Between the Shadow and the Soul - 40
[THIS IS AN UPDATE AS OF MARCH 16TH. THE CHAPTER POSTED ON MARCH 15TH WAS THE WRONG VERSION. THIS IS THE CORRECT, FULL LENGTH CHAPTER FORTY. SORRY FOR THE MIX-UP. XOXO]
CHAPTER FORTY
An Interlude: God Always Watching
Dorota had been tempted once (many, many times for a variety of reasons ranging from tiny to enormous) to just sit Miss Elle down and tell her everything she knew.
Not everything in the broadest sense of the term, obviously, but everything in regards to that burning hole in poor Ellie's life that was the absence of her father. It had taken all sorts of quiet reserve and strength (and fretful hours of contemplation over a promise she had made to Miss Blair all those years ago in the frame of a chocolate box view of Fifth Avenue) to keep her lips sealed. She could have done it so easily: written a note and slipped it underneath the bedroom door, quit polishing the silver long enough to look across the room at that lonely little girl and say "Your father is Chuck Bass."
The one time she remembered most vividly was the occasion of Miss Elle's birthday in Nice, when her little charge had been perched on Mister Waldorf's lap, bobbing up and down in time with bouncing his knees, dressed in white on a hot summer's day and smiling brilliantly as Dorota cut slices from her Tiffany blue three-tiered vanilla cake with lemon French cream and fresh raspberries. Dorota had seen Miss Blair in the background, her dark hair pulled and pinned away from her face, large sunglasses hiding her eyes, a black dress sheathing her small frame and cutting a sharp figure against the opalescent sky.
The man tickling Ellie's ribs and instructing her to blow out the candles and make a wish was not the man it should have been. It should have been Mister Chuck, and Teddy should have been there too, grinning toothily and vying for the same attentions. Miss Blair should have been smiling, the warm honey tones in her eyes flickering through slits as she squinted unabashedly against the sun.
And Dorota had poured Ellie's raspberry tea and clutched the teapot firmly between her madly trembling fingers, determined to blurt it out right then. A little girl deserved her father.
But she had bit her tongue, kept the false peace locked in the back of her memory.
Silver light filtered through sparkling panes, falling in neat squares across the tiny sleeping forms of infant twins, and Miss Blair's shoulders shook for only a few minutes. Then, she lifted her head high, tilting her chin up enough to elongate her pearly neck, and said, in a choked voice, that Dorota must never speak of what was about to happen.
And she never had, not even when she had heard Miss Blair's sobs through closed doors and observed her dabbing her eyes as she updated her private diary en route to France on Mister Chuck's company jet. Not even after that quiet night in Miss Blair's bedroom, coddling and feeding and changing the twins as their mother watched stoically from her seat in a moonbeam.
"I don't know what I'm doing, Dorota," Miss Blair had whispered into her knees. "I have no idea what I'm doing, I only know that I have to do it."
Dorota had eyed her, the lithe figure she had seen grow from a bristly young girl into a bristly young woman, who had aged more over the course of one year than her round cheeks and thick chestnut curls could ever betray. No one was guilty of any crime other than all-consuming love and passion, and in their desperation to never live without each other, Charles and Blair Bass had made it impossible for themselves to do just that.
It had all begun, of course, with the pregnancy neither of them had wanted. At least, that was how Miss Blair made believe in her celluloid fantasies. Dorota remembered very clearly that while Miss Blair had been wan and miserable at the positive result glaring up at her from numerous pregnancy tests, Mister Chuck's reaction had been markedly different. Though he was surprised when he sat down his briefcase by the front door and was all but accosted by his weeping girlfriend, he had taken the news relatively in stride.
Dorota, brewing tea in the kitchen, had watched through the slats that divided her from the living room as Mister Chuck loosened the knot in his tie, removed his shoes, combed his fingers through his perfectly styled hair, and had Miss Blair sit beside him and explain, calmly and rationally, and without apologizing or rationalizing about "taking care of it", what exactly had her so worked up.
