After I'm Gone (26 page)

“She came to my home on July fourth. She brought me money, quite a bit. I needed it to pay a balloon note on a mortgage. You see, I was very foolish and these one-year ARMs, they were quite new then. I didn’t understand how it worked. I just knew that if I took out this mortgage, I would get a very large lump sum. Enough to pay for Michelle’s bat mitzvah, repairs to the house. So I took out this loan. I didn’t realize that I had to pay it back in a year, that I had to find the cash equivalent in the form of another mortgage, and I had—well, I had bad credit, I thought it just converted. I . . . I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so stupid. I owed on the mortgage, I had maxed out my credit cards. I needed money fast.”

“Jesus, Bambi,” Bert said. “You could have come to me.”

“But I was always coming to you. Always. There had been ten years of coming to you at that point. I tried my mom, my aunt Harriet—they couldn’t help me. But then I saw in the paper how that . . . that Julie Saxony was expanding her bed-and-breakfast into a proper inn with a restaurant, and I thought: She has money. She should give me the money I need. She came to my house that day to give me the money.”

Something changed, then, in the detectives’ faces. Sad-face scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to the girl. She had a poker face. Bambi couldn’t discern anything from it. But maybe it was just that she was a woman and Bambi had spent so much of her life trying to understand men and what they wanted. The two got up and went outside.

“Stop lying, Bambi,” Bert said in a low tone. “They know you’re lying.”

“I’m not lying, though. Julie Saxony did provide the money. That’s true. You could probably look up the bank records, see when I paid off the note. In cash.”

“She didn’t come to your house on the fourth. You’re saying that because you know you were at the beach until the night of the third. We were all at the beach.”

“Yes. We were all at the beach on the third. Agreed. But I met Julie on the fourth. On the tenth anniversary.”

“You didn’t. Why are you lying about this? What are you trying to prove?”

“Bert, you’re fired. Please leave.”

“I can’t—”

“You will. You are. Go.”

He looked lost, confused, two expressions that Bambi had seldom seen pass across Bert’s face. Of course he was confused. Because she was lying, but what else could she do? She had run the numbers. Something, someone, had to be sacrificed. It was as if another onerous financial commitment had come due again. But this time
she
was going to take care of it. What a fool she had been, how inept. She had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s. She had lived in denial for years about what things cost. Thrown away her father’s money on a semester at Bryn Mawr. Let Felix throw money around, too, and never asked the price of anything.

About two weeks before he had left, Felix had sat down with her and their checkbook. “Going forward,” he said, “you need to write down everything, keep the balance. Because—well, you’re just going to have to keep track. Because once I go away, the money, it will come in at a different rate. There will still be money, but it will be different, okay? You’ve got to learn to budget, Bambi. Can you do that?”

She could have. Only, after he left, there was no money coming in. Twenty thousand dollars. That was what had been in their joint checking account in July 1976. Twenty thousand dollars. It had been gone in less than a year.

Besides, at the time, she thought Felix meant prison when he said he was
going away
. It was not until the night before that she understood he was going somewhere else. She had been putting things away and discovered a pair of cuff links was missing from his drawer. Cuff links she knew well, for she had given them to him for their fifteenth anniversary. Yet there was Felix, in short sleeves—because it was, after all, July. He was packing, she realized. Squirreling things away, getting ready to go. She didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t want to know. And not because she feared the police and their questions. She could not bear to hear Felix tell her that he was a coward.

Bert left the interrogation room, his broad shoulders slumped. Lord, how she had leaned on him over the years. Lorraine had been kind about it. But then Lorraine pitied Bambi. In the early days, the pity had been a way for her to mitigate all the things she envied about Bambi, and that had been okay. She had pitied Bambi because Felix had other women, then pitied her because he was gone.

Bambi had forgiven Felix his indiscretions. They had been there from the first. The cowardice—that was different. Felix had slept with other women, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Perhaps the opposite. Sleeping with other women was the only wedge he had against his love for her. Sure, she knew that sounded like a rationalization, but some rationalizations were true. No, it was in his flight that Felix had betrayed her and their children.

The detectives returned.

“For the record—you are speaking to us without a lawyer at your own behest,” the girl intoned into the tape recorder.

“Yes, for the record I am.”

“Okay,” said the sad-eyed detective. “You contacted Julie Saxony—when? How?”

She looked at him long and hard. “I sent my daughter Rachel. On my behalf. She went to speak to her the week before. I’m not sure of the exact date.”

“You sent your daughter Rachel, she asked Julie for money, and a week later, Julie brings you money? On the Fourth of July?”

“Yes.”

“And how did she get the money? Banks would have been closed. And, as you must know, Julie Saxony’s financial life was pored over. There’s no record of any big cash transaction in the weeks before she disappeared.”

