Dear Daughter (2 page)

Noah hadn’t wanted me to feel hemmed in, so he’d found me a suite at one of those executive extended-stay places. Two hundred square feet of beige on beige cluttered up with “modern” furniture and pamphlets that trumpeted the hotel’s amenities. Internet! Cable! Cutlery! It was far and away the nicest place I’d been in years.

(And I hated it. Too much space. Too many windows. Too many pillows. The bathtub was the only place I could sleep, not that I was doing much of that. The close quarters were as comforting as a hug—or maybe I mean a straitjacket.)

I waded through an awkward cluster of knock-off Noguchi side tables and flopped on the couch to catch up on the news. I hadn’t turned off the TV since I’d arrived—at the top of each hour I’d flip to HLN before cycling through MSNBC, CNN, Fox. If I was feeling masochistic I’d hop over to E!. More than a month in, most of the coverage was less investigative than speculative, but it was speculation I was looking for. Nothing kills a well-laid plan like dumb luck. I propped my feet on the coffee table.

It was the middle of the night, and the networks had given up pretending they were interested in anything important; I was the top story. The host had aggressively symmetrical features and a grim expression at odds with her beauty-pageant posture. Despite the frown, her forehead was as smooth as glycerin soap. She was at least two years younger than me.

I rubbed at my brow and thought about Botox.

The woman’s fish mouth was moving. I turned up the volume. “Jane Jenkins, sentenced to life in prison ten years ago for the murder of her mother, was released six weeks ago today, when a judge overturned her conviction and eight others as a result of the ongoing investigation into the deliberate mishandling of evidence by LAPD crime lab technicians from 2001 to 2005. Despite the ruling, the American public is still overwhelmingly convinced of Jenkins’s guilt: A McClure Post/ABC News poll conducted last week shows that 87 percent of respondents ‘strongly believe’ that Jenkins is responsible for her mother’s murder.”

A crocodile Birkin says the other 13 percent “
really
strongly believe” I’m guilty.

“It comes as no surprise, then, that since her release Jenkins has yet to make a public appearance—or even give any indication as to her whereabouts. If Jenkins hopes for a fresh start, however, she may be disappointed: Today crime blogger Trace Kessler, who has been covering the case since 2003, announced a reward of fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the discovery of Jenkins’s location—”

I fished behind the television and pulled the plug, wishing I could do the same for the Internet. I tapped a chewed-up nail against my reflection on the darkened screen.

Trace Kessler. Less a thorn in my side than a noose around my neck. I knew he wouldn’t hesitate for a second if he got the chance to tug that rope tight.

Stop it. Enough stalling.

I went to the kitchenette, where I’d stashed the three-pack of All-Purpose Value Scissors Noah had brought over the last time he’d dropped by the hotel. The scissors were as sharp as a midmorning drunk: When I tested them on the inside of my arm they left nothing more than a dry, piggy-pink line. I caught myself grinding my teeth. I tried to tell myself that Noah likely considered this a compromise. Knowing him, I was lucky he hadn’t stuck me with safety scissors.

When I first told him I wanted to cut my own hair, he went so still even the blue-bruised skin under his eyes seized up, as if I’d expressed an interest in weapons-grade uranium or hybrid zombie honey bees. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said, because at the end of the day Noah Washington was just a big old drama queen.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not asking for a razor blade.”

“You’d never do that. Too obvious.”

“Too forgettable,” I corrected—because at the end of the day I was just a big old drama queen, too.

In one of the kitchenette cabinets I found a coffee mug, which I flipped over so I could sharpen the scissors on the unglazed ring on the bottom, a trick I’d picked up in the prison library’s wildly malapropos outdoor life section. I dragged the blade back and forth across the off-white ceramic and felt my pique subside, gentled by the repetition, the reverberation, by the soft, sweet rasp of the blade.

