Goodnight Nobody (4 page)

Sukie nodded.

"Did she believe it?"

Sukie shrugged. "She wrote it. That's all I know."

"Did anyone else know that Laura Lynn Baird has a ghostwriter? Before it hit the Internet?"

Sukie's face was unreadable as she fiddled with the strap of her diaper bag. "I don't know," she said. "But the police asked me the exact same thing."

The mommies murmured uneasily, digesting this surprise. I don't know whether they were more shocked to learn that Kitty had written for someone as infamous as Laura Lynn or that one of us had worked outside the house at all.

"How is Philip?" asked Carol Gwinnell.

"I saw him in the police station yesterday," I said. "He seemed pretty shaken up."

"Well, why wouldn't he be?" asked Lexi.

"Philip's lived in Upchurch forever," Sukie said.

"Old family," said Carol Gwinnell.

"He was the best-looking guy in my sister's class at Upchurch High," Sukie said with a little smile. "We actually dated a little bit. A million years ago."

Lexi squinted toward the swing set, holding baby Brierly against her chest in a brightly colored handwoven Guatemalan sling. "Hadley?" she called. Her voice had an edge, and her rosy cheeks were more flushed than normal. "Hadley?" She swung around wildly. "He was right over by the slide a minute ago..."

All of us got to our feet, and I looked around instinctively for my own brood, exhaling when I saw Sam and Jack bobbing up and down on a seesaw and Sophie singing to herself on a swing.

"Mommy!" Hadley waved at his mother from the other side of the picket fence. Lexi sprinted across the playground and scooped her son into her arms.

"Don't!" she said, hugging him hard. "Don't you scare me like that!"

Hadley, who'd probably just wandered off to pick his nose in private, stared up at his mother, then burst into tears.

"I thought you were lost!" Lexi said as Hadley wailed. We gathered around her, patting her back, telling her it was okay, that we were all safe, that everything would be fine. I don't think any of us believed it. Ten minutes later trick or treating had officially been canceled. We'd agreed to have a party at Carol's house instead, said our goodbyes, gotten into our air bag-equipped, steel-reinforced cars, and driven our children back home.

Four

My cell phone rang as I was tossing two bags of instant rice into the microwave.

"Hello?"

"Birdie?" The voice on the other end was tentative and quiet. My father, Roger Klein, had always been more confident with his instrument than with words. When he played his oboe, his tone was the purest I'd ever heard, but his voice could have belonged to a fourteen-year-old schoolboy with a crush. He still called me by my little-girl nickname, and it always made my heart melt a little.

"Hi, Dad." I slammed the microwave door, hit the buttons, grabbed plates from the cupboard and paper napkins from the drawer, and looked into the family room, where the kids were happily entranced by
Bob the Builder,
and hopefully would be for another eighteen minutes.

"How are you doing?" he asked. "Have they caught anyone yet?"

I ripped open a bag of Shake 'n Bake. "Not that I know of."

"Ten-ten WINS had a story about it. Her name was Kiki?"

"Kitty," I said, cracking eggs one-handed. "Kitty Cavanaugh. And guess what? She was a ghostwriter for Laura Lynn Baird!"

"Who?"

I sighed and grabbed a package of chicken. "You know, she's one of those blond conservatives who's always shouting at someone on CNN. She's got a column in
Content
called 'The Good Mother,' and Kitty was the one who actually wrote it."

Roger wasn't impressed. "Are you being careful?" he asked. "Are you using your alarm and locking the doors?"

I slid the chicken into the oven, kicked the door with my foot, pulled the rice out of the microwave, and surveyed the refrigerator for a vegetable my kids might actually eat. "We're being careful, Dad. And I'm fine."

"Do the police have any suspects?"

"Not as far as I know. Maybe it was someone who was after Laura Lynn. People hated her."

After we'd gotten home from the park, I'd planted the kids in front of a DVD, swallowed my guilt, and spent ten minutes online. My first Google query had yielded no fewer than ten thousand hits for Laura Lynn Baird. Some of them were approving posts from hard-core fans. Others--many, many others--were from weblogs and online magazines whose authors had actively and publicly wished for her demise. "Or maybe Laura Lynn's the killer. Every time I saw her on TV, she looked like she was two seconds away from biting somebody's ankle. Maybe Kitty got uppity," I guessed. "Maybe she said that she thought drug dealers should actually have trials before being sent to the electric chair."

