Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories Read online

  The guys were quick to laugh, and to show their contempt. Any girl or woman not good-looking, and if her chest was flat, or she was a little heavy—you would walk fast to avoid their eyes—if you were fast enough, you could hide.

  “This is not Momma. This is no one I know.”

  Molina was close beside Lisette instructing her to take her time, this was very important Molina was saying, to make an eiii-dee of the woman was very important, to help the police find who had done these terrible things to her.

  Lisette pulled free of Molina. “I told you—this is not Momma! It is not.”

  Something hot and acid came up into her mouth—she swallowed it down—she gagged again, and swallowed and she was shivering so hard her teeth chattered like ivory dice shaken. Badly she wanted to run from the damn nasty room which was cold like a refrigerator, and smelly—a faint chemical smell—a smell of something sweet, sickish—like talcum powder and sweat—but Molina detained her.

  They were showing her clothes now, out of the box. Dirty bloodstained clothes like rags. And a coat—a coat that resembled her mother’s red suede coat—but it was filthy, and torn—it was not Momma’s stylish coat she’d bought a year ago, in the January sales at the mall.

  Lisette said she’d never seen any of these things before. She had not. She was breathing funny like her friend Keisha who had asthma and Molina was holding her hand and saying things to comfort her, bullshit things to comfort her, telling her to be calm, it was all right . . . if she did not think that this woman was her mother, it was all right: there were other ways to identify the victim.

  Victim. This was a new word. Like body, drainage ditch.

  Molina led her to a restroom. Lisette had to use the toilet, fast. Like her insides had turned to liquid fire and had to come out. At the sink she was going to vomit but could not. Washed and washed her hands. In the mirror a face hovered—a girl’s face—in dark-purple-tinted glasses and her lips a dark grape color—around the left eye the scarring wasn’t so visible if she didn’t look closely and she had no wish to look closely. There had been three surgeries and after each surgery Momma had promised You’ll be fine! You will look better than new.

  They wanted to take her somewhere—to Family Services. She said she wanted to go back to school. She said she had a right to go back to school. She began to cry, she was resentful and agitated and she wanted to go back to school and so they said all right, all right for now Lisette, and they drove her to the school, and it was just after the bell had rung for lunchtime at 11:45 A.M.—so she went directly to the cafeteria, not waiting in line but into the cafeteria without a tray and still in her jacket and in a roaring sort of blur she was aware of her girlfriends at a nearby table—there was Keisha looking concerned calling, “Lisette, hey—what was it? You OK?” and Lisette laughed into the bright buzzing blur, “Sure I’m OK. Hell why not?”

  Deceit

  Not by e-mail but by phone which is so God-damned more intrusive the call comes from someone at Kimi’s school—Please call to make an appointment urgent need discuss your daughter.

  No explanation! Not even a hint.

  Candace has come to hate phone calls! Rarely answers phone calls! If she happens to be near the phone—the kitchen phone—quaint old soiled-plastic that has come to be called, in recent years, as by fiat, a “land phone”—she might squint at the I.D. window to see who the hell is intruding in her life, for instance the ex-husband, but rarely these months, could be years, does Candace pick up.

  Cell phones she keeps losing. Or breaking.

  Cell phones are useful for keeping in (one-way) contact with Kimi—crummy substitute for an umbilical cord—and a pause, a beat, the signature wincing laugh that crinkles half her face like pleated paper, then—ha ha: joke—if the assholes don’t get Candace’s wit.

  And more it seems to be happening, assholes don’t get it.

  Well, the cell phone. Unless she has lost it, she has it—somewhere. Could be in a pocket of a coat or a jacket, could be on the floor of her car beneath the brake or gas pedal, or in the driveway; could be in a drawer, or atop a bureau; could be, as it was not long ago, fallen down inside one of Candace’s chic leather boots; the cell phone is a great invention but just too damned small, slight, impractical. Could be sitting on the God-damned thing and not have a clue until the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony come thundering out of your rear.

  Not that Kimi answers Mom’s calls all that readily—the docile-daughter reflex seems to have atrophied since Kimi’s thirteenth birthday—but the principle is, getting voice mail on her cell through the day at school, text messages from MOM, Kimi at least has to acknowledge that MOM exists even if MOM is no longer one of those desirable individuals for whom Kimi will eagerly pick up.

