After I'm Gone Read online

  “It’s not just Julie. There’s someone—that’s why I never spoke of it. It’s what Julie would have wanted.”

  “Someone else? Her sister?”

  Susan nodded.

  “I can promise you the statute of limitations has run out on that.” He really needed to check that detail. “No one’s going to care about Andrea Norr being an accessory to Felix’s escape. But that was it, right?”

  So the old rumor was true. They drove him out of state in a horse trailer. He couldn’t help being a little impressed with himself, ferreting out this fact, confirming an old legend. Too bad that he didn’t have anyone in his life to tell the story to.

  She gave the tiniest nod.

  “And she got paid? The sister?”

  “Something. Not a lot. And all Julie got was the coffee shop and a little cash for herself, too. But she didn’t believe it, she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she knew that Julie must have gotten lots of money, or how else would she have bought the inn, opened the restaurant? She was—kind of crazy. Not yelling, but loud enough that I could hear her. They were in the kitchen and I was in the laundry room off the kitchen. This was about a week before. She asked Julie for money, said it was only fair. And Julie said she just didn’t have it.”

  Susan had made the mistake he had hoped she would make, rushing ahead, babbling, assuming that he knew more than he did. She? Who she, what she? Not Andrea Norr.

  A silence of a sort. They could hear Doobie’s television set, the familiar chime of the Law & Order theme. Must be six now.

  “Did you see her?”

  “No. And if I thought she had anything to do with Julie’s murder, I would have told. I would have. But she was soft. Julie always said that. Soft, not used to doing things for themselves. The wife and the daughters. All spoiled, the whole lot of them.”

  “So there was a confrontation, a week before. Where someone accused Julie of taking money and she said she hadn’t.”

  “She hadn’t. Julie was really shaken up. She worried that the wife knew how to get to Felix, that the wife had told him these lies about her. That’s what really bugged her.”

  “So she didn’t know where Felix was?”

  “No. And she was okay with that, as long as Bambi didn’t, either. The day the daughter came, that was all she wanted to know. Had anyone spoken to Felix, what was going on with Felix.”

  The day the daughter came. He didn’t let on that he had assumed Bambi Brewer was the she in Susie’s tale. He flipped open a notebook. “Right, that was—Linda, right? The oldest one.”

  “I don’t remember the name. The middle one, I think. The smart one, who went to the fancy college.” She looked defensive. “Julie kept tabs, a little. She paid attention to Felix’s family. Maybe more than she should. She accused the girl of doing her mother’s dirty work. The daughter said her mother didn’t know she had come.”

  “Susan,” called Doobie, his voice as querulous as a child’s after a nap. “Susan?”

  “Yes, Doobie?”

  “What are we having for dinner?”

  “Turkey burgers and salad.”

  “And french fries?”

  “No french fries.” She looked at Sandy. “He’s older than me, by a bit. The doctor says something happens to the brain and we become like little kids again. Fewer inhibitions. We want what we want, we don’t care as much about saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ He’s a good guy. We’ve had a great life together. I’d be a shit to kick him to the curb now. Look, I’m sorry if you think what I did was a big deal. I had to ask myself what Julie would want, what was most important to her. Even if what I knew might have solved her murder—it would have hurt her sister.”

  “She wasn’t known for putting her sister first when she was alive, not according to her sister.”

  “All the more reason to do it after she died. Julie felt bad about her relationship with Andrea, wanted to make things up to her. She didn’t get the chance. I did.”

  On the drive back to Baltimore, he replayed the conversation with Susan Borden. She was one of the more credible people he had interviewed. Everyone lied, but Susan had been pretty straightforward about her lies of omission and why she had committed them.

  And her loyalty to Doobie, the child-man with the childish name and the enormous gut—it spoke well of her. We’ve had a great life together. They weren’t now and yet there he was, every day, totally reliant on her. Would Sandy have traded for more time with Mary if it had meant being with someone who wasn’t really Mary? Would he have traded Bobby-as-he-was, now in his thirties and lost to him, for a normal Bobby who died at age five?

