Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  Suddenly it hit me, hard, across the face.

  It hit me again.

  I opened my eyes. My vulture was gone. Lenore was standing above me, slapping me.

  After I opened my eyes, she stopped.

  “Jesus, baby,” she said. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  I looked at her.

  “You didn’t wake up,” she said. She looked scared. “Your phone was ringing and ringing and you didn’t wake up.”

  I had my own phone line; Kelly had somehow jury-rigged it, cutting into someone else’s line. Sometimes I listened to the Puerto Rican family whose line it was. The wife was having an affair. No one knew except the youngest son.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Lenore said. “What happened? Are you sick?”

  I shook my head, heavy and thick. “Nothing,” I said. “Just sleepy.”

  She looked at me. “You sure?” she said. “You sure you didn’t take anything?”

  “Of course not,” I said, still groggy and half-asleep. “What would I take?”

  She sat at the edge of the bed.

  “You know I worry about you sometimes,” she said. She put a hand on my knee.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I said, confused. But the words came automatically. “I’m okay.”

  “Really?” she said. She looked worried.

  “Of course,” I said. “But I better see who called. It might be our case. Maybe Tracy found something.”

  “That detective game you guys play,” she said. “At least I know when you’re playing that, you’re safe. Right?” She said it with a little desperation in her voice. Right?

  I nodded.

  Suddenly she reached over and pulled me into an awkward hug.

  “You know I love you, right, kid?” she said. “I mean, I know I’m not the best mother in the world. But you know I love you, right?”

  I hugged her back. “Of course, Mom. I know that.”

  She pulled away and smiled. “Okay. Go call your friend back. It’s late, but you’re on vacation, right?”

  She left. But on the way out she stopped and looked at me. Her gaze was sharp and stung a little where it hit me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said sharply. “You look like shit. Go call your friend.”

  She left. I stood up, head spinning a little, and called Tracy.

  “I had a dream,” she said. “A dream about Chloe. We have to go see Chloe.”

  “Did you solve the case?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I can think we can solve it tonight.”

  And all of a sudden, I was alive again.

  I went to the bathroom and made myself throw up the rest of the pills.

  Tracy met me on the front steps of my house. It was two thirty a.m. The block was quiet. From far away we heard solitary motors, sirens, a long low whistle. We walked to the train station. We lit cigarettes and couldn’t tell the difference between our frozen breath and our smoke. I was still fuzzy and slow from the pills, but I was quickly coming alive. As we walked, with every step life became more real.

  I looked at Tracy and I knew that she, like me, felt absolutely, entirely real. The coldness of the air, the smell of the subway station, the feel of cold painted metal on our hands as we lifted ourselves up to jump the turnstiles—every sense was sharp and every input was distinct and clear.

  No one else was waiting for the G and no one else was on the train and no one else got on. But it felt as vibrant and busy as rush hour. That girl from last night was another person, long gone.

  “What was it?” I asked. “Your dream?”

  Tracy frowned. “Something about Chloe,” she answered. “We have to get her out of there.”

  “If we have to drag her,” I said.

  “Yes,” Tracy said. “Even if we have to drag her.”

  I knew we would get Chloe where she was supposed to be. We would go back tomorrow if we had to. Every night. But we would get her where she was supposed to be.

  “The detective is cursed,” Silette wrote in 1959. “Solving mysteries is the only time he will be truly alive. The rest of his life will be a distant blur, good only insomuch as he can use the things he sees there in his work.”

  CC and Chloe were sitting on the couch in the office in Hell. In the corner, a man we’d never seen before was doing fat lines off the desk. But it was obvious CC and Chloe hadn’t been doing any coke. She was nodding off on CC’s shoulder. In the middle of the room, where Chloe had been doing her little act yesterday, a boy about our age was trying to get something going with another young boy. Both boys wore jeans and no shirts and had short blonde hair. The first smacked the second halfheartedly across the ass.

  “Harder,” the second boy whined. “Come on.”

  “Shut up,” the first boy said. “You’re so lame. No one’s even watching.”

  Chloe woke up when we came in.

  “You again,” she said. “What the fuck do you want?”

  Tracy didn’t answer. Instead she went over to the sofa, sat next to Chloe, and began to whisper in her ear.

  At first Chloe scowled and pulled away from Tracy.

  “Fuck off,” Chloe said.

  Chloe cursed Tracy a few more times. She stood up to leave but Tracy held her down, an easy job even for tiny Trace. Chloe was literally nearly skin and bones, her abdomen concave.

  I didn’t know what Tracy was saying. Maybe she would tell me or maybe she wouldn’t. Tracy liked secrets.

  Chloe started to squirm a little in her seat, to turn away from Tracy like a baby turning away from food it didn’t want but needed. But Tracy kept talking and kept her hands on Chloe, pinning her down, and didn’t let go. After a minute Chloe’s face became smoother, quieter. More like the face I remembered.

  Then Chloe started to cry.

  “No no no,” I heard Tracy whisper. “You didn’t know. It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

  Chloe said something but I didn’t hear what, and they whispered to each other for another minute. Chloe looked at Tracy as if Tracy was telling her the answer to a question she’d had all her life.

