads off. Their teacher got so mad when they were found, and got so much madder when Clara kept saying, “But it wasn’t a real fire.” Before she knew it she was putting her tray down and sitting opposite Kim and asking, “Okay if I sit with you?”

“Well, sure,” Kim said right away, flipping her braid behind her.

What was happening here? Last night, Clara had actually shed tears, just a few, at an old movie simply because a woman looked so alone and had no name. Clara never cried. Yesterday afternoon, she’d practically broken out in hives over a couple of dogs owned by an old lady she had, without effort, been able to ignore for years. Now she had joined Kim for lunch. She had no idea what to say.

Kim didn’t seem to mind; she shrugged her shoulders. “So . . . you want to do a crossword puzzle?”

What a great idea. Clara pulled out her phone and held it between them. A video for Bracelesses popped up, but she swiped it away.

“I’ve never really done one before,” Kim said.

Clara showed her how you started with the words moving across, or horizontally. The clue for one across: six-letter word for ache.

“Pain,” Clara said. “Wait, that’s only four letters. Anguish—that’s seven, too many, distress, also seven, what about agony? Oh, that’s five.”

“Desire,” Kim said.

Clara said the easy way to check if your word was correct was to take a quick look at an intersecting word—say, one down. The clue: Personal journal (five letters). That had to be diary, and the d confirmed that the first letter of one across was also d. Kim had gotten it right. Clara had been on the wrong track.

The puzzle was a tricky one—they got harder as the week went along—but it turned out Kim was a natural, as Clara told her while eating her poppy-seed bagel and chocolate chip cookies. Kim had something she’d brought from home, an avocado-and-turkey spiral. Together they finished the puzzle in less than fifteen minutes, faster than Clara had ever done a Thursday puzzle.

“Hey, I’ve been looking around for someone,” Kim said. “I wasn’t going to ask you, because, you know . . .” She paused. “But you’d be perfect, Clara. You have the best face.”

What was that?

“I want to put stage makeup on you—I need the practice, and this would really help. A girl in the cast got me to sign up to do the play this year, Into the Woods, and I want them all to look just right. Your face is so wide open, so inviting. I look at you and I see—so many possibilities. I could turn you into anything. With makeup, I mean. Please say yes.”