Good as Gone (13 page)

After one particularly full shift, she and a few other girls went down the street and got matching tattoos of the spiky-haloed rose on the club’s sign. She didn’t know what else she could spend cash on that wouldn’t weigh her down.

But the other law of being highly visible was you had to leave while the shine was still on. So when a group of women started frequenting the Black Rose during her shifts, Starr took note.

Lina, short for Carolina, was a fifty-five-year-old El Salvadorian with a short, grizzled mane, a thick neck, and a body that was round and pleasant. Lina came in all the time with her girlfriend, Heidi, who looked a bit like Starr without her makeup. Then one time Lina came in without Heidi, and Starr, who was ready to quit the club and move out of the Hawthorne house, got the message. She left with Lina at the end of her shift.

Lina lived in a huge Victorian in Northeast so high up it was practically on stilts. A beard of ground cover spilled down over a mossy concrete wall that looked barely adequate to keep the front yard from tumbling into the street. A stone staircase studded with clumps of tiny violets pinched shut in the predawn chill led from sidewalk to front door. Starr climbed up first, past gnarled Japanese maples with spidery leaves and bleeding-heart bushes whose hot-pink blossoms looked frozen in the act of ripping themselves open. The rough steps seemed endless after a long shift, but when Starr got to the top, she could see it was going to be worth it. The oval of stained glass in the door was just catching the first rays of sunlight.

Lina opened the door and let Starr in. The floor was made of cool, silky wood, covered with a big, soft rug of yellowish-white fur.

“Alpaca,” Lina said, watching Starr’s face as she wiggled her toes in the shag. “From home. They’re very cheap there. I got that for three hundred bucks.”

That didn’t sound cheap to Starr, but she just said, “It’s nice.” The ceiling was vaulted over the living room, and there was a large abstract painting hanging on the wall. It looked like fruit dropped from a great height. “Did you paint that?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Lina said. Her voice toughened up and she looked around the room casually. “You like it?”

“It makes me feel a little dizzy,” Starr said truthfully. “Can I lie down?”

“Of course,” said Lina, and she ushered her out of the vaulted living room and into a side room lined with raw wood where there was a tall bed covered by a shimmering, reddish-orange comforter. The wooden blinds were drawn, and it was blessedly dark. Without hesitation, Starr pulled off her shoes and climbed up on the mattress, which sank under her weight. She slid to the center and flipped over onto her back, exhausted, staring at the motionless ceiling fan of dark wood. She wondered what used to go through Heidi’s head when she stared at the ceiling fan. Where had Heidi worked before Lina came along? Had she fallen in love with Lina?

“Why don’t you tell me your real name? I don’t think it’s Starr.”

She could feel the tiny beads embroidered on the comforter biting into her spine, like the princess and the pea. “Violet,” she said, thinking of the purple flowers outside on the steep lawn. It wasn’t the most convincing name she’d ever come up with, but she needed something as good as Heidi—who’d surely made up her name, too, before she’d been extracted as neatly as a tooth so that Starr could occupy her dent in the bed. Wouldn’t it be easier if she could just use Heidi’s name? She imagined herself saying,
Heidi
, and Lina saying,
What a coincidence
.

But the bed was the softest place she’d been in months, and she accidentally said the second part out loud. Just as Lina said, “What is?” Starr let go of the ceiling fan with her eyes and fell backward into slumber.

As the door closes behind her, the superficial layer of animation Jane brings to the house falls away, and the uneasy secrets Julie and I share swell up to fill the kitchen like a scent.

“How are you feeling today?” I ask.

“Okay,” she says, placing a hand on her stomach. “Like a bad period.”

I nod, remembering my miscarriage. “Did you tell Jane?”

She shakes her head. “No. We were having a nice time. I didn’t want to make her feel bad.”

“You know, you could have called me to pick you up. If you wanted to get out of the house.” She’s silent. “We could have gotten lunch or something. Gone shopping.”

“More shopping?” she says with a quick laugh. Then she puts on an appreciative face. “I just wanted my sister.”

. . .
and now she’s gone.
The second half of the statement trails along in its wake like a ghost.

