The After Party (28 page)

1957

T
his time, Joan's disappearance was a scandal of the highest order. Three days after I'd last seen her, I rose early and walked outside in my bare feet. The driveway was already hot, though it was barely five o'clock and the sun had not yet risen. I opened the
Chronicle
to a picture of Joan's face and a headline:
JOAN FORTIER
VANISHES
. It was an old photograph, one of my favorites: we were at the Cork Club, and Joan was looking over her shoulder. Had she been looking at me? I could not remember.

I'd been waiting for this. I read the article while I stood outside, the concrete warming my feet; I hadn't even put on a robe.
The article was brief. Joan's maid had contacted the police after Joan had not come home on Wednesday night. I thought of Sari, making Joan's bed, smoothing the sheets with her practiced hand. I wondered how much she had guessed.

Joan's clothes were still in her closet. I lingered on this detail. It made sense, of course—if you were going to stage a kidnapping, you wouldn't pack a suitcase—but the detail made me unspeakably sad. I had assembled Joan's wardrobe. Most of it, anyway. When she wore a skirt I'd chosen, a dress I'd had made for her, I liked to think she thought of me.

I wondered if Mary was looking at the paper at this very moment. She was an early riser, especially as she'd aged. I wondered if Mary slept at all now, or if sleep, when it came, was fretful and brief, like my own.

Sid would have told Mary not to contact the police. Maybe she had told Sari to do it. Maybe she had already sent the money, was hoping Joan would reappear any day now, as perfect and unblemished as the day she disappeared. Maybe Mary suspected that Joan was deceiving her. Mary was nothing if not shrewd. But if anyone could trick Mary, if anyone could make her act ardently instead of judiciously, it was Joan.

I brought the paper inside, left it on the kitchen table while I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom.

I stood in the shower until the hot water ran out. I leaned my head against the tile while the freezing water hit my face. I wept. It felt like another death: first my mother, then Joan. For this death, I did not have Joan here to comfort me.

•   •   •

T
he day the story broke the police came. They were kind. They were treating Joan's disappearance as a kidnapping, with Sid, of course, as the prime suspect. It was all unfolding just as Joan had wished.

I told them that Sid seemed a little rough, that Joan seemed not entirely herself. But that was all I knew, I said. I didn't know Sid Stark very well at all.

“But you knew Joan,” a policeman—the older one—said. “Was she aware that she was in danger?”

“She brought out the best bottle of champagne from her father's locker. That was unusual.” They watched me, eagerly. “But I can't say why she did it.”

They would return periodically in the weeks and months that followed, and then they would stop.

•   •   •

T
he first time Joan had disappeared, we weren't worried. I'd wanted her back, but I knew she was safe. She'd sent a postcard. We thought she'd gone to Hollywood. A rumor that Mary had planted herself, but still, we believed it. Joan was somewhere glamorous, being glamorous. It all made sense, and, of course, Mary was in on it.

This time, her disappearance was ominous. She wasn't eighteen years old anymore, ripe, ready to be plucked: by a studio head, a rich businessman. Joan's world was no longer limitless.
And there was Sid, an outsider, with an unpleasant reputation. No one trusted an outsider.

In some moments I hoped the police would show up on my doorstep and catch my lie. But regardless, Joan would never come back. Money or no money, she had found a pocket of the world and slipped into it.

•   •   •

A
week and a half after Joan disappeared, Ciela came by. She'd called several times, but I hadn't answered the telephone since Joan's disappearance. I skipped the Garden Club meeting, sent Maria to Jamail's in my stead. The
Chronicle
had called for a quote from me, Joan's best friend. I didn't return the call. Darlene had left a coffee cake on my doorstep, surprising me with her sensitivity. I'd expected her to knock, to barge in and demand gossip. I didn't want to talk to her, or Ciela—I didn't want to talk to anyone except Ray—but mostly I didn't want to talk to Mary. I wasn't sure I could lie to her. I wasn't sure my heart would allow it, tied as it was to Evergreen. Twice, a woman had called and declined to leave a message—her words. Ray had answered both times. He said the voice could have belonged to anyone, seemed irritated by my certainty, my insistence that he repeat the exact words the caller had used. But who else would have declined to leave a message but Mary Fortier?