  I realized not one person in this room other than Tracy or me cared if Chloe lived or died. And that she had put herself here deliberately and intentionally, in this city of the dead, where no one would ever love her.

  Chloe started to sob, and clutched Tracy.

  “It’s okay,” Tracy said. “We’re all going to be okay.”

  Tracy stood up and Chloe stood up with her. I took off my coat and put it over her and together we walked out of the room through the club and out to Eighth Avenue.

  First we went back to Chloe and Reena’s apartment. Chloe didn’t stop crying. Not in the cab, not when we pulled up, not while she waited outside while Tracy talked to Reena. Later I would find out that Tracy had told Reena that Chloe couldn’t see her right now. Reena understood. She was just glad Chloe was all right. She stayed in her bedroom with the door closed as Chloe, still crying, went into her room and packed a few bags.

  “I have an aunt,” Chloe said. “In L.A. I want to stay with her.”

  “You sure she’ll take you?” Tracy asked. “You don’t want to call first?”

  “She’ll take me,” Chloe said defensively. “She said if I was ever in trouble I could stay with her. She loves me. I know she does.”

  She said it as if we wouldn’t believe her. As if no one could believe it.

  She was still crying as she finished packing and still crying as we took the train up to Port Authority and still crying as we all pooled every penny we had and bought Chloe a bus ticket to L.A., plus twenty dollars for food on the five-day trip.

  The sun came up as we sat in Port Authority. Homeless people took most of the benches. Pimps and their bright-eyed protégés kept a sharp eye out for new arrivals.

  Nothing good ever happened in bus stations. Not until now.

  At eight Chloe’s bus started seating. She hugged us eac
h, hard, still crying.

  “Thank you so much,” she said through her tears. “Thank you forever and ever.”

  Chloe got on the bus, still crying. Tracy and I got on the A train and took it to the F to the G to home.

  It was nearly ten by the time we got off the train in Brooklyn. The sun was bright and the cold had abated a bit. A year later, Tracy disappeared, never to be seen again, and a year after that I left Brooklyn forever, leaving Kelly alone with the mess we’d made of our lives. But for now Tracy was smiling, which was rare. Her cheeks glowed and she looked more alive, somehow. More like she belonged here. She had solved her mysteries.

  “What should we do today?” Tracy said, blinking in the bright sun.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Might as well go to school.”

  And that was the Case of the End of the World.

  52

  San Francisco

  THE NEXT DAY I woke up late into the dark evening, with the sad, confused feeling sleeping through the day always brings. Claude was gone. I made some tea and then some more tea and then said fuck it and made some coffee.

  The Case of the End of the World. Neither Chloe nor Tracy ever told me what Tracy dreamed, or what she told Chloe.

  I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask one more time.

  It’s easy to find someone who’s making no particular effort to hide. Chloe Roman had a Facebook page, from which I found out she wrote poetry and she lived in Los Angeles. From there it was just an hour or so, most of it spent on hold, to find out that she had no landline but had a cell phone, billing address in Los Angeles county.

  I recognized her voice right away.

  “It’s Claire,” I said. “Claire DeWitt. From Brooklyn.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Claire. Hi. Wow. How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I lied. “How are you?”

  We talked for a few minutes. I told her I was a private eye living in San Francisco. She knew that already; she’d searched me out online a few times. She told me she was a writer now. She wrote movies and TV shows for money and poetry for fun and was working on a memoir about growing up in New York City with her famous, negligent parents.

  “I’ve been looking,” she said. “I’ve been looking online. I read all about you and I found a little about Kelly. But I couldn’t find anything about Tracy. Is it true they never found anything? Nothing?”

  “That’s actually why I’m calling,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember. That night, that night when Tracy came and got you. I was wondering—she had a dream. Did she tell you about it? About the dream?”

  “Dream?” Chloe said. “You mean your dream?”

  I felt my head spin.

  “My dream?” I said. “No, what happened was—” I stopped myself. “Chloe. What did happen that night?”

  “Well,” Chloe said, “you guys had come the night before and, you know—Jesus, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t very nice.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I haven’t always been so nice myself.”

  “And then the next night, you guys came back. You and Tracy.”

  “And what did we do?” I asked.

  “Well, you came over to me,” Chloe said. “I’ll never forget. You came over—”

  “You mean, ‘you’ me? Or ‘you’ both of us?”

  “You you,” Chloe said. “Singular. You, Claire. Tracy waited by the door. You, Claire, came over and sat on that couch next to me. And you put your hand on my knee, and your hand was so warm. And I was, like, trying to get away—you know, I couldn’t stand the thought that anyone cared about me that much—it just made me sick. Sick, like I could die. You know.”

  I felt the room spin around me and I lay down on the floor. I put my cheek against the cold floor and tried to ground myself to earth, but I felt like I was floating away. I did know. Sick like I could die.

  “I tried to get away but you wouldn’t let me,” Chloe went on. “And you started to tell me about this dream you’d had.”

