Pretty Amy Read online

  “Whether people care about you or not isn’t really the issue,” he said, and he took off his glasses. “The issue is whether you care enough about yourself. So, do you?”

  “Signing that paper doesn’t prove anything,” I said.

  “That isn’t what I asked,” he said.

  “Fine. I care about what happens to me.”

  “They’re just words, Amy. I can say anything and pretend I mean it.”

  Maybe he could. It wasn’t like that for me. I lived in a house without words. He had no idea what hearing them meant, what saying them meant, even if they didn’t actually mean anything.

  But maybe he was right. Was caring about myself the secret? But even if that were true, how was I supposed to get there?

  He looked at me, his eyes going little-girl sad. “I know you’re having a hard time without your friends.”

  “What do you mean? I’m fine. I just talked to Lila,” I said, fast, fast, fast, so I didn’t have time to think it wasn’t true.

  “That’s a lie,” he said.

  How he knew this I wasn’t sure, but I hoped he hadn’t seen me flinch when he said it.

  …

  The minute I got home I tried to call Lila again. Well, not the minute I got home—first I had to deal with my mother slamming the front door in my face and telling me I could sleep on the street with the other junkies.

  After having a cigarette and deciding that dealing with my mother was in fact better than holing up under the nearest underpass, I went inside, though I did reconsider when I found her in the basement ripping apart my mattress with a steak knife.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting that monkey off your back.” She picked up a handful of stuffing from the inside of the mattress and compared it with a book in her hand. It was called Heroin: Not a Horse You Want to Ride. She must have gotten it from the library while I was at my appointment with Daniel.

  “Mom, this is ridiculous,” I said, taking AJ from his cage.

  “I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous—that you would put poison into your body. That you would bring”—she paused and turned the page—“that Lady H into my house.” She picked up another pile of mattress stuffing, studying it.

  Lady H, AJ squawked. Lady H, he squawked again.

  “Where is it, AJ?” my mother asked, like he was Lassie or something.

  “Mom, there’s nothing in there. It was a joke,” I said. I thought about Daniel’s claim that he didn’t tell my mother anything I said. Well, apparently he’d told her about the mattress.

  She pulled out another handful of stuffing and compared it with her book.

  AJ perched himself on my shoulder and bit at my hair. Snow, AJ said, snow, snow, snow.

  I knew he meant the white beads of stuffing my mother was throwing into the air as she searched, but luckily she didn’t hear him, or she probably would have thought I was on cocaine, too.

  “Why don’t you just buy yourself a microscope?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said, dragging the mattress up the stairs, the corner of it smacking each step, so she could do in private whatever tests she needed to do.

  I closed the door behind her, put AJ back in his cage, got underneath my heap of blankets on the floor, and called Lila. My hand glowed green from the buttons on the cordless phone as I dialed the number. I didn’t really know what I was going to say, but I needed to hear her voice. I needed to hear her words, whether she meant them or not.

  But instead of her voice on the line, or even the phone ringing and ringing and ringing, I got the punch in the stomach of a recorded operator telling me the number I had dialed was no longer in service and no other information was available. The only way I could reach Lila no longer existed.

  I wanted to ask the operator if she knew why, to ask her if Lila had been forced by her parents to disconnect it, or whether she had chosen to disconnect it herself. I kept listening, as if she would give me the answers I was looking for.

  I needed that woman in the phone. I needed to know why no other information was available. Why I was in my basement, under my covers with a phone to my ear, and only her recorded voice to turn to.

  That day I realized that insanity isn’t just about being crazy; it’s also about being lonely.

  I brought the phone upstairs and saw my mother in the backyard through the kitchen window. She was next to the swing set. She doused my mattress in kerosene and then lit it on fire.

  As Cassie would have said, She must be really fucking lonely.

  Twenty-seven

  With my mattress incapacitated, I slept on the couch in the living room that night. I sat AJ’s cage on the floor next to me and couldn’t help keeping my hand on it, like a little kid falling asleep holding a stuffed animal.

  Throughout the night, I would wake up to AJ’s cage shaking beneath my palm and find him flying around in circles. This was not different behavior for him, but I suppose it was different for me to notice it. Notice it and realize that if I were convicted, I would be just like AJ, flying around in circles in my very own cage.

  I smelled my father making breakfast before I saw it, smelled butter and warm batter. I picked up AJ’s cage and brought it to the kitchen table with me.

  “Bon appétit,” he said in a faux French accent. “May I interest you in some cakes made in a pan?” He was standing in front of the stove with a spatula in his hand and wearing the pink-and-white-checkered apron my mother had worn the night Dick Simon had come for dinner.

  “I can make them bird sized, too,” he said, trying to flip one in the air like the pros, but he ended up whipping it behind him, where it hit the wall and stuck like a suction cup. “Look,” he said, pointing with the spatula, “wall-cake.”

  I smiled. At least he was trying. “Where’s Mom?” Seeing as he was making breakfast, I was hoping the answer was something like Istanbul.

