Dead to Me (13 page)

Probably I was the only person in Los Angeles who felt that way, but it was haunted for me. I don’t know why
that
place,
that
night stood out. It’s not like it was the
worst dinner I ever had with my family. Maybe it was because of how fast everything went downhill afterward. All I knew was, I looked at the place and a shudder went through me, and it was my
twelfth birthday all over again.

When that day started, I’d thought it was going to be a good day. There’d been a wrapped package on my chair at the dining room table and a fresh-cut daisy in a vase next to my glass
of milk. My mother kissed my cheek as I sat down at the table, and then said, “Open it.”

It was a pair of black patent-leather shoes with low but unmistakable heels and a little strap that buttoned over the ankle.

“Just the thing for a young lady,” she said.

I wore the shoes that night along with a dress that was more grown-up than the ones I usually wore. The skirt was longer and not so full, the sleeves not so puffed. Instead of white socks with
lace at the cuffs, my mother let me borrow one of her treasured pairs of nylon stockings. During the war, you couldn’t find them anywhere, and most women went without or drew fake seams in
eyebrow pencil on the backs of their legs. Not my mother, though. She took such good care of the few pairs she had that people in our neighborhood gossiped that she must have been buying them on
the black market.

Once I was dressed, my mother set my hair in curlers and pinned the waves into ornate-looking rolls that framed my face, and she finished the whole thing off with a spritz of her Shalimar
perfume.

There was a knock at the door promptly at five thirty: Cassie dressed in her Sunday best—a salmon-colored sailor dress and white cotton gloves that made my mother suck in an appalled
breath when she saw them. Still, she smiled broadly and said, “You girls look lovely.”

My father drove us all to the restaurant, Cassie and me jostling along together in the backseat. Annie wasn’t there. She had plans that afternoon with her friends, so she said, and had
begged our parents to let her come to the restaurant late. At first I was upset, but with my elegant hair and new shoes, I found I didn’t mind so much. For once, I was the pretty, doted-upon
Gates sister.

Musso & Frank had paneled walls and soft leather booths and crisp-jacketed waiters. It wasn’t glamorous, exactly, but it made me feel like I might be, sitting next to Cassie with cloth
napkins unfolded on our laps and champagne flutes of seltzer water and maraschino cherries bubbling in our hands.

People my parents knew came over to our table to say hello. They were all writers, set designers, directors, and other unrecognizable but important people. Their smiles weren’t the
indulgent “cute kid” smiles I was used to. These smiles said “pretty girl” and “lovely daughter.” Everyone was still charming and happy and on their first drink,
and I felt the way a twelve-year-old girl is supposed to feel on her birthday.

But then it turned into any other day. Annie was late, and we didn’t order any food because my parents were waiting for her. They drank too many cocktails on empty stomachs and got crabby
with each other. Cassie and I got tired of looking glamorous and began trying to tie cherry stems with our tongues, which made my mother smack the back of my hand and hiss, “Stop that this
instant.” Then the waiter came to the table for the fifth time and asked if we were ready to order, and my father snapped at him, saying that when we were ready to order, he’d be the
first to know about it.

All the magic was off the evening by then. Cassie’s gloves were stained pink with cherries, and two wet circles darkened the armpits of her dress. I wasn’t much better—I could
smell my sweat stinking through the Shalimar. I’d picked out half the bobby pins in my hairdo and stacked them on the table next to my fork. My scalp had begun to ache from them, my feet felt
pinched in the shoes, and I’d had too many glasses of seltzer water.

“May I be excused?” I asked, already sliding out of the booth.

They hadn’t yet answered when I felt the back of my stockings catch on a splinter of wood, and a telltale rip sounded so loud that my father stopped yelling at the waiter and turned to see
what it was.

My mother looked up from her martini, and the blood drained from her face as she registered exactly how unkempt and disappointing I looked, and she said, “Sit down this instant.”

My father cleared his throat and said, “Vivian, leave the girl be. It’s her birthday.”

