The American Girl (17 page)

JULY 20, 2015

Blog Entry

One thing I know for certain: Émilie Blavette is a bitch. The second thing? I'm getting out of here before I go insane.

Pacing my room, I'm consumed by a familiar mental toothache that used to be constant but comes more sporadically these days: the yearning to pick up the phone, press speed dial, and hear a familiar voice, a little breathless from running upstairs.
Mom.
I could tell her everything, spill my guts, cry and wail and ask for advice, and be given love and reassurance. She would know what to do. Maybe she does know, wherever she is, up in heaven or reincarnated as a dolphin or whatever.

I try Dad's cell again. The phone rings and rings mournfully. Finally someone picks up, but it's not Dad. It's Meghan, bright and sweet and fucking infuriating as ever
.

“Hey, Meghan. Is Dad there?”

“Hey, hang on, I'm multitasking. Omigod, I have
so
much to
do
before we fly tonight! The baby's kicking me like mad and Leo is still wrapping up the summer school. You know how he is.”

“Yup,” I sigh, deflated. “Um, so you mean you guys aren't in Tahiti yet?”

“No, didn't your dad say?”

“Um, nope. I've been trying to get hold of him for days. I just . . . I'm wondering if I could come home early, or . . .”

“Hang on, hon. Dropped my pen. What was that, sweetie? God, my belly is so huge and I'm sweating bullets. Trying to pack a suitcase and leave notes for the cleaner and the cat-sitter and the gardener and basically the whole neighborhood here, y'know.”

When she found out she was pregnant, Meghan decided to start talking to me as if she was my mom. I say “talking” because it's just that, a kind of sweet fake-parental babble, like a Stepford wife might do. It doesn't go any deeper. For all our hours together sipping apple cider at my dad's keynote lectures, we don't know each other at all. I've made sure of that, not because Meghan's an evil stepmom, but because if I befriended the woman who started dating my dad right after we scattered Mom's ashes, it would feel like I'd killed her myself.

“Yeah, I can see you're real busy,” I say, sighing. “I guess I just really wish Dad would pick up sometimes. I need to—”

“He's not here, honey. I said.”

“It's just, he never is. And I actually need to speak to him . . .”

“Oh, Quinn, I thought we went through all this in family
therapy. You
know
you're your father's number one priority, right?”

“Clearly.” My sarcasm going unnoticed.

“Well, then, you know he'll call you back, sweetheart. What was the message?”

“Um. The message is, I fucking hate this place and the woman I'm staying with is a total bitch who just basically wants to cut my heart out with a spoon, and I'm a little bit concerned that if I don't leave soon, I'll probably go postal and kill her and her entire family, so I kinda need him to buy me a ticket home.”

“Um, okay, got it. Well, I'll definitely pass that on.”

I wonder if she's even listening. Meghan usually makes a little more effort to sound concerned. Hanging up the phone, I hear tires on the drive. My heart thumps. I feel an awful pang of hope that it's Raphael, and can't help but imagine him sweeping me off my feet.

But it isn't Raphael and it isn't Noémie or Émilie coming back from town. It's an older, rat-like guy with greasy hair. He is small and skinny and I tower over him. Leaning in the doorway, he coughs a hard, racking death-rattle cough, hocks a loogie into the bushes, and turns to me with unsmiling, watery blue eyes.

“Raphael, il est l
à
?”

“Non.”
I shake my head.

He coughs hard, spits on the ground, and says something angry-sounding in French I don't understand, but that kind of sounds like a curse word. I think the rat man will go then, but he just stands sniffing on the porch. I push my mind to think of
some French pleasantry to fill the silence. Maybe a comment on the weather.
Il pleut? Il pleuris?
Is it polite to remark on unfavorable weather conditions? Do the French talk about the weather, or is that the British? Normally, faced with this type of situation, I would just beam and say something guilelessly American in my best French accent. I've been told that's almost as good a form of communication as actually speaking a language, but something about the man puts me off. Scares me actually.

