Still Lives(63)

“I insist you take a leave for the rest of the week,” concludes Jayme. She has not sat down or unfolded her arms. “Starting tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say. Silently, I practice saying it to her: They found Kim’s body. I see Jayme’s eyes go dull and her shoulders slump. Then I see her once again hoisting herself straight and tall, marshaling her strength to tell me I need a break, I need time, when whatever pain she is carrying has rooted so deep she can’t pull it out for fear of destroying herself. They found Kim with her head bashed in. The words don’t come because I don’t want to be the one to utter them. I don’t want them to be real.

“You need me to call you a cab?” asks Jayme.

“No.” I get up carefully from the table and grab my keys. “Thanks for tracking me down. I’ll be at home if you need me.”


When I get to my car, I call Yegina again and get a curt text in return. I’m home. Everything’s fine, thank you for finally checking. I’ll call you in the morning.

It doesn’t seem like her, but I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t think about it as I inch my car along the freeway, careful not to weave.

Ray Hendricks’s revelations are pinging around in my head. Should it ease my mind to know that Nikki squealed on herself, and that she never named me? It doesn’t. It doesn’t restore Nikki to life; she won’t be snickering at herself for tripping in her snow boots, or fingering her delicate ears when she’s searching for a word.

It doesn’t make her un-murdered, either. From her family and friends, the real Nikki was stolen forever. The living girl has been erased, and in her place marches a death’s-head, a warning. A panel in my memory slides open, and here comes the whole gory parade again, images I’ve seen, stories I’ve read: the little girl strangled in the basement, the stabbed woman, the bludgeoned woman, the woman severed in half, the woman who put her mouth around a loaded pistol, the woman bound at the wrists and ankles, dragged through icy black water. Nikki. Nikki comes at the end, flopping behind a dark boat. No. Not at the end. There is one more pale figure, straggling along, and she wears Kim’s face. Then my face.

The freeway exit finally opens to the dense, honking slow-and-go of Hollywood. The traffic becomes nasty enough to keep me alert to it, every Lexus and Range Rover fighting for its slot. I’m grateful, because I want to stop thinking and feeling. I’d like to be as simple as the car I’m driving, as plain as the alley I turn down, as empty as the dark, narrow garage I slide into, just a slot in a row, with a broken door and a history no one knows. The car coughs as the engine stops, and I have to slink and twist to get out of the garage without touching the dusty chrome or the cobwebs on the garage wall. I emerge to the smell of my neighbor’s wilting roses.

My bungalow is part of a 1920s courtyard with a dozen apartments. Our walls are peeling; our pipes run slow, but the old clay rooftops look pretty and everyone’s got the same high ceilings. My neighbors include a retired Ice Capades star, a Hollywood makeup artist, an old man with a carefully preserved British accent, and some bearded twentysomethings with band aspirations.

I know everyone well enough to feel a protectiveness descend as soon as I stride down our walkway, but they’re not real friends. Everyone here liked Greg for his gregariousness, and I think they got the impression I’d run him off until his face started appearing all over TV with headlines like “Gallery of Death?” Once my neighbors avoided me out of loyalty to him; this week they avoid me out of pity.

My bungalow looks dark and cold, the windows black. I always forget to leave lights on to fake the appearance of someone inside. It takes a while to dredge out my keys, even though I just tossed them in there, because my purse is so stuffed with the recorder, the flash drive, my phone. The rest of the courtyard notices this, I’m sure. And my tired, aching swaying as I search. Where’d she stumble home from? There the keys are, wrapped in the handle of the recorder. My keys, museum keys, gym locker key, even the stupid key to Greg’s gallery, all on a ring. It amazes me how quickly things get lost. Or maybe not lost. Enmeshed. Tangled up so badly that you can’t separate one thing from another.

The branches beyond my patio fence toss and heave. I jump. Drop the keys. Pick them up again. Avoid looking at the bush. I don’t want to see the possum again.

Gold key in the heavy screen door, silver key in the inner door, even these small rituals of entry seem sadder and clumsier when you’re entering a house where you live alone. All these months, and still I am not used to it. I push inside, hear my phone buzz with a text: I really hope you’ll get some rest. Jayme.

I drop the phone back into my purse. Then I click on the living room light, illuminating my blank walls, my Fitzgerald biography lying closed on the coffee table. I go to my computer and turn it on, hoping to read Yegina’s original message about Don. As the machine wheezes and grinds, taking forever to boot up, I see dust streaks on my arm. Stupid too-tight garage. I go to the bathroom to wash.

The faucet warms up slowly, so I run the cold over my skin. Soap, rinse. Night air gusts through the open window, giving me goose bumps.

I don’t remember leaving the window open.

I do, however, recall leaving the Fitzgerald biography whacked down on the table in that spine-ruining way that my mother always told me not to do. I do remember feeling a twinge of guilt about it.