Chapter 6: The Box

Hazel kept to the edge of the hall, close to the wall, with her sleeves pulled down and her chin low. A waiter moved aside for her. A woman in silver leaned back to keep her dress out of reach. The French doors stood half open onto the terrace, and the cold air coming through them smelled of rain.

She went out, and the doors swung closed behind her. She went down the stone steps and around the corner of the house, keeping to the dark, until she reached the green back door with the scratch by the handle.

It opened before she touched it.

"I was looking for you," Rosa hissed, and pulled her inside by the sleeve. They were in the narrow passage between the kitchen and the pantry, with shelves of canned tomatoes pressing on both sides. Rosa was out of breath. Her apron was crooked. "They said you were in the hall. I went out twice and you were gone, I thought they put you somewhere, I thought..."

"I am leaving tonight," Hazel said.

Rosa stopped talking.

"Not in the morning. Tonight. Now." Hazel kept her voice low and even. "I need my papers, if they are still here, and I need to know if you can get the ring. If you cannot, it is okay."

"Leaving where? You have no money. You have no shoes." Rosa looked down at the split canvas. "Where would you go?"

"There is someone I have to find. A promise."

"Whose promise?"

"A friend's."

"The friend from that place." Rosa's face worked.

"Rosa, Dad has been talking about a man named Reyes. Dominic Reyes. Do you know where he is staying?"

Rosa stared at her. "The one Mr. Gregory shouts about? His assistant comes to my kitchen for coffee and cries about him." She shook her head slowly. "The Grand Meridian. Top floor. Hazel, it is night, and you do not know this city. I am afraid for you."

"I will be careful."

"You said that when you were fifteen, too." Rosa wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Then she nodded, hard, like someone who had argued with herself and lost. "All right. I cannot stop you. I will not pretend I would, if I could. Wait here. Do not move."

Hazel waited.

The pantry smelled of flour and old wood. She stood with her back against a shelf and listened to the party come through the walls, a distant roar of voices, a swell of strings. Somewhere out there her mother was laughing again. She did not feel the laugh now. She had already used up whatever part of her could feel it.

Rosa came back with a cardboard box under one arm and a plastic bag in her other hand. She set the box on a flour barrel and lifted the lid.

"I kept this when she moved your things. I told her it was going to the charity shop. I hid it in my room." Rosa's voice trembled and steadied. "Look."

Hazel looked. On top lay a manila envelope. Inside was her birth certificate, creased, with a coffee ring on one corner, and the old plastic ID card that had come with her from the countryside, her face at fourteen staring up at her with round, careful eyes. Under it was a bundle of photographs bound with a rubber band. Grandma Mae in the garden. Grandma Mae at a market stall with a basket of eggs. A blurry picture of Hazel at ten, holding up a jar of pickles with a huge, gap-toothed smile that she could not remember wearing.

Under the photographs lay a folded sheet of paper, soft with age. She opened it and her stomach dropped.

It was the report card. Her first one from the city school, with a gold star in the corner. She had hidden it in her desk drawer to show Grandma Mae, and Grandma Mae had died before she could. Four As and two Bs. The teacher had written in blue pen, A thoughtful and determined student.

"I did not think anyone kept this," Hazel said.

"I kept it." Rosa's voice cracked. "I kept all of it."

Hazel pressed the paper against her chest. She stood there for a few seconds, with her eyes shut and her jaw clenched. She did not cry. She knew exactly where the wall was, and she leaned on it until the burning went away.

"Thank you," she said.

"Here." Rosa shoved the plastic bag at her. "Open it."

Inside were a pair of gray sneakers, scuffed at the toes and laced with new white laces, and a folded envelope, thick with bills.

"They are my spare ones. They will be too big. Wear two pairs of socks." Rosa pointed to the envelope. "That is four hundred and twenty dollars. It is what I have."

"No."

"Take it."

"Rosa, I cannot take your savings."

"If you do not take it, I will follow you down the road and put it in your pocket myself, and I am sixty-one years old and I am very stubborn." Rosa's chin was wobbling. "Take it, Hazel. Please. I could not do anything for three years. Let me do this one thing."

Hazel took it. Her hand shook when it closed around the envelope. "I will pay you back."

