Clarke wasn't quite sure why a woman she saw in passing in a department store would have captured her interest so thoroughly, but as soon as she disappeared, she felt her heart plummet from where it had stuck in her throat. There was something entrancing about the woman that had immediately drawn Clarke to her.
But she would likely never see her again. Clarke tried to push the woman from her mind, focusing on helping the next several customers.
She was bent over, rearranging a couple boxes in the display case under the counter, when she heard the soft slap of leather on the glass over her head.
Clarke jerked upright and found a familiar pair of dark leather gloves on the counter. Her breath caught in her throat as her eyes continued up. It was the woman.
"I wonder if you might help me find this doll for my daughter," she said in a smooth, low voice.
Clarke took the slip of paper she held out, trying to keep her fingers from trembling.
"Bright Betsy," she read. "Oh, she cries. And wets herself. But I'm afraid we're all out of stock."
"Oh," the woman sighed, slipping the paper back into her purse. "Left it too long."
Clarke's heart gave a painful clang at disappointing her. She began to babble, fidgeting with the dolls on display. "But we have plenty of other dolls. All kinds, actually –"
The woman cut her off. "Right. What was your favorite doll when you were four?" she asked pensively, pulling a silver cigarette case out of her purse.
"Me?" Clarke was taken aback for a second. "Oh, I never – not many, to be honest."
The woman put a cigarette between her lips and began to lift her lighter to it.
Clarke's hand twitched as if to take her wrist, but she held herself back. "I'm sorry, you're not allowed to smoke on the sales floor," she said.
"Of all –" the woman began. With a disgruntled gesture, she put the cigarette back in the case. She looked at Clarke apologetically. "Forgive me. Shopping makes me nervous."
Clarke gave a small laugh and smiled at her. "That's all right. Working here makes me nervous."
"You're very kind," the woman laughed in return. She put the cigarette case back in her purse, then fiddled with a small, square object before pulling it out. "Here she is."
She turned it around, and Clarke saw that it was a small black frame with a picture of a young girl inside. The girl's round face, her cheeks dimpled in a smile, was framed by short, dark hair with bangs.
"She looks like you," Clarke said, lightly touching the photo with her fingertips. "Around the eyes."
Up close, the woman's green eyes were even more vibrant than Clarke had initially thought. They were almost difficult to look at.
"You think so?" the woman asked, turning the picture back around. She ran her fingers lovingly over the edges. "What did you want when you were this age?"
Clarke didn't have to think very hard to remember; that had been one of her happiest Christmases, and she recalled it to this day. "A train set."
The woman looked surprised. "Really?"
Clarke nodded readily.
"Do you know much about train sets?" the woman asked.
"I do, actually," Clarke said with pleasure and a little pride. "We just got a new model in last week, it's hand built with hand painted cars. It's a limited addition of $5000. You might've seen it on the way in over by the elevators." The woman looked in that direction while Clarke glanced about her a little helplessly. "I would show you, but I'm sort of confined by this desk."
The woman stared towards the elevators for a moment, then turned back to Clarke. "Do you ship?"
"Special delivery, you could have it in two or three days," Clarke told her. "They'd even assemble it for you."
"Well," the woman said, a smile forming on her lips. "That's that. Sold."
Clarke smiled at her, pleased to have been able to help her after all.
There was a moment of silence, then the woman asked, "Shall I pay now?"
Clarke shook herself, embarrassed to have forgotten. "Oh, yes, of course." She pulled the small archboard clipboard of shipping slips and a pen from under the register. After filling out her employee information, she slid it to the woman. "I need your account details and shipping address."
"Of course," the woman said. As she bent to write, a few curls slipped over her shoulder, and she brushed them away with a careless gesture. Clarke watched her hands loop gracefully through her signature – Mrs. Q. F. Aird.
"I love Christmas," Mrs. Aird said. "Wrapping presents and all that. And then somehow you wind up overcooking the turkey anyway," she finished ruefully.
