by Maria Hummel
Kevin follows me out of the elevator. I scan the crowd. No Kim Lord here. Not many people I recognize.
Aside from Brent’s outburst, a morose quiet pervades this scene. Evie, the registrar, is smoking in the corner with a crew member and trying ineptly to slouch in a blue blazer that matches her pumps. With her blow-dried bangs and perpetual business casual, Evie has the air of a lost bank teller who stumbled into a college party. I wave at her, but she’s focused on Brent and fighting a scowl. Evie worships Brent as much as his devoted crew does. She must not like seeing her idol unravel. She stabs her cigarette out on the ground, then lights another.
Spike spots me and grins with his upper teeth, but Kevin is already punching the elevator’s down button.
“I need to get back to the galleries. To those paintings,” he says as the panels slide open again. “You sure you’re all right? You’re pretty pale.”
I tell him I’m fine but I’m going home, if he doesn’t mind. We return to the elevator and it hums earthward.
Kevin pulls out his notebook and jots something down.
“Can I take you to lunch tomorrow?” he says. “This is turning out to be a bigger story than I thought.”
It’s not a story to us, I think. But I am ready to say anything to be alone, so I give Kevin my work number and ride silently beside him as he scribbles his notes.
When I was twenty-two and struggling to get my first clips in dinky Vermont newspapers, a beloved university professor arranged for me a job interview with Jay Eastman. Eastman was a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York journalist, and he’d relocated to Vermont to work on pieces that would become a book on drug smuggling in the rural Northeast. He possessed a thundercloud of gray hair and fierce eyes that could strip through your layers like paint thinner. He wasn’t unkind, but he was always right. He needed a research assistant who understood the local culture but would not insist on taking too much credit for it. When he gave me the assignment to talk to the teenage ex-girlfriend of a major drug dealer’s son, it was because he knew that Nikki would open up to me—another girl, about her age, just someone to talk to. And I, young and inexperienced and eager to please, would report back everything she said.
Two days before Eastman’s first story broke and Nikki officially disappeared, I was walking home in Burlington from my second job as a waitress. The spring sun was out, the lake melted, the lawns sodden, and crocuses were nudging up beside porches and stoops. Little throbs of yellow, the buds promised warmer days. Seeing them, I began fantasizing about my move to New York. In two more months, I’d have saved up enough to rent a room in Brooklyn while I took a bottom-rung job at a newspaper. I’d have the clout of a letter from Eastman, my experience from helping with his research, and my name in the back of his book. I’d find my own stories, one by one.
The fantasy had one glitch: Nikki. In two days, everyone she knew would be changed by Eastman’s article on the backwoods winter drug routes and the ways locals were smuggling opiates into the smaller towns. Eastman had promised to protect her anonymity, despite the fact that local law enforcement might subpoena him. He’d taken Nikki personally into his cluttered office and spoken to her about how he would never betray her to the police or anyone else, but still she should be careful.
Nikki had looked bold in his presence, then self-conscious and blushing. She tugged at her tight blond ponytail, then pushed her hands deep in her jean-jacket pockets until the denim was as taut as a sail, and said, “I’m ready.” But within months we would move on, Eastman and I, and with us would go Nikki’s assurance that what she’d done had purpose and meaning. As I hurried home through the chapped Victorians of downtown Burlington, I imagined Nikki a year from now, five years, living with her betrayal. If the police cracked down, it wouldn’t necessarily help the addicts. It might just mean jail time for the people she knew, while others took their place.
Eastman had made me promise not to contact Nikki, but I wished then that I could offer her a place to stay if she became afraid. The fragile sunshine around me faded and a chill made my cheeks burn. It hurt, that air, but it wasn’t a wind. It was just coldness sinking into everything: the budding trees, the strips of yellowed grass between me and the wet, open street. The cold amplified the slam of a porch door, and the slushy whispers of cars passing. It aged the grand, turreted houses, made their ornate windows seem brittle in their frames. It reached into my coat and enclosed me. By the time I got home, I couldn’t stop shivering.