So I look at him and he looks at me and the rain drips off the eaves. He sniffs loudly, wipes his nose on the sleeve of his coat. I realize that part of what freaks me is that he looks as sick and downbeat as the rain itself. And yet determined somehow. When he jams his hand in his pocket, I flinch a step back. I can't help it. I don't know what I think will be in there. A knife? A needle?

When he pulls out a wad of paper and a few greasy euros, I let out a sigh and realize I've been holding my breath awhile. He waves it at me, his hand shaking so bad I think he will drop it, but with surprising agility, he slips it into my hand. Then, touching his fingers to his forehead in a strange gesture, as if he were crossing himself, he pulls up his collar and heads out into the storm.

Shivering, I turn my back, too, heading into the house and slamming the door. I gaze down at the damp paper in my hands. It's an envelope addressed to Raphael. I turn it over and find it sealed. Another mystery. What else would you expect, when a rat-like man turns up unannounced to leave money for your vanished not-quite-boyfriend who ran off to Paris in a storm?

I walk upstairs to his room to tuck the envelope inside a book
of Baudelaire poetry on his desk, where I know he will one day find it. The doubts about him that have been forming steadily melt away because his room smells so much of him. And how can you know someone better in the end, than by their smell?

I can't resist flinging myself on his bed and burying my face in his pillow, reaching under it for the soft old Nirvana T-shirt I know will be there, taking off my own shirt, and slipping it on. Neither can I resist sending him a helpful little text to let him know that a man dropped by for him and left money.

I lie there a long while watching the screen of my phone as the light fades outside and the daytime moon glows stronger, drifting in and out of an uneasy sleep. I have a dream where someone is pacing on the gravel, up and down, up and down, under Raphael's window. But each time I wake, I can still hear it, the pacing.

Like I said, I'm going insane.

AUGUST 6, 2015

A
new search had begun, no less clueless than the one that had been going on for days through the town and the woods. There was a different feel to this one, though. Panic had replaced methodical investigation and a sticky air of guilt clung to everyone involved, especially me. Valentin suffered from it, too, as did poor Didier. Thirsty and bored, he'd sloped off to get a cold Coke from the bar. When he came back, the room had been turned over and Quinn was gone.

As the next of kin, I had been impounded in a private room next to the bar and was under close supervision. Valentin's minions brought me hot coffee with sugar to curb the hysteria they seemed to feel sure would erupt from me at any moment. I refused their offerings, annoyed that I was being politely detained under the guise of protection. In the process, I was also being denied my clothes and my phone while forensics picked over the remains of our room at a glacial pace. On the plus side, in
the four hours it had taken them, I'd had ample time to reflect on how entirely to blame I was for this new turn in events: for taking Quinn out of the hospital, for bringing her here, for leaving her alone while I made bad romantic choices.

The fact that Valentin couldn't seem to meet my eye when he rushed in for a moment told me he felt the same way. “There has been a tip about a possible sighting,” he said, brusque and businesslike, and then he was off, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs while he charged about.

I had to find a way to escape.

In the end, a little bit of cunning and a good deal of charm was all I needed to evade the security detail slash support group Valentin had apportioned me. It went like this: I spent some quality time with Didier, reassuring him that I in no way blamed him and even helping him beat some deathless game of Words with Friends he was stuck on. Clutching my stomach, I then intimated that I had lady problems. He asked how he could help. I said he couldn't, unless he knew of an all-night pharmacy and was willing to go buy out their supply of Midol plus a jumbo pack of tampons. He looked like his head would explode. I suggested that there was one other option: I could slip to my room for a second. He agreed. Avoiding the elevators, which had become a police thoroughfare, much to the dismay of the hotel staff, I took the stairs two at a time up to the third floor.

The room I had briefly shared with my pretend niece was in ruins. Furniture had been turned over. Sheets and clothes were strewn everywhere. A shattered glass, white with printing powder, lay next to a crime scene label “5.” A red stain drying
on the carpet freaked me out when I spotted it, though when I leaned close to the carpet and sniffed at it, I reassured myself that it was Cherry B rather than blood. The bathroom was almost as bad. The little pots of creams and powders Quinn had purloined from me were flung on the floor, their glittery contents spilled over towels and smeared on shower tiles. This much I knew—whoever had done this was angry.

