What Remains of Me

by Alison Gaylin

  She moved closer. She saw tears on his face.

  “Vee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How well did you know my sister?”

  “I think . . .” he said. “I think I loved her.”

  Kelly put her arms around him, emotions coursing through her—confusion and longing and hurt—Vee’s and her own. I wish you would have told me that earlier, she wanted to say. I thought you and me, she wanted to say. You know. You and me . . . But she didn’t. She couldn’t.

  He wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his head in her neck and started to cry, softly at first, then harder, his body shaking. She pulled him closer and kissed his head, his tearstained face. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

  She wanted to feel sorry for herself. For the feelings she’d had for Vee, those wasted feelings. But instead she found herself thinking about the boys who used to drop Catherine at home late at night, the sleazy, stoned-looking ones she’d sometimes see her with on the street, their arms around her, hands jammed into her jeans pockets. She thought about the older man in the Porsche with the aviator glasses and she held Vee tighter, poor Vee, who had so much more to feel sorry for. Kelly held Vee until she felt his pain as her own, until her shirt was wet with tears and there was nothing left inside him.

  KELLY WOKE UP ALONE. IT TOOK HER SEVERAL PANICKY SECONDS TO figure out where she was, to piece together the evening and the morning, and even then there were big gaps. She checked her watch, 7:00 A.M. She smelled coffee and stood up and, to her immense relief, saw Bellamy and Vee in the kitchen, mugs in their hands.

  “’Bout time,” said Bellamy. “Some of us have to go to school today, you know.”

  Vee said, “My dad is going to give you guys a ride home.”

  “Your dad?”

  “He has a place upstairs. He stayed there last night.”

  Kelly studied his face. She had a flash of holding him last night, of feeling his tears, though she couldn’t remember why exactly. That champagne. All those drugs . . .

  “I don’t have my car,” Bellamy was saying. “I’ve been driving since I was fourteen, my parents are suddenly all weird about me behind the wheel. They made me take a cab.”

  “Getting arrested might have something to do with that,” Vee said, and as though on cue, the front door opened, John McFadden unlocking it with his own key.

  “So much for privacy,” Bellamy muttered.

  McFadden said, “You ready?”

  “See you guys,” Vee said. He gave Bellamy a quick hug and then Kelly, hanging on a few seconds longer . . . She felt his lips against her neck. His breath in her ear. “I love you,” he whispered.

  Do you remember?

  Bellamy and Kelly followed McFadden out to his car—a cream-colored BMW with tan leather seats. On their way there, Bellamy gave Kelly a nudge, gestured up at the top window—John McFadden’s apartment. A female figure moved behind the thin draperies. “How much you want to bet that’s Cynthia,” she whispered, though to Kelly the figure looked smaller than Cynthia. Flatter chested. Of course, it was hard to tell, looking up from the street, and for all she knew, Cynthia Jones had been wearing some padding under last night’s macramé.

  Kelly smiled. “We could totally call Rona Barrett’s Hollywood.”

  “My dad would kill me.” Bellamy slipped into the backseat and asked to be dropped off first so she could make it to school on time. John McFadden turned the radio to KROQ. Frazer Smith’s show was on, and for the whole ride to Bellamy’s, The Fraze’s crazed voice filled the car, neither girl saying a word. Kelly had never seen Bellamy this quiet before. She remembered what Bellamy had said at the start of the party. “John McFadden is kind of weird.” She still didn’t know what that meant . . . or if it even meant anything. Sometimes, Bellamy just said things just for the sake of saying them.

  McFadden was tapping his hands on the wheel to the Dead Kennedys song The Fraze was playing when he arrived at Bellamy’s gate. He said his name into the box and pulled up the driveway. A man was heading toward their car from the front door, dressed completely in tennis whites. When he got closer, Kelly saw that it was Sterling. “Kids give you any trouble, John?” he said.

  “Nah, it was a tame party. Everybody completely well behaved—as well they should be.”

