Authors: Alison Gaylin
“You call that work,” said Trent. “I call it what I’ll be doing in heaven someday.”
“Glad I could make you happy.”
“Actually, the props should go to Errol Ludlow,” said Trent. “He made good on his
word. He isn’t such a bad guy, right?”
Brenna winced. “You ready for your trip to the fish market?”
“See for yourself.”
Brenna turned. On his desk, he’d spread out a series of poster-sized versions of his
cat renderings.
She moved closer. “Wow,” she said. “You’re an artist.”
He really was. The computerized renderings were incredibly detailed, with each version
of Persephone—fat, emaciated, bedraggled, glossy and coddled—real enough to break
a cat lover’s heart. If Trent was unsuccessful in his search, Brenna imagined that
Annette might want to frame at least one of these pictures.
“You think I should take all of them?” he said. “I mean, if Persie’s been living with
all those fish vendors for three months, I should probably just take the fat pic,
right? Oh, and I also have another one I just made—with mange . . . What are you smiling
at?”
“Persie.”
“Yeah, well, some people don’t mind if I give them nicknames.”
“She’s not a person,” Brenna said.
He sighed heavily.
“I’d take all the photos, Trent. It’s best to keep the bases covered.”
“But they’re bulky. I don’t want to carry them all.”
“That’s what your man purse is for.”
“It’s called a messenger bag.”
“Sorry.” She smiled. “I really hope you get lucky with Persephone.”
“Me too.” No jokes about getting lucky. Not even his trademark cocked eyebrow. Trent
really wanted to find this cat.
Trent slipped the renderings into his man purse. Brenna eyed it as he slung it over
his shoulder—pale desert camo, with five big, shiny general’s stars across the front
and a dog-tag zipper pull. She would’ve been hard-pressed to find any item of apparel
that tried half as hard as that bag did.
“Later!”
After he closed the door behind him, Brenna moved back to her desk and opened the
forwarded e-mail—Lula Belle’s last. She looked at the date—October 6, 2009. A day
after the one televised interview Brenna had done in the wake of the Neff case—on
Faith’s show,
Sunrise Manhattan
.
October 6. Tuesday . . . The clock radio is saying her name, waking her up with her
own name, only it’s a morning deejay voice saying it. Mickey in the Morning—only voice
obnoxious enough to get Brenna out of bed, and so she knows she’s awake, Mickey on
her clock radio . . . Brenna blinks the sand out of her eyes, her the clock glowing
6:58 A.M. and her own name on the radio.
Must have misheard.
“Brenna Spector, that’s her name, right?”
How does Mickey in the Morning know my name? Oh God, Faith’s show. He knows it from
Faith’s show.
“The woman who remembers everything—including, uh, the occasional performance malfunction
. . . Not like Mickey ever has those . . . heh heh heh . . .”
No, no, no . . .
“Five years later, and she’s looking at you, thinking about that time when you . . .”
She snapped the hair ties on her wrist
. Get out of my head, please, October 6. You are far too embarrassing.
Brenna focused on the screen, the opened e-mail. At the top, Gary had listed the locations
he could remember for the previous PO boxes. There were only three of them, as it
turned out: Atlantic City; Portsmouth, Virginia; and Louisville, Kentucky. The Louisville
one, the oldest, she’d used for a few months at the start of this year.
Odd
, Brenna thought. Not that Gary would remember only three of the PO boxes—but that
they’d be the three most recent. Brenna picked up her phone quickly, called him on
the disposable cell.
“Just a sec,” Gary Freeman said, by way of answering. Brenna heard shuffling, Gary’s
muffled voice excusing himself, followed by a door closing. She let her gaze wander
past the three addresses Gary had listed, to the last e-mail Lula Belle had sent him.
The address she used was [email protected] Cute. And worthless. No factual personal
information was required to sign up for a Hotmail account.
“You’re alone?” Gary whispered.
“Just for brevity’s sake,” Brenna said. “I’ll always be alone when I call you. You
don’t need to ask.”
He exhaled. “What’s up?”
“I’m just curious about these PO box addresses.”
“Why?”
“These are really the only ones you remember?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Spector.” He laughed a little. “We don’t all have your memory.”
“Oh, I know that,” she said. “It’s just that, in my own experience, everyone’s most
likely to remember their first time.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your first date, your first concert, your first time hearing ‘I love you.’ The first
time you met. People usually remember firsts more than, say, ninths, tenths, and elevenths.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I’d think you’d remember the first PO box.”
