The American Girl (25 page)

AUGUST 9, 2015

Video Diary: Session 7

[Quinn sits in a white wicker chair in a tastefully expensive white room. She looks fragile, hunched, and drums her fingers nervously as she speaks]

No chance of me sleeping, that's for sure. Not after the police and the prison and Noémie screaming and everything that's gone on. The stuff I've remembered . . . it's bad, but kind of vague. I've given Molly a password I found on my phone in Hush-Hush Calculator.

[She flicks through her phone]

This app, see? Looks like an innocent little calculator where—the app store tells me—you keep all the secret notes and pics you don't want folks to find. It was filed under “blog” because it opens up the drafts of my blog I kept private. Maybe that will help her. I refuse to look at it myself.

[Quinn puts the phone down on a side table]

Well, I, um, gave up trying to sleep a while ago and got up. It's hot, you know, but I feel cold. I walked to the window, undid the shutter, and opened it. Hey, I'll show you Stella's garden.

[She walks to the window and pans the phone around the garden]

Stella's not short of cash. Can you tell?

[Pause]

So many shadows down there, though you can just make out the white of the roses, the bench. No one there. Not that I can see, anyway. Still, I have this feeling someone is watching me. Time to close the shutters.

[Quinn fastens the latch and goes over to the bed, where she sits down]

Thought I saw something there. Out of the corner of my eye. Think it might've been a stink bug stuck on the mesh. Caught like me.

No chance of sleep. Not now.

[Quinn starts pacing, lights a cigarette]

I know this is wrong, right? But it eases the tension.

Um, there's another password I've remembered and it's for this phone. It unlocks a folder of videos, and ever since I remembered it, I've been watching them.

[Quinn picks up her phone again]

Eighteen percent, says the little battery. I can maybe watch this three or four times more before the phone dies.

[She flicks to videos]

Turning the sound low . . .

[Press
ing
Play, Quinn
shows us a video clip, images flickering in golds and blues]

All these beach colors. California colors. Toned guys in Speedos and skinny girls in bikinis, like some dumb
Spring Break Vines
compilation. It's weird, um, watching the old me as if I were a stranger. I was so . . . loud . . . a total tomboy, straddling that guy's shoulders in the pool, playing volleyball, swearing in French, screaming as I fall in the water.

[Quinn searches for a different clip]

On to the next. So, uh, this one shows me and Raphael huddling under a beach towel, shivering. We must be cold from going in the sea, 'cause we're wet, too. Sunny day. Must've been Freddie filming, maybe? See, there's Noémie behind us. Reading her book, plugged into her iPod. She looks kinda sad. Émilie buttering a baguette, making sandwiches for us.

It's weird . . . the police kept asking if I liked them, got on with them. I mean, um, I was like, “How would I know? Did they like me?” Seems like the police think I've been a bad girl.

[Quinn stops the video]

I hate them both, those two—Raphael and the old, oblivious me. I don't even know why I'm watching these videos. I mean, what am I even looking for? A sign? A clue?

[Quinn flicks through to another clip. When she sees it, she looks shocked. She shows us the phone. There is darkness and flashes of flesh and red and frightened eyes, someone sobbing and gasping for air. Quinn's hands shake as she tries to turn the clip off. When it does not, she crawls under the bed until she is hidden from view. Finally, the video ends and the sound of crying stops]

AUGUST 9, 2015

A
mong the fragments Quinn recovered from her iPhone was a password, which she gave to me. Like the key to the forbidden room in Bluebeard's mansion, it opened up a dark space, in this case a virtual one—drafts of blog entries I hadn't seen before because she never put them online, the last few entries journaling her holiday in France, before it all went so wrong. After Quinn crawled up to bed, I sat by the dying fire and began to read about what happened after Émilie Blavette kicked her out. I had just looked at the first entry when my phone buzzed in my pocket, the sudden noise shocking me in the silent house. I fished it out.

“Bill?”

“When should I expect you, Molly?”

“I decided to stay a little longer.”

He sighed. “Oh, Molly, why are you like this?”

“Like what?”

“Not happy unless you're where the drama is.”

“Hmm, I can't think. Maybe because you're my substitute father figure and that's how you taught me to be.”

