Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  It doesn’t seem like her, but I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t think about it as I inch my car along the freeway, careful not to weave.

  Ray Hendricks’s revelations are pinging around in my head. Should it ease my mind to know that Nikki squealed on herself, and that she never named me? It doesn’t. It doesn’t restore Nikki to life; she won’t be snickering at herself for tripping in her snow boots, or fingering her delicate ears when she’s searching for a word.

  It doesn’t make her un-murdered, either. From her family and friends, the real Nikki was stolen forever. The living girl has been erased, and in her place marches a death’s-head, a warning. A panel in my memory slides open, and here comes the whole gory parade again, images I’ve seen, stories I’ve read: the little girl strangled in the basement, the stabbed woman, the bludgeoned woman, the woman severed in half, the woman who put her mouth around a loaded pistol, the woman bound at the wrists and ankles, dragged through icy black water. Nikki. Nikki comes at the end, flopping behind a dark boat. No. Not at the end. There is one more pale figure, straggling along, and she wears Kim’s face. Then my face.

  The freeway exit finally opens to the dense, honking slow-and-go of Hollywood. The traffic becomes nasty enough to keep me alert to it, every Lexus and Range Rover fighting for its slot. I’m grateful, because I want to stop thinking and feeling. I’d like to be as simple as the car I’m driving, as plain as the alley I turn down, as empty as the dark, narrow garage I slide into, just a slot in a row, with a broken door and a history no one knows. The car coughs as the engine stops, and I have to slink and twist to get out of the garage without touching the dusty chrome or the cobwebs on the garage wall. I emerge to the smell of my neighbor’s wilting roses.

  My bungalow is part of a 1920s courtyard with a dozen apartments. Our walls are peeling; our pipes run slow, but the old clay rooftops look pretty and everyone’s got the same high ceilings. My neighbors include a retired Ice Capades star, a Hollywood makeup artist, an old man with a carefully preserved British accent, and some bearded twentysomethings with band aspirations.

  I know everyone well enough to feel a protectiveness descend as soon as I stride down our walkway, but they’re not real friends. Everyone here liked Greg for his gregariousness, and I think they got the impression I’d run him off until his face started appearing all over TV with headlines like “Gallery of Death?” Once my neighbors avoided me out of loyalty to him; this week they avoid me out of pity.

  My bungalow looks dark and cold, the windows black. I always forget to leave lights on to fake the appearance of someone inside. It takes a while to dredge out my keys, even though I just tossed them in there, because my purse is so stuffed with the recorder, the flash drive, my phone. The rest of the courtyard notices this, I’m sure. And my tired, aching swaying as I search. Where’d she stumble home from? There the keys are, wrapped in the handle of the recorder. My keys, museum keys, gym locker key, even the stupid key to Greg’s gallery, all on a ring. It amazes me how quickly things get lost. Or maybe not lost. Enmeshed. Tangled up so badly that you can’t separate one thing from another.

  The branches beyond my patio fence toss and heave. I jump. Drop the keys. Pick them up again. Avoid looking at the bush. I don’t want to see the possum again.

  Gold key in the heavy screen door, silver key in the inner door, even these small rituals of entry seem sadder and clumsier when you’re entering a house where you live alone. All these months, and still I am not used to it. I push inside, hear my phone buzz with a text: I really hope you’ll get some rest. Jayme.

  I drop the phone back into my purse. Then I click on the living room light, illuminating my blank walls, my Fitzgerald biography lying closed on the coffee table. I go to my computer and turn it on, hoping to read Yegina’s original message about Don. As the machine wheezes and grinds, taking forever to boot up, I see dust streaks on my arm. Stupid too-tight garage. I go to the bathroom to wash.

  The faucet warms up slowly, so I run the cold over my skin. Soap, rinse. Night air gusts through the open window, giving me goose bumps.

  I don’t remember leaving the window open.

  I do, however, recall leaving the Fitzgerald biography whacked down on the table in that spine-ruining way that my mother always told me not to do. I do remember feeling a twinge of guilt about it.

  Someone was here.

  Or is here.

  Steve Goetz isn’t Kim’s killer. This means there is someone else. There has always been someone else. And that someone knows who I am, and might even know what I’ve been doing.

