Though it was Janeal’s intention to find Katie and possibly Robert here, she hadn’t expected them to be the first two people she saw.
And she definitely hadn’t expected to see them doing anything so intimate as kissing.
She stood there at the open door of the yellow cab, clutching her cheap tote bag and feeling frumpier, homelier, and plainer than ever before. Janeal raked a hand through her overdark hair and self-consciously smoothed her wrinkled blouse before catching herself.
With any luck she had appeared appropriately nervous, nothing more.
A flash of light burst behind her eyes, warning of a potential headache. Not now, of all times. She had to hold it off, not that she had any real power over these things. Still, she tried. She closed her eyes and held still for several seconds, and when the flash did not recur, she slowly refocused on her surroundings.
She closed the cab door and pointed herself toward the entrance of the house, risking another look at the pair by the truck.
Robert was definitely Robert, a manlier version of the Robert she had loved. He had filled out, had picked a profession that broadened his shoulders and hardened the lines of his mouth and jaw. He glanced at her and seemed to dismiss her as a stranger, then returned his attention to Katie.
Katie. Janeal wouldn’t have recognized her except for the head of curls, the trademark beauty Janeal had coveted as a teen in spite of her own attractive auburn hair. What kids ever wanted what they had until they were older? But the way Katie stood there with Robert, it could be no one else.
An emotion stabbed Janeal with the sharp pain of surprise. Jealousy.
Jealousy? After all these years? But there they were, all her old feelings for Robert in living color.
Katie was still ruining everything. Everything. A knife of anger plunged into her heart with the jealousy. All her old feelings for Robert came rushing back.
Katie was taller than Janeal recalled, and there was something about her build that seemed unlike her old friend, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. Maybe it was the years, or the clothes. That neck-to-toe coverage was out of place in such a southwestern location on such a blue-sky day, though the mountain air was brisk. Or maybe it was the body language. Katie, too, showed no sign of recognizing Janeal or acknowledging her as the afternoon appointment.
In fact, Katie wasn’t looking at Janeal, though her face turned toward the cab. Janeal found this both irritating and unnerving.
She consciously shut out the sight of the couple, focused on reaching the front door of the house. She had to stay on track.
She saw a doorbell and punched it.
In a reasonable amount of time, a dour-looking woman—otherwise attractive except for the frown—opened the door.
“I’m Janice,” Janeal said, making sure to look down. She’d go for insecure, nervous. “A friend made an appointment—”
“Right. Come in then. I’m Lucille.” She opened the door wider and stepped back. “You’re a little early. Better than late. Are you ill?”
“It’s just a sore throat. Sounds worse than it really is.”
Janeal clutched her tote, following Lucille down a brightly lit tiled hall. It occurred to her then that they might require her to surrender the bag to a search. Or surrender it completely. Of all the details to overlook—
She held on to her mousy demeanor. “You got a bathroom?”
“Go right at the end.” Lucille pointed up the hall. “Second door on your left. Come back here when you’re finished.” Lucille stepped into an office on the front side of the house.
The rest of the house did not quite match the bathroom’s décor: white paint, tarnished chrome fixtures, one-inch black-and-white checkered tiles. Janeal supposed the house had to set its priorities. The pedestal vanity stood under a cracked mirror. There were two bathroom stalls and one shower stall and a freestanding cabinet with a key lock but no handles. Locked, probably.
Janeal tested it.
The doors swung open.
Inside, two shelves, each about ten inches deep, held paper towel bundles, boxes of tissues, tampons and pads, and large plastic bottles of liquid soap.
It would work.
Working quickly, she emptied one shelf and stood her laptop up against the back wall of the cabinet. It was almost too tight, but the snug fit would keep the thing upright. Then she debated between a tampon box—roomier, but there was only one—and a tissue box. There were six of the latter on the bottom shelf. Much safer.
She partially lifted the perforated lid off one box and emptied more than half its contents into her tote. She replaced the tissues with her wallet, PDA, keys, medication, and phone. These she covered with a thin layer of tissues, cramming them back in through the plastic and then returning the cardboard cover to its original spot. She held it in place by putting the box at the bottom of the stack.
Risky, but not as risky as carrying it around with her. She’d come back after she had a room.
