Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  “Oh no, I’ve totally branched out.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. I mix it up with a Yodel every now and then. Sometimes I’ll even have a Sno Ball if I’m feeling really adventurous.”

  He laughed a little. She couldn’t look at him laughing.

  “I don’t change, Jim.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know you don’t.” Yes, his hair was longer and he was in a suit and tie Brenna had never seen before and there were lines around his eyes and mouth that hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen him. But the look that crept into his eyes, the set of the jaw . . . it was the same way he’d looked at her fifteen years ago, when she was holding his hand in her lap, pretending she was able to read the future.

  “Maya, can you get them to bring a Caesar salad, too?” she called out. “And an order of mozzarella sticks!”

  “Brenna,” he said.

  “Don’t, Jim. Please.”

  “You could have died today.”

  “I didn’t die.”

  “Maya was scared, I was—”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I . . . I need to say it. I need to tell you, but it’s so hard.”

  Brenna’s phone vibrated again. She couldn’t have been gladder for the interruption. She looked at the screen. Errol Ludlow. “Seriously?”

  Brenna moved over to the window and put her back to Jim and flipped open her phone. “What.”

  “Brenna, this is Errol Ludlow.”

  “I know that.”

  “I cannot speak with you long as I’m expecting company.”

  “Uh . . . you called me.”

  “Right. Lis-ten.” Brenna winced. He actually pronounced the T in “listen.” “Have you, by any chance, received a call from Gary Freeman’s wife, Jill?”

  She frowned. “No.”

  “Great! All I needed to know. Ta-ta!”

  Brenna sighed heavily. Well, that was interesting. She turned around, looked at her ex-husband. She tried to focus on the new hair, the new suit, but still a dozen memories flew at her, all at once—June 24, 1997, and April 21, 1993, and February 9, 1994, and her wedding day and the day Maya was born and the night Jim stood over her, in the living room of their Fourteenth Street apartment on October 23, 1998, telling her he could never trust her again.

  She clenched her teeth and her fists and hugged her arms to her chest and shut her eyes tight, willing it away, forcing it all out of her mind at once.

  “Brenna?” he said.

  “I’ve missed you, Jim. I really have. I’ve missed instant messaging with you. I’ve missed our friendship.”

  “Me too. So much, I—”

  “But I can’t be in the same room with you ever again.”

  Jim stared at her for several seconds. And then it was his phone’s turn to ring. He picked it up. “Hi, babe . . . Yes, she’s fine . . .” He looked up at Brenna. “Faith wants to talk to you.” He didn’t move any closer—just held the phone out to her at arm’s length.

  “Thank you,” Brenna said to him. “Hi, Faith.”

  “Brenna!” Faith was outside somewhere, shouting to be heard, yet still she sounded so pleasant. How was she able to do that? Brenna could hear a whirring noise, and she thought of the helicopter and smiled.

  “Thank God you’re okay,” Faith said.

  “I’m fine—a good night’s sleep, I’ll be back to normal.”

  “Great. Listen, though. I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Sure?”

  “The people who abducted you . . . can you tell me a little about them?”

  “Uh, Faith?” Brenna said. “You’re not hoping to get a scoop out of this, are you?”

  “Heavens, no!” She laughed a little. “Though that would be clever of me.”

  “Off the record, it was two guys trying to collect money. From our witness. It’s kind of a long story.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “How long have you known the witness?”

  “Never met the guy. Never knew who he was until today.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Faith said. “Thank goodness.”

  Brenna frowned. “Why thank goodness?”

  “It was nothing personal, right? He’s a witness you’ve never met. He knows nothing about you.”

  Brenna recalled Robin Tannenbaum’s room. The copy of Extraordinary Children on his nightstand. The picture on his screen. “What is this about?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “What’s probably nothing?”

  “I never told you about this because I didn’t want to scare you . . .”

  “That’s never a good way to start a sentence.”

  Maya wandered back into the room. “Are you staying for pizza, Dad?”

