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  “Congratulations, Joey. In the history of crank calls, you win the Oscar for Most Eclectic Use of the Word ‘Shenanigan.’”

  Joey groans. “I choked. But it worked. And I found out something else—the bill’s past due for the second time this year. You think the Kims are having money problems?”

  I think about it—that great big house, but with the AC turned off. Mrs. Kim always dressed like a country-club doyenne, complete with jewelry. Always the same jewelry, but always the best. And Maggie, with her imported cigarettes and massive wardrobe. She never seemed to hurt for spending money. “I don’t know. Maggie never mentioned it, and I think she would have, if she’d known.”

  “Well, it’s hardly the kind of thing her folks would advertise, especially to their kids.” Joey shrugs. “Maybe it’s a fluke. Some bills just fall through the cracks.”

  “But medical bills? Parker’s their baby. They would never let anything get in the way of his care.”

  “Violetta’s still on the payroll,” he points out. “So it can’t be the end of the world.”

  I frown. “It was for Maggie.”

  He scowls at me. “An elephant was born at the zoo last week. Does that have something to do with Maggie too? You’re chasing shadows.”

  “And you’re helping me.”

  He looks heavenward, shaking his head. “I’ll get the fax.”

  Joey ducks down the shag-carpeted hallway to his father’s office and returns with the home health agency’s report. I half expect it to be printed on that flimsy ancient thermal paper, given the rest of the house, but the sheaf he holds up is crisp and modern.

  “Got it.” He pushes me to one side of the bed, sitting down so we can look at it together. “Time sheet,” he says, flipping past the first page. Violetta worked a long twelve hours the day Maggie died. Eleven a.m. to eleven p.m., with four of those hours being overtime.

  The second page is an hourly log written in Violetta’s tidy cursive.

  11 a.m.—Patient returned home from PT session. Gave bath and massage.

  12 p.m.—Patient napped.

  1 p.m.—Patient ate lunch.

  2 p.m.—Delivered afternoon meds.

  The list went on.

  “Flip,” I say, and Joey turns to the third page. Parker eats dinner, gets his chair wheeled around the block for fresh air, and does his homework with a tutor.

  “Even on a Saturday in the summer? That sucks,” Joey says.

  “No wonder he’s such a prick.”

  Joey laughs and we turn to the last page, the final three entries:

  9 p.m.—Patient in distressed mood. Argued with parents. Needs rest.

  10 p.m.—Patient unable to sleep. Read book, watched TV. Still distressed.

  10:30 p.m.—Patient requested anxiety meds. Calm, resting when I took leave.

  The last page is a list of Parker’s prescriptions. Vicodin and Valium are on the list, along with a few other words that read like sneezes—flunitrazepam, methylprednisolone, topiramate.

  But no Rohypnol.

  Parker was drugged and calm by 11:00 p.m. And Maggie was dead.

  “That lets Parker off the hook,” Joey says. “If he was sedated, there was nothing he could have done.”

  “It is a coincidence, though.” I flip through the log. “He didn’t need medication any other night of the week.” I stare at the pages in my hands as if they can give me answers. But there are none that I can see.

  “So, what do you think they fought about?” Joey asks.

  “Money? School? Maggie? No idea.”

  “Violetta knows,” Joey says.

  I grin. “Think you can charm her the way you did Amanda?”

  Joey cracks his knuckles. “They don’t call me Casanova for nothing.”

  I laugh and climb off the bed. “They don’t call you Casanova. I’ll ask her at the funeral. A little gossip is good for the soul.”

  Joey deflates suddenly. His eyes grow bright. “We’re burying her tomorrow,” he says. “She’s going into the ground.”

  It’s like a water balloon in the face, a burst of cold, wet reality. I’m not ready for it yet. My body shivers. I’ve got to keep moving. “Come on. Let’s go for a ride.”

  It takes Joey’s mouth a second to switch tracks, but his hands are already reaching for the keys. “Where to?”

