The Winters in Bloom (22 page)

She disappeared down the hall. I don’t know what happened to her after that. I guess she left the party.

I was still thinking about Marcella when Devon came over to me, took my hand, and pulled me into the room. I’d never even spoken to her before. I was surprised how soft her hand felt, like the skin of a baby.

The lights were too bright. I wanted to get away from her, but she asked me if I wanted some water, and before I could say yes or no, she handed me a plastic cup of what was definitely not water. I took one sip and spit it out. Of course everyone thought that was hilarious. I could feel my cheeks get hot.

“It’s your turn to be our model,” Devon said, smiling. Her teeth had been capped. They were big and so white. “Are you ready?”

“I don’t want to,” I said, and turned to leave.

The next thing I knew, a sophomore girl named Angel grabbed my wrist. Jon grabbed my other arm. They pulled me into the center of the room.

For a split second, I thought of yelling for Ian to help me. Since he liked me, right? Oh the stupidity, it burns.

I was thrashing and trying to get away when Devon picked up her camera. I yelled at her to stop and told them I would have them all arrested for assault. “Holding me against my will is illegal!”

Devon looked at Renee, who laughed. “She won’t do it. She’s a total baby who cries all the time about her mommy leaving.”

It’s not true, Mother. Up until that night, I’d cried about you only a dozen or so times in my entire life. Unfortunately, a few of those times had been with Renee, who was, after all, my best friend for ten years. Even more unfortunately, I started crying then. I looked at Renee and mouthed, “Please,” but she turned her face to Devon.

Devon took pictures of my face, my shirt, my waist, and lots of pictures of my thighs. I felt sure that every inch of cellulite was being photo-documented, and I cursed the short black skirt and myself for wearing it. I thought about my stepmother saying, “Look how cute,” and wondered how she could like these slutty clothes and at the same time hold her Virgins First policy. But mostly I thought about Renee. When they finally let me go after pronouncing me “lame” and “no fun,” I moved to the doorway, but then I turned around and walked straight over to her. I had to know.

She didn’t answer. I repeated the question. My voice was becoming loud. “Why did you do this to me?”

“Shut up,” she hissed.

“Tell me why!”

When Jon and Devon decided to go to the kitchen for more alcohol, the rest of the room filed out after them. Everyone except Renee and me.

“OK, fine.” She exhaled loudly. “Devon told us each to pick someone. I picked you.”

Of course Devon had put her up to it, I already knew that. And Renee must have picked me because she knew I was the one person who wouldn’t try to retaliate against her in any way. So picking me would be safe. Mean but safe.

“I guess I understand,” I said. It sounds crazy, but I was really trying to. “It makes sense in a sad kind of way, but you’re better than that, you know?”

“Oh god, not this again!” She burst out laughing. “You’ve always been so pathetic with your make-believe reasons why everyone does everything. As if a retard like you would have any idea.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “You want to know why I did it? Because it’s fun to screw with losers. There’s your big
why
, moron.”

She didn’t give me a chance to speak before she left the room, but it didn’t matter. I had nothing else to say. When I got home, I told my dad that I’d left early because the party was boring. Then I waited until he and my stepmother were asleep and slipped out onto the patio. I sat on the lounge chair in my bathrobe all night, listening to the crickets and staring at the moon. The annoying yellow bug light on our neighbor’s back porch made me wonder if invisible insects were climbing up the lounge chair legs and burrowing in my skin. But I wouldn’t say I was worried about it. For the first time in my life, it was like I had no feelings.

By noon the next day, half the school had linked to the Facebook page with a total of eighty-nine photographs of Gracie, Marcella, Megan, and me. The caption was “
EPIC FAIL. These losers think Ian wants THEM.”

The page was taken down when someone’s mother complained, but not before all the comments, over three hundred the one time I dared to look. Most were of the short LMAO variety, but there was a lot of really ugly stuff, too. I guess I was lucky in a way. Most of the comments didn’t single me out, and those that did weren’t nearly as horrible as what they said about the other girls:

She’s a little chunky, but I’d do her.

Vomiting a little bit in my mouth over all of ’em but not as much over the last one.

On Monday when I went back to school, several kids came up to me and whispered that I didn’t belong there. But none of the other girls belonged there, either. That’s what I kept saying. When no one would listen . . . I guess you could say I went crazy. It seems as good a word as any for what happened. I just couldn’t accept the world becoming what it had always been.

Maybe I’m still crazy, I’m not sure, but at least I’m not hopeless anymore. For the first time in a long time, I want to get up in the morning. Searching for you has given me something to do and something I really want, a
goal
, as the doc always says I need, though he means the usual stuff like getting into a good college. I haven’t told him what I’m up to, and not only because I have a feeling he’d disapprove. I can be really superstitious, and now that I’m getting closer, I’m afraid to do anything that might mess up my chances of being lucky enough to actually find you.

I do have one more thing I want to say. It’s not about what happened at school, but about all those stories I made up about you. I never told anybody how the stories ended, not even the doc, though I’m sure he’d think it means something that all the stories ended pretty much the same way.

You would get over your amnesia or escape from the cabin in Canada or be finished with your rehabilitation in Florida, and then you would hurry to a train station. You would get on board and sit down in a window seat, clutching your ticket in your hand. I could always see the ticket so clearly: it would be light blue and stamped in black,
Summerland, Missouri
. Sometimes I could see your face, at least the way I remember it from when you brought me the turtle and puzzle when I was four. Most of the time I just saw your long brown hair.