  “I’ll call you,” Bellamy told Kelly. She gave Vee’s dad a quick wave. “Bye, Mr. McFadden.” She joined her father, who put an arm around her shoulder.

  “Hello, Kelly,” said Sterling Marshall. It warmed Kelly a little, hearing him say her name.

  “Hi.”

  “Don’t let her get into any trouble,” John McFadden said to Sterling Marshall. “Or I guess I should say, any more trouble, right, Bellamy?” He smiled. Bellamy didn’t smile back.

  ONCE THEY WERE NEARING KELLY’S HOME, MCFADDEN SWITCHED OFF the radio and spoke to her for the first time. “You’re Jimmy Lund’s daughter!” He sounded shocked and kind of thrilled with himself, as though he’d just remembered the name of a song he’d been trying to think of for days.

  “Um . . . Yes.”

  He sighed heavily. “No wonder Vincent was so annoyed with me for not remembering your sister.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. “Jimmy’s worked on a few of my films. He’s a good man. How’s he holding up?”

  She forced a smile. “Good,” she said. “He’s um . . . he’s doing well.”

  He pulled to a stop in front of Jimmy’s house. Kelly grabbed her overnight bag, started to open the door. “Listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Please give your dad my best.” He smiled—a good, kind smile. Vee’s smile. Nothing weird about him.

  “Okay,” Kelly said. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Jimmy’s car still wasn’t in the driveway, which was good news. She didn’t need to lie or hide her hungover eyes or do anything, other than go to sleep. As she unlocked the front door and let herself in, Kelly allowed herself to think about her upcoming screen test, how maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all, and Vee’s dad would put her in a movie and she’d be rich and famous and never have to go to school again. She could even support Jimmy so he could retire.

  What do you think of that, Catherine? I’m going to be an actress, just like you wanted to be. Kelly brought her hand to her throat to touch the two diamonds. But she felt nothing, only skin.

  The necklace was gone.

  CHAPTER 18

  She is the anti-Suzy Chapstick. The dark side of the bright-eyed, sparkly girls on the cover of Seventeen magazine. In her smile outside the courthouse reside the dream-free lives of our youth, raised on a steady diet of soulless pop music and cinematic ultraviolence, on assaultive TV advertising fueled by fathomless, limitless greed.

  It has been said that certain faces reflect the times we live in, and in her case—in her smile—that rings particularly true. Of all the smiles that have captured our consciousness through the ages—those described in books, flickering on celluloid, beaming out of glossy color photographs and glowing on the painter’s canvas—hers is the first Death Smile. As we wade warily into the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, hers is the Smile for Our Times—a baring of teeth, as chilling and inevitable as a mushroom cloud.

  You can look away from her—and look away you will—but those dead eyes will follow you. You will never forget.

  Kelly Michelle Lund is our Mona Lisa. We brought her on ourselves.

  EXCERPTED FROM

  “A Smile for the Ages” by Sebastian Todd

  Los Angeles Times Op Ed

  March 3, 1981

  CHAPTER 19

  APRIL 23, 2010

  He deserved to die,” Rocky said, close to an hour after arriving at Kelly’s house, as they lay on their backs in her bed, breathing together.

  The start of sunrise poked through the filmy draperies—cloth she had chosen herself because it was the furthe
st thing from prison bars she could find. “They won’t block out the sun,” Shane had said, when she’d first brought the draperies home and hung them. “The sunrise will wake you up.”

  She’d smiled. “You act like that’s a bad thing.”

  That had been before she’d met Rocky, when she’d just seen him working in his yard. But once her gaze traveled from the draperies to his face—to those blue eyes shining out from painted vines, she felt as though she’d known him longer and better than anyone, Shane included. Shane especially.

  She knew, for instance, that when Rocky had said “He deserved to die,” he hadn’t meant Sterling Marshall. He’d meant John McFadden. “How do you know he deserved it?” she said.

  “I know you.”

  “And?”

  “If you killed him, you had reasons.”

  “Everybody has reasons,” Kelly said. “Mass murderers have reasons.” She stared up at her ceiling, the long crack in it, listening to his breathing. “Thank you, though.”

