Beyond the Pale Motel (19 page)

Not even a single picture of Dash's parents existed. He had erased them, and now he would erase me.

In some of our wedding pictures he wore his sunglasses, but in the ones where you could see his eyes there was something flat about his gaze. I was always looking up at him, almost worshipfully.

At two I had fallen in love with a dimple-faced, four-year-old boy named Jakey Zimelman. There was one photo—lost during my early drinking days—of me gazing at him with mad love while he beamed for the camera. Nothing had changed, except that my taste in men had gotten worse; at least Jakey's eyes were warm, even if they weren't looking at me.

I turned to a picture of Bree. She was dancing, but her partner (probably me, while too-cool Baby Daddy watched her from the sidelines) wasn't in the shot. She wore a strapless, pink tulle dress reminiscent of our fake wedding. Her platinum-blond hair was up and her neck looked long, slim, and somehow—due to the angle of the shot perhaps—very vulnerable. The lighting and the reflection from her hair made her face look even smoother and more luminous than it actually was, almost masklike. Her eyes were closed and her lashes cast shadows. I shivered, and a sick feeling crept up my spine like a monkey climbing a tree. There was that resemblance to Leila. But there was something more.

I put down the album and googled Cyan's website. The girls with their doe eyes and legs, their full breasts and streaming hair surveyed me wanly. Leila or Bree would fit right in among them. I took another drink and googled Darcy London. She had started two new clothing lines to go with Mommy's Lil' Punk: Hip Hop Tots and Baby Bling. There was a picture that showed her and Dash wearing matching Ray • Ban Wayfarers, wifebeaters, and torn jeans, running from the paparazzi. Dash was holding her elbow, steering her away, snarling back over his shoulder at the cameras, his extended middle finger blurred out. The baby, Python, bobbed in a pouch on Darcy's chest. He was wearing a black leather visor with silver, star-shaped studs, and one silver earring.

I felt like I was carrying something dead in my womb.

*   *   *

The next evening I got a call from Todd. Or was it Rick? Whichever one it was said they had broken up. I asked if they were okay. Apparently they were still friends, but his voice sounded as if this might not be true. Then he said he was worried about me, and I told him that pinched nerve was acting up again. He invited me over and I said I would think about it, thanks, inwardly cringing at the idea of socializing. He asked if I had heard about Bob.

“No,” I said, skin creepily crawling. “What?”

“A detective discovered hidden cameras in the ladies' rooms at Body Farm,” Toddrick informed me. “There was lots of footage of Leila, I guess.”

I wanted another drink. There was a wildfire inside me. “Do they think he's the…”

“They don't know. None of the other girls went to the gym. But they arrested him so there's something going on.”

Somehow I felt no sense of relief.

 

#13

 

LA summers are a killer. I mean this in the truest sense.

The heat was abominable, but power outages forced us to limit the use of the air-conditioning. And we still couldn't keep our windows open at night with that predator on the loose. My mind replayed scenes of dismemberment again and again as I lay in a small puddle of my own sweat. I dreamed of mountain lions and snakes and wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding. And heads. Decapitated heads. I had heard on the news that an Italian surgeon believed head transplants were a real possibility in the near future.

Someone had been collecting arms, legs, hands, feet, and breasts. What more did they want? Even though Big Bob had been arrested, I didn't feel safe. What if the Hollywood Killer was someone else? Someone even worse?

One night I dreamed of a basement room where I seemed to live. My hair was dyed a deep blue and I had some kind of long forelock falling into my eyes. Women's torsos were suspended from the ceiling, upside down. Blue liquid dripped from the holes where their necks should have been. One of the bodies belonged to Bree. I looked at my hands and saw the blueness staining my fingers. Or perhaps it was just the fluorescent light in the room. I woke with the terror not of the slaughtered but of the slaughterer caught.

In the morning I couldn't stop thinking about Bree. What if she was in danger? What if I could catch the Hollywood Serial Killer? What if I could save her?

That day I traded in my beloved yellow VW Bug for a used gray Honda, and the next morning I waited outside Bree's apartment building. I followed her all the way to her new salon, where I watched her through the window; she was laughing with a magenta-haired woman, reflected in a myriad of mirrors.

