Stay With Me (6 page)

Maya stared at the words. Lindsay Segal. Asking her to sleep over. She read it three more times, just to make sure she hadn’t gotten it wrong.

The problem was, she already had plans to stay at Zoe’s. Zoe had invited her two weeks ago.

Maya texted Lindsay:
Don’t know if I can.

On her computer screen, another text:
Come on pleaseeeeeee? No parents! Just us girls!

Whoa.
Maya thought of Lindsay, typing in all those Es. And
just us girls?
Why didn’t she have a date with Miles? Maya almost texted her that question, but she quickly thought better of it. Lindsay seemed like the jealous type—not that she would ever think to be jealous of someone like Maya.

Maya’s computer beeped. She glanced at it, to see a private message from NYCJulie:
Don
’t listen to Matt. You’re young. You deserve to have fun. Spend time with your friends while you still have them
. Maya smiled. She liked NYCJulie so much.

She wrote her back:
Lindsay wants me to stay over tonight.

The popular girl? Awesome! And don’t worry. We’ll still be here when you get back.

Maya thought for a few moments, then texted Zoe:
I can’t come tonite. Dad making me go to family thing. :(

Zoe replied right away:
Srsly?

Yep.

No answer.

For good measure, Maya sent another sad face.

Still no answer.

Maya got a third text from Lindsay: Three question marks.

She typed:
I’ll be there.

Yay! Get over here nowwwww

Maya’s heart pounded. She had a bag all packed for Zoe’s, but she emptied it out, going over each item of clothing individually—the boring pajamas, the boring jeans . . . Maya grabbed the pink sweater she’d bought at Forever 21—the one Nikki had said looked cute on her—and changed into it, along with her tightest pair of skinny jeans. Then she started going through everything else in her closet, looking for something, anything that was remotely Lindsay-worthy.

Nothing. But she did have some clothes that at least weren’t embarrassing. As she searched for them and threw them in the bag, Maya forgot about everything else in the room, in her life. She didn’t notice the computer beeping, her chat room friends asking where the hell she’d gone off to, NYCJulie explaining, LIMatt61 more irritated than ever, but ClaudetteBrooklyn20 defending her:
Give her a break, Matt. She’s only a kid
.

And, once she was fully packed and she’d logged out of the chat room, once she’d shoved the phone in her pocket and grabbed her bag and her favorite blue coat with the brass buttons that her mom had bought her at Urban Outfitters three weeks ago after so much begging, once she’d gone through the obligatory exchange of hugs and explanations and phone number with Dad (who really didn’t seem to care who Lindsay Segal was, deep as he was into some newspaper story he was writing), once she’d rushed out of the apartment, down the elevator, through the lobby, and up Seventh Avenue toward Lindsay’s apartment, the sun already starting to set . . . Once Maya had done all of that, only then did she stop in the middle of the sidewalk and take a few moments to think about what was going on in her suddenly, weirdly, out-of-the-blue exciting life.

“Amazing,” she whispered.

But Maya didn’t let herself think for too long. After all, she had a sleepover to get to.

Just us girls.

She took off fast toward Lindsay’s, determined not to be late. So determined, in fact, that she didn’t notice the blue car tailing her up Seventh Avenue and then left at Twenty-sixth, the cold wind blowing in her face as she wove around slow walkers, her breath quickening, her face easing into a smile. She didn’t notice the driver, watching. Watching it all.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Faith said. She heard Nicolai let out an exasperated sigh and somehow managed to restrain herself from getting up, walking over to the camera, and slapping him across the face. If he was ever going to form a relationship with something that didn’t have a lens cap, this child needed to work on his empathy skills. Big-time.

Ashley Stanley trailed a hand across her eyes. A tear trickled down her scarred cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. So strange. Ashley was a grown woman, but she still had the high, frail voice of a little girl—as though the Lemaires had trapped her voice inside her, stunted its growth. “I didn’t know it would be this hard.”

“Of course it’s hard, honey,” Faith said. “You take as long as you need.”

Ashley breathed, the breath filling and leaving her chest in halted gasps.

