Naked Angels. Judi James

her that anyone would want to latch on to. She was disposable, she knew that. She wondered if you could learn not to be, because all this rejection was very hurtful.

      Her grandmother was looking at her now. She searched the old woman’s eyes for a sign of regret over giving her up. Grandma Klippel looked sad, but not desperate. If someone had come to take her beloved Patrick away when Evangeline was younger she would have fought to the death to keep him.

      ‘You don’t have to come, Evangeline,’ Nico was saying. She barely heard him at first, she was thinking so hard.

      ‘Do you want me to go?’ she asked her grandmother.

      The old woman sighed. ‘I’ve got no rights, dear,’ she said softly, ‘whereas you and Mr Castelli are related by blood. I’m just the mother of your stepfather. I can’t keep you here …’

      ‘She can stay if she wants to.’ Nico’s face had become redder. So he didn’t want her, either.

      Grandma Klippel stood up and faced him. A handkerchief fell from her lap onto the floor.

      ‘You told me that was why you came here, Mr Castelli,’ she said. Her voice sounded polite enough but tight, as though she was coiled up like a spring inside.

      Nico ran a hand through his hair. ‘She doesn’t have to,’ he repeated.

      ‘Why?’ Grandma Klippel asked. ‘How else would you get at all the money you think is owing to her?’

      ‘Jesus!’ Nico looked angry. ‘In front of the kid, Mrs Klippel, have a little charity! Evangeline, honey, go and play outside or something for a little while, will you?’ he asked.

      But Grandma Klippel was too quick for him. She grasped Evangeline by the shoulders and her hands were shaking hard. ‘Do you want to go to New York with your father, Evangeline?’ she asked. Her voice softened, ‘You know you have a home here for as long as you want.’

      Evangeline didn’t care any more. New York sounded as bad as Cape Cod. Anywhere was bad without her mother and Darius and Lincoln and Patrick. She felt funny. She didn’t want them to know they had hurt her so much. She wanted to cling onto her grandmother and make her love her properly, somehow, but then she wanted to hurt her back, too.

      ‘I don’t mind,’ she whispered. The little girl inside her was hoping that her grandmother might fight over her. Then she thought suddenly and stupidly that her family might be waiting in New York, that they might have been there all this time; but she wasn’t a little girl now, she was nine years old, and she knew better.

      ‘You don’t mind.’ Her grandmother sounded upset.

      Nico looked uneasy. ‘Do you know what New York’s like?’ he asked. He bent down so that he was the same height. He smelt of soap and she could see where he had cut himself shaving. He had big dark eyes. She could even see her own reflection in his pupils, and that was something she had never seen happen before. Perhaps it only happened with people you were related to by blood. She tried to remember if she had seen herself in her mother’s eyes, but she couldn’t.

      ‘There’s no sea there, you know,’ he said.

      That was it, then. New York it was.

       11

       New York 1969

      Nico called the place home but even Evangeline could see it was just an hotel. It turned out Grandma Klippel was paying for them to stay there because Nico’s real home – his apartment – was not deemed appropriate for a nine-year-old to live in. Nico didn’t agree with that opinion but he liked the hotel life. He smoked fat cigars and ordered from room service with a golden grin on his face. He told Evangeline they’d be moving somewhere better anyway, just as soon as her money came through.

      Being sad in Cape Cod was easy but being sad in New York was a deal more tricky, with no sea to gaze out at and no fog to make you think you were the last person alive on the earth. In Cape Cod Evangeline had felt her parents were everywhere, watching her. In New York, though, she had to carry them in a little pocket in her head, just like she carried Lincoln’s picture in a pocket in her bag. Did they know where she was? Had they lost her too, now? The place was full of people but she felt lonelier than ever before in her life.

      The loneliness didn’t scare her, though; in a way it almost felt good. She didn’t want Nico to love her like she’d wanted Grandma Klippel to. There would be no more disappointments or distractions. All she had to do now was work at being herself. Maybe if she tried hard enough she could find something there; maybe if she worked at it there would be something to make people want her.

      She wasn’t getting any prettier but she wasn’t growing uglier, either. Her teeth were big, but straighter since she had worn braces. Her nose was a funny shape but seeing the same nose on Nico’s face every day made it better somehow, because he didn’t look too bad.

      Grandma Klippel seemed to think she’d forget about Darius and Thea in New York, because she wrote all the time reminding her how they had been and what they were like. The letters hurt badly but she still went on reading them, even when Nico got mad.

      Thea and Darius – was she really Thea’s child? They were so talented, so successful, so special, and so beautiful to look at. Her grandmother sent photographs of Darius as a child. She wrote:

       You came from good stock, dear, don’t ever forget it. Thea was a wonderful, talented woman. You were blessed to have her as a mother. Darius thought of you as his own, too – just as much as little Lincoln. Make them proud of you, dear. Don’t waste your life. Darius lived each day as though it were his last … make sure you do the same.

      The letters chilled Evangeline. Make them proud of her – how? Was she wasting her life? What was it she was meant to do?

      Something else began to trouble her. When she had discovered that her family was dead she had been too sad to wonder why. Maybe she believed things like that just happened. As she grew older, though, she realized they did not. Yet nobody had told her how they had died. Perhaps nobody knew. Nico just looked awkward when she asked him, which she did straight away, on the drive from Cape Cod to New York.

      ‘What happened to my mother?’ she asked. He had been married to her, so someone must have told him.

      Nico was silent for a long while. Then he cleared his throat. Evangeline wondered if he smoked a lot, to get a cough that bad. ‘She died,’ he said, after a while.

      ‘I know she died,’ Evangeline told him. She didn’t want to sound impolite but she wanted this thing cleared up. ‘Nobody told me how, though.’

      Nico coughed again. ‘What did the old lady say?’ he asked.

      Evangeline sighed. ‘Grandma? Oh, I don’t think she knows, you know. She still thinks they’ve just gone away. She’s old – too old. The shock could make her ill.’

      ‘Who told you then?’ Nico sounded genuinely interested now.

      ‘The chauffeur.’

      ‘The chauffeur?’ Nico punched the steering wheel, ‘Fuck!’ She had never heard anyone she knew say that word before. He apologized straight away.

      ‘Did this chauffeur tell you what happened?’ Nico asked.

      Evangeline shook her head. ‘I don’t think he knew. I don’t think he knew anything more than he told me.’

      ‘Jesus.’ Nico pulled a cigarette out of a packet in his pocket and flipped it in the air once before catching it in his mouth. Evangeline would have enjoyed that, had they not been discussing what they were. She had a bad feeling she was going to need to pee pretty soon but she realized she didn’t know her father well enough to ask him to stop. She crossed her legs instead. She watched him light the cigarette with a Zippo and smelt