Beyond the Pale Motel

by Francesca Lia Block

  Of course, there is never anything anyone can do.

  She thanked me again, told me to take care, and hung up.

  Take care of yourself. What I couldn’t seem to learn to do. The lump in my throat exploded into a shuddering gasp. Where was Scott? It was as if he had been cut out of me with a dull kitchen knife.

  * * *

  I tried to put together the pieces of the puzzle of his illness. The mysterious surgery he’d had on his leg in his early twenties, the fevers, the fatigue, the breakup with Emi, the way he had distanced himself from me and Bree and even Skylar. Why hadn’t I pushed him to tell me more about himself and what he was going through?

  Scott’s funeral was going to be in Ohio and only the immediate family was invited, so Rick and Todd had a reception to honor him. They lived in a large Spanish house in the hills. We walked up the steep stairs to the terra-cotta-tiled patio decorated with potted palms. The hot desert winds had kicked up, running fingers through the fronds. Past French doors a lavish brunch buffet was spread on a heavy oak table. No one seemed to have much of an appetite. I stared into the flames of the gardenia candles burning everywhere and wondered where Scott had gone.

  Bree and Skylar hadn’t come yet. Emi was there, looking whitewashed, like someone in chronic physical pain. She was wearing Scott’s death like a black coat that was too heavy for her.

  As I hugged her gymnast’s body, I felt a slam of guilt that I’d been jealous when Scott and she first hooked up. I’d secretly disparaged him for picking such a young woman. But I hadn’t wanted him for myself (stupid me), even if I was single at the time and he had pursued me, so what right did I have to judge his choices? She was lovely; I could see why he’d picked her. And I knew that he had broken up with her because he hadn’t wanted her to deal with her boyfriend dying. That any distance he had created between himself and me was probably nothing to do with her and all about his own gradual withdrawal from the world.

  “He never told me,” she said, shaking her shiny black ponytail from side to side. “Did he ever tell you?”

  “No. Only his mom. I’m so sorry, Emi.”

  “Do you know how I found out? No one called me. The day after it happened I went on his Facebook page to see if he was dating someone and I saw all these posts.” Tears slid down her high, rounded cheekbones. “Leukemia?” she said. “Who does that? Lets themself die of leukemia? Doesn’t get treatment. He was so selfish. So vain. Was it because he didn’t want to lose his hair or something?” She started to sob and I held her until she quieted. I’d thought the same thing about Scott, at first, but I knew it wasn’t that simple. He hadn’t wanted to cause anyone any trouble, and what bigger trouble could he cause than getting cancer, going through the treatments, and then maybe dying right away anyway? I didn’t tell all this to Emi, though. It would be easier if she believed Scott was selfish and vain, at least for that day.

  Emi left soon after, and Todd called for us all to gather in the living room and told a story about how when he first met Scott, everyone assumed he was gay. “Because he was so well groomed, sensitive, and thoughtful.” Everyone chuckled. “Then I realized he was just an amazing person and that everyone should be more gay.” He read the last text Scott had sent him. You’re doing so great with your workouts. Keep it up, buddy. Love you, man.

  Todd shook his head and bit his lip. “Sorry. I just wish I’d seen that as a good-bye.”

  It turned out everyone had a good-bye text from Scott that they hadn’t realized was one. We began an impromptu read of them. All of the messages had a special, personal reference and the words I love you. I read mine but stopped at the PS about him not wanting me to go to Body Farm anymore.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that Bob wasn’t at the gathering. Come to think of it, neither is Leila. And Bree’s still not here.

  I needed her then, and Skylar, but she didn’t respond to my text. I almost e-mailed Sky but decided it wouldn’t be cool to do that until I heard from her. So I left.

  * * *

  At about three in the morning I woke to a knocking sound and a man’s voice whispering, “I am here.”

  I bolted up; my dreams never had soundtracks like that. Outside, the Santa Anas tossed branches against the glass. So it had been the wind? Sasha had moved to the windowsill and was staring out into darkness. She looked, and felt—when I touched her—electric. I thought someone was following me home the other night, Bree had said. Was that someone out there? Following her, following us?