The news that he was going to be a father cemented the change in him that all of his friends and family had observed and remarked upon, slowly remoulding and shaping him into a man. All of the pregnancy books said that a woman became a mother the moment she found out she was pregnant, but that it took the father until the first time he held his child in his arms to come around to the notion. In the case of Chuck and Blair, of course, it was entirely topsy turvy.
He became a father almost instantaneously, more conscientious than ever about Miss Blair's needs and wishes. Every night he brought her a single yellow rose from the street vendor near the Empire Hotel's front doors, and tucked it into her hair just before kissing her on the forehead and asking her how she was feeling. Because, even before the fateful afternoon that had changed everything, Mister Chuck had realized the burden of carrying a Bass baby was no light load.
Miss Blair had been a little on the hysterical side before the diagnosis, confiding to Dorota that she thought the best thing would be to get rid of the unborn child altogether. It did not fit into her perfect plan of what she dreamed her perfect life should be; the vision had altered dramatically since her teen years, naturally, but in essence she still wanted the same things: a handsome husband with loads of money to lord over everyone in a reserved and dignified manner, an exclusive wedding so wildly elegant that the society pages would lose their heads over the guest list, a long honeymoon abroad, and - two or three years down the line - children to carry on the family traditions, attend Ivy League universities, and repeat the whole process again for themselves.
But none of that before she finished Yale.
It had been tooth and nail for her to regain admittance to the prestigious university. After a year pounding the streets and haunting the student-dominated coffee shops in the Village, of feeling more like an uprooted resident of Manhattan than an actual student, after a year of rather good behavior as far as Miss Blair was concerned, her wildest imaginings came true when Yale accepted her to transfer in the fall of 2010. Mister Chuck purchased a residence in New Haven, in which she stayed by herself for optimum peaceful and quiet study hours during the weekdays; on weekends, Mister Chuck and his driver made the trip to Connecticut, and the soon-to-be Basses rarely stepped out the front door.
One night in October, their lives were set to change.
The unmade decision had haunted poor Miss Blair for weeks as she struggled with what to do, what to tell Mister Chuck, should she tell Mister Chuck, how she would explain to her mother, should she tell anyone - and then, she reasoned to Dorota that night with only the stars to see them, as if she had willed it into being, the deficiency had set in. Mister Chuck, ever the overachiever when it came to such private matters, had given her twins to contend with. Two lives to sleep heavily in her stomach as she tossed and turned for nights and wrestled with ghosts that plagued her from future memories.
The blood stains on Miss Blair's undergarments had been an omen from heaven and hell, and she had cried into Mister Chuck's arms all night; the only time she had come up to breathe had been to inhale a hot cup of homemade soup which Dorota herself had spooned between her parched lips, while Mister Chuck held back her hair and stroked away the beads of sweat that had pooled on the back of her neck. That she had wished her children dead, had made an appointment with a specialist to discuss the procedure that would grant her a one way ticket back to life as she had known and loved it, that because of a medical complication she might miscarry her unborn twins whether she decided it was the best thing to do or not - the guilt weighed heavier on her heart than even her fear of the unknown.
Even on her wedding day, when she had still been deceptively thin and in possession of a heavenly glow not uncommon of brides-to-be (not to mention freshly pregnant mothers) her smile had not quite reached the depths of her eyes. It was all a charade to her, a coup to please her mother and society and Mister Chuck in one fell swoop.
Mister Chuck had worried incessantly - over the conditions of her bed rest, her diet, her sleeping patterns, her cell phone usage... everything they could talk about together had turned into a muted argument, with Miss Blair winging desperately against her constraints and Mister Chuck holding in his ire at the thought of how her stress must affect the children. And, once the twins were born and Miss Blair could not bring herself to touch them for more than a few minutes at a time without dissolving into silent tears, Mister Chuck took the road much traveled (treading in his own well-worn footsteps) and drank himself into a numb stupor.
It wasn't until Miss Blair moved herself to the Waldorf penthouse on Fifth Avenue that Mister Chuck awakened and remembered who he was supposed to be.
Miss Blair had never awakened, not even after she signed their marriage away and fled the country.
