SUMMER 1979
I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Gabe said. “You don’t owe this woman anything.”
“That’s not why I’d go,” Jess said.
They were sitting on Gabe’s courtyard patio behind his house in Culver City, teacups and Jess’s wineglass on the broad wooden table. She had come over unannounced, hoping for reassurance that she was making the right decision. Gabe wasn’t on board.
David poured her more wine, a dark, tannic red, its legs stretching down the sides of the glass. He was a movie stuntman, a big presence, but quiet and considerate. He hadn’t weighed in yet.
It was late; the only light came from the living room window, a warm amber glow. Just above the rooftop, beside the TV antenna, Jess could see the outline of the old Helms Bakery sign a few streets away, the red-white-and-blue shield she remembered from the delivery trucks that stopped at Ruth’s house every Wednesday.
“You want her to forgive you,” Gabe said. “But you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Jess didn’t know to whom she owed anything anymore. All the balance books were lost. She didn’t know if she was looking for an apology or forgiveness. But there was a promise in Madeline Serrano’s message. Isn’t that what we all want? To move on? And Jess, hearing that question, had thought, Yes. Desperately, yes.
“Where’s the daughter?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” Jess said. “Her mother only said that she wouldn’t be there when we met.”
Gabe ran his thumb along a crack in the tabletop, frowning. “What’s she going to tell you that you haven’t already heard?”
“Maybe nothing,” David said. “Maybe Jess just needs to hear it from someone other than us.”
Jess spent an hour working through her closet. Everything she put on looked wrong when reflected back in the mirror. What did one wear when meeting the mother of her attacker? Something that would protect her, like a suit of armor or a magic cloak. She pulled from the hangers, staring into the mirror, unconvinced. She had no idea what Madeline Serrano expected.
What Jess knew of the Serrano family had come from Anton’s unsolicited dispatches. He had supplemented his amateur reporting with obsessive historical investigation, hours hunched in library carrels searching the Business and Society pages, pasting together a rough family history.
Bruce Serrano got his first job as a parking attendant when he was fourteen. By the time he was twenty, he owned the lot. He spent the 1940s buying every vacant lot in the city’s northeast corner, just in time for the postwar car boom and the construction of the freeways. His business expanded with the city, out to the new suburbs where he built more parking lots and then reasons to park—shopping centers and office clusters and housing developments. Bruce and Madeline met at a Tournament of Roses fundraiser. By then he was a major donor; she was the daughter of a prominent Pasadena banker. A year later, they were married.
There wasn’t much information on Madeline. She was the dutiful wife in most of the pictures, Anton reported. Charity galas and civic events, a beautiful gown, pale skin and a chilly smile. Stepford territory, he said. Or else she was the secret backbone of the operation, the one who opened doors, bridging the gap between a portfolio of parking lots and a director’s seat on some of the city’s major boards.
Anton had found only one mention of Isabella pre–Zero Zone, in a list of debutantes coming out at a Pasadena country club. Can you imagine, he had said one night on the phone—our Isabella, the belle of the ball?
Jess closed her closet, settling on a blue oxford, cream linen pants, beechnut-brown boots. The outfit felt solid, sober, safe. This was the kind of conversation she hoped for, the kind that Madeline’s message promised. Two adults airing their concerns, negotiating a way forward.
A man with a low drawl had answered the number Madeline provided. He had given Jess a time and an address in the San Rafael Hills, a quiet, moneyed enclave nestled along the border between Pasadena and L.A.
Jess drove up the wide, leafy streets, climbing slowly. Above, the limbs of live oaks stretched into a sun-streaked canopy, making her windshield bright then dark then bright again. On either side, courtly homes sat above rich green lawns, marble fountains burbling, garden trellises heavy with boas of honeysuckle and grape. And then she reached the end of the road, the address in question, a high wall of river rock draped with English ivy.
She parked at the curb. A wrought-iron gate, at least twice Jess’s height, blocked the Serranos’ entrance. The points along the top looked like spear tips raised in defense of a hidden castle. Past the gate, a driveway of bleached stone stretched a few hundred feet before dissolving into a fog of morning mist and dusty sunlight.
A smaller, human-size gate stood beside the other, set into the stone. Jess took a shaky breath and pressed the call button. After a moment the gate unlatched.
She walked up the driveway, stones crunching beneath her boots. The air held an acrid tang from the stands of tall, peeling eucalyptus on either side of the driveway. In the distance, through the thinning mist, the Serranos’ house spread out before her, a massive modernist ranch, all clean angles and glass, towering windows shining in the sun. A fountain splashed in the center of the driveway’s roundabout. Jess knew the piece; she had gone to school with the sculptor. It was an arboreal monster of sharp steel triangles, like a Calder fever dream, spinning in every direction with the force of the water pouring down from its crown.
“She’s waiting for you inside.”