  I reached for the phone.

  The cops came forty minutes later. Two tall men with rock-hard chests. The older one was especially hugely muscled with acne scars scattered over his angular bone structure. The younger, baby-faced one had darker skin and bright green eyes. I wished they would both just move in with me. Or at least stay the night.

  “What seems to be the trouble, ma’am?” the older one said. His name tag read RODRIGUEZ. I was holding Sasha over my chest as if I hadn’t changed out of my nightgown and put on a bra.

  I told him about the knock on my door but not about the whisper I’d heard. They checked the perimeter of the house, said to make sure to keep everything locked up tight. I admitted I was more on edge than usual with the Hollywood Serial Killer out there, especially since my neighbor had been killed. I didn’t mention the dissolution of my marriage, the death of my best friend. Scott had told me once that he wanted to be a cop but his leg surgery had prevented it. I could imagine him standing there in a crew cut and uniform, taking care of me, taking care of people.

  “Yeah, we’ll all sleep better when we catch him,” the younger cop said. CORONADO. “Meanwhile you just need to keep your eyes open and your windows shut.”

  Sasha jumped out of my arms and began circling their feet, her tail wrapping their legs as if she, too, wanted them to stay. “My watch cat,” I said. “She likes you.” I was pathetic.

  They nodded, kept their arms crossed, patted their biceps, and left. But the younger officer turned back, handed me his card, leaning in so I could smell his cologne. “Take it easy and call if you need anything,” he said.

  I picked Sasha up again and got in bed, where I counted my lives in order to fall asleep. Or rather, deaths. Dash and Darcy London. Jarell. Carlton. Dean. Cyan. Scott was number six. I only had three more to go.

  #12

  My seventh death was in the shape of a key. My house key, in a Bubble Wrap envelope with Bree’s handwriting scrawled across the front in hot-pink Sharpie. There was no note.

  I called her, I texted, I e-mailed, but there was no response. I said, and typed, again and again, that someone had laced the cookies with THC, that I had no idea, that I would never have eaten one.

  Now I was supposed to go to meetings and call Shana every day, but I was blistering with resentment and I didn’t want to talk to her at all. I went to work and tried to pretend I was okay. The owners had hired my client Karli to replace Bree. She spent the entire day talking about her husband. He still didn’t know she had hair extensions.

  “How’s Bree?” Karli asked on a break from hubby talk. “Why’d she quit? Aren’t you besties?”

  “She got a job somewhere else,” I said, hoping to shut her down with my grim expression.

  I don’t think it was necessarily my face but rather Karli’s desire to return to the subject of her man that got me off the hook about Bree.

  At night I drove past the corner liquor store and stared at the poster of the woman with the bottle between her breasts.

  Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. I was all four. It seemed I always was. I ate a salad and took a cool shower and tried to sleep, but the nights were so hot and I couldn’t open the windows. All I wanted was to see Skylar’s face. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine it so clearly—the soiled baseball cap, the cheeks flushed, the eyes lit green. Sometimes I couldn’t look at baby photos of him; it was just too much—those fat cheeks and dimples and the gold curls tumbling down. When had he slimmed out and grow
n such straight, thick brown hair? Now his school photo at the salon made me feel the same cringe of pain. He didn’t have a phone I could call so Bree wouldn’t know. And I couldn’t do that anyway. It was one thing to lose Dash and Bree, but Skylar? I hadn’t realized how he’d single-handedly held the space between me and my desire to die.

  * * *

  That night I crawled in bed and watched the worst reality TV I could find. Sasha hid as if it offended her. On these shows there were all kinds of men behaving badly, but I realized that I might not have recognized it until the shows pointed it out. Had I learned more from reality TV than from my own mom and dad? Men were supposed to pay for the first dates, wait to try to sleep with you, express interest in you, not just what you looked like. Parents weren’t supposed to encourage hookups between their teenage daughters and twenty-one-year-old men. Fathers were supposed to tell their daughters to put on more clothes and to quiz their prospective boyfriends at the door. To protect their daughters from danger.

