She pulled out the card. Clovis Lynch. Her mother’s neat handwriting included an address and phone number. She rushed back to the living room and picked up the phone, then stopped herself. Clovis Lynch had been ancient the last time she saw him when he came to visit. He might not even be alive. One way to find out.
She dialed the number. Waited. It rang twice. Someone answered, interrupting the third ring. A groggy voice. “Hello?”
“Yes, hello. Is this Mr. Clovis Lynch?”
“Who is this? What time is it?”
“Sorry to call so early, Mr. Lynch, but I have . . . I have important information?”
What? What information? She couldn’t very well say “I’m looking to ditch my dead mother’s body, can you help?”
“Well, what is it, dammit?”
“It’s . . . it’s . . . you’ve won the lottery. You’re a millionaire.”
“Damn kids,” Clovis Lynch said, and hung up.
Alexis breathed a sigh of relief. OK. So he was alive. He was still alive. She looked at the address on the card. San Piedro Island. Now she just had to find a way to smuggle her mother’s corpse . . .
Linda. She’d call Linda. Except Linda wasn’t speaking to her. Linda had let her down. She thought for a minute. What would Scarlett do? She’d lie, of course. She’d lie if she had to. And boy did she have to.
She picked up the phone and felt just a tinge of guilt. But it couldn’t be avoided, no it certainly could not. Francolini was coming back, and he’d be bringing an army of police officers with him.
She dialed Linda’s cell phone. It rang three times. “Pick up. Please pick up.”
“Hi,” Linda said, in a small voice.
“Linda, I know you’re afraid and think I’ve lost it, and I’m probably the last person in the world you want to talk to right now, but I need a friend.”
What she really needed was a friend with a car who could drive, but she wasn’t about to say that. No, Scarlett would never say that.
CHAPTER 18
JARRET MIDDLETON
THE BACK ALLEY BEHIND THE Angeline was filled with a monologue of lonely debris and terse, silent brick walls. Alexis crouched off the step to spit in the street. The mists of the last shower and the narrow encasement of the back-facing block of buildings trapped Alexis’s thinking and it made her feel malignantly low. Like an ulcer palpitating on the back of a massive cancerous throat. She was breathing it out when the street coughed up a black Escalade, creeping behind a blinding field of light.
The driver’s window lowered just enough for secrets to float out or for a fat stack to be passed in, but Alexis was brazen and stepped up to peer inside the car.
Linda was perched like a captain high above Alexis and the street.
“I can’t fucking believe you talked me into stealing my stepfather’s car. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. . . .”
“Well the Bug is too small for a body; that’s what you’re doing here.” Alexis twisted her shoes into the wet gravel underneath the car. “Look at the size of this thing. It’s perfect.”
“Body. What body, Alexis?” Linda sat up in the driver’s seat. “What the fuck are you talking about? Answer me, there’s no way. We’re not going to—”
“Take my mother to a family friend’s on San Piedro?” Alexis nodded.
Linda climbed down, all readied with disagreement. The tableau of Alexis, the glimmering brick, and the idling Escalade was awkward. Having Linda so close in front of her caused Alexis to draw in sharp little breaths that stabbed her lungs, which she immediately tried to remedy by staring at the line of Linda’s neck. They hadn’t been this close since the bridge. One of her brows rounded in an angry knot that looked like some diminutive hand had twisted the clay of her face into a permanently exaggerated position. It slid back to the normal elasticity of youth as Alexis spoke.
“If we don’t do this right now, it’s all over. Understand?” Alexis spoke with a strength that temporarily disallowed the coercion of Linda’s interpretation. “Just follow my lead. Please?”
The basement of a funeral home-turned-hotel smelled as you might think it would: like dust and embalming fluid. The whole industry once built up around the dead didn’t seem to disappear with the presence of living tenants. It was cold and severe like any institution. Passing through the storage hall, Linda said, “It looks like Garfield.” They laughed as they rounded two sharp corners, stepping through three distinctly steep shadows that opened into the large chamber at the far back corner.
