Good as Gone (6 page)

Downstairs, she breezed past Tom, grabbed her new purse, and yelled, “I’ll be back before dinner,” over her shoulder as the door swung shut behind her. The outside air hit her face like steam off a bowl of soup; sitting in Tom and Anna’s freezing house, you forgot the sweltering heat waiting on the other side of the window. She peeled her cardigan off at the bottom of the driveway and stuffed it into her purse.

At the end of the block, she slipped the phone out of her pocket and turned it on, grateful for her last-minute inspiration to ditch it with her IDs in the front bushes before ringing the doorbell. Losing consciousness had not been part of the plan. Maybe it was the heat and all the walking, but when Jane stepped into the hallway, Julie had thought she was seeing Charlotte’s ghost. The hospital had not been part of the plan either, but at least the doctor had shed light on certain particulars.

Particulars that, of course, Anna now knew too.

No wonder she’d felt so weak. This whole time she’d thought it was love she was fighting against, or tearing herself away from, that feeling of warm belonging that threatened to betray her whenever Cal looked at her. Now she knew the betrayal ran deeper, down into her blood, bones, and tissue. No wonder she’d felt violated. No wonder she’d felt possessed.

It was a lucky thing he never found out what was inside her.

Recovering the phone had been tricky, since they watched her so closely those first few days. But on the third day she’d slipped out for the mail and picked it up on the way back in. Thank God the phone had stayed dry under the awning, and the IDs were all still there, rubber-banded to its back. When she’d powered it up, the screen flashed on, and there was Cal, smiling at her with that infuriating expression of faith and love she’d drunk in so deeply and grown so strong on—strong enough to remember who she really was and why he couldn’t find out. By the time she saw the article in the library that day—Cal had dropped her off there to study the GED books—she was strong enough to tear herself away.

She’d scrubbed everything else off her phone before she was out of Seattle, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to get rid of Cal. She felt as if he were with her still in some indefinable way. When, at the hospital, she’d learned what it was, she’d thought, maybe, somehow, when she was finished here, she could go back.

She knew it was a stupid idea, and her body agreed. It had made the decision for her.

She took one last, long look at the face on the screen, and for a moment she was lying next to him again, her fingers tracing his chest lightly, his fingers twined in her hair, listening as he described his mother’s white face, one eye swollen shut, framed in the rear window of his aunt’s Volkswagen. Sending one last, blank look in the direction of the small black boy crying at the kitchen window before twisting her blond head away and turning her back on him forever.

She got the point, and it wasn’t just that she, too, was a blond. Sometimes people had to leave, she’d thought to herself. She took a deep breath and pressed delete. Then she noticed the new voicemail message. Not recognizing the number, she pushed play and listened but a moment later jerked the phone away from her ear like it had bitten her. How many times would she have to delete him before he was gone? And how many times would it still hurt? She’d never picked up, and she’d stopped listening to the messages after the first few; they all said the same thing. Now he was trying her from different numbers, hoping to catch her off guard. She glanced once more at the unknown number, and then with a jolt recognized the area code: Portland, Oregon. It might be a coincidence, a cell phone borrowed from a friend. But what if he actually had gone to Portland? It might mean he was trying to find her, following her trail, starting with Will. Of course that’s where he would start. He’d always wanted an excuse to confront Will and get her stuff back; he’d said facing the past was important, as if he’d know the first thing about it. He could be finding out, though, right now. And once he started in that direction, how long would it be until he found her?

Looking around at Tom and Anna’s neighborhood, she could barely believe she was here, much less picture Cal turning up. Empty of pedestrians in the heat of the afternoon, the neighborhood had high white curbs but no sidewalks, and she walked in the street, stepping around straggling ropes of soft tar. She passed house after house, all of them huge to her after Cal’s pinched Seattle apartment, their plush lawns trimmed with fat shrubs and clumps of begonias so perfect and motionless in the dead air, they looked like silk flowers. Some of the porches had columns, like plantation houses.

