SUNDAY MORNING, Natty and I went to church. The new priest was an incredibly boring speaker, but the homily was not without interest to me: it was about how we focus too much on the things we don’t have instead of the things we do. I was certainly guilty of such behavior. To pass the time, I decided to count my blessings:
1. I was out of Liberty.
2. Natty and Leo, as far as I knew, were safe.
3. Win had made it easy for me to keep my bargain with his father.
4. We had money and health.
5. We had Imogen Goodfellow, Simon Green, and Mr. Kipling …
By the time I had reached six, we were standing to receive the host.
On our way out of church, someone called my name. I turned: it was Mickey Balanchine and his wife, Sophia. “Hello, cousins!” he greeted Natty and me warmly. Mickey kissed us both on our cheeks.
“Since when do you go to this church?” I asked Mickey, having never seen him there before. Natty and I attended a Catholic church because our mother had, but everyone on my father’s side of the family went to an Eastern Orthodox church if they went at all.
“Since he married a Catholic,” Sophia Balanchine replied in that strange accent of hers. Though she spoke English very well, it was obviously not her native language. “Good morning, Anya. Nataliya. We met, but only briefly, at the occasion of my marriage. It is good to see you both looking so well.” She, too, kissed us on our cheeks. “It’s hard to tell which of you is the older sister.”
Mickey pointed a finger at me. “You were supposed to come see me as soon as you got out.”
I told him that I’d only been home since Friday afternoon and had planned to visit him that week.
“Mickey, you must give the girl room,” Sophia said, and then she did just the opposite, hooking arms with Natty and me, and insisting that we join them for brunch. “You have not eaten,” she accused us, “and we live only blocks from here. We should cease making spectacles of ourselves on the front stoop of this cathedral.” She wasn’t Russian, but something about her reminded me of Nana. I took a moment to consider Sophia Balanchine. I remembered that I had thought her plain at the wedding but maybe that had been harsh. She had brown hair, brown eyes, a large, rather horsey nose. Indeed, everything about her was large—her hands, her lips, her eyes, her cheekbones—and she was several inches taller than her husband. (Mickey was so short I had always suspected him of wearing shoes with lifts.) Sophia Balanchine seemed powerful. I liked my cousin somewhat better knowing he was married to this woman.
Though Natty and I tried to demur, Sophia insisted we come to brunch and somehow we found ourselves at their town house on East Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from where Win’s family lived.
Sophia and Mickey occupied the bottom two floors of a three-story brownstone. The top floor was used by Mickey’s father, Yuri Balanchine, and his nurses. Any day now, they expected Yuri to die, Sophia Balanchine informed me. “It will be a mercy,” she said.
“It will be,” Natty agreed. I’m sure she was thinking of Nana.
Over lunch, we stuck to innocuous subjects. I found out the source of Sophia’s unusual accent—she had a German father and a Mexican mother—and Mickey and Sophia asked me about my plans for the following school year. I told them that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. The third week of the semester was about to start, and I feared that I wouldn’t be able to find a suitable school that would also find me suitable. Considering my criminal record, I mean.
Natty sighed. “I wish you could just go back to Trinity.”
On some level, I was glad not to be going back to Trinity. It was a chance to make a break from old routines, old people. That was what I told myself, at least.
“After what you have been through, it is good to make a change, I think,” Sophia said, echoing my own thoughts. “Though it is also difficult to have to go to a new school in your senior year.”
“It’s an insult,” Mickey said. “Those bastards had no cause to throw you out.”
He was wrong. The administration had had perfect cause: I had brought a gun to school.
The discussion then turned to Natty’s time at genius camp, a subject I had heard very little about myself. She had spent the summer working on a project to strip water from garbage before it left people’s houses. As she described her work, Natty sounded smart, impressive, genuinely happy, and I knew all at once that I had done the right thing in making sure she had made it to camp. I was proud that this was my sister and even a little proud of myself for having done right by her. My throat closed up. I stood and offered to help clear the table.