Alexis’s mother was on a waist-high metal table in the center of the room within the confines of her coffin. Concealed forever by mahogany. Though she was still utterly pissed at Alexis, Linda’s mood appeared to have decompressed into something more somber and essential. Her knuckles stretched to embrace the varnished box. Alexis came around the other side, flipping a red switch on the left wall. A loud shudder shot through the basement as a roller train dropped onto a casket track that weaved freely through all the concrete rooms of the foundation.
The girls grabbed hold of the coffin. Leverage was best at the widest part where the box bowed out to contain the shoulders. “One. Two. Three!” They lifted at the same time and got their cargo up an inch.
“Man, Edith’s one heavy bitch.”
Alexis blew out a breath of hot air.
“Sorry,” Linda said.
Minor scrapes and some shoulder nudging got the coffin locked onto the track. Then they walked the body down the rollers, both conscious of each other’s hesitation under the clicking cylinders. Tick, tack. Edith’s coffin turned the corner. Clap, clap.
“How’re we going to get her in the car?” Linda asked, completely disgusted with her complicity. Tick, tack, clap, clap, CLACK! Alexis widened her elbows to help slide the metal plate into place. “There’s an elevator.”
“Of course there’s a corpse elevator.” Linda shook her head, ducking out of the basement and back up the stairs.
The body was on the street and the girls still weren’t speaking, despite working together so well. Given the grand secret, Alexis rushed to wheel her mother into the car. The black alley seemed to smoke and bend in on them like a cathedral. This was a sacred act, complex enough for the Popol Vuh. She wouldn’t get to creation myths or funerary rites for two more years in school, but she felt quite aware of the grotesque responsibilities she continually bore.
The Escalade steered like a boat through neighboring streets, the back end sagging down from the weight of the exquisite corpse.
“What time is the ferry?” Linda asked.
“Can’t do the ferry. Sniffer dogs.”
“Bombs. Drugs. Dead bodies.”
Alexis nodded. “We have to drive around. Take the Narrows up to Poulsbo.”
Linda guided the black ship onto I-5 South. And their death carriage had officially begun.
Once they knew they were under way, frenzy filled the car. “Listen.” Linda commandeered the massive wheel. “I trusted everything you told me, and I couldn’t have even guessed how messed up things were with you. I mean, it’s severe, Alex.”
“You left me on the fucking bridge in the middle of the night! I told you I’d been dealing with her death, and then all this craziness followed.” She mustered what she could. “I mean . . . it wasn’t just her dying. It turns out I didn’t know anything about her, and now suddenly it’s too late for everything. Your mom remarried, Lin. Mine’s in the backseat.” Linda’s face was bisected by passing cones of yellow light.
The gravity of Alexis’s life could be felt between her bones, still living and quaking. The reality of her abandonment was starting to unfold—a black flower blooming on the ruins of her heart. LJ was dead. Mom was dead. The cops had raided the Angeline. It occurred to her then that she’d basically fled the whole scene with Linda, and the dark corridor of the highway was the first time she was able to gain any perspective on the recent insanity of her life. She wished she had more strength to fend off the attacks
she knew would keep coming from Linda, especially after the previous night, but Alexis’s face grew uncontrollably warm and welled up with pressure, then the cracks began to show. She searched for her motherly connection, but there was no warm beacon underneath that wood. It made heavy, water-logged noises when the flat bottom hit the backseat with every bump on I-5. Each tear called forth the next from behind her eyes, and she let go. Bawling.
Linda kept it at seventy and fought to keep herself from consoling what was quickly becoming a wrecked Alexis. She held the wheel and spoke softly. “I’ve never driven to San Piedro. I’ve only taken the boat. How do we get there?”
“Get on Highway 16 at Tacoma, then take 3 North at Bremerton. Look for signs for Poulsbo.”
“Who do you know in San Piedro?” Linda asked.
Alexis gulped down the moisture in her throat. “We’re going to see a cremator.”
