Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  How little it mattered that Grace had hidden, changed her name, changed herself inside and out. Riley’s family heirloom had tracked her across an ocean.

  “I couldn’t believe it either,” he said. “I thought it would take me years.” He brushed imagined dust from the picture with his thumb in what appeared to be a habit. “But you were in the goddamn library.”

  “I could have moved,” she said, her voice catching. “I sold that thing years ago.”

  “Yeah, I know. I checked with Cy when I got out to be sure.”

  “Cy? Helmers?”

  “How many people do you think read the Albemarle Record outside the state, even the county? You should have seen the map, Gracie. He pulled it up in two minutes. You’re this red dot that never quits blinking.”

  Grace was speechless. Of course. She spent her days nursing the artifacts of centuries past, but she couldn’t escape the year she lived in.

  “There are only eight little jewelry shops in the Saint whatever. I took my picture and asked around—but for the bracelet. I told her I collected cameos.”

  “She didn’t believe that,” Grace protested.

  “You’re the one who told me collectors were snotty creeps. You called them ‘dollhouse fetishists,’ remember?” He shrugged. “It’s not a real complex persona.”

  “I didn’t think you did personas.”

  “I’ve learned that it pays to be flexible.”

  “She told you where I worked,” Grace said. She had left America and made Paris into a town as small as Garland.

  “Yes, Julie, she did. It’s easy to find what you want, if you pretend you’re looking for something else.”

  • • •

  Greg had given Riley and Alls ten thousand dollars each in cash—guilt money, start-fresh money—upon their release. He had gone to work in his mother’s wine shop—he could never become a lawyer now—and saved for his friends’ release. He had brought Alls care packages—requested books, candy, better socks—every month. Greg, Alls said, would be ashamed for the rest of his life. He was castrated with it.

  Alls left town with his magazine clipping. He’d procured the necessary travel documents with the assistance of a friend of a friend he had met in the prison library, “reading National Review,” he added.

  “You have a fake passport?” Her own false identity was so flimsy in comparison.

  “I couldn’t have left otherwise, and now I can’t go back.”

  “Why would you do that, violate your parole? Risk more jail time?”

  “There’s nothing there for me, Grace. My parole is contingent on me living with my father. In Garland. Some people can do that, but I can’t.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t.”

  He was silent for too long and she hurried to fill the space. “When did you get here?”

  “Two days ago,” he said. “Today, I followed you home, rode behind the bus on a bicycle.”

  “And what—what were you planning to do, once you found me?” The real question, the one she wanted to ask but could not bear to, scratched in her throat like a struggling cough.

  He shrugged. “That depended on who I found.”

  • • •

  He wanted to know everything she did at Zanuso et Filles. She told him she restored antiques. Her boss gave her broken things, and her job was to unbreak them. What kinds of things, he asked. All kinds, she said. Furniture, lamps, china, weird old art projects. She told him she filled gouges, melted enamel, puzzled together shattered porcelain, cleaned dirt from unseen crevices, found duplicate handles, bases, hinges, and pulls when the originals had been lost—

  “You love it,” he said.

  “I do,” she admitted.

  He looked around. “They don’t pay you much.”

  “It’s not that. I really like the things. I don’t have to talk to the owners, who I’d probably hate. I just make repairs, and take my pleasure in the beauty of the thing itself.” She tried to explain to him how the work—repetitive, probing, apologetic, minute—felt like a service. Not to people, but to the objects.

  “A penance,” he said. “You’re doing penance.”

  “In a way.”

  “For what we stole, not who we stole it from, and not to me, not to Riley.”

  “No one made you rob the Wynne House,” she said.

  “Where does stealing diamonds fall within this belief system of yours?”

  “My crooked boss had me stealing for her, replacing diamonds with fakes.”

  “So you’re skimming a little off the top. That’s beautiful.” He stretched, wrenching his back from side to side. He reached down into his pants pocket and then spread her trillions and her little stones on the table. She had not seen him take them. He turned a trillion to catch the light and studied the bright spots that floated on the ceiling.

  “Gracie,” he said. “You know you owe me.”

  28

  So she’d learned about jewelry, he said. Not much, she protested. She didn’t know about jewelry, only the simple mechanics. Jewelry repair was a skill accidentally acquired.

  “Like you and the locks,” she said. “You had perfectly fine reasons for picking locks.”

  “Perfectly fine,” he said wryly. “Almost like we couldn’t help it, what happened after.”

  “Where is he?” she begged.

  He smiled. “Show me your office. I’d like to see where you work.”

  “I don’t have a key,” she lied.

  He shrugged: a minor inconvenience.

  It was after two o’clock in the morning. No metro. He told her to call a taxi.

  “Tell him to pick us up at your stop and drop us off at—what’s the nearest landmark building to you?” When he saw that she would not help him, he rolled his eyes. “I have the address. I’ve already been there. Just save me the step, okay?”

  “Sacré Coeur,” she said.

  They walked to Gallieni in the balmy night haze, passing no one on the street but a group of teenage boys who heard Alls’s English from up the block and began making lewd comments in approving tones. They were excited, Grace could tell. Tourists never came to their neighborhood.

