Laying the cloth on a light box, I immediately saw a series of small rips, irregular, but each similar to the one next to it.
I photographed everything with one of the lab’s Polaroids.
Then, my hands sweating, I scraped a bit of the dark matter staining the cloth into a glass dish and added a bit of Luminol.
It wasn’t blood.
Leaning close, I followed human instinct and sniffed. The smell was familiar, and recently familiar.
What could have the consistency of blood and smell so sweet?
It was syrup! It was some kind of syrup, from something like the blueberry ice cream that Angela and I had made a few weeks back.
But, could I assume it was all blueberry syrup? Hesitantly, I scraped another particle from the other side of the ripped cloth. This immediately reacted. Blood. I didn’t know if it was human blood, but it was blood.
The small light pieces of hair appeared to be human.
The thick brownish tufts were not. They were hair from an animal.
I glanced up at the clock and saw that it was after 2 A.M. My shoulder was barking with pain. But this was too interesting to quit, even though my shift was over. I gulped down Advil. After I’d catalogued my findings and separately bagged and labeled them, I filled out the sheets Dr. Stephen had left. Then I wrote him a note, thanking him for the gift and his complimentary words, which I left in his inbox with the forms from John Jay that would give me my internship credit. I also filled out my time card.
Bonnie and I got ready to leave.
“So are you going to tell me?”
“Sure,” she said. “What did you figure out?”
I explained my findings, and as our cars warmed up, Bonnie and I shared a cup of tea in the little break room. She told me what I had been studying.
“That was a case of a little child mauled by a bear,” she said. “It was up near the Boundary Waters, just last week, a family having Christmas at their year-round vacation cabin.”
“Was the child killed?” I asked. I didn’t understand why people were stupid enough to take really little kids, who would think grizzly bears were cute and cuddly, up into the wilderness. The Boundary Waters is fifteen hundred square miles of pristine lakes and camping areas, part of it in Canada and part of it in Minnesota. The cabin must have been just outside the park area because no one lived there year-round, or at all, except the rangers.
Bonnie shook her head. “No, but the child’s grandfather died.”
She went on to say that the decision was made not to find and kill the bear, because, well, the bear wasn’t hunting. It didn’t eat the person’s body. The man had left scraps of a pancake breakfast out to lure the animal so the child could see it. They had a big truck, but it wouldn’t start. The grandmother was afraid to move her husband, because he was so badly hurt, so she drove the child to the hospital in a little VW Beetle they kept up there. “By the time the ambulance got there, he had bled out,” Bonnie said. “People make animals look like geniuses.”
It was then that I learned about Bonnie’s husband, who died young from complications of flu. He had been a newspaper reporter, a fly fisherman who had loved the Boundary Waters. The chance to go camping up there with her sons, to help them remember their dad, which she would do again at spring break, had been part of the reason she’d moved up here. She smiled and gave me a hug as we parted.
“The other reason was you,” she said.
“You didn’t even know I existed,” I said. She was such a good person.
“I knew I’d meet you,” she said.
Breathless, I asked about Dr. Stephen’s family tragedy.
“I don’t know everything, but I know he never got over it. He has some photos in there. He and his wife apparently competed as dancers, like jive dancers. Can you imagine that? I don’t think he ever got over her, or the little girl.” Bonnie paused. “I read that obituary, too, when I came here. And it was weird.”
“How?”
“I looked up the inquest, I’m afraid. I was curious.”
“Why?” I pushed Bonnie for more. She was reluctant, I could tell.
“Well, the little girl didn’t die in the crash. I guess Stephen could tell his wife was dead, and he went in the ambulance with his baby. I gather she was bleeding from a head wound. It was no more than five minutes. The little girl was restrained in her car seat on the driver’s side and she was crying, and apparently, Stephen testified that he gave her a superficial once-over and she seemed unharmed. He could hear the other ambulance and the fire trucks coming, so he left her there with Garrett, who would have been, what? Fifteen? Sixteen?”
My very blood slowed down. “What happened?”
“She stopped breathing. A kid that little, in the cold? They should have been able to save her. It was a long time ago, but still …”
“How do they know she just stopped breathing?”
“That was what Garrett Tabor told them,” Bonnie said.
That little girl was his sister.
17
SOME WOMEN
For a week after Juliet disappeared—and again, after her body was found in the river—I had sessions on the phone with a counselor, a psychologist. The next morning, I woke up from what psychologist described as an ordinary anxiety dream: someone I couldn’t see was chasing me, and my legs were so tired that I couldn’t go on. I kept glancing back over my shoulder and begging my feet to move, as the fog behind me resolved itself into a solid shape, a human form. I couldn’t take another step. Lightning stabbed the ground around me: lightning with form, a man’s shape.
How is this ordinary?
My right shoulder blade felt three times the size of my left. I could barely raise my arm to the level of my chest. If I hadn’t had the good sense (and the good mantras-for-life from Jackie) I’d probably have it in a sling by now.
I wanted to call the police.
Garrett Tabor had hurt me, and he’d hurt me badly. Whenever I thought of just going ahead and calling, of explaining everything, I thought of those photos of my family blooming on my phone, one after another.
