After I'm Gone Read online

  She remembered a year ago, going to see a film purportedly about a group of young friends not much different from herself. Recent grads of a good school, making their way in the world, anchored by a perfect-seeming couple, a pair of college sweethearts. But the man was cheating on the woman. “What about your extracurricular love life,” she snapped at him, at last, each syllable as sharp and hard as a little karate chop. A year ago, Rachel had found the whole thing hilarious. There were no such people. Now she was living it. She may have said those very words to Marc: What about your extracurricular love life?

  Really, one could argue that watching soap operas was downright redundant at this point. But how could she live with a cheater and a liar?

  Her parents—that had been different. Her mother never confronted her father, not to Rachel’s knowledge. But then, her mother was trapped. Three kids. No work experience, no college degree. She, at least, could have expected alimony. No prenups in her mother’s day; wives still got alimony. They didn’t have to negotiate for what they deserved—

  The doorbell roused her from the couch, from the land of Luke and Laura. She couldn’t imagine who would be coming by. Almost everyone she knew was at the ocean, even Linda, with her sweet new baby boy, Noah. Rachel wasn’t ready to be a mom, not yet, not given her circumstances. But holding Noah, seeing Linda’s love for him—she hoped she wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  “Hello,” said Julie Saxony. “Is your mother at home?”

  She was perfectly dressed. At a time when hair was big and skirts voluminous, Julie wore a throwback of an outfit, a pink linen shift with a matching bolero-style jacket over it. The dress looked like one that was stowed in Rachel’s memory. My mother had a dress like that. Her going-away dress, the night of her wedding, purchased for the trip to Bermuda. There was a photograph of her in it, somewhere in this very house. And, possibly, in her father’s office, although her father had never allowed his wife or children into that part of his life.

  The only false note was the overlarge purse, which looked cheap and plastic, a very bad imitation of an old-style cosmetic bag.

  “She’s away,” Rachel said, aware of her baggy shorts and stained T-shirt. But at least her T-shirt said BROWN on it.

  “Oh. Will she be back soon?”

  “She won’t be back at all. And if you’re here to make good on what I asked last week, it’s too late. I took care of it. We don’t need your money. Our money, I guess I should say.”

  Julie pushed past her, as if she didn’t take Rachel at her word. She took in the hallway, the living room beyond it. Out of date, but still pretty and comfortable. Bambi had longed for more modern furnishings, but Felix had argued that they wouldn’t work. He believed in comfort, anyway, found the seventies-style furniture too low-slung. The living room looked like a lounge in a country club, but an unstuffy one, a place to sit and smoke, although no one had smoked in this house for ten years.

  “I always thought it would be . . . nicer,” Julie said. “I’m sorry,” she added, as if embarrassed by her own rudeness. “It’s just that I thought a lot. About where you lived. But I never got to see the inside.”

  “That’s because there was no reason for you to.”

  “Are you sure your mother won’t be back today? It’s very urgent that I speak to her.”

  “No, she won’t be back today. And I can’t imagine you have anything urgent to discuss with her.”

  Julie looked disappointed, almost the way a child would. She shifted on her feet, looked around. “I can’t stay. But I want her to know—Felix sent for me. For me.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No. I’d tell you more—the arrangements made, where I’m going—but, of course, I’ve been asked not to. He sent for me. He loves me.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” Rachel grasped for something to say, something hurtful and scarring. “You’re just a whore with no life. A thief, too. When my father finds that out, he won’t want anything to do with you.”

  “You said he already knew. So I guess you’re the liar, after all.”

  Julie lifted her chin, the proper lady, and began to walk out, making a grand gesture. A line from a movie, an old one, popped into Rachel’s head: You’re much too short for that gesture. But it wasn’t even true. Julie was tall and slim, five-eight or so, taller than their father. Rachel was the shorter of the two, a twenty-four-year-old woman who had just agreed to divorce a man she still loved because that was the only way to get the money she needed to save her mother. And for what? What had she done? Preserved this stupid life, this frozen life, like something out of a fairy tale, where everyone was suspended, waiting, waiting, waiting for the man who never came, never called, never did anything to prove he truly cared for them.

  Rachel had been going into high school the year that Felix disappeared. As a cost-saving measure, her mother had petitioned to enter her in Western High School’s A-course that fall by using her parents’ city address, assuring Rachel it would be only for one semester, that the financial situation would work out and it wasn’t fair to pull out Linda, who was a senior. Rachel’s freshman year at Western had actually lasted less than a week. She had been jumped at the bus stop by another girl for reasons that she could never discern. Jumped from behind in a hair-pulling, kicking, scratching melee that had lasted all of a minute but that felt like an eternity. It was the only physical encounter of her life. Until now.

  She sprang at Julie Saxony’s back as her onetime combatant had pounced on her, swinging wildly at the woman’s head, arms flailing, intent on bringing her to the ground. Rachel’s only thought was to make sure the other woman didn’t look so damn perfect when she got off the plane wherever she was going. To run her hose, to scuff her shoes.

