I Am No One You Know (26 page)

“ ‘Sabrina.’ ”

It was a beautiful name. But Sabrina Jackson wasn’t a beautiful young woman.

Kyle stared at photographs of the missing woman, whose blemished skin was a shock. Nor was her skin pale as he’d imagined but rather dark, and oily. Her eyebrows weren’t delicately arched as he’d drawn them but heavily penciled in, as the outline of her fleshy mouth had been exaggerated by lipstick. Still, there was the narrow forehead, the snubbed nose, the small, receding chin. The shoulder-length hair, wavy, burnished-brown, as Kyle had depicted it. When you looked from the sketches drawn in colored pencil to the actual woman in the photographs, you were tempted to think that one was a younger, sentimentally idealized version of the other; or that the two girls were sisters, one very pretty and feminine and the other somewhat coarse, sensuous.

“You? Always, it was you.”

Strange it seemed to him, difficult to realize: the skull he’d reconstructed was the skull of this woman, Sabrina Jackson, and not the skull of the girl he’d sketched. Always, Sabrina Jackson had been the victim. Kyle Cassity was being congratulated for his excellent work but he felt as if a trick had been played on him.

He contemplated for long minutes the girl in the photographs who smiled, preened, squinted into the camera as if for his benefit. The bravado of not-knowing how we must die: how our most capricious poses outlive us. The heavy makeup on Sabrina Jackson’s blemished face made her look older than twenty-three. She wore cheap tight sexy clothes, tank tops and V-neck blouses, leather miniskirts, leather trousers, high-heeled boots. She was a smoker. She did appear to have a sense of humor, Kyle liked that in her. Mugging for the camera. Pursing her lips in a kiss. The type who wouldn’t ask a man for money directly;
but if you offered it, she certainly wouldn’t turn it down. A small pleased smile would transform her face as if this were the highest of compliments. A murmured
Thanks!
And the bills quickly wadded and slipped into her pocket and no more need be said of the transaction.

The skull was gone from Kyle’s laboratory. There would be a private burial of Sabrina Jackson’s remains in Easton, Pennsylvania. Now it was known that the young woman was dead, the investigation into her disappearance would intensify. In time, Kyle didn’t doubt, there would be an arrest.

Kyle Cassity! Congratulations.

Amazing, that work you do.

Good time to retire, eh? Quit while you’re ahead.

There was no longer mandatory retirement at the college. He would never retire as a sculptor, an artist. And he could continue working indefinitely for the State of New Jersey since he was a free-lance consultant, not an employee subject to the state’s retirement laws. These protests rose in him, he didn’t utter.

He’d ceased playing the new CDs. His office and his laboratory were very quiet. A pulse beat sullenly in his head. Disappointed! For Sabrina Jackson wasn’t the one he’d sought.

“I
RESENT THIS.
You mooning over the dead.”

Startled, Kyle glanced up from the
Newark Star-Ledger
he was holding before him. He’d been reading of Sabrina Jackson, new leads in the investigation into her murder. It was a week since he’d shipped back the skull. He’d been staring at the young woman’s jauntily smiling photograph prominent on the first page of the second section of the newspaper. Vivian must have come up behind him, silently.

Kyle was astonished by the bitterness in his wife’s voice, and by the clumsy violence with which she struck the newspaper, as a child might do. “A man your age! Making a fool of himself over a girl young enough to be your—granddaughter.”

“Vivian, for God’s sake. I’m only just reading the paper. This is—”

“I know what it is! Always the dead! You never cared so much for Jacky. You never cared so much for any of us.”

“Vivian—”

“No. Don’t touch me. Your clammy hands
disgust me.
”

In the years of their marriage Vivian had never spoken to Kyle Cassity like this.

He couldn’t have been more shocked than if she’d struck him with her fists. She left the room, and her footsteps were heavy and graceless on the stairs. Kyle knew he must follow her, though he dreaded it.

In the woman’s face he had seen no love for him. No respect.

Upstairs in their bedroom that smelled of the lavender sachets she kept in the bureau drawers Vivian was crying, but tears glistened like hot acid on her face. When Kyle tried to touch her she pushed away his hands. “Your ‘fetishes’—that’s what they are. Skulls. Bones. Drawings of dead people. Dead women. I’ve seen them, they disgust me.” Another time Kyle was shocked, and deeply embarrassed. Had Vivian been going through the file drawers in his study? He had a collection of explicit anatomical drawings and color plates hidden away, at which he hadn’t glanced in years. Choked with indignation Vivian said, “You never could touch me in the light, could you! Never could make love to me knowing it was
me.
I knew about your other women. Everybody knew. Our children knew, that’s why they didn’t respect you when they were growing up—that’s why they don’t respect you now. I wasn’t going to give my husband up to those women, I wanted you then. I thought I loved you. But now—”

There were no words for Kyle to stammer except flat banal unconvincing words in which he couldn’t himself believe. “Vivian, you don’t mean it. What you’re saying—”

“I’m speaking the truth for once. This last time, the way you’ve been behaving, gone most of the time, prowling the house in the night, rude, selfish, mooning over her, whoever she is, another one of the dead. A man your age!” Vivian spoke with the liquidy passion of Callas, her voice rising to madness. “You disgust me, I’ve decided I don’t want to live with disgust any longer. Not at my age. I deserve better. I’m going to stay with Jacky. I’ve called her, it’s been decided. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” Jacky was their married daughter, now forty years old; she lived with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

Kyle was having difficulty absorbing what he heard. There was a roaring in his ears. Decided? Something had been decided.

