Stay With Me (28 page)

Clea hadn’t needed to do that. Brenna’s mother kept her spare key in the same place she always did, the plastic rock in the bed of impatiens on the left side of the front door.
It’s still there, Clea. You could have checked. You didn’t have to break Mom’s window in, it must have made such a sound . . .

Brenna swallowed hard. She thought of her mother’s voice, the sadness in it.
A mother knows . . .
she had said. She stared at the smashed-in window, the cold air rushing in. She felt sorry for her mother, for the first time in a long while.

In Brenna’s line of work, there was an adage—one she felt compelled to bring up to most clients before beginning an investigation: Be careful who you look for.

No one is perfect. Some of us are less perfect than others. Still others are better off as memories than they are in the flesh, and these people are better left unfound. It was a fact of life, but Brenna had never thought it would apply to the one missing person who had filled her thoughts for three decades, the person who had guided her life and her decisions and her mistakes
, my God, so many terrible mistakes . . .

She remembered her phone vibrating and checked her texts. There were two. The most recent, from Sophia’s strange new number . . .

Dropped Maya at her father’s. I am in Dad’s workroom.

Brenna stared at the small screen.
Dropped Maya at her father’s
. She checked the other text, from Faith.

SHE’S HOME!!!!!!!!!!!

Brenna put her head against the steering wheel. She cried until there were no more tears left inside her. She wanted to pull away from the curb and drive to Jim and Faith’s, to throw her arms around Maya and hold her tight enough never to let go. And she would, she knew.

But first she needed to leave her sister behind.

Brenna grabbed the grocery bag full of Clea’s things, slipped the diary out of her purse, and headed around the back of the house, past Neptune, to the locked shed that used to be her father’s workroom.

She looked so different from the way she always did in Brenna’s dreams, where she was always seventeen and always leaving, her blonde hair backlit by the dawn sun. Now, she was an adult, an exhausted-looking one, with dark circles under her eyes and sweat beading on her forehead, on her upper lip, her dyed brown hair wet with it . . .

The eyes, though. She wasn’t wearing the brown contacts she’d had on in the mug shot, and those clear blue eyes, just like Maya’s, those eyes Brenna remembered.

“Clea.”

“Sophia,” she said. “That’s my name. I’ve been Sophia for most of my life.”

Brenna gripped the grocery bag to her chest. “I’ve missed you. You might not know that, but you’ve been on my mind. Ever since you left.”

“Then why didn’t you take my case?”

“I . . . I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know it was you.”

Sophia said, “It’s empty.”

“What?”

“Dad’s workroom. There used to be so much stuff in here. Do you remember?” Brenna looked around the space, which was, yes, completely empty. There was a dull vinyl floor, and cement walls and no boxes, no equipment, not even a rusty chair to sit on. There were dust motes floating in the air, the setting sun catching them, making them sparkle.

Brenna said, “I can sort of remember wood shavings.”

Sophia nodded, a vague smile crossing her face. “Yes,” she said. “He had a circular band saw. He tried to make furniture, but he was really terrible. His chairs always had these huge seats and short legs. His tables were all uneven. He’d show them to Mom, and she’d roll her eyes and he’d take them in here and saw them to bits. The whole place smelled of wood shavings all the time.”

Outside, a car drove by. Brenna heard the roar of it, but she stayed focused on her sister. “Mom never let us in here,” she said.

“I know, but a no from Mom never meant much to me. I used to sneak in here all the time.” She looked at Brenna. “It’s how I found out.”

“Found out what?”

Sophia moved over to the far wall and put her hand against it. Brenna moved closer, and that’s when she saw it—a series of faint brown spots. They could have been dirt, or faded paint, or . . .

“Blood,” Brenna said.

“You can scrub and scrub,” Sophia said. “But the truth always shows itself, doesn’t it, Brenna?”

Brenna turned to her. “Is that why you did it? Dad’s death?”

“I’ve done a lot of things. Which one do you mean?”

“Changed,” Brenna said. “Is that why you changed?”

“Everybody changes, Brenna.”

Brenna dug her fingernails into her palms, the same way she so often did to come back from a memory. “You killed the man you loved.”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“I don’t remember.”

Brenna gaped at her. “
You don’t—
”

“It was thirty years ago, Brenna. I was high. Not everybody remembers everything.”

Brenna closed her eyes for a moment.
Keep calm
.

“I remembered you though,” Sophia said. “All these years . . . All this time I haven’t been myself, I’ve kept up with you.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “News. Internet. I even bought that book the doctor wrote about you. I didn’t want to get too close. Mom made it clear I wasn’t wanted in your lives. I just wanted to know you were okay.”

