Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  “Did I ever tell you about my first day in Los Angeles, Alice? I marched right up to the gates of Warner Brothers and didn’t leave until they gave me a job.”

  It was a story I’d heard a hundred times. She told it to everyone and never failed to brighten when she did. Even now, she smiled at the mention of those stupid Warner Bros. gates.

  Like a thousand other girls, my mother had gotten on a bus for Hollywood the day she turned eighteen, the prettiest girl in some godforsaken southern town she’d never once suggested we visit. But once she got to Los Angeles, she quickly realized that the city was full of pretty girls just like her, and that she didn’t know the first thing about how to be a movie star.

  But my mother had something those other girls didn’t: a skilled trade.

  All through high school, she’d worked at the local beauty parlor, setting the curls and rinsing away the gray of rich women who acted like a sharecropper’s daughter should be so lucky as to lay her hands on their heads. If she could handle women like that, she thought, she could handle anyone.

  The next day, my mother marched up to the gates of Warner Bros. Studios and asked directions to hair and makeup, and the guard had waved her on through. And luckily, there were fifty chorus girls in need of identical chignons, and one of the regular girls had called in with the flu. Not one of the hairstyles she arranged shook loose during the dance numbers that day, and she was asked to come back.

  She started with chorus girls, then worked her way up to styling the hair of leading ladies. After a few months of that, my mother felt like she finally knew how to be a movie star. She took modeling jobs and went on cattle calls until she landed her first chorus girl role.

  “And the rest,” she always said, “is history.”

  I’d heard her tell the story so often I swear I knew every beat. She loved the way it made her look—scrappy, bold, full of pluck and gumption. The exact opposite of anything I’d ever known her to be.

  “I hate that story,” I said.

  “I know you do, but Annie loved it,” my mother said, a faraway look in her eyes. “I thought it was what she wanted. It was so hard for me when I was trying to break in, and all I could see was how easy it was going to be for her with her looks, her talent, your father’s connections. If I’d known, I never would have pushed her.”

  “Known what?”

  My mother poured another cup of coffee for herself and acted like she hadn’t heard me.

  “I want you to be happy, too,” she said when she sat down again. “I guess I haven’t done a very good job at that, either.”

  I started to say that I was fine, that I was happy, but decided I’d already told my mother enough lies for one night.

  “If you’d known what you wouldn’t have pushed her?” I asked again.

  My mother had never spoken so freely with me about my sister. I wondered if seeing my sister’s handwriting, her picture after all these years, had cracked something open inside her. Yes, I wanted information. Yes, I wanted to know the truth, but even more than that, I wanted her to keep talking about Annie like she was a person we knew and loved and hadn’t tried to erase from our lives.

  My mother pressed her lips together, and she shook her head.

  “If I’d known she could get hurt,” she said.

  She stared at the table, twisting her rings and kneading her fingers, first one hand, then the other, faster and faster until finally I reached out and covered them with the palm of my hand.

  She stopped fidgeting and looked up at me.

  “Alice, if I’d been there, if I’d been the one who picked her up at the police station, things would have been different. I wouldn’t have said she made the whole thing up. I wouldn’t have cared how it made the studio look.”

  It was the thing I’d always wanted to know, but as I realized what my mother was telling me, I felt myself pulling away from her.

  I wanted to talk about Annie, but not like this.

  “I never thought she was lying,” my mother said. “I always believed her, but she hated me anyway, right along with your father. You hate me, too, don’t you? You think I let her go. You think I took her away from you.”

  There was a time when I would have told her that was exactly what she’d done. But sitting across from her at the kitchen table, I saw the suffering in her eyes, and I wondered if I’d been wrong.

  “I would have given anything in the world to be able to fix it,” she said.

  My mother folded her arms across the table and buried her head in them. Stark, animal sobs wracked her body. I put one of my hands on her shoulder until they slowed, then gave her a tissue. She took it without lifting her head from the table.

  “I don’t hate you,” I said.

  I wanted her to tell me exactly what had happened to Annie, to confirm the big, ugly thoughts that bubbled in my head like hot tar: Annie had gone to the police. She’d told them a story. Someone had hurt her. My father said she’d made the whole thing up, so he could protect the people at his studio.

  This wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to people in my world. Or maybe it was the kind of thing that happened all the time—how would I know? No one ever talked about it. No one ever called it what it was. No one said its name.

  We agreed to talk around it and fill in the blanks with whatever thoughts let us sleep at night.

  I would have stopped it.

  It would have been different if I’d been there.

  I knew why, too. It was the same reason that I couldn’t ask my mother the question I already knew the answer to.

  At last, my mother lifted her head and looked me in the eye.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, Alice, but promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you’ll come back.”

  I didn’t know whether she was talking about tonight, or always, but either way, the promise stuck in my throat. In a few hours, I’d be sneaking out of the house to call Millie. After that, I’d be back at the hospital with Annie. I already had so many promises to keep.

  And I was so tired. It had been three nights since my life was turned upside down. Three nights since I’d slept properly. Even though I was sitting up, my eyes began to droop shut.

