Good as Gone (12 page)

I watch him through the bedroom window as he stands at the pool’s pebbled ledge, sweeping the long pole of the vacuum slowly across the bottom like a gondolier. With each measured stroke, last night feels farther away. The tingle in my palm from slapping Jane, Tom’s yelling, and, most of all, the face on my cell-phone screen cradled in my palm as I crouched in the bathroom—it’s all gone now, washed clean by sleep and early-morning showers. A mistake. A misunderstanding. A blond girl in a blurry video. I grab a pair of fresh jeans out of the laundry basket and pull them on, then feel a lump in the back pocket and find Detective Overbey’s card, pulped in the washing machine and fuzzed from the dryer, unreadable. I throw it in the trash.

I take my coffee outside and settle into a deck chair to watch Tom’s rhythmic movements. It’s one of those rare, sparkling, rain-cooled mornings that occasionally graces Houston in June, a throwback to March, a day you could almost mistake for an ordinary summer day in a more hospitable climate. The shadows of the tall pine trees move on the deck; the breezes that languidly stir their tops back and forth barely reach me. A yellow worm of late-season oak pollen drops into my mug, and I fish it out. We may have our problems, but after all, we are a family again, husband and wife and two beautiful daughters, together at last.

The door opens and Jane comes out, rolling a suitcase behind her.

“Sweetie?” Tom calls as she wheels the suitcase to the car, ignoring us. I hear a car door open, then close again with a thump. As she passes by the deck without her suitcase, Tom says, “Jane?”

“I’m going back. I bought my ticket last night. I’m staying with April tonight, and she’s taking me to the airport tomorrow morning.”

Tom turns off the vacuum and leans the handle against a tree. “Sweetie—we talked about this. Maybe you need some time to—”

“I want to go back. Now.” Tom doesn’t ask why. Neither of us do. “Will you take me to April’s house?”

“Sure, sure,” he says. She disappears back inside. He turns to me.

It’s my cue. “I’ll apologize,” I say. And then, when he looks down at his sandaled feet: “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t look up as I walk past, but his anger is palpable.

I go upstairs and knock on Jane’s door and, when there is no reply, open it an inch at a time, softly saying, “Hey.”

Jane is rummaging through her closet. She looks at me over her shoulder and then returns immediately to what she is doing, which is stuffing an open duffle bag full of things she is apparently choosing more or less at random.

Behind me, the shower starts running, and I think of Julie’s new hair. I wonder how much of the excess dye will wash down the drain, whether the red will stain the tub. Then I snap back to Jane standing in front of me, back turned.

“I’m so sorry, Jane. There was no excuse for that. We were just—I was so worried.”

Jane yanks a sweater off a hanger and throws it into the bag. “Be worried,” she says. “You can do it without me around.”

I take a step inside the door and close it behind me. She whirls.

“Did I say you could come in?”

“Jane, please.”

“Please what? Please stay out of the way so you can be with your other daughter, your real daughter, the one you care about? Please be fine, so you don’t have to give me any of your precious time or listen to what I say?”

“Please stay.” She looks at me with such longing, her jaw set and quivering, like she used to when she was a child. “Your father needs you.”

Her eyes drop to the floor, and when they come up her chin isn’t shaking anymore. “I’ll go out for breakfast with him on the way to April’s. Would that make him happy?”

“I think he would like that, yes.”

“I’ll miss him. I’ll miss both of you—all of you.” She wipes her eyes with her flannel shirtsleeve. “I just—can’t be here right now. It’s making me crazy. She’s my sister too, you know. I missed her too. I was frightened too all these years.” She looks around at the room, at her closet. “I hate this room. Sleeping here still gives me nightmares.”

“We couldn’t move,” I say. “We—”

“I know, I know, you wanted her to be able to find you. And she did. So that’s all that matters. I get it.” She goes back to stuffing more things into the bag. “I don’t even mind that you’ve barely asked me about my school situation at all—”

“Jane—”

“Don’t. I’ll figure it out on my own. I always do.” She finishes her job and grabs the bag off the floor, throws it on her bed. “Just don’t take it out on me because she found you, not the other way around.”

There’s a gentle knock at the door, and Jane pushes past me to open it.

Julie is standing in the doorway holding a pair of black high-top tennis shoes in her hands. With her short hair plastered wetly to her skull, she looks older and smaller, almost birdlike.

