center of my life like a train. After my parents got involved it was simply a problem to be x’ed out like a bad equation. One Little Problem plus one trip to Swizerland equaled zero, zero, zero. Very simple.
But now it felt like a lot more than a Little Problem, and not simple at all.
“What am I going to do?” I said quietly. It was the first time I’d thought about that question in a long time. Not what was I going to do about Rose, or my parents, or going back to school—but what was I going to do about me?
I don’t know how long I stood there before an acerbic voice broke my statue pose. “The American invasion is still here, I see.”
I turned. Eve stood in the doorway in the same print housedress she’d worn last night, her graying hair loose and wild, and her eyes bloodshot. I braced myself, but maybe Mr. Kilgore was right about her forgetting her threats of the previous night, because she seemed less interested in me than in massaging her own temples.
“I’ve got the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse going hammer and tongs in my skull,” she said, “and my mouth tastes like a urinal in Chepstow. Tell me that goddamn Scotsman made b-breakfast.”
I waved my hand, stomach still rolling sickly. “The one-pan miracle.”
“Bless him.” Eve fished a fork out of a drawer and began eating straight out of the pan. “So, you’ve met Finn. He’s a dish, isn’t he? If I weren’t older than dirt and ugly as sin, I’d climb that like a French alp.”
I pushed away from the stove. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry I forced my way in. I’ll just go—” What? Crawl back to my mother, face her fury, take the boat for my Appointment? What else was there? I felt the cotton-thick surge of numbness creeping back over me. I wanted to put my head on Rose’s shoulder and close my eyes; I wanted to curl over a toilet and vomit my insides out. I felt so sick, and so helpless.
Eve mopped up a glob of egg yolk with a hunk of bread. “Sit d-down, Yank.”
That raspy voice had authority, stammer or not. I sat.
She swiped her fingers on a dish towel, reached into the pocket of her dress, and fished out a cigarette. She lit up with a long, slow drag. “First fag of the day,” she said, exhaling. “Always tastes the best. Almost makes up for the bloody hangover. What was your cousin’s n-n-name again?”
“Rose.” My heart began to pound. “Rose Fournier. She—”
“Tell me something,” Eve interrupted. “Girls like you have rich mummies and daddies. Why aren’t your parents beating the bushes for their little lost lamb of a niece?”
“They tried. They made inquiries.” Even when I was angry with my parents, I knew they’d tried their best. “After two years of nothing, my father said Rose surely must be dead.”
“Sounds like a smart man, your father.”
He was. And as a lawyer specializing in international law, he’d known the channels and byways through which to conduct his overseas inquiries. He’d done what he could, but when no one had gotten so much as a telegram from Rose—even me, the one she loved best of our whole family—my father had drawn the logical conclusion: that she was dead. I’d been trying to get used to that idea, trying to convince myself. At least until six months ago.
“My big brother came home from Tarawa with only half a leg, and six months ago he shot himself.” I heard my own voice crack. James and I had never been close when little; I’d just been the younger sister he could bully. But once he grew out of the hair-pulling stage, the teasing gentled; he joked about putting a scare into any boy who came to date me, and I teased him about his terrible haircut once he joined the marines. He was my brother; I loved him and my parents thought he hung the moon. And then he was dead, and right around that time Rose started to step out of my memory and into my field of vision. Every little girl running past turned into Rose at six or eight or eleven; every blonde sauntering ahead of me across a campus green became the older Rose, tall and just beginning to curve . . . A dozen times a day my heart knocked and then crashed as my memory played merciless tricks.