Against my will and wishes, I wasn’t seeing Dulcie on the stage but Amanda and Simone, undergoing their own metamorphosis.
The audience broke out in applause for my daughter and she preened.
What did the boys do for the two girls who stripped down and played at being lovers so well it became true?
Dulcie didn’t skip a beat as the applause finally died down, and she returned to the scripted dialogue.
I needed to know I could protect her from what Amanda’s and Simone’s parents had not been able to protect them from.
Backstage, I wrote my daughter a note, telling her how proud I was of her, how much I loved her performance, how happy I was she was coming home on Sunday, and that I missed her. Beside the note, I laid a bouquet of pink sweetheart roses I’d bought for her at the deli around the corner from the theater.
Seventy-Nine
Dulcie called me from her cell at ten-thirty, on her way back to Mitch’s, and thanked me for the flowers.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure, why?”
“I don’t know. But I keep feeling like something is wrong. It’s kind of the way you describe it when something’s wrong with me and you feel it, you know?”
I nodded. “Yes, honey, I know.”
“So are you okay?”
I decided not to wait until the weekend and told her about my wrist. When I was done, I heard her give a little sigh.
“It was really strange. I kept feeling like something hurt, but it didn’t really.”
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry. That must have been scary.”
“It was, but kind of interesting, too. Could you do it with your mom? I bet you could. I bet it’s something else we inherited.”
“I don’t know.” I bit my bottom lip and waited to hear what other amazing thing she was going to say.
“We’re here, Mom. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Hope your wrist feels okay.” And then before I had a chance to wish her a good night, she clicked off.
I walked into the apartment and played my messages before I even took off my coat. I was expecting calls from Blythe and Nina. There was only one call and it was from Noah, asking me to call him back. I wanted to but I didn’t trust myself to talk to him yet.
With nothing to do but wait for Nina to call, I went to the corner of the den where I kept my sculpture. I desperately wanted to chip away at the stone, become lost in the rhythm of the mallet hitting the chisel. But you can’t sculpt with only one good hand.
I rotated the piece on its base.
The form escaping was rough and amateurish. That I had less talent than desire for this art form had bothered me once, but not anymore. It had been either accept my limitations or give up the one thing that helped me escape the voices in my head: my patients’ fantasies, fetishes, pains, perversions, deep losses and thwarted hopes.
I clicked on the television.
Finally, at twelve-twenty, Nina called.
She’d been at a concert at Lincoln Center and then out to a late supper. I listened to see if she sounded tired. I didn’t want to tax her, even though I desperately needed to talk to her. Relieved to hear the energy in her voice, I told her what had happened that afternoon with Amanda and about the CD she’d given me and what was on it.
“Simone?” Nina asked when I finished. “Do you know Simone’s last name?”
“Alexander,” I said. “I think that’s what she told me. Why?”
“Do you have the CD with you?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to leave it in the office.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Nina, it’s after twelve-thirty.”
“I have to see it for myself, Morgan. I have to be sure. You don’t know whose daughter she is, do you?”
I didn’t.
Eighty
Nina didn’t waste any time when she walked into my apartment. She didn’t stop to take off her coat or drop her bag in the foyer. She tracked snow in on her boots as she walked across the tile floor and into the den, where she sat down in front of my computer.
“Put it on, please,” she said.
I pressed the play button and she leaned forward, still in her coat, still holding her bag.
Simone came on the screen in her red butterfly mask and I heard a soft “oh” escape from my mentor’s lips. I turned away from the screen and looked at her.
Nina’s forehead was pulled tight with tension.
“What is it?”
Nina didn’t respond. She was riveted to the screen, watching the action on the computer. After the second segment she turned to me. “You can shut it off, Morgan. I don’t need to see any more.” Her voice cracked.
I knelt down so that I was on her level and put my good arm around her. We did not embrace often-kisses on the cheek, a hand on an arm, but Nina and I were not physical women. Not touchers. I smelled her spicy perfume and felt her body tremble. “Simone Alexander is Stella Dobson’s daughter, Morgan. She died of an accidental overdose last June.”
“Based on what Amanda told me, I don’t think it was accidental. I think Simone killed herself.”
And then I remembered something that couldn’t be a coincidence at all. Something both Nina and I had known for weeks, but that hadn’t meant anything until now.
Stella Dobson was interviewing Blythe for a book she was working on. A book about women and pornography.
“Blythe-” I started.
Nina had already thought of it. “There has to be a connection. Blythe is in danger and so is Stella. We have to get to them.”
I didn’t want to question Nina’s assumption about Stella Dobson. She was a feminist heroine who still mattered in a postfeminist world.
“How do you know that Stella isn’t the one who-”
She shook her head. “You’re getting carried away. Stella’s a brilliant, driven woman who has devoted her whole life to helping women. What we have to do, Morgan, is warn her.”
Eighty-One
While I made coffee, trying to focus on the ratio of grounds to water, Nina called Stella. It was, by then, almost two in the morning and Stella wasn’t answering the phone. That wasn’t a surprise. Many people let their machines pick up in the middle of the night. My own phone had rung twice since ten-forty-five that night, and while I’d checked the caller ID both times-Noah-I hadn’t answered either call.
Nina left a message, asking her old friend to please call whenever she got the message. She left her cell number, even though she told me when she got off the phone that Stella already had it.
I poured the coffee. “We need to talk to the police,” I said.
“We can’t. You can’t. You know you can’t.”
I sighed. When it came to the police, Nina took the fine line and then doubled and tripled it, so that it wasn’t that fine at all, but was thick and much harder to cross. We’d been through this before.
I didn’t want to have an old argument with her again. Not that night. Not at two in the morning. “Nina, three women have died. A fourth almost died. How can you justify my keeping silent?”
She waved me off. “Amanda is your patient. You can’t call Noah.”
“We have to do something.”
“As long as you leave Amanda-and the CD-out of it.”
“If I don’t give them the CD, they won’t have anything to go on.” My throat hurt, my nose was running. It was late and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t give up. There had to be some way to do the right thing without crossing that damn line. “What if we can get Stella to go to the police and tell them about what Amanda and her daughter did?”
“That we can do. When we see her, when we tell her what’s happening, we’ll advise her to call the police. To tell them about the CD, about Simone, about the Web-cam girls Simone and Amanda copied. All right? Will that work? Isn’t that better?”