In Her Skin

by Kim Savage

  “Fine. I couldn’t take the life anymore.”

  “With me. You couldn’t take the life with me anymore. Is that what you’re saying, Jolene?”

  I grab his wrists. The insides are marked by yellowed thumbprints. Wolf cannot protect himself from the things he lets happen to him because he thinks he isn’t worth not letting things happen to him. I am scared for Wolf. I am scared for me. Mostly, though, I know life in Tent City isn’t the life I’m supposed to have. Life in Immokalee with Momma wasn’t, either. I’ve been inside other people’s lives, and I found out what I was missing, and it looked a lot more like this.

  “Listen to me. Being Vivienne Weir gives me a home. A real home, Wolf! And a life. Already, they want to keep me safe. I told them I was abducted and kept in a shed, but they’ve got me changing my story because they don’t want the police bothering me about catching the perpetrator. They have private security because Mr. Lovecraft is a big deal in this city, he’s built the whole skyline, and he’s had threats, and they worry about their daughter, too, since the real Vivi disappeared from their own house, this house, seven years ago.”

  “It’s only a matter of time before the police dissect your story and trip you up. It’s too complicated. Keep the con simple. You told me that one yourself. You’ve already forgotten the rules of being Jolene Chastain.”

  “That’s because I am Vivienne Weir.” I say it in my head two more times, and Wolf is talking, but I can’t hear him.

  “You might be a good con. But you can’t keep it up. Then your cover will be blown and they’ll throw you back out on the street.”

  “I won’t blow this.”

  “You think I’ll be there when you wake up from your pretty dream, but maybe I won’t be.”

  “There’s no waking up from the return of Vivienne Weir! I am the living, breathing happy ending to a national tragedy. Jolene Chastain is dead. She has to be dead.” I reach up on my toes and move hair from his eyes. “Please, Wolf. I need this.”

  Wolf pulls away and walks past the dresser, pauses, and I wince, waiting for him to smash the glass cloche. Instead he moves to the open closet and inspects the prim, pretty clothes and the clean shoes set on the floor beneath. He turns to face me, and I brace myself.

  “What happens when this family figures out you’re not Vivienne Weir?”

  How do I explain the Lovecrafts to Wolf? The safety in Mr. Lovecraft’s broad-shouldered disinterest when men have never been disinterested in me. Mrs. Lovecraft’s warmth and ready closeness, her animal protectiveness of me, and of her daughter. The promise of Slade’s easy violence. And then I think of you. Of the sense of being off-kilter and alive. You who gets me, who says it’s better with me here. You who has the potential to be my first and only friend, a friend to fill the lonely space I didn’t know existed until you filled it.

  Who till they died did not alive become.

  The idea of being ripped from the Lovecrafts is already too much to bear. Muscle ripped from tendon, the stripping of skin. This is my new fear: not Momma’s murderer. I won’t admit this, because I will hurt Wolf, and I am the only thing in this world that hasn’t hurt him.

  “Jolene.”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper, my voice catching on a sob.

  Wolf cups the back of my neck and pulls me to his chest. I breath in smoke, city, skin. My hunger for Wolf will fade; hunger always does.

  “You’ll need a plan if they find out,” he says near my ear. “You’ll need to disappear.”

  What Wolf doesn’t know is that I’ve already disappeared.

  “Promise me if you get in trouble, you’ll send me a signal,” he says.

  I laugh sadly against him. “Sure. I’ll beam my bat signal onto the night sky.”

  He pushes me away and rifles through his jeans pocket, finds a burner phone and presses it into my hand. “Take this.”

  I stare at the phone. “I can’t have this. I don’t own anything; everything is theirs. They’ll find it.” This is my second lie to Wolf. Truth is, I don’t trust myself not to go back to him, and the phone is a temptation I can’t risk.

  “Hide it wherever you hide that knife you were ready to cut me with.”

  I grimace and shove the phone back at him.

  “Fine. Tie that hideous sweater to the fire escape. That’ll be our signal.”

  “Jolene Chastain doesn’t needed rescuing.”

