He Will be My Ruin

I throw an angry hand toward the picture I just showed him. “And you don’t think this is a tad suspicious? You don’t think it warrants a closer look?”

“It certainly makes me curious, but suspicious . . .” He shakes his head. “I overheard my twenty-one-year-old daughter talking to her friends just the other day about some guy making her ovaries explode.” He chuckles. “My wife told me that means she finds him attractive. He’s not actually going to make anything explode. For all you know, Celine didn’t even know this guy. This could be some picture she found on the Internet and printed out.”

“And her phone that mysteriously vanished?”

“Yes, I noticed that. Most people your age can’t live without their phones. We questioned the neighbor and her coworker about it, and they both confirmed that Celine had a bad habit of misplacing her phone. Leaving it in coffee shops, at work. On the subway once.”

I can’t argue with him because I know that to be true. I think she lost a phone every year since college.

“She could easily have misplaced her phone earlier in the day and not bothered to do anything about it. All the other evidence was compelling enough to point to suicide that we chose not to pursue the question of the phone.”

I fall back against the uncomfortable chair, equal parts angry and deflated. On the cab ride over, I had these visions of sirens going off and a flock of detectives jumping out of their chairs to go arrest someone once I handed them this smoking gun.

Now I realize how ridiculous that was.

And I’m smart enough to accept that Detective Childs could be right. The neighbor doesn’t know about any boyfriend. Hans, her gay best friend, doesn’t know about any boyfriend. I sure as hell don’t know about any boyfriend. “What am I supposed to do?”

Detective Childs clicks a button that clears Celine’s file from his monitor.

Case closed.

CHAPTER 5

Maggie

I’ve always preferred the real jungle to the urban jungles of New York and Chicago, where my mother still lives and I visit when obligation arises. But Celine . . . she was completely enamored with New York before she ever stepped foot in the city. I can’t say I know another person who would gladly trade the beach and the laid-back West Coast lifestyle for a concrete horizon and cold climate.

Instead of staying in California, where I was enrolled in an Environmental Engineering program at Berkeley, Celine had her sights set on hopping on a plane for the Northeast and this mecca for museums and art. I think that had been her goal for years, probably since the day a seven-year-old Celine discovered my father’s Gustav Klimt in the study, an original landscape portrait that had been passed down through generations. We weren’t allowed to play in the study, and so I quickly chased her out before someone caught us.

But she kept venturing in, until one day my father came home to find her sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring up at it. My father has never been a cruel man, but he has always been abrupt and lacking patience. I expected him to discipline her but instead, he eased himself down on the floor and asked her what she liked about the painting.

I watched from the shadows of a corner, unseen, as the seven-year-old girl talked about the mix of bright colors and the flecks of gold. He, in turn, told her all about the painting, and about Klimt himself. He spent the next two hours telling her the stories behind all the sculptures and oil paintings and other pieces of art in his study.

An art history lover was born. Celine walked out of there that day and began making up elaborate stories for random objects she might find, until her voracious reading allowed her to refine her knowledge. I think that’s around the time she realized that having a collection like my father’s required a lot of money. She didn’t let that dissuade her. At age eleven and with twenty dollars of allowance money in her pocket, Celine bought a silver tea set from a local garage sale that my dad believed was worth upwards of a thousand dollars.

That tea set currently sits on one of Celine’s shelves.

Though Rosa would never guilt Celine into coming home, I think she secretly hoped that her daughter would move back after racking up four years of college debt, only slightly softened by Rosa’s savings and a few small scholarships. But Celine had other plans.

She got a job.

I enter the same solid glass doors that she walked through every day for the last five years, wondering if Celine ever considered swallowing her pride and taking me up on my offer to pay for her graduate school tuition. She could have had her master’s and been doing what she loved long ago, instead of filing papers and answering phones at an insurance brokerage firm.

It’s a prestigious firm, fine, but still . . .

“Vanderpoel, please,” I ask the security guard, my cold, stiff fingers self-consciously smoothing my ponytail as my eyes wander to the people speeding in and out of the lobby, cell phones ringing, heels clicking. Everyone’s put together so well. I can now see why Celine had a closet full of dresses. Thankfully the chilly temperature outside has forced me into one of her winter coats and scarves, hiding my sweatshirt beneath. It’s been so long since I’ve made a conscious effort with my appearance. Over in South Africa and Ethiopia or any of the countries I’ve spent the last six years living in, Gucci doesn’t matter. Blush and mascara don’t matter.

What does matter?

Clean water.

Malaria vaccinations.

HIV education.

And it’s not that I suddenly care what others think here. I’d just rather not stick out; I’ve never been one for overt attention.

“Forty-second floor,” the guy instructs with barely a glance before moving on, grinning broadly, to help an attractive woman with badge issues.

“Great,” I mutter, shifting my focus past the giant silver-and-blue decorated Christmas tree to the long corridor where doors open and close in rapid succession and people pour out. At forty-two floors up, the stairs are out.

Thankfully the elevator I step into is nearly empty and it moves smooth and fast. Still, I bolt out of it the second the doors open, earning a high-browed stare from the receptionist who sits at a long marble desk. A wall of glass and security doors stretch behind her and VANDERPOEL is engraved on a sprawling metal plaque above. “Can I help you?”

I tuck the stray hairs from around my face behind my ear. “Yeah, I’m here to see Daniela Gallo.” Human Resources told Rosa they could either courier Celine’s personal belongings to San Diego or hold them for me. I opted to pick them up in person. It gives me an excuse to see more of Celine’s recent life, plus it saves Rosa from the hard task of deciding what to do with her daughter’s things.