Here She Lies (13 page)

I walked around the bookshelf as if I had just that moment breezed into the store. Lexy reached for me. I bent down to unbuckle her and lifted her out of the stroller. Squeezing her close, I inhaled her luscious baby smell of powder and milk. “Yummy,” I cooed into her ear. “Yummy baby, all mine.”

Neither Julie nor I mentioned the woman from Gatsby’s. Julie bought a magazine and we went back to the car. She drove us home. On the way we discussed my plan to catch the last evening bus to the city and she convinced me, instead, to take her car. We agreed that when my new license arrived in the mail tomorrow morning she would borrow it, along with my rental car, until I returned to Great Barrington and we could switch back.

In no rush to leave, I played with Lexy after lunch and, during her afternoon nap, pumped some milk to leave behind. I packed my bags and then, after a simple pasta dinner, nursed Lexy once more before leaving. As I changed her diaper and zipped up her feetsy pajamas, I realized there was one thing I had neglected to pack: a photo of her to bring along with me.

Once she was snuggled peacefully in her crib, al-most asleep, I crept out of the room with my camera and went to the spare computer in the loft. I hadn’t downloaded in days and it took a few minutes for the nearly hundred images to scroll into the photo program. Here were the pictures from the other day when I had taken portraits of Julie and Lexy, separately and together, and Julie had taken a few of me and Lexy. It was one of those I wanted to print for my trip. As a quilt of thumbnail images began to fill the screen, miniature photos you could only roughly discern, even
I
couldn’t tell who was Julie and who was me. It was a strange, disturbing sensation. One by one I selected the images, assuming,
hoping
, that enlargement would show who was who.

And it did. The images startled me,
pleased
me, in how clearly they showed Julie as
Julie
and me as
me
.

The lens had revealed our essential difference. The photos of Julie and Lexy together were family shots, aunt and niece,
not
mother-daughter. I was surprised at how satisfying this was and understood instinctively that I mustn’t share the perception with Julie.
She’s
jealous
, I thought, looking at a photograph of her and Lexy smiling at each other.
Jealous that I can make
children and she can’t.
This hit me harder and more simply than ever before. I was tempted to delete the pictures from the hard drive
and
my camera’s memory card, wipe them out of existence along with envy (Julie’s), betrayal (Bobby’s) and death (Zara’s … and Mom’s … and Dad’s). Too many rough emotions had settled on this pastoral road. But what was the point?

Erasing the images wouldn’t expunge the thought.

I chose a photo of me holding Lexy, both of us twisting to make eye contact with each other, and printed it. Half an hour later I was sitting in Julie’s car, alone, equipped with her ID and a suitcase of clothing to last two days and nights in the city.

I sat quietly in the car, in the dark, in the cold. Inside the big red house with its warmly lit windows were my sister and baby. Lexy didn’t understand yet that I was leaving for longer than usual. I could go back inside, scrap the whole thing. I didn’t
want
to go, but the plan was in motion. I felt certain I was doing the right thing. Yet I didn’t. Was I making a stupid mistake? After all, Bobby continued to assert his innocence. And I kept hearing Detective Lazare’s voice warning me that “someday you may need to fall back on that to comfort yourself.” Fall back on what? What was I so sure of, exactly? Had I left Bobby because I wanted to quit my job and leave Kentucky? Because my hormones were raging so loudly I couldn’t hear basic common sense? But the credit card bills. And the love letters. And the details.

I put Julie’s car into Drive and pulled away from the house.

I arrived late at my father’s East Fifty-sixth Street pied-

à-terre; well, that’s what he called it when we were girls and he was alive and we would come into the city occasionally from our Connecticut home. It was a crumbling studio apartment whose rent-controlled lease he’d taken over as an aspiring young writer, one of those gifts you just fall into. In the early eighties, when the building went co-op, he bought in at an amazing price. It was the best, and possibly only, investment he ever made. At his death, Julie and I inherited the place, and when we came of age, we kept it.

Why not? It was a paid-off crash pad in the city of cities. Not suitable for my family or Julie’s extravagant taste, but it was
ours.

