by Amy Gentry
Just as I realize I don’t know the answer to the next question she’s going to ask, she asks it: “Who’s the fund administrator?”
“Oh, I’d have to find out from your dad,” I reply lamely. “But you’re the sole beneficiary.”
I look up and realize she’s staring at me.
I can almost see the next words forming on her lips, so before she can ask, I say, “Somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars.”
She doesn’t even try to conceal how much larger the number is than she was expecting. “Wow,” she says. And then tears start wobbling in her blue eyes; her chin shakes. “You must have really wanted to find me.”
It’s only after she goes upstairs to take a bath, and I hear her sobs coming from the bathroom, that I wonder how she could have read enough to find out about the billboards without coming across anything about the Julie Fund.
The New Girl
was thinking about her next name as she watched Mercedes gather the sheet taut with one hand, lift the mattress corner with the other, flip up a folded white triangle, smooth the crease, and tuck it in. Before she could catch the trick of the fold, Mercedes had already finished and moved over to her side of the bed. It took the more experienced woman fifteen seconds to pull out the new girl’s lousy attempt at a hospital corner and refold it.
“It looks like putting on a diaper,” the new girl said.
Mercedes paused what she was doing—scooting on one knee from corner to corner as she tucked in the bottom edge of the sheet—and rolled her unusual blue eyes. “Guess you’ve never done that before either, huh?”
The new girl felt herself flush.
Later, when they were in the supply closet together loading the cart with wrapped rolls of toilet paper, Mercedes said, “Maybe you do have a little one?” The new girl didn’t answer right away. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”
The new girl shrugged and ran the palm of her hand lightly over the spray tops hooked on the cart, feeling for the empties. “Do you have kids?” she asked.
“Dos, and that’s it for me,” Mercedes said, crossing herself with a laugh. “It’s all I can handle.”
“I couldn’t even handle one.”
“You’re too young,” Mercedes said. “Better wait until you’re my age.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
It did seem old to the new girl, enviably so. She’d gotten a nasty shock when she ran out of bus money in Eugene and found out at the first strip club she tried that you had to be twenty-one to work there. Her fake IDs were good enough to get her waved into bars, but she knew they’d never survive close inspection in the back office of a club where alcohol was served. Still, she’d given it one shot with Jessica Morgenstern, her twenty-two-year-old Texas blond-blue, at a second club.
The guy barely glanced at it under the black light before tossing it back to her. “Try across the parking lot,” he said. “They hire illegals over there.”
She snatched the fake ID back and crossed over to the Budget Village Inn and Suites. Maids made tips, didn’t they? She wasn’t entirely convinced, but the motel staff was overwhelmed that morning because of some college football game. She hardly had time to think about it, much less drop a fake, before the desk manager, balancing the telephone receiver on one shoulder, shoved a uniform at her across the counter and pointed her toward Mercedes’s cart down the hall. “Just do what she tells you, comprende?” he said with his hand over the mouthpiece, barely glancing at her.
At the back of the motel, a large storage room full of broken furniture culled from the suites hosted a rotating circle of undocumented workers who didn’t have family members in town. The young woman with whom she shared a sprung mattress mumbled in her sleep, but at least it was a bed. The work seemed all right too, at first, and she congratulated herself on her sturdy back and legs, strong from riding horses in Red Bluff.
More troubling to her were the crowds of college-age kids and their parents all decked out in green-and-yellow T-shirts with duck mascots on them, loud and patronizing and always annoyed when they had to cross over to the other side of the hall to accommodate the squealing housekeeping carts. She stared hardest at the blond, ponytailed girls. When she entered their rooms, she touched charm bracelets left carelessly on dressers, expensive-looking bottles of hair conditioner in showers, logoed duffles spilling sandals and pink pajamas onto the floor.
