Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  "Trouble is," Stan said, "the hotel said you weren't actually there all four nights. You were checked in all four nights, and you paid for all four nights, but I finally got someone in housekeeping to return my call, and it turns out that on the day of Kitty's death you never slept in the room."

  My body went icy. I turned in slow motion and looked at Evan, who'd raised his hands. "It isn't what you think," I heard. And, "I was staying with a friend." And finally, the time-honored refrain of cheaters--and maybe killers--throughout time, the world over: "I can explain!"

  "Why don't we get this sorted out at the station?" Stan asked. He turned back to me. "Goodnight, Mrs. Borowitz."

  "Fine." Evan glared at Stan, then turned to me. "Don't worry, Kate. This is all a big misunderstanding."

  I stared at him as Stan ushered him into the patrol car. "I'll call you!" Evan said softly. The car pulled away, leaving me standing there shivering in my unzipped winter coat, with Evan's car parked in front of my house and a pornographic magazine lying on the road beside it. Then I picked up the magazine, turned and ran across the yard, opened the door, rekeyed the alarm, and kicked off my boots. Bad dream, I whispered. Bad dream, bad dream, bad dream, I thought, as I crept up the stairs and made sure each of my children was still sleeping. In the morning, I peeked through the bedroom window with my heart hammering. Evan's car was gone, and my spirits lifted briefly as I indulged in a brief fantasy that maybe I'd imagined the whole thing. But when I pulled my coat on for another trip to the supermarket, Eager Beaver was still stuffed in my pocket, and the sleeves still smelled faintly of bile.

  Thirty-Seven

  "Mommy!" said Sophie, straining forward as much as her car seat would let her.

  I stifled a sigh, plastered a patient smile on my face, and turned around. "Yes, honey?"

  "Jack and Sam want to know if we're there yet."

  I turned around a little more to see both of the boys in question dozing in their respective seats. "Soph, they're sleeping."

  "They told me," she said stubbornly. "They're curious." She'd learned the word curious the week before and had been using it almost constantly ever since. I bit my lip to hide my smile. Sophie had dressed Uglydoll in a pink crocheted bikini, even though I'd told her over and over that, while we were going to the beach, it was too cold to swim, and plus, wasn't the doll supposed to be a boy? "Look," I said, pulling out the TripTik that my husband was using to supplement the MapQuested directions. "We're on this road," I said, pointing at I-195. "We have to take it until we get to this road..." I pointed at Route 25. "Then we'll go over a big bridge."

  Sophie's eyes got wide.

  "And then we'll be in Cape Cod?"

  "Yes, but we'll have to keep driving until we get to the part of Cape Cod where we're going to stay." I pointed to a blue dot on the map. "Truro. Right here, on the wrist of the arm."

  "Oh." She considered this for a minute, then started kicking rhythmically at the driver's seat in the approximate vicinity of Ben's kidneys. I knew I should have told her to stop. Instead, I closed my eyes. I'd called Stan from the Red Wheel Barrow parking lot on Monday morning and learned that Evan had been released early that morning.

  "So his alibi checked out?"

  "Seems to have," Stan rumbled. "We'll be checking with a party in West Palm Beach."

  "A party in West Palm Beach," I'd repeated, picturing a bronzed bombshell in a bikini.

  Stan paused. "You're an adult," he finally said. "I don't want to tell you your business."

  "Stan, nothing was happening, I swear--"

  "Just be careful," he said. I promised him I would. Still, I'd spent what felt like every waking minute thinking about Evan, while Ben put in fourteen-hour days in an effort to ensure that Ted Fitch wouldn't bolt and that he'd be able to take a four-day weekend. What if the last seven years of my life (and the three kids who'd come during them) had all been a mistake? What if I was supposed to be with Evan all along? What if he was all those things the love songs were about: my one and only? Then I heard Janie's voice in my head, telling me that Evan was interested only in the chase, the thing he couldn't have, whether that was me or Michelle or somebody else. And what was I supposed to do about it now?

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, we were pulling down a steep, curving driveway surrounded by bare brown branches dusted with snow.

  "Here we are!" said Ben as he rolled up to the garage of a big modern house that looked like three gray shoeboxes turned on their sides.

