Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  “I don’t want your nasty old sweater. Besides, I don’t wear black. It’s unbecoming of a young girl.” This is just the kind of airy thing I, Cindy, would have never said.

  “You took it!”

  “Ma. Behind you.”

  “Oh. Well, good. You know, it’s my favorite one.”

  “Redondo Beach,” I said.

  “Redondo Beach! I used to sing there, if you didn’t know.”

  “Not to the beach! You would sound crazy. They would have arrested you.”

  “Hah. They would like to have, believe me. No, in a bar. It was the most beautiful bar. The air inside felt ancient. The wine was free, but you had to pay for the use of the glass. I’ve forgotten why. Some kind of law, I guess.”

  When her tea was ready, I’d bring it in and sit with her a minute. We’d look over the crossword. And Virgil came at dark, to cozy me up and take me back up the hill to home with the incense still flowing from my clothes, from the places where my pulse heated up. I figured she couldn’t get into much trouble if I was paying attention to how much she drank. She put it in her tea. She was generally starting to get sloshy by the time Virgil showed up, so I hid everything in spots of my own devising. Every night, I told Bernadette I was going to a sleepover at Kayla’s. Sometimes she seemed sad when I told her. Other days she waved me off without looking up from her book.

  I think that even as many times as she asked me who I was, what I was doing in her house, there were hundreds more times she wondered and didn’t say it. She still had enough wit to sustain some pride. It embarrassed her not to know. She was aware that she ought to know what I was doing there with the wrench scuttling around under the counter to turn the gas back on. She had probably tried to make a cup of tea in the middle of the night and wondered why this act would not be allowed. So much worse than this, she would be alone in it. I probably didn’t look like an intruder in my sock feet and with Mondo leaning against my shins while I turned the pages of an old Met catalog. I could tell she was covering when she fluffed up her hair at the nape of her neck, a thing girls do. A thing I did, which she might have even copied from me to earn some unconscious favor.

  And in those moments, too, it was only safe to speak of the things that were around us and equally visible to us and not related especially to any sense of history. We could not talk, for example, about whatever we had done yesterday. It would only become clear that she did not remember. We could not talk either about me. Possibly I had already told her everything about my life. I might have emerged just before the moments that tied themselves together had broken all apart on her, and it would be hurtful to remind me of this, of how little I could mean to her.

  So instead, Bernadette would choose something in the room and comment on it, as if it were the first time she had noticed it in all these years. But the trouble was instead, then, that she chose the same few things to comment on. One was a set of green dominoes laid out in some almost totemic pattern, one was a sun-stained packet of aster seeds folded in half to accommodate the wobbling table. One was the picture of Sister Rosetta Tharpe taped to the refrigerator, and did I know that Bernadette had met her once? Why, yes, I did. But I had to pretend otherwise.

  We talked about the goats every day. They were our soap opera, our royal family, our tabloids and actresses gone to fat. Bernadette pointed out the way Dolores’s hind legs were mussed over with spume, dirt. It was a sign she had just been mounted. The billy pissed on himself to get smelly enough for mating and left his dirt on the girls. The next day, it was Panda Jane with the dirty hind parts. I pretended to be scandalized, but only because Bernadette loved so much to tease me. Really, I thought this was unremarkable. But I loved how it made Bernadette laugh.

  One of the does was clumsy. She could be counted on to knock over a pail of water, even a full one. She was so friendly she stepped on my feet. What was her name, I wanted to know.

  “Ann Richards,” Bernadette said. “She’s got a drinking problem, but you know, she’s just so brave.” And she laughed and laughed. Well, I didn’t know who Ann Richards was. But I laughed, too, because it was a thing for us to do together.

