The Guilty One (6 page)

Pet's smile faltered. She stared at the floor. “Some of them. Most of them.”

“Pet . . . they're really good. Really impressive. Do you, I mean is your work—”

“I'm a bartender.” A quick, ironic glance. “Total cliché, right? Except I'm not, like, really trying to make it as an artist or anything. I'm not good enough, and, I mean, don't feel like you have to say I am. But, yeah, for now I bartend at night and I'm getting my associate's degree over at Merritt. Maybe I'll try to get into Cal after. Or something.”

She shrugged toward the corner of the room, and Maris saw what she had missed at first—a desk made out of a plywood top set on sawhorses. It was the least cluttered part of the room. Hanging on the wall above it were metal shelves holding clear plastic bins full of crayons, pencils, markers. Large sheets of blank paper were clipped by clothespins on wires suspended from the ceiling.

“So anyway I could like make . . . well, I was going to say tea, but I don't think I have any. Diet Coke? And you can totally take the chair or you can sit on the bed, whatever.”

Pet picked up a stack of books from a TV tray table standing next to a worn red upholstered wing chair. She moved them to the floor along the wall. The TV tray was decorated with a hunting scene: a buck standing on a hill above a lake, antlers wider than its shoulders.

“I really can't tell you how much I appreciate this, Pet.” Maris felt her voice catch in her throat. The girl was too trusting, by far.

“It's no big deal.”

“Maybe I could . . . could I take you to lunch?”

“If you feel like it, I guess. But don't worry about it. Look, I'm going to put my headphones on, but just yell if you need something, okay? The internet's SloLow. S-L-O-L-O-W. Password is blue taco 1. All one word, capital B.” She shrugged. “Don't ask me why, my landlord picked it.”

She put her headphones on and her hand hovered over a bin full of crayons only for a second before she picked out a bright red stub and made a bold stroke on the paper.

Maris thought she could lose herself in watching the drawing take shape. She was suddenly exhausted. It might be nice to sit here in the enveloping chair that smelled like dusty sachets and watch this odd girl draw. But she had things to do. Which was, on reflection, a sort of novel feeling. For months, for the entire past year, she had felt that her life was sweeping her out to sea, that she was powerless against the tide of it, her only task to keep her head above water as she was carried along. At some point, there had been a fork in the river—on one side, the gentle, benevolent stream she had expected her life to take: Calla off to San Diego in the fall, leaving Maris more time to concentrate on her night classes, maybe take a trip with Jeff for their anniversary. Their twenty-second—not a milestone, but still an accomplishment. Instead, she had been swept to the other fork, to waters more turbulent than she ever could have expected: raging rapids, treacherous rocks and falls. Was the change in course all due to a caprice of fate? Inattention? Some crime Maris had never been aware she'd committed, or an accumulation of small sins?

She'd certainly had time to wonder. (Nina had acknowledged that self-blame was common, but cautioned against it. One of the many times Maris thought balefully that she ought to take the $125 an hour and just burn it, as Nina's counsel often seemed almost insultingly obvious. Still, she had been highly recommended.) You get your detective assigned to you, you hire your lawyers, your coworkers and friends organize themselves into platoons of support. Food arrives. Your lawn is mowed. It begins to seem like the purpose of all that expended energy is to keep you in a childlike state, with no responsibilities and no agenda, nothing but the waiting and the thinking and the endless replaying. “Relax,” they say. “We'll let you know when there's news.” “We'll deal with the media.” “We've covered your shifts.” “I took care of the bills.” “I had the cleaners put the flannel sheets on the bed.” All your decisions, made for you. Your hand held. Your needs anticipated. Your mail censored, your “Thinking of You” cards opened before being tucked back into their pastel envelopes.

But no more.

Maris got the laptop from her purse, settled it on her lap, feeling the warmth of the little machine against her thighs. She had chosen this. She had chosen to leave, to act, to change. A shiver—fear, anticipation, rebellion—traced up her spine as she settled her fingers on the keys. Leaving, that was one thing—going to stay with Alana, getting out of the house, all of that was just reacting. But the minute she made this detour to Oakland, she'd tripped a lever that set something else in motion. Something she hadn't even named yet.