Still she slumbered, a little older and nary the wiser, heartbroken, but ultimately unsurprised by Miss Elle's departure for a better life with a loving father.
Dorota did not want to say it out loud, for it was a terrible thing to say to a woman so imbedded with grief, but Miss Blair should have known better. Of course her own daughter would resist the life of shapeless shadows and unsolvable mysteries that Miss Blair had tried to build for her out of paper thin playing cards. The tighter she had clamped her grip around the tenuous thread that bound Miss Elle to France, and to her, the thinner and more brittle that thread had become until finally, it had snapped and sent Ellie hurtling to American, to Manhattan, to everything Miss Blair had always known would lure her away.
Like mother, like daughter.
"I only wanted her to stay," Miss Blair had whispered early one morning, cradling her pillow between her chest and her knees and staring unblinkingly out the window.
"I know," Dorota had answered her, unsolicited, as she collected the vestiges of the meager breakfast Miss Blair had managed to swallow. "But she needed to know, Miss Blair."
"I couldn't be the one to tell her." The catch in Miss Blair's voice was muffled, because she had buried her head in the down feathers. "I didn't want to lose her."
Dorota had a feeling it was going to be one of those days. One of those nights, possibly. Much like the night Miss Blair had choked out her plan to leave Manhattan and start over in the innocent, sprawling countryside of a foreign land. Miss Blair had been collecting the pieces that formed the perfect puzzle image of the cracked and cobbled together mockery of brilliance her life had become.
But she still had those days.
Those days when Lady Godiva was the best companion to a quiet and anguished reverie. Tea would be accepted in mid-afternoon, and a selection of light fruits and vegetables might serve as Miss Blair's dinner depending on how dizzy she felt when she emerged from her hot bath.
Dorota sighed to herself as she scrubbed needlessly at dish after dish of pristine china. If only she had said something that day in Nice, or one of the hundreds of thousands of times after that: when Miss Blair was out of town and Dorota had Miss Elle all to herself, she should have said everything point-blank, as Miss Elle said, with a side dish of extra truthfulness. She should not have pretended to be mysteriously deaf the one time little Ellie had come into the kitchen as she was peeling potatoes for dinner and whispered a desperate plea to know who her father might be.
There had been some whispered hope that Ellie would return by Christmas. Elle Waldorf in winter was such a pleasant sight to behold, it seemed a crime that the City of Lights no longer shone in those brown eyes, almost as dark as pitch, that there was no longer one bright spot of gold trimmed ivory white in an eddy of midnight. The sky seemed, if it was possible, more grey than ever; and when the rain fell, it hit the pavement in an almost halfhearted pitter patter - as if to cry through the window pane that it did not want to be here, but for Miss Blair to properly mourn, she needed to wallow in an endless storm.
Dorota had hoped privately to herself, and in vain. Miss Elle was not going to come back, not until her mother pulled herself together and remembered who she was supposed to be.
At least, that was what she had thought as early as that morning, when the only sounds were a ticking mantel clock, a steady rhythm that added order to the chaos that filtered in from the street, and the sounds she herself made as she scrubbed and fluffed and wiped and baked. It was a habit of hers to make strawberry paczki on Sunday, a tradition that went as far back as her own childhood in Poland. They were not as pretty and delicate as the sumptuous chocolate truffles, creamy fruit tarts, dainty biscuits, baked meringues, macaroons, and puff pastries she usually shelled out for Miss Blair's society teas, but they were far more appetizing on a serving dish, and Miss Elle could devour two of them without a spare thought.
Dorota looked at the plate of finished pastries and sighed heavily. They went into a container with the rest of the uneaten paczki at the back of the refrigerator.
The linens were tumbling in the washing machine, and it was just about time to collect Miss Blair's dry cleaning - she still had to drop some pieces off at Miss Blair's jeweler for repair, and she would have to hurry if she wanted to get to le marché before the Parisian housewives invaded and bruised all the good pickings. Dorota slipped her coat out of the front hall closet, but the buzzer rang before she could so much as do up a single button.
