After image, p.9
After Image, page 9
Matthew takes a sip of his sparkling water. “So. Isabel is throwing a little party for Chloe and me on Sunday. A kind of belated wedding reception.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you didn’t want a reception.” The less publicity, the better, he’d said. He’d had his fill of the media taking an interest in his life.
He makes a face. “Well, Izzie insists there’s got to be some kind of party. I managed to talk her down to a small gathering at her house. Just family and close friends.”
“Ah,” I say, feeling strangely touched to be included in that group.
“Will you come?” he asks. “It’d mean a lot to me.”
“Of course,” I tell him. Matthew’s always been there for me. It was Matthew who stepped in when the police wanted to question me again, months into the investigation, and made sure I had a lawyer that time around. It was Matthew who defended me to my mother when I dropped out of LACSA, insisting that I needed a break from the notoriety. “Hey, listen—” I begin. I need to tell him about the key chain. He’ll want to know.
But he’s talking over me. “Hey, you want to see something cool?” He pulls up a photo on his phone and tilts the screen toward me. Him and Chloe swimming with dolphins. “You have to do this sometime. I’m telling you, it was unreal.”
In the pictures, he’s smiling, his head tilted back, water-slicked hair catching the sun.
For some reason, this makes my heart contract. I’ve never seen him smile like that before. “It looks great,” I say.
He scrolls through a few more images—crystalline water, a beachside bonfire, Chloe on horseback. And I realize: He’s happy. Apart from that brief mention of Ruiz at the start of the night, he hasn’t mentioned the investigation once. I tug at the edge of the pure-white tablecloth, remembering Ruiz’s face in the subway station, his caution as he told me not to read too much into the key chain. I know Ruiz is trying to spare me the crushing disappointment I’ll feel if we find out it’s a fake. Can I really subject Matthew to that kind of pain, just because it would make me feel better to have someone to talk to?
Matthew is still talking. “And these mud baths, they have this direct view of the volcano . . .”
My mother thinks Matthew allows me to obsess about the case too much. But is she right? Or is it the other way around? Maybe I’m the one who keeps dragging him down, refusing to let him move on.
After Allie’s disappearance, Matthew developed ulcers. His hair started going gray. But since meeting Chloe, he seems to be feeling his way back into normal life. The two of them go running on the beach in the morning. They make green smoothies and sip them on the patio overlooking the pool.
I take a deep breath, forcing myself to comment cheerfully on the photos of the mud baths. No, I can’t tell Matthew about the key chain. Not yet. Not until Ruiz has something definitive to tell me.
Matthew glances over at me. “You look tired,” he says. “Have you been sleeping?”
I put a hand to my face, embarrassed at what it reveals about me. “Yes.”
He’s not convinced. “Ruiz shouldn’t have called you about that body. That wasn’t right.”
“Matthew—”
“No. He’s got to let you get on with your life.” He sets his phone firmly down on the table. “Getting dragged back into this, it’s the last thing you need.”
He catches the expression on my face.
“Sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to sound like your mom. I just don’t want you to miss out on . . . well, life. Because of what happened to Allie. At a certain point, we have to move on.”
I nod, trying to look like I’m taking this in. But inside, I’m thinking: And then there was one. It used to be only Matthew and me who hadn’t moved on. And now he’s joined the ranks of the others.
“Natasha?”
I know I won’t be able to speak without getting choked up. Luckily, a call comes through on Matthew’s cell, and he’s distracted from our conversation. As he answers, I take a large sip of my wine.
Holding the phone to his shoulder, he says, “It’s Chloe. Do you mind? She wants me to say good night to Sara.”
I wave to him that it’s fine, and he stands up and walks into the hallway. “Hello?” he says into the phone. “Who am I speaking with? Sara? Sara who?”
I can hear Sara shouting on the other end of the line: “Sara Navaaarrro.”
“Who?” he says, pretending not to recognize her voice.
