You Have Seven Messages (7 page)

A homeless person walks by, having an argument with himself, while a mother pulls her pigtailed daughter out of his way.

“Then what happened?”

“He told me that I had elegant features. Can you imagine? Saying that to your twelve-year-old son’s girlfriend? But something about it was right, like his intentions were innocent. I’ve never felt more alive than at that moment. As it turned out, he was the super for the building that
then housed the Click Agency. He got me a meeting and the rest is history.”

“What happened to the boy?”

Her skin blanches for a second and she frowns.

“Someone at school killed Madge and he never was the same. He ended up going to a special school. I hear he’s a veterinarian now, if you can believe it.”

“With a ferret specialty?”

She gives me a warm look, widening her eyes, and I notice her eyelashes seem to go on for miles.

“You … you’re really beautiful. Hang on. Stay there.”

I get the camera ready and shoot her, from the chin down, sitting on the bench in all black, knobby knees bare between her high socks and short skirt. I click and smile.

Next, I have her walk through the frame several times. I know the camera isn’t advanced enough to capture motion, but it might be an interesting blur. She has on a midnight blue satin jacket and I ask her to swing it around a few times. After I take the rest of the shots in the roll, I pack up the camera and we sit back down.

Daria puts out her hand and says, “That’ll be two thousand dollars, please.”

“How about an ice cream sandwich?”

“That works.”

As we walk toward the group of street vendors and bike cabs, I pull the cuff links out of my pocket and show them to her.

“Ever seen these?”

She looks at them quizzically and says, “No.”

I am not totally convinced by her answer.

“Do you think Benjamin—”

“Where’d you get those?”

“Two different places.”

“Did you steal them?”

“Not exactly.”

We get our ice cream sandwiches and continue walking. I slip the cuff links back into my pocket. “Do you know if Benjamin and my mom ever, you know …”

She laughs. “No, I don’t know.”

“Forget it.”

“Benjamin’s gay, sweetheart.”

“Oh.”
So that rules him out
.

We make it to my stoop and I ask her if she wants to come in.

“No. I’ve got to get home to pack for Paris. I’ve been spending a lot of time there because of my
Elle
contract. But you should come back and visit sometime. I’m across the hall from Benjamin, number four. Bring the photographs. I’m back Thursday.”

“Okay, thanks again … you rock,” I add, immediately regretting it. I watch her walk away and try to picture myself with her gait, her easy stare, her way of pushing herself through the world, as if nothing could stop her.

I gather the film and materials and head down to the basement. Tile tries to follow me but I remind him that there are too many chemicals.

“What, it’s PG-13 down there or something?”

“You could say that, yes. Well, it’s R, but Dad lets me ’cause I know what I’m doing.”

“Who was that lady?”

“A model. Actually, a friend.”

“A friend of Mom’s?”

“No. Don’t you have homework?”

“Yeah, math tables I can do in my sleep. Whose phone is that?”

Oh my god, he’s seen Mom’s phone
.

“It’s my friend’s. She left it.”

“No it’s not, she had an iPhone. I saw it.”

“Tile, it’s my other friend’s.”

“Something’s not adding up,” he says.

I roll my eyes. “Why don’t you go read another one of Dad’s scripts.”

“Okay, but tell me who—”

I shut the door and descend the stairs.

As the pictures develop, I crouch outside the darkroom and realize that though Tile is clueless, he may be right. It’s not adding up. Now that I know the cuff link is not Benjamin’s, it could be anyone’s, and I really need to find out whose. I take out Mom’s phone and hope the next message will shed some light.

Beep
.

Clearly someone called her without knowing it, ’cause it’s a long message of people talking in what seems to be a bar. Clinking glasses, some laughter, and what sounds like stools scraping across a floor. There’s a male voice toward the end. He’s mumbling and shaking a glass of ice. Then another voice that’s amplified by a microphone, greeting the crowd, some applause. It sounds like he says, “Welcome to the Laugh House.”