Something is wrong tonight. I know it with a certainty so strong that it makes my skin prick, like the sting of that cold spring afternoon in Vermont. The light down here has darkened to orange-black. Stained napkins, empty cups, crackers smashed to circles of crumbs—everything that was laid out to delight us two hours ago has been violated by human touch. The caterers have hauled back the tables to create a dance floor, but hardly anyone is here to dance. They’re still upstairs, or possibly they’ve already left, discomfited by a party that is still without its guest of honor. The DJ slowly turns up the beats. The music sounds thin and anxious.
Jayme and J. Ro are talking intensely by the stage, glancing over at the enormous fluffy white cake and a stack of plates that someone has rolled out to the center of the tent. The cake bears the name of the artist and the exhibition in bold red and black:
KIM LORD
STILL LIVES
Nodding at Jayme, Janis signals to a petite brunette caterer, who struggles to roll the cake away and bumps it over a curb, making the frosting slump and a plate fall from the top of the stack. The plate smashes on the tarmac beside our beleaguered museum director, Bas, who has just emerged from the loading dock. The caterer flies into apologetic motion, gathering the pieces with her bare fingers, and after a slight pause Bas reaches down an arm to stop her. She scurries off, presumably for a broom. Bas doesn’t move. He stuffs his hands in his pants pockets, crumpling the front of his pale jacket. He seems to be staring exactly nowhere, not at the broken plate, not at the cake, not at the party, and not toward Jayme and J. Ro striding his way. He looks crushed and exhausted, but not surprised.
It hits me. He hasn’t looked surprised all day.
FRIDAY
7
My neighbor’s cough wakes me. Every morning, he goes out to the wet grass of his garden, turns on his fountain, coughs, and contemplates his mortality. At least this is how I imagine it. Maybe he’s contemplating poetry or his property taxes. I’ve never spoken to my neighbor. I’ve never seen him or his fountain. The wet grass is a guess. His wall is too high. White and peeling, it runs all the way down the alley behind our courtyard apartments. It’s a large lot for Hollywood.
My neighbor’s cough has three sounds: the hack, the seizing breath, and then the rumble. The cough comes and goes, always in that order, though this morning his hack is harsh and deep, and the rumble lasts a long time. The noise of his discomfort disfigures the objects around me: my dresser bare of photographs; Jayme’s scarf and dress, twisted on the floor; her boots flopping against each other like drunks. The single butterfly earring on my nightstand. I lost one last night. I’ve had the pair since the day my grandmother died. They went to Thailand in my ears, pricked my jawbone when Greg cupped my face to kiss me for the first time.
I hold the remaining butterfly for a moment, pressing the sharp stub into the pad of my thumb until the pain wakens me. Then I go downstairs to make my morning tea, filling the pot with water, twisting the knob to the burner.
I click the computer I left on last night: there are a couple of local news articles on Kim Lord’s disappearance. No updates, except that Bas is quoted in one, saying that the museum is cooperating with the LAPD and that the exhibition will open to the public today as planned. By the gentle light of a Hollywood morning and the sound of squirrels chittering in my avocado tree outside, it seems possible that everything will be resolved. Kim Lord will reappear soon with some provocative message for us all, and an extra wave of press will drive more viewers to the Ro
cque.
Yet I wonder how much sleep Bas got last night, contemplating his missing Gala honoree and his potential firing all at once. Why did I see a weary acceptance in his face last night, while everyone else looked shocked? Maybe he’s thinking of resigning. Maybe he’s ready to give up on saving the museum. Come to think of it, he and I had a bizarre conversation on Monday, in the elevator to the fourth floor.
It was a busy day, a major exhibition looming, the museum like a hive with people hurrying in and out carrying folders and parcels and tools. I was happy to slip into the elevator alone.
“Hang on,” said a voice as the doors closed, and Bas stepped in, giving me an overly friendly grin that suggested he’d once again forgotten my name.
As we stood in the rising box, he kept rubbing his arms and shifting from foot to foot. He looked awful, like his whole body itched. I felt awkward riding silently beside him, so I asked how many people were coming to the Gala.
“Don’t know the exact figure, but it’s sold out. First time in years.” He gave me a pained smile. “Everything Kim Lord touches turns to gold.”