  Jim shook his head. “Some other time, honey,” he said, watching Brenna.

  “Faith?”

  “Okay,” Faith sighed. “Remember when you did my show, back in October?”

  Brenna sighed.

  “Of course you remember, dumb question. Anyway, we got a whole bunch of calls from the same person—the screener never put ’em through because they sounded a little . . . unbalanced, like a stalker. I think you might be breaking up a little, Brenna. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Brenna said. “What were the calls about?”

  Brenna heard a rush of static on the other end of the line, then Faith’s voice came back, “ . . . why freak you out needlessly, you know?”

  “Faith,” Brenna’s voice shook. “I lost you there for a few seconds. What were the calls about?”

  “Honey,” she said. “It didn’t have anything to do with what happened to you today. He was asking personal questions.”

  Brenna’s mouth was dry. “Personal questions.”

  “Yeah, so nothing to worry about.”

  “Do you have recordings of this caller?”

  “No . . .” More static.

  “What were the calls about, Faith?”

  “I can’t hear you! This connection is awful.”

  “What were the calls about?” Brenna was shouting. Maya and Jim both stared at her, then each other.

  “Okay, heard you that time,” Faith said. She was half drowned by the bad connection, and Brenna strained to hear her, pressed the phone into her ear, but it wasn’t working. Her voice was so faint.

  “Say it again! I can’t hear you!”

  “The calls!” Faith practically screamed it. “They were about your sister!”

  Chapter 12

  Back in L.A., a casting director had once called Diandra Marie a “super-empath.” What he meant was, when she took on a role, she committed so fully to the world of the script that she posed an emotional danger to herself and to those around her. “What if you were to be playing Ophelia?” the casting director had warned her. “Would we find you drowned and floating in the river with flowers in your hair? You must remember what Sir Ian McKellen once said—‘My dear. It’s called acting.’ ”

  Of course, the L.A. River was about two inches deep, it wasn’t McKellen but Sir Laurence Olivier who had said that about acting, and the casting director had delivered those heartfelt words of advice in the show’s rehearsal space, after hours, while putting his pants back on.

  But while she hadn’t gotten the part and couldn’t remember the name of the show (or, for that matter, the name of the casting director) he had been right about Diandra—or DeeDee as she’d been known back then. Once she found a role, she wouldn’t just dive in, she would drown in it. She’d let the character devour her until she was no longer Diandra Marie, but Ophelia or Juliet or Maggie the Cat or . . . what was this role she was playing now?

  Diandra liked losing herself.

  She stopped for a moment, checked herself out in the cracked mirror next to the vacant front desk of NYC’s “fabulous” (with quote marks around it) MoonGlow Hotel. Dark sunglasses, black trench. Thigh-high boots. And, unbeknownst to the mirror, nothing else.

  She o
pened her purse, applied bright red lipstick, and then she took off the glasses, stared into her own eyes. Diandra still couldn’t get used to the cornflower blue contacts. They made her feel like a Barbie doll. She tried to look past them and into the brown eyes she closed at night, in the quiet of her room. “I would do anything for you,” she whispered, not to herself but to Mr. Freeman, knowing in her heart that wherever he was, he could sense it.

  Mr. Freeman, her director.

  She thought of his voice on the phone today, so helpless, begging her to play this part. I need you, DeeDee, he had said, her heart warming with the words, filling with them. Truly, Diandra knew Mr. Freeman better than anyone else did. Who else had heard him helpless like that? Not his wife. Not his kids or his clients or anyone else he hung out with in L.A. No one but her.

  We all go through life playing roles. Diandra was surer of that than she was of most anything. We put on costumes and makeup every day and we walk out into this sound set of a world and we act. Others respond to it. That’s what living is, most of the time. Everyone performing for each other.

