Rainbow black, p.1
Rainbow Black, page 1
Dedication
for Nico
Epigraph
I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.
—LEO TOLSTOY, ANNA KARENINA
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter i
Chapter ii
Chapter iii
Chapter iv
Chapter v
Chapter vi
Chapter vii
Chapter viii
Chapter ix
Chapter x
Chapter xi
Chapter xii
Chapter xiii
Chapter xiv
Chapter xv
Part Two
Chapter xvi
Chapter xvii
Chapter xviii
Chapter xix
Chapter xx
Chapter xxi
Chapter xxii
Chapter xxiii
Chapter xxiv
Chapter xxv
Chapter xxvi
Chapter xxvii
Chapter xxviii
Chapter xxix
Part Three
Chapter xxx
Chapter xxxi
Chapter xxxii
Chapter xxxiii
Chapter xxxiv
Chapter xxxv
Chapter xxxvi
Chapter xxxvii
Chapter xxxviii
Chapter xxxix
Chapter xl
Chapter xli
Chapter xlii
Chapter xliii
Chapter xliv
Chapter xlv
Chapter xlvi
Chapter xlvii
Chapter xlviii
Chapter xlix
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Maggie Thrash
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
I’M STILL HERE, LIKE ONE OF THOSE CHILD STARS who’s been around forever, one who, five nervous breakdowns into her career, people are astonished to learn is only twenty-eight. Baked into every newspaper article and television segment about my blown identity is a sense of surprise that I hadn’t been frozen in time, that my life continued after the Medusa’s eye of the American news machine moved on and forgot me. In a decade I imagine they’ll circle back and rediscover me again, and we’ll revive this whole song and dance for a fresh audience.
God, I hope not. What more could there be to say? And yet, someone always seems to come up with something.
Reporters had been camped out on our street twenty-four hours a day, hoping to catch me or Gwen in a moment of candor, to ask the burning question on viewers’ minds: Which one of us did it? Which of us actually pulled the trigger and killed that kid fourteen years ago?
This distinction is less legally important than you might think. We were both there, we both fled, we would both get charged with conspiracy to murder. But for normal people, people who haven’t been to law school, whichever one of us made that tiny tug of her finger is the truly guilty party.
I was the obvious suspect, with my mirthless face and dark suits, the crease in my trousers so sharp it could draw blood. But wouldn’t it be thrilling if it turned out to be Gwen, the golden girl, the beauty to my beast, the supernova to my black hole? Wouldn’t that be a great twist?
If I’m to give my best assessment of what happened, I would first need the right word. What’s something that has the long odds of a miracle but is so colossally ruinous you’d never call it that? If I go through the whole thing from beginning to end, without mercy, overlooking nothing, will the right word become apparent?
It was “whatever,” to quote the golden girl. And I guess that word is good enough to get started, to convey, right off the top, a sort of bewildered acceptance of forces that are senseless, like how a leaf in flight accepts the wind.
i
NEW HAMPSHIRE
1983
THE FIRST COURTROOM I EVER SAW WAS ON AN EPISODE OF ONE Life to Live. My older sister, Éclair, was a soap opera fanatic. Days of Our Lives was her favorite, but she watched them all. I was six at the time, and she was thirteen. For a long time our family didn’t have a TV, because our parents were hippies and thought television was the harbinger of doom. “If you want to rot your brain, you can pay for it yourself someday,” my mom said.
So one summer Éclair called her bluff and worked her ass off laying mulch for half the farmers in the county, quitting as soon as she had her $560. The TV she bought lived in her room like a devoted pet. I was permitted the special privilege of watching her shows with her only if I promised not to ask dumb questions (“Why did Tony give the diamond necklace to the island girl?” “What does ‘blackmail’ mean?”), which meant I had to fill in the blanks myself, creating an even more dizzying web of amnesia plotlines and secret agendas on top of the existing ones.
In the One Life to Live episode that’s seared into my memory, Karen the tormented housewife is forced to testify as a witness, in defense of her best friend, Viki Lord Riley, who’s been accused of murdering an evil tycoon. In the climactic scene, the merciless prosecutor rips Karen to shreds, exposing the truth that she was secretly a prostitute, a word that shocked the characters so much I could not even imagine what it meant.
What really confused me was why Karen was being attacked by the lawyer in the first place. Wasn’t Viki Lord Riley the one on trial? Wasn’t Karen just the witness?
“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Éclair explained. “The point is, if you have a secret, you’re fucked.”
It’s still probably the wisest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.
ii
1988
OUR PARENTS OWNED A DAY CARE THEY RAN FROM OUR HOME IN New Hampshire—a converted old barn with a bright rainbow painted on the roof. Rainbow Kids Care, it was called. We had a little goat farm with five goats (Donny, Lonny, Sunny, Spunky, and Trailblazer) and a view overlooking untouched forest, the trees skeletons in winter, ruby red in fall. According to my dad, the trees were home to the fairy people who sat hidden in the branches and sprinkled fairy dust on our heads to keep us all safe and sound.
