Still Lives(18)

Yet I wonder how much sleep Bas got last night, contemplating his missing Gala honoree and his potential firing all at once. Why did I see a weary acceptance in his face last night, while everyone else looked shocked? Maybe he’s thinking of resigning. Maybe he’s ready to give up on saving the museum. Come to think of it, he and I had a bizarre conversation on Monday, in the elevator to the fourth floor.

It was a busy day, a major exhibition looming, the museum like a hive with people hurrying in and out carrying folders and parcels and tools. I was happy to slip into the elevator alone.

“Hang on,” said a voice as the doors closed, and Bas stepped in, giving me an overly friendly grin that suggested he’d once again forgotten my name.

As we stood in the rising box, he kept rubbing his arms and shifting from foot to foot. He looked awful, like his whole body itched. I felt awkward riding silently beside him, so I asked how many people were coming to the Gala.

“Don’t know the exact figure, but it’s sold out. First time in years.” He gave me a pained smile. “Everything Kim Lord touches turns to gold.”

The elevator door opened then, and Bas practically ran to his assistant Juanita’s cube and asked her to get Nelson de Wilde on the phone.

“Isn’t that good news?” I remember wanting to say. But it hadn’t seemed like good news at all.

My teakettle shrieks. I pour the boiling water over a sachet of green and pink herbs that I bought at a fancy kitchen supply store, then head for my computer again. But I never get to read more news, because my mother calls me: the story of Kim Lord’s vanishing has aired on National Public Radio.

“How’s Greg?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. My tea tastes like a marigold garden. I pour some maple syrup in it. Now it has the exact flavor of allergy medicine.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Fine. Thanks for asking,” I say.

“I could fly out there if you need it.”

“Why?” I say. “It’s not like I was dating her.”

“It’s just …”

In my mother’s pause, I hear her sadness that I am not married to Greg, not living on the East Coast, and not about to pop out a grandchild. It relieved her when I moved home after the Bolio case, but then I got my teaching job overseas and started “tramping all over the world.” My serious relationship with Greg marked a new page, and she’d hoped that I might settle down in a nearby state, might even choose a long-term teaching career like she and my father had done.

Instead, Greg and I had moved to L.A., pulled by the siren song of California, its warmth and ease, the limitless possibilities.

As a consequence, my mother allocates the city a loathing she usually reserves for Karl Rove and tomato hornworms. She always pronounces the second letter in L.A. with vindictive force, as in You’re moving to el-AY? What could you possibly want to do in el-AY? The one time she and my father visited us, she surveyed the palm trees and sun-bleached streets with hurt distaste and declared our movie-star-laden Hollywood neighborhood “a bit seedy.” For Christmas and birthdays, she mails me a steady stream of Green Mountain mugs, T-shirts, and notepads, as if to remind me of my rightful surroundings.

“It’s just … it sounds dangerous for you,” she says.

“Nobody even notices me here,” I say with a little laugh. I tell her how kind she is. How I need to get off the phone soon. “I’ve got to beat rush hour.”


As soon as I drive up the freeway ramp, the traffic thickens to sludge, and I inch and dart from lane to lane, but it doesn’t seem to bring me any closer to downtown until finally I’m there. I barely make it to the emergency meeting that Bas calls in the auditorium at 9:30 a.m.

The Rocque’s auditorium is a large, dank room at the back of the warehouse, capped with skylights. No matter the time of year or grandness of the occasion, the auditorium lowers the same cranky gloom over its visitors. The texture of the painted concrete floors and walls remains perpetually clammy, and the fold-up wooden seats seem designed to simultaneously pinch and collapse beneath you. The low stage looks like it was stolen from a high school production. It’s a horrible place for performances, or acoustics of any kind. Sound waves pile on each other, making voices and words linger and layer. As we settle into our creaking seats, I catch show sold out and the cops and disappearances and a tone, like a bass line, of deep uneasiness.

A clean-shaven Bas introduces two LAPD detectives who will be investigating the case, DeLong and Ruiz, a man and a woman, respectively, both black-haired and wearing gray suits. “We’re not sure we even have a case yet,” says Bas. He is blinking a lot. “But we’re taking precautions. Kim Lord was last seen on Wednesday and, following a text Thursday evening, has stopped communicating completely.”

Janis Rocque stands behind him in bold blue-and-white stripes, hands on her hips. She looks like a parent who’s just come home to a trashed house and wants to know who is responsible.

Yegina shifts in her seat beside me. “Should we even have Craft Club today? My brother got another rejection, too,” she whispers. “My heart’s not in my knitting.”

“Is it in organizing your inbox?” I whisper back. “Come on. We all need to decompress.” Craft Club is where we hear most of our museum gossip. Our confederation of nine women, all from different departments, meets every other Friday to knit, embroider T-shirts, gripe, trade recipes, and gripe some more. I need that today.