The word “cremator” petrified Linda, but the word was numb for Alexis. She thought of the expanse of the Pacific and wished for each incinerated flake of her mother to float across and sink into it. She knew deep down her mother always wanted to join the sea. Alexis sank within her angled seat. Her breathing came deep from the bottom of her lungs, past the earlier stabs and pinches brought on by the nerves of seeing Linda again. It was like the burn from running a long distance. Her stomach jerked and pulled in like a closed fist. Bile worked at the bottom of her throat. The rolling hum of the car went mute and nothing was to be heard but conscience opening the emptiness she already felt into a crater. One tragedy collided with another and she heard her own sadness for the first time since it all began, banging from one side of her skull to the other. From the skull down the neck and each chasm between bones, bones to joints, joints to ligaments, and skin to body, to name, time, place, the past, and the swinging blade of guilt.
Her slender shoulders twitched under her gray sweater and jacket. Linda reached for the heat. “You know,” Alexis said, chattering, “it’s like . . .”
“Easy, babe, don’t say a word if you don’t want to,” Linda assured her.
Alexis continued, “It’s like I don’t know what’s . . . going to happen next anymore. She’s dead, Lin. And LJ’s dead. The cops raided my house for Christ’s sake. . . .”
It wasn’t until these simple facts were stated out loud that she allowed them to be linked to the sick explosion inside her body. She clung to her duty of carrying the weight of her lie and its grief a little while longer, to exhaust the few options she had left before everyone found out.
“When I was a girl at the apartment with Mom”—Alexis paused—“I would play with this handmade silk monkey she made me for Christmas. Every night before bed I would stand on my small stool and perch the monkey up in the corner of the armoire so it could watch me while I slept. When I woke up each morning the monkey would always be there, still dangling at the edge, almost smiling as it kept an eye on me. Then I’d rush to play with it again.”
Linda listened and kept an eye on the road signs. They had just passed Bremerton and the gray battleships. “Now,” Alexis continued, “well, now that I’m older and all of this happened, nothing is that simple anymore. I don’t know when the doll stopped watching me sleep, and I don’t even know where it is now. I feel like my childhood is a dream that teases me with the idea of the world being simple.”
“I hear you,” Linda commiserated.
“Nothing’s that simple anymore. I just got tossed into this world that I don’t agree with, where everything drastically changes in an instant.” Alexis glanced over and Linda returned a look of recognition. “It feels like thirty-six authors are somewhere writing my life,” she said. It made Linda laugh.
“Like how Mrs. Crimson told us people think Shakespeare was written by a bunch of authors writing in secret, or over the course of time, or something.”
Linda’s eyes went wide at the odd depth of Alexis’s dread. It continued.
“One day, I awake in a fairy tale. Then I’m a real-life teenager that goes to school and gets good grades. I meet you, and the next moment I’m madly in love. A minute later, I’m gripped by some murderous rage. My mother dies. There’re secrets that come to light, then next there’s terrorism. My world spirals down. My head expands like a green balloon that nearly floats away if I don’t hold on to it with everything I’ve got, all with some sick degree of humor. Like I’m being drawn into some comic book. I fear turning the next corner because each shadow is as dark as the inside of that . . . coffin. Her coffin is in the backseat. How is that normal?” she insisted.
She couldn’t hear her mother’s voice anymore. The way they spoke clearly, and the way they’d joked about her burial and funeral seemed a world away now, mocking her with that simplicity of everything else that had been lost. She didn’t hear Mom now; she only heard that awful crashing inside and the rush of being ripped away from the world.
In an attempt to be sincere and diplomatic, she curled over in her seat and tried to offer Linda the last scraps of her sentiment. “I say things lately I wouldn’t normally say. It’s like I said . . . sometimes I don’t know who’s speaking, and I’m sorry for that.”
That’s why she didn’t tell me, Linda thought. She didn’t want any of it to come out as a lie. Linda’s eyes locked up with the overwhelming portrait of Alexis having shielded the unraveling side of her life from Linda in order not to lie to her.
Alexis held a narrow twist in her side. “I’m so glad you helped me . . . I just don’t know what I’m doing.” Her eyes were a doe’s, perceptibly alone. And they worked Linda to tears. “I like you so much . . .” Alexis writhed and muttered while Linda thought it out.