Sophia followed me into their kitchen. She told me where to set the dishes and then she touched my elbow. “You and I have a mutual friend,” she said.
I looked at her. “We do?”
“Yuji Ono, of course,” Sophia said. “Perhaps you did not know that he and I went to an international high school together in Belgium. Yuji is my oldest and dearest friend in the world.”
It made sense. They were both the same age, twenty-four, and in point of fact, they did have a similar manner of speaking. And that was why he had been at her wedding, not merely to keep tabs on my family. I wondered how much she knew about the role her oldest and dearest friend had played in Leo’s escape. The thought of it made me uncomfortable. “It was Yuji,” she continued, “who introduced me to my husband.”
I hadn’t known that.
“He told me to give you his regards when I saw you.”
Hadn’t our meeting at the church been accidental? “But you didn’t know you would see me today?” I said after a pause.
“I knew I should see you eventually,” she explained without missing a beat. “My husband had visited you at Liberty, had he not?”
Who was this Sophia Balanchine anyway? I tried to remember her maiden name. Bitter. Sophia Bitter. I wished Nana were still alive so that I could consult with her. She knew everything about everybody.
Sophia laughed. “Yuji thinks so well of you that, at times, I have been jealous. I have been dying to meet Anya the Great.”
I reminded her that we had, in fact, met.
“The wedding? That is not really meeting!” she protested. “I want to know you, Anya.” She stared at me with her dark, dark eyes.
I asked her what she thought of me so far.
“The only impression I can have of you is physical, and physically, you are attractive enough but your feet are freakishly large,” Sophia said.
“And what do physical impressions really matter anyway?”
“You say that because you are pretty,” she replied. “I assure you that they matter very much.”
Sophia Balanchine was an odd woman.
“Were you and Yuji ever boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked.
She laughed again. “Are you asking me if I am your rival, Anya? I am a married lady, don’t you know?”
“No, Yuji and I aren’t that way.” I could feel the blush spread across my face. “I just wondered. I’m sorry if it was rude,” I said.
She shook her head, but there was a smile on her face. “That is a very American question,” she said. I suspected I was being insulted. “I love Yuji very much. And all that interests him interests me as well. This is to say that I hope you and I will be very great friends.”
My sister and Sophia’s husband joined us in the kitchen. “My brilliant little cousin says she needs to get home to study,” Mickey informed us. “I wondered, Anya, if you’d like to say hello to Dad before you go.”
“You’ll come see me next week after you’ve got this school business sorted out,” Mickey said as we walked up the two flights of stairs to where my uncle Yuri was dying. “He had another stroke over the summer so he is difficult to understand,” Mickey continued. “He may not even be awake, and if he is, he may not recognize you. The doctors have him on so much medication.”
I was used to dealing with the dying and infirm.
The curtains were drawn, and the room smelled sweet and fetid, much like Nana’s had in the year before her death. Yuri’s eyes were open, though, and they seemed to light up upon seeing me. He held out one of his arms to me. “Ahhhhnuh.” He said my name with a tongue that was too thick. As I got closer to see him, I could see that half of his face was paralyzed and one of his hands was permanently flexed into a fist. He waved his good hand toward Mickey and the nurse who was in the room. “Goooo! Ahhhloh.”
Mickey translated this for me. “Dad says he wants to talk to you alone.”
I sat in the chair by Uncle Yuri’s bedside. “Ahhhhnuh.” His mouth was working furiously. “Ahhhhnuh, gooooooooo theeeeee ahkkkkkk.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Yuri. I don’t know what you want.”
“Theeeee okkk.” My face was coated in spit, but I didn’t want to insult him by wiping it away. “Mahhhh pohhh boooooooi. Theeeeeee yahkkkkk. Yakkkk!”
I struggled to make sense of this. I shook my head. There was a slate by the bed. I set it in front of him. “Maybe you could write it?”
