by Tanen Jones
I nodded. “You have to go back to work, right?”
“Yeah.” She gazed down at me, at my mouth, at the tears still clumping my eyelashes. “I wish I didn’t.”
“I wish you didn’t either.”
She squeezed my hand. “I’ll call you later. You should talk to your sister. I really think it’ll all be fine.”
I held on to her hand. It was solid and sticky in mine, our fingers interlaced, like we’d done it a thousand times before. “You think so?”
She nodded. “See you later, Robin.”
I watched her get into the police car and start it up, and then I went around to the driver’s side of my own little Nissan. The heat had stolen all the oxygen in the car, and the breath went out of my lungs as I pressed my forehead to the burning steering wheel and let my heart rate pick up again.
What a fucking moron, I thought. All it had taken was a promise from a stranger, and he’d spilled his guts. He deserved to be in prison; no one who killed people for a living should be allowed to go on being so naïve. But he’d learn, once he realized I hadn’t held up my end of the bargain. Why should I find Jennifer Clery? He’d already given me everything I asked for. And he’d done it in less time than it took for Nancy to get a cup of coffee.
He’d try to track me down once he was out. I had no doubt about that. But I’d be long gone by then.
44
Leslie
At five-thirty I shut my computer off by unplugging it. I walked as quickly as I could from my office to the elevator, to avoid having to make conversation with Justin. “Have a good night, Leslie!” he said energetically at my back anyway. I didn’t reply. Mary was waiting for me.
Stretches of the drive home disappeared from my memory. I was in the parking lot, then the intersection near the Target. Then I was sitting in my car in the driveway, thinking: I forgot to stop by the daycare.
No—it was Dave’s turn. I opened my car door. Taryn, who lived next door, waved at me from her yard. She was barefoot, aiming a kid’s lime-green squirt gun at the succulents. “Hi, Leslie!”
I lifted my head, and there was a brief moment before I remembered to reply. “Oh, hi, Taryn,” I said, running a hand through my hair.
“This is Austin’s.” She laughed. “Couldn’t find my spray bottle.”
I didn’t know what she meant, and it showed on my face.
The gun. Right. The squirt gun.
I laughed back.
Taryn cocked her head. “Have a good night!” she said after a second.
“Oh, thanks.” It wasn’t quite the right thing to say. I went into the house.
The stairs were strewn with fresh socks. A stack of mail sat on the floor next to the door. From the back of the house, muffled laughter issued. I took off my shoes and followed the noise into the kitchen.
It was brighter than the rest of the house, full of sun, and it smelled like someone had been cooking—curry, maybe. Pots and bowls crowded the sink, and the counter was covered in yellow splotches and fat, soggy grains of rice. The back door was open and the air from outside hung in the house. I stepped out onto the back patio.
Neither of them saw me at first: Mary in a blue-and-white-striped bikini top, the strings trailing into the waistband of her cutoff jeans. She was cross-legged on the grass, my sunglasses propped on top of her head, laughing, holding out her hands. The garden hose snaked over the ground beside her, parting the grass. Dave, his back to me in a lawn chair, sprawled out, still in his office clothes, tie missing.
“Come on,” Mary said, and Eli, wearing Dave’s tie around his neck, came hurtling across the lawn toward her, his legs so rubbery that his entire body was jostled from side to side with every step. He fell into her arms giggling, and Dave clapped.
“Five point four seconds,” Dave called. “Necesitas trabajar más, mijo.”
Mary rocked Eli from side to side and said into his ear, “Ready? Three…two…” She pushed him out of her arms so that he had a nearly airborne head start into his next dash toward the edge of the lawn.
“Leslie,” Dave said, twisting around. “You’re home.”
Mary looked up and pulled my sunglasses onto her face.
“You’re not ready,” I said. “We have to go to dinner.”
“You can stay out here and play for a second,” Dave told me. “Eli, look, Mommy’s home.”