  YOU’D BETTER WATCH OUT FOR MAGGIE. What if Greg was framed by the same person who sent him the note about me? And what if that person intended to implicate me next?

  Untangled backward, the logic would be simple, believable: jealous Maggie kills Kim, then frames Greg.

  Meanwhile, the real murderer gets away.

  It wouldn’t be hard to construct my guilt: just find a way to break into my not-very-secure bungalow and hide more objects from the crime. Then an anonymous tip. The police would follow the clues and recalibrate their case: Greg framed by Maggie, who did the actual deed. Jealous ex-lover. Again, this theory doesn’t point to a stranger. It points to someone who knows us, who knows where we both live. Someone from our circle of acquaintances. Maybe even someone from the Rocque.

  The bathroom doesn’t lock. I wash my arm and hands again, noting with sudden acuteness my nail-bitten fingers. My ugly and vulnerable palms.

  This is crazy. I must have moved the book myself and forgotten.

  But I didn’t. I left it upended, bending the pages.

  The house throbs with quiet. My purse is by the door, with my keys and phone. If I run, I could grab it and be outside in less than a minute.

  But what if a killer is standing right outside my door?

  I could climb out the bathroom window, but he would hear me doing it, burst in. Besides, I want my car keys and my purse so that I can drive far away.

  I could yell. I could yell out the names of everyone in the courtyard. How long would it take for them to recognize the cries and come running? How many people heard Kitty Genovese screaming? He could kill me before they arrived.

  I turn off the faucet and stand there with my dripping hands. Then I wipe them on a rough red towel. I could just stand here and listen until I hear a noise; if I don’t hear anything, then maybe he’s gone. A long time passes after this decision, but it’s probably just a few minutes.

  Something creaks upstairs.

  I throw open the bathroom, looking left and right, sprint to the kitchen. The kitchen is empty, my breakfast dishes messily stacked in the drain. I grab Theresa’s knife from the counter and stagger into the living room, ascertaining that, yes, the biography is in a different place, and, yes—worse—my desk is different, too. The drawer where I keep staples and scissors is slightly ajar. But this room is also empty. A broom stands in the corner. I hold the knife high.

  Five steps. I’m at the door. The living room light pulses. The back of my neck feels sunburned; even the motionless air in here chafes against it. I fling the knife into my purse, grab my keys, and bolt outside into the courtyard, slamming my doors behind me.

  If my neighbors glance out their windows now, I am a shadow fleeing across the grass, head down, not stopping to breathe until I get in my car and lock it. I drive eight blocks away, making sure I am not followed before I park, dig in my purse for my phone.

  Out comes the recorder, then my wallet, the knife, the flash drive, wrappers and receipts, a lipstick, a cinema ticket, until there’s nothing inside but a few stray pennies, jingling when I shake the leather. I know I dropped the phone in here, so I search again, hands fumbling through my possessions. Then I prop the purse open in my lap and swipe the silky interior, in case a hole has developed in a seam, in case things have fallen through.

  When I finally look up, the street is also empty, the cars parked, the houses locked and glassy. Nothing moves but
the jacaranda trees, waving their dark, bugle-shaped buds at the evening. The trembling comes from so deep inside me, it makes my teeth knock together. Someone was there, in that room. Someone took my phone, the way he took Kim Lord’s phone and sent messages to convince people that she was still alive. Why? I don’t know how long I sit there, but it doesn’t help. Neither does driving away, east.

  Yegina lives in an Evergreen Queen in Silver Lake. She rents from the crazy old hippie who paints all his hilly East Side houses the same shade of deep pine and undercharges his tenants in exchange for underfixing things. Yegina’s place has hardwood floors, a built-in washer-dryer, views east toward Hollywood, and free parking for her canary-yellow Mazda.

  But the Mazda is not in her driveway as I race up her winding steps, so shaky on my feet that I trip three times on nothing and almost fall flat on my face. Where is Yegina’s car? It’s clear she’s home; I can see the wooden inner door open behind the screen door. The threshold beckons: a portal to safety. Beside me, Yegina’s terraced gardens of cacti have silhouetted to menhirs in the fading light. I gasp for breath, reaching the top, when a man speaks inside the house.

