by Tanen Jones
I took an extra cupcake and put it in my purse, then asked Mrs. Borrego where the bathroom was. She pointed. I went into the hallway and began pushing doors. A bathroom, a closet, Marisol’s bedroom, and finally, near the end, her brother’s. Kevin was lying on the bed with headphones on, eating Bugles.
I slipped into the room and tapped him on the shoulder. His leg jerked in surprise and he opened his eyes.
“I brought you a cupcake,” I said, pulling it out of my purse and offering it to him. It was slightly crushed.
He struggled to sit up. “I know you,” he said. “You’re that chick Robin. You’re friends with Marisol?”
I crossed my arms. “I feel so famous. How do you know about me?”
Kevin snorted. “I’m sure you’re fuckin’ mystified,” he said as he unwrapped the cupcake. “You don’t like the party?”
I shrugged. “It’s not to my taste,” I said, trying to sound older.
“Hagh.” Kevin doubled over; he’d bitten into a plastic pig. “Ow, fuck! What the fuck!” He pressed his fist to his mouth and came away with bloody cake crumbs.
“Oh, the ears got you,” I said, watching him interestedly. “I forgot to tell you there were animals in the cupcakes. It’s good otherwise, though, right?”
“Jesus,” he said, wiping his hand on his black jeans and licking his lips. “What do you want?”
He was fourteen, already barrel-chested, with long thin limbs and a wide, melancholic face. I sat on his lap.
* * *
—
It took barely anything after that to convince him to share his weed with me. Nicky Chiklis, my recent first boyfriend, had told me Kevin’s older brother who lived in Bernalillo sold weed, so Kevin always had some. It was true; Kevin said, reclining on the bed, “It’s shush money, basically. I don’t tell our mama what he’s doing on the weekends, and he gives me dimes whenever he visits.”
“Hush,” I said. He cocked his head. “Hush money.”
“Oh, right,” he said, nodding. “How are you feeling? Is it like what you thought?”
“I feel like I’m in a movie,” I said. “Like I’m echoing.”
He laughed too loudly. “I’m high, like, all the time in school,” he said. “I can’t stand it otherwise. I think I’m not cut out for it, you know?”
“Sure you are,” I said, touching his ankle with mine. It was thrilling, like passing a finger through a flame. Kevin drew his leg back and wrapped his hands around it protectively. “Don’t you want to feel close to me?” I said.
“I don’t know anything about you,” he answered, but his eyes crinkled. “You got any older brothers?”
“An older sister,” I said. “Leslie.”
“Oh, with the…” Kevin held his hand to his chin.
“Pageboy,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I knew her. She was an upperclassman in the junior high when I started. Looked like a kid.” He eyed me. “You don’t look like a kid.”
“She’s not a kid,” I said, inhaling. “She used to lock me up, you know.”
“Lock you up where?” He leaned forward to take the joint from me.
“In the guest bedroom.” I closed my eyes. “She stole the key out of Daddy’s desk. Whenever she didn’t want to watch me anymore…or didn’t want to talk to me…I’d spend hours in there. Looking at the ceiling.”
“My brother locked me in a closet one time,” Kevin said. “It’s like a rite of passage.”
“No,” I said dreamily. “It wasn’t to mess with me. It was over and over. Like I wasn’t really human to her.” I opened my eyes. “She pretends to be a good person. But she locked me in there like a dog.”
“Jesus,” Kevin said.
I patted his hand. “Do you feel closer to me now?”
I think he did; Kevin’s brother went to prison the next year, and by the time I was in high school Kevin was dealing. Discounts for me, because I was his first. We never had sex, but he liked to watch me get high, lying beside me, his face next to mine. I fed him stories that way, like putting my tongue in his mouth; as intimate, if not more. Should I call him a boyfriend? I’d rather call him my priest. I only ever told him the truth.
32
Mary
The house on Riviera squatted by the road, dull-eyed. I’d seen the big pink stone next to the door when Leslie had taken me here to pack boxes, and I’d been right about it: when I nudged it with the toe of my sneaker, the spare key lay underneath, grimy with dirt.
Inside, the old man’s smell still clung to everything. Spoiled vegetables and cigarettes underneath a hospital varnish of antiseptic gel. I wrinkled my nose and started searching.
Leslie’s room first; why wouldn’t she hide her secrets in among the rest of her stuff? It was the first room down the hall, painted a sunny, virtuous yellow. But it was empty save for a white bed frame and several sealed cardboard boxes. I examined the boxes. TOYS, two boxes of BOOKS, and VINTAGE CLOTHES. Were ’00s clothes vintage? Who was going to buy Leslie’s old low-riders and bedazzled tees?
I scratched at the carpet where it met the baseboards, but each corner was stapled down tight, no way to access the flooring underneath. Whatever it was, she wasn’t keeping it under the floor. Crawling on my hands and knees, I checked the underside of the bed frame—dead spiders and dust balls.
