Unbecoming: A Novel

  Grace had never talked like this with anyone. She looked down at the wastebasket and saw in its lid Hanna’s reflection. She had leaned back from the table and turned her head toward the stairs and Jacqueline’s door. Grace heard it open.

  Jacqueline strode over with two jewelry boxes. “Hello, ladies,” she said. “How’s the gossip?”

  Grace smiled weakly. “Fine.”

  Jacqueline sucked her teeth. “Amaury’s going to come back to locked doors. That man.” She laid a cool hand on Grace’s bare shoulder, her jasmine perfume drifting forward. “Not that we need him anymore, right, Julie?”

  She opened the first jewelry box. Inside was a watch, a jeweled pink monstrosity.

  “Just the clasp needs fixing. I have an appointment, but I’ll be back to close.”

  “There is no clasp,” Grace protested.

  “Relax,” Jacqueline said. “It’s right there.” She split apart the jewelry cushion and dug out a jeweled crescent, a clasp in the shape of a single paisley. “The missing stones are in there too, but you can pull them out with tweezers. I can’t get in there with my fat fingers.”

  It didn’t even make sense for a watch to be in a cushioned box like that. “I’m not sure I can fix this,” Grace said.

  “I am,” Jacqueline said.

  • • •

  The watch was the sort of bauble that a Disney princess would wear if brought to life. Platinum; candy-pink crocodile strap; diamonds surrounding a pink teardrop face. Grace found a comparable watch for sale at a shop in Connecticut for ninety-five thousand dollars.

  The clasp had been torn from the band, as though the watch had been ripped from its owner’s wrist, but the stones missing from the clasp would have come loose gradually. There were nine diamonds, each no larger than a mustard seed, and only eight sockets.

  Grace was furious at this, that Jacqueline had been too sloppy to even count, to make it look right for her. There was no question that Jacqueline was stealing stones. Was there a partner somewhere, a jeweler who took in pieces for cleaning and returned them to owners sparkling with fakes? Or were these lifted right out of dressers and drawers?

  “How come she doesn’t ask you?” Grace lamented.

  “She did once, but I refused. It’s such a slippery slope for me, back to my old habits. I can’t mess around even a little. I don’t work on anything that doesn’t have good papers.”

  “What? I’ve never seen any papers. What do you do when there are no papers?”

  “I either get them myself, or get something via e-mail. If I can’t, I tell Jacqueline I won’t work on it without papers, and then she finds someone else.”

  “Me.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How could you? And not tell me?”

  “Julie, I thought you didn’t mind. You’ve never asked about papers.”

  “I didn’t know I could.” Grace’s mouth had gone dry.

  “I thought that was why you were here, why she picked you. To do the jobs that are a little . . .” Hanna wiggled her fingers.

  “And you never said anything. All this time.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to talk about it,” Hanna said. “It’s not the kind of thing people say. I’m sorry, I had no idea you were so—”

  “Was there even an Angeline?” Grace asked, disgusted.

  “Yes,” Hanna said. “She left.”

  “Does Amaury do it?”

  “He used to,” Hanna said. “Not that they ever spoke of it in front of me, but it’s obvious enough. But he got spooked or something. He only does clocks and watches now.”

  “What happened? What scared him?”

  “Nothing much. We’re all here, aren’t we? Maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it. He has a kid. He has to be cautious.”

  “I thought he lived alone.”

  “His son lives with his mother, I think in Montreuil. In his teens by now.”

  Amaury had been here since before Jacqueline took over for her father. Grace had only been here two years. Trusting her must have been a last resort.

  “These aren’t just little snatches from regular commissions,” Grace said. “This is a hundred-thousand-dollar watch.”

  “So tell her no.”

  “If there’s no one here under me, she’ll probably fire me if I don’t.”

  “There’s no one here under you.”

  Grace knew she was at the very bottom of any ladder. Jacqueline probably wouldn’t dare switch out the stones herself, even if she could. She wouldn’t want to dirty her hands. So she gave Grace the materials, the instructions, and a smile.

