Girl, Unframed

by Deb Caletti

  And it was good. After City Lights, the driver dropped us off at Fisherman’s Wharf, and we went to the places Lila had taken me to the first time I visited. We went to Ghirardelli Square and bought chocolate. Meredith FaceTimed Hoodean from Lombard Street. We walked all the way to Pier 39 to see the gross, blubbery, stinky sea lions lying around on the docks. I took her to Madame Tussauds wax museum, and she went crazy taking pictures and texting them to her mom and Hoodean and Cora. We went to Nick’s Lighthouse and ate chowder from a bowl of bread.

  That night, we ordered dinner on our own and watched a movie in the media room. It was a surprise for Meredith, something I knew she’d like even if I’d come to despise R. W. Wright’s sexy, murdered girls—an old movie of one of his earliest books, The Most Regular Evil. It was pretty cheesy, really. We made fun of the big hair and the super-high-waisted jeans. There was a lot to make fun of, until it got scary. What was scary in the 1980s was still scary now. A young woman, stalked on a dark street. She was the good girl, though, the heroine. She kept her blouse buttoned all the way up, so she got the knife away from the guy and jabbed it in his throat. I had to hide my eyes, but Meredith was brave.

  “I could do it,” she said.

  “Not me. No way,” I said.

  “You cringe cutting into a chicken breast.” It was true. There was just something too unnerving about knives plunged into skin.

  “Sick.” I shivered.

  “You’d need a baseball bat,” Meredith said. “Then you could do it.” It was a weird conversation, but not. It was just Meredith and me being Meredith and me. It felt good. I’d made a successful day, all the way through to the end.

  But then, right when the guy popped back up and the girl had to keep stabbing, Jake joined us. Meredith had finally met him that afternoon when we got home, but now he plopped himself down in the big, cushy leather chair.

  “Hey, ladies,” he said.

  “Hey, Mr. Antonetti,” Meredith said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  The room hummed with discomfort. All I could see when I looked at him was Lila’s black eye, and I could feel Meredith thinking about it too. But the awful awkwardness wasn’t just about the black eye. It was the way he sat there with his feet up on the footstool with the legs of his shorts open, revealing a dark cavity, his arms hairy and bare in his tank top.

  “Watching a movie, huh?”

  “Trying to,” I said. Meredith nudged me with her elbow. She wanted me to be polite, even though she felt the same as I did. I could see it in the way she pulled the blanket up over her pajama top.

  “It’s nice to see you with girlfriends for a change,” Jake said.

  I could feel Meredith’s unspoken question in a wrinkle of her nose. I knew her so well. God, I wanted Jake to go away.

  But he didn’t go away. He just sat there and sat there. In my space. Pressing on me somehow. He watched the movie until the end, until the dead stalker lay on the floor and the camera panned away from the house in a way that almost made you feel sorry for the guy. R. W. Wright’s books never end happily. They just keep making you uneasy, all the way until the final page and afterward.

  I don’t think I even really watched the last part of that film. I was too distracted with Jake there. Maybe Meredith didn’t see that last half hour either, because she got up the very second the credits rolled, as if she was just waiting for her chance to escape.

  “I think I’ll go to bed now,” she said.

  Upstairs, I asked Meredith if she wanted to go down to China Beach. It was only ten.

  “It’s really awesome there at night,” I said. “The waves are like silver. The bridge is all lit up. Photo op!”

  “It’s kind of dark,” she said.

  “Want to stay up and play Mad Libs or something?” We used to do that with her family during sleepovers at her house.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m really tired.”

  I couldn’t exactly blame her. I wouldn’t be able to think of a funny plural noun or a humorous article of clothing anyway. I wouldn’t be able to take in the magic of the silver tips of waves or run around on the beach. I couldn’t feel free if I didn’t feel safe.

  When I went out to the garden, the moon was a shade fuller. Max lifted his leg on the very same bush, and I heard the murmur of Meredith’s voice on the phone again.