Eli, distracted, tripped over Dave’s tie and fell hard. He let out a wail, coming up grass-stained.
“Oh, no,” Mary said. “Party’s over. You want to take him, Leslie?”
Dave glanced up at me. “I can do it,” he said. “She just got home.” He heaved himself off the lawn chair and went over to scoop Eli off the grass.
“Guess it’s time,” Mary said, raising her eyebrows at me over the sunglasses.
I shut the door to the patio behind us when we were inside. “You have to take this seriously,” I said.
“I am taking it seriously,” Mary replied. I couldn’t see her eyes.
“You’re wearing cutoffs,” I said. “You’re playing with the baby. Where’s the dress I left for you?”
She sighed. “It’s upstairs. It doesn’t fit. I got another one.”
“Another dress? From where?”
“Does it matter?” She took off my sunglasses and set them on the counter. I snatched them up. “I’m going to get ready,” she said. “You should have a glass of wine or something.”
When she turned around I saw that the backs of her thighs were pink and crazily patterned where she’d been sitting on the grass holding my baby, pretending to be his aunt. I stood there for a second, listening to Eli and Dave chattering on the back porch. Then I went to the sink and put on my yellow dish gloves.
I scrubbed every bowl, waiting for her, and then I wiped down the countertops. Dave was back on the lawn chair now, Eli draped over his chest, both of them asleep. I went to the bottom of the stairs and called, “M—Robin?”
No answer.
I climbed the stairs, picking up socks as I went. “Robin?” I said, once I’d reached the landing. The guest bedroom door stood open. I went inside with my handful of socks.
She’d made a mess of the room. Covers and sheets strewn across the floor, clothes hanging from the bedposts, dirty plates and glasses on the bedside table. The dress I’d left hanging neatly from her doorknob that morning was lying in an inside-out heap on the bare bed. The door to the bathroom was ajar, and I could see her moving around in front of the mirror.
“What’s taking so long?” I asked, sitting gingerly on the bed, next to the rejected dress. I made a neat pile beside me of the socks.
She pushed the door open farther and leaned out. Her mouth was a bright vermilion, matching her painted nails, and she’d curled her hair, except for a long limp hank that hung down behind her ear.
“You’re still in, aren’t you?” I said. “I mean, everything is still…” I stopped speaking.
Mary let the door fall open farther, and I saw that she was in a neon-yellow cocktail dress, strapless, her feet bare. Against the wood and ceramic of the bathroom she looked hyperreal, like a cutout from a magazine. I could see myself in the mirror behind her, almost a shadow in the dim bedroom. “Yeah,” she said, white teeth showing. “Everything’s good. What’s up?”
“I—” I shifted on the bed. “It’s fine. I just wanted to check.”
Mary turned back to the mirror and took up the last lock of hair, twisting it around the curling iron. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
I hadn’t sat in a bedroom watching another woman get ready in a long time. It smelled like hot hair and perfume, like the dressing room at prom. A memory floated past. My mother in the bathroom with Robin, me at the door. She’d told Robin to smile as wide as she could, and Robin had. You put it on the apples of your cheeks, my mother had said
, patting her with the powder puff. She used loose powder and too much of it, like a lot of the women I remembered from my childhood. Pink circles, fever spots. Robin grinning. It wasn’t a happy memory. Why wasn’t it happy?
I’d been watching my mother in the mirror. It was her face that was wrong. A half smile, like a grimace. My father used to tell us it was her nerves. We wore on her nerves. We weren’t supposed to be in our parents’ bathroom. It was her private space. Us being there was wearing on her nerves. That was why she looked that way.
Had I called Robin away, told her to stop bothering our mother?
I couldn’t remember. The rest of it had faded.
“How did you meet Dave?” Mary said, jarring me. “I don’t think you ever told me.”
I shook my head. “It’s not an exciting story.”
She smiled into the mirror. “Sure it is.”
“No.” I couldn’t see myself behind her anymore. “Just in school. Business school for me. He was getting his MS.”
