Square in the Face

  The phone was ringing when she walked in the front door. “Claire - it’s Lori. I’ve been trying to get hold of you all afternoon.” Her words tumbled over one another.

  “What’s up?”

  “We got the results of Zach’s last bone marrow aspiration today. Dr. Preston said he’s in remission.”

  “That’s great news!” Lori was silent for so long that Claire finally added, “Isn’t it?”

  “Havi thinks so. I’m not so sure. It’s not that hard to get a child into remission. The trick is getting them to stay there. Zach still looks so sick. And just because the bone marrow looks normal doesn’t mean that the leukemia isn’t hiding out someplace. And Zach’s still going to be on chemo, just lower doses. That’s for two or three more years. We’re not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.” Lori took a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you believe in a mother’s intuition?”

  Claire didn’t, not any more than she believed in people’s bringing bad luck down on themselves by voicing their fears. “Why?”

  “Because part of me thinks he will need a transplant. And if that happens and you can’t find his sister, then there isn’t any hope.”

  ###

  As she drove to Susie and J.B.’s house, Claire couldn’t stop thinking about Zach and Lori. Why couldn’t her friend relax and accept the blessing of her son’s remission? But Claire knew if she were Lori, she would be weighing the odds, too, and doing anything she could to make them be in her favor.

  J.B., her semi-brother-in-law, was something of a shade-tree mechanic. He could be counted on to own a half-dozen cars in various states of functionality, and he had agreed to loan one to Claire, her last step in her efforts to distinguish herself from Lucy. In addition to J.B.’s pickup, three cars were parked in the driveway, with another half-dozen along the curb. They were all beat-up enough that they could plausibly belong to a college student.

  “Hey, Big Sis,” Susie said when she answered the door. She dropped a kiss on Claire’s cheek. “J.B. will be out in a minute. He’s just getting Eric ready for the day.” Dressed for her job as a hairdresser, Susie wore white denim mini-skirt and a green smock with her name embroidered over her heart. An ankle bracelet made a line under her nylons.

  When the painting Claire had inherited had sold for millions at auction, she had offered part of the proceeds to her sister. After all, Susie was Great Aunt Cady’s niece, too, even if she hadn’t been named in the will. But all Susie would accept was enough to set up a trust fund for Eric’s college education and to pay for her classes at the Portland Beauty Academy. Susie had dreamed of being a hairdresser since her eighth birthday and the gift of a Barbie Kut-N-Kurl set.

  “Suse, I’ve been meaning to ask you - have you noticed that Mom’s buying a lot of “ - Claire veered away from the word junk in case Susie also shopped QualProd -”stuff off TV?”

  “You mean that QualProd crap? I tried to talk to her about it. I mean, she’s got three different skin care systems underneath the bathroom sink. Mom tried to tell me it was like she was the member of a special club!” Susie rolled her eyes, which were highlighted with blue shadow and rimmed with black eyeliner. “Yeah, a real special club that you can only join if you have a credit card with some money left on it. She says no matter what time of the night it is, when she wants to talk to someone, she can always talk to a QualProd operator. I told her if she feels lonely, she should just call me, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  Or me, Claire thought. Or Mom could call me. It hurt a little that neither her mother or her sister seemed to have discussed calling Claire as an option. “I’m worried about her. It seems like we should do something.”

  A shrug of Susie’s thin shoulders. She was whittled down to almost nothing by cigarettes. “I don’t know that there’s much that we can do. When was the last time either one of us successfully told Mom how to run her life? Until she gets tired of it, I think she’s going to watch QualProd all day wearing her QualProd bathrobe and with her QualProd slippers on her feet and her QualProd throw across her lap.”

  Claire realized Susie was probably right. “How are things down at Curl Up and Dye?”

