Silent Pretty Things

by O. J. Lovaz

  “Gosh, Frank, do you have to make it so creepy? Are we talking about demons now?”

  “In a way, we are. Guilt is the cruelest of creatures.”

  “All your bizarre drama aside, you may be right,” Anna admitted. “She must have been responding to a message from Dad. I’m stepping on a ledge here, but they might still be having an affair. Ugh, just to think of it makes me cringe! I bet Dad wants to continue the affair.”

  “Of course—he could rob an orphan toddler of his only toy and sleep soundly at night.”

  “But Aunt Marlene, on the other hand, ridden with guilt, as you’ve so vividly conveyed, wants to stop.”

  “We have our theory,” said Frank. “Now, if only we could get a hold of his phone to read their entire conversation, we would have this mystery solved in no time.”

  “You almost made that sound easy. We aren’t hackers, so we would need to somehow steal his pass code first—already a daunting task.”

  “And then we’d need to set up some kind of situation that would make him leave his phone unattended. And everything would probably have to be done pretty fast.”

  “A lot of things could go wrong with a plan like that,” Anna concluded. “I think it would be very risky.”

  “Would it? It does sound like a grand adventure. I wouldn’t mind being the one to unmask the beast. That would be something, huh?”

  Anna stood up, as her neck had started to hurt from looking up at Frank. With her left hand, she played three random low notes on the piano, for no reason whatsoever, and then an idea hit her.

  “There’s another option—Aunt Marlene. She would have the same conversation stored on her phone.”

  She couldn’t believe that she was actually encouraging Frank’s crazy ideas about playing detectives and stealing phones and pass codes, yet there was something liberating in this scheming with her brother.

  “But how would we get our hands on her phone? It’s about a four-hour drive to Baltimore, which is fine, but we haven’t visited her, or even seen her in years. It would be pretty odd to show up there, just out of the blue.”

  “Maybe Diane could do it, if we told her everything—which we should—but then again, who knows where she’s been for the last couple of years.”

  “Diane, huh?” Frank seemed interested. “I bet we could find her. She must have some kind of presence in social media or at least left a trace somewhere on the internet.”

  Anna paced to the kitchen counter and back, recalling her previous efforts to locate their cousin. “I looked her up a few months back on all the social media platforms I know and couldn’t find her. I think she doesn’t want to be found.”

  Frank looked puzzled. “Why would someone want to disappear like that? You don’t think she’s evading the police or something, right?” He laughed. “I do remember she was a bit of a wild child.”

  Frank’s remark evoked in her memories of the little troublemaker that was Diane back in the day. “She was spirited, for sure! Anyway, I’ve heard nothing about her since she had that big falling out with her mom years ago. Seems like she got rid of her phone, email—everything.”

  “Yeah, she vanished, just like that. Quite a trick to pull off, right?”

  “I’m not sure that it would be that difficult, if you really wanted to.” Anna wondered what that might be like; to leave everything behind, disappear without a trace, maybe even change one’s name, and live a whole new life far away from everyone one knew before. It didn’t seem so terrible. A rather alluring idea, actually, going somewhere new—but leaving her mother behind, could she do that?

  “Well, anyway,” Frank declared, “since she’s cut off all contact with Aunt Marlene, maybe she wouldn’t be of much help to us.”

  “But we really can’t be sure about it,” Anna said. “We are making wild guesses about her state of mind, feelings and intentions, when we haven’t talked to her in at least two years.”

  “Wild guesses are all we have, about everything,” said Frank. “Doesn’t mean we are wrong, though.”

  “Anyway, finding Diane might lead us somewhere. What if she knows something?” The thought hadn’t occurred to her before—some sleuth she was!

  “That’s true. You know, the last time I saw Diane was at Grandpa’s funeral. That drive to Baltimore was also the last trip we had together with Mom and Dad. I remember Mom was crying quietly the whole way, looking out the window, never looking at Dad.”