  “Put it in her ass tonight, man? Put it in her ear?” The boy couldn’t have been eighteen. “I bet she sucks it good.”

  “Mange de la merde,” she said, passing them by.

  • • •

  In the cab, Alls chattered loudly about how excited he was to be here with her, and how sorry he was that they had to stay in such a crappy hostel, but if she could just see past that for a sec she’d see that they were finally in the most romantic city in the world, headed toward Sacray Core late at night, and did she bring the camera, and baby please don’t pout, I promise I’ll bring you back in ten years and we’ll do it up in style. Grace was mute with anxiety, the color gone from her face and her lips dry, but when the driver glanced at her in his rearview mirror, her grim pallor only added to Alls’s charade.

  The walk from the cathedral to Zanuso was just over a kilometer.

  Grace had so many questions for Alls that she was scared to ask because of all the questions he could ask her in return. The small, impossible hope she had felt that he was here because he still loved her was drying up, a persistent drip from a faucet finally wrenched closed.

  “I don’t know what you think I can give you,” she said. “I have nothing.”

  “And isn’t that why you’re taking me to your work? Because when you have nothing to give, you take from someone else?”

  “You can have the diamonds,” she said.

  “I already have the diamonds,” he snapped. “How much you reckon those are worth?”

  “The little ones aren’t much, maybe four hundred each, but those trillions are special. At least five thousand each, as much as ten. Euros. I’m far from expert but you could take those and get on the Eurail and sell them in Madrid next week for fifteen thousand dollars, probably.”

  “Bullshit,�
�� he said. He put his hands in his pockets. “But is that what you think the last three years of my life are worth? Five thousand dollars a year?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “But I’m not going to help you. I’m not going to steal anything.”

  “Anything else,” he said.

  “Anything else,” she sighed.

  “If only I believed you,” he said. “But it’s not like I found you working in an orphanage, healing the sick or disfigured. I see great potential here.”

  Grace was worn out with fear and now she was exasperated. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

  “I want from you what you wanted from me.”

  “I wanted you,” she said.

  “Too little, too late.”

  They were quiet for a minute, listening to the echo of their footsteps on the sidewalk. Grace wondered what would happen if she ran.

  “I was bringing the bags from the study to the living room,” he finally said. “Riley was loading up his own bags. The front door opened, and the old groundskeeper was standing there.”

  She listened.

  “And Riley ran at him.”

  That hadn’t been in the papers.

  When Alls saw the groundskeeper, his first thought was to turn around, to hide his face. And so he saw Riley, in the doorway behind him, his face monstrous with fright, run at the groundskeeper holding an andiron over his head. The groundskeeper, clutching his trash bag, fell against the doorway, hitting his head on the jamb, and dropped to the floor. The andiron swept through the empty air at the end of Riley’s arm.

  “If that andiron had hit him, that man would have died right then,” Alls said. “But no one knows Riley swung it except for me and Riley. Not even the groundskeeper. He couldn’t even pick Riley out of the lineup.”

  Alls called for Greg, who came crashing down the hall with his bags and kicked the door open. He ran out to the car, jumping over the old man on the floor. Riley stood over the groundskeeper, staring at his slackened face, until Alls shouted at him to get moving. They drove to the Walmart and switched cars, but Riley was a wreck. He stayed glued to the TV at the lake house, certain that they were missing crucial details because their crime was only regional news at Norris Lake, not local news. He wouldn’t go to New York and he was in no shape to anyway. He had sorely overestimated his own nerve.

  “When you left with the painting,” Alls said, “you left me with him.”

  “You could have made the switch that night,” she said. “Or shredded his copy and left it all behind.”

  “How was I supposed to believe in you at all, huh? You have me tear out the painting for you, you have Riley fake a copy for you. I’m sure there’s a real deep record of things you didn’t do.”

  “I wanted you to come. I was just worried something else would go wrong—”

  “And it did.”

  Riley insisted on returning to Garland; he said it was less suspicious for him to be there, like everything was normal, even though he himself wasn’t normal at all. The groundskeeper didn’t improve and Riley started threatening to turn himself in. He listened to the people on the news describe the thugs who’d locked a frail volunteer in an airless room and couldn’t believe they meant him. He wouldn’t leave the house, and for three days he neither showered nor slept. He had glued himself to the TV and seemed to be praying to it, for the groundskeeper to pull through, for himself to wake up from a bad dream.

  “And you were worried about the painting,” Grace said. She’d played out the scenarios in her mind thousands of times: They discovered the painting was missing and blamed the culprits of the second crime for the earlier one; or Alls was found out and then so was she.

  “No,” he said. “Not that.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “You were so focused on the painting,” he said. “The days before you left—like you didn’t trust me with it. And I started to wonder if you really wanted me at all.” He stopped and looked at her. “I really wasn’t sure. And then you took it.”

  I wanted you, she wished she could say.

