After Her (30 page)

“I've imagined this moment for years,” she said. “I knew I had to talk to you. I've just been so afraid that once I did, you might turn me away.”

I gave her my standard speech then. I felt sympathy for unpublished writers trying to get their work considered. But if I started reading all the manuscripts that people sent me—people looking for advice and assistance—I'd never get any of my own work done.

“There are classes,” I said. “And workshops. Writers' conferences.”

She looked at me a little blankly. “Workshops?”

“You brought a manuscript for me to look at in that bag, right?” I asked her. “A novel?”

Not a novel, she said.

“Shoelaces.”

T
HE STORY STARTED WITH HER
mother. Whose name was Margaret Ann. Her father was my father.

She was four years old when my father died, she told me. Old enough to remember him, though not well. Most of what she knew about my father (“our father,” she said) she knew from her mother.

He was married when he and Margaret Ann met. He was one of those men, of course, that women love—a man who loved women. The problem was he loved all of them. Too many, anyway. It had taken Margaret Ann a long time to believe that with her it would be different, but finally he convinced her. This was the big love for both of them.

They were going to get married. He was going to tell Patty and me. They were going to make a life together, buy a house maybe. Have a baby.

First he brought us over to her apartment, just so we'd know who he was talking about later, when he sat us down and explained.

Only that never happened, and I knew why.

Never get over it. Never speak to you again
. The words a nine-year-old left on the answering machine of a father she doesn't want to share with anyone. And as brave as my father had been in the line of duty, evidently the idea that what I said that day might be true had terrified him. He had told Margaret Ann he could never marry her, never have another child who might leave the two he adored feeling supplanted.

She broke it off. A dozen times, easily. Weeks would go by, and sometimes months, in which they didn't see each other or speak. Then he'd show up at her apartment and it would start again.

Then she got pregnant.

Some men who already had two daughters would long for a son. But when Margaret Ann gave birth (an event our father had failed to be present for, on account of the broken arm Patty had sustained when she rode a skateboard—for the first time—straight down a steep hill), our father had only said, “Another daughter! Just what I hoped for.”

T
HEY NEVER MARRIED.
N
EVER LIVED
together, even. (Margaret Ann believed in marriage. “I'd marry you tomorrow, Tony,” she told him. “But I won't shack up.”)

So he dropped by when he could, to read to Gina or to bring her a present. Once, when she was in a play at nursery school, he came to watch. She still remembered that because she'd wanted her teacher to meet him. See, she had a father after all. The handsomest of them all.

But it was never what you could call a regular family life, or anything close. He came over for dinner on Tuesday nights, and Sunday mornings he'd make them pancakes. (“Looking back now, I think he must've come over late on Saturday and spent the night,” she told me. “But I never saw him walk out of my mother's bedroom.”)

Then came the Sunset Strangler, and even those times—brief as they were—could no longer be counted on. He worked all the time. Then he got sick. Then he was dying.

“He told my mother he didn't want us to see him like that,” she said.

He came to say good-bye. Not that he said that's what it was, but as young as Gina had been at the time, she remembered the look of the two of them, and she felt it. She saw the way her mother hugged him in the doorway, and her face after.

He had told Margaret Ann there'd be no funeral. If there were a funeral, she should be there, and if she were there with Gina, what would that have done to Patty and me? What would it have done to Margaret Ann and Gina, to sit there like two casual acquaintances?

Mostly, hearing this, I just sat there. If there was one thing I had known for certain my whole life, it was that however many women might love our father, and however many he might love, we were always his favorites. The best thing he'd ever done. His only girls.

Only we weren't.

You had to ask yourself what else that you always believed might also not be true.

I studied Gina's face. She looked like her mother, and in fact, I realized, she must be around the age that her mother had been back when we'd met Margaret Ann that first time, and she gave us the Kool-Aid with the special straws, and let us choose our dolls. When she sewed us those dresses.