Yuri nodded. For several moments, he occupied himself with moving his finger around the slate but when I looked down, it was a maze of scribbles. “I’m sorry, Uncle. Maybe we could get Mickey. He understands you better than I can.”
Uncle Yuri shook his head vigorously. “Ahhhhnuh, ohffffffeeee ohhh noooo!” Uncle Yuri grabbed my hand and held it to his heart. He was perspiring and there were tears of frustration in his eyes. “Luuuuuuuuuuuffffffffffff.”
“Love?” I asked. I still had no idea what he was trying to say, but he nodded with relief that I had at least translated that one word. With my free hand, I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and blotted his forehead with it.
“Luuuufff,” he repeated. “Thhhhhaaaaaaaaaahhhrrrr.”
I felt his hand weaken and his body relax. At first I worried he was dead, but he was only asleep. I set his hand on his chest and then I slipped out of the room. For the moment, I had escaped death again.
On the two-mile walk home, I added more blessings to my list:
6. I was young enough to correct any mistakes I had made.
7. I was strong and could go wherever my legs could carry me.
8. Anything I wanted to say to anyone living, I could still say.
“You haven’t said a word since we left. What are you brooding about, Annie?” Natty asked.
We had just reached the southern edge of the park. (It was undeniable that the park was somewhat safer since Charles Delacroix had come to town with his policy of prosecuting even small crimes.) I turned to look at my sister. Though I hadn’t had a stroke like Uncle Yuri, it was still difficult for me to express what was in my heart. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that she was the most important person in the world to me, that I was truly sorry for having lied to her about Liberty. Instead, I asked her what she wanted for dinner.
“Dinner already?” she asked. “We just ate brunch.”
Monday, while Natty and all other nondelinquents were at school, I went about the business of finding a new school for myself. Mr. Kipling had thought I should wait until after I was out of Liberty to formally begin the process. His theory had been that it was better for me to appear to have put my incarceration behind me.
According to Simon Green’s preliminary research, there were a dozen private schools comparable to Holy Trinity, and of that number, eight didn’t admit incoming seniors. That left a grand total of four schools that would even consider me. A further issue was that I was, in Simon Green’s words, “The infamous Anya Balanchine—sorry, Anya, but it’s true.” The media would likely find out about any school that admitted me, which would lead to bad publicity for the school. After making several inquiries, Simon Green had only come up with one real option, the Leary Alternative School, in the East Village, within walking distance of my cousin’s speakeasy. I had an interview scheduled with them that afternoon. Mr. Kipling would accompany me.
I usually just wore my Holy Trinity uniform everywhere, but I didn’t think that would be appropriate for an interview at another school. I decided to wear the suit I had worn to Mickey and Sophia’s wedding.
So, Leary. It was kind of artsy, if you know what I mean. No one wore uniforms. A lot of the classrooms didn’t have desks; kids sat in circles on the floor. Many of the male teachers had beards. One female teacher I saw wasn’t wearing any shoes. There was a distinct aroma to the place—clay? herbs? Obviously, it wasn’t what I was used to but I told myself that that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Mr. Kipling gave my name at the front desk and then we were pointed in the direction of a cluster of beanbag chairs. “Interesting place,” Mr. Kipling said to me while we waited. He lowered his voice. “Do you think you could see yourself making a go of it here, Anya?”
What other choice did I have? There were public schools, but any good one had a long waiting list and many of my credits might not even count. I could end up in high school until I was twenty.
After about a half hour, the headmaster, a curly-haired man in a brown corduroy suit, emerged from his office. “Come in, Anya. Stuart.” I bristled at hearing Mr. Kipling referred to by his first name. “Sorry to keep you folks waiting. I got a late start to my afternoon meditation. I’m the headmaster here, Sylvio Freeman. Everyone calls me Syl.”