“Oy, always with the Freud.”

“We all have our foibles. Anyway, the Queen Bitch has given me a place to stay.”

“The Queen Bitch?” said a voice from the doorway.

I jumped like a child caught midmischief and dropped my phone. “Evening,” I said brightly. From down the side of the chair, I could hear Bill's muffled voice, “Molly, you're worrying me.” My thumb groped down and dropped the call. Bill wouldn't mind. Stella walked towards me, slipping off her shoes and earrings as she went.

“Nice night?” I asked, a nervous laugh dying in my throat.

She crouched low by the fire, the slit in her linen dress opening to show a flash of expensively tanned thigh. Picking up a poker, she stoked the embers, before dropping it with a clang and curling herself into a chair. Her dark blue eyes considered me as if I were a pesky stain someone had left on one of her spotless chairs. She reached over to the polished table beside her and poured two glasses of something amber from a decanter, handing me one with such authority I didn't dare refuse.

“I didn't approve of Quinn asking you here, you know.” She held her glass up. “Cheers.”

“Um, cheers.” I took a sip. “Fuck. This is some badass Japanese single malt.”

“Good nose,” she said, doing that admiring frown thing. “You were rotten to that girl, tricking her when she was at her most vulnerable. You hurt her.”

I squirmed uncomfortably. I'd rather she'd hit me with the poker than another guilt trip. “Quinn knows what I did, but she still asked me here. What's your excuse?”

“I shouldn't imagine I need an excuse for being a kind host.” She sipped slowly, relishing her drink.

“What did the TV stations pay for that CCTV clip of Quinn in the pool, out of interest?” It was just a hunch I was going on.

Stella's poker face was perfect. She never even flinched. “I don't believe in discussing my finances, Miss Swift. I've done some questionable things, most with good reason. It doesn't mean I'm the villain of the piece.”

“Didn't say you were.” I was dying for a smoke but didn't dare. It was like being in Catholic school again, with the nuns.

“But you've heard things . . . on the trusty St. Roch grapevine. Marlene perhaps?”

I sipped my whiskey to hide my knowing smile. “Whatever I heard, I heard in a professional capacity. I don't judge.”

“You heard that I was having an affair with Marc Blavette under the nose of my best friend, Émilie. You heard that I broke up their marriage, destroyed their family, that when Marc disappeared everyone blamed me. You see, he was planning to leave them for me. He was gathering funds. And Marc, well, he was all charm, but he was weak and he had fallen into some very bad habits, befriended the wrong people. And when he started pressing people for money he was owed . . .” She trailed off, staring at the red shapes between clumps of burned log.

“He got deeper into trouble?”

She frowned a little, her pinched features contorting in
what would have looked like sadness on another person. “I never found out the truth. I pulled myself together.” She let out a bitter little laugh. “People said I was heartless, especially since Émilie was trailing her misery around St. Roch.” She looked at me significantly.

“You think
she
did something to Marc?”

Stella looked at me as if I was being very stupid. “Molly, that's a tad literal, if you don't mind my saying so. This isn't murder mystery television. It's life. Might I finish?”

“Sorry. Please go on.”

“What nobody saw behind her show of grief was the way she treated the children. No one except me perhaps. As a child, Noémie was always daddy's little angel, but after he left, she was too much of a reminder of Marc. She grieved for him. Émilie couldn't stand it. She made her daughter's life a misery, while Raphael could do no wrong. One child was golden, the other the scapegoat . . . and Raffi was always a charmer. Why, even as a young boy, he could . . .” She let out a girlish giggle.

“He could what?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, well, never mind. We had a connection. I taught him English, helped him get into the Sorbonne. I was the first to know he had a place and the first to know he'd dropped out.”

“Dropped out? No one said . . .”

She shrugged. “He was the golden boy here. He wasn't about to come back and tell people to stop worshipping him. No one noticed him going the way of his father.”

“Was he involved with the same people?”

She shrugged. “I don't know the details. In the end, I was the last person he would have confided in. You see, he was trying to blackmail me for rather a substantial sum of money. That is the reason I recorded the footage in the pool. I thought if he knew I had something on him, he might release me from what had become a heavy financial commitment. In the end, his scheme left me one choice: lose this house or sell my little film to the highest bidder.”