The waiter, who was still standing there, brightened and clapped his hands together. “Ah! Then let me bring a little something for the birthday girl. Compliments of the kitchen, of
course.”

“I told you,” my father said, throwing his napkin onto the table and sloshing his Manhattan, “that we were not ready to order yet.”

At the same time, my mother lifted her martini glass and said, “Another round of these, please.”

“Are you sure, madam?” the waiter asked, shooting a pointed look at my father.

“She asked for a drink, now bring her a drink.”

“May I
please
be excused?” I asked.

“Me too?” asked Cassie.

“I don’t care what you do,” my father said with a sigh.

It was another hour before my parents finally got tired of waiting and ordered Welsh rarebit for Cassie and me. It was a baby’s meal—toast and cheese—and Cassie and I picked at
it like babies while my father paid the check and stared at his watch without speaking until we cleaned our plates.

Annie never even showed up. She didn’t come home until the next morning, raccoon-eyed and defiant. When I woke up to the sounds of our mother screaming at her in the hallway, I found a
silver bracelet lying next to my head on the pillowcase. It wasn’t what I wanted, and even then, I’d known there was a decent chance she’d shoplifted it from Woolworth’s,
but at least my sister hadn’t forgotten about me.

As we got out of the car, the memory sat there like an undigested dinner roll wadded in my stomach.

“Are you okay, kid?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and followed Jerry to the parking attendant’s stand.

“Is Cyrus working tonight?” he asked.

The parking attendant was a stern-looking man with slicked-back black hair and a scar on his upper lip. In Hollywood, you had to be nice to everyone just in case they were someone important, but
the attendant seemed to know right away that we weren’t the kind of people you had to be nice to.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” he said, slouching against the stand.

Jerry reached into his wallet and handed the man a couple of singles.

“You can say.”

That made the parking attendant stand up straight. “I’d have to check,” he said, pocketing the money.

“Tell him it’s important. It’s about Annie.”

“That his girl?”

“How about you just see if he’s in and don’t worry about that.”

The parking attendant glared as he went inside the restaurant, but a few minutes later, he reemerged and escorted us toward the kitchen, scooting us out of view of the paying customers.

“Five minutes,” he said, holding the swinging door open for us. “No more.”

The air in the kitchen was boggy and filled with the sounds of loud men in a hurry. All around, people yelled out orders, dodged one another, and darted back and forth bearing heavy trays of
meat through the swinging kitchen doors.

Half hidden behind a rack of bowls and chafing dishes stood a boy who looked like he’d collapse under the weight of one of those trays. And yet, he held one piled high with plates and
bones balanced on one shoulder. Even before he pulled us out of the kitchen traffic and into the only quiet corner of the kitchen, I knew it was Cyrus.

As I turned the name over in my head, it occurred to me that I’d decoded Annie’s cipher perfectly:

It just didn’t have anything to do with the missing girl. It wasn’t a decoy to throw her enemies off track. It was a game, just like the ones she used to play with
me to pass the time during blackouts. I could almost imagine Annie sitting on the floor of her Main Street apartment with this boy, teaching him how to make a Polybius square.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, by way of a greeting.

Jerry acted like he hadn’t heard him. Instead he kicked me in the back of the heel until I stumbled half a step forward, and Cyrus really looked at me for the first time. Something about
his gaze made me self-conscious about the film of grease and steam that was already settling on my face. I looked away and fiddled with the clasp of my necklace.

“You’re the sister,” he said, setting down his tray.

“Alice,” Jerry said.

“I know what her name is.”

He was too tall, too thin. His neck was too long. His ears stuck out a little bit. His nose was crooked like it had been broken once, and his chin was pointed. Taken in individual parts, his
face was all wrong, but taken together, there was something about it that made you want to keep looking. He didn’t look like an athlete or a brain or a member of the thespian society. If he
went to my school, I couldn’t imagine a single table in the cafeteria where he would have looked at home.

Which meant that he probably would have ended up sitting with me.

“Jerry, why’d you bring her here?” he asked.

“I thought you’d want to meet her.”