I had been about to leave the party when we saw each other. I just went over to him. I never did things like that, bold things. But I’d had three beers and I went over to him and I said, I’m Leslie. I love your face, which I almost hated to remember. I did love his face, though; I’d loved it immediately, his wide, funny, flat-lipped mouth and faded pockmarks on his cheeks. The outside corners of his eyes tilted up a little, making him look permanently good-humored. His dark brown eyes, nearly the same color as his pupils.
He’d laughed, but not at me; he’d laughed and turned away from the woman he’d been talking to and said, I’m Dave. I love your face too.
I believed him when he said it. I didn’t even have a moment of doubt, the way I did when other men complimented me, their expressions expectant rather than admiring, waiting for the compliment to kick in, the way you waited for a faulty engine to turn over.
“How long ago was that?” Mary asked.
“Six years.”
She nodded. I watched her put in earrings, one after another. “Do you love him?” she said.
“Do I love my husband?” I repeated. “Of course I do.”
She padded back into the bedroom and kicked the sheets on the floor aside until she found a high heel. She put it on, then went around looking for the other one. “I just wondered if it, like, fades as you get older. I feel like everything kind of dries up, you know, eventually.”
“Not for me,” I said.
She found the other heel and straightened, several inches taller. “Okay. I’m ready. How about you?”
I couldn’t answer.
Mary came over and sat on the pile of socks next to me. The memory foam pressed us together. “If you need me to,” she said finally, “I’d help you, you know.”
I tried not to move next to her. “You are helping me,” I said.
She turned to me, her face half-lit by the bathroom. “With whatever it is you can’t tell me,” she said. “If it’s important, I’d help you. Like you helped me with Sam.”
I stared straight ahead. After a second, she got up. I heard her heels clicking down the stairs.
I stood stiffly and turned around, looking for my purse. The dress she’d discarded was still lying on the mattress, and I picked it up to turn it right side out again.
Downstairs, the porch door opened and I heard Dave and Mary speaking in murmurs. She laughed, then stifled herself, as if she was afraid of waking Eli up. I stepped back to fold the dress and my foot landed on something sharp inside the rumpled sheet on the floor. I stumbled and dropped the dress. Then I lifted the sheet and shook it.
A key fell out, black plastic at the top, with a Hertz sticker. A rental car.
She had a car somewhere.
Mary’s footsteps grew louder again. “Leslie? Are you coming?” she called up the stairs.
I dropped the sheet back over the key.
How had she gotten the money to rent it? Had she done it under her own name?
I’d almost told her when we were sitting on the bed together—almost trusted her. But she was a stranger. I had forgotten for a second that she was a stranger.
“I’m coming,” I called back, voice stronger now.
She was nobody.
Mary was at the foot of the stairs, holding out my purse. “Can I drive this time?” she said, as if she really were my sister, as if she asked for the keys every week. As if she didn’t have her own car hidden somewhere, so she could leave me whenever she felt like it.
“Not this time,” I said, as if I believed her. When had she started talking to me like that?
Her eyes were clear and guileless as she handed me my purse. “Well, come on, lady,” she said, pushing open the door. “Let’s go get your money.”
45
Leslie
The Blue Roof had once been alone on its lot, but in the past several years it had sold the surrounding land to dentists’ offices and realty businesses, and so the parking lot had had a face-lift as well, with too-white curbs and obsessively tended shrubbery. In the middle of all this the restaurant itself was incongruously shabby, the rest of the world having rejected its particular kind of tackiness in favor of the Colonial Revival brickwork and pillars meant to remind you of the buildings of yesteryear—a New England yesteryear that had never existed in the desert. The Albuquerque of my youth had looked more like the Blue Roof. Stucco, exposed beams. Strings of Christmas lights all year round.
