Stalker Girl

by Rosemary Graham

  “Okay. So why not just leave a message? Why’d you keep calling?”

  “’Cause you know how sometimes you come home and you forget to check your messages, and I just—I know how much she loves him and I honestly thought she’d want to know. . . . But I guess I lost count. I’m sorry.”

  As it turned out, it was a good thing Sheryl didn’t make the trip. Carly wouldn’t have been able to get her any nearer to Bernie Williams than across the room. Angela and Pedro did some serious crowd control.

  “Carly—”

  “Yeah?” She braced herself for more harsh words. She didn’t blame him for being pissed. She’d called eight times. During Sheryl’s birthday party. After doing that stupid stop-by that afternoon.

  “It’s nice that you thought of my mom. You know her well.” He laughed. He laughed! “The woman loves her some Bernie Williams.”

  Carly laughed, too, relieved that he didn’t seem so mad anymore. “Yes, she does.”

  “You know, if it wasn’t a two-hour drive, I think she would have bolted the minute she heard.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t exactly practical, you know?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I wasn’t thinking it through.”

  It was nice. Talking calmly like that. She had to concentrate, though, to keep her mind from going past This is nice to Maybe . . . It was hard, but she did it. She sat there, quietly, just breathing. Trying to accept how things were.

  “You still there?”

  “Yup,” she said, smiling. He was being so nice. It felt so much like before.

  “So, Carl?”

  And he was calling her “Carl,” like he did that summer.

  “Yeah?” Don’t hope, she told herself. He’s just being nice.

  “I wasn’t planning to tell you this yet, but—it seems like the right thing to do.”

  Uh-oh. The blood in her ears started pounding, so she couldn’t really hear what he said next. The first two words were muffled, but she heard the third and fourth loud and clear. They were someone and else.

  “What? ”

  “I’m only telling you because I have this idea like you think maybe we’re going to get back together, and you need to know—”

  No, she didn’t. She really didn’t need to know, and she wished he would stop, but he didn’t.

  “I’m seeing someone else.”

  19

  CARLY WENT back to bed, but there’d be no more sleep for her that night. It never occurred to her that he would get involved with someone else so soon. It had been only three weeks since they broke up! Who could it be? What about needing time for the music? Was it that record-company girl? Maybe he was just with her to get the record deal.

  Somehow, as skanky as it would have been of him to hook up with someone for the sake of getting signed, this idea comforted her. If that was the case, at least then she’d know it wasn’t real. Not in the sense of being truly together and connected like she and he were. He wouldn’t be taking this new girl to the secret room.

  He couldn’t exactly bring someone like that home to Sheryl, could he? Had he? Had he brought whoever she was home? Had the new girl been sitting there, celebrating Sheryl’s birthday with them? Had she heard Carly’s messages and rolled her eyes, too?

  She looked over at Val, who was sound asleep with a little smile on her face. Probably dreaming about Jake. She couldn’t tell Val what Brian had just told her. That would mean admitting that she’d called Sheryl just minutes after promising she’d avoid all things Brian. It would be humiliating.

  As she lay there wide awake, Carly’s fingers itched for Val’s laptop. Now that she knew, she needed to know more. She needed to know who this “someone” was who had replaced her so quickly.

  Maybe that was the real reason she didn’t want to tell Val. Val would be keeping an eye on Carly now. Now that she’d heard all the gory details of Carly’s obsessing over Brian, she’d be on the alert, watching for signs of relapse.

  When the sky finally lightened at about six, Carly rolled off the pullout and crept out of the apartment.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been up this early on a Sunday morning. The streets of New York are never so quiet as they are at that hour. Almost every store she passed was closed, with its security gate down and locked. She saw the early shift of green-aproned baristas getting the Starbucks between Val’s place and hers ready to open. She saw dressed-up old ladies climbing the steps in front of St. Cecilia’s, and a disheveled guy in a tux emerging from that new luxury high-rise on Lexington.

  Carly knew exactly what she had to do to get the information she needed. When she got home, she opened her computer, went straight to Shira’s blog, and left this anonymous comment:

  Hey, who’s the girl I saw with Brian Quinn after last week’s show?

  She had no idea if the new girl had been at last week’s show, but it was worth a try.

  There was an e-mail from her father, “gently reminding” her yet again to get her Denman application done. And one from Sheryl, written the night before.

  Subject: Bernie, birthday, etc.

  Time: 11:53:08 -0500

  From: Sheryl Quinn

  To: Carly Finnegan

  Carly, honey—

  I got your message, and that was sweet of you to call. To think of me. Actually, it was my birthday, which made it even nicer that you were thinking of me. And I would have loved to see Bernie! And if I’d been in town, I would have hopped on a train and come right up. But we had people over, and it just wasn’t a good time.

  I’m sorry to have to say this, but I think maybe for now at least it would be better for you if you didn’t call here. Brian told me he was going to tell you about the situation, and I know how much you must be hurting.

  It’s been a long time, but I’ve BEEN where you are! I do know how you feel. I know how hard it can be to let go.

  Carly, you’re a GREAT girl with a lot going for you. The best thing you can do for yourself is try to put your mind elsewhere.