We went into his office, where there was a thick kilim rug in reds and oranges, and no furniture. “Have a seat.” Headmaster Syl indicated the rug.
Syl poured us cups of licorice rooibos tea. “I’ve read all about you, Anya. Your academic record is perfectly drizzly though you should know we don’t give letter grades here.” He paused. “Forensic science. That’s your thing, right?”
I nodded.
“We don’t offer that subject, but there’s always independent study. In any case, I’d love to take you on.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Mr. Kipling said.
“I ran the idea by my Board of Overseers,” Headmaster Syl continued. “The chocolate-daughter thing wasn’t a problem for them. We have kids from many different backgrounds. Unfortunately, well … See, we’re all about peace here. And the gun possession. Well, that’s a bit of a deal breaker. My board doesn’t want that kind of thing at Leary.”
“We had to come down to hear this?” Mr. Kipling asked.
“I wanted to meet Anya myself. And it’s not without hope, Stu. The folks on my board agreed that next year, when more time has passed, they’d be happy to reconsider her application.” Syl smiled at us. “Take a year off, Anya. Volunteer somewhere. Maybe take some classes in forensics at the university. Then come back to us.”
A year was an eternity. All my friends would have graduated, even Gable Arsley. I stood and thanked Headmaster Syl for his time. Mr. Kipling was still struggling to get up from the floor, so I offered him my hand.
On my way out the door, Headmaster Syl grabbed my arm. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m involved with the pro-cacao movement. Maybe you’d like to speak at one of our rallies. I’m sure you’d have some superdeep insights.”
At last, the real theme of this meeting. The real reason Mr. Kipling and I had been forced to drag ourselves downtown just for me to be rejected. This man was no better than my old history teacher Mr. Beery.
“I’m trying to avoid making a public spectacle of myself these days, Mister … Uh, Syl,” I said.
“Understood,” he said. “Though I wonder…” Syl furrowed his brow. “You are known, for better or for worse, and that’s power, my friend. If you’ve got a chess set, why play checkers?” Syl offered me his hand, and I shook it. “Perhaps I’ll be seeing you again someday, Anya Balanchine.”
I doubted that very much.
“I didn’t think that place was right for you anyway,” Mr. Kipling said as we walked back to his office. There was a light rain, and Mr. Kipling’s bald head was shiny with mist. “No letter grades. And that weird smell. And what kind of headmaster doesn’t have any furniture?” We stopped to wait for a walk signal. “Don’t worry, Anya. We’ll find a school for you. A far better one than that.”
“Honestly, Mr. Kipling, if Leary Alternative doesn’t want me, what school will? There isn’t a school in the city that has a reputation for being more liberal than Leary, and even they think I’m damaged goods. And they’re probably right.” I was standing on a street corner at one thirty in the afternoon on a Monday, and I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be at Trinity. I wanted to be pretending to fence or complaining about tofu lasagna. I hadn’t realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in that uniform, in that school. I felt as if I belonged nowhere. Despite my resolution to count my blessings, I was starting to feel very sorry for myself.
“Oh, Annie. I wish I could make this easier for you.” Mr. Kipling took my hands in his. The rain had picked up, and the traffic light had turned, but neither of us moved. “All I can say is that this, too, shall pass.”
I looked at my longtime adviser. If he had a weakness, perhaps it was that he loved me too well and expected the rest of the world to conform to his opinion. I kissed him on his bald head. “Thank you, Mr. Kipling.”
Mr. Kipling blushed a deep scarlet. “For what, Annie?”
“You always believe in me. I’m old enough to appreciate that now.”
Back at Mr. Kipling’s office, we were joined by Simon Green, and the three of us went over my options. “As I see it,” Simon Green said, “there are still a handful of other schools in Manhattan we could try—”
I interrupted him. “But don’t you think the others are even more likely to have the objections that Leary Alternative had about me?”
Simon Green took a moment to consider this. “I’m not a mind reader, and of course, I’m not saying I agree with them, but yes, I do.”
