The Halo Effect

26

It was going to take the detective twenty minutes to get to my apartment, he said, and I spent one-third of that time figuring out where to hide Cleo’s manuscript pages. It was unlikely that he was bringing a court order to search my house for the book. It was unlikely he even knew that the manuscript existed. But now that I had read it all and studied it so carefully, I knew how explosive it was.

I wanted it put away. Safe.

I wanted it hidden.

The pages had taken on an unearthly glow. They hummed. They emitted an odor. A dog trained in searching for explosives would run right to them.

There was a doll’s cradle on the floor of a storage closet. An old toy of Dulcie’s that she hadn’t looked at in years and wouldn’t ever look at again. It was made of rough-hewn wood, about two feet long, standing about eighteen inches high, filled with a doll resting on a mattress made of flannel. I lifted the doll and the mattress and placed the manuscript on the bottom wooden panel, then put the two-inch-thick bedding back in place.

In the remaining time I exchanged my T-shirt for a fresh one, brushed my hair, washed my face and then put on some lipstick, mascara and blush. I looked at myself in the mirror. The makeup had helped, but I couldn’t erase the worry from my eyes or the fear from my expression. My nerves were showing. I added some concealer under my eyes to try to hide the circles. I wasn’t primping for him; I’d do this even if one of Dulcie’s friends came over. Just to be presentable. Just to be cleaned up.

And then I waited. Getting more and more nervous as each second passed. I went into the living room to make sure I’d put everything away and stopped to look at the photograph of my mother on the étagère. It was a shot of her with me, when I was just two years old. My head against her shoulder, her fingers playing with my hair.

She was still so lovely in that photo. Before the pills and the booze started to wreck her looks. It didn’t really surprise me that I was thinking of her again. Most of the time she was a distant memory that blew across me once or twice a month. But since Cleo had gone missing, since Dulcie had been accepted into drama school, my mother was more on my mind.

She is lying on the couch, and I am trying to pull her back from the limbo of the pills’ effects. Nothing else has worked, and so I decide to act out a story for her. One of the many extended stories I will make up about The Lost Girls.

The Lost Girls was a television show about two orphaned teenagers who were taken in by a married couple-both professors-at an Ivy League school in Boston.

The girls always got into terrible trouble, and then one of them-either my mother or her co-star, Debi Carey-would solve the insurmountable problem and save the day. Mean-while the charming but clueless elderly couple never guessed how close the girls had come to danger and sometimes death.

The Lost Girls ran from the time my mother was sixteen to nineteen, thirty episodes in all. And then it had been dropped. My mother did a few movies after that but was never the success she’d been on TV.

The year I was six, the series was in reruns. And night after night at 7:00 p.m., I sat rapt in front of the TV, not moving, entranced as I watched my very own mother be someone I did not know.

Every Thursday night, for one hour, I watched a kind of magic I could not understand. For years I have been searching for copies of those shows. But the company who owned them has been sold and sold again, and I haven’t been able to track down anyone who knows about them. But I remember them.

And after my mother left my father and took me with her, we went to live in a tiny, messy apartment in a tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Some nights, when my mother lay on the couch in her selfinduced haze-which at eight I did not understand-I retold her the story of each episode. And when I ran out of real ones, I made them up.

Trying so hard to engage her, entertain her, make her sit up and get excited about something. Trying so hard just to get her to talk to me.

After I acted out the stories, I always ended the way the shows did, with me playing the part of my mother’s sidekick and delivering the next-to-last sign-off line.

“And what happened next?” I’d say to the pale, beautiful woman lying on the lumpy couch.

“They all lived happily never after,” she’d say.

Half drugged, half asleep, sick with her addiction, it didn’t matter: she always knew her last line. The line her character had ended every episode with.

Just once I had wanted my mother to tell me a story. For her to be the mommy and me the little girl, with me under the covers and her sitting up.

And in my imagination, when she asked me what happened at the end, I would say something very different: I would smile and say, “They all lived happily ever after.”

Because that, of course, was my dream.

The doorbell rang.

As I walked from the kitchen into the living room, I wondered how it was going to end for Cleo. If there was any chance she would live happily ever after. Or if she would even live.