How dark and stupid it was to be mangled and strange, to be no particular shape, to have no self when life was stretching out before her. Jule had many rare talents. She worked hard and really had so damn much to offer. She knew all that.
So why did she feel worthless at the same time?
She wanted to call Imogen. She wished she could hear Immie’s low laugh and her run-on sentences spilling out secrets. She wished she could say to Imogen, I’m scared. And Immie would say, But you’re brave, Jule. You’re the bravest person I know.
She wished Paolo would come and put his arms around her, telling her as he had once that she was a top-notch, excellent person.
She wanted there to be someone who loved her unconditionally, someone who would forgive her anything. Or better, someone who knew everything already and loved her for it.
Neither Paolo nor Immie was capable of that.
Still, Jule remembered the feel of Paolo’s lips on hers, and the smell of Immie’s jasmine perfume.
Wearing the black wig, Jule went downstairs to the Cabo Inn’s business office. She had thought out her strategy. The office was closed this time of night, but she tipped the desk clerk to open it for her. On the computer, she booked a flight out of San José del Cabo to Los Angeles for the next morning. She used her own name and charged it on her usual credit card, the same one she’d been using at the Playa Grande.
Then she asked the clerk where she could buy a car for cash. He said there was a dealer who worked out of a backyard who could sell her something in the morning for American dollars. He wrote down an address, on Ortiz off Ejido, he said.
Noa was tracking credit cards. She had to be, or she’d never have found Jule. Now the detective would see the new charge and go to LA. Jule herself would buy a car for cash and drive toward Cancùn. From Cancùn, she’d make her way eventually to the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, where there were loads of Americans who never showed their passports to anyone.
She thanked the clerk for the information about the car dealer. “You’re not going to remember our conversation, are you?” she said, pushing another twenty across the counter to him.
“I might,” he said.
“No you won’t.” She added a fifty.
“I never saw you,” he said.
The sleep was bad. Even worse than usual. Dreams of drowning in warm turquoise water; dreams of abandoned cats walking across her body as she slept; dreams of strangulation by serpent. Jule woke up screaming.
She drank water. Took a cold shower.
Slept and woke up screaming again.
At five a.m., she stumbled to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and lined her eyes. Why not? She liked makeup. She had time. She layered concealer and powder, added smoky shadow, then mascara and a nearly black lipstick with a gloss over it.
She rubbed gel into her hair and got dressed. Black jeans, boots again, and a dark T-shirt. Too warm for the Mexican heat, but practical. She packed her suitcase, drank a bottle of water, and stepped out the door.
—
Noa was sitting in the hallway, her back against the wall, holding a steaming cup of coffee between her hands.
Waiting.
END OF APRIL, 2017
LONDON
Seven weeks earlier, at the end of April, Jule woke up in a youth hostel on the outskirts of London. There were eight bunks to a room: thin mattresses, topped with regulation white sheets. Sleeping bags lay on top of those. Backpacks leaned against the walls. There was a faint reek of body odor and patchouli.
She’d slept in her workout clothes. She eased out of bed, laced her shoes, and ran eight miles through the suburb, past pubs and butcher shops that were still shuttered in the early light. On return, she did planks, lunges, push-ups, and squats in the hostel common room.
Jule was in the shower before her roommates woke up and started using the hot water. Then she climbed back into her top bunk and unwrapped a chocolate protein bar.
The bunk room was still dark. She opened Our Mutual Friend and read by the light on her phone. It was a thick Victorian novel about an orphan. Charles Dickens wrote it. Her friend Imogen had given it to her.
Imogen Sokoloff was the best friend Jule had ever had. Her favorite books were always about orphans. Immie was an orphan herself, born in Minnesota to a teenage mama who had died when Immie was two. Then she’d been adopted by a couple who lived in a penthouse on New York’s Upper East Side.
Patti and Gil Sokoloff were in their late thirties at the time. They couldn’t have children, and Gil’s legal work had long included volunteer advocacy for kids in the foster care system. He believed in adoption. So, after several years on wait lists for a newborn baby, the Sokoloffs declared themselves open to taking an older child.
They fell in love with this particular two-year-old’s fat arms and freckled nose. They took her in, renamed her Imogen, and left her old name in a file cabinet. She was photographed and tickled. Patti cooked her hot macaroni with butter and cheese. When little Immie was five, the Sokoloffs sent her to the Greenbriar School, a private establishment in Manhattan. There, she wore a uniform of green and white and learned to speak French. On weekends, little Immie played Lego, baked cookies, and went to the American Museum of Natural History, where she loved the reptile skeletons best. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays and, when she grew up, had an unorthodox bat mitzvah ceremony in the woods upstate.
The bat mitzvah became complicated. Patti’s mother and Gil’s parents did not consider Imogen Jewish, because her biological mother had not been. They all pushed for a formal conversion process that would put off the ceremony for a year, but instead Patti left the family synagogue and joined a secular Jewish community that did ceremonies at a mountain retreat.
Thus it was that at age thirteen, Imogen Sokoloff became more conscious of her orphan status than she ever had been before, and began reading the stories that would become a touchstone of her interior life. At first she went back to the orphan books she’d been pushed to read in school. There were a lot of those. “I liked the clothes and puddings and the horse-drawn carriages,” Immie told Jule.
Back in June, the two of them had been living together in a house Immie rented on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. That day, they drove to a farm stand where you could pick your own flowers. “I liked Heidi and God knows what other dreck,” Immie told Jule. She was bent over a dahlia bush with a pair of scissors. “But later, all those books made me puke. The heroines were so effing cheerful all the time. They were paragons of self-sacrificing womanhood. Like, ‘I’m starving to death! Here, eat my only bakery bun!’ ‘I can’t walk, I’m paralyzed, but still I see the bright side of life, happy happy!’ A Little Princess and Pollyanna, let me tell you, they are selling you a pack of ugly lies. Once I realized that, I was pretty much over them.”
Finished with her bouquet, Immie climbed up to sit on the wooden fence. Jule was still picking flowers.
“In high school I read Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, et cetera,” Immie went on. “They’re, like, the edgy orphans.”
“The books you gave me,” Jule said, realizing.
“Yeah. Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She’ll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting.”