Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

“Can we at least rename her?” Iso asked. “Everyone will think we named her after that actress on that silly sitcom.”

It took Eliza a second to sort out that Reba McEntire, forever in her head as a country singer, was apparently on a sitcom these days. Eliza wondered if Iso had any memory of the fact that, back when she was a baby in Texas, Eliza had developed a bizarre fondness for CMT, the station that played country music videos, and she had liked Reba quite a bit. There had been a whole series of videos that seemed to tell a little story, about a man and a woman who circled each other in some romance novel setting, possibly one of those islands off the coast of South Carolina. And she had been a doctor, or some such, who met the love of her life in Guatemala, or someplace, but they didn’t end up together, and somehow that was okay. Madonna in the 1980s, Reba in the 1990s—who was her musical role model now, as the first decade of the new century drew to an end? Eliza wasn’t sure she could even name a current pop star. Not on the basis of her work, at any rate. She knew, in spite of herself, which one had been beaten by her boyfriend, and the one who had been arrested for kleptomania, and the one who kept going to rehab. But don’t ask her what they sang.

“No,” Eliza told Iso, with a vehemence that caught them both off guard. “You don’t just go around changing people’s names.”

“I did,” Iso pointed out. “ You did.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were Elizabeth, when you were younger, and then you decided you wanted to be Eliza.”

They were in the backyard with Albie, watching Reba adjust to her new life. She didn’t seem to trust it. She would walk a few feet away from them, then turn her head back toward them as if to ask: Is this allowed? Even her sniffs seemed tentative, halfhearted.

Eliza caught herself before blurting out: “How do you know that?” After all, there was no reason to be defensive about shortening her name. Instead she said: “I’ve been Eliza so long, I sometimes forget I was ever Elizabeth.”

“It’s right there, on your driver’s license.”

True enough. Only—“What were you doing with my driver’s license?”

Iso blushed. “I wanted a breath mint the other day, so I looked in your purse.”

“I don’t keep breath mints in my billfold, Iso.” Waiting her out, not accusing her, but not letting her think that she was getting away with anything, either.

“And I needed a dollar. A girl in my class is having a birthday and we’re all going to pitch in a dollar to buy her a gift.”

“A dollar?” Come on, Iso. Lie big or go home .

“There are twenty-five kids in my class. We’re getting her an iTunes gift certificate.”

“And will this happen every time someone has a birthday?”

Iso was caught. Her daughter, too, could be read like a book, at least for now. Eliza thought about her own parents, how much they must have known about the little secrets she carved out for herself, how indulgent they had been. They had probably thought: What’s the harm, in her dressing up like Madonna when we’re not around? What does it matter if she likes to cut through the woods to go to the fast-food places along Route 40? At least she’s getting plenty of fresh air and exercise. They had been right, yet they had been wrong, too. There was harm, everywhere.

“Oh—no. But this girl is special. She—”

It was funny, watching her daughter lie. Or would be funny, if it weren’t also terrifying.

“She has a special disease. In her nervous system. You can’t really see it.”

At least it was a smart lie. This way, Iso didn’t have to produce a classmate in a wheelchair or a leg brace. But Eliza had grown tired of their game.

“Iso, don’t take money from my purse without asking, okay? Even a dollar. You really shouldn’t go in it, ever, not without my permission. Just because I’m your mother doesn’t mean I don’t have some expectation of privacy.”

“You go in my room,” Iso said. “You’ve gone in my purse.”

“Looking for lost things. Not spying. Not”—she lowered her voice so that Albie, who was walking alongside Reba as she continued to test her new backyard—“stealing.”

“I didn’t steal!” Vehement, defiant. “I don’t steal. I needed a dollar. You wouldn’t want me to be the only one who didn’t contribute, would you?”

Her anger was so self-righteous that Eliza had to fight back a smile. That quickly, Iso had bought into her own story. But at least she had been distracted from the source of their original argument.

Except she hadn’t. “I don’t want a dog named Reba, ” Iso said suddenly.

The dog lifted up her head, looking back at them with a puzzled expression. You couldn’t call it a smile, probably shouldn’t call it a smile. Anthropomorphism and all that. But Eliza saw the trace of a tentative, provisional happiness that she understood. Please love me. Don’t hurt me.

“She knows her name,” Albie crowed with pleasure.

TWO DAYS LATER, ELIZAand Reba were returning from walking Albie to school when she became aware of a green car following her. It was one of those odd cars that Albie loved, the one with the high, round shape that made Eliza think vaguely of the 1930s, gangsters and speakeasies, although there was nothing sinister about this type of car, quite the opposite. It was almost cuddly, if a car could be cuddly, attractive in its unabashed nerdiness. Kind of like Albie.

“Elizabeth,” a woman’s voice called from the car.

Eliza willed herself not to turn around, to keep walking.

“Elizabeth,” the voice persisted.

Reba had stopped to inspect something on the ground, and Eliza didn’t have the heart to deny the dog any pleasure, no matter how small. She was much too easily cowed. Eliza wanted Reba to enjoy life a little more, to stop acting so darn grateful all the time.

“Eliza, then.” Exasperated, put upon, as if Eliza were a recalcitrant child.

“Yes?” she said, turning only slightly. The woman had lowered the passenger-side window, but she was hard to see from this angle.

“Why didn’t you turn around before?” Her voice had the very tone that Eliza tried to avoid with Iso. Quarrelsome, demanding. You couldn’t help arguing with a voice like this.

“I didn’t know whom you were addressing.”

The woman in the car wore enormous sunglasses. Eliza wondered if she realized how disconcerting the effect was, if she had chosen to look intimidating or simply wasn’t thinking about how she presented herself. She had hair the color of spun sugar, and quite a lot of it, worn in what appeared to be a series of hairdos, as if she had sectioned this amazing mass of hair into six or eight discrete pieces and created a different style for each. There were curls and waves, even two kinds of bangs: a fringe across the forehead, then swooping wings to the side.

“But that’s your name, isn’t it?” It had to be Barbara LaFortuny. Please, Eliza thought, let it be Barbara LaFortuny . She didn’t want to think about the implications of a world in which more and more people began showing up, calling her by her childhood name. She imagined a phalanx of women, all in Walter’s employ, doing his bidding. That image made her mind leap to an artist she loved, Henry Darger, and his disturbing portraits of those 1950s-perfect, perky, pervy Vivian girls. The Walter girls, his own private army.

But Walter had no interest in armies. He had always been, in his own bizarre way, a one-woman man. Or, more correctly, aspired to be. He would even say that at times. I am a one-woman man. I’m just looking for that one woman.