But she looked like my father too, I realized. And it was that fact—the knowledge that she shared his hands, his hair, his eyelashes—that made me angry suddenly. The fact that she was here, and Patty wasn't. It wasn't Gina's fault, but I hated her.

Neither of us said anything then. The waiter who had brought our wine came by to see if either of us wanted another glass. I shook my head. The thought came to me: it would have been easier in some ways if the person I'd met in this restaurant had been the Sunset Strangler instead of this beautiful young woman whose face, I now realized, resembled no one's more than my own.

“In all these years, why did you never contact me?” I asked her.

“I was afraid,” she said. “I always wanted to meet you and your sister, but I decided it was better not knowing you than risking that you'd turn me away.”

“So why did you come here today?”

“I read your book. I've read all your books, but this one was different. After I read it, I knew there was something I had to give you.”

Here she paused. I prompted her to continue. “Yes . . . ?”

“My father . . . our father . . . didn't keep much stuff at our apartment,” she said. “There was a bathrobe he always wore, that my mother gave him, and a razor. A pair of shoes he used to put on when they danced.”

But there'd been a box, she told me. After he died, her mother took it out. Only a few things in it. A ring that had belonged to his mother, with a note leaving it to Margaret Ann. A letter for Gina, with some advice about boyfriends. To be read when she reached age thirteen.

“If he doesn't treat you like a queen . . .” I said. I'd heard that too.

There was a pair of haircutting scissors, she told me. He used to cut her hair with them. Hers and her mother's. Also a notebook.

“I think my mother sent you that, a year or two back,” Gina told me. “His notes from the Sunset Strangler case.”

T
HERE WAS ONE MORE THING
in the box that had never made any sense to her. Until now. It was a plastic bag containing a bunch of shoelaces, all carefully tied into loops.

She reached into her purse and placed it on the table.

“After I read your book, I understood what they meant,” she told me.

I studied the laces. I could still see the wall of my father's office, with the pictures of the murdered girls tacked onto it. I could see the chubby fingers from my visions, as they worked the laces free from the dead girls' shoes.

I imagined my father walking into the office of the man who replaced him, with that bag of shoelaces in his hand, to turn in as evidence. And later, walking out again—the early signals of the cancer that would kill him already causing him to cough as he made his way down the hall—still holding that bag. Driving to Margaret Ann's house. Placing the shoelaces in the box. What more could he do now?

I
HADN'T ASKED
G
INA ANYTHING
about her life, but I did now.

She was thirty-three years old. She wasn't married, and she had no children. She lived in the city. North Beach.

“I might as well tell you I'm a cop,” she said. “Homicide, like our father.”

I asked her if she'd tried to show the laces to anyone in the police force. Reopen the case.

She shook her head. “We're talking about a cold case, with a rock-solid confession,” she said. “Nobody wants to hear about it.”

“And what am I supposed to do with them?” I asked her.

“Know he believed you, I guess. Know you were right.”

T
HIS WAS THE MOMENT
I
might have reached across the table. I could have put my arms around her. Taken her hand, at least. I could have told her that I'd been waiting thirty years for this moment. I might have said thank you.

“Did you know about my sister and me when you were growing up?” I asked her. “Did my father tell you?”

She shook her head. “But when I was older, my mother did.”

So she had known what we had not.

“I used to envy you and Patty,” she said. The mention of my sister's name, coming from Gina, felt like a stab. Patty was
my
sister, not hers.

“Envy us?”

“Because you had each other. And because you got to know our father. I barely had a chance.”

We hadn't got enough of him either. More than she did. But not nearly enough.

“You know my favorite memory?” she said. “It seems so crazy I have a hard time believing it was real. Only I think it was.”

I looked at her hard. She was giving me something precious now.

“We were sitting on the couch together,” she said. “I couldn't have been much older than three, and he was stroking my head. Then all of a sudden, he did the strangest thing. He pulled out a piece of my hair. It didn't hurt so much as take me by surprise. Then he started twirling it between his fingers—”

“The spider,” I said. “I know.”

