Authors: Alison Gaylin
He tapped Gary Freeman’s number into his phone, his smile broadening. This day just
kept getting better and better.
“W
hy would he ever leave you?” Trent asked Robin Tannenbaum’s computer, his hands caressing
the keyboard. “You’re so beautiful.”
Hildy Tannenbaum gave Brenna a worried look.
She shrugged. “He likes machinery.”
“I saw this model at the Mac trade show at the Javits, but they wouldn’t let me touch
it. It feels really good,” Trent breathed. “Oh, and hello Miss T–2 line, you comely
little wench . . .”
“I don’t know whether you realize it,” Brenna told Trent, “but you just said all that
out loud.”
They were in Robin’s room—a small, sparsely furnished bedroom with bare walls. Clearly,
Robin didn’t share his mother’s affection for big, complicated furniture—this was
more of a dorm room aesthetic—only without the posters, the beer can pyramids, the
piles of dirty clothes and stolen orange safety cones. In fact, the only remarkable
thing in the entire room was the souped-up Mac Pro, which Trent seemed to be taking
an undue amount of pleasure in exploring.
“Any reason why he’d need a high-speed line, Mrs. Tannenbaum?” Brenna said. “Did he
do freelance work?”
“Yes,” said Hildy. But it was clear she had no desire to elaborate.
Brenna almost felt as though she could turn to Robin, ask him herself. Though Hildy
claimed the room had been vacated for two months, it had a look to it as though he
would return any minute. The bed was made, yes, but hastily so—the plain beige spread
pulled over the pillow but not tucked under it, the shades drawn. A stale, lonely
scent hung in the air—sweat, unwashed sheets—and a few Louise Hay self-help books
were stacked on the bedside table—a pair of reading glasses and a yellow highlighter
perched on top as if he’d just rested them there a few minutes ago. Brenna picked
up the top book—
The Power Is Within You
. A recent printing of an old book, dog-eared far from the end, at page 162. Brenna
skimmed the highlighted page.
Why would you leave an unfinished book behind?
“Are you sure he actually meant to leave home?”
She nodded. “He taped a note to the refrigerator. Would you like to see it?”
“Sure.”
Hildy exited the room. Soon after, Brenna heard groans coming from the computer speakers.
She looked up to see a man and three women on screen in a tangle of sweaty gratification,
a maid’s apron the only item of clothing between the four of them.
“Trent,” Brenna said. “Stop looking at Robin Tannenbaum’s porn.”
“It’s not his porn,” Trent said. “It’s his
job
.”
Brenna raised her eyebrows. “He’s a porn star?”
“Porn editor. Found this in his Final Cut Pro . . . which sounds kinda dirty if you
don’t know it’s an editing program.” He snickered.
“So that’s why he’s got the high-speed line,” Brenna said. “So he can send the edited
films to his employer.”
“Happy Endings.”
“Huh?”
“That’s the company he works for—says it at the bottom of all his files.” He turned
to Brenna. “I’ve . . . uh . . . heard of them before. They do nice work.”
The door pushed open and Hildy walked in.
“Oops,” said Trent. He closed the video fast, though something told Brenna that even
if he’d kept the clip up there in all its blazing, groaning glory, Hildy would have
ignored it. She’d known what her son did for a living, just as she’d known about her
husband’s
Playboy
stash. Brenna could tell in the way she’d averted her gaze when Brenna had asked
her about Robin’s involvement with Web sites, when Trent had asked if he worked in
film; she could tell in how carefully she’d chosen the words “professional work on
his computer.” Hildy was going to be tough.
“I have the note.” Hildy handed it to Brenna—typewritten and just a few lines long.
“He left it for me on October 9.”
Mother:
No need to keep dinner warm. May be gone for a little while.
Best, RJT
Brenna looked at Hildy. “Best, RJT?”
“He’s never been very demonstrative.”
“Really?”
“Not with me,” she said, quietly. “Not in the house.”
“So you didn’t know many of his friends.”
“I didn’t know any of them.” Hildy took a breath. And for several moments, the only
sound in the room was the soft clack of the keyboard as Trent explored Robin’s computer.