The elevator door opened then, and Bas practically ran to his assistant Juanita’s cube and asked her to get Nelson de Wilde on the phone.
“Isn’t that good news?” I remember wanting to say. But it hadn’t seemed like good news at all.
My teakettle shrieks. I pour the boiling water over a sachet of green and pink herbs that I bought at a fancy kitchen supply store, then head for my computer again. But I never get to read more news, because my mother calls me: the story of Kim Lord’s vanishing has aired on National Public Radio.
“How’s Greg?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. My tea tastes like a marigold garden. I pour some maple syrup in it. Now it has the exact flavor of allergy medicine.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Fine. Thanks for asking,” I say.
“I could fly out there if you need it.”
“Why?” I say. “It’s not like I was dating her.”
“It’s just …”
In my mother’s pause, I hear her sadness that I am not married to Greg, not living on the East Coast, and not about to pop out a grandchild. It relieved her when I moved home after the Bolio case, but then I got my teaching job overseas and started “tramping all over the world.” My serious relationship with Greg marked a new page, and she’d hoped that I might settle down in a nearby state, might even choose a long-term teaching career like she and my father had done.
Instead, Greg and I had moved to L.A., pulled by the siren song of California, its warmth and ease, the limitless possibilities.
As a consequence, my mother allocates the city a loathing she usually reserves for Karl Rove and tomato hornworms. She always pronounces the second letter in L.A. with vindictive force, as in You’re moving to el-AY? What could you possibly want to do in el-AY? The one time she and my father visited us, she surveyed the palm trees and sun-bleached streets with hurt distaste and declared our movie-star-laden Hollywood neighborhood “a bit seedy.” For Christmas and birthdays, she mails me a steady stream of Green Mountain mugs, T-shirts, and notepads, as if to remind me of my rightful surroundings.
“It’s just … it sounds dangerous for you,” she says.
“Nobody even notices me here,” I say with a little laugh. I tell her how kind she is. How I need to get off the phone soon. “I’ve got to beat rush hour.”
As soon as I drive up the freeway ramp, the traffic thickens to sludge, and I inch and dart from lane to lane, but it doesn’t seem to bring me any closer to downtown until finally I’m there. I barely make it to the emergency meeting that Bas calls in the auditorium at 9:30 a.m.
The Rocque’s auditorium is a large, dank room at the back of the warehouse, capped with skylights. No matter the time of year or grandness of the occasion, the auditorium lowers the same cranky gloom over its visitors. The texture of the painted concrete floors and walls remains perpetually clammy, and the fold-up wooden seats seem designed to simultaneously pinch and collapse beneath you. The low stage looks like it was stolen from a high school production. It’s a horrible place for performances, or acoustics of any kind. Sound waves pile on each other, making voices and words linger and layer. As we settle into our creaking seats, I catch show sold out and the cops and disappearances and a tone, like a bass line, of deep uneasiness.
A clean-shaven Bas introduces two LAPD detectives who will be investigating the case, DeLong and Ruiz, a man and a woman, respectively, both black-haired and wearing gray suits. “We’re not sure we even have a case yet,” says Bas. He is blinking a lot. “But we’re taking precautions. Kim Lord was last seen on Wednesday and, following a text Thursday evening, has stopped communicating completely.”
Janis Rocque stands behind him in bold blue-and-white stripes, hands on her hips. She looks like a parent who’s just come home to a trashed house and wants to know who is responsible.
Yegina shifts in her seat beside me. “Should we even have Craft Club today? My brother got another rejection, too,” she whispers. “My heart’s not in my knitting.”
“Is it in organizing your inbox?” I whisper back. “Come on. We all need to decompress.” Craft Club is where we hear most of our museum gossip. Our confederation of nine women, all from different departments, meets every other Friday to knit, embroider T-shirts, gripe, trade recipes, and gripe some more. I need that today.
“Please comply with the officers—they’ll be coming around to interview many of you,” Bas urges. “Any hints, any clues to where Kim Lord was going when she left on Wednesday. Any conversations you had with her. Tell the police, not the press.”
