Dear Daughter (5 page)

I closed my eyes and ran some lines.
Hi! I don’t have a reservation, but I was wondering if you might have a room for the night? A single, please. Yes, it’s just me. Oh, my name’s Rebecca—Rebecca Parker. Yes, I’m from California. Oh my gosh! You’re right! So observant! The weather
is
much nicer there. I know, the sunshine, am I right? Can I just say that I’m stunned that someone with such wit and acumen is stuck behind the desk of a motel in a town no one except you has ever heard of—

I pinched the bridge of my nose. No. Try again.

Hi! I don’t have a reservation, but I was wondering if you might have a room for the night? A single, please. Yes, it’s just me. Oh, my name’s Rebecca—Rebecca Parker. Yes, I’m from California. It
is
lovely there. You should visit some day! And can I just say that I love what you’ve done with your hair?

Better. I pulled a fuzzy knit cap from my bag, tugged it low over my ears, and walked in. I stepped up to the desk and clasped my hands together to keep them from trembling. “Hi, I—”

“Welcome to the Country Inn,” the woman said, lifting her head without lifting her eyes from her phone. “Registration’s on the left.”

“I don’t have a reservation, but—”

“It’s Sunday night. Neither does anyone else.” She dropped her cellphone into the purse hanging from the back of her chair. “It’ll be sixty bucks—well, actually, it’s really like fifty-nine forty-five because of tax and everything, but I don’t have any change.”

“Don’t you want to know what kind of room I want?”

“Yeah, we’ve only got one kind.” She looked me over, frowned. “Unless you want the handicap one?”

I turned my face to the side. “The regular one’s fine.”

“Cool.”

I slid the money toward her and wrote a name in the registration book. She didn’t even glance at it.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old; her hair was shoulder-length and slicked straight back from her forehead. It might’ve been brown, might’ve been blond, who could tell through all that product. She was trimmed with an unwieldy jumble of accessories, bangles and feathers and scarves and bells—a cat toy in knock-off Hermès.

Her name, according to the tag pinned to her chest, was Kayla.

Top-to-bottom train wreck.

Although—I was one to talk. I’d approached my new look like a bomb squad would a suspicious package: There would be no uncontrolled explosions of desirability on my watch. Beneath my lumpy, oversized coat I was wearing a twin set and pleated trousers, ballet flats with bows on them. The shoes were too small—a reminder to dowd down my natural gait—and had soles so thin I could feel the grout lines on the lobby’s tile floor. My underwear came up to my navel.

I felt my eyes soften as I let myself indulge, just for a moment, in the memory of more fashionable days. I regretted it almost immediately. The first image that came to mind was of the last truly hot thing I ever wore: a pair of boots I stole from my mother’s closet on the night she died.

I did that a lot back then, stealing my mom’s shit. Not because I was a psychopath or a sociopath or whatever-other-kind-of-path the prosecution argued I was. I did it because I was a teenager, and—my god, people, how many times do I have to say this?—that’s what teenagers do. (Unless you’re the kind of kid who wants to be a DA, I guess.)

But if it matters, I wasn’t actually planning on stealing those boots: I was planning on stealing some money. Two weeks earlier my mother had taken away all my credit and debit cards in retaliation for a photo shoot I’d done for
W
, and since I’d decided I needed to get fucked up, I needed cash.

Which meant it was time to hunt for buried treasure.

Despite being almost exclusively attracted to financiers (or perhaps because of it), my mother harbored a profound distrust of banks, and she kept her valuables—cash, letters, jewelry, keys—hidden all over the house. In empty wine bottles, in the pockets of fur coats, in hardcover copies of
books she thought I’d never read. She used decoys and misdirection; she hid useless items in obvious places so you wouldn’t look for the useful items that were inevitably right nearby. She used what I liked to think of as Jane Repellent: sachets of lavender and white rose, my mother’s favorite scents. She used to scatter the things everywhere. Once I asked her if maybe they were multiplying and should we perhaps call an exterminator before our noses rotted off in protest. She just gave me her favorite look—
Jesus Christ, Jane
—and walked away.

