“Well, she’s doing a damn good job of it,” Maravelle says. “I’m going to kill her when I get hold of her.”
Shelby is on the couch with big Pablo snoring beside her, hoping to be phoned with good news. She has always considered the view from her window to be beautiful, a mix of tar, cobblestones, rooftops, water towers, but now the outside world looks wicked. While she waits to hear from Maravelle, Shelby is drinking green tea and smoking a cigarette. She figures the habit that’s good for her will cancel out the one that’s bad. The police have told Maravelle they can’t do anything until twenty-four hours have passed from the time her daughter is reported missing. Just long enough for a murder or kidnapping. Long enough for Jasmine to wind up stuffed into a green garbage bag and dumped onto the Grand Central Parkway. Shelby can’t imagine what Maravelle must be going through. The responsibility of loving someone is too much for anyone to take, which is why she’s done her best to avoid it.
Not long after midnight, a cab pulls up to Shelby’s building. Pablo starts barking, which revs up the other dogs. Shelby hushes them. She perches on the back of the couch and spies a young woman with a backpack getting out of the taxi. It’s Jasmine.
Shelby phones Maravelle, pronto. As soon as she answers, Shelby says, “Forget the police. She’s here.”
“Oh, my God! I’m driving over there right now.”
“She’ll run if you do.” Jasmine rings the bell downstairs. Shelby darts to the wall so she can buzz open the door. “She needs to feel like some outside adult will listen to her. So I’ll pretend to be an adult. You know she’ll tell me stuff she won’t tell you.”
“Okay, Shelby, but understand this: I’m leaving the most precious thing in my world in your hands.”
Fuck it, Shelby thinks as she hangs up. She has never wanted to be involved with people. People are dangerous, unreliable, stupid, greedy, needy, breakable. Look what happened to Helene, to Ben Mink, to Harper Levy’s wife. The dogs go nuts when there’s a knock on the door. Fortunately the upstairs neighbor is a waiter who doesn’t get home till dawn, and the couple beneath her have such huge drunken fights they’re in no position to complain about noise.
Shelby tries to plan a great opening remark, but when she sees Jasmine’s tearstained face, she simply puts her arms around the girl and hugs her.
“I hate my mother,” Jasmine says.
It’s as good a beginning as any. The dogs are thrilled to have company, especially Blinkie, whom Jasmine used to think of as creepy and scary. He leaps around until she picks him up. “Oh, Blinkie,” Jasmine says, as if he’s the only one in the world who could ever understand her. She hides her face in his fur and sobs.
“You must be starving. I have Chinese food,” Shelby says.
Shelby always has Chinese food. She now stores her unread fortune cookies in a plastic container she keeps on the kitchen counter, behind the toaster.
“Why don’t you ever eat those?” Jasmine asks.
“No one should know the future,” Shelby says. “What if it’s horrible?”
“What if it’s great?”
“Like life on Long Island?” Shelby jokes.
Jasmine groans and throws herself onto the couch while Shelby reheats broccoli with black bean sauce and General Tso’s chicken. “I don’t know if I can eat,” Jasmine says when the plates are brought out.
Shelby starts right in on her food. How did she come to be responsible for the well-being of someone’s child?
“The taxi driver was so creepy,” Jasmine says. “He told me if I didn’t have a place to stay I could stay with him. He made me sick to my stomach.” All the same, she has begun to eat, daintily at first and then as if she were starving. “Do you have soy sauce?”
Shelby gets some soy sauce. She starts the discussion gingerly. “Let me guess. You hate Long Island.”
“You try living there.”
“I did until I was nineteen. How do you think I got this way?”
They both laugh, but Jasmine doesn’t stop laughing. It’s the kind of laughter that quickly becomes hysterical. Shelby can tell it’s going to turn into crying before it does.
“I have a life,” Jasmine sobs. “I have friends.”
“As in the creepy boyfriend?”
“Marcus is not creepy. And he loves me.”
“Love is for when you’re older,” Shelby says.
“Like your age?”
“I am not the love expert,” Shelby admits. “Learn from my mistakes.”
“My mother thinks she’s the expert. She thinks she rules the world.”
“Well, I hate to tell you, but she does rule your world. You’ll make new friends on Long Island.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Now you sound like my mother.”
A mistake. Shelby tries another tactic. She’s best as bad-girl -sister who knows the score. “Don’t you get it? You’ll be the new hot girl -everyone wants to date. People are so bored with the friends they have, you’ll be a queen. Queen Jasmine from Queens. You’ll meet other guys. Better ones.”