This was off-putting for the simple reason that no one came to see Miss Blair at her home unless they were implicitly invited - by paper only, as most of them had come to learn; any invitation extended at a social event was merely a fleeting nicety not to be observed. Any other visitors would, naturally, be ringing to see Miss Elle - but none of them would dream of doing so before noon, and every last one of them knew very well that she was no longer in residence. That left one explanation for why someone would be pressing the bell at such an hour, on a gloomy weekend, in a nice neighborhood.
Someone was very lost and had no idea upon whose territory they were encroaching. The best thing would be to usher them away before Miss Blair could snap out of her self-pity long enough to hear the irritating noise, because if she came down those stairs and saw some stranger lingering in her doorway, Dorota did not know if she could dispose of the body fast enough to eliminate Miss Blair as the primary suspect.
With a heavy, weary sigh, Dorota shouldered the potential responsibility, and moved forward to unlock the door.
The man she saw through the peephole, dapper as ever in a tailored Hugo Boss suit that hung on his body with the ease that came with high quality, was most certainly not lost.
Dorota had not spoken to Miss Blair's ex-husband since she had abandoned her life in Manhattan to move across the Atlantic and help Miss Blair through her hard time. It had been a hard decision, because New York City had become just as much her home as it had always been Miss Blair's, but where Miss Blair went, Dorota went too.
She had seen him since then, though, almost every day.
No, not in the form of a man lurking across the street, pining away for the woman in the master bedroom.
She saw him every time she looked up and Ellie was standing there. She saw Mister Chuck and so did Miss Blair, and she saw Miss Blair, both of them distilled into one little girl. Little woman. She was harsh and rude and brusque and indifferent, and she took up with the wrong boys and made the wrong friends and sometimes wore too much makeup and stayed out too late (she thought no one knew that, but Monsieur Lucien Poirier was a very observant man albeit a little too informative), but she was also sad and lonely and searching for something and beautiful and sensitive and, when she was tired enough, sweet as chocolate right to her crème-filled center.
(And it might as well have been that little woman on the doorstep. It was remarkable: the real, live resemblance...)
Miss Blair had been afraid of losing her from the day she arrived on French soil, straight from New York City and bawling her brown eyes out for the warmth of her brother. Mister Chuck had left a message to let Dorota know that Mister Teddy was suffering the same separation anxiety and that it would probably be very hard for Miss Blair to endure those cries if she knew who they were for, so Dorota had explained the piercing screams away as a bad reaction to her new country environment in Lyon, and eventually the tears fell only for food, attention, changing... normal things.
But it was not normal for a twin to be separated from her other half. Dorota had watched Ellie shoot up from a sprig of a little girl, had seen her hair darken, her jaw sharpen, her lips grow plump. And each time she looked at Ellie and saw something new, she wondered what had happened to Mister Teddy that day - had he grown a quarter of a foot? Had he asked his father to teach him how to shave yet? And when Elle got her first kiss, did Teddy have a special someone? It was very hard, not knowing - what he looked like, what he was doing, who he was with.
(And likewise, it could have been him, that darling little boy, ringing the buzzer and waiting not-so-patiently to be invited inside...)
It had been hard for Miss Blair, too, of course. She knew that Ellie belonged with him, not her, and that it was wrong of her to keep Miss Elle sequestered away on the other side of the Atlantic. They had moved from Lyon to Marnes-la-Coquette because Miss Blair had hoped the change in scenery might make her forget, or ease the sting, but it had only made it more pronounced. Miss Elle changed into a young woman in that house, experienced her first period, had her first boyfriend over for dinner. Was Teddy dating girls in Manhattan? Had he grown into a young man?
But Miss Elle had been Miss Blair's last gift from Mister Chuck, a living reminder of the time they had spent together. Of course she did not want to return that precious package to its sender.
"Dorota, are you going to answer that or not?" Miss Blair's inquiry floated down the stairs ahead of Miss Blair herself, giving Dorota just enough time to banish the quiver in her spine.
"I was just on my way to get your dry cleaning, Miss Blair."
