A Dress to Die For (15 page)

Laura told Wendy to have the factory take out the seam allowance—an inch on the sleeve hem—and put a baby hem on it. Thus, the sleeve would be five-eighths short instead of an inch and a half, but that also meant it wouldn’t have the nice, flat coverstitch. The change would cost in time and effort, another hit to Jeremy’s books.

She closed her laptop and thought about the snippets of Soso’s conversation. He knew Mom, but his affection was feigned, or at least trumped by his need to service the high prince, who seemed to have some sort of interest in the dress and finding her father. He didn’t seem to have any interest in hurting her mother, but Laura had an icky feeling in her gut about the guy. She figured that he was looking for Dad, and when he found him, things were not going to go so well for the gay/straight man who had left his family.

Could that have been the reason for the notes? Some sort of cry for help? Help he knew he had no business asking for, everything considered? Then why no contact information? Why just the ridiculous little declarations of affection? And why so many more for little freaking Lala? A little snot who had told a man his pants were too tight? God, she must have been intolerable once she got past the cute phase. Something came back to her in the fugue state between wakefulness and sleep, and she hugged a pillow on the couch.

She felt a little tick in her throat and thought,
A pin. A pin. I swallowed a pin!
She had kept them pressed between her lips whenever Mom did her little lessons. Everyone thought it was cute that she put them there like a real seamstress. Then one day, she had breathed too hard, and a pin lodged in her throat. She faced the ceiling, and people stood over her and shouted. The feeling of panic was overwhelming and threatened to wake her from the memory. Both her now-self and her past-self inhaled gentle breaths. In the corner of her vision, she saw a cutting table, tall windows, and four dress forms in different sizes. She saw Ruby, all of six and a half, on the periphery, a
Vogue
dangling from her fingertips. Mom took the rest of the pins from between Laura’s lips, saying something that was lost in the panic of the moment.

A man leaned over her, his face huge. “Relax,” Dad said. “I have you.”

And she did relax. She opened her mouth, and he pressed her tongue down with one finger. She didn’t gag or cough or stick herself by moving, because she was in his competent hands, safe and protected. He kneeled beside her, his brown eyes the picture of concentration and concern, while he reached in and, on the third try, plucked out the pin.

**

She woke up on the living room floor with the sun blasting her face and the phone ringing half an arm’s length away. Her head pounded. Her shoulders ached. The taste of Brunican wine coated her mouth.

“Jeremy?” she gurgled when she picked up the phone, eyes too bleary to look at the incoming number.

“Jimmy.”

“What?”

“Your mother had a heart attack.”

She jumped to her feet. The room spun a little, but she managed to keep herself upright by holding the back of a chair. “Where is she?”

“They just admitted her into the ER at Beth Israel.”

Laura was on her way to the bathroom with no idea what she even wanted to do there. “Is she going to die?” Then she almost ran to the kitchen, but when she got to the counter with Jeremy’s chrome box of meds, she again forgot what she wanted to do.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming. Right now.” She hung up. She dressed and showered so fast she had to make sure she had her pants on frontward. Once she got outside, she called Ruby.

“Hello?” Ruby yelled over loud music in the background.

“Go somewhere quiet!” Laura shouted.

The lady walking in front of her spun to give her a dirty look, and Laura extended her middle finger. The woman turned back around and walked faster. Over the phone, she heard flushing toilets, giggling girls, and Ruby saying, “For Chrissakes, it’s my one day off—”

“Mom had a heart attack.”

“Is she going to die?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, and I know exactly nothing. But please keep your phone on and don’t be in a freaking club when I call.” She stepped in front of a cab, forcing it to stop, and got in the back.

“I’m coming home right now.”

“Call me before you get on a plane.”

She was about to hang up when she heard Ruby’s voice. “Laura!”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too. Get home.”

**

The hospital had a gift shop on the bottom floor, and Laura bought a cross-stitch kit of a yellow bird on a branch. It might have been two dollars or two hundred. She had no idea. Somehow, she found Mom in the huge building by saying her name to as many people with laminated IDs around their necks as she could find. Jimmy stood in the cold hallway, flipping through a magazine. The light was unforgiving. He looked as though he’d been up all night, his moustache askew at the sides and melting in with the hair growing on his cheeks.

