Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  I caught a cab at the corner of Greenwich and Jane. "Where to, hon?" the cabdriver asked. "JFK," I told him. I rested my head against the cool glass of the window and watched the city slide by: buses and cabs, trash cans overflowing with empty green champagne bottles, spent streamers and Happy New Year foam headbands crumpled in the gutters. The British Airways counter was open. I used my credit card to book myself on the first flight to Heathrow. My mother was in London, and even if she wouldn't talk to me or console me, London was the first place I could think of, and the farthest I could run.

  Eighteen

  The next afternoon, after feeding the kids lunch and putting them down for a nap (actual sleep for the boys, lying quietly on her bed leafing through a copy of Vogue she'd convinced me to check out of the library for Sophie), I surfed over to DieLauraLynn.com, one of the just over 1,700 websites, blogs, and online magazines devoted to the proposition that the media's latest blond conservative darling was misguided, wrong, silly, stupid, narcissistic, overly ambitious, dangerous to women the world over, and personally responsible both for the postmillennial death of feminism and for young girls' eating disorders. This site was the one that had broken the news that Kitty Cavanaugh had been ghostwriting for Laura Lynn Baird. It had an unflattering picture of Laura Lynn on the home page, with devil's horns protruding from her blond mane and animated flames issuing from her miniskirt. The words "Liar, liar, pants on fire: Laura Lynn's ghostwriter revealed!" scrolled in boldface eighteen-point red print across the bottom of the page.

  I clicked the link to enter the site and was whisked to a collection of all of the articles written about Kitty Cavanaugh's death and the revelation that she'd been penning "The Good Mother." I scrolled through slowly, jotting down notes, biographical data--Kitty's maiden name (Verree) and hometown (Eastham, Massachusetts, just as on the postcard I'd seen). At the bottom of the page was another link. "Media click here," it invited. When I clicked, an email popped up, preaddressed to tara@radicalmamas.com, with "Media Request" written in the memo line. I backspaced over "Media" so that all that was left was "Request." It was three fifteen, which meant I had fifteen minutes until Sophie roused her brothers and the three of them came down the stairs, demanding a snack or a trip to the park, or, God help me to endure it, another game of Candy Land.

  "Hello," I typed. "I am..." My fingers paused. I am what, exactly? A married mother of three trapped in a whitebread Connecticut suburb with too much time on her hands who just wandered across her dead neighbor's body came to mind.

  "I am a graduate student in women's studies," I typed instead, figuring that it had been true at one point in my life. "I am working on a paper giving a feminist critique of ghostwriting as a publicly sanctioned act of female self-erasure." There. That sounded nonsensical enough to actually be true. "I'd like to ask you some questions about Laura Lynn Baird and Kitty Cavanaugh. You can reach me at this number between 8:30 and 11:45, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday." I added my phone number, typed my name, and hit send before I could lose my nerve.

  Sophie wandered down the stairs with her Uglydoll tucked under her arm and her brothers trailing two steps behind her. "Nook," she requested--her babyspeak for "milk." I lifted her into my arms, sniffing her hair in search of a sweet, innocent whiff of Johnson & Johnson's No More Tears. Instead, I got a noseful of something expensive and probably French, since Sophie liked to tear the perfume samples out of the magazines.

  The telephone rang. I tucked it under my chin and scooped Sophie against my hip. "Hello?"

  "Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between eight thirty and eleven forty-five?" an amused young woman's voice asked. "I just had to call now to figure out whether you were in prison."

  "Not prison," I said. I helped Sophie and the boys into their booster seats and went to the refrigerator to find them a snack. "No, I'm a, um, part-time student with three kids, and those are the hours that they're in nursery school," I said, pulling out three pudding cups and plunking them down on the table.

  "Three kids in nursery school," the voice said. It was an arch, ironic voice, a young woman's voice attached to--I snuck a fast look at the caller ID while I unpeeled the pudding lids--a 212 area code. "Mercy me. Anyhow, I'm Tara Singh from Radical Mamas."

  "Mommeee!" Sophie wailed as Jack licked the top of her pudding container. I gave him a stern look and took a deep breath.

  "Whoa," said Tara Singh. "Sounds like you've got your hands full."