The house was swarming with staff that night, so I had to be careful about my search. (My mother was throwing some event for whatever charity she was pretending to care about. Special-needs dolphins or unattractive children or whatever, I don’t know. I was never deemed fit to attend her parties.) But it was easy enough to lift a walkie-talkie from one of the party planner’s minions and track my mother’s movements that way—even if it meant I had to listen to their delusional twitterings about the sublime stylish charming lovely
Mrs. “No please call me Marion” Elsinger.

As soon as I heard she was sampling gougères in the kitchen, I headed for her closet.

In no time at all I uncovered all sorts of crap (a ruby stick pin, a set of keys, an erotic letter from stepfather number three), but it took me a while to find the roll of twenties in the hollowed-out heel of a Tory Burch wedge. I was just pulling out the cash when I saw the boots peeking out from behind a rack of clothes from Chloé’s frankly forgettable 2002 spring collection. I’d never seen the boots before, but
oh
, they were luscious—above-the-knee black leather, an elegant toe. They were the perfect height, too: just shy of
Pretty Woman
. I tossed the walkie-talkie aside, dropped to the floor, and grabbed for them. I slipped the left one on and tugged at the zipper. It caught on my calf.

“Skinny bitch,” I muttered.

I braced my leg against the wall and pulled.

A noise from the bedroom. The rap of high heels on hardwood. My mother.

I scooped up the walkie-talkie, the other boot, and everything else I’d strewn on the floor and began hopping toward the connecting door to the bathroom, but the sound of low, angry voices stopped me short. There was someone in there with her.
Who the hell was that?
I held on to a nearby shelf for balance and put my ear to the wall.

“I don’t owe you shit,” my mother was saying. I reared back. I’d thought she reserved that tone for me.

Whoever else was in there spoke next. It was a man. “You think you’re so much smarter than everyone else, don’t you?” he said.

“Smarter than you doesn’t mean much,” she said.

“Should’ve slapped that mouth off years ago.”

They moved away from the door, and their voices grew faint. I pressed the entire length of my body against the wall, but even like this I could only catch fragments of what they said next.

“—you think I won’t—”

“Fuck you—”

“What you did—”

“—get away with anything—”

“No one will—”

“I never—”

“—Tessa—”

“—Adeline—”

“
Jane
.”

“Hello?”

I gave a start. Kayla was watching me, her forehead crumpled in annoyance.

I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“I asked if there’s anything else you need,” she said.

I stared at her. “No?”

“So . . . like I said, your room’s on the second floor.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“And, again, the stairs are just over there.”

I nodded. Right.
Right.

“Right,” I said. I drew in a breath. “I guess I’ll just need my key, then!”

Her next words were slow and very deliberate: “It’s in your hand.”

I glanced down. “Oh.”

For Christ’s sake. Get it together, Jane.

“Hey,” Kayla said abruptly. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“No,” I said again. But this time it wasn’t a question.

She squinted. “Are you sure?”

My own eyes narrowed. “Way sure.”

“Well, okay,” she said after a moment. “I hope you enjoy your stay or whatever.” She shook her head and reached into her bag for her phone. The jangle of a key chain reminded me of something—the blue truck out front. My shoulders settled. I smiled.

Boots and cash aren’t the only things I know how to steal.

•   •   •

My legs had just enough juice left in them to get me to my room. Once inside, I bolted and chained the door behind me. I checked the windows and closed the drapes. I unplugged the phone. I pulled back the faded floral-print bedspread and the beige thermal blanket. Then I went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and locked that door, too, before climbing into the bathtub and pulling the shower curtain closed and waiting for my heart to return to a regular rhythm instead of thumping clumsily against my ribs.

I’m sure there are those for whom getting out of prison is a whole, like, Beethoven’s Ninth sort of thing. Rousing, joyous, accompanied by a choir. But for me—for most of us, I’d guess—it was more like Beethoven’s Fifth. We’re too busy being taken aback by the sheer size and scope of things to do anything but lose our minds a little, like the first time you go to a grocery store and realize there’s more than one kind of Wheat Thin.