  At home, I found it helped me, this habit of dwelling only in the things I could see. I could crawl from one moment to the blank vista of the next. When Clinton hugged me too long and felt the bra strap through my T-shirt, I could go blank into the dark parts of the plain air, the parts that are always there and which you can travel into. Moment, moment, moment. I shaved off one moment and left it behind. I was becoming someone he couldn’t keep track of, and he had no idea. At home, we were always watching a courtroom TV show about roommates who couldn’t agree whose turn it was to pay for cable. At Bernadette’s, I ate pomegranates and read Khalil Gibran. I kept waiting for someone to enforce a normal bedtime, or at least ask where did I get the small black cherry candle I was now burning in my room to read by, what was the matter with my face, because my face was looking different. Even apart from the makeup and hair dye, I knew something new was starting to show up there.

  XII

  Why was it, I can’t remember now. I think I had fallen down in the goat berries and gotten them all over my shirt, or possibly I was just dusty from moving around in the barn. But anyway I needed a change of clothes, and everything in the hampers had been there who knows how long, and reeked like mink marks, so I decided to wear something of Jude’s.

  I knew it was wrong to go into Jude’s room. There was still some investigation tape across the door. I had to duck under to get inside. I couldn’t believe how many things Jude had. A shoebox of nail polish bottles had been dumped out on the rag rug, eighty kinds. They were all across the floor, and left here and there where detectives had been through them.

  Most of her clothes were on the floor of the closet, things cramped together with trash, and I saw a blister packet of birth control pills, which made me ache for her privacy, even while I trampled it. I wanted to leave her alone, but I wanted, too, to bury myself in the stuff that smelled like her, some harsh perfume like burning wood. It didn’t seem like it would be so wrong to take one of the dresses off the hanger. I was covered in goat berries, after all. I had to wear something clean. The dress was a black slippery thing with a drawstring waist and no sleeves and even right against my skin it felt like an animal. My blood warmed it up right away.

  Maybe it was because the dress felt good. It felt good in a way my own clothes never did. Like I had skinned a lake and was wearing its hide on me. I’m saying this, I’m trying to explain. I saw the little vial of neroli oil, plain, with a white cap and a sticker almost rubbed off. I put it around my jaw and on my wrists like I had heard about. I felt like I should sit with my skirt circling me in the grass and toss an apple into the sun. I was not myself. My lungs were bigger. The sun was shaping a cloud and letting the light get choked up behind it. Swift, like it happens here often, the panels of light just dropping away in an instant. I had no use for Cindy anymore. So I put on more of the missing girl’s things. Her bracelets. She had stacks of them, the aluminum ones with diamond shapes cut in the metal. And because I liked the way they slid over my arms I also was touching at my hair and I twisted it up with a barrette. I don’t have any more words for it now. My spine was long. I felt like I had grown a tail, a halo, a claw.

  My experimental walk down the hallway to the bathroom, all the time I was nervous to see myself. But Cindy wasn’t there. With Jude’s clothes on me, my new muscles slipping up under my skin, she wasn’t there. This was a boat to go over a green ocean in, and there could be bells ringing somewhere. Hello, Marilou! I saw the word ITALY lit up in capitals, or I thought I did. The fish in my stomach coursed together by drumbeat or scattered. Help! I thought. I think I even laughed.

  I must have looked at myself a long time like that.

  Bernadette came into the bathroom. For some reason, this felt much more serious than my previous attempts at dissolving mysel
f into Jude. Maybe I had begun to fool myself in some much more essential way. And possibly I’d already laid in all of the damage much earlier, in some instant that still eludes me. But I do know: This is where I would stop it, if I could actually go back and do such a thing. My heart hammered some warnings to me. I saw her tumbled hair behind me in the mirror. I hadn’t thought it through, of course. I had not thought what to say to her, standing there in her daughter’s dress, and with her jewelry warming up by my wrists. And with her neroli-oil perfume heated by my skin running out into the world.

  I thought she might spank me again. Or haul me up and throw me out. But she passed lightly behind me and stepped over to the commode. She hiked up her skirt and peed, her face blank as an animal’s. Then she paced again behind me, wetted her hands in the faucet, and patted herself with the water under her armpits. She smiled at me, licked a finger, and pushed away a sleep crumb from my cheek. When Virgil came to pick me up that night, I cried a little, going away, watching Mondo run out into the road behind us.