I was swimming laps in the pool when I opened my eyes and saw a woman looming over me. For an instant I thought she was Joan. But my eyes adjusted and the thrill—of dread? joy?—disappeared. It was only Ciela, peering down at me.

I didn't glide through the water, like Joan had. My stroke was sloppy, unpracticed. I'd never swum laps before. The pool was for lounging, for dipping your toes in. For sitting beside with a drink. But I had to distract myself. The sitting still, the waiting for news, the daily ritual of unfolding the
Chronicle
in the driveway—I couldn't bear it.

And yet I knew it would be worse when Houston began to forget, when the news of Joan migrated from the front page to the last; when some other, newer scandal took up our attention.

“What are you doing here?” I hadn't meant to sound hostile, but the sight of Ciela, here when I had clearly wanted to be left alone, disarmed me. “I mean,” I said, “I didn't know you'd be stopping by.” I tried to make my voice nicer, smoother.

“I haven't been able to get ahold of you,” she said, lightly. “I thought I'd swing by. Maria said you were outside.”

I climbed out of the pool. I took my time drying off, twisting the water out of my hair, smoothing oil on my legs. The coconut scent reminded me of Joan.

“Do you mind sitting out here?” I asked. “I want to get a little sun.”

I wanted no such thing. I hated tanning. The oil was for when Joan came over. I wasn't sure why I was using it, except that I didn't want to go into the house with Ciela.

Ciela waited until we had perched ourselves, awkwardly, on the red plastic lounge chairs. Though Ciela didn't look awkward, even dressed as she was, in a slim-fitting yellow dress. She wasn't showing yet.

“You must be falling to pieces,” she began. I hadn't expected sympathy.

I began to cry, and she sat down next to me.

“You'll ruin your dress,” I said, and pointed to the oily spot blooming on the fabric above her hip.

Ciela shook her head. “It's a silly old dress. What about you, Cece? Are you bearing it?”

“I miss her,” I said.

“Of course you do. And not knowing . . . where she is.” She chose her words carefully. “And poor, poor Mary Fortier. Joan was her life.”

“Yes,” I said weakly.

Ciela continued. “She was your life, too, wasn't she? I used to envy you and Joan your closeness,” she said.

“And now?”

“And now I feel sorry for you.” She let go of my hand, smoothed her hair behind her ears. She wore ruby and turquoise starburst earrings. She could wear jewelry that would have looked gauche on anyone else.

I didn't mind Ciela's pity; I welcomed it. I wanted her to touch me again. I reached for her, but Ciela turned and I let my hand fall into my lap.

“Cece, I have to ask you something. I know you saw Joan before she disappeared.”

Everyone knew that. It had been in the paper, and even if it hadn't Ciela would have known. Word traveled fast in our circle, and Ciela knew everything anyway.

“Did she tell you anything before she disappeared?”

Later, I appreciated Ciela's cleverness. If she had asked if I knew where Joan had gone, I could have told her no, honestly.

But she'd asked the right question, which meant she suspected. I felt grateful that she assumed Joan had confided in me.

I almost told her.

But no. I looked Ciela straight in the eye, and lied.

“She did not,” I said.

Ciela nodded. “Poor Joan,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“She was never really happy. We were never really enough for her, were we?”

My legs, gleaming in the sun, were already turning darker.

Ciela waited for me to answer.

“Do you think she's dead?” I whispered.

“That's what everyone thinks,” Ciela said. “I'm sorry. It's just that the longer she's gone, with no word—it's not promising, is it?”

I didn't answer. Promising. What an odd way to put it.

“What do you think?” Ciela asked softly.

“I don't know,” I said truthfully. “I thought I knew her,” I said slowly. I wanted to tell her something, something true. “But in the end, I did not.”

The glass door slid open. Ray was home.

“Hi there, Ciela,” he called from behind us, in his easy, considerate way. “Did Cece offer you a cocktail?”

•   •   •

T
hat afternoon I lay in bed, the curtains drawn. I hadn't turned on the fan. Tommy was napping, I'd let Maria go home early. Ray was in his study.