  "Yes," I said, pulling Sophie's pudding out of Jack's hands and distributing spoons. "Listen, if you'd be willing to talk with me, I get into the city quite a bit."

  "Oh, you do not," said Sophie, jabbing her spoon into her pudding. I glared at my daughter and tucked the phone more tightly against me. Too late. Tara Singh giggled.

  "Anyhow, is there a chance we could meet for coffee or a drink?"

  "Sure thing," she said. "Just let me look at my book..." I could picture this woman, a much hipper mother than I'd ever be, wearing a strappy tank top, low-rise jeans, and thick-soled boots, with her hair in a twist and an army-navy bag with a peace sign pin slung over her shoulders.

  "How's tomorrow?"

  Tomorrow was Friday. The kids had school in the morning. Then the boys had a six-month checkup with their speech therapist. They'd done a year of therapy starting when they turned two and weren't speaking more than a handful of words apiece. After nine months, the high-priced, extremely credentialed therapist had told me that her best guess was that the boys could talk but simply preferred to let Sophie do it for them.

  But maybe I could get Gracie to sit, and maybe Ben could come home early enough to give them dinner. I could get dressed up in grown-up clothes, meet Tara Singh for drinks, and then have dinner with Janie. Or with my father, who, I realized with another pang of guilt, I'd been neglecting.

  "Let's go somewhere fabulous," I said. Tara laughed at that, the slightly condescending laughter of a New Yorker dealing with a suburbanite whose entire knowledge of the big city came from watching expurgated Sex and the City reruns on basic cable.

  "Somewhere fabulous it is," she said, rattling off a name and an address. "Pastis...Nine Ninth Avenue," I repeated, scribbling it down with a purple Crayola on the back of a brown paper bag.

  "Hey, you didn't mention where you go to school."

  "Upchurch Community College" rolled off my tongue as if I'd been saying it my entire life. I got off the phone just in time to prevent Sophie from punting her half-eaten pudding cup at her brothers.

  "Behave," I said.

  Sophie stared at me blandly. The ring of pudding around her mouth looked like lip liner. "Mommy, you are lying," she said.

  I swooped down and covered her cheeks with kisses, surprising her. She giggled, then pushed me away. "Not lying," I explained, scooping up the abandoned pudding cups and tossing them into the trash. "Not exactly. I'm just telling a story."

  I hadn't been exactly right about Tara Singh, but I hadn't been that far off either. The low-rise jeans I'd pictured were present and accounted for. The strappy tank, in a pretty blush pink, was topped with a fitted coffee-colored corduroy jacket. No wedding ring. One tiny pin decorated the left breast pocket. "Mommies Are People," it read.

  "Thanks so much for meeting with me," I said, easing myself onto the rickety wood and wicker cafe chair at a table at Pastis. We were back in my old neighborhood, which was a lot more fabulous than when I'd lived there, if by fabulous you mean hot, noisy, and crammed with beautiful people, none of whom seemed to be eating anything I'd regard as a meal. As I picked up my menu, a gazelle in a pixie cut two tables over considered a plate of green beans.

  "My pleasure," Tara said, flipping open the menu. The green bean woman frowned at her plate, poked the beans with her finger, then summoned a waiter. "Is there butter on these?" I heard her ask.

  I shifted again before deciding that getting comfortable on the tiny chair wouldn't happen in my lifetime. When the waiter came, I ordered a glass of chardonnay and, in defiance of the
butterless green bean woman, a cheeseburger and fries. "Same for me," said Tara Singh. "With a Diet Coke." She replaced her menu. I pulled out my notebook. Tara grinned at it, then shook her head in mock sorrow.

  "So. Laura Lynn Baird had a ghostwriter," she gloated. "A dead ghostwriter. It's like Christmas came early this year!"

  "How'd you get the story?"

  She gave me a mysterious smile and smoothed her napkin on her lap. "Actually, it was an anonymous tip. An email. But when I called Content to check it, they didn't deny it."

  "When did you get the email?"

  Tara fiddled with her fork. "The day Kitty died, actually."

  "And you have no idea who sent it?"

  She shook her head. "I saved it, of course, and I forwarded it to the cops, but so far..." She shrugged again. I wrote it down.

  "You've been following Laura Lynn Baird's career for a while, right?"

