Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

  Apparently she wasn’t the only person in the car with delayed-cord-cutting issues. “Well, if those two versions are your only choices, I’d stick with the first.”

  “Somewhere between asshole and pathetic daddy’s boy lies the truth, which is that I live a really great life and figure out ways to make people money in the process. Like, say I go to a tiny little restaurant with a young chef who’s doing everything right; I’ll see if he’s the kind of guy with bigger dreams that might require investors. Then I try to get a deal done and take a little commission for myself in the process.”

  “Why does your mom give you a hard time?”

  “Because usually the people I turn to for the seed money are the same two guys I’ve been working for since I was mowing lawns for the snowbirds as a kid. And they happen to be my dad’s friends, which makes them only slightly less despicable than the AntiChrist.”

  “And one of these men is my new boss?”

  “To the extent you have a boss.”

  Drew pulled next to a parking hydrant in front of a rehabbed town house and hit the emergency blinkers. The ground floor’s front window was lined with commercial real estate listings. He was out of the car before she’d even unbuckled her seat belt. He tossed the keys on the driver’s seat before shutting his door. “You can drive, right?” he hollered from the curb. “Just in case?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She watched through the glass as he spoke first to the receptionist, then shook hands with a leggy woman with spiky black hair. She walked to a file cabinet and returned with some paperwork. He removed a pen from his sports coat pocket and gestured toward the car. Spiky woman was looking at her now. Was Alice supposed to wave or something? She pretended to fiddle with the car stereo, then saw Drew leaving the building in her periphery with the paperwork.

  He hopped back into the driver’s seat, placed the documents on the center console, and began a rapid-fire signing of pages that had been pretabbed with hot pink tape.

  “Creepy in there,” he said as he scrawled. “Those girls are all way too pale and tall. I felt like a field mouse dropped into the middle of an anaconda tank.”

  “So you said you find ways to make other people money. Does my new boss see the Highline Gallery as a hobby, or is it actually supposed to turn a profit?”

  He snapped his Montblanc into his coat pocket and tapped the contract against the steering wheel. “Excellent question, Alice.” Stepping out of the car, he glanced back at her. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  Chapter Seven

  Joann Stevenson felt a tongue between her toes and jerked her leg back, letting out a high-pitched squeal.

  “Sebastian!”

  Her shih tzu matched her yelp as he leaped to the floor, then back onto the bed near her head. She couldn’t help but giggle as his fluffy nine pounds bounced around her pillow.

  “I thought you said we had to be quiet.”

  She felt a warm mouth against the back of her neck. This time, the kisses were definitely not Sebastian’s.

  “We do have to be quiet.”

  “Mmm, you sure about that?”

  She felt Mark’s bare skin against hers beneath the sheets. Felt his knee rub against the back of hers. She turned to face him. Saw him smile before he kissed her.

  “Very sure.”

  “Absolutely certain?”

  She raised a finger to his lips. “Be very, very quiet.”

  She fumbled for one of Sebastian’s smooshy toys from the top of the nightstand and tossed it across the room. He happily followed.

  “Good dog,” Mark whispered.

  She hadn’t been kidding about the need for silence. They stifled their giggles and adjusted their bodies as necessary with each squeak of the mattress, each knock of the headboard against the bedroom wall. She struggled to choke back her own sounds at that crucial moment. Bit her lip so hard she thought she might bleed.

  Afterward, they shared silly, silent, sweat-soaked grins. She nestled her way into the crook of his right arm and placed her head on his chest.

  “I don’t want to move.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You’re a scientist. Can’t you invent a machine that lets us hit pause and stay here naked for a week while the rest of the world remains still?”

  “I adore you, Joann, but I don’t think either one of us would be faring very well if we kept this up for a week straight.”

  “We could pause for showers and nourishment.”

  “Now that sounds like a plan.”

  A monotone beeping erupted beside her, and she let out a pained groan as she slapped the top of the alarm clock.

  “Do I even want to know what time it is?”

  She gave herself twenty minutes between snooze alerts, and the latest round of beeping marked the end of the third respite. “Eight o’clock.”

  “Crap. I need to be on campus by nine. So how are we sneaking me out of here?”

  After fifteen years as a single mother, Joann had never—not once, not ever—allowed a man to spend the night in her bed while Becca was home. Sleepovers in front of her kid were a strict no-no on Joann’s list of self-imposed rules. But she’d known the previous night that Becca would be out with her friends until ten. And things with Mark had heated up when she’d asked him inside after the restaurant. She’d known him for two months now. Had hit double digits in dates. And he was—well, he was different.

  So she’d broken her own rules. As if she were the high-schooler and Becca the parent, Joann had sneaked Mark into her bedroom before Becca returned home. Left Becca a note in the kitchen: “Decided to hit the hay early. Knock if you need anything. Apples and really tasty cheddar in the fridge if you want a snack. Love, Mom.”

  Now she had to sneak the boy out.