  Her? Jacqueline could say to the hypothetical interrogators who bothered Grace’s imagination. This girl? American. Hired her off the street. She betrayed me—a thief!

  Rage spread from Grace’s fingertips up to her ears. She was disgusted that she could still be so naive.

  • • •

  Jacqueline’s office was neater than usual. Grace started with her desk drawers. Cigarettes, pens, hair ties, a melted lipstick, busted sunglasses, mints, dozens of crumpled receipts, dirty centimes. In the filing cabinets, Grace peered over the papers for bulges. She rummaged in the pockets of the silk jacket draped over the chair. She checked behind the books, lifting them by the spines to check for false compartments. She ran her hand under the desk in case anything was taped there. When she was done, there was only the safe, but that was hopeless.

  Grace sat in her boss’s chair. Hanna would be back from lunch soon; she didn’t have much longer. The clock ticked. The chair creaked. The inkjet printer was unplugged. Grace leaned forward and lifted the lid, and there, as goofy and bright as a little girl’s bead set, was a plastic bag half-full of cheap stones. There were hundreds, all zirconia or something like it, all on the small side, pencil-eraser size or less. No, Jacqueline wouldn’t risk the big central stones of a piece; she’d just swap the smaller ones. Grace raked through the bag. There were cuts in every style—round, square, emerald, baguette. An impostor ready for every role.

  She went back to her desk to retrieve one of the replacement diamonds Jacqueline had given her. From the plastic bag, she took three more just like it.

  And now to work: She blew out the eight empty sockets and emptied three more, leaving the little rocks loose on the table. When she heard Hanna at the door, Grace brushed the three diamonds into her lap with her forearm. She spent the next hour popping the zirconia into the eleven sockets and clamping them shut.

  She picked up the clasp, now filled and glittering, and banged it against the table. Hanna yelped and jumped.

  “Do you mind?”

  “I’m testing the settings,” Grace said. Nothing trembled, nothing budged. She inspected the clasp under the lamp, looking for differences in luster or color or sparkle.

  “Looks good,” she murmured to herself.

  “Watch yourself,” Hanna said. “It’s a slippery slope, petite voleuse.”

  When Hanna left at seven, Grace worked on the Mont box for an hour, listening for the door in case Hanna came back and surprised her. When the box was dry enough to put back in the paper bag, she pulled the three diamonds from her skirt pocket and arranged them under her magnifier. Incredible, that some speck of mineral could command so many hearts and wallets, just because it threw the light around and made a rainbow on the wall. So did the face of her Timex.

  She hadn’t stolen anything since the painting and now she’d stolen diamonds.

  They were just chips, really. Very small and not worth much. And Jacqueline deserved it. Stealing from her was hardly stealing.

  Grace pulled her hair back and started up the computer to run her daily check on the Albemarle Record. The computer took ages to boot up, and Grace was impatient, freezing the screen by clicking too fast. She waited restlessly for the Record’s page to load.

  And there, the day’s update: Riley and Alls had vanished from Garland.

  Riley had last been seen by his family on Saturday; Alls, by his
parole officer. Greg refused to comment. Where they had gone, the Record did not speculate.

  • • •

  Grace had a bad night. She blinked right through the pills’ attempted shutdown like a trick birthday candle. She counted backward from a thousand, twice. She got out of bed and did a hundred sit-ups, trying to tire herself. She drank another glass of wine and read about marquetry from a ten-pound text that was usually as soothing as a lullaby. She thought about calling Hanna, but she didn’t.

  This wasn’t exactly what she had feared, but twice what she had feared.

  At four in the morning, she gave up. She startled Mme Freindametz in the kitchen when she went down to make tea; she had been working nights before her break and now she couldn’t sleep either. They exchanged a look of grudging sympathy.

  She was gilding another layer on her James Mont box when Hanna came in at eight. Grace was in no hurry to revisit the watch, though Jacqueline would be waiting for her to do the strap. She had locked up the watch itself before she left. Grace knew that she would not scrutinize it in front of her.

