by Joy Fielding
No, she was too well dressed to be a cleaning lady, and her hands, while undeniably a mess, were too soft and uncallused for someone accustomed to physical labor. Perhaps instead of cleaning these houses, she sold them. Maybe that was what had brought her to this part of town. Maybe she had come to meet a client, to show off a recently renovated home and had … what? Been hit over the head with a falling brick? Despite herself, she quickly felt her head for bumps, finding none and ascertaining only that her hair had come loose of its tight clasp and was hanging in stray wisps at the base of her neck.
She turned right on Mt. Vernon, then left on Cedar Street, hoping that something would transmit the necessary signals to her brain. “Something please look familiar,” she coaxed the tree-lined streets as she turned again at Revere, walking toward Embankment Road. The sun had disappeared behind a great gray cloud, and she felt cold, though the temperature remained steady. She recalled that the winter had been a relatively mild one and that the experts were predicting another hot summer. The Greenhouse Effect, they called it. Greenhouse. Greenpeace. Acid Rain. Save the Rain Forests. Save the Whales. Save Water—Shower with a Friend.
She felt suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. Her feet were sore, the big toe on her right foot now completely numb. Her stomach was starting to rumble. How long had it been since she’d eaten? For that matter, what sort of foods did she like? Did she know how to cook? Maybe she was on some sort of kooky diet that had affected her brain. Or maybe she was high on drugs. Or alcohol. Was she drunk? Had she ever been drunk? How would she know whether she was drunk or not?
She covered her eyes with her hands, wishing for the telltale pounding in her head that would signal an approaching hangover. Ray Milland’s Lost Weekend, she thought, wondering how old she would have to be to remember Ray Milland. “Help me,” she whispered into her closed palms. “Somebody, please, help me.”
She checked her wrist for the time, an automatic reflex, and saw that it was almost five o’clock. She had been walking around for almost an hour and had seen nothing in that time to give her any clue as to who she might be. Nothing looked familiar. Nobody had recognized her.
She found herself on Charles Street, an easy and attractive mix of shops, from the local grocery mart to a variety of jewelry and antique stores, everything from hardware to fine art. Had she been heading here to buy her milk and eggs?
A man brushed past her and smiled, but it was the smile of one weary soul to another at the end of a trying day, and spoke nothing of acquaintance. Even still, she was tempted to seize this man by the shoulders, to plead with him for some indication that he knew who she was, if necessary to shake an identity from him. But she let the man pass unmolested and the moment was gone. Besides, she couldn’t just accost total strangers on the street. They might call the police, have her locked away. Another crazy lady trying to find herself!
Was she crazy? Had she just escaped from an asylum? From jail? Was she on the run? She laughed at her own histrionics. If she hadn’t been crazy before all this started, she certainly would be by the time it was over. Would it ever be over?
She pushed open the door of a small convenience store and went inside. If she lived in this neighborhood, there was a good chance she frequented this little shop. At the very least, she hoped she had shopped here enough times to be familiar to the man behind the counter. Slowly, she made her way between the rows of canned goods toward him.
The proprietor, a ponytailed young man with uneven features and a straight line for a mouth, was busy with several customers who had converged on him simultaneously, each one claiming to be the first in line. She took her place behind them, hoping to catch the young man’s eye, praying to hear a crisp, “Hello there, Ms. Smith. Be right with you.” But all she heard was someone asking for a large pack of cigarettes, and all she saw was the proprietor’s skinny back as he swiveled around to reach for it.
She glanced over her left shoulder to a row of impossibly beautiful young women, who stared back at her from the covers of several dozen magazines. Allowing her body to drift toward the magazine rack, she found her eyes riveted to the sultry face of one model in particular. CINDY CRAWFORD, the name beside the face proclaimed in bright pink letters, SUPERMODEL. No doubt who she was.
She lifted the magazine from its slot and studied the model’s face: brown eyes, brown hair, a mole to the left of her slightly parted lips that distinguished her from the hundreds of other equally pretty faces that were everywhere. So beautiful, she thought. So young. So confident.
It occurred to her again that she had no idea what she looked like, no conception of how old she was. Her fingers gripped the sides of the magazine, bending its edges, curling them inward. “Hey, lady,” a male voice called out, and she turned to see the proprietor waving an admonishing finger, “you don’t handle the magazines unless you’re gonna buy them.”
Feeling as guilty as a child caught shoplifting a piece of candy, she nodded understanding of the rules, and clutched the magazine against her chest as if it were a lifeline. But she didn’t move.
“Well, you gonna buy it or not?” the young man asked. The other customers had departed, leaving the two of them alone. Now was her best, perhaps her only, chance to confront him.
She threw herself toward the counter, watching him take a quick step back. “Do you know me?” she asked, straining to keep the panic out of her voice.
He stared at her without moving, his eyes narrowing in concentration. Then he tilted his head, his ponytail grazing his right shoulder, a smile creeping across the straight line of his mouth, twisting it into a flattened U. “You somebody famous?” he asked.
Was she? she wondered, but said nothing, waiting, holding her breath.
