Catherine (14 page)

I thought for a moment. What could I say that would keep Q out of my hair? There seemed
to be only one answer. “What if I stop seeing Hence? I’ll stay away from him. I swear.”

Q’s expression softened, but only slightly. “Give me a reason to think you’re lying
and I’ll go straight to Dad. Don’t think I won’t. And your boyfriend will be out on
the street… or worse.”

While I hated letting Q have the last word, I knew from long experience that there
was no winning an argument with Bad Quentin. I punched the elevator button, but the
car was off on another floor, and there was no way I was going to stand around
waiting for it in Q’s presence. Instead, I stomped up the stairs to my bedroom and
slammed the door behind me. It was a kind of hell, being trapped in my room when I
knew Hence was downstairs somewhere, probably being further abused by Q. I wanted
so badly to throw myself between them, to stand up for Hence, but how could I get
involved without making Q even angrier and more suspicious than he already was? While
I didn’t know what he had meant by “or worse,” I didn’t want to find out.

One thing was clear: Hence and I would have to stay apart at The Underground and avoid
doing anything to cause suspicion. Of course I had lied to Quentin. Nothing would
keep me away from Hence now that I was sure he felt the same way about me that I did
about him. Because I
was
sure. I lay on my bed a long while, replaying the events of that afternoon, remembering
how we’d held each other in front of China Yearnings, how Hence had taken my face
in his hands, and how, into the tent made by my hair, he’d whispered that he had loved
me almost from the moment we met.

That night while I slept, my mind whirred along without me. When I woke up, two words
I’d read the night before were pinballing through my mind, lighting up bumpers and
bouncing off of each other:
Jackie
and
sculpture
. So I flew out of bed, grabbed my mom’s journal, and paged through it to find the
place where she mentioned Jackie’s after-school sculpture class at the 92nd Street
Y. It was a long shot, but it was something.

Back at my laptop, I typed the words
Jackie Gray
and
sculptor
, but not much came up. So I tried
Jacqueline Gray
, hoping I was spelling the first name right, and sure enough, there she was:
Jacqueline Gray—American Sculptor
. Finally, I was getting somewhere.

I scrolled through photographs of her work: marble statues of women, their forms blooming
from—or maybe melting into—backgrounds of chunky rock or glossy polished walls. Dad
used to
drag me to museums to “civilize” me (his word, not mine), but as soon as I got old
enough to have some say, I put a stop to that. I don’t get most art, but Jackie Gray’s
statues were cool—scary and beautiful all at once.

I clicked on a link that read “Biography” and arrived at a page titled “About Jacqueline
Gray,” complete with a photo of a woman about my mother’s age. Jackie’s multicolored
scarf held back a thick cascade of dreadlocks, and she wore a floaty tangerine blouse
over a black tank top. I skimmed her biography. She had grown up in Manhattan and
earned a degree from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. I breezed through a ton of information
about all the awards she’d won and the galleries she’d shown at, hoping to find clues.
Near the bottom of the page, my attention snagged on a single sentence:
Jacqueline’s work has been exhibited internationally, and a statue from her groundbreaking
sequence, Missing Person, was acquired by the Miami Institute of Contemporary Art
for its permanent collection.

The words
Missing Person
caught my attention. I followed the link to a photograph that stole my breath—a woman
cut from black marble, her arms flung wide before her, her loose dress billowing.
Her straight hair spread out into the air behind her as though blasted by a powerful
wind. Her face—the narrow nose, the big eyes, the full lower lip—was my mother’s.
From the hips up, the statue looked like any normal portrait, but below that her body
morphed into a gnarled tree trunk, as if she had been caught in the middle of a transformation.
Was my mother turning into a tree? Or was she a tree turning human? The statue’s mouth
gaped with horror or sorrow.

Jackie’s phone number wasn’t listed, but a link on her web page led me to an address
in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn—close enough to get to by public transportation,
if I could navigate the spaghetti tangle of the New York City subway map. Or if I
could enlist a local to help me.