  She and Hanna worked on the centerpiece in silence, threading the leaves onto the branches. Grace was lost in the brambles of her thoughts, and perhaps Hanna was too, but she didn’t show it. “Tighter,” she said to Grace. “Softer angles.”

  “I’ve read about this woman,” Grace said. “Heather Tallchief.”

  “I don’t know her,” Hanna said.

  “She and her boyfriend stole an armored truck together. Three million dollars inside. The truck company hired her as a driver.”

  “Go on.”

  “She was only twenty years old. She’d run away from home a few years before, and she was working at an AIDS hospice and then going to dance clubs at night. She met this guy, Solis. He was forty-six. He was a poet.”

  “First love,” Hanna said drily.

  “He’d gone to prison decades before, for killing an armored truck driver. But she didn’t know that yet, not until she’d moved in with him, and by then, she believed anything he told her. That it was all a misunderstanding. You know.”

  Hanna nodded.

  Grace told her the rest of the story: Solis planned the Loomis heist stitch by stitch, Tallchief later said, so slowly that she didn’t know what she was doing until she was doing it. She said that Solis hypnotized her every day, and not until she drove the truck off route, to the abandoned warehouse where he was waiting for her, did she realize what she had just done. When she climbed out of the truck, she was terrified. No one had any idea where she was. When he threatened to kill her unless she stayed with him, she did as she was told.

  They fled Las Vegas on a plane Solis had chartered. He pushed Tallchief onboard in a wheelchair, disguised as an old woman in a wig and dark glasses. She had a crocheted blanket draped over her lap. But when the plane landed, she stood up and walked off, tall, strong, and young. The pilots remembered that, when police questioned them later. But she and Solis were long gone.

  He shipped the money overseas in unmarked freight containers. In a few months she was pregnant, and as soon as she had the baby, she bundled him up and ran away.

  Grace had watched the interview over and over. “Were you afraid he’d try to find you?” the reporter asked.

  “Yeah,” Tallchief said.

  “And did he?”

  “No.”

  Tallchief faked an English accent and made up a new name, and she found work first as a prostitute and then as a hotel maid in Amsterdam. She brought up her son there. She went to work every day, volunteered at her son’s school, and became someone else.

  When her son was ten years old, she came back to the United States. She stated her true name and turned herself in so that her son would have citizenship somewhere, some legal identity. She’d been hiding for twelve years.

  In the courtroom, the judge likened Tallchief to the hundreds of girls who’d stood before him. Grace imagined all the women who carried drugs in diaper bags, screened phone calls, drew the blinds, smashed the cameras, lied, lied, and lied some more but who forgot to look both ways when they walked their own bodies across the street. They took the fall for their boyfriends and husbands and men they wished were their boyfriends or husbands. The judge invoked that tired sex-work cliché: A bad childhood, a bad father, and bad boyfriends created a woman who was doomed to be a shadow of all her experiences. Women, the argument implied, were weak: They would do anything for what they believed was love.

  Tallchief wept in the courtroom, but she did not beg. “I want you to understand that it’s not in my nature to steal or to plot intricate thefts,” she said. “I am not a thief. I am not a lifelong criminal.”

  Her lawyer showed video of her loved ones in Amsterdam, offering testimonials. They wept as they remembered Tallchief coming to them with the truth, one by one, and begging their forgiveness. Forgive her, they pleaded. She is not who she was then. Her ten-year-old son wore a sweater and necktie, the knot too large above his narrow chest. He said he hoped that he would see his mother again soon, that he missed her so much.

  The prosecutor asked the judge to think of the armored car company whose business was destroyed by the burglary, and of the casino whose money they had stolen. The judge sentenced Tallchief to five years in prison and ordered her to repay the three million dollars—the entire amount, since Solis was still at large. She was led from the courtroom in leg irons.

  “I’d like to believe he actually loved me,” Tallchief said after the trial. “I loved him. I feel foolish and hurt now, but that’s the past.”

  • • •

  “What an idiot,” Hanna said when Grace had finished.

  “Hardly,” Grace said. “I don’t think she was an idiot. What good would it do her now, to believe he never loved her?”