  My mother sighed and said, “Never mind,” before I’d managed to promise her anything. She pinched her eyes shut and then brushed her hair out of her eyes with her fingertips and straightened her blouse, and she was herself again. It was almost as if our conversation had never happened.

  “You should go to bed, Alice,” she said. “I’m going to sit up a bit longer.”

  I took Irma’s letters with me when I went up to my room, and my mother didn’t try to stop me. I left her there at the table, cradling the photograph of Annie in her hands.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I’m writing this because a woman has been murdered, and I believe my own life is now in danger.

  On July 3, 1948, Conrad Donahue murdered Irma Martin. I saw this with my own eyes, and would swear to it in a court of law.

  Should my word fail to convince you, go to Irma’s apartment at 6326 Lexington and lift up the floorboards under her bed. I believe what you find there will be of interest.

  If my life is forfeit, it is my last wish to see that justice is done.

  Signed,

  Millicent Grabowski, a.k.a. Camille Grabo

  Up in my room, I had to read Millie’s letter twice before it could sink in. She’d seen me take it, so she must have meant for me to have it. Unfortunately, I had no idea what she expected me to do with it. Take it to the police? She could have done that herself, and it would have meant a lot more coming from her lips than mine. Give it to Jerry? I knew what Millie would have to say about that.

  And I had other questions now, too. For somebody who’d witnessed a murder, Millie was awfully bold to be lingering around her own apartment. Annie hadn’t even been there the night that Irma was murdered, and look what had happened to her. There was something more to it, but whatever
it was, I couldn’t make it out.

  I put the letter down and picked up the one that had been calling out to me since the moment I first saw it. There was something indecent about reading a dead girl’s letters, but the moment I saw that tense, angular penmanship, I couldn’t help myself. It was the postcard that led me to the Stratford Arms; it was the Nihilist cipher at the flophouse all over again. It was another piece of my sister, only this time, she wasn’t hiding anything.’

  Dear Irma,

  Is this heaven? I keep pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. And when I’m not pinching myself, I’m slapping myself in the face for not thinking of this sooner. And when I’m not busy pinching and slapping myself, I’m having the best time I’ve ever had in my life.

  You never feel crowded in Los Angeles, so I didn’t quite appreciate the difference before. It’s not more space I want. It’s land. Wide-open stretches of land, and pastures with honest-to-god cows and horses grazing on them. And it gets so hot here. Unbelievably hot, so that all you want to do at night is sit on the porch and drink cold beer and listen to cicadas. I met a boy with a guitar last night, and we sat and sipped and sang all night, and he wouldn’t call me anything but “Miss.”

  The only good thing about leaving is knowing that I’ll come back, and that next time, I’ll bring you with me. Even if I have to drag you out here by your hair.

  Send my love to the girls. I miss you. Be good.

  Love,

  Annie

  It was Annie there on the page, the charming, chatty Annie who’d gossiped with me under the covers long past our bedtime. Only she’d changed. No more dreams of being a movie star or singing to a crowd of thousands from the middle of a giant stage. All she wanted now was a little breathing room and a little quiet, and maybe a few friends to share it with. The way she wrote about it, it sounded so nice that I started from the beginning and read it again. By the time I finished, I was crying.

  I cried for what Annie had been through to survive. I cried because now I knew that at least once, at least for a little while, she had been truly happy and free. And I cried because it didn’t last.

  I didn’t have it in me to read the rest of Irma’s letters then and there. Instead, I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and hid the letters in my sock drawer. It was another one of Annie’s old tricks. Everybody thinks to look inside a sock drawer, but nobody ever thinks to look inside the socks. I folded each letter in half long ways, stuffed it inside a kneesock, then folded the sock with its mate, making sure that no telltale envelope was sticking out. I did this with every letter except one.

  Until I figured out what to do with Millie’s letter, I wanted it on my person at all times. I pinned it to the inside of my skirt waistband, checking my profile in the mirror to make sure it didn’t show. It didn’t. I should have tried moving in it, too, to make sure that the paper didn’t crinkle when I walked, but I only made it as far as the bed, and honestly, by that point, I really didn’t care. I didn’t bother to turn back the covers.

  Falling asleep was like falling down a well. When I hit the bottom, everything went black for a while.

  It was still black when I opened my eyes, but even then, I could tell there was something strange about my room. Still half asleep, I propped myself up on my elbows and squinted into the darkness until I made out the silhouette by the window. I knew that person.

  What are you doing here? I whispered even though we were alone.

  You tell me, she said, stepping into the swath of light that fell across the floor. It bathed her face in a soft, ghostly glow. She wore the same gray shirtwaist dress I’d seen her in that day at the Stratford Arms, the frumpy headband and the little dab of plum lipstick.

  You don’t make sense. You’re not like Annie’s friends.

  Of course I’m not. She stepped away from the window and approached my bed, still ringed in that strange silver light.

