How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (6 page)

The first several months there, I had hardly any contact with Buster at all, nor with Alissa for that matter. Since Buster spent a large part of every year either in Washington or at the foreign embassy to which he had been posted, he was mostly at home only on weekends and sometimes not even then. As for Alissa, she was too busy being everything but a mother to be a mother; that's what she had me for. And so, most of my dealings with them were through the daily notes Alissa left for me on the butcher block in the kitchen, a knife always stuck in the top of the note so that no stray wind could ever blow her precious words away, notes filled with instructions on nutrition and scheduling recommendations for Stevie and Kim.

“Five fruits and vegetables each and every day, Charlotte. Even with your math-challenged mind, you can count that high…right?”

“Fifteen minutes of TV in the morning and fifteen at night. That's it. They don't call it the idiot box for nothing…right?”

“That last piece of chocolate cheesecake is mine…right?”

There were times I thought there must be better uses for that sharp note-stabbing knife than the purpose it was being used for.

And so, before another day had passed following my interview with Alissa, my life began to be filled with the education of small children, with shopping for birthday parties and making sure granola bars and juice boxes were in backpacks, with tutus and Samurai violin lessons.

It didn't take many more days to pass before I started to fall in love with those kids. It wasn't so much that they were particularly charming, certainly Kim wasn't, but there was something so vulnerable about their orphans-within-a-two-parent-household circumstances. If their parents would not pay enough attention to them, then I would let Stevie play with what little makeup I owned, I would learn how to play games involving balls and things so I could teach Kim how to play, too.

It may not have been anybody's idea of the Ideal Life, but it had become
my
life and it was sufficient.

The bedroom they gave me was in the far corner of the penthouse, a tiny box of a room—see? I had guessed that would happen!—that I suspected had been meant as an extra storage closet. It wasn't so bad, though, not like what I imagined would be the airless, lightless, spiderweb-infested lodgings of any nanny living in the suburbs. I had a bed, a lamp to read by, there was even a TV, if I were so inclined, which I rarely was. So what if the room was a shade of yellow I detested; I was too timid to complain.

All households with small children have their routines. But the Keating household really didn't have a routine that involved both parents and children for six out of the seven days of the week.

The only thing Alissa could be depended upon to do with her children was to take them out on Saturday afternoons. They invariably left at 1:00 p.m. and would remain gone for three to four hours, no more, never less. Their routine was also invariable: lunch at a kid-friendly restaurant like Rumpelmeyer's, a visit to the toy store FAO Schwarz when it was still there, the big Toys “R” Us when it replaced the other and a final stop at some educational place, the planetarium or the Museum of Natural History.

The first few Saturdays that Alissa took the kids out for their afternoon outing passed unexceptionally. Even though I had told myself I would spend my three hours off a week working on writing something, anything, I instead met my own friends for lunch and shopping, Helen and Grace, my closest girlfriends.

Take care of kids for 165 hours; eat, shop for three. Take care of kids for 165 hours; eat, shop for three. If nothing else, the routine that I was forced to follow was improving my math skills.

But then a Saturday came when I woke with a stomach bug, leaving me no choice but to complete the remaining three of the 168-hour weekly cycle in my room, with no more than golf on the tiny TV to keep me company.

Then a knock came at the door and I suddenly had company.

“May I come in?” Buster poked his head around the door. “I didn't hear you leave today so I thought you might be in here. Are you unwell?”

It seemed such a formal way to phrase the question—“Are you unwell?”—formal and utterly charming.

And when he came all the way around the doorway, the tray in his hands containing a Lenox bowl of chicken soup and a SpongeBob SquarePants plastic glass with a straw in it, he needed to do no more to sweep me away.

Even if I was lying down, he still swept me away.

“I just figured that—” he smiled sheepishly like a wolf “—even the girl who takes care of everyone else needs someone to take care of her sometimes.”

See what I mean?

When I had trouble sitting up, he set the tray gently on the floor and even more gently helped me, arranging the pillows behind me.

He even fed me with the spoon.

“Shh,” he said when I started to protest.

It just seemed so unseemly, my ambassador boss treating me with more tenderness than I'd ever seen him show to, well, his own children. It was inconceivable that he'd ever behaved so with Alissa.

“One day, when you're feeling better, maybe I'll let you take a turn and you can feed me.”

Combined with my feverish state, the image he'd put in my mind of me feeding him caused me to snort, which in turn caused the chicken soup that had been in my mouth to spray out my nose.

I must have seemed a charming companion.

Red-faced, I finished being fed in silence.

Afterward, he dabbed at my mouth, then eased me back down upon the pillows, smoothing the sheet over me.

“Would you rather be alone,” he asked, then paused before adding hopefully, “or would you like some company?”

All of a sudden, I hated the thought of being alone in that yellow room with nothing but golf, which I could neither stand nor understand, for company.

“Some company would be okay,” I said tentatively, “I guess.”

Aside from the narrow twin bed, the only other seating in the yellow room was an uncomfortable armchair with unpredictable springs that I only used late at night to sit at my desk, trying to convince myself I could someday be a writer.

Buster looked the question “May I?” And before I knew it, he had pulled the uncomfortable seat up alongside the bed, settling himself into it, despite that he dwarfed the thing.

“Do you know much about golf?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“It's a silly game,” he said. “Useful, though. Would you rather watch or talk?”

“Talk would be good,” I said, “I guess.”

