by Amy Gentry
They were pristine. The patent-leather flats so shiny, the soles of the Reebok sneakers fluorescent yellow, the miraculously white leather sandals with gold lions on them framing brightly polished toenails without a single chip. Staring at the floor, she cast her mind back through the past few weeks and saw a parade of flip-flops and leather boots looking as unscuffed as if they’d just come out of the box. She could see, framed by the black plastic smock, her own feet perched on the silver bar in Jane’s Converse, which had felt comfortably worn. Now she noticed that the tiny holes in the canvas—one near the right toe, another on the side, another near the heel—were too perfectly placed. She’d worn through shoes before; the canvas should have been frayed under the laces, the holes should have bloomed unattractively along the seam of the heel, not in neat little ovals in the middle of the fabric, and the rubber should have been thin enough under the soles for her to feel every pebble on the sidewalk. These weren’t worn; they were distressed.
She imagined a city divided between those like herself and the kid with the oversize pants—people whose shoes endured a constant pounding, scuffing, sweating, straining, and staining with grass and mud and soft, oozing tar—and those who whooshed past them in SUVs, the ones who never walked more than twenty steps outside each day, much less to a bus stop or convenience store, and whose shoes, therefore, never wore out.
She wished for a moment she could tell Cal.
Not Jane, though. Jane had never walked anywhere. She would have found ways to rebel against Anna and Tom without ever having to rebel against that.
The hairdresser tilted Julie’s head back up, and she glanced at the ceiling, hoping, for Jane’s sake, that the needle upstairs wasn’t hurting her too much.
4
If Tom suspects the ovarian cyst is not an ovarian cyst, he doesn’t say anything about it, and I, in return, say nothing about the gun that appeared in his hand last night. After we settle Julie on the sofa Monday morning with hot tea and the remote control, she turns on a cable movie that’s already halfway over, one of those holiday-themed romantic comedies with six different plots so isolated from one another that most of the stars probably never shared a soundstage. I notice A Little Princess, which I went back and got her that first week, still lying in its plastic wrapping on top of the Blu-ray player.
I sit next to her with her feet in my lap under the afghan, rubbing them absently. She looks incredibly weary, and within fifteen minutes she has fallen asleep, her night in pain having caught up with her.
I move her bundled feet gently off my lap, slip the remote from under her arm, and mute the television just as some stockbroker in a natty suit looks up, realizes it’s five minutes until midnight, and tears out of his office to propose to the actress on the other side of the movie. Tom is in the kitchen, putting the breakfast dishes away before he goes upstairs to work.
The thought of Tom’s presence in Julie’s room is not the only reason I don’t want to go back to bed. The tiredness nags at me, but something else does too.
“I have to pick up some papers from my office,” I say. “I hate to leave just now, but she’ll sleep for a while.” I glance at Julie. “And I need to get it over with so I can start working on grades.” Tom doesn’t need to know that I’ve successfully lobbied the chair of my department to let me turn in final grades at the end of the summer. It’s amazing how sensitive department heads are to my particular brand of family emergency—the kind that involves knives and young daughters and the national news.
Tom looks at me mutely from the kitchen, and I admit to myself that I’d feel better if I knew how long I’ve been living in a house with a loaded gun. “Will you be around in case she wakes up?” I ask instead.
“Of course,” he says. “Is she—”
“I told you, she’s fine,” I snap. Then soften. “I just don’t want her to wake up all alone.”
He nods.
On the phone with Carol Morse in the car, I must sound a little off, although I feel my request to see her is perfectly reasonable. After all, she’s invited me to make an appointment with her before. “Do you want to come in with Julie this afternoon?” she asks.
I know Julie won’t be coming this afternoon—she’ll be sleeping. But I can tell Carol about that when I see her.
“No, I thought this time I would just—I want to see you by myself.”
“All right,” she says, and then, “I have a cancellation this morning at eleven. Can you make that?”
It’s probably her lunch break. Maybe I sound worse than I think I do.
I kill an hour at the paperback bookstore next to her office, thumbing through romances and mysteries. When I walk in, I’m somewhat surprised to find her younger than I remembered, no older than me, and wearing chino capris. For some reason, this bothers me.
“Come in, come in,” she says and gestures me over to a sofa with a woven blanket draped over one arm. I notice a box of tissues sitting on the side table by a lamp with an artfully lumpy ceramic base, and I wonder if Julie ever cries here. Carol Morse closes the door and sits opposite me in a low-backed chair.
“Thanks for fitting me in,” I say, suddenly nervous. “I hope this is—it’s a little strange. It’s about Julie.”
“How is Julie?” she asks with an appropriate degree of concern.
“Fine. Well, not fine,” I say. “She’s sick today, so she won’t be coming in.” Carol just looks at me, but for some reason I don’t want to tell her about the hospital. Right now it’s the only secret Julie and I share; perhaps I’m afraid to find out Carol already knows. I continue, probing to see whether she’ll volunteer the information on her own. “I was sort of hoping you could help me out with Julie a little. I feel like—I feel like she’s keeping things from me. And I know you can’t talk about what she says to you, but I have some things to tell you that might change your mind on that.”