Brenna said, “Tell me about the woman with the Southern accent.”
“I didn’t think Robbie actually knew her,” she said. “I walked by his room and I heard
this voice and I assumed it must have been a . . . a movie.”
Brenna said, “Do you recall what the woman was saying?”
“I heard, ‘Let me go, my love.’ ”
Brenna closed her eyes, the previous night seeping back into her mind—she felt her
desk chair beneath her, her eyes blurry with sleep, her mind starting to fog . . .
Brenna’s seventeenth Lula Belle download plays out, but she’s finding it hard to focus.
Her eyes flutter closed for a moment, and then open on the screen, on Lula Belle on
the floor, palms in front of her, both legs pretzeled behind her shadow of a head.
“I’ve been with him for three weeks and I don’t like him anymore. He keeps looking
at my neck like he wants to bite it, and sometimes, I could swear he’s got fangs.
It’s the dust, I know. The dust. It’s making me see things.”
Brenna squints at the screen.
The dust?
“ ‘Let me go,’ I tell him, this man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with.
‘Let me go, my love.’ ”
Hildy said, “Something about bites on her neck . . .”
“It was a download,” Brenna said.
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Other nights, though,” she said slowly. “I mean . . . I couldn’t make out what was
being said. I tried
not
to hear, to be honest . . . But she sounded so different than the other . . . um
. . . female voices on Robbie’s computer.”
“How so?” Brenna said.
“She sounded as though she were speaking directly to him.”
Brenna nodded. “She’s like that.”
Trent looked at Hildy. “I don’t see anyone in his Skype contacts. Of course he could
have deleted her.”
“I don’t know what Skype contacts are.”
Trent started to explain, but Brenna wasn’t listening, her attention drawn away, as
it was, by the pile of books on Robin’s bedside table. Underneath the three Louise
Hays was a library book. She could tell what it was just from glancing at the spine,
but she picked it up anyway.
Extraordinary Children
by RF Lieberman.
She opened it up, glanced at the date. It had been checked out on October 5—the same
date Brenna had appeared on Faith’s show . . .
The klieg lights shine hot on Brenna’s face. She’s wearing a long-sleeved black shirt
and her hair is down and she sweats at the temples. She craves a drink of water. Faith
smiles at her. Her TV makeup is flawless, the warm air between them thick with the
sweet smell of it. “You ready, Brenna? We’re on in five.”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna start out by talking about your childhood. That okay with you?” She’s got
Lieberman’s book in her lap. Brenna’s stares at it, then looks up, into Faith’s sky
blue eyes. The lights make them twinkle. “Sure,” she says.
“Great.”
“Can you tell me something, though?”
“Uh-huh?”
“How’s Jim?”
Brenna bit her lip hard. She put the book back. Could be a coincidence, she thought.
But if so, it was a strange one. Robin Tannenbaum checks Lieberman’s book out of the
library the same day Faith shows it to her viewers on
Sunrise Manhattan
. The next day, Lula Belle sends Gary an e-mail, instructing him to send this month’s
check to a PO box under Robin’s name and located in the town where Brenna grew up.
Three days later, he leaves a typed note for his mother and is never heard from again.
Did Brenna’s appearance on
Sunrise Manhattan
trigger Robin’s disappearance? Not necessarily. But the fact remained: It happened
first.
“You can take the computer,” Hildy was saying to Trent. “Do whatever you have to do
with it for as long as you have to do it.”
“You mean it?”
“I know this will sound strange, but it will be a relief not to have it around.”
Brenna looked at her.
“It frightens me,” she said. “Robbie spent so much time with it, and he’s gone, and
I . . . I feel . . .”
“Like the computer took him away?” Brenna said.
“Yes. Like it sucked him in when I wasn’t looking, then printed out that note so I
wouldn’t suspect anything, and . . . Oh, this sounds even stranger when I say it out
loud.”
