Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  “What about the police?” I asked.

  Raymond nodded. “They knew, of course, but Polaris fixed it with them, somehow. I’m not sure how. Maybe he paid them off. I don’t know. I know they tried to interview Lilly, but she couldn’t speak to them. She didn’t actually talk until she came up here to be with us.”

  “The therapist!” I said.

  They looked at me, confused by my excitement.

  “Lilly was in therapy, right?”

  “For more years than I’d like to think about,” Lilly said.

  “Your therapist must have known about it, then.”

  Lilly nodded. “Of course he did. But he wouldn’t have told her. It’s confidential. Dr. Blackmore would never do anything like that.”

  I felt a surge of adrenaline, and my heart started beating faster. I tried to calm my voice so that it would not betray my astonishment. “Dr. Reese Blackmore?” I asked.

  Lilly nodded. “Do you know him? He treated me from the time I was a little girl until just before I got married.”

  “Is this the same Reese Blackmore who runs the Ojai Rehabilitation and Self-Actualization Center?”

  “Yes, that’s him. He’s a recovered memory specialist, one of the pioneers in the field. And he also does drug and alcohol treatment. He says the two are very interrelated. People who suffer from repressed memory often self-medicate.”

  I stared at Lilly. “How could you not have told me this?”

  “What?” she asked, sounding confused.

  “That your therapist knew Chloe.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Didn’t I? When we talked about Jupiter? Didn’t I tell you that Jupiter and I had the same therapist? And of course Jupiter met Chloe in Ojai.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her and said flatly, “Blackmore was a client of Chloe’s.”

  “A client?” Lilly said.

  “She was a stripper, and probably a high-class hooker, too. He was a client. That’s why he brought her to his clinic,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it,” Lilly said, her eyes flashing with anger.

  “Chloe’s mother told me.”

  Raymond said, “Are you serious? Chloe’s mother told you that she was a hooker?”

  I said, “An exotic dancer who had a few private clients.”

  Lilly moaned softly.

  “He knew about you and your mother, and he had a relationship with Chloe,” I said.

  She moaned again.

  “How did Jupiter end up at the clinic?” I said.

  “I’m sure Polaris sent him,” Beverly said. “We’ve all known each other for years. Reese was a member of that first Topanga Canyon commune. That’s why we sent Lilly to him. Because he was our friend. She was one of his very first patients, and the reason he ever began work in recovered memory.” Her voice was soft, and horrified.

  “Was he in San Miguel with Polaris?”

  Beverly shook her head. “No. He was in graduate school by the time the Topanga commune broke up. In clinical psychology.”

  Raymond interrupted. “I can’t believe Reese would have said anything to Chloe. The man is a nationally recognized expert in the fields of drug treatment and recovered memory. He saved Lilly’s life, for God’s sake. He would never have betrayed her confidence.”

  “No. No he wouldn’t,” Lilly said, shaking her head. She had gotten over her initial shock, and her voice was adamant. “Dad’s right. Dr. Blackmore would never do anything like that. Never. She must have found out from someone else. Polaris must have told her. And I don’t believe Dr. B would have slept with her. He’s just not that kind of person.”

  Unlike Lilly, I wasn’t suffering from transference. I was perfectly able to imagine her shrink sleeping with a prostitute, and then setting her up to blackmail one of his patients. My husband might spend his days dreaming up horror, but it was my job that required the ability to imagine the true evil of which human beings are capable.

  “How do you know that Chloe’s mother was telling you the truth? I mean, maybe she was lying. Or maybe you misunderstood,” Lilly said.

  I sighed inwardly, but said, “I’ll verify the information before I act on it. Okay?”

  Lilly nodded, relieved. I would do what I’d promised; I’d call Wanda again, to satisfy Lilly. But I was also determined to investigate Reese Blackmore further, however that made my friend feel.