“It was real, then,” she said. “I never knew for sure. I've sometimes thought I must have dreamed that up.”

I shook my head.

“I love it that we get to share him,” she said, reaching her hand across the table.

I didn't take it.

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “But I don't want to know you. It's not your fault, but I had a sister, and you're not her.”

“I know,” she said. Quieter now.

“I only had one sister. Nobody could ever replace her.”

“I wouldn't ever think—” she started.

“I have to go now,” I told her. “I'm giving a reading tonight.”

I picked up the bag with the shoelaces then, and I left her. I hoped that I would never lay eyes on that woman again.

 

Chapter Thirty-six

I
doubt anyone observing my performance on the stage at the Herbst Theater that night—hearing me read from
Man on the Mountain
or afterward, listening as I answered questions from the audience—would have guessed that anything particularly unusual or upsetting had taken place in my life a couple of hours earlier. (Or that I had a revolver in my pocketbook and a bag with shoelaces taken from the shoes of the fifteen women murdered by the Sunset Strangler. Or that the person who had presented these shoelaces to me just hours before—sixteen pairs, it turned out, when I counted them later—had been a sister whose existence had been unknown to me until that moment.)

Maybe I sounded a little distracted or cut things off a little earlier than I might have otherwise—but I have given a few hundred readings and book talks over the years. If there is one thing I know how to do at this point, besides write the books, it's how to sell them.

After my talk was finished, there had been the usual book signing. This one went on nearly an hour, due to the length of the line and the number of people in it who wanted to talk with me.

“Is it true you found the shoelaces in the truck?” another woman asked me. “And you keep them with you like the woman in the book?”

A writer takes certain liberties with a story, I told her. This is a work of fiction, don't forget.

It was nine thirty by the time I left the theater, and the streets of San Francisco were mostly quiet. As I made my way across Van Ness to the Civic Center underground parking lot where I'd left the rental car, I was thinking about how good it would be to open the bottle of wine back in my room and sit out on my balcony, looking over the mountain, see the stars. I was thinking about my visit from Gina, of course, and the haircutting scissors, and the spider. Most of all I was thinking about the resolution, at last, of my long quest for the shoelaces, and feeling guilty for my unkindness to the woman who had brought them to me. I had blamed her for something that was not her fault: the simple fact that she'd been born, and that my father must surely have loved her.

More than most nights, I wanted to call Robert.

I
WAS THINKING ABOUT ALL
this as I put my credit card in the machine and paid the parking fee, and I was still thinking about it as I stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the lowest level of the garage. It was easy enough to spot my rental car when the doors opened. Mine was practically the only vehicle left at that hour.

It was almost silent in the garage, except for the faint humming sound of the fluorescent lights and the click of my heels on the cement floor. Somewhere, a floor or two above, an engine started. Otherwise, empty space. Dead air.

I had my key in the lock when I felt the presence of somebody else behind me—felt him before I saw him, before he spoke. I turned, suddenly alert, and saw a dark form in a Giants cap emerge from behind a cement column, coming my way. He moved slowly, with the wheezing breath of a man no longer young, and in poor health.

“Hey, wench. I think you're giving me a ride.”

No time to do anything. He had a gun.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said. “That I was never the gun type, and you're right. I just wasn't sure my usual methods would work . . . in this environment.”

I swallowed hard and opened my mouth as if to speak.

“Make a sound and I pull the trigger,” he said. “But I'd rather take a spin with you.”

H
E WANTED ME IN THE
driver's seat. He got in next to me. Gun barrel pressed against my rib cage.

As instructed, I put the car in gear and guided it up the ramp to the exit booth. I was looking for my moment—another driver maybe, an attendant. Someone to whom I might give a signal. But the garage was empty. I rolled down the window, put my ticket in the slot, and pulled out onto the street.

