by Rae Meadows
NO ONE TELLS EVERYTHING
A Novel by Rae Meadows
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-890-9
M P Publishing Limited
12 Strathallan Crescent
Douglas
Isle of Man
IM2 4NR
via United Kingdom
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email: [email protected]
ALSO BY RAE MEADOWS
Calling Out
Originally published by:
MacAdam/Cage
155 Sansome Street, Suite 550
San Francisco, California 94104
www.MacAdamCage.com
Copyright © 2008 Rae Meadows
All Rights Reserved
Meadows, Rae.
No one tells everything / by Rae Meadows.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59692-292-1
1. Women periodical editors—Fiction. 2. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) —Fiction. 3. Murder investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.E15N6 2008
813′.6—dc22
2007050801
Paperback edition: May 2008
ISBN 978-1-59692-294-5
Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FOR ALEX AND INDIGO
NO ONE TELLS EVERYTHING
A novel by Rae Meadows
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1
The girl has been missing for thirteen days. On the television, her parents make a desperate plea, their faces fallen and ash gray. The mother has a look of resigned expectation, as if she’s about to get punched and can’t avoid the blow. Of course she’s replaying every critical remark she ever made to her daughter, every jealous thought.
Grace makes an inner toast to regret, and finishes her glass of wine. She’s one of three left at Chances, the vaguely Irish bar at the end of her Brooklyn block. It appears the other two, a few seats over, will soon be leaving together. The sinewy young woman has a black serpent tattooed on her lower back. It keeps peeking out from under her shrunken T-shirt. She pretends it’s not on purpose that her shirt keeps inching up, that she doesn’t notice her new companion sneaking glances down to where the snake disappears beneath her low-riding jeans. Grace admires the move; the woman knows just how to play it.
The guy has nicotine-stained fingers and black hair that hangs over his forehead in a wing-like piece. He looks up for a minute and quickly sweeps the bar. His eyes catch on Grace, who smiles at him with half her mouth, hoping she seems mysterious, hoping her look says, come on, it could be fun. The corners of his lips jerk up, more like a tic than a smile, before he turns back to his tattooed friend. Grace pretends to drink from her empty glass. In the dusty mirror behind the bar she doesn’t think she looks that different than she used to—pale skin, dark hair, angular face. But as her mother often reminds her, a thin face over thirty makes a woman look older.
Please make the professor call, she thinks. Make him call and I’ll stop drinking.
For a year Grace has clung to the belief that the professor would pick her in the end, a wedge of hope lodged like a splinter refusing to surface. But of course he isn’t leaving his wife, of course he was never going to. Last night he told her he’s taken up Bikram yoga and he and his wife are going to couples counseling. He thanked her for helping him figure some things out. She wanted to tell him that he was a cliché but she knew that she was one too. And she didn’t want to make it harder for him to change his mind.
“Jimmy,” she says. “Can I get another one?”
Grace is drinking her usual Chardonnay. When Jimmy sees her walk in he pours a full glass. She thinks about changing her order sometimes, asking him with a straight face for a Cosmopolitan or a Lemon Drop, but when the moment comes, it doesn’t seem worth it just for his amusement. It’s soothing, this safety of routine. And Jimmy is her ever-willing co-conspirator.
She has lived in this neighborhood for nine years. First the artists dotted the Italian enclaves. Then, as in most gentrifying areas, the working families moved out of the brownstones and the hipsters settled in. Now it’s space-age strollers, organic T-shirts, rutabaga gelato. She is glad, at least, for her rent-controlled apartment, her little wooden boat that bobbles atop the water, regardless of what the next wave might bring. Grace keeps to herself as the scenery shifts around her. Her old laundromat became a video store became a frozen yogurt shop became a pilates studio.
She looks in the mirror at the black-haired boy. He winks at her before looking away. Next to him, the young woman arches her back in a feline stretch before leaning forward with her elbows on the bar.
The TV flashes a photo of Sarah Shafer, the honey-haired freshman who disappeared. The sound is muted now but Grace knows what’s being said. Still no sign of her, no word, no leads, since she vanished from the quiet campus of a small college two hours from the city. It’s a picture they’ve used before, cropped in close, a disembodied arm around her slender shoulders. Something about her face reminds Grace of her sister. The light hair and brown eyes, the small, even teeth of her smile. Callie has been gone for twenty-five years but Grace wonders what she might have looked like today, a week before her thirty-third birthday.
“It’s a shame,” Jimmy says, turning from the TV, “about that college girl. Sounds like she was a good kid.”
“Yeah,” Grace says, taking a sip of wine. “They always say that though, don’t they?”
It makes for a better story when the person is irreproachable, innocent. But then, at some point, the truth dribbles out—drugs or a townie boyfriend or some other unsavory element—and it all gets a little more complicated, a little too human. A little too much like the rest of us, she thinks.