She was so furious at Alexis for the lies. But they were lies to avoid lying. She remembered being Alexis’s age, and the logic seemed to make perfect sense. Everything had been fucked up from the moment she met her. Her parents disapproved of it. Her friends disapproved of it. And she knew there was something she always distrusted. It was a macabre sort of drama (they were driving her mother’s dead body to a cremator, seriously) that showed up since before Moonlight Phở and never left. But she put herself in the shoes of her frail, sweet girl. Linda could see she was so scared and decided to drop the act. There was no way the two of them could act like their thing was sweet and innocent, but they could take it slow, and first get out of the trouble they were in.
Highway 3 languidly rolled through the evergreen hills and farm flats that eventually reached the tip of the isthmus. Their lonely car sped through the foggy aggregates between groups of black and densely clustered trees. A lone seaplane wobbled in overhead as it approached Liberty Bay, the small red lights signaling high above from underneath. Then again it was quickly quiet. Alexis slumped toward the door half-asleep with a permanent wince pulling her face apart. Her eyes were closed and Linda maintained the tiring drive through the Suquamish Indian Reservation, past the casino thronging with gamblers’ cars slick and rusting in the rain.
Twenty minutes off the highway and Alexis went from a dreary slump to an upright incision of pain.
“Al, what’s wrong? You feeling OK?” Linda was concerned.
The muttering picked back up, only this time more forceful. “Fucking . . . hate you . . . Ma, jus’ stop it . . . we’ll get you to Clovis, he’ll do . . . Why didn’t you name me Angeline? All the ones gone live in me, just like the hotel . . . do Ma. Shush. It’s OK. On the ocean floor there’s a door to the sky . . . you’re all gone and I’ll never, ever know why, we never know why.” Alexis turned and grabbed a fistful of Linda’s jacket and twisted it up tight around her hand. “Stop the car!” she yelled, and Linda slammed to a stop.
From the side, the passenger door shot open and Alexis rolled to the steep drop to the roadside. Linda looked over the wheel, then got out and ran around the warm rumbling hood the other side along the shoulder of the road. Alexis was bent over. Her vomit was hitting the tar in waves of wet splats. A wave, and then another. Alexis was folded over, holding h
er stomach, when she glanced up with green strings of saliva running from her chin to the ground, staring up at a worried Linda, her dead mother, and an idling car smoking from the back and glowing red. She darted from the road’s edge down the embankment and straight into the forest.
Linda sprinted through the trees, yelling after her. “Alexis! Alexis, come back!” The chase steadied, and Linda was taller with longer legs and lean muscles. She accelerated quickly through the trees for a few hundred feet, then stopped, her ears tuning out the patter of rain on the hundred tiers of skyward leaves floating on the soaked thin limbs extended over and above her body poised in the chase. Footsteps scattered in the roughage ahead, and she followed.
The girls ran blind, the forest floor was heavy and wet. Linda gained on Alexis’s explosive but labored path. And she remembered yelling one last plea when her breath quickened as she came down the bank of a ravine to see Alexis stumbling and losing speed. She came up on her right side and tackled her roughly to the ground. Alexis struggled to pry herself away by holding the bigger shoulders at bay. Then she punched Linda in the jaw. They rolled in the sopping leaves together, twisting legs and pulling hair and jackets. A stronger knee gained its way to the inside of a smaller, more petite thigh. A strong fist pulled the sweet angle of hair on the back of the younger head straight. And the body weight shifted. A more curved, mature pelvis nailed a younger thrusting torso hard to the wet dirt.
“Stop.” Linda breathed heavily over Alexis’s raw mouth. Alexis’s breast heaved in a dirt-covered sweater, her jacket pulled up over her side, exposing the milky pool of her stomach dredged by red lines. Her eyes fierce, wild, jejune. Face was flush and fat from crying and puking in the cold. Linda took her free hand and wiped it down across Alexis’s mouth, clearing the dried ring from the edge of her lips, then she kissed them. Hard. Alexis breathed deep the sweet taste of Linda’s mouth, which soothed the remaining burning in her stomach. She wrapped her legs around Linda, whose weight rubbed up the middle of Alexis’s torso, and the two rolled and kissed while wrapped in the tightest hug they’d at that point ever shared or known at all.