I almost spat my whiskey out. “What in God's name was he blackmailing you for?”

She laughed, an eerie, high little laugh, like some forties melodrama queen going insane. “If that was the sort of thing I was willing to divulge to a journalist, do you really think the blackmail would have worked?”

AUGUST 10, 2015

S
tella lent us a black Buick Electra 225, the same make of car Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in. I tried not to take it as a hint. The car had been customized to reflect the needs of the times: a built-in navigation system with soothing voices that told you when you were about to fuck stuff up, and—I was pretty sure—bulletproof glass on the windows. We were headed into a different part of town, following Quinn's instinct that the things she remembered had happened there
somewhere
. So far it seemed to me that a cop car was likely to follow us at a not-so-discreet distance wherever we went.

I kept one hand on the wheel, one on the dial of the radio until I found a channel apparently devoted to the early work of Dolly Parton. Quinn was lolling in her jean shorts and Black Sabbath T-shirt, looking more like the teenager she was than I'd yet seen, one bare foot stuck out the window, the other crossed
in her lap, the better to paint her nails with creamy matte polish called Siren in Scarlet.

“I don't know how you can paint them on a road like this,” I said.

She did a snort-laugh. “Practice.”

“Since when have you practiced painting your toenails in a Buick Electra on a French country road?”

“I have amnesia,” she said, her tongue probing the corner of her mouth as she licked red over her big toenail. “How would I know?”

“Good point.” A bubble of anxiety writhed up from my stomach. I hadn't yet found the nerve to relay Stella's confession from the previous night. In the short space of the morning, I'd seen Quinn pitch between depression and manic glee at small things like finding the nail polish. Her mood seemed unstable. I felt responsible for keeping her calm while we took this road trip to the dark corners of her mind.

In a falsely cheery voice, I said, “Fuck me, it's a beautiful day. The sun is shining. We have a fast car, cigarettes, and Dolly. I don't know about you, but I feel like something out of
Thelma & Louise
.”

“What's
Thelma & Louise
?” she said, nonplussed.

Still on my psycho pep squad high, I said, “An amazing film as well as a classic piece of nineties feminism. More my generation than yours, I'll admit.”

She yawned and dropped a finished foot, toes spread simian-style. She picked up the other with her hands, crossed it over her leg. “What happens in it?”

“These friends go on the road to escape their shitty lives, husbands, kids, whatever. And then the younger one—Thelma—keeps getting them in all kinds of trouble.”

Painting the big toe first. “What kind of trouble?”

“Well, first her husband is hitting her. Then she meets a guy in a bar and he nearly rapes her and Louise has to shoot him. Then they rob a bank and Thelma, well, she . . . romances a guy in a hotel room . . .”

“Romances? You mean fucks.” She blobbed scarlet onto her middle toe.

I looked over at her, suppressing a laugh. “What, were you raised by sailors?”

Her foot dropped with a soft thud. “Stop the car.”

A bubble of panic rose and popped. “What did I say?”

“Stop the car. Stop the car. Stop the car.” Her hands flailed, flicking spots of scarlet on the dashboard. The nail polish rolled to the floor, glugging its blood-colored contents into a gleaming puddle.

I pulled hard into a dusty turnout. A truck sped by on my left, blaring its horn. The police cruiser slowed, then went around us somewhat reluctantly. I waved to the gendarmes as they went by, sure they would circle around and find us again.

“What is it?” Tentatively, I touched her arm.

Her skin was raised in a sharp braille of goose pimples. Shaking, she fell forward, her head between her knees. Her pale fingers clawed at her hair, raising beads of blood.

“Sweetie, stop!” I pulled her hand away from her hair and lifted her up, propping her against the seat. It surprised me how
light she was, as if her bones had gradually hollowed over the last few days. Her head lolled. I smelled piss. Looking down, I saw the dark stain spreading in her shorts.

“That place. That . . . I was there. I was there!” She screamed the last word, her spine jolting her straight.

“Shhh, shhh,” I said, stroking her hair. “It's okay. You're safe.”

Her face turned slowly towards me, a blue vein popping on her forehead as if someone else inside were trying to break through. “No, I'm not.”