He mistook her silence for affirmation. “Well, I know there are a few movies shooting in the city right now,” he said, taking several steps to his right so that he could study her profile, “but I don’t go to a lot of movies, and I don’t recognize you from anything I watch on TV. You on one of those soap operas? I know that them actresses are always coming to shopping malls and stuff like that. My sister made me take her once. She had to see Ashley Abbott from The Young and the Restless. ‘The Young and the Useless,’ I call it. You on that one?”
She shook her head. What was the point in continuing this charade? Clearly, he didn’t know her any better than she did.
She watched his body tense, then stiffen. “Well, you gotta pay for the magazine, whoever you are. Celebrity or not, it’s still two dollars and ninety-five cents.”
“I … I forgot my purse,” she whispered, starting to feel queasy.
Now the man looked angry. “What, you think that just because you’re on some dumb TV show that you don’t gotta carry money around like the rest of us? You think that because you’re kinda pretty, I’m gonna make you a present of whatever you want?”
“No, of course not ….”
“Either you pay for the magazine or you get out of my store and stop wasting my time. I don’t need people making fun of me.”
“I wasn’t trying to make fun of you. Honestly.”
“Two dollars and ninety-five cents,” he said again, extending his hand, palm up.
She knew she should simply hand over the magazine, but something would not allow her to give it up. CINDY CRAWFORD looked so lovely, so happy, so damned sure of herself. Was she hoping that such boundless self-assurance would rub off on her? She reached inside the pockets of her trench coat in hopes she might be carrying some loose change. Her hand moved rapidly from one pocket to the other, refusing to believe what it had found. When she finally brought her hand back out, she saw that it was filled with crisp, new hundred-dollar bills.
“Whoa,” the man behind the counter whistled. “You rob a bank or something?” Then, “You just print these up, or what?”
She said nothing, staring with wonder at the money in her hand.
“Anyway, I got no use for hundred-dollar bills. I give you change of a hundred, I do
n’t have any change left for anybody else. How many of those you got, anyway?”
She felt her breath pushing its way out of her chest in short, shallow bursts. What in God’s name was she doing with two pocketfuls of hundred-dollar bills? Where had all this money come from?
“You all right, lady?” The man behind the counter looked anxiously toward the door. “You aren’t going to be sick, are you?”
“Do you have a bathroom I can use?”
“It’s not open to the public,” he said stubbornly.
“Please!”
The desperation in her voice must have convinced him because he quickly raised an arm and pointed toward the storeroom to his right. “Look, I just washed up in there. Try not to be sick on my clean floor, okay?”
She quickly, located the small bathroom just inside the storage area. It was a tiny, crowded closet of a room, containing an old toilet and a broken mirror above a stained sink. The walls were lined with boxes of supplies. A half-filled bucket of water, a mop balanced precariously at its side, rested by the door.
She dashed toward the sink and twisted open the cold water tap, burying her magazine underneath her arm, quickly catching the icy water in her hands and splashing it against her face until she felt as if she could straighten up without fainting. What was going on? If this was a nightmare—and this was a nightmare—surely it was time she woke up!
Slowly, she lifted her face toward the mirror, then had to clutch the sides of the sink for support. The woman who stared back at her was a complete stranger. There was nothing even remotely familiar about her face. She scrutinized the pale skin and dark-brown eyes, the small, faintly upturned nose and full mouth painted the same shade as her nails. Her brown hair was perhaps a shade lighter than her eyes and pulled back into a ponytail by a jeweled clasp that had come loose and was threatening to fall out. She pulled it free of her hair, shaking her head and watching her hair fall in soft layers to her shoulders.
It was an attractive face, she thought, objectifying it as if, like CINDY CRAWFORD, it was on the cover of a magazine. Kinda pretty, the young man had said. Maybe slightly better than that. Everything was in its proper place. There were no unsightly blemishes. Nothing was too big or too small. Nothing jarred. Everything was where it was supposed to be. She estimated her age as early to mid-thirties, then wondered if she looked older or younger than she really was. “This is so confusing,” she whispered to her image, which seemed to be holding its breath. “Who are you?”
“You’re nobody I know,” her reflection answered, and both women dropped their heads to stare into the stained basin of the white enamel sink.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, feeling a bubble of heat explode inside her. “Please don’t faint,” she cried. “Whoever you are, please don’t faint.”
But the wave of heat continued to wash across her body, sweeping past her legs and stomach into her arms and neck, getting caught in her throat. She felt as if she were melting from the inside out, as if, at any minute, she might burst into flames. She splashed more water on her face, but it did nothing to cool her off or calm her down. She began tearing at the buttons of her coat in an effort to free her body, give it more room to breathe. The magazine under her arm slipped to the floor, and she quickly bent down to scoop it up, pulling open her coat as she stood up.
She took a deep breath, then stopped dead.
Slowly, as if she were a marionette and some unknown force were manipulating her strings, she felt her head drop toward her chest in one seamless arc. What she saw—what she had seen when she was down on her knees retrieving the magazine but had managed to ignore—was a simple blue dress, the front completely covered in blood.