  “Same old, same old. Everybody’s always yaking at me, telling me stuff I don’t really need to hear. Sometimes I think they just come to get their hair done because I’m cheaper than a therapist. The worst ones are the perms because they take so long. By the time you finish combing them out they’ve had time to get everything - and I mean every little thing - off their chests. Yesterday, I heard about,” Susie began to tick off on her long, yellow-stained fingers, “one, about how some lady’s having an affair with her boss and both their spouses know and think it’s okay, and two, about how some other lady’s mother wasn’t really dead but stuck away in an insane asylum, and three, then I got some girl who wanted to me to help her figure out if her boyfriend’s gay.” A snort. “Like I’m gonna know. She wanted to know if it was bad sign he was getting all these dirty e-mail messages from people with names like Boy Toy.” She shook her head. “I got this job so I could cut hair, not be a counselor. “

  That was the difference between her and Susie, Claire thought. Susie didn’t want to hear everyone’s secrets, but Claire would love a job where people confided in her all day. Whenever she saw a movie showing a Catholic making a confession, she always found herself a little envious of the priest sitting on the other side of the screen.

  A little body suddenly hit Claire from behind, almost knocking her over. Turning, she reached down and swung two-year-old Eric up into the air while he squealed.

  “Hey, sweetness, how’s it going?”

  Eric’s only answer was to squeeze her nose and make a honking sound. He was still laughing at his own joke when she set him down.

  “I wish I had his energy,” Claire said as she watched him zoom around the room.

  “God got it mixed up,” J.B. said as he came into the room wrapping a rubber band around his ponytail. His denim shirt had the sleeves ripped off, the better to show off muscular arms tattooed with a Harley and a dancing girl. Around his neck, a black beeper dangled from a leather thong. Claire hoped that the beeper didn’t mean J.B. had gone back to his old sideline of selling a gram of this and a kilo of that. “It should be the kids drinking coffee and complaining that they just want to go back to bed, and the adults should be the ones bouncing off the walls.” He turned to Claire. “Let’s go see what we have on the lot.”

  As they stepped outside, Claire turned to catch the screen door before it could bang into Eric. She caught a glimpse of J.B. sneaking a kiss from Susie. When she was sixteen, Susie had dropped out of high school, moved out of their mom’s apartment and in with J.B. Claire had thought Susie would be lucky if the whole thing lasted six months, but here they were, still together seventeen years: one baby, five or six motorcycles and probably three hundred cars later.

  J.B. waved his hand to indicate the ten or so cars parked in front of his house. “You can have anything except my pickup or the Chevette,” J.B. said. “Susie uses that to get to work.”

  “Chevette!” crowed Eric. In the daylight, Claire could see that his blond hair was beginning to darken, but his eyes were still a bright, fierce blue. He ran to one of the cars in the driveway and banged on its door with his fist. “Pinto!”

  Claire looked closer. It was a Pinto. “Eric can tell cars apart? I thought kids his age were into dinosaurs.”

  J.B. shrugged, setting his dangling skull and crossbones earrings into motion. “Oh, he can also tell the difference between a T. Rex and a Brontosaurus. But he likes cars nearly as well.”

  Claire guessed that, in its own way, the Pinto could also be considered to be a dinosaur. It seemed to be held together primarily by gray primer. “A Pinto, huh? I didn’t think those existed anymore.”

  “It’s a ‘71, so it’s probably a collectible. I got if for fifty bucks. It even runs. Do you want to borrow it?”

  Claire had an image of having to come to a sudden stop at
a red light, her car being bumped from behind, the sudden whoosh! of flames. She shook her head.

  She came away with a twenty-year-old Firebird, British racing green except for one bright blue fender. On the way home it started to drizzle, and she discovered that the car’s heater didn’t work. It was also almost impossible to see out the rear window, which was slanted at such an extreme angle that the rain beaded up on it and didn’t go anyplace. She wouldn’t need the car for long, though, just for her visit to the clinic tomorrow afternoon. The car completed Claire’s transformation into Lucy Bertrand, a transfer from Corona State who had just figured out she might have a little problem on her hands.

  YY4U

  Chapter Nine

  “Hi, this is Ginny. Leave me a message after the beep.” Even Ginny’s voice was tentative.

