How many balloons floated up from this part of the park every day? I wondered.
“Kelsey, don’t cry, we can get another balloon. Come on. Let’s go. A red one. Would you like a red one this time?” asked the exasperated mother.
“No-o-o-o.”
The smell of the zoo, animal and raw, was all around us, assaulting us. Nina’s nose twitched and she frowned, but I liked it and breathed in deeply.
Leaving the zoo, we walked deeper into the park, engulfed by trees thick and heavy with leaves. Up ahead a bed of delphiniums swayed in the breeze.
“You used to love balloons,” Nina said. “But only green ones. You were so stubborn. Never blue, never red. If they didn’t have green, you wouldn’t take a balloon.”
I laughed.
She continued to reminisce. “You were so stubborn about everything. When your father and I came to get you, you were sitting on the edge of your mother’s bed, holding her hand and telling her a story. She was deep into her drugged sleep, but you were still trying to reach her. And when we tried to take you away from her, you didn’t cry or scream or argue. You simply refused to move. You just held on to her hand and kept talking to her. Trying to save her with your story.”
I felt an old surge of loss come up and overtake me, the same way that a sudden spray of perfume can overwhelm your senses. And for an instant I could still smell my mother’s perfume-roses and lemon and lavender-a scent memory. The only real memory I had of my mother. I knew her face from photographs, and there were fragments of images and words, but they were never whole. A smile, her blue eyes glassy and unfocused. The mess of the apartment on Avenue A. The kitchen sink that always had dirty dishes piled in it. Her lovely hand, with long fingernails painted pink, trembling as she reached for the amber pill bottle. The feeling of her thin arms around my back. The whisper of her voice, My little lost girl.
I remembered the crystal bottle of perfume that sat on her dresser, still half-full, and the way she so carefully tipped it over every morning and wet her fingers with just enough to dab behind her earlobes and mine. It was her last vanity. No matter how broke we were or how pathetic the meals she managed to make for us were, the one thing that she never gave up was her French perfume.
The only thing I wanted to talk about less than what I was doing to help find Cleo was the year I was eight, when everything changed and I lost my bearings.
“Morgan, do you know why finding Cleo matters so much to you?”
“Because she is my patient. Because I was helping her. But I didn’t help her enough. Because I failed. Because I can’t fail.”
“Haven’t you ever failed with another patient?” Nina’s voice was a curious cross between doctor and mother. Probing but warm. Inquisitive but caring.
“You know I have.”
“So why this one? Why are you doing what you know is ethically questionable?”
“Because if I don’t, no one else will.”
“But you’re becoming obsessed with this.”
“Listen. There is a woman who confided in me. Only in me. And so I’m the only one who has what might be the clues to her disappearance. How on earth am I supposed to turn my back on her?”
“You need to be needed too much, Morgan.”
I stopped. She took two more steps until she realized that I wasn’t still by her side, and then she stopped, too, and turned around, smiling.
“You once did that to me-at Rockefeller Center when we went to see the lighting of the Christmas tree. You were what, thirteen? We got separated. Do you remember?”
“You do that, you know, play unfair,” I said. “Play mother one minute, supervisor the next, family member, colleague, confidante. I’m not the only one who breaks the rules.”
“I just use all the tools at hand. And they still aren’t getting me anywhere, are they? You’re still a stubborn rod of steel that I cannot bend.”
“Oh, I bend. Just not over everything.”
“Morgan, what are you doing?”
“Why do you think I am doing anything?”
“I know you. Whatever it is, I want you to stop.”
“I can’t, Nina. If I do that, if I give up, then…”
A trio of ten- or eleven-year-old girls ran by, screaming out to one another, laughing and shouting. The noise was too loud to talk over, but as soon as they had passed, Nina interrupted what I had been saying.
“Just stop. Get out of whatever you’re in the middle of and let the police do their own job of trying to find her.”
Smiling, I took her arm. “Yeah. Walk away from a patient. You didn’t teach me to do that. You know you didn’t. So in a way, you could say this is really all your fault.”
She moaned. I laughed.
“Oh, Morgan, only you could turn this around to make it all my fault.”
“I’m not making it all your fault. It is all your fault.”
And then she sobered. “What you’re doing is insanely dangerous.”
“Helping Detective Jordain?”
“Meeting Cleo’s clients.”
“I didn’t tell you I was doing that.”
“You told me you were thinking about it. And ever since you were a kid that has been code. You always had an oh-so-clever way of telling your father or me something you wanted us to know without actually telling us.”
What she didn’t say, what we both knew she was referring to, was the phone call I had finally made to my father when I was eight years old and watching my mother disappear in front of me.
“Daddy, maybe one day you could come over. Not today. But when Mommy is feeling better. But not yet. She’d be mad if I asked you to come.”
He hadn’t listened to me. Or rather he had listened to what I wasn’t saying and he had come. But he had been too late.
39
That night at the bar was disappointing. The third man I met with seemed incapable of having anything to do with Cleo’s disappearance because he had Parkinson’s disease and walked with the help of two canes. I couldn’t imagine he’d have the strength to hurt anyone. But what was on my mind the next day was that something particular to him was again part of Cleo’s description of the fifth man: the Healer.
This last client had a scar on his right cheek-another detail that she attributed to the Healer. It was a small, inconsequential thing on its own, but along with the money clip and the taste for Cristal, the deception was curious.
Why had she only mixed up the details when she was writing about the Healer? Was it a writerly technique she had been playing with and hadn’t gotten around to fixing? Was she just trying harder to protect his identity? Or was it more complicated than that? Why describe the others, but not this client?
During my eleven o’clock session, Elias called. The machine answered and he left a message asking me to call back. When I did, only twenty minutes later, he sounded frantic and desperate.
“Can you meet me?” he asked.
“If you want to come to the office I have an opening in a half hour.”
“That’s tight. I have a meeting. Do you have anything later?”
I told him I could meet him at two-forty-five at the Starbucks near my office on Lexington Avenue.
He was already there when I walked in. I had an hour before an appointment farther downtown with an antique dealer who was helping me find a special birthday present for Dulcie.
I watched him as I approached his table. The circle of people who cared about Cleo were all walking wounded. And Elias was at our center. He looked haggard and exhausted. Eyes that were huge pools of sadness, fingernails bitten down to the quick and furrows in his forehead that seemed deeper and more pronounced than even a few days ago.
“If I don’t do something to help find her soon, if I can’t get more involved somehow, I’m going to go crazy,” he said.