  “Gosh, you’re right. I was, um, seventeen, at the time; Diane is three years younger than me, so she must have been fourteen. I can’t believe it’s been that long. After that I only spoke to her on the phone, and not very often. I guess life happened. I don’t know.”

  Anna felt a tinge of sadness and the sting of guilt.

  Frank seemed immersed in a thought, then asked, “When you looked her up, did you try different variations of her name?”

  “I did—tried Diane Jennings, then Diane Wilde, then hyphenated, Jennings-Wilde. Same result.”

  “Jennings,” Frank repeated with a curious look on his face. “I’d almost forgotten Uncle George. Do you remember him?”

  “Only vaguely. I was still pretty young when Aunt Marlene divorced him, and then I never saw him again.”

  “Yes, I know. He was actually very nice.”

  Anna chugged down some water. “So anyway, I’ll give it another try tomorrow—finding Diane, that is.”

  “All right, I will too. Call me if you find anything, and I’ll do the same.”

  “I think you have more important plans tomorrow. Let me do the searching; and I want to be the first you tell when Sarah says yes.”

  “It goes without saying, little sister.” Frank moved off the wall and walked toward the spot with the guitars. “And trust me: with or without Diane, we are going to get to the bottom of this awful business.”

  He took his brand-new Fender electric guitar from the wall. “But right now, let’s give it a rest—we’re done with that ghastly thing for the night. I owe you a rocking guitar solo.”

  Frank made his guitar cry, laugh, and scream, skillfully and passionately. They rocked the night away, playing some of their old favorites. When it started getting too late for the kind of noise they were making, they switched to mellow rock ballads.

  Anna left Frank’s close to an hour after midnight and went straight home. She felt lighter, relieved—she’d done well with Frank. He hadn’t stormed off to confront her father, he’d been reasonable—and now, she wasn’t alone in this.

  She could have sworn the car drove itself home. She was half asleep already when she made it to her bedroom. She took off her shoes and dropped like a rock on her bed with her clothes still on. Her last conscious thought—tomorrow she’d search for Diane fanatically, in the darkest corners of the internet if necessary. She wouldn’t leave a rock unturned.

  CHAPTER V

  When Diane Jennings clocked out at 4:00 p.m., she had plenty of energy left to make the most of her Saturday evening. The bus station was a short walk away from the large hospital just outside of Boston where she had begun working as a nurse three months ago. She got there a few minutes before the bus arrived.

  Diane texted her friends Stacey and Camila and made plans to meet them at a tapas bar in two hours. It hadn’t been a bad day at the emergency room; better than most days anyway—it could get pretty scary there sometimes, especially at night.

  She worked nights Monday through Thursday and had Friday and Sunday off, with Saturday’s day shift stuck in between—a bizarre, impractical schedule. Friday had been demoted to a mere parenthesis in her week—nap day. The closest thing to a weekend she had started after work on Saturday evening and ended midafternoon on Monday.

  From her stop, Diane walked five minutes to her apartment complex. In another forty minutes, she’d taken a shower, blow-dried and combed her hair, and done her makeup.

  She inspected the final result on the mirror and was very pleased with her look—the makeup was jus
t right, making her blue eyes pop out; and her dark-brown hair, complemented with caramel highlights, looked full and lustrous. She got into a tight black dress, one of her favorite pieces of clothing, and completed her outfit with a pair of black high-heel shoes.

  Having some time to spare, Diane took her laptop computer, crossed over to her tiny living room, and sat on the couch to check her email.

  This was a new email account. She’d closed her old one two years ago along with her social media pages; a fresh start. She’d only used this one in her job search and to write to her father—she made him promise not to share her contact with anyone, especially not her mother, his ex-wife Marlene.

  Sifting through the piles of digital garbage that she’d accumulated over the last few days; she saw a new email from her dad and hastened to open it.

  Hey kiddo!

