Lie Still (25 page)

“How much have you unpacked?” she asked.

“Mostly just the kitchen.”

“Are you depressed?”

“I’m pregnant.” Automatic indignation.

“My aunt was pregnant for six years in a row and ran a sewing business nine hours a day out of her utility room. This looks like the house of someone who’s depressed. At least, it is a house that is
depressing
. Why are these blinds shut?”

She strolled over to the large picture window and zipped up the blinds along with some dust. Then she muscled open the ancient crank-out windows. She was probably setting off an orchestra of alarms, freaking out the dudes who monitored these things in their anonymous cubicles. The keypad by the front door appeared unperturbed, its red light blinking cheerfully.

“You know, three months ago I was a working professional,”
I said indignantly. “I ran an art gallery and was on a first-name basis with every museum curator in the city. I was tidy. I wiped my windowsills every other week. I scraped the crumbs off the butter in the morning.”

The word
butter
ran smack into a gulping sob. Misty tossed off sparkly flip-flops and pulled her bare feet up under her knees on the couch. She patted the place beside her for me to sit. A slumber party move. Instant intimacy. All at once, I was spilling everything about the stalker. The rape.
Everything
.

Misty inserted the right questions to speed along my catharsis. “Are you OK now?” she asked finally. “You scared me. I haven’t cried since I was twelve.” She rolled her lips tight. Maybe it was a remark she regretted.

“I do this every week or so, stalker or not.” I said it lightly, but what the hell was I doing telling her all this stuff? Yes, it had felt good. Now it felt bad. This woman wasn’t Lucy. I wasn’t even sure she was my friend.

“I’m going to wash my face.” I pulled myself up.

My ravaged eyes stared back at me in the bathroom mirror. I wondered how it could be that Misty Rich hadn’t cried since puberty. I wondered about where she put the tears over the inevitable, casual betrayals by high school friends and awkward first love, over death and wistful goodbyes and even over sappy Lexus commercials at Christmas and reruns of
Grey’s Anatomy
. Her question about whether I was depressed hovered like a shadow I couldn’t catch. Because I knew she meant
clinically
depressed. Did she think I was imagining things? Making them up? Did Mike think that, too, but was too afraid to say?

When I walked back into the room, Misty was sliding a box out from beside the wall.

“Let me help you a little,” she said. “I have a couple of hours.”

I hesitated only briefly, too wrung out to protest.

I thought about the little girl in the picture while Misty sliced through tape on a box with a sharpened Swiss Army knife that
hung on a keychain she pulled out of her back jeans pocket. The girl in the picture couldn’t have been more than eight years old. Misty said that it was the happiest day of her life, as if things had crumbled from there. So what made her weep for the last time at age twelve?

“I
t’s impressive that you can still do that.” Misty pointed to my round belly hanging over a full-lotus position. A productive hour had passed without much talking, and we were now cross-legged on the floor, sorting books and DVDs out of five open boxes.

“Mark Twain, John Irving, Patricia Cornwell, David Halberstam … eclectic tastes,” she mused. As she flipped over a Pat Conroy novel, my eye caught the long scar on her left arm, a vertical six-inch white line between her wrist and her elbow. She had made no effort to cover it today, and I stared at the permanent reminder of something awful on her soft white skin.

“My parents died in a car crash,” I blurted out. “When were you in a crash? When you were twelve?”

“That would make sense, wouldn’t it?” She traced a finger absently along the scar.

It made no sense, of course, unless it was true, because I was simply grasping, reminding her of what she’d told me that day at her house.

“Caroline said that your parents died when you were still in college. I hope you’re not upset that I know. It must have been … terrible.”

I’d never kept this aspect of my life a secret. What bothered me more with each passing minute was that Misty remained as impenetrable a mystery as ever. Every one of my questions was like a bullet ricocheting back at me.

I gestured to her T-shirt. “What does ‘Remember the Missing’ mean?”

“I started doing a little volunteer work for the Texas branch of a missing persons organization. Mostly, I insert information on sightings and new cases into their website. It’s about two hours a week.”

“Nothing more?”

“Why would there be more?”

“Do you know where Caroline is?”

“You seem upset all of a sudden.”

“It’s just that … I don’t really understand why you’d warn me off Caroline even though you clearly have some kind of relationship with her.
Do
you know where she is? You don’t talk about her. You don’t seem that concerned about her disappearance.” I barely squeezed
The Catcher in the Rye
into the bottom shelf. “That didn’t come out right. There’s not even anything in your fi—” I almost said
file
.

Misty didn’t seem to notice. “Next, you’re going to ask me if I killed her.” Her voice was surprisingly even.

“Of course not,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry if my questions are … intrusive. Really. I know that you haven’t known her that long, either.”

Oddly, that was the arrow that hit the mark. My anemic apology. She slammed a book into the shelf. Her pretty face was twisted.

“Time doesn’t really matter when it comes to relationships, does it, Emily? You can spend a long time never really knowing a person or a short time knowing them too well. If you were trapped in a room with a serial killer, you’d know him better than his mother does in five minutes. I’d say I know Caroline better than most.”

Was she hinting that it was a serial killer who carved those ugly marks on her body? That it wasn’t a car crash that scarred parts of her I could see and God knows what parts I couldn’t, hidden behind soft T-shirts and tight jeans?

I was suddenly sure of one thing. Misty was a victim. Of what, I didn’t know.

“Misty, you should make sure that alarm system is on all the time. Even in the daytime. The cops … Mike … they are recommending that to everyone who has one.” The baby began to hop on my bladder like it was a mini-trampoline. I sucked in a few deep breaths, the cleansing kind taught by my old yoga guru.

“I can take care of myself,” Misty said quietly. “Believe me.”

