She's Not There (5 page)

She reached down and pulled the dog closer.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Amelia opened her eyes, she was surrounded by a soft blue blur and for a second, she thought she was back in the bubble dream. She reached for her glasses on the nightstand and put them on. The flowers on the blue wallpaper came into focus. She looked down at the bedspread. The white dog was gone.

When she swung her legs over the side of the bed, she winced. The pain was still there in her body and she still had a headache but at least she felt rested. The smell of strong coffee drifted up from downstairs. Her stomach rumbled.

After a quick trip to the bathroom, she dressed in her jeans and blue shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen. There was a clock on the wall near the sink, a black plastic cat whose cartoon eyes and pendulum tail swung slowly back and forth. It was eight thirty.

Jesus, she had slept more than twenty hours straight.

There was no sign of Hannah, but there was a half-full Mr. Coffee on the counter, an empty mug, and an open cartoon of chocolate donuts. Amelia filled the mug and took a donut. She stood at the window over the sink, looking out as she ate. It had turned colder overnight, leaving a morning fog hugging the ground and making the trees in the backyard look like they were levitating. She heard the click of the dog’s toenails and turned.

The poodle came quickly to her, wagging its tail. But Hannah, trailing behind with a leash, drew up short just inside the door.

“Good lord, hon, what happened to your hair?”

Amelia realized that yesterday her hair had been hidden beneath the canvas hat. “Bad perm,” she said with a smile.

Hannah shook her head and went to the coffeemaker. “You going to want more coffee?”

“No, I’m good.” Amelia sipped her coffee, watching Hannah pour out the carafe and wipe down the already spotless counter. “Hannah, I need to buy some toiletries and some clothes. Is there someplace downtown?”

“Downtown? Nah, not unless you wanna pay five hundred dollars for a sweater in one of those tourist places.” She stooped to get the dog’s bowl and refilled it with water. “I’m heading out to my doctor’s appointment and I could drop you off at the mall if you like.”

Amelia reached down and gathered the dog into her arms. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all, hon,” Hannah said. “You’d better buy a jacket while you’re there. We got a cold spell coming.”

The mall was just opening when Amelia walked in. A yawning girl was rolling open the metal grating at Aéropostale, and the smell of baking pretzels from the Auntie Anne’s kiosk mixed with the scent of lemons oozing out of the Bath & Body Works shop. All down the long wide aisle, lights were going on in the shops. The smells, signs, window displays, colors—it all came at Amelia in a rush of sensation, and for several seconds, she had to just stand still, letting her brain absorb it all and scan for connections.

Of course she had been in a mall before. But when and where? Nothing . . . nothing was coming.

But then she heard music and she recognized it immediately as a Christmas carol, though she couldn’t recall which song it was. Amelia felt a stab of sadness that she had forgotten something so simple, that she couldn’t remember the last Christmas she had celebrated or any Christmas in her entire life for that matter.

She squared her shoulders.

No. No more sadness.

Anger was what she needed right now. Not the anger of frustration, but the kind of cold anger that would help her form a plan for going forward, that would force her brain to be calm and calculating enough to let her deal with whatever shit was thrown at her.

Shit?

She didn’t even know if she was the kind of woman who used words like “shit.” No matter, she decided. She was now.

She found a mall directory and decided to head to JCPenney. But halfway there, a light went on above an imposing wall of glass. She stopped and looked up.

It was a white apple. No name, just a giant glowing apple.

The lights inside the store flickered on, revealing rows of sleek white tables and walls of blue screens. There were four people milling around inside, all wearing jeans and bright blue T-shirts with large square pendants hanging around their necks. She had the crazy thought that it all looked like some strange alien spaceship.

But then she looked up again at the white apple and it clicked in her head. Apple. She once had something with that emblem on it. Was it a computer? Computers could tell you anything about anybody, Hannah had said.

Amelia went inside and walked slowly down the aisle of computers that were lined up like artwork on the white consoles. She stopped, staring at the image on one screen. It was moving, a swirling nebula of green and blue, like her bubble dream.

“Can I help you?”

Amelia turned and looked down into the round face of a young woman, who smiled at her from beneath her fringe of heavy black bangs. The pendant hanging on her chest was a name tag with the name
M
ARIA
, and below that were two flags, an American flag and a red, white, and green one Amelia didn’t recognize.

“Yes, I need some help. I need a computer.”

“Well, this is the MacBook Pro,” the clerk said. She tapped a key, and the nebula disappeared, replaced by a bright blue screen. “It comes with eight gigs but you can always add more RAM. What do you need it for mainly? Watching movies? Are you a gamer?”

“No, I just need to look things up.”

“O-kay.” Maria pursed her lips. “The Pro’s got a nice touch. Go ahead, try it out.”

Amelia positioned her hands above the middle row of keys and for a moment it felt like her fingers knew what to do, where to move. Did she know how to type? Had she been a secretary once? She knew what computers were but there were gaps, as if she couldn’t remember the terminology or exactly how to do things.

“Show me how to search for something,” Amelia asked.

Maria stabbed at some keys and looked up. “What do you want to search for?”

“Myself,” Amelia asked.

