Ghost Flower

  “You can’t spell BRAINS without BAIN,” he told her solemnly.

  “You have been using that joke since junior high school.” She leaned toward me. “Sadly he is the only one who ever found it funny.”

  “At least I know how to load a dishwasher. If you put the pot in like that, it will block the water flow to the rest of the dishes.” He tapped his nose and said to me, “See? Big picture.”

  I rinsed, and they argued about putting knife points up or down, crystal yes or no, the right place for the spatula; making fun of one another. I found myself getting pulled into the easy rhythm of their back and forth, of their banter. This is what it’s like to be part of a family, I thought. To belong to people who care about you. As we laughed together, some part of me that had been inert suddenly flamed into life, filling me with the joy and wonder of a child reaching through a crowd for a favorite toy she thought was lost forever.

  I made myself let go of the dish I was washing, and it shattered in the sink, ending the banter. “Sorry,” I said, not even trying to sound like I meant it. “We don’t learn a lot about fine china on the streets.”

  That feeling of belonging was gorgeous, like a mirage, tantalizing, false, and dangerously out of reach. It wasn’t a good idea for me to get close to these two. I didn’t want them to like me, and I didn’t want to like them. We would all be safer if they stayed wary.

  Expendable, I reminded myself. This was an act, and you are expendable.

  “I’m exhausted,” I announced. “I want to go to bed.”

  Bridgette managed to look genuinely confused. She said, “of course,” and showed me to my room, two flights up at the top of the tower. “Wear anything in the drawers. There should be pajamas and a robe.”

  “Great,” I said, my back to her, my palms cupping my elbows.

  The concern in her voice even sounded real. “If you need anything—”

  “I just need to go to sleep.”

  “Sure, okay.” I sensed her hesitating, maybe going to say something, but it was only, “Well, goodnight,” followed by the door clicking closed.

  I listened for her footsteps to retreat before I risked turning around. I was biting my lip, and my hands were shaking so it took me two tries to lock the door. I barely made it to the bed and covered my head with a pillow before I started to sob.

  CHAPTER 8

  I’m sitting at a wide polished table in a big room. I’ve never been there before, but it’s familiar to me, the kind of room you find in institutions everywhere: a few round tables with chairs clustered around them, windows with bars on them, some easy chairs in the corner, a desk for the guard or nurse, depending.

  There’s a girl across from me. Like the room, I don’t know her, but she’s familiar. Somewhere outside a phone begins to ring.

  “Who are you?” I ask the girl.

  “Who are you?” she repeats back.

  The phone rings again.

  “I don’t like games,” I tell her.

  “I don’t like games,” she says to me.

  Ring-a-ling, says the phone.

  “Why are you doing this?” I demand.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Stop it,” I yell at her.

  The ring-a-linging gets louder. “Stop it,” she says calmly.

  I know instinctively it’s the phone she’s talking about. That it’s for me; it’s important, a matter of life and death. Just like I know I don’t want to answer it.

  I get up from the table and move to the door. Why didn’t I think of this before? I can just get up and leave; I don’t have to talk to this crazy person. I’m not a prisoner.

  The door to the room is locked. Behind me, the girl laughs, a silvery, amused laugh that sends a chill up my spine. I reach for the doorknob again but my palm is sweating and my hand slips off. I can’t get out, I’m trapped.

  I woke up clutching blankets and wondering where the hell I was. I could still faintly hear the sound of her laughing.

  For a long time the line between my awake and asleep lives had been blurred or even inverted. My dreams were mundane—sharing all the pizza we could eat and frosted cans of Diet Coke in a mall food court with Nina or waking up in an airy room with politely floral wallpaper in a bed with sheets—while my reality bristled with grim faces calling me mean names and threats that lurked in shadows. Finding myself in a massive bed with a wrought iron headboard and crisp white sheets and puffy duvet, I really wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or awake.

