Tell Me No Secrets (10 page)

She closed her eyes, opened them again to see the same young man in bed with a beautiful woman whose curly blond hair draped teasingly along the tops of her bare breasts. Either a flashback or a very speedy recovery, Jess thought, watching their tongues disappear into each other’s mouths.

Whatever happened to dialogue? she wondered. For as long as she’d been sitting here, nobody on the screen had said a word. They kissed, they killed, they fled, they fornicated. But nobody talked.

Maybe it was better that way, she decided. Think how much better off they’d all be if nobody ever said anything. It would certainly make her job as an assistant state’s attorney a whole lot easier. She’d simply shoot the bad guys instead of trying to convince a peevish jury. As for family problems, a well-executed left hook to the jaw would put an end to her tiresome brother-in-law. Her father’s disquieting announcement would be something she’d never have to hear.

Her father in love, she thought again, witnessing his image jump onto the screen, suddenly larger than life, as he stepped into the young man’s place, assumed his starring role. It was her father who now gathered the naked young woman into his arms, kissed her full on the lips, twisted her silky blond hair between his fingers. Jess tried
to turn her head away, couldn’t, sat transfixed, powerless, a prisoner to her own imaginings. She saw her father cup the young woman’s face in his large hands, watching, with Jess, as her blond hair turned brown, dusted over with gray. Creases of wisdom appeared around the young woman’s eyes and mouth. Her eyes deepened from light blue to navy to forest green. She turned and peered through the screen at Jess.

Her mother, Jess realized, as the woman’s slow smile enveloped her. Her beautiful mother.

Jess leaned forward in her seat, her arms reaching around herself, holding her body tight.

And then another woman, smaller, thinner, her hair shoe polish black, dressed in flowing chiffon and Birkenstocks, dancing into the frame, into her father’s arms, her father oblivious to his change in costars, her mother clinging precariously to the side of the screen, her image growing weaker, fading, disappearing.

Gone.

Jess gasped, her head dropping to her knees, clutching her stomach as if she’d been shot.

“What now?” someone muttered.

Jess tried to sit back up, aware of a tightening in her chest. She twisted her shoulders, arched her back, wondered if there was some subtle way she could unhook her bra, decided there wasn’t. She felt hot, flushed, dizzy.

Well, of course she was dizzy. Of course she was hot. She was wearing her coat, for God’s sake. The theater was crowded. They were packed in like sardines. Small wonder she could scarcely breathe. It was a miracle she hadn’t already fainted. Jess threw her shoulders forward and pulled
at her sleeves, wrenching the coat free of her arms as if it was on fire.

“For God’s sake,” a voice beside her complained. “Can’t you sit still?”

“Sorry,” Jess whispered. She was still hot, flushed and dizzy. Taking off her coat had accomplished nothing. She began pulling at her sweater. Blue, green, turquoise—whatever color the damn thing was, it was too warm. It was choking her, denying her air. Why couldn’t she breathe?

Jess looked around frantically for the exit sign, her head bouncing from her right to her left, her eyes darting in all directions simultaneously, her stomach pushing against her ribs. The turtle soup mocking me, she thought, pulling at the neck of her turtleneck sweater, picturing herself suddenly surrounded by a sea of headless turtles.

Was she going to be sick? Oh no, please don’t throw up. Please don’t throw up. She looked back at the screen. The young man lay dead on the ground, his face so savaged by the dogs he was no longer recognizable. Barely human. The mob, satisfied, abandoned him to the deserted stretch of highway.

Had her mother met a similar fate? Savaged and abandoned on some desolate stretch of road?

Or was she sitting somewhere in a theater much like this one, watching some equally grotesque concoction and wondering if she could ever go home, if her daughters could ever forgive her for abandoning them?

“I don’t need this, Jess,”
she had shouted the morning of her disappearance.
“I don’t need this from you!”

Jess felt the bile rise in her throat. She tasted mock turtle soup mixed with honey-glazed chicken and Gorgonzola
cheese. No, please don’t throw up, she prayed, clenching her jaw, gritting her teeth.

Take deep breaths, she told herself, remembering Don’s advice. Lots of deep breaths. From the diaphragm. In. Out. In. Out.