Then the room was flooded with light.

“Someone here who wants to see you,” Ray said. The mattress shifted under his weight as he sat down. A hand on my back. I didn't want to be touched. I wanted to be alone with my grief.

But this hand was small, the touch light.

I turned over. “Hi,” Tommy said, which he had been saying a lot lately. He was already in his footed pajamas, his hair damp and combed sweetly away from his face. He smelled of baby powder. I held out my arms and he came to me without hesitation.

“Hi,” I said back. “Hi.”

•   •   •

T
he next day the news was about Sid's previous arrest, years before, for tax fraud. There was nothing violent in his past, not officially, but who knew? Houston loved to speculate.

I had just come in with the paper when the phone rang. I don't know what compelled me to answer it.

“Cecilia,” Mary said, after I had said hello.

“Yes,” I said, “this is she.”

I pressed the receiver to my ear, half expecting to hear the sounds of Evergreen—a servant, taking away a cup of coffee; Joan, scampering in the background. I heard nothing, of course. Those were the old sounds of Evergreen.

“Mary?” My voice was tentative. She turned me into a child so easily.

“I trust you have seen today's issue of the
Chronicle
.”

“Yes.” It was in my hand, the musty scent of newsprint in my nose.

“You have a child of your own.”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“Then you can imagine—” She stopped short. “I called to say that I know you don't know anything, Cecilia.”

I said nothing.

“About where Joan might be. Because if you did, you would have told me. Told someone. You love Joan too much not to.”

I clutched the phone.

“Cecilia? I am correct in these assumptions?” Still, I couldn't speak. “Cecilia? Are you there? Please.” Hearing Mary Fortier's voice break—she sounded, finally, like what she was: a distraught, sixty-seven-year-old woman—allowed me to respond. She had brought it on herself. She had helped ruin Joan.

“Yes,” I whispered. And again, louder: “Yes. I would tell. Of course I would tell.”

“I thought so,” Mary said wearily. She sounded so old. “I thought so, Cecilia. I thought so. Joan is lucky to have a friend like you.”

I think I would have pleased Mary Fortier had I been her daughter. I wanted the same things she wanted: to stay put, namely. Was it Mary who had ruined Joan? Perhaps it was Furlow, who had made Joan believe in the fiction of her own power. In this way, he had treated her more like a son than a daughter, letting her
believe that she could have anything. Everything. She had only to want it, and it was hers. For a while, it had been true: a pony, a diamond, Furlow's endless adoration. But then Joan was no longer a child, and her needs became more complex: she began to want a world that Furlow could not have predicted. And he had not given her the means to move within this world, because he hadn't truly wanted her to. Furlow had given Joan plenty, but he had not given her a bank account in her own name.

Or was it David who had ruined Joan? A child who could not help the fact of his own life. A child born of his mother's reckless desire. It might have been a fantasy, but I wanted to believe that David had given Joan something. That Joan might have regretted her life, but not her child: that she could separate one from the other, the pain from the gift. David had given his mother his trust, even when Joan had not deserved it.

But who knows?

None of us wanted Joan to leave. She was a daughter. We—her parents and I—believed she belonged to us. Daughters sat tight. Daughters abided. They never left.

But in the end, Joan was no one's daughter.

Ray found me at the kitchen table, staring out the window.

“It'll be all right,” he said.

It might be, I thought, or it might not. Only time would tell. But there was this: Tommy's warm hand in mine, every day. Ray's solid presence next to me, every night. Joan's life was unknown to me now. But Tommy and Ray were alive, safe. Mine.

1958

I
lived a year without knowing what had happened to Joan. Alive or dead, I had no way of knowing. Houston moved on, as it always did; I'd overestimated the city's interest in Joan Fortier. I should have known better—I'd lived here my entire life, after all. Sometimes I thought it was better that Joan left when she did. There were younger, fresher girls rising up to take her place. At first, when the girls and I resumed going to the Petroleum Club for our monthly dinners, we were a spectacle. Joan's friends. Then, gradually, people stopped looking. They would have stopped looking at Joan, too, though now I knew she wouldn't have cared.

