Reggie got to the doorway and tucked her body behind it, peeking in. Lorraine was hunched over the table, gripping a mug of tea tightly. George was right next to her, his body pressing against hers, his arm around her.
“I suppose it was inevitable,” Lorraine said, sitting up straight with effort. She ran her hand through her hair, which looked uncharacteristically unkempt. Her eyes were red, her cheeks blotchy. “Something terrible happening. I think I’ve known it all along, sensed it. That Vera was on a path that could only lead to destruction. Ever since we were girls, then after, when Father died, the part of her that was cracked just broke completely. I think I lost her back then. Before, maybe . . .”
“It doesn’t do any good,” George said, voice breaking now as he pushed his own cup away, untouched tea sloshing over the edges. “You think I haven’t done the same thing? Been over it again and again in my head, fantasized about all the ways we could have saved her? If onlys do no good, Lorraine. Vera made her own choices. And maybe those choices led her to what happened. But maybe not. Maybe it was totally random.”
Lorraine was crying, not delicate little ladylike sniffles, but great sobs of agony. She rested her head against George’s chest and wept. George held on to her, ashen faced, his own eyes wet with tears. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “It just seems so unfair. So . . . surreal,” he whispered into her hair.
A strange sick feeling crept over Reggie. This was not simply two good friends comforting each other—it was obvious from their body language that they were more than that. She thought of the way she’d heard George’s voice the night Lorraine threw her mother out, and the whole thing was so obvious—he’d been spending the night with Lorraine. After he’d said his good nights to them, he must have doubled back, waited until Reggie had gone to bed, and sneaked back into the house, up to Lorraine’s room. Or maybe, maybe they’d been in the garage, on the leather couch. Maybe that’s what Vera had referred to when she said she knew what went on out there. Reggie’s stomach did a disgusted flip.
She remembered the way Lorraine had looked when George gave Vera the swan earlier that night.
Had Lorraine been jealous? She wondered if this was the real reason Lorraine threw Vera out—she didn’t like the way her boyfriend was looking at her sister. And just how far would Lorraine go to protect her relationship with George if she felt threatened by Vera?
She squinted in at her aunt, seeing things in a whole new light while one question rang out like an alarm bell: what other secrets were there that she didn’t know?
Lorraine lifted up her head, looked at George, and said, “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I was just lying in bed, imagining what he might be doing to her . . .”
“I know,” George said, rubbing her back in slow circles. “I can’t standing just sitting back, waiting. Knowing she’s out there somewhere, tied up. That it’s just a matter of time.”
Reggie backed away from the kitchen and went upstairs in her sock feet, avoiding the bottom step that squeaked.
It’s just a matter of time.
Her stomach churned and her mouth went dry.
George was right. The worst part was waiting. Reggie couldn’t bear the thought of spending the day doing nothing but obsessing about what an idiot she’d been to be blind to Lorraine and George’s relationship. Were there other things hiding in plain sight, clues that might lead her to her mother?
REGGIE STOOD IN THE hallway outside her bedroom, pulled down the trapdoor that led to the attic, unfolded the wooden ladder attached to it, and climbed up.
The attic, which had once served as her mother’s sewing room, was now a sort of Vera Museum. She flipped on the hanging bulb and looked around.
There were two sewing machines and three dress dummies, each wearing the last outfit she’d put on them. Headless and armless, they were three Vera-size torsos dressed in her clothes: strange oracles Reggie wished could speak.
Abandoned bolts of fabric and boxes of scraps lined one of the walls. There was a worktable with scissors, a ruler, an iron, and a pincushion. To the left of the table was a full-length trifold adjustable mirror. In front of this was a trunk full of old pictures, magazines, sewing patterns, photos from Vera’s modeling portfolio, and high school yearbooks. Reggie opened the trunk and sorted through some of these relics, searching for a clue as to who her mother had been before she came along. But Vera had left few clues. There were no diaries. No old love letters. Nothing scandalous. Nothing to tell Reggie who her father might have been. Some old playbills and programs from school with her mother cast in starring roles: Wendy in Peter Pan, Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. Reggie flipped through Vera’s senior yearbook and found a picture of her mother, who’d been voted Most likely to be famous. A girl named Lynda had written, Shoot for the moon, Vera. There were other photos of Vera: in the drama club, where she was in a reclining position, being held up by the other members; onstage as Lady Macbeth. Reggie closed the yearbook, holding it on her lap while she stuffed everything else back into the trunk.