“You’ll need these,” she says, holding out the shoes.

“You can keep them,” Jane says, her voice roughening around the edges. “I need a new pair anyway.”

“Are you sure?” says Julie.

“Yeah,” Jane says. “I want you to have them.”

“Thanks,” says Julie.

“You have my e-mail address, right?” Jane asks. I feel like I should be leaving the girls alone to say goodbye, but they are directly blocking the door, so I just stand, hands in jean pockets, waiting.

“Yeah,” Julie says. “Thanks for hanging out. I had a nice time.”

“Me too,” says Jane. She lunges forward and gives Julie a quick hug. “I love you. I’m glad you’re home.”

Then she turns to zip up the bag on the bed. She grabs a stack of notebooks from her desk and loops her book bag over one shoulder. By the time she turns back to the door, Julie is gone, the door to her room shut.

I reach out my hand for a bag, but Jane shakes her head, grabs the duffle, and moves out the door. She makes it all the way down the stairs at a brisk march,
thump-thump-thump,
the heavy, purposeful Jane step, as if she’s shipping out; I follow in her footsteps more softly and slowly. Tom gets up from the kitchen table when he sees her and steps toward her, reaching out for the bags. She surrenders everything to him, even the notebooks, and he silently carries them out to the car. I keep shadowing her until we reach the back door, where Julie must have hovered long ago, a knife at her back, before taking her last step over the threshold of childhood and into whatever was waiting for her on the other side.

My hands still in my pockets, I want to reach out for Jane’s shoulder. I don’t, but maybe some invisible part of me does, like a phantom limb, because she turns around anyway.

“Mom,” she says, and she buries her head in my shoulder for a second, her arms pinning mine down, almost hurting me.

When she pulls away, I’ve got tears in my eyes, but I let them stand and subside and pull my hands out of my pockets at last, rest one on her elbow. “I love you,” I say.

Her face is serious and a little sad. “Mom,” she says. “I think you should know something. Julie has a cell phone. She told me she borrowed one to call me yesterday, but then I saw it in her purse.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a slip of paper. “I wrote the number down.” She gently takes my hand away from her elbow, and the last bit of Jane I feel is her fingers pressing the paper into my palm.

Then she’s gone. The car growls down the driveway, and I stand there a bit too long before putting the paper in my pocket, still feeling Jane’s touch and wondering absently why she has a white bandage around one of her fingers.

When I turn, Julie is standing by the kitchen island, looking at me. I wonder how long she’s been there, what she heard and what she saw.

learned how to lie at the Black Rose in Portland, Oregon. Not that she’d never lied before—to police officers, to foster parents, to anyone who looked like he or she might use the truth to hurt her. But those were lies she told with words, and anyone who was really paying attention could see through words. At the Black Rose, she learned to lie with her whole body.

She’d washed up in Pioneer Courthouse Square as Mercy with brown, shoulder-length, under-the-radar hair, and walked due east over the river until she was through with walking. She’d passed two other clubs, but the Rose was the first one with a picture on the dingy sign, and the swirls of dark petals surrounded by a spiky halo appealed to her. She didn’t even have to take her clothes off to get the job, just show Gary, a tall, skinny guy with a hipster mustache, proof that she was over twenty-one. He explained that she’d be renting her mandatory stage time with watery ten-dollar drinks the customers bought her, ten drinks for one stage dance, twenty for two, and so on. If she didn’t make her drink quota, she’d be buying the rest herself at the end of the night, out of the cash she made from lap dances and stage dollars—
after
tipping out the bar, the door, the waitresses, and the security staff. So it would
behoove
her, Gary said, enjoying the use of the word, to hustle as many drinks off her lap dances as she could.

As for rules—well, since deregulation, anything went. No no-touch rule, no three-foot rule, and nothing had to be covered. He gestured over to one of the armchairs that lined the walls, where a dancer was sitting naked in a customer’s lap, her legs open, his fingers sunk inside her up to the third joint. The customer’s head leaned back against the wall while the dancer rolled on him absently. “Thank you, Oregon Supreme Court,” Gary said, with a smile implied but none on his face.

She
didn’t have to do that stuff, of course. The point was, she could do just about whatever she wanted. She could light her pubes on fire for all he cared. There was just one thing.