She went quietly on with the business of organizing my library, and when she spoke next, it was about a new bakery in Clairmont’s old downtown, run by a young couple from France. They paid their mostly Hispanic help $2 an hour more than minimum wage, provoking concern from other local shop owners, who didn’t want this to upset the equilibrium.

I let the dark thread of our conversation drift away.

Four hours later, my house was revived, as if it had seen a good therapist. Mike’s Raymond Chandler books sat companionably next to my Charles Dickens collection on the built-in shelf in the corner of the living room. The steady light of the Blu-ray player glowed. Misty had hooked it up with the efficiency of the Geek Squad and placed it on the shelf below Mike’s precious plasma, the remotes lying neatly beside it.

The fuzzy beige rug that Mike and I bought at a flea market in the city one summer day was rolled out, accenting the warm tones of the wood floor. Familiar old lamps were in place, plugged into sockets. The buttery leather couch, the dark purple go-to recliner that Mike affectionately named “Barney,” and the two red and cream dragon-print armchairs were arranged for intimate conversations. A Tahitian woman counting shells by an aqua sea, a thank-you from a young artist I championed, was settling in over the fireplace. Empty boxes were broken down by the back door, ready for recycling.

The evil polished and tucked away.

“M
isty?” I walked into the living room carrying a tray of hot chai tea, swirled with cream, and dark chocolate scones from Harry & David. They were two New York parting gifts discovered sandwiched in a box between my signed copy of
A Prayer for Owen Meany
and a DVD of
Revolutionary Road
.

I’d left Misty unloading guest towels and random toiletries in the bathroom, which she’d insisted on finishing. Apparently, that’s where she still was. I should go help her. She shouldn’t be sorting out half-empty bottles of shampoo, sanitary pads, toothbrushes, and old, clotting nail polish that I should have tossed before leaving New York. Instead, I set the tray on the coffee table and fell back onto the couch, propping my well-worn UGG slippers next to the tray, placing my hand lightly on my stomach.

“Hi, Baby.” I closed my eyes.

My body slung forward, like I’d been rear-ended in a car. All I captured of the sound was its last, whispering echo from the back of the house. I glanced at my watch. Dammit. I’d been asleep twenty minutes. I needed a shock alarm collar or something. Where was Misty? What woke me? Had she fallen?

The red lights were blinking. No alarm sounded. I didn’t even know whether the alarm was silent.

I kicked off the slippers to walk silently across the living room, toward the hall that led to the bathroom where I’d last seen Misty working.

I passed our bedroom, the future guest room, and the cozy study we planned to use as the nursery. The last door on the right at the end of the hall opened into the bathroom. It was equipped with a pedestal sink; a pink claw-foot bathtub; the circa 1980 pre-fab glass shower I used every morning; cranky plumbing, circa God-knows-when; and the small linen closet that Misty had been stuffing with my life’s toiletries. It was not, however, equipped with Misty.

The narrow hall dead-ended in front of a small oval stained-glass window of a purple tulip. A sharp left led to the sunroom. I stood at the threshold of the bathroom door. The light was off and everything in place except for the dripping piece of yellowing rose-and-vine wallpaper over the commode that I’d peeled back this morning to reveal a print of little girls in blue bonnets.

I inched reluctantly toward the passage that led to the sunroom. Where was the light switch for this part of the hall? A spiderweb tickled my forehead, and I swung frantically at it, imagining its architect crawling on my head. Wasn’t the security system supposed to take care of him? But it wasn’t a spiderweb. It was a pull chain, which I’d forgotten about, attached to a naked bulb in the ceiling. I tugged on it and was unrewarded with about 40 watts of light.

I moved toward the sunroom, its French door shut tight, old newspaper superglued over each pane of glass. The previous owner, the elderly Elsa, had done a painstaking job. Her mind was eventually eaten with too much paranoia to live alone. But maybe she knew something everybody else didn’t.

I’d left the door open, I was sure, because we’d experienced unseasonably cool Texas weather the last couple of days. I liked to think the warm sun crept its way down the halls, keeping our gas bill low and Mrs. Drury’s ghosts from lingering.

Maybe Misty had gone home? But without saying goodbye? I heard a slight sound behind the sunroom door, like a cat’s paws hitting the floor. But I’d found Belmont in a box of clothes before my nap, and he’d indicated that I should not remove him, ever.

My mind called up an image of Misty, sprawled on the floor behind that door, a man holding her Swiss Army knife at her throat. I marched the last few steps, twisting the glass knob with a sweaty palm. Pale yellow light poured into the hall.

Misty knelt over a box, her back to me.

She quickly snapped around, only losing composure for a
second, but it was one of those critical seconds that causes you to rethink everything.

A fusion of hormones and fear and loneliness must have thrown off my instincts about people.

I didn’t speak. The late afternoon sun struggled through grimy windows that overlooked the backyard, a bramble of bushes and trees cooked to a crisp for the past four months.

I had a mindless thought that the windows needed scraping and new hardware before the baby was born. Most of them were painted shut. Mike’s and my child would breathe fresh air.

“I thought I’d get a start in here while you napped,” Misty said, brushing off her knees. “I see you’ve already begun on those baby boxes over there.” She gestured across to the other side of the room and an assortment of half-unpacked shower gifts.

Was the awkwardness real or imagined? I was focused on the box at her knees. The one she’d been bent over. It wasn’t open.

“I didn’t want to wake you.” She gestured to the room. “I was just getting a sense of how much is left to do.”

The excuse she’d thought up, maybe, just in case, before digging the tip of her knife into a box.

She took a few steps toward me. “It’s getting late. You look tired.”

We moved wordlessly out of the sunroom, down the hall, into the living room, past the lukewarm tea on the tray.