Brenna put a hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t. I understand.” And she did. She knew
what it was like to have someone warm and alive beside her one day, gone the next,
the whole house filled with the lack of her—the Rose Royce record on the turntable
in her bedroom, the strands of blonde hair in the brush she left behind, the clothes
in her closet and the pack of Marlboro Lights stashed under her pillow and the Adam
Ant poster on the hot pink wall that she’d painted herself. All of it still there,
waiting . . .
Please come home,
Brenna thinks, standing in Clea’s old room at 10 P.M., August 29, 1983. She stares
up at Adam Ant. He’s grinning at her. He’s grinning with those mean thin lips like
he knows where Clea is, and he could be the man in the blue car. Anybody could be
the man in the blue car . . .
“Robbie didn’t take his cell phone,” Hildy said. “Honestly, why would someone go away
for two months without taking their cell phone?”
Brenna gave her a long look. “Maybe he didn’t want to be traced.”
“Excuse me?”
“Almost any cell phone can be tracked because of GPS capability,” Brenna said. “Even
the simplest phone is sending and receiving messages from the nearest tower every
few minutes, so the user can be found that way—through triangulation. Right, Trent?”
“But I would never think of doing that,” Hildy said. “I can barely use my own cell
phone, let alone triangulate my son with towers.”
“I’m sure, Hildy,” Brenna said.
“So . . . why?”
“Maybe it wasn’t you he was worried about.”
Hildy’s eyes widened.
“Can I have the cell phone, Mrs. Tannenbaum? It would be helpful to look at his contacts.”
She nodded. Slowly, she slipped a smart phone out of the pocket of her robe, handed
it to Brenna. “It never rings,” she said. “I carry it around anyway. Charge it every
night. Do you want the charger?”
“Please.”
Hildy left the room. Brenna looked at RJ’s phone—an iPhone to match the Mac Pro. Brenna
wasn’t a fan of smart phones. She found them pointless, but she’d used Trent’s for
a couple of hours on October 19, 2008, when her flip phone died on a stakeout. It
was just like this one. She clicked it on, tapped the phone icon. “Weird.”
“What?” Trent said.
“Looks like RJ made and received no calls on this thing.”
“He probably deleted his call log,” he said. “I can recover that.”
“You’re the best.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But listen, can you first take a look at this download for
me?”
She gave him a look.
“It’s G-rated, okay?”
“What is it?”
“Just a picture. It looks . . . personal.”
Brenna moved to the computer.
Trent clicked on the picture so that it filled his screen, and when Brenna saw it,
her mouth went dry. Her pulse pounded and her head swam and for a moment, she feared
she might collapse, right there in Robin Tannenbaum’s bedroom, with his sweat smell
in the air and his mother entering the room again, his mother standing right behind
her, asking, “Do you know those people? Do you, Brenna?”
There is a connection. There has to be, my God, there has to.
Brenna stared at the faded, scanned photo: a blonde girl, around ten, riding a blue
bicycle, a much littler girl with curly dark hair balanced on the handlebars. Both
were wearing bright, one-piece bathing suits. Both were laughing into the camera . . .
Look at me, Daddy! Look!
“He loved to take pictures of us,” Brenna whispered.
“Who?” Trent said.
“My father.”
The picture, circa 1975, was of Brenna and Clea.
S
omehow, Brenna managed to make it through the next several minutes, Trent doing most
of the talking as she tried to quiet the thrumming in her head, the pounding of her
heart.
Move through this
, she told herself.
You can fall apart later, but for now stay here. You have to stay here to find Robin
Tannenbaum, and now you need to find him. You must find him.
Hildy Tannenbaum provided them with her son’s credit card bills and banking information
as well as a few recent pictures of him, then allowed them to open his closet, which
was reasonably full—though, Brenna noticed, mostly with summer clothes. At the back
of the closet, Brenna found a tripod—but no cameras, cables, lights . . .
Winter clothes, film equipment. He’d left on a film job, most likely on the East Coast.
You could tell so much more about a missing person by what was gone from his room
than what remained in it. Brenna had always known this, yet never applied it to her
own life. The picture from the computer screen—Brenna and Clea on that bike, Clea’s
bike—had that ever been in Clea’s room? Had she seen her sister looking at it? Placing
that very picture in a book and slamming it shut as Brenna walked in . . .