"You will not. And the ring." Rosa drew a breath. "It is in Miss Vivi's blue jewelry box, top drawer, under the velvet. I cannot get it tonight. Her mother is in and out of that room. But I will get it. I swear on my mother."

"Do not risk your job."

"It is not a job." Rosa smiled, crooked and wet. "It is a hole I climb down into every morning. Go on. Put on the shoes."

Hazel sat on a flour barrel and changed out of the split canvas. The sneakers were two sizes too big, and she folded a dish towel into each toe. They were warm inside. They smelled like Rosa's kitchen. When she stood up, her feet felt, for the first time in three years, as if they belonged to somebody who was allowed to walk away.

She hugged Rosa once, fast, hard, without a word. Rosa made a small, startled sound and held on.

Then Hazel let go and went out into the dark.

---

The back gate was a narrow iron door set into the wall, wide enough for one person and a bag. Hazel had used it a few times when she first came here, when she was lonely and wanted to walk. She lifted the latch quietly, and the hinge gave a long, thin squeal.

"Hazel."

She did not jump. Her body went rigid, her hand tight on the strap of the bag. Her heart beat three times, and then she turned.

Theo stood against the wall five feet away. He had taken off his jacket, and his tie was gone. A cigarette burned between two fingers, and she could see the shape of him against the light from the kitchen window, tall and stooped with his shoulders drawn up. She had not known he smoked. She had not known many things about him.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Out."

"It is almost midnight."

"I know."

"You do not have a phone." He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. "You do not know the area. Mom is going to lose her mind when she finds out you left."

"She will not."

"She will."

"She will be relieved," Hazel said. "You know that. You can tell them if you want. I will not stop you."

He did not answer. His eyes went down to the sneakers, which were too big, and to her sleeves, and she saw his throat move, as it had in the kitchen.

"Your arm," he said. His voice was rough. "Hazel, what happened to your arm?"

"Do not."

"I only..."

"You said to put my sleeve down." Hazel's voice stayed quiet. She was not angry. She just wanted him to hear it. "You said Vivi would get upset. I put it down."

Theo's face went tight. For a long moment, the only sound was the wind in the trees. When he spoke again, it came out cracked.

"I know what I said."

"Then you have your answer."

"I do not." He took a step toward her and stopped when she stepped back. "Who did it? Was it the school? Was it..."

"Ask Mom what she signed," Hazel said. "The day I went in. Ask her what was on the paper."

"What do you mean?"

"Ask."

She turned and pulled the gate wider. Behind her Theo said, "Wait," and she kept going. He said it again, softer, and then he said, "There is a bus stop at the end of the road. The last one leaves at twelve forty."

Hazel stopped with one foot on the path outside. She did not look back.

"Thanks," she said.

She walked. The road was dark and lined with tall hedges, and the only light came from distant porch lamps. Her borrowed shoes slapped the pavement, and she counted steps until the count blurred. Halfway down the road she looked over her shoulder. The gate was still open. Theo still stood in the spill of kitchen light with his hands in his pockets, watching her go, and he did not move until she turned the corner.

---

The bus came at twelve thirty-eight. It was almost empty. Hazel took a seat at the back with her bag on her lap and her forehead against the cold window, and she watched the dark houses slide away.

She had four hundred and twenty dollars, a cardboard box, a hotel name, and only a few days.

When the lights of the city came up, she opened the box again to check the papers. She slid the photographs aside, and the report card, and the envelope, and her fingers touched something else at the bottom, something stiff and glossy that had been slipped under the lining.

It was a brochure. Cream paper, a photograph of a lake, a name in gold letters. Westmoor Academy for Young Women. Discipline, Structure, Reform. Clipped to the front was a form, filled out in her mother's neat, slanting hand. Hazel's name. Her date of birth. Under Reason for Placement, someone had written, Behavioral concerns. Possible relapse.

At the bottom was Claudia's signature, and a date four months old.

Hazel read it twice. Then she folded the form along its old crease, slowly, and put it carefully into the envelope with her birth certificate, as if it were something she would need later.

She was not surprised. That was the strange thing. She sat with the paper against her knee and waited for the shock, and what came instead was a clear, cold calm, like a lamp being turned on in a room she had been sitting in for years.

They had never planned to take her back. They had only planned where to put her next.