  You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought. It’s still a play where everyone dies in the end.

  Miss

  Me

  September 23, 2001

  Is there room in the refrigerator for another platter?”

  Bambi, who had been in a fog all day, glanced distractedly at the middle-aged woman who had asked the question. Brown hair, dressed in a knit two-piece, which Bambi’s expert eye identified as high end, perhaps even St. John’s, a few seasons ago, although that was always fine in Baltimore. But the woman was a stranger to her. Why would someone unknown to Bambi be at Aunt Harriet’s shivah?

  “Thank you—Naomi.” The name came to her in the nick of time. Naomi had been Linda’s classmate at Park. Bambi kept forgetting that her daughter, forty-one this month, was a middle-aged woman, too.

  She walked Naomi’s platter back to the Gelmans’ kitchen, which had been redone a year ago and now had one of those enormous French-door Vikings, wide and deep enough to hold multiple platters from Seven Mile Market, the kosher deli, not that anyone in this crowd kept kosher. Not even Linda had gone that overboard. Bambi hoped Bert and Lorraine, who had been generous to host this shivah, would also allow her to leave much of the food behind. Oh, she would raid the platters for the cold cuts, maybe some of the cheese and fruit, but now that she was alone in the Sudbrook Park house, she had no use for all the cookies and cakes and pies. Neither did Bert nor Lorraine, with Sydney in New York and the twins at law school in Chicago, but they would find it less shameful to toss out the uneaten food. Rich people were allowed to waste things.

  Returning to the living room, Bambi still couldn’t get over how many people were here. Her mother had been right, after all, to insist that they needed something bigger than her little apartment in Windsor Towers. Bambi had thought no one would come. Harriet had no spouse, no children, and she had outlived the few friends she hadn’t alienated. Yet the Gelmans’ first floor teemed with people. Bambi’s friends, Ida’s friends, even the girls’ friends had been coming and going all afternoon. Perhaps, Bambi thought, people were simply desperate to gather. But what was the point of being with other people when the conversation immediately turned back to all the horrible topics—the Towers, anthrax, Cipro, the stories of near misses, the personal connections to those who had died. No one in Bambi’s circle really knew anyone who had been affected, although Joshua, Rachel’s husband, had a college friend who had been on the upper floors of the second tower and gotten out in time.

  “The body was found”—Bambi started at that bit of overheard conversation, but surely they were talking about the attacks? She continued to move through the crowd, checking on people. They would have to say a prayer at some point. Thank God they had Linda’s oldest to get them through it. Like most of her generation, Bambi read Hebrew only in transliteration and didn’t know any prayers by heart. Her family had been conservative when to be conservative was to be rather lax.

  But Felix knew Hebrew. She remembered her surprise, early in their marriage, when she realized that Felix had been raised in a relatively devout home. Synagogue was not just a social network for Felix. He relaxed there, took solace in High Holiday services. It was more than a way to burnish his social standing, although he always pretende
d otherwise.

  After he had gone, Bambi sometimes looked at the new bimah, the Chagall-inspired stained glass behind it, and felt as if she could count the Brewer dollars that had gone into it—and wished she could have every one of them back.

  “I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” a woman said, clasping Bambi’s hands. Corky Mercer, the absentee owner of the Pikesville boutique where Bambi had worked for twenty years now, all the while pretending it was a lark, something to do after the older girls left home. The job had kept them all in clothes they otherwise never could have afforded.

  “She?”

  “Your aunt.”

  Of course. Her aunt, Harriet. They were here for Harriet. “She hadn’t been well for two years, but, no, in the end, she didn’t suffer,” she said, extricating her hands. Corky meant well, but Bambi didn’t appreciate any touch that held her in place. She wondered if Corky would have done the same to a lifelong customer, as opposed to a customer who had ended up being a lifelong employee.

  Aunt Harriet had died in her sleep at age ninety-five. It had been at once slow and sudden, the end of a gradual decline that began with a fall at age eighty-three. It was only a broken wrist, but it was the beginning. That was when they started hiring the aides—and when Harriet’s eccentricities became more pronounced.