  “What good would it do her? It’s not a choice; it’s a belief. She got conned and she should have stayed gone.”

  Grace agreed with that part. Some people watched the parade of faces on America’s Most Wanted and fantasized about catching one of them at the local gas station, buying cigarettes and SunChips. They wanted the watchdog’s glory, holding tight to the burglar’s pant leg with their teeth. But there were other people who didn’t want them punished. There were other people who looked into the blurry eyes of the same faces and breathed Go, go, go.

  “They’re gone,” Grace told Hanna, her voice catching in her throat. “The boys.”

  “They can do that? No.”

  Grace shook her head. “They absconded. Together.”

  “Where do you think they’ve gone? Mexico?”

  Grace was exhausted enough to be confused; it took her a split second to remember that Hanna thought she was from California.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  “Why, where do you think they went?”

  Grace could only shake her head.

  “What, you think they’ll come here?” Hanna stabbed her index finger at the table. “Do they even know you live here?”

  “They shouldn’t,” Grace said.

  “Why would they—what do you think is going to happen?”

  A hair had fallen into the silver paint on her Mont box. Grace no longer bothered to hide it from Jacqueline. She reached for the tweezers, but she knew she’d have to sand off the whole layer. The paint was too dry already.

  Grace scraped at the wood, gathering the metal paste under her fingernail. She pulled the hair out. It was hers, fallen from her clip.

  Hanna was staring at her. “Julie, what did you do?”

  Grace opened her mouth and closed it again. They were coming for her; she knew it.

  “Well,” she began. “I stole from the Wynne House first.”

  VI

  Garland

  16

  What do you mean, not going back?” Riley had asked her.

  They were lying on his single bed at his parents’ house. Downstairs, the Grahams’ annual holiday open house was in full swing. All three leaves were needed in t
he dining room table to make room for the food: sausage balls, country ham biscuits, pepper jelly, hot crab dip. Grace had rolled the cheese straws with Mrs. Graham in the kitchen that afternoon. “Oh, my Gracie, how we all missed you,” she had said. “I’m so glad to have my girl back for a few days.”

  Grace had wept, inexplicably, into her shoulder. “I missed you too,” she said. She’d only been gone two weeks. Grace had flown home, frantic and despairing, the day after Alls left. She needed to be with Riley, safe, and that was as far as she could think. She hadn’t turned in any final papers and she would miss the exams. Grace hadn’t had a B since sixth grade and now she would flunk her first semester of college, but that didn’t matter a tenth as much as her other failure did.

  At the party, Dr. Graham ladled whiskey sours from the punch bowl, none for himself. An ice ring full of holly leaves bobbed in the middle. Riley’s great-uncle Gil had eaten most of the rum-soaked maraschino cherries already; Grace had seen him furtively replenish the bowl. Grace and Riley had made their rounds as a couple, hands clasped, to let the guests look Grace over and remark on how she had changed after just a few months in New York City. Sometimes they said, very satisfied, that she had not changed at all. His aunt Holly, she of the agate cameo bracelet, treated Grace like a riddle to be solved. Was she thinner? Had she changed her hair? Were her clothes different, because something was. Grace shifted uncomfortably, remembering an inanity she’d heard as a girl about virgins walking one way and not-a-virgins another. Grace hadn’t been a virgin for many years, but she felt sure she knew what the something was. Maybe, Aunt Holly concluded with a wistful smile, the change was in Grace’s attitude: She was coming into her own as a young woman. Grace felt as though she were auditioning all over again, this time to stay.

  She and Riley had snuck upstairs when the guests coaxed Mrs. Graham to the piano, where she was now banging out carols, speeding them up with each verse until the singers were breathless trying to keep up. Always, these carols collapsed into tipsy giggling. The last singer standing received a peppermint pig, tied with ribbon to a tiny hammer. Riley and his brothers were never allowed to win, but the Graham boys always sang in the contest anyway, pushing the tempo, like false bidders driving up an auction price. Grace could hear Jim and Colin now rushing through a tongue-twisting “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”