Girl in the Rearview Mirror Read online

  By July, I’d rebuilt the whole house. I stacked the boxes against a wall and lived with the display for weeks, until one night, drunk and melancholy, I lit a fire in the courtyard grill and threw them in, one by one. Better not to remember. The bits of glue and polyester turned the smoke greasy and black, and bright, shiny fragments lingered like wreckage in the grate.

  Summer passed.

  In September, a professor emailed me about an internship with a developer’s office. It was unpaid, so I’d have to keep waitressing, but I’d get real experience. The firm constructed luxury homes in planned neighborhoods around the city. My first day, I wore a new pencil skirt and a real silk blouse. My boss, John, took me around to meet the architects and designers.

  By nine-thirty, I was unceremoniously led to a desk heaped with files. John’s secretary hadn’t returned from maternity leave, and I took her place. His department divvied up parcels of land into lots, fitting in as many houses as possible without losing the illusion of exclusivity. Nothing to do with design, but I kept the job. It filled my hours.

  I was hunched over my desk, trying to locate a particular permit among a stack of fat folders. I’d gone for drinks after my waitressing shift the night before, and a headache stuck its hammer and chisel into my temple. I tugged at my skirt, which kept riding up over the leather seat, and the papers slid off my lap.

  The door rattled open, and a big man came in, whistling. Big as in tall, with broad shoulders. He wore the nicest suit I’d ever seen, the color of new straw. He was handsome. Thick blond hair, and a face lovingly chiseled by time. Laugh lines framed his pale blue eyes, and a two o’clock shadow peppered his square jaw.

  One of my papers had drifted to his feet. He picked it up for me with a gallant gesture. He asked for John, and I buzzed him through.

  He was back again two days later: navy suit, green tie flecked with tiny white dots. He became a regular visitor. While he waited, he’d toss an idle comment my way, casually as a match to the sidewalk. The drought, the World Series, the light rail.

  One day he remarked that there wasn’t another person outside for blocks. It was eerie. He told me his favorite city was New York, with its bustling sidewalks.

  I said I loved Chicago. He was intrigued. “Cold country, huh? I’ve never been.”

  His name was Philip. He came around once or twice a week. Sometimes he brought me iced coffee, always with a mound of sugar at the bottom that zipped up the straw and crunched between my teeth like tiny diamonds.

  At the office manager’s birthday party, I asked what his story was. We were all packed into the break room tearing into a sheet cake like children. My coworkers were mostly middle-aged and pasty, as if their skin had absorbed the sickly fluorescent lighting. They were overworked and competitive, many still scarred from being laid off after the crash, but today Pam was talkative. She was turning fifty, and exuberant from everyone’s teasing.

  “You don’t know who Philip Martin is?” she said. “They’re right, I really am getting old! When I was your age, he was everybody’s dream. A football star. So good looking.” She paused for a bite of cake, holding her hand in front of her lips while she chewed. “He’s the Senator’s son. You know, Jim Martin.”

  The Senator I knew—in college he was reviled by students for his conservativism, although he was a generous donor. One of the buildings was named for him, his portrait hanging solemnly in the hall.

  “We all thought he’d do something major after school. Become a movie star, or go the big-time in football. He was really something. But there was some kind of scandal.” She tapped her fork against her lip. “He left the limelight then.”

  I asked what had happened, but she didn’t remember the details.

  “Landed on his feet, of course. His type always does. He owns a ton of land. He’s working with John on some mixed-use development. Restaurants, condos, the whole ‘boutique living’ thing.” She flashed air quotes. “I shouldn’t scoff. It’s keeping us in paychecks.”

  “I assumed he was a lawyer,” I said. “Working so closely with John.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” She winked. “He has been dropping in a lot lately.”

  “Please. You know John won’t return a phone call if he can help it.” But a giddy sugared feeling buzzed through my body.

  A few weeks later, Philip was holed up in a conference room most of the afternoon. At quarter to five a sleek blonde came in carrying a little girl on her hip. They looked alike, their fair skin flushed from the November chill, dressed in white cotton sweaters, the woman’s a slouchy kimono, the girl’s embroidered with sheep. Frowns puckered their foreheads as they stepped into the stuffy office.

