Good as Gone (7 page)

“Julie?” Jane’s voice came back to her, and she realized she’d missed a question. The music was quieter; Jane must have just turned it down. “Do you remember? What you did that time when we split up?”

“Tried on prom dresses,” she said. “Pretended I was a princess.”

“Oh,” Jane said, and laughed. “Well, that definitely explains why I ended up getting a gift certificate from Waldenbooks that year.”

She knew better than to let this moment pass because of some stupid kid. “I thought you loved reading!”

“You could have picked out a book, though.” Impossibly, Jane sounded hurt, although she was still laughing. “You know, I don’t think I ever used the gift certificate. I mean, after everything happened.”

The light changed, and they barely made it through the intersection this time, moving at a snail’s pace. She watched the boy swim through the weeds by the side of the road until they gained on him, pulled ahead, and finally passed him. In the rearview mirror he looked almost motionless.

She turned back to Jane. “Look, pull the car over. Do you want me to get you the newest Baby-Sitters Club book? They’re probably on number ten thousand by now.”

It worked. Jane laughed and turned the music up.

In Montrose, they parked the car outside a hair salon that had a tattoo parlor upstairs. They got out, and Jane took a deep breath. This must be where Jane went to feel like Houston was her city, not just some place she accidentally wound up because her parents lived there. The sad part was Jane’s pride in her insider knowledge, as if it were hard-won. As if anyone couldn’t walk into any city and find the artists and gays and addicts and tattoo parlors within half an hour by bumming a couple of cigarettes and picking up the free papers on the street corner.

The salon was full of clients, but the woman behind the counter eyed Julie and said she could get her color started and then cut her next customer’s hair while the dye was processing. Julie eased into the chair, felt the woman’s fingers in her hair, and saw her look down critically; she said, “Short and red,” fast, before the woman could comment on her roots. The woman met her eyes in the mirror and said, “Okay, hon, let me get the book.” She left and came back with a floppy binder full of inch-long swatches like the silken manes of tiny horses or trophies of all the girls she’d ever been. Julie pointed to one, and the woman nodded. “Oh, sure, number eight, that’ll look good on you,” and she disappeared into the back to mix the dye.

Jane stood behind her, looking at her face in the mirror. “Mom’ll freak,” she said. “But I think it’s going to look amazing.”

“What do you want to do while I’m cooking?”

“Look at magazines, I guess.” Jane shrugged. Julie could see the realization dawning in Jane’s eyes that there was nothing particularly special about this place. Anywhere must seem hip when you’re getting your hair dyed to piss off your mom.

That gave Julie an idea. “You could go upstairs,” she said. “Get a tattoo while you’re waiting.”

“Think I’m made of money?”

“Don’t you have a credit card?”

“Mom cosigned. It’ll show up on her bill.”

A wave of generosity, accompanied by the need to get Jane out of the room before it became obvious she had roots, made Julie point at her Anna-bought purse on the floor. “She gave me a couple hundred bucks. Why don’t you pay for my hair with your card, and I’ll give you the cash? You can spend it upstairs.”

Jane hesitated.

“Don’t tell me you don’t have your next one already picked out.” Julie predicted something small and discreet, but visible.

“I was thinking of a little outline of Texas on my left ring finger,” Jane admitted.

“So get one!”

“Mom will see,” Jane said. “I figured I’d wait—”

“Until what? Until you’re thirty? Come on, quit hiding who you really are.”

She could tell Jane was eating this up. “You’ll be okay down here?” she said, reaching for the purse.

“Yeah. I don’t mind magazines.” It was true. She used to ogle them in their plastic folders at the library when Cal dropped her off to study for the GED. Once she’d even smuggled a
Better Homes and Gardens
into the restroom and ripped out a picture of a fluffy white cake surrounded by silver and gold Christmas ornaments—not for the recipe, just the picture. Now the magazine cake was crumpled in a dumpster somewhere in Jersey Village, where the bus had dropped her off, along with her shoes, a cheap gold necklace with a dangling horse charm, and her backpack full of souvenirs. All her earthly possessions. Except—

She lurched forward, but it was too late; Jane was already digging through the floppy bag. Before she could even form the words
Give it to me, I’ll find it,
Jane had the wallet in her hand and was fanning the ATM-fresh twenties out of its pocket. Julie sat back quickly, willing Jane not to notice the IDs in the wallet, the phone in the inner pocket of the purse, or her own momentary panic.