  She hadn’t planned to actually bloody her, but when that happened—well, it happened.

  March 27, 2012

  9:00 A.M.

  Sandy actually felt bad locking Bambi Brewer up overnight. But what else could he do? She was lying her head off, and if he let her go home, she was going to brief whoever she was protecting. The only choice was to isolate her, lock her up too late to get before a judge—and get to the one daughter as quickly as possible.

  And, yeah, he felt like a bum, going to see a woman whose daughter had surgery the day before. But it wasn’t life-threatening, according to her mom. The kid had already been discharged.

  Rachel Brewer lived maybe a mile, as the crow flies, from where Bambi Brewer had grown up, but a crow would cover a lot of distance in that mile between the once-grand homes of Forest Park and these modest brick rowhouses on Purnell Drive. Sandy found it interesting that she was the kind of person who didn’t mind being in the minority. Hard to know, but he would guess that this stretch of houses was mostly African American. Middle-class, solid citizens, but it wasn’t a situation that most white people he knew sought out. Not that Sandy could ever decide if he was white. Sure, he looked white and Cubanos were technically Caucasian, but did that make him white? Coming up, before there were so many Latinos in Baltimore, the world had basically been black-white-Asian, and Sandy was white. But now, although he had not changed, he would be called “Latino,” a word that meant nothing to him.

  It was the July fourth thing that had done it. Not impossible. But it made no sense. Where had Julie Saxony been for twenty-four hours in that case? Not driving, based on her car’s odometer. Not at home, not checked into any motel or hotel uncovered by detectives, or ferreted out by the reward money dangled by the Havre de Grace Merchants Association. So Bambi was lying about that. But why? And also lying about sending the daughter to do her bidding, based on what Susie recalled of the conversation. The daughter had said explicitly that her mother didn’t know she was there. Okay, Susie’s memory could be wrong on that point, or the daughter could have been lying to gain some perceived advantage. But the mother was definitely lying, and the daughter was the one per
son who could contradict her.

  The woman who answered the door to Sandy and Nancy was not the beauty her mother was. It was only then, allowing himself that rather ungallant thought, that Sandy realized he did find Bambi Brewer very beautiful for a woman in her seventies. This one was pretty as middle-aged women go, her features roughened by whatever her father had contributed. But likable, younger looking than her age, even with no makeup and those deep circles under her eyes. She hadn’t slept last night. Well, she had a sick kid and a mother in lockup. Those dark circles were earned.

  They did the little dance of introductions, the pretense of hospitality. They were keen that she not lawyer up, but it was tricky, playing her this way. He hoped she would be looser at home, more relaxed. He hadn’t factored in the demands of a toddler.

  “Your mother confessed last night to killing Julie Saxony.”

  “She’s lying,” Rachel said.

  “Why?”

  “No idea. But I know it’s a lie.”

  “How?”

  “Because I saw Julie Saxony on July third. I was alone at the house. She came by, she wanted to speak to my mother, I sent her away.”

  “Did she come by with the money? The money you asked her for a week earlier?”

  A beat. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened. She came by with the money.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Three hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “That’s more than your mother’s mortgage and debt. Based on the papers we’ve seen.”

  “Really?” She was surprised they knew about the mortgage. “Well, maybe it was the exact amount she stole.”

  “Have you ever seen three hundred fifty thousand dollars? It’s a lot of money to put in a suitcase. Julie Saxony’s sister has described the piece of luggage your father handed to Julie that night. She says there couldn’t have been that much in there. And no one saw Julie put anything in her car that day. Why are you so convinced that Julie stole it?”

  “My mother said she did.”

  “Your mother told us she killed Julie Saxony, and you have no problem saying that’s a lie.”

  “I told you, I saw Julie on July third. I was at home. No one else was. She left, end of story. I thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. She left and someone killed her.”

  “She could have come back. The next day. I mean, if she really wanted to see your mother—”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Again, how can you be sure?”

  The child began chanting then: miljews, miljews, miljews. Sandy couldn’t begin to make it out, but it apparently referred to milk and juice, as the woman got up and fetched two cups, the kind with lids that don’t spill, whatever those are called. Sandy would probably know those kinds of things if he were a grandfather. He could tell the mother was happy for the distraction, because she made a big production out of it, probably using the time to think about what she wanted to say.

  Only liars and very polite people need that much time to decide what to say.

  “Do I have any—I don’t know—I mean, not confidentiality, but can I tell you things that you won’t tell my mother?”

  “Maybe. It depends.”

  She sighed. “Julie Saxony came to tell my mother that my father had sent for her. Of course, that wasn’t true.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she was found dead.”

  “But that doesn’t mean she was lying. You’re working backward from a known fact. She might have been going to your father, wherever he was. And someone might have killed her to prevent that from happening. Maybe your dad wanted her dead.”

  Rachel was clearly having trouble processing all this. Again, it might have been the fatigue, or it might have been that she had held back this piece of the story for so long that she hadn’t thought about how others might arrange the same facts. Felix had summoned Julie Saxony, but Julie was found dead. In this woman’s mind, those two things weren’t connected.