  Or was it simply that someone was finally there, paying attention? At any rate, the calls began twelve years ago. Even after Bambi’s mother moved into Windsor Towers, just down the hall from her older sister, Bambi still got the calls. Sometimes from Harriet, sometimes from the front desk, but mostly from the nursing aides who were subjected to Harriet’s verbal abuse. Bambi wouldn’t call her aunt racist—

  I would, said the Felix who lived in Bambi’s head. Still. Still.

  But Harriet was misanthropic and suspicious of almost everyone, regardless of race. She also had a bad tendency to cite people’s appearance in her tirades. So, yes, when she yelled frizzy-haired slut at the Jamaican aide, or big-mouthed idiot at the next woman, it probably seemed racist. “If you knew the things she says to my mother, her own baby sister,” Bambi said when she tried to appease the women. “I’m the only person she likes.”

  They were not appeased.

  Bambi really was, according to Harriet, the only person she liked. When Bambi was a child, Aunt Harriet had said: “You are my favorite niece.”

  Bambi, just ten, had said: “But I’m your only niece.”

  “Exactly,” Harriet said with a scary loud laugh, slapping her thigh. “So you’re my least favorite, too. When I write you out of the will, it’s so I can put you in the will.”

  But as Bambi emerged as a belle, Harriet’s teasing evolved into sardonic adulation. Harriet, never married—by choice, she said—took vicarious pleasure in Bambi’s social successes. She always wanted to know if the boys were from good families, by which she meant only one thing: Were they rich? She resented Felix at first. “He nipped you in the bud,” she said. “He knew a good thing when he saw it.”

  Yet Linda, Rachel, Michelle—they were of no interest to her. Even as Michelle began to resemble Bambi more and more, Harriet ignored her nieces. “You’re my only heir,” she said to Bambi time and again.

  “What about Mother?”

  “She has a husband.”

  Bambi’s father had died less than a year after Felix disappeared, so it seemed to Bambi that she and her mother were in similar situations, even if her mother did have Social Security, life insurance, and savings to draw on. Still, in Harriet’s mind, it was different, a disappeared husband apparently being much worse than a dead one. Even as her animosity toward her sister lessened, softened by Ida’s decision to follow her to the Windsor Towers, Harriet insisted that Bambi, and Bambi alone, deserved her money.

  How much was there? Enough to make a difference? She hated herself for thinking about it—yet it had been her only thought for forty-eight hours, since the last call about Aunt Harriet came, and she wished it could be her only thought now, that it could force other things from her mind.

  She caught Lorraine looking at her, eyes full of pity, and she knew it was not for Aunt Harriet. Bambi wouldn’t be pitied. She checked her posture, smoothed her hair, and searched the crowd for her daughters. Here was her fortune, achieved against enormous odds. Linda, the family breadwinner and a good mother, with four terrific kids. Rachel, still trying to be a mother, while now enjoying success doing some computer work that Bambi didn’t quite understand, but it had grown out of a silly thing she had done, creating a computer program that sent out a poem every day. And Rachel had helped Michelle find a job at a start-up, although its main appeal to Michelle seemed to be the glamorous offices, created out of an old factory in the heart of Canton.

  Where was Michelle? She hadn’t slipped out before the prayer, had she? That would be in very bad taste on her part. Not that anyone would remember, tomorrow.

  Michelle wandered the upstairs, looking for a computer. She wanted to check her e-mail. Since September 11 she had been even more obsessive about going online. She checked her e-mail as often as possible, used random chat rooms. Everyone was checking in on each other. A few girls from Park, even Adam Gelman, who still had a crush on her. Sometimes she thought she should take him in hand and break him, like a horse. A third-year law student, he was still something of a thuggish frat boy. It would be a good deed for all womankind to tame him and put him back in the population, gentled. But he didn’t have any money to spend on her, much less time. So—no thank you.