  “You’ll see.”

  • • •

  The building is a low gray affair south of Colorado Boulevard that looks like an architect’s representation of manic depression. The heavy block of metal and cement is highlighted by off-kilter windows with white sashes. They’re supposed to make the place feel brighter on the inside. To me, it looks like a preschool for the criminally insane.

  Dr. B’s office is on the first floor, with a view of the parking lot.

  Joey drops me off and keeps his questions to himself.

  “I won’t be long,” I tell him. He waits in the car.

  I knock on the first door on the right, and Dr. B calls out that it’s open. There is no waiting room here, just the hallway, and a dimly lit gray office with the mandatory guest chairs, walnut desk, and ficus tree in the corner. I drop into my customary seat at the far end of the lone couch.

  Dr. B smiles and comes around the desk to take the chair opposite mine. She hasn’t changed in the past year and a half—short black hair crisply cut into a bob, beige blouse and gray lady pants, the kind that have a matching jacket somewhere and come from a store that sells exclusively to women over forty.

  “Jude,” she says, and settles into her seat. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  I laugh and shake my head. “Wouldn’t it be nicer not to see me? Doesn’t a visit signify some sort of relapse?”

  Dr. B shrugs. “Not necessarily. There are preventative visits. And then there are the visits we do to satisfy our loved ones. Your mother, in this case. This is more of a checkup than anything else.”

  “Okay.” I don’t dislike the good doctor. Ever since she stopped trying to bullshit me. After three sessions of “you’re safe here,” she finally admitted bad things had to happen to good people, or she’d be out of a job.

  “So, tell me about Maggie. I understand she was your best friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she killed herself.” It’s not a question.

  “Reportedly.”

  “You have reason to doubt it?”

  I like Dr. B, but I’m not sure I’m ready to tell all. So I shrug.

  “When you were told it was suicide, how did it make you feel?”

  Good old Dr. B. She’s an ace at walking the middle path. She should have been a Buddhist.

  That much, at least, I can share. “Like shit,” I say.

  “A classmate of mine committed suicide my first year of college,” she says. Dr. B’s pointless stories are meant to make it clear that you’re not alone. But who’s to say it’s not just the two of you, then?

  “I hear it’s a stressful time.”

  “I didn’t know him,” she replies. “They held emergency meetings with the resident advisors and asked all of us how we felt. ‘Like shit’ would have been a good answer. I wish I’d thought of it at the time. Instead, I told the truth. I was annoyed. I was being coddled because some imbalanced kid killed himself in his dingy little dorm room. If they’d spent a little more time talking to him and less time talking to me, maybe he’d still be alive.” Dr. B is tapping her pad with her pen now. She’s looking through me, thinking back. “I wonder how you’ll see all this in thirty years, Jude.”

  “Thirty years is an awfully long time,” I reply.

  “Yes, it is. But I’m here to tell you that it will all look exactly the same.”

  I shift in my seat and clear my throat. It’s cool in the office, with the central air ghosting along silently, but
I’m thirsty and the air is dry. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what happens when people die. Time freezes around them. If you stand too close, you get caught, like a fly trapped in amber. It takes a certain amount of strength to pull away and leave it behind.”

  “This kid in college, you said you didn’t know him.”

  She shrugs and leans back in her seat, intensity gone. “That’s right. We had exactly one class together, a psych 101 symposium, ironically enough. There were two hundred and fifty of us in an auditorium every Monday for lectures.” She chuckles. “You see, I even remember the day of the week. I remember looking him up in the roster after the news came down, hoping it would jar my memory of him, but it didn’t.

  “Of course, the difference here is he was a stranger. Maggie Kim was your best friend.”

  I feel a flutter in between my stomach and my chest. A sour taste hits the back of my tongue. “True,” I concede.

  She looks at me for a long time before saying, “So, I’ll ask again: How does it make you feel?”

