Her duffel bag was gone.
“You didn’t pick up last night,” Dave said. I could hear rattling in the background. “Have you been out for like ten hours?”
“I guess so.” I crawled out of my bed and leaned over hers to look in the gap between the bed and the wall. No duffel. “It was a long day.”
I stepped away from the beds and stumbled toward the bathroom. My mouth was sticky. Bits of peanuts littered the carpet between the beds and the door to the bathroom. I pushed it open and turned on the light.
“Did you find her?”
It took me too long to answer, standing there in my wrinkled clothes staring at myself in the bathroom mirror.
I was alone.
It was over.
Finally I said, “Yes.”
“Well, that’s great! She’s in Henderson, then, right?”
I put Dave on speakerphone on the nightstand and went over to my purse and pawed through it. I’d left my wallet unbuttoned last night; it was lying half-open on top of everything else. I tossed it on the floor and pulled out the iron-free dress and pair of underwear I’d packed. “No.”
Television in the background. Dave’s voice was tinnier on speaker. “What do you mean? She wasn’t at the address?”
I took my wrinkled clothes off, my fingers clumsy on the buttons. “I—”
There was a rattling noise and a knock on the motel-room door. I yanked the dress over my head and hurried to open the door.
Mary was standing there, makeup-free, in cutoffs and that utility jacket from yesterday. She held up a Walgreens bag. “You said she was blond, right?”
“Is that her?” Dave asked from the nightstand.
All the breath went out of me in a rush. I snatched up the phone and switched speakerphone off. “Yeah. I think she’s going to, um, come with me,” I said, voice wobbling. “We might be back late tonight. I’ll text you.” I looked at Mary as I said it, but she only pushed past me into the musty room, rummaging in the Walgreens bag.
“Good.” A pause. “I’m missing you, baby.”
“Me too,” I said automatically. “Dave, I—”
The television in the background shut off, and Dave laughed. “Eli says—”
“What?”
“Eli says—”
Mary finished tugging on her tank top and turned to face me as she sat on the bed, crossing her legs. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. There was something uncertain about her expression, a slackness to the muscles there. “Can I call you back?” I said into the phone. “I need to talk to…”
“Robin?” Dave asked.
“Yes,” I breathed.
12
Mary
“Was that your husband?”
Leslie nodded. She was in a shapeless navy shift dress now, still wearing those pearl earrings. The skin around the earrings was red and irritated from where they’d dragged against the mattress in her sleep.
She was just standing there, clutching her phone. I held up the box dye and wiggled it. There was a picture of a frowning woman on the cover with a platinum Cleopatra bob. “Didn’t you say Robin was blond?”
Leslie let out a breath. “You mean it?”
I shrugged my jacket off and hung it over the chair. “It’s just a week, right?”
“Yes,” Leslie said almost before I stopped talking.
“And we never see each other again.”
“Yes,” Leslie said, “yes—I’ll get you a burner phone, you can toss it as soon as you leave.” She shut her mouth on whatever else she was going to say. Her eyes were red-rimmed, makeup caked in the corners.
“I want to get out of here,” I confessed. “I need to not be where—where Sam is.”
“What about your parents?” Leslie asked. “And your car? Will anyone come looking for you if you’re gone for a whole week?”
“Wow, Leslie,” I said.
She blanched. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t.” I glanced down. “No. No one will come looking. I don’t have…people like that, people who would worry.” I shrugged. “It’s just me. And you now.”
For a second we were motionless, staring at each other, linked invisibly by our ridiculous partnership. Then she stumbled across the room toward me. I could have brought my arms up to defend myself, but I didn’t. I let her fall against me. She clung to me, smelling of yesterday’s schnapps and Lancôme powder and sweat. She hugged me, like I was saving her from something.
* * *
—
I slipped the cash back into Leslie’s wallet when she went to take a shower. When she came out, I was watching an infomercial about a food processor, with the bits and pieces of the hair-dye kit scattered around me on the mattress.
“I can’t open this,” I said, holding out the bottle of developer. “Hey, have you ever used one of these things? The chopper thing? Does it work?”
Leslie took the bottle from me and pulled at it. “They don’t chop things evenly,” she said. “So some stuff cooks all the way through, some gets burned…It’s a—let’s go into the bathroom, I feel like this is going to explode—it’s a scam.”
I gathered up the rest of the kit and followed her meekly into the stuffy motel bathroom. “Am I going to have to watch videos?” I blurted suddenly, watching her wrench at the cap.
“What?” Leslie glanced up, her ears peeking through her wet hair.
“Like of Robin,” I said, the name feeling foreign in my mouth. “Do I need to, like, watch videos of her so I can pretend to be her?”
She frowned and pulled again at the developer bottle. The cap came free at last and Leslie sighed in relief. “We never made home videos or anything. There’s a few photos of us in old albums and things, but…it’s really just signing her name. I guess you could practice her signature, but I doubt anyone’s going to be looking that closely at it.” She swallowed and handed the bottle back to me. “You just have to act normal. You don’t even have to act like you like me. She definitely didn’t.”
“What if I get caught?” I asked. The bathroom lights were bright blue fluorescent, washing us both out in the mirror. “What if they find out I’m not her?”