  Adam and Alec’s room was as it had been when they left for college, only clean. Their mother had tried to impose her will on the room to a certain extent—the sports and music posters were beautifully framed, not tacked up with tape or thumbtacks. The built-in desks, the bright red chairs, even the basketball hoop mounted to the wall—these were not IKEA finds, Michelle knew. She remembered an earlier version of this room, with two sets of bunk beds. Because, of course, Adam and Alec must have both options, up and down. They had never wanted to have separate rooms. They had gone to college, shared a dorm room, and now they were at DePaul together. Weird. The only profound difference between them, as far as Michelle could see, was that Adam had a crush on her and Alec couldn’t stand her.

  No computers here, although there was a television set. She thought about turning it on, settling in, but it wasn’t TV she longed for. She wanted to talk—only not to the people downstairs. She wanted to talk on the computer, where people were wittier and understood her jokes and it was okay to be a little ADD. To talk past people, as opposed to talk to.

  And to try, again and again, to chase her father down the rabbit holes of various search engines. She was still fond of Alta Vista, although curious about Google, which suddenly seemed everywhere. Imagine, she had been at College Park at the same time as Sergey Brin. Now there was a lost opportunity.

  She checked Bert and Lorraine’s room. Lorraine didn’t even have a television set in here, much less a computer. Michelle lifted the sheets, looked for labels. Frette. Not silk, she decided, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. Cotton that felt like silk. She filed the name away as she often did with the brands she discovered at the Gelman house, adding it to a voluminous wish list.

  She had been living in Rachel’s old apartment for five years now, but she yearned to move. Everyone said of her new job, “Oh, you can walk to work!” Sure, if she wanted to wear flats or put on sneakers and then change into her heels. Both options struck her as untenable. What she wanted to do was buy a condo across the street from her office, in this gorgeous building called Canton Cove, with harbor views and all sorts of amenities. But even with the new job, she wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage. And almost anyone could get a mortgage these days. You could buy a place with no money down and, by the time you signed your loan documents, you’d already have made ten, twenty thousand dollars on paper. But Michelle had credit card debt. It was Rachel’s
fault, letting her have the apartment, with its relatively low rent. That had lulled Michelle into thinking she had more money than she did. She had spent what she wasn’t paying toward her rent, and then some, and now she was in debt.

  She left Bert and Lorraine’s room and went down the hall to Sydney’s room. For a moment, she thought she had gotten confused. Surely, this was the old guest room? But Sydney’s room was now a home gym, a proper one—elliptical machine, treadmill, a television mounted to the wall above them. A rack of weights, serious ones. Those must be for Bert. And—wow, a sauna. Michelle opened the door and leaned in, drinking in that lovely dry-wood smell. When had Lorraine done this? After Sydney moved to New York to take a job?

  Or after she had announced right before graduation that she was moving to New York to live with a thirty-five-year-old woman she had been dating secretly for two years?

  Lorraine and Bert had taken it very well, everyone kept saying. Michelle and her sisters found that hilarious. As if Sydney had shamed them. Sydney was only the most disgustingly perfect person in the world, so perfect that even Rachel didn’t seem quite as shiny alongside her. (Truth be told, it pleased Michelle that Rachel was second to someone, brain-wise and perfection-wise.) Sydney was so wonderful that she had called Bambi and Ida to express her sympathy for the loss of Aunt Harriet, then explained that she would miss the funeral because she was volunteering at a soup kitchen that was providing meals for rescue workers.

  No, Sydney was not the kid that Lorraine and Bert should be putting on a brave front about. But then Lorraine and Bert somehow didn’t know how awful the twins had been as teenagers. Mellowed now, presumably, but there had been the incident with the drunk girl, the video they had made of her. They hadn’t touched her. They had just filmed this poor girl stumbling, then throwing up, and then, with the logic of the inebriated, removing her clothes because they were covered with vomit. They filmed every moment, with a droll running commentary, then screened it for their friends in the Gelmans’ den. When the prank—Bert’s term—caught up with them, the boys insisted they were protecting themselves against what the girl might say later. “We were just documenting it,” Alec said. It was her house, her father’s liquor, and the twins were sober. But Michelle thought that was the truly creepy part, the twins’ self-control, their clear-eyed decision to sit back and record this girl’s humiliation.