My father laughed. I considered a bag of baby carrots in the vegetable crisper. If I dumped enough ranch dressing on them, I might get lucky.

"Listen, Kate," said my father. "I've got a concert tonight, but I could rent a car and drive up afterwards."

And do what?
I wondered, putting the dirty dishes into the sink.
Use your oboe to beat murderers back from my door?
"Nah, we're fine. Ben's coming back tomorrow afternoon."

"Daddy's coming home!" cheered Jack and Sam, racing into the kitchen, wearing jeans and striped shirts from the Old Navy clearance rack, waving plastic swords at each other.

"You should call your mother," my father said.

"And where might I find Reina these days?"

He cleared his throat. "Still in Torino. I faxed her the clippings about the murder, and I know she's worried too."

Then why hasn't she called?
I thought but didn't say. Instead, I promised I'd try ringing her in Italy when I had a free moment. I said goodbye, hung up, clicked
Bob the Builder
into oblivion over the boys' shrieks of protest, and supervised hand washing for dinner.

Five

The earliest thing I remember is my parents singing together. My father would be at the piano, which was draped with a lace scarf and covered with gold-framed pictures of the divas: Callas, Tebaldi, Nellie Melba, and my mother, of course. I'd be belly-down underneath the piano on the pink and ivory fringed rug, with my coloring books and my crayons. My mother would stand behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder. She'd sing Mozart arias with her heavy eyelids half-closed, pianissimo, the kind of vocalization, she told me, that was hardest for the soprano to master. Even when Reina sang softly, her voice was bigger than I could ever be, huge and rich and thrilling, a living thing that pushed at the walls and the ceilings and took up all the space in the room.

I could feel her voice, and my father's admiration: love and lust. I couldn't name it at four years old, or six or eight, but by the time I was ten or so, I knew enough to slip out of the living room after the first song. I'd lock the door of my bedroom, flop facedown with my book, plug my headphones into my ears, and blast Blondie and Pat Benatar, but I could still hear them: the notes vibrating in the overheated air, and then the silence, more intimate than if I'd actually caught them doing it.
"Mi chiamano Mimi,"
she would sing--her favorite aria, one she'd never performed, a part for a lyric soprano, not a coloratura, the ones who sing the highest parts and some of the showiest ones. Still, I knew, my mother dreamed of playing Mimi, of dying beautifully every night on stage.
"Il perche non so."

My mother, Reina, was born Rachel Danhauser in Kankakee, Illinois. She renamed herself when she moved to New York City at twenty-one with nothing but two hundred dollars and every recording Maria Callas had ever made. (She also had a full scholarship to Juilliard, but that's precisely the kind of detail my mother tends to leave out of her life story, especially when she's telling it to reporters.)

My parents met at Juilliard, where my father was teaching and my mother was a graduate student. I've imagined the scene many times: my father, a thirty-six-year-old bachelor, hair already thinning, glasses perpetually askew over his mild brown eyes, having achieved as much fame and fortune as any oboe player can hope for, because while there are superstar singers, virtuoso violinists, millionaire pianists who play solo performances to sold-out concert halls around the world, there has never really been a breakout oboe player, unless you stretch and count Kenny G, which my father does not. And there was Reina, her five feet nine inches enhanced by three-inch heels, her hair a tumble of dark brown curls; towering, magnificent Reina, sheet music clutched to her chest, folding pointed crimson-painted nails into a fist and knocking at his rehearsal room door, asking, sweetly, if he could accompany her. (I can even imagine them consummating their love beneath a sign reading
PLEASE DO NOT EMPTY YOUR SPIT VALVE HERE
, but only after I've had a few drinks.)

I was born the summer after my parents' first wedding anniversary, and after forty-eight hours in Lenox Hill Hospital, they brought me home, to the rent-controlled prewar apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue that, since time immemorial, had been inhabited almost exclusively by musicians. Leases were handed down like heirlooms. A bassoonist leaving for the Boston Symphony would bequeath his two-bedroom to the new second-chair cellist; a tenor departing for London would hand down his studio to the new assistant concertmaster at the Met.

The air in our building was full of music. Fugues and concerti poured through the heating vents, arpeggios and glissandos filled the hallways. As you rode up in the elevator, you would hear the trill of a flute, or a mezzo-soprano working on one phrase of an aria; the brassy
wah-wah
of trumpets, the mournful, lowing notes of a cello...but it had been years since a baby's cries had joined the choir.