  “Still sleeping,” he said, turning back to his sizzling pan.

  I looked at the clock. It was ten o’clock a.m. Usually if she wasn’t up by seven we were checking her breathing with a spoon. “Guess it’s tiring playing narcotics detective.”

  “Let her be. She had a rough night.”

  “Not as rough as my mattress,” I said, pointing through the window to our backyard, where my mattress lay like a burned marshmallow. I was sure Joe and his mom had seen it, had smelled it. Bald Britney Spears weird? Um, yeah.

  “She just cares about you.” This is what my father said every time my mother did something crazy. My mother’s definition of care was a mental disorder. “Besides, you’re the one who lied,” he said.

  “I didn’t lie. I was joking.”

  “You say pancake, I say poncake.”

  “I’ve never heard you say poncake.”

  “I hope you’re hungry,” he said, walking toward the table with a plate piled high.

  “Does she know you’re making breakfast?”

  “I didn’t make it for her. I made it for us,” he said.

  Such was my life: my mother went arsonist on my belongings like I was a felon; my father made me pancakes.

  I had to admit, that morning I liked it. It was nice sitting with my dad, eating terrible pancakes and listening to him talk about proper mastication techniques for better dental health. I should have known something terrible was just around the corner.

  My mother ran down the stairs, yelling, “What did you do now?” I thought she was referring to the smell of my dad’s pancakes, but then I heard two car doors slam in our driveway.

  I found my mother standing at our front window. She had the curtain open a sliver, like a scared old lady.

  “Who is it?” I asked, and then answered my own question by coming around behind her and looking for myself. I saw two policemen leaning on the side of their squad car. One was flipping through a wallet-photo-size notebook. The other was looking over his shoulder at our house and nodding.

  “What are they doing here?” I asked. Was there
some new law I didn’t know about where they could come and haul me away at any time? “You didn’t call them, did you? About the stupid heroin?”

  “Why, should I have?” she asked, squinting at me.

  “Maybe they’re here about the mattress,” I said.

  My father walked up behind us from the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

  “Ask your daughter,” my mother said, crossing her arms.

  The policemen rang the doorbell and my mother jumped like she had been burned by the sound. I heard AJ squawking from the kitchen. “What is that bird doing at the table?” she asked.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” I said.

  “Why should I? It’s not for me.” She didn’t move.

  I matched her stance, a younger, shorter, saner mirror image.

  “Which one of us already has a criminal record?” she asked.

  “I haven’t been charged yet.”

  “Exactly—yet.”

  My mother and I stood across from each other like two cowboys ready to draw in a duel. Maybe I couldn’t always say what was on my mind, but I could stand and stare like a ninja. The bell rang again.

  “Is someone going to get that?” my father asked.

  My mother and I didn’t move.

  One of the policemen started knocking, loudly, and yelling about getting a warrant. That was enough to make my mother give up. She went for the door like she was the explosive at the end of a fuse their words had lit.

  “Sorry, I was in the shower and didn’t hear the bell,” she said, trying to sound her most law-abiding and innocent. Even though it was so obvious she had not been in the shower, even though my father and I stood on both sides of her.

  “I’m Officer Kavanagh, and this is Officer Teesdale,” he said, indicating himself, then the shorter guy next to him. “Does Amy Fleishman live here?” he asked, looking down at his pad.

  “For today she does,” my mother said.

  Officer Teesdale asked, “Do you know a Lila Van Drake?”

  “She does,” my mother said. “Well, she did, anyway. Amy chooses not to see or speak with her anymore.”

  “Is that true?” Kavanagh asked.

  With my parents standing there and two policemen staring at me, I couldn’t really do anything but agree.

  The policemen looked at each other and Kavanagh wrote something down. “Have you talked to her at all lately?”

  “She just told you she hasn’t,” my father said.

  “Then you don’t know she’s missing?”

  I heard what he said, but I didn’t understand it. “What do you mean, missing?”

  “Maybe we should come inside.”

  We moved out of the way so they could enter. Kavanagh had to duck to make his way through the door and Teesdale knocked on the side of the doorjamb as he crossed the threshold. They were different from the guy who had arrested us. Who knew Collinsville was so well protected?

  “Can I offer you some pancakes?” my father asked as they sat at the kitchen table.

  “No,” Kavanagh said.

  “Coffee,” Teesdale said, and then gestured for me to join them in one of the free chairs.

  It wasn’t until then that I realized I’d been standing. I couldn’t feel my legs. I couldn’t feel anything except hot, buzzing panic.

  “Nice bird,” Kavanagh said, pointing at AJ’s cage.

  “Did something happen to Lila?” I asked.

  My father brought the coffee and bowed slightly as he placed it on the table. He looked down and realized he was still wearing the apron. “I don’t usually cook,” was how he decided to explain it.

  “She’s probably on some bender, sleeping one off on someone’s couch,” my mother said.

  “That’s certainly a possibility,” Teesdale said, latching his hands together on the table and leaning closer, like he was asking me to deny it.