  I looked at the oversized sliding glass front door. "Are you sure?"

  "Here." He passed me a sheet of paper with a printed picture of the house. I consulted the photograph, then looked at the house, its grayed, weathered facade broken here and there by oversized square windows. "Yup, that's it." I paused. "Cheerful place."

  "Brian says the house turns its back on the world," Ben said, putting the car in park. All three kids had fallen asleep. We sat quietly for a minute, listening to the ticks of the cooling engine and the wind. "It's beautiful inside," he said.

  "I'll take Brian's word for it," I said, getting out of the seat and inspecting the empty garden beds, divided into neat rectangles and covered with mulch, each one absolutely empty.

  "Come on," said Ben. He'd gathered all the suitcases and duffel bags and our six bags of groceries, including a twenty-pound turkey, and started ferrying them to the front door. He must have made up his mind, or written himself a memo--Try harder with wife--because he'd been on his best behavior for the entire ride up. He'd stopped before I'd asked him to, purchased my preferred traveling snacks (Dunkin' Donuts coffee and roasted sunflower seeds), and kept the kids entertained by singing along to every song on Dogs Playing Polka.

  "I'll bring everything inside. Why don't you go explore."

  "Okay." I crunched across the gravel path and slid open the sliding front door. There were three bedrooms downstairs, linked by a hallway of creamy tile. Sunshine spilled through the doors and through the oversized windows in each of the bedrooms, making warm golden squares along the floor.

  I climbed the stairs. "Oh, wow." The entire second story--living room, kitchen, dining room--were all one open space lined with floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that looked over the blue-green water of Cape Cod Bay.

  "Look at that view," Ben said. I jumped a little as his cheek brushed against my neck.

  "Our bedroom should be down this hall." He took my hand and led me into a big, high-ceilinged room. To my right more sliding glass doors looked out over the empty garden beds and the rolling green hills we'd driven through to get here. To my left, through another wall of doors and high windows, was a small deck, with a double chaise longue. Beyond that was the water again, gentle waves lapping at a shore lined with seaweed and driftwood. "And look at this!"

  The bedroom had its own bathroom, with a sunken Jacuzzi big enough for two, and a toilet in its own snug little stall. "You can poop while you're looking at the ocean," I said.

  Ben's hands slid off my shoulders. "That was beautifully put, my bride."

  Getting rid of the rest of my family the morning after Thanksgiving hadn't turned out to be hard at all. I'd told Ben I needed a few hours to scrub the pots and pans and maybe take a walk. He'd nodded approvingly. "Don't work too hard," he said, causing the fishhook of guilt that had taken up permanent residence in my chest to give a painful twist. "Take a break," he told me and kissed my cheek. "Everything was delicious." I managed a weak smile as he piled the kids into the car for a trip to the pirate museum in Provincetown. As soon as the minivan had pulled out of the driveway I dumped half a bottle of detergent into the turkey pan and the dish I'd used to bake Ben's mother's sweet-potato-and-marshmallow casserole, filled the sink with hot water, and picked up the telephone.

  "We're right on the border of Wellfleet and Eastham," Bonnie Verree told me.

  "Could I walk there?"

  She considered. "Maybe ride a bike," she said, and told me how to get there. "It'll take you half
an hour," she said.

  "Give me an hour," I said. "I have to make sure I remember how to ride a bike."

  I imagined I could see her smiling as she answered, "Some things you don't forget."

  Gone for bike ride, I wrote on a note that I stuck on the refrigerator. I dashed to the bedroom, pulled on the jeans and sweatshirt and hiking boots I'd packed, along with my freshly cleaned shearling coat, my red wool hat and wool mittens. Thank God the bike I'd glimpsed in the garage had air in its tires and a recently oiled chain. I pushed it up the steep driveway with the cold air stinging my cheeks, swung my leg over the seat, and wobbled away, gaining speed as I coasted down a narrow ribbon of blacktop lined with towering brown-leafed trees and blueberry bushes.

  After ten minutes I pulled off my hat and mittens. Ten minutes after that, breathing hard at the crest of a hill, I took off my coat and bundled it onto a rack over the rear tire with a bungee cord the last rider had left there. Fifteen minutes more and I was coasting down another long hill with my hair flying behind me, made a sharp left, and pedaled through Wellfleet's tiny downtown, out to Route 6, then onto a bike path, which led one to the Verrees' back door.