Brenna stared at her. “Okay?” she said. “You took my daughter.”

“That was after you turned down my case. You have an only child, Brenna. You’re my sister. You’d think you’d know how I felt. You think you—”

“
Why did you take her?
”

Clea looked at her, a sad smile curling her lips. For the briefest moment, she looked so much like Maya . . . “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Brenna closed her eyes. “Jesus,” she said. “I never knew you at all.”

“What’s that?” She gestured to the bag. “Groceries?”

“No. It’s your things.”

She handed her the bag. Sophia looked inside. She put it on the floor. “How did you get this?”

“Like you said. The truth always shows itself.”

Sophia picked the journal out, and as she looked through the pages, Brenna noticed, for the first time, the gun in her hand. She looked up at Brenna, her eyes welling. “These aren’t my things,” she said. “They’re Clea’s.”

“You are Clea. You’re my sister no matter what you do or who you hurt or how much you try to change. No matter how little I know you, you’re my flesh and blood and you always will be.”

“Do you love me?”

Brenna said, “I have no other choice.”

“Do you need me?”

“I am trying not to.”

Sophia threw the journal at Brenna’s head. It clipped her in the side of the face, slamming into the wall behind her. Brenna’s eyelid stung. She wiped it with the back of her hand. When she brought the hand away, she saw fresh blood. She flashed on a memory, a vague, pre-syndrome one—Brenna on her back in the grass, crying. Clea sitting on top of her, her hands working Brenna’s arm, just above the wrist, where the skin is most tender. Brenna remembered the awful sting of it, the tears in her eyes, and Clea laughing. Clea’s voice. “
Indian burn!
” Brenna must have been three years old.

Sophia said, “You want a Kleenex?”

Brenna shook her head.

“I’m a good person, Brenna.” She raised the gun, pointed it at her. “I just need to feel needed. Everybody does.”

Brenna gazed at the gun. She felt three years old again. Helpless. Her gaze went from the barrel to her sister’s eyes, and she remembered Clea standing over her bed as she had at seventeen, Brenna just eleven years old, her eyes fluttering awake. She remembered Clea’s finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Mom,” she had said. And Brenna had promised. She swore she wouldn’t tell. And then Clea had said . . . why was she only remembering this now?

Brenna didn’t care about the gun anymore. She saw only Clea’s clear blue eyes, she saw Clea at seventeen, in love and hopeful and starting her adventure.
You’ll forget me, Brenna. Just wait and see.

“I never forgot you,” Brenna whispered. “I never will.”

A tear slipped down Clea’s cheek. “It’s good to be wrong sometimes.” She placed the barrel of the gun against the side of her own head. The temple. “Tell Maya I didn’t mean to scare her,” she said. And before Brenna could stop her, Clea pulled the trigger.

Epilogue

One month later

Sophia Castillo’s memorial service was held at Temple Beth-El, the same synagogue where both she and Brenna had been bat mitzvahed. Sophia had been cremated, which the synagogue frowned upon, but of course, it also frowned upon suicide and murder, and Sophia had been guilty of both.

In fact, the only reason that the service happened at all was that Evelyn Spector was friendly with the new rabbi, a youngish guy who frequented the library and was a member of the book group she’d recently formed with Ruth.

It was a very private ceremony, as serial killers’ memorial services always were. The funerals of storied detective Diane Plodsky and respected businessman and father-of-three Bradley Lowell had drawn spillover crowds and had made the covers of both the
Post
and the
Daily News
. Even Mark Carver’s service had attracted a respectable group of gawkers. But Sophia’s was cloaked in secrecy and shame.

Brenna was there, with her mother, Nick, and Maya.

No one had wanted Maya to go, but she’d insisted. “She was my aunt,” she said. “She was Mom’s sister.”

“Are you sure?” Brenna had said to her this morning. “It could bring on memories.”

Maya smoothes her short, newly bleached hair as though she is feeling it for the first time. “I can handle memories,” she says.

Now, she was holding Brenna’s hand as the rabbi began speaking about Sophia. She turned and looked at her daughter, both grateful and amazed.

Brenna wasn’t sure if Maya’s ordeal had strengthened her, or if it was preexisting strength that had enabled her to survive it. But either way, it was a part of her now. It was in the protective way she watched Faith and Jim when she thought they weren’t looking. It was in the way she refused to return any of Miles’s calls. It was in the way she squeezed her mother’s hand now, as the rabbi talked about “a mother, sister, daughter, and aunt who, somewhere along the line, lost her way.” It was in the way she whispered to Brenna, “Squeeze my hand back. Sometimes, that helps.”