  “If you’re right, and Dr. Blackmore wasn’t the source of the information, then that brings us back to square one,” I said. “I think we should make a list of everyone who knew about what happened in San Miguel.” I flipped to a clean page in my notebook and started writing. “The three of you knew. And Dr. Blackmore. Polaris and Hyades. The maids, Juana and the others. Jupiter, of course. Can you think of anyone else? Did anyone else know?”

  Lilly shook her head, and then stopped. “Well, not anyone who would have said anything,” she murmured.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t have said anything,” she said again, the slight tremble in her voice betraying her doubt.

  “Who?” I asked again.

  “Archer,” she said. “Archer knew. He’s always known.”

  I looked at Lilly and her parents. The blood had drained from Beverly’s face. Raymond’s jaw was set. He looked grim, and very angry.

  We sat silently for a while, and I wondered if they were each thinking the same thing as I. Which of the people that Lilly trusted and loved had betrayed her? Was it her ex-husband, the father of her daughters, with whom she’d begun to achieve a rapprochement? Was it her therapist, who’d brought her back to life when she’d come to him, a broken and silent child? Was it her childhood companion, the closest thing to a brother that she had? I hoped, for her sake and despite their insistence to the contrary, that the source of the information was Polaris. I couldn’t help but believe that even blood oaths have a way of disintegrating when a man is lying in bed with a girl half his age.

  Finally when the silence had grown thick and uncomfortable, I said to Lilly, “Do you mind telling me a little bit more about what happened in Mexico? I know it’s painful for you, and if you can’t, I’ll understand. It’s just that I think that if I know more about it, it might help me.”

  Lilly dragged her hand through her hair distractedly. The hair had grown back quickly. It was about two inches long and curled softly over her scalp. Romantic tendrils traced the perfect curve of her shell-like ear. Even with cropped hair and a face ravaged by anxiety and sorrow, Lilly was ethereally lovely.

  “I’ll talk about it,” she said. “The fact that I can at all is thanks to my therapy with Dr. Blackmore. Like I told you, I started seeing him as soon as I got home from Mexico.”

  I turned to Beverly and Raymond. “You sent Lilly to see Reese Blackmore because you knew him?”

  Raymond said, “Polaris and I agreed that it would be best for Lilly if nobody else knew about what happened. We trusted Reese. He had lived with us in Topanga; he knew us and had known Trudy-Ann. He was the logical choice.”

  “And the only one we could afford,” Beverly interjected.

  “He was wonderful,” Lilly said to her stepmother. “He saved my life.”

  “How long did it take before you started speaking again?” I asked.

  Lilly shrugged. “A while. At I first we would just sit there quietly. I remember sometimes he would play games while I watched. You know, board games, or dolls. Something like that. He had a huge pile of Barbies.”

  Beverly shook her head. “I hated that,” she said. “I never let Lilly play with Barbie dolls, and I tried to convince him to get rid of those. But he wouldn’t.”

  I could sympathize with Beverly’s dislike of the dolls. I hated them, too. For years I hadn’t let Ruby play with them, and when I’d finally succumbed to her entreaties, I did my best to convince her that it was more fun to cut off their hair and draw tattoos all over their bodies with permanent marker than to play Barbie and Ken’s wedding day.

  “It was
a good thing he didn’t listen to you,” Lilly said. “Those Barbies were what finally got through to me. After a couple of weeks of being home in L.A. with my parents, and of seeing Dr. Blackmore almost every day, I started speaking again. I didn’t remember anything about what happened to my mother. I think I told you about that. How I had memories of playing in the fountain with Jupiter, and then of someone screaming. And the dress. The white dress . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “We talked about that. And about how you slowly began to remember more,” I prompted her.

  “Playing Barbies helped me to remember. It wasn’t immediate, by any means. My memory came back slowly. Over the years. We’d play with the Barbie dolls, and we would act out what happened. There was one doll that we always used to represent my mother. A Malibu Barbie. I guess I thought she looked like her.”

  Raymond stifled a laugh and then looked contrite. “I’m sorry. It’s just that Trudy-Ann did kind of look like Malibu Barbie. She was tall, and blond, and had a great tan.”