The neighbors must have gathered around me, gazing down at a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, looking for signs of the talent I undoubtedly possessed.
Those fingers,
Mrs. Plansky the clarinetist might have said.
A pianist, maybe?

Look at her lips,
my father would interject.
Woodwinds. Maybe the French horn.

No, no,
Reina would say, clutching me proudly.
Have you heard her cry? The notes she can hit? E above high C, I swear it!
And she'd beam down at me, false eyelashes fluttering. (Somehow I know that even two days after giving birth, Reina would have been wearing her false eyelashes.)
My daughter is going to sing,
she would say, and all of them would nod almost unconsciously in agreement.

A singer,
they would repeat, like two dozen fairy godmothers giving their blessing.
A singer.

It would have been easier if I hadn't been able to sing at all, if I'd been completely tone-deaf, if I couldn't have carried a tune in a bucket. The hell of it was, I was good, just not good enough. I had a fine voice for high school choirs and college glee clubs and, eventually, for winning fifty bucks' worth of free drinks singing karaoke at the local bar. I had an ideal environment, and the best instruction that could be bought or bartered for. But to my mother's eternal dismay, I didn't have an opera voice.

My singing career, such as it was, ended when I was fourteen, two weeks before I would have auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts.

"Can you have your mother come up for a minute?" Mrs. Minheizer asked at the end of the lesson. Alma Minheizer was seventy-two, small and pink-cheeked, with a corona of fluffy white hair and a wall full of framed photographs of her own performances around the world. She'd been one of my mother's teachers, fifteen years before, when Reina had first moved to New York. I went downstairs to fetch my mother, who was home, for once. She'd made a big point of telling me that she'd turned down Queen of the Night in San Francisco in order to be home for my audition.

"What's this about?" she demanded from where she was posed on the couch, perfectly lipsticked, eyebrows plucked into dramatic arches and glossy curls piled high, with a lap full of sheet music and her calendar. She'd been chatting to her agent--in Italian, naturally--and wasn't happy to be interrupted. I shrugged, walking with her to the elevator, holding Mrs. Minheizer's door, and leaving it open so that I could make out most of what they were saying. I slumped against the wall, then sat on the floor, trying to make myself invisible. Easier said than done. I was five feet eight inches tall, with my mother's figure--big breasts that I disguised under shapeless sweaters and baggy sweatshirts, heavy hips that no amount of dieting or aerobics would ever diminish, my mother's full lips and thick curls. She wore hers flowing over her shoulders, or arranged in a complicated updo. I wore mine hanging in my face, which did a pretty fair job of disguising the zits on my forehead. I had Reina's looks (or I would, when my skin cleared up), but I didn't have anything even close to her sound. I knew it, and Mrs. Minheizer knew it too.

"...never be better than adequate," I heard her say. I sank down further on the carpeted hallway floor, giddy and queasy with a mixture of shame and relief. Someone had finally told Reina what I'd suspected, what a dozen other teachers had hinted at but hadn't had the courage to come out and say...and because it was Mrs. Minheizer, who'd been, in her day, one of the leading soubrettes in the world, Reina would have to listen.

"Alma, that's absurd," my mother said. I could imagine her lifting her chin in an imperious gesture, and the gold and ruby bracelets she wore clinking on one plump wrist.

"...know how hard this life can be. If I had a daughter--"

"Well, you
don't.
I
do.
" Even back then, Reina spoke primarily in italics.

"If I had a daughter," my teacher continued, her voice smooth and quiet and absolutely serious, "and she could do anything else--write, or paint, or teach, or work in a bank--I'd tell her to do that. You know what our life is like! There are a hundred singers for every slot in the chorus, never mind the principals. If you're not the best of the best, there's no place for you."

There was a pause. Some murmuring. "So she'll practice," said my mother.

"She does practice," Mrs. Minheizer said. "I've never had a more diligent student than Kate."

I could picture my mother dismissing my diligence with a wave of her hand. "She can always practice harder." She slammed Mrs. Minheizer's door harder than she had to and strode down the hall, white lace sleeves fluttering, lavender chiffon skirt swishing, in a cloud of perfume and indignation.

"What'd she want?" I asked, pushing myself to my feet.

Reina made a dismissive noise in the back of her cosseted throat. "You need to practice harder," she said.