I wondered what the intruder could have been searching for that would have made them trash the room, especially since Quinn was right there for the taking, prone on the bed, a sitting duck. They could have taken her quickly and quietly without doing any of this, and what did it achieve?

I turned back to the room, trying to remember how it looked when I left what felt like centuries ago. Squinting my eyes, I could picture the sheets on the floor and pillows strewn everywhere, the open bottle of Cherry B on the floor near the TV. In other words, the room was already trashed when I left it and the bathroom had already been a flurry of towels and teenage makeup application. The only thing different, other than the mess left by forensics tramping through, was the overturned chair and the snowfall of broken glass, the spilled Cherry B and the smeared makeup.

Weird: to rip the lids off of lip gloss and eyeliner and spill them, to shatter the sad little glitter cakes of eye shadow and blush and smear them everywhere, almost more like a teenage temper tantrum than a break-in. In fact, the whole thing seemed more aimed at me than at Quinn, almost as if
she'd
wanted to get at me, but why would she? Casting my mind back to my teenage
years, I remembered the crushing embarrassments that fueled that kind of meltdown: when your dad grounded you on the eve of a big date, or your big sister read your diary aloud at the dinner table.

Your diary . . .

That's when I understood what had happened. She must have woken fuzzy-drunk and all alone. She was thirsty or needed the can and stumbled into the bathroom. There, she followed the invisible umbilical cord that should've led to her phone, but it wasn't in sight. She hunted under towels, inside tubes of lipstick. When she couldn't find it anywhere, she knew I'd taken it and vented her rage on my kohl. It was dumb luck, probably, that sent her out in the hallway in the moment that Didier was getting his Coke and the coast was clear.

With shaking legs, I staggered over to the Cherry B stain, fell beside it with a thump, forced my ass up, pulled my jeans on. I was on autopilot, ready to go. I patted my back pocket, checking for my own phone. It was gone.

It was my turn to trash the room. I tried to be grown-up and methodical, searching carefully under pillows and sheets, in drawers, but I ended up looking in crazy places—the window ledge, the wardrobe, under the bed. That last place was where I found it.

I snapped it on and found the usual—one message from Mom, one from Bill. My eyes blurred. I flicked past them. No stranger to phones getting hacked, I tend to be a bit more careful than Quinn. I never keep masses of social media apps and notes, not even contacts. Important photos I email to Bill,
then delete. It's positively generic with its raindrop wallpaper, almost as dull as when I bought it. Mom's messages come up as
Lillian
because that's her name. I don't save maps or browser history. In other words, there was no clue in my phone that would have let Quinn know I wasn't her aunt. The only thing I'd been careless about was leaving evidence of my own nosiness lying around: the one page open in my internet browser was Quinn's blog.

In other words, she woke up drunk to find that not only had I stolen her phone, but had, in effect, been reading her diary, trespassing on her innermost thoughts, a privilege she carefully saved for a handful of anonymous internet “friends.” No wonder she pulled a Lindsay Lohan on the room. When my sister read my diary, did I run away and make everyone lose their minds for a week? You betcha.

Icky with guilt, I sat transfixed in my phone's bluish glow. Quinn's words slid back and forth before my eyes like distant ants, cold somehow now that I was in her bad books. I'd been a mom for precisely a week and now my only child had run away.

“Today was amazing and scary,” said Quinn's italicized words at the top of the blog. “The place Raphael took me to is steeped in ancient history. Witch burnings. Murders. Passions running wild and cutting a swathe through generations of families. Les Yeux, a name soaked in blood.” The kid needed an editor, seriously. I mean,
a name soaked in blood
? It did make me shiver, though.

Les Yeux
. . .
I might have had her blog open, but it was
days since I'd been on this entry. Which was as much to say, this was the bit she'd last read. I flicked to Maps. Sure enough, she'd been in there, too, looking for a way to walk to the caves. The blue line plotted a circuitous path around the outskirts of St. Roch and up through the same woods she walked out of screaming that day.