“Maybe,” said Vega. “I want to ask you a couple of questions about her ballet class. Kylie Brandt also took ballet. We’re thinking the kidnapper might have seen or gotten to know the girls that way.”
Stacy pressed her front teeth against her bottom lip; Vega could see her temples pulse.
“Like a stalker?” said Stacy. “Someone stalking ballet classes for kids?”
“Yes, maybe. Does anything come to mind?”
“No,” she said, right away. Shook her head and kept shaking it.
She had voluntarily removed herself from remembering, Vega knew. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves.
“Do you have any pictures of her taking ballet, or a video of a performance maybe? Anything I could look at that might help me?” said Vega.
Stacy stopped shaking her head suddenly. “You mean something that might help me, don’t you?” she said, popping her jaw down.
“Maybe,” said Vega.
“You probably think I got rid of all of Ashley’s things, just because I don’t have pictures of her everywhere.”
Vega didn’t respond.
“You’re wrong,” Stacy said. “I have everything. Everything. I have her hair. I have her underwear. I just don’t have it out here. Because of this.”
She pointed to her jaw, clamping and unclamping, still. She opened her mouth, white teeth, a salmon-colored tongue. There was no gum. There had never been gum.
“I tried putting pictures of her up. I’d look at them and get muscle spasms or pass out. Gnawed my teeth down to stubs. Then I got a shit-ton of meds so I can operate in the world, but I still do this twenty-four seven, three sixty-five,” she said, tapping her jaw again.
They were quiet, the only sound the clicking of Stacy’s teeth. She had an aggressive spark just then; Vega thought she might jump up and bite her. She thought of what Cap would do and started talking. She thought of her mother.
“People pay me a ridiculous amount of money to find their kids,” she said. “They come to me and they’re out of their minds. So I find them, most of them. And the parents either live their own lives and hope that works out for their kids, or they live their lives for their kids, and the kids still grow up and fuck up, and the parents still worry about them until all their hair falls out….”
Stacy watched her, listening, moving her chin around in tiny circles fluidly, like she was hearing soft music.
“Or I don’t find the kids at all,” said Vega, quieter. “And you know what that’s like. And either way, anyway, you’ve got scraps. My mother never got more than four hours of sleep at a time because she was so amped up with worry that something would happen to me and my brother. It was like her religion. And then she died when she was forty-one.”
Vega’s injuries started a little marching band, throbs and beats, forehead, cheek, knees. Everything hurt, all her skin hot like it had been grazed by an oil fire.
“Was it suicide?” said Stacy.
“No. Cancer.”
Stacy nodded, but it wasn’t pity or sympathy—Vega had seen many of those nods, the glistening eyes and Halloween mask frowns. This nod was her seeing all the layers at once. Copy that.
Vega looked down at her hands through blurry eyes, and they appeared to be vibrating in her lap, shaking.
Stacy stood up from the couch.
“When Ashley was three or four she used to say, ‘I hate you, Mommy.’ Back then I’d get all out of shape about it—I’d yell at her and send her to her room and get all rankled—but now when I think of it, when I think of her face…”
Stacy cupped her hand in the air in front of her.
“I know she didn’t mean it. She was doing it just to see what I would do. I was like her lab rat. She was trying to figure us out. What makes us sad, what makes us happy. She figured it out too. Always the same answer.”
She lowered her hands to her sides, rubbing the fabric of her dress between her fingers.
“I’ll get the pictures,” she said.
She started to leave the room and then paused in the doorway, craned her head over her shoulder to speak.
“I don’t think your mother worrying about you gave her cancer.”
Then she left.
Vega wiped tears from her cheeks, forgetting about the raw skin, and twitched at the pain. Her breath was choppy, a washboard in her throat. She fumbled for her phone in her inside pocket and skimmed over about twenty texts. She tapped her brother’s name. His read, “Saw you on TV. Kick all kinds of Ass ;)”
Vega smiled, and that hurt her face too, and she wrote back, “Shut up.”
There was also one from her father, but she skipped it, went straight to Cap’s: “Can your guy get financials on Toby and Erica McKenna quick?”
“Probably. Why?” she typed back.
While she waited for his response, she sent an email to the Bastard, and then Cap’s text came back: “I think they have too much money and look too good.”
She was about to write him back when Stacy returned holding an orange shoebox. She sat on the couch and placed the box on the low table between them. She didn’t open it right away.
“This has pictures from ballet class, I think,” she said. “You can take them with you if you want.”
“Are you sure?” said Vega. “I can look at them here.”
“I can’t,” said Stacy. “Please take them. You can bring them back.”
She ground and snapped her teeth in the front now, incisors on incisors. Vega stared at them, glowing white.
“You have really nice teeth,” she said.
“I should,” Stacy said, a laugh crowding her throat. “They’re all crowns, every one of them. My ex paid for those too. I wear these mouthguards at night, used to just wear one up top, but I chewed through it like a dog. So now I wear top and bottom.”
She continued to talk about the mouthguards, how she put them in the dishwasher once and then her ex-husband paid for replacements, and she hadn’t felt silly because the dentist told her the mouthguards were silicon, so why shouldn’t you be able to put them in the dishwasher? It seemed to calm her, talking about the teeth, so Vega spaced out a little and tried to remember something from Ashley’s file.
“I’m sorry, what does your ex do for a living again?” she said.
“He’s a floor manager at a Game On, down in Philly.”
“He’s done that awhile?”
“Yeah, about ten years I guess.”
Vega leaned forward, tried to get deeper into the blackness of Stacy’s eyes, searching.
“You have a nice home,” she said. “And nice teeth. Does your ex make that much money at Game On—that’s sporting goods, I’m guessing?”
“Oh no way,” said Stacy, unoffended. “He had this aunt I never heard of, died and left him a wad of cash a couple years ago. And he felt guilty, you know. Only thing that worked out the last four years.”
Vega thought of the impalpable entity that was a wire transfer, imaginary money rattling through an imaginary pneumatic tube in the sky. Her phone buzzed and kept buzzing against her ribs as she watched Stacy’s mouth moving, showing off the crowns, flawless and counterfeit.
—