Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

I didn’t have the knife with me this time, but I also hadn’t closed the bedroom window all the way on my way out. There was enough room for me to get my fingertips under it and slowly raise it. The room was dark, but the light from outside was sufficient to show that the bed was still empty, the comforter pushed to one side exactly as I had left it. I stepped inside and quietly pulled the window closed. Through the bedroom door I could hear the sound of the television going in the living room. I couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed to be a news program, maybe CNN or NY1. Footsteps crossed from the living room to the kitchen. A glass was set down on the countertop, or maybe in the sink. Then I heard water running.

The TV on and water running – I wasn’t likely to have a better chance than that to open the door unnoticed. So I turned the knob carefully and drew the door back. I followed the hallway past the bathroom to the living room. The kitchen was on my right, a pair of narrow French doors flung open on either side. I crept up to the one closer to me.

She was at the sink, with her back to me. She was wearing black jeans and black canvas sneakers and a hooded grey sweatshirt with the hood draped down between her shoulders. A plate and a fork were set out to dry on a rubber tray next to the sink, and from the way her arms were moving, it looked like she was working on the glass.

“Don’t move, Jocelyn,” I said. “My name is John Blake, and I’m-”

I heard the glass slip and smash in the bottom of the sink. One of her hands leaped to her chest. “Jesus, you scared me,” she said, turning around. “You shouldn’t do that, John. Sneaking up on me like that, after all this time.”

And suddenly I was back where it all began, staring in blank confusion at a picture from the past. Because it wasn’t Jocelyn.

It was Miranda.

“How’s your head?” Miranda said. “Sorry I had to hit you so hard, but you really didn’t give me any choice. It was either that or kill you, and I really didn’t want to kill you.” She was holding a steak knife in one hand and had picked up a piece of the broken glass in the other, but when she looked at my hands and saw that they were empty, she dropped both on the rubber tray and came forward. “Don’t need those, I guess. You’re not going to hurt me, are you? Poor, sweet John. I can still hear you telling Wayne how all you wanted was for me to be alive again. It touched me. Seriously.”

She was a foot away from me. She put a hand up to my face, touched my cheek. I felt her fingertips against my skin as though from a mile away. She said, “You’re going to have to talk to me, sweetie. This isn’t going to work otherwise.”

Like one of those optical illusions where first the cubes seem to be pointing in one direction and then suddenly they’re pointing in the other, and you can’t imagine how they could ever have looked like they weren’t.

“Miranda-” The words wouldn’t come. Everything was wrong. If Miranda was here, was alive, then who…? “Jocelyn. You killed Jocelyn.”

She shrugged. “I’d be dead now if I hadn’t.”

“And Lenz. You killed them both.”

“Look, if we’re going to have this conversation, let’s sit down.” I didn’t move. “You want to stand? Fine, John, we’ll stand.” She leaned against the refrigerator, crossed her arms over her chest.

“How could you do it?”

“Do you mean how could I or how did I? Are you disgusted with me, or just confused?”

“Both,” I said.

“It’s not so hard, baby. Really, it isn’t. You do what you have to do to get by. But you’ve learned that, too, haven’t you?”

“What happened to you?” I said, in a small voice.

“To me? What about you? All these years, I always pictured you down at NYU thinking great thoughts, reading – I don’t know, ancient Greek history or something. I figured you’d be a professor, or maybe a scientist – or, or, I don’t know, you’d go into politics, I’d turn on the news and there you’d be, running for mayor of New York. I’ll tell you, it made it easier when I was dancing in every cheap dive across the South. At least one of us was doing better, you know? I certainly didn’t picture you doing this. Working with drug dealers, breaking into people’s apartments. Chasing after strippers with blood on their hands.”

“You were going to be a doctor,” I said.

“I was going to be a lot of things.” She came forward again, gently pushed me out of the doorway so she could step through. “At least let me turn off the TV.”

I caught her arm as she passed, stepped out into the living room with her. “What,” she said, “you don’t trust me? I’m not going to do anything.” She kept her hands high as she went to the couch, picked up the remote control, and turned the TV off. “See?” She sat down. “Now you.”

I sat across from her. It was beyond comprehension. That she was here at all, that I was, that we were sitting across from each other like old friends catching up after years apart, all while Susan lay in the hospital, clinging to life, and Jocelyn lay in the morgue, half her face blown away, deliberately misidentified to the police by Lenz. On one level, it all finally made sense – the pieces fit. But on another, it made no sense at all.

“It was you dancing at the Wildman,” I said. “Not Jocelyn. Danny Matin said it was you and so did the bartender, and it wasn’t because she looked like you, it was because it was you.”

“Yeah, it was me.” She lit a cigarette, held the pack out to me, dropped it on the coffee table when I didn’t react. “I’m not proud of what I did there, but I did it.”

“But why did you use her name?”

“I couldn’t use mine – not to set up a robbery. And they won’t hire you in a strip club these days without seeing ID. I had an old ID of Jocelyn’s from when we were dancing together. The picture was close enough.”

Close enough. And when the burglars she’d recruited were caught and tortured and killed, and she’d needed someone to die in her place on the roof of the Sin Factory, Jocelyn had been close enough for that, too. Jocelyn, who was still in love with her, and who came running, bringing flowers no less, when Miranda had called her out of the blue offering a reconciliation. I thought about the message on the answering machine – Miranda hadn’t set herself up accidentally, she’d set Jocelyn up, very deliberately.

“How did you get Lenz to go along with it?” I asked.

“What choice did he have? He’s the one who’d told me about the buy in the first place. He shouldn’t have, but the man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to brag. And thank goodness. If he hadn’t, I’d have been working at that dive for nothing, not to mention fucking him for nothing.” She put on an expression of mock sympathy. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You didn’t think I’d been saving myself for you, did you?”

“Hardly,” I said.

“I remember the day he came home from that bar and said Khachadurian’s son had been in and had told everyone they’d caught the men who’d robbed his father. Wayne was so happy. He told me, ‘Those sons of bitches got what they deserved.’z” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “You know what Khachadurian did to them?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know what he did.”

“Well, I had to give Wayne the bad news. I told him, ‘If we don’t do something and fast, you and I are going to be in the same boat as those sons of bitches, because I’m the one who told them about the deal, and you’re the one who told me.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack, drop dead right there.”

She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.