Now there were other cars, and people. But also that gun.

“One move,” he said, “and you're visiting your daddy in heaven. You know I can do it too. You know what I've done.”

A
S A YOUNG GIRL GROWING
up on the other side of the bridge, I had always dreamed of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge at night. Now I was doing it, with the San Francisco skyline stretched out like a string of lights in my rearview mirror, and the familiar dark silhouette of Mount Tamalpais looming ahead of me. Even though we were headed in the no-toll direction, the man in the seat beside me evidently felt moved to make an observation.

“That guy who said he killed those girls,” he said. “Big faker. I read where he used to work in one of these booths. I'm guessing the pussy never did anyone in. Didn't look the type. A random crazy, that's all.”

For a few minutes, I just drove. I was searching for the moment I might try something. Crash into a guardrail maybe. Lean on the horn. It would not be hard to attract notice here. Just not enough time to get something solid between me and the bullet.

“I read that book you wrote, you know,” he said. “They were talking about it on the radio. Went to a bookstore. Paid twenty-five bucks for the damn thing. Now,
that's
what I call a crime.”

He laughed, though the sound that came out of him was more wheeze than chuckle, and it made his whole body shake a little. The gun barrel trembled against the fabric of my blouse.

“Of course, if you'd've interviewed me first, before you wrote it, I could've given you a lot more details,” he said. “You had to be there.”

I couldn't speak. I gripped my hands tight to the wheel and stared straight ahead, though I was thinking about my pocketbook on the floor behind me. With the revolver in it. I summoned an image of my father, at the wheel of the Alfa some Saturday afternoon, taking my sister and me out for tiramisu. My strong, brave father, who made me feel he'd never let a single bad thing happen to me, so long as he lived.

“I used to watch you and your sister, up on the mountain,” he said. “Cute, but not in my sweet spot, if you know what I mean. I like a girl that's a little more mature. Without being over the hill, if you follow me.

“You, for instance. You're holding up okay from the looks of things. But let's face it . . . you've seen better days.”

Think about the gun,
I told myself.
The gun in the purse. Get the purse. The gun.

We drove in silence for a while. The road stretched on ahead of us into the dark. And then he was indicating an exit: Stinson Beach, Muir Woods.

“Turn here,” he said. The road to Tennessee Valley. The trail to the ocean. The bluffs. A single pair of headlights visible behind us, none ahead. Our headlights sliced the darkness.

“You still bleed?” he said.

My mouth opened, but no words came out.

“You bleed?” he said again. “You know. That thing the women do. The curse.”

Just think about the gun,
I told myself
. Just get the gun.

“In case you're thinking that I want to fuck you,” he said (taking another of those gasping breaths), “I don't. You have something I want is all. I know it from that book you wrote.”

Another wheeze.

“My shoelaces. I want them back.”

W
E HAD REACHED THE TRAILHEAD
parking lot.

“Here,” he said.

I turned off the engine.

“Step out of the car,” he said. “But slow. I need to keep my eye on you.”

I opened the driver's-side door and put one foot outside, tentatively, on the ground.

“My
one
eye,” he added, climbing out from his side, the gun trained on my chest the entire time.

He came around the car and stood in front of me. Until now, I hadn't really seen his face. I'd been too shaken in the garage, and all I'd registered was the Giants cap with its brim pulled down low. Then in the car it was just too dark, and I was just too scared, staring at the road. But now he stood before me in the light spilling from the interior of my rental car and I saw it: the one drooping lid, the hollow left eye socket, the place where, thirty years ago, my funny, fearless little sister had pressed the BB gun into his face and fired that single shot.

“Pretty sight?” he said. “We have that bucktooth sister of yours to thank.”

There was no moon that night. But with the car door still open I could make out my purse on the floor behind the driver's seat.

“What is it about the shoelaces anyway?” I said. Terrified as I was, something compelled me to ask. Maybe I'd distract him. Get him to explain it to me. Watch for an opening.

