Dietland (39 page)

Rubí reached into the bag and dropped a few bras into the fire. “So what's the special occasion?” Marlowe asked me. “We don't get to burn underwear and eat curry every night. You're spoiling us.” She handed Huck a pair of lacy pink crotchless panties, which he threw into the drum, giggling with delight.

“My surgery was scheduled for today,” I said, drinking rum and mint from the plastic cup, enjoying the feeling of community. “I wanted to celebrate.”

“I had no idea,” Verena said.

Sana and Rubí put their arms around me, squeezing me between them. “I want you to know she's gone,” I said to Verena. “The thin woman inside me, the perfect woman, my shadow self.”

“Alicia?”

“No, I'm reclaiming her. That perfect woman, that smaller self, was only ever an idea. She didn't really exist, so she doesn't need a name.”
Alicia is me, Alicia is me.

Verena blew me a kiss from across the fire. “Virginia Woolf once wrote that it's more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality,” she said. And so it was, but at last my phantom was gone. I knew my life would never be easy, but this must be what Sana had meant. I had crossed over and would never go back.

I turned my face away from the fire, burying my head in Sana's shoulder, a moment of escape from the heat of the blaze and my emotions. When I looked up again, Verena was standing on the other side of the drum, holding the framed pair of Eulayla's fat jeans. She hit the frame against the metal drum, shattering the glass. With the jeans freed from the frame, she hugged them to her body.

“Verena, what are you doing?” Marlowe asked. She spoke for all of us. The jeans had always been a sacred object, untouchable.

“I've been inspired by Plum,” she said. “This feels right.”

She held the legendary jeans out in front of her, the jeans that had obsessed me as a teenager, the jeans that had launched a million diets. “The New Baptist Plan really worked,” I said, staring at the iconic denim. “I'm completely transformed. You guaranteed it.”

“Born again,” she said.

“No calorie counting and no weighing,” I said.

“No pain, no gain.”

“Results not typical.”

“Feel the burn.” Verena tossed her mother's jeans into the fire.
“Burst!”
she said as they sank into the flames.

 

• • •

Who is Jennifer?

Soledad Ayala was born in Mexico in 1973. When she was eight years old, her family moved to South Dakota for five months, then to Iowa for six months. In each place, the other children made fun of her for being chubby, for having an accent and a weird name:
Soledad.

Dad! Daddy! Soleduddy!

When her family moved to Wyoming and she started another new school, she told the teacher her name wasn't Soledad but Jennifer. The girls named Jennifer whom Soledad had met weren't like her. They were blond or brunette and pretty. They didn't have accents or dark skin. They had nicknames like Jenny or Jenna, names that no one laughed at. Soledad didn't want to be laughed at. She wanted to blend in.

For a few years, every day on the first day of school, the teacher would call out the name Soledad Ayala and Soledad would raise her hand and say, “Everyone calls me Jennifer.” Throughout her elementary school years she was known as Jennifer Ayala. Even her parents called her Jenny, but she knew in her heart she wasn't a real Jennifer; she wasn't like the American girls, she was only an impostor. She liked to think that by calling herself Jennifer, Soledad would disappear, but whenever she looked in the mirror Soledad was still there.

When she and her family settled in California, she started junior high; her guidance counselor, Miss Jimenez, told her that she shouldn't pretend to be someone else. “Soledad is your real name,” she said. “That's what we should call you.” Soledad was unhappy at the thought of giving up Jennifer, but she didn't want to disappoint Miss Jimenez. The nickname faded away, consigned to Soledad's early childhood, but her mother sometimes called her Jenny for fun when they were reminiscing about old times.

“Who's Jenny?” Luz had asked when she was little and first cognizant that her mother had a name and it was Soledad, not Jenny.

“Jenny is a girl I used to be,” Soledad had told her daughter, but that wasn't true. She had never been Jenny; she had only been an impostor.