I found Cooper downstairs, lugging a dolly loaded with cases of beer. “Whoa. Where
are you running to?” he asked. It was hard to tell if he was still annoyed with me
for the previous night’s adventures.

“Looking for you,” I said. “Is there a show tonight?”

Cooper jutted his chin at me. “Don’t even think about sneaking into the club again.
Hence has been in a terrible mood all day, thanks to you.”

I thought of the girl scratching on the window and Hence’s off-the-charts bizarre
reaction. Had Hence told Cooper about that?

“I won’t,” I promised, crossing my heart. “Anyway, I’ve got more urgent things to
take care of. I figured out where my mother’s best friend lives.”

Cooper leaned against the beer dolly, waiting.

“In East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I’m going to go knock on her door. Want to come along?”

He gave me a look I couldn’t quite read.

“The subway lines are confusing. I could really use your help.”

Cooper let out a sigh that ruffled his bangs. “Right,” he said. “I’m on the clock.
There isn’t a show tonight, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do.” And with
one monumental push, he and the dolly vanished around a corner.

“Whatever,” I said to the empty hallway. Had I done something to make Cooper dislike
me? How did I manage to rub everyone I met the wrong way? I was still standing there,
frozen, wondering what to do next, when I heard footsteps coming toward me.

It was Cooper again. “Okay,” he said, sounding grumpy and reluctant. “I’ll take you
there.”

“You will? Tonight?”

“You heard me say I had to work, right?” He inclined his head toward Hence’s office.
“Tomorrow morning.” Cooper lowered his voice to a whisper. “Until then, would you
please get upstairs before Hence sees you? He’ll come up with even more busywork to
torture me with, and then I might not be able to get away tomorrow at all.”

Stupid Hence. Why did he have to make things so difficult? Without another word, I
ducked off toward the elevator and punched the button.

While it annoyed me to have to hide out in my room, a lot of my mother’s journal still
needed to be read. I spent the rest of the day stretched across her bed, reading much
more slowly than usual so I wouldn’t miss the one crucial bit of information that
would make everything fall into place. I was puzzling through one of her poems, trying
to figure out what it meant, when I noticed the smell of food—something hot and delicious
rising from somewhere in the building. All at once I was starving, not to mention
a little loopy from spending so much time alone. Beyond the window,
the sky had darkened to an electric blue. How long had it been since I’d spoken to
a human being, or eaten anything that wasn’t a Pop-Tart?

As I was tucking the journal into its hiding place, someone knocked on the apartment
door. I pressed my eye to the peephole and saw Cooper on the other side, looking less
exasperated than I’d seen him in a while. “Coming,” I said as I undid the locks.

“Want some dinner?” he asked. This was a surprise. A few hours earlier, I could have
sworn I’d exhausted the last of Cooper’s patience. Now he was inviting me for a home-cooked
meal?

“I’m starving.” I followed him onto the elevator. He hit the button for the second
floor—Hence’s apartment, I guessed. “Is His Majesty going to be eating with us?”

I was relieved when Coop shook his head, his bangs falling into his eyes. I had to
restrain myself from brushing them back. His eyes—an unusual blue-green and fringed
with long lashes—deserved not to be hidden. “Hence is out somewhere,” Coop said.

This was welcome news. Coop undid what seemed like seventeen locks and swept into
the apartment ahead of me. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting—a dungeon full of
cobwebs and spiders?—but I found myself in a stylish living room done up in earth
tones and leather, with a faded Persian rug on the gleaming wood floor. Glaring from
the far wall was an Andy Warhol–style portrait of a punk rocker with spiky red hair
and bugged-out eyes.

“Who’s that?” I pointed.

“Johnny Rotten. Front man for the Sex Pistols. A seminal punk-rock band of the seventies.”

“I
know
who the Sex Pistols are.”