“We’ll get the computer back to you as soon as we can,” Brenna heard herself say,
as Trent finished unhooking the cables and wrapped the monitor in a clean blanket
Hildy had given him.
“Take your time,” she said. “I have no use for it.”
Brenna forced a smile. “That’s nice of you,” she said. “But all the same, I’d rather
not have Trent get too attached to it. He’s kind of weird about mechanical things.”
“Dude. I’m right here.”
“Brenna?”
“Yes, Hildy?”
“That was you and your sister? On the computer?”
“Yes.”
“Why would my son have that picture?”
Brenna swallowed hard. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” she said.
Same thing Morasco had said on October 1, standing across from Brenna in a distraught
mother’s abandoned kitchen, that musty scent in the air—old furniture, dust—Brenna
thinking,
It smells like ghosts. . .
“Why just sixty-four thousand dollars?” said Trent, which brought her back into the
room, nostalgic for three months ago.
A simpler time
, Brenna thought—which made her smile in spite of everything. Breaking into the home
of a long-gone grieving mother with a man she was developing a whole bunch of complicated
feelings for, yet still it was a hell of a lot simpler than this.
“I remember that TV show,” Hildy Tannenbaum said, and Brenna had an urge to call Morasco,
to rush to his apartment and show him the picture and cry into his chest like a child.
I don’t understand. Please help me understand.
She wouldn’t do it, though, she knew. Every time she felt compelled to do something,
she had to weigh it against what would happen later—the remembering. But still . . .
Still.
I don’t understand
.
Please help me.
“
Inspiration,” said Trent.
Brenna blinked at him.
He was pointing at a picture that had been taped to the inside of Robin Tannenbaum’s
closet, next to a full-length mirror—a paparazzi shot of Steven Spielberg, printed
out from a computer.
Brenna said, “He wants to be a director?”
Trent shook his head. “He wants to
look
like a director. Like Spielberg. That’s why it’s next to the mirror. Mrs. Tannenbaum,
when you last saw Robin, was he growing a beard?”
She nodded. “It wasn’t a full beard yet, but he did stop shaving.”
“When?”
“Maybe a few days before he left?”
“Knew it,” he said. “Can I take this picture?”
“Of course, but why?”
“I think if I Photoshop elements from it into the recent shots of Robin, we’ll get
a pretty good likeness of what he looked like when he was last seen.”
Hildy stared at him. “My goodness,” she said. “I never even noticed that picture.”
Trent shrugged. “Only reason why I did is I’ve got one myself.”
Hildy frowned at him. “You have a picture of Steven Spielberg next to your mirror?”
He shook his head. “Vin Diesel,” he said. “Not for the shaved head. It’s the ink and
the bod I want. And you know . . . the fashion sense. Actually, I’ve got a whole Diesel
calendar next to my mirror.”
“I have no idea who that is,” Hildy said.
Brenna looked at Trent. Any other time, she would’ve had a field day with this information.
At the very least, she would have asked him which exact tattoos he’d copied from Vin
and what the ladies thought of the beefcake calendar next to his bedroom mirror. But
she didn’t have it in her. She didn’t have anything in her, except the need to find
Robin Tannenbaum—and then Lula Belle—as soon as possible. “Who sent Robin that picture,
Trent?”
“A Hotmail address.”
“Sweetpea81?”
He nodded, slowly.
How does Lula Belle know so much of my life? Why does she have this picture?
Brenna at ten, shouting for her sister:
“Clee-a! Mom says dinner’s ready!”
Brenna opening the door and Clea is putting something into a book. A snapshot. One
her dad took. Brenna and Clea on a bike. She’s closing the book and she’s looking
up, she’s looking at Brenna and she’s shoving the book in a drawer . . .
It’s all so foggy. Is this a real memory—or just something I
want
to remember?
It was impossible to say. Were everyone’s childhood recollections this murky—or just
Brenna’s, made murkier when compared to all the ones that came later?