I crossed the parking lot with Mary, several steps behind her. From this vantage point I could watch the little flickers that passed over the faces of almost everyone who saw her, as if she were famous, but she was only beautiful. I wondered if it was uncomfortable, to walk in the middle of so many gazes, skewered by them, or if she did it on purpose—drew them all in, searched for their eyes. Like a mirror made of faces, reflecting her wherever she went.
But when we reached the front doors, she didn’t appear to have noticed anything. A short middle-aged man held the door for her, and her face lifted as if no one had ever thought to be so kind to her before. “Thank you!” she said, her puffy Texas vowels back again. I realized that this too was an act—an old act, one I should have recognized a long time ago. Beauty was untrustworthy, so she added naïveté, a country accent. Like Marilyn Monroe, with the breathy little-girl voice. I remembered her back at Letourneau’s: I think people think I’m dumb.
Had I seen any part of her real personality? Or had she just shown me whatever she thought I wanted to see?
Wasn’t that what I’d hired her to do?
Some parts had to be real, I thought. It was impossible to be disingenuous every second. When she’d dripped across my bathroom floor on purpose—that had been the real Mary, maybe. And when we’d lain on the carpet in my father’s old house, listening to the Laura Nyro record. I hadn’t been alone then.
Inside, the restaurant was designed to look like an Old World courtyard, with murals of people leaning from painted balconies, their arms full of real ivy, which snaked down the walls along decades-old cracks. Wicker fans hung motionless from the ceiling, a holdover from when the restaurant hadn’t had air-conditioning, and each table had a miniature chain-pull lamp and a built-in ashtray, which could be emptied from below. No one was allowed to smoke in restaurants anymore, but the ashtrays suggested a sort of bitterness about this rule on the part of the management that was soothing to the many elderly smokers who were regulars there.
“We’re with Albert,” Mary said to the man at the host station, leaning familiarly on his podium. “I don’t know if he’s—Albert! Hi!”
Albert was at a table at the far end of the courtyard, underneath a painting of a red-cheeked woman leaning out of a window, clutching a bottle of wine in one hand and a dripping glass in the other. Next to the painting, he looked dour in his brown sport coat, napkin in lap and walker propped against the w
all. He didn’t hear Mary call out for him, but his head turned as she approached, a bright bit of yellow against the fake Spanish tile. “Girls,” he said, rising from his seat. “Nice to see you again. Robin, I’m speechless.”
Mary seemed to blush. I watched curiously as I saw that she only performed the body language of it, or maybe it was just that her makeup was thick enough to hide any extra color in her face. “Thank you! Oh my gosh. No, don’t get up—we’re too fast for you, we’re already sitting down. How are you?”
He tilted his hand: comme ci, comme ça. “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Look.” He stuck out his leg; there was a cuff sewn into the bottom, a bit too high, so that his translucent leg hairs showed just above the tops of his socks. “How are you? No trouble with traffic?”
“No, no. It was fine.”
He squinted at me. “And your husband? Your son—what’s his name? Eli?”
“Yes, Eli,” I said. Mary twitched in my direction and I added, “They’re fine.”
A potbellied man in plain clothes came to our table. I thought he might be the owner; he wore an expression that suggested both that he was ready to murder the incompetents around him and that he hoped we had a pleasant evening. “Can I get you something to drink? A bottle of wine for the table?”
“What do you think?” Albert asked us. “We could have a bottle, couldn’t we? Is red all right with you?”
“That would be amazing,” Mary said, smiling between Albert and the owner.
“How about you, Robin?” Albert asked when he’d finished ordering. “Have you been around to see old friends this week?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mary said, clasping his hand. “I looked up a couple of people I used to know. It’s been pretty interesting seeing what’s changed and what hasn’t.”
I stared at her. Had she really been talking to people Robin had known? Was that where she was going when she left the house, in the car she’d hidden from me?
“You found some who hadn’t moved away, then? It seems like it’s a rite of passage now, to leave home as soon as possible. I don’t know too many parents whose children stayed in one place.” Albert patted my leg. “Except for Leslie, of course.”