In Her Skin(33)

Driving the getaway car was unplanned. Momma was the shill and we had no one else to drive. It was a short con gone bad: I don’t remember the details. Around the time we got to Immokalee, we’d done so many cons, flimflams, grifts and gaffs, they started to blur.

What I do remember about Immokalee: tears. Bus tickets. A stash of money in the cookie tin. A packed suitcase under the bed. Momma getting ready to leave him.

Your absence drives me to these sad thoughts. Wears me down, day after day.

Mrs. Lovecraft doesn’t like to interrupt my tutoring sessions and never sticks around. Slade is unconscious. I wander into Mr. Lovecraft’s office and slide the pocket door closed behind me. A dark drizzle blurs the windows and reduces the sidewalk people to their brightest colors. The restaurant is closed now, but I stare anyway, the way Mr. Lovecraft did that first night I came, wondering what he saw. Himself and herself, I imagine, having dinner, never suspecting someone would break in and disrespect the safety that comes with being rich, and take their daughter’s friend.

For the first time, I wonder: Why not you? You had to be a tempting morsel for a baby twiddler, that dimpled chin and those pretty eyes. The Lovecrafts were lucky. Lucky people born to a world of near misses and fortunes. Looks. Power. Children so spectacular they scare their own parents.

Mr. Lovecraft’s desk is very old and glossy and has lots of little cubbies. I sit in the leather chair and lean back, pretending to be a man of importance. I wonder what a man of importance earns each year.

I slide open a drawer.

A fat packet of glossy pages are held together with a black clip. I have stumbled upon Henry Lovecraft’s personal version of porn: a collection of stories featuring himself. There are Boston magazine articles and Yale Alumni Magazine articles and look, even a whole People magazine containing an interview he and Mrs. Lovecraft did after Vivi disappeared. They are not the cover story; a little box in the corner has a picture of me. I separate the packet into two neat piles and turn to the article. A warm flush fills my cheeks as I look at the Lovecrafts from seven years ago. They are smoother around the eyes and mouth, with larger pupils and lusher hair. His hand grips her shoulder and he stands behind her. Their eyes are guarded: they are under attack, and this is their chance to tell their side of the story.

I slip the magazine back. I know this story already: it is mine. Underneath Henry’s porn is another fat packet, this time clippings of his only daughter’s achievements, including the profile I read in the library. I lift it out and glance through the stories, and that’s just what they are: stories. They have nothing in common with the Temple I am growing to know, the Temple who feels like a marionette on strings. The Temple who insists the perception of the golden child is not the reality. Only I know this Temple. This is the Temple you save for me. My lap grows warm, thinking of your head there, those grateful eyes, the vulnerability. I’m the best thing to come along to you in all of ever. I am your release valve, the friend who knows you from before, but not now. Who has no expectations of what you should be. You can be anything with me, Temple, and I will accept you and cherish you. Where others see an overachieving straight arrow I know a pervert with a thing for EDM, Molly, and freaky puppets. I specialize in damaged things and you don’t need to be fixed, you need your spiky parts arrayed like the deadly sun that you are. You can’t touch a sparkler, you have to hold it at arm’s length, let it blaze and appreciate its beauty.

I get you, Temple. I get you.

A siren starts and I jump, falling forward slightly, and my fingers press the drawer bottom. It springs back against my fingertips, and a false bottom pops up. I slip my fingernails underneath as the front door slams shut.

“Vivi!” you call from the front door, urgent. You want me. I wait until your calls move upstairs and into my bedroom before I slip out of the office and onto the parlor couch, pretending to be asleep.

*

Of course you like cemeteries.

I suppose a girl whose best friend disappeared when she was nine years old might be hung up on the possibility of death. I will give you this. But chilling at King’s Chapel Burying Ground as the sun goes down has to be among the creepier things I’ve done (and that’s saying a lot). It’s the oldest cemetery in Boston, and the kind of place that likes to remind you that you, too, are going to die, its gravestones carved with winged death’s-heads flying to heaven, and hourglasses with shifting sands.

You lie on the grave of Joseph Tapping. It’s carved with a face-off between a bearded Father Time and Death. Your knees are bent, because in olden times people were short, or maybe just the graves were. It’s not a nice thought.

“I guess old Joseph Tapping wanted more time?” I say.

Your hands are folded behind your head and your elbows point outward and you look uniquely relaxed. I can’t bring myself to lie on a grave, so I lean against one, and it is ridiculous that no one’s kicking us out for disrespecting this historic place, but this seems to be a theme with you, a girl who defies correction in any form.

“Hmm?”

“Father Time and the skeleton facing off. You know: the struggle between life and death?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Temple, why are we here?”

“Because when my parents ask where we were and you feel the overwhelming need to be truthful, you will tell them we went to an ancient graveyard, and they will be completely freaked out.”