The Great Gilly Hopkins (15 page)

Her mother was really coming. At least Nonnie, who had talked to her on the telephone while Gilly was at school, believed she was. She was due at Dulles Airport at 11
A.M.
on December twenty-third. A whole week to wait. Gilly thought she might die waiting. She dulled the agony somewhat by plunging into housecleaning for Nonnie.

Nonnie was all right. She could still chatter Gilly straight into a pounding headache, but she meant well. And then, whenever Gilly would lose patience with her, she'd remember the first day Nonnie had taken her into Jackson Elementary School.

They had marched into the principal's office, and Nonnie had said: “Margaret, this is my granddaughter, Galadriel Hopkins.”

The principal had raised her eyebrows. She had obviously known Nonnie for years, and this was the first mention she'd ever had of a granddaughter. “Your granddaughter?” she said, giving Gilly's new blouse and jumper the once-over. “Hopkins, did you say?”

You had to hand it to old Nonnie. She didn't blink an eye. “Yes, I said Hopkins. She's Courtney's child.”

“I see,” said the principal, and you could practically see the wheels spinning in that prissy head of hers. “I see. Hopkins. Now how do you spell her Christian name?” Had she exaggerated Christian ever so slightly? If so, Nonnie took no notice.

Nonnie spelled out Galadriel as patiently as Gilly might have spelled out a hard word for W.E. “Her school records will be sent directly to you. She's been in school in Maryland.”

“Maryland?” The same tone of voice used earlier for Hopkins.

It was a scene that was to repeat itself with variations many times in those first couple of weeks. “Hopkins?” they always asked. “Galadriel? How do you spell that?” “Maryland, did you say?”

Gilly had had plenty of practice staring down sneers, but it was hard to imagine that someone like Nonnie had. But Nonnie looked straight down her short nose at every sneer and they stopped, at least the face-to-face ones did. Nonnie was gutsier than she looked.

But everything would be all right for them both now. Courtney was coming.

“It's silly to be nervous, isn't it?” Nonnie said. “She's my own daughter. It's just that it's been so long. And she was hardly speaking to her father and me in those days. What will we say to each other?”

Oh, Nonnie. If I knew what mothers and daughters said to each other, wouldn't I tell you? How should I know?

“She'll think I've gotten terribly old. My hair was quite dark when she left.”

“Yeah?” She tried to put Courtney's hair on Nonnie's head. It didn't work.

“Would you think it was very silly of me to get a rinse?”

“A rinse?”

“Just to cover a little of the gray?”

Nonnie a Clairol girl? “Why not?”

“Let's do it!” So while Nonnie was rinsed and curled, Gilly was cut and blown.

“You look lovely, my dear.”

Nonnie looked totally unnatural, but then Gilly had never seen her with black hair before. Maybe she'd look great to Courtney. “You look nice, too,” she lied.

Money, though not as scarce as at Trotter's, was hardly in the supply hinted at in the letters to W.E. Nevertheless, Nonnie seemed determined to prepare royally for Courtney's return. They bought a Christmas tree that would touch the high ceiling of the living room and had to hire a neighbor's boy to carry it from the back of the old station wagon into the house and help them set it up.

Every ornament they hung had a family history, and Gilly half listened as Nonnie recounted each tale. She was too excited to concentrate fully, but she did grasp that the lopsided pasteboard star was one that Chadwell had made in the third grade. Most of the glued-on glitter had long departed. There was a yarn snowman that Courtney had made when a Brownie, it was gray now, and beginning to ravel. And there were yards of tattered paper chains. “You sure you want to put these chains on?” Gilly asked Nonnie.

“Oh, we have to have the chains. We always had the chains.”

So Gilly glued the chains together as best she could and hung them. The whole effect was appalling—a pile of junk. But then she put on three boxes of tinsel, one strand at a time, so that the entire tree was under a silver veil. In a dark room with only the Christmas tree lighted, it wasn't bad. Not a department-store display, but not bad.

Nonnie slipped her glasses on and off her nose, trying to take in the sight, and finally let them hang on the ribbon around her neck while she clapped her hands like a little girl. “I can't remember ever before having such a lovely tree,” she said.

Neither, after she thought about it, could Gilly.

Pow!
That's what she thought of that.

