Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  “Josie?” I said into the phone.

  Her sigh of relief came through the receiver like a blast of white noise.

  “I thought you wouldn’t remember me,” she said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “Is it?”

  Holy shit, that tone, needy and accusatory at once; I hadn’t heard that unsavory combination in years, but it stung with startling familiarity.

  6

  “It’s been a while,” I said. I switched the handset from my right hand to my left when I noticed how tightly I was holding it.

  “Time goes by.”

  Silence.

  Was she going to tell me why she was calling, or was she going to make me ask her?

  Considering who I was talking to, it’d probably be the latter. Josie had a way of involving you this way, quietly, furtively, passive-aggressively. She’d decided against college and worked at the Wegmans across the bay, manning the register and stocking the shelves of the grocery store, though what she really wanted to do, at least from my vantage point, was to get high and date the worst kind of men. Sometimes dangerous men—like I still remembered Rudy, who had a devil tattooed around his neck, its body bright red and elongated like a snake. One time Marlene and I had to restrain him—literally throw our bodies on top of him—because he and Josie had taken mushrooms and his trip was not working out. I doubt I’ll ever be able to forget Josie’s crazy cackles while her sister and I struggled to keep Rudy pinned on the floor.

  “In that old house we shared back in Rochester, do you remember the lock breaking on the downstairs closet?” she asked.

  This was a strange tack, but I figured I’d go with it.

  “Not really.”

  “Must’ve been from the 1800’s. You took it off the door and we all took turns holding it. It was so heavy, made out of cast iron. We figured out that the spring was broken, but no locksmith around town had the right part. You drove that lock all the way to Buffalo. In the three years we lived together, I never saw you give up on anything. You never stopped watching a movie, no matter how bad it was. I once saw you make the same cake recipe seven times in a row because you wanted to get it right. You never broke up with a guy—the guy had to break up with you.”

  “Either you’re paying me a compliment or telling me I have a mental disorder.”

  “I’m outside your building right now,” Josie said. “In the lobby.”

  I was about to ask, All the way from Rochester? but that was stupid because who knew where she was living nowadays.

  “I’ll be down,” I said.

  Four years my junior, I remembered Josie being kind of trampy-looking, never leaving the house without some serious red lipstick and her long bleach blonde hair in a wild, sexy wave. I guess it was foolish of me to expect her to look the same, because she did not. Her attire was all business, a dark blue suit jacket and skirt outfit that gave off a lawyer-like vibe. Her shoulder-length blonde hair curled inward in a way that only hair stylists have been able to do on mine. She’d gotten heavier around the middle, but then again, so had I.

  As soon as I stepped off the elevator, I thrust out my arm to shake her hand, but I hadn’t counted on her coming towards me to give me a hug. So her belly ran into my hand; I kind of stiff-armed her like a running back fending off a tackler.

  “Oops,” I said.

  An awkward gesture fortuitously became an impromptu ice breaker: she smiled, I smiled, and now we hugged for real. We moved away from the elevator and stood next to the wall of mailboxes.

  “You look so much the same,” Josie said.

  “You look…not the same. But in all the right ways.”

  “I was just a girl when you knew me.”

  “That’s true.”

  “That’s not who I am now.”

  Almost defiant, the way she said this.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I just started my new job at Lenrock. As a marketing associate.”

  That was Lenrock University, whose sprawling campus was within walking distance of where I lived.

  “Congrats, but I figure you didn’t drop by just to tell me that.”

  “My daughter,” Josie said. “I don’t know where she is.”

  7

  I couldn’t see myself sitting behind Ed’s desk again, or moving those client chairs over to my desk. I knew it would be weird to be in the office without him, but I didn’t realize just how weird. So Josie and I walked over to Elkwood, the world-famous vegetarian restaurant on the Commons. It was the quiet hours between lunch and dinner. We sat at the bar and watched the workers set up the dinner tables while we talked.

  “Penelope Hae Jun Sykes,” Josie said. “Penny.”

  She handed me a photograph. Her daughter stared back at me with a smile as promising as tomorrow. In a one-piece yellow bathing suit, she sat cross-legged at the bed of a stream, one foot dipped in the water, a cascading waterfall flowing down in the background.

  “Her twelfth birthday,” Josie said. “That was a great day.”

  It’s next to impossible for girls not to be beautiful at that age, and Penny was no exception. She held a red tambourine in her right hand, and I could almost hear all the sounds frozen in this picture: falling water, the laughter of youth, a festive shake of the musical instrument.

  The girl in the photograph was Asian, Korean, I presumed from her name, which meant Josie had adopted her. I suppose it made logical sense, since Marlene was an adoptee like me, so this was like a form of honoring the memory of her sister, but something felt off. On the back of the photograph was the print date, and a quick calculation told me that she’d adopted Penny two years after Marlene’s death. Which meant at twenty-five—the age when her sister had died—Josie had become a mother.

  Was it possible that Marlene’s death straightened her out, turned her into a responsible adult? Absolutely. But it was equally possible this was an impassioned gesture by a callow person.

