Chapter 24
“Perfectly innocent question,” I said when Bonnie had got herself pulled back together with more apologies to me. “Why do you have a gun in the house, Mrs. Young?”
“Doctor Young,” Sicily said.
“No, please, call me Bonnie,” the woman said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your—”
“Dolly,” I said quickly. Sicily narrowed her eyes at me.
“Like Dolly Parton,” Bonnie said.
“Exactly like.”
“Dolly,” she said, tucking the sides of her black bob behind her ears. “To tell you the truth…”
I’d always found that people about to tell me the truth were either going to insult me or lie.
“I didn’t want that thing in the house,” she said. “Even with all the…” She fluttered her hands. “Recent events, I guess you can say. May you live in interesting times, right? But Marisa, she suddenly felt differently.”
“Mom wanted a gun?” Sicily stood back from Bonnie. “Why?”
“She thought we needed some protection in the house,” Bonnie said. “Just in case.”
Just in case of what? What had Marisa gotten her white, suburban butt into? “Suddenly? How long ago was this?”
“A few weeks,” Bonnie said, but she didn’t sound sure.
“And she didn’t say anything else about why she—you—might need protection?”
Bonnie pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Only that she would feel safer if we were prepared for the worst.”
“You’re a doctor, right? What kind?”
“My specialty is pediatrics,” Bonnie said. “Children,” she added, as though I wouldn’t know the word.
“So you know the leading cause of death of kids in our country,” I said. “More than cancer or car accidents. If I know it, you definitely know.”
Bonnie lifted her head so that the reflection in her glasses hid her eyes, and then she took them off and let them clatter to the counter. “Firearms,” she said.
“I’m not a child,” Sicily said. But of course she was missing the point, like a child.
“Anything specific causing your wife concern lately?” I asked. “Watching too much sensationalist programming? Joining any, uh, new book clubs? Or neo-Nazi enclaves?”
“No,” Bonnie said. “She’s been too busy to get … swept up in anything like that. I told the police all this.”
“Busy doing what? Making merry?”
“Sure. Of course. Getting the house ready for Sis to come home from school.” Bonnie reached to put a hand on her daughter. “Sis is in her first year at Northwest, making us proud. Our alma mater, you know.”
“Yeah, I have a question about that—”
“But,” Sicily jumped in, “Mom was busy working, too, right? Umma?”
“Was she a pediatrician, too?” I asked, with a fat cake-slice of sarcasm for Sicily.
“Office management,” Bonnie said, looking between us. She knew she was missing something. “She took a job with her friend, who’s in real estate. Oh, you might have heard of her. Edith Maxwell?”
“Edie,” I said, trying not to slide into my stage accent. “Well, sure. We go way back. She and I are practically family.”
BONNIE INVITED ME TO STAY for lunch and wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Something simple,” she said, gazing around the kitchen as though it was a new addition to the house. “Mari’s the one who usually…”
“Come see my room, Dolly,” Sicily demanded.
There was nothing I wanted more than to be the hell out of there before anyone got misty about Marisa again.
Sicily led me out of the kitchen. “Dolly?” she scoffed. “Who’s that, exactly?”
“I thought she might recognize the name Dahlia,” I said. “Maybe not. Maybe she doesn’t know I exist. You didn’t. But it seemed to me you didn’t want her to know who I really was, so I had to think fast. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“She’s just so…”
“Hair trigger?”
Sicily frowned. “What’s that supposed mean?”
“Wigged out? Freaked out? Pulling a gun on people? I found my boyfriend dead in an alley yesterday, and a tiny suburban doctor holding a gun is the scariest thing I’ve encountered this week.”
We were standing in the hallway in front of an open door. Inside, a wide bed covered with a scalloped-edge quilt. I nudged the door all the way open with my boot and went in.
“Hey,” Sicily said. “Hey. You can’t just walk into places uninvited.”
Why stop now? “You invited me,” I said.
“To my room,” she said. “Not theirs.”
I’d already figured out it was Marisa’s room.