  “We’re here to meet Philip,” the woman said. “Is he ready?” She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead and I saw a clutch of diamonds on her left hand.

  I offered to take a message in, but she said not to bother, giving me a tight smile. She put the girl down and settled into one of the transparent plastic chairs in the waiting area, pulling out her phone.

  The little girl sidled up to my desk and poked at the sculpture I’d set there: a wire figure holding a barbell with a metal sphere at either end. I showed her how it worked, pulling it off kilter and letting go. It bobbled back and forth, first violently, then slower and slower before coming to a stop in perfect balance. The girl laughed, a loud burble.

  I asked her if she wanted to try.

  She nodded shyly. Her teeth were tiny and white and spaced out, like pieces of candy. She told me her name was Amabel.

  The next time I saw Philip, he asked if I might be interested in babysitting. I’d made a big impression, he told me, smiling.

  I wore a new blue dress, but Philip wasn’t home. His wife, Marina, showed me around their incredible house. I wanted to peek into every room, touch the surfaces, but Marina gave off an air of elaborate boredom, which I emulated. She was dressed for a formal dinner in a silver gown that clung to the saber-like contours of her body.

  She opened a massive refrigerator and pointed out a meal someone named Eva had prepared for Amabel and me. Bottles of champagne lined the door, and a purple radicchio sat like a fat purse beside a ceramic bowl of eggs in a dozen shades of brown.

  “You’ll find everything, I’m sure.” Marina played with the clasp on her bracelet. Her cell number, not Philip’s, was on a Post-it note centered on the otherwise bare refrigerator door.

  Amabel had been coloring in the kitchen during my tour, and now she jumped down from her seat. She shouted, “I wanna show Finn my fox,” and darted away.

  “Don’t run up the stairs.” Marina’s voice was deep and flat, so she sounded as if she couldn’t care less. She looked me over. “Thanks for coming out. Kids get these crushes. I’m sure it’ll pass.”

  Making Amabel fall in love with me turned out to be easy. She led me to the playroom and proceeded to chatter for hours. She surprised me by preferring cheap plastic toys to the beautiful carved wooden ones on her shelves. Her particular favorite was a disturbing set of dolls whose heads snapped off and reattached to bodies in different outfits.

  I was enchanted by the four-story wooden dollhouse that opened on hinges like a jewelry box. Its rooms were elaborately finished with wallpaper and furniture and tiny knickknacks: an etched vase on the mantel, a goldfish bowl with an orange fish inside. I lifted the hinge of the toaster, and a piece of toast popped up.

  Amabel took it out of my hand. “You’ll be Jasmine,” she instructed, giving me a doll without a mouth.

  I was back the next Friday night, and the following Monday, and then Philip asked if I’d consider a more full-time gig. Marina wanted to focus on expanding the museum, he explained, though I’d never heard of any museum.

  “And Amabel adores you.”

  Absurdly, I felt triumphant. I tried to control my smile, so wide it stung my cheeks.

  I had to provide my real name for the background check. It was six days before Philip called to say we were all set, his
voice an unaltered purr. He asked me about Natalie, and I said, “I prefer Finn,” and something in my clear, curt answer must have stuck, because I never heard that name from them again.

  The next week, I went along on a trip to their house in San Diego. While the Martins hustled to massage appointments and dinner parties, Amabel and I played on the beach, the wind ripping through our hair. I ran along the ocean, seeing it for the first time. I’d expected it to be like Lake Michigan, wrinkled and gray. Instead, the ocean was a force, a roar in the deepest hollows of my ears. It was more alive than anything I’d ever seen. I felt like I’d found a door into a new world, bright and beautiful and flush with pleasure.

  I kept the tiny fishbowl with its goldfish on my nightstand, a talisman from the dollhouse. I told everyone the job was temporary. But I fell in love with Amabel, and with the Martins. I met the Senator, and then Bryant, and soon my friends were Bryant’s friends, the people I gossiped about were the Martins’ people. The few hours a week I spent alone, at my apartment or talking to my parents on the phone, my life felt faded and ill fitting, like the molting skin of a snake.

