As soon as I drive up the freeway ramp, the traffic thickens to sludge, and I inch and dart from lane to lane, but it doesn’t seem to bring me any closer to downtown until finally I’m there. I barely make it to the emergency meeting that Bas calls in the auditorium at 9:30 a.m.
The Rocque’s auditorium is a large, dank room at the back of the warehouse, capped with skylights. No matter the time of year or grandness of the occasion, the auditorium lowers the same cranky gloom over its visitors. The texture of the painted concrete floors and walls remains perpetually clammy, and the fold-up wooden seats seem designed to simultaneously pinch and collapse beneath you. The low stage looks like it was stolen from a high school production. It’s a horrible place for performances, or acoustics of any kind. Sound waves pile on each other, making voices and words linger and layer. As we settle into our creaking seats, I catch show sold out and the cops and disappearances and a tone, like a bass line, of deep uneasiness.
A clean-shaven Bas introduces two LAPD detectives who will be investigating the case, DeLong and Ruiz, a man and a woman, respectively, both black-haired and wearing gray suits. “We’re not sure we even have a case yet,” says Bas. He is blinking a lot. “But we’re taking precautions. Kim Lord was last seen on Wednesday and, following a text Thursday evening, has stopped communicating completely.”
Janis Rocque stands behind him in bold blue-and-white stripes, hands on her hips. She looks like a parent who’s just come home to a trashed house and wants to know who is responsible.
Yegina shifts in her seat beside me. “Should we even have Craft Club today? My brother got another rejection, too,” she whispers. “My heart’s not in my knitting.”
“Is it in organizing your inbox?” I whisper back. “Come on. We all need to decompress.” Craft Club is where we hear most of our museum gossip. Our confederation of nine women, all from different departments, meets every other Friday to knit, embroider T-shirts, gripe, trade recipes, and gripe some more. I need that today.
“Please comply with the officers—they’ll be coming around to interview many of you,” Bas urges. “Any hints, any clues to where Kim Lord was going when she left on Wednesday. Any conversations you had with her. Tell the police, not the press.”
Kim Lord was going toward Pershing Square. I saw her, I think. But what if it wasn’t her? I don’t want to get sucked into a police investigation, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I search the crowd and find my eyes jolting against the gazes of others. Most people look scared or lost. The entire education staff, all women, have their arms folded. Lynne has a scowl so severe that her dark-painted mouth has almost disappeared. Jayme has made her face completely immobile; if a fly landed on it, she would not twitch a muscle.
Phil and Spike, the twins and my closest department colleagues, are sinking deep in their seats like they’re in the front row at a cinema and trying to avoid neckache. I wonder when their chairs will snap. I wonder how they’re absorbing the news. There are lumpy people and smooth people, and the twins are smooth. Maybe the smoothest people I’ve ever met. It’s as if two decades of constant interaction with an identical human has worn them each down to their essential contours. Like stones sanded by water, they tumble easily through their days, never laughing more than a chuckle, never complaining more than a whine, and never working without reminding the rest of us that they regard the Rocque’s whole operation as kids’ play. But an abduction? The cops? It’s too abrupt and dark to mock.
Now Bas is talking about a new museum confidentiality policy and only speaking to the media through Jayme. The twins slide lower, as if some tide beneath the seats is tugging them under. They admired Kim, but were they friends? Who else at the museum knew her well?
In the third row, I recognize a silhouette with rumpled hair.
Ice threads my veins. There, also tipped back in his seat, is the stalker from last night.
“That’s him,” I hiss, bumping Yegina.
“Who?”
I tell her about the guy in the mustard-colored jacket, how he lurked in the galleries. “He’s here again. How do you think he got in?”
She follows the line of my gaze. “He’s not stalker material. He came with J. Ro. Maybe he’s police, too.”
He doesn’t look like police to me. He doesn’t have that stiffness and reticence. He looks, once again, like someone who would rather be taking a nap.
“On a positive note, the timed admissions for the first three weeks of Still Lives have sold out,” Bas says almost eagerly.
Janis Rocque makes a noise like a soft bark. She muscles Bas aside to take the microphone. “We know you all have busy schedules,” she blasts. “Meeting is over. Carry on with your days. We’ll update you as we can.”
The staff of the Rocque has never responded well to an order, but today we file out silently, somberly, except Yegina, who is already texting someone and treads on the back of my heel. I yelp. My voice carries through the hard room, and suddenly a hundred people are staring at me with visible curiosity and fear. In the dim room, they look like cave dwellers startled from a sleep.
“I’m okay,” I say too loudly, and hurry along.
Across the rows of chairs, I catch Evie’s eye and wave. She shakes her head sadly, as if to say, What is happening to us? I wonder if she’s thinking that Kim has been kidnapped or thinking that she chose to disappear. Evie told me once that she herself ran away at eighteen to escape her stepfather.
“Miss,” says a male voice behind me.
I stumble against a chair trying to step out of the way. Another crash.
“Excuse me, miss.” A hand touches my elbow. I look back into the face of last night’s outlier and flinch. His blue eyes ride slowly over my face.
“Hendricks,” Janis Rocque calls out to him.
“Sorry,” I say, though I don’t know why.
He waves to her, then says to me, “You dropped this last night.” He holds out my butterfly earring.
8
When I get back to my office, I set my earring down carefully, simultaneously bothered to have lost it and relieved to have it back. My maternal grandmother loved butterflies. She never learned their names or natural history, but she saw them everywhere as signs of good luck. Blind optimism was a lifelong calling for Grandma Margie, a petite, rich New York teenager whose father lost all their money in the Depression, whose brother lost his mind in the Second World War.
By the time I was her grandchild, Grandma Margie had evolved into a perpetually raven-haired beauty who liked to wear mint-colored suits and shoes “with a little heel” in them. She abhorred bad posture. Whenever we watched movies on television, she would chat her way through them if they bored or unsettled her, which was often in our house because my mother adores PBS. “Oh look, there’s a Mercedes,” my grandmother once murmured during a crowd scene in Gandhi. “You don’t look like a monkey to me,” she told me as I stared at Inherit the Wind. Even when we were kids, my brothers and I treated my grandmother with the kind of protective reverence one usually reserves for a child. Yet we all wanted—needed—her to take pride in us.
I bear my grandmother’s name: Margaret. She was Margie and I’m Maggie. My grandmother is with me at all times, yet, like the earrings, I don’t feel her presence unless I press against it. Last night, it was Margie who stopped me from going into that third gallery, who felt I’d seen enough. Six years ago, it was Margie who refused to believe what would happen to my source, Nikki Bolio.
It was I, Maggie, however, who decided to flee overseas afterward, and then never to go back to the career I once dreamed of having, of recording people’s stories, writing their difficult truths. I don’t know what my grandmother would have decided in my shoes. She came from a different generation, with narrower ideas of what a woman could do.