Still Lives(84)

“I don’t know.” I don’t meet her eyes. “I just pieced things together.”

“You should have gotten credit.”

“So I could put it on my résumé?” I ask.

“Hendricks said you would make a great investigator if you weren’t such a decent person,” she says.

“It sounds like you two talked for a while,” I say.

“Not really. He didn’t want to talk to me,” Yegina says, now smiling. “But I knew something was up between you, so I got nosy.”

My mind flashes to Hendricks jumping into the pit of glass, smashing down with his knees bent, then swimming over to me, his hands cut on the broken pieces. His red-streaked palms reaching. I don’t remember what happened next, but he must remember. He must have done something to stop me from bleeding to death. He must also have taken the cassette in my recorder. And then he made me lie. Made me look like a clumsy idiot to Detective Ruiz. And never apologized. I mumble something and flip through the magazines. A masthead catches my eye.

“Check this out,” I say, grabbing the issue of ArtNoise, which shows a blurry picture of the crew party on the roof on the night of the Gala. Evie is circled in bright-red ink. “Kevin’s article.” There I am in a full-page photo, standing at the threshold of the third gallery, my head bowed, blond hair falling in my face. Jayme’s green dress curves tight around me; her high-heeled boots extend my legs to spikes. I look good. A little dangerous. Unpredictable.

But I also look like someone has just slapped me hard, and I am afraid to raise my head.

I close the magazine and sink back to my pillows, suddenly exhausted. “I’ll read it later. I’m sorry. I’m so tired.”

Yegina sits there a moment, and then starts sliding the magazines back into her bag. “I’ll hold on to them,” she promises. “Do you want me to bring whatever Hendricks left you?”

“No,” I say, closing my eyes. “Leave it in my office. I’ll be back.”

“Good,” Yegina says softly, and strokes my forehead. “I’ll swamp your inbox and take you to lunch at the new shabu-shabu place on Sunset. It’ll be old times.”

“Can’t wait,” I say.

I wish we both believed it was true.





A MONTH LATER





30

The swelling is down all over my body, thanks to walks to the creek with my parents’ collies and deep sleeps in the starry northern quiet, but my face still looks unbalanced to me. Not bigger or puffier, just not mine. Every morning I pull my T-shirts over it, open my mouth for hearty breakfasts, whistle as I wander down cool dirt rows, helping my parents plant tomato seedlings. Every day I try to look pleased to hear (again) about the neighbor’s grown-up doctor son, who runs marathons and works at the local hospital, and I smirk at stories of the town’s crazy libertarian, who recently hung the governor in effigy from his plumbing sign.

Yet every evening I stare at my face in my mother’s mahogany mirror, and try to find what’s different.

“Mirror, mirror,” my mother says from the threshold one day. “You look like my daughter again.”

“Thanks to you,” I say. Every day I ricochet between gladness and dread at my mother’s homemade bread, her clean, crisp sheets, at my father’s ebullient teasing, the solid weight of his arm around my shoulders. I wish I could belong to them again.

My mother steps into the room and straightens the already straight pillows on the bed. Then she shakes the gauzy curtains so that the evening light spills through them. It’s spring light, frail and silver-gold.

“There are some new graduate programs at the university,” she says. “Your father and I want you to live here. If you find a degree you like.”

I don’t know what to say. Behind every delicious meal and chat about the new bike path has been this unspoken question: Why don’t you stay here?

Why don’t I?

A fly buzzes out from the window, huge for this time of year, and we both watch it. The black body loops and settles back against the pane. Ever since I arrived home, Kim Lord’s death has receded behind the avalanche of a new homicide. Laci Peterson, a missing and pregnant California woman, washed ashore in Richmond in April, within miles of the beached body of her unborn son. Picture after picture of her life layers the media now: pretty at Christmas, holding her belly. Handsome husband with his strong chin, his arm squeezing his wife.

Meanwhile, Kim is not forgotten, not replaced. She has simply faded as another victim takes the spotlight. Before long, another lovely murdered face will rise beside Laci’s, and Laci, too, will move to the background with the other victims of homicide. We’ll talk about her case as solved or unsolved, as if knowing who killed her and dumped her body explains anything about why her life had to end. Eventually the reason she died will frame her whole existence—and not the infinite reasons she deserved to live.

My mother sighs at my silence. “I’m afraid there’s something back there that won’t let you go,” she says. “I don’t think it’s Greg anymore.”

“It’s not Greg,” I say.

“Then what is it?” She’s almost in tears. “Why do you get involved in this stuff? You don’t have to.”

I shake my head, wishing I could explain. Instead, my dry eyes follow the fly, imagining slapping it, and the way its grotesque body would open, spilling its guts, smearing the glass. It crawls up the window until it reaches a ledge, then pauses, tenderly rubbing its legs together.