The One I Left Behind (29 page)

“Phone’s been ripped out of the wall,” said Tara, holding the torn wires in her hand. Tara was all jazzed up, excited as hell about this, and Reggie kind of hated her for it.

Reggie went over to look at the phone. It was on a small bedside table next to a full ashtray. The butts in it were all Vera’s—Winstons with red lipstick stains. Reggie pulled open the drawer underneath and found a phone book, a package of Trojan condoms, some matches, and a piece of paper with her mother’s handwriting. She pushed the condoms to the back of the drawer before Tara could see them and took out the scrap of paper.

Second Chance
was all the paper said. The words were circled.

Was Vera hoping for hers? Is that what she thought this guy was going to give her?

A nice, normal life.

Reggie stared down at the paper in her hands and thought about how cruel hope could be.

She’d made a faint thumbprint of blood on the edge of the paper.

“What the fuck happened here?” asked Sid, crushing his cigarette out in the ashtray with Vera’s.

“I dunno,” said Reggie, stuffing the slip of paper into her pocket beside the safety pin, “but it doesn’t look good.”

She decided not to tell them about the bloody towel. Christ, Tara would probably pick it up, sniff it, hold it to her heart, and go into a trance.

“But what I don’t get is what she was doing here to begin with,” said Tara. “I mean, she’s got a home, right? And all kinds of interesting theater friends who probably have homes, too. So why come to this dump?”

“It’s anybody’s guess,” Charlie said, kicking at the empty liquor bottles on the floor.

“Maybe she just needed a space that was all hers, you know?” Tara suggested. “Someplace she could come and think.”

“Dude,” Sid said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, “this isn’t exactly a thinking kind of place, you know? I’m guessing she met guys here. Maybe made a little money off them.”

“Huh?” Charlie said. “Are you saying she’s like a—”

“My mother is an
actress
,” Reggie practically shouted, determined not to let him say the word. If he didn’t say it out loud, it wouldn’t be true. And it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be.

They all stood in silence, no one moving or even looking at each other. Then Tara started spinning slowly around the room, hands outstretched, eyes clamped shut. She looked like a kid playing pin the tail on the donkey.

“This is where he grabbed her,” announced Tara. “Right about here, I think is where it happened,” she said, wiggling her fingers like anemone as she stopped in the center of the room.

Charlie snorted. “What this looks like to me is that somebody was searching for something. Just tearing the place apart to find it. Getting more pissed off by the second.”

“I still think it could have been the cops,” Sid said.

“No way,” Charlie countered. “The cops would have treated this place like a crime scene. Been real careful. Maybe the place got torn up like this after they came. Or maybe they found it this way. No way to know. The one thing I’m sure of is that my dad and the other cops wouldn’t do something like this.”

“It was him,” Tara said, eyes still closed, hands outstretched, as if reaching for some invisible thing. “Neptune. I know it was. I feel him in here.” She gave a dramatic shudder.

“Okay, say it was Neptune who came here and trashed the place. What could he have been looking for?” asked Reggie.

Tara’s eyes opened wide and glittered in the dull light. “Something that could tie her to him. Evidence. Neptune grabbed her, and came back to make sure there was nothing lying around that could connect the two of them,” Tara said. “That makes total sense!”

“Assuming it was Neptune who did this,” added Charlie.

“Of course it was Neptune,” Tara said. She gave Charlie a scornful look. “Who else could it be?” She looked at Reggie now, like she was asking her the question.

“Anyone.” Reggie sighed, remembering the old man with the dentures saying there were lots of men. “It could have been anyone.”

“Dude, this is totally fucked up,” Sid said, squinting around the room. “I don’t know what went down here, but I’m getting some seriously bad vibes from this place.”

“Totally,” Tara said, giving a dramatic shiver and moving closer to Sid.

Reggie realized she had no right being in this room. Who did she think she was, trespassing like this? She was no sleuth, no superhero. This wasn’t some TV show or comic book. The room and everything in it terrified her, and not simply the way it had been torn apart—it was the whole thing: the mismatched dishes, the barren refrigerator, the condoms, the roach in the bathroom. The fact that she hadn’t known her mother at all. That she’d seen her as some sort of golden Wonder Woman, the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl, Homecoming Queen, Actress Extraordinaire, savior of little girls being ripped apart by dogs. But now, the curtain was being pulled back to reveal someone else entirely.