  “Too late,” I said to the screen. The numbness had just started to set in.

  But not enough.

  The phone rang. It was Todd. I hadn’t seen him in a while, since I’d been avoiding the gym. He said, “Put on the local news.” I turned the channel. Leila’s face was there. A head shot. And some candid shots of her laughing and without much makeup so her freckles showed. It hit me with a dull, blunt-object thud in my chest.

  Todd was still talking. She had been gone since we had the gathering for Scott. Actually, before that. Since before Scott’s death. Everyone figured she had just been out of town. But she still wasn’t back and she hadn’t returned anyone’s calls.

  “They found her body in the desert,” Todd said. “She was…” He stopped. He was crying.

  “No.” I wanted to hang up.

  “Her breasts were—”

  “No,” I repeated.

  “—cut off. Do you want us to come over?”

  “No.”

  “Catt?”

  “I have to hang up,” I said.

  I drove to the liquor store that night and purchased a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Then I went home and got in the bathtub and drank the whole thing. It was not dramatic in any way. I just drank it down. I did not call Shana or Bree or Dash or Cyan or Jarell. Instead, I stayed up all night and googled Leila Reynolds. So many pretty pictures of her. Clicking through them, it was as if I was looking for some clue, but I had no idea what I was really looking for. Until I found it.

  There was a picture of Leila in shorts and a crop top, her hair straightened so that it looked even longer and shinier, working out at Body Farm. Around her neck she was wearing a gold necklace that spelled out one word: California.

  When I tried to stand up, I watched the room circle me like a carousel. Or a zoopraxiscope. Was that what it was called? Those early viewing machines that predated movies? Determined, I got up anyway—though a muscle spasm in my hip clawed me back—and tried to walk to the bathroom but almost fell. A metallic taste swam up my gullet. I vomited on the floor and for a moment felt a bitter relief.

  Who had been in my house who knew Leila? Who had been on my couch? From whose pocket could the necklace have slipped? Bree was always here, but Bree was gone now. Scott and I had eaten Chinese food recently on my couch. Scott had been Leila’s trainer before Big Bob took over. I could see a man standing over Leila with blood splattering his glasses, glazing his hands. Killing all those women as if somehow by taking their lives he could lengthen his own. Because he had nothing to lose? What was I thinking? I was thinking that Scott was a killer?

  I went to look for the California necklace in my jewelry box but it wasn’t there. The last time I’d seen it was when I’d photographed it for my Love Monster blog, draped over blue satin with a vintage 1950s Visit California postcard in the background.

  I picked up the phone and called the North East police station, asking for Officer Coronado, the cop who had given me his card. A female officer answered and told me he wasn’t available. “May I help you?”

  “I think I may have some information about a case,” I said. “The woman who was killed? Leila Reynolds. I had her necklace. But I didn’t know that it was hers. Someone left it in my couch. Then they took it.”

  I must have sounded drunk and crazy because the officer only took down my name and number and told me someone would contact me in the morning.

  * * *

  The next day Officer Coronado called me back. In spite of, or maybe because of, the circumstances, my heart fluttered like a true-love addict’s when I heard his voice. As if he might rescue me from all of this.

  I told the officer that I’d last seen Leila Reynolds at the gym. That Bob was her trainer. That she was very sweet and everyone seemed to like her. No boyfriend that I knew of. No local, immediate family. That I knew of. I didn’t tell him this: that I had assumed things about her because she was nice and beautiful. I had assumed she was loved and happy.

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “I’m sorry, we can’t divulge that information,” the officer said. “You mentioned something about a necklace on the phone?”

  I wanted a drink. To put out the wildfire inside of me. “I found it between the cushions in my couch. It looked like the one she was wearing in a picture I saw online. It said California. But now it’s gone. Do you want to see a photo? On my blog. I could show you.”

  “So you say you found this item in your couch? Where is it now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe someone took it. It was in my jewelry box and then it was gone.” The idea of Scott, the would-be cop, being involved with Leila’s death, taking her necklace and leaving it in my couch, seemed insane in the light, which is why I did not mention him then. But why had the necklace been there? If it had been there at all?

