She's Not There

by P J Parrish

  The mall was just opening when Amelia walked in. A yawning girl was rolling open the metal grating at Aéropostale, and the smell of baking pretzels from the Auntie Anne’s kiosk mixed with the scent of lemons oozing out of the Bath & Body Works shop. All down the long wide aisle, lights were going on in the shops. The smells, signs, window displays, colors—it all came at Amelia in a rush of sensation, and for several seconds, she had to just stand still, letting her brain absorb it all and scan for connections.

  Of course she had been in a mall before. But when and where? Nothing . . . nothing was coming.

  But then she heard music and she recognized it immediately as a Christmas carol, though she couldn’t recall which song it was. Amelia felt a stab of sadness that she had forgotten something so simple, that she couldn’t remember the last Christmas she had celebrated or any Christmas in her entire life for that matter.

  She squared her shoulders.

  No. No more sadness.

  Anger was what she needed right now. Not the anger of frustration, but the kind of cold anger that would help her form a plan for going forward, that would force her brain to be calm and calculating enough to let her deal with whatever shit was thrown at her.

  Shit?

  She didn’t even know if she was the kind of woman who used words like “shit.” No matter, she decided. She was now.

  She found a mall directory and decided to head to JCPenney. But halfway there, a light went on above an imposing wall of glass. She stopped and looked up.

  It was a white apple. No name, just a giant glowing apple.

  The lights inside the store flickered on, revealing rows of sleek white tables and walls of blue screens. There were four people milling around inside, all wearing jeans and bright blue T-shirts with large square pendants hanging around their necks. She had the crazy thought that it all looked like some strange alien spaceship.

  But then she looked up again at the white apple and it clicked in her head. Apple. She once had something with that emblem on it. Was it a computer? Computers could tell you anything about anybody, Hannah had said.

  Amelia went inside and walked slowly down the aisle of computers that were lined up like artwork on the white consoles. She stopped, staring at the image on one screen. It was moving, a swirling nebula of green and blue, like her bubble dream.

  “Can I help you?”

  Amelia turned and looked down into the round face of a young woman, who smiled at her from beneath her fringe of heavy black bangs. The pendant hanging on her chest was a name tag with the name MARIA, and below that were two flags, an American flag and a red, white, and green one Amelia didn’t recognize.

  “Yes, I need some help. I need a computer.”

  “Well, this is the MacBook Pro,” the clerk said. She tapped a key, and the nebula disappeared, replaced by a bright blue screen. “It comes with eight gigs but you can always add more RAM. What do you need it for mainly? Watching movies? Are you a gamer?”

  “No, I just need to look things up.”

  “O-kay.” Maria pursed her lips. “The Pro’s got a nice touch. Go ahead, try it out.”

  Amelia positioned her hands above the middle row of keys and for a moment it felt like her fingers knew what to do, where to move. Did she know how to type? Had she been a secretary once? She knew what computers were but there were gaps, as if she couldn’t remember the terminology or exactly how to do things.

  “Show me how to search for something,” Amelia asked.

  Maria stabbed at some keys and looked up. “What do you want to search for?”

  “Myself,” Amelia asked.

  Maria’s smile hardened as her eyes took in Amelia’s matted hair, baggy jeans, and rumpled blue shirt. “Listen, maybe you should go to the public library. They can—”

  “No,” Amelia said. “I just need a little help here, and if you can’t be bothered then I will go buy a computer someplace else.”

  Maria blinked several times. “Okay, what’s your name?”

  “Amelia Tobias.”

  Maria tapped some keys and then looked up. “Wow, you’re in a magazine.”

  “Magazine?”

  Maria stepped aside so Amelia could see. It was a page from Florida Design. There was a color photograph of a blonde woman in a red halter dress standing near a pool. A large pink house with palm trees and a white yacht was visible behind the woman. The type below the picture read “Mrs. Alex Tobias in front of her Fort Lauderdale Isles home: ‘When we remodeled Casa Rosa, we were careful to preserve the past.’”