Following the noise of traffic, she stepped out of the subdivision and started walking along a busy thoroughfare. Cars spat hot breath and gravel at her ankles as they raced by. There was no sidewalk here either, no curb even, just a narrow trail worn in the crabgrass near the greasy roadside before it plunged into runoff ditches padded at the bottom with tangled weeds. She walked past a rambling strip mall: Kroger, Qwik Klean, Jenny’s Gifts, the streaky glass box of a Dairy Queen. The only logical destination of this ragged path was the bus stop. She cast a glance toward the kiosk and saw three women waiting for the bus in service uniforms, each with a rolling cart full of bottles. Cleaning ladies. Her back hurt just looking at them.

As she passed a McDonald’s, she saw a long blue awning peeking out from the strip center behind it:
BOBBY’S POOL HALL
, in dingy white block letters. She walked toward it in relief. So there were hiding places here, after all. Although the other stores in the strip center had glass fronts, she noted that Bobby’s windows were covered with weather-beaten plywood and wondered if there was any business in the back. Not that she needed any, she hurriedly told herself; she was going to be here only a few weeks. But it wasn’t a bad idea to find out what was around. Besides, she had money in her wallet, and maybe what she really wanted was to sit for a few hours away from the roadside, drinking away the pain in her gut.

At this time of the afternoon, there were only a few barflies. They sat close to the entrance, talking with a curly-haired woman behind the bar who laughed loudly as she wedged limes on a cutting board. None of them paid any attention to her until she leaned against the bar. Then the bartender stopped laughing abruptly.

“What do you want, honey?” She squinted. “Job? You gotta be eighteen.”

“Corona, please.”

The woman laughed. “You’re going to have to show me some ID, hon.”

Julie dug through her new wallet and pulled out one that said she was twenty-four. Even as she handed it over, she felt a moment of panic. It was a California driver’s license, a real one, the kind you can get in a lot of trouble for stealing.

The bartender gave it a long, hard look, then glanced at her, then back down at the ID. “Mercedes Rodriguez?” she said, drawing out the syllables like it was an impossible name for anyone to have.

“Mercy,” she said automatically. The last time she’d used Mercy, she’d had short brown hair, but it was dark in Bobby’s Pool Hall, and the wide-cheekboned face and blue eyes looked close enough.
Mercy, Mercy,
she told her face,
look like Mercy.

It almost worked. She could feel the woman struggling to care. Then someone called “Bev!” from the end of the bar, and the bartender glanced anxiously over her shoulder, and by the time she looked back at Mercy, she was having none of it. “Sorry, señorita,” she said, all the patience draining from her voice. “You don’t look twenty-four, and it’s an out-of-state ID. I gotta be careful in this neighborhood. For all I know, you wandered over from the high school.” Bev threw the ID down on the counter and hustled off.

This goddamn city.
She wasn’t planning to be here long, but she’d already flashed a fake ID within ten blocks of Tom and Anna’s house and been turned down.
Don’t shit where you eat
meant something different when she was working at the Black Rose, but it applied here too. She grabbed the ID off the counter and shoved it back into her pocket.

Now the two men at the bar were staring at her. One of them said, “Come on, Bev, have a heart!”

The other chimed in, “She’s old enough. I can always tell, like rings on a tree.” He guffawed.

Now she really had to get away. On a sudden instinct, she pulled the phone out and dialed one of the numbers Tom and Anna had made her write down on a scrap of paper and keep in her new wallet.

“Hello?” The voice had the doubtful tone of someone picking up an unknown number.

“Hey, Jane,” she said. “It’s Julie.”

“Where are you? What number is this?”

She looked out the window and saw a sign across the street. “I’m at the Starbucks by our house. I borrowed a phone off someone. Listen, I had to get out of there, Mom and Dad were hovering. Can you pick me up?”

“Are you at the Starbucks on Memorial?”

“Yeah. I have to go, this lady needs her phone back.”

“Just hang on, I’m at a friend’s house. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Jane hung up.

She slammed the bar door behind her as hard as she dared, but it bounced on a cushion of air six inches from the frame and she could still hear the voices inside laughing at her as she hurriedly crossed the street.

Fifteen minutes later, Jane pulled into the Starbucks parking lot in Tom’s SUV, rolled down the window, and said, “Nice shoes.”

“Thanks.” Julie looked down and saw Jane’s Converse on her feet. “I mean, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Despite the dark hair and bangs, Jane didn’t look much like Charlotte at all. Jane was taller, stronger, Julie told herself.

