Still Lives(32)

“We might be obstructing an investigation.”

“It’s not like that, I swear. There’s nothing on here that will help the police.”

He closes my fist around the flash drive. I wince at his touch. You shouldn’t trust me, I say in my mind, and Greg asks Why? And I say, You shouldn’t trust me because I still stupidly wrongly hopelessly love you. But I say nothing aloud; instead, my fingers stay closed.

Greg stands up. I feel a squeeze on my shoulder and a tiny peck on the top of my head. “I hope you and the squirrels of NIMH get some good sleep,” he says.

Still speechless, I stand and turn on the patio light for Greg to find his way out. The glow illuminates a low branch in a nearby bush and what looks like a white hose wrapped around it. As I lean close, the hose shifts, and inside its hollows, an elongated face gazes into mine. It has a sharp funnel for a nose and deep-set eyes. It looks like a distorted heart. I leap back, yelping, and there’s an immense, heavy scrambling as the creature disappears deeper into the bush.

“Possum,” Greg says in a wondering voice. “They’ve evolved into possums.”


Kim is missing and Greg doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know her. He loves her, but he doesn’t know her. After he leaves the patio, I go up to my bedroom, lie down, and brood with a spinning and bitter mind about this paradox. Greg doesn’t know Kim or love Kim, but he thinks he does. He thinks he knows Kim because she is his mother. Not his mother, who is dead, but the mother of his childhood. The beautiful Theresa Ferguson, who was also an heiress and a runaway. And a genius. Theresa was the opposite of me, which was why Greg loved me until the moment his mother died.

Theresa Ferguson was born in 1932 to a wealthy New York family and ran away to Paris at eighteen. She enrolled at the Sorbonne, and drifted from lover to lover, all over postwar Europe. She learned five languages and never married. A “protofeminist,” Greg called her. Her sculptures are in the collections of eight minor museums.

When Theresa gave birth to Greg, she was forty and living in a Swiss town filled with artists. Greg’s father was just one of many who came through, an Irishman who never knew of his son. Greg didn’t seem to mind much. Instead, he channeled all his filial devotion toward his mother, who alternately adored and ignored him. He grew up at the fringes of her all-night parties—waking in the mornings to find strangers filling the other bedrooms, and once an entire French circus troupe sleeping off hangovers, the acrobats still wearing their dusty tights.

Theresa relocated to a New York suburb in Greg’s teens. He and I stayed in her gorgeous, art-strewn house one night before leaving for Los Angeles. I don’t think Theresa disapproved of our big move, but she’d always disapproved of Greg’s interest in me, a young woman with a country upbringing and no distinct ambitions.

That night, Theresa cooked a full French meal for the three of us. She chopped, she sliced, she stirred, pacing about the kitchen, her dark hair piled messily on her head. The one time she looked directly at me, her gray eyes carved holes. “Are you thirsty, Maggie?” she asked.

I realized I was.

“Oh no, I’m fine,” I said.

She poured me a glass of water anyway, her bony fingers extending it. “You look thirsty,” she said.

I offered several times to help Theresa. She finally handed me a chef’s knife and asked me to cut some red bell peppers. I made a pile of chopped pieces before she came over and stared at them.

“Greg, can you show her how to julienne,” she said coolly.

Wordlessly, Greg stood behind me, wrapped his arms past my waist and murmured in my ear, directing me, as we cut the rest of the peppers together. Theresa faded outside the fortress of our intimacy and the smooth movements of the knife. That night he also sneaked into my bed, and we had the best sex of our relationship, better even than the first months in Thailand, Theresa’s old clocks wheezing in the hall while we touched in silence with the fever of teenagers.

When I opened my suitcase in a hotel in Ohio, I found the chef’s knife, carefully wrapped in butcher paper. No note.

I showed it to Greg. He raised one eyebrow. “She’s just funny that way,” he said. “She gave my last girlfriend her extra blow-dryer. She likes to get rid of stuff.”

Theresa’s knife was an expensive one. After Greg moved out I kept it. I still use it, ignoring the pang it gives me every time: that I might never learn the right way to slice things.


Kim Lord knew who her stalker was. She knew, but she chose not to tell anyone who could protect her. Not Greg, not the police. Why? Did she believe nothing could happen to her, she who had spent years immersed in the accounts of killers who lurked in alleys and parks, in innocuous apartments, and in the very homes and beds of the women they murdered? Did she think she was safe, she who posed as, and then expressively painted, the Black Dahlia in her final position: arms raised, legs spread, gutted, with her intestines tucked beneath her? Did she think she could escape, when Gwen and Chandra and Nicole could not?

Or did Kim Lord have a reason not to name him? What could she be hiding? Outside my bedroom window, the branches of my avocado tree rustle and toss. The creature must be climbing higher. I push my aching head deeper into my cool pillow to block out the sound. The pressure makes me want to throw up again. I squeeze my eyes shut, longing for sleep, though I know it will come over me like a heavy sack, and I will wake feeling worse.