She stands in her usual posture, arms behind her back, unapologetically observing us. I’m tempted to ask her about Regina until Gabe waltzes past me, a grin plastered onto his face as he waves to Judy before pressing the button for the shades on the French doors. Our Roman shades are electric, one of the many upsells we didn’t need. Gabe wanted the best, even if it means Judy now disappears in slow motion.
At first, her crush on Gabe was cute. Innocent until every time we turned around, she was pacing outside our garden, pausing if Gabe was taking off his wet suit, spying when Gabe and I embraced, chuckling when Jasper did something naughty. It’s not dangerous or threatening, just intrusive. Even here, along the canals, where people are always watching.
The shades click once they’re rolled down. We can’t see Judy anymore, but I can still feel her lingering. On the coffee table, Regina Geller’s prettyface beams at me from my phone. I hold it out to Gabe, who appears to have forgotten the story I was telling him, like this isn’t the way we have all conversations as parents. Fragmented, interrupted. “When we saw her yesterday, Jasper was pointing and calling herGigi. Is she—have you ever seen her before? Is she someone we know?”
Gabe studies her picture. “I don’t think so.”
He sits on the couch, brushing his hand through his hair as he collects his thoughts.
“T., I know this is really disturbing. Accidents like this don’t happen here.” He motions me to sit beside him, and when I do, he massages my shoulder, his hand warm and stabilizing. “It’s completely normal to want to make this horrible, random death make sense.”
Gabe’s quick to tell me how normal my worries are. When the baby doesn’t kick for too long, when she won’t stop hiccuping, when Jasper failed his iron test—these are all normal worries. It reassures him to know these are typical concerns, that we have nothing atypical to worry about. No matter how common my fears are, their mundanity does little to quell their persistence, the way they keep my limbs rigid, my mind spiraling. It’s a visceral response, one that makes me feel dramatic. Emotional. Pregnant.
“I’m sure Jasper called to someone, but—” Gabe takes my phone from my hand and angles it toward me, so I can’t avoid Regina’s innocent, joyful expression. “You’re sure this is the woman you saw? There are a thousand girls who look like this in Venice.”
He raises an eyebrow to indicateYou look like this. Given my sandy hair and blue eyes, most people assume I was born with Hollywood in my veins and surfing in my soul. With his brooding Italian good looks, people assume Gabe’s the transplant, when he’s the native to the bay, the one who couldn’t imagine living more than a stone’s throw from the ocean. I’m the small-town girl from Vermont who never had persimmons or Korean food before I moved to LA as an adult.
My resolve weakens. The fist of apprehension unfurls in my gut. The woman in the photograph, her hair is lighter than the hair of the woman we saw in Café Collage, not dyed blue at the tips, no visible tattoos beneath her long-sleeved shirt. She has only a general resemblance to the woman at the café. Still, there’s something about her that nags at me, something I can’t quite shake.
“You’re sure she isn’t familiar?” I ask Gabe.
He takes a minute to study the photograph, really considering it.
“No.” He puts the phone screen-down on the table. “I’m sure Jasper was calling to someone. He probably wanted her cookie or liked her T-shirt. Maybe it was his way of sayinggirl.Gee-gee.Maybe it’s a new word.”
I relax even more as I picture Jasper waving to tourists along the canals, shouting for their chips or lemonade, babbling in his secret language. Gabe reaches down and pulls my feet into his lap. His fingers dig into my arch, radiating pleasure through me, so much so that I have a contraction. Gabe feels it, too, and we both laugh, the lust fizzling before it’s even started.
He spreads his fingers across my stomach, beckoning to our girl. “Do you think you’re nervous about the baby?”
My eyes sting, and I will myself not to let that sensation erupt into tears. At some level, everything is about the baby. She’s still breech, and if she doesn’t turn by my next appointment, I’ll have to decide whether I want to schedule a C-section or get an ECV to shift her so she’s head down. I only have three weeks left, two if I need surgery. It’s too soon. I don’t want another C-section. I’m still recovering from the last one.