  Beverly said, “She was always lying out, working on her tan. The first time I saw her was on the roof of the trailer parked in the yard of the Topanga house. She’d climbed up the ladder and was lying up there, getting a tan.”

  I wondered if I would be able to recount recollections of Peter’s previous girlfriends with such equanimity. Probably not. That might be one of the reasons I had never joined a commune and practiced peace, happiness, and free love.

  A small smile played across Lilly’s lips, alleviating for a moment the look of strain and anxiety. “My mother was Malibu Barbie, and I was Skipper.” The smile slowly faded. “We’d act out the day that she died. At first I couldn’t remember much. Just what I told you. Dr. Blackmore would ask me questions sometimes. Like ‘Where were you standing?’ or ‘What was Mommy wearing?’ It was funny, but when I wasn’t paying attention, that’s when I’d remember something. I’d be looking at one of the posters in his office, instead of at the dolls, and he’d ask me where I was standing, and I’d immediately know—in the corner between the bed and the wall. As the years passed, more and more details came out. Finally, when I was about twelve or so, it became as clear as it is now. I remember pretty much everything. I remember holding the gun and the noise of it going off. It was so loud. Louder than anything I’d ever heard. I remember the look on Mommy’s face. Like she was surprised. And sad. The saddest look in the world. There was blood all over her white dress, and all over me. My hands were wet and sticky with her blood. I kept screaming at her. Begging her to wake up. But she wouldn’t. She just lay there, without moving. And her blood was all over my hands.”

  We sat in stunned silence. Suddenly the maid bustled in with a pitcher of coffee. She stopped, looked at us, and blushed. Then she raised the pitcher in the air wordlessly. Lilly nodded, and the maid refilled our cups and rushed out the door. For a few moments the only sound was the tinkling of teaspoons in the delicate porcelain coffee cups. I stared at the streak of thick cream swirling in my cup and tried to wipe the picture of Lilly’s dead mother from my mind. I couldn’t. It was too powerful an image, made even more dreadful by the substitution my own imagination had wrought. Instead of Lilly’s anguished face, I saw my own little girl’s.

  “You’re a brave woman, Lilly,” Beverly said, breaking the silence. “And you were a brave girl. You confronted that truth again and again. I’m proud of your courage. I always have been.”

  Lilly leaned her head on her stepmother’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mom,” she said. Then she looked at me. “You haven’t asked me about Archer.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Don’t you want to know what’s going on with him?”

  “Do you want to tell me?” I said with some trepidation, reminding myself what happens to people who badmouth their friends’ lovers. They lose their friends.

  “Peter was right,” Lilly said. “As soon as I was away from all this, I instantly had clarity about it. I think I was hoping it would work, for the girls’ sake, and mine, too, I suppose. But that thing he did at your house. And then lying about it. He’s still the same guy he always was.”

  I nodded.

  “I told him that we were over. We’ll be friends, for Amber and Jade’s sake, but we’re not going to get back together.”

  “What did he say?”

  She shrugged and passed a hand over her short hair. “He cried.”

  Raymond snorted in disgust, and I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

  Lilly smiled ruefully. “Archer’s always been a good crier. The problem has always been figuring out whether the tears are real.”

  “And do you think they were?” I asked over Raymond’s dismissive grunt.

  Lilly shrugged again. “Who knows. It doesn’t really matter, though, does it?”

  “And you really don’t think he could have been the source of Chloe’s information?” I asked.

  Lilly shook her head. “I know Archer, and I know what he’s capable of.”

  When I left Lilly’s house, I replayed in my mind the complicated and devastating story she’d told me. I also wondered at my own ability to compartmentalize. Lilly was a suspect in Chloe’s murder. Perhaps the most obvious suspect. Yet there I was, carrying on as if my friend were absolutely innocent. I hoped she was. I wished fervently that the killer were someone else. Someone like Polaris. Or Archer. Anyone would be preferable to Lilly.