  I am going to New York in two weeks for a marketing-and-sales conference my boss wants me to attend. It took a little arm twisting, but I finally accepted the burden of going to the Big Apple for five nights, weekend included, staying in a luxury hotel, eating and drinking to my heart’s content, all paid by the company, and, sure, sitting in on a few entertaining presentations and collecting business cards from pretty ladies.

  So I was wondering if you would like to meet me in New York. I checked the train schedule from Boston and the last departure on Saturday is at 6:30 p.m. It gets to New York by 11:00. I can pick you up at the station, and if you’re not too tired, we can go to a piano bar or something, anything you like. Then on Sunday, we can take in the sights of Manhattan, go for a walk in Central Park, take the subway to Times Square. The last train to Boston from New York departs at 7:00 p.m., so we would have almost the whole day for ourselves. It will be great.

  It goes without saying that you won’t have to worry about expenses. I’ll pay for your train tickets and won’t let you spend a penny of your own money in New York. It’s the least I can do for my daughter. It was so wonderful seeing you in Boston last year, and we had such great fun. We are due for another great time like that. So, just say yes, and I’ll buy your tickets.

  One more thing. I promise not to upset you or anything during our time together in New York, but maybe over a glass of wine, just for a few minutes, I do want to talk to you about your mother. I would very much like you to let her back into your life. She needs her daughter, and you need your mother. I know you’ve always blamed her for our divorce, but love is a lot more complicated than that. The heart cannot be compelled to love or stop loving. If nothing else, I’m thankful to your mom for giving me the best gift I could have hoped for, you!

  Love,

  Dad

  Tears came streaking down Diane’s face. Her makeup would be ruined, for sure, but she cared little about that now. Her mind was flung into a storm of thoughts and feelings which she couldn’t altogether comprehend—tenderness shrouded in melancholy, resentment entwined with regret, and even a tinge of compassion for her mother, burning faintly under a timeworn layer of pride.

  How could her mom have stopped loving this saint of a man? Even now, he defended her and pleaded on her behalf, with nothing to gain from it. The perfectly natural thing would be for him to resent her, if not for the breakup, at least for the time stolen from a life together with her daughter.

  Diane’s memory of the divorce was painfully clear—she’d just turned eight years old. Soon after, her mother decided that they would move to Maryland, hundreds of miles away from her father. Even then, her father managed to visit her at least every other month, staying in cheap motels nearby just to spend a weekend with her.

  The more she had to wait to see her dad, the more memorable their encounters became; and by contrast, the more awful her bitter, nagging mother seemed to her every day.

  By the time she became a teenager, Diane already avoided talking to her mother as much as possible, and when they did talk about anything but the most immaterial of trifles, one of them, or sometimes both, would wind up in bitter tears, such was the rancor that Diane had bottled up, like the foulest of wines.

  After high school, she got a cashier job at a home-improvement store and got the hell out of her mother’s house. They exchanged heated, hurtful words at the time.

  Then she left town, cutting off communication with everyone but her dad. He’d always been an angel in her life. In fact, she was able to complete her nursing degree program in no small measure because of her father’s support.

  Diane wiped off her tears with the back of her hands, smearing her makeup and getting it on her hands too. She began typing up her response.

  Hi Dad,

  That sure sounds amazing. Let’s do it. You go ahead and buy them tickets. Thank you so much. I’ll be looking forward to it. I always look forward to hanging out with you.

  I would hang out with you at the edges of hell—and I think we have, haven’t we? Kidding! But Manhattan, well, you’ve really outdone yourself this time.

  Now, about that other thing—I’m not sure that Mom ever deserved you, or that she deserves your kindness now, but you sure deserve that I listen to all you want to tell me. We can talk at that fancy piano bar you want to take me to.

  Hugs and kisses,

  Diane

  After sending the email, she went back to her bedroom and, as quickly as she could, removed her smeared makeup using two towelettes, and started the process again.