I lugged my suitcase and garment bag up the five flights. The studio was predictably musty, so I immediately opened both windows. Night air trickled in with its pleasant springtime bite and I felt a little bit at home. This tiny space was so familiar: four cream-colored paint-crusted walls defining a twelve-by-twelve cube of a room with an incongruously high fifteen-foot ceiling. The small, dusty chandelier no one could reach, an old Murphy bed that had been here when Dad originally got the place, a small table and two ornately carved wooden chairs. The kitchen consisted of a couple of time-worn appliances jammed in one corner; there were no counters or drawers and in lieu of a cupboard there were three dusty shelves. The place was a hovel—presumably the only apartment in this co-op building that had never been renovated—but I was glad to be here. I opened my suitcase on the table, brushed my teeth, lowered the Murphy bed, made it up with clean sheets, stripped naked, pumped some breast milk, which I stowed in the tiny freezer, and went to sleep.

I was up by six. The orientation wasn’t until ten, so I pumped milk and then went out for breakfast at the same diner where Mom and Dad used to take us for lunch when we visited the studio as children. I bought a
New York Times
and sat on a ripped vinyl stool dipping toast into runny eggs and drinking decaf coffee that was remarkably delicious. It was very strange being alone here, family-less, without Lexy. I ached with missing her and tried to keep my mind off all my doubts and to force myself to go along with the program I had set for myself.

I expected the job orientation to be a breeze. It was a big corporate hospital chain that held new-employee orientations once a month. You would learn their rules and they would further process your paperwork and get a chance to eyeball you in advance in case the off-site interviewer had made some awful mistake. I had planned, after the orientation, to go apartment hunting, giving myself this afternoon and tomorrow to look, but decided on impulse that that could wait. I missed Lexy way too much to stay. As soon as I was done at the hospital, I decided, I would return to Great Barrington.

I finished my coffee and went back to Dad’s to shower and change. I felt uncomfortably raw, hyper-aware that one way or another this was going to be a pivotal day—depending a lot on what Bobby would tell me after his session with his computer sleuth—that I was either beginning a new life or spinning my wheels. I dressed in the same interview suit I’d worn two years ago for the prison job—boring beige, neutral and unthreatening—and blew my hair dry. Makeup.

Stockings. High heels. Once the job was sealed I would put this outfit away until the next job change.

Too restless to wait in the tiny studio, I headed outside.

Because the hospital was far west, between Ninth and Tenth avenues, I started walking (regretting the heels). I had always enjoyed walking in New York and today in my business clothes I blended easily into the rush-hour montage of people flowing through the urban grid. The morning air felt crisp and exciting. I wondered how long it would take me to feel I belonged here and then, reaching Seventh Avenue and Columbus Circle, I realized how long it had been since I had set foot on this island.

The old Coliseum was gone, razed, and in its place was a huge, glittering mall. I had heard about the transformation, but this was the first time I had seen it with my own eyes. It was startling and phenomenal. My first impulse was to hate it because it was different, pulling the plug on one of my antiquated Manhattan memories that I had never really cared about but suddenly, when it was gone, I mourned. Then I felt the tug of curiosity and crossed the street. It was not yet nine o’clock, so I still had some time. I pulled open one of the big glass doors and went inside.

The space was enormous, a granite-and-steel temple to commercialism. I knew shopaholic heaven when I saw it and strolled happily through the lobby past looming metal sculptures of twenty-foot naked giants (yes, real art here: we
are
more than we buy), gleam-ing plate-glass windows beckoning with displays of luxury goods, stuff stuff stuff teasing you, just daring you to come inside. I rode the escalator up one flight and saw immediately that the anchor store on the second floor was a large chain bookstore, with other stores flowing off two hallways adjoining a lobbylike gallery displaying more artwork, all with weighty price tags. Another flight up took me to
another
gallery-lobby with five-figure art and a Samsung store as its anchor.