A couple of evenings later I drove back to her apartment building and parked out in front. I saw a man sitting in his BMW down the block. As if being controlled by an unseen force, I got up and went over to the car. I rapped on the window with my knuckles. He looked at me.

Stu.

“Hey,” I said. “What the hell?”

He jumped, startled. He had been talking on his cell. When he saw it was me, he sneered. “Look who's here,” he said, lowering the window and his gaze, down the length of my body, at the same smooth pace.

“Why the fuck are you here?” The adrenaline was forcing the whiskey through my blood faster than normal but not enough to sober me up.

“Why the fuck are you here? I might ask.”

“Are you watching Bree? You sick fuck.”

Are you watching Bree, you sick fuck?
I think he said it, but I'm still not sure.

“I'm going to call the cops,” I said. I took out my cell phone.

“You really want to do that with all that booze in your system,” Stu calmly replied. His head looked huge. “How many years sobriety do you have again?”

The night of my birthday came back as if I'd fallen down a hole back into the scene. I was looking for Bree in the fun-house maze of my bungalow, wanting her help. She was doing the dishes—too fast, slamming them around, splashing water onto her dress—she wouldn't even look at me. My mouth felt stuffed with dry, sweet cake mix and I couldn't talk.

Back in real time I watched Stu drive away.

I'm still not sure if he was actually there at all.

*   *   *

One night during my “watch,” I saw Bree leave her house wearing a short, black cotton dress and motorcycle boots and carrying her camera and Louis Vuitton overnight bag. Skylar was with her but he only had his school backpack. The sun was setting, the sky an odd shade of lilac. I followed them to Baby Daddy's historic seven-story, art deco apartment building in Hollywood, where he and Bree had lived when they first got together, and watched her park and walk Skylar past the cypress trees and in through the glass doors. She didn't stay long.

It is important for me to say, here, that I did not drink that night. I hadn't had a drink since after seeing Stu in front of Bree's apartment building. Not that I considered myself on the way back to recovery; unlike some white-knucklers I was clear that I couldn't do that on my own, long term. But I knew there was something wicked coming, like a storm when you smell metal in the air, and that I would have to face it without the scrim of drink to protect me.

I drove behind her out of the city, along I-10, listening to Savages—music as wailing, dark, and discordant as my state of mind. Night was falling across the brushfire-begging chaparral, and the air smelled of noxious fumes. If aliens had landed, they would think humans were attached to these toxic metal boxes with wheels, that they ate greasy food, gambled, drank beer, worshipped and despised young, beautiful women, and desperately needed hospitals. The aliens would not be wrong. A few scraggly palm trees gave way to dusty shrubbery, and in the distance mountains blackened against a sunset sky. I drove stealthily behind Bree, reciting my Fourth Step inventory in my head to keep from thinking about what I was doing and what she would say if she caught me. I would still list Dash, Darcy London, Jarell, Carlton, Dean, Stu, Big Bob, the psycho on FU Cupid, Cyan, my mother, my father and Bree, and I would still list the same things that I should have done differently. Shana had moved higher up the list; I'd added Jimmy, peripherally, and Scott was on there for dying, for not getting treatment, for not telling me he was sick. But I was also responsible for everything that had happened.

You know those red stains on the highways? Are those from blood? How do they get rid of those things?

A dead animal lay in the middle of the road, too mangled to identify. I swerved to avoid it and felt my stomach lurch. Once on a trip to the mountains with Dash, I'd seen a deer lying like that, fragilely broken in its darkening blood. It had disturbed me more than it should have, Dash said when I wouldn't stop crying.

“You need to try some meds.”

“You know I can't. Of all people you should know.”

“SSRIs aren't drugs in the same way, Catt. They just make your body do what it should do naturally. If you'd taken them as a kid, you probably wouldn't have had to start self-medicating.”

He was probably right. If I had listened, things might never have gotten to the point they had.

But he would have left you anyway. And so would Bree.

If Bree were an animal, she would be a doe for sure, I thought.