Jess recognized that drawl from her phone call. On the other side of the fountain, a young man leaned into the open engine of a royal-blue Mercedes. Jess circled the fountain toward the front door, catching glimpses of him at the edge of the car’s raised hood. He was tall and lean, with a short dark beard and lank hair that hung past his chin. He wore a denim jacket one shade lighter than his jeans, and a white cowboy hat, the brim tied up to the sides with a thin leather cord. He scratched his beard while he worked, looking down into the engine as if trying to keep himself from staring at Jess.
She paused at the front door. Madeline had promised a private meeting, but how could Jess know that was the truth? She imagined the door opening, Isabella waiting on the other side.
The cowboy lifted his eyes over the top of the car’s hood, watching.
Jess pressed the doorbell.
“Is it too bright in here?”
Jess looked away from the windows, the pool and tennis court below, the expansive view into the arroyo. Madeline Serrano had returned from the kitchen with a small tea service on a tray. She watched Jess from the other side of the living room.
“Your sunglasses,” Madeline said.
Jess pulled them off, tucking them into the pocket of her oxford. She squinted in the brightness. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot I had them on.”
Jess saw a slight hitch in Madeline’s polished demeanor as she took in the scar. But she banished it quickly and set the tray on a glass-topped coffee table. She wore a pleated shirtdress, blue like the Mercedes outside, and a long strand of dime-size pearls. Jess studied her for hints of Isabella, trying to see one woman in the other, but came up short. Madeline carried herself with crisp elegance. There was no sign of what Jess remembered of Isabella, or what had metastasized over the years in her imagination: the slouchy, feral girl full of malice.
Sitting on the sofa, Jess turned to find a wall of photographs: Isabella as a smiling little girl on a tire swing, an uncomfortable teenager in a ballerina’s tutu, a serious young woman in the passenger seat of the Mercedes. She seemed to grow thinner with each image, a girl disappearing. Looking at each photo, Jess felt a jolt. She had never imagined Isabella’s life before the gallery attack. It was as if Isabella hadn’t existed before that moment. Here was a history Jess had never considered.
Madeline passed a teacup and sat on the edge of a wingback chair. “Thank you,” she said, nodding to Jess’s sunglasses. “I like to see someone’s eyes. Bruce says I’m old-fashioned that way.”
Jess looked to a black-and-white wedding photo on the wall. There was Bruce Serrano, chest and chin raised, intense, defiant almost, holding hands with a young Madeline, tall and thin in a long white gown. The hint of a smile played across her lips as she returned the camera’s gaze. Ready to eat the world, these two.
“You and Bruce have met,” Madeline said.
Jess turned back to Madeline. “We have?”
“Years ago. He was part of a group of investors renovating a shopping center. You were hired to create a piece there, a skylight. He stopped by the work site a few times. I remember how impressed he was with what you were making.”
Madeline tried a smile. There were still echoes of the confident young woman from the photo, but her certainty now seemed forced.
Jess thought back to that early project at the mall in Panorama City, the skylight she and Gabe had built. Nothing else came.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember him.”
There was that arch smile now; Madeline had found it again, amused that someone wouldn’t remember her husband, or would have the arrogance to pretend that they didn’t.
“It was a long time ago,” Madeline said, “and he was one of many men in suits, I’m sure. But Bruce has been interested in your work for quite some time. He even thought of commissioning something for this house.”
Jess looked out into the room, its windows offering sweeping views in every direction: north to the mountains, east to the desert, then west to the sea, toward her studio and apartment in Venice. She felt watched. She imagined Bruce Serrano standing here, surveying his city. She imagined Isabella alone in the dark, looking out at the electric spread of lights, trying to pinpoint one in particular, a telltale beacon giving Jess away.
There was a noise from somewhere in the house, what might have been a footstep, the clack of sole on tile. The sound pulled Jess’s breath tight, and she sat that way for a moment, coiled and waiting. When no one came, she let herself deflate a little.
“You said that you wanted to talk about your daughter.”
Madeline sipped her tea, then replaced the cup onto its saucer with extraordinary care.
“I feel the need to apologize for Isabella’s actions,” Madeline said. “As I told you on the message, she has had her share of difficulties. And those, of course, become my difficulties. You’re not a mother, Miss Shepard?”
Jess understood that this wasn’t really a question. It was a statement, an assertion of authority. She thought of Christine in her doorway making the same point two different times, a baby in her belly, a little boy waiting beside her car.
“I’m not.”
“But you are a daughter,” Madeline said. “So you understand the ties between a mother and daughter, and the knots that sometimes form along those ties.” Her face shifted into a close approximation of a frown; the gesture, at least, the intention. “Isabella has made a long string of poor decisions. But I love my daughter, Miss Shepard. I want what is best for her.”
