by A. J. Banner
Mia lifted her right foot and wiggled it. “I’m Cinderella!”
I searched my purse for the keys. Where the hell were they?
“Open the door, baby,” Jessie said. “We can’t steal shoes. It’s dangerous to get in the car by yourself.”
Mia shook her head. “I’m Cinderella,” she repeated.
I cupped my hands to the window and peered into the car. The keys glinted on the front seat, mocking me. “I’ll have to call a locksmith.”
Jessie followed my gaze. “Oh no! Wait. I have an idea.” She unzipped her shoulder bag, brought out a golden tube of lipstick. “Mia, look here.” She held up the lipstick to the window. The initials M. K. were engraved on the side. “Remember when we tried on makeup?”
Mia looked up now, her eyes focused on the lipstick.
Monique’s voice echoed in my mind. I kept a gold pen by the phone . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jessie pulled out a matching compact, also engraved with the initials M. K. She opened the compact, the mirror reflecting a flash of sunlight. “This is magical princess makeup, and it’s all for me.” She made a show of applying the bright cherry lipstick, admiring herself in the mirror.
Mia flung open the door and emerged without a thought for how she had given us fibrillations. “I want to try,” she said, reaching for the lipstick. Then her face contorted into a grimace, and her lips began to tremble. Her eyes misted over with tears. “Mommy,” she said in a plaintive voice. “I want Mommy. Where’s my mommy? Mommy!”
Instantly, my irritation dissolved. I picked up Mia and held her tightly. “It’s okay, honey. We’re here.”
It took me a while to calm her, and later, after we’d returned Mia to Harriet, I confronted Jessie as I drove her back to the cottage. “You stole from the Kimballs.”
In the passenger seat, she breathed vapor on the window, traced a circle with her forefinger on the glass.
“How did you get Monique’s makeup?” I asked again.
Jessie shrugged. “She loaned me stuff.” She took the lipstick and compact out of her pocket, laid them on the seat. “I was going to give them back.”
“Jessie, you realize—”
Her face crumpled. “Please don’t tell. I thought she wouldn’t mind. I was going out to the Under 21 Club. I was going to put them back right after. I always do. She would never have known I took them. But then she and Chad came back early.”
“You can’t keep her stuff.”
“Why not? She’s dead now.”
“Jessie . . .”
“Well, she is. They both are.” Jessie looked out the window. After a minute, she said, “Do you think she was pretty?”
“Who, Monique?”
“She was a model once. In France.”
“She was elegant.” Monique’s voice floated back to me, the shimmer of her dress, the way she could walk in heels as if gliding on a cloud.
“Do you think her accent was sexy? Like Le fromage est sur la table?”
“You’ve been learning French?”
“I said, ‘The cheese is on the table.’”
“That’s good. Did you take any other things from Monique? What else do you have?”
Jessie looked down at her fingers adorned with silver rings. Then she looked up at me, her gaze wide-eyed and anxious. “Are you going to tell my parents?”
“That’s up to you. You do need to talk to them.”
“They’ll kill me.”
“They might be angry, but they’ll get over it.”
“I have some other things . . .”
“You can’t keep them.”
“I know.” Jessie twisted her hands together in her lap. “There’s one thing . . . It’s personal. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see it.”
“What thing?”
“A journal. I couldn’t help it. But it didn’t tell me anything.”
“What do you mean? What was it supposed to tell you?”
“She did say something, but not about . . . what I needed to know.”
A chill traveled up my back. “What did you need to know?” I turned onto Shadow Bluff Lane, the trees casting long autumn shadows across the road.
Jessie blinked away tears. “This one time, I was babysitting Mia. I tried on Monique’s makeup, just for fun. After Mia went to bed. I put on one of Monique’s black bras. I was only messing around. And . . . he came home.”
“Who came home?”
“Chad.” Jessie stared through the windshield at the dense forest. “I didn’t hear him come in. He said he forgot something. He looked like he’d been crying. Like maybe he wanted to get away from Monique. Like they were fighting.”
I turned up into the cottage driveway and parked. “How did he react to you? Was he angry?”
“At first, he was kind of shocked. He was like, what are you doing in our room? But then he looked at me in a whole different way.”
I went cold. “What way?”
Tears slipped down Jessie’s cheeks. She didn’t bother to wipe them away. “He said I looked beautiful.”
“And . . . ?” Could Chad have exploited this young woman, right under everyone’s noses? He’d seemed so friendly, so . . . normal. But then, Ted Bundy had seemed normal to his neighbors, as well.
Jessie’s eyes misted over, full of grief and longing. “He said I smelled like his wife. I was wearing her Dior perfume. The bottle was so pretty.”
I took a deep breath. “Did he—? Did you—? Did the two of you—?”
“First, he did this.” Jessie held her hand near my cheek. “I didn’t move. I closed my eyes. I wanted him to touch me.”
I tried to keep my voice steady. “What happened next?”
“He kissed me.”
“He did?”
Jessie leaned back against the headrest. “He was the best kisser. He didn’t tongue me, not the way Adrian does. Adrian slobbers. But Chad, he was gentle.”