Reggie needed to go, to get away from the sweet, boozy smell. She couldn’t bear to see the wrecked, squalid little room any longer. She turned and walked out without a word, leaving the key in the door, unable even to face Dentures.

“W
ANNA SEE SOMETHING?”
T
ARA
asked. She was in the backseat with Reggie this time along with the cans of beer Sid had stopped for at Cliffside Liquors, where they never blinked at Sid’s fake ID. Charlie was up front playing copilot while Sid smoked another joint.

“Watch it, man,” Charlie warned. “You’re drifting into the other lane. You’re way too wasted to be driving!”

“Relax,” Sid told him. “Like I said, I’m lucky as shit. And this car, she practically drives herself.”

Reggie was feeling grateful that none of them had said any more about her mother or her trashed little motel room.

Tara had been chattering at Reggie since they left Airport Efficiencies—trying to cheer her up, she guessed. Reggie was taking her advice, forcing a beer down, thinking it might take the edge off. Make her skin stop crawling a little. She thought of the roach and the sound it made scuttling along the tile floor.

Sid turned up the radio. “I love this song!”

It was The Who doing “Pinball Wizard.”

“Well?” asked Tara, voiced hushed and conspiratorial as she leaned toward Reggie. “Do you wanna see or what?”

“Sure,” Reggie told her, taking another good slug of beer.

Tara’s face was lit up, expectant. She couldn’t wait to show Reggie this thing, whatever it was.

Tara rolled up the long, safety-pinned sleeve of her dress to reveal the pale inside of her forearm. Reggie squinted in the dim light of the car to see that it was covered in scars. Strange designs: neat rows of little raised white scar-tissue horseshoes, like the world’s smallest pony trotted there, following the blue trail of her veins. These weren’t like the delicate etched lines Tara had on her legs from the razor blade. This was something else entirely.

“Eohippus,” said Reggie, remembering something she’d learned in biology about the tiny ancestor of all horses.

“I did it with a lighter,” Tara whispered, the words hot against Reggie’s good ear.

Reggie bit her lip as she studied the scars on the soft and vulnerable-looking underside of Tara’s forearm. Her own skin started to itch in that now-familiar way—the yearning to cut, to feel the tease of the blade against her flesh just before she pushed it in. She thought of the safety pin in her pocket and wanted to open it up, see how deep a scratch she could make. She knew that it would make everything else go away, and she needed that now more than ever. She wanted it and hated herself for wanting it. It was all one big fucked-up contradiction, like thinking Tara’s scars were awful, but being jealous of them at the same time.

Tara smiled. “Do you want to touch them? You can.” And, without another word, she reached for Reggie’s hand and guided Reggie’s fingers down to her scarred arm. When the fingers made contact, Tara inhaled sharply, like the touch hurt, and Reggie jerked her hand away, only to have Tara push it back down.

“It’s okay,” Tara whispered as Reggie’s fingertips worked their way gently over the bumps and ridges of scars. “I want you to.”

Chapter 31

October 21, 2010

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

R
EGGIE CAUGHT HERSELF RUNNING
her fingers over the scars around her prosthetic ear—a nervous habit she thought she’d broken long ago.

“I’m so sorry about what happened earlier with my mom,” she said as she and Charlie walked across the parking lot toward the neon-lit front doorway of Runway 36. She’d already apologized several times, but no matter how much Charlie said it was fine and not to worry about it, she remembered the way he’d backed out of Vera’s room, baffled and frightened. Vera’s screaming seemed to go on forever—she clenched the bedclothes, rolled her eyes madly. She was breathless and hoarse by the time Reggie and Lorraine managed to get an Ativan under her tongue. After many minutes of hyperventilating and ragged sobs, she’d drifted off to sleep. When she woke up, she seemed to have no memory of the incident.

“It’s no problem, really,” Charlie said. “I’m sure it’s unsettling to have a stranger pop in, after all she’s been through.”

“Between the illness and the meds we’ve got her on, she’s pretty loopy.”