“On patient confidentiality? That’s impossible.”
“Even for a parent?”
“Especially for a parent.” She looks at me levelly. “Anna, are you aware that your daughter hasn’t come to her sessions for the past two weeks?”
After a stunned pause, I manage to say, “Carol, how could I be aware of that, since nobody bothered to tell me?” She stays silent for long enough that I become uncomfortably conscious of my hostile tone. “I mean, no, no, I had no idea. She’s been saying she’s coming here, I just assumed—I mean, wouldn’t you think we would want to know that?”
“Julie is an adult,” the woman says coolly. “Her appointments are completely confidential.” I have a sudden picture of Carol Morse at home with her husband, listening to Fleetwood Mac in the Jacuzzi she surely has on the back deck of the house she purchased by taking strangers’ money for reassurances that their lives are okay, that everything will work out.
With difficulty, I control my urge to get up. “She was here for the first two sessions, I know she was,” I say. “Can you tell me anything about what she said? Can you tell me—anything at all?” I have to get something out of this woman. “Please. She hasn’t told us anything beyond what’s in the police report. Which—” I can’t bring myself to say that what she told the police isn’t true. Not all of it anyway.
While I am searching for the words to tell her about the hospital and the ultrasound, Carol Morse says, “Have you asked Julie?”
Have I asked Julie? Have I—something shorts out in my brain. I want to stand and shriek; I want to knock over the artful ceramic lamp and fling the woven throw to the ground and stomp on it.
Instead I ask, “Do you have children?”
“No, I don’t,” she says evenly.
“I can tell,” I say. I grab my purse, standing up.
“Mrs. Whitaker,” she says.
“Dr.,” I snap.
“Dr.—”
“Davalos.”
“Dr. Dava—”
“Oh, you can call me Anna.”
“Anna,” she says, refusing to take the bait. S
he’s not even standing, and although I want to storm out, somehow the fact that she is still sitting in her low-backed chair keeps me from doing so for a moment longer. “Anna, Julie has had an incredibly difficult time. I can tell you that much. The trauma of what she’s been through is not something most people can imagine.”
She wants to talk about trauma.
“Many survivors of sexual abuse feel an overwhelming sense of shame,” she says. “Especially when the abuse is prolonged and combined with other trauma. She needs to feel that she’s safe talking to you.”
“Of course she’s safe,” I say. Angry tears have started streaming down my face despite my efforts.
“She’s not sure how to relate to her family anymore, or to anyone who hasn’t been through what she has. She might protect you from the details because she doesn’t want to make you sad or upset.”
“Just tell me,” I beg.
“Your job is to let her know you love her, no matter what happened.”
“Please.”
“Anna, don’t you want to come sit down? We have thirty more minutes in this appointment. I feel like it would be good for you to talk to someone as well. Don’t you think that’s true?”
I get out of there and into my car so fast I’m almost halfway home before it occurs to me to swing by the university. Both to substantiate my lie—there might really be student papers, after all—and to sit behind a closed door with a lock on it and think. I don’t want to see or talk to anyone right now, not even Julie. When I get to my office, I notice a flashing red light on the phone, indicating that I have messages. It takes me a second to figure out how to retrieve them; hardly anybody calls office phones these days. The first three messages are from reporters, and I delete them without listening past the introduction.
After the fourth beep: “Uh, Dr. Davalos, this is Alex Mercado. I’m a private investigator. I know you aren’t talking to the press right now, and I don’t need to ask you any questions. Actually, I have some information to share with you—some things I think you’ll be interested in knowing. So, uh, give me a call back.” He leaves a phone number. “Again, it’s Alex Mercado, and I’d like to meet somewhere and talk face to face, if that’s okay.”
“End of message,” says the female voice recording. “To repeat this message, press—”
I copy the number down on the second listening. Then I listen to the message two or three more times before deleting it, just to make sure I’m really hearing someone self-identify as a “private investigator” on my voicemail. I am.
We never hired a PI to find Julie. We had so much faith in the police then—a thought that presses a burst of angry laughter out of me now. I suppose I thought of private eyes as a solution only for people in movies. But then, I wasn’t the one in charge of the solutions, or much of anything, for a while. The first thing I do now is turn on my desktop computer and Google Alex Mercado private investigator. He comes up right away under a link for AMI Inc., which leads to a website so corny I think, There’s no way this isn’t fake. There’s actually a fedora in the logo. What next, a magnifying glass? I open a new tab and start looking around for websites where PIs are registered, searching for credentials.
Back when Julie disappeared, there were crackpots. We didn’t want to change our number because we still believed she might try to contact us, and even though the police had a special tip line set aside for Julie, we still got the calls: I have information you’ll want to know, they always said, or I saw her, I swear to God it was her, she’s in Tucson, or She’s in Jacksonville, or She’s in Missouri City. One or two of them refused to be referred to the police. It has to be you, and it has to be in person. Needless to say, the police were listening in on our line, which I assume had as much to do with their suspicion of Tom and me as anything else—God, what a time—and the calls must have all been traced to lonely middle-aged men living with their ailing mothers or teenagers playing games of truth or dare because none of them turned up any leads.
