by Amy Gentry
She got the point, and it wasn’t just that she, too, was a blond. Sometimes people had to leave, she’d thought to herself. She took a deep breath and pressed delete. Then she noticed the new voicemail message. Not recognizing the number, she pushed play and listened but a moment later jerked the phone away from her ear like it had bitten her. How many times would she have to delete him before he was gone? And how many times would it still hurt? She’d never picked up, and she’d stopped listening to the messages after the first few; they all said the same thing. Now he was trying her from different numbers, hoping to catch her off guard. She glanced once more at the unknown number, and then with a jolt recognized the area code: Portland, Oregon. It might be a coincidence, a cell phone borrowed from a friend. But what if he actually had gone to Portland? It might mean he was trying to find her, following her trail, starting with Will. Of course that’s where he would start. He’d always wanted an excuse to confront Will and get her stuff back; he’d said facing the past was important, as if he’d know the first thing about it. He could be finding out, though, right now. And once he started in that direction, how long would it be until he found her?
Looking around at Tom and Anna’s neighborhood, she could barely believe she was here, much less picture Cal turning up. Empty of pedestrians in the heat of the afternoon, the neighborhood had high white curbs but no sidewalks, and she walked in the street, stepping around straggling ropes of soft tar. She passed house after house, all of them huge to her after Cal’s pinched Seattle apartment, their plush lawns trimmed with fat shrubs and clumps of begonias so perfect and motionless in the dead air, they looked like silk flowers. Some of the porches had columns, like plantation houses.
Following the noise of traffic, she stepped out of the subdivision and started walking along a busy thoroughfare. Cars spat hot breath and gravel at her ankles as they raced by. There was no sidewalk here either, no curb even, just a narrow trail worn in the crabgrass near the greasy roadside before it plunged into runoff ditches padded at the bottom with tangled weeds. She walked past a rambling strip mall: Kroger, Qwik Klean, Jenny’s Gifts, the streaky glass box of a Dairy Queen. The only logical destination of this ragged path was the bus stop. She cast a glance toward the kiosk and saw three women waiting for the bus in service uniforms, each with a rolling cart full of bottles. Cleaning ladies. Her back hurt just looking at them.
As she passed a McDonald’s, she saw a long blue awning peeking out from the strip center behind it: BOBBY’S POOL HALL, in dingy white block letters. She walked toward it in relief. So there were hiding places here, after all. Although the other stores in the strip center had glass fronts, she noted that Bobby’s windows were covered with weather-beaten plywood and wondered if there was any business in the back. Not that she needed any, she hurriedly told herself; she was going to be here only a few weeks. But it wasn’t a bad idea to find out what was around. Besides, she had money in her wallet, and maybe what she really wanted was to sit for a few hours away from the roadside, drinking away the pain in her gut.
At this time of the afternoon, there were only a few barflies. They sat close to the entrance, talking with a curly-haired woman behind the bar who laughed loudly as she wedged limes on a cutting board. None of them paid any attention to her until she leaned against the bar. Then the bartender stopped laughing abruptly.
“What do you want, honey?” She squinted. “Job? You gotta be eighteen.”
“Corona, please.”
The woman laughed. “You’re going to have to show me some ID, hon.”
Julie dug through her new wallet and pulled out one that said she was twenty-four. Even as she handed it over, she felt a moment of panic. It was a California driver’s license, a real one, the kind you can get in a lot of trouble for stealing.
The bartender gave it a long, hard look, then glanced at her, then back down at the ID. “Mercedes Rodriguez?” she said, drawing out the syllables like it was an impossible name for anyone to have.
“Mercy,” she said automatically. The last time she’d used Mercy, she’d had short brown hair, but it was dark in Bobby’s Pool Hall, and the wide-cheekboned face and blue eyes looked close enough. Mercy, Mercy, she told her face, look like Mercy.
