Surviving Valencia

“Great. Now I’m afraid to go inside,” I whispered.

He rested his hand on my leg. “I’ll protect you.”

Chapter 32

The next day while I was sewing some rickrack on an apron, I came up with a plan: I would hire a private investigator. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.

Without too much trouble, I found one. His name was Jeb Wilde and I found him online. I told Adrian I needed to get my hair trimmed, and Jeb and I met at a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Dragon. I was surprised he could meet me immediately like that, but I decided to not overanalyze it. I brought both envelopes with the photographs and note inside and a stack of old clippings from 1986. I also had an envelope with $1500 to get the investigation started.

I was wearing dark sunglasses that undoubtedly drew attention to me but made me feel like I was unrecognizable, and a black hooded sweatshirt I had just purchased at a thrift store and planned to dispose of in the parking lot dumpster when I left. Jeb was sitting in a booth with his head down, doing a Sudoku puzzle. He had told me that was how I would recognize him. A thermos of coffee sat in front of him, open, the lid a convenient little cup. I slid in across from him. He flipped his puzzle over and looked up at me.

He looked like a Midwestern man, a farmer or something. Early sixties with thinning hair and an ordinary, round head. Wiry and small. Could this little guy solve mysteries? Could he put my life back together? I doubted it and suddenly found the $1500 in my handbag very hard to part with.

“Well…” he said, polishing his lined bifocals with the edge of his shirt, “tell me what you know.”

That was it. No formal introductions. Apparently we weren’t going to order food, which was fine, but seemed weird. Wouldn’t the people who worked here get mad at us if we just used their booth for a business meeting? I wondered if this might be the wrong guy. I looked around for someone else, some slick looking man in a fedora and a trench coat, head bent down over a Sudoku puzzle…

“Do you have the money?” he asked.

“Umm, yeah.” I handed him the envelope. What was to stop him from taking it and never saying another word to me? “Do I get some kind of receipt?”

He scribbled something illegible on the back of the Chinese calendar placemat and handed it to me.

Okay.

He cleared his throat and leaned in closer to me, “From what I understood on the phone, you need to know if your husband killed your sister. Hmm?” He raised his scraggly brows at me. Hearing these words spoken aloud made something inside me break, and I started to cry.

“I don’t think he did it,” I whispered.

Jeb just nodded and took a drink.

Chapter 33

By Christmas of 1987 some of the novelty of being the girl with the dead twin siblings was wearing off. I’d gotten used to being unpopular, in the sense that I had stopped expecting to change it, but I still wasn’t immune to wanting to be liked. I overheard talk of boy-girl parties that I was not invited to. I briefly entertained the thought of trying to have one myself, but I knew no one would show up. Or worse, they would because they thought it was funny. There was a Christmas dance at our school, and I asked my dad if he would take me. He said he would, which I really wasn’t expecting. It was a “dress-up” dance, exclusively for seventh and eighth graders. I had nothing to wear to it. I was down to two pairs of jeans and a handful of tops I circulated between. Everything else was outgrown or worn out. My shoes and first bra I had purchased with change from my piggybank, but now the pig was almost empty.

The weekend before the dance, my younger cousins BobbieMae and TobiSue got dropped off at our house to visit while their parents went to a bowling tournament. They were nine and seven, freckly, red haired little pumpkin heads, and looked more like different aged twins than ordinary sisters. They both shrieked instead of talked, and TobiSue, the seven year old, still ate her boogers, but I was thrilled to have some company. On Friday night my mother took the three of us to the video rental store that had just opened up a few blocks away. TobiSue and BobbieMae were immediately drawn to Pretty In Pink.

“She has red hair like us,” said TobiSue, waving the box above her head.

“We have to get it then, Aunt Patricia,” said BobbieMae-the-bossy.

I could not tell you what other movies we got, because all I remember is Pretty In Pink. My cousins and I watched it twice, and then when they went home on Sunday afternoon, I watched it twice more by myself. It was the dress that got me. The dress that Andie sewed herself. On Sunday evening I went upstairs and knocked on my mother’s door. Lately she was always in there resting. At first she didn’t answer, but then, the third time I knocked, she called out, softly, “Rewind those movies and leave them on the kitchen counter top so I remember to take them back.”

“I will. Can I come in?”

No answer. I tried to open the door but it was locked.

“Mom, do you have any material you don’t want? You know, like, fabric?”

“There’s a bag of scraps in the hall closet. Good night.”

My imitation Swatch watch told me it was 7:19.

I went to the hall closet and found a paper grocery sack filled with some cut up old curtains, small pieces from a patchwork quilt I’d seen my mom working on when I was very little, and an old burgundy tablecloth with brown gravy stains on it. I gathered up a needle and thread, some scissors, and a Capri-sun, and headed downstairs with the bag of fabric to get to work.

Right away, I knew I would use the curtain tiebacks for straps. They were perfect for that: hemmed with lace accents and thick but not too thick. The tablecloth’s gravy stains would probably be invisible at the dance, since it was half-dark in there, so that provided me with a huge piece of fabric. I wrapped it around me, toga-style, and used a long strip of curtain lace as a belt. I admired myself in the bathroom mirror. Not bad. Then I put Pretty In Pink in the VCR one more time and watched it while I started sewing.

The dress looked good enough to draw zero attention to me at the dance. That was the best I could hope for. I hadn’t entertained aspirations of pulling a Molly Ringwald. Walking in and having no one look at me was more than I had hoped for. My dad dropped me off, and even handed me a five-dollar bill on my way out of the car. I walked in and paid the $2.00 fee, got my hand stamped and hung up my coat, and sat on the bleachers most of the night playing Cat’s Cradle with one of the chaperones. A boy named Davis Neighbors asked me to dance to The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range and I said yes. Then halfway through he took his hands off my waist and danced a little bit away from me. Then after another line or two of the song, he walked away entirely, leaving me standing there alone on the dance floor, smelling like his aftershave. I was just glad to have been asked to dance by anyone.