“Mom got me all these flats,” she apologized. “I just wanted something I could walk in.” She pulled the heavy passenger-side door open and climbed in.

“I said it was okay.” Looking closely at Jane’s face, especially when she smiled, Julie could tell she had never been very far from home. College didn’t count, even if it was halfway across the country—it was still closer to home than a single bus ride could take you. If you looked past Jane’s piercings (two: nose and eyebrow), tattoos (two small ones, one on her shoulder and one on her hip, and Anna didn’t know about either), and hair (the bleach-and-green was clearly a home job, but the black dye was from a salon), you saw a girl who’d never had to take the bus all that much.

Julie regretted putting her own hair through this last round of bleach. It had looked smooth enough at first, but now the ends were getting ragged, the part below her shoulders breaking off and poofing out. Worst of all, darker hair was creeping in at her hairline. If she hadn’t needed to look the part so desperately, she could probably have gotten away with dirty blond.

But she hadn’t wanted to be a dirty blond. She’d wanted to be Julie.

Jane clicked her keys against the wheel impatiently. “So where are we going?”

“I want to chop all this off,” Julie said, holding out a handful of split ends.

“Like, right now?”

“Yeah, right now. And dye it, maybe. I figured you’d know a good place for that.”

Jane looked impressed. “I can take you to the place I go. It’s in Montrose. What color are you going to dye it?” She squinted shrewdly. “Better not be black.”

“I don’t know, maybe red,” she said without thinking. At the Rose, she’d always made bank with red hair. Besides, white-blond Julie was starting to get to her. She’d stared at the pictures of the missing girl and at herself in the mirror beforehand, but when she started playing Julie for Anna and Tom and Jane, something shifted. She saw Julie’s innocence in the way all three of them looked at her, and it was unnerving. Anna, in particular, watched her as if she might break.

Jane was already pulling out of the parking lot, her strong jaw set under its sprinkling of covered-up acne, saying, “Cool, let’s get out of here.” If Julie was worried about Anna, she should have started with Jane in the first place. Shutting Anna out was Jane’s superpower.

Tom’s Range Rover was a smooth ride, just more ease and luxury so built into Jane’s existence she didn’t even know it was there. Jane wove in and out of the four-lane traffic on Westheimer as she drove toward the city, the SUV soon dwarfed by hulking black Suburbans with tinted windows, shiny trucks that were all tire and no flatbed, a Hummer that looked like it could transform into a robot. A few lanes away, a silver convertible idled like a half-melted bullet in the sun. The apartments gave way to sparkling-white office buildings set on lots kissed around their edges with manicured shrubs and palm trees. Everything gleamed, even the street signs, which were mounted on giant chrome arcs.

“Can you believe how much the Galleria has changed?”

She caught the small dip in Jane’s voice and immediately felt a prickling on the back of her neck, alerting her to a shared memory she was in no position to ignore.

“Yeah, I know,” she said.

“Do you remember that time Mom dropped us off at the Galleria to do our Christmas shopping?”

“That’s what I was thinking about too.”

“I thought we were so cool,” Jane went on, her eyes on the taillights ahead of them. The traffic light had changed and they were inching sluggishly forward, but they weren’t going to make it past the danger zone on this green. “It felt like we were so grown up. You must have been in, what, sixth or seventh grade? Because—” She broke off. “And I would have been in fourth or fifth. We bought lunch at that one fancy food-court place with the crepes. Do you remember splitting up for an hour to buy each other’s presents? That was my favorite part. We, like, synchronized our watches and met at the bakery afterward.” She laughed. “I even doubled back and hid which direction I was coming from so you wouldn’t guess where I bought your present. I think it was Claire’s or something.”

Jane’s voice tugged at her ear, but Julie was distracted by a boy of around twelve or thirteen in a T-shirt and saggy, wide-legged blue jeans weighed down with a heavy wallet chain who was striding through the still-sidewalk-less guts of the drainage ditch parallel to the road. His tangled hair was long and brown and very deliberately shielding his face as he marched, hands in pockets, visibly sweating. He reached the base of one of the chrome arcs, which proved to be a formidable obstacle at ground level. Trapped between an evergreen shrub and the curved chrome, he hiked up his billowing, half-shredded pants leg with one hand and stepped over it, like a cartoon lady pulling up her skirts to step over a puddle.