Faith wanted to look away. How horrible it felt, to watch another person cry like this, a fragile young girl, and not be able to hold her.

“At night, I keep seeing their faces. I can’t sleep without dreaming about them. It’s like they’re still with me. Just like they said they’d be.”

“The Lemaires.”

“Yes. They said no one ever leaves them. Not really.”

Faith swallowed hard. “No one.”

The girl nodded.

“So there were others? Before you?”

“I think so.”

“With you?”

“Can we do the interview again?”

Faith nodded. She handed Ashley a Kleenex and waited till she gave her the signal, and glanced over at Nicolai. Her own hands were trembling now. Her stomach felt weak. The way Ashley’s voice sounded, the lilt of it . . . at certain times, she sounded so much like . . .

“Rolling,” Nicolai said.

Ashley said, “You can ask me that question again.”

“Are you sure? We can skip it if you like. Move on.”

“No. Please. Ask it. I need to answer it.”

Faith placed her hand over Ashley’s. She looked into the blue eyes and felt tears coming. Faith, the complete professional, the planner. Faith, who had never cried, not even when she won Miss Georgia. Not even on her wedding day to Jim, or when the doctor told her she’d never be able to have children of her own . . . Faith, who didn’t cry, not ever, because crying was for the weak.

Faith shut her eyes. She took a few Pilates breaths and told herself that when she opened them, she’d be looking at Ashley Stanley, a grown woman and a stranger. Not a child. Not her little girl.

Not Maya.

Ask her the damn question
.

“Ashley,” Faith said. “What made you get into the Lemaires’ car?”

“I was lost.”

“I know,” Faith pushed on. “Let’s retrace that day, okay?”

She nodded.

“You’d gone to the movies with your friend and her boyfriend, but you felt like a third wheel.”

“Yes.”

“You snuck out of the theater, and you figured you’d walk home, but once you were into the mall parking lot, you realized home was a lot farther away than you thought it would be.”

“Yes.”

“And it was getting dark.”

“Yes.”

“Then, out of the blue, Mrs. Lemaire pulled up.”

“Yes.”

“She was the only one in the car.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, tell me, honey. You’re a smart girl. When she rolled down the window and asked if you needed a ride, what was it about this woman—this stranger you’d never seen before—that made you get into the car with her?”

Ashley shook her head. “I
had
seen her.”

Faith looked at her. “Excuse me?”

“I’d seen her before, at the same movie theater. I’d seen
Notting Hill
and my friends were teasing me because I cried. She told me not to listen to them. She was crying, too. She was . . . she’d gone with her . . . her husband. Date night, she said . . . First date night since their baby was born . . .”

“Oh my God.”

“Yep,” Ashley managed a weak smile. “She lied about having a baby. Wish I could say that was the worst thing she’d done. But when she pulled up in the car . . .”

“She wasn’t a stranger.”

A tear trickled down Ashley’s cheek. She brushed it away.

“You felt safe with her.”

“Later . . . at her home . . . she said they chose me that night. When she saw me at
Notting Hill
, when she saw my friends making fun of me, she told Charles . . . She said she told him, ‘She’s the one.’ She said, ‘We chose you, and you’re happy now.’ ”

Faith’s mouth felt dry. She needed to move on to life in the Lemaires’ house of horrors—she only had fifteen minutes with Ashley, and had to give her viewers what they wanted. But all she could think of was that young girl, a girl Maya’s age, shedding a few tears over a romantic film. A girl in a movie theater with her friends, a normal child, completely unaware that her life was about to be destroyed by that nice lady on her date night—that lady who told her it was okay to cry.

Faith made herself say, “I’m gonna ask you a few questions about the house.” But she couldn’t wait until her fifteen minutes with Ashley were up, and she could escape.
I’m so lucky
, Faith thought.
I need to be more grateful
. And she wanted to show it. She wanted to take off this thick TV makeup and hurry home to her apartment and to her beautiful little family. She wanted to feel her husband’s arms around her—have a date night of her own. But first she wanted to catch Maya before she went to Zoe’s for her sleepover. She just had to hug that sweet girl for all she was worth.

