Authors: Alison Gaylin
S
he wants to die.
The memory flew at Brenna Spector like words on a passing billboard—there for just
an instant but solid, real. Brenna had been staring at the image on her assistant
Trent LaSalle’s computer screen—their latest missing person, if you could call what
they were looking at a person. She was more a shadow, standing behind a scrim, backlit
into anonymity—all limbs and curves and fluffy hair, but no detail, no color. No face.
She looked as though she was naked, but you couldn’t even be sure of that. But then
she tapped her lower lip, the shadow-woman on the screen, she tapped it three times,
triggering a memory from less than two months prior . . .
She looks into the girl’s eyes with the chill wind biting their faces and icy water
everywhere, so cold it burns. Brenna stares at her—poor, pretty mess of a girl. Then
at her boyfriend standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder, the fingertips white
from the tightness of the clutch. She looks back at the girl’s face, at the mascara
streaks on her cheeks, looking so awful for the wear—
worse than Maya and me put together—
and then, into the eyes . . . such fathomless sadness as she meets Brenna’s gaze,
her boyfriend oblivious, smiling a little.
She doesn’t want to be here. None of us do, but this girl . . .
The girl taps her lip three times like a Morse signal.
She wants to die.
“She’s so freakin’ hot,” Trent said.
Brenna came back from the memory, fixed her gaze on the screen. “Uh, Trent? She’s
a
silhouette
.”
“Hey, so are those chicks on truck mud flaps.”
Brenna rolled her eyes.
“You’ll get it when you see more.”
As if on cue, the shadow-woman began stretching her body into a series of suggestive
yoga poses—a slow backbend, followed by the sharp V of the downward-facing dog, a
seamless shift to standing, after which she reached down, grasped her right ankle,
and pulled the leg straight out and then up, until the knee touched the side of her
head.
“See?” Trent said.
With shocking ease, she yanked the leg, stolelike, around her shoulder. Her voice
was a soft Southern accent, drifting out of the speakers like steam. “I’ll bend any
way you want me to.”
Trent nearly fell off his chair.
“I get it, I get it.” Brenna grabbed the mouse and hit pause. “Who is she?”
“Lula Belle.” He said it the way a nun might say the name of a saint. “She’s an artist.”
Brenna looked at her assistant. He was wearing a black muscle tee with a deep V-neck,
the Ed Hardy logo emblazoned on the front in glittery red letters. His hair was spiked
and gelled to the point where it could probably scrape paint off the side of a bus,
and, Brenna now noticed for the first time, he was sporting a new tattoo: a bright
red lipstick print, hovering just above the left pec. Trent’s definition of an artist
was, to say the least, dubious.
“A
performance
artist,” he said, as if he’d been reading her mind. “She’s on the Web. You can download
her, uh, performances.”
“She’s a webcam girl.”
“No,” Trent pointed to the screen. “Lula Belle isn’t about porn. I mean, you can get
off to her for sure, but . . .”
“But what?”
“Here—I’ll show you.” Trent moved the cursor, fast-forwarding the screen image. Brenna
watched the shadow twist and bend, watched her drop into the splits and pivot, throw
her pelvis over her head and somersault backward to standing, watched her pull up
a stool and straddle it, legs spread wide as a Fosse dancer, watched her produce an
old-fashioned Coke bottle from somewhere off camera, tilt her shadow-head back, touch
her shadow-tongue to the tip, and then take the bottle down her throat all the way
to the base, all this inside of twenty seconds.
Brenna said, “Well, I guess you could call that an art.”
“No. Wait.” When Trent hit play, Lula Belle was on the stool, legs crossed, fingers
twisting in her hair. “Listen.”
“ ‘ . . . and you know that little soft part of your head, Lula Belle? Right next
to your eyebrow? That’s called your temple. Daddy took his gun, and he put the barrel
of it right there at his temple, and he pulled the trigger and his whole head exploded.’
That’s how my mama told me. I was twelve years old. ‘Do you understand, Lula Belle?’
she asked me, and my heart felt like someone had taken a torch to it, melted it down
to liquid right there in my chest. But I knew I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t allowed to
cry. Mama didn’t . . . she didn’t take kindly to tears . . .”