“I haven’t a clue. All I know is I got the money I needed.”

“We should probably speak to your daughter.”

“My daughter’s at the hospital.”

It was the first sign of genuine emotion in the female detective’s face. So she was a mother. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not major. Her child needs cleft palate surgery. She’s adopted, from China. It’s pretty common now. For the children to need this surgery. If you don’t agree to a special-needs child, it’s much harder to adopt from there.” She found her speech speeding up. She was chattering, as if she was nervous. Why was she nervous? She had already done the hardest part. “It didn’t used to be that way. Foreign adoption has changed so much. And Rachel and Joshua, because they live in the city—well, it seemed unlikely that they would get a child domestically, in the city, and they were over forty, which makes them too old for most U.S. adoptions, and then Guatemala closed and Vietnam had problems and—well, China was it.”

Nattering, nattering, nattering. Gathering her thoughts even as she appeared to be fraying. Maybe she shouldn’t have sent Bert away. What were her rights now? Did she get another phone call, could she demand a new lawyer? How could she get word to Rachel?

“Look, I said I did it. Can’t you just arrest me? The sooner you do that, the sooner I can get before a judge, see if bond can be arranged. My granddaughter had surgery today. I can’t possibly spend the night here.”

But in the
end, that’s exactly what she did. They took her into custody and drove her out to Towson, locked her up in detention there and told her to be grateful for that. Granted a phone call, she swallowed her pride and called the Gelmans’ home, praying Lorraine would answer.

For the first time in a long time, a prayer was answered.

“Bambi—Bert told me what’s going on. He’s beside himself. What are you thinking? How can you turn your back on his help when he only wants what’s best for you? Why—”

“Lorraine, you have to get to Rachel. Tonight. I think I bought her some time, but the police will come for her tomorrow. Whatever happens, she has to insist she was not at my house on July third, or that she didn’t see anyone there.”

“I don’t—”

“Lorraine, she’s my daughter. She finally has the only thing she ever wanted, her own child. Her life is worth more than mine, in so many ways. I know that I can’t say such things to Bert. He can’t allow me to lie, which is why I’ve had to let him go. But you’re my friend and a mother, not a lawyer. You have to let me do this. Whatever Rachel did—she did it for me. Now I have to do this for her.”

July 3, 1986

H
er room was as she had left it, a scant six years ago. It was not so much tribute as inertia. Her mother was fighting a running battle with Michelle, who wanted to claim one of her sisters’ rooms, then begin a costly redecoration. Easier to keep everything as it was.

The thing that bothered Rachel, however, was that she felt younger and stupider than the girl who had left this room to attend Brown.
That
girl had been skeptical of her high school classmate, Marc Singer.
That
girl had high intellectual standards. She read serious books and aspired to be a poet. The “woman” who had replaced her was now spending her afternoons watching
All My Children
,
One Life to Live,
and
General Hospital.
She hadn’t washed her hair or taken a shower since Monday. She knew she was being foolish, that she shouldn’t be depressed about the decisions she had made. She was right to give up on Marc, to erase everything of their life together. She deserved better. He was never going to be faithful to anyone. She couldn’t live her mother’s life.

But that thought, which occurred to her as she stared into the refrigerator, despite knowing its contents by heart by now, seemed treasonous. Her mother was such a good person. Who was Rachel to feel superior to her, to demand something better? It was her mother who deserved better, and now Rachel was going to give it to her. Wipe out her debt once and for all.

She found a jar of olives and took it back to the sofa. If she had gone to the shore with her mother and Michelle, there would be crabs and Silver Queen corn and gorgeous tomatoes, hothouse at this time of year, but still good. The Gelmans entertained so well. A little showily, but that was okay. Her father, too, had been extravagant when it came to parties. He believed there was no point in having money if people didn’t know you had it.

The corollary, as best Rachel could work out, was that people should never know that you didn’t have money. That was how her mother had lived for the past ten years, and that was what had brought her to near ruin this summer. But Rachel had saved her. At some cost to herself, but she believed it wouldn’t feel that way in one, two years. She would meet the right man, they would have a family. She was going to get a do-over. Marc was the wrong person for her. He wasn’t a good person. Her father broke the law, made his money from the poor and weak, cheated on her mother. Yet, somehow, he was a good person. Marc sold commercial real estate, was at his parents’ home every Friday for Shabbat dinner, cheated on his wife—then lied about it. Then acted as if she were the crazy one when she confronted him. That was evil. That was cowardice.

She remembered a year ago, going to see a film purportedly about a group of young friends not much different from herself. Recent grads of a good school, making their way in the world, anchored by a perfect-seeming couple, a pair of college sweethearts. But the man was cheating on the woman. “What about your extracurricular love life,” she snapped at him, at last, each syllable as sharp and hard as a little karate chop. A year ago, Rachel had found the whole thing hilarious. There were no such people. Now she was living it. She may have said those very words to Marc:
What about your extracurricular love life?