Reggie gazed into the dusty mirrors, studying the images of the three faceless dummies in Vera’s clothes behind her. Reggie squinted and thought she saw them move, reach for her with invisible arms, whisper in hushed tones.
She’s out there. It’s up to you to save her.
“What, are you thinking about sewing yourself a ball gown or something?”
Startled, Reggie looked away from the mirror and spun to see Tara nearly beside her. She’d crept up the attic stairs so silently, Reggie had no idea she was there.
“I was just looking through some of my mom’s old stuff.”
“How come you didn’t meet us at the diner, Reg? We were gonna go out to Airport Lanes, talk to Dix, look around. Remember? We waited for you for nearly two hours. Sid had to get to work at the golf course. Charlie went off to do some lawns.”
“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t. I don’t really see the point.” Reggie bit her lip, remembering what Lorraine had said: I suppose it was inevitable. Something terrible happening.
Reggie put a finger out and touched the mirror, making a line in the dust, a circle that turned into a tornadolike swirl. Some things are just bigger than we are. The pull of gravity. The hand of fate.
Hand.
In her mind’s eye, she saw her mother’s wrecked hand in a milk carton, pointing up at her.
You. It’s up to you to save me.
But Reggie couldn’t. That was the thing.
She couldn’t because she was stupid and selfish and didn’t want to learn any more horrible secrets about her mother. She was a fucking coward.
“The point?” Tara bit her lip, studied Reggie in the dim light. “The point is that we’ve gotta keep trying, right? If we stop looking, it’s over.”
“It’s over anyway,” Reggie said.
“Reggie,” Tara said, “just because you found shit you didn’t want to see doesn’t mean you can quit. So your mother had this secret little room and hung out in sleazy bars and saw lots of men. So what? She’s still your mom, Reg. You can’t just turn your back on her because you want to keep some fucked-up little perfect mother charade going.”
Reggie looked in the mirrors. Tara was beside her and the dummies were behind them, strange phantom stalkers.
“What’s this?” Tara asked, reaching for the yearbook.
“My mom’s. The trunk is full of all her old stuff, but there’s nothing helpful. I thought if I looked carefully, there’d be something, some little shred. Some clue.”
Tara flipped through, finding a photo of Vera. “God, she was beautiful.” She squinted at the yearbook, then at Reggie. “You look like her, you know. Around the eyes. And the shape of your face.”
“I’m nothing like her,” Reggie said.
“But the rest of it, your nose and eyebrows, they come from someplace else. Your father, probably.” Tara flipped through the yearbook. “Maybe he’s in here. Maybe it was some old flame from high school.”
Reggie shook her head. “She got pregnant in New York.”
Tara licked her lips. “So maybe it was someone she was in a play with there. Or someone she worked with. Maybe it was someone famous, Reg! Maybe that’s why your mom’s always been so secretive.” Tara flipped through the papers, found a theater program for The Crucible. “Hey, isn’t this that play about the Salem witches?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“And look, they did it at a theater in Hartford.” Tara wrinkled her nose, counted backward on her fingers from 1985 to 1970. “October 1970,” she said.
“So?”
“So . . . your mom was in this play in Hartford then, not off in New York! I’m no baby expert or anything, but I think that would have had to be around the time she got knocked up with you.” Tara’s face glowed in the dim light, flush with excitement.