I was drawn by a display case in the lobby, the kind of horizontal vista where you might find a whole city in miniature. Upon closer inspection I saw that it was a virtual map. A wave of the hand morphed neighbor-hoods recognizable by their iconic symbols: a paper food container sprouting chopsticks for Chinatown, a dollar bill for Wall Street, a painted canvas for SoHo, an espresso cup for Little Italy, and so on and so forth up and down and across the city. Technology didn’t particularly interest me, but
this
was fun and before you knew it I was peering into the store through a glass wall beneath a big sign announcing Samsung Experience. It was a showplace for high-tech gizmos so cut-ting edge you couldn’t even buy some of them yet: bitsy cell phones and featherweight laptops and massive televisions with precious living rooms you could sit in and actively pretend you were relaxing at home with your
very
big big-screen TV. When I turned away from the
experience
I felt a little high, a sensation that turned to dizziness when I spotted … Clark Hazmat? … waving his hand over the virtual map in the lobby. The hair was different, but the laughing-skull tattoo on his right shoulder was definitely his.

Clark Hazmat. I couldn’t believe it. He had been one of our orderlies in the prison clinic up until just a few months ago.
A nice guy
, Bobby and I had always agreed—a white-collar criminal, a computer hacker, not a
real
criminal—easy to say so long as he was behind bars. Seeing him here now, free and “on the outside” came as a considerable shock. My mind skipped like a stone over a crystal lake of political correctness beneath which darker, realer prejudices mingled like drunken harpies—
prison prisoner criminal guilty risky
scary vulnerable Zara killer murderer following-me
dead
—until sinking into the depths of automatic judgment. Just like that, I sized him up as a threat, even though in the PT clinic he had been a reliable helper and I had genuinely liked the guy. Everything was context: there, he was safe; here, he was dangerous. Period. And why
was
he here, anyway? My finger itched to dial Detective Lazare and find out if Clark Hazmat had been on the list of recently released inmates.

Before I had a chance to slip past him to the escalator, he saw me.

“Miss Milliken? Hey! It’s me! Clark from
back
home
!” Wink wink. I looked around; there was no one else there. I guessed that on the outside we were supposed to act as if we’d never done time.

Clark was a small man with a big embrace. At the prison, inmates were strictly forbidden to touch us and so I hadn’t known what a tactile guy he was. He was wearing cologne, an improvement over the generalized smell of sweat that had clung to many of the prisoners regardless of how clean they were. After the hug we stood back and smiled at each other. Clark wore the shadow of a teenage acne mask, a misfortune he couldn’t help, and a new hairstyle he definitely should have done something about. His inmate’s regulation buzz cut had sprouted into a frizzy topiary puffed high in the front, long down the back of his neck and trimmed short in between. And he had a big, bushy mustache. I felt like asking what was up with all the hair, but I pretended I didn’t notice.

“Clark! What are you
doing
here? It’s
so
great to see you!”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say.” He smirked and nodded rapidly, but that was his special humor: dry, self-effacing, a little obtuse. “Looking for work.

Busboy, shit like that. I just talked to someone at the fancy-pants restaurant upstairs,
Per Say
.” I had heard of Per Se—it was considered one of Manhattan’s finest restaurants—but I hadn’t realized it was right here.

“That joint’s a con. Guy as good as told me the prices were fixed. Menu on the way out said it all: two-ten apiece just for lunch. Thought I’d choke. Guy gave me such a friggin’ attitude, even with all my experience I
know
I’ll never hear from that queer again.”
All my experience.
Clark’s criminal record detailed a range of experience from petty to grand larceny; he was what they called a nonviolent felony repeat offender. I didn’t want to insult him by asking if he was showing prospective employers his real résumé—or why he was showing them his creepy tattoo. I knew that finding his place in the law-abiding layers of society would be a real endeavor, which was no doubt why he was aiming low, at busboy, when he might have sought something a little more dignified and better paying, some kind of starting position in an office somewhere.

“You can do better than busboy, Clark.”

“You think?”

“I do.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m selling myself short. Maybe I oughta try for something better than that restaurant shit. Problem is …” He trailed off.