Jimmy gives her a strained smile as he adjusts his pants beneath his bulging gut, a fairly recent addition to his physique. Grace knows he thinks she’s bitter, thinks her idiosyncrasies are hardening into oddities as the years pass. He doesn’t even bother flirting with her anymore.
“Maybe she ran off and got married,” she says.
Jimmy wipes the bar down, shaking his head.
“You don’t believe that, Gracie,” he says. “You’re just being contrary.”
She smiles. She doesn’t tell him that she thinks people like to emote concern about something inarguably sad and remote, that it’s easy to feel sorry like that. She thinks Sarah Shafer is not quite as wholesome as she’s being made out to be. Maybe she’s on a bender in Atlantic City, or hiding out in a squat in the East Village, or hitchhiking her way to Seattle with a guitar player. It seems romantic that she might have thrown down the gauntlet on a certain kind of life. That sh
e escaped. But even as Grace thinks this she knows that if it were her, she’d be doing none of those things.
The newly formed couple down the bar murmurs to each other as they slide off their stools and head for the door, his hand on the small of her back. He looks back but his eyes don’t settle on Grace. She may have finally crossed over into the gaping blandness of sexual invisibility, a prospect that is both terrifying and comforting. Age has worked its gradual and wicked magic to render her a mere facet of the landscape. She looks away before they are gone.
Jimmy clears their glasses.
“It looks like you have an admirer,” he says, as he slides a napkin toward her. “For the woman down the bar. Zach. 233-3475.”
Grace laughs and blushes, feeling both pleased and foolish. She wonders if Jimmy feels any jealousy, any proprietary twinge, or if it’s way too late for any of that. He watches as she pours a little wine onto the napkin until it is soggy and the number bleeds.
“Hey, how’s the job search going?” Jimmy’s been asking her this for years.
Grace is a copyeditor at a weekly news magazine where writers encapsulate world events into short digestible paragraphs. Stories are decorated with charts and photographs, and analysis is kept to a minimum. She reviews layouts for typos, misspellings, extra spaces, overuse of colons, poor grammar, dangling modifiers. She envies the writers and feels disdain for them; she doesn’t think they’re doing anything she couldn’t do. It’s just that she got stuck. Her conversations with Jimmy about it invariably end with, “I need a new job.” But by the following morning she’s lost her resolve.
The hope of something better out there has kept her from shriveling up into dust within the padded half-walls of her purposefully Spartan cubicle. Its lack of personalization is her own stubborn statement that it’s not where she belongs, that her residency is temporary, even if five years have already gone by.
In response to Jimmy, she usually says something deflective, but a while ago, in a flurry of optimism, she finally did apply for some jobs—a newsletter creator at a museum, a junior editor at a celebrity gossip magazine, a copywriter at a teen clothing catalog, a content writer for an online baby site, even a reporter for a local Brooklyn newspaper. She parted with those envelopes, one by one, with the flinty anxiety of calling herself on her own exaggerated expectations. She was hoping for a little luck.
“I sent out some resumes,” she says to Jimmy.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Grace smoothes her eyebrows with her fingertips, obscuring her face.
“Interviews?” he asks.
“No. Not yet.”
“That’s okay. Congratulations anyway. That’s big news.”
Jimmy goes down the bar to finish washing the night’s glasses. Grace has watched his hair thin and recede over the years, as he has watched her turn into a wiry and solitary fixture on the third stool from the left. They pretend that they’re not hiding out in this bar, each hoping that the other doesn’t one day find a reason to move on.
She doesn’t tell him that she’s heard back from all but one of the potential employers. The rejections were pleasant and apologetic, but definitive nonetheless. They didn’t say it but she knows they wondered what she’s been doing all these years. She’s banking on the one application still outstanding. As a kid she used to make deals with God, like: if you let me beat Callie in this race, I’ll believe in you. Sometimes it worked. The past few weeks Grace has reverted to a similar approach with her job search, ready to barter her faith for a chance at a new start.
It’s midnight. Her loneliness tugs, an insistent pull on her sleeve. She finishes the last of her wine, slips a few bills under her glass, and buttons her coat.
She sighs and says to Jimmy, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”
“Goodnight, Gracie,” he says, his voice warm and consoling, knowing and not knowing.
Grace waves and goes out into the misty spring night, turning uphill toward home. She wonders if Sarah Shafer will ever reappear.
Midway up the block, a scourged man in army fatigues darts out from the doorway of a closed drugstore.
“Spare some change for something to eat?” he barks.
The sidewalk is empty and dark. Fear rises in her throat and she keeps walking, her hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets.
“Sorry, not tonight.”
“Please,” he says with such desperation that she slows to a stop under the lamplight.
He has sores around his nose and mouth, a missing front tooth. But he is young, barely more than a teenager, ravaged thin.
“All right,” he says. He is both strident and plaintive, his voice stripped bare. “I’ll be honest with you. It’s not really for food. Just help me out, okay?”