Dorota clutched the ticket in her fist and stayed rooted in the foyer, as her instinct warned her to. She was in the perfect spot, between the staircase and the front door, and she could throw herself in front of either should the emergency arise. Miss Blair was in no condition to be ambushed in such an alarmingly blunt way, especially in the wake of her last phone call from Miss Serena, whose report on Miss Elle's situation under Mister Chuck's care had only led to an hour of silent contemplation - the main topic of anguish: Miss Blair's Inherited Failings as a Mother.
She would need to be gently prodded back up to her room, so that Dorota could interrogate Mister Chuck and find out just what he was doing here and why he thought he could barge in, uninvited. No one came to see Miss Blair unless they were invi...ted...
Though she wore only a loose blouson baby doll with macrame trim under a smoke grey full-length silk robe, Miss Blair had insisted Dorota set her hair in the gently sloping curls she was well-known for, and it was clear even in the pale light of the front room that she had spent the remainder of her alone time painstakingly applying just enough makeup to make herself presentable while still managing, through years of clever and reverently-adhered-to moisturizing techniques, to sport le bare face with a mysteriously youthful and entirely natural glow.
"What are you waiting for?" Miss Blair demanded, her freshly painted fingernails coming to rest at the bottom of the railing. "My silk shirts to be pressed? Go, before they mix them up again."
Dorota nodded, wondering if perhaps she had imagined Chuck Bass - a product of too much reminiscing, to be sure. She would have to remember not to get so caught up in the future. Besides, what on earth would Mister Chuck and Miss Blair have to say to each other after almost seventeen years apart? All that time without a single word passed directly between them, with only buried photographs, second hand news, and a brown-eyed brunette teenager to serve as a reminder of the other's existence... They shared a past, but there was nothing the two of them could possibly have in common in 2028. Perhaps they would have to see each other sometime soon, for surely Teddy would want to meet his mother? But aside from that, things would carry on. Mister Chuck would convince Miss Elle to give her mother a chance, and they would reconcile, and it would be a broken family, but at least there would be no more secrets.
"Oh, and Dorota?"
Miss Blair called down to her from where she had stopped on the landing, and Dorota stuffed her fingers into her black gloves as she nodded, "Yes?"
"Be sure to send Chuck up to my room on your way out."
There was only one thing to do: pinch herself and wake up.
When that failed, Dorota did the only other thing she could do. And when she had managed to draw her lips into a straight line, she reached blindly forward and swung open the front door.
"Dorota," he drawled. "Good morning."
Then, without waiting for her to ask him in, Mister Chuck swept past her and glanced around for less than a moment before his eyes lit on the stairs.
In even less than less than a moment, he was out of sight, the backs of his shiny black shoes disappearing on fluffy white carpet, on his way to the second floor and Miss Blair's bedroom. It would be the first time either of them laid eyes on each other since...the day she had left him, once and for all, for Mister Harold's chateau in Southern France. Dorota had seen, out of her peripheral vision, Miss Blair turn on her heel and shut their bedroom door behind her.
They had parted ways in a bedroom. (In fact, they had done all manner of things in bedrooms that Dorota preferred not to think about. God was always watching them, and they would be punished appropriately.) It was only fitting that they would reunite in one.
There was dry cleaning to be picked up, fresh and ripening fruits and crisply sliced vegetables to select from carts, enough errands to run that Dorota could be occupied for the remainder of the day if she really needed to stay away from the house. She could stop by the supermarket for other necessities, stock up on some snacks for herself while all of the holiday goodies were still on display; some of Blair's shoes needed to be repaired, and the florist down the way had promised to keep her updated on their hydrangeas. There was a calligrapher's address in her handbag, and she was supposed to stop by and commission some handmade invitations to Miss Blair's annual tea with the American ambassador.
Not to mention all the appointments she needed to confirm with Miss Blair's hairdresser, the new massage therapist at Miss Blair's preferred spa, the dog groomer, the dog walker, the...