But Jane just beamed at the stack of bills. “Thanks!” she said and headed for the stairs.

Just in time. The hairstylist was back in a black apron holding a bowl full of glowing red paste in one hand and a brush in the other. “This is going to be gorgeous,” she said, “trust me,” and Julie did, she really did. She leaned back and felt the cold goop applied to her part. “We’re getting rid of those nasty roots first,” the stylist said and continued to chatter, the way good hairdressers do when they can tell you don’t want to say much. At one point she said, “My sister and I are like y’all—we look so different, people never believe we’re related.”

She let the stylist tilt her chin down toward the floor and finally figured out something that had been bothering her since her arrival in Houston. It had been nagging at the corners of her vision everywhere she went, from Target to the therapist to Bobby’s Pool Hall to the weathered-brick coffee shop where Jane had insisted on stopping for pastries on the way to the hair place. Something not quite right, some quality that made the whole city feel like a stage set. Now, surrounded by other clients and with her head pointed floorward, looking under the table with its big mirror, she could see them propped up on footrests on the other side, all in a row: the shoes.

They were pristine. The patent-leather flats so shiny, the soles of the Reebok sneakers fluorescent yellow, the miraculously white leather sandals with gold lions on them framing brightly polished toenails without a single chip. Staring at the floor, she cast her mind back through the past few weeks and saw a parade of flip-flops and leather boots looking as unscuffed as if they’d just come out of the box. She could see, framed by the black plastic smock, her own feet perched on the silver bar in Jane’s Converse, which had felt comfortably worn. Now she noticed that the tiny holes in the canvas—one near the right toe, another on the side, another near the heel—were too perfectly placed. She’d worn through shoes before; the canvas should have been frayed under the laces, the holes should have bloomed unattractively along the seam of the heel, not in neat little ovals in the middle of the fabric, and the rubber should have been thin enough under the soles for her to feel every pebble on the sidewalk. These weren’t worn; they were distressed.

She imagined a city divided between those like herself and the kid with the oversize pants—people whose shoes endured a constant pounding, scuffing, sweating, straining, and staining with grass and mud and soft, oozing tar—and those who whooshed past them in SUVs, the ones who never walked more than twenty steps outside each day, much less to a bus stop or convenience store, and whose shoes, therefore,
never wore out.

She wished for a moment she could tell Cal.

Not Jane, though. Jane had never walked anywhere. She would have found ways to rebel against Anna and Tom without ever having to rebel against that.

The hairdresser tilted Julie’s head back up, and she glanced at the ceiling, hoping, for Jane’s sake, that the needle upstairs wasn’t hurting her too much.

If Tom suspects the ovarian cyst is not an ovarian cyst, he doesn’t say anything about it, and I, in return, say nothing about the gun that appeared in his hand last night. After we settle Julie on the sofa Monday morning with hot tea and the remote control, she turns on a cable movie that’s already halfway over, one of those holiday-themed romantic comedies with six different plots so isolated from one another that most of the stars probably never shared a soundstage. I notice
A Little Princess,
which I went back and got her that first week, still lying in its plastic wrapping on top of the Blu-ray player.

I sit next to her with her feet in my lap under the afghan, rubbing them absently. She looks incredibly weary, and within fifteen minutes she has fallen asleep, her night in pain having caught up with her.

I move her bundled feet gently off my lap, slip the remote from under her arm, and mute the television just as some stockbroker in a natty suit looks up, realizes it’s five minutes until midnight, and tears out of his office to propose to the actress on the other side of the movie. Tom is in the kitchen, putting the breakfast dishes away before he goes upstairs to work.

The thought of Tom’s presence in Julie’s room is not the only reason I don’t want to go back to bed. The tiredness nags at me, but something else does too.