5

Alan Dufresne wasn’t lying about his father. On one of the computers in the Plaza Garden Suites business center, he logged into his e-mail and showed Brenna the correspondence he’d exchanged four months after his father’s July death with the credit department of WeKeep Storage in Provo, Utah, the representative informing him that Roland Dufresne had indeed maintained a space there since October 2, 1981.

“My mother had no idea he’d even
been
to Provo,” Alan told Brenna. “She asked me to go there and open it. I have two other brothers but out of all of us, I was closest to my dad.”

“So you did.”

Alan gave Brenna a look, as though traveling from his home in Sacramento, California, to Provo on a moment’s notice to check out the contents of a storage space was a no-brainer, which, of course when Brenna thought about it, it was.

“What was your mom afraid she’d find in it?”

He shrugged. “Gifts from some secret girlfriend probably.”

“Nothing worse?”

Alan turned to Brenna, the saucer eyes deep and sad. “My dad was a truck driver. He was gone a lot of the time, and you know what they say about truckers on the road. But he wouldn’t
hurt
anyone. My mom knew that and so did . . . I
still
know that. My dad was a great father and a good man.”

He’d already said that—not to Brenna but to the person who’d been writing him for the past two weeks, claiming to be her.
I know it sounds bad, Brenna. But my dad wouldn’t hurt anyone. He was a great father and a good man.

He’d shown Brenna those e-mails first—a steady exchange of them, increasingly friendly and confidential, between himself and [email protected]. It was not Brenna’s e-mail address—she’d never had a Hotmail account. But her middle name did begin with the letter N. And sitting there behind the closed glass door of the hotel business center, reading the e-mails one by one, the real Brenna Nicole Spector had felt as though the floor beneath her had dropped away, and she was sinking into something thick and deep and inhospitable. A quicksand of confusion. It had become hard for her to breathe. It was hard still.

This person knew things about Brenna. Personal things. I
know you’ve never met my assistant, Trent
, she’d said in one e-mail,
but trust me. He’s a real character.
In another, she noted that she had “a very close friend” on the police force in Tarry Ridge. In several she mentioned Maya. Most of the information, of course, could have been gleaned from the media over the past couple of months.

But not all of it.

Brenna’s eyes were focused on the credit department e-mail, but her mind was scrolling back, into a memory from just fifteen minutes ago, of reading the sixth and final e-mail from BrennaNSpector, sent just yesterday . . .

Alan, I know how hard that must have been for you—discovering that your father kept secrets. My father kept secrets, too. He tried to be a good father, and I remember him that way. But I’ve since found out he was deeply disturbed. A sad, sick man . . .

Brenna whispered, “How does she know
that
?”

“Who?” Alan said. “The credit rep from WeKeep?”

She blinked. “No. I was talking about the person who was e-mailing you. The one pretending to be me.”

“Oh.”

“That stuff about her father.”

“It’s true?”

“It may be.” Brenna exhaled. She looked into the dark, sad eyes of the son of Clea’s . . .
Lover? Abductor? Trusted friend? Killer?

And it hit her that this man—not Nick Morasco, not Trent, not even her mother—this corporate lawyer from Sacramento, whom Brenna had met via a bag of her sister’s belongings, would be the first person she would say the words to out loud.

“My father committed suicide when I was just seven years old,” she said. “I have the police papers.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That isn’t the point, though. The point is, I only found out about it when I
read
the police papers. That was two days ago.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My mother lied to us. I’d always believed he’d just left home.”

He frowned at her. “So this person . . . The one who’s been writing me—”

“Knows more about me than I do,” Brenna said. “Or at least, she’s known it for longer.”

“Or he.”

Brenna cleared her throat. “It could be a he. Could be anybody.”

Alan shook his head. “It’s a brave new world we live in.”

“Huh?”

“Internet hacking, identity theft . . . Heck, if that person could break into that Snapfish page and change your e-mail contact info, then who’s to say they couldn’t go into the police records and find out about your dad before you were ever able to read them?”

“Snapfish page?”