  I’m caught in a middle place, unable to look at her, my vision gone heavy with unshed tears. I didn’t think I’d ever be here again, in this room, with this woman and her questions. With this same drowning feeling inside.

  When I speak, my voice is frogged and cracked. “She didn’t do it.”

  “You’re saying it was an accident?”

  I clear my throat. “I’m saying Maggie had every reason to live.”

  Dr. B studies me quietly. This time, I hold her gaze. She jots a few more notes down.

  “Plans for Christmas?” she asks, looking at her notes.

  It’s August. Summer suicides don’t plan for the holidays. I tell her the truth. “Thinking about seeing my dad. Since it didn’t work. This time.”

  She looks up from her notes and gives me a half smile. “So I heard. Good.” She puts down her pen. “It’s dry in here. Want some water?” She moves to the mini fridge behind her desk without waiting for an answer and hands me a bottle before swigging some herself.

  “Tough room,” I say, taking a pull from the bottle.

  She smiles at me, and there’s a twinkle in her eye. “I bet you say that to all your shrinks.”

  “Nope,” I promise, holding my fingers in a scout’s swear. “Just you.”

  Dr. B slides back behind her desk and opens the file cabinet, returning my folder to its proper place. “I’ll tell your mom we talked. Don’t kill yourself for the next ninety days, at least. It’ll make me look bad.” She winks at me. Unlike my mother, Dr. B knows when I’m a danger to myself. Lord knows she saw it, once upon a time.

  “Good luck, Jude. If you ever want to talk, don’t wait for your mom to call me.”

  I grab my bag and head for the door. “Oh, one thing,” I say, stopping at the threshold.

  “What’s that?”

  “Rohypnol. What’s the clinical usage for it?”

  Dr. B gives me a considering look. “Flunitrazepam. It’s like Valium to the tenth degree. Technically, it’s used for short-term insomnia and pre-surgical anesthesia. Easy to OD on it, especially with alcohol or opiates in the mix. Is that bit of trivia for you, or your friend?”

  “Both,” I say.

  She looks at me for a long moment, and grabs a card from her desk.

  “I want to see you again. When’s the funeral?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” She writes a date and time on the card. “Friday, you and me, Jude. This talk was for your mom. Friday is for you.”

  I take the card slowly, and nod. Joey and Tallulah both said it straight. After tomorrow, I’ve got to find my way back to the land of the living. But not just yet.

  “Flunitrazepam,” I repeat. “Thanks, Dr. B.”

  To her credit, she doesn’t ask the question that’s clearly on her lips. “Watch yourself,” she says. I shut the door softly behind me.

  14

  Roofies,” I tell Joey when I climb back into his car. He closes the paperback he’s been reading and shoves it beneath his seat. “Cyrano?”

  He nods. It’s the book he took back from Maggie. “You were saying?”

  The sun sinks into the west in a blur of red and purple. The whole world is room temperature. It feels like we’re indoors.

  I shut the door and rock my head against the seat. “The roofies in Maggie’s system. They’re also called flunitrazepam. One of the drugs on Parker’s list.”

  Joey stares at me and whistles low as it sinks in. “So she might have gotten the drugs from the house after all.”

  I nod. “Or someone did.”

  Mrs. Kim said Maggie was going to Hell. Who else had access to Parker’s stash that might have helped her along?

  “Violetta would have noticed the drugs missing,” Joey says. He’s right. Missing meds could cost her her job. She’d keep watch over something like that.

  “One more thing to ask Violetta.”

  “After the funeral,” Joey insists.

  “After.”

  He nods, satisfied I won’t make a scene in the middle of Maggie’s service. “Where to next?”

  “I don’t care, as long as it’s not here.” I blink, long and slow, trying to soothe the headache that’s starting behind my left eye. Maybe I should have let Shasta read my tarot cards. They’d have made more sense than all this.

