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ChapterEight
Rina was at the hospital till late morning. She sat on a plastic chair by her mother’s bedside, watching the sunlight play out across her worn face, which was smeared with bruises. Her father had gone to a doctor’s appointment of his own, which was a merciful relief. Rina didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to consider the idea that he’d hurt her mother. It was too alienating.
Minutes before Rina planned to depart for the day, Steve called her. It was the fortieth time since yesterday. It had come with twelve text messages, all of which read:“Please, call me back. I need to talk to you.”But Rina had been dealing with her own private demons. She couldn’t deal with Steve’s.
“What is that racket?” Ellen’s eyes flipped open, and she glared at Rina and Rina’s buzzing phone. “And what are you doing here? Aren’t you off to Timbuktu? Or wherever it is, you make your money?”
Rina swallowed the lump in her throat. “How are you feeling, Mom?”
Ellen shifted and scrunched her face as though pain rocketed through her body when she moved. “Where’s Wally? What did you do to him?”
Rina yearned to roll her eyes, but she didn’t. Instead, she reached for the glass of water on the table and helped her mother drink from its straw. She had a flash of a memory of her mother doing that years ago—helping Rina drink juice when she’d had strep throat. It had been rare for her mother to do something so tender. Perhaps that was why it had stuck with her.
Rina left before her father arrived. She made her way down the staircase, too frightened to use the elevator, worried the doors would burst open to reveal Wally himself. The sunlight blistered her face in the parking lot, and she donned a large pair of Gucci sunglasses. Just then, she would have given anything to be working a case somewhere else in the world, digging through someone else’s secrets rather than her own family’s.
What did she know? That her mother was injured and didn’t remember what happened. That her father wasn’t telling the whole story. And that, many years ago, her sister had disappeared—and they still had no idea what had happened. It was a terrible story. And she couldn’t make sense of it.
Rina left her car at the hospital and wandered barefoot along the beach for a while. Again, Steve called, but she ignored it. As a gust of Pacific wind rushed across her face, something tugged at her mind, something she’d forgotten. Suddenly, she remembered what Steve had said during their last phone conversation. His niece was missing. Since then, she’d told herself that people in the Montgomery family didn’t just go missing, and they didn’t need her help. As she’d fallen through memories in Santa Monica, she’d let the news trickle out of her mind.
That wasn’t like her. But she wasn’t sure she recognized herself right now.
Rina told herself she’d call Steve back later tonight and kept walking past the Ferris wheel and around the mini market where she, Penny, and Cody had eaten ice cream cones and drunk soda. Very soon, she turned the corner and approached Santa Monica High School, a sturdy red brick building with three stories, a football field with AstroTurf, immaculate tennis courts, and a billboard out front that said: “The Santa Monica Fighting Trojans!”
Rina hadn’t been back to her high school since graduation. She could still remember how it smelled: like gym clothes, bubble gum, and cheap cologne. Like thousands of pubescent teens, all with private hopes, dreams, and body odors. As she got closer and closer, she imagined Cody stepping out from the front door in his letterman jacket and nodding hello. She imagined them kissing against the tennis shed as the wind fluttered through her hair.
Although it was technically trespassing, Rina stepped onto the property and strode past the front door. It was just past twelve-thirty, which meant the kids were in lunch, eating slices of pizza that tasted vaguely of cardboard and drinking cartons of milk. She imagined the small dramas at lunch tables—the breakups, the teasing.
Half expecting someone to barge out and tell Rina she shouldn’t be there, Rina hurried around the corner and toward the back of the high school. She didn’t dare hope it was still there, but when she saw it, she nearly fell to her knees.
After Penny had disappeared and it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Santa Monica High School had had a fundraiser to make a mural for Penny. It was five feet high and ten feet across. Jefferson Hutchins, the best painter at the high school at the time, had painted Penny as she’d been back then, smiling out from the exterior wall thoughtfully. She was writing in her journal, her pen poised. Rina knew the image well. She’d taken the photograph they’d used for the painting.
Funnily enough, it looked as though there had been recent touch-ups on the painting. Rina imagined a current high schooler carefully fixing what the weather had done to the image. This was so many years after Rina had last seen Penny’s face.
Now that Rina saw the image again, she was transported back to that long-ago day when she’d taken the photograph. It was maybe six months before Penny had disappeared. Rina was sixteen, and Penny was fifteen or close to it. They were on the back porch of the home where her parents still lived, writing or drawing and listening to music on their boombox. Rina could practically hear the mid-90s hip hop and grunge. Mariah Carey. Madonna. Michael and Janet Jackson. They’d jumped up frequently to dance, swaying their hips.
That had been the night they’d had the boys over. Cody had come, as had Penny’s crush and all of their other friends. They’d played music as loud as the boombox could go. The boys had brought beers, and Rina had been anxious, watching her sister to make sure she didn’t drink too many.
Where had their parents been?
Rina leaned against the wall, racking her mind for more memories. This had been the one and only party they’d ever had at their parents’ place. Perhaps they would have had more if Penny hadn’t gone away.
Suddenly, the memory smacked her over the head.
Their parents had been gone. They’d left for vacation—without Penny and Rina—telling them that they needed alone time. They needed space.
Rina remembered laughing with Penny about this.
“It’s like they didn’t know what it would be like to have children,” Penny said. “They did not think things through before they had us.”
“I’m surprised they even had a second kid,” Rina teased. “Once they realized how hard it was with me, why did they keep going?”
Penny swatted Rina on the calf and reached for a Twizzler, which she ate languidly, her eyes closed against the sharp sunlight.
“Maybe one day they’ll fake their deaths and abandon us,” Penny said.
Rina laughed. “They’ll have different identities. New passports.”
“They’ll move to Paris or Bangkok or Buenos Aires,” Penny went on. “And when people ask them why they don’t have children, they’ll say, ‘Children hold you back from what you really want in life!’ And they’ll laugh like villains in the movies.”