  Bonnie and Hugh lived in a little Cape Cod-style house with silvery cedar shingles. The kitchen's fake-brick linoleum floors and yellow Formica countertops, the dark wood kitchen table and Tiffany-style light fixtures looked to be circa 1975, but everything was neat and clean, and there was strong coffee brewing in the battered percolator. The paintings on the walls were in the same style as the one I'd seen in Kitty's living room: bright, representational seascapes in rich, inviting colors--deep azure blue of the ocean, golden sand, bright red and orange umbrellas, white seagulls punctuating the sky.

  Bonnie set a basket of blueberry muffins on the table. "Frozen berries," she said, as I gathered my sweaty hair into a bun at the nape of my neck. "I picked them myself last summer." She poured coffee into a pair of heavy clay mugs and sat across from me at her table, looking at me expectantly.

  "I've found out some things about your daughter," I began, and wrapped my hands around the mug. "Some of them are...well, they're a little..."

  She nodded, bending her head as if readying herself for the guillotine. She wore a loose-fitting purple jumper, a white turtleneck, a necklace of rough-hewn purple stones, thick blue wool socks underneath leather sandals. Her eyes looked wary, and her face was set in tense lines, as if she was awaiting more bad news. "Go on," she said.

  "It looks as though...that is, some people are saying..."

  "Just tell me," Bonnie urged. "I don't think there's anything I can hear that'll make me feel any worse."

  Don't bet on it. "I think that she might have been involved in prostitution."

  Bonnie stared at me with her blue eyes wide. Then she bent over sharply at the waist. I saw her shoulders shaking, heard the tiny gasping sounds she made. It wasn't until she straightened up, wiping her eyes, that I saw that she hadn't been crying at all. She was laughing.

  "Kitty?" she gasped, her round frame shaking with mirth. "My Kitty? Prostitution? Oh...oh, that's just...oh my," she said, and doubled over again, leaving me sitting in a spool chair, blushing furiously, completely without a clue.

  When Bonnie finally regained her composure and wiped her eyes, she told me she was sorry. She could see, she told me gravely, that I must have put a lot of thought into my investigation. She was even pretty sure how I'd been misled. "The older men, right?" she asked.

  I nodded dumbly.

  Bonnie sighed and wiped her eyes again. "She wasn't having sex with them, and she wasn't taking their money. Whatever else she might have been, Kitty was the most moral person I ever knew. She never wanted a single thing from any of those men except the truth," she said, and pushed herself back from the table, walked over to the coffeepot, and refilled her cup.

  "The truth about what?"

  Bonnie sat down heavily at the table and said, "Kitty was looking for her father."

  I think my jaw must have dropped as the pieces fell into place: Kitty's unwillingness to tell Dorie what she was really after with those older men; Kitty crying over lunch with Ted Fitch; Joel Asch looking at me with what I now knew must have been regret on his face, looking at me and saying that it wasn't what I thought, that, after all, he was old enough to be her--

  "Father," I said. I looked at Bonnie. "But..."

  She shook her head shortly. "Kitty wasn't mine," she said. "She was my sister Judith's daughter."

  There were about a hundred questions I wanted to ask. I settled on the most obvious. "Do the police know?"

  Bonnie nodded.

  "What happened?"

  Bonnie ran her fingers over her necklace. "This was the sixties," she began, "which I think should explain a lot of what I'm going to tell you." She lifted the stones from her chest, then let them fall back again. "My father--our father--was a police officer. Officer Medeiros. Very strict. Judith and I had to be home by ten on school nights, eleven on weekends; we couldn't date until we were sixteen; we couldn't drive, couldn't go anywhere unsupervised, couldn't do anything..." She shook her head. "It didn't bother me much: I was a homebody, even back then, and I didn't have boys beating down my door. But Judy..." She sighed and shook her head again, and I thought I saw Kitty in that pained, rueful gesture.

  "How about your mother?" I asked.

  "Gone," said Bonnie. "Breast cancer. Judy was eleven, and I was nine."