“It doesn’t matter,” Reggie said, grabbing the program from Tara and dropping it back on the pile. “I’m sure whoever he is, he doesn’t even know I exist. And my mom is the only person who knows who my father is, and she’s gone. We can play cops and robbers all we want, running around to bars, looking for clues, but none of it makes any difference. We can’t save her, Tara. No one can. It’s all just a stupid, useless waste!” She leaned her head down and started to cry, hating herself for it. She was a coward and a baby, and now Tara knew it and Reggie didn’t even care.
“Hey,” Tara said, her voice practically a whisper as she put a hand on Reggie’s back. “I know how you feel.”
“Bullshit,” Reggie hissed, looking up and staring at their reflections in the mirror. A thin-faced girl who looked more like a boy. She’d forgotten to put her ear on, and with the new haircut, the missing ear was obvious and made her look freakishly unbalanced. And Tara, Tara looked like some beautiful actress straight off the set of a vampire movie.
“Sometimes,” Tara said, “sometimes it’s all just too much, you know? All the fucked-up stuff going round and round in my brain. And people are trying to talk to me, but it’s like they’re underwater—they don’t have a clue. I’ve got voices of dead ladies whispering to me, my mom screaming at me to pick up my room and telling me that maybe if I wasn’t such a goddamn slob, my dad wouldn’t have left us.” Tara’s chin started to quiver, but she sat ramrod straight, reeling herself in. When she spoke again, her voice was low and calm. “And some days I’m sure I’m gonna explode if I can’t slow all the thoughts and voices down, keep them from spinning out of control.”
Reggie stared at herself in the mirror, snuffling, tears and snot dripping down her face.
“But I’ve learned the secret,” Tara said, smiling impishly. “I can stop them now. We both can.”
Reggie sat down in front of the mirror, watched as Tara reached into her black bag and pulled out the silver box with the razor blade wrapped in fabric like a tiny present. She held it out to Reggie, waiting.
Reggie took the blade, pulled up the leg of her sweatpants, eager. But she stopped herself and looked at Tara.
“It’ll feel so good,” Tara said, leaning forward, trembling a little as she stared down at the unblemished skin on Reggie’s calf. Tara looked so amazing, so pale and sparkling, like her skin was made of moonlight.
“You do it for me,” Reggie said, holding out the razor blade. Tara gave a grateful little gasp, like a girl who’d just gotten what she wanted most for Christmas.
Tara gripped the blade, hovered over Reggie’s skin, making the moment last. Tara’s breathing got faster, more ragged. Reggie bit her lip, waiting, wanting it, but fearing it at the same time. Tara brought the blade down lightly, caressing the skin, not breaking through.
“Please,” Reggie said, and Tara pushed the blade down hard, making Reggie cry out. Tara made an mmm sound as she pulled back the blade and let herself touch Reggie’s cut, opening it up, making Reggie wince. It was deep and bled more than any of the little sissy cuts Reggie had given herself. She let the pain wash over her like a wave; felt herself melting into it.
There was no Neptune, no missing mother, no Charlie or Lorraine or horrid little room at Airport Efficiencies.
There was no one but her and Tara, whose fingers were sticky with Reggie’s blood, both girls feeling invincible.
Chapter 33
October 22, 2010
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
“SHIT!” REGGIE YELPED, THE blade of the utility knife nicking the tip of her left thumb. Blood smeared on the piece of Sheetrock she’d been cutting, making a Rorschach test design that looked at first like a ladybug, then, as the blood seeped farther, like a lobster. For half a second, she was back in her old body, letting herself get some sick pleasure from the pain, getting lost inside it, thinking it made her more powerful somehow.
“Idiot,” she said to herself as she moved to the kitchen sink to wash out the cut. She peered through the window over the sink and saw a news truck with a satellite dish down at the bottom of her driveway. A man was coming up with a heavy camera resting on his shoulder. A woman with immaculate hair and thick makeup followed. The press continued to come and shoot footage of the house and knock at the door, which Reggie and Lorraine never answered. The phone rang nonstop, but they always let the machine get it.
