Follow Her Home (3 page)

“Get your shoes,” I said. She walked to the pile of shoes at the entrance and found her pair. The thousand-dollar Louboutins. I gave myself a mental pat on the back and decided not to mention them to Luke. I strapped my platforms back on and put her keys in my clutch, switching out my own.

We left the Marlowe, and I turned back to look at its dark outline against the ink-blue sky. I smirked. I had entered with Marlowe on my mind and left with a case and a femme fatale wearing four months' rent in accessories.

The night was still pleasant, and muddled stars hung somewhere above us as we stumbled, collectively eight inches taller and several drinks deeper than base level, to my car on Lillian Way. I keyed open the front door of the Volvo 850 and the interior brightened with an air of surprise. “Where's your car?” I asked. She flicked vaguely at a tree. I started to get irritated but noticed the dark outline of a dirty black Jetta parked squarely under the branches. I fished in my purse for her keys, and bingo, a match. Not that the make of her car mattered in the least to solving Luke's mystery, but I thought it might pay to look thorough.

I opened the passenger door of my sedan and let her crawl in before I took the driver's seat and changed into my driving flip-flops. I threw the platforms into the passenger foot well, where they joined my minicloset of accumulated uncomfortable footwear without, apparently, bothering Lori. “Buckle up,” I said. She strapped herself in and let her head roll to a painful eighty degrees against the taut seat belt above her shoulders. She didn't seem primed for conversation.

Now that Iris was on my mind, I saw the resemblance between the two girls. It wasn't a direct likeness as much as it was a common thread. Their features shared a slippery, nymphish quality and their bodies a young litheness, though Iris was several inches taller.

At the very least, Lori and Iris were more likely sisters than Iris and me. Since the beginning of my school days, I had been tall and bony. Until late in high school I wore unstylish glasses and a series of blunt haircuts. Austerity suited me, and it was only after I got into college that I spent time on my appearance at all. Iris was attractive from the minute she emerged from childhood. Before she was old enough to drive, she turned heads just by setting foot inside a grocery store. She had well-defined features that she learned to enhance with makeup, set in a face the size of a fist. She had the long almond eyes that ran in our family, but they carried a look of gentle innocence that differentiated them from mine. Her nose was angular and her small mouth fitted with full, shapely lips. She dressed well—she was proud of her figure.

We grew up in Northridge, hot, quiet, and suburban, with our strict Korean mother. Our father died of liver cancer when I was five and Iris three. We missed him in a way, but by the time we were thinking people, he was little more than a myth. Our mom was an accountant before we were born, and when she was widowed, she went back to her job. She would have stayed at home if it had been an option—she was meticulous about our upbringing and education and resented the job that kept her away.

She nurtured me with a watchful eye. I never touched a video game, and when I graduated from kindergarten, television was out of my life. I never thought to turn on cartoons when she was at work. I was an obedient child. I loved my mother. Though she was sometimes shrill and demanding, she showed love and affection even in her harshest words. I suppose my childhood didn't match the American television ideal, but I was neither bored nor unhappy. I did well in school and earned my mom's praise at every corner.

To fill the hours when I wasn't eating, sleeping, or studying, I read. My mom yelled at me for reading in the dark, and, true to her invectives, my eyes started to go before I turned ten. I was drawn to the stories. They existed outside what I knew, and as a girl from a family of women, I adopted Marlowe. He was quick-witted and masculine, fascinating and foreign, and I took to him right away. After what happened to Iris, the favorite character of my youth became a fixture in my life. I found more than fantasy in the world of noir, and I sank into the scorching bleakness with self-punishing relish.

Iris was just two years my junior, but by the time she was in high school, she had, in a calm way devoid of rebellion, fashioned herself a different upbringing. She didn't care for the piano lessons I had attacked with duty and gusto, and after a few years of lukewarm strokes of the ivory keys, she was allowed to quit. She wasn't a bad student, but she bristled with nerves when our mom mentioned my study habits or my grades. By the time Iris started middle school, our mom learned to respect the differences between her daughters. Where I could be pushed and scolded, Iris would shrivel and question her self-worth. She was a shy, delicate child who cried easily and melted under pressure.