  She climbed from bed and pulled on her dog-walking sweat suit. Sebastian hopped excitedly at her feet. She cracked open the bedroom door, listening for the usual household sounds. Becca’s sleep schedule was unpredictable. Sometimes she sprung from bed at the crack of dawn to surf the Net or to catch up on whatever TiVo’d show she wanted to kibitz about with her friends at school. Other times, she was truly her mother’s daughter, hitting the snooze button until Joann had to drag her from bed.

  The house was silent.

  “Coast is clear,” she whispered.

  She admired the leanness of Mark’s body as he pulled on the jeans and striped shirt he’d worn the previous night. Forty-five years old, but the man looked good. She waved him into the hallway, past her daughter’s room. At the top of the stairs, he took her hand and pointed to the first step. They took each step in synchronicity, walking with a single gait. She gave him a quick good-bye kiss at the door, then watched him through the living room window, making his way to the Subaru he’d parked on the street, two houses down.

  She heard a low growl and looked down to see Sebastian with one of her UGGs in tow.

  “Hold your horses, little man.” She leashed him up, then paused at the bottom of the staircase, wondering whether to wake Becca before their walk. Becca could get dressed in ten minutes flat when necessary, and it was good to see the girl get some much-needed sleep.

  She and Sebastian kept their usual pace on the usual route around the usual block. Most people—and dogs for that matter—would have tired of this morning routine long ago, but she liked to think that both she and Sebastian appreciated this ten-minute ritual as “their” time. Between raising a kid and working full-time as a records clerk at the hospital, life tended toward chaos. At least she and Seb could count on their walks.

  Unlike too many of her mornings, Joann found her thoughts during this particular jaunt to be peaceful. In the fifteen years she’d been trying to build a life for Becca, Joann had been lonely. She had a few friends at the hospital, but they were married with younger children and didn’t have the need for friendships that extended past working hours. She had met some men along the way, but none of them ever stuck. She had a kid, af
ter all. She had all of her rules as a result. Not many men were willing to abide. And the few who had? None had ever turned out to be worth what felt, to Joann at least, like an awful lot of effort.

  Until Mark. She’d met him at the prospective-students reception she had forced Becca to attend. Becca fostered fantasies of attending design school at Parsons in New York City, but Joann certainly couldn’t afford the tuition, and the last thing she wanted for her kid was to be unemployed and saddled with debt at the age of twenty-two. She was hell-bent on getting her into a state four-year college.

  Even with her single-mother status hanging out there for all to see, given the nature of the event, she’d been certain Mark was interested. He’d gone out of his way to catch up to her and Becca after the panel discussion to speak to her about the university’s physics department. Becca barely hid her indifference, but Joann feigned a deep interest in the school’s brand-new lab facilities. When she finally said good-bye, she was disappointed he didn’t ask for her number. But two days later, there he was, roaming the hallways of St. Clare’s Dover General Hospital in search of the records department.

  “Are you lost?” she’d asked.

  “Not anymore. Call me old-fashioned, but I just couldn’t hit on you in front of your daughter. It’s okay I’m here, right? If not, if I read things wrong the other night, I can—I don’t know, awkwardly excuse myself with some ridiculous cover story?”

  “As curious as I am to hear what you’d come up with, no, a cover story is definitely not necessary.”

  They were two months in, and nothing about Mark had once felt like work. They talked, dined, walked, kissed, and made love effortlessly. She kept reminding herself to take it day by day, but she found herself imagining a future with him.

  And it wasn’t only her love life that was falling into place. After a few rough teenage months, Becca seemed to be back to her normal self. No more skipped classes. No more missed curfews. She’d even set aside some of her more rebellious ways, hanging out with a few of the popular kids at school.

  As they approached the house, Sebastian—as usual—pulled against his leash. She let go, allowing him to drag the thin brown strip of leather behind him as he ran to the door. She opened it for him and followed him inside.

  “Becca,” she called out as she hung her keys on a cat-shaped hook in the entranceway. “Time to get up.”

  Nothing. Sebastian beat her to the top of the stairs and scratched at Becca’s door.

  “Come on, sleepy girl. I’ll drive you, but we’ve both got to get going.”

  Still nothing.

  She opened the bedroom door, expecting to find her daughter in that same sleeping position she’d used as a toddler—on her side at a diagonal, head rested on her forearm, one leg straight, the other bent like Superman taking flight, blankets and pillows scattered across the bed.

  But the bed was empty.

  She knocked on the bathroom door down the hall. Nothing. Opened the door. No one.

  She walked back to the bedroom for another look at Becca’s unmade bed. Was it her imagination, or were the sheets bundled into the same knot as when she’d quickly pulled the door shut last night to hide the mess from Mark? Same with the bathroom: Becca’s paddle-shaped hairbrush was tossed on the right side of the sink counter, and the adjacent bottle of gel was capless, despite Joann’s repeated reminders about the cost of dried-out hair products.

  Joann tried to convince herself she was wrong. Becca must have woken early and left for school already. Maybe she realized Mark was over and snuck out to give them privacy.

  But as much as her brain tried to create a simple explanation, somehow Joann knew—truly felt the truth, at a cellular level. Her daughter had never come home last night. And the explanation wouldn’t be simple, if it ever came.

  Chapter Eight

  “Please tell me this is one of your practical jokes.”

