Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  “I missed you, you know,” Annie said. “I thought about you all the time.”

  I smiled, but a small, poisonous thought bloomed in my head. I could have crushed it, but instead, I gave it room to spread its roots. And when I should have said, I missed you, too, instead I said: “You promised you’d write to me.”

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  Her voice sounded distant, distracted, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I couldn’t tell whether she was sorry, or annoyed that I’d even bring it up after all this time.

  “I meant to,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t you?” I asked. I hated the way the words sounded in my ears—petty, bitter, and accusing. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. You were just gone. You left me.”

  Annie let out a long sigh and turned her face away from mine.

  “This was never about you, Alice.”

  She said it as kindly as you could say something like that. I could tell she tried to make her voice gentle, but her words still cut me because I knew they were true. Terrible things had happened, and because of them, my big sister disappeared. That she could have been more careful with my heart and her promises was the least important thing about it.

  “And I really did think about writing to you,” Annie said, staring out the hospital window, “but something always stopped me. Then so much time had passed. I didn’t know if you hated me, or whether you even cared if I wrote to you at all. It was easier to think that you’d moved on with your life.”

  “But I didn’t,” I said, the tears finally starting to flow down my cheeks. “I was always waiting for you.”

  As she watched me cry, Annie drew in a jagged breath and held it. She started to look away, but then caught herself and lifted her head so her stricken eyes met mine. Though it must have hurt her to do it, she put her arms around me and pulled me close to her.

  “Then that makes me impossibly sad.”

  Just then, Jerry came back in, two reporters trailing behind him. I wiped my eyes as Annie let go of me.

  “I’m sure you don’t want to be bothered right now, but these gentlemen wouldn’t stop following me.”

  The so-called gentlemen in question didn’t give us a chance to answer.

  “So, girls, you claim that Conrad Donahue did this to you?” one of them asked. He wore a Los Angeles Times badge and a brown jacket that was speckled like a chicken egg.

  “Yes, he did,” Annie said, and I nodded in accord.

  “Let’s get a picture,” said the other man. “You two squeeze in together there.”

  He took me by the shoulders and squared them up, folded my hands into Annie’s, and posed us there together, the devoted, damaged sisters.

  “Can you try to look a little bit more…pitiful?” the photographer asked.

  When Annie looked at me, I knew what she was thinking. We were the Gates sisters, crusading angels of the Allied forces. No one was going to pity us when they saw our picture in the Los Angeles Times. We put on our glamorous, elusive, uncrackable faces, but in the picture that ran in the paper, the one that I will never, ever cut out and glue into a scrapbook, we don’t look pitiful or brave.

  We look impossibly sad.

  Right behind the reporters came Cy.

  He hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek, but it was clear who he was really, finally here to see.

  Annie clapped her hands over her mouth when he came through the door, and Cy threw his arms open wide and ran to her. He’d brought flowers. He hugged her gently and kissed her on her good cheek, and together they rehashed every terrible thing that had happened over the past week like it was a funny story.

  “It took me forever to get up here,” he said. “Once they found out we were friends, all the reporters wanted to get a picture of me for their stories. Do you think the casting people at Paramount read the crime section?”

  “I’m sure you’ll look devastatingly handsome,” Annie said. “And you’ll be called in for screen tests at every studio in town, but you’ll just say, ‘Oh, I fight crime. Motion pictures are so beneath me.’”

  As they laughed together, I sat off to the side, eavesdropping and feeling jealous. Why could she talk like that with someone like Cy but not with me? Why couldn’t it be easy between us like it was with them?

  Down the hallway came the sounds of a parade, shouts and cheers and a phalanx of heavy footsteps. Cy and I stuck our heads out to investigate and saw the police officers and reporters winding up the stairwell to Conrad’s floor.

  “It’s showtime,” said Cy, rubbing his hands together. “Do you want to come, Annie? I’m sure I could find a wheelchair for you.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” Annie said.