The decision was hardly a decision at all. Dorota shed her coat and hurried up the stairs as quickly as she could without sacrificing stealthiness. The door to Miss Blair's room had been left blessedly ajar, so it was only too easy to stand beside a pot of flowers and pretend to arrange the bouquet as she inclined her better ear to eavesdrop on their conversation, which she could just barely make out from the wrong side of white yew.
"...until she was out of the house. Now it isn't a surprise."
Miss Blair was perched on the edge of her bed, or at least it sounded that way. There was a rustling that sounded suspiciously like the Miss Blair's bedsheets moving around (a sound Dorota was well-acquainted with due to Miss Blair's tendency to wallow and contemplate her misery while lounging in bed), and then Mister Chuck's voice, raspy and low, had joined Miss Blair's - and if the mental picture Dorota had conjured in her head was anywhere close to the truth, the two of them were seated less than an inch apart.
"You mean Dorota didn't know I was coming?" There was a chuckle and a pause. "I think she's slipping."
Then whispers dominated the conversation for several moments, before more rustling, and then a breathy little giggle that was far too inelegant for Miss Blair to ever use in public.
Though it was often her place to say curiosity killed the cat, Dorota simply could not help herself. Mister Chuck and Miss Blair were on the same continent, in the same country, inside the same house, looking at each other from across the same dark bedroom! Their love affair, marriage, and whirlwind divorce had been the single most explosive occurrence to bombard New York society since Gloria Vanderbilt's career as an author. People in Paris still sometimes grew wide eyed and slack jawed when they realized the perennial society hostess and famed bachelorette Blair Waldorf was the former Mme. Bass. The entire island of Manhattan had been flabbergasted at their swift and tidy divorce, and from what Dorota had gleaned from conversations between Mister Nate and Miss Jenny, the whole matter as a topic of conversation had been swept under the rug when Mister Chuck had all but disappeared from his usual social scene.
This was a convergence to rival the very formation of the Himalayas! Numerous people would have their servants commit murder in order to witness this event.
Dorota would never breathe a word of it, not ever, nor did she relish the same sweep of satisfaction a gossip maven or society matron would glean from it. Despite all her pessimism and doubtfulness, no one wanted Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf to get back together more than she did. No one. Not even Mister Chuck or Miss Blair, no even the enterprising Ellie. Ellie had not been there from the beginning as she had, and Mister Chuck and Miss Blair were, more often than not, utterly and epically blind.
She would have to think of some way to get him to stay in France, and in Miss Blair's home instead of one of his dozens of luxury hotels. That way, she could push them together and reignite their spark with the aid of sheer proximity. But she needed to see exactly where they were as far as speaking, eye contact, general comfortableness, before she pursued any clear course of action.
That, and only that was the reason she crept forward and pressed her right eye up to the sliver between jamb and door to peek at what was going on in that bedroom.
When she emerged from the front door 30 seconds later, her coat firmly buttoned and her fingers trembling within her toasty gloves, Dorota's face was more red than a beet.
God always watching, she thought as she stared resolutely at a shopping list she had drawn up for herself. But I definitely am not!
But no matter how quickly she walked or how doggedly she strove to keep her mind on task, she could not seem to shake the image from her brain. When she stopped to pick up a copy of the International Herald Tribune and saw Mister Chuck's face staring up at her above a special interest piece, she chalked it up to simple coincidence - he was an internationally famous businessman, naturally one would assume to see him the global edition of The New York Times. The only reason she considered it so remarkable was that she had seen him just that morning, that he was in Miss Blair's bedroom -
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Domini nostri, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Domine Iesu, dimitte nobis debita nostra, salva nos ab igne inferiori, perduc in caelum omnes animas, praesertim eas, quae misericordiae tuae maxime indigent. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell: lead all souls to Heaven especially those who are most in need of your mercy.
Those who are most in need of your mercy. Dorota cast a dark glance over her shoulder, casting her ire in the direction she had come from. It was all Mister Chuck's fault and Miss Blair's fault, because if she did not care so very much for both of them (Miss Blair, especially) and for their happiness, and were she not so certain that their mutual well-being laid in each other, she never would have risked her sanity and renowned upstanding moral character due to her cursed nosiness!
