Ghost Flower

by Michele Jaffe

  I laughed. “How have you been?”

  “Oh, great, you know. Got disinherited by my parents when I came out, but re-inherited by them when my sister got married because they wanted to show the new in-laws our family was capable of breeding boys. The usual. What have you been up to?”

  I had the insane urge to confide in him, tell him the truth about everything. I don’t know if it was Roscoe, or the fact that the effort required to keep all my lives, all my lies, straight was getting too massive to bear on my own.

  He spared me having to lie by saying, “Don’t answer. I probably don’t want to know.” He leaned close. “Was it raunchy?”

  I thought of some of the places I’d slept. “Definitely.”

  He wrapped an arm around me again and pulled me toward him, and we stood side by side looking out over the golf course. “Ah, nature,” he said. He took his arm away to rifle in his pocket and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. “Smoke?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You never did get into it.” He lit up, and I realized it was a joint. He was smoking a joint right in the middle of the golf club with half of Tucson society behind us. He took a long hit, held it, then exhaled, waving the smoke away with a practiced gesture.

  “Do you remember when we used to ride our bikes over the course at night? God, that was so insane. Pitch-black, and I’m on your handlebars, and you have no idea where you’re going.”

  “Terrifying,” I agreed because it sounded like it was.

  “But exhilarating too.” He took another hit, exhaled. “And you were a demon. You could ride anything.” He exhaled a long stream of smoke. “Do you remember that crazy mare my parents bought right before you left?”

  I shook my head.

  “About a hundred hands tall and with a take-no-prisoners attitude toward people. They called her Medusa because she scared the trainers stiff. But when you came over, you walked up to her like it was no big deal, had a little chat, and climbed on. No one else could do that. We had to separate her out from the rest of the stock because she was so wild.”

  “I don’t ride anymore.”

  He gave me a probing look. “Are you sure you’re Aurora Silverton?”

  “No,” I said. Just speaking the word, saying something true, made me giddy.

  He looked down at the half-finished joint between his fingers like he was seeing it for the first time, then put it out against his palm. He shook his head. “I guess we all have our own forms of self-destruction.” I smelled burning flesh.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Me? Of course.”

  I saw him slip the rest of the joint into his pocket and caught a glimpse of a hand puckered with burn marks. He said, “So you must miss Liza.”

  I hedged. “I still have a hard time believing it.”

  “That she’s dead or that she killed herself?” he asked sharply.

  “Both, I guess. Why?”

  He shook his head and gazed out over the golf course. “I couldn’t decide if it made the most sense in the world or the least sense. Did you have any idea she was going to do it?”

  I shook my head. “Did you?”

  “No. I would have said it was impossible. Frankly”—he looked at me—“I would have thought you were more likely to be the one. Especially after what I saw that morning.”

  “That morning? Why?”

  “Do you remember the guy I was dating then, Ox?”

  “You did not date someone named Ox.”

  “It’s a common name in Slavic countries,” he protested. “Anyway he was Liza’s next-door neighbor, and his room overlooked her backyard. That was one strange family. Well, you must know, you were her best friend.”

  “I wish I could remember,” I said. “I just…”

  “Liza was definitely the normal one. I didn’t see the oldest sister much because she was away at school, but the little girl was like something from the Addams Family, pale and greasy and always with a book right in front of her face, even when she walked around the house. Her dad seemed harried and like he was in a bad mood all the time. And he always parked in the driveway, never in the garage. Ox and I talked about it a lot, you know, the way you speculate about your neighbors, coming up with different crazy theories. Especially when we realized that the garage was double-insulated, had its own cooling system, and was protected by a fancy alarm.”

  “You figured that out just from watching him out the window?”

  He grinned. “We snooped.”

  “So what was in there?”

  “We considered an S&M dungeon, a harem, a lab for making mutant species, a giant tarantula, the table where he dismembered his lust rage murder victims, wine cellar—all the obvious things. But the truth was way weirder.”

  I swallowed down my growing sense of apprehension, and the sound felt strangely loud out on the quiet patio.“What?”

  “Records.”

  I let out a sharp, involuntary laugh. I’d been expecting something so much worse. “Records?”

  “Vinyl. Like maybe ten thousand of them, all in original sleeves covered in plastic.” He paused like he was trying to put together all the parts of the story. “It’s about three A.M., and I am rolling a joint or something. And I hear this noise from next door. I look down, and there is Liza carrying case after case of her father’s records outside from the garage, right?”

  I nodded, and he went on. “When she’s got about ten cartons of them in the yard, she takes a record out very carefully, places it on the ground, and smashes it with a hammer. She did it again and again, smashing them one by one. Not just hitting them once but pulverizing them. Smash, smash, smash.” He hit the palm of his hand with his fist. “At some point she must have gotten bored because she started going faster, making a less careful job of it.”

  He took the half-joint out of his pocket and relit it.