  For fun, we started calling the tip line on the flyer Alistair Vanderjohn had left at Pecjak’s. Shayna knew someone who did it full time in Texas. He would look up all the things on the Crime Stoppers website and call a bunch of times to say he saw speeding cars of various descriptions leaving the scene of the shooting or robbery or whatever. Sometimes he gave Shayna a cut for calling in the tips because the regular Crime Stoppers operators were getting to know the sound of his voice, even when he made it high or spoke through a sock. Shayna knew the whole deal. He ran an algorithm to determine the most common alphanumeric combos on plates. He listened to the scanner radio constantly. He ran it all night while he was sleeping. And sometimes, when he went around he found a place that just had a bad feeling in it. It might just be a strip mall doughnut shop or a roadside beauty school, anyplace with a bad sparkle in the air. It didn’t matter. He called it in. Sometimes he just made shit up. He made up women who did bad things and told the tip line about their heart-shaped mouths and chestnut ringlets and where the moles were on their faces and where they dumped the bodies. Crazy enough, those were just slightly more likely to pay out. “It’s a little like being a psychic,” Shayna said. “He helped catch a mom who left her babies chained up in a storage locker, just because he had a feeling. He called in and said it was a redheaded woman who drove a purple PT Cruiser. Broke the case wide open. He made ten grand on that one alone.”

  So Shayna called and called about Jude:

  “I saw her get in a red car.”

  “I saw her get in a blue car.”

  “She got on a 250cc motorcycle of some kind.”

  “She became a Scientologist and signed up to do the thing? Where you live on a ship?”

  “I saw her just ten minutes ago at the Wendy’s off I-79. She was with an obese man in mesh shorts.”

  “She was wearing a headscarf.”

  “They cut off all her hair.”

  “She’s in a barn somewhere near the Mason-Dixon Line.”

  “She was sold to a tech billionaire. No, I don’t know what for.”

  “She jumped off the bridge, the big one over the gorge. The, I don’t know, the gorge bridge? No, I’m not laughing.”

  She made a separate call for each. Each time, she wrote down a seven-digit number on the back of the flyer.

  “OK, the guy’s catching on to me. Your turn.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Baby, just close your eyes and see something. Then tell him what you saw.” She handed me the pen and the flyer. “Just don’t make it too specific or it won’t work.”

  I dialed the number. “She ran away to the ocean,” I said. “She’s sitting on a rock right now.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jude. That’s where she is.”

  “Who?”

  “Jude. Vanderjohn? She’s missing?”

  “She’s on a rock—by the ocean?”

  “That’s what I saw when I closed my eyes.”

  “This is not a prank, young lady.”

  “OK, sorry,” I said. He didn’t give me a claim number.

  I was across the way with Bernadette’s goats when a little sky-blue sedan pulled up and stopped my heart. Nobody was supposed to come by that I knew of, and I had never seen the car before. People’s cars always looked to me like an extension of their face. Melda McConaughey’s rusted-out bug looked like Shelley Duvall, for example. But the man I had seen at Pecjak’s—Jude’s father—got out and pulled a banker’s box from the trunk and went right on in the door like he had been expected. I was terribly afraid he would turn and see me watching him. Just like that, he looked up and waved hello.

  The truth is, I had been ducking Bernadette’s friends ever since I had decided to dye my hair black and become the slippery person. It would become too complicated to keep up my trick if anyone was there to ask questions, and I’m sad to say it, but lots of people are quick to take an out, and not have to drive halfway across the county to sit in a dim living room and drink bitter tea and get dog hair all over themselves. So I told Bernadette’s friends, when they called, that she was feeling unwell and I was just down the road to bring her a casserole but they shouldn’t bother. I didn’t have to tell anyone twice. It didn’t really occur to me that anyone would drop in without calling. Or had I left the phone unattended? I considered unplugging the cord whenever I watered the goats or left for the day, or even keeping it in my pocket so as to avoid any more surprises.