  “Is Lila okay?” I asked, feeling like she had been standing right next to me and I had lost her in a crowd.

  Lila, AJ squawked, Lila, Lila, Lila. I put my hand on his cage to quiet him. It was strange, having him repeat out loud the way her name was pounding against the inside of my head.

  “Did she tell you whether she was planning on going anywhere?” Teesdale asked, watching me over his coffee cup.

  “Where would she go?” I asked. And why wouldn’t she take me?

  “Has she contacted you at all in the last four days?”

  “No,” my mother said, glaring at me, daring me to prove her wrong.

  “She’s been gone that long?” I asked.

  “Give or take. Her parents only reported her missing yesterday. I guess they thought she might come back.”

  “They usually do,” Kavanagh said, and both of them nodded.

  My father came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Well, are you looking for her? She could be hurt, or lost, or tied up in some maniac’s garage,” I said, my voice escalating.

  “I’m sure they are doing everything they can,” my father said.

  “It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found,” Teesdale said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “He means she skipped town,” my mother said, sounding like Lila had spit in her face.

  “She wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “Really?” she replied, snapping her head hard enough to sprain her neck in order to look at one of the cops. “How often does someone get kidnapped just as they’re about to go to trial?” She was doing her best I guess I look like I was born yesterday expression.

  “She wouldn’t leave me,” I said.

  “Well, she did,” my mother said. “She was smart enough to know that her life was more important than your friendship—something you should have realized by now.”

  My father just rubbed my shoulders, I think less out of comfort and more because I was there and he could. I was there and Lila was gone.

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to set up a tracking device on your landline,” Kavanagh said. “Just in case she tries to call you here.”

  “Yes, whatever you need,” my father said.

  “Someone has been calling over and over again and hanging up,” my mother said, sounding very sleuthy.

  “That was probably Lila,” I said. “She might need help.” Lila, I thought, or Aaron. I tried not to think who I would rather it had been.

  Lila, AJ squawked again, Lila, Lila, Lila.

  “Could you identify anything from the calls? A sound? A location?” Teesdale asked.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, putting my hands on the table and leaning toward my mother.

  “How could I have known?” she asked.

  But then I wondered when she would have been able to tell me. We yelled about the arrest, we fought about the arrest, we stewed about the arrest. There wasn’t much room for anything else.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” Kavanagh asked.

  “She hasn’t used it in weeks,” my mother said.

  “Do you mind if we check the phone records on it?”

  “Whatever you need,” my father said again.

  Who knew what they would find on those phone records? Would they be able to find anything, considering it had been turned off and hidden up on the high shelf? At least what my mother had said was true. I hadn’t used it in weeks.

  “Looks like she made your decision for you,” my mother said, tearing up. “I’m calling Dick.” She wiped her eyes and left the table.

  “We have some forms you’ll need to sign for the tracking system,” Teesdale said, looking at my father. “Why don’t you come outside?”

  “Don’t worry,” Kavanagh said, “we’ll find her.”

  My father squeezed my shoulder and followed the officers out, still wearing that apron. I knew they’d taken him outside so they could talk to him privately, tell him to watch me, to make sure I didn’t follow Lila’s lead and try to go anywhere.

>   Those calls had to have been Lila, checking in from the road. I could see her. In the distance was a green highway sign. The air smelled of gasoline and cows. Maybe there was the sound of crows cawing, or crickets thrumming, or corn growing. Maybe Lila wanted to apologize but couldn’t. Maybe she wanted to say good-bye without words.

  While my mother was upstairs plotting Lila’s murder and my father was in the driveway with a frilly pink apron on talking to policemen, I grabbed the cordless phone and AJ and went down to the basement to call Aaron. Taking my chances before the tracking system was installed.

  “Do you know where Lila is?” I asked as soon as he answered.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Lila.” I paused. “Brian’s Lila.” I wondered if anyone would ever refer to me as Aaron’s Amy. It was doubtful, considering no one had ever seen us together.

  “No,” he said. He had me on speaker. I heard music in the background. I heard him spinning a wheel on his skateboard, but no laughter. He was probably in his room. It was only then that I realized I had never seen his room, had never even seen his house.

  “The police were here,” I said. I was out of breath, like I had just run a long distance. “She’s missing. No one knows where she is.”

  “Wait, what?” he said. I heard him take the phone off speaker. “Police?” he whispered. “Where’s Brian?”

  “I don’t know.” AJ stared at me from his cage, his eyes like shiny black beads. “They say she’s been missing for four days.”

  “Did you tell them anything?”

  “I don’t know anything.” I pulled my comforter off the floor and wrapped it around me.

  “You didn’t say something to the police?” he asked again.

  “No,” I said. I was starting to feel defensive and I wasn’t sure why.

  “Well, why would she just leave?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I heard Aaron put me back on speaker. I heard him opening drawers, heard him breathing and texting.

  “Aaron?”

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Are you going to look for them?” I was hoping he would say yes. I was hoping he would say, Yes, I’ll pick you up, and we’ll go look for them together.