The Venus Fix (18 page)

“I know that, but not tonight. You’re exhausted. She’s exhausted.”

“I was so frightened. Last time she was here, she just refused to leave with me. But when I couldn’t find her…it never occurred to me…I thought…” I was surprised to feel the tears. I didn’t cry often, but I wasn’t often afraid for my daughter’s life.

He got up, came over to the bed, sat beside me, pulled me to him and stroked my hair. For a few minutes, he soothed me the way he had when we’d been together. There were problems in our marriage, but they had never interfered with our caring about each other and being friends. I didn’t cry for long—a fast release of pain and fear and then I straightened up and wiped my eyes.

“Morgan, are you seeing a lot of Noah Jordain?”

The question took me aback. “Why?”

“I think it might have something to do with Dulcie’s attitude.” I thought about it.

“I don’t want to believe that. But the first time she pulled this wasn’t long after I started seeing him.”

“And now that the relationship has been going on for a while, I think she’s getting more worried that we’ll never get back together again.”

“You think she’s doing this so that we spend more time together? You think she wants me to get upset and wants you to comfort me?”

“You’re the therapist, not me.”

“You’re not doing bad for a layman.” It was an old joke between
us. No one is a good therapist in his or her own family, and Mitch had more often than not been the one who had realized what was going on with us.

He looked at me with an expression that I hadn’t seen for a very long time.

Whenever Mitch had wanted to make love, his features became less animated and his eyelids became heavy. I used to tease him that he practiced the expression, but of course he didn’t. I’d seen the “sex look” on some of my patients’ faces when they discussed their relationships. I’d never imagined I’d see it on Mitch’s face again. And then he reached up and with his right hand began to massage the muscles in my neck, where he knew I stored all of my tension. He was good at it. He’d been doing it for years. I let my head fall forward. I let him touch me and try to work out my tightened cords. And then his lips were on the skin he had just warmed, and I could smell his familiar amber-scented cologne.

For a few seconds, I sat there under the spell of old memories and an easier time—before Dulcie became a teenager, before Mitch told me he wanted more from a relationship than he got from me, before the fabric of our family had been ripped apart.

And then I picked up my head and pulled back.

“What is going on?”

“You’re different,” he said, and then he grimaced. “That was the worst sentence. I can’t believe I said it. Listen, I don’t know how to say this. And I know it’s a bad time to even bring it up, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe we shouldn’t have split up so fast—”

“Mitch, don’t do this.” I stood. “It wasn’t fast. It was a year. And it was what you wanted. And you can’t change your mind now after—”

He reached out and took my hand. “Can’t we even talk about it?”

“You are falling for it. Our daughter is sitting in there manipulating us. You’re the one who noticed it.”

“I know that. But I also think there’s something to the idea that we should be together again. At least try.”

“No. Not now. We have a big problem here. Our daughter is not talking to me. She ran away from home tonight.”

“She didn’t really run—”

“She did, Mitch. We need to discuss Dulcie. About how much she wants to test for this TV series, and how we are going to explain to her, in a way that she understands, why it is not right for her. And in the middle of that you are thinking about us? We had months and months to think about us!”

I was trying to keep my voice down but it was hard.

“I know, but what if it’s all unnecessary. What if we did get back together? You’re different now than you were. I don’t think we’d have the same problems. And we’d solve what’s bothering Dulcie. She could stop acting out. Believe me, I’m more surprised than you are. I didn’t expect to feel this way about you again, but I do.”

In the middle of this crisis, in the middle of a nightmare night, why was Mitch pushing this? I knew better than to listen to my ex-husband, but I really hated the idea that I was going to walk out of that apartment and leave Dulcie there. I had missed her so badly the last time. She was only thirteen. I wasn’t ready to let her go. Was there really a chance that it could work between Mitch and me, and the three of us could once more be a family?

I’d give up anything for that.

Anything?

Noah?