  Tara nodded, still smiling, with her plum-painted lips parted to show square white teeth. There wasn't a single line on her coffee-colored skin. I wondered how old she was--twenty-three? Twenty-four? Awfully young to be a mama herself. "I know what you're thinking," she said.

  I raised my eyebrows and waited.

  "Do I think Laura Lynn could have killed Kitty Cavanaugh? The answer is maybe."

  Maybe, I wrote.

  "I wouldn't put anything past that bitch," Tara said. "Up to and including homicide. She was crazy--and not just because crazy makes good television. She was..." She grinned even wider and performed a gesture I hadn't seen since my own days on the playground: pointed her index finger at her head and twirled it in tiny circles.

  "Nuts," I said.

  "Institutionalized," Tara said. "Just before her father died. She checked herself into some clinic in Pennsylvania for a month. Her people said it was exhaustion. Please," she said, rolling her expressive eyes. "If you're exhausted, you go to sleep, not to Happy Meadows."

  I scribbled down the words Happy Meadows and made a mental note to ask my old snitch Mary Elizabeth whether she'd heard anything about this.

  "Well, actually, the paper I'm writing is about erasure as subversion. You know, women writers through history who've chosen to use pen names, or male names, or write anonymously, as a way of undermining the patriarchal...hierarchical..." Shit. Seven years ago I could've slung this bullshit with the best of them. "Anyhow. You really think that Laura Lynn could have done it? She'd be a pretty obvious suspect."

  "Even though she'd be a completely obvious suspect, even though she'd be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. I'm telling you, bitch is ca-ra-zee." She tapped her straw on the table until it burst out of its white paper wrapper. "Did you hear about the time she threw a can of Diet Coke at Chris Matthews's head?"

  "Um..."

  "I know it sounds like an urban legend, but it wasn't. It happened. We've got streaming video of it on the Web site."

  "So I guess the question is, does she have an alibi?"

  "Sure," said Tara. "Of course she did. The day Kitty got killed, she was addressing Women United for America's Future in Washington."

  "Hmm," I said, writing it down.

  "I've got an alibi too, in case you're interested," she said, making a sour face. "God knows the cops were."

  "Well, if you've got a Web site called Die Laura Lynn dot com..."

  Tara's peals of laughter rang out across the room, causing the green bean lady to scowl at us. "Please," she spluttered. "Do you think I'd really be that obvious?"

  Good point.

  "And just because Laura Liar has an alibi, it doesn't mean she wasn't involved."

  "But why?"

  "Maybe Kitty wanted what was hers," she said, twirling the straw wrapper between her fingers until it was thin as thread. "Maybe she asked for a cut of Laura Lynn's salary...or a byline. Maybe she threatened to go public--tell the world that not only was Laura Lynn not writing that wretched column, but the closest Laura Lynn ever came to caring for her own child was holding him during photo shoots."

  "So..." I put the pieces together. "You think that Laura Lynn could have hired someone to have Kitty killed?"

  Tara grinned again. "Sure. She could have waved ten thousand tax-free dollars in front of some broke-ass Young Republican who'd run up a bunch of credit card debt. Why not?" She sat back, looking satisfied, as a waitress delivered our burgers. "And Laura Lynn was a major right-to-lifer--oh, excuse me, she was an advocate for preborn Americans. Don't you love that? Preborn Americans? I wonder what that makes us. Postborn? Anyhow. Right-to-lifers and gun nuts--plenty of overlap in that Venn diagram, and Laura Lynn was their patron saint." She nodded as she picked up her burger. "I could imagine her getting in touch with one of those wack jobs, showing them Kitty's picture and saying, This woman's an enemy of the preborn. Or that she'd threatened Laura Lynn. Or that she was having sex with contraception." She burbled more laughter. "Sure, I could completely see it going down that way."

  "And what about Kitty Cavanaugh?" I asked.

  "You're writing about erasure?" Tara asked, and I nodded. "Well, she's your girl. She doesn't have much of a paper trail," Tara said. "Grew up on Cape Cod. Graduated from Hanfield in ninety-one, and then I couldn't find anything until ninety-five, when she started writing for a hospital newsletter. She did some pieces for women's magazines--Redbook, Cosmo--in the nineties. Mostly health-related stuff, stories about young women with breast cancer, 'Ten Diet Tips for Strong Bones,' like that. Nothing political at all, as far as I can tell. She got married in 1999, moved to Connecticut, and then she started ghosting for Laura Lynn." She took a bite of her burger, wiped her lips, and looked at me. "Did you know her at all? Did she believe that shit, or just write it?"