“Um . . .”

“What Snapfish page?”

“You’re joking, right?”

She leveled her gaze at him. “I haven’t joked once since I got here, Alan.”

“I’m talking about the missing persons Snapfish page,” he said, very slowly. “The one you posted the picture of your sister on.”

Brenna stared at him. “
What?
”

Without saying any more, he logged onto Snapfish and called up the page: a collection of personal photos titled, “MISSING LOVED ONES.” He scrolled down the page, photos of tiny children and smiling brides and strapping young men, the captions slipping fast up the screen like movie credits. So personal, so full of loss.
Beloved Dad . . . Missing since 2001 . . . 1995 . . . Have you seen our daughter?
We think about him every day . . . Gone from our lives but not our hearts . . .

Alan stopped scrolling at a picture of a smiling blonde girl.

Clea.

Brenna couldn’t speak. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen—on the picture of Clea, aged sixteen or seventeen, standing in their kitchen back in City Island, smiling in front of their mother’s light blue cupboards. Robin’s egg, their mother had called the color. She’d always been so specific about it.

In the photo, Clea’s long hair was in a ponytail. She wore a red T-shirt with a pink heart on it, the collar cut off. She wore her favorite denim jacket with the black lace sewed on. Brenna felt the weight of the grocery bag in her lap, the weight of that same jacket. “My God,” she whispered.

“I never went to the police to find out who she was. I was too . . . My dad . . .”

“I understand.”

“But I did go online a lot, looking for missing persons pages. There are hundreds of them. When I found this one, I recognized her immediately,” Alan said. “You could just imagine my reaction, especially when I saw what she was wearing.”

There must be an explanation
, Brenna thought.
Something simple I’m overlooking. There has to be, please . . .

“Brenna?”

“I didn’t post that picture. I’ve never seen that page before.”

He gaped at her, saying nothing.

Brenna just nodded.
Thanks for not asking me if I’m kidding
.

“Who could have done this?”

“I wish I knew.”

“So strange,” Alan said. “I never let . . . that person . . . know that I was coming to New York. It was a last-minute trip—a client flew me out. I had told her I’d send her the bag, but she still hasn’t e-mailed an address.”

“Can you give me the address once she sends it?” Brenna said.

“Sure.”

“And can you do me another favor?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep writing her. Act like nothing’s wrong.”

“That will be hard.”

“I know.”

“Wish I could ask her where the hell she got that picture.”

Makes two of us
, Brenna thought, all the while slipping into August 31, 1990,
lugging her heavy, dark blue vinyl suitcase to the front door of their house on her way to freshman orientation at Columbia. A car horn outside their door: Two honks, short and polite.

Brenna says, “Must be the cab.”

“Wait,” Mom says.

Brenna doesn’t want to. The air-conditioning’s out again and the air in the house is slow and thick and hard to breathe, and besides, she hates the idea of saying good-bye to Mom. Not of leaving her. The actual act of looking into Mom’s eyes and telling her good-bye.

She turns. Mom is standing closer than she thought. Brenna tenses up, and Mom pulls her into a hug.

Brenna hugs her back.
Maybe I don’t have to say it. Maybe I don’t have to say anything at all.

Mom’s skin feels cool and sticky. She presses her cheek against Brenna’s and it’s wet. Brenna wonders whether it’s sweat or tears. In her mind, Brenna asks:
Do you love me?

“Here,” Mom whispers. She slips something into Brenna’s hand.

Brenna pulls away to see it—a slim white envelope. She opens it up. There’s a check inside. Five hundred dollars.

“That should get you through the first quarter.”

“Thank you, Mom.”

There’s something else in the envelope. A picture. Brenna sees Clea’s face in it and looks up, into Mom’s eyes.

Mom nods.

“I didn’t know you kept that picture.”

“Of course I kept it,” Mom smiles. It’s a hard smile. “You took it, Brenna. I’ve saved every picture you’ve taken.”

Alan said, “Brenna?”

She dug her fingernails into her palms, and she was back in the present, staring at the picture, at the caption: “MISSING SINCE 1981.”