I wander toward the credenza, staring at the frames arranged on it. There’s a photo of a very young Matthew and Isabel, sitting on the floor of a tiny apartment and eating dinner on an overturned cardboard box that serves as their table. There are a couple of industry photos, Matthew standing beside men I don’t recognize. And then, a photo of Isabel and Matthew and Allie at Lake Gregory. Allie told me they used to go up there in the summer, to Crestline, that Matthew had taught her to fish there. In the photo, Allie must be nine or ten, and she’s wearing a bright-blue swimsuit. The smile spread across her face is one I never saw when I knew her: pure, uncomplicated happiness.
I look at her round cheeks, her goofy stance. She looks nothing like the Allie I knew so well.
CHAPTER 17
December 2007
After Allie and I escaped the Christmas Eve dinner, Allie lay back on her bed while I sat at her desk, sorting through the mess scattered across its surface. A half-empty perfume bottle, scraps of silver fabric, an old-fashioned lighter with flowers engraved on the sides.
Laughter floated up from downstairs.
“God, why don’t they leave already?” Allie said, pulling a pillow over her face.
The dinner had continued without us. My mother tried, once, to get us to come downstairs, but when she saw Allie’s belligerent face, she gave up without too much fuss.
“They’re not so bad,” I said mildly. I liked Isabel, who was unfailingly gracious to me. And Matthew’s only crime seemed to be talking too much.
Allie yanked the pillow off her face and shot me a look that could’ve peeled paint off a wall. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I fiddled with the silver lighter. “I mean . . .” All she had to do was be nice to them for the length of one dinner. It didn’t seem that much to ask.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Tash, if you defend them, I will lose my mind.”
“I’m not!” I had never disagreed with Allie before. I was beginning to see that it wouldn’t go well if I ever decided to go that route.
“Good,” she said sharply. Then she rolled over onto her stomach and pushed herself up to stand on the mattress. “God, on a night like this, I’m going to need reinforcements.” She reached up to the air-conditioning vent, fiddling with the screws that held it against the wall. Once she had them loosened, she pulled the vent off, revealing a row of tiny liquor bottles, the kind you saw on airplanes, lined up on the inner ledge of the duct.
“Welcome to Café Allie,” she said with a sweep of her hand. “What can I get you?”
“Allie!”
“What?” She set the vent down on the bed, grabbed a few bottles from the ledge, and then sat down on the mattress.
“You’ll get in trouble,” I said.
She laughed. “Only if they find out. And they won’t find out.” She tossed me two bottles of Baileys. “Here, you’ll like that. Tastes like candy.”
I turned the bottle over in my hands. Getting caught wasn’t my only concern. “I thought you were sober,” I said in a hesitant voice.
“I am!” Allie said cheerfully. “No pills, no coke, not even any weed. I’m practically a saint.” She twisted the top off a bottle of vodka and took a long swig. “Relax, Tash Ross. Alcohol was never my problem.”
Was that how it worked? Were they two separate things?
I looked at the array of bottles inside the AC duct. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Oh, I know people,” she said. “Billy at the corner store likes me.” She drained the last of the bottle into her mouth, then picked up her hairbrush from the bedside table and began running it through her hair. Allie had wavy hair that seemed to look artfully styled no matter how messily she arranged it.
“Why can’t I have hair like yours?” I asked.
Allie stood up and walked to her dresser, where she began sorting through bottles of hair products. “Want me to show you how to do it? You just have to have the right tools.”
Which is how I ended up sitting on the edge of her bed while she wielded a flat iron and a spray bottle on my hair. She drank as she worked, her mood improving with each sip. And I drank, too, appreciating the burn of the Baileys as it slid down my throat. The feel of Allie’s fingers as she worked on one section of my hair and then another put me into a kind of trance.
“How long does this take?” I asked.
“As long as it takes,” she said. “That’s what Ray, Isabel’s stylist, used to say. He always said, ‘Para lucir hay que sufrir.’”
