Good as Gone (22 page)

“I’ve got you,” he said, panting, and his hot breath warmed her cheek through the screen door. “I’ve got you.” He leaned hard on his side of the door, and she could feel his weight through the mesh, curiously soft and intimate against her own, and what a time to remember his bulk on her, what a time to remember those nightmare communions, what a time to suddenly feel more his than ever, in this moment of almost-freedom, of failed freedom.

“What happened here is your fault,” he breathed through the mesh. “You aren’t Ruth. You aren’t Esther. You’re
nothing.
”

But in her bloody hands, something wicked still remained.

She slashed blindly with the blade at his fingers, and when they opened, she ran.

Nothing nothing nothing

Nothing nothing nothing nothing

Nothing

She ran to the rhythm of what she was.

There was something, though, curled right up in her core, and every pounding, naked footfall sent shock waves through her legs to say hello to it.

Goodbye,
she told it.

I don’t care,
she told it.

You’re nothing,
she told it. But she knew she was wrong.

She remembered a distant promise of help—peaches in syrup, canned corn—and ran hopelessly toward it. Every ounce of effort went into not tripping on the uneven sidewalks or getting smacked in the face with low-hanging branches or tangling herself up in her sheet, which was trailing. She could not take the time to look back and see if he was ten steps behind, twenty, or none; one fall, and his hands could close around her throat, bloody hands she’d slashed open herself with the wicked little blade, the same blade she’d used to commit the sin that could never be erased. Oh, Charlotte. Poor, poor Charlotte.

She ran through the old Houston neighborhood of hunched brick houses concealing God knows how many pulped skulls and ruined little girls, houses with who knew how many buried secrets in the backyard, zigzagging crazily around corners. The quaint old fairy-tale curves of the houses with their thick climbing vines nauseated her, and she ran past them in search of the larger streets that would signify civilization, and possibly help. But the streets were eerily bare—was it too early, even, for morning walks?

She emerged from the stifling neighborhood onto a corner with a stoplight and paused to catch her breath. A small park lay on her right next to a long, rectangular building with a covered walkway running its whole length. She recognized the sculpture on the lawn, a canal of rusty metal sunk into the grass in a random, nonsensical pattern like a dropped ribbon, and vaguely remembered visiting this museum on a long-ago field trip.

Looking around, she realized that it wasn’t morning after all; though the light was at half strength and she felt that she’d lived through a long night, the colors weren’t right for sunrise. The sky was a dingy, opaque white that made her feel as if she were still indoors, just in a bigger room. The trees loomed large, so dense and saturated with green, the color seemed to bleed off the edges of the leaves. That and the fact that the trees were absolutely motionless in the dead air made them look like fake trees on a stage set, or in a dream. She ran into the empty street and, craning her neck to the right, saw a freeway.

Then she saw it, towering above her, taller than the trees, taller than the lampposts.
Missing:
A girl, blond, beautiful, and pink-cheeked.

It wasn’t her. Nothing like. She looked at the billboard and then down at herself, barefoot, filthy after months in the dark with him and the things he’d done to her. And now she had the something that wasn’t nothing curled up in her gut to remind her of those things. To remind her, too, of what she’d done to Charlotte. The girl on the billboard knew nothing about that. She was perfect.

The next moment, as if someone had ripped a Band-Aid off the sky, a wall of rain fell down. In a few seconds it made a river that flowed past her bare feet and hid the billboard almost completely.

She started running again.

By the time she got to the food pantry, the rain had slackened to a drizzle like laundry being squeezed out, and the sun was poking out from behind wet-flannel clouds, making the last drops sparkle in midair. The ground was already starting to steam, but she shivered in front of the thin plywood stall. It was padlocked shut.

“If you need anything,” the woman with the peaches had said. She needed lots of things. Her stomach swam with the sickness that could attack her at any time of day, especially when she hadn’t eaten. The only thing that kept her from vomiting was the thought of being found on her knees on the concrete, alone, in front of the pantry stall. She circled around behind it.

