Dear Daughter (21 page)

“But seriously—would it really have been
so
unlikely?” Crystal, sensing a sympathetic audience, was warming to her anger. “It’s not like I had nothing going for me. Sure, he could’ve done better, but he
definitely
did worse, believe me. Every piece of trash in town went down on her knees just to get closer to his wallet.”

Her voice was rising, and people were starting to look over. I shifted uncomfortably and tucked my chin to my chest. “So you weren’t after his money?”

“Hell, no, I was after his body.” She burst out laughing then, shaking her head and absently rubbing the side of her face, as if her resentment was just a muscle twitch she could soothe away. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. No—scratch that. It’s been a long thirty years.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s just such bullshit. I was a nice girl—I mean, too nice at times, obviously—so why didn’t I get my chance? Instead I had to watch him with girls like fucking Tessa Kanty. That girl was rotten to her core, a thief and a liar and god only knows what else, and no way she wanted anything but what he could buy her—but she was beautiful, so why should he care about all that other stuff?” Crystal lifted her glass and held it unsteadily in the air. “To Tessa Kanty, the biggest bitch in the Black Hills.”

At that moment I was half tempted to do something I’d never done before: give a near stranger a spontaneous hug. Finally, someone who actually got it.

“I think you’ve had enough.” I looked up and saw Tanner glowering over us. How long had he been standing there?

He reached out and started to pull Crystal’s drink away, but she jerked it back. “Shut up, Tanner. You didn’t even know her.”

“Don’t have to. I know Eli. He wouldn’t want you talking about his sister.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t know her, either. Tessa was a money-grubbing whore, nothing more, nothing less.” Her eyelashes were working wildly to hold back her tears.

Tanner relinquished her glass with a sigh. “Okay, Crystal, fine. Finish up. Just keep it down, would you?”

“Thanks,
Dad
.” She turned her head to swipe a hand over her eyes. I snuck her a cocktail napkin, which she dabbed at her nose. “Bet this wasn’t listed on Cora’s schedule,” she said. “‘Come one, come all, see Crystal make an ass of herself!’” She sniffled. “God, I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be.”

“You’re nice.”

I swallowed back the instinctive denial.

She sipped at her drink, and in the silence, inevitably, we both found ourselves watching the game. Like everyone else in town, we were just looking for something to do that didn’t involve thinking.

Too bad not thinking wasn’t an option.

“Crystal,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

I found another cocktail napkin and folded it into squares. “What happened to that girl you were talking about? To Tessa?”

“She ran away.” Crystal looked down into her beer. “No one was sad to see her go.”

I looked down into my own empty glass. It was better than telling Crystal I hadn’t been sad to see her go, either.

“Do you know why she left?” I asked. “Was it Eli—”

“Oh, no, she left for the same reason girls like that always run away: ’Cause she got knocked the fuck up.”

•   •   •

As soon as the streets seemed empty enough, I headed back to the parking lot next to the inn. I climbed into the truck and started the engine. Then I pulled out my phone.

“Contact me any time, for anything,” that’s what Noah had said. I hoped he’d meant it.

I put the car in gear and jammed the phone between my shoulder and ear.

No one answered.

I swerved around a pothole; the phone fell to my lap. I chanced a quick glance down at it and stabbed at Noah’s name again before pressing it to my ear.

“I told you to text,” he said.

“I missed the sound of your voice.”

This was meant to be a joke. It didn’t come out that way.

I checked my rearview mirror, then snapped my eyes back to the road in front of me. It wasn’t my best idea, talking while driving, but neither of these things could wait. “I need something,” I said.

“Of course you do. But I don’t work for you anymore, or don’t you remember?”

“Well, I know how you love pro bono—”

“Jane, it’s late—”

“Look—ah, shit.” The truck lurched and I nearly bit my tongue off.

“Where are you?”

“Never mind that, just—I need to know if you have my birth certificate.”

“Why do you need that?”

“Do you have it or what?”

“Of course I have it, I had to use it to get your name changed—you’re lucky I’m still at the office.”