“I’m glad you girls got to spend a little time together. And I’m so sorry for the way I behaved. I just wish we had known where you were.” I’m choosing my words carefully, giving her plenty of space, like she’s a deer behind a tree instead of a girl behind a butcher block.

“I’m really sorry about that,” she says. “I guess I started feeling a little—trapped.”

I can’t even think about what that word must mean for her. Hearing her say it is different from when Tom said it last night. It makes me feel trapped too, suffocated by grief. Like she’s keeping me in a room with all the lights off. I scramble at the evidence of her lies, the paper folded up in the pocket of my jeans, but I am so afraid of confronting her with it that what I end up saying instead is “Julie, I think it’s time we get you a cell phone.”

She doesn’t blink. I let a beat go by before I continue. “For Tom and me, really. So we can reach you, and you can reach us, if you need to.”

Should I have waited a moment longer? Was her mouth opening to tell me the truth when I cut her off?
I have one already, it’s in my bag, here’s a plausible explanation of how I came to have it, along with my very good reasons for not mentioning it.

At any rate, what she says now is “Thanks, Mom.” And I feel a strange relief that I don’t yet have to hear the plausible explanation, the very good reasons. She goes on: “Can I ask you something I’ve been worried about?”

“Of course.”
Maybe it is coming, right now, after all
.

“I’m kind of worried about . . . money.”

It’s so unexpected, so unlike something Jane, for instance, would say, that I just repeat the word blankly. “Money?”

“Well, I know I’ll have to get a job at some point.”

“Oh, honey, you don’t need to think about—”

“But I do need to think about it. I do,” she insists. “We haven’t talked about what it was like for you guys after it happened, but I know you must have spent a lot of—I mean, I know it’s expensive. I’ve—seen the billboards.”

“You have?”

“I looked up some stuff about my case on the Internet,” she says.

Has she been on Tom’s computer? Or did she use the secret phone?

“I just—I know Dad left his job. And Jane’s in college—”

“Your father does fine, and so do I. We’re fine, Julie.”

“—and now I’m here.”

“Which is the best and luckiest and most wonderful thing that could ever have happened to us.”

“I know. I know. I just—” She throws up her hands. “I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.” And then, in a slightly different tone: “I’ve been applying for jobs, you know.”

I’m caught off guard. “What kind of jobs?”

“Oh, anything,” she says evasively. “Baristas, cashiers. I even went inside that bar around the corner yesterday—I forget the name—to ask if they needed a dishwasher.”

It takes me a moment to realize what bar she’s talking about. That squalid, sad little bar in the strip center? Billy’s or Bobby’s or something? She went in
there?
She’s watching my face, hanging on my flickering expressions, so I try to look expectant, like I’m waiting without judgment for her to finish.

“I tried Starbucks too,” she goes on quickly, “but I didn’t end up applying there. I was too tired. And kind of addled, I guess from the painkillers. That’s when I called Jane.”

“On a borrowed phone,” I add. I can’t help it.

“Yeah. I don’t know why I didn’t call Dad, except I knew Jane had the car and that he would have to walk in the heat to come get me. I didn’t want to be too much of a bother. And I was kind of—not thinking too straight.”

This whole conversation is a lie.

“Anyway, so I wanted to tell you—I feel really bad about this, but I want you to know where I’ve been.” She takes a breath, steeling herself for the big revelation. “For the past few weeks, I haven’t been going to therapy.”

I brace myself. She’s going to tell me everything. And it will make sense. It will make perfect sense.

“I’ve just been driving around,” she says, and so it’s to be another lie after all, I think, and then immediately afterward I’m not sure. “I can’t bear to think of all that money it’s costing, so I just cancel, and then I drive around trying to figure out what I’m going to do. If I get a job, like as a waitress or something, I can study for my GED at night, and then—maybe I’ll go to college too, someday. Like Jane.” She looks up on that last phrase with an absurd kind of hope, daring me to disbelieve the emotion underneath those words. It works; the thought of all the opportunities Jane’s had, all the opportunities Julie missed out on and that can never be made up, is paralyzing.