"Mom..." I took a deep breath to steady myself while she pressed the button for the elevator. "I don't want to sing anymore."

She stared at me, black eyebrows aloft, as if she'd never heard those words before and didn't know what they meant. "I'm sorry?" Her stiff eyelashes fluttered. "I beg your pardon?"

"Mom, I hate it," I said. This wasn't exactly true. I liked crooning Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday songs in the privacy of my bedroom. What I didn't like was the endless cycle of reaching and falling short and trying harder and falling short again, the way I'd finish a piece and watch while Mrs. Minheizer would compose her face carefully and pause before saying anything. In that pause, I'd feel her weighing her words, parsing the difference between what she wanted to tell me and what she would actually say. I'd lived with the real deal long enough to know that I was a pretender. I'd heard my mother. I'd heard her students too, heavy-hipped, double-chinned girls, unfashionable and unremarkable until they opened their mouths and their voices were so ethereal, so transcendent that, like magic, they became beautiful.

"I'm no good," I mumbled.

"Kate, I won't
hear
this."

"You know I'm not," I said, the words tumbling out, loud and reckless in the high-ceilinged hallway. "I don't have it. If I go to the auditions at Performing Arts, they're going to laugh at me, and if they take me, it'll just be because I'm your daughter."

My mother's face softened for an instant, probably because I'd paid her a compliment. Then she jabbed the button for the elevator again with one crimson-tipped finger. "We'll find you another teacher."

"Mom, I've been through every teacher in the building!"

"There are other buildings," she said grimly. The elevator doors slid open. She got on. I stood in the hallway.

"Kate."

"No."

"Kate, you're being--"

"No."

She must have seen something in my face that convinced her I wasn't kidding. The doors slid shut on her disappointment, but by the time I'd walked down the stairs, Reina had regrouped. She stood in the doorway, gave me a tremulous smile, and held something toward me like a peace offering. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when I looked down and saw my father's third-best oboe in her hands. "You have
talent,
" she called toward my back, as I pushed past her and half ran down the hall to my bedroom, where I flopped on my bed and opened my copy of
The Mists of Avalon.
"Kate, you
do
! And maybe you won't be a singer, but you shouldn't give up on
music
!"

I won the battle but lost the war. I canceled my audition at Performing Arts with the promise that I'd continue with my voice lessons until I left for college. Reina and Roger grudgingly enrolled me in Pimm, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side that was, I later realized, chosen because it was the only other high school they'd ever heard of (and the only reason they'd heard of it was that a senior there had been killed in a rough-sex-and-cocaine romp in Central Park that had been all over the headlines the year before). Pimm was full of sleek girls with trust funds who'd heave up their celery sticks in the echoing marble bathrooms every day after lunch. They'd all known one another since their preschool days and weren't in a big hurry to welcome a brunette, trust-fundless interloper who wore a size in the double digits and never made more than the occasional foray into their top two pastimes--shoplifting and bulimia.

I pretended not to care, but I did, of course, especially when I would watch my parents making music together. I pretended not to mind that my mother was out of the country more than she was in it, but of course I longed for her, even when I was fifteen and required by law to sneer at anything that came out of my mother's mouth.

"I'll be back by June," Reina told me the afternoon I arrived home from school and found her in the bedroom with her scuffed leather trunks with their brass padlocks open, getting ready for a three-month stint at the Staatsopera.

"Vienna?" I asked, hating the sound of my voice, hating the way I looked like her and how it seemed such a cruel joke that the instant I opened my mouth to sing, the best I could hope for was "adequate."

"Vienna," she confirmed. Her dimples flashed as she smiled, and her hair gleamed: she'd had the color touched up that afternoon, the way she always did before a long trip. "They've given me a contract for three operas, and you know how rare that is!"

"Three months is a long time," I said, my voice cracking. "You'll miss the school musical." We were doing
West Side Story,
with boys brought in from Episcopal, and I'd landed the part of Anita, a coup due mostly, I figured, to Pimm's lack of altos. But somehow the lowcut blouse and long black wig had given me a confidence I'd never felt in all my years of voice lessons. I'd been imagining opening night, my mother handing me a dozen red roses, her eyes wide with astonished approval.
Kate, you're really good!
she'd say.

Reina sat down on the satin coverlet on her bed, rubbed a scuff mark off the toe of one glossy black leather boot, then took my hands in hers.