Life was funny that way, how you could mold your path to a truth even before you knew it to be true. If you were brave. If bravery was the word for it. People sabotaged themselves all the time, when they weren't ready to face things. But sometimes they also created circumstances that forced the changes they weren't ready to make deliberately.

The brass fittings—it was true that Alana had wanted to restore the window handles and hinges from her condo in a historic building in downtown Santa Luisa, the sort of exquisite detail that had become her odd passion. Maris had researched a place that could do the work; she had thought it would be a novel and meaningful gift to mark her moving in with Alana, however temporarily. All of that was true. But Maris had still chosen this errand that took her out of the smooth arc of her getaway, picking up the fittings on the very day of her departure, when she could have waited until another time, or done it in advance. Had she gone directly from Linden Creek to Santa Luisa this morning, she would already be standing in Alana's light-filled kitchen, sipping a glass of lemon seltzer. Instead, Maris had come to this neighborhood, this pocked patch of ruin bounded by freeways and abandoned schools and barbed-wire fencing, and while she hadn't broken her own car window or stolen her own belongings, she might as well have.

The thought was oddly thrilling.

As Maris searched
Oakland police report robbery
, she realized that she had left the package in the diner. But she could no longer imagine giving her sister a set of six brass door cranks and hinges as a gift anyway. Let someone else have them. She scanned the screen, raising an eyebrow at the “homicide tip line” (“tips may be made anonymously”) before clicking “citizen police report” and being rewarded with paragraph after paragraph of text. She read it twice, registering only a few details (“report theft of dog” seemed oddly quaint), but her mind was already far ahead.

If she reported the robbery, she would have to give all the details—the true ones, who she really was. Surely the police would know the name. Or was that a naïve assumption? That police here would care at all about things that happened out in the suburbs? Still, it wasn't worth taking a chance. She would never get her things back. Their total value—well, it wasn't much, was it? Besides, she had money, a little over twelve thousand dollars in the account she had opened last week, in her name only, the proceeds from the sale of Jeff's stock that had just vested. She had to make it last until she and Jeff worked out the rest, but for now it was plenty, especially since Alana wasn't going to charge her rent, at least until they made some long-term decisions. She'd buy clothes, toiletries. She'd figure it out.

She opened a Yelp window and searched “auto glass.” There were dozens of options, one of them promising on-site service within three hours. Three and a half stars, that would do. She dug her phone from her purse, ignoring a text from Alana (“On your way? ETA?”). It took a call to her insurance company, but in moments she had an appointment an hour from now.

The phone buzzed a new text. She glanced down, impatient with her sister, wishing she hadn't promised Alana she'd be there for dinner. Alana would make a thing of it, takeout from that Italian grocery she liked, a bottle of wine that would be expensive enough to make the occasion seem celebratory. Alana meant well, but today was not a celebration. How could it be?

But the text was not from Alana.

At Alana's yet? You still haven't given me an answer about the 10th.

The tenth . . . that was less than two weeks away. Christ. Maris stabbed the phone savagely and dropped it into her purse. How Jeff could ask that of her . . . how he could ask anything of her . . . how could people actually look at that man and call him strong, right in front of her face?

Her thighs were sweaty under the thin cotton, heated by the laptop. She closed it and put it back into her purse. Her hands were trembling. She couldn't call Jeff, couldn't stand to hear his voice, not now. She couldn't see Alana, couldn't abide her orchids and slivered almonds and Eileen Fisher linen shifts, her curtain of smooth silvery hair. Her eternal kindness. Maris couldn't deal with one more second of stillness, of forced rest, of the calm and numbness that seemed to be the atmosphere of this strange world that she now lived in.

“Pet,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again, louder. “Pet.”

The girl set down her crayon—the drawing taking shape featured a lot of red and orange, with accents of lime and cornflower blue—and smiled at Maris, tugging her earbuds out. “You get ahold of who you needed to?”