I shuffled back out into the main part of the house and turned toward the old man’s study. There was an ancient IBM desktop, from the time when powered-off computer screens were gray, not black. At the very least, I bet I could play King’s Quest on it, no problem. I pressed the power button and the modem wheezed, rousing itself into a gradually increasing pitch, like an airplane taking off. The screen remained gray. I poked at the mouse and pressed a few sticky keys. Nothing. I felt around the back of it for the cord and followed it with my fingers down to the modem. It was plugged in, the computer was running, and yet nothing showed on the screen. I held down the power button and tried again. The monitor was dead.
Okay. I glanced around the study. Dust motes drifted in the faint light from the blinds. Bookcases, mostly empty. Boxes here and there. A closed door on the opposite side of the room, maybe leading to the second hallway. An outdated globe, scattered office detritus: plastic in- and outboxes, chunks of Post-its. The wedding photograph was back on the desk.
There were a lot of little drawers in the desk—maybe in there. I opened them one at a time. Mostly they were badly organized documents, things that should have been in the filing cabinet across the room—mail from the bank, tax documents, the carbon copies of dozens of checks. Here and there I found household things like packs of playing cards and pencils and old spare keys, and one little drawer held nothing but a fragile-looking glass-blown Christmas ornament still attached to its gold hook. Another held a few childish construction-paper drawings of houses and cats. The longest drawer had a lock on it, and it wouldn’t open when I tugged. I looked closer.
The handle had no dust on it. No—one side had a wad of gray, as if someone’s thumb had dragged all the way across the handle, gathering up the dust as it went. And it was recent enough that I could still see the track.
That was it.
I tried the spare keys in the lock, but they were all too big. I stuffed them in my pocket in case I needed them in the rest of the house. There weren’t any other keys lying around the rest of the study that I could see, and most of the books were in boxes, so I doubted the drawer’s key had been in any of those. I crawled underneath the desk and craned my neck, but there wasn’t anything taped to the underside of the wood, and pushing on the bottom of the drawer from below did nothing but rattle whatever was inside.
I stood up and opened the little drawer with the Christmas ornament, carefully removing the gold hook. I’d picked a couple of locks before, but I wasn’t an expert by any means, and I had no idea whether the h
ook would work. I fitted it into the lock and tried to feel for tumblers, jiggling it up and down.
There was a click. My breath caught.
The drawer slid open. What a shitty lock. I could have opened the drawer by yanking it hard enough, I thought—but then Leslie would be able to tell someone had broken in. This way was better.
Inside were more documents, crumby Hostess wrappers, a very nice Montblanc, and—
A cellphone.
My heart was pounding. I took out my own phone charger and plugged the phone in, waiting as the screen came slowly to life. It was a BlackBerry-style cell with a physical keypad, one of the ones you paid twenty bucks for at Best Buy. No password. I used the navigator arrows to select the text-message icon.
There was only one exchange in the phone, between the user and a number that hadn’t been added to Contacts. A 505 area code, local. I clicked on it.
It was definitely Leslie’s phone, not the old man’s. The last text message had been sent in late February, after he’d died. Leslie had said:
We met earlier this afternoon. Please use this number to contact me from now on.
The reply came several hours later:
OK to come by Sunday with the cash. If Ed is at front desk ask for me.
After that, the other person never responded again. Leslie had texted over the next several weeks:
Please confirm one more time so I can be sure.
Please confirm.
I need to hear back from you.
No one answering door. Please reply.
I need an answer.
Reply.
The store has been closed all week. What’s going on?
I want my money back.
I want my money back.
Give me my fcking money back.
I clicked slowly through the rest of the phone. No email. Nothing in the trash. When I clicked on the navigator, the navigation history loaded below the search bar. Just one address: 31 Piedra Roja Rd, Corrales, NM, 87048.
I copied the address and went back to the phone’s main screen to paste it into the Google search bar.
Google said it was a Curves—one of a chain of gyms that only allowed women and were decorated like the set of an infomercial.
But Leslie didn’t go to Curves. She went to Planet Fitness—I’d seen the messages on Facebook only this morning reminding her to re-up her membership. I thumbed through the reviews, of which there were three. One of them began, I’ve been going to this gym since it opened in April, and I’ve lost twelve pounds with the help of their lovely trainers!
Thank you, Carol Fernandez. I gave her review an anonymous thumbs-up.
So Leslie had gone to the Curves before it was a Curves. I scrolled through all the Google results for the address, but I couldn’t find the name of the business it had been before it went up for sale.
how to find out what building used to be, I searched.
The National Archives, Find a Historic Building, Cyndi’s List, How to Find Out If a Building Is Being Demolished Near You! Zoopla, Zillow, Reddit threads, Google Maps. I tried Zillow and a couple of records-of-sale sites. None of them listed the sale to Curves—maybe it was too recent to have been entered into the archives online. I clicked on a Quora question that more or less matched mine. The respondent listed several of the links I’d already seen on Google and finished up with, But if you’re looking for a privately owned residence that’s not a historic building, and there are no records of sale available online, there’s not much you can do unless you’re buddies with a P.I.!
I blinked. I wasn’t buddies with a P.I., but I did know a police officer.