  Joey starts the engine and maneuvers us back onto the street. “This is Southern California,” he says. “Let’s go watch something burn.”

  • • •

  We are not the only ones on the side of the road overlooking Angeles Crest. Families come out like crowds in a monster movie, early evening picnics in view of the fire line.

  Dull orange light marches across the hillside less than a mile away. As the sun fades, the firelight brightens, like the slow burn of a cigarette transforming leaves and paper into ash. The difference is, the families all head home eventually. Joey and I have nowhere we want to be.

  We sit there in the turnout, our backs to the scenic overlook, watching the array of firemen and helicopters attempt to control the burn. It looks like Mother Nature is winning.

  The sun is completely gone when we get back into the car and sit facing the lights of the city. Up above, the sky is gray bleeding into black, the smoke a pale miasma over the darkness. Stars fight to be seen over the streetlights and windows of the city. The air is oven-hot. A breeze moves toward us, not cool, but at least it’s in motion. There’s a music in the sounds of the city, the rush of the freeway, the rumble of trucks, the distant honking of horns and shouts down below. The fire helicopter hovers over the mountaintop, then buzzes away, a water-laden bumblebee. It’s a lullaby of life, sung all day and night. I lean back into my seat and listen.

  “Jude,” Joey says. “If it turns out somebody did this to Maggie, what then?”

  “Then we find them, and make them pay.”

  He hesitates. “And if it turns out it was an accident?”

  I sigh and stretch, rolling out the ache in my shoulders. “Then I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  “It’s not wasted,” he says. “It’s just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  He shakes his head, and folds his hands behind his neck, eyes back on the night sky. “You’re a hard girl to be around, Jude. This whole thing’s been . . . hard.”

  I fold back in on myself, feeling threadbare, worn through. “I know,” I tell him. “For you and me both.”

  A siren sounds in the distance, fading into the night.

  Joey reaches to turn on his iPod, but I lean forward to stop him, my hand on his. For just that moment, we are so close, with his boy sweat and my own scent of exhaustion and sorrow.

  Joey. He’s always right here. I want to lean into him. I want to rest my cheek against his T-shirt and breathe him in, let hi
m put his arm around me and tell me everything will be okay.

  But I’m not in tears. This wouldn’t be just mourning or comfort for a friend. What’s safe for grief in the daytime is dangerous at night in a car with the top down and the city spread out before you. In the movies, it’s expected. The girl cries and the boy comforts her with a kiss. This isn’t a movie.

  A hot wind blows across the arroyo. I blink, unmoving except for that slow scrape of lid over cornea and back.

  A bare six inches between us, then four. I blink again, unable to breathe.

  What would Maggie do? She would tilt her head back for a kiss. I can imagine the movement, so slight, so simple. An invitation. Joey couldn’t help but lean in and kiss me, and then it would be done. Whatever came next would be a new maze to navigate, but not impossible.

  Just tilt your head, I tell myself. Such a small move, from friend to female.

  Maggie would have done it. She did it all the time, and made it look easy.

  But I can’t. I’m just not the tilting kind.

  “What?” Maggie asked. It was September and we were lounging on a double-wide air mattress in the middle of the pool that would kill her by summer. Her hair was longer. Mine was exactly the same. “If it’s not something Joey said, then what aren’t you telling me?”

  It was getting cloudy out and I was cold, but I didn’t want to go inside just yet, so I sat there, forcing down the shiver rising inside me.

  “I’m not telling you things I don’t want you to know,” I said.

  “Is somebody hurting you?” She waited, knowing that I’d fill up the silence eventually.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t Joey. Sweet, normal Joey. He was my Mr. Almost. No, the real problem lay closer to home.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, holding on to the warmth of my own body. “Roy tried to come into my bedroom last night.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Maggie spat, grabbing my arm. “Your mom’s boyfriend? Did he hurt you? Did he try to . . .”

  I shook my head. “I locked him out.”