Does it matter?
Lula Belle had this picture now. Lula Belle knew the cement mixer song. Lula Belle
was bound and determined to screw with Brenna’s brain until it broke . . . or she
was family. Or she was both.
“Are you all right, dear?” Hildy said.
Lula Belle, are you my sister?
“Yo, Brenna?”
Brenna took a breath. “I haven’t seen one of my dad’s pictures in thirty-two years.”
Hildy said, “Why not?”
“He left us.” Brenna cleared her throat.
“And your mother was that angry?”
“It wasn’t anger . . .” She looked at Hildy and made herself smile. “To Mom, Dad was
like that stack of
Playboy
s you found in your husband’s closet. You know . . . only without the cute cartoons.”
Hildy stared up at her, her eyes buglike behind her glasses, an emotion passing through
them. An understanding. “Sweep him under the rug,” she said. “Act like he never existed,
so he’ll never be able to hurt you again.”
“Yes.”
“Your mother—did she ever speak to you about your father? Tell you stories or . . .”
“No.” Brenna’s voice trembled. “She never mentioned his name. He must have taken hundreds
of photographs of us—she got rid of them all. My mom sculpted and painted—she said
she didn’t trust cameras. And so all we had was school pictures, and then after Clea
went away . . . my mother got rid of most of those. In my mind, Clea is always seventeen
because that’s the only picture Mom kept of her—her eleventh grade class picture.
The one the police used.”
Hildy took both of Brenna’s hands in hers. Her grip was surprisingly strong, as if
to pull her back into the present. It worked.
Stay here
.
“I don’t want to be like that,” Hildy said. “Robbie’s hurt me plenty, but I don’t
want to make him disappear. He’s my boy. I want him back.”
“We’ll do our best for you,” said Brenna. “I promise.”
Hildy’s eyes started to glisten. A tear slipped down her cheek, and without thinking
Brenna took her in her arms and hugged her—her arthritic back hard and curled like
a turtle’s shell beneath her palms, the orange wig wiry at her chin, all of Hildy
so small and brittle, it broke Brenna’s heart. “I want to help you,” Brenna said.
And she did, so very much. She wanted to help them both.
T
he thing with Trent: He was a douchebag. But beneath that gelled-up, tatted-out, spray-tanned
exterior, he was also a friend. And so as prone as he was to say the wrong thing at
absolutely the worst possible time, he also knew when to shut up.
After he’d slipped the computer into the trunk of his Ford Taurus and Brenna had gotten
into the front seat and buckled up, Robin Tannenbaum’s photos and billing information,
the contents of his desk, and his phone, too, in a manila envelope in her lap, along
with a printout of the picture of Clea and herself, Trent turned to Brenna. “Are you
okay?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Brenna shook her head again, and for Trent, that was enough. He turned the ignition
and flipped the radio to his favorite station—some Sirius channel that played an awful
lot of Justin Timberlake. For most of the ride home, he bobbed his head and tapped
his hands against the steering wheel and didn’t say a word.
The roads were reasonably clear, though with more cars going into the city than usual
on a Saturday—Christmas shoppers. Brenna focused on the cars. Because of her condition,
and a knowledge of automobiles she’d perfected after Clea had gotten into a blue one
she couldn’t identify, Brenna tended to notice cars and keep them in her mind. She
read up on them, and could discern most makes, models, and years by sight alone. Brenna
took comfort in that as Trent drove—the red 2003–2006 Honda Civic at their side, scooting
along behind a beige early 2000s Cabriolet and behind them, the huge, cross-hatched
grille of a black Dodge Magnum—had to be a 2005–2008 because those were the only years
they made those grilles—intimidating things. They sneered into the rearview.
Year, model, make, color . . . all of it so organized and simple and certain. So easy
to identify a car as opposed to a person, who can take off all her clothes but drape
herself in shadow, who can lay her soul bare—lay
your
soul bare—but with a phony accent and you don’t know who she is, you can’t know who
she is, until . . .
Lula Belle, are you my sister?