Cyrus gave me a look, then sighed and shook his head. It was a look I recognized, having received some version of it from my mother at least once a week for the past four years. There was pity
in it, a pinch of disappointment.
You’re not her
, it said.
You’re not Annie
.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I already told you everything I know, Jerry.”

“It’s been two days, Cyrus. You sure you haven’t heard anything since then? Anything at all?”

Cyrus looked over his shoulder, where a mustachioed man in chef’s whites stood at a chopping block, fingering the blade of his knife and glaring at us.

“I’ve been working,” he said, clutching the kitchen towel that was tucked into his apron ties. “Right now I’m just trying to stay out of sight, which is what
you’d be doing if you were smart. This is bad business, Jerry. People are going to get hurt, and if Annie knew you’d roped Alice into this, she’d kill you.”

“What about Irma’s people?” Jerry asked. “Has anyone called them yet to let them know?”

Cyrus shook his head. “Millie would be the one to do that. Not that Irma really had any people. There might have been a sister in San Antonio—I’m not sure.”

“Who’s Millie?” I asked.

“It’s complicated,” Jerry said, trying to change the subject.

“It isn’t. Millie’s a friend,” Cyrus said. “She and Irma live in the same building. Or at least they used to. They were tight, like me and Annie were.”

He stood up a little straighter when he said it, like somebody was about to pin a medal on his shirtfront. I wasn’t surprised that he felt that way about Annie, but there was one question
that nagged at me.

“If you and Annie are so tight, why haven’t you been to the hospital?” I asked.

“The hospital?”

Cyrus cocked his head to the side and squinted like he was trying to see me through a dense fog. Jerry swore under his breath.

“She’s—she’s still alive?” he whispered.

He turned to Jerry, his eyes searching the detective’s face for a sign that it was true.

Jerry put up his hands and took a step back. “I was going to—”

Cyrus didn’t let him finish.

“I don’t care what you were going to do,” he said.

His hands clenched into fists at his side, and for a moment, I thought he might take a swing at Jerry.

“Calm down, Cy.”

“You didn’t tell me,” he said through gritted teeth.

Cyrus looked like a wire about to snap even though he hadn’t touched Jerry, hadn’t even raised his voice.

“The last time I saw you, I didn’t know where she was—I swear,” Jerry said.

Cyrus unclenched his fists as he considered Jerry’s words.

“If I’d known, I would have told you, Cyrus,” Jerry said.

He stepped forward now and placed a hand on the boy’s arm. Cyrus’s shoulders slumped, and he let out a long, weary breath.

“I just wish I’d found out sooner,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Jerry said. “She’s in pretty bad shape. She hasn’t woken up yet, but the important thing is, she’s alive.”

Cyrus turned to me, a sad half smile on his lips.

“So I guess that’s why I haven’t been to see her,” he said. “I don’t know anything I didn’t know two days ago, and I’m not sure I want to know.
Annie was the strongest person I ever met, and they got her anyway. If you think you and Jerry can do any better than she did, you’re either very brave or you don’t understand what
you’re up against.”

I knew he was scared, and as I listened to him talk, I began to wonder if I’d been scared enough.

“What are you still doing in town, then?” I asked. “Why don’t you just leave?”

From his station, the chef with the knife bellowed Cyrus’s name while carving slabs of meat from a standing rib roast with great speed and violence. Cyrus nodded to him and carried the
tray of dirty plates back to the industrial-steel sinks that lined the back walls of the kitchen. Once he’d unloaded this, he passed through the swinging kitchen doors and disappeared into
the sea of diners. A few minutes later, he returned laden down with a teetering pile of dishes and highball glasses and joined us back in our corner of the kitchen.

Breathing heavily under the weight of the tray, he said, “I can’t leave Millie here by herself. And besides, I need the money. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to.”

I saw then that Cyrus wasn’t so much thin as underfed. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible, working in a place where you were surrounded by steaks and lobster all day, but then,
I guessed that probably wasn’t what Cyrus got to eat.

“You have to go now. Both of you. I don’t want to get fired.”