But she wasn't stupid, and she had talents that I lacked, which the traditional bent of our mom's early parenting had neglected to nurture. She had always excelled in art class, but her gift for paint and pencil did not get the same attention as mine for letters and numbers. By high school our mom had become more affirming, and without a finger in her back, Iris bloomed. She developed a fascination with fashion and design, and while an interest in arts was not quite uncommon at our private high school, she was serious. She dressed with maturity and a strange, elusive style that ignored the norms of her classmates. As soon as I got my driver's license, I ferried her to thrift shops and fabric stores. For her fourteenth birthday, our mom gave her a sewing machine. She started to wear makeup and perm and dye her hair, and while she never stopped being quiet, sweet-tempered, self-effacing Iris, she gained a little confidence to go with her burgeoning beauty.

Despite our differences, we were as close as sisters could be. Growing up in a house with no father and a working mother, we had little entertainment outside ourselves. From childhood, we were best friends, and though we had the usual skirmishes, we were, on the whole, inseparable. We shared a bedroom for fifteen years, and we rarely spent less than an hour trading whispers between crawling under our covers and saying good night. She called me
unni,
the Korean word for older sister, though she spoke little Korean.

We both took it hard when I left for Connecticut, but I was thrown into a dormitory and assailed with new situations and eager new faces. It was an adjustment for me, and it took time and effort that I couldn't often spare for missing home. I talked to Iris several times a week, and in the beginning she cried during most of our phone calls. I felt guilty sometimes for the lack of tears on my end, but she knew I missed her—I had never been the expressive sister.

When I went home for Christmas, she was glowing with joy, and as I was happy to be home, I credited our reunion. I wasn't wrong, but I was less than half right.

Over the next few months, we talked once or twice a week. I was, for the first time, excited about a boy, and a lot of our time was devoted to discussing my blossoming relationship with Diego. In retrospect, I should have heard her silence on her love life. I must have presumed it was the result of her steady relationship with her recently acquired first boyfriend. She was a perpetual romantic, prone to crushes and analytical speculation, but she avoided the subject of her love life for months.

In April, my mom asked me if I knew why Iris was depressed. I had never before been blindsided by my sister, and that first conversation with our mom did nothing to change my certainty that everything was okay. I told her she was imagining things, and I didn't dwell on the possibility that Iris had been less than truthful with me.

The next couple weeks tested my capacity for denial. Iris refused to get out of bed or go to school, and in early May I got a phone call.

We had been talking about nothing, about food or school, when she said, in a voice calm as a frozen lake, “I think I'm pregnant.”

I laughed. It was just past dinnertime in L.A. “How much did you eat?”

“I haven't been to the doctor yet, but I took three tests.”

That my sister could be pregnant, and that I could have missed the loss of her virginity—these new facts unlocked a quadrant of the universe that I had never before encountered. I spent a lot of time reading about dramatic events and emotional turmoil, but I had avoided all the heartbreak that inspired the literature, and took a happy, peaceful life as my due.

Sex was not a closed topic between Iris and me. We had spent hours discussing the mechanics and implications, spinning out situations, the who and where and how. I had friends who had lost their virginity in high school, and the concept of sexual purity had never meant much to me. Our mom never talked to us about sex, one way or another, so we built our own understanding.

If Luke thought I would be interested in sniffing out foul play involving another half-grown girl, he wasn't too far off the mark.

*   *   *

I took Sixth past Rimpau, Mansfield, June, McCadden, and Highland and turned onto Citrus. The address belonged to a peach house on a residential strip. It had the feel of a parent's house. Two triplets of stairs led up to the front door, beside which hung the digits 4, 3, and 2 in pebbly iron calligraphy. The rounded butt of a Lexus SUV glinted from its perch on the sharply inclined driveway.

I stopped my car and saw fit to pry. Light filled the front seat, giving the tight quarters the air of an interrogation room. I couldn't be quite as aggressive as Marlowe, but I didn't think Lori would be tough to crack.

