Until I Find You (102 page)

“I was just appalled that your mom and dad would leave a four-year-old in the back of their car—in
Venice,
” he said.

Lucy was fingering the tattoo magnets Alice had given Jack for his fridge. Japanese flash
—irezumi,
Henk Schiffmacher had called them. There were half a dozen magnets the size of quarters. Jack had used them to hold the four photographs of his mom’s naked torso against the refrigerator door—four slightly different views of her
Until I find you
tattoo, which he saw Lucy looking at very closely.

But Lucy wouldn’t settle down. She went off to have a look at the stuff on Jack’s desk. The flat glass paperweight, which slightly magnified the photo of Emma naked at seventeen, was an eye-catcher. (He’d always thought that one day he would regret keeping one of those photographs, which Claudia had asked him to get rid of.)

“I gotta use your bathroom,” Lucy said. There were two other bathrooms in the house, but she waltzed right through Jack’s bedroom and went into his bathroom and closed the door.

Jack had converted Emma’s former bedroom into a small gym—two kinds of stationary bikes, a treadmill, an ab machine, some benches, and a lot of free weights. There were no mirrors on the walls—just some of his favorite movie posters, including a couple from films he’d been in. There was a mat on the floor for stretching and rolling around—a long rectangle, about a third of a regulation-size wrestling mat.

Jack sat down on the mat and hugged his knees to his chest, wondering what he should do about Lucy. He heard the toilet flush and the water running in the sink; he heard the girl come out of the bathroom and pick up the telephone on the night table next to his bed. Jack could tell by her automatic tone of voice that she was talking to an answering machine.

“Hi, Mom—it’s me,” he heard Lucy say. “I’m in Jack Burns’s house, I’m naked, I’m in his bed. Isn’t this what you always wanted? Sorry I beat you to it, but what’s it matter? The thought of you
or
me with Jack Burns is gonna drive Dad crazy. Love ya!”

Jack went into his bedroom and saw that Lucy hadn’t been kidding. She’d pulled back the covers and was lying naked on his bed. “
Now
we’re going to get in trouble,” Lucy said.

“Maybe
you
are, Lucy, but I’m not,” he told her.

He walked past her into the bathroom; he was intending to bring her clothes to her, but he couldn’t see her clothes or imagine what she’d done with them. She’d put her dirty running shoes with the little socks on his bathroom scale, but the rest of her clothes were gone. (
How could they just disappear?
he was thinking.)

Jack went back into the bedroom. “You’re leaving now, Lucy. Where are your clothes?”

She shrugged. Yes, she was a pretty eighteen-year-old. Even Jack could count the years from 1987, when he first came to L.A., and add them to four. (And after all, he’d been doing a lot of thinking about four-year-olds lately.) But Jack wasn’t even
considering
having sex with Lucy, not even if it was legal—that wasn’t the issue.

She was one of those willfully grimy girls with flecks of gold glitter in her hair; every toenail was painted a different color. The finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand was tattooed on the inside of one thigh—high up, where her running shorts had covered it. Some young women were more arousing before they took their clothes off; besides, Jack had never liked being bullied.

“I’ll give you a T-shirt and some running shorts of mine,” he said. “I’ll dress you myself, Lucy, if you don’t get yourself dressed and get out of here.”

“My mom’s already called the cops,” she told him. “She’s home all day with nothing to do. She just screens all her calls, in case it’s my dad. I’m telling you, she’s already played my message twice—she’s already given the cops your address, and everything.”

Jack went into the kitchen and picked up the phone there. He called 911 and said he had an unwelcome eighteen-year-old girl in his house—she had hidden herself in his car. Now she’d undressed herself and called her mother. He hadn’t touched her, Jack said—he didn’t
want
to touch her. “If the girl won’t dress herself, maybe one of the officers you send should be female,” he said.

Jack was asked if this was a domestic dispute. Did he
know
the girl? “I haven’t had any contact with her since she was a four-year-old!” he shouted.

Well, that meant he
did
know her, didn’t it? Jack was asked. (He should have seen that coming.) “Look, she thinks I’m the reason her mother and father got divorced. She and her mother are
obsessed
with me. Her father
hates
me!”

