What We Saw at Night (21 page)

They can do this with animal cells in the lab now, easy as peanut butter and jelly. Vets use this kind of treatment all the time for horses who rip ligaments racing or jumping. So the work Dr. Andrew and his brother and his son were doing with XP could someday, many generations from now, lead to a world with no sickle cell and no Huntington’s disease and no cystic fibrosis, the killers of the young. When I thought of it in that way, I felt not like an experimental animal, but proud: a pioneer, like Juliet had made me with Parkour.

“Even if they can do that, and say they can, what about cancer?” Juliet said.

“You’re going to get squamous cell cancer sometime in your life. That’s the nature of the beast. Big deal,” I said. Squamous cell skin cancer is gross and it leaves a scar where
they remove the superficial skin, but it’s not usually a lethal type of skin cancer. Some XP people have them all over. I’ve never had one. Rob had one, on his shoulder, despite his face getting all those huge blisters when he was a baby.

“I mean melanoma that goes all the way.”

“If they get it early, like Rob, it’s completely curable.”

“But you’ll get it again, somewhere else on your body.”

“Juliet, you have to die of something!”

“Whatever.” She turned her back to me and continued in her detached monotone. According to her, even Dr. Andrew wouldn’t reveal the specifics of some genetic mutation among the children of certain families of one “tribe” in Bolivia. But it meant that, although they suffered the same symptoms of harm from sunlight as every other XP kid, they didn’t develop melanoma. Finding a way to make XP a chronic illness was one giant leap in eradicating it. If people with XP could live the same way as people with diabetes or high blood pressure, they could have real lives.

Hearing all this, my heart thumped with excitement. But it also thumped with fear, because something else was clearly on her mind. That was when she dropped the bombshell: last October, Garrett had promised to take Juliet with him when he joined the research team. He promised to make her first among equals in the study—although, by virtue of being Dr. Andrew’s patient, she’d have been in the first pool, anyhow.

That was how they reconnected.

“But weren’t you going out with Henry LeBecque?” I asked.

That was a front, she explained. Besides, Garrett’s father and his uncle would be there, safeguarding her.

I stared at her, not sure what to believe, not sure how much
she
believed. “You considered it? What about your parents?”

Juliet scoffed. “No! What works with them is: I don’t bring anything up until the last minute. Then, they won’t stop me. With this, I could say it’s for credit, for college, or something. Besides, I can’t tell anyone. Which means
you
can’t tell anyone, either.”

I chewed a nail. I wasn’t sure how to respond to any of this. But she kept going.

In the past, Juliet’s disappearances, her sabbaticals, her so-called “periods of reflection” had all been stolen time she spent holed up with Garrett. Sometimes, she even used the all-purpose, fail-safe excuse; she said that she was with me. I felt sicker and sicker. Was I suddenly her therapist? It was a job I didn’t want. But I listened anyway: to tales of Juliet and Garrett Tabor traveling to Minneapolis, sleeping in blackout rooms where waiters brought them caviar and champagne at midnight. These hotels, Juliet said, were frequented by foreign businessmen; the staff had a policy to avert its eyes from unusual couples. Tabor told the desk that Juliet was his daughter (Juliet was always swathed in expensive scarves and huge sunglasses); no one could have believed that a father shared a bed with his college-age child. So he was careful to get a double-king room. Even then, the relationship had been much more than sex:
One Thousand and One Arabian Nights
in reverse, with a harem of one. Garrett told Juliet of cities, like Las Vegas (which might as well be Jupiter to Juliet and me) where lives were lived on the reverse clock, like our own lives. They could be happy there, together—

“What about the women his own age?” I finally shouted. “What about the Daytimers? Like Dr. Wilenbrand. Like Gina—”

“I know about them,” she interrupted. “They’re a front
for the sake of his family. Like Henry was for me. Don’t you see that? We had to keep up appearances.”

“What about your
dad
?” I said. “How could he not know?”

“He sees what he wants to see. When it comes to me, he’s no detective. He sees you. He sees Rob. He sees how you have my back. He sees our cozy little world of three, doing crazy stunts at night, but never getting into any real trouble.”