“How is she?” Laura asked.

He folded his magazine. “She keeps trying to walk out.”

“The food’s probably too tasty.”

“Her cooking didn’t do you no harm.” He was actually getting defensive about Mom. Half a date, and he can get between them on a joke about tasteless food?

“Thanks for staying. I guess if you wanted to go home, I’ll tell her you waited.”

He leaned against the wall and glanced up at her. “Who do you like for killing the princess?”

Oh, so he intended to stay and insinuate himself. Well, all right. Mom stood to benefit from having him around, and if he liked her that much, all the better.

“Well, she was killed in a fire. So there’s no proof it was a murder at all.”

“Pretend it was. We can’t go in there until they’re done poking at her anyway.”

Laura leaned against the wall, deciding to play. Pacing around with worry wasn’t going to help at all. “When she came back from her month in New York, with my father, thank you, she had the inaugural ball. And you know it was three days of fabulous with the orange gown on the last night.”

“Who made the other two?”

Laura hadn’t thought of that. “I have no idea. We can ask Mom. But whatever happened in that dress started the Fortnight Coup. So you’d think if the high prince wanted her dead, she’d have been dead twenty years ago.”

“If it was the high prince. What about your dad?”

“Maybe. But he’s in New York now because those notes were hand delivered. I happen to know that Soso doesn’t know where he is, but once I find him, I’m going to clock him for giving Mom a heart attack.”

“Your mother didn’t have a heart attack over your father.”

“Well, her cooking didn’t do her no harm.”

He smirked and opened his magazine again. “Twenty years is a nice, round number.”

A nurse exited Mom’s room, carrying a clipboard in one hand and rolling out an instrument-filled cart with the other. “One at a time,” she said.

“You go,” Jimmy said.

**

Mom looked like hell in a hospital gown and IV, but when she saw Laura come in, she smiled and waved.

Laura took her hand. “Mom, I’m so—”

“What’s in your bag?”

“What?”

“Do you have a hairbrush? I look like someone wrung me out.”

“You just had a heart attack.” But Laura opened her bag and sorted through her things. She had a little comb, a few bobby pins, and a tube of lipstick she’d stashed in case she and Jeremy turned a corner and found a camera waiting.

“I’m so glad you came in first.” Mom grabbed the comb and tried to sit up, but she cringed with the effort and flopped back down. Laura took the comb from her and worked on her hair.

“He’s a cop, Mom. He’s seen people at their worst.”

“Ow! Do you have to pull it?”

“Ruby’s on her way.”

“She didn’t have to go through the trouble.”

“You can tell her that when she gets here. Do you like this clip?” Laura held up a rhinestone-and-feather thing from her bag. It was leftover from some event where she’d taken her hair down after the cocktail hour, and the clip had gotten moved in the bag transfer.

“It’s a little garish for the hospital.”

Laura found a tube of concealer and used it on her mother’s dark circles. “Last night, I had this dream, or memory maybe, about swallowing a pin. Dad pulled it out. Did that happen?”

“Yes. You were very cute with pretending you were a seamstress. Not pretending anymore, I guess.”

“Don’t even get me started.” Laura perfected the concealer and fussed with a powder brush on Mom’s cheeks. “I’m so far from what I wanted to be doing right now. Except working with Jeremy, which I do want, and I love more than anything. Otherwise, it’s all pushing paper and making decisions and telling other people how to do what I could do better. I don’t think I’m happy, but then I think I should give it more time. I don’t know.” She gave Mom one last rub at the corner of her eye. “There. Magnificent. You look like a bypass is ten years away, at least.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now, I’m going to send Jimmy in and go make some calls. Then I’m going to figure out what to do about the dress and the princess and Dad, because it’s eating at me.”

“Don’t blame him for this.” Mom indicated the bed with a sweep of her hand.

Laura kissed Mom on the cheek and went out to send Jimmy in to see her newly beautified mother.

