Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  “Hello, Mr. Dietrich. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, thrusting my right hand forward with plucky enthusiasm. Of course, I knew how to shake hands properly, and I knew that grown-ups didn’t stick out their hands like they were directing traffic when greeting one another, but Mother insisted I do it this way. She said it made me look more youthful and endearing.

  “And how old are you, little girl?” my mother asked, affecting a gruff, low-pitched voice.

  “I’m seven.”

  “Sir,” she said in her normal voice. “Remember to say ‘sir,’ Alice.”

  “I’m seven, sir.”

  Back to the old-man voice. “And how do you like school?”

  “I like it very well, sir.”

  My mother groaned. “Say it with a little more pep, Alice.”

  “I like it very well, sir!”

  “That’s better. Try to stay bright and sunny, Alice. People will always respond better to you if they think that you’re a cheerful person.” She sighed. “Now, if only we could do something about those freckles.”

  She introduced us to anyone important, or anyone she thought was important. Anyone who wasn’t one of the threadbare office drones, thwarted artists, or blowsy husband-hunters who showed up anyplace they were lucky enough to be asked.

  When we were older, she made me play the piano for them and she made Annie sing. The rehearsals we went through for those parties were ten times worse than practicing introductions and passing olive trays.

  Even so, I loved to hear Annie sing. She had a full, throaty alto voice like Judy Garland, and when she sang something she really loved, like “Over the Rainbow” or “My Funny Valentine,” I could see her go somewhere else. She wasn’t singing to a room of our parents’ drunk friends anymore. When she sang, she might as well have been in her own room, singing for nobody but herself.

  I would never have gone so far as to say that our parents loved her more than me, but it was clear they considered her more promising. Where Annie was “beautiful” and “smart,” I was “cute” and “clever.” Annie was charming; I was pleasant. Annie danced ballet and tap and took voice lessons, and I backed her up on the piano. And we both went to those awful parties.

  Things changed when Annie started high school. Our parents sent her out to talent shows, where Annie sang insipid, perky little songs while I accompanied her. Annie also sang at other parties—Hollywood parties—parties at which I wasn’t invited to perform, since I was too young to be beautiful or glamorous, but too old to be cute. My mother zipped Annie into dresses with full chiffon skirts and as low a neckline as a fifteen-year-old could pull off, and pinned her hair into complicated twists on top of her head.

  “Mother, it hurts,” Annie complained.

  “Glamour hurts, dear. Just wait until next week when I take you in to Stella for a rinse,” she said, tugging at Annie’s scalp. “We’ll turn this straw into gold yet.”

  Other things changed, too. Boys started calling the house, asking for her, sometimes two or three a night. Once or twice, I answered the phone and pretended to be her, but was always found out within a few sentences. Each of Annie’s boyfriends annoyed my parents more than the last, until she finally stopped bringing them home at all. She’d say she was going to the library to study or meeting a girlfriend for a soda, and then she’d meet her friends at the beach or go to the drive-in in Van Nuys.

  I missed spending all my time with her, but I also liked not being half of a set—the boring, tagalong half. The more Annie fought with our parents, the more I tried to be the perfect daughter, clearing the table while they screamed at each other across it. After she stormed out, I’d sit in the living room and do my homework. I made good grades, friends they more or less approved of—I did whatever they asked me to do. The better I was, the less attention they paid to me.

  But I wanted to have it both ways, too. When Annie snuck in through our bedroom window reeking of cigarette smoke and giggly with beer, I’d be waiting under the covers to press her for details. Annie liked telling me these stories. I guess I was a good audience, young enough to be shocked and old enough to be impressed. Besides, she knew I’d never rat her out to a woman who used to dress us in sailor suits for her friends’ amusement.

  She told me about the time she and her friends snuck into a drag show at a Central Avenue jazz club, and how they raced their cars up and down Highway 1. She told me about the pair of GIs who showed up at their beach party and disappeared with one of the girls before anyone figured out they’d stolen all the beer.

  “Sandy says she’s moving to San Diego with one of them,” Annie told me. “He took her out to this spot real far away from where we were and told her a bunch of goofy stuff, and then Sandy said they wound up exchanging marriage vows right there on the beach.”

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Annie nodded. “It is very silly. Especially since he left town the next day. Without Sandy, I might add.”

  “Poor Sandy.”

  “I don’t know that she really deserves our pity,” Annie sighed. “I’ve been trying to tell her that he’s not coming back for her, but she won’t listen. She just moons around the hallways at school, trying to look tortured and wise. Alice, promise me you’ll never marry a GI on leave.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  Nights like that were fun, but they always made me very aware that I was Annie’s kid sister. She had exciting friends who did exciting things, and a whole life that had nothing to do with me. But as always, Annie made room for me. My favorite times with her were Sunday evenings when my parents went out for dinner and drinks with friends and left Annie and me with the house to ourselves. Sometimes we made elaborate desserts like trifle or cherry torte that never came out right, or wrote new endings for the awful movies we’d seen the week before. But most Sunday nights, we did puzzles.