I save this one, ’cause I may need to hear more. I take the photographs out of the solution and hang them to dry. Back in my room I Google
Laugh House
and nothing in Manhattan comes up. I listen to the message again and try
Laugh Lounge
instead. It shows up on the Lower East Side.

I go back to the basement and look at the pictures.
Obviously, I still need to get the hang of the camera. Everything’s manual, so I was really just guessing. But there are two pictures that stand out: the silhouette of Oliver in his window, and the one of Daria sitting on the bench. Oliver looks like a ghost and Daria looks like someone dangerous. I decide to give Oliver the picture, the first one taken by my camera.

I walk across the street with the photograph turned toward my chest, protecting it from the natural elements. His housekeeper answers again. She doesn’t look as happy this time, so I give her an extra-bright smile. She points upstairs and shakes her head, indicating that Oliver isn’t there. I hand her the photograph.

“Could you give that to him?”

She nods, takes the picture, and shuts the door. I look at Mom’s phone: 3:30. It takes me two trains to find the F, which I take to Second Avenue, near Ludlow. People have this fear of New York being a dangerous city, but I’ve never felt unsafe. Today it’s all hipsters and slackers, smoking and slapping each other on the back, and African nannies with pale babies in designer strollers. Ludlow Street used to be rough, I do know that. My mom told me she once went to an up-and-coming designer’s place on Stanton, to see about doing a Milan show, and heard shots fired next door. But that was twenty years ago, when the KFC had bulletproof glass.

The place looks like it just opened, and there’s a bartender in her thirties, from Korea or maybe Japan. She smiles at me and I smile back, trying to act nonchalant.

“I have a … strange request. I think someone accidentally called me from here and I wondered if you could—”

The phone rings behind the bar and she keeps looking at me as she answers it. I suddenly feel misguided and out of place.
What am I doing here?

She puts down the phone and sighs, walks over to me and waits for me to go on.

“Could you maybe listen to the voice on this message and just tell me if you recognize it?”

“Why don’t you sit,” she says, and starts wiping the counter with a dingy towel. Something in her sees my desperation, even though I’m trying to hide it. She pours me a Sprite.

“Wait a minute,” she says. “How do you know they called from here?”

“A comic gets introduced and says welcome to the Laugh Lounge.”

She looks at me like I’m really clever.

“Okay, give it to me.”

I find the message and hand the phone over. As she listens, I study her face. She smiles a little, and then opens her mouth like she’s going to sing.

“That’s Cole, one of our regulars. You’re right! Go, Nancy Drew.”

“I prefer James Bond, but I’ll take what I can get.”

She gives me back the phone and a look of pleasure falls over her pale, angular face. “You aren’t going to stalk him or anything?”

“No, just boil his bunny.”

She squints and her face becomes something else entirely, a feral cat with wounded eyes. Then she’s instantly back to being pleasant. “Cole … hang on.”

She turns to the cash register and pulls a picture off a bulletin board covered with snapshots of smiling customers. She hands it to me, and I look down at an attractive man my mother’s age having what looks like a scotch at that very bar.

“That’s him,” she says.

I hold this picture close. He looks shiny and clean, blond hair slicked back. When she turns her head, I secretly place it under a bar napkin.

“When does he come in here?”

She looks above my head, toward the light from the street.

“He used to come all the time. The other bartender likes to take snapshots of our biggest customers. But he hasn’t come in a long time, actually. Maybe a year.”

She busies herself behind the bar for a while and I sip my drink. When I get up to leave she shakes my hand, like I’m a full-grown adult. I steal the picture and she pretends not to notice.

Back on the subway I study Cole in the photograph. He has on a black sport coat. He looks eager. I glance up and notice that everyone on the entire subway car is reading, trying to transport themselves away. I pull out Mom’s phone and search through the contacts. Catherine, Cate, Charles … 
Cole
.

It’s lame when you try so hard to get what you want, and then when you get it, you realize you need something else even harder to get. I really don’t want to believe that my mother was cheating, but something is telling me to keep following my instincts. I mean, what if finding her phone was a sign? And speaking of signs, I now know there were others, besides when I found her talking on the phone in the bathtub. It’s like when you love someone so much you are blind to their flaws.