  Preserve the past . . .

  Voices in her head again, and this time one of them was her own.

  This is the house I wanted you to see.

  She could see herself. She was standing in front of the pink house, but it looked nothing like the house in the magazine. It had boarded-up windows, a jungle of vines and trees, a dry fountain, and there was a red sign near the door—FORECLOSURE. PRICE REDUCED!

  She could hear screeching sounds from above and see a flurry of acid green wings against a blue sky. The screeching mutated into a man’s voice.

  Mel, this is a teardown. I want something new and clean.

  But I like this place, Alex. This place feels right.

  And then . . .

  The feel of arms enfolding her, his arms, and his lips pressed on hers, and the rustle of palm fronds and dying screams of the wild parrots as they flew away.

  “Is that really you?”

  Maria’s voice brought her back. When Amelia turned to look at her, she knew the young clerk was trying to reconcile the bruised, disheveled woman in front of her with the sleek creature on the computer screen.

  She couldn’t answer. Her headache had returned, and when she looked up at the ceiling, the lights were haloed.

  “I need . . .” Amelia closed her eyes for a second and then opened them. “I need to buy a computer,” she said. She hoisted up the Vuitton duffel. “I need something small and light that I can carry in this.”

  There was new respect in the young woman’s eyes. “I’ve got just what you need—a tablet. Compact, light, and fast, but it comes with sixteen gigs.” Maria smiled. “You can never have enough memory, right?”

  It was just a sliver of black glass and aluminum that weighed only a pound. Five hundred dollars had seemed like too much to pay for the tablet, but the clerk had assured Amelia that she could search for anything with it, that the whole world was hers at the brush of her fingertips.

  She left the store exhausted, her head pounding after the lesson the clerk had given her on how to use the tablet and how to connect to the Internet with the prepaid wireless SIM card she had been able to purchase with cash.

  The mall was warm and crowded now, the people pushing around her in a fast current. The piped-in Christmas carols were like a broken-fluorescent-light buzz in her head.

  See the blazing Yule before us.

  Fa la la la la, la la la la . . .

  The image from the magazine of that blonde woman standing in front of the pool was burned in her brain. Had that really been her? What else was the tablet going to be able to tell her about herself? And what was she going to be able to find out about Alex?

  Fast away the old year passes! Fa la la la la, la la la la!

  A sudden wave of nausea overtook her, and red and green sparks shot across her vision. Amelia stopped and shut her eyes, clutching the plastic bag from the Apple store to her chest.

  Someone was laughing, a cruel shrieking laugh.

  Fa la la la la! Ha la la la la!

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  She opened her eyes. A young man with spiky platinum blond hair was standing in front of her. He had a tiny silver ring in his nostril, and she focused hard on it, trying to stop the spinning.

  “I just need to sit down,” Amelia said.

&nbs
p; His hands were gentle but firm as he led her into a store. He sat her down in a chair and she bowed her head, closing her eyes. Slowly the dizziness began to pass.

  “Here, drink this.”

  She opened her eyes to see the young man holding out a glass of water. When she didn’t take it, he added, “I’ve got some wine in the back. Do you want that instead?”

  She shook her head and looked around. It was a beauty salon, but all the other chairs were empty. The whole place was empty except for a sleepy girl with pink hair manning the desk by the entrance.

  Amelia looked in the mirror, catching the eye of the young man standing behind her. “I had a concussion and get dizzy sometimes,” she said. “Thanks for helping me. I’m okay now.”

  He was studying her, with one palm cupping his chin. “Are you sure? I mean, are you sure there’s not something else I can do for you?”

  Her hair, she realized—he was staring at her hair. It looked even worse than it had this morning when she got up, matted lank ropes hanging to her shoulders.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  She let out a long sigh. “Can you fix it?”