Noah, whom I couldn’t even think about without feeling
confusion and exhilaration. Who moved me and got inside my head in a way no one,
including Mitch,
ever had. Would I give up Noah to have Dulcie smiling and home with me for the next five years? Even if Mitch would never understand the darkness in me the way Noah did?

Would anything ever matter again if together we were able to make Dulcie’s life lighter?

A
manda was alone at home. Her father was away on a business trip to somewhere or other—he was always gone—and her mother was at her book club meeting. She’d stayed late at the office and gone straight there, calling Amanda at seven o’clock to make sure she was home and had found the dinner the housekeeper had left for her.

She’d told her mother she wasn’t hungry. That she had a sore throat. That maybe she was coming down with something. She wasn’t sure why she’d lied, except that she really didn’t feel that good. But not because of a sore throat—it was worse than that. It was everything she had read on news sites about Penny Whistle, ZaZa and Tania and what the guys had been talking about at school before Dr. Snow showed up.

And it was Dr. Snow, talking to her as if she knew everything. As if she really could look right inside her and see how it was all twisted up and scary.

Her fingers on the keyboard, she stared at her desktop, hesitating before clicking the Internet icon. She thought she’d be over this by now, but every fucking time she signed on, she got a cramp in her stomach. Sometimes it lasted a few seconds.
Sometimes it was so bad she had to lie down. She never knew why it was worse some days than others. She wanted to tell Dr. Snow about it tonight. She almost had. Almost asked her how long it would hurt. How long it would take before she stopped missing Simone? How long it would take before she’d stop thinking of her when she did the things they used to do?

Simone had lived online.

Amanda used to sign on and instantly an IM would appear.

Wht r u dng?

They’d instant-message back and forth while they did their homework, talked on the phone to other kids and watched TV. They were never not in touch with each other.

So when she went online now and the IM box didn’t pop up right away, she noticed it. And when someone else contacted her, she felt sort of disappointed when she saw the user name and it wasn’t Simonesez.

Amanda’s hands perspired and shook a little as she typed in the URL. She didn’t have to even think—it was right there. Literally at her fingertips.

She was holding her breath, not knowing what to expect. She hadn’t gone there since Simone had died. It had been months and she still missed her best friend as much as she had the very first week she had died. But she had to make sure. If she was going to tell Dr. Snow, she had to make sure first that she was right.

Silently, the Web site appeared. Amanda stared at the checkerboard of women’s photos. How was she going to find the other two girls? The ones that they had found before. She didn’t remember their names. She and Simone had just clicked on anyone who had New York in her profile, and then watched, sometimes laughing and sometimes getting disgusted and sometimes admitting to each other that it was a little
sexy to watch this stuff. And then they’d sit and talk about Timothy and Hugh and the other guys they knew who watched this stuff all the time and why the guys liked these girls so much more than them. They finally went shopping at Victoria’s Secret so they could get dressed up to look like the Webcam girls. They posed each other in front of the Web cam Amanda had bought for just this purpose with money she’d saved up and watched themselves on the screen to see if they looked as good as the other girls.

They never did.

It hadn’t seemed like a big deal when they’d started. It seemed pretty normal for them to want to know what the guys were watching. They were curious. There was nothing wrong with that, was there?

In her mind, Amanda was defending what they had done to someone who wasn’t there. She was explaining it as if she were on trial.

No, she wasn’t.

She was trying to imagine what it would be like to explain to Dr. Snow. But first, she had to be sure.

Amanda started clicking on all the New York names. They all looked familiar. She and Simone must have gone to dozens of these sites after that first night they’d stumbled on the guys surfing the Net at a party at Hugh’s house. She and Simone weren’t even invited. But Les, her brother, who was friends with Timothy and Hugh, had dragged them along. He was supposed to be babysitting them, not taking them out. Timothy had been nice to her. He’d been the only one who even noticed her and Simone in a normal way. He’d stayed nice to them. He’d even gone to Simone’s funeral with her. Sat next to her. Not like it meant anything. But it was nice, anyway.