T
he plane was late. It seemed to Gilly that everything in this world that you can't stand to wait one extra minute for is always late. Her stomach was pretzeled with eagerness and anxiety. She stood sweating in the chill of the huge waiting room, the perspiration pouring down the sleeves of her new blouse. She'd probably ruin it and stink besides.

Then, suddenly, when she'd almost stopped straining her eyes with looking at it, the door opened, and people began to come off the motor lounge into the airport. All kinds of people, all sizes, all colors, all of them rushing. Many looking about for family or friends, finding them with little cries of joy and hugs. Tired fussy babies, children dragging on their mothers. Businessmen, heads down, swinging neat thin leather briefcases. Grandparents laden with shopping bags of Christmas presents. But no Courtney.

The pretzel turned to stone. It was all a lie. She would never come. The door blurred. Gilly wanted to leave. She didn't want to cry in the stupid airport, but just at that moment she heard Nonnie say in a quavering voice, “Courtney.”

“Hello, Nonnie.”

But this person wasn't Courtney. It couldn't be Courtney! Courtney was tall and willowy and gorgeous. The woman who stood before them was no taller than Nonnie and just as plump, although she wore a long cape, so it was hard to make out her real shape. Her hair was long, but it was dull and stringy—a dark version of Agnes Stokes's, which had always needed washing. A flower child gone to seed. Gilly immediately pushed aside the disloyal thought.

Nonnie had sort of put her hand on the younger woman's arm in a timid embrace, but there was a huge embroidered shoulder bag between the two of them. “This is Galadriel, Courtney.”

For a second, the smile, the one engraved on Gilly's soul, flashed out. The teeth were perfect. She was face to face with Courtney Rutherford Hopkins. She could no longer doubt it. “Hi.” The word almost didn't come out. She wondered what she was supposed to do. Should she try to kiss Courtney or something?

At this point Courtney hugged her, pressing the huge bag into Gilly's chest and stomach and saying across her shoulder to Nonnie, “She's as tall as I am,” sounding a little as though Gilly weren't there.

“She's a lovely girl,” said Nonnie.

“Well, of course, she is,” Courtney stepped back and smiled her gorgeous heart-shattering smile. “She's mine, isn't she?”

Nonnie smiled back, rather more weakly than her daughter had. “Maybe we should get your luggage.”

“I've got it,” said Courtney, slapping her shoulder bag. “It's all right here.”

Nonnie looked a little as though she'd been smacked in the face. “But—” she began and stopped.

“How many clothes can you wear in two days?”

Two days? Then Courtney had come to get her after all.

“I told you on the phone that I'd come for Christmas and see for myself how the kid was doing….”

“But when I sent you the money…”

Courtney's face was hard and set with lines between the brows. “Look. I came, didn't I? Don't start pushing me before I'm hardly off the plane. My god, I've been gone thirteen years, and you still think you can tell me what to do.” She slung the bag behind her back. “Let's get out of here.”

Nonnie shot Gilly a look of pain. “Courtney—”

She hadn't come because she wanted to. She'd come because Nonnie had paid her to. And she wasn't going to stay. And she wasn't going to take Gilly back with her. “I will always love you.” It was a lie. Gilly had thrown away her whole life for a stinking lie.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” Gilly said to Nonnie. She prayed they wouldn't follow her there, because the first thing she was going to do was vomit, and the second was run away.

She tried to vomit, but nothing happened. She was still shaking from the effort when she dropped her coins in the pay telephone beside the restroom and dialed. It rang four times.

“Hello.”

“Trotter, it's me, Gilly.” God, don't let me break down like a baby.

“Gilly, honey. Where are you?”

“Nowhere. It doesn't matter. I'm coming home.”

She could hear Trotter's heavy breathing at the other end of the line. “What's the matter, baby? Your mom didn't show?”

“No, she came.”

“Oh, my poor baby.”

Gilly was crying now. She couldn't help herself. “Trotter, it's all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it's supposed to.”

“How you mean supposed to? Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough.”

“But I always thought that when my mother came….”

“My sweet baby, ain't no one ever told you yet? I reckon I thought you had that all figured out.”

“What?”

“That all that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain't ready to die, are you?”

“Trotter, I'm not talking about dying. I'm talking about coming home.”

But Trotter seemed to ignore her. “Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, ‘Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.' Like life owed you good things.”