  It had been three weeks since Drew Campbell had signed the lease for the Highline Gallery. Now she stood, one night before the grand opening, feeling tiny beneath the eighteen-foot ceilings and next to Jeff Wilkerson’s six-foot-three frame.

  Jeff’s comment was a reference to her long-standing habit of testing what she called his Indiana goodness.

  “I know,” he would sometimes say, “I’m gullible.”

  But gullible was not a word Alice would choose to describe Jeff. To call a person gullible was to imply he was stupid. But Jeff was no dummy. He’d been a top student at Indiana University, both as an undergraduate and then in law school, moving to New York City to work at one of the world’s largest firms. But after seven years of slaving away at billable hours, he realized that life as a big-firm partner wouldn’t bring any monumental changes, so had hung out a shingle on his own.

  No, nothing about Jeff was gullible. He was well read and refined, brilliant even, as much as Alice hated the overuse of that word. But he still had that Indiana goodness. He was trusting. Earnest. Vulnerable. He wasn’t the kind of person who even contemplated the possibility that others would fabricate facts for mere entertainment. Jeff was good. And his vulnerability made him sweet. It also made him a tempting target for people like Alice.

  She’d lost count of the number of times he’d fallen for her ridiculous stories: that some breeds of cats could grow their tails back, that a car’s stereo would stop working if the transmission fluid fell too low, that she’d had a bit part in the Aerosmith video for “Janie’s Got a Gun.” As for that last one, even when he called to complain he’d watched the entire clip on YouTube without spotting her, she only persuaded him to watch a second time as she listened, stifling her giggles.

  Granted, her pranks had occasionally misfired. To this day, Jeff was convinced that her father disliked him because, on her recommendation, Jeff had eschewed the usual handshake on their first introduction, opting for a flash of the peace sign instead. Her father was bemused by the episode, but Alice saw no point in disabusing Jeff of his impressions, because in truth her father did not like Jeff, but for entirely different reasons.

  She kept expecting Jeff to stop falling for her jokes, but he insisted she had a poker face that could break a casino. He’d express disbelief, and like Lucy with her football, she’d persist that this time she was serious. She suspected he often feigned the credulity, but even so, her white lies and his Indiana goodness formed one of the few patterns that had cemented in their ever-fluid relationship.

  Unfortunately, this was not another occasion for leg-pulling. They stood side by side, Jeff with his hands on his hips, Alice with crossed arms, perusing the series of black-and-white photographs.

  “Those of us in the art world would refer to this as high concept,” she said.

  “Nice try for your consumer base, but you forget that I know you. And I know that you know this is a bunch of pretentious crap.”

  She tried out her most authoritative gallery-managing voice. “The artist refers to the SELF series as a portrait in radical introspection. By examining the baseness of raw physicality, we reveal our true selves and can therefore achieve a higher level of inner reflection.” She’d been diligent throughout the day in referring to Hans Schuler as “the artist” and to these photographs as the “SELF series.” As she stumbled through the words, she realized it might take more than a day to overcome the bad habits formed over the last two weeks, when she continually referred to Schuler as the “German Boy Toy” and to his pictures as her “porn collection.”

  The centerpiece of the series was a photograph he called Fluids, featuring a taffylike strand of drool stretched from his lips to the bloody bite marks in his wrist. His hairy wrist. Prior to seeing the diverse variety of exposed Schuler flesh in close-up, she had no idea that one body could contain so much fur. She posed next to the Fluids photo in mock contemplation, placing the hook of her index finger beneath her chin.

  “Can you picture me now on the cover of New York magazine? I can already imagine the tagline: ‘New Highline Gallery Seeks to Ma
instream Radicalism.’”

  He shook his head. “That is scary. You could actually pull that off, Al. Maybe you should have been an actress after all.”

  She usually hated all iterations of shorthand for her already short name, but for some reason, when Jeff had taken to calling her Ally and then Al when they’d first met seven years ago, she had never minded.

  “I feel like I’m selling snake oil. Radical introspection? What does that even mean, and why would we want to mainstream it?” She found the photographs aesthetically unappealing and intellectually vapid, so had simply pulled catchphrases from the artist’s Web site when drafting her own materials for the exhibit. “Please remind me I just have to make it through this first show, and then I can start highlighting actual artists.”

  According to her deal with Drew, the Highline would open with an exclusive three-week showing of Schuler’s SELF series. She would have to continue selling Schuler’s work afterward, but could move on to showcasing other works.

  “Just hang in there, all right? This is a good gig. You’re going through the rough patch now.”

  She grimaced. “I don’t think I like the idea of anything rough or patchy with our friend Hans here.”

  “So what is the man who bites himself bloody like in person?”

  She plopped herself down on the low white leather banquette at the center of the gallery space and clucked her tongue. “You see. Now there’s the catch.”

  “You mean to tell me that Hans’s hairy porn isn’t the catch?”

  “Just a part of it, I’m afraid. Schuler apparently read one too many J.D. Salinger obits and has decided he’s a recluse.”

  “Salinger went into hiding because he couldn’t stand the public attention anymore. Does your guy realize no one’s even heard of him?”