For a long minute, he said nothing. Just breathed, with that heavy, labored sound of a person for whom the simple act of drawing breath has become one of life's many chores.

“Call me sentimental,” he said. “It has to do with my mother.” And here he chuckled slightly, bitterly, to himself, and shook his head a little. “Always has to do with the mother, doesn't it?”

I didn't need to say anything here, and I knew it.
Just let him talk.

“Bitch wasn't what you'd call the Donna Reed type. More of a party girl. I dragged her down. Cramped her style. Or so she said.”

“Dragged her down?” I said, although he hardly needed coaxing.

“When she went out at night, I had the run of the place. I was a kid—got into the food, made a mess. The things all brats do. One time I thought I'd try on her perfume, but I spilled it. She comes home, and I'm stinking of Evening in Paris.”

The beating she gave him that night was rougher than usual. But never mind, he said. He probably deserved it.

“That's when she got her bright idea,” he said.

He had these little boots. Like a man's, only small. He loved those boots. The kind that laced up, like a lumberjack or something.

“Now, before she went out, she'd untie the laces. Then tie them up again, but one to the other. So tight I couldn't walk. Crawl maybe, but even that not so good. And then she'd leave.”

With his laces tied like that, he couldn't get into trouble. Couldn't get into
anything.
Not even the bathroom. Now whenever she got home, there he was. All wet and stinking, and not from perfume.

“Look at you, Kenny,” she'd say. “Soiled yourself again.” Then came another beating. Maybe with her hand. More likely with the curling iron, plugged in.

“I can still see her,” he told me. “Bending over me in her going-out dress, with her titties hanging out. Tying my damn laces.”

I could tell he was in another world now, even though he was talking to me. He still had the gun, and he still had it pointed at me. But there was a faraway quality to his voice, as if he had half forgotten I was standing next to him, and I began to think that maybe soon the moment would come when I could get to my pocketbook and grab the gun.

“Sometimes she'd bring one of them home with her,” he said. “I'd have to lie there on the floor in my piss-soaked trousers and listen to the two of them going at it. Disgusting. Usually they were too drunk to pay me any attention, but one bastard saw me there one time. ‘Fuck this, Eileen,' he says. ‘You got your fucking kid in the room.'

“ ‘Forget it,' she tells him. ‘He's all tied up.' Like it's a fucking joke.”

He lowered his hand, with the gun in it. He seemed to close his one good eye, and he stopped talking for a moment. I wondered if this was the moment, if I should dare to try to open the car door, pull out my bag, rummage inside it for the gun. Suddenly he spoke again, and now his voice was different, as if it came from a whole other place in his diaphragm. His breathing was even shallower than before.

“She was the first,” he said. “I was sixteen. Took me a lot of years, but I took care of that bitch. And now it's your turn, Farrah.”

He reached for me with his free hand, grabbing my arm and spinning me around into a chokehold, the gun now pressed against my throat.

I tried to make out anything in the darkness beyond the car. Earlier I had noticed a pair of headlights behind us as we'd turned onto the Tennessee Valley road, and I had felt the fleeting hope that maybe someone would wonder why a car would be headed toward a hiking trail at this hour of night. But the lights had disappeared. Whoever it was who'd been driving behind us had evidently turned off. I was alone.

“This one would make a good story,” he said. “Too bad you won't be there to write it.” I began to feel light-headed as the killer increased the pressure around my neck.

“But first,” he wheezed into my ear, “you need to tell me where my shoelaces are.”

I tried to talk, but my mouth had gone dry. Maybe I could tell him they were in my purse, and then I could get at my gun, but no, he'd be the one to look. He'd see I had a weapon. I knew what would happen then.

Then I saw it, though he didn't. Coming toward us, on his blind side, I could make out the form of another person moving closer. Much as it had been thirty years before on the mountain, I could see a figure approaching. As the killer could not.