  I’d failed. Shit, I was such a failure.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Exhibit 55: Sworn statement of Meredith Jenkins, 1 of 2

  I had this great idea for Meredith because of R. W. Wright—a night tour of Alcatraz. R. W. Wright’s Hell House is set there. I wasn’t sure we could get tickets on short notice, but when I mentioned it to Nicco, he said that his mom knew someone in the National Park Service and that he’d see what he could do. Four tickets, Monday night, bam. I thought of all the ways I’d like to thank him, mostly involving my mouth and his mouth, but then I tried to put that out of my mind.

  We met Nicco and Carlos at Fog City Diner by the Alcatraz boat dock. Meredith couldn’t believe how Lila just gave me her credit card and let me call the car service whenever I wanted. She was used to the Seattle me, who rode my bike or walked everywhere because Edwina made me use my own money for everything, and you couldn’t exactly do anything too splurge-worthy with what I made at Jitters during the school year.

  They were waiting outside. Nicco was wearing his jeans and a green T-shirt and a blue hoodie, and I remember this so clearly because I was shocked again at how incredibly good looking he was. It’d been only three days, but it was like, Oh, yeah—you. Wow. That hair, you know? His eyes.

  He brought me close, and I didn’t even care what Meredith saw or thought. He smelled so good. I wished we were alone. I wanted his hands on me, and mine on him. Samuel Crane—he had dry lips that he wet with his tongue just before he kissed me. He kept a tube of ChapStick in his pocket. This was atoms and particles, the kind of nuclear fusion that fuels the sun, light molecules bashing together to create energy. And that was before we even touched. That’s what sat between us in the empty space. I could feel it there, crackling.

  Carlos had been Nicco’s best friend since they were kids, same as Meredith and me. He was going to be a senior next year at Nicco’s school, George Washington High, and he was a barista at Jive, near the beach. Carlos was a big guy. Tall, wide, and sweet. Super funny. Really nice.

  “Greetings, inmates,” he said when we first walked up. Meredith laughed. She even blushed, or it might have been her sunburn. I was really glad Carlos came. I was sure he would distract Meredith from all the times Nicco and I had our hands on each other, but I was wrong.

  We ate fried fish and onion rings, which was an awesome beginning to a night, if you ask me. Anything that starts with onion rings generally goes well. Since Carlos and I worked in coffee places, we talked about all the annoying things people did, like ordering overly complicated stuff, and calling espresso “expresso,” and getting upset about a drink that wasn’t even theirs. “Relax about the ‘no whip’! Is your name Marybeth?” Carlos joked. Carlos told us how he’d met Nicco during swimming lessons when they were eight, when Nicco was crying by the fence. Meredith told them about our seventh-grade skit, when she was Alexander Hamilton and I was Aaron Burr and we dueled with swords from Party for Less.

  We waited at the dock. The boat going to Alcatraz Island was leaving at seven. We shoved on with everyone else and watched the skyline fall away as the boat got farther from the city. It was freezing out there, and Carlos gave Meredith his hoodie, which she kind of liked, I could tell. The hoodie went down to her knees, and she looked cute in it. She smiled, pleased. He was a good guy, and this was proof. In retrospect, I’m not sure why girls don’t have to get cold, but whatever. Nicco put his arms around me. The sky began to turn hues of gold, and then the water did. The rock with the old prison on top grew larger and larger. As we got closer, wisps of fog appeared and started to thicken. It was spooky, to be honest.

  I
leaned on the ferry railing and looked out as Nicco pressed against my back. I wished everyone would get off that boat except for us, but I was excited to see the place, too. We practically ran up the big hill, same as kids on a field trip. It was creepy and fortresslike, a prison that had housed the most notorious criminals in history—Al Capone, and the Birdman, and Machine Gun Kelly. In its twenty-nine years as a prison, no one had escaped from there. People had tried, but you couldn’t survive those torrid currents and frigid waters.

  You can tell I listened to the audio tour.

  Or at least, I listened for a little while. I listened until Meredith and Carlos got far enough ahead of us, until they were paying rapt attention to the tiny cells, with their sickening green walls and rusted urinals, leaning in to look at the same time, the earbuds in their ears.