“We didn't really get to talk at the party too much. I hear you work for the Big Cook.”

She puckered her lips and rubbed her head against the textured seat belt. “Uh-huh.”

“Since when?”

“Mmm … last year?”

“Were you in school before that?”

She nodded, her cheek cuddling the seat belt.

“So, what, that makes you like twenty-three?”

She nodded again, then shook her head and lifted two fingers in a V. “Two.” That made her four years younger than me. I thought again of Iris.

I was off track and decided to get straight to the point. Given her current state, I doubted that subtlety was necessary. “What do you think of Mr. Cook?”

She closed her eyes with an air of peace. “Funny.”

“Funny?” I tried to picture Mr. Cook cracking a joke and had to laugh. He might have strained a cheek from the effort. I had known the man since the end of high school, when Luke and I started hanging out off campus. When we got around to planning our summers in the spring of freshman year, Mr. Cook offered us easy employment at his firm. He was nice enough, but with all the edge of a Mormon on a Sunday.

“He's awkward. And adorable.”

“Adorable?” I felt something icy spread through me at the word. Maybe Luke was onto something. When Mr. Cook was in the room, I would remember to straighten my back and pull down the hem of my skirt. Not because he was looking, either.

“I think he likes me.”

I tilted back my head and looked down my nose at her. “Really.”

“Don't tell anyone, okay?”

“Who would I tell?” There was at least one obvious answer here, but she didn't quite grasp it. “What makes you think that anyway? The man's married.”

She giggled. “He doesn't want to, you know,
do
me, he just
likes
me.”

“Then how does he like you?”

She mused with a whimpering hum. “I dunno.” She undid her seat belt. It was a messy operation that needed several attempts.

“Are you friends with Diego too?”

“Not really.”

“You know I went to college with him and Luke. He's a good guy.”

She nodded in angles, apparently too drunk to feign interest.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said. She struggled with the door for a couple seconds without looking at her hand before letting herself out.

I got out of the car to walk her to the front door.

“I'm fine,” she said. “Thanks so much though.” She circled her arms around my neck in a high-school-dance hug, her head resting on my shoulder, pelvis a comfortable couple inches removed from my thigh. “Night, Junie. Drive safe.” I grimaced. The only person who called me Junie after the fourth grade was Diego, and the nickname faded out after we broke up. She disengaged herself and I took her palm in mine, pressed her keys into it, and folded her fingers like I was wrapping a gift. I smiled and shrugged, and after reopening her hand to stare at what I'd given her, she did the same. She turned around and tripped up the steps to her front door. She waved, with her head tilted and fingers splayed every which way, and then she let herself in.

I got into my car and brought it back to life. I started to turn into an opposing driveway to go the other way on Citrus, but stopped. Something bothered me about the BMW parked at the curb, sitting quietly in the path of my headlights. The yellow-white beams fell onto the car like a spotlight, and I knew instinctively that something was off. The image before me was like one of those subliminal ads in magazines that makes you look a little bit longer. I steadied my foot on the brake and studied the car under the scrutiny of my headlights. It was a 5 Series, license plate 5PXK766, antenna like a shark fin sticking out of the rear windshield, paint job a hard, glinting Goth-manicure black.

There was the problem. The car was black inside and out. I switched on my high beams. Buckets of white light spilled on the BMW, but its insides remained tarry and inscrutable. I dropped my car into Neutral, rolled down the window, propped my left foot on my right knee, and lit a Lucky Strike. When I'd smoked about half of it, I let it hang from my lips as I texted Luke: “On the job. 5pxk766?” I looked back at the BMW. Nothing new.

I backed my car close to the curb in front of 432, then cut the headlights and killed the engine. The space around me turned milky bright again. I stared at the BMW and wondered if it was any of my business. Luke hadn't mentioned it, and I couldn't think how it would answer any of his questions. I knew Luke would be missing me, and it was time to head back to his party and get properly drunk on this nice Friday night.