“Hmmm . . .” he said. “That’s a good point. I guess maybe I blocked it, but let me
think . . .” Gary kept talking, but Brenna didn’t hear him. She was reading the content
of Lula Belle’s final e-mail. It was, as Gary had described, just one line. No greeting,
no signoff. Just PO box and a location. Brenna stared at it, her jaw going tight.
Gary was saying, “For the life of me, I can’t seem to remember—”
“This forwarded e-mail,” Brenna interrupted. “This was the last e-mail you received
from her. The last PO box she was at?” She wished, more than anything, she could get
her voice to stop trembling.
“Yes,” Gary said. “Is something wrong?”
“The check you sent there—to that . . . that location. Was it ever cashed?”
“No,” he said slowly. “Does the location mean something?”
Brenna cleared her throat. “Probably not to the case,” she said. But if he really
had read Lieberman’s book, then Gary had to know it meant something to
her
. The PO box was in City Island, New York—Brenna’s childhood home.
I
n Brenna’s
dream, her father was crying at a traffic light on City Island Boulevard, head
pressed against the wheel. Horns blared all around them and Brenna was staring
up at the light, fear racing up her back, through her hair. “
Move it, asshole!
” someone shouted. It sounded as if
he were in the car with them—this stranger yelling swearwords at her father,
hating her father, her father who was sobbing at the wheel, his back shaking.
Brenna wanted to scream. She wanted to tell her dad to close the windows, lock
the doors so that person couldn’t come in. But she couldn’t talk. Why was Dad
crying? She’d never seen him cry before. Was it something she’d said? What had
she said? How had she gotten here, back in City Island, back in the Land Shark
with the sun streaming through the windows and her dad here with her, her dad
crying.
She felt a hand over hers. She squeezed it.
Clea
. Clea’s hand. Clea’s calm voice. “
Daddy, the light is green
.”
“Clea!” Brenna gasped herself awake, but still she
heard her talking—the same voice, Clea’s voice. Clea in the room with her, a
young girl talking . . . “and Mama didn’t want me to keep a diary, but
I told her that Anne Frank kept a diary when she was in hiding
. . .”
Not Clea. Lula Belle. On Brenna’s computer screen
twisted into a backbend, Lula Belle, her long legs spread very wide, her fluffy
head thrown back. “Anne Frank named her diary Kitty, and she loved Kitty very
much . . .”
Brenna had fallen asleep at her desk, watching the
downloads Gary had sent.
“ ‘You’re not in hiding, Lula Belle,’ Mama said.
But she knew I was. I was hiding from the world, hiding from her.”
Brenna had been watching them for hours, in
chronological order. She was currently in the middle of month nineteen—there
were twenty-three months in all, around a hundred downloads—and as obsessed as
Gary and Trent and Errol may have been with the idea of some faceless albeit
extremely flexible woman revealing her so-called innermost secrets, Brenna
wasn’t feeling it.
On the contrary, she’d rather snort bug spray than
hear Lula Belle say one more word about herself. Couldn’t she talk about
anything else? Politics? The weather? Chocolate-chip cookie recipes? Hell,
anything would have been a welcome change from this overwrought pseudo-Tennessee
Williams monologue Brenna had been slogging through for the past five hours—all
of it meaningless, but for the cheesy music of the words.
“I want my Kitty, Mama. Let me have a Kitty of my
own . . .”
“I got your Kitty right here,” Brenna muttered.
She clicked off the download and gloried, for a few
moments, in the hum of the radiator, the street noise beyond, the absence in
her
New York apartment of sugary Southern accent.
Honestly, Brenna was beginning to think the cement
mixer song—like Lula Belle’s decision to make City Island the home of her final
PO box—was just a bizarre coincidence. Maybe Brenna’s father hadn’t made up the
song after all. Maybe it was just something he’d heard once or twice on the
radio, and Lula Belle had heard the same song and created a story to go around
it. Because she
was
creating these stories out of
thin air, Brenna was certain. The inconsistencies gave her away. In the early
downloads, for instance, Lula talked about spending her “whole entire life
locked indoors, seeing nothing.” But in the later downloads, she waxed on about
ocean waves and saltwater air, feeling the sand between her toes as a little
girl—and this was just one small example. She loved and missed her father; then
she didn’t. He had shot himself in the head; then he had simply left home. She
took her first lover at fourteen. She was a virgin until she was eighteen and
met “the boy on the road”—whom she refused to call by name but prattled on about
nearly as much as her sadistic mama. If Gary Freeman honestly believed Lula
Belle was baring her true soul to him, then it had to be due to large amounts
of
blood rushing away from his brain to elsewhere in his anatomy.