Jess was struck again by the thought of a trap. She listened for footsteps, the cry of a door’s hinge.
“Where is she?” Jess asked.
Madeline lifted her cup again, holding it aloft for a shaky moment. A slosh of tea crested the lip, pooling in the saucer.
“We don’t know.”
Jess felt her body seize, fear like a giant hand, squeezing.
“I thought she had been released,” Jess said.
“She was. But because she is now an adult, we were only informed after the fact. She left the facility on her own. We hoped—I hoped—that she would come home.”
“Where else would she go?”
“It’s possible that she’s trying to find the others—those people from the room you built. Whenever I visited her, she spoke about them. Sometimes it sounded like she was just waiting until they were together again.”
Jess turned away, looking back to the wall, and there it was, the photo Anton had described on the phone years ago: Isabella standing in a ballroom, centered in a row of debutantes. All the other girls were bright and blond, smiling with entitled radiance. Isabella stood shorter, even thinner, her eyes contemptuous, staring back through the pomp and bullshit. Jess had seen that look before.
“I didn’t ask you here to assign blame,” Madeline said. “There’s more than enough to go around. But Isabella is a highly impressionable young woman. And it seems that your work, for some, holds an incredible power. My husband felt that power. Isabella felt it.”
“It’s not the same thing.” Jess hated the sound of her denial: unconvincing and desperate. “Your daughter needs help.”
“That’s what I’m asking for. Your help.”
It had been a trap all along. Jess should have trusted Gabe, trusted her own fear.
“If we can find her,” Madeline said, “you could speak with her, reason with her—”
“She needs a doctor.”
“She has seen many doctors over the years.”
“Then you need to find another.”
“Miss Shepard, it was your work—”
“She attacked me.” Jess stood, knocking her cup with her knee. The tea spilled, puddling on the table, running off the edge in a long, thin stream.
“My daughter would not have been imprisoned without the room you built,” Madeline said. “Imagine her, Miss Shepard, in that room. Your room.”
“I have imagined her.” Jess backed around the table, stepping in the tea, her boots pressing dark footprints into the snowy carpet. “I want to stop imagining her. I want this to stop.”
“Then help us,” Madeline pleaded, her voice betraying real emotion for the first time. It was all showing now. “You could explain how Isabella misunderstood your work.”
Madeline took a step forward and Jess raised an arm to keep her back. She felt all her fear and rage move down to her fingertip, another wand pointed.
“Miss Shepard—”
“Keep her away from me.”
Jess moved past Madeline and out the door, back into the overbright morning, toward the fountain, past the Mercedes where the cowboy watched from the open engine. She felt Madeline behind her in the doorway, heard Madeline calling out, Miss Shepard, Miss Shepard, an appeal, a demand, her voice following Jess down the driveway.
Back in the Scout, her body rattling, Jess remembered to breathe. The radio was blaring—somehow she had bumped it awake when she started the truck, a chugging rhythm like a cartoon train staggering down the tracks. Iggy Pop, “Some Weird Sin.” When she switched it off and the flood of ringing sound finally drained away, she heard tapping on the passenger window. The cowboy was knocking on the glass.
He removed his hat and opened the door, leaning inside.
“Miss Shepard,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”
She noticed the brightness then, the glaring light through the Scout’s dusty windshield. Jess reached for her sunglasses but her shirt pocket was empty.
“She needs your help,” he said.
“Mrs. Serrano has more than enough resources. She doesn’t need my help.” Jess reached behind her back, running her hands along the seat, feeling for her sunglasses.
“I’m talking about Isabella.” His voice was soft and low. It sounded like he was trying to soothe a frightened animal.
“There’s nothing I can do for her,” Jess said.
“You don’t really believe that.”
Jess almost sputtered, irate, incredulous. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“That’s true,” he said. “I’m sorry. My name’s Vincent. Vince. Nobody calls me Vincent except Mrs. Serrano.”
His swerve into introduction knocked Jess even further off-balance. What was she supposed to say here, Nice to meet you? She bent forward, searching for her sunglasses on the floor of the cab.
“Isabella saw something you made,” he said, “and it changed her.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Vince raised an eyebrow, a gesture that seemed to Jess half consideration, half dismissal.
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t negate the fact.”
“What fact?”
“That none of this would have happened without you.”
Jess looked back at Vince. His eyes were remarkable, soulful and sad, a pale denim blue, matching his outfit. All his energy was in those eyes. The rest of him—the lanky, unhurried quasi-cowboy—now seemed like a child’s costume worn to protect that wounded sincerity.
He reached into his shirt pocket and produced Jess’s sunglasses. A magic trick. Voilà.
He looked at Jess’s cheek. “I’m sorry she did that,” he said. “You didn’t deserve it. But she didn’t deserve this either.”
Jess took her glasses and shifted the truck into gear.
“I’ve already told you,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do.”