  “For what?”

  “Assuming the best of me?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him smile.

  “Your trial was a total farce,” he said.

  “You followed it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When it was going on?”

  He nodded and her heart leaped, just a little. Rocky had never spoken about his past. And the idea that he’d followed her trial, that he knew who she was before she’d knocked on his door, that he’d cared about what happened to her . . . He deserved to die. He’d sounded so certain when he said it, hadn’t he? Almost as though he’d known it for a fact . . .

  Almost as though he’d been there.

  The trial had been a farce—Rocky was right about that. Kelly’s lawyer Ilene Cutler had opted not to put her on the stand. “You seem older than you are, and not in a good way” was how it had been explained by Cutler—a Big Deal Hollywood Defense Attorney somehow retained by Kelly’s mother (in exchange for what? free makeovers?). Instead of focusing on guilt or innocence, Cutler had strived to portray Kelly as a poor, messed-up teen who was out of her element—making a big deal of all the drugs she’d done before the Resistance cast party and the fact that it hadn’t been Kelly’s gun; it had belonged to John McFadden, swiped by “aspiring actress” Kelly from his private collection that very same night. “She thought maybe she could scare him into casting her,” Cutler had said—an out-and-out lie. “That’s how misguided this poor, drugged-out girl was on that fateful, record-hot night.”

  Cutler had called it a “crime of passion,” though in private, she’d made it known that she’d seen no passion in Kelly—only “smugness” as she put it. “You’re an actress,” she had said to Kelly, who again was most assuredly not. “Try to at least act remorseful.”

  She’d made Kelly wear barrettes in her hair. Ballet flats, high collars, and no makeup, not even lip gloss. It was supposed to make her look young and innocent, but, as Kelly had tried to tell Ilene, it actually made her look bitter, as though she’d missed out on a lot of fun and wanted revenge.

  Ilene had gone for involuntary manslaughter, but the jury had convicted Kelly of second-degree murder and she’d been sentenced to twenty-five years to life. “I told you not to act smug,” Ilene had said, after the verdict—the last thing she’d ever said to her.

  Kelly said, “My lawyer didn’t like me very much.”

  “That’s no excuse,” he said, “for making you dress like a nun with a grudge.”

  She ran her hand softly over the side of his face. “Nun with a grudge.” She smiled. “That’s pretty good.” A faint stubble pierced his warm skin, five o’clock shadow making thorns on the vines. “Where did you come from, Rocky?”

  “Up the hill.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He moved on top of her, stroked her hair. “Do you really want to know?”

  She started to say yes, then stopped. His eyes were calm. She couldn’t figure out what was going on behind them. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Ask me when you’re sure.” He eased off of her, and she reached for him.

  “Rocky.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “I have to,” he said. “Your husband might come home, and even if he doesn’t, the press are bound to show up here soon. All those phone calls . . .”

  “No, no. I know you have to go back to your house,” she said. “Just . . . please . . .” She took a breath, steadied herself. “Don’t leave my life.”

  “What makes you think I’d do that?”

  “Everybody else does.”

  “I’m not everybody else,” he said. “Neither one of us is—which, when you think about it, is pretty much our whole problem.”

  He slipped out of bed and started pulling on his clothes. Kelly remembered going to Rocky’s house for the first time—on a whim, but such a planned, premeditated whim, waiting until Shane and his client were deep in conversation, slipping out for a “little walk” she’d been debating in her mind for days. She remembered how fast she’d walked those three miles, the way her heart had pounded, the tugging doubts. But when she’d knocked on the door and Rocky had answered it, a calm had come over her as though, for the first time in her life, she was where she belonged. “I know you,” she had said. No, that was wrong. She hadn’t said it. She’d only thought it.

  It was the eyes. The only part of Rocky that hadn’t been tattooed, and she knew them. At least she thought she did. Vee’s eyes. For five years, she’d wanted to ask, “Are you Vincent Vales?” But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say the words. If he said yes—or if he said no—where would that leave them?