  I hadn’t registered much of the room the night before, just the presence of a bed and a bathroom. Now I had a chance to look around. Light tilted over me through a full wall of windows that made it feel like a Parisian garret. There was a little couch and chair with light purple and blue-and-white plaid cushions and a small table.

  I climbed out of the bed and walked around, running my fingers over the fine fabrics—soft velvet, smooth silk, and a curling wool that was how I imagined lambs felt. None of the synthetic bedspreads, with crude sunflower patterns designed to hide the puckered cigarette burns and awkward stains, that had been the closest I’d been to clean sheets in a long time.

  I made my way to the bathroom, and I felt a bubble of laughter burst from me.

  It was magnificent. Two and a half hours to clean, easily. There were piles of pristine white puffy towels scented with lavender and a massive white tiled steam shower and a huge crystal and iron chandelier hanging from the ceiling. But the best part was the claw-footed tub. It stood in front of an arched window through which I could see a garden and a swimming pool and another gigantic house because, of course, where I was standing was just the guest house.

  I slid into the empty tub, resting my cheek against the cool porcelain and hugged myself to make sure I was truly awake. I couldn’t believe where I was. It was perfect, a fairy tale good enough to banish the yawning chasm of emptiness and longing that had threatened to completely swallow me the night before. It was impossible not to feel happy and secure and content surrounded by such beauty.

  I pulled off the T-shirt I’d slept in, turned on the water, and ran a bath for myself. There were three kinds of bath salts on a table next to the tub, and I chose some that smelled like grapefruit. The water crept up the sides of the tub, washing away the dirt of the past day, but it felt more like the dirt of the past year.

  I washed my hair with shampoo that smelled like rosemary and mint; used a conditioner that said it had harnessed the power of red orchids and smelled like a bouquet of wild flowers; and found a razor, shaving my legs and arms and bikini line with attention I hadn’t paid in a long time. I slathered myself with Lime Basil lotion and felt clean. Completely clean.

  That, I decided, was one of the perks of being rich: the idea that you could always just wash whatever you’d done away with a scented soap. When I got my money, the first thing I was going to buy would be bath products.

  The mouthwatering smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen twined itself around the smell of everything I’d used and made my stomach growl, urging me to hurry up. In one of the drawers I found a tank top and leggings and in another a long cable-knit grey cashmere sweater. I put them on, and the sensation of the fine fabrics sliding along my smooth, clean skin made me aware of my body in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. I felt simultaneously cosseted and nearly naked. It was heavenly.

  Even as I enjoyed the sensual softness, a chill swept over me. I realized there was something I needed to ask, something crucial. It was a major oversight because it should have been my very first question:

  What could possibly have happened to make Aurora leave all this behind?

  CHAPTER 9

  According to Bain, there was an easy answer for that and a more complicated one. Aurora ran away the same night her best friend Elizabeth “Liza” Lawson died. Liza had committed suicide, jumping to her death from the top of Three Lovers Point into the steep shadowy canyon below.

  “You can read about it online,” he said.


  “But what about your cousin?”

  He shook his head and looked down at his plate. “We assume Aurora ran away because she felt so awful about Liza’s death. But our grandmother offered rewards and put private detectives on the roads into and out of Tucson, and no one could trace her.”

  “Would her friend killing herself really make her run away?” I asked, licking raspberry jam off the end of the knife I’d been using to spread it across my toast.

  “You’re lucky Bridgette isn’t here. She wouldn’t like that,” Bain told me, nodding at the knife that was poised halfway back to the jam jar. She’d been gone when I got downstairs, which was a relief. There was something about her that made me edgy.

  I put the knife down and folded my hands like a good student.

  Bain rubbed his wrist, his eyes fixed on the doors beyond me like he was looking into the past. “The two of them were nearly inseparable, like a little unit themselves. They didn’t really hang out with other kids in their class, or Ro didn’t anyway. I think Liza was more popular. And even though Ro always came off as so confident and in control, Liza was really the dominant one. Ro needed Liza, her approval, her guidance. At least, that’s how it seemed to me,” he added, half-undercutting his observation. I wondered if he was able to see the fissures in Ro’s confidence because they were the same as his own. “So yeah, Liza’s death would have hit Ro hard. Really hard.”

