“Oh—no. But this girl is special. She—”
It was funny, watching her daughter lie. Or would be funny, if it weren’t also terrifying.
“She has a special disease. In her nervous system. You can’t really see it.”
At least it was a smart lie. This way, Iso didn’t have to produce a classmate in a wheelchair or a leg brace. But Eliza had grown tired of their game.
“Iso, don’t take money from my purse without asking, okay? Even a dollar. You really shouldn’t go in it, ever, not without my permission. Just because I’m your mother doesn’t mean I don’t have some expectation of privacy.”
“You go in my room,” Iso said. “You’ve gone in my purse.”
“Looking for lost things. Not spying. Not”—she lowered her voice so that Albie, who was walking alongside Reba as she continued to test her new backyard—“stealing.”
“I didn’t steal!” Vehement, defiant. “I don’t steal. I needed a dollar. You wouldn’t want me to be the only one who didn’t contribute, would you?”
Her anger was so self-righteous that Eliza had to fight back a smile. That quickly, Iso had bought into her own story. But at least she had been distracted from the source of their original argument.
Except she hadn’t. “I don’t want a dog named Reba,” Iso said suddenly.
The dog lifted up her head, looking back at them with a puzzled expression. You couldn’t call it a smile, probably shouldn’t call it a smile. Anthropomorphism and all that. But Eliza saw the trace of a tentative, provisional happiness that she understood. Please love me. Don’t hurt me.
“She knows her name,” Albie crowed with pleasure.
TWO DAYS LATER, ELIZA and Reba were returning from walking Albie to school when she became aware of a green car following her. It was one of those odd cars that Albie loved, the one with the high, round shape that made Eliza think vaguely of the 1930s, gangsters and speakeasies, although there was nothing sinister about this type of car, quite the opposite. It was almost cuddly, if a car could be cuddly, attractive in its unabashed nerdiness. Kind of like Albie.
“Elizabeth,” a woman’s voice called from the car.
Eliza willed herself not to turn around, to keep walking.
“Elizabeth,” the voice persisted.
Reba had stopped to inspect something on the ground, and Eliza didn’t have the heart to deny the dog any pleasure, no matter how small. She was much too easily cowed. Eliza wanted Reba to enjoy life a little more, to stop acting so darn grateful all the time.
“Eliza, then.” Exasperated, put upon, as if Eliza were a recalcitrant child.
“Yes?” she said, turning only slightly. The woman had lowered the passenger-side window, but she was hard to see from this angle.
“Why didn’t you turn around before?” Her voice had the very tone that Eliza tried to avoid with Iso. Quarrelsome, demanding. You couldn’t help arguing with a voice like this.
“I didn’t know whom you were addressing.”
The woman in the car wore enormous sunglasses. Eliza wondered if she realized how disconcerting the effect was, if she had chosen to look intimidating or simply wasn’t thinking about how she presented herself. She had hair the color of spun sugar, and quite a lot of it, worn in what appeared to be a series of hairdos, as if she had sectioned this amazing mass of hair into six or eight discrete pieces and created a different style for each. There were curls and waves, even two kinds of bangs: a fringe across the forehead, then swooping wings to the side.
“But that’s your name, isn’t it?” It had to be Barbara LaFortuny. Please, Eliza thought, let it be Barbara LaFortuny. She didn’t want to think about the implications of a world in which more and more people began showing up, calling her by her childhood name. She imagined a phalanx of women, all in Walter’s employ, doing his bidding. That image made her mind leap to an artist she loved, Henry Darger, and his disturbing portraits of those 1950s-perfect, perky, pervy Vivian girls. The Walter girls, his own private army.
But Walter had no interest in armies. He had always been, in his own bizarre way, a one-woman man. Or, more correctly, aspired to be. He would even say that at times. I am a one-woman man. I’m just looking for that one woman.
“My name is Eliza.”
“Your legal name,” the woman said.
“My name,” she repeated, “is Eliza. Perhaps I have you confused with someone else.” She stopped, corrected her slip. “Perhaps you have me confused with someone else.”
“Perhaps,” the woman said with a chuckle, “I just have you confused.”
She took off her dark glasses then, and although this revealed the scar that started at the corner of one eye and ran southward, she looked less menacing without the Gucci glasses. Eliza remembered what Peter had told her. A teacher, attacked in her classroom, now an advocate for inmates. Put that on paper, and it sounded like someone Eliza would like.
“He needs you, Elizabeth.”
She shook her head.
“Eliza, then.”
“This isn’t about my name,” she said. “He doesn’t need me.”
“But he does.”
She tried again. “He doesn’t have a right to need me.”
The woman leaned across the front seat of her car, as if to motion Eliza to climb inside. Reba growled, and the sound seemed to surprise the dog, then please her. She growled again with more conviction. Barbara LaFortuny—who else could it be—pulled back, reached down, then held up a folded piece of paper.
“He asked me to hand deliver this one. He wanted to know, without a doubt, when you got it. Time is important to him. The clock is ticking. A date has been set.”
Eliza studied the white piece of paper in must-be-Barbara’s hand—only one sheaf, how much could it contain, how much damage could it do—and reluctantly accepted it. Evidence, she decided. She would memorize the license plate, too, when the woman drove away. She would memorize everything about this encounter. She wasn’t sure what she would do with her memories, but she would have them.
Barbara LaFortuny’s hands were beautiful—manicured, flashing with interesting, important rings—and, based on the impression of the quick moment in which their fingers touched, quite soft. The eccentricity of her hairstyle aside, this was a woman who had the time and means to tend to herself. Eliza folded the already folded piece of paper in half, then shoved it in the pocket of the fleece vest she had thrown over her T-shirt. It was the first cool morning of the fall. On the walk to Albie’s school, she had been joyous, carrying his book bag while he took Reba’s leash.
“Let’s go”—she stopped herself from saying the dog’s name. She didn’t want Barbara LaFortuny to know anything about her family. She already knew too much. Had that green little play-gangster car tracked Eliza and Albie to school that day? She considered pulling her cell phone from her pocket, snapping LaFortuny’s photo then and there, so she could show it to Albie’s school, and Iso’s, yet the car was already moving on. Chesapeake Bay plates. SAVE THE BAY. Save Walter. Barbara LaFortuny didn’t lack for causes.
Home, Eliza put on the teakettle, but then the phone rang, and in the middle of the call something arrived via FedEx, and the teakettle whistled, and the dauntingly high-tech washing machine began beeping an error code, which required getting out the manual, which required finding the manual, and before Eliza knew it, it was 3:30 P.M., time to pick up Albie and much too warm for the fleece jacket, and she was back in the maelstrom of family life. It was ten o’clock before she had the time and privacy to read the letter, eleven o’clock before she remembered that she had stashed it in her pocket.