  They weren’t in the front room, so I snuck around the back of the house and hovered myself down on my heels below the kitchen window. I could hear papers slithering across the table, and my own ragged heartbeat, which I tried to stiffen.

  “Bernie. Bernie. It’s not going to help. You’ve got to look at it the way it is.” His voice sounded a little tired, but not angry.

  “It’s just so good to see you, Alistair. Let’s put it all behind us. Let’s go back to Chico. I’ve had enough of this place. Oh, I’m sick to death of it. I want to see the sky again.”

  “Here’s the main thing, OK? We’ve got to keep her face out there. I’ve been talking to the detectives, and they say that’s the way to go.”

  “Whose face, baby?”

  “Jude. Jude is missing.”

  “I swear to god, Alistair. You can’t come down here and chew on my ass every time she complains about something I’ve done.”

  “I assure you, I didn’t come to chew your ass. Our girl is missing.”

  “Jude and Virgil are off on a wild teenage love trip. You’re just a smother. And I will not subject my baby to these fear-based beliefs of yours. Besides, she’s just across the road with the goats. Or her friend is. Well, I don’t know what they’re doing. You go look for yourself.”

  “I saw her—that’s Virgil’s sister, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I don’t keep track of Jude’s friends. But yes.”

  “She’s by herself. Jude is missing. Jude isn’t here.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? We just painted our nails this morning. We’re going to make banana bread.”

  “Bernadette. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going round and round with you, especially not if you’ve been drinking.” As far as I knew, she hadn’t been, but I could see how he’d be confused. Her memory was shot so it didn’t much matter, actually. A big silence spilled out and out like oil on water, and then I heard her chair creak.

  “You know, I’m kind of tired,” she said. “You should probably go. I am just too weary for all this. If you want to nail me to the cross, you’ll just have to come back tomorrow.”

  “I’m leaving tonight. Driving right to the airport.”

  “Airport! Well, take me with you, then. Take me back to Chico, darling. I’ve had enough of this place. I miss seeing the sky. Oh, I am heavy sick of not seeing the sky.”

 
I braced for whatever Mr. Vanderjohn was about to say to that, but then on the other side of that silence, I heard him crying. It was shuddery. It sounded like he was chipping pieces off a big rock, but trying to be quiet about it. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed silly to keep hiding since he had recognized me, but neither did I want to see a crying man. It seemed like if I looked, he would know something about me which I hid desperately. He cried for what seemed a long time. My legs were burning and my heels had gone numb, but I couldn’t move.

  Finally I heard the screen door, and then the car starting up. He hadn’t said good-bye. Probably he knew there was no reason in it. I gave it a few more minutes before I came inside. I was hoping Bernadette would be untroubled by recent memory so I could ply her toward some safe activity instead, but she was holding one of the flyers right up under her nose.

  “Who are you?” She sounded puzzled, and not angry, but I didn’t want to risk the mood going bad.

  I found a fresh bottle of gin and poured it half with Coca-Cola into her travel mug and took it to where she sat.

  “I’ll trade you,” I said, and shoved the mug into her hand. The stack of flyers I took upstairs with me to destroy.

  XIII

  This one I heard from Sissy Pecjak, whose brother was a hospital orderly. Apparently, when they didn’t find any hint of Jude in the correctional system, the police began checking the hospitals. In Mon General, they found a girl who couldn’t remember her name. She matched Jude’s description. She had not produced any ID. The hospital records averred someone had left her in one of the courtesy wheelchairs at the emergency entrance on May 19, a few days after Jude’s last sighting. She had been signed in under the name Janet Lockjaw, which afterward it was clear had been some species of joke.

  Apart from being severely malnourished, she carried a bone infection in her jaw. She couldn’t or wouldn’t say where she had been. But when they asked if her name was Judith Vanderjohn, she said yes. When they asked her if she lived in Deep Valley with her mother, she said yes. Was she hurt? Yes. Who did this to her? Yes. Then she switched to saying Wow. She stayed stuck on Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Wowowowowow. The nurses, when they thought nobody was listening, called her the Human Ambulance.