  “Alice?”

  I understood why Annie might not want to be there, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. As we walked down the hall, I wished that everyone could have been there. Millie. Gabrielle. Ruth. And, of course, Irma. Conrad Donahue and the girls who brought him to justice.

  No, not girls.

  When Cy saw the reporters standing up ahead, he threw back his shoulders and lifted his chin. Another small, spiteful thought entered my mind. You never came to see Annie once until the reporters showed up.

  I chastised myself for the thought. Cy wasn’t a high school sophomore on summer break. He had to work to support himself, and he’d come to see Annie as soon as he could. The reporters and the pictures had nothing to do with it.

  Then I remembered something Ruth had said the night before at the Stratford Arms.

  “What was she even doing there that night? She was supposed to be here.”

  At the time, I’d thought she was talking about Gabrielle, but she was talking about Annie. Annie, who was never supposed to have been in the park at all. Ruth hadn’t betrayed my sister. She and Jerry had been waiting at the Stratford Arms for her to show up with Gabrielle.

  Someone else told Annie to go to MacArthur Park.

  Someone else sent her into Conrad and Rex’s ambush.

  And there was only one person it could have been.

  Amos Carey made sure Cy, Cassie, and me had an excellent view of Conrad’s hospital bed when they lifted him up and put the cuffs on him. One officer told us to step away, that there was nothing to see here.

  “Are you kidding me?” Cassie asked, standing on her toes to get a better look.

  Cy tried to put his arm around my shoulder as we watched, but I pushed it away and elbowed my way through the crowd of onlookers until I was standing next to the Herald reporter.

  When I thanked Amos for saving us a spot, he said, “The least I can do. Thanks to you, I may never have to interview another insipid movie star again. Real news from here on out, baby.”

  “That’s great, Mr. Carey,” I said. “Are you interested in one more tip?”

  I pulled him back from the others and whispered it in his ear. To him, it was just another story, but the words tasted like poison as they rolled off my tongue. If I’d had the slightest doubt, I would have swallowed them down. I would have told myself to forget about them. But when I said them aloud, I knew they were the truth.

  “You’re gold, Alice,” he said as we joined the others at the front of the crowd.

  I didn’t feel like gold. I felt like I’d been gutted.

  As I took my place between Cassie and Cy, I closed my eyes and remembered what I used to tell myself after Annie left home.

  You are Philip Marlowe. You are Sam Spade. You are ice, you are stone, and nothing can touch you.

  In an hour or a day, I would let myself feel this. I would hurt, I would be angry, and I wouldn’t do it alone. But until then, I needed those words. I needed to believe they were true. If I didn’t, I knew I’d never be able to say what I had to say next.

  Conrad Donahue did not go quietly. He called the policemen names and swore he’d have their badges as they read off the long list of charges: murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, assault. He demanded the na
mes of their commanding officers. He demanded his lawyer, the head of Insignia Pictures, and Nicky Gates. He demanded they leave him in peace, that he was in a great deal of pain and needed his rest. Didn’t they know who he was?

  In the end, someone brought up a wheelchair and they wheeled him out, still raving about the indignities that he’d suffered and how he’d make them all pay.

  After it was over and the last of the reporters had trickled away, Cy squeezed my hand and said, “Would you care to accompany me downstairs to the hospital cafeteria for a slice of very mediocre pie? My treat.”

  I thought about the way he’d held me in my kitchen for as long as I’d needed him to, how he’d said I was pretty and brave. How he’d made me believe that when all this was over, there might be something between us, something sweet and good that had nothing to do with the worst week of my life.

  But there was never going to be an us.

  I unwrapped Cy’s fingers from mine and turned to face him. It was a handsome face, the kind that looked nicer the longer you looked at it.

  “What do you say, Alice?” he asked, grinning like he believed the pack of lies he’d told me and Jerry and everyone.