  "I'm sorry," I murmured, and tilted the coffee in my cup.

  She nodded. "I think my father wouldn't have held on so tightly if he wasn't afraid of losing us. And that's what happened with my sister. The tighter he held on, the more he told her no, the more she'd just find another way. She'd climb out her window and smoke cigarettes on the roof, or she'd sneak out the cellar door and go to parties with her friends. When she was eighteen, she left for good."

  "To New York," I guessed, and Bonnie nodded.

  "She wanted to be a painter." She pointed at the pictures on the wall. "All of these were hers."

  I studied the pictures more carefully. All of them were seascapes, with turquoise water and honey-colored sand, views of the ocean at sunrise, or during the daytime, dotted with umbrellas. None of them had any people. There was just the sea and the sand and the birds in the sky.

  "Could she make a living at it?"

  Bonnie sighed. "On the Cape? I think so. She could have found a gallery in Wellfleet or Provincetown to show her work. She would have done fine. Judy was beautiful." Bonnie said. "She had long dark hair, almost to her waist, and she was tall with a nice figure. That might have made up for some of what she was lacking in talent. She was good for here, but I don't think she was good enough for New York." She rubbed her fingers against the red-and-white checked tablecloth. "I think there are a lot of beautiful girls in the world, and a lot of them moved to New York City in the 1960s wanting to be artists or singers or actresses or models or something. Judy's paintings were good, but they weren't very fashionable. Everyone was doing abstracts. None of the galleries wanted pretty pictures of the ocean. If she'd researched it ahead of time..." Bonnie sighed. "Well. Judy never thought about the odds. She dropped out of high school as soon as she turned eighteen and went to live in the Village. It broke my father's heart...but it was about the most romantic thing any of our friends could imagine."

  Even almost forty years after the fact, I could hear bitterness in Bonnie's voice, sadness mixed with a little sister's grudging admiration for what her big sister had gotten away with.

  "Here," said Bonnie, pulling a photograph out of a drawer at a wooden desk against the wall. I looked and saw a tall, slender girl with long dark hair like Kitty's. She wore a peasant blouse that dipped low enough to show off her smooth, tanned skin and a miniskirt cut high enough to show coltish legs.

  "That was taken when she was seventeen," Bonnie said.

  "So what happened in New York?" I asked. "Did she support herself?"

  Bonnie shrugged. "My father sen
t her money, but I wasn't supposed to know about that." I wasn't sure whether she could hear the bitterness in her voice. "Judy sent letters home to us, about the walk-up she was living in, her roommates, the restaurants where she was working. She'd send postcards with pictures of the city--Central Park, the Empire State Building." She stretched out her hand for the photograph. I gave it to her, and she slid it back into the drawer. "She lasted seven years down there, and when she came home, she was six months pregnant."

  "Had she gotten married in New York?"

  Bonnie shook her head. "Judy talked a good game about how marriage was an instrument of the bourgeois oppressor, how she wanted to experience different men the same way she wanted to experience different cities, how she never wanted to be tied down, but I shared a room with her. I was the one who heard her crying at night. After a while, she told me that she'd fallen in love with the baby's father, but that there were complications." She ran her hands through her silvery curls. "He was a very important man, she said. And married, but trying to get out of it. Once he did, they'd be together. He loved her, she told me, and she knew they'd be together." Her voice cracked, and she pressed her hands against her eyes.

  "Did you..." I began.

  Bonnie shook her head. "She never told me his name." She straightened her shoulders. "I wish I had a picture of Judy when she was pregnant with Kitty," she said. "She never got bloated or blotchy or had her fingers swell. I know it's a cliche, but she just glowed. Like she'd swallowed one of those candles she was always burning, or like she knew some secret, some big, delicious secret that she'd never have to tell."

  "Wow." I'd never glowed when I was pregnant. The best I'd been able to manage was a certain fresh-scrubbed, rosy-cheeked look, usually after I'd splashed cold water on my face after a vigorous bout of vomiting.

  Bonnie sighed. "Even nine months pregnant, there wasn't a boy we'd known in high school who didn't want to take her out. They'd stop by the house with treats for her--scented candles, journals, an embroidered pillow she'd seen in some head shop in Hyannis, a crate full of lobsters--"