What could I tell the police about what Tabor had done to me, without risking some kind of retribution from him? How could I prove he’d smacked my shoulder black and blue with an oar? I already knew the answers. I wouldn’t be able to prove it. My mother would find out I’d been diving, alone, and that I put myself at his mercy. Down would come the hammer. It was suspended over me by the slenderest of threads since the consequences of our first (and last) free dive.
I sat up and decided, no matter what, I would call.
Then I remembered that my phone was still in that boat, and, as such, was probably now a cube of frozen circuits. Of course, Jackie was a nurse manager for a hospital emergency room. We had a landline. We had two.
I stared at the house phone, and imagined telling Tommy Sirocco, Juliet’s dad, about Garrett Tabor chasing me in his boat … injuring me with an oar. I pictured telling him that this happened after I dived to discover he moved skeletonized bodies he’d chained to ruins of a boathouse in a cliff thirty feet under the surface of the lake.
Bodies that were no longer there.
Bodies I couldn’t prove had ever been there.
Tommy was protective of me. Tommy would believe me.
But if I were a detective assigned to this case, I would wonder why there was so much bun and no burger. I had bruises, but I’d been climbing on icy rocks. The Odyssey was out there … I still had to figure out how to recover Wesley’s Odyssey—which didn’t even belong to him but to the dive shop where he worked—and which had probably drifted to Michigan by now. Put this all together and it spelled nothing.
Peeking out of my door to make sure the shades in the living room and kitchen were all pulled tight, I nipped into the bathroom.
When I came out, I noticed my mom. My mother was awake, sitting at the kitchen table, gazing into space. Strange. She would have been home for a long time, since midnight. ??
?Did you pull a double?” I asked. She was about to earn her PhD, and it had been years since she worked a double shift. She only switched to PMs, from three to eleven, after Juliet died, to be with me more often. Although it could get her spinning biorhythmically, the change had worked in Jackie’s favor: she worked two weeks straight, including weekends at the ER, and then had ten full days off. And as it turned out, she loved it. But I had no idea what she was doing at the kitchen table at nine in the morning. If I hadn’t awakened unexpectedly, I would never have seen her. So when I came out, I sat down with her. She didn’t seem to see me.
“Did you hear me, Mom?”
Jackie looked at me then, but not as though she really saw me.
“What are you doing up?” she said.
“Well, I had a nightmare. But I could ask you the same.”
Angela was at school. From my sleep world, which was never fully curtained off from the Daytimers’ world: I heard the flow of their comings and goings, the deliveries of mail and packages, the exodus from the bus at 3 P.M., the traffic at 4 P.M. My mother would have been there when Angela left for school. She always was. I was there after school. Always. I slapped down a bee of panic. Tabor was not going to grab my little sister.
Taking down our jar of cinnamon sticks and the sugar bowl, and my herbal sleepy tea, I began to boil water. Questioning, I held out two cups.
“Mmmmm. Thanks. I need some,” said my mother. “I did work a double. We had a bad car accident last night. Mother and two little girls. The smaller girl is just hanging on. The older sister is fine. Mom is dead. I sort of wanted to stand in with the little one until the grandmother came, all the way back from Saint Petersburg. And then, you can imagine, the grandmother went wild. She saw them yesterday morning.”
“Awww, no,” I said. “That’s terrible. From around here?”
“Nope. The grandmother is. The mom and the children, from Chicago. On the way home. Car filled with Barbies. Shit.” She picked up her computer bag and headed for the stairs. Then she came back and kissed my head. “I forgot my tea.”
“You don’t have to stay up.”
“Did you hear from Rob?”
“Just a postcard. He won’t be back until … until the end of the week. And I don’t know, you know?”
“He’s being stubborn.”
“It’s more than that, Mom,” I said. “I know Rob loves me, but something is wrong and it’s more than that he wants us to go on with our lives after Juliet.” As I said this, I realized that I had known, for a long time, that this was really true. Rob didn’t keep anything from me. He never had.
“You’ll figure it out,” Jackie said. “Keep communicating. Don’t put up walls.”
“I’m not the one who’s putting up walls, Jack-Jack,” I said. “This is all his choice. I’m sure he’s getting with the ski bunnies in Vail.” A beautiful picture of my beautiful guy entwined in the dark with some girl with a movie-star ass quickly turned my stomach sour.
“Well, write me up as a victim of disappointment in Rob’s character then. I’m beat, and I guess I can talk to you tonight. I guess I can. It will keep until tonight. I’m just … dazed. I just didn’t let myself feel it.” She made for the spiral staircase that led up to her room, but dragging, and I was alarmed until she added, “Don’t call me Jack-Jack.”
Whatever it was didn’t sound like it would keep until tonight, but I wasn’t about to cause her to fret even more.