Brenna’s computer made a beeping sound—an instant
message coming in. She felt a slight surge in her pulse, the dimmest spark of
the most misguided type of hope.
Jim
.
There had been a time, not too long ago, when she
and her ex-husband would instant message for hours, every night. She’d loved
it.
Brenna hadn’t seen Jim in years because she
couldn’t handle the onslaught of memories that came from looking into his eyes
or hearing his voice or feeling the heat he emitted—Jim,
alive and in the room with her
. It was too powerful—and not for the
bad memories, either. No, it had always been the good times that made Brenna
die
a little inside when she recalled them, and that wasn’t fair to anyone—not to
Jim, or his wife, Faith, or for that matter, Brenna herself.
The instant messaging, on the other hand
. . . That was just words on a screen, and it had been different. Jim
and Brenna were both bad sleepers and so they’d talk, late into the night, about
their jobs, about the news, about Maya. They’d make each other laugh over old
inside jokes and give each other advice and send each other links to new songs
or movie clips on YouTube. Nothing too heavy, nothing inappropriate. But every
night, for close to a year, until it became something necessary. Weird as it
might sound, it had been about as deep and fulfilling a friendship as she’d ever
had—until Jim had decided that this time, he was the one who couldn’t handle
it.
Their relationship had become
too
necessary, he
explained. And he cut things off. Brenna understood. Of course she did. But at
the same time, she could remember it all—every joke and piece of advice and warm
recollection and movie clip, every word from Jim that had ever appeared on her
screen.
She missed him so much.
Brenna clicked on her online icon. Her breathing
slowed. The instant message was from Kate O’Hanlon, her old friend—if you used
the word “friend” very loosely.
Got some info on the City
Island box
, it read.
Kate worked at the New York Postal Inspector’s
Office, and Brenna had e-mailed her asking for her help in finding who the box
was registered to, just after speaking with Gary Freeman.
Brenna typed,
And?
Breakfast. Tomorrow. Artie’s.
Brenna sighed. Always the quid pro quo with
Kate—and always with a meal included.
Fine
, Brenna
typed.
8 A.M.
7:30.
Brenna grimaced.
Okey
dokey
!
She started to go back to the Lula Belle downloads,
but that only made her remember that dream again—that strange dream with her
father sobbing against the steering wheel. God, Brenna hated seeing men cry.
She
couldn’t stomach it, never could, and never quite understood
why . . .
Let’s give the downloads a
rest.
Brenna went back online. She called up Google,
fully intending to do another search on Lula Belle—see if, this time around,
it
turned up anything other than a marker for her now-defunct Web site, bed and
breakfasts, and lost animal postings (turned out Lula Belle was a surprisingly
popular name for English bulldogs).
But instead, Brenna clicked on Google Images, her
fingers typing in “Jim Rappaport” as if they were powered by something other
than Brenna’s mind. A dozen pictures popped up, and again with her brain telling
her to stop, Brenna was modifying her search, adding “Christmas 1998.”
She saw the picture, up in the right corner of the
screen—Jim and herself, young and smiling—in front of the tree at the Helmsley
Palace, where Jim’s paper, the
Trumpet
, had its
holiday party that year. The picture was in the
Trumpet
’s archives, and of course, she knew the caption without
having to read it—
Senior reporter Jim Rappaport and his
wife, Brenna, left their toddler with a sitter to share in the seasonal
fun
.
Step away from the
computer
, Brenna told herself. But she was enlarging the photo and
staring into it, into the evening of Saturday, December 19, 1998. She felt the
strapless red velvet dress against her skin—bought four days prior at the
Dizzy’s on Nineteenth and Fifth. And she let herself lapse into the memory,
knowing she shouldn’t, aching even as she did . . .
The draft in the hotel ballroom chills her back. Goosebumps.
Jim’s hand on her bare shoulder, and through the speaker system, Brenna
hears Etta James singing “White Christmas.” Brenna’s had two glasses of
champagne and nothing to eat and her head swims a little. They’re standing
right next to the tree—an enormous pine, and Brenna is focusing on a
snowflake ornament—white ceramic with sparkles mixed in. It reminds her of
something, something from childhood, something comforting and warm she can’t
quite specify. . .
“Brenna?” Jim’s fingers move
across her shoulder blades, and she turns to him. “You okay?”