I heard a rustling of papers.

“Okay,” he said, “here it is. Now what?”

I tightened my hands on the steering wheel and made sure I was in the very center of the road. “When was I born?” I asked.

“Uh, Jane—”

“Just tell me, would you?”

“The same day you were always born—November 22, 1986. Is this your weird way to remind me to get you a present?”

“Shut up and let me think.” The truck thudded over the buckled road. I pretended it was pulling my mind along with it. “Wait,” I said. “What’s the name of the hospital?”

“Hold on, give me a second, this is all in German—”

“And also French and Italian, surely you know one of those. Didn’t they teach you anything at Yale?”

“Yeah, useful languages, like Spanish.”

“Very funny—keep looking. It’ll probably be the word ending in ‘spital.’”

“Thanks, I never would have figured that out—no, I don’t see anything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Wait, could this be it? ‘
Hausgeburt
?’”

I pulled over to the side of the road and threw the truck into park. “What’d you say?”

“
Hausgeburt
.”

“Spell it for me, because your German is
Scheiße
.”

“Hey, I’m helping
you
here.” But he spelled it anyway.

I rested my forehead against the steering wheel. “Are you absolutely sure that’s what it says?”

“Positive.”

I sat up and put the car into gear again. “Okay, great, thanks, nice chat.”

“Wait, did you see that—”

I hung up.

Hausgeburt
. My mother—
my mother—
had a home birth? The same woman who took Vicodin when she had a hangnail? No fucking way. Goddammit, she’d lied about
my
age, too, hadn’t she? Which meant my father wasn’t some decrepit dead dude from Lichtenstein—he was some loser from South Dakota.

That bitch. I’d had a father all this time.

Worse, I’d been reading the wrong horoscope for
years
.

What many people don’t know—but wouldn’t be surprised to hear—is that Janie Jenkins has been stirring up controversy since the moment she was born: At the time of Janie’s birth, her mother was not married to her father, Swiss billionaire Emmerich von Mises. It was widely known that they had planned to marry, and Emmerich publicly acknowledged Janie as his own, but unfortunately he died in December 1986, at age eighty-six, just two months before he was to have wed Marion.

The children of Emmerich’s first marriage had been opposed to the relationship with Marion from the start, suspecting her of using their father for his money. And, indeed, Emmerich left Marion a generous bequest. It was whispered, however, that she was also considering taking legal action to ensure the ongoing financial support of her daughter. However, there is no sign that she ever filed suit.

When I spoke to the von Mises family, I learned the story behind the alleged dispute. Andreas von Mises, Emmerich’s son, explained their reasoning. “It is not that we wanted an innocent child to go without,” Andreas said, “but the family was extremely reluctant to side with the woman who we then believed had callously manipulated our father. However, once we registered our objections and told her we would make them public if we needed to, Marion withdrew her claim. She was just looking out for her daughter, she said—and she didn’t want to tarnish my father’s legacy. In retrospect, I . . . regret the incident. I misjudged Marion. She was only trying to do what was best.”

–Alexis Papadopoulos,
And the Devil Did Grin: The Janie Jenkins Story

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“You look like shit,” said Peter as he slid into the chair opposite me at breakfast Wednesday morning.

Of course I looked like shit. After I’d parked the truck in the abandoned barn in Adeline it had taken me just over an hour to hike back. Even after a hot shower, the tips of my fingers were still tingling.

“I don’t sleep well in strange beds,” I said.

Or strange bathtubs.

And my thoughts sure hadn’t helped.

Do you ever think about it, about nothingness? I do. I think about it all the time.

Because of course it’s nothingness that awaits us.
Of course
it is. If it weren’t, why would our hearts keep pumping any longer than they had to? Why wouldn’t we all emerge into the world, pure and innocent, and then, before we had a chance to get into any trouble—before we even had a chance to take our first, oily shit—just immediately shut down our systems and head straight to the hereafter? If there were a better life after death, why bother getting fitter for survival’s sake? Why would evolution even be a thing? Why fight for something second best? If death was
really
awesome, in a life-or-death situation, our bodies wouldn’t muscle up with epinephrine and cortisol, our brains would hit us up instead with sloppy sleepy happy love. Hannibal Lecter would be our Mickey Mouse.