  4

  Popular wisdom says Arizona heat is tolerable because it’s dry. It’s true that back in the Midwest the summer air was so heavily damp you didn’t so much stroll in it as press through it, wearily. But this July, the Phoenix temperature rose to 110, 115, relentlessly, day after day. Exposed to the sun, skin grew taut and stinging, sweating from places I’d never known could sweat: shoulders, wrists, ankles. People took cover in the slim, slanting shadows of streetlights and stop signs and palms.

  The Tuesday after the Fourth of July festival, I was trapped in traffic, twenty minutes late to pick up Amabel from her afternoon enrichment camp. Heat shimmered in oily waves between bumpers. The sun had sunk to an angle impossible to block with a car visor. Light drove into my eyes like wind or rain.

  My dying air conditioner wheezed and spat warm air. Traffic crawled past blocks of upscale strip malls. A stucco Starbucks, a restaurant called Egg, designer outlets. Behind me, a Hummer reared onto the sidewalk, careened through a parking lot, and elbowed back into the street a few cars ahead. Horns blared.

  Finally, I came to my turn. Amabel’s camp was held in a private school, a low building surrounded by an appealingly ramshackle garden. The parking lot was empty, where usually there was a line of parents. I dashed out, leaving my car running.

  The doors were locked. Kids’ flag paintings were papered over the windows, stripes wavering and psychedelic. The lights inside were turned off. I yanked futilely at the door handle.

  “Hello? Amabel!”

  The day was mockingly peaceful. They wouldn’t have let Ammy go anywhere on her own; they were strict about sending kids out one by one as the moms’ cars arrived. Maybe they’d called Marina when I was late. Or she’d come to get Amabel for some unexpected reason, which had happened once, when Marina’s father had had a heart attack and they’d gone straight to the airport.

  I called Marina. No answer. Panic began creeping over my body, even as I tried to stay calm.

  Then I heard a squeaking sound. And another. Rhythmic and repeating.

  I heard, or hallucinated, a laugh.

  I hurried through the gardens toward the playground. The path wove romantically and inconveniently around prickling shrubs and raised beds of protuberant cacti and the swollen tongues of succulent leaves.

  Amabel’s voice, clear and bossy, shouted, “Higher!”

  I rushed around the last bend to the playground. Amabel was on a swing, safe, happy, her hair streaming behind her as a teacher pushed her high—too high, it seemed.

  “Amabel!” I shouted, sick with relief.

  “Finn!” She waved.

  The teacher was tall and thin, wearing a floppy sunhat and flared white sailor pants. Strange outfit for someone dealing with kids.

  “Thanks so much for waiting with her,” I called.

  The woman turned. She tugged the rim of her hat so it sprang into a parabola around her face. A face I recognized. Catlike and small under a frame of red hair.

  It was the girl from the fair. The redhead.

  “Hi, there,” she said. Amabel’s backpack was slung over her shoulder.

  Amabel swung between us almost comically, thrashing her legs to slow down. I snatched at the swing’s chain, jolting my arm. Amabel screeched. I hardly heard her. When I lifted her onto my hip, my shoulder flamed with pain.

  “It’s her!” She squirmed. “I told you!”

  I let her down and grabbed her hand. She wriggled brattily, and I tightened my grip on her wrist, making her squeal.

  I knelt to her level, breathing hard. Pink blotches of indignation rose on her fair face. “Are you okay?” I searched her for signs of harm, but she seemed fine, apart from her wrist. Her lip jutted.

  The redhead observed us, arms crossed, and I swore she was smirking. She was older than I’d guessed at the fair, early twenties, maybe. Even in the shadow of her hat, her skin was pale, almost opalescent. Against it, her hair was bright as a flag. She looked me up and down, assessing my pastel shorts and black tank top, my practical outfit suddenly childish. She stretched the red bow of her lips.

