Free Stay With Me by Alison Gaylin Page B

a last-minute trip—a client flew me out. I had told her I’d send her the bag, but she still hasn’t e-mailed an address.”
    “Can you give me the address once she sends it?” Brenna said.
    “Sure.”
    “And can you do me another favor?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Keep writing her. Act like nothing’s wrong.”
    “That will be hard.”
    “I know.”
    “Wish I could ask her where the hell she got that picture.”
    Makes two of us , Brenna thought, all the while slipping into August 31, 1990, lugging her heavy, dark blue vinyl suitcase to the front door of their house on her way to freshman orientation at Columbia. A car horn outside their door: Two honks, short and polite.
    Brenna says, “Must be the cab.”
    “Wait,” Mom says.
    Brenna doesn’t want to. The air-conditioning’s out again and the air in the house is slow and thick and hard to breathe, and besides, she hates the idea of saying good-bye to Mom. Not of leaving her. The actual act of looking into Mom’s eyes and telling her good-bye.
    She turns. Mom is standing closer than she thought. Brenna tenses up, and Mom pulls her into a hug.
    Brenna hugs her back. Maybe I don’t have to say it. Maybe I don’t have to say anything at all.
    Mom’s skin feels cool and sticky. She presses her cheek against Brenna’s and it’s wet. Brenna wonders whether it’s sweat or tears. In her mind, Brenna asks: Do you love me?
    “Here,” Mom whispers. She slips something into Brenna’s hand.
    Brenna pulls away to see it—a slim white envelope. She opens it up. There’s a check inside. Five hundred dollars.
    “That should get you through the first quarter.”
    “Thank you, Mom.”
    There’s something else in the envelope. A picture. Brenna sees Clea’s face in it and looks up, into Mom’s eyes.
    Mom nods.
    “I didn’t know you kept that picture.”
    “Of course I kept it,” Mom smiles. It’s a hard smile. “You took it, Brenna. I’ve saved every picture you’ve taken.”
    Alan said, “Brenna?”
    She dug her fingernails into her palms, and she was back in the present, staring at the picture, at the caption: “MISSING SINCE 1981.”
    “Had you ever seen that picture before?”
    She turned her gaze to Alan. “I was the one who took it.”
    Once she got home, Brenna tried to remember taking that picture of Clea. Like all of her memories of her older sister, though, it was dim in her mind and fading still. Clea stopping to pose in their mom’s kitchen on her way out to . . . what? A birthday party, maybe? A night out with friends?
    Clea hated to be photographed, Brenna remembered that much. Used to throw her hands in front of the camera like a movie star evading paparazzi. Of course, it could have just been Brenna’s camera she wanted to evade. In her teens, Clea had found her little sister so annoying that their mother used to scold her for it—and you could actually see it in the kitchen picture, the way she stared down the camera: the flat eyes, the too-wide, get-it-over-with-already smile. Was I too young and dumb to notice, or did I just not care?
    Brenna put the bag of Clea’s things down on her work desk, along with the business card Alan Dufresne had given her. Then she started through the kitchen, down the hallway, and into her bedroom, all the while lapsing back into a memory she knew would never fade—September 30, 2009. Just last fall, returning home and getting ready for bed after her first meeting with her then-client, Nelson Wentz . . .
    Brenna slips her black sweater over her head, lays it on the bed and folds it, Wentz’s voice still in her brain , the insistence in it, the powerless anger .
    Carol doesn’t have anything she wants to keep from me.
    Brenna has the same thought she had an hour ago, in the Wentzes’ sad, pristine house. How hard does someone have to work to be in that type of denial?
    She yanks off her boots, unbuttons her jeans, slips them down to her stockinged ankles, and kicks them off. As she folds them,