It almost worked. She could feel the woman struggling to care. Then someone called “Bev!” from the end of the bar, and the bartender glanced anxiously over her shoulder, and by the time she looked back at Mercy, she was having none of it. “Sorry, señorita,” she said, all the patience draining from her voice. “You don’t look twenty-four, and it’s an out-of-state ID. I gotta be careful in this neighborhood. For all I know, you wandered over from the high school.” Bev threw the ID down on the counter and hustled off.
This goddamn city. She wasn’t planning to be here long, but she’d already flashed a fake ID within ten blocks of Tom and Anna’s house and been turned down. Don’t shit where you eat meant something different when she was working at the Black Rose, but it applied here too. She grabbed the ID off the counter and shoved it back into her pocket.
Now the two men at the bar were staring at her. One of them said, “Come on, Bev, have a heart!”
The other chimed in, “She’s old enough. I can always tell, like rings on a tree.” He guffawed.
Now she really had to get away. On a sudden instinct, she pulled the phone out and dialed one of the numbers Tom and Anna had made her write down on a scrap of paper and keep in her new wallet.
“Hello?” The voice had the doubtful tone of someone picking up an unknown number.
“Hey, Jane,” she said. “It’s Julie.”
“Where are you? What number is this?”
She looked out the window and saw a sign across the street. “I’m at the Starbucks by our house. I borrowed a phone off someone. Listen, I had to get out of there, Mom and Dad were hovering. Can you pick me up?”
“Are you at the Starbucks on Memorial?”
“Yeah. I have to go, this lady needs her phone back.”
“Just hang on, I’m at a friend’s house. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Jane hung up.
She slammed the bar door behind her as hard as she dared, but it bounced on a cushion of air six inches from the frame and she could still hear the voices inside laughing at her as she hurriedly crossed the street.
Fifteen minutes later, Jane pulled into the Starbucks parking lot in Tom’s SUV, rolled down the window, and said, “Nice shoes.”
“Thanks.” Julie looked down and saw Jane’s Converse on her feet. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Despite the dark hair and bangs, Jane didn’t look much like Charlotte at all. Jane was taller, stronger, Julie told herself.
“Mom got me all these flats,” she apologized. “I just wanted something I could walk in.” She pulled the heavy passenger-side door open and climbed in.
“I said it was okay.” Looking closely at Jane’s face, especially when she smiled, Julie could tell she had never been very far from home. College didn’t count, even if it was halfway across the country—it was still closer to home than a single bus ride could take you. If you looked past Jane’s piercings (two: nose and eyebrow), tattoos (two small ones, one on her shoulder and one on her hip, and Anna didn’t know about either), and hair (the bleach-and-green was clearly a home job, but the black dye was from a salon), you saw a girl who’d never had to take the bus all that much.
Julie regretted putting her own hair through this last round of bleach. It had looked smooth enough at first, but now the ends were getting ragged, the part below her shoulders breaking off and poofing out. Worst of all, darker hair was creeping in at her hairline. If she hadn’t needed to look the part so desperately, she could probably have gotten away with dirty blond.
But she hadn’t wanted to be a dirty blond. She’d wanted to be Julie.
Jane clicked her keys against the wheel impatiently. “So where are we going?”
“I want to chop all this off,” Julie said, holding out a handf
ul of split ends.
“Like, right now?”
“Yeah, right now. And dye it, maybe. I figured you’d know a good place for that.”
Jane looked impressed. “I can take you to the place I go. It’s in Montrose. What color are you going to dye it?” She squinted shrewdly. “Better not be black.”
“I don’t know, maybe red,” she said without thinking. At the Rose, she’d always made bank with red hair. Besides, white-blond Julie was starting to get to her. She’d stared at the pictures of the missing girl and at herself in the mirror beforehand, but when she started playing Julie for Anna and Tom and Jane, something shifted. She saw Julie’s innocence in the way all three of them looked at her, and it was unnerving. Anna, in particular, watched her as if she might break.