  “Oh my god, your face,” Josie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re making that face you used to make. Like you’re smelling something rotten.”

  “I don’t think I’m making any kind of a face,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t, because it’s your face. You’re not looking at it.”

  I’d forgotten just how much Josie and I used to argue.

  “You said you have some documents for me to see?”

  I scanned the police report she’d brought. It stated Penny’s last seen location as Llewellyn College, an hour northwest of Athena. Scars/marks/tattoos, last seen health condition, all standard questions and answers. There were no signs of a kidnap or a struggle. She’d packed a suitcase and was gone, so this was more like a runaway situation, but not technically even that, because I noticed her birthday was two months ago.

  “She just turned eighteen,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “She’s no longer a minor.”

  “So she can just take off without telling me, her own mother?”

  The answer was yes, but saying it out loud wasn’t going to help matters.

  “Do you have any other photos, something more recent?”

  Josie took out her phone and swiped the screen until she found one, looking like it’d been taken in her dorm room on move-in day, boxes on the unmade twin bed, a cluster of clothes on hangers thrown over the desk. Somebody else, perhaps Penny’s roommate, had snapped the picture, as Josie was standing next to her daughter. Outside of looking slightly taller and older, Penny didn’t seem much different than the bathing suit picture, except for that forced smile on her face.

  “Maybe you can fill me in a little bit, how you guys got along,” I said.

  “We love each other,” Josie said. “She’s my baby. It’s us against the world.”

  Us against the world. That phrase took me back. Josie used to say it a lot, mostly in jest. Now,
it sounded like a threat.

  “Just you two? I thought adoption as a single parent was almost impossible.”

  “Andrew and I were married for eleven years. The year Penny turned ten, he died. Brain cancer.”

  I looked up from the photo on the phone and met her eyes. They were her best asset, as green as dewy grass, but the sparkle that I remembered —devilish, trouble-making glints—that was long gone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Hasn’t been easy raising her by myself, but I’ve made it this far.”

  “The last guy of yours I remember is Rudy.”

  Josie laughed. “With the neck tattoo.” I laughed, too. “A real winner. Like I said, Siobhan, I’m all grown up now. With grown-up problems.”

  I hailed the bartender and we ordered gin and tonics. He brought us a bowl of pretzels with the drinks.

  “Penny had her troubles with self-identity, as I’m sure you’d understand. I stayed in Rochester after Marlene’s passing. Not many venues for Penny to connect with her heritage there, so I sent her to Camp Wooram, just like you. She was fourteen then. Didn’t want to go, so I kind of forced her. When she returned, she didn’t speak to me for a month. And when I say ‘didn’t speak to me,’ that’s exactly what I mean, complete and utter silence.” She stared at the photograph. “But we got through it, together. When I lost my job last year, Penny was so sweet—she asked if we could delay her college enrollment, you know, so we could save money…”

  Josie closed her eyes and turned away from me, then fished out a packet of tissues and dabbed at her eyes.

  One of the many things Ed taught me was the importance of keeping clients talking, so I thought it might be a good time to lament over our career choices for the moment. As it turned out, we’d both gone into industries that had been ravaged by technology. Josie had been working for Kodak until it went bankrupt. I told her about the Athena Times’ slow demise, the newsroom shrinking every year until we were running a skeleton crew.

  “They folded the Times into the Binghamton Bulletin,” I said. “The satellite office in Cortland is now covering Athena, supposedly.”

  “I used to read your movie reviews. They were funny, especially if you didn’t like the films. Almost emailed you once.”

  But she hadn’t, because, well, I’d run out of her life, hadn’t I? Back when we were living together, we’d had a flexible lease so we could vacate any time with a month’s notice, so I paid in full and got the hell out of there and never spoke to Josie again after Marlene died. I had every right to do this, but it sort of made me a heel, or at least feel like one now.

  “When I looked up private investigators in the area and saw your picture next to your boss on the website, I had to admit, I was surprised. But then I thought of that lock in our Buffalo house. Your tenacity.”

  “I don’t even know what’s going to happen now that Ed just passed away,” I said.

  I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of my past week: the death of my boss, the inheritance of the investigative agency, my uncertain future.

  “Well,” Josie said, “all I know is that my daughter is missing. I don’t care if you’re unsure because I know who you are. So will you help me find her, Siobhan? Kim Shee-Bong? For old time’s sake if nothing else?”

  Josie no longer looked like a mother with a lost daughter; she looked like Marlene’s little sister, in trouble, in need.

  “Yes,” I said.

  8

  After the gin and tonics were empty, we switched to soda. Time to get down to business.

  “When’s the last time you heard from Penny?” I asked.

  “A month ago. I dropped her off at Llewellyn in July. They have a six-week summer program for incoming freshmen, and because Penny’s very shy, I thought it a nice way to get her better situated. Of course she didn’t agree, we fought, she didn’t call for two weeks, but by the time the school year started at the end of August, she was so happy, Siobhan. I drove down to see her when the rest of the students moved in, and I got to meet her roommate. We all went out to dinner…”

  Josie paused to take a sip from her cup. She shook her head, as if to clear it.