The chicken soup and juice had revived me enough so that I was wanting to cringe for having nothing better to say than “I guess” at the end of every response. In fact, I found myself hoping that I'd be interesting enough to command the attention of a handsome ambassador, even a married one.

He got up, switched off the set—there was nothing so exotic as a remote control for the nanny, certainly not one that worked—and sat back down again.

And then we talked.

Mostly, he talked, I should say, about his exciting career, about the books he liked to read. And yet, even though he did most of the talking, it felt as though we talked a lot about me. He would ask a question, like, “So what was it like, being on television in all those commercials at such a young age?” And then, when I mealymouthed with, “It was okay…I guess,” he amplified my answer with, “I know it must have been surprising. Oh, not that those commercials weren't wonderful, because they most certainly were, in particular the one where you rubbed your tummy as you said your line. But how many people can say they were in a series of commercials? Not many, would be my guess.” He'd seen my stupid commercials! What could he have been at the time, his early twenties? What man that age would take note of, and later remember, such insipid commercials?

“Actually,” I corrected in a small voice, “television has been around for quite a while, so probably a lot of people could say that. I guess.”

He laughed as though I were an incredibly witty person, as opposed to the overprecise geek that I was.

And so we passed our first Saturday together, with him carrying on the conversation for both of us in that same innocuous vein. Just before four o'clock, with Alissa and the kids due back any minute, he picked up the tray, excused himself and said he sincerely hoped he'd made me feel just a bit better.

“You did,” I said.

When the next Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I was well enough to go out again, I had my hand on the door before I heard his voice call out to me.

“Charlotte, I guess you must be feeling well enough to do whatever it is you usually do?”

“I guess,” I said.

“But it sure would be nice if you changed your mind and decided to stay here,” he said with his sheep-wolf smile, “with me. I feel as though we barely got a chance to talk last week.”

“I could always cancel my plans,” I said, “I guess.”

“And I guess that would be finer than fine….” He sheep-wolf smiled again.

And so I canceled my plans with Grace and Helen, canceled my friendships with everyone in the world, never looking back, at least not for a long time.

Over the course of the next several Saturdays, we got to know each other better, always in the yellow bedroom. Even though we had the whole deserted penthouse to range over, we stayed where we had begun. What it lacked in comfort, it made up for in feeling talismanic to what we both felt growing.

At first, we talked about safe subjects. He liked to tell me about his career, seemed to respect that I was intelligent enough to understand whatever he might choose to share. And he was most interested in hearing about my desire to be a writer. Despite my relative lack of experience with men, I'd come to realize that there is a certain kind of man for whom the writing female is an endless source of fascination. Perhaps it's as simple as this: they are curious as to what we write because they imagine we share our characters' bravery and desire. Certainly, if there's any sex involved in the writing, people would assume that you've either done or desperately want to do all the acts depicted; although God knows what they think about people who write serial-killer books with sex scenes involving gerbils. Or perhaps the fascination that writers hold for some people is more complex, like recognizing that the mind that is capable of sustaining a fantasy over a hundred thousand readable words must somehow be qualitatively different than the mind that cannot. They see the creativity as something other, foreign, exotic, those three adjectives having discretely different meanings.

“That's the thing,” said Buster at last, one Saturday, “my wife could never be a writer.”

There it was: the first time he had brought up her name between us, even though he hadn't named her by name at all, but had merely spoken of her in her assigned role.

That was all it took, though, the watershed after which he felt it safe to discuss his wife's shortcomings at length. It would be easy to characterize him merely as a selfish and philandering husband—indeed, he was those things—but it would be a mistake not to allow the core truth in the things he said.

He said his wife didn't understand him; and she didn't.

He said there was no warmth between them; and there wasn't.

He said she was the coldest of cold fish; and she was.

It was all true. Every accusation he leveled at her carefully coiffed head was true; I'd seen it all with my own eyes.

“I'm feeling overwhelmed by work lately,” I'd overheard him say to her one time.

“You just need to be more focused,” she replied, not even deigning to look up from her own work.

“Hey, how about a hug for an overtired ambassador?” I'd heard him suggest to her not long after I moved in.

“Not now,” Alissa replied. “I just did my hair. Are you really going to wear
that
to dinner with the Carlsons tonight?”

Then there was the time I tried to explain to her that some of the other kids at the playground were bullying Kim over his name, singsonging the cheer “Kim, Kim, he's no Tim! If
she
can't do it, let's get a boy and win!” True, it was a lousy rhyming scheme, but it still hurt Kim. I told Alissa that it might be a good idea to come up with a nickname for him, preferably an “I eat nails for breakfast” kind of name, so he could avoid the taunts until he was old enough to defend himself from such abuse, at least mentally.

“What about Killer?” I suggested.

“What about Kim?” she countered. “Look, Charlotte, I really do appreciate your concern, but you are, after all, just the nanny. Kim needs to get tough. It's a cruel world out there. He might as well learn it at an early age. He'll be all the stronger for it later. One day, he'll thank me for this.”

Somehow, I doubted that. What I really thought was that, one day, the overpriced therapist he'd undoubtedly need would thank her for it.

Sure, it was a cruel world out there. Nobody needed to tell me that. But I also knew that there was no need to make it any harder on a kid than it needed to be, just for the sake of toughening a kid up. What, did all of life have to be boot camp? And I also knew Kim's pain, because I was the one who was there for him when the other kids bullied him, I was the one who held him when he cried about it at night.