Unforgettable (4 page)

She changed her password and then sent Trish a terse e-mail to the effect that her screen name would be canceled in two days. She clicked for return receipt acknowledgment so she would have proof that Trish read it.

Another thought occurred to her, even more chilling. Trish had all the passwords and privileges to Rett’s bank and investment accounts, electronic wallet passwords to order merchandise at dozens of eShopping sites, and ATM and credit cards that gave out cash. In a panic, Rett used her master setup privileges to limit Trish’s activity to sending and receiving mail. But that wouldn’t stop Trish from accessing the Web through the nearest Internet cafe or a 50-hours free access CD-ROM.

She started clicking through Web pages to change access passwords. When she got to the checking account page, she saw that a thousand dollars, the daily maximum, had been withdrawn that day. She clicked to a credit card interim statement site — a cash advance had been made that day for another two thousand dollars. Shit.

Frantically, she dug through the credit card file folders until she found the company they paid to keep track of all the cards and insure against theft. When Trish’s wallet had been stolen it had saved them a small fortune and a tremendous amount of time. One phone call and all the credit accounts were closed with new cards to be reissued in her name only.

It was almost midnight before she finished faxing letters to all the various brokerage houses and mutual funds to rescind Trish’s access. Trish would certainly still be up at this hour, and Rett realized that at midnight she would be able to withdraw another thousand from the checking account using the ATM card. She didn’t know what kind of treatment she would get from the big bank — she had started out with a small local that had been bought up several times since. But someone answered the 800 help number.

“I need to cancel ATM privileges for my account and remove an authorized person from the account records. It’s urgent.”

“I can help you with that,” the soft-spoken man on the end of the line assured her. He asked her a few questions to prove her identity. She could hear tapping in the background as he made a note about removing Trish from the account. “Your ATM cards are now invalid. I’ll put a flag on your account right now for a supervisor’s review of all transactions processed later today — it’s just after midnight now so that an in-person cash withdrawal will be impossible unless it’s you. You need to go into a branch tomorrow, as early as possible, and sign a new account application and signature cards. That’s crucial.”

She promised she would be there in the morning and hung up, feeling a little more secure. She would be able to turn things over to Naomi a little less messed up and with a promise to stay more involved. She shouldn’t be letting someone make so many decisions for her. It was lazy and irresponsible. It was the same as tattooing sucker on her forehead. Until she’d opened the file cabinet she hadn’t known they had accounts at so many different companies. She wasn’t even sure if that was good or bad.

She fished a diet Coke from the back of the refrigerator and took it out onto the small balcony. The night air was refreshing and the never-ending hubbub from the Promenade reminded her she wasn’t alone. During infrequent lulls in both traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway and raucous pedestrians and roller-bladers on Ocean Avenue, she could just make out the quiet brush of surf against sand along Santa Monica Beach. She was okay. She would be okay tomorrow, too. Keep singing that tune, she told herself. You might begin to believe it.

The bank was crowded but otherwise uneventful. She stopped at the market for fresh milk and bagels, then went home to practice.

She preferred to practice in the bedroom. The vaulted ceiling had slightly better acoustics. She found her Casio keyboard under the unwashed laundry Trish had left and played herself a little Mozart fanfare to get going.

She faced the mirror over the dresser and closed her eyes. Feel your feet on the ground, she thought. Feel your feet on the carpet on the ground. Feel your feet in your sandals on the carpet on the ground. Where is your center? Make it quiet… Inhale … expanding ribs and stomach, feeling the muscles around her diaphragm pulling for even more air … Don’t raise your shoulders. Exhale … muscles working reverse, letting the air go as slowly as possible, but all of it go out in the end to make all possible room for fresh. Inhale… exhale.

Just above a whisper she vocalized a round “ah” at middle C and holding, then increased volume to full voice. C became D, whisper to full voice and back again. She worked her lower range first, pushing on the D below middle C to keep it accessible. There were not a lot of women who could hit and hold a note that low. All warmed up, her throat was a musical instrument that ran scales, flipped between upper-and lower-range notes and slid two octaves like butter. It sounded as good at nearly forty as it had at nineteen. Heck, it sounded better.