  I took a polite bite of toast. The butter said “Imported” on it, and the jam was some special kind with a typewriter-typed label. The two of them together tasted how I imagined fresh picked raspberries exploding on my tongue would taste. With the crunchy texture of the sourdough toast, it was incredible, distracting despite what we were talking about.

  “So the idea is that Aurora was so freaked out she ran away? Sounds cowardly.”

  He didn’t like me saying that. He got tense. “You didn’t know her. I’m sure something must have happened.”

  “Like what? What do you think happened?”

  He stared down at his plate. “I don’t know. There are tons of different theories—coyotes, kidnappers.” He pushed his chair away from the counter and stood, moving like a rangy animal who felt trapped. “The only thing I’m sure of is that either she died or she was seriously traumatized and ran away.” He carried his dishes to the sink. “Which is why you can say you have no memory of what happened. That it was completely obliterated by trauma. But you still need to learn all of those.”

  “Those” were five file boxes full of everything I needed to know about Aurora.

  The next weeks passed in a pine-and-lavender-scented cocoon. Being Aurora didn’t just mean memorizing facts about her; it meant learning to use forks the way she did, how to dismantle a whole broiled fish, when to use finger bowls. It meant remembering that Aurora was afraid of heights and devising an excuse for why, unlike her, I didn’t play the piano or tennis or get along with wild horses.

  Aurora was a girl made up of the memories of other people, and I lurched into her life like a figurative Frankenstein. That was what girls like Bridgette forgot—the My Fair Lady story of a girl being constructed by a master was basically the same story as the making of a monster.

  It started off with flash cards with a photo of a friend or family member on the front and their vital statistics—Alive or Dead, relationship to Aurora, notable facts, size of bank account—typed on the back. Dozens of lives, years of pain and agony and carefully tuned emotions, reduced (by Bridgette) to three lines on a card.

  There was something both reassuring and sinister about the way everything was brought to the same level: “collects fossils,” no different from “fought with brother at Father’s Day dinner,” or “committed suicide.” It was like looking at the underdrawing of a massive altarpiece, the saints in the process of being marked out in the periphery, just vague outlines in charcoal to start with, Mary Magdalene indistinguishable from St. Jerome, until the shading kicked in.

  Bain and Bridgette took turns visiting me. I was not allowed out of the house, and I was never seen with either of them.

  Once I’d mastered the cards, I graduated to DVDs. Bridgette and Bain had compiled footage of important people, generally at incredibly dull-looking parties in one of the three reception rooms—Goldenrod, Heliotrope, and Lilac—at the country club, or at the dining room of the golf course. I watched them during the evening with a bowl of butterscotch ice cream (Aurora’s favorite flavor).

  I ate crustless mozzarella and ripe red tomato sandwiches (Aurora didn’t like crusts) as I memorized the plans of Silverton House, the house where Aurora lived. The house belonged to her grandmother, Althea Bridger Silverton [Alive, 81 years old, matriarch of family, $60,000,000+]. Althea became Ro’s guardian after the death of her parents, Nellis Silverton [Died when Aurora was three, during rock climbing accident. Ro asleep, wife saw him fall to death but could offer no assistance, $15,000,000] and Sadie Silverton [Died when Aurora was twelve, boating accident. Had shown signs of mental instability after death of husband; when Aurora was ten she took her and they disappeared for six months. Estate to Aurora]. The housekeeper at Silverton House, Maureen March [Alive, 63, loves Aurora, plays video poker, $76,000], was practically considered a member of the family.

  “Why does it matter how much everyone has in their savings account?” I asked Bain one day.

  “So you know who they are,” he said, as though that made sense.