I finished my first bottle of Baileys and twisted open the cap of the second. “What does that mean?”
“‘You have to suffer to be beautiful.’”
I turned to look at her, but she yanked my head back into the position she wanted it in. “How do you know Spanish, anyway?” At school, she took French.
“Girl, Spanish is my first language. When I was little, Isabel was busy making movies. So she got Marisol to look after me.”
I’d met Marisol. At Isabel’s house, she often clattered around in the kitchen while the rest of us gathered in the living room. “I thought Marisol was your housekeeper.”
Allie shrugged. “Now she is. But she started out as my babysitter. She used to take me to her house in the Valley sometimes, and I’d play with her kids. They taught me all the good swear words.”
When she’d finished with my hair, she said “There!” and prodded me toward the mirror. As I stood up, I felt pleasantly buzzed, a warm feeling spreading throughout my body. Walking closer, I stared at my reflection. “Whoa.” My hair, usually frizzy and uncontrollable, fell in soft, dark-blonde waves past my shoulders.
“Right?” Allie said, pleased with herself.
I turned my head from side to side. “Wow.” Even my face looked different. Without the distraction of my wild hair, my eyes took center stage, pale and bright against my freckled skin.
Allie threw herself down on the bed, grinning. “Eat your heart out, Palos Verdes Prep.” She yawned and pulled a pillow over her head.
I spent a few minutes gazing at myself in the mirror, lifting my hair up in different styles and examining my reflection. I had never thought of myself as pretty, but now I was wondering if I’d been mistaken. Maybe I could get Allie to do my makeup, too, to show me how to use all the bottles and tubes on her dresser. “Hey, Als?”
But when I turned around, I saw that her chest was rising and falling in a slow rhythm. She’d fallen asleep. It was only then that I noticed how many empty vodka bottles were strewn across the bed.
Carefully, I gathered up all the empty bottles and wrapped them in a Neiman Marcus bag I found under Allie’s desk. Then I padded downstairs into the empty kitchen and shoved the bag deep into the garbage, covering it with some crumpled-up paper towels.
At the sink, I poured myself a glass of water. When I heard a sharp laugh coming from the yard, I jumped. Edging over to the sliding doors, I saw Giles and Matthew, fully dressed, floating on rafts in the steaming pool. Matthew reached out and yanked at Giles’s raft, almost overturning him, and Giles let out a shout. They were both holding highball glasses as they paddled around. What was it that Isabel had said about them? Like children.
I was about to slip back upstairs when a voice called out from the living room: “Hello?”
Shit.
“Who’s there?”
That was Isabel’s voice. It was funny how familiar it sounded. I’d heard it so many times before in movies that it somehow felt like the voice of an old friend.
“It’s just me,” I called. “Natasha.”
“Oh, Natasha! Come join me.”
Slowly, I walked into the living room, where Isabel lounged on the couch, her long legs stretched out on the cushions.
She smiled at me and adjusted her position so there was room beside her. “Come sit. The boys are being very silly at the moment.”
“Where’s my mom?” I asked, taking a seat on the edge of the couch.
“Oh, she went to bed a while ago.” Isabel had kicked off her shoes and looked completely at ease, as if this were her house, not ours. There was a fire going in the fireplace, and the flickering light played across her features. She leaned closer, and I flinched, thinking she was about to smell my breath. But she just tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “You girls have been doing each other’s hair, it seems.”
I put a hand up to my hair, which didn’t feel like mine anymore. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Well, you look very beautiful,” she said. The way she looked at me made me feel as if I were standing in a spotlight. “Oh, she blushes! I’m serious, you know. You have very lovely bone structure. And look at this skin!” She touched my cheek with one manicured finger. “If you’re ever interested in modeling, I could connect you with some people.”
I laughed—a loud, abrupt sound.
Isabel looked surprised, and perhaps a little offended. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Sorry, it’s just . . . I’m not really model material.”