  Your daughter.”

  “Y-yes? What about my daughter?”

  Cool-calm! Though Candace’s voice is hoarse like sandpaper and her heart gives a wicked lurch in her chest despite that morning’s thirty-milligram lorazepam.

  “Has Kimi spoken with you, Mrs. Waxman, about—yesterday?”

  “Y-yesterday?”

  “Kimi was to speak with you, Mrs. Waxman, about an issue—a sensitive issue—that has come up—she hadn’t wanted us to contact you first.”

  Weedle, Lee W.—“Doctor” Weedle since there’s a cheesy-looking psychology Ph.D. diploma from Rutgers University at Newark on the wall behind the woman’s desk—speaks in a grave voice fixing her visitor with prim moist blinking lashless bug-eyes.

  Why are freckled people so earnest, Candace wonders.

  “Your daughter has been reported by her teachers as—increasingly this semester—‘distracted.’ ”

  “Well—she’s fourteen.”

  “Yes. But even for fourteen, Kimi often seems distracted in class. You must know that there has been a dramatic decline in her academic performance this semester, especially in math . . .”

  “I was not a good math student, Dr. Wheezle. It might be simply—genetics.”

  “ ‘Weedle.’ ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name is ‘Weedle,’ not ‘Wheezle.’ ”

  “Is it! I’m sorry.”

  Candace smiles to suggest that she isn’t being sarcastic, sardonic—“witty.” Though Weedle is a name for which one might be reasonably sorry.

  “ . . . have seen your daughter’s most recent report card, haven’t you, Mrs. Waxman?”

  “Did I sign it?”

  “Your signature is on the card, yes.”

  Weedle fixes Kimi’s mother with suspicious eyes—as if Candace might have forged her own signature. The woman is toughly durable as polyester—like the “pantsuit” she’s wearing—short-cropped graying hair and a pug face like an aggressive ex-nun.

  “If my signature is on the card, it is my signature.”

  Candace speaks bravely, defiantly. But this isn’t the issue—is it?

  Hard to recall, in the lorazepam haze, what the issue is.

  “You can’t expect children to leap through flaming hoops each semester. Kimi has been an A student since day care—it’s cruel to be so judgmental. I don’t put pressure on my daughter to get straight A’s any more than I’d put pressure on myself at her age.”

  Since the ex-husband is the one to praise their daughter for her good grades at school, as a sort of sidelong sneer at Kimi’s mother whom he’d taken to be, even in the days when he’d adored her, as an essentially frivolous person, Candace takes care never to dwell upon Kimi’s report cards.

  Now the thought comes to Candace like a slow-passing dirigible high overhead in the lorazepam haze—she hadn’t done more than glance at Kimi’s most recent report card. She’d had other distractions at the time and so just scrawled her signature on the card having asked Kimi if her grades were OK and Kimi had shrugged with a wincing little smile.

  Sure Mom that smile had signaled.

  Or maybe Oh Mom . . .

  For this visit to the Quagmire Academy—i.e.
, Craigmore Academy—which is Candace’s first visit this term—Candace is wearing a purple suede designer jacket that fits her tight as a glove, a matching suede skirt over cream-colored spandex tights, and twelve-inch Italian leather boots; her streaked-blond hair has been teased, riffled, blow-dried into a look of chic abandon and her eyebrows—recklessly shaved off twenty years before when it had seemed that youth and beauty would endure forever—have been penciled and buffed in, more or less symmetrically. Her lipstick is Midnight Plum, her widened, slightly bloodshot eyes are outlined in black and each lash distinctly thickened with mascara to resemble the legs of daddy longlegs. It’s a look to draw attention, a look that startles and cries Whoa!—as if Candace has just stumbled out of a Manhattan disco club into the chill dawn of decades ago.

  Weedle is impressed, Candace sees. Having to revise her notion of what Kimi Waxman’s mom must be like, based upon the daughter.