A figure leaned against the back of the pantry stall, sheltered behind it on the concrete slab, smoking a cigarette. The woman heard her and swiveled her head slowly in her direction, as if she anticipated being bored by the sight. She took her in from head to toe with a long look, exhaled, and waited with the cigarette held between two fingers down by her knees. She seemed like she was used to waiting.

Suddenly the woman snapped to attention and took another, quicker drag off her cigarette. Then she leveled it out in front of her, pointing. “Wig Girl!” she said. “I know you. You’re that wig girl. Where’s your wig at?”

The girl opened her mouth to say something, but just then the cigarette smoke from the woman’s outstretched hand caught the breeze and drifted toward her. The rush of nausea it induced sent her to her knees in the mud, and she puked into the long, wet grass behind the wooden stall, but there was nothing to puke, just acid that burned her throat. Afterward she couldn’t see anything but green and yellow flecks for a while, and then there was a moment of blackness before she felt a warm hand on the back of her neck.

“Wig Girl, you don’t look so good,” the woman said as she helped her to a sitting position on the concrete. The flecks cleared, and she saw the woman’s face more clearly. The weave was gone, and the woman’s short black hair shot back away from her face in stiff little flames. “My name’s Janiece. And your name’s about to be Mama, if I’m any judge.”

The girl breathed in and out, taking long gulps of the now smoke-free air. “I ran away,” she said, and then paused. She couldn’t think of the words for what had happened. She’d lied. She’d killed. She’d tried to be good. She’d failed.

“Yeah, I got that,” Janiece said. “You got people you can go to?”

She shook her head.

“You need some clothes? A place to stay?”

She nodded.

“You need to get rid of that?” Janiece pointed.

For a moment she was confused.

“Whose baby you having, honey?” the woman asked a little more softly.

The retching came from so deep within her this time that she thought she would be torn to pieces. Except that wasn’t even a possibility. To have pieces, you have to be
something.

Janiece watched her as she came up wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Okay, then, never mind about that. You need some food in you either way.”

She looked mutely toward the food pantry behind them.

“Oh, hell no,” said Janiece. “Rhonda’s a nice lady, but one look at that four-months-gone belly and she ain’t letting you out of her sight. They got a room for you.”

“A—room?”

“Look at that, it talks! Yeah, they got a special room with a special movie. They’re
Catholics,
understand? You don’t want to mess with Catholics in your condition, shit.”

“She said—if I needed—”

“If what you need is a lecture on keeping your legs closed. And I ain’t saying you don’t.”

“I need—” Every word felt pulled from a bottomless well. Sometimes the bucket hit water, and sometimes it went down and down and dangled in space.

“I know what you need, and I can tell you right now, you can’t get it—not without a bunch of papers signed by your folks back home. Hell, it’s probably someone there did it to you in the first place.”

Home.

You’re nothing.

“Come on. You’re coming with me.” Janiece helped her up and sighed. “Whoever did that to you, I hope he rots in hell, because getting it out is going to be a whole lot of trouble. Money too.” A sideways glance. “But we’ll talk about that part later.”

She thought about hell. She thought about heaven. She thought about what was inside her, the life, the heartbeat. Then she thought about John David, his weight on top of her again and again. She hadn’t crawled out of the hole after all. It was inside her. Its name was Esther.

In 2002, a rock climber named Ryan Hartley scaled the Transco Tower using a small pick. When he reached the thirtieth floor—almost halfway up—he jumped.

On his broken body they found a note protesting the war in Iraq. Presumably he chose the Transco Tower because it was a symbol of Houston’s oil boom: sixty-four stories of silver-black glass thrusting heavenward, alone in the middle of a retail and residential area, the tallest skyscraper ever built outside of a central business district. Pure energy shooting out of the center of the earth, as if a geyser of oil could be caught, purified, and transformed into a prism of light. As if anything could be that pure.

