A picture of Jenny, holding her favorite stuffed animal (a fluffy pink dog she named Todd for some reason). I will keep the picture in the pocket of my denim jacket, and I will look at it every day.
Shalimar perfume. Gabriel made me take that because “my girl should always smell the way I like.”
The big butcher knife from the kitchen, wrapped in one of my sweaters. For when Gabriel is asleep, and I find the courage.
With love,
April (Your Future Mom)
Four
Quentin
“THE SMILE,” GEORGEPollard said. “The way she runs her hand through her hair. The ring on her finger. See it? That’s aquamarine. April’s birthstone.”
Quentin and Summer were sitting across from Pollard at his sprawling, polished desk at the Duarte Medical Center, watching the video clip of the woman he insisted was the very-much-alive April Cooper. It was well after his usual work hours—close to 8:00P.M., Pollard having made up an excuse about a dinner meeting with the hospital board that his trusting wife had accepted without question.
Pollard had sneaked around on his staff and lied to his wife in order to meet Quentin and Summer, which said a lot. But he wanted no part of theClosurepodcast—no visible part of it, anyway. “I feel awful about what happened to your family and I want to help,” he’d said to Quentin over the phone that morning. “But if you mention me by name, position, or anything that directly identifies me, I’m afraid I will have to take legal action.”
Quentin hadn’t pressed. To be honest, he understood where George Pollard was coming from, both in his desire to distance himself from April Cooper and in his need to do something to make up for the damage she’d done. But he also believed he could get Pollard to reconsider. Meeting the man in person, looking him directly in the eyes and witnessing the change in them as he gazed at the woman on his computer screen, Quentin saw a lot of the same emotions that had plagued him since childhood. Longing. Loathing. Guilt... The key was to convince Pollard—as he’d somehow convinced himself—thatClosurewas the cure for all of it.
The video they were watching was the same link that Pollard had sent to theClosureemail address. He’d sent it in response to a call for information Summer had posted on an Inland Empire Killers message board and it was a three-month-old clip of Robin Diamond, the film columnist for the popular website DailyCulture.com, discussing feel-good movies with her mom, Renee, in honor of this past Mother’s Day.
It was Renee they were all focused on—soft-spoken, ash blond, sixtyish Renee. Renee, who had cried overBambiwhen she was pregnant, who lovedEaster Parade“above all other movies” and had watched it with her grown daughter “at least a dozen times,” and who Pollard swore up and down was a very-much-alive April Cooper. “She couldn’t wait to be a mother,” he was saying now. “She wanted kids, a house, and a husband. In that order.” His eyes clouded for a moment and he smiled. A dreamy, lost, young boy’s smile. “Actually, the husband part she said she could take or leave.”
Great quote, thought Quentin, who was recording the conversation on his phone. He always did this, even with deep-background and off-the-record and completely unwilling sources. With some of the particularly distrustful ones, he even kept a mini voice recorder running as backup. (He’d bought it from a spy store, and it looked exactly like a pen.) Summer found it unethical, but he didn’t. He’d never air the interview without permission. And if he never got permission, he’d destroy the recording. Eventually. What was the harm in that?
“It’s strange,” George Pollard said as the video ended. “I never goto the Daily Culture website. I so rarely go to any of those sites. But I saw the link to the video on my home page—‘Mother’s Day Means Movies,’ I think it was called. And for some reason I had to click through. It was like someone was guiding me there.”
Summer said, “How soon into the video did you start thinking Renee was April?”
“Immediately,” he said. “And it was more than thinking. It was knowing.”
“Really?”
“It was her voice. It sounds exactly the same.”
Quentin studied Pollard’s face—a tanned and gently worn version of the teenager’s in the photograph, the dark hair gone silver and expensively cut, fine lines around the eyes and lips that looked as though they’d come from years of smiling. Hard to believe that George Pollard was two years older than Quentin’s mother would have been. He’d aged well—the way people of health, privilege, and happiness tend to do. Kate had none of those things in her life, and it had shown all over her.
“You’re positive it was April’s same voice,” Summer said.
Pollard nodded, his dark eyes misty.She was my first love, he had written in his email.But I’d rather not say any more than that here...
Quentin said, “You never forget the voice of your first love.”
Pollard’s gaze traveled to the desk—the one framed photograph he’d placed at an angle, next to his computer. “That’s right,” he said quietly.
It was always interesting, the personal pictures people chose to frame and display. In his office at Claremont College, Dean had dozens of them—candid and staged photos of his parents, his younger sister and her husband and baby, a cheesy shot of Quentin feeding him cake at their wedding, even a black-and-white of his childhooddog. Reg Sharkey, of course, had a mantelpiece littered with framed pictures from a lifetime ago, while Summer’s desk at work held just two: a photo of Joan Didion and herself, taken at a book signing, and a college-era pic of Quentin, his face contorted in laughter. It embarrassed him every time he caught a glimpse of it.
Quentin, for his part, had none. To him, framing a picture was an attempt to make time stand still—something that was neither possible nor desirable. He preferred to keep his personal photos on his phone, ready at any given moment to be deleted forever.
The sole framed picture on George Pollard’s desk, the one he stared at now as though he were asking it for guidance, was of his family—his entire family. There were at least twenty people in the shot, ranging in age from elderly to infant, all wearing pale blue T-shirts, the wordsPOLLARD REUNION 2014emblazoned in white on the front. “Do they know about April?” Quentin said.
“No.”
“None of them?” Summer said. “You haven’t shown your wife the video?”
“No. And I never will.”