My jaw clenched. Jack-Jack was right again. People do see what they want to see.

“I haven’t been with him that way in a long time, I swear. But I can’t give him up. I told you the truth.” She sighed, that defeated adult-stranger sigh I’d gotten used to hearing. “He’s Garrett Tabor. And I was a kid. He treated me like an adult. He treated me like an equal. Also, it was like being with a genie. You made a wish for an escape, and there it was.”

“What about what we saw at Tabor Oaks?” I demanded.

“We only saw him once, Allie-Bear. I’m not sure what you saw that other night. And I’ve been over it with him. He made a bad choice. He picked up some woman in Duluth and brought her back to his dad’s apartment. He was lonely. He was confused. He swore it was a one-time thing.… But still, you’re right. There’s too much. I mean … Nicola Burns. No one will ever forget that. It changes everything, forever. It made me start to think about my life, and my mother, and what I’ve done to them that they don’t even know about. I was only fourteen, Allie.”

“But now you’re almost seventeen.”

“And then maybe I can be with him. You know, legally. I mean, it happens. People used to get married when they were thirteen.”

“Listen to yourself right now,” I said.

We were silent.

“My leg hurts,” Juliet said.

“I’ll go find a nurse.”

My head felt as if it were about to explode. I was grateful for the chance to bolt out the door, to stretch and jump and run in place, to punch the flat of my hand with my fist because I couldn’t take a bat to the walls and the windows. Tabor.
Tabor. Tabor
.… The name was everywhere I looked. This hospital was called Divine Savior, but our wing was The Tabor Clinic. Our savior was Dr. Tabor, the founder.

“My friend Juliet is in pain,” I told a nurse who was unfamiliar to me.

“Are you Jackie Kim’s girl?”

“Yes. I’m Allie. And I don’t know if you can give me some Tylenol? I don’t know if it’s in my orders. But I have such a headache, I’m afraid it’s going to make me sick.…” Which it did. All of a sudden.

I ran to the nearest washroom.

Garrett Tabor had killed Nicola. I knew it as sure as if he’d pointed a gun at her and fired. Only
he
knew where that poor dark-haired girl was now, the girl he left stripped on the floor like a broken doll. He would have been happy to explain to Juliet how killing Rob and me would have been an accident.

I never got another chance to speak to Juliet alone that night. As it happened, I ended up getting a shot for my first migraine—orders from Dr. Lauren Wilenbrand—along with an order to lie with cold packs over my eyes for the rest of the afternoon.

W
hen I got home from the hospital, I found my early admission acceptance letter from John Jay. Because of my bad genes and my good grades, I had even received a tiny scholarship: $4,000 per semester if I maintained a 3.0 GPA or higher. Apparently, mine was also the first letter they sent out. They really seemed to be chomping at the bit to accept me. I’d be starting in September, eleven months from now—but there was the option of starting in January, too. I decided, why not? All my classes were AP anyhow. I wrote to my advisor, Dr. Barry Yashida, to ask his advice.

Casually but elaborately, as I passed through the kitchen from the shower, I let the scholarship letter drop on the counter where my mom was chopping vegetables. When I came back out, fifteen minutes later, she was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Jackie Kim is not easy to tears.

“Onions?” I joked.

“No, age. Being old enough to have a college kid rocks my world.”

“Time for that Ethiopian baby, huh, Jack-Jack?”

“Alexis,” she said. Our eyes met. For the first time, my mother had acknowledged that I actually might go away at some time, live apart from her, have a life of my own. “I’m proud of you.”

“I think my porcelain skin tone had something to do with it,” I said.

“Stop!” She swept me into a hug. “Let me enjoy this moment.”

“Okay,” I said. I shut my eyes, letting myself enjoy the moment, too.

“I’m glad you’re not going away right now, though.”

“I know,” I said, not quite agreeing. Weturned our focus to the stir-fry.

Angie burst in with plans for her Halloween costume. Naturally, she was going to be David Belle, which meant she would look like a guy in a T-shirt. I texted Juliet and Rob, both of whom instantly texted back
LOL!!!!
and insisted on helping her prepare. And that set the tone for the next few weeks. The tres compadres, somehow united again.