She flushed the toilet and washed her hands and returned to Lucille’s office. Lucille sat behind a metal desk under a window overlooking the parking lot. Katie sat in a faded upholstered recliner. She stood when Janeal came in.
“Janice”—Lucille looked at a calendar that also served as a desk blotter— “Janice Regan. This is Katie Morgon, my codirector.”
Katie held out her hand a few inches to the left of where Janeal was standing. “Good to have you here, Janice.”
From this distance, Janeal thought that the woman looked more like her old friend than at first. She registered several facts quickly. The wig. The burns, hidden except on the side of her face by all those clothes. The incredible ordeal Katie must have gone through to have survived.
The blindness.
That Katie couldn’t see was both a relief and a devastation. Janeal’s disguise, such as it was, need trick only one person—Robert—instead of two. But to lose one’s sight after so much other loss! Janeal’s sympathy overtook her worry.
For the first time, the reality of Katie’s survival knocked the wind out of Janeal. The horror of the choice she had made fifteen years ago marched up to the forefront of her mind and started screaming at her as if she’d abandoned Katie an hour ago.
She began to quiver with fear, the surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline acting like a shot of caffeine straight to her heart.
She grasped Katie’s scarred hand and shook it weakly, saying nothing. Her fingertips brushed against a ring Katie wore, and she looked at it to avoid having to look at Katie’s face. Katie’s open, kind, nonjudgmental face.
Janeal’s grasp tightened on Katie’s palm. That ring, six diamonds in a gold band—that was her mother’s wedding ring. The band Janeal had slipped onto her own hand, the band that she believed had fallen off her finger and melted in the flames with everything else.
Six diamonds glinted as if they were living things, one diamond for Jason and Rosa and each of the four children they’d always planned to have—and did. The pristine jewelry represented a cruel contradiction of reality, in which five of the six stones had been crudely pried out of their settings and crushed underfoot while the sixth stubbornly remained, a pointless and off-balanced solitaire.
How Katie had come by it was only one of many questions that could not be asked this moment. Janeal let go. Katie’s hand stayed suspended in the air for an extra second, and Janeal thought she understood what was really happening here, thought she might expose Janeal as an imposter and a criminal and a would-be killer who had abandoned her to smoke and ash.
If Janeal believed in all that cosmic-energy, fabric-of-the-universe, supernatural-sensation hocus-pocus that was trendy, she might have believed Katie had caught a glimpse of Janeal’s innermost mind. That Katie once was a fortuneteller, con or not, sent a shiver up Janeal’s back.
She expected Katie to point a finger and shout, “Don’t think I don’t know exactly who you are!”
Her sympathy for Katie evaporated like droplets of water in a hot cast iron skillet.
Janeal held herself together under the assaulting possibility of what would happen if Katie had one more moment to think— “. . . don’t usually take new residents without a referral from a personal PO,” Lucille said as she tapped her pen tip on the desk blotter, challenging Janeal to defend her desire to be accepted here.
“I . . . I’m waiting on a new one to take my case file,” she croaked. She placed a hand around her raw throat. “They said by Monday I should have an assignment.”
Katie was watching her with those frightening blank eyes. Janeal doubted that her carefully fabricated story would ever pass Katie’s instinctive lie-detector test.
Lucille huffed. “So you have friends in high places.” An accusation. “Lucky you. Here, though, such friends are pretty much worthless. You will not be seeing any friends for the first six months of your stay, during which time you will be expected to attend every session we schedule you for whether you think it applies to you or not. We have a strict rotation work roster and a stricter curfew. Do your work without complaining and you might get to choose your jobs in a year. If you think I am the warden of your prison now, you will think of me as your fairy godmother by the time Frankie has had her way with you.”
Janeal looked for a chair to sink into and found she was standing in front of a well-worn sofa that faced the door.
“If and only if she approves you for work at the end of that time, you may take a job outside the house so long as your shift gets you back here by four thirty on any given day, no excuses.”
Janeal took a deep breath and decided that her chances of slipping under Katie’s radar would be better if she didn’t have to speak, although her illness made her voice nearly unrecognizable. She hoped.
