Genuine Fraud(55)

“Some of them didn’t make it,” said Patti. “She would find them on the street and they had kitty bronchitis or some other plague. They would die a tiny sad death, and Immie would burst her heart every time. Then she went to Vassar and we were left with these guys.” Patti stroked a cat that was wandering under the dinner table. “Nothing but trouble, and proud of it.”

Like any Greenbriar “old girl,” Patti had stories of her school days. “We had to wear stockings or knee socks with our uniforms, year-round,” she said. “And come summer, we were so uncomfortable. In high school—this was in the late seventies—some of us went without underwear, just to stay cool. Knee socks with no underwear!” She patted Jule’s shoulder. “You and Immie were lucky the uniforms changed. Did you do music at Greenbriar? You sounded so passionate about Gershwin the other day.”

“A little.”

“Do you remember the winter concert?”

“Sure.”

“I can just see you and Imogen, standing together. You were the tiniest girls in the ninth grade. You all sang carols, and the Caraway girl had the solo. Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

“They lit the ballroom up for the holidays, with the tree in that one corner. They had a menorah, too, of course, but they didn’t really mean it,” said Patti. “Oh, damn. I’m going to get teary, thinking about Immie in that blue velvet dress. I bought her a holiday dress for that concert, royal blue with darts down the front.”

“Immie rescued me on my first day at Greenbriar,” said Jule. “Someone knocked into me in the cafeteria line, and spaghetti sauce splashed all over my shirt. There I stood, looking at all those glossy girls in clean clothes. Everyone knew each other from the lower school already.” The story flowed easily. Patti and Gil were good listeners. “How could I sit down at anyone’s table when I had sauce, like blood, all over me?”

“Oh, sweet potato.”

“Immie came striding over. She took my tray out of my hands. She introduced me to all her friends and pretended she couldn’t see the mess all over my shirt, so they pretended they couldn’t see it, either. And that was that,” said Jule. “She was one of my favorite people, but we never kept up after I moved away.”

Later, in the living room, Gil settled into the couch with his oxygen tubes in his nose. Patti brought out a thick photo album made of gilded paper. “You’ll let me show you pictures, won’t you?”

They looked through old photographs. Jule found Imogen exceptionally pretty—short and a little impish. She had light hair and fat dimpled cheeks that later became high cheekbones. In many of the pictures she was displayed in front of some attractive destination. “We went to Paris,” Patti said, or “We visited a farm,” or “That’s the oldest carousel in America.” Immie wore twirly skirts and stripy leggings. Her hair was long in most pictures, and a little wild. In later pictures, she had braces on her teeth.

“She never had any adopted friends after you left Greenbriar,” said Patti. “I always felt we failed her that way.” Patti leaned forward. “Did you have that? A community of families like yours?”

Jule took a deep breath. “I didn’t have that.”

“Do you feel your parents failed you?” asked Patti.

“Yes,” said Jule. “My parents did fail me.”

“I think so often that I should have raised Immie differently. Done more. Talked more about the difficult things.” Patti rambled on, but Jule didn’t hear her.

Julietta’s parents had died when she was eight. Her mother passed away from a long and gruesome illness. Shortly afterward, her father bled himself out, naked in a bathtub.

Julietta had been raised by another person, that aunt, in a home that was not a home.

No. She would not think about it anymore. She was erasing it now.

She was writing a new story for herself, an origin story. In this version, the living room was trashed. In the dark of night. Yes, that was it. The story wasn’t finished yet, but she ran it through as well as she could. She saw her parents in the circle of light created by the streetlamp, dead in the grass with the blood pooling black beneath them.

“We need to get to the point,” said Gil, wheezing. “The girl doesn’t have all night.”

Patti nodded. “What I haven’t told you, and why we asked you here, is that Imogen dropped out of Vassar after first term.”

“We think she got in with party people,” said Gil. “She didn’t work up to her potential in her classes.”

“Well, she never did love school,” said Patti. “Not the way you obviously love Stanford, Jule. Anyway, she left Vassar without even telling us, and it was a month before she even got in touch. We were so worried.”

“You were so worried,” said Gil. He leaned forward. “I was just angry. Imogen is irresponsible. She loses her phone or forgets to turn it on. She’s not good with calling, texting, any of that.”

“It turns out she went to Martha’s Vineyard,” said Patti. “We used to go there all the time as a family, and she ran away there, apparently. She told us she rented a place, but she didn’t give us an address, or even a town.”

“Why don’t you go see her?” asked Jule.