What's Mine and Yours(70)

Noelle was dead. Noelle was pregnant. No, it was neither of those things. If she was honest, she knew what it was that worried her. Noelle had been sleeping late and skulking around. Noelle was high. There had been warnings in those pamphlets, the ones they’d given her so long ago, that first time Robbie was hospitalized, before the cop car and jail. He’d been babbling, senseless, and she’d driven him to the emergency room, only for them to tell her he was coming down, and she had yelled, From what? She’d felt ashamed that the doctors and nurses, who didn’t live with Robbie, didn’t love him, had known something about him that she hadn’t. They’d warned her—Addiction runs in families. She had folded up the fact and stowed it away for some other year. The girls had been small then. If there was one of them who was susceptible now, it was Noelle—she was the oldest when Robbie left, the most likely to be ruined.

Margarita strode out of the bathroom, laughing and wringing her hands with a towel. She went to the refrigerator and retrieved a lemon, sliced it in half on the counter. As she crossed through the living room, she was struck motionless at the sight of her mother pacing.

“Mama?” Margarita inched toward her, the split lemon in her hands. “What’s the matter?”

Hank answered. “She can’t find Noelle.”

“Did you check downstairs?”

Lacey May shot her a look.

“She’s probably downstairs,” Margarita said in defense of herself.

Lacey May pointed a finger at her face. “You know you live with your head in the clouds, Margarita. The rest of us are living down here.”

Margarita stood quietly, holding her lemons.

“Just go on and carry out your beauty experiment. We’ll figure this out.”

Lacey May turned away from her, and Margarita knew she had been dismissed. She found Diane back in the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet, her clothes soaking wet. She reeked of eggs.

“Margarita,” she sang, still giggly from the cold water, the fun they’d been having. “?Qué pasó, Margarita?”

“Shut up and put your head back,” Margarita said. She squeezed the stinging lemons over her sister’s scalp.

In the living room, Lacey May had collected herself and decided they should make a round of calls before they left to search. They tried Duke and got no answer, so they called Ruth. She answered right away.

“I haven’t seen her in a couple days,” she said. “Lacey May, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me you’d decided to sell the house?”

“What’s that about the house?”

“You lied to me. I saw the old tenants move out, and you told me you had new ones lined up.”

“I do. They needed until November, and I told them that was fine.”

“Well, this morning a man came by for an inspection. I went out to meet him as soon as I saw him pull up in his truck, and he told me the new owner was coming by in a few hours.”

“Oh God. What else did he say?”

“He said the house was sold.”

“Robbie,” Lacey May said. “Goddamn it. It was Robbie.”

“Calm down, maybe I misunderstood. He can’t just sell the house on his own. Isn’t it in your name, too?”

“Maybe that didn’t stop him. I’ve got to go, Ruth.”

Lacey May hung up the phone, her heart thumping. She sensed one of the girls enter the room. Noelle had her hair tied into a knot on top of her head, the skin under her eyes plump and pink, like bruises.

“Where the hell were you?”

“I was downstairs listening to music in the closet.”

“In the closet?”

Noelle nodded, and Lacey May was too numb to lecture her daughter, her mind too foggy. She stood, and Hank stood with her.

“I’ve got to talk to him,” she said. “But I ought to go alone.”

She could see now that feeling inside her hadn’t been about Noelle. It had been a premonition of this catastrophe, whatever Robbie had done with the house.

“I didn’t think he was capable of a thing like this,” she said, staring at the kitchen table, the grain of the artificial wood. “You think you know a person,” she began, but she didn’t say anything else.



The rehearsals for Measure for Measure were in full swing at Central, and Noelle was grateful for the long hours. As stage manager, she was the first to arrive and the last to leave, which was exactly what she needed. She helped Mr. Riley with blocking and cataloged the props. She directed the group to the appropriate pages of the script. But there were long breaks, too, when she wasn’t needed, and she sat with Gee in the auditorium.

She was the one who had started going and sitting with him. And while he didn’t seek her out on his own, he didn’t object. When they talked, he sat stick straight, facing the stage, peering at her sideways, as if he didn’t want to look at her head-on. She didn’t mind that or the way he never spoke more than a sentence or two at a time. He listened to her go on and on about her theories about the play, the classic rock albums she was listening to in order to edify herself. She talked about everything besides what was going on with Lacey May and Robbie, the phone calls she’d overheard between her mother and a lawyer. She didn’t know why, but she had a feeling that if she ever decided to tell him the truth, he wouldn’t look at her the way Duke did: as if she were no good, destined to be bad because of her family. Lately, she’d been wondering if that was the only reason Duke wanted her: he saw her as broken, easy.