It wasn’t working. Nothing was working. She felt the perspiration break out on her forehead, felt it trickle down the side of her face. She was going to be sick. She was going to throw up in the middle of a movie in the middle of a packed theater. No, please, she couldn’t do that. She had to get out. She had to break free.

She jumped to her feet.

“Oh no. Sit down, lady!”

“What the hell’s going on?”

Jess grabbed for her coat, pushed her way through the row to the aisle, stepping on toes, knocking against the shoulders of the people in the row ahead, almost tripping over someone’s damp umbrella. “Excuse me,” she whispered.

“Ssh!”

“Don’t come back!”

“Excuse me,” she repeated to no one in particular, racing for the lobby, gulping down the outside air. The girl behind the ticket window eyed her suspiciously, but said nothing. Jess ran along the street toward her car. It was still raining, now harder than before.

She fumbled through her purse for the car key, then fumbled with it again trying to put it in the lock. By the time she got behind the wheel, she was soaked through, her hair dripping into her eyes, her sweater clinging clammily to her body, like a cold sweat. She threw her coat into the backseat, then spread out across the front,
letting the dampness cool her. She swallowed the cold night air, savoring it in her mouth as if it were a fine wine. She lay like this until gradually, her breathing returned to normal.

The panic subsided, then died.

Jess sat up, quickly turned on the car’s ignition. The windshield wipers shot immediately into action. Or, at least, one of them did. The other one merely sputtered into approximate position, then dragged itself along the window, like chalk across a blackboard. She’d definitely have to get it taken care of. She could barely see to drive.

She pulled the car out of her parking space onto the street, heading south on Central. She flipped on the radio, listened as Mariah Carey’s high whine reverberated throughout the small car, ricocheting off the doors and windows. Something about feeling emotions. Jess wondered absently what else there was to feel.

She didn’t see the white car until it was coming right at her. Instinctively, Jess swerved the car to the side of the road, the wheels losing their grip on the wet pavement, the car spinning to a halt as her foot frantically pumped the brake. “Jesus Christ!” she shouted over Mariah Carey’s oblivious pyrotechnics. “You moron! You could have gotten us both killed!”

But the white car was long gone. She was screaming at air.

That was twice today she’d barely missed being demolished by a white car, the first a Chrysler, this one … she wasn’t sure. Could have been a Chrysler, she supposed, trying to get a fix on the car’s basic shape. But it had sped by too quickly, and it was raining and dark. And one of her windshield wipers didn’t work. And what difference did it
make anyway? It was probably her fault. She wasn’t concentrating on what she was doing, where she was going. Too preoccupied with other things. Too preoccupied with not being preoccupied. About her sister. Her father. Her anxiety attacks.

Maybe she
should
give Maureen’s friend Stephanie Banack a call. Jess felt in the pocket of her black slacks for the piece of paper on which her sister had written the therapist’s address and phone number.

Jess recalled Stephanie Banack as a studious, no-frills type of woman whose shoulders stooped slightly forward and whose nose had always been too wide for the rest of her narrow face. Stephanie and her sister went all the way back to high school, and they still kept in frequent touch. Jess hadn’t seen her in years, had forgotten she’d become a therapist, decided against seeing her now. She didn’t need a therapist; she needed a good night’s sleep.

Central Street became Sheraton Road, then eventually Lake Shore Drive. Jess started to relax, feeling better as she approached Lincoln Park, almost normal when she turned right onto North Avenue. Almost home, she thought, noting that the rain was turning to snow.

Home was the top floor of a three-story brownstone on Orchard Street, near Armitage. The old, increasingly gentrified area was lined with beautiful old houses, many of them semidetached, most having undergone extensive renovations during the last decade. The houses were an eclectic bunch: some large, some tiny, some brick, others painted clapboard, a hodgepodge of shapes and styles, rental units next to single-family dwellings, few with any front yard, fewer still with attached garages. Most residents, an
equally eclectic mix parked on the street, their parking permits prominently displayed on the dashboards of their cars.