**

The waiting room was done in the most generic shades of blue and grey. Laura found herself annoyed and impatient with the worn places on the cushions and the pattern on the carpet. All the seats were taken, except ones next to someone. She sat on a low, magazine-strewn table, facing the window. She wanted to be alone. So she closed off a part of her mind where she existed with only the phone’s ring in her ear.

“Hello?” Jeremy had been sleeping. It was one in the morning the next day in China. She nearly broke down in tears hearing his voice, and he made it worse by speaking again. “Laura?”

“Mom’s in the hospital. The doctor said she has to have a bypass tomorrow, so I don’t think I’ll be coming into work. I’m sorry. I’ll try to answer my emails from here.”

“Whoa, there. Slow down.” His voice slipped, and he coughed. “Hang on.” He coughed for a good fifteen seconds.

“I can call you back.”

“No. Shut up. I’m fine. I can try to get out of Guangzhou, but I may have to go through Hong Kong.”

“What? No. Wendy can handle the office. I’ll be on email.”

He coughed again. That happened whenever he woke up, no matter what time, and she was forced to take it easy for that minute and just wait.

“You okay?” she finally asked.

“Wendy?” he asked.

“Oh, God, you’re right.”

“Don’t freak out. Please. I can be back in two days. I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do.”

“And I’m telling you, you don’t have to come back. I’ll be in the office on Tuesday morning at the latest.”

“Have you lost your mind? I’m not coming back for work. I’m coming back for you.”

She found it hard to speak after that, and the long silences she’d sat through for him were reciprocated as she tried not to sniff or snort too loudly into the phone. “I’m so worried,” she said between sobs. “It’s Dad. I can’t even... it’s too long to tell now. If she dies, I will kill him.” The last word came out as a non-threatening squeak.

“She’s not going to die.”

“Unless she does.”

“Laura?”

“Jeremy.”

“I need to call the airline and get a flight out. Can I call you back?”

“Say you love me,” she said.

“You love me.”

“You love me, too.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Hurry home.”

**

Jimmy came out as she was hanging up the phone, jingling his keys and looking focused.

“Where are you going?” Laura asked, as if he were obligated to tell her.

“Picking up some things from the house. Slippers, whatever.” He clutched a slip of paper, looking a little upset, a little paler, and discombobulated. She found that weird for a police officer who had probably been bled on multiple times.

Laura held out her hand for the paper slip. “I’ll go. You sit.” He didn’t give her the list. “Here’s the thing. Mom thinks if she asks me to go get the stuff, she’s bothering me, and she’d rather bother you. But I bet she doesn’t want you in her drawers. As a matter of fact, I bet she’s going to be really uncomfortable knowing you’re picking up her underwear. So…” She wiggled her fingers, and he placed the paper in it.

**

She was grateful to get out of the hospital and do something useful. She’d never been good at sitting still, and she could tell the thing with Mom was really going to test every bit of her endurance.

Packing Mom’s warm slippers and socks, poking in her closets to find a comfortable nightgown and some piece of memorabilia to comfort her in strange surroundings, Laura came upon the photo album again. She opened it. Dad. Dad everywhere. She tried to memorize his face but only saw Ruby, until she looked so closely that his face fell apart in a spill of grainy dots. Even when she looked for Barnabas in his natty suits and side-parted hair, her eyes gravitated to her father’s face, his slim form, and his soft-looking hair. She studied his visage for some kind of connection but found none.

Her phone rang.

“Hi, Barry.”

“Am I taking you out tonight again? There’s a club on 25th Street I guarantee you haven’t been to.”

“My mom’s going into surgery in the morning.”

“Sorry to hear,” he said.

“Hey, um, can I have the name of the transportation company you used for the dress?”

“Oh my God, what a nightmare. That crazy bitch insisted on them. Hang on.” She heard the rustle of the phone and some clacking noises. “Laranja Transport.” He spelled it, gave her the number, then said, “You pronounce the
J
like an
H
.”

“Thanks. Do you know what language that is? Sounds like Spanish.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I gave the name to the cops, too. So you’re going to be asking the same questions.”

“Probably. Thanks, Barry. I know you’re waiting to hear from me on the other thing.”