Part 23 (2/2)
And so we shared everything, didn't we? The main thing, darling: When you get this, your brother and I will be gone. It's best this way even if you can't see it. Try to understand. You must know you can't possibly give him what I can. And you know d.a.m.n well why. I won't say what I want to because you won't believe me. You can't see it and wouldn't see it. Not even when I showed it to you. I guess I understand because maybe I wish I didn't see everything, all the time. Even now, writing this, I can see your flat gray eyes. They're his. Alice *
Several weeks later, I drive to the Los Angeles Public Library and spend the day scouring newspapers from the previous month, crime beat stories in newspapers throughout the area.
Stories of mutilated starlets, scorched bodies, pregnant suicides, lost girls leaping, falling, and being pushed, strangled, shot, stabbed, and set in flames. All of them somehow in flames.
When I have nearly given up, my eyes catch a small headline in the Santa Ana Register. It reads, UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN RAVINE.
The article notes that the woman's body was virtually unrecognizable from having lain in several inches of standing water for so long. The only clue to her ident.i.ty was a small card, an identification card of some sort, with the text nearly completely effaced by the water. All that remained were the letters L o.
Lo The irony is so rich as to be painful. Whose ident.i.ty-Lois, Lora, Lora, Lois-had Alice planned to wear, and did it matter?
Her face faded away, erased by water, cold and dark and I can see them both down there, one face wiped clean, made new, and one split apart, turned inside out. If I could, I'd give them back their faces, like in the solemn, lurid photograph lying on the carpet, the photograph that gives them tawdry life still, their twin faces turning out to face, always turning out to face me and say *
Months before, before everything, this ...
It was at Calisto's, after two hours of sidecars at a tiny table in the corner, Mike Standish with one arm around each of us, king of the castle, smoking and laughing.
Alice and I standing side by side in front of the mirror in the powder room, packed with primping women, music scattering through the door with each entrance and exit.
Suddenly, as she stained her lips hot red, Alice seemed struck by our matching images. She stopped and watched, as if transfixed. Then: ”Do you ever feel like you're being followed?” It was a bullet shot in my ear.
”What? What?” I said, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear and then tucking it again as it slid out, and then again once more.
She stopped and smiled dreamily, ashamedly. ”I'm sorry. I'm drunk, Lora. So drunk.”
”What? But what did you say?” I said, standing straight.
She looked around at all the preening women. ”Come on,” she said, scooping my arm in hers and pulling me out into the hallway, and down past a clanging kitchen toward the open door to a back alley.
”Alice, I ...”
”It's okay. You don't have to pretend with me.”
”Pretend what?”
”That you don't like it. All of it and more still. Darker still.”
”I never think about it,” I said, even as I didn't know what she meant, or what I meant. ”I don't like it. I never thought about it once.”
She put her face close up to mine, peering hard at me. Heavy and confused with liquor, I thought she might somehow be able to know, to read my thoughts by staring hard enough, to know things about me I didn't even know.
”You don't have to talk about it, but it's something we both have, Lora. It's something we've both got in us.” She rapped her chest, her decolletage, glaring at me.
”I don't have it in me,” I found myself saying with sudden fierceness as the music swung mightily around us, pouring out loudly from the club, kicking up suddenly with the tempo, and the crowd swarming.
”I don't have it in me,” I said louder, trying to rise above the cacophony.
She said nothing but kept staring, her hand resting on her chest, her gaze unwavering.
”I don't have it in me.”
I don't have it in me.
I could feel my face contort, my voice rise and crack, fighting the band for all it was worth, fighting the street sounds streaming through from the alley, the clattering dishes from the kitchen, those hard eyes boring through me.
I don't have it in me.
Not at all.
end.
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