  For Candace has style, personality, wit—Candace is, as the ex-husband has said, one-off. Poor Kimi—“Kimberly”—(a name Candace now regrets, as she regrets much about the marriage, the fling at motherhood and subsequent years of dull dutiful fidelity)—has a plain sweet just slightly fleshy and forgettable face.

  Weedle is frowning at her notes. Which obviously the cunning psychologist has memorized that she might toss her dynamite material, like a grenade, at the stunned-smiling mother of Kimi Waxman facing her across the desk.

  “ . . . at first Kimi convinced us—her teachers, and me—that her injuries were accidental. She told us that she’d fallen on the stairs and bruised her wrist—she’d cut her head on the sharp edge of a locker door, in the girls’ locker room, when she was reaching for something and lost her balance. The more recent bruises—”

  Injuries? More recent? Candace listens in disbelief.

  “—are on her upper arms and shoulders, as if someone had grabbed and shaken her. You could almost see the imprint of fingers in the poor child’s flesh.” Weedle speaks carefully. Weedle speaks like one exceedingly cautious of being misunderstood. Weedle pauses to raise her eyes to Candace’s stricken face with practiced solemnity in which there is no hint—not even a glimmer of a hint—of a thrilled satisfaction. “I am obliged to ask you, Mrs. Waxman—do you know anything about these injuries?”

  The words wash over Candace like icy water. Whatever Candace has expected, Candace has not expected this.

  And there are the moist protuberant eyes which are far steelier than Candace had thought.

  The lorazepam, like the previous night’s sleep medication, provides you with a sensation like skiing—on a smooth slope—but does not prepare for sudden impediments on the slope like a tree rushing at you, for instance.

  Warning signs are needed: SLOW. DANGER.

  “Excuse me, w-what did you say, Dr. Wheezle?”

  Weedle repeats her question but even as Candace listens closely, Candace doesn’t seem to hear. In her ears a roaring like a din of locusts.

  “Then—you don’t know anything about Kimi’s injuries? Neither the older ones on her legs, nor the more recent?”

  Candace is trying to catch her breath. The oxygen in Weedle’s cramped little fluorescent-lit office is seriously depleted.

  “ ‘Kimi’s injuries’—I j-just don’t . . . I don’t know what you are talking about, Dr. Wheezle—Weedle.”

  “You haven’t noticed your daughter’s bruised legs? Her wrist? The cut in her scalp? The bruises beneath her arms?”

  Candace tries to think. If she says no—she is a bad mother. But if she says yes—she is a worse mother.

  “Mrs. Waxman, how are things in your home?”

  “—home? Our home?”

  “Do you know of anyone in your household—any adult, or older sibling—who might be abusing your daughter?”

  Abusing. Adult. Candace is sitting very still now. Her eyes are filling with tears, her vision is splotched as it often is in the morning, and in cold weather. In order to see Weedle’s scrubbed-nun face clearly Candace has to blink away tears but if Candace blinks her eyes tears run down her face in a way that is God-damned embarrassing; still worse, if Candace gives in, rummages in her purse for a wadded tissue. She will not.

  “N-No. I do not—know . . . I don’t k-know what you are talking about, I think I should see Kimi now . . .” Wildly the thought comes to Candace: her daughter has been taken from school. Her daughter has been taken into the custody of Child Welfare. Her daughter has falsely informed upon her.

  “Mrs. Waxman—may I call you ‘Candace’?—I’m sorry if this is a shock to you, as it was to us. That’s why I asked you to come and speak with me. You see, Candace—we are obliged to report ‘suspicious injuries’ to the police. In an emergency situation, we are obliged to use the county family services hotline to report suspected child abuse in which the child’s immediate well-being may be in danger.”

  Candace is gripping her hands in her lap. Why she’d chosen to wear the chic suede skirt, matching jacket with gleaming little brass buttons and the leather boots, to speak with the school psychologist/guidance counselor, she has no idea. Her heart feels triangular in her chest, sharp-edged. Despite the lorazepam and last night’s medication she’d had a premonition of something really bad but no idea it could be—this bad.