She gasped, the soft, frightened cry of a small animal caught in a trap. The sound quickly grew into a moan, then emerged as a scream. She heard footsteps, the sound of other voices, felt herself surrounded, overwhelmed.
“What’s going on in here?” the proprietor started, then stopped, his words retreating into the open hole of his mouth.
“Oh, my God,” a young boy groaned from somewhere at his side.
“Gross!” his companion exclaimed.
“What have you done?” the store owner demanded, his eyes searching the tiny cubicle, undoubtedly for signs of broken glass.
She said nothing, returning her gaze to the front of her bloodied dress.
“Look, lady,” the man began again, shooing his two young customers away from the door, “I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t want any part of it. Take your blood and your hundred-dollar bills and get out of my store before I call the police.”
She didn’t move.
“Did you hear what I said? I’m going to call the police if you don’t get out of here right now.”
She looked toward the frightened proprietor, who suddenly grabbed the mop from the bucket and brandished it at her as if he were a matador and she the bull. “Blood,” she whispered, her disbelieving eyes drawn back to the front of her dress. The blood was reasonably fresh, still a little damp. Was the blood hers or someone else’s? “Blood,” she said again, as if the repetition of the word would pull everything into place.
“You got ten seconds, lady, then I’m calling the cops. Now, I don’t want any trouble. I just want you out of my store.”
Her eyes returned to his, her voice so soft she noticed that he had to bend forward in spite of himself to hear it. “I don’t know where to go,” she cried, and felt her body crumple, like a piece of paper in someone’s clenched fist.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” the man said quickly, catching her before she could fall. “You’re not fainting in my store.”
“Please,” she began, not sure if she was pleading for understanding or unconsciousness.
The young man, while not very tall or muscular, was surprisingly strong. He gripped her tightly around the waist and marshaled her quickly to the door. Then he suddenly stopped, looking uneasily around the store. “Is this one of them hidden video shows?” he asked warily, a hint of embarrassment creeping into his voice, as if he might have been had.
“You have to help me,” she said.
“You have to get out of my store,” he told her, regaining his composure and pushing her outside. She heard the door click shut behind her, saw him angrily shooing her away.
“Oh, God, what do I do now?” she asked the busy street. Again, the puppeteer took charge, buttoning her coat, tucking her magazine beneath her arm, directing her gaze toward the traffic. Seeing a taxi approach, the string pulling her right hand shot up, jerking her arm up and out. The taxi came to an immediate stop at the side of the road in front of her. Without further thought, she opened the cab’s rear door and climbed inside.
TWO
SHE wasn’t sure what made her choose the Lennox Hotel. Maybe because it was one of downtown Boston’s older hotels and therefore smaller and somehow more lifesize than its more modern counterparts, or maybe because fond memories of earlier visits still lingered in her subconscious, she didn’t know. It was even possible that she was already registered here as a guest, she told herself hopefully as she approached the front desk, praying, as she had earlier in the convenience store, for a kind smile of recognition.
She had to wait in line behind a couple and their two young sons, towheaded little devils in matching sailor suits, each clinging to his share of their mother’s ample hips and wailing their collective discomfort for all the lobby to hear.
“I’m hungry,” the younger of the two, a boy of maybe four, complained, lifting up his mother’s skirt and exposing her knee, as if contemplating taking a bite.
“I want to go to McDonald’s,” his brother, older by no more than a year, immediately elaborated.
“McDonald’s! McDonald’s!” became the rallying cry as they danced circles around the helpless adults who were their parents and who were doing their best to pretend that none of this was actually happening.
“Let Mommy and Daddy get us a room, then we’ll f
ind a nice restaurant, okay?” the young mother pleaded, fixing her husband with a stare that begged him to hurry things along before she started screaming.
“McDonald’s! McDonald’s!” came the expected and immediate response.
And then they were miraculously gone, guided inside a waiting elevator by a solicitous bellhop, and the lobby once again assumed the air of a refined, European-styled hotel. “Can I help you, ma’am? … ma’am?”
“I’m sorry,” she said when she realized that the young man behind the reception desk was addressing her. Obviously she had better get used to being called ma’am. “I’d like a room.”
His hands began tapping at the keys of his computer. “For how long?”
“I’m not sure.” She cleared her throat, once, then again. “At least one night. Maybe two.”
“A single room?” He looked past her to see if she was alone. Automatically, she did the same.
“Just me,” she whispered, then louder, “Yes, a single room. Please.” Mustn’t forget my manners, she thought, and almost laughed.
“I have a room,” the young man recited, reading from his computer screen, “at eighty-five dollars a night. It’s on the eighth floor, no smoking, and it has a double bed.”
“That’s fine.”
“And how will you be paying for that?”
“Cash.”
“Cash?” For the first time, the young man’s eyes shot directly to hers. She noted that he had the bluest eyes of anyone she’d ever seen. At least she thought he had the bluest eyes of anyone she’d ever seen. She couldn’t be sure. God only knew the things she’d seen.