No. There’s fuck-all to look forward to. Our bodies understand this. The real problem is, it’s unbearable to
know
this.

So we cope. We fashion faith and magic and online personality tests, orthopedic inserts for the five-inch stiletto heel that is mortality. And you know what: We’re good at it—we’re really fucking good at coping. That’s why I think—why I think that maybe when the end finally does come it will be easier than I fear. I think our minds all scavenge about for the closest thing to comfort, whatever that may be. The satisfaction of noble sacrifice. The pride in a job well done. The promise of a bright, white light.

Or denial. That’ll be my go-to. Even as those very last seconds tick down, even as everyone else knows with absolute certainty that This Is It for me, I’m sure I’ll still be expecting a miracle cure, a second wind, a call from the governor. Some sort of glitch in the self-destruct system.

Hope is asymptotic in its decline. If the past ten years have taught me anything, it’s that.

But if all this is true . . . then what did that mean for my mother? The coroner said it took her
minutes
to die after she was shot. Did she try to sit up or reach for something to tie off her leg, to press against her face? Did she call 911 and ask for help? No. She scooped up a fingerful of blood from her chest and wrote my name next to her on the floor.

There was no denial there. My mother knew damn well what was coming. Otherwise, she would have tried to save herself. Instead, her last act was a fuck you.

What, then, eased my mother’s way? Even I can admit that she was human, so there must have been
something
. But it sure as hell wasn’t faith or sacrifice, and I can only come up with one other option: that she was in so much pain, oblivion would come as a relief.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I shook myself back into the present and looked down at the mess of pancakes on my plate. I wasn’t really eating them. I was just kind of digging at them like they were a Mayan ruin and I didn’t want to disturb whatever lay beneath. Way subtle, subconscious.

“Who was that guy you went off with last night?” Peter asked.

At that, I took a bite. I’d never realized how useful food was at buying time—and disguising alarm. It was one thing if Kelley and Renee had noticed Leo’s interest in me: I could count on their discretion. But it was another thing if
everyone
noticed.

“Kelley’s brother,” I said after I swallowed.

“You seemed to know each other pretty well.”

“Everyone in town is just really friendly. I bet that takes some getting used to for you, being from New York.”

“Well, when it’s coming from a cop—yeah.”

“Leo’s a cop? I never would have guessed.”

(It sure is easy to play dumb with a guy like Peter.)

I sat up, as if I’d just had a brilliant idea. “Hey, you know what you should do? You should ask
him
about that bank robbery. He probably knows all about it.”

He shook his head. “Tried. If he knows anything, he’s not saying. Not to
me
, anyway.” He paused. “But you—you he likes.” He gave me a meaningful look, by which I mean that he rounded his eyes like a Kewpie doll. His left eyelid kept twitching, as if it couldn’t quite decide if a wink would be too much.

“Would you like me to ask him for you?”

He smiled. “I’d really appreciate it.”

“I’d be happy to.” I paused and thought of the business card in my bag. “And is there any way you might be able to do me a favor in return?”

“Well . . . I guess?”

“I know this is kind of a weird thing to ask, but I really need to run a few errands today. For personal things.” I paused. Should I just go ahead and say I needed to buy super tampons? No, better to stick with the insinuating caesura. “But my car’s dead, so I was wondering if maybe I could borrow yours?”

For whatever reason, the request didn’t faze him. “Are you sure you can get the cop to help out?” he asked.

Not even a little.

“Positive.”

He shrugged and pulled the keys out of his pocket. “Sure, why not? The magazine’s paying for mileage. Just don’t flake out on me. I really need that guy’s help.”

“It’s a deal.” I held out my hand. I’d meant for him to drop the keys in my palm, but he shook it instead. His skin was warm and damp, like half-risen dough.