  "I don't know," I said, setting my own burger down and feeling like I actually knew less about the mysterious Kitty Cavanaugh than I had when I'd thought she was just another inferiority complex-causing Upchurch supermom.

  "You want to know the weird thing?" Tara asked. She shifted in her seat, smoothing the lapels of her jacket. "She looks...kind of nice, in her pictures. Not like Laura Lynn, who always looks like she's on the verge of spitting. Kitty looked like someone you could be friends with, you know?"

  I nodded, thinking about my own Kitty sightings: Kitty in the park, Kitty in the supermarket, Kitty nodding hello at the soccer field or running the cookie-decorating table at the Red Wheel Barrow holiday craft fair with a kind word for every child. And hadn't she always been friendly to me...and my kids? She'd always smiled. I remembered that now. I'd thought she'd been smirking at my cheap, sloppy clothes, at my fractious children, at how chaotic our lives seemed next to her own, but maybe her smiles had been just smiles. Maybe my own insecurities had gotten in the way of our actually getting to know each other, and maybe even becoming friends.

  "Kitty used to live in New York, right?"

  "Bunch of places," Tara said. "Park Slope for a while, then Chelsea, then the West Village."

  I flipped a page in my notebook and heard Kitty's voice on the telephone. We have a mutual friend..."Did you ever come across the name Evan McKenna in conjunction with Kitty? Or Laura Lynn Baird?"

  Tara shook her head. "Why? Who's he?"

  "Nobody," I said, and flipped my notebook shut. "He's nobody."

  After finishing my burger, showing Tara my kids' pictures and admiring hers, and thanking her for her time and her insights, I walked out of the restaurant, pulled out my cell phone and finally returned Evan McKenna's call. My message was short and sweet: "Evan, it's Kate Klein. I need to speak with you." Then my cell phone number. Then "Goodbye."

  I put the phone in my pocket and looked around through the swirling crowds of people along the cobblestones on Gansevoort Street. They all seemed to be twenty years younger than I was, their bright chatter rising like snowflakes in reverse into the starless black sky. The boys wore knit caps with pom-poms on top--a new fashion, one more I'd missed--and the girls all seemed to be wearing skinny striped knit scarves that they'd twined arou
nd their necks in double and triple loops. I looked down at myself: three-year-old navy wool coat, Janie's sweater, canvas tote bag, scuffed black boots. Then I sighed and started uptown to meet my father.

  Nineteen

  "Birdie," my father said, opening the Met's backstage door and folding me into his mothball-scented embrace. He held me at arm's length and looked me up and down while I smiled under his scrutiny. "You look great. Come on," he said, swinging his oboe case beside him as we walked to the subway. He slid his Metrocard through the sensor once for himself and once for me. "Are you hungry? Did you have any dinner?"

  "I did, but I'll keep you company," I said. Back at the apartment, I carefully removed the razor blades he used to make his reeds from the dining room table and hung my coat over the back of the chair that had always been mine. Nothing ever changed here. The piano was still draped in the same fringed scarves, still topped with the same framed photographs; the walls of the dimly lit living room were still lined with pictures of my mother--publicity stills, or shots of her on stage, in costume. I tossed my coat on the plush pink love seat, and gathered up two months' worth of newspapers and takeout menus. My father set the table. I emptied the dishwasher and checked the fridge for the staples that would satisfy me that he was keeping himself fed. There was a desiccated packet of deli turkey, a container of olives rimed in blue mold, two slices of petrified bread, and a box of baking soda.

  "I've been eating at the diner," he said. He'd pulled off his jacket and bow tie, and his suspenders hung down around his knees. "And there's milk. See?" He waved the carton at me, and I nodded my approval. The doorman buzzed up, my father went to the door, and a few minutes later the kitchen table was covered with steaming cartons of spareribs, dumplings, chicken with broccoli, spicy green beans, and fried rice.

  "How's the investigation?" my father asked, popping a water chestnut into his mouth.