I never spoke to Mary Fortier again. I tried, once. I went back to Evergreen, when I was four months pregnant and just starting to show. I'd gotten pregnant in the month after Joan left, and at
first I'd feared for the child growing inside me, that I might ruin this new life with my sadness. I was sick, as I was with Tommy, but this sickness was different. It felt cleansing. I spent entire days sprawled on the cool tile floor, only rising to my hands and knees to vomit. My misery served a purpose, in stark contrast to the futile longing I felt for Joan. My longing would not bring her back.

I never knew what Mary understood of Joan's disappearance. And in the end, I couldn't decide which was worse: never to know your daughter's fate, or to know that your daughter had swindled you. That your daughter had staged her own disappearance, at least in part, because she never wanted to see you again.

I'd read Furlow's obituary in the
Chronicle
. There was to be no funeral, no service. The picture that accompanied the obituary was the same one I had seen so many times: a young Furlow standing in the oil field, his life ahead of him, Joan not yet a thought in his head. It was a mercy, that Furlow's mind was lost before Joan was lost. He would not have survived her absence. I hoped he'd died living in a world in which his daughter was present and beautiful and loved him.

I began to forget. It is either the mind's greatest mercy or its worst trick: that we forget those we love. If I thought about her a thousand times a day in the months after she disappeared, then I thought about her nine hundred ninety-nine times in the year after she disappeared, and so on, until I had to look at a picture of her to remember her face. But her voice—deep, a little gravelly—I could always call up her voice.

I went to Evergreen to pay my respects. Ray waited in the car,
with Tommy. I touched my stomach constantly now, evidence of what I had gained in sacrificing Joan. And Tommy—Tommy blossomed after Joan left. I wished she could see him, wished so badly she could take pleasure in the little boy he was becoming. He spoke beautifully now, had preferences I could not have imagined: he delighted in the birds that fed at the birdfeeder outside our window, hummingbirds especially. He loved music, the sound glasses made when they clinked together, which Ray and I had discovered one night as we toasted our anniversary with flutes of champagne. He toasted our water with his milk every night before we ate. I no longer hid him away; I felt guilty for ever doing so.

Dorie answered the door.

Mary was in Galveston.

“That's where she lives now,” Dorie said.

“Alone?”

Dorie nodded. “All alone.”

I stepped away—Dorie had not invited me inside—but then I changed my mind.

“I want to see a picture of him. A photograph.”

“Of who?”

“You know who,” I said, in a low voice.

Dorie did not move. She'd never really liked me, even when I was a child.

“I know one must exist,” I said.

She nodded, almost imperceptibly. When she returned, a minute later, she carried a small silver frame, polished to gleaming.

She opened the screen door and dropped it into my hand.

“David,” I said. Joan's eyes, the curve of her mouth. “He was beautiful.” And he was.

“You don't know the half of it,” Dorie said, but her voice was soft.

“He looks like Joan. A miniature Joan.” He was smiling, looking to the side. He looked around four years old—no longer a baby, but not quite a child. I wanted to think he was staring at his mother, at the woman who had only really loved one person, her entire life: him.

He looked like any child. He could not have conceived of the depth of his mother's love. I handed the frame back to Dorie.

“Where is this kept?” I asked.

“On my bedside table,” she said. “Mrs. Fortier had one on hers, too. She took it with her.”

I nodded, and took a step backward. Being here, at Evergreen, undid me. I half expected Joan to walk around the back of the house in her red bathing suit, smile, wave me to the pool.

“He was loved,” Dorie said, with fervor in her voice, before I turned to go. “He was adored.”

•   •   •

M
y daughter was born in April, as the azaleas were blooming. We named her Evelyn, after Ray's grandmother. Ray asked me if I wanted her middle name to be Joan, but I did not. I wanted that name to die with Joan, with me.

When Evelyn was six months old, and Houston was no longer so hot you felt half in hell, I opened an envelope with no return address. I almost didn't see it: Joan's necklace, the one Furlow
had given her so many years ago. I hadn't seen it since that night in high school.

“Look,” I said, and dangled the delicate chain from my finger. The star was tinier than I remembered, the diamond smaller.

Evelyn reached for
it.