Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

“We thought it would come in handy in-Well, you know.”

In jail, thought Max. Yeah, I know.

Patty and Lilith were waiting for them at the arboretum gate. Patty too had changed out of her whites, into a denim shirt and wide-bottomed jeans with the seat worn shiny. Lilith was wearing the tight hip-hugger jeans she’d arrived in, and a dark-brown, V-neck, cashmere sweater that showed both her figure and her glossy brown hair to best advantage.

Patty gave Lyssy a hug and wished him happy birthday. Lilith kept her eyes trained on the ground as she wished him the same. Little-girl voice, diffident posture-but was it a disguise, or had the alter switched back to her original personality since lunch? Once again, Max realized that he had no way of knowing for sure.

“We never did work out that password, did we?” he whispered out of the side of his mouth, as he and the girl walked on ahead together, trailed at a distance of ten yards or so by their escorts.

“What password?” said the girl. “Who are you, anyway?”

Irene had finally managed to contact Lily from the taxicab, she told Pender when she returned to the hotel. Only it wasn’t Lily, she went on to explain, it couldn’t have been. “She called me Dr. Cogan. She’s never called me Dr. Cogan-not once in all these years. It’s been Dr. Irene this, Dr. Irene that from the time she was four.”

“Dr. Cogan is probably what Corder calls you,” suggested Pender, who was wearing his horseblanket-plaid slacks and a periwinkle polo shirt. “Maybe she picked it up from him.”

“And the way she rushed through the call, like she couldn’t get rid of me fast enough? I’m telling you, it was Lilith, it had to have been. And the only reason she’d be trying to trick me into thinking she’s Lily is if she had something up her sleeve-something like, say, escaping?”

“Well gosh, Irene, in that case maybe we ought to get her moved to some kind of maximum-security facility where-Oh, wait a minute, I just remembered-she’s already in one.”

She blew him a juicy raspberry. “Not funny, Pender.”

“M’dear, you spent half of last night talking my ear off about how hard a time you were having letting go of Lily, but how you knew it was the right thing for both of you. You sure this isn’t just more of the same?”

“I don’t know, maybe you’re right, Pen. Only…. “Sitting on the edge of the bed, scarcely aware of what she was doing, Irene had unwrapped a complimentary pillow mint and popped it into her mouth before she remembered she couldn’t stand the taste of peppermint. Genteelly, she spat it out into a tissue, and tossed the tissue into the wastebasket.

“Only what?” prompted Pender.

“If I were Al Corder, I’d want to be told.”

“Call him, then.”

“I tried, but he must have left for the day-all I got was his voice mail. They won’t give me his home number either-it’s unlisted.”

Pender’s cetaceous brow creased in thought. “I could be missing something here, but if Corder’s already left for the day, maybe he’s not the person you need to talk to. Our flight’s at ten-thirty, right?”

“Yes, but we’re supposed to be at the airport no later than nine thirty. Oh, and I got us an extension on the checkout time, but we still have to be out of our rooms by six-thirty at the latest or we’ll get charged for an extra night.”

“Which gives us a couple hours to kill. We might as well stop by the hospital after dinner, see if we can wangle a visit with Lily. If not, maybe we could talk to whoever’s in charge, give ’em a heads-up. At the very least, it’ll be one less thing for you to worry about. How’s that for a plan?”

“How about before dinner,” Irene suggested.

“Fair enough,” said Pender. “Can I have your other mint?”

Al Corder changed into khaki slacks and a soft old blue-and-brown-checked flannel shirt, worn tails-out to cover his paunch, then he transferred the contents of his pockets-wallet, coins, fifty bucks in a $-shaped money-clip, a hospital pager, and a Swiss Army knife-from the suit pants to either the khakis or the top of the bureau. As he tossed the suit into the dry-cleaning pile in the closet, Cheryl emerged from the bathroom in her slip and began rummaging through her bureau.

“You done in the bathroom?” he asked her, patting her plump rear as he brushed past her.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

But he quickly doubled back, stooped in a Groucho Marx crouch, to ogle the white breasts dangling fatly beneath the thin fabric of her slip as she bent over to search the bottom drawer of her bureau. “Why, I haven’t seen a pair of melons like that since they closed the farmers’ market.” He waggled his eyebrows and tapped the ash from an imaginary cigar.

“Steady there,” said Cheryl, but she allowed her husband a quick fondle before changing into a dark blue skirt and a white cotton blouse with a moderate neckline-over the last year or so, she’d caught Lyssy staring at her chest with more than passing interest. She crossed the hall and rapped at Alison’s door. “You almost ready, honey?”

Alison opened the door wearing below-the-navel jeans and a skintight sleeveless top that barely reached the bottom of her rib cage. “Oh, Allie, you’re not wearing that, are you?”

The girl looked down at herself. “Well, yeah, Mom-I appear to be,” she observed drily.

“At least put on a sweater.”

“I’m not cold.”

“It’s not your temperature I’m worried about,” her mother retorted.

While mother and daughter fought their age-old battle, father ran an electric razor over his five-o’clock shadow, then splashed on some Old Spice aftershave, which he preferred to the designer brands his wife and daughter continued to give him every Father’s Day. Cheryl and Alison were still arguing in the hallway when he left the bedroom. “Holy cow, is that what you’re wearing?” he asked Alison guilelessly.

“I’m not a baby anymore!” she shouted. “Why don’t the two of you just grow up!”

It took Max a few seconds to recover from his near-coronary over Lilith’s ostensible failure to recognize him.

“Just messin’ with your head,” she told him with a wink and a grin.

“If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll-”

But the psych techs had caught up to them. “Let’s get moving, Lyssy,” said Wally. “You don’t want to be late to your own party.”

The sky was Portland pewter, with a fitful summer breeze rustling through the pines as the patients and their escorts hiked through the arboretum. Wally unlocked the gate; the little procession ducked through the arch-topped door set into the spike-topped brick wall.

Everything felt different on the other side. The openness, the wide lawn, the heavenly smell of new-mown grass, the rusting swing set, the clothes drying on the line-a delighted Max spread his arms and turned in a clumsy circle, like a Bizarro-World version of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. “Wa-ow,” he said-the two-syllable wow was the cornerstone of his Christopher Walken impression.

“Wow what?” said Lilith.

Max glanced around to be sure the psych techs weren’t watching. “No walls,” he whispered. “No fuckin’ walls.”

Silver cardboard letters spelling out Happy Birthday dangled crazily from a string across the top of the front doorway of the director’s residence; it was the director himself who answered the bell. “The gals are in the kitchen preparing the, ah, birthday repast,” Alan Corder announced as he ushered the four of them inside. Lilith said she wanted to help, so Patty accompanied her into the kitchen. Soon, Max mouthed to Lilith as they parted; she nodded curtly and turned away.