  They had reached Zanuso. “Stand here,” he said. He nodded to the brick wall, under the awning. “Watch,” he said, nodding first toward the street and then up at the building’s windows. He seemed comfortable; he knew where he was.

  There was not a soul in sight. Alls got to his knees. When he moved his feet, his shoes made no scuffing sound against the pavement, as though he were barefoot. He reached under his shirttail and took from just inside the waistband of his jeans a leather case. He silently unzipped it and pulled out a small tension wrench and a steel pick. He wriggled the short end of the wrench into the keyhole and then slid the pick in next to it. She couldn’t tell him she had a key now. He pushed gently on the wrench, bobbing it clockwise, as he pushed and pulled the pick with his other hand, raking the inside of the lock. He frowned, and Grace looked nervously up and down the block. Still silent. Alls pulled the pick and wrench from the lock and slid the pick back into his case. He chose a small hooked one now, and, shifting his crouch to get even closer to the lock, he slipped the hook inside the keyhole and began to probe, pushing down on the handle, then pulling the pick out a bit and pushing down again.

  She heard something inside the building and touched his shoulder, but he had already heard it. His tools were out of sight and he was on his feet, hustling her toward the corner. They made it just around when she heard the door burst open, a man muttering to himself as he hurried up the sidewalk in the other direction, the door falling shut behind him. She could hear Alls’s heartbeat against her, or maybe she could feel it through his clothes and his skin.

  He worked on the lock for what felt like a very long time, but when Grace looked at her watch, only ten minutes had passed. She heard a car, probably two blocks away but getting closer. Alls pulled the pick from the lock and made one quick tug upward on the wrench. The lock clicked. He turned the doorknob and nodded for her to enter.

  She let him close the door behind her. He was almost silent, and in the dark, with only her yellow dress as light, it seemed impossible that she was not alone. But she heard his voice behind her. “Go on,” he whispered.

  She reached out for the wall to steady herself, and she followed it to the stairwell. She groped for the rail and stepped down, one two three, feeling the wall for the turn, and then the nine steps to the bottom. And then there was another door, and another lock.

  This time, he used a flashlight. He had it open in two minutes.

  Grace had spent hundreds of hours alone in the studio late at night, lights blazing. But now she was scared to touch the light switch.

  “You know what they say,” he joked, his voice overwhelming the dark. “Weakest part of a lock is the keyhole.”

  She felt him in the room, moving silently about. She stood still. In a moment he had turned on her desk lamp.

  He looked over her table, the tools neatly grouped by form and by function in glass jars, the stack of folded cloths.

  “You should pick locks,” he said, more to himself than to her. “You’d be great at it.”

  He walked around to the Czech centerpiece. “What is this fairyland here?”

  She took a deep breath. “You can’t take that. You’d never find a buyer for it.”

  “I just asked what the hell it is,” he said. “It’s as big as a doghouse anyway.”

  She toured the centerpiece for him, the silk cornstalks and beaded trees, the muslin shepherdesses and wax peaches. Hanna had done such beautiful work.

  “The peaches are mine,” she said. “And these acorns, this beading.”

  “What about the jewelry?” he asked. “Where is that?”

  “In her office,” Grace said, glancing at Jacqueline’s doorway.

  She followed him in.

  “In here?” he asked, pulling open her desk.

  “No, in there.” She pointed to the stack of magazines sitting in front of the safe.

  He took a quick breath an
d flexed his hands.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “You going to try to stop me?”

  “Could I?”

  “I haven’t done this much,” he said. “Could take a while.” He lay down on the floor, on his belly. His legs bent at the knee and his feet stuck up, shoes dangling. He didn’t fit on the floor.

  Grace watched for a while as he spun the dial back and forth. “Are you listening to it?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I wish. These wheels are too light to click.”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “Not your problem, remember? Any guesses on the combination? Birth date, phone number, weird superstitions?”

  “I’m not going to help you,” she said.

  “Yeah, I got it. You would never.”

  He asked for scrap paper and a pen, and Grace brought him the supplies from her desk. He began to try combinations and mark them down. What he was doing looked like a joke. Cracking a safe couldn’t possibly work this way and he couldn’t possibly believe it would.

  “You can’t try every combination,” she said.

  “You know, in some ways, you seem really different. Right off the bat. For one thing, you’re not trying to get everybody to fall in love with you all the time. Laughing and covering your mouth, telling little stories about how clumsy you are. But you’re still a know-it-all.”

  “If I was so transparent,” she started, but he interrupted her.

  “To answer your question, I don’t think I’ll need to try every number.” He’d clenched his teeth in concentration. “The wheel was parked at thirteen, so we’ll start with that as the last one. And there’s a little forgiveness for the shaky handed. Multiples of five should do it.”

  She didn’t know what to do. She sat down in Hanna’s chair and flipped through her notes on the centerpiece. Vendredi, 24 août, the top page read. Tomorrow. Nous ratisserons la pelouse et finirons la caisse. Comb the lawn and finish the case.

  Ratisserons, finirons. We will comb, we will finish. Hanna had accepted her help more fully than Grace had realized.