Charlie nodded. “You have any luck reaching that social worker?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t much of a help. She gave me the name and number of the shelter, though. I put in a call and was told Sister Dolores is the one in charge, but she’s not working today. She’s going to call me back tomorrow.”

Charlie nodded.

“Shall we?” he said, eyeing the dimly lit doorway of Runway 36 with trepidation.

The door was thick steel and had several dents in it, like someone had been at it with a battering ram. There was an awning overhead with a flashing red neon airplane—Reggie was sure if she looked at it too long she’d have some kind of seizure.

The entryway of a building was supposed to draw you in, offer a welcoming transition between the outside world and the inside. The experience of entering the building influenced the way you felt once you were inside.

The only way to make the doorway to Runway 36 less welcoming would be to drape it in barbed wire.

In the parking lot off to the right, there was a small group of people smoking. One of them was a girl with a high-pitched pig-squeal of a voice who kept saying, “He never knew what hit him! I’m telling you, he NEVER knew what hit him!”

“Let’s do it,” Reggie said, yanking the heavy door open and stepping through first.

Not much had changed. The place was still dark and stank of beer and cigarettes, although smoking in restaurants and bars was now illegal. Reggie checked the pool table in the middle of the room and was slightly disappointed to discover that it was newer and no longer shimmed with old phone books. The red-vinyl-covered barstools had been reupholstered in black vinyl. The place was crowded, and it seemed to Reggie as if everyone had stopped what they were doing to stare at her and Charlie.

“I don’t have a warm, welcoming feeling,” Reggie whispered, leaning toward Charlie.

He put his arm around her. She knew it was meant to feel reassuring, but really, it just felt heavy. “I guess we don’t look like regulars,” he said in a low voice. He smelled like Listerine and sweet aftershave. She noticed he’d showered and shaved before picking her up, which seemed a little too I’m-thinking-of-this-as-a-date for her comfort level. She gently pulled away from him, leading the way toward the bar.

Reggie remembered following Sid across the room twenty-five years ago—his swaggering walk, the way Tara bounced along beside him; how their visit to Runway 36 had led them to the horrid little room at Airport Efficiencies.

Where would it lead them this time?

Irrational as it was, Reggie thought of turning around, walking back out before she had a chance to find out.

But then she thought of Tara. Tara, tied up in some god-awful dungeon, being shot full of morphine, her right arm ending in a mass of bandages.

But that wasn’t the Tara that scared her. No, when she closed her eyes, she saw the thirteen-year-old Tara, dark eyes glimmering, pissed off and self-righteous, saying, “I guess I’m fucked if it’s all up to you.”

“I’m trying!” Reggie said out loud without meaning to.

“Hmm?” Charlie said from half a step behind her. The music was loud enough that he hadn’t heard.

“Nothing.”

Behind the bar was a sweaty fat man and a rail-thin woman with frizzy dyed red hair.

“What can I get you?” asked the woman.

“You have Beck’s?” Charlie asked.

The woman frowned. “The only thing in bottles I got is Heineken.”

Charlie nodded. “I’ll have one of those.”

“Make it two,” Reggie said, knowing it wasn’t wise to ask about the wine selection.

Behind the bar, up above the liquor bottles was a big-screen TV. It was tuned to a cable news channel, but the sound was off. Reggie saw a shot of downtown Brighton Falls, then Monique’s Wish. Reggie felt her breath catch in her throat. It was so like stepping back in time, seeing her home on the news. Only this time it was Tara’s face that filled the screen. It was a terrible picture—slightly out of focus and Tara was looking far off into the distance, squinting a little.

The frizzy-haired woman brought two beers and greasy-looking glasses.

“You know a guy who calls himself Rabbit?” Charlie asked, pushing the glass aside and taking a sip from the green bottle. Reggie could tell he was enjoying this. Hunting down a serial killer was a whole lot more exciting than selling condos and little ranch houses with remodeled kitchens and nice yards for the kids to play in.

The woman squinted at him. “You two cops?”

Charlie laughed, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a card. “Nah. I’m in real estate.”

She took the card and studied it. “And what? You wanna sell Rabbit a house or something?”

“Or something,” Charlie said, smiling slyly. This was so not the Charlie that Reggie knew. He was far too suave.