  Claire took a breath, ready to ask the young woman to call her. She wanted to ask Ginny if she’d ever noticed any sign of an alarm during her visits to the Bradford Clinic. She still wasn’t sure which plan would be best at the clinic - the one Jimmy had suggested, or her original idea of using a pick kit. Although she had practiced for several hours each day, Claire hadn’t gotten to the point where she could open a door in five minutes, like Jimmy. Still, she was fairly certain that she could do it in fifteen.

  Instead of a beep, a mechanized voice followed Ginny’s, saying, “This voice mail box is full and not accepting any new messages.” With that, there was an abrupt click and then the hum of a dial tone.

  Lonely Ginny, seemingly friendless - how could she end up with a full voicemail box? She had told Claire that since dropping out of school the only people she regularly spoke to were the clinic’s staff. Claire felt a spurt of uneasiness.

  Slowly, she put the phone down. She found Charlie in the kitchen and explained the situation to her. “I’m worried something’s wrong. She doesn’t seem to have any friends. How did she get a full voice-mail box unless she’s been gone for a while?”

  “Is she near her time? Perhaps she has just gone to the clinic to have her babies.” With a wooden spoon, Charlie stirred the chopped onion she was slowly sautéing for Zwiebelkuchen. The onion-topped yeasted flat bread was Southern Germany’s answer to focaccia.

  Claire shook her head. “She’s not due for another month. When I talked to her four days ago, she had an appointment at the clinic later in the day. What if she started asking questions about Lori’s daughter?”

  Charlie wiped her hands on her white apron, then took it off and hung it on the back of a chair. “Let’s go, then.”

  “Go?”

  “I have watched you practice with those picks on every lock in this house all week. If that girl doesn’t answer the door, you can get us inside to see if she is okay.”

  In the half-empty parking lot in front of Ginny’s building, they parked next to a Pizzicato Pizza delivery van with a vanity plate that read U8MYPY. They walked up the worn, rain-puddled stairs to Ginny’s apartment, which was on the second floor of the three-story building. Light leaked through the cheap yellow fiberglass curtains, but no one answered the door when Claire knocked. Thinking of the man who had recently been convicted of murder on the basis of a telltale ear print, Claire pressed her ear against the door, but heard nothing.

  Ginny’s apartment complex was laid out like a budget motel, with the doors of two mirroring apartments grouped together, then a gap, then another pair of matching doors. There was no one in sight. Probably most of the tenants were in class, and the drizzling gray day offered nothing to entice those who weren’t. “I will keep watch,” Charlie whispered, so Claire slid the pick kit out of her pocket, knelt down, and began to work.

  Compared to the locks at Claire’s own house, the lock on Ginny’s apartment door was so simple it could have been opened by someone with a butter knife and a little patience. Claire had just felt the last tumbler click home when Charlie hissed a warning. “Hier kommt jemand!” Someone’s coming. Charlie had taught her a few phrases in German, but Claire had already heard the footsteps coming down the staircase. Quickly, she turned the handle and nudged the door a fraction so that it was barely ajar.

  “Jetzt!” Charlie hissed. Now.

  Looking up, Claire could see a pair of Nikes coming to the bottom of the stairs, ten feet from where she was. There was no time to get to her feet. Suddenly, Charlie dropped to her knees next to her. She tilted her head as if she were looking for something. “There it is,” she said.

  Claire stared at her blankly.

  Charlie stabbed her finger near a tiny pebble that had worked its way loose from the concrete. “There is your contact.”

  The footsteps had stopped. Claire looked up and into the eyes of a pizza delivery guy, a white guy with long blond fuzzy dreadlocks. In his hands was a square red insulated bag. His nose, eyebrow and lower lip were pierced with silver rings, but that wasn’t what bothered her. It was the way he was staring, or not at her, but past her, in the direction of the door that now sat slightly ajar in its frame. And then she saw what had attracted his attention. Not the door itself, but the pick kit, resting on the doorsill and flipped open so that all the tiny tools were visible.

  Charlie had given Claire an idea. Making a show of it, Claire used her index finger to pick up the imaginary contact, and then popped it in her mouth. She got to her feet, blocking the pizza delivery guy’s view of the door. Then she opened her mouth and ran her right index finger across the tip of her tongue, at the same time pulling the red inside of her eyelid down with her left hand. In went the imaginary contact.