“He kissed you, and that’s it? If something more happened, you can tell me. I’ll keep it confidential. Just between you and me.”
Jessie looked at me with an expression full of sadness and longing. “He told me to go home.”
“That’s it?”
“I called him a few times after that. Then he changed his cell phone number. And Monique started looking at me funny, too. It didn’t matter what I did, how I dressed, what I said. I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at her. He told me I was beautiful, but I guess I wasn’t beautiful enough. I wasn’t as beautiful as her.”
I had lived right across the street from Jessie, right next door to Chad. I’d seen them both coming and going. But I hadn’t really seen. “You know it wasn’t okay for him to do that. You’re underage and Chad . . . He was married.” He took advantage of your naïveté, your immaturity.
“But I wanted it. It was my decision, too.”
You only think it was. “You had a crush on Chad.”
Jessie leaned forward, her arms crossed over her abdomen. “It was more than a crush. My heart still hurts, and my stomach, too, like I ate something rotten, like the time I got the flu.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie.” I bit my tongue to keep from spouting useless advice. “What about Adrian?”
“I didn’t tell him, but he knew something was up.”
“You stayed with him through all this.” Back in my high school days, I had occasionally, shamelessly juggled more than one boyfriend at a time. Not that Chad had been a boyfriend to Jessie, as far as I knew.
“Yeah, but . . .”
“I know it’s hard. You’re a good person at heart. You deserve a future and happiness.” I yanked a tissue from the box on the dashboard and handed it to Jessie.
“So do you,” Jessie said, blowing her nose.
“Thank you.” I’ve forgotten the meaning of happiness. “Did you start, um, borrowing Monique’s things after that encounter with Chad?”
Jessie nodded. “All the guys looked at her. Even Adrian. He said she
was hot.”
“You wanted to be like her. And then maybe Chad would want you.”
Jessie ignored the crumpled tissue in her lap and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. The tears kept coming. “How come she mesmerized everyone? Even Adrian? What did she have that I don’t have? I feel bad that I’m even thinking this stuff.”
“You don’t need to be like her or anyone else. You’re fine the way you are.”
“Except for stealing, right?”
“You need to talk to your parents and come clean.”
“Yeah.”
I glanced at my cell phone. It was four o’clock. “Will you be okay driving home in your car? I can take you. We can get the Honda back to you later.”
Jessie sat up straight and took a deep breath, shoring up her nerve. “My parents will be home around six. So we have time.”
“Time for what?”
“You need to come over. I have to show you something.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jessie ushered me into the foreign world of her room, dimly lit by the tepid autumn sun. Her bed was an unmapped sea of wrinkled sheets. An iPod lay on the nightstand next to a black lace bra.
Where was the young Jessie I had known, still in thick glasses and excited about her science projects? The girl who explained the way images flipped upside down on the human retina, before the brain turned the pictures right side up again? Such mysterious mechanics of physiology had always fascinated her—she had talked of becoming an ophthalmologist.
But as her body had begun to mature, she had switched to contact lenses, and I suspected that sometimes, she made do with blurred vision for the sake of vanity. Ironically, her eyes seemed more hidden now behind mascara than they had behind her glasses.
Now she scooped up the bra and tucked it under her pillow in one swift movement. But she could not easily hide evidence of her night forays. A skimpy silver tank top glittered on an armchair. A mound of clothes rose up on the dressing table, next to a jumble of perfume bottles, tubes of lipstick, palettes of eye shadow. A mass of gold necklaces and beads spilled over the edge of a jewelry box.
But across from the bed, along the opposite wall, her childhood picture books squeezed into a tall set of shelves. I recognized Dr. Seuss titles, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said, rushing to the chair and grabbing the tank top. She shoved it into a drawer.
I looked around for a place to sit. She hurriedly smoothed the bed, making room on the cover. I sat on the mattress. “Do your parents know?” I asked her. Jessie crouched in front of her desk, which sat next to her bookshelves. Her back was turned to me. “Do they know what?”
“That you’re sexually active. I can tell.” In fact, I was only guessing.
She searched through her key chain, hesitated a moment. “You make it sound so technical.”
“It is technical, in a way.”
“It’s not about sex.”
“Maybe not for you.”
“They don’t know. Their heads would explode. They would lock me up.”
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“You don’t know my parents,” Jessie said bitterly. “Once I came home and my mom was in my room. In my space. She said she was doing laundry but that was a gigantic lie. She was snooping.”
“Parents do that because they care. I know how that sounds.”
“Stupid. It sounds stupid.”
“You’re using birth control, aren’t you?”
“The operative word being control. That’s what my mom is, a control freak.”
“Whatever you do, Jess, do for you. Look at your own dreams. At your conscience.”
“My conscience is not compatible with life these days.” She used a small brass key to unlock the bottom drawer of her desk.
“Don’t say that. You have a good head on your shoulders.”
“But I have to learn how to use it, huh?”
“You’re too hard on yourself. And on your parents, too. They’re doing their best.”
“When I turn eighteen, I swear. Only a couple more days.”