Really, one could argue that watching soap operas was downright redundant at this point. But how could she live with a cheater and a liar?

Her parents—that had been different. Her mother never confronted her father, not to Rachel’s knowledge. But then, her mother was trapped. Three kids. No work experience, no college degree. She, at least, could have expected alimony. No prenups in her mother’s day; wives still got alimony. They didn’t have to negotiate for what they deserved—

The doorbell roused her from the couch, from the land of Luke and Laura. She couldn’t imagine who would be coming by. Almost everyone she knew was at the ocean, even Linda, with her sweet new baby boy, Noah. Rachel wasn’t ready to be a mom, not yet, not given her circumstances. But holding Noah, seeing Linda’s love for him—she hoped she wouldn’t have to wait too long.

“Hello,” said Julie Saxony. “Is your mother at home?”

She was perfectly dressed. At a time when hair was big and skirts voluminous, Julie wore a throwback of an outfit, a pink linen shift with a matching bolero-style jacket over it. The dress looked like one that was stowed in Rachel’s memory.
My mother had a dress like that
. Her going-away dress, the night of her wedding, purchased for the trip to Bermuda. There was a photograph of her in it, somewhere in this very house. And, possibly, in her father’s office, although her father had never allowed his wife or children into that part of his life.

The only false note was the overlarge purse, which looked cheap and plastic, a very bad imitation of an old-style cosmetic bag.

“She’s away,” Rachel said, aware of her baggy shorts and stained T-shirt. But at least her T-shirt said
BROWN
on it.

“Oh. Will she be back soon?”

“She won’t be back at all. And if you’re here to make good on what I asked last week, it’s too late. I took care of it. We don’t need your money. Our money, I guess I should say.”

Julie pushed past her, as if she didn’t take Rachel at her word. She took in the hallway, the living room beyond it. Out of date, but still pretty and comfortable. Bambi had longed for more modern furnishings, but Felix had argued that they wouldn’t work. He believed in comfort, anyway, found the seventies-style furniture too low-slung. The living room looked like a lounge in a country club, but an unstuffy one, a place to sit and smoke, although no one had smoked in this house for ten years.

“I always thought it would be . . . nicer,” Julie said. “I’m sorry,” she added, as if embarrassed by her own rudeness. “It’s just that I thought a lot. About where you lived. But I never got to see the inside.”

“That’s because there was no reason for you to.”

“Are you sure your mother won’t be back today? It’s very urgent that I speak to her.”

“No, she won’t be back today. And I can’t imagine you have anything urgent to discuss with her.”

Julie looked disappointed, almost the way a child would. She shifted on her feet, looked around. “I can’t stay. But I want her to know—Felix sent for me. For me.”

“You’re lying.”

“No. I’d tell you more—the arrangements made, where I’m going—but, of course, I’ve been asked not to. He sent for me. He loves me.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Rachel grasped for something to say, something hurtful and scarring. “You’re just a whore with no life. A thief, too. When my father finds that out, he won’t want anything to do with you.”

“You said he already knew. So I guess you’re the liar, after all.”

Julie lifted her chin, the proper lady, and began to walk out, making a grand gesture. A line from a movie, an old one, popped into Rachel’s head:
You’re much too short for that gesture
. But it wasn’t even true. Julie was tall and slim, five-eight or so, taller than their father. Rachel was the shorter of the two, a twenty-four-year-old woman who had just agreed to divorce a man she still loved because that was the only way to get the money she needed to save her mother. And for what? What had she done? Preserved this stupid life, this frozen life, like something out of a fairy tale, where everyone was suspended, waiting, waiting, waiting for the man who never came, never called, never did anything to prove he truly cared for them.

Rachel had been going into high school the year that Felix disappeared. As a cost-saving measure, her mother had petitioned to enter her in Western High School’s A-course that fall by using her parents’ city address, assuring Rachel it would be only for one semester, that the financial situation would work out and it wasn’t fair to pull out Linda, who was a senior. Rachel’s freshman year at Western had actually lasted less than a week. She had been jumped at the bus stop by another girl for reasons that she could never discern. Jumped from behind in a hair-pulling, kicking, scratching melee that had lasted all of a minute but that felt like an eternity. It was the only physical encounter of her life. Until now.

She sprang at Julie Saxony’s back as her onetime combatant had pounced on her, swinging wildly at the woman’s head, arms flailing, intent on bringing her to the ground. Rachel’s only thought was to make sure the other woman didn’t look so damn perfect when she got off the plane wherever she was going. To run her hose, to scuff her shoes.

She hadn’t planned to actually bloody her, but when that happened—well, it happened.