  “Girl, I can fix anything,” he said, smiling. He drew a pink cape over her and picked up a brush but then paused. “You have extensions,” he said, feeling her scalp. “I don’t think I can save them. They’re put in with glue, you know.”

  “Then cut them out.”

  “I’d have to cut you pretty short. You sure?”

  Amelia nodded.

  “What about the color? I can touch you up. Same shade of blonde?”

  Amelia took off the purple plastic glasses. “No, change it back to my natural color.”

  “What is it?”

  She couldn’t tell him that she wasn’t sure. “Why don’t you just decide what will look good.”

  He gave her a huge smile. “God, I wish all my clients were like you.”

  The next hour went by like a sensual dream. The warm scented water of the shampoo, and the stylist’s hands—his name was Martin, and he was working at Supercuts only until he could get to New Orleans—were ever so gentle as he cut out the extensions. The pink-haired girl went next door to Sbarro and brought Amelia pizza, which she ate with slow and deliberate pleasure.

  As she was finishing a second pizza slice, she had the odd thought that pizza was not something she was allowed to eat.

  Allowed?

  That Russian voice was there in her head again and she heard the words more clearly now than she had back in the thrift store.

  I need to see your bones.

  The Russian man’s face came slowly into focus—a thin hooked nose and sparse white hair—and he was poking her in the ribs, telling her she was too fat, while the girls around her giggled. And a different man was telling her to put the cookie down and calling her Jelly-Belly.

  She swallowed the last bite of pizza, and along with it the anger over the old man who had made her cry and the other man who had called her that name. What kind of a person had she been that she had given these men such power over her?

  Finally, Martin stepped away from the chair and Amelia put her glasses back on. In the few times she had seen her reflection since waking up in the hospital, she hadn’t recognized the woman staring back at her. She still didn’t.

  The woman in the mirror had dark brown hair cut close and boyish with spiky bangs. The haircut made her face look round and her neck very long.

  “Is it okay?”

  She looked up at Martin. He looked worried.

  “It’s sort of just how I pictured you for some reason,” he said. “Sort of Leslie Caron circa An American in Paris.”

  Amelia stared at her reflection and then smiled. “I like it. Thank you, Martin.”

  He let out a long breath. “Well, one thing’s for sure. No one’s going to recognize you.”

  It was near one by the time she made her way to JCPenney. Hannah was due to pick her up outside at two, so she didn’t linger as she bought underwear, socks, a nightgown, and a light robe. She picked up a pair of short flat boots and, on impulse, a pair of turquoise Converse sneakers. In the women’s department, she filled her arms with jeans, khaki pants, a heavy nubby gray sweater coat, and five black long-sleeved T-shirts. She quickly tried on the jeans in the dressing room, and was gathering them up to leave when she froze.

  Music . . . sweet-sounding, tinkling music. More Christmas music, but not carols this time. Something else, something so very familiar that it was almost like it was coming from deep inside her head instead of from the speaker up on the ceiling.

  Nuts? Nut . . . Nutcracker. She let out a sigh of relief. That was the name of the music, The Nutcracker.

  And then, floating on the edges of the music, she could hear words, foreign words, like the ones that had come to her before, but this time she was certain it wasn’t Italian. It was French that she was hearing.

  Piqué, piqué, arabesque allongé. Pas de chat, pas de chat, pas de bourrée.

  It was the same voice, the Russian man who had said, “Make ugly go away. You try make pretty.”

  Suddenly, she could feel something shift in her body, something buried deep inside her. Without realizing it, she extended her left leg, pointed her toe, and raised her arms over her head.

  She stared at herself in the triple mirror. But she was seeing herself reflected back in many, many other mirrors, walls of mirrors, mirrors with railings, mirrors clouded with the steam of condensation in rooms filled with music, the smell of coffee, and wood floors marked with resin. And the Russian was there. He had been her teacher.

  Make pretty.

  Her mind had forgotten but her muscles had not.

  I am a dancer.