Reggie let the curtain fall closed and inspected her thumb.
She was usually much more careful than this. Hypervigilant about safety. Fortunately, the cut wasn’t deep.
She still had the scar from the cut Tara had given her: a thin line on the back of her calf; the mark others noticed and sometimes asked about. (She told them she’d done it in a bicycle accident.) There were other scars, too. Fainter, paler ones across her arms and legs. Ghost scars that she could only sometimes see.
Reggie had continued to cut throughout high school. She did it in secret, the way some girls did cocaine or gave blow jobs to strangers. She did it in her room at home or locked in a stall in one of the girls’ bathrooms at school. It was a compulsion. An addiction. A need to feel control, to focus her mind when it was running in crazy, nonsensical loops. Only when she left home was she able to stop—when she got to Rhode Island and began her life as a new and different girl, a girl without a past.
And now here she was, right back where she started. Her skin itched in the old, familiar way, the urge to cut strong. And the utility knife was right there. It would be so easy to pick it up, run it across her skin.
Reggie turned off the faucet and was pressing a paper towel over her thumb when her cell phone began to vibrate in the pocket of her jeans. She slid it out—Len again.
She answered it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Reggie? Oh my God, I’ve been worried sick! Why didn’t you call? Didn’t you get my messages?”
“I’m sorry. Things here have been so crazy. I meant to call, but I wasn’t—”
“You’re back home, aren’t you? Back in Brighton Falls?”
“Yes,” she said. The cut on her finger continued to bleed. She reached for a fresh paper towel and put pressure on the wound with her index finger. “Len?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I tell you something? Something I’ve never told anyone?”
“Of course.”
Reggie braced herself. She thought of backing out, inventing some other lie, but she’d come this far. If she told, the secret would be out and wouldn’t have the same kind of power over her. Then maybe her skin would stop crawling and she’d stop eyeing the utility knife so longingly. “When I was a kid, I used to cut myself. On purpose.”
“Okay,” he said, voice calm and steady.
“I’d use a razor blade and never go very deep, just deep enough to hurt, to draw blood. I started around the time the whole Neptune mess began. When everything seemed so out of control, so hurtful and violent and scary as hell. Cutting brought this sense of order. Of calm.”
Len was silent a minute. “It makes total sense. It’s messed up and awful and I’m really sorry you went through it, but I get it,”
he said at last. “But I’ve got to ask, why tell me all this right now?”
“Because there’s no one else I can tell it to. That’s the whole point.” She needed Len to get this, to really understand what she was trying to say. “You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted to tell all my fucked-up little secrets to. I was wrong to not tell you when my mother first showed up. I get that now and I’m really, truly sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“No, it isn’t. I can’t stand the thought that I did something to hurt you. You’re my one true friend, Len. The person I’m closest to in the world. I’m not going to pretend I know how to define our relationship, and I can’t promise I’ll ever be ready to move in with you. But I love you, Len. In my own fucked-up little way, I love you very much.”
“I love you, too,” Len said.
“I can’t stand the idea of losing you,” she said, biting her lip.
“I know,” he said. “I can’t stand the thought of being without you, either.”
They were silent a minute.
“They said on the news that another hand had been found, that Neptune is back.”
“He’s got my old friend Tara. My aunt had hired her as a nurse to look after my mom. I think Tara found out something and went digging around and got a little too close.”
“Jesus!” Len said. “I think I should come down there. I can pack a bag, be out the door in ten minutes.”
“No,” Reggie said quickly, looking at her blood-soaked paper towel. “I mean, thank you, but—no. You can’t. It’s just too much of a collision between my past life and my current life for me to handle right now. And there’s nothing you can do anyway. I’m really fine.”
“You don’t sound fine,” Len said, his voice warm and husky. She wished he were there, holding her in his arms.
“Being back here hasn’t been easy,” Reggie admitted.
Len made a soothing sound of agreement. “You’ve spent your whole life running away from that place and everything that happened there,” he said.
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