  “Ooh!” She squealed. “It’s not in right.” Blinking and grimacing, she swept her finger against her open eye, mimicking other contact wearers she had occasionally watched with fascinated disgust.

  The pizza guy grimaced. Averting his gaze, he started down the second flight of steps, a murmured “Gross!” trailing back over his shoulder.

  As soon as he was out of sight, they stepped into the apartment. Claire scooped up the pick kit and quickly closed the door behind them. “Ginny?” Claire called out, already knowing there would be no answer. As she walked through the small apartment, Charlie’s gaze went from photograph to photograph, not realizing the Ginny in the pictures was different from the Ginny who lived in this place.

  A half-eaten burrito sat on a paper plate in the middle of Ginny’s makeshift table. Bending closer, Claire smiled as she recognized the sweet spicy smell of Macheezmo Mouse’s famous boss sauce. Only then did she see that the chair had been overturned. A cold pulse of fear went through her.

  “Come look at this,” Charlie called. In the bathroom, a pale gray towel lay on the yellow linoleum floor. The center was blotched with a dark brown stain. Claire pressed a finger against the matted loops. The blood was slightly tacky, nearly dry.

  Without speaking, they opened the only other door. In the tiny bedroom, the narrow bed was neatly made. There was nothing in this room to help them unravel the mystery of what had happened in the rest of the apartment.

  They went back out into the main room, and Claire pressed the blinking light on the black answering machine. “Ginny, honey, it’s Mom. It’s about three in the afternoon on Monday - could you call me tonight? I was hoping I could talk to you about your dad’s birthday this Sunday. I was hoping maybe you could take the Greyhound home and surprise him. I’ve got some tip money saved up, so I could pay you back. You don’t even need to bring a present. Just bring yourself, that would be all the present he would ever wish for. Anyway, give me a call and tell me if you can swing it.” After the beep, a mechanized voice gave the time and day. Ginny’s mother had called only a few hours after Claire’s visit.

  The next five calls were also from Ginny’s mother, her voice increasingly plaintive and the time between calls increasingly shorter. “Ginny, please call me!” she pleased in the last call. “Are you all right, honey? It’s okay if you call me collect. Please call and let me know you’re” - and then the machine mercifully cut the call short.

&nb
sp; “She’s got Caller ID,” Claire said as she looked down at the machine. “Maybe she saw it was her mother calling and decided not to answer.” Had Ginny stood and looked at the pictures of her old life as she listened to her mother’s voice and tried to formulate the lie she would use when she returned the call? “Do you think maybe she couldn’t figure out how to avoid going home and got freaked out enough to run away from her own life?”

  Charlie shook her head. “Perhaps that could explain the chair being on its side, but not the blood. Maybe got a nosebleed while she was eating. She stood up fast so that it would not stain her clothes, then went in the bathroom and cleaned up with a towel.”

  “I wish I knew what time she’d been eating. If this was her lunch, then it was before she went to the clinic, and this can’t have anything to do with my having come here, asking questions. If it was her dinner, then it was after.”

  “Let us consider the possibilities,” Charlie said calmly. “These things could be signs of a struggle or a bloody nose. But they could also mean that she went into labor.”

  “But she wasn’t due for another month,” Claire protested.

  “Twins often come early.” Charlie gestured to the overturned chair. “Didn’t you tell me the father of this child was unpleasantly surprised by her announcement?”

  Claire nodded. “Ginny said he wanted her to have an abortion. She said he seemed afraid that she would sue him for child support.”

  “Then he would have a motive for being angry with her. Perhaps he came here and argued with her.”

  “I don’t remember hearing a lock turn when she answered the door,” Claire said. “I don’t she was the kind of person to look her door. She still thought she was living out in the tulles, the kind of place where you keep your keys in the ignition.” She thought of something that made her feel better. “Even if she did go to the Bradford Clinic and start asking a bunch of questions, who would attack a pregnant woman over something that happened ten years ago? Besides, if they were going to have that strong a reaction, strong enough that they would want to harm her, wouldn’t they do it then and there?”