Dead Dreams (16 page)

“I’ll—I….”

“I’ll—I, what?” she snapped. “I’ll bring your clothes with me, and you can change at the McDonald’s two blocks from Fremont Bank.”

“I know where that is.”

“Don’t be late. Eleven is the appointment at Fremont. They’re not like a Bank of America. They close at noon, sharp. I’m already driving there.” It was ten forty.

“I’ll be there.”

I slammed on the accelerator, breezed down Willow and Middlefield, and swung a right at the traffic light toward the Hooper Street McDonald’s. No parking was available in the public lot next to the bank. As I backed up into a tight spot between two Ford trucks, I saw a yellow Corvette whiz past behind me on Main Street. Had it come from the parking lot I’d pulled out of? Why would Keith, assuming it was him, be here? Was he suspecting something and following me? I wouldn’t put it past him to spy on me and make me look bad in front of my parents. My stomach twisted, and I had the PMS-cramped feel in my abs. A few Tums would have helped.

But then, it could be Keith just had a client appointment, I reassured myself and took a few deep breaths to steady my heart beat.What excuse could I give him for not being at work at this hour, if he saw and stopped me? Right after I’d taken leave to see Dad, too.

Sarah had never met anyone from my family, but she’d seen photos of Keith in my cell phone camera gallery, where I stored some pictures of my relatives. Unfortunately, I’d shown Keith shots of her, too. Would he recognize Sarah and interrogate her? It was crucial I got to her before he spotted her. And, being the chatty sort, would he have told her of our dad’s condition if he’d already recognized and stopped her?

A sudden sharp rap on my driver side window jolted me.

“Hey!” Sarah’s worried face peered at me. Maybe Keith
had
told her.

She stepped back and jerked her chin at me. Was she annoyed?

“I just got here,” I said.

“Oh, good. I thought I’d kept you waiting.” I stared at her and realized I’d never heard her come close to being considerate, especially about timing. This switch deal must have been weighing heavy on her.

She had on a bright yellow pants suit, with a light blue, silky blouse peeking from under the nipped-waist blazer. Some modern Chanel. The same outfit but a size bigger awaited me at the apartment. She’d purchased all this the day before.

Sarah went on, saying, “I got your stuff.” She shoved two large brown paper bags, the sort they gave out at Bloomingdale’s, at my face. Faded blue jeans with rhinestones on the pockets and a claret-colored, loose- knitted blouse were inside one. The blouse was going to make me dumpy. And I was to use my sneakers with the outfit.

We hurried toward McDonald’s, Sarah tottering on her five-inch, black heels. Her pants covered most of the stiletto. I had the same style and color waiting at home, but thankfully mine was only a two-inch stack. No way could I pull off that high of a perch without stumbling. Would anyone at the bank notice the slight height variation in our shoes? Someone with a keen eye for fashion might.

The lunch crowd hadn’t started so we had the restrooms to ourselves. The jeans fitted fine, if a tad short, but the blouse hung like a sack.

“Perfect,” Sarah said.

She’d also brought one of those weighted waistbands I had to secure around my middle to give me a more pudgy look, so the bank officials would remember me as rotund. This would make it easier to emulate me when Sarah had to pass off as Brianna, the pudgy-in-the-midsection girl. We’d also agreed on me wearing glasses, so when she was me, she’d put on a pair of far-sighted spectacles that would make her eyes bigger and more like mine.

My years of stage work had prepared me for our biggest challenge: makeup to widen and flatten my cheeks so my face looked rounder. Highlights on the upper bridge of my nose to give me a less chiseled look. If anyone noticed anything at all about me, they’d believe I had a moon face, to go with the rotund torso.

I applied some dark tones to hollow out Sarah’s cheeks, giving her face a slimming effect, since my real face shape was more oval and bonier. I already had my hair in a ponytail and that would work fine, since Sarah’s was bobbed and rounded at her shoulders. We calculated that by the time we finished with the first phase of paperwork, it would be noon. That would give us time to get to our apartment, and we would switch hair color. After trying the hairpieces, we’d both agreed they screamed of fake. So, we’d tossed the wig idea. Thank goodness for the wonders of dyes. I’d need to cut my length, too, since my hair was quite a bit longer than Sarah’s and too voluminous. She’d get away with light-brown hair extensions, which we would sweep into the ponytail.

“It’s a good thing Jackson won’t be there later when we switch,” I told her.

She nodded.

Anyone looking on would have thought we were getting ready for a party, with all the makeup brushes and contour sticks that went back and forth between Sarah’s face and mine. Twenty minutes later, which meant we were already late, no one could have said that Sarah and I looked remotely alike, except that if anyone studied us closely enough, it was obvious we had an inch of makeup on.

“Where are you parked?” I asked.

“That big lot behind here.” She looked at the mirror and smacked her lips together. They were painted a bright red, which made her lips look as if bumblebees had stung them.

“Did you see a yellow Corvette come out from there?”

“Yellow what?” She asked dumbly as she stuck on false eyelashes. When it was my turn to become Sarah, I’d have to secure the fake lashes on, too. For now, I just had my real, scanty ones.

How could she not have seen that flashy-looking car? A cold wave brushed my arm. “I think it passed by our apartment building earlier. You didn’t happen to see it?”

She frowned at me, as if annoyed. “I was boxing my stuff, not staring out windows. Were you expecting your
brother
to visit? I thought you were practically estranged from him.”

So, she remembered Keith drove a Corvette. “Nothing to be agitated about. He’s not the visiting-sister kind of bro. I just thought… My mind’s been playing tricks on me.” Perhaps the lack of sleep, the stress, the fear, the nightmares had conspired to conjure imaginary images in my brain. Minds had been known to crack under less pressure. “Forget it,” I said.

