Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

Mike looked wary. “How’s that going?”

“Gordon offered to make a spreadsheet. There’s already been a heated discussion about whether to alphabetize or group by section.”

“They ask your opinion?”

“Nope.”

“You gonna organize them by color once they’re gone?”

“Yep.” She kissed him on the mouth. Her fingers scratched into his beard. She playfully tugged at his cheek. “Don’t fuck with my mom.”

“Baby, you know I would never do that.”

Andrea knew he would do exactly that, but there was no reason to delay the inevitable.

The motion detectors triggered the lights as they walked down the long hallway. Her new apartment was smaller than her previous one, but at least it wasn’t above her mother’s garage. It wasn’t above anything. Andrea had only been able to afford a basement unit in SOBO, which was what the locals called South Baltimore. The landlord had cut the rent when she’d found out that Andrea was a Marshal. Even with that, Andrea was going to be eating ramen noodles until she collected social security. If social security still existed when she was finally able to retire.

Andrea shot Mike a final look of warning as she opened the door.

He saw her parents and said, “Oh, look, Mom and Dad are here.”

Laura clutched a book in her hands.

Gordon cleared his throat.

Mike plastered on his stupid grin as he walked around the room. “Nice place you got here, Andy. This is clearly the first time I am seeing it and I have no idea where the bedroom is.”

Laura’s nostrils flared.

Gordon cleared his throat again.

Andrea grabbed the bottle of wine. She couldn’t do this without alcohol.

Her tiny kitchen was just off the living room and backed up to her even tinier bedroom. The bathroom was so narrow that the door scraped the toilet. She had exactly three windows. The one over the kitchen sink was long and skinny and offered a prime view of the footwear worn by the people traversing the sidewalk on the other side.

Andrea was pretty sure she loved the place.

She looked for the wine glasses but quickly gave up. She hadn’t managed to unpack anything before her parents came to help, mostly because she knew that her parents were going to help. She found two water glasses, a jelly jar and a coffee mug in a box marked stuff.

Andrea turned on the kitchen faucet, squirted dishwashing liquid, grabbed the sponge. The dinner plates from last night were caked in sauce. Unbidden, her mind flashed up Nardo Fontaine taking his hand away from his neck. The blood had splattered all over Star. The woman hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t even wiped the blood from her face. She had sat down at the stool, clasped her hands on the counter, and stared ahead at the white tile wall as she waited for someone to tell her what to do.

Andrea closed her eyes. She took a deep breath.

This was how it happened sometimes. The trauma came back. Flashes of violence, flashes of pain. Instead of fighting it, instead of trying to change her whole life into something different because of it, Andrea had learned to accept it. The memories were part of who she was now, just like the memory of the triumph she’d felt when she’d taken Ricky Fontaine’s full confession.

Andrea listened to the sounds in the other room. Her absence had brought down the temperature. She could hear Laura lecturing Mike, Gordon laughing at them both. She slipped her iPhone out of her back pocket. Andrea’s iCloud account had backed up the photos she had surreptitiously captured of teenage Judith’s collage. The original piece had been destroyed in the fire. Andrea had the only proof that it ever existed.

She scrolled past the liner notes from Melody Brickel’s mixtape. The affirmations from what she’d later found out were from one of Melody’s letters. The ultrasounds of infant Judith that fanned out from the center of the piece. The photos of Emily laughing and playing and doing everything but dying.

Andrea had been so desperate to persuade herself that Judith looked like Clay, but the fact was, she looked very much like her mother. Emily’s light blue eyes were nothing like Clay’s icy blue. As for Judith’s sharp cheekbones and slight cleft to her chin, they could have come from some distant Vaughn or Fontaine the same way Andrea had drawn her own Piglet nose from her family’s gene pool.

She swiped the screen, stopping at the group photo Judith had placed among the other candids in her collage. It was the same photo that Ricky had given a place of honor for forty years.

The clique.

Emily and Ricky were dressed alike, their liquid eyeliner and spiral perms placing them squarely in the eighties. The boys all had shaggy hair and wore their Members Only jackets with the sleeves pushed up. Ricky resembled Nardo more than her fraternal twin. Blake and Clay could be brothers. Together, the group looked like they were posing for a prequel to The Breakfast Club, though there wasn’t a jock or a princess. Andrea only saw the nerd, the basket case, and of course all but one was an admitted criminal.

Gordon’s loud laughter broke the spell. Andrea heard a teasing in Laura’s voice when she responded. For once, Mike apparently had nothing to offer.