Chapter 44
Dodie
New York, New York
One year later
When I first came to New York, I spent a lot of time in Central Park.
I had taken a waitressing job to pay the bills, because I had no modeling work yet and I wasn’t old enough to get my trust fund.
I lived in a tiny apartment with two awful roommates.
We hated each other. I loved it. It felt like home.
Still, I was broke and Central Park was free, even though it was dangerous, so on days when the weather was nice and I had an unscheduled hour, I’d go.
I’d walk, or I’d lie on the grass of the lawn and stare at the sky.
No one knew or cared where I was. I didn’t matter.
I didn’t want to matter. I wanted to be no one.
“You’re pretty,” my first agent said to me frankly after she’d signed me. “I have this shampoo thing here, you’d be good for that, but we could market your face. You’d have to learn to smile more.”
“No, thank you,” I told her politely. “Hair is just fine.”
She looked doubtful. “It’s just a shot of the back of your head. You get that, right? It’s a start, but—”
“The back of my head sounds great,” I said.
I watched her try to discern whether I was being sarcastic. I wasn’t. “You’ll never make it big with shampoo. You know that?”
“I’m counting on it,” I replied.
She never understood me. That was fine.
I did show my face eventually, of course. In a commercial, you smile for the camera, then turn, raising your arm and letting your hair run over it. “You look good,” one director said to me, “but you’re not warm. Try for warm.”
In Central Park, no one cared if I was warm.
So when I came back to New York after my siblings and I killed Sister, and I started looking for a new apartment, it made sense that I ended up on 107th, with the park outside my window.
The elderly landlady warned me that the park had a lot of “those people.” I didn’t care.
When I saw the joggers, the dog walkers, and the creeps going about their business, this was the first place I’d lived that felt like home to me, even with the banging radiators and the crooked bathroom door that you had to force closed.
It felt like I belonged here, like it was mine.
That was the first change I made. The second change came when my agent learned that I was back in town.
She called me, and partway through her shouted lecture, I hung up.
I never called her again, and from the moment I hung up that phone, I never again thought about whether my hands were pale enough or what the size of my calves was.
The third thing I did was by far the hardest.
First, I had to track down Nadia, my fellow model, and ask her where she lived. Then I went to her building and stood outside. I tried to look casual, as if I was expecting a friend to come out any minute. People bought it. It helped that models lived there, so I looked like I belonged.
I didn’t see the person I wanted, so eventually I chatted up a nosy neighbor and found out where he worked. Fifteen minutes later, I walked into a record store on Lower Broadway. The bell above the door jingled.
Ethan looked up from where he was standing behind the counter. When he saw me, he went very still. “Dodie?”
I cleared my throat. “Hello, Ethan.”
He blinked, then looked around, as if panicked. A man with a graying ponytail was browsing records in one corner. A kid in a ball cap was pocketing his change and leaving, brushing past me to get out the door.
“You’re back in town,” Ethan said.
“I am.” I let my gaze take in his tall frame, his dark tousled hair, his glasses. The flush on his cheeks. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my belted wool coat. “You work here.”
“I’m the manager.” Immediately, he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, his cheeks going more fiery red. “Oh, God, that sounded bad.”
I smiled. The man with the ponytail paused his browsing and glanced at us.
“You have my number,” Ethan said when he dropped his hand. “You could have called.”
“I wanted to see what you do for a living,” I replied. “The truth this time. And I think…I wanted you to see my face. A phone call wouldn’t do.”
“So you tracked me down?” he asked. “Why?”
I was sweating under my coat. I was so nervous that I clenched my hands into fists inside my pockets and reminded myself to breathe.
I’d never been this terrified in my life, and that included the moment that Anne Whitten’s murderous ghost pulled me under black water, her bony hands dragging me down.
I hadn’t thought I would get this next chapter, but I had been wrong. I hadn’t died in that basement, the same place Ben had died, with Sister pushing me down. I’d walked out of there instead. This was my chapter, and I planned to take it.
The ponytail man was listening avidly, his eyebrows rising. Good for him.
“I want to know if you’ll go on a date with me,” I said to Ethan.
“A second date?” he asked, surprised.
“Yes, a second date.”
Our gazes caught, and I didn’t know what he saw, but slowly, he relaxed. His shoulders lowered. The panic left his face. His cheeks were still a little red, but he smiled.
“I’m happy to see you,” he said softly.
“I’m happy to see you, too.” I meant it.
We looked at each other for another long moment.
Maybe this would work, and maybe it wouldn’t.
There was no way to know, but I was going to try.
Not because I needed to or because I was supposed to.
Because I wanted to. I wasn’t used to wanting things, to hoping for them.
Apparently, it started now. In this chapter, I was a woman who had things to do.
The man in the ponytail said, “Say yes quickly, son, before she changes her mind. She’s a looker.”
I bit my lip. And I waited for an answer.
—
This morning, I had put on my favorite work outfit: black pants, spiky black heels, black turtleneck, red lipstick. Dramatic? Yes. The men I worked with loved it. They said it gave the right first impression.