  When she’d broken up with her last L.A. boyfriend, he’d looked so upset, but none of that was real. You were just pretending with me, he had said. You were pretending all along. Pretending as he said it—playing his role just like everybody else. Diandra had left for New York and he’d put on a new costume and makeup and started a new scene, pretending his way into yet another dumb romance with yet another pretty actress—this one based on “art,” he had claimed, for the new actress “understood” him the way Diandra did not . . . at least until the new girl took off her makeup and went off-script and betrayed him as he should have known she would. And he wouldn’t tell Diandra her real name. Even though he’d promised her, he wouldn’t say it, even as his credits rolled.

  But Mr. Freeman and Diandra. They were different. He took off his makeup with her, let her see his true self—his tears, his mistakes, all those things that kept him up at night. He showed her his soul. And he saw hers, too, as no one else had, ever. He cared enough to see it, and so she would play any part for him.

  She would do anything.

  “What’s your name, beautiful?”

  Diandra turned to see the desk clerk ogling her. He was old and pasty-faced, with black hairs poking out of his nose, but Diandra gave him her best smile—the Marilyn one with her eyes half closed behind the sunglasses and the contacts and her shoulders drawn up, as though she were shivering from the very thrill of meeting him. She looked at the clerk as if he were Mr. Freeman himself—her director—and then she gave him the name she held tight in her soul.

  “Pretty name,” the clerk replied, as she headed for the elevator. She felt his gaze on her ass and imagined the sound of applause.

  “She doesn’t look like a high school student,” Maya said, gesturing at the TV. “She looks like a forty-year-old lawyer.”

  “Gabrielle Carteris is an old soul,” Brenna said.

  “I was talking more about her glasses frames.”

  Jim had left an hour ago. “Good-bye, Brenna,” he had said after giving Maya a long hug and telling her he’d see her on Christmas. “It was good seeing you.”

  “It was good seeing you, too, Jim. I mean it.” Brenna stares at the floorboards. She can’t look into his eyes. I can never see you again, she thinks. I can never look at you again.

  After he’d left, Brenna had feared some kind of drawn-out discussion with Maya over the implications of that good-bye, whether it meant Dad could come by on certain occasions, that they could maybe do things other separated-but-amicable families did—celebrate birthdays together, holidays . . .

  But that hadn’t happened, either. Maya had said nothing and Brenna was glad for it. For someone who’d been through as much therapy as she had—and who demanded such deeply personal information from clients and witnesses—Brenna was pretty indirect about her own feelings. Her whole life, she’d been perfectly happy not talking things out, lest the conversation prove hurtful and wind up stuck in her mind forever. But memory issues aside, evading painful truths seemed to be a family trait, passed down to Brenna by her photograph-destroying mother and now down to Maya, who’d spoken more about the cast of the original Beverly Hills 90210 tonight than about her own father.

  Of course, 90210 was as worthy a topic as any, wasn’t it?

  “Jeez, that guy wears more hair gel than Trent!” Maya said.

  They were eating the pizza Maya had ordered in front of the one of the earliest episodes, in which Midwestern twins Brenda and Brandon were still trying to get used to life in sunny, glamorous Beverly Hills and their parents had actual storylines. Brenna owned the first eight seasons on DVD, but she never could get her daughter to watch any of it with her. Tonight, though, Maya had suggested it, her attention now pretty much equally divided between the show, her slice of pizza, and the giant sketch pad in her lap.

  Brenna appreciated the gesture. She had a deep affection for old 90210 episodes much the same way she did for her Hostess products—they were fun, palatable, and comforting in their familiarity. (Plus she’d watched them so many times that each viewing blended into the next in her mind; no memories were triggered.) But she certainly didn’t expect the same feelings from her daughter, who’d been born two years post–Shannen Doherty, and was barely four years old when David and Donna tied the knot on the two-hour-long series finale.

  Usually, Maya had about as much interest in watching 90210 as she did in eating a pizza half-piled with anchovies. (The smell seeps into the entire pie, Mom. It’s like an alien invasion.) So the fact that she was now doing both at once was a true show of love, divided attentions or not.

  Of course, Brenna’s were divided, too—with Faith’s phone call, and the jumble of thoughts it inspired, winning out over both the TV and the pizza.