Soledad had a firm alibi for the night that two of her daughter's rapists, Lamar Wilson and Chris Martinez, disappeared. The police assumed the men had jumped bail, but given the high-profile nature of their crime, a thorough investigation was necessary in order to rule out other possibilities. They began with Soledad, who'd been recorded on CCTV at multiple locations in Santa Mariana on the night in question, including the local shopping mall, where she stayed for several hours, browsing aimlessly and having dinner with friends from church; and the supermarket, where she carefully loaded her cart with a week's worth of food for herself, now that she was alone. For days afterward she was observed in town by neighbors and police, doing nothing out of the ordinary. The police were confident that neither she nor any members of her family had plotted revenge against Wilson and Martinez—Soledad's father and husband were dead, she had no brothers; her sisters, mother, and other relatives were back in Texas. The investigation moved on.

Weeks later, after Wilson and Martinez were dropped into the desert along with the rest of the Dirty Dozen, Soledad cooperated with federal authorities, agreeing to speak at a press conference. FBI agents were impressed with the bereaved mother's courage, but they began to investigate her anyway, lacking confidence in the Santa Mariana police. They soon discovered that Leeta Albridge had been a volunteer at the women's clinic where Soledad had once worked training rape crisis counselors. The FBI knocked on Soledad's door again, to address what couldn't be a coincidence, but there was no answer. A neighbor told them she'd gone to Mexico City to care for a sick aunt.

While Mexican law enforcement officers tried to locate Soledad, FBI agents in Houston visited her mother in the hospital, where the old woman would soon die from pneumonia. In her delirium she was insistent that her daughter was innocent of any wrongdoing and said she wasn't running from the police but had killed herself. “She had a gun,” her mother said, describing the days before Luz's funeral. “She was upset. She was drinking.” Soledad's sisters, who were in the hospital room while their mother was being questioned, pleaded with the agents to leave her alone, but they refused.

“She's a good girl,” Soledad's mother repeated many times through her tears, and then she added: “My Jenny wouldn't do anything wrong.”

Soledad's three sisters rose from their chairs in unison, demanding the interview be terminated, but it was too late. The agents had heard what their mother said.

After her connections to Leeta Albridge and captain Missy Tompkins were uncovered, federal agents interviewed Soledad's other friends and her associates from the army. In the Inwood section of Manhattan, FBI agents searched the apartment of specialist Agnes Szydlowski and her husband. As medics in Afghanistan, Agnes and Soledad had saved each other's lives. Agnes drank coffee and smoked cigarettes at her kitchen table as the agents dusted every surface in her home for fingerprints. “I love Soledad like a sister,” Agnes said, “but you're wasting your time. She's never been in my apartment.”

Investigators later discovered that Agnes and her husband owned a motorcycle, the same make and model as the one witnesses in Times Square described on the night Stella Cross and her husband were murdered.

“That motorcycle was stolen months ago,” Agnes said. She said nothing else until she had a lawyer.

Across the Atlantic, authorities in Scotland began to investigate British Army captain Gwendolen Campbell at the request of the FBI. During Gwendolen's first deployment to Afghanistan, the Taliban shot down a helicopter she was riding in, leaving her blinded in one eye and missing several fingers. Despite her injuries and the deaths of her fellow soldiers, she survived the attack thanks to American medics on the ground—Soledad and Agnes. Rarely did a day pass without Gwendolen thinking of the two women who had saved her life. When she heard the news that Soledad's daughter had died, Gwendolen felt wounded, as if it had happened to her own family. She traveled from her home in Glasgow to California to attend the funeral. After she returned home, her family and friends reported that she fell out of touch, which wasn't in keeping with her normal character. No one had been able to find her.

Investigators searched every residence associated with Captain Gwendolen Campbell in England and Scotland. They received a tip about a Highlands farmhouse not far from the village where the Empire Media CEO's nephew had been found wandering one morning weeks earlier, released by his kidnappers. There was no direct evidence that Gwendolen had been in the farmhouse, and the nephew could not identify her, but there was a knife in the kitchen with traces of blood and blond hairs on it, which were later proven to be a DNA match for the CEO's twin brother. On the bathroom mirror was a message written with red lipstick:
For Jennifer,
with
no regrets.