It was the 1980s, before those studies claiming that your kid would become a mentally ill delinquent if you didn’t pick the right preschool. Before the promises of “Baby Einstein Academy” or “Stepping-Stone to Success Day Care.” No one thought, when they handed over their two- through five-year-olds to my parents, that anything crucial was happening inside those two- through five-year-old brains. Keep the kids alive and reasonably happy until they could be picked up at the end of the day—that was the job. It was babysitting. Apple juice, graham crackers, finger painting, story time. I remember it all feeling pretty simple. Then again, every speck of my memory has been turned over, interrogated, and second-guessed to the point where I hardly know what I remember and what I don’t.
The day after she graduated high school, Éclair put us all in the rearview mirror and moved to Miami, about as far away from New Hampshire as a person could get while still technically being in America. Her dream was to be a backup dancer for Gloria Estefan, get “discovered,” and be propelled to stardom. She soon had a whole life of her own—a wardrobe comprised entirely of leopard print, a boyfriend with a car phone and his own exercise videotape company called Bangin’ Beach Bods—and her trips home were brief and infrequent.
Without her around, Days of Our Lives and One Life to Live lost their magic, and I stopped watching them. I’d gotten sort of nerdy and preferred books anyway. In the woods, there was an old shed kids called the “witch hut,” and I practically lived there, reading and listening to my Walkman and doing nothing.
But what were you doing in the woods?
I was asked this a hundred times, years later, in the sterile white office of a police station.
Nothing. I was doing nothing.
Adults seem to forget that between the grind of childhood (art time, nap time, snack time) and the grind of teenagedom (soccer practice, homework, party), there is a brief, sweet set of years where no one cares what you do, and you roam free. How could I explain the idle magic of these afternoons without sounding insane? That I collected rocks and gave them names, that I imagined clouds had personalities, that I believed animals would talk to you if they trusted you. Walking, walking, walking, practically losing my identity as I followed a red fox for miles into the forest.
I took after my mother, who was always more interested in animals than in people. The two of us would discuss our animal neighbors endlessly, like a pair of ladies gossiping at the hairdresser, except instead of so-and-so got drunk and wrecked his truck or so-and-so is sleeping with the mailman, it was the black bear found a new patch of berries or the skunk’s babies all had pure white tails. Occasionally my dad would interrupt us with some news from the real world:
“I’m bringing Dylan Fairbanks to stay for the week. His mom’s been arrested again, and she’s trying to make bail.”
Mom would seem momentarily confused, as if trying to remember which animal of the forest Dylan Fairbanks was and why we would ever bring him in the house.
“. . . Oh, of course, put him in Éclair’s room. How about I take them to the movies tonight? I need a little change of pace. Does Dylan like movies, Lacey?”
I shrugged. All I really knew about Dylan was that he loved NASCAR, or at least I assumed he did, because he wore the same threadbare NASCAR T-shirt every day.
We got to the Stardust drive-in movie theater as the sun was setting, and Mom spread a quilt on the grassy knoll up front, in the family-friendly area. I didn’t see many kids as young as me and Dylan there. Alien was playing, and as soon as the movie started, it was clear that it wasn’t meant for children—no talking animals or goofy sidekicks or precocious kid characters. The dark, industrial spaceship was ominous and unsettling, and when the alien finally appeared, it was so terrifying I stopped breathing. Part of me loved it; I had never been so thrilled in my life. But another part of me was already blaming my mother: Why are you letting me watch this?
At some point in the middle of the movie my mom leaned over and asked Dylan and me if we’d like popcorn and hot dogs. I thought she was joking. Hot dogs? Mom always said the body was a temple and the meat industry was the axis of evil.
“Ketchup and mustard? Ketchup and mustard? What do you like on your hot dogs?” She looked from Dylan to me, weirdly agitated. I shrugged, baffled. Then she trotted off into the darkness without waiting for an answer.
The movie was scaring me to death, and I kept glancing at Dylan to see if he was as terrified as I was. But he had the same dim look on his face as always. And when it was over, all he said was “If I met an alien, I would do a karate chop and its head would fall off.”
Mom never came back with the popcorn and hot dogs. I looked around and felt a creepy disconnect from reality—was this still the movie? If I opened the car door, would I find her body torn apart and a slimy alien waiting to leap out at me?
The family-friendly area was emptying out. A caravan of minivans streamed through the front gate, leaving behind popcorn-littered turf and derelicts and people with nowhere else to be: a teenage gang kicking abandoned cups across the gravel lot, cherry Slurpee spills arcing like blood splatters; a trailer park couple drinking from a jar while a baby howled in their junky back seat; a too-thin man leaning against the chain-link fence, flashing a switchblade open and shut: click, click, click. I felt lost, though I hadn’t moved an inch from the quilt where my mother had left us—it was everything around me that had changed. Even the group of hippies in their peace-sign T-shirts seemed suddenly homeless and addled. They weren’t holding hands or strumming guitars like in Alice’s Restaurant; they were arguing viciously, pointing fingers at each other: “Your fault!” “No, your fault!” You heard a lot in those days about how the region was falling apart; this was the first time I’d ever seen it with my own eyes.