  “But Vivienne Weir might.” He tosses the phone onto the bed and turns to go, stopping once to look over his shoulder, waiting for me to ask him to stay. The pain in his eyes is dizzying. I bite my lip hard until he leaves, climbing back through the window, shoulder blades jutting through his jacket. I breathe only after he leaves; as he came, on shaking metal scaffolding, hours closer to the pain he seeks.

  In Tent City I had a dream that kept coming back, where Momma’s last boyfriend and Wolf were sitting at a table set with china and flowers, and there was classic music, and Wolf was cutting off parts of himself and offering them to the Last One, and he was eating, and it was very civilized, and I would wake drenched in sweat with my heart beating inside my chest to be let out, grabbing under the blanket to feel Wolf’s arms, hands, legs, ears, making sure the parts were attached.

  Tonight, I wake twice from that same suffocating dream. Except this time, we are in the Lovecrafts’ dining room, and I am with you, Temple, and we are eating as old-fashioned music plays, and I am afraid of what I am eating, but it is delicious, and I eat until I am full.

  * * *

  We are crammed in the detective’s paneled office: Detective Curley behind the desk; Ginny, who has taken ownership of me since I entered the room, with an arm around the back of my chair; Mr. and Mrs. Lovecraft, him standing, her seated; and two men, the Lovecrafts’ attorney, Lawyer Gene, and a stooped man named Harvey Silver, who knows Lawyer Gene and who seems to be on the same payroll, and by that I mean the Lovecrafts’. It turns out Harvey is a psychiatrist and a trauma specialist who has diagnosed me with dissociative amnesia along with repressed memory even though we met in the parking lot twelve minutes ago. Everyone is talking at once but me. It’s a scene out of a black-and-white movie, when the bank is closing and everyone’s about to lose their life savings.

  Ginny slices the air with her hands and yells, “Hold up!” which is wrong for a fifty-year-old lady with too-long hair. Everyone stares at her in shock.

  Harvey recovers first and sees his opening.

  “Childhood trauma can result in difficulty with memory storage and retrieval. When a memory is forgotten, clinicians say that a likely explanation is dis-soci-ation.” He says this like the detective is a little kid, and though Ginny nods nicely, I think Harvey is making the wrong play.

  “Dissociation?” Lawyer Gene says. I cringe at the staged feel of it.

  “Yes, Gene,” Silver says. “Dissociation means that a memory is not actually lost, but is ‘unavailable’”—air quotes; God—“for retrieval. That is, it’s in ‘memory storage’”—more air quotes, at which Curley rolls his eyes—“but cannot for a period of time actually be recalled.”

  “What’s the bottom line, Mr. Silver?” growls Detective Curley.

  “Doctor,” Ginny corrects.

  Everyone ignores Ginny, even Dr. Silver, who directs his answer to the detective, the only person in the room who needs convincing.

  “It’s Vivienne’s way of protecting herself from the pain of that memory,” Dr. Silver says.

  When my name is spoken for the first time, everyone remembers I am there. They turn and look at me. I scowl.

  “Dissociative amnesia has been positively linked to overwhelming stress caused by a traumatic event: an event suffered, or witnessed, or even simply imagined. Until those memories are unlocked, we will never know for sure.”

  “You’re saying either she was abducted, or she saw someone abducted, or she imagined she was abducted? Fantastic,” says Detective Curley.

  “There isn’t cause for sarcasm, Detective,” s
ays Mrs. Lovecraft.

  “What my wife means, Detective, is that we understand your skepticism. It was hard for us to believe, too,” says Mr. Lovecraft.

  “Seven years is a long time to forget,” Detective Curley says. “Can’t she be treated to make her memory come back?”

  I want to yell at this guy to take the excuse we’re offering him and retire early. Boston must be a boring city if he’s looking for stuff to do. A working vacation in Immokalee would keep his reflexes sharp.

  “There are no laboratory tests to diagnose dissociative disorders. A doctor might use blood tests or imaging to make sure Vivi doesn’t have a physical illness or side effects from a medication. She might be referred to a mental health professional such as a psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychiatric social worker who is specially trained to diagnose and treat mental illnesses,” says Dr. Silver.

  Ginny sits up a little straighter, though I’m pretty sure she is not the mental health professional Mr. and Mrs. Lovecraft would choose, as “court-appointed” and “free” are probably not on their list of requirements.