“Vivian, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t possibly—”

“I can. I can, and I will. I
am.
”

Kyle stood smiling as a man might smile who has been struck a mortal blow.
It’s over. She knows my heart.
He tried to reason with Vivian but she would not be dissuaded. In her fiery face shone the valor of revenge. When Kyle fumbled to embrace her she pushed him away with an expression of contempt.

“We’re too old for love. We make ourselves ridiculous.”

I
N THE MORNING
when Vivian was preparing to leave, Kyle said good-bye to her quietly and without rancor. He took her limp hand that felt so soft and so vulnerable in his, and he would have closed his arms around her in a clumsy farewell except with a little cry of hurt she stepped aside, her face averted. She was fearful of leaving, Kyle saw. But he would not attempt another time to dissuade her. As she’d seen into his heart so he had seen into hers. Though he knew he wouldn’t be home to take the call, he said, “Call me tonight. Keep in touch.” After forty years he could not bring himself to speak her name another time.

Before the taxi arrived to take Vivian to Newark Airport, Kyle was gone. He would drive to Easton, Pennsylvania, as he’d been planning irresolutely for days. His heart beat with the avidity of a young lover.

“O
FFICER.
C
OME IN.
”

The face of Sabrina Jackson’s mother was tight as a sausage in its casing. She made an effort to smile like a sick woman trying to be upbeat, but wanting you to know she was trying for your sake. In her dull-eager voice she greeted Kyle Cassity, and she would persist in calling him “Officer” though he’d explained to her that he wasn’t a police officer, only just a private citizen who’d helped with the investigation. He was the man who’d drawn the composite sketch of her daughter that she and other relatives of the missing girl had identified.

Strictly speaking, of course this wasn’t true. Kyle hadn’t drawn a sketch of Sabrina Jackson but of a fictitious girl. He’d given life to the skull in his keeping, not to Sabrina Jackson of whom he’d never heard. But such metaphysical subtleties would have been lost on the forlorn
Mrs. Jackson who was staring at Kyle as if, though he’d just reminded her, she couldn’t recall why he’d come, who exactly he was. A plainclothes officer with the Easton police, or somebody from New Jersey?

Gently, Kyle reminded her: the drawing of Sabrina? That had appeared on TV, in papers? On the Internet, worldwide?

“Yes. That was it. That picture.” Mrs. Jackson spoke slowly as if each word were a hurtful pebble in her throat. Her small warm bloodshot eyes, crowded inside the fatty ridges of her face, were fixed upon him with a desperate urgency. “When we saw that picture on the TV…We knew.”

Kyle murmured an apology. He was being made to feel responsible for something. His oblong shaved head had never felt so exposed and so vulnerable, veins throbbing with heat.

“Mrs. Jackson, I wish that things could have turned out differently.”

“She always did the wildest things, more than once I’d given up on her, I’d get so damn pissed with her, but she’d land on her feet, you know?—like a cat. That Sabrina! She’s the only one of the kids counting even her two brothers, made us worry so.” Oddly, Mrs. Jackson was smiling. She was vexed at her daughter, but clearly somewhat proud of her too. “She had a good heart, though, Officer. Sabrina could be the sweetest girl when she made that effort. Like the time, it was Mother’s Day, I was pissed as hell because I knew, I just knew, not a one of them was going to call—”

Strange and disconcerting it was to Kyle, the mother of the dead girl was so young: no more than forty-five. A bloated-looking little woman with a coarse, ruddy face, in slacks and a floral-print shirt and flip-flops on her pudgy bare feet, hobbled with a mother’s grief like an extra layer of fat. Technically, she was young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

Well! All the world, it seemed, was getting to be young enough to be Kyle Cassity’s daughter.

“I’d love to see photographs of Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson. I’ve just come to pay my respects.”

“Oh, I’ve got ’em! They’re all ready to be seen. Everybody’s been over here wanting to see them. I mean not just the family, and Sabrina’s friends, you wouldn’t believe all the friends that girl has from
just high school alone, but the TV people, newspaper reporters. There’s been more people through here, Officer, in the last ten–twelve days than in all of our life until now.”

“I’m sorry for that, Mrs. Jackson. I don’t mean to disturb you.”