  Nicco yanked his, let them drop to his chest.

  “I can barely stand it,” he said. He brought me to him. His hands moved down my back.

  “I know.”

  “You look so beautiful. I want you so bad.”

  Oh my God—the word want. It just did me in. To be beautiful and wanted—it made you feel so powerful and amazing. But those very same things could make you feel powerless and ashamed. No wonder want and desire were confusing. No wonder they seemed like something that should be kept secret.

  “Prisoner of love,” Nicco murmured, and then he scribbled in the air, like he was writing it down in his notebook.

  Prisoner of love.

  This is a horrible story, given what happened. Horrible. But the point is, I heard it: love Love made me want him even more. Love was the promise of something bigger than sex. It was proof that I was interesting and worthy for way more than two days. And love supposedly made desire okay, since desire by itself was too dangerous. This was silly, honestly. Love could be so much more dangerous.

  The lights went off with a huge chunk sound. Suddenly, it was pitch black. I screamed, and Nicco put his arms around me. He’d been on this tour before and knew what to expect. We were in almost total darkness, with only the sick yellow glow from a few of the cells.

  We’d fallen behind, so far behind that we were all alone. I could hear the creaks and groans of the old, old building, the pings of pipes or maybe spirits. You could feel what it was like to be alone in there, sitting with your wrongdoings. Festering and tormented from your moment of violent passion or years of doing bad shit to other people. Oh, God, it was creepy. The biggest punishment was making you a lonely, lonely outcast.

  Nicco was still thinking about my body and his. His hands were everywhere. I was a little distracted by how scary things were in that place. I felt the presence of those bad men on the thin mattresses, peeing in those rusted urinals. I kissed back anyway.

  His tongue was in my mouth, his warm hands up my shirt. A guard appeared down the hall. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, come on. Stay with the group.” We were two kids causing trouble. We were two teenagers feeling what every person has felt from the beginning of time, only no one wants to admit it.

  When we caught up, Meredith was pissed. I could see it in her face. I’d known her forever, so I understood what that tight closed mouth meant. Maybe it didn’t take years of friendship, because Carlos obviously knew what it meant too. He kept trying to make jokes. He was using the last resort of good guys in awkward situations—punching a friend in the arm. Poor Carlos.

  We’d been selfish. I felt bad. I wanted to blame my actions on desire, but I wasn’t a caveman. I wasn’t one of the evil men without a conscience who had been locked away in that place.

  We came out into the night air. You’d think it would be a relief, being out of that vacant, haunted building, but it wasn’t. It was still so eerie out on that rock. People felt it. Hands slipped into other hands. The fog was so thick, you could barely see out. But you could hear that frigid water crashing and crashing against the rock. It crashed like a bad omen. The fog said that lots of things couldn’t be seen. So many things were hidden and obscured until you got up close to them.

  We piled onto the boat. It seemed unsafe to ride that stretch back to the city. The water was rough. We sloshed around, and a few people squealed (okay, me) when the nose of the ferry rose and then banged down. You couldn’t see two feet in front of you.

  The guys went to get hot chocolate for the four of us. I couldn’t imagine drinking it, or even how it would stay in the cup. Maybe they just wanted to get away from the tension that sat there between Meredith and me.

  “Mer,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. She sat in one of the seats with her arms crossed.

  “Mer, come on. What?”

  “You just went off. You left me with someone I don’t even know.”

  “I thought you guys were having fun. I thought you might like some time alone.”

  This was a lie, and she knew it. She gave me that look.

  “It seemed like you liked each other,” I tried again.

  “Uh-huh.” I hadn’t seen her that mad maybe ever. “Right. Nice try.”

  “Mer,” I pleaded. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not the same person here,” she said. “You and that guy. You’re worse than Cora. You’re not even yourself in this place.”

