“No, ma’am,” he says. “I don’t mean to offend, but I don’t believe in psychics.”
“Then why did Nolan say you told him about Mr. Budowitz?”
“All I did was relay a message,” he says. “Mr. Budowitz approached me.”
Lyla’s eyes widen, but only for the tiniest instant.
“Did you go to see him?” Aziz asks. “Was he helpful?”
Lyla gives him a slight smile and shakes her head slowly. “You should trust in your belief system,” she says. “He wasn’t helpful at all.”
Lisa. Lisa. Leeeesaaa . . .
Lyla grips the steering wheel, the psychic’s voice looping through her mind, the shrill, familiar punch of it. She’s alone in the parked SUV, staring at that cheap sign. She’s told no one that she’s left the house, so she needs to do this fast. In less than an hour, Nolan will be done with his workout, and she doesn’t want him looking for her.
She opens the car door, then stands next to it, steadying herself. Mr. Budowitz approached me. That’s what Aziz had told her. Carl Budowitz, itinerant psychic, had spotted a big, bald, terrifying-looking man standing in the checkout line at the health food store the previous afternoon and clocked him as Lylan’s bodyguard. He strode up to Aziz without hesitation or fear. I know who you work for, he had told him, pressing a purple business card into his hands. I need to speak to them. I’ve been getting visions. They relate to their daughter. “He walked as though he had purpose,” Aziz had said to Lyla. It was why he hadn’t figured him for just another crisis opportunist and told Nolan about him instead. It was that driven, determined step.
He was determined all right, Lyla had told him. He was determined to rip us off.
Good thing you saw through him, ma’am.
“Good thing.” Lyla slams the door to the SUV and hurries across the empty street. By the time she gets to the door, it’s open, Carl Budowitz standing in it, as though he’s been expecting her. Apparently, he has no need for a doorbell.
She pushes him inside. Shuts the door behind her. She had planned on staying calm, as though she has nothing to hide, but she can no longer control herself. The gift has failed her. Lyla’s fingers grasp Carl’s thin T-shirt. She grabs him by the shoulder, her nails digging into his skin. “Where is Fidelity?”
Carl gapes at her, like someone watching a movie.
She shoves him to the ground. The fall is almost graceful. When he hits the cement floor, a grim smile plays at his lips.
“What do you want?” Lyla rasps. “Money? How much?”
“What?”
“You want a book deal? Your own TV series? I know people. I can make it happen.”
“I don’t want any of those things.”
“Bullshit.”
“Spirits speak to me. They tell me truths. I have to—”
“Where is Fidelity? Where are you keeping her?”
He says nothing.
“Tell me!” Lyla’s throat is raw. Her muscles are clenched and coiled, her hands balled into fists. She closes her eyes and takes a long, shuddering breath. Calm, calm, calm . . . When she opens them, Carl hasn’t moved.
“Look,” she says. “I don’t know who you are or what your deal is.” She crouches on the floor. She speaks quietly. “The one thing I do know is that you’re trying to scare me.”
Lyla kneels next to Carl. Moves in close enough for him to feel her breath on his skin. Through the beaded curtain, the sunlight warms the back of her neck. She uses it to get into character. I’m in control. I have the power. She makes herself stare into those laser-blue eyes, and she gives him the look, the Lyla Look. “I don’t scare, Carl.”
He stares back at her. “I can’t help the fact that I can see what you are.”
“Where is she?”
“I told that bodyguard the truth. I had a vision.”
“Where is Fidelity?”
“I keep having visions. They’re getting clearer, every day. But they’re not telling me where Fidelity is. They’re telling me who she is. Who you are.”
“Who the fuck are you? What do you want?”
“It’s a gift I didn’t ask for,” he says. “You have to believe me. I don’t want to know the truth. I never want to know the truth. But the truth finds me. And it won’t leave me alone until I . . . reveal it.”
Lyla lifts herself from the floor, her gaze darting around the dusty space. She sees a door in the back corner of the room and hurls herself at it, throwing it open. “Fidelity?” she shouts. “Are you in there?”
The room is small and dark. She finds a light switch and flicks it on, but all she sees are a few cardboard boxes, a sleeping bag on the floor next to a faded rug with a Mexican print, a paperback Carlos Castaneda book lying on top of it. The only other things in the room are the huge crystals, placed around the sleeping bag like sentries. The largest one is close to a foot tall, jagged as an iceberg, and pink. Rose quartz.
There’s nothing in this room that would belong to Fidelity or to any little girl. She whirls around, looking for more doors, a staircase leading up or down. She throws herself against the walls, pressing against them, shouting Fidelity’s name. But this isn’t a movie, and she isn’t a heroine. She presses her forehead against the wall, wanting to cry, to collapse. The words scrape at her throat. “Where is my daughter?”
She feels warmth at her back. Carl is standing now, and when he speaks, it is in a voice that’s quiet and calm enough to be a guide for meditation. “She’s not your daughter,” he says. “You know that, Lisa.”
He had to have been a con artist. A blackmailer. A bad guy with a plan. How else would he have known the name that Lyla had used during her lost year spent homeless on the streets of Toronto? How else would he have been able to imitate a voice she hasn’t heard in nine years?
Lisa! Leeesaaaaa, what are you doing?
Carl sounded exactly like her, a girl whose name Lyla had once known. A girl with short, spiky hair and rough hands and a bad temper. A homeless, hysterical girl with a beautiful baby who was suffering because of her . . . You seem stressed, Lyla had said back then. Please don’t take it out on the baby. I can help you take care of her. Let’s travel together.
You look so familiar. Do I know you?
I have one of those faces. My name is Lisa.
“Were you there too, Carl? Did you follow the three of us? Were you hiding in the public bathroom? Has it taken you all these years to track me down?”
Lyla is in her car now. Speaking to no one. Asking questions no one can answer, not anymore. She’s on her way home, but she’s taking the long way, following the body of water that runs through these western Hudson Valley towns. The Esopus River the locals call it, though it’s always struck Lyla as strange, calling it a river when it’s so slim and weak in parts—a creek, really. Calling the Esopus a river is like calling Carl a psychic, or that girl a mother. They’re frauds. All of them.
She never deserved that baby. What mother dresses a daughter like that? A T-shirt at least three sizes too big, Thomas the Tank Engine on the front. Everyone knows that Thomas the Tank Engine is for boys.