It just had a master’s suite vibe to it, I guess.
On a chest-high dresser, a series of frames showed Sicily from infancy to current age, the hair growing long, getting cut tomboy short, growing out again.
The teeth falling out, growing back, and braces coming and going.
One snapshot in a frilly gold frame showed the back of a dark head of hair tipped toward a baby, Madonna-and-child style.
No spikes in that monkey mama.
In front of the photos sat a pretty wooden box. I flipped it open.
“What are you doing?” Sicily said.
It was a jewelry box, stuffed with nice things. It had a little drawer, too, with more keepsakes tucked away. I remembered Marisa sitting on my mattress on the floor, gold at her ears, wrist, fingers. “This is hers, right?” I said. “She wears a lot of jewelry for someone who used to have nothing.”
“So?”
“So she could have easily taken all this with her. If she was planning to go.”
“Oh.”
Of course, I’d lived close to the bone my whole life, too, and I’d never developed a magpie attachment to shiny objects. To be ready to fly, you had to keep your grip loose and your pockets light. I knew in my bones this was something Marisa would remember, too.
Was it better to believe your mother had been taken? Or that she had left you? That she couldn’t stay, or simply hadn’t?
I should have known the answer by now.
We left that room and headed toward Sicily’s, but at the foot of the stairs, I was faced with the array of the kid’s school pictures again.
My mood downshifted without warning. How had I let Marisa’s location become my problem? She had never cared about mine.
Sicily’s room was tucked into the eaves of the attic and decked out in pink.
Pink walls, pink trim, pink sheets. It smelled pink.
She had her own shiny pink Christmas tree in the corner, hot pink baubles and draped ropes of metallic pink beads.
I sank down on a fluffy white rug and leaned my back against the bed.
“Nice,” I said, running my fingers across the carpet. “What is this? Unicorn pelt?”
“What’s your problem?”
There was no way to explain my problem with all this soft living to the daughter who had been cherished, worshipped like the Christ child. And I had got myself into a sitch here: I didn’t know if I could sit through an entire lunch as good-natured Dolly.
“What do you think was making Marisa nervous enough to buy a gun?” I asked.
Sicily shrugged sadly.
Marisa had been so jumpy the night I’d seen her, I’d called her out on it. Why had she come to me in the first place? To tell me that I had a sister? But why now? More likely she would have come to ask for some kind of help with whatever she’d gotten herself into.
The best question was … Why me?
I remembered Marisa tugging at Alex’s sleeve. Probably she hadn’t come to see me in the first place.
But I was the one who made sure she didn’t feel like staying. If something happened to Marisa now, or she never turned up, I would have a lot to answer for.
Sicily was watching me with wide, worried eyes. I turned away.
Across the room sat a stack of vinyl albums and a little mod record player. I crawled over to it and pulled down a handful of records at random. Fleetwood Mac? “These are yours?” I asked.
Sicily didn’t have to answer. She sat on the edge of her bed and picked up the nearest stuffed animal, a handful of an owl who’d seen better days.
“She likes Fleetwood Mac,” I said under my breath. If Marisa had led with that morsel, maybe I would have let her tell me whatever it was she’d come to say.
I slid Rumours from its sleeve. The label had an image of a street lined with palm trees and the words Burbank Home of Warner Bros.
Was this a first pressing, mint condition?
Sicily didn’t know the treasure trove she was sitting on.
Most of my records had been bargain-bin finds, cut-outs with the sleeve notched along its edge to show that it had never sold.
Of course, there was nothing some of those fanboys at the music shop loved more than a platter no one else had valued. They loved an orphan.
I dropped the needle and here came that chugga-chugga guitar of “Second Hand News,” like a train coming. Or going.
I could imagine living up here high in the trees, listening to records and enjoying a bright outlook. When the next track started up, groovy and low-key, I said, “It’s a nice room.”
Sicily was pulling at one of the stuffed owl’s wings, over and over. She’d been doing that to her scarf fringe in Alex’s office, too.
