It was the ringing of her cell phone that brought Patty Cakes back from the edge.
She was surprised to hear it, jerked backward into the now. She was sure she’d left the phone on her night table, plugged into the charger and with the ringer off. She’d done that deliberately before she started drinking last night because she didn’t want anyone calling. Not customers, not her cousins who lived in the Bronx. Not even Monk Addison.
So how did the phone get all the way under the ancient claw-foot tub?
The ringing snapped her back so quickly and so completely that the echo of her last scream still seemed to bounce off the walls; and it no longer seemed to belong to her. More like the cry of a seagull far away down a windy beach. Even her tears stopped.
It kept ringing, refusing to go to voicemail.
Patty leaned down, her shoulder hard against the cold curve of the tub, and fished for it. Finding a wadded-up tissue that was soaked with beer, blood, and bathwater. Finding the lip liner she’d lost before Christmas. Finding the withered husk of an ancient roach. Then her fingers found the phone, clawed it toward her palm, caught it like a reluctant fist, and pulled it out.
The screen display was blank. No name, no text.
Patty punched the green symbol anyway.
“Yes?” she asked, surprised that her voice wasn’t shrill. When no one spoke, she repeated the greeting.
Nothing. No sound. No rustle of someone who’d accidentally dropped their phone.
“Hello? Who’s calling?”
There was a faint hiss, like the way open lines sounded back in the days of landlines. No one spoke.
She tried saying hello a few more times, and then punched the off button. As she did that, in the fragment of a second before the connection was completely dead. she thought she heard a voice. Two words. Small, faint.
“Mẹ ơi?”
Patty Cakes froze, staring in horror at the phone. She rarely spoke Vietnamese, though she often dreamed in her native language. Even after all these years living in America she had never forgotten a single word. And certainly not those two words.
Mẹ ơi.
Mommy.
And the voice. The voice.
Her voice.
Tuyet. Yes! That was it. That was the name of the little girl whose face was looking up at Patty from her own skin. Tuyet. Sweet Tuyet.
Or … was that her name at all? Doubt suddenly welled up in her. Was this little girl just a ghost from too much drink? She’d had the DTs before, and they always came with visual aids. Cruel stuff, with clarity to sharpen the edges.
“Làm ơn, mẹ ơi,” cried the little girl’s voice. “Làm ơn đừng quên tôi…”
Please, Mommy … please don’t forget me.…
The scream boiled up inside of Patty as she stabbed the buttons to hit callback. The phone rang. And rang.
And rang.
Her daughter did not answer. Of course she did not. Tuyet was ashes in an urn. She was memories sewn into the tissue of the past. She was seven years old—and had been seven for ten years. She would be seven years old forever, because little murdered girls do not age.
The phone rang and rang and then it stopped.
When she stared through tears at the screen display there was no record of any outbound call. Not since she’d called Monk yesterday afternoon. There was no record of an inbound call at all. Not in a full day.
She wanted to hurl the phone away. Instead she clutched it to her chest, where she could feel the beat of her heart through the skin of her tightly curled fingers.
“Please…” she begged.
The phone rang. Patty jumped and sobbed as she punched the button.
“Tuyet!” she cried. “Tôi đây. Đó là mẹ.”
I’m here. It’s me. It’s Mommy.
There was nothing for a million years as she strained to listen. Only the echo in her mind of those words. Those terrible words.
Please, Mommy … please don’t forget me …
“God, no,” begged Patty.
The voice on the other end said, “Patty…?”
It was not her little girl, and Patty caved over the phone. The voice was male. Familiar. A friend, but right then she hated him. She hated anyone who could possibly have been on the other end of that call except the one person who could not be there.
“Patty?” called the voice. “Are you there? Are you okay?”
She raised the phone as if it weighed ten thousand pounds.
“Monk…?” She wept. “Oh my god … Monk…”
She couldn’t finish the call because the shakes hit her then. They hit her like fists, like kicks, and the phone tumbled from her trembling fingers.