Forgive Me(56)

All this got Angie thinking about the attic where she’d found the picture in the jewelry box. She would let her father sleep in that chair a little longer, so she could return to the attic uninterrupted.

She began rummaging through boxes, plastic containers, and sundry bags, mostly filled with clothes. There was nothing of real interest, nothing until she found a container with her mother’s old check registers inside. There were boxes full of registers going back years—decades, actually. Not that this surprised Angie, who knew of her mother’s penchant for keeping papers because she was too busy to shred them, and never threw anything in the trash that could be used by identity thieves, even bank registers from accounts closed long ago.

It was fun and a little sad to review a lifetime of purchases. She found plenty of pedestrian entries—food, clothing, utility bills—but the more personal ones were what Angie found most touching, including all the lessons (dance, swim, horseback riding, tennis, soccer, art camps); all the home repairs; all the charitable giving, including one check for fifteen hundred dollars labeled a loan made out to Susie Banks, a close friend of Kathleen’s. Aunt Susie, to Angie. All the women close to her mother were aunts to Angie, except for her real aunts who Angie didn’t know.

As Angie looked at her mother’s handwriting, she thought of the words on the back of the photograph. Forgive me. “Forgive you for what, Mom?” she said aloud.

As she flipped through the check registers, years passing in seconds, a blur of purchases speeding before her eyes, one entry caught her eye. It was a two hundred dollar sum paid to MCEDC and recorded as “Microtia Gift.” The gift had been made five years ago, recorded as paid on March the fourth.

Microtia was the little girl’s ear deformity. Angie had looked up the condition online, but learned nothing revealing or helpful in her search for the girl’s identity. Using her phone, Angie typed MCEDC into Google and found the Microtia-Congenital Ear Deformity Center in Burbank, California. From what she could tell, it looked to be the world’s most prominent institute for research and surgical repair of microtia and a related condition called atresia.

Angie combed the check registers again with a different focus. The more recent check registers should be downstairs in her mother’s desk, but in these older registers she soon came upon another entry for a payment to MCEDC, that one also made on the fourth of March, also for two hundred dollars. She kept looking, register after register—thirty or so registers in total, stored in a dozen check boxes. Angie found the same entry made year after year. The checks were always written on the fourth of March and always for two hundred dollars, which told Angie it was significant, though she had no idea why.

The last entry Angie found dated back to 1984. It might have been the first entry recorded. She didn’t know if other, older registers were anywhere else in the house.

Downstairs, she rifled through her mother’s desk and found her more recent checkbook registers. She flipped through pages, but did not have to go back very far. A little over a month before her death, Kathleen DeRose wrote a two hundred dollar check to the MCEDC on March the fourth.

Angie sat in her mother’s office chair, spun it a few times, thinking what it could mean, knowing she would end up calling Bao.

Angie’s phone rang. She was sure it was Bao calling her. “Were your ears ringing?”

It wasn’t Bao. It was Mike. “Ange, I got a joke for you. Three pimps walk into a bar.”

Angie gasped. “They’re there?”

“Mr. Fedora, Casper the Friendly Killer, and some tall, thin, good-looking guy I hate on account of those very attributes. A couple girls are with them and they don’t look like they subscribe to Good Housekeeping, if you get my drift. I’m going to strike up a little conversation. See what happens.”

“You be careful as can be.”

“Hey, I’m Captain Careful, the world’s dullest superhero.”

“Listen, if you can’t get inside, see if one of the girls can get Nadine the burner phone and my business card. The message is we want to help. Don’t play the hero, Mike. Got it?”

Mike hummed a few bars from Superman’s theme song in response.





CHAPTER 29



Exhibit D: Excerpts from the journal of Nadine Jessup, pages 44-50




I am here in the basement on my bed (my bed, ha that’s a good one, like I want to claim it for my own . . . mine, mine, mine). Anyway, here I am on a bed in my, oh let’s call it “designated area,” my cube (like where my dad’s employees work) down in this bogus maze of makeshift rooms. I’m staring up at a ceiling carpeted with so much mold I want to gag, waiting for something to happen, something I don’t want to have happen. I don’t want another job, another man, but someone will show up because someone always shows up. To pass the time, I’m sneaking in a little journaling, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. I still feel sick and dirty and disgusting. Whatever was me, the old me, I think has rotted away and now whatever I am is all that’s left.

At least I have something inside me to numb the pain, something Tasha gave me, something small and blue that makes the mold on the ceiling ripple like waves and my body feel weightless and my soul feel free. I can do anything in this state of mind. Even let them use my body as an ATM for “Stinger” Markovich, Ricardo, and the others. I understand that I’m here, trapped in this situation because of me and nobody else. I could have said no to the pictures. I could have somehow not fallen for Ricardo, not trusted him, escaped from that first apartment when he gave me the chance. I could have said no to the work, no to using my body, but I didn’t fight them because I was afraid—afraid of them—and now I’m a part of this. You can’t separate a part from the whole without suffering, Ivan said to me. He told me you can’t cut off an arm and not have it bleed.