  So take care of yourself, okay? Maybe after some time goes by we can reconnect, but I really think this is for the best right now.

  xxoo,

  your friend,

  Sheryl

  It was a nice idea, putting her mind elsewhere. At the time, though, it was impossible.

  There was nowhere else for her mind to go.

  The next day she got the answer to her question from good old dependable ShiraZ.

  ShiraZ

  ERNESTINEISEVERYWHERE

  You Heard It Here First: My Source tells me the new woman seen at Brian’s side is Taylor Deen, photographer extraordinaire and senior at West Village Friends. The pair got to know each other recently when Train hired Taylor to shoot a week of shows. My Source says he’s “totally whacked” for her.

  ShiraZ

  Carly clicked on the photographer extraordinaire link, thinking she’d find flowers and sunsets or maybe some arty industrial landscapes. But instead she found herself face-to-face with Brian. Actually, all three of them: Brian and Liam and Avery, sitting backstage at Train all sweaty and smiling. She knew it was Train because she recognized the ratty couch. She’d sat on it enough times to know its stains and holes and cigarette burns intimately. Backstage at Train was quite the pit. But the black-and-white picture made it look cool and glamorous. The picture taker had perfectly captured that fired-up, we-killed-tonight glow the guys had after a good show.

  Carly clicked through the whole series, which was aptly titled “Gig.” It began with the guys unloading the van in the alley behind the club and then went through the whole show; sound check; guys onstage; crowded dance floor; the obligatory after-show mingle with fans cramped into Train’s tiny greenroom; then equipment packing; van loading; and finally the empty, trash-strewn club at three a.m.

  After she clicked through the whole series, she went back to get a better look at a shot of Brian onstage. This
picture blew her away. It was the Brian she knew. The Brian she thought only she knew. His eyes were closed, his head was bent slightly over the neck of his bass. She could tell that in his mind he was in that place he’d once described to her as “a warm red room where all that exists is rhythm.”

  She was about to click to the next picture when she glanced at the people crowded in front of the stage: the usual gaggle of girls staring up at Avery, practically salivating, and of course the skinny hipster wannabe boys with their eyes homed in on Avery’s guitar. Some—the smart ones—studied Brian’s bass. Then, off to the side of the crowd, she spied a familiar profile.

  Her own.

  She wasn’t exactly skilled with photographic software, but she was highly motivated, and within minutes she managed to crop the shot and zoom in on herself.

  It was not a pretty picture.

  She had her arms crossed in front of her chest. Her face was mostly in shadow, but she could see the way her eyes were narrowed and her mouth scrunched up in a tight, ugly frown. She wasn’t looking at Brian. She wasn’t admiring or appreciating or adoring him. She was glaring at another girl who was admiring and appreciating and adoring him.

  And this wasn’t just any other girl. It was that girl she’d made the scene about, from Up All Night Records.

  This was the night she’d made that scene.

  The night Brian dumped her.

  She clicked back to the after-show shots. She’d clicked through them quickly the first time, thinking they were generic crowd scenes. On closer inspection, she saw that they were focused on Liam and Avery and their groupies. In the first one, they were chatting up two smiley girls. But then off to the side, slightly out of focus, you could see Brian talking to the Up All Night girl. Diagonal to them, a few feet away, there she was, leaning against the wall and scowling in all her jealous ugliness.

  In the next photo, two more girls had joined the Liam and Avery Admiration Society, and she’d gone from standing cross-armed and glaring to striding across the room, ready to claim her man from the would-be interloper.

  Carly cringed as she clicked to the next picture. Liam and Avery were at the center. There were five girls now, three of them talking to Avery, the other two clearly settling for Liam while waiting to talk to Avery. But Brian was also in the frame. He was smiling, talking with his hands like he did when he was excited. The girl was smiling, too. From this angle Carly could see that it was an innocent, friendly conversation. The girl wasn’t leaning in, breasts first, like those girls surrounding Liam and Avery. But out at the edge of the picture, there Carly was, making her way toward them, ready to bust it up.

  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The final seconds of her relationship caught on camera.

  In the next one, Brian wasn’t smiling anymore, and the girl looked surprised. Maybe even a little scared.

  And who could blame her? Carly looked downright scary. The wrath of a woman scorned and all that. She’d positioned herself between them and had Brian by his resisting hand. Carly was smiling at the girl, a deranged don’t-you-mess-with-my-man smile.

  The next shot was a close-up on Liam and Avery’s drama. They had their phones out and were taking numbers. The Up All Night girl was nowhere to be seen. Brian was talking to someone just outside the frame. He had both hands in his pockets, and his face had that awful look of annoyance Carly had seen just two days before when she’d done that stupid, desperate stop-by.

  In the rest of the pictures Brian mostly had his back to the camera. But there was one that clearly showed his face. He was inside the van, sitting in the driver’s seat, the door still open. Avery sat next to him in the passenger seat, checking his hair in the rearview mirror. Brian was looking directly into the camera, smiling.

  The way he used to smile at her.

  20

  IN A matter of hours, after putting her considerable Bellwin School informational-literacy skills to work, Carly had filled several pages of a brand-new notebook with the highlights of Taylor Deen’s charmed life.