  “So we’re just supposed to wait until the girl remembers if there was a crime?” Detective Curley says, rolling his eyes.

  “That is exactly what we mean,” Lawyer Gene says, standing. “Vivienne has nothing else to say.”

  We take that as our cue to get our stuff.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak with Mr. Lovecraft alone for a moment,” Detective Curley says from behind his desk, irritation replaced by something cooler.

  Mrs. Lovecraft blinks crazily at Mr. Lovecraft. Lawyer Gene puffs up. “Anything you have to say to Henry Lovecraft you can say to me,” he says, and there’s a badass behind those wire-framed glasses.

  “I gotta be honest, Lovecraft. I don’t get why you’re lawyering up over this.” Detective Curley sounds like a TV cop. The others move into and down the hall, thick in conversation, and I stay behind, just outside the door, forgotten. I slide down to the floor and bury my face in my knees so no one walking by will bother me; unfamiliar crying kids scare people. Scooting closer gives me a good slant-view angle back into the room, where Lawyer Gene nods for Mr. Lovecraft to sit beside him.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” says Mr. Lovecraft.

  “I mean, this has got to be a public relations windfall. You and your wife came under some heavy criticism after that girl disappeared. Some people called you negligent. ’Course it wasn’t your fault the girl went missing: How could you have known? Still, some people didn’t see it that way. Gotta hurt business, in a small city like this. But now: now you got a chance to be the hero. I’m just a dumb Boston detective, but it seems to me that this whole thing works out for you.”

  Suddenly I understand who Detective Curley is. When everyone else maybe forgot Vivienne Weir, Detective Curley is the guy who remembered. He’s the guy who kept Vivi’s photo taped inside his locker here at the station. The one who never felt the case get cold.

  “Are you saying I waved a wand and made Vivienne Weir magically reappear?” Mr. Lovecraft is aggressive. Aggressive won’t work with Curley. Lawyer Gene knows this and tries to calm things down.

  “The detective isn’t accusing you of anything. Are you, Detective?” says Lawyer Gene.

  “I am not. And yet, you have your lawyer here,” says Detective Curley. His chair squeals, and if the man had his feet up on his desk, I would not be surprised.

  “Mr. Lovecraft and his wife have been through significant emotional trauma. It has taken years to get their lives back from a press that criticized them unfairly. Criticism, I would add, that would not have been heaped on them were they not public figures. Over the last seven years, they have grieved, they have prayed, and their prayers have been answered. Travis and Marie Weir were not alive to witness the miraculous return of their daughter. Let’s not compound the tragedy by casting aspersions on the only family that Vivienne Weir has going forward,” says Lawyer Gene.

  The detective claps slowly.

  Chairs scrape. Mr. Lovecraft and his lawyer are outta there, and so am I.

  “Worth every penny you’re paying him, Lovecraft,” I hear the detective call as I make for the lobby, nearly seen by Mr. Lovecraft and Gene, and panting by the time I reach Mrs. Lovecraft and Ginny, without Harvey Silver, whose work here is done. The women sit on plastic chairs, and Ginny covers Mrs. Lovecraft’s hands in her lap, as if she was the one traumatized.

  “Oh! Vivi!” Mrs. Lovecraft says, surprised. “How did we lose you?”

  Ginny pulls me down to sit in the chair on her other side. “There’s something I need you to understand. No one is going to force you to remember something you aren’t ready to. You have the Lovecrafts, and here at the precinct, I am your family.” She pats my knee firmly. “You are not alone.”

  For the first time, I feel rotten for the way I’ve judged Ginny. She has holes inside her same as me, and she likes how I fill them. It just goes to show all anyone really wants is family.

  * * *

  This is the way you celebrate a win. This is life.

  A napkin is draped in my lap and the fork I dropped is replaced before I can say oops. When I spill crumbs next to my plate, another waiter scrapes them away. The air conditioner gets turned down because the hostess saw me shiver from across the room, and then she checks to make sure I’m comfortable, twice. My Sprite is refilled without asking. In candlelight, everyone is prettier, and I am prettier, and it becomes a running joke that every time I stuff food in my mouth, someone will stop by the table to talk to the Lovecrafts and wish me well.