Opposite the tower, across a rectangle of grass, stands the Water Wall fountain, a horseshoe-shaped artificial waterfall exactly sixty-four feet tall, each foot representing one floor of the Transco Tower. Once, we took the girls there after Christmas shopping at the Galleria. Jane, three at the time, pulled away from my hand and ran up to the edge of the water, and Tom took off running to catch up with her. Adventurous Jane stopped right at the bottom of the steps and looked straight up at the curved wall. Then, dizzied by the rushing water, she took a step forward. Her legs buckled under her. She sat down and let out a wail.

Julie, five, lay on the concrete, her head tipped back to see the giant arc of rushing water from a safe distance. While Tom gathered Jane up in his arms, I lay down next to Julie so that I could see what she saw. I remember her warm head nestled into my temple, her wispy hair blowing against my cheek. Together we listened to the sounds of Tom comforting Jane, barely audible over the noise from the waterfall. The water slammed down the wall so fast that it hardly looked like it was moving at all.

When Julie spoke, her words went right into my ear. “Mommy,” she said. “Is the sky falling down?”

I made a mental note to repeat it to Tom later that night, after the girls went to bed, and said in a loud voice that the water noise turned into a whisper, “Don’t worry, honey, it can’t get us here.”

I felt rather than saw her brave little smile.

Seen from a distance, silhouetted against the lit-up Water Wall and framed by a stone archway, they could be a couple taking engagement photos: Gretchen and Maxwell, their hands clasped together, Gretchen leaning backward in a graceful bow shape against his weight. Then he jerks her forward like a dancer and clasps his arms around her, and they become one dark figure, waltzing back and forth in front of the illuminated wall of water. But as I hurry toward them over wet grass that gets muddier closer to the fountain, I see her elbows angling out as she tries to push him away, his arms pinning them back down again. They are both fighting to get at her purse, which looks as if it has been wrapped around her neck in the struggle. I break into a run.

I always forget how loud the Water Wall is up close, a pounding roar that changes pitch and intensity with my every step, fading one moment into the background in the manner of white noise, then throbbing with renewed intensity. A mist fills the round concrete plaza in front of the curved wall of the fountain, making the ground treacherously slippery, and at night the light is a yellowish, jaundiced glow emanating from the underwater fountain lights. Just as I cross under the archway onto the plaza, the conjoined silhouettes tilt alarmingly and skid on their fulcrum. Gretchen stumbles backward over something lying on the ground and then she’s down, her head bouncing at the impact, Maxwell collapsing on top of her. He continues to flail for a moment like some deep-sea creature washed up on the shore, then pulls back, separating their bodies. A sliver of light outlines his beard and briefly illuminates a panicked snarl of animal rage on his face before he leans into the darkness, reaching for the purse that is now lying halfway under Gretchen’s limp body on the wet concrete.

The man who did this to me.
That’s what she called Maxwell on the recording. I don’t know what he did or who she is, but seeing his hand reach toward her motionless form, I know I have to stop what he’s going to do next.

I propel myself forward as hard as I can, and then my shoes are sliding on the wet concrete, just as Gretchen’s did a moment before, and my feet slip out from under me. I manage to get my hand out in front of me and drop to one shin, but my teeth close on a millimeter of tongue when I hit the ground, and a flower of heat spreads through my mouth. Maxwell sees me and springs to his feet, still straddling Gretchen’s limp body. When he opens his mouth and speaks, his deep voice carries over the rushing of the water behind him, just as it carried over the sea of voices at the Circle of Healing.

“I know what this looks like,” he says, panting. “But you don’t know what this girl is capable of. She’s dangerously disturbed. She lies. She’s a killer.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, but I can’t hear my own words, and I know that the lying part is true.

“She’s been stalking me, making threats. She tried to blackmail me. She wants my money.” He gestures toward a duffle bag lying slumped on the wet ground a few feet away. “She forced me to come here, threatened me. And then she attacked me.” I look down at the unmoving body on the concrete. “I swear, I was defending myself! She’s got a gun in her purse!”

But it’s a mistake, because now I will never let him get that purse in his hands. “If all she wants is your money, why would she attack you?”

He licks his lips. “Like I said, she’s disturbed. I’m successful, I help people.” His voice rises petulantly, his beard bulging over his Adam’s apple. “Girls like that can’t stand a—”