  Eleven minutes late for the appointment with Weedle. Taking a wrong turn into the school parking lot and so shunted by one-way signs onto a residential street—God damn!—returning at last to the entrance to the school lot which she’d originally missed impatient now and would’ve been seriously pissed except for the lorazepam—(which is a new prescription, still feels experimental, tenuous)—and a hurried cigarette simultaneously first/last cigarette of the day, Candace vows—and inside the school building which looks utterly unfamiliar to her—Has she ever been here before? Is this the right school, or is her daughter enrolled at another school?—bypassing the front office in a sudden need to use a girls’ lavatory at the far end of the corridor—praying Dear God dear Christ! that Kimi will not discover her mother slamming into one of the stalls, needing to use the toilet and yet, on the toilet, cream-colored spandex tights huddled about her ankles like a peeled-off skin, there is just—nothing.

  God-damned drugs cause constipation, urine retention. If excrement is not excreted, where does it go?

  Once a week or so, Candace takes a laxative. But sometimes forgets if she has taken it. Or forgets to take it.

  Candace recalls another lavatory she’d hurried into recently on a false alarm, at the mall. This too a place where girls—high-school, middle-school—hang out. She’d been shocked to see a poster depicting a wan adolescent girl with bruised eyes and mouth staring at the viewer above a caption inquiring ARE YOU A VICTIM OF VIOLENCE, ABUSE, THREAT OF BODILY HARM? ARE YOU FRIGHTENED? CALL THIS NUMBER. At the bottom of the poster were small strips of paper containing a telephone number and of a dozen or more of these, only two remained. Candace wanted to think that this was some kind of prank—tearing off the paper strips as if they’d be of use.

  Weedle is inquiring about Kimi’s father: does he lose his temper at times, lose control, does he ever lay hands on Kimi?

  “ ‘Kimi’s father’—?”

  Candace has begun to sound like a deranged parrot echoing Weedle’s questions.

  “Yes—Kimi’s father Philip Waxman? According to our records, he is your daughter’s father?”

  Some strange tortured syntax here. Your daughter’s father.

  “Well, yes—but this ‘Philip Waxman’ no longer lives with us, Dr. Weedle. My former husband has moved to Manhattan, to be nearer his place of employment in which he occupies a sort of low-middle-echelon position of shattering insignificance.”

  “I see. I’m sorry to hear that . . .”

  “Sorry that he has moved to Manhattan, or that he occupies a low-middle-echelon position of shattering insignificance? He’s in the insurance scam—I mean, ‘game’—should you be curious.”

  Candace speaks so brightly and c
risply, Candace might be reciting a script. For very likely, Candace has recited this script concerning the former husband upon other occasions.

  Usually, listeners smile. Or laugh. Weedle just stares.

  “The question is—does Kimi’s father share custody with you? Does she spend time alone with him?”

  “Well—yes. I suppose so. She is in the man’s ‘custody’ on alternate weekends—if it’s convenient for him. But Philip is not the type to ‘abuse’ anyone—at least not physically.” Candace laughs in a high register, a sound like breaking glass. Seeing Weedle’s disapproving expression Candace laughs harder.

  Once it is dialogue Candace is doing, Candace can do it. Earnest conversation is something else.

  Weedle asks Candace what she means by this remark and Candace says that her former husband has refined the art of mental abuse. “But indirectly—Philip is passive-aggressive. It’s as if you are speaking to a person who does not know the English language—and he is deaf! He becomes stony-quiet, he will not engage. You can speak to him—scream at him—clap your hands in his face, or actually slap his face—only then will he acknowledge you, but you will be at fault. It is impossible for the man to lose at this game—it’s his game. And if you stand too close to him you’re in danger of being sucked into him—as into a black hole.” Candace laughs, wiping at her eyes. Black hole is new, and inspired. Wait till Candace tells her women friends! “ ‘Abusive men’ are ‘provoked’ into violent behavior but my former husband can’t be provoked—he is the one who provokes violence.”

  But is this a felicitous thing to have said? With Weedle staring at Candace from just a few feet away, humorless, and slow-blinking?

  “What do you mean, Candace—‘provokes violence’?”

  “Obviously not what I said! I am speaking figuratively.”

  “You are speaking—in ‘figures’?”

  “I am speaking—for Christ’s sake—analytically—and in metaphor. I am just trying to communicate what would seem to be a simple fact but—I am having great difficulty, I see.”