  This is the treatment you get when you build things in this town.

  My stomach is the only one not having a good time. It doesn’t want to stretch, but I hear Wolf’s warning that this could be over soon and a hibernation reflex is kicking in and I cannot stop eating this amazing, fancy, famous hotel-restaurant food. My gut gurgles, crying, “Enough!” for everyone to hear, and your parents laugh, and you laugh, and I hold my stomach, and though it will hurt to eat, I grab one more roll.

  The laughter fades and arms cross over and between us, making our dirty plates vanish. Mrs. Lovecraft pushes a small box across the table to me. It’s a shade of blue-green that I’d call big-money blue, and it’s tied with white satin ribbon.

  Mrs. Lovecraft runs two fingers along her collarbone, girly and excited. “Open it, Vivi.”

  “But it’s so pretty, I’ll ruin it.”

  “It’s from Tiffany,” you say flatly.

  “Temple!” Mrs. Lovecraft protests. “Don’t spoil it!”

  “I’m just letting Vivi know the significance of the box. You want to open it, trust me,” you say, and I hate that I’m missing something.

  I look to Mr. Lovecraft—females look for his approval—and he nods, so I carefully untie the ribbon. Nestled on a square of cotton is a thick silver link bracelet with a single heart charm.

  “Go ahead, read the heart,” urges Mrs. Lovecraft.

  I lift the charm. “‘Daughter,’” I read softly.

  You’ve been quiet through dinner. True, we keep getting stares, and this likely does not play as cool at the Parkman School, and I have heard you complaining to your friends on your phone. I don’t know how you feel about this silver heart, because you are their real daughter, and I’m just some girl from the past making your lives messy. Something hard flickers across your face, but then it’s gone.

  “Try it on,” Mr. Lovecraft urges.

  I try to slip it on, but my wrist is not as delicate as Mrs. Lovecraft imagined, and it pinches. Mrs. Lovecraft reaches across the table to help close it. As she does, she looks at my fingernails, and the corners of her mouth droop, and I’m aware of the white ridges from the lean year with Wolf.

  I dangle the bracelet in the candlelight. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned,” I say, and this is true, and the way these people soften me is dangerous.

  “We thought it would remind you of your place here
with us. It’s only going to get better from here on, we promise,” says Mrs. Lovecraft. She looks to Mr. Lovecraft meaningfully.

  He clears his throat and leans over his folded hands. “Vivi, we need to talk.”

  I drop my wrist and the bracelet clatters on the table. This is it. Time to drop Vivi Weir’s skin.

  I look for the nearest exit.

  “Now I know we said one and done,” Mr. Lovecraft says, “but there is another thing we can do to ensure the police don’t continue to bring up unpleasant facts.”

  I’m wearing shoes I can’t run in and that burner phone would have been handy right about now. I have been careless. I have gone soft as one of those dinner rolls, two of which could easily fit into my bag.

  “It may seem frightening. But it’s actually not as scary as it sounds.”

  Below the table, I drop a stolen dinner roll to the floor. “Scary?”

  “The Today Show called,” Mrs. Lovecraft blurts. “They’d like to do an interview.”

  “An interview? With who?”

  “With you. Really, with us,” Mrs. Lovecraft says, leaning toward me. “You wouldn’t be alone, not for a minute.”

  “Why would they want that?” I say it slowly, like Vivi would, but really I’m just trying to calm my breathing down because I don’t have to leave you. Yet.

  “People care about you. You give them hope that sometimes, there are happy endings,” Mrs. Lovecraft says.

  “But won’t it bring us more attention?” I say, attention being something I do not need.

  “Actually, just the opposite,” Mr. Lovecraft says, happy to correct me. “I have a public relations woman on my staff. She strongly recommends doing the interview. See, though we handled the police, the press won’t leave us alone anytime soon. The Today Show is a one-shot deal, like ripping off a Band-Aid. It’s the same principle as our conversation with Detective Curley. The press will have their story, and they’ll leave us alone.”

  I think of that single reporter underneath my window. “There haven’t been that many—”

  “There’s something else,” he interjects. “Once the TV show airs and the public is behind us, the police will have more pressure on them to accept what you’ve told them.”