At the time, I found it hard to believe that so many people would want to be a part of such a horrible circumstance, but in the years since, the years of forgotten nightmares and long commutes past her hundreds of imaginary graves, I have almost felt I understood them. It’s so easy to forget how terrible the world is. Tragedy reminds us. It is purifying in that way. But when it starts to fade, you have to return to the source, over and over.
When I find a reliable-looking registration site searchable by ZIP code, I’m surprised to find that Alex Mercado Investigations is the second name to come up. On the AMI website, I click the About Us link and am treated to Alex Mercado’s credentials: Almost three years as a police detective in the special victims unit of the Houston Police Department. Six years as a private detective. A few links to news stories about crimes that the agency claims to have helped solve; one of the links mentions his name.
I pick up the phone and dial. A male voice answers after the second ring.
“Alex Mercado Investigations. Is this Anna Davalos?”
“Yes,” I say, a bit startled, although of course he would have caller ID. “You left a message earlier.”
“Thanks for getting back to me,” he says. “Look, I realize this is a little odd, but I would really like to meet with you and talk about some things.”
“About Julie?”
“Of course. I don’t feel comfortable saying more on the phone. Would you be able to meet me somewhere?”
“Yes, but it has to be today. It has to be now.” It’s remarkable how easy it is to finish this conversation: I suggest a diner, not the cutesy retro kind you find around my neighborhood, but a Waffle House near the freeway. I feel my pulse racing, but my voice stays absolutely cool and untroubled as I say, “I’ll meet you there in half an hour.” It’s like I set up things like this every day.
Just before I’m about to hang up, he asks one last question, as if he can’t resist. “Have you ever heard of Gretchen Farber?”
“No,” I say. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I’ll see you in half an hour.”
Gretchen
made one mistake, and the mistake’s name was Cal. He was supposed to be another rung on the ladder out of the dark hole she had come from. It was her fault he’d become more.
At the time, she’d been planning her next move for so long it felt inevitable. As soon as the set was over, she smiled, murmured “Thank you” into the mic, and slipped offstage fast. She headed toward the ladies’ room but swerved past it fluidly at the last second, slipping out the back door instead and then pounding through the alleyway and around to the front entrance. Then she waited. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, heart throbbing painfully from the sprint and her skin prickling in the chill. Coatless, her black Salvation Army trench still slouched up alibi-style next to her purse backstage. At least it wasn’t raining, for once, aside from a little halo of mist around the neon club sign.
And then he was there, pulling his collar up as he emerged onto the sidewalk, the neon light shining pink on his shaved head. She steeled herself to make his dreams come true, trying to look as if she’d been waiting for someone else when he happened to step into her path. “Hey, do you have a cigarette? I’m dying.”
He just looked at her, blinked for a moment, then broke into a helpless smile. “I don’t smoke,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s a nasty habit. I’m not supposed to be doing it. If my band sees me, they’ll kill me.” She gestured toward her throat, opened her mouth, pointing into it as if he could see the damage that cigarettes had already done to her vocal cords. Then she remembered Will’s hands at her neck, how she’d worn a turtleneck but couldn’t sing for two days afterward. Will had told Dave and Len she had laryngitis.
“Are you okay?” he asked suddenly, his smile going out.
She had only thirty more seconds to get this settled, so she let herself come a little unsewn, just enough to throw a natural wobb
le into her voice. “Rough night,” she admitted. “Honestly, I kind of need a break from those guys. Where are you headed?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “Home. Do you need a ride?”
“Yeah,” she said. “If you’re okay swinging by a drugstore or something for smokes.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, I feel like a complete weirdo.”
“No, it’s okay,” he said, and she knew it was far more than that. She was still watching the door just behind him out of the corner of her eye. Plenty of people were smoking under the sign, but there was no one out here she didn’t want to see—yet. The door flapped open incessantly, burping out a few more plaid-flannel shirts each time. He noticed her noticing and twitched to look over his shoulder, and she willed her eyes to become china plates fixed on his until he stopped.
“I’m Cal,” he said, extending a hand. “And it’s right around midnight, so you”—he gestured toward the dingy marquee—“must be Gretchen.”
She wasn’t, but he was so proud of that line she knew immediately he didn’t have any others. So she just nodded yes and grasped his warm hand, cracking open a little at the thought of all the things he was taking on faith. When she said, “Thanks, Cal,” her voice broke again, not on purpose this time, and she pulled her hand back fast; he took a step forward, like you do when you see something just beginning to topple off a shelf.
She righted herself and said, “So, where are you parked?”
“That way.” He pointed, and she let him march past her with just the faintest brush of shoulders, falling in a little behind. Giving him some time without her in his sightline so that he could reflect on his unbelievable good luck. That idea was so sad she almost laughed. She hoped he would forget about the cigarettes, because although she could hold a lungful of pot for a minute and a half before letting it out, cigarettes made her cough and cough.
He didn’t forget. The car slowed down five blocks from the club and he prepared to turn into a gas station.