She forgot all about Trish in the lush beauty of the B-flat that opened a short French art song. Love, flowers, blue skies all ended at that B-flat again. The world was her voice.

She flipped on an accompaniment recorded on a CD and ran through several standards she always had ready: “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Love for Sale,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” “The Air That I Breathe.” She spent another half hour trying out a new song, “When She Believed in Me,” for the jazz festival where she would perform with David Benoit. It would be great exposure, and she owed the gig to Naomi’s perseverance with the recording label that represented Benoit. It was possible the live gig would lead to another recording chance, even if it was on someone else’s project. The song originally had been written for and recorded by Kenny Loggins, but she pushed the memory of his voice out of her ear and found her own inflections.

 Singing jazz for a week in New York had made her lax with her phrasing. It always did. Phrasing mattered less with jazz, where the rhythm and harmonies were what the other musicians counted on. She made her vocal muscles remember better habits by running thrbugh some lengthy pieces, including Sting’s “Fields of Gold” and Loreena McKennitt’s “Lady of Shalott.” They both required concentration on phrasing and memory. When she finished she felt back to normal. Her voice was still her rock. Nothing could bother her now.

Fuck you, Trish.

Replenished with a bottle of water and a bagel slathered with cream cheese, she headed for the office and discovered a series of faxes waiting — various waivers and forms to close or restrict accounts. She also discovered an e-mail from Trish saying that closing off her access to the checking account had been breach of contract since fees were due her for work Rett had performed.

Rett sent back a short missive. At her earliest convenience, Naomi will account for your unpaid percentage from which she’ll deduct the funds and cash advances you withdrew yesterday. Please keep her informed as to your location since this e-mail address will go away tomorrow. She didn’t add that the credit cards were all canceled. Let Trish find that out for herself, and please, Goddess of Retribution on Faithless Lovers, let it be in the most embarrassing setting possible.

The thought of credit card bills made her realize the mail was due. She found Mrs. Bernstein in the lobby trying to ferry her groceries from the parking garage to the elevator. Mrs. Bernstein wouldn’t admit to being a day over seventy, but Rett suspected eighty was closer to the truth.

“I’ll carry those if you’ll get the mail,” Rett bargained. Mrs. Bernstein treasured her independence.

“I must admit they seem uncommonly heavy today. Thank you, dear.” Once Rett had taken the bags, Mrs. Bernstein removed her gloves and tucked them into the matching leather bag.

“Of course I might insist on a cup of your coffee.” The delicious Viennese blend would lift her spirits considerably.

“You won’t have to twist my arm. I have some ginger cookies my granddaughter made me if you’re so inclined.”

The elevator chugged its way upward while Mrs. Bernstein talked about the weather and the smog. She would discuss nothing personal until she was inside her four walls, where, as she had once told Rett with a sour glance at her neighbor’s door, she knew no one was listening to her private business.

Once inside Mrs. Bernstein made deliberate haste to the kitchen. “I’ll make us both a cup, dear. Here’s your mail. Looks like something nice is right on top. I’ll have nothing but bills.”

The “something nice” was a hand-addressed gray envelope — no doubt an invitation of some sort. There was no return address on the front, so she turned it over.

Time shivered to a halt.

She had not thought about Cinny Keilor consciously for years, although her fantasies had been known to include a lissome blonde with tanned legs and a tight sweater — pink and fluffy. Cinny Keilor.

It was unreasonable that her heart beat faster. She could hear Cinny’s soft soprano in her head, singing one of the ditzy high school chorus songs they’d learned. Cinny’s voice in her ear, crooning, “Rett, I need you. Rett, I can’t believe you make me feel this way. Rett, I want you to …”

She could almost taste Cinny’s lip gloss and smell the herbal shampoo in her hair. Just the sight of her name and Rett was in the rear seat of Cinny’s brother’s car and Cinny was slowly sliding onto her back.

“Rett, I can’t help it. That feels so good, Rett.” An aching whisper, “Please, Rett, please. Please, Rett, stop. Stop it, Rett!”

Rett snapped out of her reverie when Mrs. Bernstein set down a delicate saucer and cup and a plate of ginger cookies. Cinny Keilor had been good at saying yes and even better at saying no.

