In Her Skin(3)

Which is rare.

I tab back to the photo of Vivienne in the sun. The Weirs are dead and they were vain. Instead of giving the newspaper a useful photo of their daughter, they gave the newspaper a pretty one, one that showed them on some fancy vacation, tanned and happy. My hand curls around my neck, dirty hair brushing my knuckles—hair that might have been lighter once. Vivienne’s smile is sweet and her cheeks are round, but teeth rot and faces drop with misery. Behind the basic pretty that care affords Vivienne is plain, and plain can morph into anything.

The loudspeaker booms: “The library will close in five minutes.”

When dead, vain parents plunge into the sea, they leave behind loving relatives to care for their child. Loving relatives who might not look for that mole, this scar, that overlapping tooth.

“Please bring any items to be checked out to the circulation desk.”

Wallet! I scramble off my seat and run back to the carrels. Yours is empty, the pull-chain on the banker’s lamp swinging, your chair pushed far beneath the desk. Temple Lovecraft is slippery. Temple Lovecraft is gone. But what if Vivienne Weir was back?

I am Vivienne Weir. I am Vivienne Weir. I am Vivienne. Three times makes it so.

*

The back rooms of Precinct 1440 smell of burnt coffee and desperation. It is loud and disorganized enough that someone left a picture of an age-progressed Vivienne Weir tacked right on the wall.

An expression leaves a mark on your face if you repeat it enough. The forensic artist knows this, because in the picture on the right, sixteen-year-old Vivienne Weir has teeny wrinkles beside the bridge of her nose. In the actual photo of nine-year-old Vivienne Weir on the left—the last one taken before she disappeared, the same one in the newspaper—her face is in the act of making those exact lines. I shake my hair around my face (people in shock do this) and lean forward, practicing that exploding smile over and over again.

The wrinkled lap of a skirt appears inches from my nose. I lose Vivienne’s smile and raise my chin slowly.

“Here’s your Coke,” the police social worker says, slipping back into her chair across from me. “Now, can you tell us anything else?”

I ignore the sweaty Coke, look her full in the face, and say for the third time, “My name is Vivienne.”

Police social workers like Ginny have terrible jobs. They aren’t real shrinks and they aren’t cops and they get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to work with what the cops don’t want to work with. I met one the time Momma and me got caught in a sting. Her name was Reva and she sipped the same Styrofoam cup of tea for hours and her breath smelled like nail polish remover and she wanted to “reach” me the same way Ginny wants to reach me now. But I don’t need to be reached, I need to be off the streets and nestled in with a brand-new family, and Ginny’s going to help me whether she knows it or not.

Ginny is today’s mark.

I tuck my mouth and eye the half-eaten doughnut sitting between us, bleeding jelly. Vivienne wouldn’t have gnawed at it the way I did, even if she was semi-starved. She’d take baby bites, because a jelly doughnut was considered a sometimes-treat to her instead of enough sugar and fat to live off for three days.

“No matter what you say, nobody will be upset with you. We need anything you can remember about your abductor,” Ginny says, pinching her forehead between thumb and forefinger. “For your own safety.”

She’s getting tired but she won’t give up, this Ginny, because Ginny is good at her job. It’s the only thing in her life she is good at. I need to be her win. Two cops drag in an old hooker by her sleeves. She’s screaming about being profiled even though she is very clearly a hooker, and her voice is on the same wavelength as Momma’s, hoarse from cigarettes and stomach acid. When she cuts her way around us, jerking and yelling, Ginny doesn’t blink, but I do, because I hear Momma’s voice, smell her Pall Malls and cherry Tums.

The hooker’s voice is a sign. It’s Momma telling me this plan is a good one.

Ginny ignores the hooker. “Consider the other girls he could abduct,” she presses. “These kinds of criminals don’t quit until they get caught.”

Actually, Ginny, these kinds of criminals get caught all the time, and then they get sprung, and then they take out getting caught on their girlfriends. Sometimes, they kill them.

“I told you. I don’t remember anything.”

Ginny rises and I follow her into a conference room with buzzy fluorescent lights, because Vivienne would follow an adult. Ginny settles into a new seat in the new room. I expect the suspicious detective named Curley who is assigned my case to take her place, to play Bad Cop, because that’s the only reason they bring you to a separate room. It’s like pushing a reset button. Only Ginny didn’t get the memo and launches in one more time.

“Seven years held by the same man. That’s a long time not to remember anything about him.”

Ginny’s thinking I have Stockholm syndrome and I’m thinking I have Can’t-Make-It-Up-Fast-Enough syndrome and people like Ginny and the librarian and Reva are all the same. When Ginny goes home at night to her sad cats in her sad condo, she feels her job rewards her, though she probably reuses tea bags and drives an eleven-year-old Corolla with a suction-cupped GPS and charges groceries on her credit card. I don’t feel bad for her, but I do need to move things along, and you’d think she’d be getting antsy since that network TV show calling her name starts ninety minutes from now.