“You can’t be Mercy. We’ve got one already.”

Starr’s first stage dance was on a Thursday afternoon, too early, though you couldn’t tell what time it was inside the windowless club, where the fog machine churned day and night. She gyrated awkwardly to the music, slithering out of the makeshift girl-next-door costume she’d cobbled together with a stolen G-string from a mall store, and awaited the exposed and endangered feeling. But the closer she got to peeling the G-string down around her ankles, the more clothed she felt. Naked on the stage save for neon-yellow platform heels, she was unassailable, stripped down to armor that could never be taken off.

When she got down from the stage and walked among her prey, the feeling faded—they were sad daytime customers, and since there was a club on every block, it was nothing they hadn’t seen before. The newly eviscerated vice laws meant the strippers could use their bodies to wrest money from wallets with brazen aggression. Some of the girls ended every dance lying on their backs, arms pasted to the floor, waving their legs like strange underwater plants around naked genitals elevated to customer-face level. Their pussies were as dry as mouths left open too long and as impersonal as rubber chickens, but it didn’t matter; men stood transfixed, peering into the permanent gooseflesh as if they could will its transformation into warm, wet intimacy. Starr tried the helicopter move at home once, but her abdominal muscles were pathetic. She could barely manage the most basic pole moves, though she was learning from her roommates, most of whom were dancers too.

Gary had pointed her toward the dilapidated Victorian off Hawthorne with half the front steps rotted out and black-taped windows that beaded up and sweated in the never-ending drizzle. She didn’t leave anything there; her backpack full of trophies and her slowly growing collection of outfits were safer in a locker at the Rose, and she wore her only jewelry, the gold chain with the little horse charm, around her ankle while she danced.

For all she was addicted to the hot lights on her sweaty skin and the bitter taste of the fog machine in the back of her throat, there was no doubt Starr was a terrible stage dancer. Her lap dances were more successful. She hated being down on the floor amid the stares and gropes and was distant and sullen. But sullen had its own appeal for some, and she had her customers just like the girls who giggled and flirted had theirs. Enthusiasm was not required so long as she got the script right, and the lines were almost painfully easy to memorize; it didn’t matter whether or not they believed her, it was all part of the transaction. She learned which customers to tell it was only her first or second time doing this, which to tell that she was saving money for college or some new toys for her kid. With others, she didn’t say anything about herself at all, just made a kind of purring noise, as if she felt lucky to be grinding on their crotches.

Still, there were too many strippers and not enough customers. Some of the girls rolled their eyes about the “de-reg” and bitched that a worse thing had never happened. Some nights Starr barely took home anything after tip-out. Plus, there were a million ways you could slip and fall in the newly permissive atmosphere, a million ways you could ruin everything in the split second between a smile and a nod. She had seen girls followed out back on their cigarette breaks by their favorite customers after an offer to make a little extra money and then come back that same night with a black eye or a broken strap, or not at all.

Starr, remembering the Petes, had no interest in these side transactions. But if she said no too many times, she risked losing herself a regular, which meant losing the club a regular, and that wasn’t good either. So her job was to say nothing at all, to communicate neither yes nor no but keep looking as if she might say yes someday, as if she were just waiting for the right moment. It was an education in disappearing.

Graduation came when another dancer handed her a plastic tub half full of Manic Panic hair dye in an unmissable shade of red and said, “Trust me. It’ll show up under the lights.” Advice of this nature didn’t come often, so Starr took it and found that being brighter on the outside meant, paradoxically, making an even darker hiding place for herself on the inside.

Over the next eight months she learned it didn’t have to be just hair; it could be an accent, or a strange last name, or a fake tattoo on the back of her neck. It could be bright blue eyeliner, a pair of cowboy boots, or something outlandish she made up on the spot when customers asked where she was from: a farm she had grown up on, a famous ballerina she had studied with. When you looked like she did, with wide cheekbones and smooth, white skin and big, blank kewpie-doll eyes, people would accept anything about you but the truth. Whether she told them she’d been a porn star or a prizefighter, they believed her, in a way they’d never believed or cared about her invented baby sister or community college courses. She started making real cash, buying four stage dances a night and entertaining tables of a dozen customers or more who came in just for her. Moreover, they bought drinks for any girls she brought over, and that made the other dancers friendly.