IN A PERVERSE way, that build-up to Halloween was a sort of premonition of longing for the past, the kind I’d first understood trapped under the car with Rob. I’d spent so much time worrying about the future I’d rarely focused on the preciousness of
now
. I’d made a very conscious decision not to discuss Garrett Tabor with Juliet anymore until she was ready. And I let Rob know that I wanted to cool it a little on the intimacy front.

Naturally, he thought it was because I was scared of losing him when I went to John Jay next year. He was right, but it was more than that. I couldn’t be with him until the
Garrett Tabor issue had resolved itself completely, until I knew for certain that Juliet would be all right. And Rob, being the person that he was, buried himself in creating a tribute video for Mrs. Burns in honor of Nicola, cobbled together from the existing footage that we had. He never heard if she received it; she never thanked him. But it didn’t matter. She was alive. She was surviving, for now.

When the three of us were together at night with Angela, we were one again. Or at least we were one in playing our respective roles. But it was enough. All the annoying and hideous things that Angela did suddenly made me laugh. In them, I could see me and Juliet—one minute jumping out of trees, the next minute threatening to chop off her hair so she looked “more like the King of Parkour,” and another minute talking back to Jack-Jack because Mom wouldn’t allow her to trick-or-treat past ten at night.

The morning of October 31
^st
, maybe an hour before dawn, Juliet reached into her pocket and handed me an old picture of us in our Halloween costumes: me as her penguin (yes, I loved her so much that I dressed as her stuffed animal) and Juliet wearing oversized ruby slippers, holding hands, knowing that trick-or-treating would be limited to a few homes who stayed up late just for us. Beneath it was a scribbled quote from Henry David Thoreau.
I have traveled a great deal in Concord
.

Juliet missed nothing; she just didn’t tell everything she knew.

“Thanks,” I murmured.

“Can I stay over?” she asked quickly. Angie and Mom had been asleep since midnight. Rob was pulling out of our driveway. I nodded.

She borrowed a pair of pj’s. We slipped under the sheets, huddled on one side of my big bed, as we’d done hundreds of times before.

I waited for her to speak.

“That’s really cool you got into college,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”

“Yeah … I’ve already started, in a way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Reading,” I said. “And writing. Just to get a head start. I might try to graduate in December. I have the credits.”

I debated whether or not to tell her more. Although some assignments were ordinary, others were instantly fascinating and demanding. One instructed us on the fundamentals of criminal research, the ways that experts used field notes and different kinds of observation to tighten the loop on criminals. Another discussed the ways in which traditional constants of human nature and behavior, in the anthropological sense, were some of the most reliable tools in modern criminal investigation.

In the past two weeks, I’d learned one fundamental lesson: the world changed, technology changed, but people did not.

I discovered that I was born to love this discipline. Seriously. All I lacked was the ability to go outside. But my freshman-advisor-to-be, Professor Barry Yashida, even wrote me a personal note. Not every investigator works in an urban lab, he assured me. One of his students was confined to a wheelchair and a computer speaking board by cerebral palsy, and, though she never left the first floor of her house, she was a full-time, respected LAPD officer in their major crimes unit. I didn’t think I would ever have that kind of future. But it was encouraging to hear. I would begin online in January.

Meanwhile, I learned more than I ever wanted to about serial killers, even after my brief summer research. For instance: Bellevue, Washington, seems be serial killer central.
You would probably find half the missing persons in America, there or at least their skulls. Also, until they fell apart, serial killers compartmentalized. In their “professional” lives, they took strays, prostitutes and addicts and homeless women and runaways: the earth’s restless whose last known address was a street corner. Tony Costa, who cut up girls and buried them in the woods on Cape Cod, had at least two wives … and three kids. Charles Manson was expert at spotting needy throw-away girls. But for every rule there was also an exception. For instance, Ted Bundy was different: his victims weren’t the lost. They were nurses and university students and school kids. He could look preppy and speak with intelligence. People trusted him.