  I recognize the voice but can’t place it, not with this tearing in my chest. I’m about to ring Yegina’s bell when I hear softer sounds, little smacking, breathy noises. Yegina is kissing someone. He says, “Wow,” and now I recognize the depth and treble, though the voice is stripped of its usual heartiness. I peer through the gray scrim: Bas Terrant is sitting on the leather couch, and Yegina is sitting on him, her dark hair falling in his face. They are both still fully clothed, but his hands are probing under her shirt, his knuckles pushing out the cotton. I stare, paralyzed, watching the way Yegina arches and presses into him.

  A black car drives slowly, slowly down the street below, the windshield shining. Didn’t I see that car behind me on Sunset? I can’t make out the driver.

  Fear is like an itch all over my body. I must emit some sound, because just then Yegina looks up from Bas’s lap and sees me. Her eyes narrow.

  I take the stairs two at a time.

  22

  Greg’s key fits into the deadbolt in the back entrance of his gallery. It turns easily. I always wondered if it would still work, or if he’d change the lock on me. More likely, Greg forgot that he ever gave me a copy. In case you need it for any reason, he’d declared with a magnanimous air. On many lonely nights that casual offer loomed in my mind, and I would come up with a thousand reasons to arrive at Greg’s place. They all dissolved by morning. In case you need it. Translation: You may need me. I assume you will.

  I hated the key, but I kept it. And now I want to search his apartment before it’s too late.

  Yet as soon as I push Greg’s door in and shut it behind me, all willpower deserts me. I slide to the floor, hug my knees, and sit there a long time, unable to do anything but catch my breath. I can’t think about the killer, or Yegina and Bas; I can’t think about anything but staying safe. I’m safe here. No one will guess I’m at Greg’s. After a while, my breath slows, but not the trembling. It’s as if a two-by-four is slamming around deep inside me, the vibrations reverberating out. Even the veins in my wrist throb and twitch.

  Beyond my knees, the dimensions of the rooms materialize, the white-painted walls of two galleries, artworks, a metal desk with a laptop on it. I stagger to my feet. A series of black ropes hangs from corner to corner; a TV monitor sits on a pedestal. Postcards dot the walls at intervals, odd messages on them, part of some conceptual project in which the artist did not stop walking around Rome until he collapsed. I stroll the galleries for a long time, examining every object, until the shaking ebbs.

  There is a lone door at one end of the room. I open it and see plywood stairs down to a dark basement that smells of mildew. Somewhere down there, the police found a cloth with Kim Lord’s blood on it. The killer must have sneaked into this space—how? Through this entrance or a separate opening below? The blackness of the space reaches for me. I’m too tired to meet it. I shut the door.

  Another staircase rises behind the metal desk. I know where it goes. I know Kim and Greg must have taken these steps many times, and that in the silent room upstairs, their love bloomed, and a child was conceived.

  By the time I get to those stairs, there is another Maggie in the gallery, moving with dragging steps. Her purse swings from her shoulder. She looks like me, but she is outside me and inside me at the same time. I am inside and outside, too, but we aren’t combined. I don’t stop her as she takes off her shoes, as she climbs, her bare feet whispering on the slats. When she reaches the small apartment above, the photograph of Greg’s mother is the first thing she sees, propped on the nightstand. Young Theresa Ferguson, dark head cocked, in a long sheath dress. Young Theresa Ferguson leaning against old Parisian stone, hiding her hands.

  The other Maggie stares at the picture and slowly unzips her skirt, pulls her blouse over her head, bends to drop her bra and panties. Then she walks naked to Greg’s king bed and climbs into it. The sheets are freezing, but her prickling skin feels distant. She lets her head sink on one plump pillow and pulls the other to her, hugging it. Her body feels heavy and quiet now, and fully alone. The rest of the world is far away.

  She lies there, staring at a blank wall until it wavers and vanishes.