  I ate sticky buns without pecans (Aurora didn’t like nuts) as I practiced navigating the corridors and back stairs of Silverton House in my mind so I wouldn’t hesitate if someone told me to go get something because Bridgette said, “Grandma is tricky that way. She’ll want to believe you, but she’ll be watching for little signs.”

  I ate cheese-covered popcorn as I studied the photos on top of the piano. There were a lot of pictures of Bain and Bridgette, which allowed me to see that they had outfits for every sport from golf to boating, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes with their parents, Bridger and Genette. I gorged myself on Aurora’s facts, her family, her favorite food, but what I really wanted—what I was starving for, I realized—was a photo of Aurora.

  There weren’t any. Not one.

  I kept returning to the picture that had captured my attention the first night. I couldn’t help thinking there was something hidden in it, a message, a clue. One afternoon while I was eating a tofu corn dog (Aurora had unfortunately decided to become a vegetarian before she left; I was planning to change that), I realized what felt off about it. It was the only photo with a matte around it. And unless I was mistaken, the matte had been used to crop something—or someone—out. I had it facedown in my lap, trying to remove the back when Bridgette came in.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, nearly dropping the groceries she had in her arms.

  “I want to see who else is in this picture.”

  She snatched it from me and put it back on the piano. “What makes you think there’s anyone else in it?”

  “You can see the tip of a shoe next to Althea. And your father,” I pointed at the man in the polo shirt, “is looking in that direction. Who is standing there? Is it Aurora?”

  Bridgette kept her eyes and one hand on the photo. She nodded, with her back to me. “This picture was taken the weekend before she disappeared. There’d been a tennis tournament at the club and—” She shook her head.

  “Why did you cut her out? And why aren’t there any pictures of her?”

  “After she disappeared it just upset everyone to see pictures of her. So we got rid of them. Why are you so interested?”

  “I wanted to see what she looked like.”

  She rounded on me. “She looks like you. Exactly. Like. You.” With each word she took a step toward me. Her posture was tense, angry.

  I put up my hands. “She may look like me, but she’s not me. Whatever was between the two of you, it has nothing to do with me.”

  She stopped moving and stared at me, twisting th
e ring on her finger for a moment like she was calming herself down. When she spoke again, her voice was normal. “You’re right. It doesn’t. Sometimes it—you just startle me.”

  Bridgette was there for the next twenty-four hours, so I stayed away from the photo.

  I learned the names and identifying characteristics of the ten dogs Aurora had had in the course of her life (all dead) while devouring red velvet cupcakes with extra buttercream frosting (Aurora’s favorite). Everything I memorized about Aurora, every new fact, made me more eager to see a picture of her. Would people accept me as Aurora? Would this really work?

  There were no cards for Bain and Bridgette, but I made them up myself in my head. Bain Silverton [Alive, 23, working in the family real estate development business, capable but lazy, net worth unknown]. Bridgette Silverton [ostensibly Alive but only visible evidence of a pulse was twisting Cartier ring, 21, taking time off from University of Arizona to work on father’s campaign for Congress, only uses fake sugar, net worth unknown but apparently inadequate or wouldn’t be doing this because Bridgette didn’t do anything without a good reason].

  On my seventh night there, when I was eating frozen pizza (with pepperoni—Bain had slipped it to me when I’d begged for meat a few days earlier and it was our secret), a Sonora Heights Academy yearbook dropped onto the counter in front of me. “This is Bridgette’s from senior year,” Bain explained, taking a beer from the refrigerator and sitting on the stool next to mine. “She told me you wanted to see a picture of Ro. Ro was a freshman, so her class is in there too.”

  My heart began to pound faster. I flipped through, looking for the freshman class, missing it the first time and having to fan the thick pages back. “Aurora would have been a senior this year,” I said, half-babbling to cover my excitement.

  “That’s why you really only need to get an idea of who her classmates are, in case they come up in conversation.” Bain gulped the beer down fast. “They’re graduating on June 14, and most of them will be taking off for the summer right after. So if you don’t come to Tucson until a week later, you won’t run into them.”