  “What did I say?” I asked Chloe.

  “Well,” she said, “you told me you had this dream. And I was all, you know, why would I give a shit? But you wouldn’t stop, you started telling me about this dream. This dream about a peacock. Well, you said ‘peacock,’ but I think you really meant peahen, because it was a girl. But anyway, that this peacock wanted to find God. Because God was so pissed off at people and he’d turned the lights off. So it was like the dark ages, you know? Like how some people call this the Kali Yuga? Like that. Everyone was fighting and killing each other and it was just generally like hell. Like shit. You know, like things are.

  “So this peacock, she decides she’s going to get the lights turned back on. And, you know, she was this vain, stupid bird, or so everyone thought. I mean, she was a peacock. Everyone was, like, laughing at her and throwing things at her. You know, she was the patron saint of whores. She was a girl. But no one else could fly that high. No one else even tried.”

  I rummaged through my purse and found a Percocet. I put it in my mouth and chewed it and swallowed. I remembered whispering in Chloe’s ear, my voice still so young, but I knew what I was saying was true. I was entirely certain that I was alive, and that I belonged on this earth: “People thought she was just a stupid girl. Just this stupid, slutty girl no one cared about and nobody loved.”

  I heard Chloe make a sound and I wondered if she was crying. My hands were shaking and I took out another pill, but then put it back.

  “But she did it,” Chloe said. “The peacock. She flew and she flew and she found him. She met God. And she told God how much she loved us, how we really weren’t so bad after all, about how, you know, we’d fucked up everything so bad, but we could do better. It might take a few lifetimes, it wouldn’t happen right then, but we could get better. She saw the best in us, even though we’d ruined everything. Even though we’d screwed up and ruined it all. And he was so impressed, he changed his mind. He turned the light back on. He didn’t think she was just some stupid girl. He thought she saved the whole world.”

  One arm around Chloe, pulling her close, warmth growing where we touched, Chloe shivering, smelling salted, metallic blood from her cuts. I was wiping tears off my face.

  “But when she came back down,” Chloe told me, telling me the story I had told her,“she wasn’t a peacock anymore. The sun had burned her feathers black, and blistered her crown red, and now she was a vulture, the wisest animal on earth, the animal who knows all the secrets.”

  Whispering to Chloe, her squirming to get away.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered in her ear, “you didn’t know. Soon we get to be vultures again. We don’t have to pretend we don’t know everything anymore. We just have to grow up a little first, that’s all.”

  “Claire? Claire, are you there?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m here. I just—I remembered it differently. That’s all.”

  “Yeah,” Chloe said. “It was such a strange thing to say, but somehow it made sense. I mean, it made everything make sense. All of it. Like a poem.”

  We didn’t say anything for a minute. My hands were shaking.

  “Claire?” Chloe said again. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” I said. I was too here. More here than I ever wanted to be. Chloe told me about her kids, her husband, her writing. Her life sounded pretty good.

  “It’s all because of you guys,” she said. “All the good things that happened—they were all because of you and Tracy. Because you came and got me. Because you didn’t give up.”

  “No,” I said. “They were because of you. Because you didn’t give up.”

  “No,” she said. She started to cry. “I have two beautiful children, they’re like these little fucking miracles, they’re so normal and not crazy. Because of you. Because of what you said.”

  I remembered now: waking up in the night, calling Tracy, still sick from the pills. We have to get her out of there. I had this dream.

  �
��And Tracy,” she said. “I never talked to her again. Not after the last time.”

  “Well none of us—” I began and then I stopped myself. The Percocet kicked in. I felt as close to nothing as possible. But something stuck in my throat.

  “The last time?” I asked Chloe. “When was the last time you talked to Tracy?”

  “After I’d been in L.A. for a while,” she said. “She found me. She found my aunt’s number and called me.”

  A chill crept up the back of my neck.

  “When?”

  “Maybe a year after I moved out here,” she said. “Maybe a little more.”

  Tracy had disappeared on January 11, 1987. Chloe had gotten on the bus to Los Angeles January 14, 1986.

  “So it’s true no one ever found out anything about Tracy?” Chloe asked. “Not even you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s true. But I’m starting to have an idea.”

  Chloe asked for details, but I didn’t want to tell her. It was just an idea.

  But it was a pretty fucking good one.

  We got off the phone with promises to get together and keep in touch. Maybe we would.

  But for now, we hung up and I lay on the floor for a while.

  Maybe out of everything I thought I knew, there was nothing I was more wrong about than my own life story.

  When I got off the phone there was a message from Claude. I felt a little dizzy and weak. I drank a glass of orange juice and took a shower and did a line of coke before I called him back.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hi. I mean, it’s me. What’s up?”

  Claude paused. I felt a drop of blood trickle from my nose, and I wiped it away with my hand.

  “Are you okay?” Claude asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “I think I found the guitar,” he said. “I went through all of Paul’s money stuff and I found it. The missing guitar. It’s a Wandre. The one that was stolen. He bought it two years ago, and I’m pretty sure it was never sold or traded. It’s just gone. Does that help?”