She reaches into her purse and pulls out a loose bill, a twenty, and hands it to him. He scampers down the hill toward the dealers on Third Avenue.
###
There are no messages on Grace’s answering machine. The professor once had the nerve to tell her, stroking her hand, that she simply lacked the tools to express herself. At the time she let it go because she wanted to not be alone more than she wanted to call him on his arrogance.
She takes a few Tylenol PMs to drag her down into sleep and gets under the covers. She dusts off one of her well-worn fantasies in which she’s browsing in a darkened bookstore, the light butter-rich and flattering, her face smooth and dewy. Her lips are deep matte red and she wears all black. She’s in the Fs, and she runs her finger dreamily along the spines—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert—looking for something she can’t quite recall. And then the professor is there, leaning against a shelf of expressionist art books. He is forlorn—he thinks he may have missed his chance—and he is transfixed by her. She feels a taught wire of acknowledgment between them and her stomach melts.
But she can’t even get to the point of his hand up her skirt because the image of Sarah Shafer filters in, asserting itself into her consciousness. Her glistening eyes and expectant smile. What is she haunted by? Who does she think of when it starts to rain? What does she want to be?
She was last seen leaving her dorm alone, past midnight, her ghostly image caught in four stilted, washed-out frames of security camera film. What did she do? Grace is more intrigued by the girl’s possibilities than her own. She falls asleep thinking of her.
CHAPTER 2
Grace waves to people as she makes her way through the fluorescent-lit halls of the office, but she doesn’t stop to chat. The others in her department are amiable but she prefers not to join them on their daily excursions to the cafeteria or out for drinks at the bar next door. Pleasant but peripheral is how they’d describe her. Without her shell of detachment she fears she risks wandering the barren plains of ordinariness.
Safely at her desk, she drinks coffee and scans the paper for any news on Sarah Shafer. There’s a small mention of her disappearance, noting that the police are investigating a promising lead. Alongside the article is the same photo that was shown on TV the night before. Grace wonders whose arm it is that mantles the girl’s shoulders a little too tightly. She pictures a boy in a Greek-lettered sweatshirt who picked Sarah out of the freshmen facebook and then got her drunk so he could get in her pants.
“Hey, Grace.”
Brian rests his arms on the top ledge of her cube and drums his thumbs. He is her boss, eight years her junior, and when it’s just the two of them, his confidence tends to slip into adolescent uncertainty. He’s always after something he can’t ask for. Grace thinks he’s intrigued by her aloofness. He thinks she is hiding someone interesting.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hey. Hi. Can I come in?”
He slouches in her rarely used guest chair. His sneakers are big and purple. In his quest to be cool he often miscalculates with endearing fashion mishaps. He flips his shaggy bangs from his eyes and leans back, crossing his ankle on his knee. Not long ago he and Grace shared a drunken make-out session on a team-building
cruise around the Statue of Liberty. They have never spoken of it.
“So we have to kick ass on getting the cover story cleaned up and turned in before close,” he says.
Brian admitted to her once that he never imagined he would be a glorified proofreader, but he takes his job seriously because in no other areas of life are the rules so clearly defined, the satisfaction so dependable. Sometimes she wishes she shared his outlook. What she would never tell Brian is that she feels her job is a slow death, even though she’s never demonstrated a particular drive to do something different.
“Come on. It’s important for this department to show off a little,” he says. He playfully punches her arm but then lets his hand drop.
“Hmm,” she says, granting him a small smile. She shifts in her seat and pulls her skirt down over her knees.
“You might try showing a little enthusiasm, Grace,” he says, deflating.
She has an urge to pat his head.
Grace imagines the thrill of quitting when she gets a new job. No two-week notice, no send-off party. Snip, snip. The joy of disengaging from this sameness.
“Okay,” she says, suddenly feeling a tiny pang of remorse at the prospect of never seeing him again.
She likes Brian, and sometimes she wonders if she could really like him. His efforts are like little life preservers tossed in her direction, ready to pull her to normalcy. For now she prefers to watch them float by.
He jumps up from the chair and rubs his hands together.
“Strategy meeting at noon,” he says.
Brian shuffles out, the cuffs of his jeans dragging on the floor.
She quickly finishes the day’s assignments so she can search for Sarah Shafer online. There is a little piece in the Nutley Journal, Sarah’s New Jersey hometown paper, an interview with her once happy family: dad an accountant, mom an elementary school teacher, younger brother a high school basketball star, younger sister on the seventh-grade honor roll. Vacations to Rehoboth Beach. Two cocker spaniels named Scout and Atticus. Sarah was supposed to have gone home to visit this past weekend. And no, there is no chance that she ran away. The family, the article says, has been doing a lot of praying. They have plastered the Long Island campus with fliers of Sarah’s face, hoping for any information as to her whereabouts.