Jane was already pulling out of the parking lot, her strong jaw set under its sprinkling of covered-up acne, saying, “Cool, let’s get out of here.” If Julie was worried about Anna, she should have started with Jane in the first place. Shutting Anna out was Jane’s superpower.
Tom’s Range Rover was a smooth ride, just more ease and luxury so built into Jane’s existence she didn’t even know it was there. Jane wove in and out of the four-lane traffic on Westheimer as she drove toward the city, the SUV soon dwarfed by hulking black Suburbans with tinted windows, shiny trucks that were all tire and no flatbed, a Hummer that looked like it could transform into a robot. A few lanes away, a silver convertible idled like a half-melted bullet in the sun. The apartments gave way to sparkling-white office buildings set on lots kissed around their edges with manicured shrubs and palm trees. Everything gleamed, even the street signs, which were mounted on giant chrome arcs.
“Can you believe how much the Galleria has changed?”
She caught the small dip in Jane’s voice and immediately felt a prickling on the back of her neck, alerting her to a shared memory she was in no position to ignore.
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
“Do you remember that time Mom dropped us off at the Galleria to do our Christmas shopping?”
“That’s what I was thinking about too.”
“I thought we were so cool,” Jane went on, her eyes on the taillights ahead of them. The traffic light had changed and they were inching sluggishly forward, but they weren’t going to make it past the danger zone on this green. “It felt like we were so grown up. You must have been in, what, sixth or seventh grade? Because—” She broke off. “And I would have been in fourth or fifth. We bought lunch at that one fancy food-court place with the crepes. Do you remember splitting up for an hour to buy each other’s presents? That was my favorite part. We, like, synchronized our watches and met at the bakery afterward.” She laughed. “I even doubled back and hid which direction I was coming from so you wouldn’t guess where I bought your present. I think it was Claire’s or something.”
Jane’s voice tugged at her ear, but Julie was distracted by a boy of around twelve or thirteen in a T-shirt and saggy, wide-legged blue jeans weighed down with a heavy wallet chain who was striding through the still-sidewalk-less guts of the drainage ditch parallel to the road. His tangled hair was long and brown and very deliberately shielding his face as he marched, hands in pockets, visibly sweating. He reached the base of one of the chrome arcs, which proved to be a formidable obstacle at ground level. Trapped between an evergreen shrub and the curved chrome, he hiked up his billowing, half-shredded pants leg with one hand and stepped over it, like a cartoon lady pulling up her skirts to step over a puddle.
“Julie?” Jane’s voice came back to her, and she realized she’d missed a question. The music was quieter; Jane must have just turned it down. “Do you remember? What you did that time when we split up?”
“Tried on prom dresses,” she said. “Pretended I was a princess.”
“Oh,” Jane said, and laughed. “Well, that definitely explains why I ended up getting a gift certificate from Waldenbooks that year.”
She knew better than to let this moment pass because of some stupid kid. “I thought you loved reading!”
“You could have picked out a book, though.” Impossibly, Jane sounded hurt, although she was still laughing. “You know, I don’t think I ever used the gift certificate. I mean, after everything happened.”
The light changed, and they barely made it through the intersection this time, moving at a snail’s pace. She watched the boy swim through the weeds by the side of the road until they gained on him, pulled ahead, and finally passed him. In the rearview mirror he looked almost motionless.
She turned back to Jane. “Look, pull the car over. Do you want me to get you the newest Baby-Sitters Club book? They’re probably on number ten thousand by now.”
It worked. Jane laughed and turned the music up.
In Montrose, they parked the car outside a hair salon that had a tattoo parlor upstairs. They got out, and Jane took a deep breath. This must be where Jane went to feel like Houston was her city, not just some place she accidentally wound up because her parents lived there. The sad part was Jane’s pride in her insider knowledge, as if it were hard-won. As if anyone couldn’t walk into any city and find the artists and gays and addicts and tattoo parlors within half an hour by bumming a couple of cigarettes and picking up the free papers on the street corner.