  “Is your shoulder all right?” Her voice was high and breathless.

  “What are you doing with Amabel?”

  The woman’s head tilted, as if perplexed. “I was visiting with your daughter? Amabel was telling me about her school?” Her voice rose at the end of every sentence. “I’m thinking of sending my own daughter here. It’s magical, isn’t it?”

  Around us, the gardens were as quiet as if the busy afternoon traffic, the bustling shops, didn’t exist. Birds shrieked and rustled invisibly in the daylilies. Their droppings pocked the spongy ground under the swings. Amabel’s hand was hot and damp in mine.

  “How old is your daughter?” I asked, skeptical. She was beyond thin; her body was wiry, lean muscles running tensely along her bones. Blue veins curled up her wrists.

  “She’s four?” She tugged at Amabel’s backpack strap.

  “She wasn’t at the fair with you. We saw you there, last weekend.”

  “You mean the fireworks? She’s afraid of noise.”

  “Amabel said she’s seen you before.”

  That laugh again. She crouched to Amabel and her hat brim hid her face. “Have we bumped into each other before? How funny. We must be neighbors.”

  Amabel grinned up at me. “Her name is Iris.”

  The woman clapped. “What a good memory! You must be very smart. I am Iris. And you are?” She held out a hand to me. Her nails were curved like talons.

  “We need to get going,” I said, pulling away. “I’ll take her bag.”

  She shrugged off Amabel’s backpack and held up her hands in surrender. She seemed amused.

  I felt I’d made a mistake, like I’d missed something. I tugged Amabel away.

  “Break a leg, sweetie!” the girl—Iris—called after us.

  Adrenaline surging in my limbs, I walked too quickly, Ammy stumbling to keep up. Tomorrow night, her camp was putting on a play to celebrate the holiday. She must have told this woman.

  When we reached the parking lot I glanced back, but the path to the playground was empty.

  As we drove, I scrutinized Amabel in the rearview mirror. She had no marks on her, her clothes weren’t askew, her feet were tightly laced into her princess sneakers.

  “How long were you with that woman?” I asked.

  “I dunno. After the other kids left. You were late.”

  “What did she want?”

  Amabel kicked the back of the seat, her face stiff with an expression of regal hurt.

  “I’m sorry I was late. But you should have stayed inside. Who let you leave without me? Huh?”

  Amabel stubbornly clenched her lips together.

  I pulled into a McDonald’s. My hands shook as I unbuckled her.

  Eventually—after four chicken pucks rattling in a cardboard box, c
hocolate milk, a Strawberry Shortcake doll in a plastic bag—Amabel talked. It was too good a story to keep to herself; she told it proudly, aware that I was acutely interested.

  She’d been in the school lobby, peeking through the artwork to watch for my arrival. Most of the other kids had gone. When she saw a car just like mine—silver and “little”—she called, “She’s here!” and scooted out. (I felt a flash of righteous anger at her teachers’ negligence, a momentary relief from my own guilt and fear.)

  When Amabel ran up to the car, both she and Iris were startled.

  “She was smoking,” Amabel said reluctantly, knowing it was naughty. “But she threw it away.”

  Iris was friendly. She asked Amabel if she wanted to play.

  Amabel was enchanted. Up close, Iris looked like a movie star. She laughed softly at everything Amabel said. She wore a green ring, and when Amabel admired it, she slipped it off and gave it to her. (Amabel reluctantly brought the ring out from her pocket and set it on the table. The metal was warm, greasy with lotion; the inset was faceted green glass.) Iris asked where she lived, and Amabel described the big house with the pool that Iris could come visit.

  Then I’d shown up, angry and mean, hurting Amabel’s arm.

  “You were rude,” she accused, spitting the word—Marina’s cardinal sin.

  Exasperated, I shook my head. “Being polite doesn’t mean talking to strangers, going off with them by yourself. That’s not safe. You know better.”

  She gaped at my unfairness. “She wasn’t a stranger! I knew her.”

  “No, you recognized her. That’s not the same thing.”

  She shrugged, whacking her plastic-wrapped doll against the table.