33
Mary
The phone rang six times before Nancy picked up. “Hello?” I tried. “Nancy? It’s me.”
A long few seconds of silence. Then Nancy said, “Okay, hang on,” far away, as if to somebody else. The line went dead.
I blinked and jabbed at the phone to redial. It went straight to voicemail this time.
I paced out of the study and into the living room, opening my texts app. For some reason I had expected her to pick up right away. I could’ve sworn that was exactly what she would do. The way we had tilted toward each other—how easily it had happened, as if the muscle memory was still there.
As I was staring at the texts app, my phone buzzed in my palm. I swiped to answer.
“Hi, sorry,” Nancy said. “I was inside, I don’t have good reception in the building.”
My mouth hung open for a moment. “It’s Robin,” I said experimentally.
“I know.” I heard her make a little glottal noise; she’d almost said something else.
“I wanted to talk to you again,” I said, hoping to draw it out of her.
She cleared her throat. “I was thinking about calling you,” she said quietly. “But then I thought…I didn’t know when you were leaving again.”
A funny feeling stole through me. Nancy is in love with me, I thought. That’s what this is about. I pictured her wrapped around her wife, staring at the phone on the bedside table. My face in her mind now. For ten years, she’d wanted to see Robin one last time.
And then I’d arrived.
It was sort of beautiful. Romantic, almost. And if Nancy could help me with Leslie, that was a win-win, wasn’t it?
I let the silence spool out before I said, “I was supposed to leave today. But I didn’t.”
Nancy exhaled, sounding like she was trying not to let me hear her relief. “Okay,” she said.
“I’m scared.” My throat felt tight. “I’ve never…You’re just…I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to get in the way of you and—I don’t want to get in the way of anything,” I said. “I don’t even know what I want.”
“I don’t know what I want either.” She sounded like she was echoing me just to soothe me.
“Things are so crazy right now,” I said. “With my family. I found out—I mean, I can’t tell it to a cop. But I wasn’t even thinking about it with you. It felt like ten years hadn’t even passed.” I put the phone close to my mouth and drew in a quick breath so she could hear it. “Did it feel like that to you?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Are you in trouble? What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing. I just—This is crazy, but I canceled my flight home.”
“You canceled?”
“I want to see you again,” I said, letting the words spill out like I couldn’t help myself.
“I don’t know.”
She was so ready to give in. I could hear it in her voice. “Please, Nancy,” I said.
“I’m on a shift.”
I squeezed the phone. “I could meet you somewhere?”
She didn’t reply for a minute. Then she said, “Do you remember where we used to meet at the lookout off La Cueva?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said quickly.
“We could talk there. I have to go,” she said. “Wait there for me.”
“I will,” I breathed into the phone. “I’ll wait for you.” I picked my words carefully. Nancy had waited for a decade. She’d like it, me waiting for her this time. I envisioned myself leaning against Nancy’s cop car with the hazy, dusty city spread out below me. Where was my lipstick? I rummaged in my purse.
“Bye,” Nancy said, unable to prevent a hint of shy conspiracy from edging into her tone. Like we were the last two girls awake at the sleepover.
“Bye,” I said softly, and let her hang up first. Then I went back into the study to unplug Leslie’s phone and clear the history. As I set the phone back in the desk, the papers underneath it shifted slightly, and a wrinkled envelope peeked out from behind the rest. I drew it out. It was lumpy, that’s why it was wrinkled. The flap hadn’t been sealed, only tucked into the rest of the envelope like a Chinese ta
ke-out carton. I opened it curiously.
Inside was a pair of earrings.
Those were the earrings Leslie had been wearing that first night, when we’d met in the parking lot. She’d put them in the desk sometime between then and now. I glanced up at that wedding photograph. There were the earrings I was holding. On Christine’s ears this time, as she looked timidly into the camera, clutching her new husband’s arm. In a dozen years she would be dead. In a few decades, Leslie would be the only one left in this house, laboring on her knees to pack her family’s things into each labeled cardboard box.
I shoved the earrings back into the envelope and replaced them underneath the phone in the drawer. It took me three tries to get the lock to catch. Leslie should have picked a better place to hide the phone. But I knew why she’d been drawn to this one. The kids’ drawings, the Christmas ornament. It was where her father had stored the private objects of his life.
I got slowly to my feet. I needed to get out of this fucking house. It was as full of secrets as Leslie’s house was bare.
34
Mary
Back in my rented coupe, I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. My eyelids felt puffy and heavy, but I didn’t look any different. I studied my face for a moment, thinking about what Nancy would see in it, and then I got my lipstick out of my bag and applied it carefully. It was too dark a color for daytime, but that was all right. I’d look like I was trying to impress her.
La Cueva was a winding road that peaked right before the valley drop-off into the foot of the mountains. The government had marked a portion of the land just off the road as a picnic site. I pulled into the bare-dirt lot and got out. It was a clear, sunny day, and I could see for miles, until the roofs blurred together into the purple band of the horizon. In the other direction, the mountaintops were still white here and there with snow, although it was nearly gone, drained into the arroyos below.