The Guest Room(73)

But she still found herself unsettled by what he may have done at that party and a little adrift in his presence. The expression sex slave kept coming back to her. Moreover, her father still wasn’t allowed to go back to work: he was still being punished by his bosses. Their house was still awash in unsettling vestiges from the party last Friday night, such as that awful couch.

And her uncle’s wedding was off. She was no longer going to get to be a flower girl, and she had been looking forward to that; she had been looking forward to that a lot. She loved the dress, and she had no idea now if she would ever have the chance to show it off. It was red velvet; it had a white collar and pearl buttons. When else would she have the opportunity to wear it? She’d probably outgrow it before she was asked again to be a flower girl.

When the phone on the kitchen wall rang, both of her parents turned toward it as if it were the smoke alarm. Then she noticed that they both looked at each other. Her father answered it; her mother leaned against a counter, holding her coffee mug with both hands. Melissa finished chewing the bite of toast in her mouth and swallowed. She planned to listen carefully. But then her father took the phone with him and wandered through the dining room and into the living room, and she couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying.

“Who is it?” she asked her mother.

“I don’t know, sweetie.”

“You look worried.”

“No.”

She didn’t believe that—her mother was worried—but Melissa could only sit against the back of her kitchen chair and wait. Both she and her mother waited.

A minute or two later, her father returned. “I’m…I’m going into the city today, after all,” he said.

“Really? Was that someone from Franklin McCoy?” her mother asked. “Was it that lawyer you despise?”

“Nope.”

“Dina Renzi?”

He had gotten dressed that morning in blue jeans and a black hoodie. Now Melissa watched him put both hands in the kangaroo pocket. At first, she thought he looked a little bewildered. But then she understood that this wasn’t confusion at all: he was stunned. “Not her, either.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” her mother said. “Who was it?”

“It was the police.”

“That detective? Detective Bryant?”

“A different one. A man. He was in the city. He…”

“Go on.”

Her father looked at her. “Melissa, your mom and I are going to talk about this in the other room. It’s nothing you need to worry about, I promise. So, why don’t you finish your breakfast and then I’ll finish making your lunch.”

She motioned at her plate and the cereal bowl, empty except for the last of the milk and a few floating Cheerios. “I’m done,” she said. She noticed the little pieces of toast left like bits of bark on her plate, and added, “I don’t eat the crusts.”

“Sweetie—”

“No!” she cut her father off, that disgusting expression—sex slaves—bubbling to the top of her mind, incapable of being repressed. She was about to say more, but the words caught in her throat. She blinked, but her eyes already were welling up. Her parents were stunned at the way she had silenced them with that one definitive syllable.

“Okay, Melissa,” her father said gingerly. “What?”

“I want to know what the police want. I’m tired of learning everything about that party online or at school.”

And that was when the room seemed to really go mad. Her father wanted to know what she was doing reading about the party on the computer, and her mother was asking her what people were saying at school. They were talking at the same time, over each other, their words running together like the great buzz at the Broadway theater before the show started last week, a burble from which all meaning had to be extracted from the single words that would rise up from an otherwise incomprehensible thrum. It made her angry. It made her furious. She didn’t know why she was the one who had to answer questions. None of this awfulness was her fault. She’d done nothing wrong. She just wanted things to be the way they were.

Suddenly both of her parents were kneeling on the kitchen floor beside her, rubbing her arms and her back, because those tears had become sobs. She tried to stop, shaking her head and rubbing her face with her napkin, but she was a mess. She just couldn’t help it, and now all those questions were forgotten as her father kept saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” and her mother kept murmuring, “Shhhhhh. Shhhhhh.”

But it wasn’t okay, it just wasn’t. That was horribly clear, because now her mother was asking her father again, “What did the police want? Why are you going into the city?”

Melissa felt her father looking at her again. And this time he answered her mother, all the while continuing to rub her back. “I’m going to the morgue. They want me to identify the body of a person who was…who passed away. They think it’s the body of one of the girls who was at the party.”

Her mother sat back on the floor as if she were a toddler. “No,” she said.

“Do you mean you have to go look at a dead body?” Melissa asked her father, sniffling, her voice now a desperate little pant in her head.

Her father nodded. “Yes. One of the girls.”