mother’s bed and pulled—clawed—at the edge of the duvet, yanking it off. It was weighty and full of feathers and covered with beautiful fabric—a Florentine pattern in dark corals and pinks and light greens. Clare wrapped it around herself, then sat inside it and looked at her mother, feeling almost shy.
Her mother had stopped singing and was looking back. Clare realized how long it had been since her mother had looked at her, right at her face. Her mother’s eyes weren’t shocked or afraid, and they did not seem to be the eyes of a woman who could go shoe shopping while her daughter lay in her room almost delirious with loss and fear. Her mother looked at her with a gaze full of kindness.
“Mommy,” said Clare, quietly. “Mommy. You can’t go outside in that. It’s winter. It’s cold.”
Clare’s mother smiled at her, a mother’s smile.
“Your new shoes,” whispered Clare, wonderingly, “they shouldn’t sell summer shoes in winter.”
Still surrounded by the duvet, Clare walked on her knees over to the claret-colored chair, paused for a second or two, then put her head in her mother’s lap. “Please stay here, please stay, please stay. Don’t leave. I miss you all the time,” pleaded Clare.
Her mother lifted Clare’s head from her lap gently, using both hands, as though Clare’s head were made of glass, and stood up, stepping around Clare, around the tumbled fabric that formed a kind of landscape on the floor. Clare looked up at her mother, waiting.
“Oh, Clarey,” said her mother, tenderly, patiently. “Resort. You remember.”
Clare shook her head.
“Resort wear. In stores. That’s how you can buy summer clothes in winter.”
Clare’s mother walked out, her heels loud on the oak plank floor of the hallway, then loud again on the stairs.
Clare sat on the floor, dazed. Her mind stayed empty for a while, and then she began remembering a slumber party she’d been to the previous spring, just before the end of school. Two popular girls had been there, twelve-year-olds with plucked eyebrows and long, swinging hair. They’d decided to play “makeover” on the plainest girl at the party, a girl with whom Clare had gone to school since she was four and whose dreadful shyness had, by first grade, stopped even the sternest teachers from calling on her. Her name was Candy, a name so wholly wrong for her it seemed cruel to say it, and hardly anyone did. The older girls covered Candy’s face with awful, garish makeup—an orange, pink, and blue mask—and curled and teased her thin blond hair into a knotty mane. “You look gorgeous, Candy! Just like a movie star, I swear to God,” the girls told Candy lovingly, looking around and nodding at the other girls at the party, prompting them to join in. Some of them did, crowding around Candy in a cooing, patting cluster as Candy, flushed and speechless, blinked her gummy eyelashes in happiness.
Exhausted on the floor of her mother’s room, Clare recalled her own shame at having watched Candy’s transformation without saying a word. When she finally spoke up, it was the disaster she’d known it would be. “Shut up, you guys. You know she looks terrible. Why don’t you leave her alone?”
All the girls glared at her, then one of the twelve-year-olds said, “Bitch! You must think you’re really hot. Look, you made her cry.” And that was the worst of it, the way Candy looked, desolation creeping over her face as she realized they’d been making fun of her all along. As Clare left the room to call her mother to pick her up, she saw one of the twelve-year-olds putting her arms around Candy to comfort her and Candy letting her do it.
Clare should have known better— had known better—but it was the way the girls had spoken to Candy, the texture of their voices. Such meanness served up in the sweetest tones, and to someone whose need for love was terrible in its completeness.
The worst thing, Clare thought now. Worse than hitting. The
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