  Not jigsaw puzzles, but real ones. Both of us were crazy about any kind of crossword, brain teaser, or jumble, and fought over those pages of the newspaper, eventually reaching an arrangement where Annie got the morning edition and I got the evening edition. It was too good a thing to quarrel about.

  Our obsession started during the war after our mother told us about the cryptographers who worked for the government, making up all kinds of codes to transmit secret messages that couldn’t be deciphered by the Axis. She wrote out the whole alphabet in Morse code, and Annie and I practiced sending the long and short signals across darkened rooms using flashlights and whistles. I wondered why our mother would ever want to be something as idiotic as a movie star when she could do something like that.

  During blackouts and curfews there wasn’t much to do, so Annie and I made a game of it: the Gates sisters, cryptographer spies and crusading angels of the Allied forces. Glamorous, elusive, and uncrackable.

  We would make up codes and ciphers and hide them around the house. First you had to find the code, and then you had to break it. For a while, Annie preferred the Caesar cipher, a simple letter-substitution code that uses a disk with the alphabet inscribed in a ring. Inside, there’s a smaller, movable disk that you align with the letters on the outside ring to tell you which letters to substitute.

  So, a code like this:

  dtz xrjqq

  with a wheel like this:

  would be broken like this:

  dtz xrjqq

  you smell

  The codes were easy to crack once you had the key, but Annie was very good at hiding them. There were things about our house that only she and I knew. We knew which stairs creaked in which places, where the carpets were loose and could be pulled back, how long you could hide in the laundry chute before your arms gave out and you went tumbling into the basement, and every cubby, crawl space, alcove, and hidey-hole in the place.

  Annie and I eventually realized the limitations of the Caesar cipher. Keys can be hidden, but they can also be found by the enemy, so we decided to invent a system that used the Caesar cipher princip
le without a physical key. Instead of a wheel, the key to the code was located in the greeting or closing of the message, and we must have had a hundred of them. We taught a few of them to our most trusted friends in the neighborhood and used them when we played spies or war or secret mission, but only Annie and I knew them all.

  It was fun while it lasted, but it didn’t. We grew up. The younger neighborhood kids went back to playing house and school and doctor, and Annie began to spend most of her free time being carefully groomed for teenage stardom by our mother, and I was left somewhere in between.

  Of course I didn’t like it. You might think I was jealous that Annie was the chosen one, that she’d been whisked away to a glamorous world I wasn’t ever going to be a part of, but that wasn’t it. We’d both been around movie people our entire lives, enough not to be dazzled by that kind of life. But I missed her. And I didn’t like the way she changed when she ventured out into that world.

  When we were home on Sunday nights, Annie was full of clever ideas and funny stories, but when she came home from singing at those parties, she looked like all the life had been sucked out of her. She’d ignore me when she came into the room, peel off her dress, and disappear into the bathroom for at least an hour. When she came out, she would sit at her vanity and brush her hair, while practicing coquettish facial expressions in the mirror. After slathering a layer of cold cream on her face, she’d sink into bed without saying a word. It was like watching a mannequin.

  In the morning, she’d be herself again, and I’d act like nothing had happened.

  Once, I asked her why she wouldn’t look at me, why she wouldn’t talk to me. All she said was, “Alice, when I get home from those things, I just wish I was invisible, so I pretend that I am.”

  So, I let her be invisible. It didn’t seem like much to ask. If I’d known she would develop a taste for it, that one day she’d disappear altogether, maybe I would have done something else. Maybe I would have tried harder to stop her.

  When I got home from the hospital, I felt like I’d been gone for a year. My head was a hive of hospital sounds and ugly thoughts. My eyes were bloodshot; my hair was greasy. I’d been wearing the same clothes for more than a day, and all I could think about were the bruises and bandages on my sister’s face.

  “How was Cassie?” my mother asked.

  “Fine,” I said, too jarred and lost in thought to make up a story about spending the night at my friend’s house.

  Fortunately, my mother wasn’t interested in hearing one.

  “I thought we’d have an early supper. Your father and I are meeting friends later on this evening, or at least we are if he ever gets home. I can’t imagine where he is right now,” she said, chattering as much to herself as to me. “What’s the matter, Alice? Better watch out or your face will freeze that way.”

  My lip had curled into a sneer, listening to her babble on about meeting friends for drinks when across town, her older daughter was lying in a hospital bed. But then I remembered that she didn’t know, and that the reason she didn’t know was because I hadn’t told her. I stopped scowling and helped her set the table.

  My father came home later, even more distracted than usual, and we sat down to Sunday dinner. I ate as much as I could on an uneasy stomach, smiling politely and answering their disinterested questions about my sleepover at Cassie’s house. After we’d finished eating, they seemed as eager to clear the table as I did.

  My head was teeming with questions, and Jerry had raised more of them than he’d answered. When I was at the hospital, by Annie’s side, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Now that I wasn’t, I knew I had to do something.

  I got into bed exhausted that night, but as much as my body wanted sleep, my brain was having none of it. I thought about what had happened to Annie, played out the ways it might have happened over and over in my mind. What had she been doing out there in the park at that hour? Did she know the person who’d done it? Had she been afraid? Had she even seen it coming?