  October 6. I’m on Sunrise Manhattan and a man calls, asking about my sister. Same date, Robin Tannenbaum checks Extraordinary Children out of the library, reads about how Clea went missing. The next day, October 7, he downloads a childhood picture of Clea and me (sent to him by Lula Belle). And Lula Belle, in turn, e-mails Gary Freeman, directing him to send money to a PO box in our hometown—which happens to be owned by Robin Tannenbaum.

  Tannenbaum then borrows a significant amount of money from his neighbor, Mr. Pokrovsky. And on October 9, he writes his mother a note, takes his winter clothes and his camera equipment, fills up his tank in White Plains, and disappears.

  Lula Belle, did you run off with Robin Tannenbaum?

  Lula Belle, are you my sister?

  Would Brenna ever know the answer to these questions, or would they run through her mind like this always? Earlier tonight, just after Jim left, Brenna had gone onto her computer, looked up the Web site for Happy Endings, and after getting flashed by so many inappropriate pop-ups she’d thrown a paper towel over the screen in case Maya walked in, she had finally found the tiny “contact us” button and e-mailed the “Company Head” (pun intended?) , begging for any bit of information he could provide on his former employee Robin Tannenbaum, the whole process no doubt choking her computer with spyware, when the odds of Brenna’s getting a reply from the Head were about as good as Trent’s chances of going on a week-long Caribbean cruise with Claudia the paramedic.

  Lula Belle, please let me find you.

  Maya was saying, “ . . . and if Donna is so insecure about the way she looks, why is she wearing those mom jeans?”

  Brenna smiled. “Everybody wore jeans like that back then.”

  “Seriously? The waist comes up to her boobs. It makes her look horrible!” She sighed, went back to her sketch pad.

  Brenna watched her for a while. “What are you drawing?”

  “A decent outfit for Donna.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No.”

  Maya held up her pad, and Brenna saw a perfect likeness of herself—her lips pursed, her eyes gazing up and into the distance, focused on something very far away.


  “It’s me,” she said.

  Maya nodded. “Lost in thought. I have to wait till you space out again so I can get the eyes right. Shouldn’t take too long.”

  Brenna sighed.

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Yes, you are. And I don’t blame you. Here you went through so much today, and I should be just . . . holding you. And instead I’m . . . I’m just . . . I’m trying to figure something out.”

  Maya said, “Okay, number one, you’re the one who went through so much today—all I did was sit around this apartment. Number two, holding me would be . . . it would be kinda weird.”

  “Point well taken. Is there a number three?”

  Maya nodded. “You can’t just tell me you’re trying to figure something out, and not expect me to ask what that thing is. I mean, it’s not like saying you’ve got brown hair or your tooth hurts or something. You say, ‘I’m trying to figure something out,’ it begs an explanation.”

  Brenna smiled. “It’s complicated, honey.”

  “I’m not simple.” Maya set her sketch pad against the wall, and Brenna stared at her own face on it—the pursed mouth, the distant eyes, the shadows beneath the cheekbones, and so many other details, so painstakingly rendered—the way her hair curled against her collarbones, the arch of her eyebrows, the tension around the mouth, the tiny oval birthmark, just above Brenna’s jaw. She couldn’t help but picture Maya, her artist, Maya watching her while she was unaware, taking her whole face in. Maya capturing Brenna on paper so carefully, so expertly, as if, by way of the outside, she could get to what was inside. Maybe Maya wasn’t as indirect as Brenna thought. Maybe she kept quiet about things, not for her own sake, but for that of her emotionally evasive mom.

  “Okay, you win,” Brenna said.

  “Really?”

  “Under one condition.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will let me keep that drawing.”

  Maya’s face brightened. “Sure.” She put the TV on pause.

  And Brenna told her everything.

  After she was done, Maya stared at her for a good half minute, at least. “So,” she said, finally. “You think this Robin guy saw you on TV and realized Lula Belle was Clea and . . . like . . . asked her about it and she sent him that picture of you guys and then they ran away together?”