Ethan—as he told me on our second date—was not only a record store manager but also a part-time musician, playing bass with his band at obscure bars on Saturday nights.
He knew someone who knew someone else, and by our sixth date I had heard about an independent record company in a rented office in SoHo that was in need of a receptionist. The job was one of precarious stability and strange hours for a company running on pennies, with pay to match.
No sane person needing a paycheck would rely on it.
I got it, of course, even with no experience as a receptionist. Their standards weren’t very high.
I answered phones, kept schedules, and made coffee.
The partners who ran the place were two fortyish men with rumpled sport coats, raspy beards, and bloodshot eyes, who somehow worked both all the time and never.
The schedule made no sense. The musicians were younger than me and hit on me regularly, and some of them smelled truly terrible.
Boxes of records were stacked randomly behind my desk.
People cared greatly about T-shirts. There was absolutely no money.
It was the first job I ever had that I loved, and I never wanted to leave it.
After work at least once a week, I’d walk to Lower Broadway to pick up Ethan as he closed the store, and we’d explore the city.
We’d eat fifty-cent noodles or catch a second-run movie.
We’d wander thrift shops while sipping milkshakes.
We’d buy secondhand books. We’d read the scandalous movie titles on the porn posters in Times Square.
We’d talk about everything and nothing. We’d hold hands like teenagers.
Sometimes he’d kiss me in a doorway, right there among the stacks of garbage and the crazy people. Then we’d go home.
The phone on my desk rang as I was putting on my coat at the end of the day, and because I was in a generous mood, I answered it.
“Dodie,” came my big sister’s voice. “I finally caught you.”
“I’m just leaving,” I said. “Can this wait?”
“No, because you’re never home.”
“Not never.” Ethan and I got in late on the nights we ended at my place. I never checked my messages because I was too pleasantly distracted by then. The tall, quiet ones are apparently the most devastatingly talented.
“Never.” Violet was very sure of this. “I need to talk to you. Give me five minutes.”
I rolled my eyes, though she couldn’t see me. I regretted ever giving her my number at work. “Go.”
“Lisette wants to come the weekend before Christmas,” Violet said. “She wants to see the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Center, and the Rockefeller tree.”
“Violet, those things are boring. No one in New York does those things.”
“Lisette wants to see them, so you’ll take her.” She used the Big Sister Voice of Dire Threat.
“Fine. But we’ll also go shopping. And don’t blame me if she hates it.”
“She won’t hate it. You’ll have to pick her up at Grand Central. I’ll give you her train time. And don’t leave her waiting.”
It was only September. “I can remember to pick up my niece three months from now, yes.”
Violet didn’t notice—or chose not to acknowledge—my sarcasm. She continued with a list of instructions, from what to feed Lisette to making sure she wore her mittens. I looked at my nails and barely paid attention.
Lisette’s visits to me in the city, when she slept on my secondhand sofa, were a new thing.
Lisette had a wild, independent streak, and the supervised trips to New York were her parents’ compromise so that she wouldn’t pull a stunt like she had last year.
The deal was that Lisette got to spend a weekend with her glamorous aunt—me—and in return, she did her best to behave. So far, it seemed to be working.
“Did you get all of that?” Violet asked on the phone.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t.”
“I absolutely did. If Lisette is giving you so much trouble, why don’t you send her to Vail’s?”
“I already am. At Thanksgiving.”
I laughed. “Does she think she’s getting a turkey dinner?”
“No, she thinks she’s getting toast and canned tuna. Which is what Vail will be eating.”
Lisette probably wouldn’t mind. She was used to the menu at the house in Fell. She had spent two weeks there in the summer, just like Ethan and I had.
If you had ever told me that I would spend summer vacation in Fell, of all places, I would have thought you were crazy.
But Vail had worked hard fixing the house up.
He’d gotten rid of most of the old furniture, and he’d finally stripped the ugly wallpaper in the kitchen.
It was almost nice there now. It helped that the ghosts seemed to be finally gone.
I had told Ethan about Ben, about the Whitten children. What we’d done. Ethan had paled, but he said he understood. For weeks after that, I expected to get no answer when I called him. I expected us to be over. Who would put up with that kind of madness?
But incredibly, he’d kept answering my calls and going on dates with me. He’d come to the house in the summer and seen it for himself. He said he understood me a lot better after he spent time in Fell.
He also said he had a cousin who was in an expensive rehab and an uncle with a gambling problem, so ours wasn’t the only family with secrets.
“Are we done?” I asked Violet. “I have to go see my boyfriend and have some actual fun. You should try it sometime.”
“I have fun,” Violet said.
“No one in Vermont,” I declared, “has fun.”
“God, you’re such a snob,” my sister shot back. “Goodbye, Dodie.”
I grabbed my bag and ducked into the ladies’ room. I changed into jeans, sneakers, and a thrifted sweater with a pattern of Queen of Hearts playing cards. I believed it was incredibly fashionable, and no one could tell me otherwise.
I rubbed off my red lipstick and tied back my hair. I was in a hurry now. Ethan was waiting. New York was waiting.
By the time I walked out the front door and onto the street, I was smiling.