“Maybe that hippie headmaster was right,” Mr. Kipling said. “You could take a year off—”
“But I don’t want to take the year off!” I protested. I’d be practically nineteen when I graduated and that was dangerously close to twenty, i.e., ancient. “I want to graduate with everyone else.”
“So, we look at schools outside New York,” Simon Green suggested. “People won’t know who you are there. Finishing schools in Europe, college-prep programs, even military schools.”
“A military school! I…” I couldn’t even complete the thought.
“Simon, Anya is not going to a military school,” Mr. Kipling said softly.
“I was only brainstorming,” Simon Green apologized. “I thought that a military school might be liberal about admittance after the semester had started. Even considering Anya’s … history.”
My history. Naïvely perhaps, I had thought the worst of this would be over once I had served my time at Liberty, but that wasn’t turning out to be the case. I walked over to the window. Kipling & Sons had a view of Madison Square Park. After dark, all the chocolate dealers hung out there. I’d gone with Daddy when I was a little kid. You could get just about any kind of chocolate there—Belgian, bittersweet, baking, and of course, Balanchine. That was when chocolate had been my favorite flavor in the world and before it had taken away almost everyone I loved, and ruined my life. I rested my temple on the glass. “I hate chocolate,” I whispered.
Simon Green put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t say that, Anya,” he said gently.
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s brown, ugly, altogether aesthetically unappealing. It’s unhealthy, addictive, illegal. It’s bitter when it’s good and too sweet when it’s cheap. I can’t honestly understand why anyone bothers with the stuff. If I woke up tomorrow and the world had no chocolate in it, I would be a happier person.”
Mr. Kipling put his hand on my other shoulder. “You can hate chocolate today if you want. But I wouldn’t make a policy of it. Your grandfather was chocolate. Your father was chocolate. And you, my girl, are chocolate.”
I turned around to face my lawyers. “Look into all the options for schools, bearing in mind that I really can’t leave Natty. If we don’t find anything, maybe I’ll get a job.”
“A job?” Simon Green asked. “What skills do you have?”
“I have no idea.” I told them we’d talk later in the week and then I headed out the door.
I was still waiting at the bus stop when Simon Green caught up with me. “Mr. Kipling says I’m to accompany you home.”
I told him I would rather be alone.
“Mr. Kipling is very worried about you, Anya,” Simon Green continued.
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll get in trouble if I don’t come with you.”
The bus arrived. On the side was a screen advertising: CHARLES DELACROIX (D) FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY. His aging-superhero face dissolved into his campaign slogan: Great cities require great leaders. The whole thing made me sick. I would have waited for another bus but the schedules were erratic. The Charles Delacroix Express was what it would have to be.
Simon Green sat next to me on a seat toward the back of the bus. “Do you think Delacroix will win?” he asked.
“Haven’t honestly put much thought into it,” I said.
“But I thought you and he were such great friends,” Simon Green joked.
I could not bring myself to laugh.
“I think it’s been a harder campaign than he thought it would be. But I tell you, I don’t think he’s awful,” Simon Green said after a pause. “I mean, I think his heart is in the right place.”
“Heart?” I scoffed. “That man has no heart.”
“The truth is, Anya, I think he could be very good for us. He’s talking a lot about how a safe city needs to have laws that make sense.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should, though,” he remonstrated me. “I’m sorry you lost your boyfriend in all this, but there are greater matters at hand here. Charlie Delacroix is more than just Win Delacroix’s father, and assuming he prevails here, no one thinks district attorney is the last stop for him. He could be mayor, governor, president even.”
“How wonderful.”
“Someday, I might like to get into politics myself,” Simon Green said.
I rolled my eyes. “You really think the best way to go about that is acting as legal counsel to the first daughter of organized crime?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me sometime.”