The redbrick facade of the house Jess lived in had been sandblasted over the summer and its wood shutters had received a fresh coat of shiny black paint. Jess felt good every time she saw the old house, knew how lucky she’d been to be able to rent its top floor. If only it had an elevator, she wished, though normally she thought nothing of the three flights of stairs. Tonight, however, her legs felt tired, as if she’d spent the last few hours jogging.

She hadn’t jogged since her divorce. She and Don had regularly run the distance between the North Avenue and Oak Street beaches when they’d lived on Lake Shore Drive. But the jogging had been at Don’s insistence, and she’d given it up as soon as she’d moved out, along with three balanced meals a day and eight hours’ sleep a night. It seemed she’d given up everything that was good for her. Including Don, she thought now, deciding that tonight was one of those nights that it would have been nice not to have to come home to an empty apartment.

Jess parked her old red Mustang behind the new metallic gray Lexus of the woman who lived across the street and ran through the light drizzle—was it actually snow?—to the front door. She unlocked the door and stepped into the small foyer, switching on the light and relocking the door behind her. To her right was the closed door of the ground-floor apartment. Directly ahead were three flights of dark red-carpeted stairs. Her hand tracing an invisible line along the side of the white wall, she began her ascent, hearing music emanating from the second-floor apartment as she passed by.

She rarely saw the other tenants. Both were young urban professionals like herself, one a twice-divorced architect with the city planning commission, the other a gay systems analyst. Whatever that was. Systems analyst was one of those jobs she would never understand, no matter how often and in how much detail it was explained to her.

The systems analyst was a jazz fan, and the plaintive wail of a saxophone accompanied her to her door. The hall light, which was on an automatic timer, turned off as she stretched her key toward the lock. Once inside, the saxophone’s mournful sounds gave way to the happier song of her canary. “Hello, Fred,” she called, closing the door and walking directly to the bird’s cage, bringing her lips close to the slender bars. Like visiting a friend in prison, she thought. Behind her, the radio, which she left on all day along with most of the lights, was playing an old Tom Jones tune. “Why, why, why, Delilah …?” she sang along as she headed for the kitchen.

“Sorry I’m so late, Freddy. But trust me, you’re lucky you stayed home.” Jess opened the freezer and pulled out a box of Pepperidge Farm vanilla cake, cutting herself a wide slice, then returning the box to the freezer, the cake already half-eaten by the time she shut the freezer door. “My brother-in-law was in top form, and I got sucked in again,” Jess stated, returning to the living room. “My father is in love, and I can’t seem to be happy for him. It looks like it’s actually starting to snow out there and I seem to be taking it as a personal affront. I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.” She swallowed the rest of the cake. “What do you think, Fred? Think your mistress is going crazy?”

The canary flitted back and forth between his perches, ignoring her.

“Exactly right,” Jess said, approaching her large front window and staring down onto Orchard Street from behind antique lace curtains.

A white Chrysler was parked on the street directly across from her house. Jess gasped, instantly retreating from the window and pressing her back against the wall. Another white Chrysler. Had it been there when she arrived?

“Stop being silly,” she said over the loud pounding of her heart, the canary bursting into a fresh round of song. “There must be a million white Chryslers in this city.” Just because in the course of a single day, one had almost run her down, another had almost plowed into her car, and a third was now parked outside her apartment, that didn’t necessarily add up to more than coincidence. Sure, and it never snowed before Halloween, she thought, reminding herself that she wasn’t even sure that the car that had almost collided with her own in Evanston had been a Chrysler.

Jess edged back toward the window, peering out from behind the lace curtains. The white Chrysler was still there, a man sitting motionless behind the wheel, shadows from the streetlights falling across his face. He was staring straight ahead, not looking in her direction. The darkness, the weather, and the distance combined to throw a scrim across his features. “Rick Ferguson?” she asked out loud.

The sound of his name on her lips sent Jess scurrying out of the living room, down the hall, and into her bedroom. She threw open her closet door, falling to her hands and knees, and rifling through her seemingly endless supply of shoes, many still in their original boxes. “Where the hell
did I put it?” she demanded, getting off the floor, stretching for the top shelf where she kept still more shoes, old favorites not currently in fashion but too precious to throw away. “Where did I hide that damn gun?”