  “I don’t think you’re going to like the way your picture comes out in the newspaper tomorrow morning,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Had he actually thought he could make it up to Annie by helping me? Was that his way of atoning for what he’d done?

  I leaned in close, pointing my finger so it stuck him in the clavicle.

  “I’m talking about how you should leave. Now. Because in a few hours, Annie, Jerry, and everybody else is going to know exactly what you did.”

  It wasn’t Ruth or Jerry or Millie who’d betrayed my sister. It was Cy.

  Before the night he kidnapped me, Conrad had thought Annie was dead. And then, as we idled in front of County Hospital, he’d said: “A little birdie told me that Annie Gates is here.”

  And earlier that same night, standing in the kitchen at Musso & Frank, I’d let it slip to Cy that Annie was still alive. I’d even been angry at Jerry for keeping the truth from him.

  By itself, that might have been a coincidence, but as I sat in Annie’s room, watching her and Cy compare notes, another question had tugged at me.

  How had Rex found Gabrielle in the supply closet here at Cedars of Lebanon? I’d wondered. It didn’t make sense. She was too smart to do anything that would give away her hiding place, and nothing she’d done would have led Rex to believe she was anywhere near the hospital. There was no reason for him to go searching for Gabrielle at Cedars of Lebanon. Unless, after insisting we split up, Cy had scoured every corner of County Hospital and found nothing. Unless he’d called Rex when he was done to tell him where I was looking.

  All along the way, he’d been feeding Conrad and his cronies little bits of information, assuring them he was loyal, that he’d never rat them out for what he knew.

  Annie was never supposed to be in MacArthur Park the night she was attacked. She was supposed to bring Gabrielle to Ruth, but then at the last minute, plans got changed. Someone told Annie to bring Gabrielle to the park instead, someone she trusted. And there was only one person who could have made that call, only one person who could have told Conrad where Annie would be.

  Millie hadn’t taken the pictures of Annie being beaten. It had been Cy who’d hidden in the bushes and watched the whole thing, snapping photographs he never intended to develop unless whatever deal he’d made with Conrad fell through—in case he needed to blackmail him. It was smart of Cy to play both sides of it like that, to turn the camera over to Millie for safekeeping, to distance himself from the evidence, knowing he could always go to Irma’s apartment and get it back if Conrad didn’t cooperate. No matter which way things turned out, he should have gotten every little thing he wanted.

  I remembered what the doctor at County Hospital had told me the morning I first arrived and saw my sister in that hospital bed. No one had called for help until later. Cy had left my sister for dead, left her body for the maintenance man to find like a piece of trash on the dock.

  Cassie and I walked back to Annie’s room together. Maybe I should have been dancing in the streets or cheering from the rooftop, but I guess I wasn’t really in a cheering kind of mood. Cassie seemed to feel the same way. Still reeling from the double shock of seeing one of her film idols up close, then seeing him hauled away in handcuffs, she shuffled down the hall in silence. I wondered how I was going to explain why Cy wasn’t with us, but when we got there, I realized it didn’t matter what I said. At that moment, nobody was going to care what had happened to Cy.

  Because, somehow, Gabrielle was there.

  Jerry and my mother stood side by side at the foot of Annie’s bed, watching as Annie and Gabrielle wept and clung to each other like shipwreck victims in a lifeboat.

  When she saw the look on my face, Cassie took me by the arm and dragged me out of the room. She led, and I floated along behind her down the hall, through the door, and into the stairwell. I didn’t know how Gabrielle had gotten there, and I didn’t care. All I could think was that it shouldn’t have been Gabrielle crying in Annie’s arms. It should have been me.

  I was the one who needed my sister now.

  I sat down on the steps, tears knotted in my throat. Why did everyone else get to see that Annie?

  Cassie took a seat on the step next to me, her arms wrapped around her knobby athlete’s knees. It was hard to tell where her tan ended and her bruises began.