Simon Green’s laughter was drowned out by a sickening scream followed by an ominous thud. My head was thrust forward into the seat in front of me. There were more screams, and then the bus came to a stop. Simon Green grabbed my arm. “Anya, are you all right?”
My neck hurt a little but other than that, I felt fine. “What just happened?”
“We must have hit something,” Simon Green said in a dazed voice. I turned to look at him. There was a gash on his right temple where his glasses had pierced his skin. “Mr. Green, you’re bleeding!”
“Oh dear,” Simon Green said weakly.
I ordered him to hold his head back. Then I took off my jacket so that I could use it to sop up the blood.
“Everyone stay on the bus!” the driver barked. “There’s been an accident.”
Obviously. I looked out the window. In the middle of Madison Avenue, a girl of about my age was lying unconscious. Her limbs were contorted into catastrophic angles. The worst part was her head, which had nearly twisted off her neck. Only a small band of skin was keeping her from being decapitated.
“Simon,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to live.”
Simon leaned over me to examine the scene. “Oh dear,” he whispered just before he passed out.
At the hospital, I waited while they examined Simon Green. The doctors determined that, aside from blood loss, there was nothing seriously wrong with him. They stitched up the gash on his temple. Because he had passed out, they were making him stay the night for observation.
I had called Mr. Kipling, who assured me he was on his way. Simon Green and I watched the news on his slate while we waited for Mr. Kipling to arrive. The lead story was about the bus accident. “In Midtown today, several were injured when a city bus bearing a Charles Delacroix campaign advertisement struck a pedestrian.”
“Ooh,” Simon Green said, “bad publicity. The Delacroix people must be furious.”
The news cut to a man-on-the-street interview. “The girl—she must have been sixteen, seventeen—she was crossing in the middle of the street when boom. And next I know, she’s lying there on the ground with her head nearly cut off. Poor thing. You can’t help but feel for the parents in cases like this.”
The reporter broke in. “The teenager was pronounced dead at the scene. The other injured passengers were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital. In an unusual coincidence, Anya Balanchine, the daughter of notorious crime boss Leonyd Balanchine, was also a passenger on the bus and is believed to be seriously injured.”
“That is so annoying!” I yelled at the screen. “I’m not injured. I’m fine!”
Simon Green shrugged.
“They have no right releasing my name,” I grumbled.
“Last spring, Anya Balanchine was arrested for the shooting of her own cousin, who had been trying to shoot Anya Balanchine’s boyfriend at the time, William Delacroix, the son of acting District Attorney Charles Delacroix.”
“His name is Win!” I objected.
“Although Charles Delacroix initially led in the polls, in the last month his major challenger, the Independent Party candidate, Bertha Sinclair, has narrowed the gap to five points. It’s too early to see how this latest incident will impact voters.”
“Like it’s his fault a bus with his picture on it hit that girl,” Simon Green commented.
A nurse knocked on the doorframe. “There’s a man here for you,” she said to me. “Is it okay if I let him in?”
“Yes, we’re expecting him.”
The nurse went to fetch Mr. Kipling.
I sat down on the side of Simon Green’s hospital bed. This whole day had been ridiculously frustrating and yet, I had to count my blessings. That girl had been my age and I’m sure she hadn’t woken up this morning thinking she was going to die. Blessing number nine: At least I haven’t been hit by a bus and decapitated. Despite everything, I started to laugh.
“What’s funny?” Simon Green asked.
“I’m just glad—” I started to say, and then Simon Green cut me off.
“Hey, that’s not Mr. Kipling!” he said.
I turned. Through the window in Simon Green’s hospital room, I saw Win. He was wearing his Trinity uniform. Win waved at me.
“I’ll only be a moment,” I said to Simon Green. I stood up, straightened my skirt, and went out to the hallway.
“You look pretty good for a gal who’s seriously injured,” Win greeted me. His voice was casual. “You wore that to your cousin’s wedding.”
