Dead to Me (32 page)

She hadn’t put that phone number in her shoe because she’d expected to end up in a coma. She’d expected to save Gabrielle or die trying.

Either way, she had never intended to see me again.

If Annie had known me at all, maybe what I did wouldn’t have surprised her. But of course she didn’t. She knew a twelve-year-old kid who loved puzzles and followed her big sister
around like a devoted puppy. And yet, how could she not know me? How could she expect to find me just the way she’d left me?

“I’m sorry, Alice. I’m so sorry,” she said.

Sorry you stayed away
, I wondered,
or sorry you came back?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to dwell long on that question, because at that moment, my new friend Amos Carey from the
Los Angeles Herald
burst into the room.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said to me, before turning around and registering the battered girl and the silence that hung in the air heavy as summer smog and
twice as combustible. “Sorry if I’m interrupting something.”

“Not at all,” Cassie said. I think we were all grateful for an interruption right about then.

“I just got back from downtown. The evening editions are out, and Conrad’s picture is on the cover of every one. The police are going to arrest him any minute now. I thought you all
might want to be there to see it.”

O
ver the years, I’d thought a lot about what it would be like to talk to my sister again. In my imagination, I would go to visit her in a
cute stucco cottage in the Valley. We would make lemonade from lemons that grew in her yard and have a merry conversation that sparkled like sunshine on glass, and at the end of it, she’d
invite me to come live with her. I knew it was a fantasy, but I’d never guessed it would be quite so far from the reality.

The room emptied out. Cassie went with Amos Carey when he left to take up his post outside Conrad’s room. My mother excused herself to call our family’s attorney. Amos had filled her
ear with the kinds of stories my father was telling down at the Hollywood precinct, and by the time he was done, her face had turned chalk white.

“He’s trying to do the right thing,” she said, apologizing on behalf of her unhinged spouse. “If only he’d thought to try that a few years sooner.”

I didn’t see Jerry leave. One minute he was there, wordlessly absorbing Annie’s anger and disappointment, and then he wasn’t.

And then, it was just Annie and me. I was still sitting on the corner of her bed. I didn’t feel like I belonged there, but I couldn’t bear to leave, either.

“Conrad didn’t…hurt you, did he?” she asked.

I gestured to my face. “You mean besides this?”

Annie frowned. “You know exactly what I mean.”

Of course I knew. I looked away, ashamed at having been flippant about something so awful.

“No,” I said.

Annie fell back against her pillow and let out a long sigh, as though asking had sapped the rest of her energy.

“I know about Conrad, what he did to you….” I said, still unable to meet her eyes.

Annie cut me off with a wave of her hand. “I wish you didn’t. It was a long time ago, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Damn it, Alice, none of this is your fault. Stop apologizing.”

I flinched at her words and clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from apologizing yet again. For a while, we sat, me staring at my hands, her out the window.

Finally, she said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that I never wanted you to know. Some people, once they find out, that’s the only thing about me they can see. Some just want the
details. They want to know all about how it happened. And then my favorites are the ones who want to know what I did to deserve it.”

“But it wasn’t your fault,” I said.

“That thought helps far less than you’d think,” she said.

“It’s not the only thing about you I see,” I said.

Annie smiled. “That helps a little bit more.”

She closed her eyes, and for a minute or two, I thought she’d fallen asleep. But then she opened them again and murmured, “How was Gabrielle? Was she okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see her after she talked to the police.”

“You mean after they took her.”

“I was asleep.”

She touched my hand and said, “I know it’s not your fault, Alice.”

Since she’d woken up, she’d asked about Gabrielle three times, and she and I hadn’t even said hello. Maybe she sensed what I was thinking because she cocked her head to the
side and studied my face for almost a full minute.

“It’s strange,” she said. “You’re all grown up now. Just like I remember you, only…”

I wondered what word she was searching for. There were so many ways I wasn’t the girl she knew four years ago. Four years ago, I ran everywhere I went because I was always excited to get
there. I had been known to wear jumpers and shirts with puffy cap sleeves, often at the same time. I smiled more then.

“Older,” she said at last.

“Older?” I repeated, certain it would have been something more. Or at least something else.

“Well, you are. You’re old.”

“You’re older,” I shot back like I was twelve again. “You’re an
adult
.”

“I’m not even twenty yet. I’m a baby.”

She gave me a little grin and tapped the end of my nose with her fingertip, a gesture I would have found annoying coming from anyone else.

“So, the way I hear it, my clever little sis figured everything out. Found the girl. Found enough evidence to put Conrad and Rex away for a long time. Is that about right?”

“It was Jerry,” I said. “Until he showed up at County Hospital to see you, I didn’t know what to do.”

“But he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without you,” she said.

I should have felt proud, but instead, I thought I might cry. I knew I wasn’t clever. Annie had to know it, too. She knew what had happened. I’d bungled so much, made so many bad
decisions.

“I missed you, you know,” Annie said. “I thought about you all the time.”