The rabbi spoke on, Brenna thinking not so much about Clea/Sophia but about life, how it never taught you things gently, how it slapped sense into you instead. Live and learn, sure. But why did both have to be so damn hard?

From now on,
Maya had said on the car ride here,
I’m going to tell you all my secrets
.

Brenna wasn’t holding her to that, though. She wasn’t holding her to anything. Her priority was to love Maya, to support her and help her heal and grow up without anyone or anything intruding—especially the past.

Brenna and Maya were in therapy together, with Lieberman. He’d warned them both not to expect instant results, to take it one day at a time. “You’ve both been through so much,” he had said at their last appointment on February 15,
and as he says it, Brenna sees the sparkling dust motes in her father’s workroom, the slight smile on her sister’s face as she puts the barrel to her head . . .

“It’s okay, Mom,” Maya whispered.

Brenna realized she was crying. That happened to her a lot these days. She’d cry tears and not even know it until someone pointed them out. “She was misguided, yes,” the rabbi was saying. “But she left behind people who loved her very much . . .”

Brenna’s gaze drifted to the door, where a few more people were filtering in: a small group that included Alan Dufresne. Brenna frowned. What was he doing here?

“Oh good,” whispered Brenna’s mother.

“You know him?” Brenna said.

Brenna’s mother gave Alan a slight wave that he returned.

You never fully know anyone
.

The rabbi wrapped up his brief speech. He said the mourner’s kaddish, and Brenna, Nick, Maya, and her mother stood up, bowing their heads. When the service was complete, Brenna excused herself for a moment, headed toward Alan.

“Your mother invited me,” he said.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “She’s a nice woman,” he said. “I’m really sorry for your loss.”

Brenna’s mother started toward them.

Alan said, “Did you ever find out how my father knew your sister?”

Brenna shook her head. From what she and Trent had pieced together with the help of one of Clea’s old friends, a former motel worker named Clint Lamont from Pine City, Utah, Clea had recovered from her OD with a few extra screws loose. She’d headed out of the motel and down the highway in her nightgown, stopping traffic literally.

It had been Clint who had spotted her. But he had no sooner set her up in a spare room with some money out of the cash register and a set of his sister’s clothes than she’d escaped again, hitchhiking for around a month, hanging out at truck stops, quoting Kerouac to the clientele. Back then, she hadn’t gone by Clea Spector or Sophia Castillo. She was known to all as Julie Barnes.

“I found some love letters in my dad’s things,” said Alan. “They were from a woman named Pamela. You know where she was from?”

“Where?”

“Provo, Utah.”

Brenna looked at him.

“In one of the letters, Pamela asked him to keep something for a young friend of her daughter’s. She didn’t name names, but do you think, maybe . . .”

Brenna remembered January 20—two days after Sophia had shot herself. Brenna had opened her e-mail for the first time in days and clicked on a forwarded article Trent had sent her, from the
Deseret News
, dated May 2, 1970. In her mind, she was reading through it again, about the car crash, the doomed Liptak family, the daughter, Sophia Belyn . . . She read it all the way to the last sentence, seeing the words in front of her eyes as she met Alan’s gaze:
Mrs. Liptak is survived by a younger sister, Pamela.

“It’s very possible,” Brenna said.

Brenna’s mother rushed up to Alan. “You two know each other?” she said.

Alan nodded. “So nice to finally meet you, Evelyn.”

Strange,
thought Brenna as her mother pulled him to the side of the room and chatted with him as though he were her dearest friend—the keeper of her daughter’s old identity.

But then, all of life was strange, wasn’t it?

Brenna gazed across the room at Nick, talking to Maya, making her smile. Two weeks ago, he’d been reinstated on the Tarry Ridge Police force, but was considering a move, he’d said. Away from the suburbs. Away from the house he’d once shared with his wife and baby son. Back to his old stomping ground—New York City.

Why is it that so many steps forward always involve a step back?

She scanned the late group of guests who had come in with Alan—two older women who looked as though they’d gotten lost, and a tall, black-haired man, standing in the doorway alone, shifting from foot to foot. She stared at him.
Could it be?
He’d been so hard for her and Trent to track down, and even so, he’d never replied to her e-mail.

She walked up to him and he turned—a very young man with brown skin and dark eyes and a somber, unfamiliar face.
I don’t know him
, Brenna thought.

And then he smiled, genetics springing into place, refusing to be ignored, explaining everything that words could not.

It was Maya’s smile. Clea’s smile. “I’m Robert,” he said.

“I know,” she said, pulling him into a hug. “I’m Brenna. I’m your aunt.”