Q: So what was your stepmother’s reaction when Ms. Mattingly didn’t come home that night?
A: Panicked. She called the police around two in the morning, after she and my dad went by Ricky’s house and nobody was there. But the officer brushed her off and said this is an adult woman who doesn’t have to abide by a curfew.
Q: Were you present when she called the police?
A: No, I was at my apartment with my wife and son. Diane called me about 3 a.m. and told me Clara was missing, and about her whole conversation with the police. She wanted me to drive around and see if I could spot them. So I got in my car and went looking in any place that seemed like a possibility. I even drove past the rectory, because it’s on the way to the pool hall, and saw all the emergency lights spinning through the trees, but I didn’t make any connection. If I thought anything it was that maybe some priest had a heart attack.
Q: And you received no contact from Ms. Mattingly in that time? No phone calls? No messages?
A: Nope. Nope. It definitely had me nervous. I always thought Ricky was a bad character and worried about her safety when she was with him. He had a short temper and a violent streak. I imagined all kinds of things could go wrong when she was with him, but I never imagined this.
I shouldn’t have unearthed those transcripts. They keep creeping back into my mind now, gnawing at me. I’ve guessed that when Annemarie went looking for her biological mother, she expected someone with a past—her birth certificate warned her she had been born in prison, after all—but surely not someone who hadn’t budged since then. And one whose name she already knew, no less. If she felt a morbid curiosity at first, it wouldn’t last long. I’m not the Hollywood actress she’s almost certainly seen performing a variation on my distant sins. I’m a liability, an embarrassment, and that is all.
What if she tracks down Clinton, I think all of a sudden as I watch Janny prod at the Jenga tower with an inquisitive finger. What if she realizes I have no worthwhile information to offer her, and seeks out my stepbrother instead? It was Clinton who kept the house after my stepfather moved into a nursing home. After a lifetime of halfhearted employment and false starts, he finally achieved stability by being the last one standing. The thought of Annemarie knocking on his door, witnessing the façade of affluence, is sickening.
She needs to get her answers from you, I think, and I drop my head into my hands, my hair blocking my view of the wobbly column of blocks. I don’t even know where to begin.
When Afternoon Classics comes on I stand at my makeshift barre and begin my barre work. The plies and eleves, the battement tendus and rond de jambes, all the steps I coaxed out of my memory and supplemented with a worn old book from the prison library. In a real class the music is based on what exercises the teacher plans for her students, but in my situation I must base my exercises on whatever happens to be on the radio. Yet I have learned to flow with it, and after a while the music tears open the fabric of this reality, the visual fact of it, and I walk through the wispy and ragged entrance it creates. Inside it, I’m in a rose-hued leotard and tights and a stiff round skirt. I recline in a chair like a sleeping swan. The room is familiar—the narrow bed with its loom-woven white coverlet, the wallpaper flocked with pink flowers, the map above the dresser, the open sewing box on a table at the center. And the man, faceless, standing in tense repose at the door.
I rise from the chair, dance away from him through the slanting shadows. My motions are nervous, mincing. They tell the story of a girl hastening to straighten the disorder, shirking away from the figure now stalking in the short space between the footboard and the far wall. He approaches, coming at me with feinting steps this way and that. Each time I hurry the opposite way, spinning in graceful disoriented circles, bumping the furniture. At last he takes two broad and powerful strides that force me to a rapid backward tiptoe, little bourré steps without the toe shoes, before I land gently, on my seat, on the bed.
I look up at him.
I know the dark hair, the pointy tips of his ears. I know the black waistcoat and stiff white collar. Where the face should be there is only emptiness, like staring into a dark pond, but I know who he is. Find yourself in the painting, my art professors used to say. The technique, the craftsmanship and style, all are important; but to fall in love with a work of art you must find in it what speaks to your soul, what you know to be true.
At the end, when I step out of the rip in the fabric and rest my hand on the steel bar again, taking my end pose in a cold room and a jumpsuit, I know with a fresh certainty that this is not a story for Annemarie. There has never been a single thing I can do for her, not to provide for her, not to protect her or nourish her—but at least I can give her a better story than this one. The truth is that she is good and worthy, and my part is only a matter of painting a picture in which she can see herself. Something grand, I think. Something beautiful.
Chapter Three
Ten days pass before I receive an answer from Emory Pugh, but he’s come through for me. The envelope is thick, and I eagerly unfold the four sheets of paper crammed into it. His letter is brief, as always.
Dear Clara,
Here are the pictures you asked for. I don’t have a copying macheine but I printed these out off the internet instead. I hope they are what you wanted. My printer does not do color. I think the one in front of your house is very pretty.
He goes on talking about other things, but I skip the rest and go straight to the photos. So strange that Emory Pugh has the internet in his house. We aren’t allowed any access to it at all, and I still don’t really understand it.
The first photo is Ricky’s mugshot. His thick brown hair is askew, and he’s grinning. There’s a sleepiness to his eyes, but they looked that way naturally—bedroom eyes singers used to call them, with a certain weight to his brow that always made him look like he had just woken up. This isn’t the kind of photo I wanted, but it’s still a bit of a shock to see his face—so familiar and also so young. I had known Ricky since I was nine years old; he grew older and I did, too, but at the same pace, matched to one another. Not anymore, though. Not anymore.
The page beneath it must be the one Emory Pugh was referring to. A slim blonde girl is sitting on the steps in front of the Cathouse, her dress pulled down over her knees, feet bare. She’s looking into the middle distance with a thoughtful expression. It’s true, she’s very pretty, but this isn’t me. That’s definitely the Cathouse behind her, but this is Katie Rayburn, the actress who played me in the film, posing for some sort of publicity shot. My friend in North Carolina is confused, but I can’t blame him for it. She does look like me, at least enough for a casting director.
And then, the one I was hoping for. He’s found it. It’s a shot of me and Ricky sitting in a booth at the Godfather’s Pizza in San Jose, about a year and a half before everything went wrong. Ricky has both arms thrown across the back of the booth, one disappearing behind my shoulders. We’re both smiling for the camera, and I’m caught in a half-turn, snuggling my body against Ricky’s side. He’s wearing one of his newsboy caps and a collared T-shirt, the one with the tiny alligator on the chest, which is tucked into his jeans. Ricky wasn’t a big guy, but in this pose—his body taking up most of the space in the photo’s frame, stretched out in the loose, authoritative way of men—it’s not difficult to remember his appeal. There was no threat to him, no machismo, only a careless sort of confidence and goodwill. He was just a boy in the neighborhood, and always the underdog. The one who detested sports, drew pictures during class and got jerked around by the jocks when they stopped by the Circle K to buy cigarettes after a game. Marlboro Reds box. No, I said Marlboro Lights box. Make that a soft pack. No, Camels. C’mon, faggot, what’s taking you so long?