“I have to pick up some papers from my office,” I say. “I hate to leave just now, but she’ll sleep for a while.” I glance at Julie. “And I need to get it over with so I can start working on grades.” Tom doesn’t need to know that I’ve successfully lobbied the chair of my department to let me turn in final grades at the end of the summer. It’s amazing how sensitive department heads are to my particular brand of family emergency—the kind that involves knives and young daughters and the national news.

Tom looks at me mutely from the kitchen, and I admit to myself that I’d feel better if I knew how long I’ve been living in a house with a loaded gun. “Will you be around in case she wakes up?” I ask instead.

“Of course,” he says. “Is she—”

“I told you, she’s fine,” I snap. Then soften. “I just don’t want her to wake up all alone.”

He nods.

On the phone with Carol Morse in the car, I must sound a little off, although I feel my request to see her is perfectly reasonable. After all, she’s invited me to make an appointment with her before. “Do you want to come in with Julie this afternoon?” she asks.

I know Julie won’t be coming this afternoon—she’ll be sleeping. But I can tell Carol about that when I see her.

“No, I thought this time I would just—I want to see you by myself.”

“All right,” she says, and then, “I have a cancellation this morning at eleven. Can you make that?”

It’s probably her lunch break. Maybe I sound worse than I think I do.

I kill an hour at the paperback bookstore next to her office, thumbing through romances and mysteries. When I walk in, I’m somewhat surprised to find her younger than I remembered, no older than me, and wearing chino capris. For some reason, this bothers me.

“Come in, come in,” she says and gestures me over to a sofa with a woven blanket draped over one arm. I notice a box of tissues sitting on the side table by a lamp with an artfully lumpy ceramic base, and I wonder if Julie ever cries here. Carol Morse closes the door and sits opposite me in a low-backed chair.

“Thanks for fitting me in,” I say, suddenly nervous. “I hope this is—it’s a little strange. It’s about Julie.”

“How is Julie?” she asks with an appropriate degree of concern.

“Fine. Well, not fine,” I say. “She’s sick today, so she won’t be coming in.” Carol just looks at me, but for some reason I don’t want to tell her about the hospital. Right now it’s the only secret Julie and I share; perhaps I’m afraid to find out Carol already knows. I continue, probing to see whether she’ll volunteer the information on her own. “I was sort of hoping you could help me out with Julie a little. I feel like—I feel like she’s keeping things from me. And I know you can’t talk about what she says to you, but I have some things to tell you that might change your mind on that.”

“On patient confidentiality? That’s impossible.”

“Even for a parent?”

“Especially for a parent.” She looks at me levelly. “Anna, are you aware that your daughter hasn’t come to her sessions for the past two weeks?”

After a stunned pause, I manage to say, “Carol, how could I be aware of that, since nobody bothered to tell me?” She stays silent for long enough that I become uncomfortably conscious of my hostile tone. “I mean, no, no, I had no idea. She’s been saying she’s coming here, I just assumed—I mean, wouldn’t you think we would want to know that?”

“Julie is an adult,” the woman says coolly. “Her appointments are completely confidential.” I have a sudden picture of Carol Morse at home with her husband, listening to Fleetwood Mac in the Jacuzzi she surely has on the back deck of the house she purchased by taking strangers’ money for reassurances that their lives are okay, that everything will work out.

With difficulty, I control my urge to get up. “She was here for the first two sessions, I know she was,” I say. “Can you tell me anything about what she said? Can you tell me—anything at all?” I have to get something out of this woman. “Please. She hasn’t told us anything beyond what’s in the police report. Which—” I can’t bring myself to say that what she told the police isn’t true. Not all of it anyway.

While I am searching for the words to tell her about the hospital and the ultrasound, Carol Morse says, “Have you asked Julie?”

Have I asked Julie? Have I
—something shorts out in my brain. I want to stand and shriek; I want to knock over the artful ceramic lamp and fling the woven throw to the ground and stomp on it.

Instead I ask, “Do you have children?”

“No, I don’t,” she says evenly.

“I can tell,” I say. I grab my purse, standing up.

“Mrs. Whitaker,” she says.

“Dr.,”
I snap.

“Dr.—”

“Davalos.”

“Dr. Dava—”

“Oh, you can call me Anna.”