My head hurts from trying to separate what’s real from what’s not. “That’s—I’m glad you’re thinking about your future,” I manage. “I mean, I want those things for you too, if that’s what you want. But for now, you have to see a therapist. Someone else, if you don’t like her. Money doesn’t come into it. We’ll be fine, we’ll manage.”

“You’ve spent so much on me already,” she presses on. “All those clothes, new furniture, and now a phone. And if I ever do catch up enough to get into college—I don’t know what college costs, but I doubt there are special scholarships for kidnapped girls.”

The word
scholarships
makes me think of something. “The Julie Fund,” I say.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“The public donation fund in your name. It’s how we paid for the billboards and the reward money and—everything else.”
We
did? Tom, the accountant, did. He handled everything, while I—who knows what I was doing. I can barely remember the days, weeks, months. “There was a sum put aside for ransom. We were going to use it to set up a scholarship in your name if—” I can’t finish.

“Can’t we use it now?” she says. “I mean, I’m back.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I say, groping through hazy memories for the details. “There are restrictions to what public donations can be used for, and somebody who’s not in the family has to be in charge of it. Tom and I can’t even make a withdrawal without getting in touch with the fund administrator.”

Just as I realize I don’t know the answer to the next question she’s going to ask, she asks it: “Who’s the fund administrator?”

“Oh, I’d have to find out from your dad,” I reply lamely. “But you’re the sole beneficiary.”

I look up and realize she’s staring at me.

I can almost see the next words forming on her lips, so before she can ask, I say, “Somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars.”

She doesn’t even try to conceal how much larger the number is than she was expecting. “Wow,” she says. And then tears start wobbling in her blue eyes; her chin shakes. “You must have really wanted to find me.”

It’s only after she goes upstairs to take a bath, and I hear her sobs coming from the bathroom, that I wonder how she could have read enough to find out about the billboards without coming across anything about the Julie Fund.

was thinking about her next name as she watched Mercedes gather the sheet taut with one hand, lift the mattress corner with the other, flip up a folded white triangle, smooth the crease, and tuck it in. Before she could catch the trick of the fold, Mercedes had already finished and moved over to her side of the bed. It took the more experienced woman fifteen seconds to pull out the new girl’s lousy attempt at a hospital corner and refold it.

“It looks like putting on a diaper,” the new girl said.

Mercedes paused what she was doing—scooting on one knee from corner to corner as she tucked in the bottom edge of the sheet—and rolled her unusual blue eyes. “Guess you’ve never done that before either, huh?”

The new girl felt herself flush.

Later, when they were in the supply closet together loading the cart with wrapped rolls of toilet paper, Mercedes said, “Maybe you do have a little one?” The new girl didn’t answer right away. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

The new girl shrugged and ran the palm of her hand lightly over the spray tops hooked on the cart, feeling for the empties. “Do you have kids?” she asked.

“
Dos,
and that’s it for me,” Mercedes said, crossing herself with a laugh. “It’s all I can handle.”

“I couldn’t even handle one.”

“You’re too young,” Mercedes said. “Better wait until you’re my age.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

It did seem old to the new girl, enviably so. She’d gotten a nasty shock when she ran out of bus money in Eugene and found out at the first strip club she tried that you had to be twenty-one to work there. Her fake IDs were good enough to get her waved into bars, but she knew they’d never survive close inspection in the back office of a club where alcohol was served. Still, she’d given it one shot with Jessica Morgenstern, her twenty-two-year-old Texas blond-blue, at a second club.

The guy barely glanced at it under the black light before tossing it back to her. “Try across the parking lot,” he said. “They hire illegals over there.”

She snatched the fake ID back and crossed over to the Budget Village Inn and Suites. Maids made tips, didn’t they? She wasn’t entirely convinced, but the motel staff was overwhelmed that morning because of some college football game. She hardly had time to think about it, much less drop a fake, before the desk manager, balancing the telephone receiver on one shoulder, shoved a uniform at her across the counter and pointed her toward Mercedes’s cart down the hall. “Just do what she tells you,
comprende
?” he said with his hand over the mouthpiece, barely glancing at her.