Maria’s smile hardened as her eyes took in Amelia’s matted hair, baggy jeans, and rumpled blue shirt. “Listen, maybe you should go to the public library. They can—”

“No,” Amelia said. “I just need a little help here, and if you can’t be bothered then I will go buy a computer someplace else.”

Maria blinked several times. “Okay, what’s your name?”

“Amelia Tobias.”

Maria tapped some keys and then looked up. “Wow, you’re in a magazine.”

“Magazine?”

Maria stepped aside so Amelia could see. It was a page from
Florida Design
. There was a color photograph of a blonde woman in a red halter dress standing near a pool. A large pink house with palm trees and a white yacht was visible behind the woman. The type below the picture read “Mrs. Alex Tobias in front of her Fort Lauderdale Isles home: ‘When we remodeled Casa Rosa, we were careful to preserve the past.’”

Preserve the past . . .

Voices in her head again, and this time one of them was her own.

This is the house I wanted you to see.

She could see herself. She was standing in front of the pink house, but it looked nothing like the house in the magazine. It had boarded-up windows, a jungle of vines and trees, a dry fountain, and there was a red sign near the door—
F
ORECLOSURE.
P
RICE
R
EDUCED!

She could hear screeching sounds from above and see a flurry of acid green wings against a blue sky. The screeching mutated into a man’s voice.

Mel, this is a teardown. I want something new and clean.

But I like this place, Alex. This place feels right.

And then . . .

The feel of arms enfolding her, his arms, and his lips pressed on hers, and the rustle of palm fronds and dying screams of the wild parrots as they flew away.

“Is that really you?”

Maria’s voice brought her back. When Amelia turned to look at her, she knew the young clerk was trying to reconcile the bruised, disheveled woman in front of her with the sleek creature on the computer screen.

She couldn’t answer. Her headache had returned, and when she looked up at the ceiling, the lights were haloed.

“I need . . .” Amelia closed her eyes for a second and then opened them. “I need to buy a computer,” she said. She hoisted up the Vuitton duffel. “I need something small and light that I can carry in this.”

There was new respect in the young woman’s eyes. “I’ve got just what you need—a tablet. Compact, light, and fast, but it comes with sixteen gigs.” Maria smiled. “You can never have enough memory, right?”

It was just a sliver of black glass and aluminum that weighed only a pound. Five hundred dollars had seemed like too much to pay for the tablet, but the clerk had assured Amelia that she could search for anything with it, that the whole world was hers at the brush of her fingertips.

She left the store exhausted, her head pounding after the lesson the clerk had given her on how to use the tablet and how to connect to the Internet with the prepaid wireless SIM card she had been able to purchase with cash.

The mall was warm and crowded now, the people pushing around her in a fast current. The piped-in Christmas carols were like a broken-fluorescent-light buzz in her head.

See the blazing Yule before us.

Fa la la la la, la la la la . . .

The image from the magazine of that blonde woman standing in front of the pool was burned in her brain. Had that really been her? What else was the tablet going to be able to tell her about herself? And what was she going to be able to find out about Alex?

Fast away the old year passes! Fa la la la la, la la la la!

A sudden wave of nausea overtook her, and red and green sparks shot across her vision. Amelia stopped and shut her eyes, clutching the plastic bag from the Apple store to her chest.

Someone was laughing, a cruel shrieking laugh.

Fa la la la la! Ha la la la la!

“Hey, are you okay?”

She opened her eyes. A young man with spiky platinum blond hair was standing in front of her. He had a tiny silver ring in his nostril, and she focused hard on it, trying to stop the spinning.

“I just need to sit down,” Amelia said.

His hands were gentle but firm as he led her into a store. He sat her down in a chair and she bowed her head, closing her eyes. Slowly the dizziness began to pass.

“Here, drink this.”

She opened her eyes to see the young man holding out a glass of water. When she didn’t take it, he added, “I’ve got some wine in the back. Do you want that instead?”

She shook her head and looked around. It was a beauty salon, but all the other chairs were empty. The whole place was empty except for a sleepy girl with pink hair manning the desk by the entrance.

Amelia looked in the mirror, catching the eye of the young man standing behind her. “I had a concussion and get dizzy sometimes,” she said. “Thanks for helping me. I’m okay now.”

He was studying her, with one palm cupping his chin. “Are you sure? I mean, are you sure there’s not something else I can do for you?”

Her hair, she realized—he was staring at her hair. It looked even worse than it had this morning when she got up, matted lank ropes hanging to her shoulders.

“What happened?” he whispered.

She let out a long sigh. “Can you fix it?”

“Girl, I can fix anything,” he said, smiling. He drew a pink cape over her and picked up a brush but then paused. “You have extensions,” he said, feeling her scalp. “I don’t think I can save them. They’re put in with glue, you know.”

“Then cut them out.”

“I’d have to cut you pretty short. You sure?”

Amelia nodded.

“What about the color? I can touch you up. Same shade of blonde?”

Amelia took off the purple plastic glasses. “No, change it back to my natural color.”

“What is it?”

She couldn’t tell him that she wasn’t sure. “Why don’t you just decide what will look good.”

He gave her a huge smile. “God, I wish all my clients were like you.”