On the third day, searing pains started up in the new girl’s shoulders, lower back, neck, and upper arms. She could barely roll out of the storage-room bed, and vacuuming sent shooting pains up through her skull in rhythm with the roar of the machine. That morning, while Mercedes was cleaning a bathroom, the new girl stole a moment to rub her shoulders while the vacuum idled. She spotted a long green-and-yellow ribbon on the dresser, lifted it up, and tied it around her own ponytail, wincing at the burn in her triceps, then stared at herself in the mirror and pursed her lips up in a tight, rosebud smile. When she heard the toilet flush, distant and faint behind the vacuum noise, she yanked the ribbon off. Mercedes emerged from the bathroom holding a dwindled roll of toilet paper and exaggeratedly mouthing the word Restock.
After they finished up in the supply closet, Mercedes said, “I know where you’ve been sleeping, and girl, you’re going to kill your back that way. Come home with me tonight. We have an extra bed since my cousin moved out.”
The new girl nodded, and Mercedes smiled briefly before wheeling the cart back out to knock on the next door.
Home was a second-story apartment in a red-brick apartment block about an hour away by bus, including fifteen minutes waiting for a transfer in the misty drizzle. The new girl resented having to pick the bus fare out of her meager tips, but when they climbed the stairs after dark she could see from the steam on the kitchen window that a meal was waiting. Mercedes opened the door to the warm sounds of television commercials and a running faucet, and the larger of two small boys lying in front of the TV set looked over his shoulder and said, “Hi, Mom,” then turned back as a cartoon started.
From the kitchen, a woman was already talking to Mercedes in Spanish, running through the events of an exhausting day, from the sound of it. Mercedes cut her off, also in Spanish, and gestured toward the new girl, who closed the door behind them and relaxed into the noisy, steamy apartment. The woman who turned from the sink looked about ten years older than Mercedes, but it was hard to tell under her heavy makeup.
“That’s my sister Lucia. Sit down,” Mercedes commanded, pointing, then she launched into a fresh round of Spanish directed at her sister, gesturing toward the single plate set on the kitchen table. The woman barely glanced at the new girl, not smiling, and shrugged. Wordlessly, she opened the kitchen cabinet, removed a plate, gathered up silverware from a drawer, and set them all on the low counter that separated kitchen from dining area. Then, grabbing the magazine that had been open in front of her on the counter, she walked out of the kitchen, past the children in the TV room, and into the hall.
“Is she okay?” the new girl whispered as Mercedes moved around the counter into the kitchen and started scooping some chicken and rice out of a pot on the stove onto the plate.
“She’s fine, she’s okay. She watches the kids until I get home, then she has to go to sleep to get up early to open at the department store.” But by the time Mercedes had finished serving up her own plate and brought it to the table, another TV had started up in the back bedroom, Spanish voices clearly audible through the thin walls, clashing with the English-language cartoons. “Eat.”
The new girl obeyed. The food was good, and she said so.
“It’s been a while for home cooking, huh? Lucia’s a good cook. She won’t let me pick up McDonald’s for everyone on the way home; she says the boys have to eat everything fresh.” She shuddered over a forkful of chicken. “I couldn’t do it with my hours at the motel, but she’s going to try to get me hired at the store when she’s been there a little while longe
r.”
The new girl felt the warmth of the meal spreading through her. The chicken leg on her plate was so tender, the meat fell off the bone with the gentlest prod of her fork. She thought about what it would be like to have a girlfriend, someone to talk things over with while they waited in the kiosk. She imagined them in their uniforms, side by side on the bus, laughing about—what?
“It’s my turn!” “No, mine!” The cartoon show’s credits were rolling, and the boys were struggling for the remote. When one started wailing, Mercedes snapped her head over her shoulder, the smile dropping from her face like a mask.
“Boys!” she shouted. “It’s bedtime! I’ll be in your room to tuck you in in five minutes, so start brushing your teeth now!” She looked back at the new girl apologetically. “I’ll go make sure you’ve got clean sheets and put the boys to bed. You have more food if you like, watch TV.” She gestured vaguely, then got up and walked through the TV room, stopping a few times to pick up toys on the floor before vanishing around the corner.