“Looks like a party invitation,” Mrs. Bernstein observed. She settled onto the barstool next to Rett and sipped from her steaming cup.

Rett pulled a card and a folded sheet of paper out of the envelope. “Oh my God — my twenty-fifth high school reunion. Unbelievable.”

“Twenty-five years? Did you graduate when you were sixteen or have you been fibbing about your age?” Mrs. Bernstein sounded disapproving, but the faded gray eyes behind the thick lenses twinkled.

Rett set the papers down as if not touching them would help her not remember the silk of Cinny Keilor’s skin. “Actually for me it’s twenty-three years. Our high school was really small the years I was there. There was a lot of talk of closing it and combining it with Greenleaf High, even though they are homecoming rivals. God, I haven’t thought about that in years. Homecoming.”

 Rett caught herself before she said “shit.” Homecoming was not a pleasant memory.

“Anyway,” she continued, “there were less than twenty in my graduating class. So the tradition is to have a reunion every five years and invite everybody who graduated in that five-year range. So it’s exactly twenty-five for some and two years more or less for everyone else. I haven’t gone to any of the earlier ones, though.” Rett inhaled the bracing aroma of the coffee, then delicately sipped. Very nice.

“But you’ll go this time—just think of showing everyone what a success you’ve become.”

Rett started to protest that she was not a big success as success was measured in the music world, but then she realized that she was about as big a success as anyone from Woton, Minnesota, had probably ever been. It was not an unpleasant realization. Trish might call her trash, but in Woton she would be a star. That is, as long as her mother wasn’t around to remind everyone that Rett would never amount to anything.

Mrs. Bernstein asked all about New York and they talked through two cups of the Viennese coffee. She accepted with equanimity Rett’s news that Trish was no longer living with her. All the while Cinny Keilor’s name seemed to glow on the paper in front of Rett and a ludicrous flutter of breathless anxiety flitted in the pit of her stomach.

Mrs. Bernstein settled in front of her favorite soap as Rett went back to her apartment. When she opened the door she remembered that Trish could still get in. There was no sign of her, though. A quick flip through the yellow pages had a locksmith on the way.

She studied the reunion invitation for a long time.

There were a variety of parties and get-togethers over the one-week period preceding the official reunion set for the third Saturday in August. August in Minnesota — the humidity didn’t get any higher and the mosquitoes didn’t get any bigger than August in Minnesota.

Cinny was chairing the reunion committee — that was typical of her. Head cheerleader, organizer of the student prayer group, secretary of the student council… the list went on and on. Cinny had handwritten her name on the back of the envelope as Cinny Keilor, but in the official announcement she was Cinny Keilor-Johnson. So she’d married. That was hardly a surprise.

There was a reservation card included and when Rett unfolded it, she found a note. "
I 
hope you’ll come, Rett. I’d love to see you again. Hugs, Cinny."

It was just an innocent little note, Rett told herself. Cinny would have long forgotten their code. Whenever they’d ended up in each other’s arms Cinny referred to it later as “seeing” each other. Cinny had always initiated their encounters by asking for a hug.

It was easy to slip into memories of Cinny Keilor. One hot, humid summer night she had nibbled Cinny’s neck and nuzzled her earlobe for the first time. Cinny’s breathing was shallow and ragged.

She had whispered, “I want to, Rett. You know I do.”

Rett had been beyond words. Cinny’s top was half-unbuttoned and Cinny was clutching Rett’s mouth against her breast with desperate intent. Rett knew what she wanted. Had known that was she wanted for what seemed like all her life.

“Yes,” Cinny whispered. She gasped when Rett’s tongue found her nipple. “That feels so good when you do it.”

Rett was on the verge of tears. She had no words, just pent-up need. She wanted to be inside Cinny, to be everything to her. Her hand was sliding down the tight front of Cinny’s jeans. Cinny had never let her get so far before. Instead of nuzzling through her shirt and bra, her mouth was exploring Cinny’s breasts. Her searching fingertips found silky hair and Cinny let out a hard groan. She was arching, trying to give Rett more room for her hand.