Dorota wanted only the best for her Miss Blair. Wasting away all alone in her house in Paris was not the best. But couldn't they have shown even a tiny bit of restraint? Did they not need to sit down and discuss things like grown adults? What about the children? Were Teddy and Elle fending for themselves in Manhattan, without either parent there to watch over them and care for them and make sure they were not getting into too much trouble, because if Teddy was anything like Miss Elle he could probably stir up enough trouble without her there to speed things along. How could Mister Chuck leave them all alone? Why couldn't he have called Miss Blair and demanded that she meet them in New York? That way, everyone could have been together and things really could have been sorted out the proper way!
The proper way.
Dorota shuddered, but it had nothing to do with the chill.
Perhaps she would not be so disturbed if she could riddle out exactly what image she was supposed to be seeing in the big picture. Clearly Mister Chuck and Miss Blair had communicated before his arrival, and clearly the communication had gone swimmingly, but that did not ease Dorota's thoughts. All through her errands, only one question plagued her mind, to the point where several cashiers and more than several fellow shoppers grew agitated by her tendency to stop mid-step and stare into space.
Ellie and Teddy. What were they doing? Did they know about this too?
If they did, where were they?
Between le marché and the supermarket, Dorota had the sudden epiphany that that day, that glorious glorious le Jour de l'An, could be a new beginning in more ways than a flip of the calendar. And once that thought was in her head, once the tiny seed of hope she had planted in November and nursed throughout the long, dark winter began to sprout and bloom and blossom in her mind's eye, she could see the whole harmonious scene as if it were already laid out in front of her.
And the centerpiece of that whole harmonious scene was a hot and home made feast, the likes of which she could only prepare if she purchased the right ingredients!
When Dorota made her way back up Avenue Mozart, the street that did the most to make her feel like she was back on Fifth Avenue and delivering groceries from Dean & Deluca, she thought she saw a vision of Mister Chuck and Miss Blair as teenagers, seated at the café tables outside Toques Et Chefs, their brown hair glossy even in the abysmal light. Their twin coffee cups sent steam swirling beneath their nostrils, lent a rosy tint to their pale cheeks. Then Miss Blair's brow narrowed as though she were trapped in the midst of a very serious thought, and Dorota realized that it was not Miss Blair at all.
The teenage girl who looked so very much like the woman for whom Dorota had served faithfully for so man years was...
"Ellie?"
Phantom sounds of clinking china and broken porcelain sounded all around the street corner when Mister Teddy - for who else could it possibly be? - looked up at her from beside his twin sister.
It was - they were - together and right across the street from - but she hadn't expected them to be there so soon - Mister Chuck must have brought them, but - loitering outside?
"This is Teddy," Miss Elle said unnecessarily, and it was then that Dorota took into account her longer hair and softened accent. "Teddy Bass."
Yes, Dorota wanted to breathe. Yes! I know! I saw him when he was just a little newborn baby, held him and fed him and oh just look at him!
Teddy. And Ellie. Together. Right in front of her. This sight was truly a convergence to rival the very creation of the universe. Suddenly, it was 2011 and they were in Manhattan, and the two children before her were small enough to fit in the crooks of her elbows, and they were walking beside Central Park in the beaming light of a glaring hot summer sun. She barely registered when she dropped the grocery bags and lost all the vegetables she had so carefully selected from only the best carts at le marché, because it really was time. It really was le Jour de l'An.
"Is maman home?"
Dorota wanted, again, to shout YES! But, one thing gave her pause.
If she took the twins to the house, they would expect to speak to their parents promptly.
That meant she was going to have to brave the bedroom door and pray twice as hard to the Virgin Mary to protect her eyes from further corruption.
But if she could do that, if she could manage to get all four of them in the same room and use Miss Blair's best Baccarat to eavesdrop through the wall, then everything would work out. Even if she might have to request a personal day to visit a therapist for a thorough mind cleanse.
God always watching, she reminded herself as she fished through her coat's many pockets for the key. It will all work out.
"Follow me."