As closet doors opened and closed somewhere in the apartment and the two boys squabbled over something—“Give it!”—the new girl eyed Mercedes’s purse where it lay, unzipped, on the kitchen counter. One half of her brain was still riding the bus into work the next day, and the other half was adding up her tips, subtracting bus fare, calculating if the rest would cover brown hair dye. There was no need to steal money when all that stood between her and real earning potential was a little plastic rectangle saying Mercedes Rodriguez, California, brown hair, blue eyes, twenty-four years old lying in an unzipped bag three feet away. If the universe was handing out mercy, she’d take it.
9
Tom doesn’t come home after eating breakfast with Jane. He doesn’t come home for lunch either.
It occurs to me for the first time that Tom has not so much as mentioned the Julie Fund since our daughter’s return. Surely he has thought about what we could or should do with the money—whether we should proceed with the scholarship in Julie’s name or if, as Julie hinted, we could convert it into a kind of scholarship for her. Or maybe, now that Julie is twenty-one, it’s her money, her decision. “Sole beneficiary.” Then what about the trustees, the administrator? Tom has dealt with everyone, even our lawyer, for so long that I find myself completely at a loss as to where to begin.
Tom’s desk is in the room where Julie lies sleeping. I gave her a Valium after she got out of the bathtub, and she swallowed it with her skin still steaming, slipped under the covers, bathrobe and all, and closed her swollen eyes immediately.
Now I walk down the hall and, after listening for a moment to her gentle wheezing from just outside the door, nudge it open. She hasn’t moved, not even to roll over; the covers are still where I placed them, her red hair sticking out in strange directions, the way short hair does when you go to bed with it wet. I can just see a faint pinkish shadow seeping out from under her head on the pillow.
I turn my back to her and sit down at Tom’s desk, conscious of the magnified squeak of the office chair, the brittle sound of its wheels rolling over the plastic carpet protector. At one point I jerk around, positive I heard Julie stir, but she’s still lying motionless, facing away from the desk.
Tom’s desk is almost antiseptically organized, writing tools neatly ensconced in sectioned pencil holders, notepads and graph paper slotted away in stacking mesh trays. A tiny, dry-needled cactus perches on the windowsill behind the desk, just catching a sliver of light from a four-inch suspension of the wide-slat blinds. A studio portrait of the four of us sits in the corner of the desk, and in front of it, a shot of Julie—not the one we used for the missing-person picture that was all over the news, but one from the Grand Canyon, the last family vacation we ever took. It’s a posed shot. From that trip, there are countless pictures of Jane straddling voids, her feet on two boulders, hands on hips, elbows akimbo. Julie, who had just gone through a growth spurt and seemed unsure how long her limbs were, kept slipping as we climbed the rocks, and stayed well away from the edge. In the photo, she’s perched uncertainly on a rock, one foot up in front of her, elbow on knee, chin in hand.
After a moment I move the mouse and am relieved to see the monitor come to life with no password prompt. The desktop photo is a landscape, some generic tropical island at sunset, and the folders are arranged with painstaking neatness. I do a file search, typing in key words one after the other—Julie, fund, trust, trustees, donation, reward—thinking there must be a spreadsheet somewhere, a record of incoming donations and search-related expenses, or at the very least a file with the contact information of the trustees. Nothing comes up, and I find myself wondering whether Julie’s done this same search recently. If so, she couldn’t have had better luck than I’m having. I open the web browser and check the history—nothing. Which, considering she just told me she’s been looking up her case on the Internet, makes it look an awful lot like she cleared the browser history herself.
Pushing away this thought, I start pulling out desk drawers but encounter only the expected debris of empty mechanical pencils, rubber bands, and paper clips. A side drawer holds stacks of blank tax forms that make my head spin just to look at them. I slide them all shut as quietly as possible and tug the handle of the file drawer. Locked.