I took the scissors back to the bathroom, grabbed a hank of hair, and pulled it taut. My hair was finally starting to dry, curling up and frizzing out, something that used to drive my mother crazy. She always tried to get me to wear it up—a ponytail, a bun, a chignon. “You could be so elegant if you just tried,” she said once, in a rare moment of maternal optimism. As I stared at the mirror, my hands swept up the whole mass of my hair and coiled it on top of my head. It made my neck look longer, my jaw sharper, my eyes brighter, and even in the gruesome light of a hotel bathroom, I could see that she’d been right. Maybe I had some pretty left after all.

Fuck it
.
It’s just hair
.

•   •   •

The following Saturday, Noah arrived just before 5:00 in the morning, as promised. He bolted the door behind him before giving me a queer look. “I suppose that’s one way to discourage photographers,” he said.

“Flatterer.”

He thrust a bag of donuts at me. “The best I could do at this ungodly hour.”

I took it reluctantly. I’d been trying to put on as much weight as possible, but I couldn’t exactly run out for a burger and fries, and delivery was out of the question. So I’d been living on supermarket ramen—chicken ramen, creamy chicken ramen, spicy chili chicken ramen—and what I lacked in heft I’d begun to offset with bloat. If I sat very still I imagined I could feel the saline bubbling up under my skin. What I would have given for a nice light salad or an emetic.

Noah watched me force the last donut down, casting a critical eye over my knobby elbows and protruding collarbones. He couldn’t even see the worst of it, the sunken sternum, the knife-blade hipbones. The stuff of physiological liminality, of premature birth and imminent death. And of prison food. “You’re still too thin,” he said.

“You’re still too bossy.”

His gaze darted to the side, a characteristic evasion. I liked to pretend that he did this with all his clients, that he was maintaining a professional distance, making sure he didn’t see the answers to questions he’d never meant to ask. But this was an evasion of its own: It was really me he didn’t want having the answers.

Noah was my seventh lawyer—or maybe the eighth? God, another thing I can’t remember. I know I was represented first by one of my ex-stepfather’s poker-faced lawyers, but he cut me loose when he began to comprehend the extent of the evidence against me. Next was a press-savvy Hollywood lawyer, but I dumped him when I realized he owned candy-striped dress shirts. Then there was a series of increasingly disreputable ambulance chasers, some of whom were after the money I stood to inherit if we managed to sidestep a statute or two, some of whom just wanted the fame.

Noah, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with money or fame or even power—which was, of course, why I wanted him. As my lawyer, I mean.

We’d been together since 2006, which was the year I finally came back to myself enough to care about an appeal. He’s—well—how to describe Noah? Tall, handsome, apologetic. Rumpled brown hair that bleaches blond in the summer. An accent out of a Tennessee Williams play and a genetic inclination for a farmer’s tan. He grew up in some asshole of a town in Mississippi, shit poor and hungry for everything but daddy issues, but his optimism remained improbably intact. I bet he still goes home every year for Thanksgiving thinking that
this
time he’ll finally talk the family into getting over
Brown v. Board of Education
.

I was given Noah’s name by one of the few guards who didn’t have the stomach for what enforced isolation did to those of us in the Secure Housing Unit, and as soon as I earned pencil-and-paper privileges, I began writing him. It took seventeen letters to convince him to come see me, because I knew seeing me was key. If he had assessed my case on its intangible merits—or me on mine—he never would’ve taken me on as a client.

But I had him as soon as he set eyes on me. I wasn’t at my worst, but I was close to it: skin and bones and half catatonic. I didn’t even believe he was really there until twenty minutes into our interview. He was my first visitor in years.

As I’d anticipated, his compassion was as immediate as it was ill considered. There aren’t many upsides to seven weeks in solitary, but inciting humanitarian sympathy sure is one of them.

This is one of the things you need to know about Noah: No matter what you may have heard, he really did want to make a difference, to fight for the huddled masses or whatever (I mean, the guy probably potty trained at a year so he could do his part for the environment). He redeemed me by mere association. The Tourvel to my Valmont. The Hillary to my Bill. The Cindy Lou Who to my Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

If I’d been a better person I would’ve cut him loose years ago.

That morning in the hotel suite Noah looked like he’d been up all night, and he probably had, what with everything I’d asked him to do. His hair had been tugged and tufted, and his usual hangdog look had gone from basset hound to bloodhound. When he sat down opposite me, his eyes flickered shut before he wrenched them open again.