  Twenty-two

  THE mother half of my working mother identity took precedence the next day. Isaac had come home the day before with a note pinned to his backpack. In flowery script, complete with smiley faces and misspellings, his preschool teacher informed me that I was delinquent in my volunteer duties, and thus was expected in class the next morning. The note had the tone of a cheerful jury summons, and I experienced the same trepidation as I had in junior high school when being called into the principal’s office. The summons further instructed me to be prepared to officiate at a lice check, but since I refused to believe this could be anything but a typo (Rice check? Mice check?), I was utterly unprepared when Ms. Morgenstern handed me a comb and a pair of latex gloves.

  “You can usually find the nits in the hair over the ears or at the nape of the neck,” she said with a cheerfully condescending smile.

  I stared first at the picture of the terrified louse stenciled on the comb and then up at her face. “Nits?” I could hear the quaver in my own voice.

  “Little baby lice,” she said. “Look for eggs, or the little critters themselves. I’d start with Madison if I were you. And Colby. The two of them have been scratching all week.”

  Since when had lice become a routine part of the academic experience? When I was a kid, nobody had lice. Or at least kids growing up in the New Jersey suburbs certainly didn’t. Maybe those New York children had heads full of creepy crawlies; those same children who were gnawed on by rats while they slept. But not us; not the kids who rode their Big Wheels down wide sidewalks past manicured lawns. And now, here I was, picking through the fragrant, shampooed locks of a class full of Travises, Hunters, Jacksons, Sadies, and Maxes, looking for insects. I couldn’t help but wonder if Ms. Morgenstern drafted me specifically because she knew I spent my working hours searching out the human equivalent.

  The return of my morning sickness at the very thought of vermin infesting the scalp of my cosseted little boy and his passel of overly indulged friends caused me to be more thorough than I might have been otherwise. I ran the comb through the kids’ hair and diligently lifted up each and every strand, terrified I would actually see a louse laying its eggs and wriggling its little legs. I was undoing Fiona’s braids when my cell phone rang.

  “How close are you to a newsstand?” Al said as soon as I’d answered the phone.

  “Oh no.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “Read me the headline.”

  He cleared his throat. “LIKE BROTHER LIKE SISTER—” he b
egan.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said. “I’ll call you back.” I was still holding on to Fiona’s head. I let her go and walked over to Ms. Morgenstern. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and handed her the combs. “I’ve got to go.”

  She opened her mouth in protest, but I shook my head. “It’s an emergency.”

  She pursed her lips and then widened them into her ubiquitous smile. “We’ll expect you back next month.”

  I nodded and found Isaac. He was in the playhouse, wearing a pair of purple high heels. And a set of Viking horns. I kissed him goodbye.

  My cell phone rang again while I was standing in line at the Quikmart, paying for the tall stack of Daily Enquirers I’d pulled off the rack. It was Lilly. And she was hysterical.

  “Did you see it?” she screamed. “They know everything. Everything!”

  “I know,” I murmured into the phone. I looked down at the cover photograph. It must have been taken right after Lilly had first shaved her head for her recent film, and her fragile skull filled almost the entire front page. They’d caught her without her usual wide and friendly grin; her mouth was twisted in an unfamiliar scowl. The newspaper had done its homework. The article contained a detailed description of Trudy-Ann’s death, and Lilly’s role in it. Everything was there—her mother’s relationship with Polaris, their life at the Topanga commune and in Mexico. There was a photograph of Dr. Blackmore with his hand to his face, refusing to be interviewed, and a sidebar detailing his theory of recovered memory of childhood trauma. They’d even included descriptions of papers he’d published in which he analyzed the case of a patient he referred to as “Little Girl Q.” Little Girl Q had accidentally caused the death of her mother and then repressed all memory of the event. Through intensive work with Dr. Blackmore, she had recovered her memories, and as a result become an emotionally whole individual who did not need the assistance of narcotics to handle her emotional pain. The newspaper left it up to the reader to assume who Little Girl Q really was.