“Had you ever seen that picture before?”

She turned her gaze to Alan. “I was the one who took it.”

Once she got home, Brenna tried to remember taking that picture of Clea. Like all of her memories of her older sister, though, it was dim in her mind and fading still. Clea stopping to pose in their mom’s kitchen on her way out to . . . what? A birthday party, maybe? A night out with friends?

Clea hated to be photographed, Brenna remembered that much. Used to throw her hands in front of the camera like a movie star evading paparazzi. Of course, it could have just been
Brenna’s
camera she wanted to evade. In her teens, Clea had found her little sister so annoying that their mother used to scold her for it—and you could actually
see
it in the kitchen picture, the way she stared down the camera: the flat eyes, the too-wide, get-it-over-with-already smile.
Was I too young and dumb to notice, or did I just not care?

Brenna put the bag of Clea’s things down on her work desk, along with the business card Alan Dufresne had given her. Then she started through the kitchen, down the hallway, and into her bedroom, all the while lapsing back into a memory she knew would never fade—September 30, 2009. Just last fall, returning home and getting ready for bed after her first meeting with her then-client, Nelson Wentz . . .

Brenna slips her black sweater over her head, lays it on the bed and folds it, Wentz’s voice still in her brain
,
the insistence in it, the powerless anger
.

Carol doesn’t have anything she wants to keep from me.

Brenna has the same thought she had an hour ago, in the Wentzes’ sad, pristine house.
How hard does someone have to work to be in that type of denial?

She yanks off her boots, unbuttons her jeans, slips them down to her stockinged ankles, and kicks them off. As she folds them, Brenna allows herself to think of the photograph on the far left side of in the slim drawer at the top of her dresser, empty save for the photo and small stack of envelopes.

She pads over to the dresser and slips out the photograph, looks at it for the first time in eight months. Such a frail thing, this photo, dull and faded as Brenna’s memory of taking it. She runs her thumb over Clea’s face. She doesn’t look annoyed anymore. In fact, she barely looks human, the features so time-softened that she’s almost two-dimensional . . . a drawing.

Brenna places the picture in the drawer, slides it all the way to the back, pushes it shut
. Maybe I’m in denial, too
, Brenna thinks
. Maybe Clea isn’t alive and out there somewhere. Maybe that’s just something I tell myself, like Nelson Wentz tells himself that his wife has nothing to hide . . .

Brenna was in her bedroom now. She dropped her handbag on the bed and slid her hand in to touch Clea’s journal, to bring herself back. Then she walked up to her dresser and opened that slender drawer for the first time since September.

She let out a gasp.

The thing about having a perfect memory is, you always remember where you put things. Exactly. Brenna often wished she had a dollar for every person who said, upon hearing of her disorder, “If I had your memory, I’d never misplace my keys again.” (And while we were at it, why did so many people keep misplacing something as important as their keys?) But it was true. Brenna always knew where her keys were. She always knew where everything was . . . or at least, where it was supposed to be.

On September 30, 2009, Brenna had put the picture of Clea in the very back of the drawer. It was now at the front of it.

“It’s Brenna,” Jim was reading off the caller ID screen, and his voice tripped over the name. Faith had just gotten home, Ashley Stanley all over her brain. She’d hugged her good-bye. Ashley hadn’t hugged back. Faith was pretty sure Ashley wasn’t a big fan of bodily contact, a sweet girl like her, so deserving of a hug. And that made her situation even sadder. Ashley had so many worse scars than the one on her face.

Saying good-bye to Ashley, Faith had thought again of Jim and Maya, her beautiful, healthy family. For a moment, she’d flashed on the phone call she’d gotten before the interview:
She’ll ask to go out. She thinks she’s old enough. She’s not
. . . But she’d quickly dismissed it
.

She’d hopped into a cab and gone home without even bothering to take off her stage makeup, envisioning it all in her mind—the warmly lit apartment, her husband and stepdaughter waiting for her. She’d pictured herself rushing in and hugging them with all her might, holding them close, telling them how lucky she was to have them in her life . . .