“We conduct random urine tests,” Lucille went on. “You’ll comply on demand, or you’ll be back to using public restrooms within an hour of your refusal. There are no cell phones allowed. No electronic devices. Television time is an earned privilege. So are phone calls. Not that you’ll have anyone to talk to.”
Janeal glanced at Katie, who had returned to her seat in the recliner, so intently focused on her that Janeal had to look away. Her eyes went to the wall by the door. A short bookshelf stood there, and a key rack hung above it. Three of the seven hooks held rings. Van, Kia, Master Room the labels said.
“Let’s see your bag.” Lucille came around to the back side of the desk. She stuck her hand out and waggled her fingers for Janeal to hand it over.
Lucille hefted the tote onto the coffee table and plowed through it.
“You travel light.”
Since it wasn’t a question, Janeal didn’t offer an answer.
“You got a suitcase?”
Janeal shook her head.
“Well, I guess we’ve had people come in here with less than one change of clothes and a head cold.” Lucille picked up some of the tissues Janeal had tossed into the tote. “At least you’ll have something to wear on laundry day. Which reminds me: you don’t get paid around here, but we do have a points system that will allow you to make ‘purchases’ from our donations pile. So you can build up a closet as you go.”
Janeal was about to ask how that worked when Lucille added, “You also have the chance to lose points faster than you rack ’em up.”
Janeal could feel Katie’s cool gaze burning into her soul like some comic book hero’s x-ray vision.
“Where’s your ID?” Lucille asked.
“Stolen,” Janeal said.
“Bogus. I’ve heard it all, Janice. You’ll have to come up with another story.”
“I’m telling the truth. I took a shower at the hostel downtown last week— someone walked right in and took it.”
“You got any money?”
“I—it all went for the cab fare.”
“And how do you plan to get home if we don’t let you stay here?”
Janeal was dumbstruck.
Lucille threw the tote bag down at Janeal’s feet. “If we’re going to start off this relationship by you thinking you can waltz in here and yank my chain, you need your head checked more than most. You play me straight, girl, or you don’t get to play at all.”
It wasn’t often that Janeal was caught without words, but Lucille’s impatience and Katie’s silence—why was she here for this interview?—rendered Janeal undecided about how she should answer. Which woman did she need to play most strategically?
Lucille, she decided. For now. She definitely needed to be allowed to stay.
Janeal rubbed a hand over her face and tried to conjure the closest thing she could to contrition. She hadn’t had a lot of practice with that one.
“I hid the money in the bathroom. I thought you’d take it.”
“How much?”
“Forty-two dollars and seventy-six cents.”
“Well that was an unnecessary little spat we had to get into, then. You keep what you come with, though there isn’t anything to spend it on here.”
Janeal nodded, eyes on her feet.
“How about that ID?”
“I swear I don’t have any ID,” Janeal rasped.
“And that PO?”
“I’m supposed to see him Thursday. Or Friday, I don’t know.” Janeal’s frustration started to rear its head. “I don’t really care if they ever get me someone.”
“She’s a liar,” Lucille said to Katie.
Katie folded her hands in her lap.
“Better than some but not good enough to say I’ve never seen the likes of her before.”
Katie didn’t reply.
“I got enough liars on my hands to keep me all wrapped up for the next six years. I’m not looking to acquire any more.”
This was going far worse than Janeal had envisioned.
“Please”—she dropped her face into her hands and tried to summon tears—“if I can’t stay here I don’t know where I’ll go next . . .”
“Right. Not too many places offer free room and board for six months in exchange for a good attitude.”
Janeal couldn’t find any real tears in her acting repertoire and so resorted to a tantrum. She had not expected this inquisition.
“This is so unfair. I am at the bottom here! No one else is willing to help me get back on my feet, and why?” She stood and yanked her tote off the floor as if to leave. “What have I ever done to you? And you think you—”
“Janice,” Katie said. “Why do you want to be here?”
Janeal whipped her head around to face Katie. She took a deep breath to center herself and refocus. She searched her mind for an appropriate cliché.
“Because I think I have it in me to get it right this time.”
And when it was spoken, she wondered if she had pulled that out of some subconscious desire to apologize.
Or not.
Katie smiled for the first time and looked at Lucille.
“I think I can handle one more liar,” she said.
Lucille shook her head and went back to her desk. “Then have at her.”