“What’s Stone House?” she said.
“What?”
“Earlier, you asked me what Stone House is,” she said.
Do you remember that? I didn’t.
Then I did—from the list of purchases on Marisa’s credit card, before I’d got distracted by airline transactions and a gun pointed at my face. “Stone House,” I said, sitting forward. “You didn’t recognize that name? It was a pending charge. Recent. And not pack-of-gum money.”
“Like, how much?”
“A couple of zeroes. I can’t remember exactly. But she was also in the middle of a lot of really high-end holiday shopping, so maybe it was something like that.”
Sicily tossed the owl to the side and got her phone out.
“Man,” I said. “Marisa settled into money so well you’d think she was born to it.”
“She likes to give it away,” Sicily said as she thumbed her screen. “Umma gets a little mad, sometimes, how much Mom gives to charity and stuff. Bell ringer buckets. Homeless people on the street, but there’s so many of them. She can’t fix their lives with a few dollars.”
She hadn’t quite figured it out, had she? “Bless your heart,” I said.
Sicily’s brow furrowed into her screen. “Stone House,” she announced. “It’s a day spa.”
“As opposed to those night spas.” I waited, then finally had to ask. “What’s a day spa?”
“Just a place to get, you know—”
“I really don’t.”
“Manicures? Mani-pedis, massages. It’s not a place you’d stay the night, like a resort or anything.”
“Couple of zeroes spent on mani-pedis? Yikes.”
“Seaweed wraps and stuff,” she said.
“If you say so.”
“It’s out near my school,” she said. “Maybe she made appointments for us to go together.” She looked up and saw me smirking at her. “She likes to buy presents, so what?”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Her expression turned thoughtful. “I’m not sure you do, actually.” She stood up and slipped her phone into her pocket. “Come on.”
“Where? I’m enjoying this album.”
“Album?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s old. I assume you’ve heard it before.”
“Catty,” I said. “The word you’re looking for is classic.”
“Why don’t you listen to, like, new music?”
This again. But I got up and followed her back downstairs to the first floor, to the door across the hall from the master bedroom. Inside there was a smaller bed covered in delicate, ruffle-edge bedding. Everything was white and pristine, with no personal belongings visible, no photos.
“Whose room is this?”
Sicily passed behind me and went to a set of double closet doors.
“Yours, I think,” she said.
“Really catty,” I said. “I should like this side of you better, but, for the record, I don’t.”
Sicily stopped with her hands on the door handles. “I’m not, like, taunting you or whatever. It’s a guest room, I guess. But when anyone comes to stay, Mom puts them in the basement. It’s more private down there, but I think it’s probably because of this.”
The doors opened to each side, like wings spreading.
Inside, the closet was stacked from the floor and, above on a shelf, to the ceiling with Christmas presents. Boxes and packages and bags with bows. The wrapping papers were varied: blues and silvers, greens and golds and reds, stars, snowmen, Santas, reindeer, holly and jolly, all accounted for.
“Great speckled bird,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
“You aren’t kidding about the gift-giving thing,” I said. “The tree’s already loaded and she’s got twenty-five tabs open on her laptop with more things you might like.”
“I think this is for you.”
I stared into the closet, everything within me going still. “What?”
“I’m pretty sure these are all presents for you.
I always wondered what they were for. Even opened a few over the years.
But I had to tape them back up, in case she noticed.
” Sicily reached in and grabbed a thick and squishy one.
The green-striped paper crinkled drily in her hand.
She held it out. “Last year’s wrapping paper.
Here, open it, if you don’t believe me.”
I backed up.
“It’s just a Christmas present, Dahlia,” she said. “From your mother.”
My mouth was dry. “I don’t want it.”
“Why not? It’s probably something warm, and you look freezing most of the time. Okay, what about—”
“I don’t want—any of it.” I stepped back. I couldn’t look at the kid. “Thanks for the offer of lunch, but I—I have to … I can’t.” I was in the doorway, somehow, already gone. “Tell Bonnie I’m sorry.”