“Oh, no! It’s got to be done, I guess.”

The phone rang several times while Mrs. Jackson was showing Kyle a cascade of snapshots crammed into a family album, but the fleshy little woman, seated on a sofa, made no effort to answer it. Even unmoving on the sofa she was inclined to breathlessness, panting. “Those calls can go onto the answering service. I use that all the time now. See, I don’t know who’s gonna call any more. Used to be, it’d be just somebody I could predict, like out of ten people in the world, or one of those damn solicitors I just hang up on, but now, could be anybody, almost. People call here saying they might know who’s the guilty son of a bitch did that to Sabrina but I tell them call the police, see? Call the police, not me. I’m not the police.”

Mrs. Jackson spoke vehemently. Her body exuded an odor of intense excited emotion. Hesitantly Kyle leaned toward her, frowning at the the snapshots. Some were old Polaroids, faded. Others were creased and dog-eared. In family photos of years ago it wasn’t immediately obvious which girl was Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson had to point her out. Kyle saw a brattish-looking teenager, hands on her hips and grinning at the camera. As a young adolescent she’d had a bad skin, which must have been hard on her granting even her high spirits and energy. In some of the close-ups, Kyle saw an almost-attractive girl, warm, hopeful, appealing in her openness.
Hey: look at me! Love me.
He wanted to love her. He wanted not to be disappointed in her. Mrs. Jackson sighed heavily. “People say, those drawings looked just like Sabrina, that’s how they recognized her, y’know, and I guess I can see it, but not really. If you’re the mother you see different things. Sabrina was never pretty-pretty like in the drawings, she’d have laughed like hell to see ’em. It’s like somebody took Sabrina’s face and did a makeover, like cosmetic surgery, y’know? What Sabrina wanted, she’d talk about sort of joking but serious, was, what is it, ‘chin injection’? ‘Implant’?” Ruefully Mrs. Jackson was stroking her chin, receding like her daughter’s.

Kyle said, as if encouraging. “Sabrina was very attractive. She
didn’t need cosmetic surgery. Girls say things like that. I have a daughter, and when she was growing up…You can’t take what they say seriously.”

“That’s true, Officer. You can’t.”

“Sabrina had personality. You can see that, Mrs. Jackson, in all her pictures.”

“Oh! Christ. Did she ever.”

Mrs. Jackson winced as if, amid the loose, scattered snapshots in the album, her fingers had encountered something sharp.

For some time they continued examining the snapshots. Kyle supposed that the grief-stricken mother was seeing her lost daughter anew, and in some way alive, through a stranger’s eyes. He couldn’t have said why looking at the snapshots had come to seem so crucial to him. For days he’d been planning this visit, summoning his courage to call Mrs. Jackson. He’d nearly forgotten the painful episode with Vivian the night before: had scarcely thought of Vivian at all. No doubt, she would return to their marriage. No doubt, their marriage would endure. The time for a breakup was past: Vivian was right, people their age made themselves ridiculous very easily. Mrs. Jackson said, showing him a tinted matte graduation photo of Sabrina in a white cap and gown, wagging her fingers and grinning at the camera, “High school was Sabrina’s happy time. She was so, so popular. She should’ve gone right to college, instead of what she did do, she’d be alive now.” Abruptly then Mrs. Jackson’s mood shifted, she began to complain bitterly. “You wouldn’t believe! People saying the cruelest things about Sabrina. People you’d think would be her old friends, and teachers at the school, calling her ‘wild’—‘unpredictable.’ Like all my daughter did was hang out in bars. Go out with married men.” Mrs. Jackson’s ruddy skin darkened with indignation. Half-moons of sweat showed beneath her arms. She said, panting, “If the police had let it alone, it’d be better, almost. We reported her missing back in May. Over the summer, it was like everybody’d say, ‘Where’s Sabrina, where’s she gone to now?’ A bunch of us drove to Atlantic City and asked around, but nobody’d seen her, it’s a big place, people coming and going all the time, and the cops kept saying ‘Your daughter is an adult’ and crap like that like it was Sabrina’s own decision to disappear. They listened to her tape and came to that conclusion. It wasn’t even a
‘missing persons’ case. So—we got to thinking maybe Sabrina was just traveling with this man friend of hers. The rumor got to be, this guy had money like Donald Trump. He was a high-stakes gambler. They’d have gotten bored with Atlantic City and went to Vegas. Maybe they’d driven down into Mexico. Sabrina was always saying how she wanted to see Mexico. Now—all that’s over.” Mrs. Jackson shut the photo album, clumsily; a number of snapshots spilled out onto the floor. “See, Officer, things maybe should’ve been left the way they were. We were all just waiting for Sabrina to turn up, any time. But people like you poking around, ‘investigating,’ printing ugly things about my daughter in the paper, I don’t even know why you’re here taking up my time or who the hell you
are.
”