The air hung still and hot; night hadn't cooled it much. We were approaching the real desert, with its vast expanses of empty. The highway wound and I followed Bree at a dangerous distance. She turned onto a dirt road and I had to kill the lights.

Bree, a deer, a female deer, parked and got out of her SUV, adjusted her dress. There was a small building there, middle of nowhere; it looked abandoned except for one lit bulb. The neon sign reading
MOTEL
was out. Someone had graffitied
Beyond the Pale
across the front wall.

A van was outside. It looked like Cyan's van, but that didn't quite make sense.

I parked behind a small outcropping of rock. Bree didn't seem to notice me; it was as if I had already become a ghost.

For a while I just waited. I saw her enter the building and I listened to the hum of a swamp cooler and the Santa Anas shivering the palm fronds into a whispered frenzy. Time passed; I'm not sure how much. I didn't know what to do. What if she caught me? How would I explain myself?

Finally I got out of my car, the back of my legs suctioning against the vinyl, and snuck around the side of the motel. Weeds brushed my shins and sand gritted my eyes. The air had a faint smell of hot metal.

Through a cracked glass door I saw Bree lying naked, except for her boots, on a bed, her ice-blond hair yanked into a wispy ponytail, her legs spread and her fingers tucked almost shyly between them. Her breasts loomed large, pearled and perfect as the moon that night. Her head was back, her throat exposed. Her eyes looked unfocused. Drugged? There were silver chain bracelets on her neck and wrists. Over her, fully dressed, stood Cyan, taking photos.

What I felt was a strange mix of jealousy, betrayal, desire, anger, confusion, and fear. Why wasn't I there on that bed? Why wasn't someone looking at me that way? Why didn't Bree love me anymore? Was she high? How had I ever believed Cyan desired me? When did Cyan and Bree become close enough to make this happen? And then: Why was Cyan out here in the desert, in this place? Who was he? Besides Dash's brother, the photographer, who was Cyan?

What follows may make no sense. I'm not sure it happened this way, but somehow it all resulted in my current state. And that is what I want to tell, so I will try to recount the events that led up to it as best I can. I was sober, that I know. But I was also, after everything, less than sane.

Cyan pulled something out of his back pocket, and before I really realized what it was (I had only recognized it by the expression in Bree's eyes), I howled Bree's name and threw my cell phone as hard as I could against the glass door. A panel shattered. Cyan whipped around. Bree got up and stumbled screaming through the doorframe and into the desert. Cyan moved toward me holding the thing I'd seen in his hand. A knife. He was evenly tanned; his head was freshly shaven, but not his face—a shadow of stubble defined rather than blurred the angles of his cheeks and chin—and he wore black jeans and a T-shirt and his boots, dusty with desert. The glistering look in his eyes reminded me of a man who has been interrupted just before he is about to come.

“Catt?” he said.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed.

In one motion Cyan grabbed me by the wrists, pinned my arms behind my back, and held me against him with the flat of the knife at my throat. I tried to turn to face him but I couldn't move. For a moment I flashed on how he had stood over me, taking off my clothes. In the desert motel his voice had the same soft tone I had heard in it that night. But how different the words. “She's not going to get far. The drugs will take effect and she'll pass out. Then I'll go get her. Right now, I have things to show you.”

“Fucking let go of me. What the fuck are you doing?”

“I'm going to show you something,” Cyan said. Beyond the pale motel.

*   *   *

There were many things Cyan made me see that night in the desert. As I screamed and kicked and spat, he tied my arms, stabbed a needle into my leg, and sat me in an old wheelchair. He wheeled me along through empty rooms with broken windows and sand on the floor. Dark rooms. There were tiny squee-ing bats on the ceiling of one dark, dark room. A desert rabbit in a cage. Bones of a coyote and the bones of cats and the bones of birds. The bones of a large dog.

We went into another room. There were chains on the wall. I was already feeling weaker, less able to struggle. Cyan positioned me in front of a black-and-white picture of a woman wearing only a pair of garters and high heels. She was very tall and thin with angular, shadow-casting bones and rapacious eyes. I recognized Cyan's photography. And his facial structure.