“And do you know this band?” Cooper pointed to the wall behind us, which bore a large,
silver-framed professional shot of four now-familiar skinny dudes in black, the most
familiar one brandishing a V-shaped guitar.

“That’s Riptide.”

“Very good. Now you should try listening to their music.”

“How do you know I haven’t?” I asked, though of course he was more or less right.

“Just a wild guess.” Coop led me through a dining room—also surprisingly posh—into
a kitchen full of shiny appliances and black granite countertops. A cookbook was splayed
open on the counter, and the sink was full of dirty pots and pans. “I hope you eat
meat.”

Dinner turned out to be lasagna with sausage. Sitting side by side at the kitchen
island, we wolfed down our first helping, not even talking, and when he asked if I
wanted seconds, I nodded and held out my plate. “This is surprisingly not bad,” I
told him.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He fished a couple of Cokes out of the enormous
refrigerator.

“You cook like this when Hence isn’t here? It looks like a lot of work.”

“He’ll eat it when he gets home.”

“That’s not going to be soon, is it?”

“You’re that scared of him?”

“I’m not scared. I just can’t figure out why he doesn’t want to help me find my mother.”

“You really don’t get why you bother him?” Coop got to his
feet and beckoned for me to follow. “Put that plate down. I’ve got something to show
you.”

Intrigued, I complied. Hence’s bedroom was huge, decorated in shades of tobacco and
cream, with a Bose stereo system and a heavy king-size bed. The sight of it brought
a new and distressing thought into my head: Did Hence have a girlfriend? Did he bring
her here? I had an uneasy feeling I was about to see something I wouldn’t want to.

Coop hit a switch, illuminating track lights trained on the wall beyond the enormous
bed, and I got the answer to my question. From waist height to the ceiling, the wall
was covered with framed photographs. I looked from one to the next until it became
clear: Every single one contained my mother. In the center hung a large photo I recognized—my
mother’s high school graduation portrait, her black hair gleaming against the white
gown, a gold honors tassel draped over her shoulder, a mischievous smile on her lips.
To its right hung a grainier, more candid shot of her in front of an ice-cream store,
smiling over a triple-decker strawberry cone. In the photo beneath, she wore braids,
a navy-and-white-plaid school uniform, and knee socks, and her arms were flung around
a young version of Jackie Gray, both of them laughing. I let my gaze travel to the
next photo and the next and the next: my mother in a tank top and cutoffs; my mother
sitting on the edge of a fountain; my mother in front of CBGB in a belted trench coat
and a pink beret. The come-hither look in her dark blue eyes told me all I needed
to know about who had taken that picture—who had probably taken most of the shots
on the wall.

My gaze landed on a strip of black-and-white photo-booth
shots—matted, framed, and under glass—of my mother kissing a young Hence, his hands
on her waist and her arms wrapped around his shoulders. In the last of the four frames
they had pulled apart and were looking sideways at each other, their expressions identically
naughty, as if they were getting away with something unspeakably delicious but forbidden.
They certainly looked like they were in love—or very seriously in lust. Had she ever
looked at my father that way? I took a giant step back from the wall and was surprised
to find Coop watching me. I’d forgotten he was in the room. He seemed to be waiting
for me to say something, but I couldn’t think what it might be.

“Did you see this one?” He pointed at the photograph farthest to the left, one I had
missed. I walked over to it and recognized a portrait of my mother on her wedding
day, clutching daisies, a wreath of baby’s breath in her simply done hair. I had always
loved that photo; we had a copy of it on a shelf in our living room. Though my mother’s
dress was nothing special—just a simple white sundress—in it she looked supremely
confident and regal. Beside her my father looked proud, and a little afraid, in his
navy-blue suit. But unlike the version at home, this one had been scissored down the
middle so it contained only my mother, like those snapshots I’d found at home with
Hence cut out. An ornate silver frame surrounded the portrait as though it were an
ordinary, unvandalized wedding photo.