  She’d known that I needed to get out of that room in a hurry, and she knew the reason.

  “It’s probably easier for her with Gabrielle,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and tried to swallow the knot of tears. It stuck there, and when I spoke, my words came out in a high-pitched, whiny whisper.

  “Why?” I asked. “She’s known her a week. I’m her sister.”

  “She didn’t leave Gabrielle behind. She didn’t run away from her. She didn’t let her down.”

  “Then why doesn’t she say she’s sorry if she feels that way?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Cassie, what if she doesn’t love me anymore?”

  Before I could get the sentence out, the knot in my throat loosened and filled my mouth with sobs. I buried my head in my lap and cried until the hem of my skirt was damp, while Cassie put her arm around my shoulders.

  “She still loves you, Alice.”

  “What if she leaves? What if I lose her again?”

  “Things go back to the way they were before,” she said. “Or they don’t.”

  It was such a cold thing to say, so unlike Cassie. But she looked me in the eye when she said it, and her arm stayed wrapped around my shoulders.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, it’s up to you what happens. I hope she stays, Alice. I really do. But if she doesn’t, it can’t be like it was before. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether we’re still friends or not. But if you want to sit alone in the dark waiting for her again, we won’t be.”

  I hiccuped and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Cassie wouldn’t look at me while she talked, but it sounded like something she’d practiced saying before.

  There weren’t many people who would cover for me, break into my house to make sure I was okay, guard my sister from thugs, and babysit my mother the way Cassie had. Especially not after the way I’d treated her.

  But she hadn’t dropped everything for me, either. Cassie had a life, a whole group of friends and things she did that had nothing to do with me. She wasn’t some pathetic sap, sitting around waiting for me to need her.

  “You’re such a good friend,” I said, breaking into fresh sobs.

  Cassie pulled her arm off my shoulder and gave me a shove. It wasn’t very hard, but I hadn’t expected it and nearly slid off the step.

  “Yeah, so what?” she asked with a smirk—the smirk of a girl who woul
d probably make fur coats out of kelp and do bad movie star impersonations at the beach whether she was twelve or twenty or forty.

  “Cassie, can you forgive me?”

  I wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t important.

  It’s amazing the things my mother can do when she’s sober. She can give fifty showgirls chignons that won’t shake loose during the big song-and-dance number. She can arrange for the transfer of her comatose daughter to the most prestigious hospital in Los Angeles in the dead of night. She can actually be a halfway-decent parent.

  And she can get a ward of Juvenile Hall released into her custody. I don’t know what she said, what kind of stories she told, to make them turn Gabrielle over to her. All I know is no one ever showed up to try to take her away from us.

  Gabrielle told the truth about everything—in the police station and in court—and she never tried to unsay any of it. Not even later, when certain parties made it known in the form of threatening letters and rocks through our windows that it might be safer, happier, and more profitable for her if she did.

  I still don’t know where she comes from. We were walking home from school one afternoon and passed a shabby little carnival that had been set up in the neighborhood. She said that she used to be able to see the Dragon Bamboo Slide at the Venice Pier from her bedroom window. But another time, she said she was from El Monte, and another time, she said South Gate.

  Some secrets are too big to bury, some things can’t be hidden, but a girl is just about the right size.

  My mother says that Gabrielle staying with us is temporary, but it’s been months now with no sign of things changing. I think my mother likes having two girls around the house again, especially one who is coltish and sings and smiles a thousand-watt smile when she is happy. But Gabrielle is not Annie, and I hope that my mother is grateful for this, because I know that I am. Gabrielle is pliant and easygoing, where Annie insisted on her own way. Gabrielle is airy and affectionate, but she’s also fragile in a way that Annie never was. She goes quiet sometimes, and it looks as if a light has gone out inside her. My mother and I are still trying to figure out what works best when this happens. Sometimes talking helps. Sometimes it really doesn’t.