  It was now just about time to leave if she wanted to get to the tapas bar by 6:00 p.m., though she knew her friends would not really be annoyed if she got there a few minutes later.

  All she needed now was to find her small black-and-white evening purse, which she knew must be somewhere in her bedroom, but where? She looked in the closet, where it would normally be, but it wasn’t there. She searched around the room impatiently, went to the living room and back, then sat on her bed to think with her eyes closed, and that’s when she recalled that, for no apparent reason, she had put it in the bottom drawer of the dresser.

  She dashed there, opened the drawer, and there it was, her darling little evening purse, which had been a birthday gift from her father and always reminded her of happy times with him. Beside it was a letter she had last opened almost a year ago, a letter from her mother—she’d sent it to her old address in Maryland just before the postal service’s mail-forwarding period expired.

  Diane never called her or wrote back.

  She felt drawn to the letter now, the reason why she couldn’t have articulated, but sure enough she lifted it from the bottom of this drawer that contained nothing but the purse and the letter itself.

  It occurred to her that this bottom drawer was special as it only contained items of nearly magical qualities—beloved, dreaded, or despised, but special nonetheless. This was no longer a place to store socks, panties, shorts, camisoles, or trinkets of any sort. Hereafter, the price of admittance into this drawer would be tears, whether joyful or bitter. An engagement ring, a child’s handprints, or the last train tickets, only those sorts of items would prove worthy of entry into this reborn bottom drawer.

  She took the letter out of the envelope slowly, as if seeing it for the first time. As she opened it, she wondered if she might find new meanings in her mother’s letter.

  Dear Diane,

  I pray to God that you get this letter and that you’re well and happy. I suppose there must be a reason why you have decided to shut me out of your life, disappearing like this without notice and without as much as a trail of crumbs to follow. You must think me your enemy, an ogre from which you must run away and hide. I guess I may have done and said some things to earn your resentment. I know damn well that I have made more than my fair share of mistakes in this life.

  You might find this hard to believe, but ensuring your well-being and happiness was all I wanted to do ever since I first felt you moving around in my womb. It’s very difficult for me to accept that I was so bad at being a mother that you must hate me so much today.

  Allow me to give
you a few words of wisdom. You will find, hopefully not the hard way, that life can be as treacherous as it is beautiful, and sometimes, you’re not quite sure which side of the coin you’re on. There are almost infinite ways to mess up your life—some, like dating gangsters, are very obvious, but there are much subtler dangers, teeny bad choices that lead to other bad decisions, slowly leading you astray until one day you’re left wondering what the heck happened to your plans and dreams.

  You would do well to remember that the devil always comes wearing its best colors. I must admit that I stepped on a few landmines myself when I was younger than you’re now, and so I may have obsessed with preventing you from making the same mistakes. I’m sorry that I didn’t always have the level-headedness to give you advice the right way, as I should have. It’s just that you have learned all too well how to push my buttons. There’s too much of me in you, I guess.

  About your father, I won’t say much, only a couple of lines, because enough has been said already. He’s an amazing person and the best father you could have had. For that, I will forever be grateful to him, and I hope you always keep him involved in your life. Such a great man deserved to be truly loved by his wife, and I just didn’t have that to give to him anymore. He has that now, and I am happy for him. Love is a mysterious thing that doesn’t obey any rules we might want to impose upon it. That is all I can coherently say about that.

  I hope you will at least give me some peace by letting me know that you’re doing well, wherever you are. I would have wanted a college education for you, and I was shocked and disappointed when you just up and went to live on your own. I felt you were throwing your life away; but you’re smart and determined, some might say stubborn too, so I know you will accomplish whatever you set out to do.

  I miss you terribly. A mother should not be estranged from her daughter. My sincerest desire is that we mend our relationship. I will be here, waiting with open arms and requiring no explanations. Please know that however imperfect a mother I may have been, I have always loved you above everyone and everything else. I know you must know that.