“Where’s my mom?” I asked. Without waiting for Dylan to answer, I said, “Maybe we should wait in the car.”
But the car was locked. I didn’t know what to do. Should we stay put, or sneak into a dark corner and hide? I decided we should look for her. Sitting on the knoll was like asking to be kidnapped. It was the age of “stranger danger”; every kid at school knew someone who knew someone who’d gotten AIDS from a candy bar or been abducted and sold to the Amish.
“Look at those kiddies,” I heard someone say. “They’re on a hot date. Hey, kids! Kiddies! C’mere! Where your daddies at?”
Just like during the movie, I checked Dylan’s face to see if he was scared, but he seemed totally unfazed. Maybe in his world it was normal for moms to randomly vanish. At the Snack Shack, a boy with yellow teeth was sweeping up. I wanted to ask if he’d seen my mom, but I was smart enough not to advertise that Dylan and I were alone.
“I think we should call 911,” I said.
Dylan shook his head. “No, no. Call my neighbor.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“When I can’t find my mom I’m supposed to call my neighbor.”
I couldn’t believe it. Call 911 was drilled into the head of every kid I knew. My friend Sandy had once called 911 when she couldn’t find her cat for ten minutes. I’d never met anyone who’d been told to call their neighbor.
“Well, who’s your neighbor?” I asked.
“Hank.”
“Who’s Hank?”
“My neighbor.”
I decided to call my dad and ask him if I should call 911. I don’t remember how I found a dime for the pay phone. Maybe Dylan had one, or maybe I begged one from the yellow-toothed guy in the Snack Shack. In any case, I dropped the coin in the slot, pushed the grimy buttons, and waited for my dad to pick up.
“4431.” To the bewilderment of most people, my dad always answered the phone with the last four digits of our number. He was a British expat, and that’s how he’d grown up doing it in England.
“Daddy? I can’t find Mom. She went to get us hot dogs and she never came back.” There was a pause. I wondered if he hadn’t heard me. “Daddy? Hello?”
“Lacey, listen to me. Don’t move. Stay with Dylan and don’t move an inch. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He spoke urgently, with a no-nonsense tone I’d hardly ever heard in his voice before. It scared me.
“Should I call 911?”
“No.”
I looked at Dylan. What did he and my dad know that I didn’t? What was the point of all those videos we’d watched in school about Mikey and Janie and Susie and their various emergencies if we weren’t supposed to call 911? I hung up the phone.
“Hey, kiddies. You on a hot date? You gonna go all the way?”
It was one of the teenagers wearing sunglasses. I looked away, which was what we had learned in the Just Say No after-school program. Never make eye contact with someone on dope, because they might “wig out” and attack you.
I hid myself behind the phone booth. Nearby, Dylan had found a half-finished hot dog on a table and was eating it.
“Well, I’m glad you got your hot dog,” I said.
“Me, too,” Dylan agreed, his mouth full.
I was being sarcastic, I growled at him in my mind.
A monotone voice sounded over the drive-in speakers: “The Stardust will be closing soon, please make your way to the exit.”
I felt a lump forming in my throat. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Finally I heard a crunch of gravel as my dad tore into the lot. He was driving the old VW bus that we hardly ever used because it always broke down. I ran up to him, Dylan padding after me.
Dad leapt out of the van. “Get in now,” he barked at us, and we obeyed. Everything felt confused, and I didn’t know what scared me most: aliens, hoodlums, missing moms, dope fiends, the man with the switchblade—they all mixed together in the darkness.
The windows of the bus were dirty, and we couldn’t see what was happening outside in the gravel lot. I heard my dad yelling, “That’s my wife! Move aside!”
I was shaking. My mother was lying there dead, I was sure. Strangely, all I could think about was how much I didn’t want Dylan to see me cry.
A man shouted, “You dirty hippies, get outta here, you filthy pieces of shit, get a job, wear some shoes, this is America, you commie Jew trash, get the fuck outta my place of business!”
Then a gunshot. Dylan and I both heard it and shrieked.
The passenger door groaned open. Dad had Mom in his arms. She was alive—I could tell by the delicate way he placed her in the van, like a knight who’d rescued a princess from a dragon. Relief flooded me. Before I could open my mouth to ask what was happening, he said in a strangely calm voice, “Don’t be scared. Your mom fainted. It’s just the bloody arse of a manager, shooting his gun in the air. Just trying to scare us. Everything’s hunky-dory. Just a little silly drama.”
In the weeks to come, he’d refuse to tell me a version of the story that I found satisfactory. So I had to make one up myself. Maybe the hippies had attacked my mother for buying a meat product, or maybe the man with the switchblade had tried to murder her because she resembled an ex-wife who had stolen his money and faked her own death.
My dad’s explanation, repeated many times to me, was completely insufficient: “Your mother fainted. And the manager wasn’t nice about it.”
“But why was everyone yelling?”
“Because when people are confused, they yell.”