“You swear what?” I could not disguise the alarm in my voice. Jessie seemed younger than her age.
“Just, I swear, that’s all. Darn, damn, shit.”
“Jess—”
“My mom almost faints if I say shit. But people say a lot worse these days. Like—”
“You were going to say something else about your birthday.”
“I don’t even want a birthday cake or presents or anything.”
She glanced out the window, at the oblique view of what had once been the Kimballs’ house. Jessie’s room was on the first floor, facing the Calassis house. This room had been the guest room in our house across the street.
“Look, don’t do anything rash,” I said.
“Why not? Life is short. You never know when you’re gonna die, right? You could get burned to death in your sleep.”
“Your house is not going to burn down.”
“How do you know? You don’t know that. You don’t know when someone you love with all your heart is going to go up in smoke.” Her voice wobbled dangerously close to a cliff.
I realized, then, that even in the midst of her tearful confession of love for Chad, Jessie might’ve been lying, telling me what I wanted to hear. Had Chad stopped at kissing her? Or had he gone further? Jessie might never tell me the truth. People kept layers of secrets, I realized—the ones held close to the surface, wanting to be revealed, and deeper ones, hidden too far down to be retrieved or sometimes even acknowledged.
Jessie opened her desk drawer and brought out her loot—a glass paperweight with a leaf suspended inside, like an insect in amber; a gold Cross pen; a sample bottle of Dior perfume. A twilight-blue cloth journal with images of migrating geese woven diagonally across the cover.
She sat beside me on the bed, the journal in her lap. “I was going to put it back,” she said, “but the Kimballs came home early—”
“Where did you find this?”
Jessie pushed her hair out of her eyes. “She didn’t hide it very well. It was in her dresser under the bras.”
“But she did hide it. You shouldn’t have been rummaging in her drawers.”
“I know, but I found it. The cover looked so beautiful and I thought, maybe she wrote something like—I don’t know. Like maybe something about Chad wanting a divorce.”
“You thought he might get a divorce to be with you.” I kept my voice even—I had been naïve once, too. Perhaps I was still naïve in entirely different ways.
“Stupid, right?” Jessie gazed out toward the charred rubble, her eyes red and watery.
“Oh, sweetie, you’re not stupid. You’re just a teenager with a broken heart.” I had been there once, where she was now, when my heart shattered for the first time.
Jessie’s lips trembled. “Yeah,” she whispered.
“But you can’t go rummaging through other people’s stuff. You need to give this to the authorities.” What authorities did I mean, exactly? What would Ryan Greene do with a private diary? “Or maybe give it to her next of kin.”
“Who, Mia?” Jessie wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. “Not Harriet. Harriet didn’t even like Monique.”
“You should give it to the police.”
“What if I go to juvie? I knew this kid once—”
“Whatever happens, the truth is always the best policy.”
“What if I throw it back on the property? The cops could find it there.”
“You would know the truth. That you took it. They would know, too. They’ve already combed the property. The journal is not ours to keep . . . or even to read.”
“The cops will read it, too. And I already read it. She’s dead, what does it matter?”
“Jess. It matters.”
“Whatever.” She opened the journal and pointed at the first page. “She talks about a man she was with. Not Chad.�
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“How do you know that? People write fantasies. Not always reality.” The curtains began to slap against the open window, the wind picking up outside.
“Seems pretty real to me. She was sleeping with some guy named Jules.”
I inhaled sharply. The pages became porous, sucking up all the oxygen in the room, until I could hardly breathe. “That can’t be right.” Is Jules at home?
“Yeah. She had a boyfriend. A French guy. Jules is a French name, right? Or something?”
“Or something,” I said faintly.
“Look. Right here.” Jessie transferred the journal to my lap.
On the parchment-like paper, Monique had written Johnny’s nickname, Jules, from Jules and Jim, the movie we had all watched together. At the end of the movie, Catherine, the femme fatale, the woman both men loved, drove her car off a bridge with Jim inside, leaving Jules to deal with the ashes of his friends.
You would be Jules, the quiet one, Monique had told Johnny. Chad would be Jim, the noisy one.
And who would be Catherine? I had asked.
Moi, bien sûr.
Monique’s flamboyant handwriting slanted across the page, reminiscent of calligraphy from a time when penmanship had been a valued art.
Dear Jules,
We’re finally leaving. Our decision fills me with hope but also with grief. To move is to say a final good-bye to you. Mia imagines herself a princess moving into a mythic castle. Jim and I, we will make her dreams come true. If only I could believe in fairy tales as she does. Sometimes, when I see you, memories come back to me. Details. Moments. We agreed that we shared physical pleasure and nothing more. I know what I said, but for me, hearts and bodies could never be separate.
But I have grown to love Jim for his gentleness, compassion, and so much more. My heart and body are with him, at long last.
He never suspected the truth of what happened between you and me, but Harriet has always known. I see the way she looks at me. She thinks I’m a bad mother. She does not understand the depth of my love for Mia and now for Jim, as well. But as long as we stay here, close to you, the past will always be with us.
Jules, I wish . . .
Bonsoir, mon amour.
Monique