That long-ago night, when she and Simone had walked into
the darkened bedroom, they’d seen three boys glued to the computer, the screen’s light reflecting on their faces, and instantly sensed they shouldn’t be there, but they were too curious to leave. The boys never heard them—they were way too involved watching two women making out in a bubble-filled bathtub.

“What ho’s,” Hugh had said in a voice that gave Amanda goose bumps. “I’d like to be that bar of soap.”

“Wrap those legs around me like that. Fucking A,” Barry said.

Only Timothy hadn’t spoken. It was a small thing but it had meant something to her.

So what? Then, at sixteen, Amanda had already seen stuff. She wasn’t too freaked out about it. When you’re a teenager and you have a brother eighteen months older than you, there’s not that much you don’t know about. Her parents had lectured her about going online and giving out her real name, and she’d heard them fighting with Les over what he was looking at on the Net. She’d even wound up on smutty sites by accident, but she’d never watched any porn before. She’d never seen anything that was as down and dirty as what the boys were watching that night.

She and Simone sneaked out before the guys caught them, but a few months later, when Simone was at Amanda’s for a sleepover, they’d asked Les if he’d show them what sites he went to. He said no about a hundred times and then Simone had offered to give him a blowjob in exchange for some of the URLs. He said yes.

Amanda was dumbfounded and sat there without moving the whole time that Simone and Les were out of the room.

“Why did you do it?” she asked her friend later.

“I like him. I thought maybe it would make him like me,” Simone said. Her voice was flat. “The worst part was he kept watching the Web the whole time I was doing it.”

After that, she and Simone became obsessed with figuring out what was so special about the online girls, and what was wrong with themselves.

No. She wouldn’t start thinking about it. It would just make her cry. And that wasn’t the point. She needed to figure it out. She needed to understand what was happening. It was too creepy. There was no way that what she and Simone had done had anything to do with the girls who were getting killed.

But what if it had?

T
he message light was blinking when I walked in the door that night. I dropped my coat on the couch, but before I had a chance to hit the play button, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Dulcie’s gone to bed,” Mitch said. “I thought we could talk.”

“Did she say anything?” I unwound my scarf from around my neck and walked into the kitchen. There was a bottle of wine in the fridge; I poured myself a glass.

“No. She asked me if I’d pick up some things for her from your place. I told her that I wouldn’t. That she needed to ask you herself.”

“I’m not going to force the issue with her,” I replied. “I need some time to figure it out, to try to come up with a way to reach her.”

“While you’re thinking about that, I want you to think about us, too.”

“Okay.”

“That’s all? Okay?”

“Yes. That’s all. I’m tired. I’m angry with Dulcie. I can’t think about us, too. Not tonight.”

The apartment was so stuffy. With the phone up to my ear, I took my wine back into the den and walked over to the window, put the glass down on the floor, reached up, opened the window, felt the quick rush of cold and took a gulp of sharp air.

“What’s that noise?”

“I just opened the window.”

“It’s freezing outside, Morgan.”

“I know, but it’s hot in here. I left the heat on too high. Mitch, I’m tired. Let me go, we can talk tomorrow.”

I sat on the couch, thinking about the words I’d used when I’d said goodbye to him. Nothing was an accident. I’d said
let me go
but I’d really meant
I want to go.

I didn’t want to think about Mitch.

I wanted to work out what to do about Dulcie.

What could I say to her to make her understand that everything I do, I do for her?

The red light was still blinking. I hadn’t listened to my messages. Over at the desk, I looked down at the machine. The flashing LED light showed fifteen calls. It
had
to be a patient in crisis. I hit the play button.

“Morgan? Are you there?” It was Noah, his voice low and soft and just a little concerned. “I’m at work. Can you give me a call when you get home?”

I felt the tug of wanting to pick up the phone and call him right away, but the next message had already started and was so loud it startled me.