Page 80 of Dark Ugly Places

My finger hits something softer, embedded deep in the tire. Wedging my finger inside, I try to pry it out, but the groove is too deep, my finger too fat. I stand up and search the tool bench behind me until my eyes land on a Phillips-head screwdriver. I grab it off the wall and find the same indentation in the tire, the squelch of something stuck there that shouldn’t be there.

Carefully, I insert the head of the screwdriver and pull it out.

Blackness on my fingertips. The tackiness of something dried and biological. Several threads, black as night, attached together at the top.

Emmy’s hair.

There you are … I found you.

It makes sense that it would be here. After all, with Jason gone all the time, the car itself was barely driven. Cared for, sure. Cleaned, yes. But hardly driven. I feel myself nodding, the small clump of hair in my hand almost unbearable. An emotion—my emotion, not Nicola’s—swells within me that I cannot place, and I brace myself against the tool bench. My hand clutches my chest, and I feel myself breathing heavily. A single drop of water cascades down my cheek, and I realize I might be crying.

That’s a first.

These feelings, this body, they are so real to me now that I scarcely remember the numbing blankness of the dark place—where Nicola is now.

That day, the ambulance didn’t come right away. Eight minutes of waiting, holding back under the unforgiving Los Angeles sun, the asphalt a hot pan beneath her bloody hands. Emmy was first on the stretcher. On the road, the glass had shattered, and Ben’s iPhone was a broken mess littering the road. Of course something got left behind. In all the destruction, here was a tiny piece of what survived.

When I stand, the garage door is opening. Outside, the flashes of paparazzi trail behind Bambi, flickering as she pulls in through the gates. The Range Rover pulls into the garage, and the door begins to lower. She gets out, her hands visibly shaking, sunglasses still on as she catches sight of me. “What are you doing?”

I tuck the little clump of hair into my palm, feeling the fibers crack and bend. I need to preserve it, to keep it safe, this tiny fleck of evidence. “I came to adjust the security system and thought I heard a noise.”

She takes off her glasses and examines me, her eyes visibly alarmed and tear-streaked. “Your hands, they’re black.”

I shove the tiny piece of hair into my back pocket, pretending to wipe them. “I know. I was cleaning the oven. Then I heard a noise.”

“You don’t have to clean, Martha,” Bambi says suspiciously. “Lucita does that.”

“Right,” I say, trying to steady my breathing.

“Come inside,” she says. “I need your help.”

As I’m leaving the Redferns’ garage, the tumble dryer slows, a steady rhythmic beat. Nicola’s little song travels up through me.

Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.

Mama’s gonna find you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird don’t sing,

She’ll snap its neck and drown it in the bathroom sink.

I know I’m the only one who hears it. Even Nicola is too far away now. I made sure of that.

33

Nicola

Minutes in the darkness feel like days, days like weeks, weeks like months, and so forth. The agony of nothing is difficult to bear.

All I have here are memories. The incessant blankness of my own mind spewing forth version after version of the past, as if nothing and everything happened, as if each instance of it were somehow true. No wonder it is easy to lose oneself in here. You cannot know yourself truly without the existence of others. But here in the darkness, you have only yourself.

“Are you angry at your father for dying?”

I look up, and Dr. Constance is staring at me, floating amid the darkness. Her messy desk appears, her papers sprawled across the surface. She writes something about me in the files, something untrue, something harmful.

“You mean, am I angry he killed himself? No.”

“Are you sure?”