What the Dead Want(3)

“You sure she wasn’t getting high on her own supply?” Simon had asked when he first met Janine. “Seems like she was taking drugs all that time instead of inventing them. Doesn’t she seem a little, uh . . . too calm? Like, permanently calm?”

But Gretchen was sure these were the very qualities that her mother had loved in Janine. Mona had been a kind of cult figure in the art world—Mona Axton Gallery in Chelsea was renowned. She dealt constantly with the woo-woo personalities of the artists who showed in her space, or came to her as an authority on paranormal ephemera—photographs and objects they believed were “haunted.” Mona was deeply interested in all things otherworldly, but she also wanted to substantiate these things—make sure they weren’t just made up. Maybe it wasn’t that odd that she’d had a scientist for a best friend, someone who could keep things in check. Once the gallery was doing really well, her parents moved from their creaky walk-up apartment in the East Village, with its strange artifacts and incessant weirdo visitors, to the clean, cool splendor of their place near Central Park. In their new apartment there was more room, a doorman, an amazing view—and wild-eyed photographers didn’t show up at all hours claiming to have seen the ghost of Allen Ginsberg levitating above a tree in Tompkins Square Park. Collectors of Victorian ephemera didn’t show up on the doorstep unannounced trying to sell them necklaces made out of human hair, or “haunted objects.”

It was six years ago that they’d moved. And four years and eight months since her mother disappeared. Gretchen missed her mother so much she still didn’t know if she would ever be happy again. She had been frightened and worried, then finally she’d felt a terrible mix of guilt-ridden anger, thinking that her mother had left her and her father. She started thinking that couldn’t be true and she was awful to think it—especially if something terrible had happened.

Police searches and private detectives turned up nothing. Mona’s picture was all over town and in the paper. The story of her disappearance was even on a television show about unsolved mysteries. They implied that her close ties to the occult were responsible somehow—like there was some otherworldly mystery to her disappearance.

“That stuff in the papers, it’s nonsense,” Janine had told her. “There is a logical reason for why people go missing, and we might not know what it is, but it is certainly not because of the work she did with spiritualist photographers. That’s art, Gretchen. Don’t let these people confuse you. Your mother may have been an artist and a spiritualist at heart—but she believed in evidence as much as any scientist.”

From then on Janine had taken Gretchen to school, babysat when her father was out. If Gretchen needed special film or art supplies or weird clothes from the thrift store, or anything at all, Janine got it for her. And if Gretchen had a bad day thinking about her mom, Janine would tell her to stay home from school and just hang out. Janine was the queen of hanging out. She’d take Gretchen to movies or ice-skating or on trips upstate to go apple picking.

“Do you think Mom’s dead?” Gretchen asked her once.

“I don’t,” Janine had said.

“Because you have evidence?” Gretchen asked. “Because there’s some evidence she’s alive?”

At that Janine looked right into her eyes. “There’s no evidence one way or the other, but what I feel, what I know about your mom, I think she’s out there somewhere. We just don’t have enough information. And until there is proof otherwise, I choose to believe she’s alive.”

Gretchen had wanted to hear that Mona was alive, but once Janine said it, it made her feel worse. The idea that someone had taken her mother and was holding her somewhere was terrifying. But the idea that her mother had simply left them, had walked away and never come back, no good-byes, no explanations—that hurt like a dull throb in her heart.

Janine had seen the pain in her eyes and put her arms around Gretchen.

“The truth is,” Janine said, “we just don’t know. But you asked me how I feel. And I feel the force of your mother’s life around us. Sometimes you have to follow your gut to get to the proof you’re looking for.” At the apartment, after Aunt Esther’s call, Janine looked right into her eyes again. “You sure you want to spend the whole summer upstate in Mayville?”

“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “It sounds like it’ll be a good vacation.”

Janine looked a little skeptical. “It’ll be interesting, anyway,” she said.

“Can I inherit a house if I’m only sixteen?” Gretchen asked.

“Sure you can,” Janine said, laying down some Scrabble tiles that spelled the word “pickle.” “You just can’t do anything with it yet.”

The next day Gretchen barely had a proper good-bye with Simon before the car arrived. He came downstairs and lay on her bed with his big feet propped against the wall, telling her how he had a crazy conversation about poetry with the guy who owns that vintage clothing store with the neon pink sign down on St. Marks Place.

“The guy has a big tattoo across his chest that says I Need More,” Simon said. “I’m like, more what? Did he just get bored and not go back to the tattoo shop for the final word?”

“More shirts?” Gretchen said. “How’d you see his chest?”

“’Cause he was showing me the tattoo.”