“You know the whole family?” he was asked.

When Jack gave his address, he got a quick “Wait a minute” in response. A squad car had already been dispatched. Naturally, there’d been an earlier call—Lucy’s mother. The first caller had said something about a rape-in-progress.

“That’s not true!” Jack shouted.

“The toilet keeps flushing!” Lucy called from the bedroom. “Forget the cops. You better call a plumber!”

Jack hung up the phone and stomped back through his bedroom to the bathroom. Lucy had put her clothes in the water-tank part of the toilet. (They were soaked; Jack put them in the bathtub.) The rod that held the ball was bent out of shape; that was why the toilet kept flushing. At least he knew what to do about that.

When Jack went back into the bedroom, Lucy was writhing all around on his bed; the bedcovers were completely untucked, and one of the pillows had been flung on the floor. The bed looked as if he’d just had sex with
several
eighteen-year-olds—all of them gymnasts.

“This is nothing but a big nuisance,” he told the little bitch. “Believe me, you’re not going to think this is so funny when they check you for
bodily fluids.
”

“I’m just so sick of hearing how you fucked up my entire family!” the girl shouted.

Jack walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He went outside and stood leaning against his Audi in the driveway. He was still waiting for the police to arrive when he noticed the photographer, an overfamiliar paparazzo—best known for his photos of a young actress barfing in a swimming pool at a wedding in Westwood. Jack saw the paparazzo looking at him through the long telephoto lens from the far side of the street.

When the cops came, Jack was glad that one of the two was a female officer. Jack told her where Lucy was, and the policewoman went into the house to find her while he told his story to the other officer.

“Are you sure she’s eighteen?” the policeman interrupted Jack once; otherwise, he just listened. The paparazzo had crossed the street and was photographing them from the foot of Jack’s driveway.

“She can’t wear her own clothes—they’re all wet,” Jack was explaining to the officer, just before Lucy ran naked out the front door and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. The policeman tried to shield her from the photographer.

The female officer came out of the house carrying a bath towel. She tried to wrap the towel around Lucy, but Lucy kept wriggling out of the towel. It took both officers to disengage the girl from around Jack’s neck. Jack just stood there, doing his best not to touch Lucy, while the paparazzo kept snapping away. If the photographer had taken one step up the driveway, Jack might have broken all the fingers on the guy’s hands—one finger at a time, even with the police officers there.

“I suppose stuff like this happens to you on a regular basis,” the male cop was saying to Jack.

“Whatever he’s been telling you, I’ll bet it’s true,” the female officer told her partner. “If this girl were my daughter, I’d be tempted to drown her in a toilet.”

She was a tall, lean black woman with a despairing expression that was accented by a scar; the scar had dug a groove through one of her eyebrows. Her partner was a husky white guy with a crew cut and pale-blue eyes; his eyes were as calm and unblinking as Lucy’s.

“Be sure to check her for evidence of
bodily fluids,
” Jack told the officers, “in case I’m lying.”

The black woman smiled. “Don’t
you
get in trouble, too,” she told him. “Behave yourself.”

“We’d like to have a look inside your house, just to corroborate a few things,” the husky policeman said.

“Sure,” Jack told him.

It was a long day. Jack kept looking out the window. He was hoping the paparazzo would come onto his property, but the photographer maintained his vigil at the foot of the driveway. After the police took Lucy away—Jack insisted on
giving
Lucy the bath towel—the photographer went away, too.

Jack was surprised that both police officers never once appeared to doubt his story, but the female officer had cautioned him about the photos of Alice’s breasts and her tattoo on the refrigerator. When Jack explained the history of the photographs, the policewoman said: “That doesn’t matter. If there’s ever any trouble here, you don’t want pictures like those on your
fridge.
”

He showed her the photo of Emma naked at seventeen—the one under the paperweight on his desk. “Ditto?” he asked her.

“You’re learning,” the female officer said. “I sense that you have real potential.”

After everyone had gone, Jack found Lucy’s thong in his bathtub; it was so small that the police must have missed it. He put it in the trash, together with the four photos of his mom and the old one of Emma.