With Jasper, the only easy part of pregnancy was the gestation itself. It was so easy that he didn’t want to leave the womb. Ten days after my due date, I was finally induced. Even after they pumped me full of Pitocin and broke my water, he still didn’t want to come out. Each time I had a contraction, his heart rate dropped to dangerous levels. They gave me something else to stop the labor until, hours later, they decided he had to come out. As they raced me into an operating room, the headnurse shouted in a voice that was too loud, too insistent. When they cut me open, they found the cord was wrapped twice around his neck. I’ll never forget the gesture Gabe made as he described how the doctor unwound the cord, circling his arm like he was untangling a scarf.
When we brought Jasper home, I was terrified that he’d suffered brain damage during labor. I searched for signs in every cry. And he cried a lot. When he slept, I continually checked his breath. At first I was so determined to keep him alive that I forgot to love him. The nerves rise up now as I think of going through it all again with this one.
Gabe’s right. I am anxious. Work’s always proved a useful distraction. The physical act of constructing jewelry is fully consuming. A flame too long over metal and you’ve scorched an earring. A heat too high and a ring collapses into a pile of gold. An extra strike with the file and you’re uneven again. The craft requires your undivided focus. Without it, my anxiety has vast swaths to expand in.
“It’s been a long day.” I hold out my hand so he can help me up. “Let’s go to bed.”
As so often happens during my pregnancy, I’m asleep within minutes. A sleep deep enough that I can’t dream, can’t worry, can only let my body rest.
In the middle of the night, I wake up sweat-drenched, the baby tap-dancing on my bladder. I get up to pee, and it all comes back to me: the police lights along the bridge, the tape across the saltbushes, Regina Geller. Gigi.
Gabe snores softly from the other side of the bed. I tiptoe to the window, press the shade half up. Outside, the canal is as dark and quiet as it should be at two in the morning. Despite the calm, my heart races. I wonder if it makes my daughter’s heart race, too, if she knows my panic as well as she knows my voice, my diet, my laughter. If I’d woken last night, I might have seen Regina Geller. I might have been able to save her.
I head downstairs for a glass of water and chug it, relishing in the cool liquid as it slips down my throat, then regretting it because, after Ifall back to sleep, I’ll have to pee again in no time. I spot my phone on the coffee table. Earlier, I’d been so distracted by thoughts of the baby and whether Jasper could actually have known this woman that I forgot to plug it in. I assume it’ll be dead. When I tap it, Jasper’s smiling face, covered in cake from his first birthday, peers back at me. The screen unlocks because I’m staring at it, so I swipe to open my phone, and a different face fills my screen, one that will never smile again.
I stare at Regina’s photograph, those piercing blue eyes glancing sideways at the camera. Something in her hair catches my attention. I use my thumb and pointer finger to zoom in on it. It’s a butterfly barrette with little red wings dusted in gold. The woman at the coffee shop was wearing the same one. It was Regina. My son called to her. Not to her pen or her tattoos but to her. Gigi. He knew her, and I have no idea how.
Chapter Six
Barb
LA is gray and overcast, the entire city mourning my daughter. I drop my bag at the Marriott in Santa Monica. It’s too early to check in, so I do my best to distract myself with the mystery for book club until the city wakes for the day. If I were the mother in one of my books, I’d be here, too, the amateur sleuth, the only one desperate for the truth. It’s impossible that I’m here, in LA, reading a book where I could be a character. Waiting, but not for Regina. I can tell I’m grieving, though it’s different from when my parents, various friends died. I’m cocooned in disbelief. I don’t even realize I’m still reading until I land on a word that makes me dizzy.Murder.
On the page, I underline the details that signify to the police a murder has been committed—forced entry, abrasions on the skin, a missing knife in the butcher block, the angle of the stab wound. I know nothing about the scene of Regina’s death, whether the police were as conscientious as they are in this novel. While I shouldn’t be taking notes from fiction ... if her death wasn’t an accident, surely there were signs. What if the police overlooked evidence, grasping for a conclusion that created the least amount of work for them? After all, this is Venice Beach. The police have plenty of crime to deal with, without adding a death that could easily be written off as an accident. Oh, Regina, whydid you have to live in a place like this? Why did you have to die in a place like this too?
My plan is to go see Officer Gonzales and demand answers. There’s something I have to do first, though. I need to force my brain to accept what my heart cannot. Regina is gone. I’m in her city, but I will not see her. I will never see her again.