I could hear her moving about up there, doing her own bedtime prep. The whole second floor was my mother’s bedroom, library, and study. Up there, she had her own refrigerator. She and Gina took Mondays off from their run, so Mom would probably sleep until afternoon. She loved sleep. As someone who never got enough, she considered sleep near-sexual in pleasure. Her king-sized Australian basswood bed, with nine pillows, belonged in a castle. She reasoned that, as a single mother of forty with two young daughters, she was never going to need the kind of privacy a woman of thirty-three with no young daughters might need. When she met Mr. Right, she told Gina, (cliché although it was) it would be in the emergency room, where he’d just suffered his serious bout of chest pains over a slight decline in his six million shares of Disney stock. The wedding would be in Monaco.
I drank both cups of tea. I was starving, but if I ate what I wanted, which was Brie with pickles and pimentos on whole wheat, I might never sleep. I settled for a handful of shortbread, left over from my Aunt Carmel’s largesse. Carmel was perhaps the best cook I had ever known, better even than Mrs. Dorn, who made her own bread every day. After the epic pie-throwing incident, these words would never cross my lips.
I could see how women ended up tipping the scales at two hundred pounds as a result of depression. Men were iffy. Brie never let you down.
Where was Rob tonight?
How was he rounding out the last days at Heavenly? Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes, stinging. How dare he dump me for trying to do good? How dare he dump me at all? I didn’t even care that he’d dumped me. All I wanted was to hold him and kiss him and smell his hair and the hollow of his neck. All I wanted was for him to love me still.
I sat back to read a book of essays debunking traditional religions.
Dr. Andrew, my mother’s boss, was a devout Lutheran, two words that didn’t seem to link up. As I see it, Lutherans are a sort of default religion, like vanilla, neither as frankly and joyously wacked as Pentecostals nor so joylessly and grimly superior as Catholics. Dr. Andrew had given the book to my mother to read, because it troubled him. He considered his faith his compass, he told my mom.
In some religions, people don’t believe in life after death (and I guess that if I had a religion, it would be one of those kinds; I think that one life is more than enough). For those people, immortality is human memory.
If that were true, Juliet certainly was alive, still.
A zombie angel.
How I loved her.
Her parents and grandparents and her cousins loved her as much as Rob and I did. Even little ski fans, who’d never met Juliet Sirocco but had seen film of her flying like a whirling blade through the sky above the slopes, taking every chance and no prisoners, they loved her, too.
And Garrett Tabor …
I sat up on the leather recliner, my book tumbling to the floor.
That last night at the lab, Tabor, referring to Juliet, had said, I love her, too.
I love her.
Not in the past tense.
Garrett Tabor was too smart to make mistakes with ordinary speech. Every moment he was near me, he was playing me. He knew exactly what he was saying.
What did he mean? That Juliet was still alive somewhere? Or that his love for her was still alive?
The thought exhausted me. I put my head back on the leather cushion of the chair and started to drift off, when suddenly, I was aware of another person in the room. Jerking to an instant salute, I sat up and saw my mother, who had pulled up a chair and was sitting across from me.
“I didn’t come home late just because of the accident,” she said. “There was another reason.”
She looked funny. She looked more worn out than usual, and she usually looked more worn out than she should have. For a moment, the funny way she looked made me afraid. I thought for sure she was going to tell me that she’d had a bad mammogram, although she wasn’t even old enough to have regular mammograms.
I said, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Really nothing. I just have to talk to you.”
She didn’t look like it was “nothing, really nothing.”
My mother said, “There are going to be clinical trials, starting in March. I wanted to be the one to tell you this. A Danish geneticist, of all things, has teamed up with Andrew and they have permission for clinical trials for … well … for …”
“Me.”
As a person who worked full-time, who had a relatively young child, and a daughter with a condition, Jackie was pushing herself
way too hard to finish her PhD, a degree that had taken people as long as five years. (Have I mentioned that this was all voluntary? I had not seen my father outside a Skype screen since I was in preschool, but he’d recently been promoted to chair of his department at Seattle Mercy, and was also a full professor. Not only that, he now had normal IVF twin boys—so his guilt checks were ever more handsome and did not look to be decreasing, even with my increasing age.) Naturally, my mother’s dissertation was on a specific genetically transmitted chronic condition, and naturally, her dissertation dealt with a very specific kind of gene therapy that would convince the DNA of the XP person to copy itself as normal.
She had finished her dissertation over the summer.
This was all still theoretical. Until now.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you finished your dissertation,” I said. “Before it became outmoded.”
“Me, too,” she said. “But that’s …”
I finished for her: “That’s biology for you!” My mother says this about pretty much everything except the weather. I asked, “What are the horrible mutagenic side effects? What will grow out of my forehead?”
“There aren’t any that they see. The first trial is in March and the next one is in October. Here. Not Denmark.”
That sucks. I wanted to go to Denmark.
Then I said, “Nausea, vomiting, headaches, irritability, joint pain, constipation, dizziness or vision problems that, in rare cases, could be the sign of a potentially life-threatening condition?”
“No, wise guy,” my mother said, and two perfect movie tears formed in each of her eyes. “You’re already part of the longitudinal study, and have been for more than ten years, so you’ll automatically be part of the first group. I can’t decide about waiting for the second group or going ahead. That’s up to you, I suppose.”
“Holy cow.”
“Yes, Allie. Holy cow indeed.”