  “And here’s what’s weird,” he said, exhaling a cloud of purplish smoke. “Or, weird-er, I guess. I swear as she smashed them she was crying. Like she was sorry to be doing it. But the next morning when her father came out and saw it, her face was completely expressionless. She stood there in a sea of broken records and watched, totally impassive, as he collapsed. Her older sister had to catch him in her arms before he fell to the ground. Then Liza dropped the hammer, right there, and walked off. Curtain. I don’t think she ever went back to her house. That night I saw you and her at the party and then… poof.” A shiver ran down my back, though the air was warm.

  “I—I had no idea,” I stammered.

  “That’s why I was surprised when we heard what she did. I mean, she seemed so strong. Unflappable. Without even a hint of remorse when she saw how upset her father was. He must have done something really horrible to her to make her act that way.”

  “He must have,” I murmured.

  “Intense, right?”

  I nodded. Cleared my throat. “I know this is weird, but do you remember what I was wearing that night?”

  “Of course I do, cutie. A trench coat. I remember it because I asked you if you were having an assignation, and you said you thought you had. But then you got your heart broken, so now it was to become an adventuress. And then I had a smoke, and someone said they saw you with Stuart.”

  My mind was reeling with all this new information. Liza’s fight with her father. Aurora’s broken heart. It was like the clues kept coming, but none of them seemed to be adding up.

  Uncle Thom poked his head out of the bar then and said, “Dinner, kids.”

  Roscoe said, “That’s my cue. I just came to see you. I don’t do dinner theater.” There was a rumble of voices behind us, and he glanced over his shoulder. “Speaking of outrageous acting…”

  CHAPTER 34

  I followed Roscoe’s eyes and saw Coralee and her crew coming toward us. Roscoe leaned toward me, said, “I’ll see you at tennis tomorrow,” kissed my cheek and took off.

  “Wait,” Coralee called, running after him. Grant hung back t
o stand by me. He held his camera toward me. “Look at the screen, not at me, in case Coralee is watching.”

  I pretended to be very interested in the footage he was showing me, which was of Coralee doing some kind of dance in fast-forward. “I think I’d like to see this for real,” I told him.

  “Funny, I didn’t peg you as a masochist. Coralee’s dancing is not for the faint of heart. Anyway, the thing is, I can’t stop thinking about kissing you. Don’t look at me; look at the screen.”

  I kept my eyes on the screen and bit back my smile. “I liked it too.”

  “I have this idea that it could be really pleasant to make out with you for four, maybe five hours. Are you free tomorrow afternoon after the tennis tournament?”

  “I have to check with Bridge—”

  “So that’s how I shoot a musical number,” he announced, slightly too loud.

  I looked up and saw that Coralee had rejoined us. “You’re showing her my Sonoran Sunrise Festival clogging performance?” She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she was secretly proud.

  “That was really great,” I said, looking sideways at Grant.

  She turned to Grant. “I’m going to run to the bathroom, then grab my date. You and Huck get into position in the dining room.”

  “As you wish, sir,” he said.

  She made a heart with her fingers and held it up to her chest. “Love him!” She grabbed me by the arm. “And you come with me.”

  “Clogging?” I whispered to Grant as she pulled me away.

  “It begins and ends with her initials,” he explained with a grin.

  I was still digesting that as Coralee dragged me through the crowd toward a sign that said “RESTROOMS” in gilded serif letters more suitable for a bank than a bathroom.

  There was an arrow pointing down a set of dark green carpeted stairs. “The stairs to the old pool are at the bottom to the left through the door that says ‘AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL’. In case you ‘forgot.’” She put “forgot” in air quotes.

  I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  She pulled me against the wall and whispered in my ear, “Look, I know your secret. So you can stop with the I-don’t-remember-anything-about-anything act.”

  My stomach lurched with shock. Coralee knew I was an imposter. Coralee. Queen of tweeting. If she told anyone, it would all come out. The deal with Bain and Bridgette. Who I really was…

  I couldn’t let that happen. My heart started to pump in my ears. “You do?”

  She nodded. “Of course. I figured it out ages ago. But don’t worry, I didn’t tell then, and I won’t tell now.”

  I suddenly had the feeling that she and I were not talking about the same secret. “Thanks,” I said. “Who told you?”

  “No one told me. I could just tell. I’m good at watching people. The way he always happened to pass by during tennis practice. And I saw him leaving notes for you at the Old Man.”

  “Notes? With an Old Man?” I repeated.

  “The Old Man? That big cactus near school.” She sighed with exasperation. “I told you, I know about it. You don’t have to keep pretending. It was romantic the way you had to be secret and have Liza pick them up and deliver them for you.” My heart foundered as she said, “But now you get a second chance.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Although, in that instant, I was fairly sure I knew.

  “Hugsbyefornow,” she said, pushing me excitedly in the direction of the stairs.

  Turn and run, a voice in my head told me. Go. This is one meeting you are completely unprepared for.

  But I couldn’t. Like I was being urged forward by an invisible hand.

  The face in the scratched-out picture.

  I followed the short stairwell down until it ended at a door that said: “NO EXIT. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.”

  I paused, then pushed through it.

  The smell hit me first, the clean smell of chlorine and the less clean smell of mildew. My footsteps echoed through the massive tiled room. The pool was empty, but in the dim light coming from the emergency exit signs, you could see it had once been fancy, with a wall of green-and-gold mosaics on one side and a wall of mirrors on the other.

