Real Bad Things(14)
No need to check on Georgia Lee. For years, Jane had kept tabs on her under the guise of mildly stalking old high school friends. Everyone did that; therefore, she reasoned, no one could peg her as suspicious should anyone care to dig around in her browser history. She knew all about Georgia Lee’s job at the pharmacy, her city council position, her marital and parental status. No way she’d admit to being linked to a murder. And Jane didn’t want to open any doors where Georgia Lee was concerned. Best to keep some things in the past.
After thinking more on it, she stretched to reach her phone from where she’d tossed it onto the mat, removed the Google Alerts, and deleted her phone’s browser history even though nothing ever truly disappeared online. The thing she really wanted to search—Is a confession and a body enough to convict a person of murder, or no?—would probably reveal she was fine.
Goddammit, she thought. She really should have changed her name. Gone into hiding when she had the chance. But Jason. Always Jason. Jane never should’ve left him alone with Georgia Lee that night. She tapped out a text, asking him to call her. As always, the screen stayed blank.
Everything will be fine. If she repeated it enough, maybe it’d come true.
After her shower, she threw on some jeans and a vintage The Lost Boys T-shirt she’d swiped from a one-night stand years ago, slicked her hands with gel, and proceeded to fix her hair even though she had nowhere to go. The routine soothed her and made her feel less unemployed and look less indigent. In the kitchen, she made herself a cup of store-brand coffee she found in the cabinets and waited for Diane to wake. She took one sip and dumped it in the sink.
Bored, she wandered into the bedroom she and Jason had shared. Diane hadn’t lied. Wasn’t but a foot of space clear on the floor. The room smelled of mildew.
When she turned to exit, she busted her pinkie toe against the leg of an old chair. Diane kept so much unnecessary shit. Tin cookie cans full of thread and needles and denim patches Diane had never used despite the frequent holes in the knees of Jane’s and Jason’s jeans. Fringed purses and frayed tops. A set of faded purple dumbbells from Diane’s brief Jane Fonda workout phase before she’d said to hell with it and switched to SlimFast for breakfast and lunch followed by dinner at her favorite bar, whose phone number Jane could still recite. She bet someone would answer. Bars tended to stay open in towns where everything else died.
She knew better than to expect anything of hers in the bedroom, locked in time and place as it had been in her memory. Still, she looked. The only photos she found were in a shoebox that held assorted memorabilia of random men Diane had dated before Warren. Twenty-three in all. None around longer than three months, by her recollection. Some she’d seen occasionally in nearby towns or at gas stations. Others seemed to have fallen off the face of the planet—no doubt in hiding from Diane. Of the boyfriends in the box that Jane remembered, she and Jason had only liked one. He taught them penny poker and chased them around the house, them screaming in terrified delight. Diane was nice when he was around. Somehow, Jane couldn’t recall his name, only that she liked him and he had a missing ring finger. The photo she found of him and Diane had been taken one blistering hot day, out near the river on the Maud Proper side. Jason skimmed rocks across the water, Diane nearby saying something to upset his aim. Jane sat with the guy on a beach towel. She asked him what had happened to his finger. He laughed, leaned in conspiratorially, and whispered, “Your mom.” Before she had a chance to ask what she considered to be an important follow-up question—a knife, a hammer, a car door, her teeth?—Diane appeared out of nowhere, took his hand, and teasingly led him toward the murky water. He never came around again.
She flipped through the odd collection and set aside pictures of Asian men who might be Jason’s dad, a smaller pile than the one she sorted of white men for herself. That pile held several options, such as the bare-chested, long-haired guy in the red bandana, which she found at the bottom of the box. Or the snap-shirt cowboy, whom she suspected once owned the turquoise-and-silver ring that dwarfed her thumb. Or the smiling blond in a red shirt and jeans and a giant gold belt buckle in the shape of Arizona, whose smooth surface she ran her fingertips across. Briefly, she mused about that missing ring finger and whether she’d find it at the bottom of the box too.
All she knew of her father was that Diane had gotten knocked up at sixteen by a guy nicknamed Tough, who was out there somewhere without any idea he had a daughter named Jane.
Diane’s parents didn’t disown her after she got pregnant with Jane, but apparently they were heavy handed with the shame and the I told you so’s because they were Christians, the kind who actually went to church and didn’t believe in abortion, not even in secret to save face. Jane suspected Diane had only kept Jane to spite her parents. Like most men, Tough loved Diane and then left her. Tough hadn’t lasted, but the parental estrangement had.
Maybe Tough was dead too.
One of her exes had gotten her a DNA test, back when no one worried about cops arresting their relations for heinous crimes they’d committed when they were young and stupid. Jane had declined the gift but hadn’t explained why she didn’t want her DNA anywhere someone could find it.
At the bottom of the box was one last photo. In it, Diane wore a yellow tube top and skinny white shorts. Warren stood behind her with his left forearm providing additional support for her breasts. Both smiling. No other photo had ever captured Diane that happy.