“You have to stay focus or we won’t be able to pull this off. We have to hustle. We’re already late. Jackson will kill me.”

What would Jackson say about her makeup? Or, was he used to her dramatics? Probably.

We scurried out of McDonald’s just as a wave of office workers breezed in and almost knocked my Bloomingdale’s brown bag out of my grasp at the exit. My car was closer, so we tossed the evidence of our scheme in the trunk and headed toward Fremont Bank about thirty yards away.

“Remember, try not to say too much,” Sarah warned me. “And you have this habit of pushing your hair behind your ears, even when there’s nothing falling over your face. If you did it a few times, I could imitate that.”

“Sure.” I’d been practicing raising my eyebrows as a manner of accenting, and Sarah would imitate this, too, when she “became” Brie. Something extraordinary like that would be a subconscious hook for people who noticed us to recall and identify us as unique. When they saw Sarah (as me) and noticed the eyebrow-raising thing, they’d psychologically equate it to Brianna O’Mara. At least, I hoped they would.

But I was bummed I never got the chance to research the penalties of us being caught. Could we be charged for switching identities?

When I stepped through the wooden double doors of Fremont Bank, my breath stuck in my throat. A long Verde marble counter greeted us at the right side, and a booth with a mahogany desk, the Victorian kind with scrolled feet, sat to the left. On a dark brown leather club chair next to the scrolled-feet desk sat a suited man with one leg crossed at the knee. He looked about fortyish, with a thick head of brown, wavy hair, peppered with silver at the temples, at least from his profile. Opposite him, on the other side of the desk, sat a lady with a black, double-breasted suit made of a soft silk-wool blend: expensive but typical, no-nonsense, “try to impress” banker’s style, Sarah termed it as we walked in.

The lady with the banker suit had the whitest blonde hair I’d ever seen. Maybe dyed. I couldn’t say for sure. Her name tag said, “Marlene Stefford, Branch Manager, Executive Vice-President.”

Blondie Marlene stood and offered her hand toward Sarah as she and I sashayed to the desk. Jackson—at least, I guessed he was Jackson—turned and smiled broadly at us as if we’d just hit the jackpot, and maybe that was how I felt then. I nervously glanced up the bank camera focused on us.
What was I getting myself into?

“And, you must be the lovely Brie. We meet at last.” Jackson’s Tennessee drawl was even more pronounced than it had been on the phone.

“Nice to meet you.” I shook his hand. He had a soft grip. Surprising for a wide-shouldered man, and brawny, too—probably from all the golf.

“Heard much about you.” He jerked his chin at Sarah, who stood grinning, showing her even teeth. This was part of the act for me to follow when I was her. Jackson wouldn’t be around later, or there would be no way we could pull this off. He’d recognize I wasn’t Sarah and vice versa if he was there. Sarah had apparently convinced him he wasn’t needed later. He had other clients to tend to, anyway.

“Good things about me, I hope, Mr. Anderson,” I said. I pushed invisible hair behind one ear.

“Nothing but the best,” Jackson said.

Would he bring up our telephone conversation? Sarah seemed oblivious enough about it, but I never could tell with her. She tended to keep mum about certain things, especially things of which she didn’t approve.

The transfer paperwork went smoothly; Marlene Stefford, with the help of her underling, a Garrot Darcey, who didn’t seem remotely like Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcey, shuffled papers back and forth between them. This Mr. Darcey had beady eyes, nose beaked like a toucan, and he had the habit of making sure the stacks of paperwork in front of Sarah to sign had their corners squared up, all the while looking over his shoulders as if he expected some bandits to ambush us. It was disconcerting to watch him.

Yellow sticky notes were pasted on each page near the line Sarah was to autograph. I kept lifting my eyebrows in feigned surprise whenever he added more piles for her sign so Garrot Darcey would notice this eyebrow trait. He kept grinning at me, yellow teeth and all. I hoped he wouldn’t discern any of my peculiar natural mannerisms and find them missing when Sarah took my place. She didn’t have the acting background I had, although during our practice at home I thought she was quite good. If we got caught with our switch, would the bank officers call the cops? I glanced at the camera again. These days, it was hard to hide anything with technology. If they blew up our images, could they tell subtleties? And, if it came to it, and my parents were called to identify me, would they wonder why my makeup was about two inches thick?

Concentrate.

Sarah had Jackson to bail her out, but with my dad hospitalized, I couldn’t add to my mother’s burdens. And forget about Keith. A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. Was it too late to pull out of this scheme? I was worried for my dad. Sarah had insisted I turn off my phone during the transaction. What if there were an emergency at the hospital?

“That’s it for now.” Marlene stood abruptly and gathered the signed documents; her sharp nails, red like blood, scratched the papers as she sorted the stack. Definitely the fashionista sort. I dragged my feet to hide them under my swivel seat. With her heels, Sarah stood at least two inches taller than I did, but, would Marlene realize later that the “new” Brie was actually shorter than this present one? It might not be so easy to fool her.

Marlene cleared her throat. “Ladies, why don’t you grab a quick lunch and be back here in forty-five minutes?”

I glared at Sarah, who looked as horrified as I felt. Forty-five minutes? That wasn’t enough time to get my hair cut at the salon—I was sure I was going to get an ear-full from the hairdresser about having too much hair, and no way she could rush through this. After the cut, I had to dye the massive thing at home—a just-in-case measure, as we didn’t want the cops to know about the hair-color, should they got a hold of the hairdresser. Then, we’d need to switch make-up, re-dress, gather enough breath to calm ourselves, and arrive back here. Even theater performances didn’t demand such speedy changes.