  I am a dancer!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When he arrived at the restaurant, there was nowhere to sit. At least no place that suited his needs. There was one spot open at the bar, but it would have required him to sit with his back to the door and that was never going to happen in a million years.

  So Clay Buchanan waited, standing near the door, savoring the last drags on his Dunhill, and when a seat opened up on the patio facing the street, he snuffed out his cigarette and slid into the rattan chair.

  YOLO. It was a dumb name for a restaurant, he thought. But when he glanced at the matches he had snagged from the hostess, he saw that it stood for You Only Live Once.

  He ordered a Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. Sixty-five bucks a shot, but he wasn’t paying. He took a sip, closing his eyes in pleasure at the caramel taste.

  Carpe diem, baby.

  The restaurant was starting to fill up as the nearby glass office buildings disgorged their inhabitants for happy hour. For the next half hour he sat nursing the bourbon and watching the young women click-clack in on their sky-high heels, long hair and short hemlines swinging, their eyes honing in on the male prospects.

  God, the women were beautiful here.

  Silicone-pumped and pouty-lipped beautiful. Not his taste really—he liked his women with real curves on their bodies and more lines on their faces—but these women were exotic compared to the ones back home in Nashville and, like rare birds, interesting to watch.

  And watching was what he was really good at.

  He had found that out when he was just twelve—that morning out in the duck blind on Old Hick Lake with his dad—found out that he could spot the green heads even before the dogs could hear them. It took him ten more years of sitting in blinds before he realized he didn’t like shooting the ducks. He just liked watching them. He liked watching any creature that flew. He liked the fact that he could tell a Ruddy from a Merganser on the wing with his bare eyes. Liked the fact that he could check off another line in his journal after a sighting. Liked that he had a Wings Over Tennessee certificate on his wall that said he had recorded five hundred sightings. And he
really liked the fact that nobody who came into his office had ever had the balls to ask him why a guy like him liked to watch little birdies.

  Buchanan took another sip of bourbon, his eyes flitting over the bar crowd.

  When he was in a place like this, or any place where humans gathered, he saw himself as a big bird of prey—a peregrine falcon maybe—soaring high above and looking down at the world below from all the angles. He could see things that others, so intent on their little grounded lives, could not. He could see the big picture.

  Funny how things turned out. There had been some bad detours in his life and a soul-killing job as an insurance fraud investigator. Yeah, it was funny, that all those mornings freezing his ass off in a duck blind had led to this, doing something that he was really good at.

  He finished the bourbon and thought about ordering another but he was tired from the job he had just finished up in New York and the plane ride in from Kennedy, and he needed to stay alert. He asked the bartender for a glass of water instead and glanced at his watch.

  Almost six . . . a half hour late. So where was this guy Alex Tobias?

  Then he saw him, getting out of the white Mercedes G-Class SUV about twenty feet away.

  The man looked just like his Google images—an easy six six and reedy thin, like he ran marathons or, more likely, power-biked up computer-screen mountains. He had thick black hair and was wearing a gray suit, white dress shirt, and light blue tie.

  Buchanan honed in on the details: The suit was a two-button tight fit, probably John Varvatos. The shoes were sleek and black, maybe Tod’s. The effect was stylish but restrained, like Tobias wanted to be the hippest guy in the room but pulled back from the edge just enough to keep the old guys from feeling too old.

  Buchanan wished he’d had more time to check out Tobias. He didn’t like taking on a case without knowing as much as he could ahead of time.

  Back at Kennedy, there had been just enough time for him to fire up his Acer in the airport and do a quick search on the man. Plenty of sites popped up that gave him the basics: that Tobias was thirty-eight, had graduated from Florida State law school but was now a partner in McCall and Tobias. It was one of the Southeast’s best law firms, complete with sleek mahogany and glass offices in a high-rise, a staff of eighty, and a client list peppered with the names of basketball stars, banks, and cruise-line titans. The firm even had a motto: “We’re In This Together.”