  Sandy believed they were.

  “But I didn’t—” She stopped.

  “You didn’t kill her? I mean, you hit her hard enough to knock her earring out, the one that your mother found and sold a month later, but you didn’t kill her? Your mom thinks you did.”

  “She didn’t tell you that.”

  “No, she just confessed to a murder she probably didn’t commit. Possibly to protect the person who did.”

  She wasn’t having problems focusing anymore.

  “I need a lawyer.” It was a statement of fact, flat and plain-spoken. By force of habit, Sandy tried to forestall the inevitable.

  “Look, we’re still just talking here. If you say you didn’t kill her, you didn’t kill her. Maybe you just, I don’t know, knocked her out, called one of your father’s old buddies, like Tubman, to help you? And you didn’t know what he did or how it ended. That’s okay. We’re just talking. You bring a lawyer in, we’ve got to go out to headquarters, you’ll want to find a babysitter and here’s your kid, just getting over something really major—”

  “No, I need a lawyer. We can drop Tatiana at my sister’s house. Michelle, the younger one. And I’ll call Bert Gelman before we leave. Is that a problem, Bert representing my mother and me? Is he allowed to be my lawyer, too?”

  “I have a hunch,” Sandy said, “it’s what your mother wanted when she fired him last night.”

  Noon

  Michelle had a nanny whom she called a babysitter. She wasn’t fooling anyone, including herself. The woman lived in a private apartment above the garage, worked almost sixty hours a week, with Tuesdays and Sundays off. Michelle felt guilty about this. But Hamish wanted her free to go out, to focus on him. She missed the children when she was out, yet she also dreaded Tuesdays and Sundays, which seemed to last forever. It never stopped. Two was so much harder than one, although thank God Hamish III was in school now. Still, that left her with Helena, who was more outrageous than most three-year-olds.

  Helena’s high-maintenance ways were thrown into sharp relief by Tatiana’s temperament. A by-product of being in an orphanage, Rachel had said once, and Michelle had said: “Do you think there’s an orphanage where I can drop my kids off for a week or so?” She thought it was funny. Rachel, not so much.

  Today was a Tuesday, but she hadn’t mentioned that when Rachel had called. She had said, “Sure, bring her over.” And that had felt good. Until a few years ago, she had so little to offer her sisters. It was nice to be the generous one, the bountiful one. To have the biggest house, to hold the family gatherings, to be able to help out financially. She was especially keen to do anything she could for Rachel.

  Rachel’s one was so dainty, alongside Helena. Of course, she was younger and, well, malnourished. But there was something in her movements, something delicate and fine. Michelle watched her examine Helena’s cache of toys in the den—and watched Helena become instantly passionate about any toy that Tatiana touched. “Mine.”

  “Be nice,” she said. “Share.”

  Tatiana didn’t seem to mind. She just moved on to the next toy, which Helena promptly took, saying: “Mine.”

  She was her mother’s daughter all right.

  Although the house was toasty warm, Michelle pulled her sweater tighter around her, took another sip from her homemade cappuccino. Why are you going to talk to the police now? she had asked her sister. What is going on?

  It’s going to be okay. It’s just crazy. No one did anything.

  Did Mom—

  No, no.

  Did you—

  No, Michelle. I think Mom thinks she’s protecting me or something, but I didn’t do anything. Honest, I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t do anything really bad.

  But Michelle had. Michelle had done something very bad. She had come so close to telling Rachel, the day of the shower, before Hamis
h III was born. But she had a moment of—what to call it? Clarity. She wanted to confess to Rachel because it would make her feel better. She wanted to tell her sister about the worst thing she had ever done, in hopes of forgiveness that she didn’t deserve. She still yearned to be forgiven—and still understood that she didn’t deserve it. That was the price she had to pay. For six, almost seven years now, she had tried to persuade herself that her life was proof that she had done the right thing. Hamish, the children—a bad person would not be given these things. And a remorseful person was not bad, right? She used to be bad, but she wasn’t anymore.

  “Mine,” Helena said, snatching another toy from Tatiana’s hands. Tatiana never countered, never complained, just went searching for something else. Was Michelle supposed to check her bandage soon? She needed to read the sheet Rachel had left for her.

  She sipped her cappuccino. She was really enjoying being nice, if not the Nice One, the role that still belonged to Rachel. It had been a revelation, learning that being nice wasn’t for suckers, that living a life in which one could like one’s self was akin to being softly massaged, all the time. Every “please,” every “thank you”—it was like a coin dropped into a bank. No—a coin tossed into a fountain, like the old wishing fountain at the Westview Cinemas. You gave the coin away. It was no longer yours. It had no currency. And yet you still felt rich somehow, in the moment you released it. I can afford to surrender this quarter. I can afford to say please and thank you and no, you were ahead of me, because I can afford to be nice now because someone finally loves me. Someone I don’t deserve. If Hamish knew—if Rachel knew—if her mother knew—