  I was sitting straight up now, alert, my backbone pressed against the headboard, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to move. It wasn’t exactly because I was afraid. It was that feeling you have when you’re little, when you know that the horrible thing in your closet, under your bed, can’t touch you as long as you stay tucked under your covers. In bed, nothing could get me. Ruth couldn’t get any closer. I was safe there.

  But the second I got out, it would all start again. The moment my feet touched the floor, they would have to fly.

  I don’t understand what you have to do with my sister, I said.

  She sighed, then shook her head and turned away. Well, then, you’d better wake up.

  I gasped and bolted upright, immediately reaching for the clock on my nightstand. It read eleven o’clock. I’d overslept, and now I was late for my phone call to Millie. The dream left me feeling rattled and off-kilter, but I shoved it aside. I needed to be clearheaded, and I needed to find a pay phone. Wherever Millie was hiding out, I didn’t want to risk giving her away with a long-distance phone charge.

  I flung my legs over the side of the bed and smoothed my skirt. A little rumpled, but I was presentable enough for the hour and my destination. The closest phone booth I could think of was a few blocks from my house, near a gas station on Santa Monica. Traffic would be light this late in the evening, but at least I’d be out in the open at a big intersection.

  Leaving the window unlatched, I stepped out onto the small balcony outside my bedroom window. It was too narrow to be a real balcony, and when Annie and I were younger, our mother had covered it with flowerpots and hanging plants. Annie had trampled every one of them, sneaking in and out of our bedroom window, and after she was gone, Mother had never thought to replace them. Once I was out the window, I climbed over the balcony railing and pitched myself off, reaching out in the darkness for the palm tree that grew next to our house. I wrapped my arms and legs around its trunk, then shinnied down.

  When I was on the ground, I saw that the light was on in Cassie’s bedroom. It seemed odd that she’d be up at this hour. The Jurgenses were early risers, all out the door with full stomachs at the crack of dawn. I was sure Cassie had field hockey or marching band or diving practice, or possibly all three, in the morning. Two weeks into summer, she already had a deep tan and brassy blond streaks in her hair, while I still had the pallor of a larval worm.

  I was still looking up at Cassie’s bedroom window when I heard someone clear a throat, someone standing only a few feet away from me there in the dark. I jumped, and the house keys fell from my hands.

  “Who’s there?” I whispered.

  I was relieved when Cassie stepped out of the shadows, but only until I got a good look at her face.

  “One day. That’s what you said. You promised.”

  She must have been spying on me all night, waiting to see if I’d sneak out and prove once and for all that it had been a mistake to trust me.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” I said. “I’m only going to the pay phone.”

  “You have a phone.”

  She had a glint in her eye that said, You think you can lie to me, Alice Gates?

  It said, You push me around, you shut me out, you take every kindness I’ve ever shown you for granted.

  It said, I am done feeling sorry for you, and really, isn’t that all our friendship has been since we were twelve? Me feeling sorry for you and your sad, rotten life.

  For a second, it felt like there was a fist wrapped around my heart. My life floated up before me, and I saw what it would look like without even the illusion of a friend, a sister, a family. Cassie was my safety wire. As long as she was there, I didn’t notice how completely alone I really was.

  “What?” Cassie said in a tone that sounded more like an accusation than a question. “What is it?”

  I whispered, “It’s Annie. Someone tried to kill her.”

  I told her about MacArthur Park and the days I’d spent in the hospital with her and how I’d met Jerry there.

  “Do you have any idea who did it?” she asked.
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  I shook my head. “I’m not sure, but I think it might have been Conrad Donahue.”

  Cassie’s eyes had been wide with amazement as she took in my story. Now they narrowed.

  “Is this a joke to you?”

  I took a step back and held up one hand to her, a truce. A promise.

  “Annie knew something about him, Cassie. Something bad. He was afraid it was all going to come out.”

  Biting her lower lip, she asked, “If that’s true, then aren’t you in danger, too?”

  I didn’t answer her. Was I in danger? Sure, I’d had a close shave with Rex, but it was nothing like the kind of danger Annie had faced. I was like Cyrus. I wasn’t part of this. I still had the option to stay out of sight.

  “I’m fine,” I said at last.

  “Then why are you sneaking off in the middle of the night to use a pay phone?”

  I was beginning to be worried that I’d told her too much, that the more I told her, the more she’d want to know. Nothing good could come of that.

  “I’m going to call a friend of Annie’s. Someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Is it someone we know?”

  “It’s Camille Grabo,” I said.

  I regretted the words the instant they were out of my mouth.

  Cassie gasped, then drew back her hand and slapped my cheek. “You’re unbelievable, Alice. Camille Grabo? Conrad Donahue? Do you think I’m stupid?”

  Before I could stop her, before I could convince her I was telling the truth, she stormed onto her porch steps and through the front door. A few seconds later, she appeared in her bedroom window. Looking down at me, she pulled the curtains shut and turned out her light.

  And then I was alone, just like I’d always wanted.

  I used to dream about disappearing and leaving a mark on someone like the one Annie had left on me.

  But Annie left her marks in different ways. She loved people; she took care of them. The only marks I ever left on people were the kind they regretted.