  But she was wrong. I was myself. I was Linda Short’s daughter, and Lila Shore’s daughter, and I was nice and not, cautious and reckless. I didn’t want to be one thing. I wanted to be all things.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Exhibit 56: Sworn statement of Meredith Jenkins, 2 of 2

  Nicco offered to take Meredith and me home, but I said no. He kept giving me those Is everything all right? looks. I called the car service to pick us up. On the drive, Meredith was silent, her shoulders turned away from me. I saw her reflection in the window, staring out into the night. There was no excited water bottle opening or nervous chatter with the driver. She’d gotten used to all that pretty quickly. It was a quiet, strained car ride.

  But at home, things got worse.

  Way worse.

  * * *

  All the lights in the house were off. Max didn’t even bark when Meredith and I arrived. Dogs feel the mood of a house. Dogs use their instincts, and he was lying under the dining room table, his ears down, Jacqueline looking over him with her wide, empty eyes.

  It quickly became clear why Max was hiding. Upstairs there was yelling. Screaming. It was louder than Jake and Lila’s previous fights. It was more vicious.

  Protecting us! Like hell! Lila’s words dripped sarcasm. I didn’t know what this meant. All I could feel was her fury, swirling down the stairs like a cloud of black smoke from a fire, a fire horrible enough to burn the city to the ground. And all I could see was Meredith, my friend whose parents played Mad Libs with her and her sister, standing by me in shock. The outing with Nicco and Carlos didn’t even matter anymore. It was a petty squabble that had vanished the second the earthquake rumbled, because who cared anymore?

  Meredith looked at me, horrified. I doubt her parents even raised their voices. Ellen might make a snippy remark when Meredith’s dad was late to a regatta.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  I didn’t know. “Let’s just go upstairs,” I said. The just meant I had it handled. That I understood how these things should be managed. Of course I didn’t. You can’t handle an out-of-control blaze. You can’t manage a natural disaster.

  We went to my room. Max didn’t even budge from under the table. It reminded me of the earthquake drills we had when I was a kid, where you hunched under your desk.

  Meredith and I sat on my bed. She looked terrified.

  What did you think? Like you didn’t know? Jake yelled.

  One of your guys? One of your guys! Lila kept repeating this. Why didn’t you tell me? You never told me!

  Back off. Back away, I’m warning you. Jake’s voice was menacing. That’s such a dramatic word. An R. W. Wright word. But it was the only word for it.

  Protecting us, what a joke! A fucking sta
keout? Watching us? You’re going to fucking prison! What the fuck. This can’t be happening!

  Lila was furious, but she was crying, too. And I knew what this was about. The car on the street. Jake had told me the same thing when I first asked. One of my guys. But now he was telling her the truth. It wasn’t one of his guys. It was a detective. Those paintings, that art—it was stolen, I was sure now.

  Back away. Get out of my face!

  I could hear a crash and a scream and then a thud. A push, a fall.

  “Sydney,” Meredith said. “Jesus! We have to do something. You have to call someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know! Your grandmother. Your father! Nine-one-one! This is scary.”

  Something shattered. There was the sound of glass breaking.

  “Sydney!”

  “Okay! Okay.”

  I fished my phone out of my bag. Meredith got up. “I don’t want to hear this. This is so awful,” she said. She went to her room. She shut the door. I didn’t know who to call. Edwina was old and eight hundred miles away.

  If his name hadn’t been programmed into my phone, I wouldn’t have even known how to reach him. Jeff Reilly gave his number out to only a few select people. Lila would be angry and betrayed if I called the ghost man that was your father. I remembered the time I went to his house for a few days when I was around ten, when Lila and Trace Williams needed some time alone to work things out. He took me shopping. He wasn’t sure what to do with me, so he gave me stuff. He bought me a sequined top, which I thought was shiny and beautiful, but we got it in the women’s department, and at lunch, he hit on the waitress. Lila was livid when she saw that sequined top. It went missing after that. When I found it shoved in the kitchen garbage can, she wouldn’t let me have it back. I started to sob so hard my stomach hurt. I loved that top. Lila said, A piece of trash belongs in the trash, but I was the one who felt like garbage.