I’d braced myself for the disorientation—it wasn’t the first time I’d been released into the wild, after all—but I hadn’t anticipated the brute force of it. I mean, sure, I’d known I was out of practice with people. Who wouldn’t be after the last ten years? Even when I wasn’t in isolation, I’d been relegated to the bottom rungs of prison society, the status reserved for snitches, psychopaths, and slobs, and my conversations had been largely limited to terse exchanges with guards and counselors, none of whom were particularly interested in small talk—if they were interested in talk at all. Before Noah, months would go by with no more than a hundred words drooling out of me, 90 percent of them yes or no.

But even so,
Jesus
.

I stretched out in the tub, rolling some of the tension out of my ankles. My feet just barely reached the wall above the faucet. I kicked, scuffing black swirls on the pale pink tile.

Jane wuz here
.

I scrubbed the marks off with the elbow of my cardigan. My name looked a lot better in blood.

I toed off my shoes and hugged my knees to my chest.
Enough
. I had more important things to think about. Like a car. I had one waiting for me in Omaha, a generic late-model sedan I’d picked up on Craigslist because I figured late-model sedans were what all the best criminals drove, but now I’d have to improvise, and I hate improvisation. It’s lazy, the last recourse of myopics and fools, and I didn’t want to admit to being either.

Plus, unless I was very much mistaken, in this particular case improvisation meant stealing Kayla’s truck. Which meant I’d have to wake up hella early.

I pulled off my glasses and rubbed the lenses with the hem of my sweater. God, what was I even doing? Conducting an
investigation
? Pursuing a
lead
? No, I was following a
hunch
, a hunch based on a fragmented memory of a conversation I’d barely heard.

Tessa, Adeline, Jane.

I told the cops all about the conversation I’d overheard in my mother’s closet, but they were so sure I was full of shit from the get-go. It didn’t help that when they begrudgingly allowed me to listen to a few audio samples in an effort to identify something—anything—about that mystery man’s voice, all I could provide were a few flimsy adjectives. The voice was brusque and mean, that’s all I knew, I said. The homicide detective actually rolled his eyes at me when I told him this.

It also didn’t help that there wasn’t any evidence anyone else had been in her room. Nor was there any evidence my mother knew anyone named Tessa or Adeline. For a moment I felt a flicker of hope when I learned that one of the servers who worked the party was named Adel
aide
, but the only remotely suspicious thing about her was a boyfriend who worked at Abercrombie & Fitch.

Eventually I began to doubt myself, too, particularly when I considered how strange it was that she’d have a man in her bedroom: Even when my mother was married her room was off-limits to anyone but her. Then there was the fact that her voice had been raspy and angry and full of four-letter words. The more I thought back on it, the more those words sounded like something
I
would have said.

The longer we went without finding anything to go on, the deeper I descended into One-Armed Man territory. Not even
Noah
thought it could lead anywhere.

After all: If there was really something to find, wouldn’t Noah have found it?

Then again, it was the only thing I had.

As soon as I was considered sane enough to spend time in the prison library, I began the slow and agonizing process of combing through the shelves. Legal texts. Popular fiction. European history. Menippean satire. Early American literature. Self-help. You name it, I read it. And as I did I slowly but surely compiled a list of Adelines.

Adeline the cyclone.

Adeline the blood parasite.

Adeline the record label.

For a while there it wasn’t looking good, and the people in charge of administering my Seroquel sure as hell knew it. But then I found Adeline, Illinois, a pinky-toe town roughly equidistant from Madison, Chicago, and Cedar Rapids, not far from where John Deere fabricated his first steel plow. That I was so excited about its discovery is a testament to just how desperate I was, because as far as I knew my mother had never set a French-pedicured foot anywhere in the area between Los Angeles and New York. But there were straws to be grasped at, too: Adeline’s relative proximity to Peoria, where one of my stepfathers had apparently owned a factory; the record rainfall the year my mother died; the fact that I had once heard her say the word “Dubuque.”

Noah, finally, agreed to look into it, though he was careful to lead-line my balloon. Whenever he updated me on his progress, he would open with something like “Please remember we need to manage our expectations.” But I was so frantic for good news that I took as encouragement the mere suggestion I should have expectations left to be managed. Without context, even the feeblest hopes loom large and beguiling.