She turned the archboard back to Clarke. "Done." As she began to gather up her purse, she asked, "Where'd you learn so much about train sets anyway?"
"My father was an engineer. He liked anything mechanical, so I got a lot of models sets as a child," Clarke told her. "Also, I read. Too much, probably."
Mrs. Aird smiled at her. "That's refreshing."
Clarke tore the copy of the shipping slip from the archboard and handed it to her.
"Thank you," Mrs. Aird said, tucking it into her purse. With a playful smile, she turned to go. "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas," Clarke echoed.
Mrs. Aird walked a few feet away, then turned back towards her. "I like the hat," she stage whispered, gesturing to her own head. Her eyes flicked up and down Clarke's body for a split second, then she stepped away.
Clarke blushed, but felt a smile tug at her lips.
She watched as Mrs. Aird walked away, memorizing the bounce of her hair and swing of her jacket, until her black heels had disappeared around the corner.
With a sigh, Clarke put the archboard back under the register. As she turned back around, she caught sight of something on the counter. Off to the side lay Mrs. Aird's gloves.
Clarke looked back towards the elevators, as if she could make Mrs. Aird reappear with the power of her thoughts. She picked the gloves up, running her fingers over the soft leather. She had to return them to Mrs. Aird somehow.
In a flash, she remembered the shipping slip. She remembered Mrs. Aird's address; the elegant sweep of her long fingers as she wrote was burned into her mind. If Mrs. Aird hadn't come back by the end of the day, she would mail them back to her.
Clarke couldn't keep her eyes away from the elevators; every time she heard them ding, she glanced over, half expecting to see Mrs. Aird's elegant form appear around the corner. But by the time Clarke's shift ended, the woman still hadn't returned. She briefly considered leaving the gloves with the lost and found, but found she couldn't quite let them go. Besides, she reasoned with herself, Mrs. Aird might not think to look there.
Making her way downstairs, Clarke had a sudden inspiration and stopped in the greeting-card department on the first floor. It might be nice to send a card along with the gloves, to wish Mrs. Aird a Merry Christmas. The card she picked was rather simple, in blue and gold, but it was pretty. She took it down to the lockers, and spent an agonizing five minutes trying to figure out what to write. What she wanted to say – "You are magnificent," or, "I can't get you out of my head" – was too personal to write down, so instead she wrote the horribly boring, "Special salutations from Washington's" and signed it with her employee number, 645-A, instead of her name.
As she opened her locker, the shrill ring of the end-of-shift bell sounded. Clarke stood there for a moment, letting the sound buzz inside her skull, hoping to drown out her racing thoughts, before placing her Santa hat and manual inside the locker.
She tucked the gloves and card into her satchel and met Finn back outside. They biked a few blocks away to meet some of Finn's friends, Bellamy and Octavia Blake, for a movie. Bellamy knew the projectionist, and he let them sneak into the projection booth. The theater was playing Sunset Boulevard that night, which Clarke had been dying to see.
Finn pulled her onto his lap as they settled around the small window in front of the projector and began playing with her hair. Octavia leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, not even paying attention to the movie, while Bellamy pulled out a small notebook.
They all chatted softly through the beginning of the movie, Clarke switching her attention between the screen and the conversation.
"Move over," Octavia admonished Bellamy when he began to lean into the window. "Nobody else can see the screen."
"Nobody else is watching," Finn said.
Clarke nudged her shoulder back into him. "I'm watching."
"I've seen it six times," Bellamy told her.
"Really?" she asked.
Bellamy gestured with his notebook. "Right now I'm charting the correlation between what the characters say and how they really feel."
"My big brother, the movie jerk," Octavia mocked.
Clarke smiled. She thought it was cute that he would be that interested.
After the movie, the four friends make their way to a nearby bar. They worked their way through a dozen beers, talking about nothing as they grew more drunk.
"I'm strictly a beer man," Bellamy said with a laugh. "Everything else makes me want to vomit."