  When I wake, the room is dark and I have to grope around the bedside to find a lamp. The shade, made out of an old detergent bottle, casts a mellow orange glow. Scanty furniture unfurls along the walls. The whole apartment is one room, with a sink, an oven, and a fridge in one corner; a wardrobe and a mirror in another; the bed in a third; and a lime-colored sofa and a coffee table in the last. Low walls part the spaces. Three paintings on the wall follow a ball bouncing. Skylights in the ceiling reveal a cloudy, reddish night sky.

  The room feels staged. Despite the carefully chosen decor, or perhaps because of it, the space has the air of a display. No messiness, no dust bunnies or stray hairs. Didn’t they strew things like Greg and I did? I was always picking up his damp towels, wiping his coffee stains from the counters.

  I sit up and look down at my naked breasts and thighs. And blush. My cheeks and face are soaked. I was crying in my sleep. What did I dream of? I don’t feel any better, and I don’t feel any more like myself, but I know I’m running out of time to search this place before one of Greg’s assistants finds me here.

  I wind the sheet around me and patrol the room, finding no possessions that look like Kim’s. Greg’s checkbook. Greg’s socks, paired in his drawer. A curled rubber glove in the trash can, which makes me curious. Probably left by the police, who’ve been here already. The oven looks unused. The fridge holds a few apples, a brick of cheese, and a can of expensive lemon soda, which I crack and drink.

  Theresa Ferguson watches me as she always has. Her photograph sat by Greg’s bedside in our bungalow, too. Theresa is eighteen and wearing curled hair and a hat, a tube of a dress, and an expression of guarded triumph. Her hands are hidden behind her. Greg told me this was because they were burned and scarred; she was learning to be a glassblower.

  I toss the soda can, go to the wardrobe and open it. Finally, some evidence of Kim’s life: his side, her side. Greg’s shirts and pants hang straight and pressed, like uniforms; Kim Lord’s billow and sag, so many different sizes and shapes. Her items are fewer, but they dominate the closet, these ludicrous-now-tragic costumes that didn’t protect her. The pale-pink Ann-Margaret dress; the high-waisted straight skirt and suit jacket straight from Vertigo. A navy trench coat. Two wigs, one coarse and black, one brown and curly. A few paint-spattered shirts and jeans. I check the pockets, all empty. She didn’t own much. Or she didn’t intend to stay long.

  For several minutes I stare at the clothes, puzzling. I let my hand drag down the waist of the dress, squeezing its cool threads. Then I shut the wardrobe.

  Greg’s mother continues to watch me from across the room. The day she died, Theresa told Greg that although I was “thoroughly nice,” I
wasn’t “worthy” of him. But it doesn’t hurt anymore, her rejection of me. What hurts now is that there’s a clue to Kim’s death here, and I can’t find it.

  I yank open the wardrobe again and start with the Ann-Margaret dress, pulling it over my head, yanking when it strains. The black wig next, and then jeans barely reaching my thighs. None of this fits me. All of it constricts, even the wig, which pins my ears. Kim Lord was almost two sizes smaller than I am, and the woman in the mirror looks like an ogre who stumbled into the closet of a princess. I put on gloves from the bottom of the closet, slip my toes into her tiny shoes, then throw my purse over my shoulder and pirouette back and forth.

  Who killed you? I ask my reflection. Why did you die? I say, pursing my lips, cocking my dark head. I run my hand over my flat, empty stomach, and sicken myself by imagining it full.

  Finally I turn away and look back to see my own shoulder blades poking from the unzipped spine of the pale-pink dress. It’s too tight to close. My skin and bones look smooth and winglike, but mostly they look exposed.

  A narrator inside me begins to murmur: See now? Feast your eyes. You’re alive. You get to live. Leave this place. Leave L.A.

  I take everything off, get dressed in my own clothes, and put Kim Lord’s neatly back except for the black wig, which I keep on my head. Then I take Theresa’s knife from my purse. The blade’s still sharp, though duller than it once was. The silver reflects pieces of the room around me, faintly and without depth or proportion. In Theresa’s last months, when she was dying, she sometimes called our landline. Her voice would gravel and grind so deep, it sounded like a man was speaking through her. A collector of debts. Why, she said to me once. Why am I still here.

  I slide her knife in the rack with Greg’s other blades, and I leave.

  Outside, the deadbolt locked again, I throw the key into the dumpster behind the next building.