  Rocky said, “That lawyer. The one who didn’t like you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you tell her that you killed John McFadden?”

  Kelly nodded.

  “Did you tell her why?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She said it didn’t matter,” she said. “Reasons don’t matter. Facts don’t even matter. What matters is what they think of you—the press, the jurors, the general public. Everything depends on what story they want to buy.”

  “She wasn’t wrong.”

  Kelly’s gaze traced the pale blue seahorse on his back, its long tail coiling around his spine. “No,” she said. “Fashion choices aside, Ilene wasn’t wrong about anything.”

  Rocky said something she could barely hear. He was still facing away, speaking more to the lamp than to her and in such a soft voice it was as though he was alone in the room.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  But it hadn’t been nothing. Kelly could have sworn he said, “I should have testified.”

  “Is that you, Vee?” she whispered.

  He turned. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He kissed her gently—a good-bye kiss. Heat flooded through her, tears in her eyes and that feeling—the sweet pain of his leaving. Had she ever felt this way with Shane? With anybody?

  “You’re my only friend, you know,” he said.

  Rocky yanked on his white T-shirt, stepped into his flip-flops. As he pulled on his windbreaker, she stared into the green eye on his neck—the same bottle green her sister’s eyes had been. “Rocky,” she said quietly.

  “Yes?”

  “Sterling Marshall deserved to die too.”

  He stopped. Looked at her, the expression on his face mirroring hers—shock. She hadn’t expected to say that. She’d never even known she felt that way, not until the words had come out of her mouth.

  Rocky said, “I saw that interview he gave the Times a few days ago.”

  Kelly shook her head. “It isn’t the interview.”

  “Then what? Why?”

  She wanted to tell him so much, needed to. She took his hands in hers, and he didn’t move closer or pull away. He just stood there, watching her face, waiting. “I
got pregnant from a conjugal visit.” She looked down at their clasped hands. “One of three times Shane and I ever . . .”

  “Three times?”

  “Yes. All right around when we got married.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shane never knew I’d gotten pregnant, but Sterling did. The prison doctor called him—nobody keeps secrets from Sterling Marshall. He threatened to cut us off, and I didn’t want to hurt Shane. Not because of the money. He wouldn’t have cared about losing the money. But he loved his dad so much. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to Shane if Sterling stopped talking to him.”

  “So you ended the pregnancy.”

  “Ended everything. My feelings for Shane. Any romantic feelings . . . I can’t . . . I can’t be with him anymore. I keep thinking things will change, but there’s this barrier. It never feels right. He’s patient. He thinks prison did it to me, but it wasn’t prison. It was his father. Him too, in so much as he’s his father’s son and I can’t ever forget that.”

  “I understand,” he said quietly.

  She stared into Rocky’s eyes. He did understand. She knew that. Rocky always told her the truth, and it went both ways. She couldn’t lie to him, even if she wanted to. “I didn’t kill Sterling Marshall,” she said. “I went to his house, but he was dead when I got there.”

  “Why did you go to his house?”

  She swallowed hard. “Because,” she said quietly, “he asked me to come.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rocky pulled the windbreaker hood over his shorn, painted head. “I wish I could save you, Kelly.”

  “From what?”

  “Other people’s opinions.”

  He slipped out of her room without waiting for a response. Kelly listened to his footsteps on her walkway, the opening and slamming of his pickup truck door, the rev of the engine, tires crushing gravel.

  She got out of bed, moved over to her dresser, and cracked the top drawer. She didn’t open this drawer, not usually. It was for keepsakes, and it didn’t hold much: a few beaded clutch purses that used to belong to Jimmy’s mother, a bag full of beach rocks from a trip with Shane to Big Sur, a framed photograph of Catherine she’d stolen from her mother, back when she’d moved out of her house, four months before the murder. But what she was looking for was at the bottom of the drawer, slid under the clutch bags where no one would find it. A postcard. She hadn’t looked at it since she’d first put it in the drawer—hadn’t wanted to, though she thought of it, often.