  “Sometimes I wake up and I think I’m in someone else’s life. How can she just…”

  “You’re doing something about it now.”

  “It’s that school, Siobhan, that fucking school. It seemed like the right place for her. Tiny, just five hundred students altogether, smaller than most of the survey courses at Lenrock University. I didn’t want Penny to get lost in a huge school like that, and she didn’t, either. We picked it together.”

  I’d driven by Llewellyn a number of times, a small women’s college in the quiet hamlet of Selene. A few years back, I wrote a glossy interview of the new president, an alumni of the school who became a successful high-fashion model and an even more successful businesswoman. Overlooking Lake Selene, it always seemed like an idyllic way to spend your undergraduate years.

  “For the first month, Penny and I talked every day…”

  “Every day?”

  “We’re best friends. It’s not unusual for best friends to talk, sometimes even more than once a day.”

  I smiled and nodded and kept my opinions to myself.

  “But then by the end of September, she told me not to call anymore, saying she needed some time by herself. She stopped returning my calls and her voicemail message box got full. I got nervous and called the school. I talked to one of her professors, and he said Penny was still attending class. But obviously something wasn’t right, so I drove down to see what was going on. So I get to her dorm room, and on the door there’s a sign that says to call this phone number if you want to see Penny. I dial and wait, and two girls come sauntering in. One had dyed her hair green like a clown, and the other had so many earrings that she would’ve set off a metal detector. They said they were expecting me because this is what the abuser does after the victim makes her stand.”

  “Abuser?”

  “That’s what they called me. At this point I was beside myself, and maybe I got a little dramatic, because they called security to escort me away.”

  “You never saw Penny?”

  “Once I calmed down and explained the situation, the guard took me back to those two girls, who led us to a different dorm, the one overlooking the lake. The guard explained they were headed up to TLC, Tender Llewellyn Care, the emotional support group on campus where they work with students who have issues with sexual or physical abuse. They called it their safe house.”

  “And that’s where Penny was, kept safe, from you.”

  “Her own mother.”

  “Did she have anything to say?”

  “She read from a note card. It was like a press release. Penny said she felt manipulated, how co-dependent we were with each other. I don’t like remembering it, Siobhan. I ran out of there, so embarrassed. Those two girls stood by her, all pious and supportive, but I swear it was all for show. That bitch with the green hair, that smile of hers—she was enjoying it.”

  “But then Penny must’ve left the school without telling you.”

  “The dean called me two weeks ago to tell me she took a leave of absence. I drove back there, but she’d already moved out of TLC. I found those two girls, but they told me Penny is working things out and that I had to stop hounding her. I called the police, but all they did was fill out this stupid form. The way the officer was dealing with it, it felt like he was just going through the motions.”

  We finished our drinks. Waiters and waitresses clad in white shirts and black pants visited each table to light up a votive candle and drop a single yellow rose into a tiny vase. Early diners stood by the hostess’s station; four college-aged kids looked like they were on a double date. The joy they exuded was in stark contrast to the sadness and disappointment of Josie. Her relationship with Penny might have been the stifling kind, but it didn’t seem unreasonable for a mother to know where
her daughter was.

  “Before you lost touch with her, did Penny mention anything that seemed strange or unusual to you?”

  Josie considered the question for a bit. “No, not a thing. I thought you looked surprised when I told you that we talked every day, but our chats were nothing more than just two girls prattling on about a whole lot of nothing. What we ate, what we wore, that sort of thing. She hates it when I ask her about her meds, but I have to stay on top of her.”

  “Meds?”

  “She’s got Graves’ Disease. Her thyroid goes into overdrive. It’s manageable, as long as she takes her methimazole. Wherever she is, I hope she’s remembering to take it.”

  “Did Penny sound different when you talked to her last? Stressed out, maybe angry? Think back.”

  “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing since? Our conversations are on permanent repeat in my mind. Nothing. She was my happy little girl, and then…gone.”

  “Living away from home, in college, this is usually when kids break away from their parents,” I said.

  “Breaking away is one thing, but just up and leaving completely? It’s ridiculous. It’s ungrateful. After all I’ve done for her. After all we’ve been to each other.”

  Josie insisted on paying the bill, which was actually the perfect moment to bring up the issue of money.

  “I do need a retainer to do my work,” I said.

  “Right, of course,” Josie said. “How much?”

  “A thousand is what Ed went with, but five hundred would be enough for me to get started.”

  “I just started a new job at Lenrock last week, so I won’t get paid until next Friday. I had some moving expenses, too, so money’s kinda tight. Could I postdate it?”

  My first client, and she wasn’t even going to pay me. Not the best way to usher in my new firm, but she was a friend and in a bind, so I told her it was fine. I asked her to email me the photo of Penny from her phone, which she did as we waited for the waitress to return with the credit card slip.