Gwendolen's passport had recently been logged at the airport in Buenos Aires. Since then there had been no sign of her.

Soledad Ayala (Aliases: Jennifer Ayala, Jenny Ayala) was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, the only woman there, with a promise of a $100,000 reward for information leading to her capture.

In an interview with
The Nola and Nedra Show,
Cheryl Crane-Murphy said, “Before we send a lynch mob after this woman, might I remind everyone that Soledad Ayala earned the Silver Star for bravery in Afghanistan? She was not able to collect her award at the White House
for obvious reasons,
but she still deserves our respect.”

“Might one call her an American hero?” asked Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.

“One might,” said Nola Larson King.

 

• • •

ON FRIDAY, I WAS AWAKENED
by the music:
“.
 . .
your
mama's in the trunk of Daddy's car / no baby, she's not gonna wake up / you see, Mama could never keep that big mouth shut . 
.
 .”

I placed the stacks of cash in white envelopes and stuffed them into a paper bag that Julia could take with her should I decide to give her the money. As I was folding up the bag, my phone rang.

“Change of plans,” Julia said, nearly breathless. “Come to the Beauty Closet right away.”

“Why can't you come here?” I preferred Julia on my turf. Besides, I wasn't allowed back in the Austen Tower.

“I'll explain when you get here. Ask for me at the desk. We have all new security staff, so they won't recognize you. Use a fake name. Hurry.”

I rushed to shower and dress. While lacing up my boots, I heard the doorbell ring. “Bomb threat!” Marlowe shouted from downstairs. I was ready to go. I'd folded the paper bag into a firm rectangular parcel, which I now stuffed under the waistband of my oatmeal skirt, where it stayed pressed against my belly. I put on a loose jacket and draped a scarf around my neck to hide the extra bulk.

“Bomb threat!” Sana yelled, leaving three rapid knocks on my door. A bomb was the least of my worries. I was more concerned about being mugged.

I followed the women out the front door, careful to avoid eye contact with the policewoman who was shepherding us out. If something went wrong, it was possible I wouldn't be returning to Calliope House. I looked at it over my shoulder on my way to Sixth Avenue, its plain brown exterior belying the beating red heart inside.

The other women took their places on the benches, but I hailed a taxi. “Just where do you think you're going, Sugar Plum?” Sana said. “Bomb threats are a group activity.”

“She's abandoning us,” Verena said.

“You're going to miss out on ice cream,” Marlowe added.

I slipped into the back seat of a waiting taxi. “I'm not abandoning you,” I said before closing the door. “I have errands to do and then I'll come home. I promise.” Driving away, I watched them through the back window: Verena and Rubí, Marlowe and Huck, Sana—the usual gang, my friends. For them it was an ordinary day.

In Times Square, crowds on the sidewalks stood still, gazing up at Soledad's face on the jumbo screen, as if toward some celestial event. It was too soon to know whether Jennifer—Soledad's all-American girl who had morphed into something else—was an out-of-control blaze leaving only destruction or a controlled burn intended to purify. I patted my stomach as I weaved through the people, feeling the money under my clothes, as well as my thumping pulse. I entered the Austen Tower and went through the metal detector. I gave the guard a name, not my real name, and waited for Julia. When she arrived, I saw that her façade was already crumbling. A bit of flab hung over the waistband of her pants; her straightened hair was beginning to frizz and coil; her makeup had faded, leaving nothing but a faint outline of her features, her face that of an old china doll that had been bleached in the sun.

She didn't speak until we were in the elevator. “Can you believe they offered to throw me a goodbye party this afternoon?” Julia snorted.

On the outside of the door to the Beauty Closet was a sign that read
INVENTORY IN PROGRESS. ENTRY FORBIDDEN!
Once we were inside, Julia locked the door and disarmed the keypad. The Beauty Closet matched Julia in its disarray. Hundreds of tubes of lipstick and mascara had crashed to the floor, as well as bottles of a perfume called Hussy, which had shattered, leaving liquid and glass everywhere. There was a stench, the sweat of a thousand hussies, which made it painful to breathe.