Chapter 15

June 27, 1997 · Gone One Day

THE WOMAN IN THE SWEATY BALLCAPwas on the futon in the living room, waiting, Roo and Luce in the kitchen. Luce opened and closed cupboard doors, looking for—she didn't know, an impulsive movement busying her arms against the slowly creeping jitters. Through the window over the sink she could see the day pulsing with quivery heat and chirping crickets, and where was her mother? Luce needed a plan, but what she had was an outsider.

Roo rested his cheeks in his palms at the kitchen table, glancing back and forth between the living room and Luce. "You can't," he whispered at Luce, but she leaned down right against his ear.

"Trust me," she said. "I received a sign." And that lie, she knew, might be enough to make him play along. It wasn't totally untrue. They'd done something with the melon-head mummy—disrupted something. Maybe called this woman to their front door. Or she had shown up as an absolute coincidence. Either way, she was here, and Luce was her mother.

Luce slipped on one of Gloria's kimonos that she'd found draped over a chair and approached the woman slowly. She swung her hips, held her chin high, imitating the way her mother radiated through space. Because she could not find her mother, she would become her. She led the woman back into the office, and when they reached the threshold, they walked right in, like it was entirely natural to step from one room into the next. "Sit," Luce instructed, pointing to a foldout chair and sitting across from her. The lady was cracking her knuckles, but she stopped once she saw the mummy. She stared. Should Luce have hidden it? Its melon head tilted as if it had a question, lopsided eyes already smeared at one outer edge. Shit. Well, there wasn't anywhere in here to stuff it, and besides, if the mummy had somehow called the woman here, it should stay.

The TV was no longer playing the video of the twins. She willed it to flick back on with some kind of instruction, for something to flash, to beep, to open. Nothing.

"I wasn't sure I wanted to keep this appointment," the woman said. "Been debating, trying to get a sign. But nothing's changed since we talked on the phone a few weeks ago."

Luce sucked in her breath and waited. So her mother had booked this weeks ago, and they'd talked about—something. She ran through a list of things to say, her cheeks growing pinker as nothing seemed right. Everything she and Roo had done up until this point could have been so easily explained if their mother came home right then. But this? She imagined the volcanoes of her mother's eyes. Volcanoes? Yes. She imagined what she would say to her mother—the lady was desperate. It was our duty to help.

The woman cleared her throat. "It's my daughter. She—"

"Died," Luce filled in, trying to channel Gloria and the way she filled up the space around her like rain spilling into the grooves of a road.

"Uh—yeah, but I was gonna say she was the whole sunshine of my world."

"Sorry," Luce said, casting her eyes to the floor. "Please go on." She did not need to be Gloria. She needed to listen.

"I was an addict for a long time," the woman said. "Bad stuff. Then she came along, and it got me to change." She was speaking slowly, voice cracking, dipping, falling. She touched her fingertips together into a kind of pyramid on her lap, worked her jaw. "Not right away. There was some struggle. But it stuck, eventually. I got clean. She played the piano. A real whiz. And then she died."

"I'm very sorry," Luce said. The woman gnawed on the inside of her cheek. Luce remained quiet, though it seemed obvious that she needed to offer something, some words of wisdom, some insight into what had happened to the daughter, or to reassure the woman that the girl was okay, when the woman spoke again.

"Who is that supposed to be?" she asked, nodding over at the mummy. Luce tried to come up with something that didn't sound crazy, but before she could, the woman spoke again. "She's the same size as my daughter was. Exactly. Same height, same body shape even, weird as that is. And I think my daughter had those same shoes. Or something really close. My god. And her face—Jesus." She paused and stared at Luce, crossed and uncrossed her arms. "This looks exactly like her. I don't understand—it's like you knew her."

The woman was biting her cheek again, but this time the skin around her mouth was quivering, little tremors built entirely of restraint, the shaking of a muscle under maximum capacity. This was a moment of paths diverging. Luce swerved. "Follow me."

Gem's eyes were closed. Luce leaned low, pressed her ear against Gem's chest, listened to her lungs. Just faintly, she could hear a rattle inside, a thickness. She looked up at the woman, who was staring at Gem, and gave her as much as she could remember of the speech her mother had given the man who'd died. Luce held a small tape recorder, something she'd grabbed from her mother's desk on the way out. Fumbling through the dark.

"We know you travel in a higher frequency," Luce said into the air. "Speak, and Gem will enable us to hear you." She pressed the record button on the machine, and the little red light flashed, wheels inside the machine turning. The woman nodded quickly. She was buying in. Luce stared at Gem, willing her to open her eyes or hum, something, anything, but the room was silent. They held still like that for one minute, two. The old floorboards in the house groaned and for a moment, Luce imagined it as the sound of the mummy calling out in search of her mother, what a thought, and why had she believed that something in this room would happen when she did not have the gift—of course nothing happened.