  She came from a well-known Greenwich Village family. The kind of family whose weddings and deaths and home remodelings got written up in the New York Times.

  Her mother, Judith Monroe Deen, was the only child of Ben and Sadie Monroe, founders of the Monroe Gallery, “the epicenter of the sixties art scene.” One article mentioned an unverified rumor that Sadie Monroe had been “romantically linked” with Bob Dylan before marrying Ben and that she was the Sadie mentioned in one of his more obscure songs. According to Contemporary American Art magazine, the Monroe Gallery was still considered “one of the art world’s center rings.” Getting a show there was considered “a clear indication of an artist’s having ‘arrived.’”

  Ben and Sadie Monroe died tragically—together— when their car ran off the road and tumbled into the sea in Jamaica, where they spent part of every winter at what their lengthy obituary called a “rustic island getaway.” A thousand people, including Sir Paul McCartney and his then-wife, Linda (Stella’s mother), who once showed her photographs at the gallery, attended the memorial service. Taylor’s mother, who was only twenty-one at the time, inherited the gallery and the brownstone that held it, as well as the rustic island getaway.

  Three years after her parents’ obituary, Judith Monroe made the Times again for her wedding to R. Conrad “Duffy” Deen III, heir to the Deen furniture fortune and “independent scholar” of modernist art. This wasn’t one of those three-paragraph jobs under a smiling studio portrait of the couple but a full-length article with details about how they met (at a dinner honoring an artist she was showing in the gallery), where they went for their first date (an experimental dance performance in Tribeca), and what the guests were served at the reception (poached salmon with a caviar cream sauce, just like at the dinner where the bride and groom first locked eyes across a crowded room).

  A few years after the wedding, Judith and Duffy appeared in the Home section of the Times. They’d just done a major overhaul of the brownstone in anticipation of the birth of their first child. The smiling couple was pictured in the doorway of the nursery, each with a hand on Judith’s swollen belly. The room looked nothing like the fluffy stuff you’d see in a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue. No baby animals. No fairies. No balloons. Instead they’d painted the walls deep red and hung abstract impressionist prints, which they thought would be “far more interesting to an infant’s mind.”

  Carly checked the date and did the math. That lump was the future Taylor Deen.

  True to her Village roots, and perhaps to that early exposure to fine art, Taylor grew into an artist herself. She’d been winning photography prizes, showing and publishing her pictures since she was ten. Her list of accomplishments included honorable mention in the Shoot Nations global youth photography contest and first prize in the New York Times Magazine contest for high-school students, as well as regional and national placement in the Scholastic Art & Writing competitions.

  Once she ruled out the Up All Night girl, Carly had been half hoping that Brian’s new “someone” would turn out to be one of those girls who were always trying to get his attention online or hanging around gigs slipping the guys their phone numbers and inviting them to parties.

  If Brian had hooked up with a status-seeking groupie, Carly would know that he was just passing the time. It wouldn’t last. He’d get bored. Not that she thought he was going to come back to her. She didn’t. She just wanted to have mattered to him. She wanted what they’d had to mean as much to him as it did to her. If he were with one of those girls, Carly would be okay with it because she’d know that what she’d had with Brian was so much better. So much more real.

  But this wasn’t a girl looking for status. She didn’t need it. She had plenty of her own.

  Carly’s image search yielded plenty of pictures by Taylor Deen, but only two measly pictures of Taylor Deen. One was taken when she was twelve, at an awards ceremony. Carly could see she was pretty, but she was a young-looking twel
ve, skinny and gangly. There was a more recent one on her school’s Web site, but it was a group shot of kids who’d gone on a service trip to fix houses in New Orleans. Taylor was on the side, half in shadow, eyes half closed, talking to someone off camera.

  There was no way Carly could friend her, so she couldn’t get past the worthless thumbnail that showed only one eye and half a nose. If she wanted to see Taylor, it was going to have to be live and in person.

  All she wanted was a glimpse. A face to go with the name. And so the following Saturday morning she took off to stake out the Deen family’s brownstone until she got it.

  PART three

  Nine Days Later

  21

  A person is guilty of stalking in the fourth degree when he or she intentionally, and for no legitimate purpose, engages in a course of conduct directed at a specific person, and knows or reasonably should know that such conduct:

  1. is likely to cause reasonable fear of material harm to the physical health, safety or property of such person, a member of such person’s immediate family or a third party with whom such person is acquainted. . . .

  —New York State Criminal Code New York Penal Law Section 120.45

  THE PROSECUTOR, a friend of a friend of Taylor’s family, was threatening to charge Carly with stalking in the fourth degree, a class B misdemeanor in the New York State criminal code, punishable by a $500 fine, three months in jail, and/or a year’s probation.

  “And/or?” Carly’s mother asked. “Are you sure it isn’t either/or?”

  “Yes,” Carly’s lawyer said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten all three. And I’ve only heard of one or two cases where someone actually did time, but theoretically, yes. If she’s charged, she could have to pay a fine, do time, and have her whereabouts monitored by the state for a year after that. And the family wants an order of protection.”