I know it sounds weird that you always took a train, when we don’t have a train station in this town or even any track. I never really understood why I kept imagining it that way, because I knew it was impossible. But that’s how the stories always ended. That’s how you came back to me.

TWENTY

C
ourtney’s mother
had insisted that they meet in the city. It was the second week of June, a Wednesday, and Liz had a dance class in the afternoon, but she claimed she had something very important to discuss first. Courtney tried, “Just tell me,” but her mother said it couldn’t be handled on the phone. “You won’t believe me if I don’t give you the evidence.”

A few hours later, they were settled on a bench at Washington Square Park, which was right around the corner from the dance studio. Courtney was wearing her usual baggy jeans and a T-shirt; her mother was in leggings and a white silk shirt with pearl buttons. Liz was sitting up straight, watching a group of kids throwing Frisbees, while Courtney was hunched over, staring at a death certificate her mother had forced into her hands. The woman’s name was Harmony Meers. She’d died in a car accident in California in 1996.

“Who is she?”

“The real Amy Callahan.”

“That’s impossible,” Courtney mumbled, but she was nervously twisting the ends of her hair, knowing Liz had hired a private investigator. The last time Liz had done this, when Courtney was dating a man her mother didn’t trust, it turned out that the man was not only married but also behind on his child support payments from another marriage, unemployed, and recently bankrupt. He’d told Courtney he was single, of course, but he’d also bragged about being part of a team that had created Flash Player.

“Amy Callahan changed her name when she moved to California.” Liz opened up a thin brown envelope and handed Courtney the investigator’s report. “It’s all explained here. And before you ask, he assured me that David’s wife doesn’t have any other relatives named Amy. This has to be the person your correspondent is pretending to be.”

Though she and Amy had been corresponding for only about two months, they’d gotten so close that simply seeing Amy Callahan’s name on the top of the first page made Courtney tear up, as if someone she actually knew had died. Thankfully she was wearing sunglasses, so her mother couldn’t tell her she was being silly.

All of the important facts were in the summary. Amy Callahan had left Kansas City for Los Angeles in 1995, and changed her name to Harmony Williams. A few months later, she had changed her last name again after she married a man named Glenn Meers. When a truck broadsided her car, she’d been married for only a few weeks, and her husband obviously didn’t know her very well. The investigator had tracked down Meers, who admitted he’d never tried to contact any of his wife’s relatives after her death. Meers had been in and out of prison for years on drug charges. Maybe that explained his lack of interest in his wife’s past. The investigator had also tried to contact Amy’s family back in Missouri. He found only a stepmother, who complained that neither Amy nor her sister had visited her after her husband died. She hung up without asking why a private investigator was calling about her stepdaughter.

The report included two driver’s license photos: one of Harmony Meers and the other of Amy Callahan. There was no denying they were the same person, though Harmony looked like a hollowed-out shell of Amy, who’d been positively pretty.

Courtney sat back for a minute. It was just hitting her that the graceful, cautious woman she’d seen at the co-op was the same person whose sister had died years ago. She was surprised by how sad she felt for David’s wife.

“It says there are seventeen pages, but you only gave me the first four,” she finally said, looking at her mother. “Where’s the rest?”

Liz shrugged. “I didn’t bring it because it wasn’t relevant. It was primarily about Amy Callahan’s failed attempts at a singing career. I suppose that’s why she chose the name Harmony, though it seems to push it a bit much.”

Courtney scrutinized her mother. She didn’t seem like she was lying, but if she was, it had to be because of David. “Did the investigator also talk to Kyra?”

Liz shook her head. “I told him to find out what he could without discussing this with David’s family.”

“She may not even know what happened.”

“I’m confident she does. It would be quite easy to discover using Amy’s social security number.”

“But it says right on the first page that she changed her social security number.”

“I don’t believe that’s legal,” her mother said, which seemed ridiculous under the circumstances. Before Courtney could object though, Liz clapped her hands together. “In any case, David’s wife is obviously estranged from her sister if she hasn’t tried to look for her at least as hard as I did. She’s had years to do so, if she wished to. And it’s hardly your business, is it?”

Courtney vaguely remembered Sandra mentioning something about Kyra being estranged from her family. This was a long time ago, right before Michael was born, when Sandra was talking about helping them as much as she could with the new baby. But her mother was right. None of this was her business.

Liz turned to face her. “I would think it would be obvious why I insisted on keeping David’s family out of this. I was trying to spare you the embarrassment, in case this turned out to be a scam, as I suspected.”

Courtney didn’t say anything, but she was thinking it couldn’t be a scam. The writing in Amy’s emails was nothing like some Nigerian money request.

I’m listening to Ravel’s “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,” which Ravel wrote for another musician who lost his right arm in World War I. It reminds me of what my shrink always says: you can lose what feels like everything and still find your way back to yourself.

Even if her name wasn’t Amy, she wasn’t pulling some kind of scam. It wasn’t possible.

“I hope you didn’t share any of our personal business with this identity thief,” Liz said. “ Your father would be mortified.”

“I never mentioned Dad at all.”

She reached over and pushed back Courtney’s sunglasses. “But you did mention me?”

My mother called for the fifth time this week. I know she still feels guilty about the way she treated me after my son died, but I wish I could convince her that I’ve never been angry about that. She’s always trying to help me with something I don’t need help with. She thinks that will make us close again, ignoring the fact that we were never close.