I looked down at my jacket, which was stained with Simon Green’s blood. “I’ll never be able to wear it again.” It would not be the first (or the last) of my clothing to meet such an end. I offered him my hand to shake but he embraced me instead. It was a hard embrace, one that hurt my still sore neck, one that lasted too long. “I was on the bus but they got everything else wrong,” I said.
“I can see that.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
Win shook his head. “I was nearby when I heard about the accident. And I wanted to make sure you weren’t dying. We’re still friends, aren’t we, Anya?”
I didn’t know if we were friends. “Where’s your girlfriend?”
Win told me she was in the lobby.
“And she doesn’t mind that you’re here?”
“No, Allie knows that you are important to me.”
Allie. The l’s replaced the n’s, and it was like I had never existed. “You shouldn’t be here,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because…” I couldn’t make myself say all the reasons. Because we didn’t belong to each other anymore. Because it hurt me to be near him. Because I had promised his father. Because his father had the ability to make my life very difficult if I didn’t keep my promise.
“Anya, if you thought I was dying, wouldn’t you come?” Win asked.
I was still considering this question when Mr. Kipling arrived. Upon seeing Win, Mr. Kipling looked more than a little nonplussed. “Why are you here?” Mr. Kipling spat at him.
“I’m going now,” Win said.
“Be careful how you leave, son. The paparazzi have just arrived. They’re probably looking for a shot of an injured Anya Balanchine, but I bet they’d settle for a shot of the acting district attorney’s son. And you know what would really drive everyone mad with delight? A shot of you and Anya together.”
Win said that he had learned a secret way out of the hospital from when he’d stayed there last spring and that that was how he and Alison would go. “No one will ever know I was here.”
“Good. Do that. Now,” Mr. Kipling ordered. “Anya, I’m going to go see how Simon is doing but I don’t want you to go home without me. I should be there to shield you from the reporters.” Mr. Kipling went into Simon’s room.
“Well,” Win began once we were alone. He stood up straight and took my hand in both of his. “I am relieved that you are well,” he said in a strangely formal way.
“Um, okay. I am relieved that … you are relieved.”
He released my hand. As he turned away, he stumbled a bit over his cane. “I was hoping for a more elegant exit,” he said.
I smiled, reminding myself that I didn’t love him one bit, and then I went back into Simon Green’s room.
It was almost nine by the time Mr. Kipling and I were finally in the elevator and on our way out of the hospital. “I’ve got a car waiting for us. If there are any reporters still out there, let me do the talking,” Mr. Kipling said.
“There she is!”
There were probably only a handful of cameras, but the flashes were still blinding in the darkness.
“Anya, are you glad to be out of the hospital?” one of the reporters called.
Mr. Kipling walked in front of me. “Anya is happy to have escaped serious injury,” he said. “She’s had a very long day, folks, and she just wants to go home.” He led me by my elbow toward the curb, where the car was parked.
“Anya, Anya, how was Liberty?” another reporter yelled.
“Give us a quote about Charles Delacroix! Do you hold him accountable for the bus accident? Do you think he’ll win the election?”
Mr. Kipling had gotten into the car, and I was about to follow him when something stopped me. “Wait,” I said. “I do have something I want to say.”
“Anya,” Mr. Kipling whispered, “what in the world are you doing?”
“The girl who died today. She was my age,” I said. “She was crossing the street and then she was gone. I am sorry for her friends, her family, and especially her parents. It is a tragedy. I would hope that the fact that an infamous person was riding on the bus wouldn’t take away from that.”
I got into the car, then pulled the door shut.
Mr. Kipling patted me on the shoulder. “Well done, Annie. Your Father would be proud.”
When I got home, Imogen and Natty were waiting for me, and no small amount of tears was shed over my safe homecoming. I told them they were making too much of it, but it was nice to know that my absence had not gone without notice. It could not be denied that I had been worried over. I was missed. I was loved. Yes, I was loved. And in that, at least, I was blessed.