I smiled, but a small, poisonous thought bloomed in my head. I could have crushed it, but instead, I gave it room to spread its roots. And when I should have said,
I missed you, too
,
instead I said: “You promised you’d write to me.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

Her voice sounded distant, distracted, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I couldn’t tell whether she was sorry, or annoyed that I’d even bring it up after all this
time.

“I meant to,” she said.

“Then why didn’t you?” I asked. I hated the way the words sounded in my ears—petty, bitter, and accusing. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. You
were just gone. You left me.”

Annie let out a long sigh and turned her face away from mine.

“This was never about you, Alice.”

She said it as kindly as you could say something like that. I could tell she tried to make her voice gentle, but her words still cut me because I knew they were true. Terrible things had
happened, and because of them, my big sister disappeared. That she could have been more careful with my heart and her promises was the least important thing about it.

“And I really did think about writing to you,” Annie said, staring out the hospital window, “but something always stopped me. Then so much time had passed. I didn’t know
if you hated me, or whether you even cared if I wrote to you at all. It was easier to think that you’d moved on with your life.”

“But I didn’t,” I said, the tears finally starting to flow down my cheeks. “I was always waiting for you.”

As she watched me cry, Annie drew in a jagged breath and held it. She started to look away, but then caught herself and lifted her head so her stricken eyes met mine. Though it must have hurt
her to do it, she put her arms around me and pulled me close to her.

“Then that makes me impossibly sad.”

Just then, Jerry came back in, two reporters trailing behind him. I wiped my eyes as Annie let go of me.

“I’m sure you don’t want to be bothered right now, but these
gentlemen
wouldn’t stop following me.”

The so-called gentlemen in question didn’t give us a chance to answer.

“So, girls, you claim that Conrad Donahue did this to you?” one of them asked. He wore a
Los Angeles Times
badge and a brown jacket that was speckled like a chicken egg.

“Yes, he did,” Annie said, and I nodded in accord.

“Let’s get a picture,” said the other man. “You two squeeze in together there.”

He took me by the shoulders and squared them up, folded my hands into Annie’s, and posed us there together, the devoted, damaged sisters.

“Can you try to look a little bit more…pitiful?” the photographer asked.

When Annie looked at me, I knew what she was thinking. We were the Gates sisters, crusading angels of the Allied forces. No one was going to pity us when they saw our picture in the
Los
Angeles Times
. We put on our glamorous, elusive, uncrackable faces, but in the picture that ran in the paper, the one that I will never, ever cut out and glue into a scrapbook, we don’t
look pitiful or brave.

We look impossibly sad.

R
ight behind the reporters came Cy.

He hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek, but it was clear who he was really, finally here to see.

Annie clapped her hands over her mouth when he came through the door, and Cy threw his arms open wide and ran to her. He’d brought flowers. He hugged her gently and kissed her on her good
cheek, and together they rehashed every terrible thing that had happened over the past week like it was a funny story.

“It took me forever to get up here,” he said. “Once they found out we were friends, all the reporters wanted to get a picture of me for their stories. Do you think the casting
people at Paramount read the crime section?”

“I’m sure you’ll look devastatingly handsome,” Annie said. “And you’ll be called in for screen tests at every studio in town, but you’ll just say,
‘Oh, I fight crime. Motion pictures are so
beneath me
.’”

As they laughed together, I sat off to the side, eavesdropping and feeling jealous. Why could she talk like that with someone like Cy but not with me? Why couldn’t it be easy between us
like it was with them?

Down the hallway came the sounds of a parade, shouts and cheers and a phalanx of heavy footsteps. Cy and I stuck our heads out to investigate and saw the police officers and reporters winding up
the stairwell to Conrad’s floor.

“It’s showtime,” said Cy, rubbing his hands together. “Do you want to come, Annie? I’m sure I could find a wheelchair for you.”

“I think I’ll pass,” Annie said.

“Alice?”

I understood why Annie might not want to be there, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. As we walked down the hall, I wished that everyone could have been there. Millie. Gabrielle.
Ruth. And, of course, Irma. Conrad Donahue and the girls who brought him to justice.

No, not girls.

When Cy saw the reporters standing up ahead, he threw back his shoulders and lifted his chin. Another small, spiteful thought entered my mind.
You never came to see Annie once until the
reporters showed up.

I chastised myself for the thought. Cy wasn’t a high school sophomore on summer break. He had to work to support himself, and he’d come to see Annie as soon as he could. The
reporters and the pictures had nothing to do with it.

Then I remembered something Ruth had said the night before at the Stratford Arms.

“What was she even doing there that night? She was supposed to be here.”

At the time, I’d thought she was talking about Gabrielle, but she was talking about Annie. Annie, who was never supposed to have been in the park at all. Ruth hadn’t betrayed my
sister. She and Jerry had been waiting at the Stratford Arms for her to show up with Gabrielle.

Someone else told Annie to go to MacArthur Park.

Someone else sent her into Conrad and Rex’s ambush.

And there was only one person it could have been.

Amos Carey made sure Cy, Cassie, and me had an excellent view of Conrad’s hospital bed when they lifted him up and put the cuffs on him. One officer told us to step away,
that there was nothing to see here.