Trent hit pause and turned to Brenna. “You get it?”
“She bares her soul. Shares her secrets.”
He nodded.
“And people pay for this.”
“Yep.”
Brenna shook her head. “Weird.”
“Well, the Coke bottle thing helps . . .”
“When did she go missing?”
“Less than three months ago.”
“And the client?”
“It was a third party.”
“Who was the third party?”
“Another PI. Lula’s manager hired him.”
“And the PI’s name is . . .”
“Brenna?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“As long as you’re not asking me in order to avoid my question.”
“Seriously.”
“Okay.”
Trent cleared his throat. “When I first showed you Lula Belle . . . you . . . remembered
something, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Strange how “remembered” could be such a loaded word, but in Brenna’s world
it was. Since she was eleven years old, she’d suffered from hyperthymestic syndrome,
a rare disorder that enabled her to remember every minute of every day of her life,
and with all five senses, whether she wanted to or not. It came, a California-based
neuroscientist named Dr. Louis Gettis had told her on June 24, 2006, “from the perfect
storm of a differently shaped brain and a traumatic experience”—
storm
, as it turned out, a good metaphor, seeing as how the syndrome had descended on Brenna,
battering her mind into something so different than it had been before. She had two
types of memories now—the murky recollections of her childhood and the vivid, three-dimensional
images of everything that had happened from August 22, 1981, to the present.
Brenna could recall, for instance, what she had for breakfast on June 25, 1998, to
the point of tasting it (black coffee, a bowl of Special K with skim milk, blueberries
that were disappointingly mealy, and two donut holes—one chocolate, one glazed). But
her father, who had left her family when she was just seven—he existed in her mind
only as strong arms and the smell of Old Spice, a light kiss on the forehead, a story
told by one of her mother’s friends, years after he’d gone. He wasn’t whole in Brenna’s
head. She couldn’t clearly picture his face. Same with her older sister, Clea, who
had gotten into a blue car on August 21, 1981, at the age of seventeen and vanished
forever. Clea’s disappearance had been the traumatic event that had sparked Brenna’s
perfect storm—yet ironically that event, like Clea herself, was stuck in her fallible
pre-syndrome memory, fading every day into hazy fiction.
Brenna had known that would happen—even as a kid on August 21, 1982, the anniversary
. . .
Sitting at her bedroom window with her face pressed against the cool of the screen,
glancing at the digital clock blinking 5:21 A.M. and chewing grape Bubble Yum to stay
awake, her throat dry and stingy from old gum, trying with everything she has to remember
the car, the license plate, the voice of the man
behind the wheel from a year earlier . . .
Brenna shut her eyes tight and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in her head—one of
the many tricks she’d figured out over the years for willing memories away.
“So?” Trent said.
She opened her eyes, took a breath. “What was your question again?”
“What were you remembering when you looked at Lula Belle?”
“Not much—a gesture,” Brenna said. “On October 30, Maya and I were in Niagara Falls
on vacation, remember?”
He gave her a look. “I can remember two months ago.”
“Well, we were on the
Maid of the Mist
, and there was a girl on the boat who tapped on her lip three times, just like Lula
Belle did at the start of the tape.”
“What did the girl on the boat look like?”
“Probably in her early twenties. Blonde. Miserable. She was leaving the boat with
her boyfriend, and she had mascara running down her face.” Brenna looked at him. “She
looked like she wanted to die.”
Trent’s eyes went big.
“I know what you’re thinking, but we
all
probably looked that way,” Brenna said. “We were getting hailed on. It was freezing
and windy and everybody was seasick and Maya called me the worst mother in the world
for taking her on that boat in the first place.”
“Still,” he said. “It could have been Lula Belle you saw. Less than a month after
she went missing. On that boat with some jerk-off. Praying to be saved from him . . .”
“Hell of a coincidence.”
“Happens all the time.”
“Trent, it was just a gesture. Do we have any idea what Lula Belle looks like?”
“No.”
“What about this third party? Do they?”
He shook his head. “Her own manager doesn’t even know what she looks like. He lives
in California. Never met her face-to-face. He maintained her site, made the checks
out to cash, sent them to a PO box . . .”