She gazes into his eyes—brown
with gold flecks. She is inches away from him. She can feel his breath
. . . “If you’re remembering something, tell me, okay? I can help
you. I always want to help you . . .”
Brenna’s buzzer sounded, and she was back, tears in
her eyes, alone. Longing. Why had she done that? Why did she do these things
to
herself?
Again, the buzzer. “Oh no.” Brenna recalled the
awkward phone message she’d left five hours ago, word for word. She swatted the
tears from her eyes, cleared her throat, went for the buzzer. “Yes?”
“Nicholas Morasco to see Brenna Spector.”
A wave of guilt washed through Brenna—
Sorry if I kept you waiting. I was busy
crying over someone I don’t know anymore.
She shook it off, pushed the button. “Shouldn’t
that be Senior Detective Nicholas Morasco?”
“Nah. We’re watching porn, I’m off duty.”
Brenna smiled, hit the buzzer.
She listened to Morasco’s footfalls jogging up the
stairs and opened the door before he knocked.
She warmed at the sight of him, standing in the
doorjamb with his messed hair and his wire-rimmed glasses, his late-day beard
scruff, and his inevitable tweed jacket and jeans combination, all of it working
on him for some reason—that rumpled, professorial look. She still couldn’t
believe he was a cop. “It isn’t porn you know,” she said. “It’s performance
art.”
“Right . . . I’m definitely gonna need a
drink, then.”
She grabbed a couple of beers from the
refrigerator—a nice Brooklyn IPA that Faith had brought by a week ago—and walked
Nick over to the couch. They drank, he talked about his uneventful day at work,
and she asked him about the new chief of police in Tarry Ridge—a decent guy,
according to Nick (though a second choice, Brenna knew. Nick had turned down
the
job himself).
Then, she filled him in on everything that had
happened over the course of the day—everything, that is, except for her
conversation with Gary Freeman. By the time she was through, she was feeling
like herself again.
“Errol Ludlow, huh?” said Morasco. “No wonder
there’s porn involved.”
Brenna nodded. She hated lying to him. Of course,
this wasn’t lying, right? She’d just left out the part about Errol getting
fired.
Morasco was staring at her in such a way, though,
she had to avert her gaze. He had the type of dark eyes that seemed to see right
into your thoughts. Brenna knew that it was largely due to myopia, but
still . . .
Brenna got her laptop from her desk, flipped it
open on the coffee table, and settled in next to Morasco. “You ready for a
little performance art?”
He gave her a half smile. “I’d be lying if I said I
didn’t wish that was a euphemism.”
Brenna felt her face color a little. “Me too,” she
said, before she noticed how Morasco was looking at the screen—the picture from
Jim’s Christmas party filling it.
Brenna minimized the picture.
“Pretty dress,” he said.
“It’s old.” She took a very long swallow of her
beer, recalling Ludlow, of all people. Ludlow, sitting across from her at the
Waverly Diner at 9:45
A.M.
, watching her with
that knowing smirk she wanted to slap off of his face.
Yes,
and how is Detective Morasco? Page Six spotted you two at some bar
. . . which one was it?
Ludlow, “knowing” Ludlow, who in reality knew
nothing other than what he read in the papers, who had no idea that Brenna and
Morasco had kissed only once, on November 9 at 12:45
P.M.
, in the parking lot of a bar that was never written up in Page
Six, and if Ludlow had only seen the look in Morasco’s eyes when she pulled away
. . . No, that was wrong. Brenna’s memory couldn’t tell a lie, even a
white one. It had been Nick who’d pulled away.
Brenna gritted her teeth.
Don’t go there, not now
.
“Lula Belle,” Morasco was saying now. “Sounds like
a cartoon cow from a milk commercial.”
Brenna laughed. “Wait till you see her.” She called
up the next download and hit play. At the start of it, Lula Belle was standing,
arms and legs akimbo, backlit as ever so that the edges of her hair glowed,
halolike.
Morasco frowned at the screen, but within moments,
Lula Belle turned to the side and arched her back. Then she slipped into the
splits, touching her toes to the crown of her head. “I’m open to you.”
“Oh my,” he said.
The silhouette rolled onto her back, raised a
delicate hand to her brow. “So please, my sweet . . . be open to
me.”
Morasco moved closer. The screen flickered in his
eyes.
“Still thinking about cartoon cows?” said
Brenna.
“Uh, no.”
She smiled at him. “Didn’t think so.”