I went to one of her photo shoots once, in the Meatpacking District. I remember she had nothing on, but there were balloons covering her private parts. There was a man in the picture with real snakes around his neck who freaked me out. It was an ad for Diesel jeans that ended up everywhere. There were trailers, and Mom had her own. I was waiting outside with Tile, and through the makeshift window I heard kissing sounds. At the time I just thought it was one of the makeup artists, the gay guys she was always kissing. Now I wonder if it was someone else. But if she was really fooling around, why would she do it with Tile and me so close by?

As I approach my building, I run into my dad on the street. He looks angry.

“Hey, listen. I saw you coming out of the subway. What’s our rule on this?”

I realize I’m still holding the photograph. I try to subtly slip it into my back pocket. I start to stammer a little, until—I swear—Oliver comes out of nowhere, spinning his book bag.

“She was with me,” he says, “and my housekeeper. See?” He points to his housekeeper walking up the steps across the way. I nod my head as if it’s perfectly natural that I’d be traveling on the subway with Oliver and his housekeeper.

“All right, but next time tell me where you’re going. You coming up?”

“In a sec.”

He leaves us there, and Oliver keeps swinging his bag and looking at me.

“Thanks for the picture,” he says. “It’s really macabre.”

“Not really what I was shooting for, but you’re welcome.”

“No, in a good way.”

“Okay.”

He kisses me on the cheek, easy, like he planned it. Then he pushes up the sleeve of my hoodie, writes his phone number on the underside of my forearm, and gently slides my sleeve back down.

“Later, Fifteen.”

I watch him run up his stairs and disappear behind the giant wooden door. Then I roll up my sleeve and make sure it’s still there, that I didn’t dream it.

Tile, Dad, Elise, and I have dinner in the dining room, which we haven’t used since Mom died. It’s something Elise made, and the only way I can describe it is
stew
. Even though I think I like her, it feels weird having her in my house, and the fact that Tile loves the stew is making me burn with anxiety. It’s not about the stew, of course, but about everything I’ve learned over the past week, and the question still swimming in my head. Was my mom having an affair? It sounds corny, but for as long as I can remember, when I picture my parents in memories, they’re smiling. They had their own separate lives, for sure, but when they were together they were happy. The only time I ever sensed something was off was one night when I’d come back from Rachel One’s eleventh birthday party. I heard whimpering, and opened the door to the
powder room to find my mom on the floor, her gown splayed around her like a parachute. She was crying, and when she saw me she didn’t stop, it just got worse. I asked her what was wrong and she kept saying, “I’m fine, Luna, I’m fine.”

I got her into bed and went back downstairs into the kitchen to get some water. My dad was sitting at the table with an empty glass in his hand. He wasn’t crying, but he looked fallen.

“Hey, Moon.”

“Hi. What’s going on?”

He waved his hand. “Minor bumps in the road. Nothing to be startled about.”

“Okay.” As I left, he cleared his throat really loud so I turned around.

“You know that no matter what, your mother and I, we will always love you and Tiley.”

I remember thinking this wasn’t something my father would say. Way too Hallmark Channel. But he meant it, and I told myself it
would
be okay. Now, watching Elise reach for another scoop of her stew, I wonder if it ever was.

All through the next day, my first day back at school, I make sure the number doesn’t fade, protecting it with my long-sleeve sweater. It’s time for
me
to carry a secret.

Between fourth and fifth periods I see the two Rachels
in the bathroom. They’re doing their lipstick and looking totally put-together.

Six months ago I was like one of those people who walk along the side of highways. Lost, and maybe a little crazy. Now I feel on track, but I’m not sure exactly where I’m headed.

The first time I actually cried after Mom’s death was at the end of the reception following the funeral. Most people had gone, but there was a group of women huddled in the den, looking at some magazine that my mother was in. I crept up behind them without them noticing, to get a glimpse of the page they had suddenly stopped at. It was a girl my age, dressed in short shorts and what looked like a high-fashion sports bra.