“Well, of course you are! Just look at you. Like a young Nicole Kidman, that’s what I thought when I first saw you.” She smiled, then gazed into the fire. “You know, modeling is how I got my start when we moved out here from Ohio. Without that money, Matthew and I wouldn’t have survived our first year in LA. Of course, I never had the right body type for it. Too many curves, no matter how much I dieted. But you—your height, your weight. You’d be perfect.”
I glanced down at my flat chest, my bony legs. I’d never thought of either as assets.
“Anyhow,” she said lightly, “if you’re ever interested, just let me know.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Before, I’d assumed she was just being nice, but now I wondered: Was she serious? Me, a model? The thought was absurd. As was the idea of me ever picking up the phone and simply giving Isabel Andersen a call. But another part of me, the part still buzzing from alcohol, thought: Maybe I will. Maybe it’s that easy. Call up Isabel, and she’ll change my life.
She took a sip of her wine. “So, I hear that you and Allie have grown close.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s nice,” she said slowly, toying with the edge of her sleeve. “I know Giles was worried about . . . that aspect of having her here.”
“We’re great,” I said. “She’s great.” And I felt it, in my chest, how much I loved Allie. How important she was to me.
“Mm.” Isabel’s long eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks. “Just be careful, okay, Natasha?”
I paused. “Careful about what?”
“Careful about my daughter,” she said quietly. She leaned forward and set her wineglass on the coffee table. “I can see you’re a sweet girl. A soft girl. But Allie—she’s not like you. Don’t get me wrong—my daughter can be wonderful. Charming. But I don’t want you to get hurt when . . .” She pulled her knees up to her chest, suddenly looking very vulnerable.
“When what?”
For a moment, she didn’t say anything. “I suppose you know why we pulled her out of Seabrook,” she said.
I felt my forehead wrinkle. That was an odd way of phrasing it. Allie hadn’t been “pulled out” of Seabrook. She’d been kicked out. But maybe Isabel didn’t want to acknowledge that.
“Yeah. She told me.”
Isabel dug her toes into the leather of the couch. “She was very careful, you know, about the number of pills she took. Not enough to do herself real harm, but enough to scare the daylights out of us.” She looked at me, her eyes liquid. “She wanted to punish me, you see, for sending her there. That was her way of getting back at me. Her revenge.”
Outside, there was a large splash—the sound of someone falling into the pool—followed by the roar of Matthew’s laughter. I squeezed the glass in my hands. What was Isabel talking about? What pills?
“Just be careful, that’s all,” Isabel said. She reached out a hand and placed it on my arm, the warmth of her skin radiating through my sleeve. “Allie is unpredictable. And I’d hate to see her turn on you the way she’s turned on us.”
CHAPTER 18
When Matthew returns from talking to Chloe, we spend the rest of the evening discussing his new house, the upcoming move. The whole time, the knowledge of the key chain digs into my chest like a splinter. But I sip my wine and smile and think of Matthew’s happiness—how new it is, and how fragile.
When I leave his house, I follow the footpath along the canals, shivering in the cold. The air is icy and salt-tinged. Across the water, someone is steering a boat out of its slip, and its headlights spark against the dark water. And I think again about that moment with Isabel when we sat together on the couch at Christmas, her warm, concerned tone as she spoke.
I’d hate to see her turn on you the way she’s turned on us.
At the time, I hadn’t known how to take her warning. Now, though, her words seem prescient.
In the end, Allie didn’t turn her anger on me the way she had with her family. But that last year, she put up a wall around herself. It happened slowly, steadily, over a period of months, and when she was done, I’d been stunned to find myself on the other side.
When I return home, I find a package waiting for me in the mailroom—the doorbell camera I ordered this morning. After taking the box up to my apartment, I spend the next hour figuring out how to set it up and get it to sync with my phone. The process is fiddly, but once the camera is installed, I can sit on the couch in my living room, gazing at my phone screen, and see everything that’s happening outside my door.