She'd have to invent it. "Sometimes a question helps," Luce said, winging it, her panic growing. "Or telling your daughter something you want her to know."

The woman cleared her throat again, wiped at her eyes with the pad of her thumb. She told the air that she missed her daughter. She cleared her throat, and then, closing her eyes, said slowly, her voice a little more hoarse, as if speaking directly to her, "I miss you." She wanted to know that the girl was okay. She wanted to know if she—and here the woman heaved once before going on—if she could forgive her. They sat in silence, listening, the woman alternatively looking at Gem and then over at Luce while Luce, wearing her mother's face, nodded at her aunt as if she were in conversation. Finally, she clicked off the recorder.

"So?" the woman asked, crossing and uncrossing her legs. "Did you hear something? 'Cause I didn't."

"Yes," Luce said, fumbling. "Sort of. Her voice is very faint."

The woman sat still and quiet, and Luce groped for more. Of course this wasn't what her mother said, of course this wasn't what her mother believed. People left this room weeping, grateful, hugging Gloria at the door or pressing items from their purses into her hands, oranges, dollars, photographs, envelopes. She ran her hand along Gem's arm, feeling the rough, dry skin beneath her fingertips, and coming up with no other idea, she rewound and then pressed play for them to listen to the silence she'd recorded. She turned the volume as high as it would go, thinking that perhaps, somehow, impossibly, beneath the silence there would be something else, Gem's voice maybe, and if there was, oh god, if she could have been hearing Gem all along? But the only sound was low static.

"What is that?" the woman asked, grabbing Luce's arm like forceps. "Is that Laura?"

There was a spike of static. Luce plugged the recorder into speakers they used to play music for Gem, turned the volume high. The tape cracked again, much louder this time. Was it her mother beneath the recording they'd just done? Both Luce and the seeker leaned forward in their seats, straining toward the speakers. If you listened hard enough, Luce thought, maybe your brain would invent a voice speaking back to fill your ache, like a phantom limb.

"I gotta say, I was skeptical before I came," the woman said, staring at the recorder. "I watched a 20/20 special on how psychics make their tricks work. No offense, but most of you guys are con artists. Anyway, I'd heard that the recorder catches sound waves from radios or TVs, and that's what makes it work. But this, oh my god—" She paused to listen. Brought her head closer to the speaker.

Static crackled again, and then a higher note, like the hum of repelling magnets. It didn't sound like a voice, really, Luce thought. It was like the breaking of a voice between notes, a crackle. She leaned in close too, closing her eyes, squinting her face up to try to concentrate her attention as the woman, wet-eyed, asked her to rewind.

Luce played it again. The silence returned, loud, then a creak from somewhere in the house's bones, a bird's call, a faint dog bark, and then the static jumped. The speaker volume was way up.

"There!" yelled the woman, and oh my god, she was right. "Rewind right there." The sound on the recording had jumped, the static clinging and gathering, sound layered, and, yes, Luce could hear something different, something noisier, something like words. "She's answering my questions," the woman said. "I hear her voice. I heard it. She said… she said, love you, Mommy."

Static, and then something else. Yes, Luce was sure of it. Something else.

"I hear her. Oh my god," she cried, the tears bigger now, the pads of her thumbs not keeping up. "Hi, baby, hi Lolo," she said. She reached her hands up into the air, arms wide. "I hear you, honey, and I'm right here. Mommy's right here."

There was nothing she could do—the arc of the woman's arms reaching out toward the idea of her child in the air all around them made Luce's bones ache with longing. There was no time for that. She pushed a smile onto her face so that this seeker, should she glance over, would know that she, too, was sharing in this experience, that everything in this room—bed, table full of medicines, flies buzzing against the window, the redwoods outside, Gem in the bed—all of them were experiencing the same extraordinary thing.

But the thing was, Luce wasn't. She had heard something. Just not those words. In the static, lifting out of the sound like mist from a creek, were very different words, words she hadn't thought about in a long time. She had not allowed herself to replay the entire memory in years—the cow-skull woman… you, locked out on the balcony—

Luce was startled when the woman stood up. She wasn't wiping away tears anymore, just letting them collect on her chin. Straightening her jacket, she reached into her pocket and handed Luce a hundred-dollar bill. And then, moving very quickly, she was gone.

Back to the night of the cow-skull woman, when you were locked out on the balcony—and so back she went.