He pulled a bulging folder from the stained and battered briefcase he loved to lug around to offset his good looks.

“Your papers,” he said.

He held on to the folder a second longer than he needed to.

I opened the file. On top was a driver license. I held it up to the light so I could examine the picture. An uneven bowl cut and homely bangs. Discount wire-rimmed glasses that magnified contacts the color of wet cardboard. My hair was the same shade. I looked like the kind of person who doesn’t know what masturbation is.

I had no idea how Noah had managed to get the license made so quickly. He must’ve called in a hell of a favor.

Noah was watching me as he tried to make himself comfortable on a Bauhaus club chair the color of something you’d find in a Dickensian orphanage.

“There’s plenty of room over here on the couch,” I said, still looking at the license.

“That thing’s made of rocks,” he said. “Tell me why I booked this place again?”

“Because this is the first chance you’ve had to spoil me.” I held up the next sheet of paper. “No problem with the name change?”

“No. It’s legit—well, legit enough. You planning to go by Becca or Becky?”

“Call me Becky and I’m telling
People
magazine your favorite book’s
The Fountainhead
.”

If I’d been free to pick any name in the world, I would have gone for something diaphanous and fanciful, like Coralie or Delphine, the kind of name a
grande dame
gives a
petit chien
. Because no one—no one—daydreams about pretty names more than girls called Jane. And with good reason, you know? I mean, even our most illustrious Janes are world-class sticks-in-the-mud. Austen, Eyre, Doe? Spinster, sucker, corpse.
It’s a wonder I managed as well as I did.

(Although at least Jane is reasonably dignified. When I was arrested the tabloids decided to call me
Janie
, and ever since everyone else has followed suit. Like I needed another reason to hate Aerosmith.)

But there was no place for whimsy in my world—not that there ever was—so I picked the kind of name a person could trust . . . and forget immediately thereafter. Rebecca Parker was such a perfect choice, I worried I might forget it too.

Noah cleared his throat. “Still with me?”

I rustled about in the folder, reminding myself to—what did that damn counselor call it again?—stay in the moment. “Social security?” I asked.

“It’s there,” he said. “Took me the better part of the last two weeks, too, most of it in line or on hold. It was a perfect opportunity to think about my illustrious career and wonder where it all went wrong.”

“You should’ve followed my lead,” I said. “Twenty-six, fabulously wealthy, and I never even finished high school.”

“Yeah, you know what my mom says when I talk to her? ‘Noah,’ she says, ‘Why can’t you be more like that nice girl Janie Jenkins?’”

“She’s not the only one.”

It was a tired shtick, but it still made me smile. Noah reached for my hand and managed to glance his fingertips across my knuckles before I pulled away.

“What about the money?” I asked.

After a moment he nudged a manila envelope across the coffee table. I opened it and found records of accounts and transfers and investments—and a roll of bills. The hold on my mother’s estate had been lifted, but for all practical purposes I was a fugitive, and I needed to avoid traceable transactions. Although carrying that much cash was almost as risky.

I began to count out the bills, but when I lost track for the third time I gave up. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes. There was a noise, a low thrum from the other room—I’d left the bathroom fan on. Down the hall, a door slammed.

I started to say I don’t even know what, but Noah leaned forward and cut me off with a look on his face I knew all too well. “Now,” he said, “you’re a grown woman, you can do what you want—”

(Has a sentence starting with “now” ever gone well for the person on the other side?)

I blew out a breath. “You’re seriously going to do this?”

“I just think you need to consider the possibility that you might not be able to disappear.”

“Of course I can. That nice judge said I could.”

“Every single cable news network has been rerunning footage of the trial.”

“Good—then everyone will expect me to look like I used to.”

“Jane, they made a
movie
about you.”

“Even better! Then everyone will expect me to look like what’s-her-face.” I frowned. “How is what’s-her-face, by the way? Still doing that kid from that wizard movie?”

“Can you be serious for a moment?”

“I’ll be
fine
, Noah. I’m not an idiot.”