The elevator doors opened. She flinched and checked to be sure the car was empty. We got in. “This was the best thing to come out of the pageant deal,” she said. “Getting hooked up with volunteering here. My mom came with me that first day, just to check it out, and now she’s here every afternoon. She comes to laugh.”
“Laugh?” I could think of few things sadder than kids with cancer.
“You’ll see.”
The elevator made a bouncy stop on the second floor. The doors opened. Nicole held her breath. Nobody got on the elevator. The doors closed. The elevator rumbled upward.
“Hey, the pageant thing?” I said. “I don’t know. You don’t seem the type.”
“My mother asked me to try out. She was freaked that Dad would play hardball in the divorce settlement. She had me apply for every scholarship out there. My grandmother made my mom do it, and that was the way she got the money to go to Sarah Lawrence. Everybody loves to hate the girls because they’re pretty, but they’re also really smart and motivated to do great things, teach, go into politics, philanthropy. They’re big-hearted. We were sisters.”
“He’s being a dick about money, your father?”
She shook her head. “He’s the best. He never said anything about the pageant stuff, but I could tell he was bummed about it. He’s the quiet type. Low-key, conservative, don’t draw attention to yourself. He definitely has an eye for the ladies, though. Wait’ll you meet my mom.”
“Seriously?”
“Calm down, boy.”
“I saw her on the ’net, but only partially. That news clip. The reward money offer.”
We stopped at the sixth floor. The doors opened. A tall dude in a mechanic’s jumper was fixing a light. He did a double take on Nicole. She tensed and turned to hide her face. The doors closed. “Bet your dad has an eye for the ladies too,” she said.
Six years after my mother’s death, and my father was nowhere near getting over her. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re gorgeous. Therefore your mother must be gorgeous.”
“You’re insane.”
“You don’t like to talk about them, your parents. No response?”
I shrugged. “How many more floors?” I said.
“This one.” The elevator doors opened, and Nicole was a new person, totally relaxed. She knew all the nurses’ names as she led me down the hall. Anthropomorphized animals danced on the walls. A party clown with a therapy dog headed into a room. A boy, maybe six, hugged Nicole. His head was bandaged. “Mom was worried,” he said. “She kept saying she hoped you weren’t in a car accident.”
“We hit a little traffic,” Nicole said.
“And you couldn’t call to tell her that?”
“You sound like Mom.”
The kid grabbed my hands and used me as a swing. “We all call Nic’s mom Mom,” he said. Then, “Dude, wait!” He ditched us for the therapy dog. His sneakers lit up each time his heels hit the floor.
We turned into a room where a woman was sitting with a bunch of kids around a short table, teaching them to finger paint. Nicole would look almost exactly like her in twenty-five years. “I thought you were in an accident,” she said.
“Traffic.”
“And you couldn’t call to tell me that?” Nicole wasn’t kidding. Mrs. Castro may even have been as pretty as her daughter, but not as beautiful. She smiled warmly. “So this is Jay, bearer of broken umbrellas.” She balled her hands so she wouldn’t get paint on my back as she hugged me tightly. I was a little startled. She said to Nicole, “She’s waiting for you.”
Emma was in bed, asleep. She was maybe ten or so. A vaporizer puffed white smoke.
“Em?” Nicole tickled the girl’s foot.
An oxygen cannula tied into her nose. She was pale with dark circles under her eyes. I didn’t see any signs that she was breathing.
“Oh my god,” Nicole said. She shook the girl. “Em? Em!”
The girl grabbed Nicole and tickled her.
“Not funny, miss,” Nicole said. “This is my friend Jay. Jay, this is my totally obnoxious friend Emma.”
“Yo,” Emma said. She gave me a high pound with a shaky fist. Then to Nicole: “He is a hottie.” Back to me: “So how does that make you feel, that my ridiculously beautiful girl here thinks you’re hot?”
“My experience is that girls often confuse hot with tall.”
Emma grabbed my hand. Hers was tiny in mine and trembling and a little blue. “I like him, Nic. Like the vampire in the movie, the good one. I love vampires.”
“We all do,” I said.
“I like to scare myself stupid.”
“Me too.”
“Mom’s gonna use the umbrella in one of her sculptures.” She winked at me.
“How old are you?” I said.
She made her voice deep with a British accent: “Veddy, veddy old.”
“Stop flirting for five seconds and tell us what trouble you were up to today,” Nicole said.
“Wrote a poem for you. The assignment was: Find a small treasure and offer a gratitude for living in a free country. I wrote it this morning, before the rain.” Emma flipped up her laptop screen. “‘I look out my perfectly crooked window blinds and see freedom of an immaculate sort. The tops of the pines tickle into a wilderness of blue and white, and all I need now is red. And what do you know, I have it here, this heart-shaped Valentine’s box Kevin Connelly gave me but last year. Sweet candy is this America.’”
Nicole kissed the girl’s forehead and turned to me. “See?” she said. Then to Emma: “You were eating raspberry sherbet.”
“That mind-reading thing? Annoying.”
“It’s all over your face.” Nicole took Emma to the bathroom.
“I have your father’s book,” Mrs. Castro said.
“You and like three other people,” I said.
“It was a best seller, at least in art history circles.”
“Must’ve been before I was born.”
“It was, actually. It’s a definitive text, you know? I met him once.”
“Seriously?”
“Briefly. At a show he was covering. We didn’t get a chance to speak. My husband saw to that.” Her eyes were glazing over. “He and your father had words.”
“My father hit on you?”
“No, no, of course not. They were arguing about one of the paintings. Rafael can be a bit insecure, and maybe your dad had a little too much wine, and. . You know what, Jay? It was a long, long time ago. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Really, sweetheart, it was nothing more than a little tiff. Don’t mention this to Nicole, all right? She gets mad at me when I talk about her father behind his back, and she’s right to do so. Secret kept?”
“I’ll let my father know you liked the book.”
She smiled, but sadly. She nodded toward the bathroom. Nicole had left the door open. She and Emma were in a tickle fight at the sink. Nicole had an amazingly cool laugh, loud, nothing fake about it.
“Isn’t it just awful?” Mrs. Castro said. “She was so beautiful.”