Shit.
Who needs computer passwords if you keep the hard copies under lock and key? These must be client files—highly confidential. Suddenly I feel certain the information on the Julie Fund is in this drawer. I think I’ve seen a desk key on his key chain before, but keys always come in twos; there must be a spare somewhere. I open the shallow drawer again to make sure there are no diminutive keys jumbled in with the paper clips. In a fit of inspiration I lift up the plastic separator and peek under the molded plastic, where I find some dust, at least, but no key. I open the other shallow drawers so I can rifle through them, but there’s nothing to rifle through. How can anyone be expected to find anything in all this not-mess?
This time the noise behind me is real, and I whip around, cringing at the creaking chair. Julie has turned her face toward me, but her eyes are still closed, and after another murmur and a sigh, she goes silent again. I wonder if she’s faking it, if she opened her eyes and saw me, closed them when I turned around. After a frozen moment in which my limbs go numb anticipating her slightest movement, I decide it doesn’t matter. If she’s seen me, it’s already too late, and I might as well get what I came for. And maybe she hasn’t. Choosing to believe the latter, I rack my brain one more time for the key’s hiding place.
I’ve never been a big snooper. You’d think after Julie’s disappearance I would have watched Jane like a hawk, would have flipped through her phone, once she got one, for her contacts and text-message history, read her diary—not that Julie’s diary, which the police scoured, contained anything more interesting than track practice and homework and i’s dotted with hearts. Still, I used to think that by resisting the urge, I was honoring Jane’s privacy. Now I realize the urge was never there; I just didn’t want to know. Jane’s rebellion was healthy, proportionate—the constantly re-dyed hair, the piercings. What more could I gain by prying? I thought if I let her have her private world, if I let her slam the door and listen to her music, one day she would come out and thank me for giving her the space. Now that she’s left the house, the city, the state, I realize she wanted me to pry. I remember the stack of notebooks she was carrying as she left the house this morning. Those were journals; she actually left her old journals in the house when she went to college. She left them for me to find. And now that I’m just catching up to her need for me, it’s too late.
And then I know where the key is, and that Tom has hidden it not just from the world at large, but specifically from me. He put it in the very last place I would look.
I reach for Julie’s picture, turn it around, and find the key tucked under one of the metal clamps that holds in the photo. I pull it out. I open the drawer.
At the back, behind fifteen inch
es of client files, there’s an unmarked folder. I pull it out. Then I rearrange the files to hide the missing one to the best of my ability, lock the drawer, replace the key, and extract myself from the room full of Julie’s warm, sleepy breath as quickly and silently as possible, taking the folder with me.
I am expecting, perhaps, something thicker, a dusty file full of newspaper clippings, our correspondence with the parents’ group, media, and law enforcement. Instead, I find a few forms clipped together, folded because they’re larger than letter size: the bank documents for setting up the trust. I scan the top part, but it’s all standard language, dense as a block of wood to me. There are appended documents, and when I unfold them I see the notarized signature at the bottom of the fund-administrator form. Alma Josefina Ruiz. I have no idea who that is, but she holds the purse strings to what I now see was an impressive $240,000 of collected donations in 2008. Who knows what’s left now, but it might be enough to pay for GED classes, or even a few years of college if she gets into a state school.
I don’t remember an Alma. But then I don’t remember much of anything from that period. I drank a lot. I slept for days at a time. I took pills so I could sleep at night after having slept all through the day. Above all, I didn’t want to know details. I wanted everything to blur, fade, go away forever. I wanted to be left alone. Now, faced for the first time with everything I blocked out quantified starkly in dollars, I finally feel how alone I have succeeded in making myself.
I check the time and wonder when Tom will be getting home. He used to go to the support group for parents of missing children on Sunday evenings, but does he still, now that Julie is home? Is he allowed? What would it be like to be surrounded by the faces of those whose children are still and always missing after your own prayers have been answered?