The salon was full of clients, but the woman behind the counter eyed Julie and said she could get her color started and then cut her next customer’s hair while the dye was processing. Julie eased into the chair, felt the woman’s fingers in her hair, and saw her look down critically; she said, “Short and red,” fast, before the woman could comment on her roots. The woman met her eyes in the mirror and said, “Okay, hon, let me get the book.” She left and came back with a floppy binder full of inch-long swatches like the silken manes of tiny horses or trophies of all the girls she’d ever been. Julie pointed to one, and the woman nodded. “Oh, sure, number eight, that’ll look good on you,” and she disappeared into the back to mix the dye.
Jane stood behind her, looking at her face in the mirror. “Mom’ll freak,” she said. “But I think it’s going to look amazing.”
“What do you want to do while I’m cooking?”
“Look at magazines, I guess.” Jane shrugged. Julie could see the realization dawning in Jane’s eyes that there was nothing particularly special about this place. Anywhere must seem hip when you’re getting your hair dyed to piss off your mom.
That gave Julie an idea. “You could go upstairs,” she said. “Get a tattoo while you’re waiting.”
“Think I’m made of money?”
“Don’t you have a credit card?”
“Mom cosigned. It’ll show up on her bill.”
A wave of generosity, accompanied by the need to get Jane out of the room before it became obvious she had roots, made Julie point at her Anna-bought purse on the floor. “She gave me a couple hundred bucks. Why don’t you pay for my hair with your card, and I’ll give you the cash? You can spend it upstairs.”
Jane hesitated.
“Don’t tell me you don’t have your next one already picked out.” Julie predicted something small and discreet, but visible.
“I was thinking of a little outline of Texas on my left ring finger,” Jane admitted.
“So get one!”
“Mom will see,” Jane said. “I figured I’d wait—”
“Until what? Until you’re thirty? Come on, quit hiding who you really are.”
She could tell Jane was eating this up. “You’ll be okay down here?” she said, reaching for the purse.
“Yeah. I don’t mind magazines.” It was true. She used to ogle them in their plastic folders at the library when Cal dropped her off to study for the GED. Once she’d even smuggled a Better Homes and Gardens into the restroom and ripped out a picture of a fluffy white cake surrounded by silver and gold Christmas ornaments—not for the recipe, just the picture. Now the magazine cake was crumpled in a dumpster somewhere in Jersey Village, where the bus had dropped her o
ff, along with her shoes, a cheap gold necklace with a dangling horse charm, and her backpack full of souvenirs. All her earthly possessions. Except—
She lurched forward, but it was too late; Jane was already digging through the floppy bag. Before she could even form the words Give it to me, I’ll find it, Jane had the wallet in her hand and was fanning the ATM-fresh twenties out of its pocket. Julie sat back quickly, willing Jane not to notice the IDs in the wallet, the phone in the inner pocket of the purse, or her own momentary panic.
But Jane just beamed at the stack of bills. “Thanks!” she said and headed for the stairs.
Just in time. The hairstylist was back in a black apron holding a bowl full of glowing red paste in one hand and a brush in the other. “This is going to be gorgeous,” she said, “trust me,” and Julie did, she really did. She leaned back and felt the cold goop applied to her part. “We’re getting rid of those nasty roots first,” the stylist said and continued to chatter, the way good hairdressers do when they can tell you don’t want to say much. At one point she said, “My sister and I are like y’all—we look so different, people never believe we’re related.”
She let the stylist tilt her chin down toward the floor and finally figured out something that had been bothering her since her arrival in Houston. It had been nagging at the corners of her vision everywhere she went, from Target to the therapist to Bobby’s Pool Hall to the weathered-brick coffee shop where Jane had insisted on stopping for pastries on the way to the hair place. Something not quite right, some quality that made the whole city feel like a stage set. Now, surrounded by other clients and with her head pointed floorward, looking under the table with its big mirror, she could see them propped up on footrests on the other side, all in a row: the shoes.