“Bringing Sexy Back” sprang out of Trent’s cell phone. Ironically, it was the same
song that happened to be playing on the radio. Dueling Timberlakes. “That’s a text
message,” Trent said. “Can you check it for me?”
Brenna picked up his phone, clicked on the text message icon, and looked at the screen.
“It’s from Annette Shelby. Do you want me to read it to you?”
“I’ll read it later.” Trent said it in such a way that it made her put the phone down—still
she couldn’t help but see the text:
I didn’t mean to hurt you.
Brenna looked at Trent, the way he stared out the window, his jaw set. She took in
the purplish circles under his eyes—the pallor you could see despite the spray tan—and
it hit her that maybe there was something else about Trent’s appearance that was different
today. Maybe he didn’t look thrashed, so much as lost. Sad. “You okay?”
He shook his head.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Come on, Brenna.”
“What?”
“Duh. You’ve kinda got more important things on your mind. We’re talking possible
family
issues.”
“I’d like to hear what happened,” she said. “And just so you know, Maya stopped saying
‘duh’ in the fifth grade.”
Trent gripped the wheel.
“Listen, I know how much Persephone means to you and—”
“Don’t even say that name to me.”
Brenna stared at him. “Why?”
He exhaled hard. “I spent three hours at the fish market last night. Talked to every
freakin’ fishmonger in Lower Manhattan. They really call ’em that, you know. Fishmongers.
Sounds like an insult to me but whatever.”
“No one had seen Annette’s cat?”
“No. I showed them all the pictures, normal and poster-sized. Nada. I had to use a
whole can of Axe spray, just to get the fish smell off me.”
“Oy.”
“Big fail.”
“You did your best. Maybe someone took her in.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Trent was merging into traffic on FDR Drive. “I called
Mrs. Shelby.” he said. “I told her I was sorry, and I didn’t mean to let her down,
but I was running out of ideas.”
“Was she upset?”
“I thought so.” He sighed. “She told me to come over to her place. I thought she was
gonna chew me a new one.” Trent swerved into the left lane and sped up.
Brenna clutched the arm of the seat. “Hey, take it easy,” she said.
But Trent ignored her. “I guess I should have figured it out when I saw all the candles.”
Trent sped up even more. Brenna was starting to feel nauseous.
“Candles? At Annette’s place?”
“I figured she must’ve blown a fuse. Jeez, suave NYC baller like me—I am so freakin’
naïve sometimes. I even asked if she wanted me to look at her box! You wanna know
what she said
then
?”
Brenna winced. “Not really.”
Trent stared out the window.
“Look. I’m sure she just misses Persephone, and—”
“Persephone died three years ago, Brenna.”
Brenna stared at him. “
What?
”
“Natural causes. Before Annette Shelby even moved to New York.”
“You’re not serious.”
He swerved back into the right lane. “She used that cat as a prop. I was a gigolo.
Not a player, Brenna. A gigolo. A high-priced, well-kept man ho.”
“You’re sure that’s all she wanted? I mean . . . I understand she’s lonely. But she
could have just wanted a . . . a friend . . .”
“Candles. Everywhere. And she’s wearing this white silk thing . . . It was like a
goddamn Mariah Carey video in there.”
“Wow.”
“She paid me all that money, just to have drinks with her every day and play detective.
She didn’t hire me for my brains.” He sighed heavily. “She just wanted my tight young
ass.”
Brenna tried a smile. “Normally, you’d be bragging about that.”
“I know.” Trent turned to Brenna—his eyes were pinkish with hurt. “I guess I don’t
like being lied to
.
” He lurched back into the left lane, and for several moments, Brenna was in a different
car—her mother’s white 1978 Buick Skylark.
September 8, 1981, and Brenna’s mother is driving to the police station, Brenna in
the front seat. She is trying to recall the car —the make, the license plate. Her
mother has asked her and she wants to make her happy, wants to find Clea, wants everything
to go back to the way it was, wants it so bad . . . But all she can see is blue metal,
Clea sliding into it. And that voice, that man’s voice. “You look so pretty, Clee-bee.”