  Halfway down the length of the pool, I saw him. He was sitting on an abandoned lounge chair, legs straight in front of him, arms crossed over his plaid button-down cowboy shirt, leaning back with the kind of quiet patience of someone who could wait all day, all year for something. I could imagine him sitting there a dozen, two dozen, times before—same place, same posture. I could imagine Aurora walking toward him just like I did now.

  He said her name out loud now, and the way he said it was enough. Even though his face had been scratched out in the photo, I knew immediately who he was.

  Colin Vega.

  CHAPTER 35

  I could see why Aurora had scratched his face off so completely because if she hadn’t, it would have been hard to be angry with him.

  He was the kind of good-looking that smacks you in the stomach, the kind you see a hundred miles away and only looks better when it’s up close, the kind that makes your stomach feel gooey and all your joints seem to be less functional than they were the minute before you saw him. He looked like Superman in the moment right after he’s done something death-defying but before he’s put Clark Kent’s glasses back on—a little rough, not quite tame.

  But maybe the Superman impression was wrong because there was an edge to him, a tautness of his jaw. This was no good boy, but he wasn’t a simple bad boy either.

  Given what I knew of Aurora, I could imagine the two of them had been sparky together.

  He had deep-set brown eyes ringed with thick lashes, high cheekbones that cut his face into plains, and a tight mouth that looked like it could curl up in the corners, but didn’t. His hair was shorter than in the photo strip and kind of fuzzy, like it had been buzzed off. He had a scar through his left eyebrow. His face looked older than I’d pictured it, or maybe just careworn. His eyes seemed like they were the kind that could dance with mischief or even laughter under the right circumstances, but there was no laughter in them now. There was nothing.

  He didn’t stand as I drew closer, just looked me up and down and said, “You cut your hair.”

  My heart caught in my throat. I said, “You too.”

  He ran his hand over his, front to back then back to front and nodded. “Occupational hazard.”

  I said, “You—you’re not supposed to be here. I heard you moved.”

  “I heard you were back.”

  The coldness in his tone and his gaze was awful. He hated me, or who he thought I was.

  “How’s Dartmouth?” I asked.

  “I didn’t go. I enlisted instead.”

  “Enlisted?”

  “Marines. Did a tour and a half in Afghanistan.” He rubbed his thigh like it was really important for the fabric of his jeans to be smooth. Without warning he said, “You know I waited for you that night. And the next day. And the next night.”

  I didn’t have to ask which night. I knew he meant the night Aurora disappeared. “I’m sorry.”

  “‘I’m sorry’? That’s all you have to say?”

  “What else do you want me to say?”

  He seemed genuinely at a loss for words. Silence spread through the vast tiled room. “Something about why you didn’t come? Or call? Or show up? Why you ran away without me?” He shook his head and moved his eyes to stare at the middle distance. He said, “I thought you were dead.”

  “You sound disappointed I’m not.”

  His eyes came back to me, and now I would have given anything for the blankness that had been there before because the pain in them was terrible. “This is not a joke. Do you know what you did to me? Thinking you were dead? It destroyed my life. You were alive all this time, and you didn’t once write? Or call? What happened to ‘let’s run away together’?” He swallowed. “What happened to ‘I love you forever’?”

  He stared at me waiting fo
r answers I couldn’t possibly give. “I—I didn’t know,” I said lamely.

  I saw the inadequacy, the searing failure of that answer in his face. “You know why I enlisted?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because I didn’t care if I lived or died anymore. If you were dead, the world wasn’t worth living in. And the whole time there was a part of my mind that still kept wishing maybe you were alive. Maybe one day you would come back, and maybe, just maybe, you could tell me what happened.” He was breathing hard. “And now here you are. I’m listening.” The pain in his expression was lit with a flickering flame of hope.

  Seeing it broke my heart. He deserved so much better than the half-lies and tawdry excuses I offered to everyone else like distracting toys. He deserved the truth.

  I said, “I’m not who you think I am.”

  The pain, the shimmer of hope, didn’t disappear, but it wavered. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not the person you missed. I’m not that girl.” This was hard. Too hard. I had to get him away from me, keep him far away.

  He frowned. “Say that again.”

  “I’m not that girl.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “I am a fool.”

  I reached out a hand for him. “No, you’re—”

  He recoiled. “Don’t touch me. Whoever you are, don’t touch me.” He sat up straighter, bending at the waist to lean toward me. “Are you telling me you’re not Aurora Silverton?”

  I hesitated. But I knew it was the only way. The only way to make this right. “Yes. I’m a fake. My name is Eve Brightman.”

  He let a long low breath and shook his head. “What are you here for? Why are you doing this?”

  The agony in his voice made me hate myself. What could I say? What explanation could I possibly give? Suddenly the whole thing, the quarter of a million dollars, the not wanting to be lonely, the finding out the truth—everything felt squalid.

  Like he was reading my thoughts, he said, “You’re right. Don’t say anything. There is no good reason.”

  “It was Bain and Bridgette’s idea. They’ll tell you,” I said. For some reason it seemed important to think of anything that could make me seem less hideous in his eyes.