“Oh—yes. I found someone to fix the car this afternoon, in an hour. That was lucky.”

“That's awesome. You can totally hang out here while they're working on it.”

Maris waited for the convulsive shrinking away that was her reaction to kindness these days, an almost instinctive reaction to the pain, but it didn't happen. Her breath eased in and out, her pulse stayed even. She could stay here, for a while. Here felt strangely safe. Anonymous. “Thank you. Listen. I was wondering. I might . . . need to find a hotel, for a few days. Near here. Do you know of somewhere? Not fancy, just clean and, you know, safe.”

Pet blinked, frowning. “You mean, while they work on your car? For just a window?”

“Oh no, the car will be done today. It's just that . . . well, I need a few days to, um . . .”
Collect myself. Think. Tie up loose ends.
Nothing that came to mind sounded right.

To not lose my shit
. It popped into her head unexpectedly, the voice of Calla's friends. Not Calla—who was proper in a way that chagrined Maris, who wondered if she had inadvertently passed down her own vein of prissiness—but her girlfriends, who were unfettered and ebullient and crude. And this girl, this odd half-Czech girl who could be beautiful but clearly didn't want to—it seemed like something she might say.

“It's just,” she tried again, wiping her sweat-dampened hands on her pants. “I'm kind of moving from one life to another. Oh, that sounds so new agey, I'm sorry. I'm getting divorced, and I don't want to live in the town I used to live in anymore, and I'm not exactly sure where I want to go next.”

“Wow,” Pet said. “That's a lot to handle. Where were you living?”

“Linden Creek. For almost twenty years.”

“Oh . . . nice,” Pet said. “I mean, I've never been there. But it's nice, right?”

Maris wondered what the girl knew of Linden Creek: third highest per capita income in the Bay Area; overpriced restaurants; manicured parks and neighborhoods full of cookie-cutter mansions. Voted Republican, rare in Northern California.

“Yes, very nice. But I need a change.”

“But not here.” Pet laughed. “I mean, there's nice parts of Oakland. There's all these new condos downtown.”

“Maybe.” Maris didn't bother to explain that she actually knew her way around at least one truly bad part of Oakland. By comparison, this area was just medium-bad, but unfamiliar. “I mean, that's a ways off. I need to figure out what I want to do first.” She waved a hand. “A job . . . if I want to move near family, all of that. I just need a few days to get my shit together.”

She snuck the word
shit
in there at the end, breathless, bold. It felt both reckless and tantalizing.

Pet nodded, biting her lip thoughtfully. “There's this big Hyatt down by Chinatown—”

“Not a Hyatt,” Maris said quickly. “I need something inexpensive.” Which was true, but that wasn't the real reason. She wanted somewhere that she would be ignored. No concierges, no uniformed desk clerks and bellboys. “There were some motels on Telegraph when I came off the highway? You know . . . look like they were built in the seventies?”

Pet raised her eyebrows. “I know the ones you mean. Look . . . they're not like totally safe. A lot of prostitutes. There's been some crime. There was a murder . . . couple years back?”

“Oh,” Maris said, embarrassed. She had thought maybe people stayed in them because they were close to the hospital. She'd imagined old people with suitcases, visiting even older relatives, returning to their rooms at night to watch cable TV and wait for the flip of the coin, recovery or death. But yes. Prostitutes, that was much more likely.

“And they're not even all that cheap, like you'd think. I mean, like sixty bucks a night? For that?”

It took Maris a second to realize that she meant the rooms, not the prostitutes. “Well, is there somewhere else, I don't know, even if it's a little more expensive? An old hotel downtown or something?”

“Not really. I mean, other than the hourly ones. It's not like tourists come here.” Pet laughed shortly. “Listen, I do have an idea, though. There's an apartment behind this one. Norris—my landlord—he's just fixing a few things before he rents it out again. Guy moved out last week. Maybe you could rent it for a few days?”

“I don't need a whole apartment,” Maris said, and then thought—
a whole apartment
. Hers, not Alana's. A place where she could be alone. A place where no one would find her, even if it was just for a short time.