If he hadn’t been leaving for Halifax in the morning, Jack might have been more careful about the trash. It would make sense to him later—how the magazine that bought the paparazzo’s photographs had sent someone to the house on Entrada Drive to sort through Jack’s trash. It made sense that the magazine would talk to Lucy, too—and that she would dismiss the incident as a “prank.”

All Jack said, when the magazine later asked him for a comment—allegedly for a follow-up story—was that the police had behaved properly. First of all, they’d believed Jack. Wasn’t Lucy the one they’d taken away? “You figure it out,” Jack said to the woman from the magazine, who called herself a “diligent fact-checker.” (He meant that the police hadn’t taken
him
away, had they?)

But Jack knew nothing about any of this when he left in the morning for Halifax. Given all the things that had happened to him—the bad choices he’d made, those years he would regret—the Lucy episode struck him as a virtual nonevent. He didn’t even call Dr. García and tell her about it. (
Let her wait; let her hear about it in chronological order,
Jack thought.)

But sometimes even a nonevent will be registered in the public consciousness. Jack had done nothing to Lucy—except try to look after her, when she was four. But in a scandal-mongering movie magazine, complete with photos, the girl’s irritating “prank” would carry with it a whiff of something truly scandalous; it would appear as if Jack Burns had gotten away with something.

This would be hard to say to Dr. García, when the time came, but—although it didn’t yet exist—a trap had been set for Jack. Lucy wasn’t the trap, but she was a contributing factor to a trap that waited in his future. That nice female officer had tried to tell him. Jack had thrown away the photographs, but the photos hadn’t been all she was warning him about.

“If there’s ever any trouble here—” Wasn’t that how she’d put it?

34

Halifax

J
ack called Michele Maher’s office on his cell phone en route to the airport. It was very early in the morning in L.A., but Dr. Maher’s nurse answered the phone in the doctor’s Cambridge office; it was three hours later in Massachusetts. The nurse was a friendly soul named Amanda, who informed him that Dr. Maher was with a patient.

Jack told Amanda who he was and where he was going. He said he’d gone to school with Michele—that was as far as he got with their history.

“I know all about it,” Amanda said. “Everyone in the office wanted to
kill
her for not going to the Oscars with you.”

“Oh.”

“Are you going to have lunch with her?” Amanda asked. Jack guessed that
everyone in the office
knew about the letter Michele had written him; possibly Amanda had typed it.

Jack explained that he was hoping to see Dr. Maher on his return trip from Halifax. He’d booked a stopover in Boston. If Michele was free for dinner that night, or lunch the next day—that was as far as he got.

“So now it’s
dinner
!” Amanda said eagerly. “Maybe lunch
and
dinner. Maybe
breakfast
!”

Jack told Amanda that he would call later in the week from Halifax—just to be sure Dr. Maher had the time to see him.

“You should stay at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. You can walk to the hospital and our office. I can reserve a room for you, if you want,” Amanda told him. “The hotel has a gym and a pool, and everything.”

“Thank you, Amanda,” he said. “That would be very nice—if Dr. Maher has the time to see me.”

“What’s with the
Dr. Maher
?” Amanda exclaimed.

Jack didn’t bother to tell Amanda to reserve a room for him at the Charles under a different name, although not only Michele but
everyone in the office
would know that Jack Burns was in town and where he was staying. As interested as Jack was in the Halifax Explosion, or the idea of making a movie in his birthplace, he was by no means committed to the role of the amnesiac transvestite prostitute in Doug McSwiney’s screenplay; in fact, the more Jack thought about the issues he had with McSwiney’s script, the less he felt like registering in
any
hotel as an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. (At the hotel in Halifax, he’d made the reservation in his own name.)

Jack thanked Amanda for her friendliness and help and gave her the phone number of his hotel in Halifax, and his cell-phone number—just in case Michele wanted to call him.

Jack had sufficient airplane reading for the trip, beginning with Doug McSwiney’s screenplay, which he read two more times. Called
The Halifax Explosion,
McSwiney’s script was purportedly based on Michael J. Bird’s
The Town That Died—
a chronicle of the Halifax disaster first published in 1967. Bird’s book, which was by far the best of Jack’s airplane reading, had been rendered a disservice.