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I know this is a stressful time. But I’d imagine there are thousands of these type of necklaces, and I can’t really do anything without some actual evidence. I’ll be honest with you, this isn’t going to go anywhere, but if it would make you feel better, I’d be more than happy to take a report.”

  “Thank you,” I said, flooded with a tide of red shame that included suspecting Scott, wasting the officer’s time, and wanting to smell his cologne again. “It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  On the way home from work that night I bought some more Jack and drank it, welcoming the burn in my throat, the way my head spun. Then I went online and typed in Hollywood Serial Killer. I stared at the photos of the victims. Mandy Merrill. Adrienne Banks. Michelle Babcock. Leila Reynolds. They all had long hair, long legs, big eyes, big breasts. My brain hurt as I rummaged roughly through it, searching.

  They all looked like someone else.

  They all looked like Bree.

  The pictures on my phone were mostly of Bree and me at work when we got bored. Of our hair. The styles we gave each other. Bree couldn’t take a bad photograph, from either side of the camera, actually. Even when she’d been a full-blown addict, she always looked perfect in every shot. I came to a picture of Skylar and me that she’d taken. We were both leaning out the windows of her SUV, wearing aviator sunglasses and backward Dodger caps and scowling unconvincingly, smiles lurking underneath. Then there was a picture of Bree and Skylar leaning on each other, back-to-back, with their arms crossed over their chests. Badass. Bree. Who looked like Leila and the others.

  And someone had followed Bree home from the gym one night.

  I knew then that Bree was in danger. Worse than the danger I was in from myself.

  I drove the few short blocks to Bree’s apartment building. When I drank, I thought I was a pretty good driver—more relaxed. Yes, I actually told myself this. I put on NPR to help me relax more. There was a story about a tiny Egyptian statue in a museum in England that moved incrementally in a perfect circle all by itself. No one knew how it did this. I wondered if it was some sign of the end of the world.

&
nbsp; Sleeping morning glories and insomniac jasmine clambered up the adobe walls and over the tiled roof of the building. The summer air smelled oversweet, as if it were trying to lure me somewhere unsafe. A large, sinister-looking banana tree blocked the front window. All lights were off inside.

  Bree and Skylar lived on the ground floor; I had always hated that. Now more than ever.

  I knocked on the wooden door, and then on the glass panel on top, knowing no one would answer. No one did. Maybe Bree was out on a date or at a meeting with Shana, and Skylar was with Baby Daddy. Skylar should be with me.

  Not now, you’re fucked-up.

  * * *

  Before Bree and I were sober, we used to have parties at this apartment building. We served cheap white wine in plastic glasses and chugged whiskey from our private stash. We wore tutus and off-the-shoulder spandex shirts or corsets, cropped lace leggings, and combat boots. Our hair was cut in bangs and styled in braids.

  One party had a wedding theme, and for that we wore bridal dresses we had found at a thrift store, hemmed into minis and dyed bright pink. We put white sheets over the picnic table in the yard and decorated it with candles and roses in jam jars. The food was a buffet of cheeses, chocolate, and grapes. Blue twinkle lights in the trees. Some friend of someone’s played the harp. Bree and I stood on her neighbor’s balcony and pretended to get married. Then we threw our bouquets of roses down into the garden, and Baby Daddy dove and caught them both. No one knew who he was, but he was tall and tan with slanted, green eyes, had surfed professionally, and was in a band, so he was allowed to stay. I sucked his comely cock while he went down on Bree. He tasted like citrus and his skin was ridiculously soft. Then she kicked him out and she and I slept in each other’s arms in her four-poster bed with our dyed-pink wedding veils hanging from the wrought-iron chandelier.

  This happened another time, this threesome, on one of the very last nights Bree and I got wasted. The night Baby Daddy fucked me, and then Bree, and Skylar was conceived. The death of the Barbicide boy and Bree’s pregnancy had sobered Bree and me up almost immediately after that, and we never slept in the same bed again.