Clarke fingered the stem of her wineglass. "Well, wine makes me feel naughty but in a good way."
Finn piped in, "I drink to forget I gotta get up for work in the morning."
Octavia scoffed. "See, that's your problem, Collins. You really oughta drink because you remember you've got a job." She shook her head. "Employment's a curse."
"You've got a job, Octavia," Clarke pointed out.
Octavia raised an eyebrow. "You call that a job? I call that an illusion."
"You get paid," Bellamy said, tipping his beer bottle at her. "Is money an illusion?"
Octavia rolled her eyes. "My big brother, the jerk philosopher."
Clarke turned to Bellamy. "Where do you work?"
Finn smirked, putting on a bit of teasing swagger. "Didn't you know? Bellamy works at the American Museum of Natural History."
"No kidding." Admiration colored Clarke's tone.
"It's a job," Bellamy said humbly. "What I really want to do is teach history."
"Say, Clarke, before I get too drunk to remember…" Octavia dug into her bag and pulled out a worn leather-bound sketchpad.
Clarke gasped in excitement, standing in her stool to reach across the bar for it. "You found it! I was afraid I'd lost it forever after your last party."
"It ended up on top of my refrigerator, if you'd believe it," Octavia laughed.
Clarke flipped through the pages of the sketchbook, taking in her old sketches and watercolors. "Thank you, Octavia, I was missing it."
Bellamy leaned towards her. "So you draw pictures?" he asked.
Clarke closed the book, smoothing her hands over the cover. "Some. Landscapes and sketches."
Finn leaned towards Octavia as if he was going to tell her a secret, but said loudly enough for Bellamy and Clarke to hear, "She's more excited about a chintzy sketchbook than she is about sailing with me to Europe.
"Women," Octavia said with a roll of her eyes.
Finn pushed at his shoulder with a bark of laughter. "You said it, pal."
Soon after, it became apparent that Octavia and Finn were silently trying to drink each other under the table, so Bellamy closed the group's tab before they could kill themselves. He and Clarke ushered the pair out of the bar, where they threw their arms around each other and began to stagger home. Clarke and Bellamy walked several feet behind, watching to make sure neither stepped into the street.
After a few blocks of drunken yelling and laughter, they finally made it to Clarke's apartment. Of course, it was then that Finn had to go stumbling straight into a tree, knocking himself over and bringing his bike down on top of him.
"Finn, be careful!" Clarke called, as Octavia giggled and staggered as she tried to haul him back up.
With a small shake of her head, Clarke left them to it and turned back to Bellamy.
"Say," Bellamy said, looking a little nervous, "you should come by the museum for dinner sometime. I work nights, so. I've got a pal who sets up the backdrops for displays, he loves to pontificate. I'll introduce you."
"Really?" Clarke asked. A real job as an artist. Even if it was just painting landscapes for museum displays, thousands of people would see it. "Yeah, I'd like that."
"Yeah?" Bellamy asked, a smile spreading across his face. Clarke nodded. "Ok."
They said their goodbyes, and Bellamy guided Octavia down the street as Clarke pulled Finn up the stairs and into her apartment. She helped him take off his coat and shoes, then placed him in her bed, where he immediately began to snore.
After taking off her own shoes and hat, she sat down at her kitchen table, Mrs. Aird's gloves and her card laying before her. She looked through the door to Finn's sleeping form, wondering at the difference she felt between him and Mrs. Aird. Even in just the short amount of time Clarke had spent with her, the woman had made her feel more alive than Finn ever had. There had been a spark of something that had taken hold of Clarke, and now refused to let go.
Before she could lose her nerve, she wrote down Mrs. Aird's address on a packing envelope and slid the gloves and card inside, then hurried across the street to the mailbox. As she held the envelope half-in and half-out of the slot, she was struck with the idea that her life was on a teetering point, too. As soon as she let go, everything would change.
She opened her hand, and let the envelope fall.