SHE DID REMEMBER. IT WAS ALL THERE. JUST HIDDEN, waiting to be let out into the light of day like an old poltergeist freed from the basement.
It must have been September. She could still feel the heat. Seventh-grade boys and girls, out on a trip to Crissy Field, doing the things schoolkids did. Working a little. Playing a little. Teasing …
Maggie Flavier could still picture herself on that bright distant morning, thin as a rake but tall for her age and with a look about her that turned men’s heads. She tried not to notice. She felt alone and a little unhappy in San Francisco. This was her mother’s idea, not hers. To flee Paris and an estranged father, to try to find some new life halfway across the world in a city where they knew no one, and had, as far as the young Maggie could see, no clear idea of what the future might bring.
She’d danced at the stage school in France, and men looked then. Her mother had watched and taken note.
They were so kind in the church school on Pine Street. They smiled a lot and listened to her. They didn’t mind she hated trigonometry and algebra and preferred to dress up and play on the stage instead, always inventing something, stories, characters, voices, situations, imaginary people she created to fill the void inside.
These small and seemingly useless talents mattered, her mother told her. Because of the auditions. She spoke the word as if it possessed some magical power. As if it could save them. The young Maggie had no idea how. All she understood was that she possessed a burning, unquenchable need to be noticed, to be applauded. By her peers. By her mother, more than anything.
The notes had been coming for weeks, always unsigned, always written in a crude childish hand on cheap school notebook paper. They were, young Maggie thought, beautiful in a simple, babyish way. Flowery language. Sometimes bad French. Sometimes, she thought, better Italian, which she recognised from lessons in Paris. They were never coarse or dirty, like some she’d received, and some the other girls sent from time to time. All they spoke of, carefully, indirectly, was love. As if there were an emotion somewhere waiting for her to discover it, like a hidden Easter egg, a secret buried in the ground. Something ethereal, something holy, distinct from the hard, cold physical reality of the life she knew. She didn’t really understand the words or the poetry, some of it so old she found the verses unreadable. So she threw them away mostly, until the last.
Had this unseen admirer written, simply, Margot Flavier, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime, then, perhaps, she would have tried to understand. But nothing was that clear and sometimes the language was so florid, so odd, she thought it was a joke. Sometimes it scared her a little. She was young, she was exiled in a foreign land, with a strange and unhappy mother who wished to push her into a career about which she felt unsure, not that her doubts mattered for one moment.
Naturally, she told the girls. Barbara Ronson. Louise Gostelow. Susan Shanks. The trio who ran the class.
Naturally, when the final note arrived, they had an idea.
That last message came the day after she’d gone to the first successful audition of her life, taking time off school for the short flight to L.A. with her mother, spending hours reading the scripts, trying to make her fast-improving English bad again for a group of men and women who seemed to demand that. Afterwards, when they waited at LAX for the flight home, her mother had made a call on a public phone. When she returned, her face glowed with a happiness Maggie had never seen there before. Maggie had the part. Françoise in L’Amour L.A. A life mapped out in a single day, not that she knew that then, not that she felt anything much at all, except pleasure that this had produced joy in her mother.
Maggie had been surprised. She thought she’d fluffed her lines and failed the audition.
The next morning, she came into school and found the note tucked into the seam of her locker. It read, Tomorrow at Crissy Field I will reveal my love.
Barbara and Louise and Susan had gawped at the scrawled, nervous handwriting, giggling, and then concocted the plan.
Out on the hot, dusty sand dunes of the Marina the following day, they’d played it out. While the