  And then I turned over the things that Jerry Shaffer had told me, how my father was a piece of work and Annie wasn’t any kind of angel.

  After an hour or so of that, I gave up on trying to get some sleep and decided I could either stay in bed, driving myself crazy, or do something productive.

  And that’s how I came to be in my father’s office, digging through his desk drawers at two in the morning.

  Even on the nights they went out, my parents had cocktail hour promptly at five and drinks with dinner, so I wasn’t worried that my snooping would interrupt their drunken slumber.

  The first drawer I tried was filled with old receipts and folders full of my father’s press releases and news clippings. On my father’s desk, there’s a picture of him and the movie star Betty Grable. Well, sort of. In the picture, Betty’s hanging on the arm of a good-looking director in a tuxedo and making her sex-kitten eyes at him, and my father’s standing in the background with one of his arms chopped out of the frame. You know those captions in the high school yearbook: “Susie and Joe are crowned Homecoming King and Queen, while Norman looks on.” That’s how the rest of life is, too. There are the people who look gorgeous and do interesting things, and there are the people who look on. My father is worse because he looks on for a living.

  The center drawer was locked. I took the letter opener from his desk blotter and jiggled it into the lock like I’d read about in my detective novels. It must have been a pretty crummy lock because after a minute or so, the drawer popped open.

  There were only two things inside, and neither one of them seemed worth locking up.

  The first was a matchbook with a maroon cover and gold embossed lettering that read MARTY’S, and a phone number written inside. I didn’t know why it was important, but I pocketed it anyway.

  The second thing I saw was a postcard, the kind that tourists buy by the handful on Hollywood Boulevard, covered with palm trees and oranges and pretty girls in bathing suits, so they can show their friends that they were there. I turned it over and gasped when I recognized Annie’s handwriting. It read:

  Dear Occupant:

  Right away, I saw that it was one of our old ciphers. As Annie’s codes went, this one was pretty easy to crack, a simple null cipher. We employed them only when the message wasn’t that secret, or when the perceptiveness of the potential interceptor was beneath contempt. The tip-off was in the salutation. A letter that started with “Greetings” signaled that the message was contained in every third letter, “Hello,” in every fifth. “Dear” was the easiest to do, especially if you were in a hurry, and it signaled that the message was in the first letter of every word.

  The message read:

  Sorry to ruin all the fun, really. Does Alice really miss sis?

  That’s what my father would have read. To me, though, the message said:

  Stratfrd Arms

  It was postmarked two months after she’d left home, and she’d meant it as a message for me, even though I’d received it almost four years too late.

  Los Angeles is a city where girls get lost all the time. They disappear, change their names, and nobody ever hears from them again. Just one year before, someone found the body of a girl named Elizabeth Short in a vacant lot, cut in half, all the blood drained from her body, knife gashes at the sides of her mouth. The newspapers started calling her the Black Dahlia, and they wrote about her every day for months: her boyfriends, what she was wearing when she disappeared, what was in her handbag. There was a whole parade of suspects, but the police never found out who did it.

  The problem was nobody cared about Elizabeth Short until she was dead. She drifted alone in California for years—no family, no real friends—living in grimy rooming houses. She was a pretty girl with a moon-shaped face and thick black wavy hair, but when they found her, her teeth were so rotten she’d plugged the cavities with candle wax. For some reason, that part made me the saddest. If she’d had someone looking out for her, someone who could see how lon
ely and neglected she was, maybe she wouldn’t have gone off with the wrong person that night. Maybe she wouldn’t have turned up dead in a vacant lot.

  I’d stayed with Annie for more than a day in the hospital, and no one had come to see her except a private detective. For all I knew, nobody else would. But I knew that if Annie woke up, she was in as much danger as she’d been in before, and that she’d need someone she could trust to help her, the way I couldn’t four years before. I wondered what had happened between this postcard and now, what chain of events had led to her being beaten and left for dead in the park. Part of me didn’t want to know the people she’d known, the places she’d been, the things she’d done during those years. I didn’t want to think of my sister in those dark places.

  I was trying to jiggle the lock shut on my father’s desk when I realized that the detective novels never talked about that part. When Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade rummaged through a drawer, they didn’t care if anybody knew they’d done it. But I did. I lived here.

  The plan I came up with was far from perfect, but better than standing there in a panic.

  I went to the window of my father’s office and pulled up the sash and screen. For a man so meticulous about locking up match-books, he was thankfully less careful about his windows. At least that meant I wouldn’t have to break the glass. Next, I went through the other desk drawers again, dumping a few files on the floor and rummaging through the papers on top of his desk. To make it convincing, I lowered myself into the flower bed underneath the window, trampling the bushes before hoisting myself back inside. Now it looked a little like a break-in.

  For good measure, I removed several pictures from the wall, even though I knew the safe was behind a particularly large and ugly painting of a mean-eyed rooster. Where my father had acquired it, or why, I had no idea.

  More out of curiosity than anything, I tried another trick from my detective novels. A smart person doesn’t write down the combination to their safe and leave it lying around their office, and my father was a fairly smart person. However, he was also a person who had trouble remembering his home phone number and his wife’s birthday. The combination would be around here somewhere.