Kim Lord was going toward Pershing Square. I saw her, I think. But what if it wasn’t her? I don’t want to get sucked into a police investigation, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I search the crowd and find my eyes jolting against the gazes of others. Most people look scared or lost. The entire education staff, all women, have their arms folded. Lynne has a scowl so severe that her dark-painted mouth has almost disappeared. Jayme has made her face completely immobile; if a fly landed on it, she would not twitch a muscle.
Phil and Spike, the twins and my closest department colleagues, are sinking deep in their seats like they’re in the front row at a cinema and trying to avoid neckache. I wonder when their chairs will snap. I wonder how they’re absorbing the news. There are lumpy people and smooth people, and the twins are smooth. Maybe the smoothest people I’ve ever met. It’s as if two decades of constant interaction with an identical human has worn them each down to their essential contours. Like stones sanded by water, they tumble easily through their days, never laughing more than a chuckle, never complaining more than a whine, and never working without reminding the rest of us that they regard the Rocque’s whole operation as kids’ play. But an abduction? The cops? It’s too abrupt and dark to mock.
Now Bas is talking about a new museum confidentiality policy and only speaking to the media through Jayme. The twins slide lower, as if some tide beneath the seats is tugging them under. They admired Kim, but were they friends? Who else at the museum knew her well?
In the third row, I recognize a silhouette with rumpled hair.
Ice threads my veins. There, also tipped back in his seat, is the stalker from last night.
“That’s him,” I hiss, bumping Yegina.
“Who?”
I tell her about the guy in the mustard-colored jacket, how he lurked in the galleries. “He’s here again. How do you think he got in?”
She follows the line of my gaze. “He’s not stalker material. He came with J. Ro. Maybe he’s police, too.”
He doesn’t look like police to me. He doesn’t have that stiffness and reticence. He looks, once again, like someone who would rather be taking a nap.
“On a positive note, the timed admissions for the first three weeks of Still Lives have sold out,” Bas says almost eagerly.
Janis Rocque makes a noise lik
e a soft bark. She muscles Bas aside to take the microphone. “We know you all have busy schedules,” she blasts. “Meeting is over. Carry on with your days. We’ll update you as we can.”
The staff of the Rocque has never responded well to an order, but today we file out silently, somberly, except Yegina, who is already texting someone and treads on the back of my heel. I yelp. My voice carries through the hard room, and suddenly a hundred people are staring at me with visible curiosity and fear. In the dim room, they look like cave dwellers startled from a sleep.
“I’m okay,” I say too loudly, and hurry along.
Across the rows of chairs, I catch Evie’s eye and wave. She shakes her head sadly, as if to say, What is happening to us? I wonder if she’s thinking that Kim has been kidnapped or thinking that she chose to disappear. Evie told me once that she herself ran away at eighteen to escape her stepfather.
“Miss,” says a male voice behind me.
I stumble against a chair trying to step out of the way. Another crash.
“Excuse me, miss.” A hand touches my elbow. I look back into the face of last night’s outlier and flinch. His blue eyes ride slowly over my face.
“Hendricks,” Janis Rocque calls out to him.
“Sorry,” I say, though I don’t know why.
He waves to her, then says to me, “You dropped this last night.” He holds out my butterfly earring.
8
When I get back to my office, I set my earring down carefully, simultaneously bothered to have lost it and relieved to have it back. My maternal grandmother loved butterflies. She never learned their names or natural history, but she saw them everywhere as signs of good luck. Blind optimism was a lifelong calling for Grandma Margie, a petite, rich New York teenager whose father lost all their money in the Depression, whose brother lost his mind in the Second World War.
By the time I was her grandchild, Grandma Margie had evolved into a perpetually raven-haired beauty who liked to wear mint-colored suits and shoes “with a little heel” in them. She abhorred bad posture. Whenever we watched movies on television, she would chat her way through them if they bored or unsettled her, which was often in our house because my mother adores PBS. “Oh look, there’s a Mercedes,” my grandmother once murmured during a crowd scene in Gandhi. “You don’t look like a monkey to me,” she told me as I stared at Inherit the Wind. Even when we were kids, my brothers and I treated my grandmother with the kind of protective reverence one usually reserves for a child. Yet we all wanted—needed—her to take pride in us.