Brenna sighed. “In that case,
I
could be Lula Belle.”
“Oh man, that would be so awesome.”
Brenna’s gaze shot back to the frozen image on the screen. “Do we at least have her
full name?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“What about her social?”
He shook his head.
“So let me get this straight. All we have on this woman is a fake name, a fake accent,
a PO box, and a very obvious skill set.”
“You think her accent’s fake? Really?”
“Trent.”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you think we could accept this case?”
He picked at a fingernail.
“Trent.”
“We . . . we only have this one video.”
“And?”
“The Web site’s been taken down since she disappeared. There’s no way of downloading
more.”
“So?”
“So . . . if we officially accept the case, we can get . . . uh . . .” He cleared
his throat. “We can get all the rest of the videos.”
“Oh, for godsakes,” Brenna said. “You’re a
fan
.”
“I know, I know . . . I mean, I never heard of her before yesterday, but I can’t get
her out of my head. I can’t stop watching. I don’t even care what her face looks like
or how old she is . . . It’s like Errol said—she gets under your skin and stays there.”
“
Errol?
”
“Crap. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“Errol Ludlow? He’s the third party?”
Trent’s face went pinkish. He bit his lower lip, and stared at the floor like a shamed
kid. “Yes,” he said finally. “Errol Ludlow Investigations.”
Brenna stared at him. “No.”
“He said you were the best around at finding missing persons—that’s why he wanted
to hire you.”
“No, Trent. Absolutely not.”
“He wants to let bygones be bygones and—”
“
No!
”
Trent looked close to tears.
Brenna hadn’t intended to say it that loudly, but she wasn’t going to take it back,
either. In the three years that Errol Ludlow had been her boss, he’d put her in serious
danger four times. Twice, she’d been rushed to the hospital. Her ex-husband had made
her promise to quit and then the one time, three years after Maya was born, Brenna
had made the breathtakingly stupid mistake of taking a freelance assignment from him,
it had ended her marriage for good. Brenna couldn’t let bygones be bygones. Trent
should’ve known that. There were no such things as bygones in Brenna’s life—especially
when it came to a king-sized bad memory-trigger like Errol Ludlow. “No, Trent,” she
said again—quieter this time. “I’m sorry you’ve grown attached to this girl’s silhouette,
but we can’t take this case.”
Trent started to say something—until Ludacris’s “Money Maker” exploded out of his
jeans pocket, interrupting him. His ringtone. He yanked his iPhone out of his pocket
and looked at the screen. “My mom.”
“Go ahead and take it,” Brenna said.
Trent moved from the office space area of Brenna’s Twelfth Street apartment, past
the kitchen, and into the hallway that led to the living room. Brenna glanced at the
shadow on the screen caught frozen, one delicate hand to her forehead—the swooning
Southern belle. “Sorry, Lula.” Brenna wondered why Errol had accepted a missing person
in the first place. From what she knew, he only handled cheating spouses.
Work must be tight.
She clicked play. Lula Belle arched into a languorous stretch that seemed to involve
every muscle in her body and sighed, her voice fragile as air. Brenna watched her,
thinking about what Trent had said.
She gets under your skin and stays there . . .
Was Errol a fan, too?
“I miss my daddy,” Lula Belle said. “He was the only person in the whole world, could
stop me from being scared of anything.” She turned to the left and tilted her head
up, as if she were noticing a star for the first time. “I used to be afraid of all
kinds of stuff, too,” she said. “The dark, ghosts, the old lady next door—I was sure
she was a witch. Dogs, spiders, snakes . . . even cement mixers, if you can imagine
that.”
Brenna’s eyes widened. She moved closer to the screen.
“I somehow got it in my head that those cement mixers were like . . . I don’t know,
giant vacuum cleaners or something. I thought they could suck me in through the back,
and mix me in with all that heavy wet cement, and I’d never be able to get out, wouldn’t
be able to breathe.”
“Me too,” Brenna whispered.
“But my daddy, he made everything better. He got me a nightlight. He protected me
from that mean old lady. He told me those dogs and snakes were more scared of me than
I was of them, and he was right. But the best thing my daddy did. Whenever we’d be
driving and I’d see a cement mixer he’d sing me this song . . .”