'You want to know?' he said, pushing himself out of the sofa. 'That's easy. I'll let you see for yourself.'
He walked around the sofa and motioned Gia to follow. She found him standing over a black trunk with brass fittings. He pulled it a few feet closer to the window and opened the lid.
'There,' he said, rising. 'Go ahead. Take a look. That's all that's left of my little girl.'
Gia knelt and looked but didn't touch. She felt as if she were violating someone, or committing a sacrilege. She saw a stack of unframed photos and forced herself to pick it up and shuffle through them: Shots of Tara at all ages. A beautiful child, even as an infant. She stopped at one with Tara sitting atop a big chestnut mare.
'That was Rhonda, Tara's favorite horse,' Portman said, looking over her shoulder.
But Gia was transfixed on Tara's clothing: a red-and-white checked shirt, riding breeches, and boots. Exactly what she'd been wearing at Menelaus Manor.
'Did... did she wear riding clothes a lot?'
'That's what she was wearing when she disappeared. In colder weather she'd wear a competition coat and cap. Made her look like the heiress to an English estate. God she loved that horse. Would you believe she'd bake cookies for it? Big thick grainy things. The horse loved them. What a kid.'
Gia glanced at Portman and saw the wistful, lost look on his face and knew then he'd had nothing to do with his daughter's death.
She flipped further into the stack and stopped at a photo of Tara beside a trim, good-looking man in his thirties. Their hair and eyes were matching shades of blond and blue. With a start she realized it was her father.
'Yeah, that was me. I was Portman then, now I'm portly man.' He patted his gut. 'It's all the meds they've got me on. Name an antidepressant and I've tried it. Every one of them gives me these carbohydrate cravings. Plus the only exercise I get is moving around this place.' He waved his hand at the tiny apartment. 'Which, as you can imagine, isn't much.'
'You said you worked for Chase?'
''Worked' is right. Not a big job, but a solid one. I made decent money. And I was planning on getting my MBA, but... things didn't work out.'
Gia flipped to the next picture. Tara standing beside a slim, attractive brunette.
'That was Dorothy,' Portman said.
'Her mother.'
Portman shook his head. 'She took Tara's disappearance harder than I did, which is pretty hard to imagine. They were best buds, those two. Did everything together. Dot never recovered.'
Gia was almost afraid to ask. 'Where is she now?'
'In a hospital room, hooked up to a feeding tube.'
'Oh, no!'
Portman seemed to go on automatic pilot as his eyes unfocused and his voice became mechanical. 'Car accident. Happened in 1993, on the fifth anniversary of Tara's disappearance. Ran into a bridge abutment on the LIE. Permanent brain damage. Because of the speed she was going, the insurance company said it was a suicide attempt. Our side said it was an accident. We met somewhere in the middle but it still didn't come near covering her ongoing medical expenses.'
'What do you think happened?'
'I don't know what happened, but what I think is between me and Dot. Anyway, I couldn't afford to pay for all the care she needed-I mean I couldn't lose the house because I had to think of Jimmy who I had to raise all by myself then.'
'Jimmy?'
'Flip ahead a few photos. There. That's Jimmy.'
Gia saw Tara next to a dark-haired boy with a gap-toothed smile.
'He looks younger.'
'By two years. He was five there.'
'Where is he now?'
'In rehab. Booze, crack, heroin. You name it.' He shook his head. 'Our fault, not his.'
'Why do you say that?'
'Jimmy was six-and-a-half when Tara disappeared. We forgot about him when that happened. Everything was Tara, Tara, Tara.'
'That's understandable.'
'Not when you're six. And then seven. And then eight-nine-ten, and your family life is an ongoing wake for your sister. Then at eleven he loses his mother. I'm sure he heard the suicide talk. And to him that meant his mother had abandoned him, that her grief over her dead daughter was greater than her love for her living son. He was too young to understand that maybe she hadn't thought it through, that maybe it was the worst day of her life and some crazy impulse took control.'
Gia saw his throat working as he looked away. She couldn't think of anything to say except, You poor man, that poor boy. But that sounded condescending, so she waited in the leaden silence.
Finally Joe Portman sniffed and said, 'You know, you can keep hope alive for only so long. When we hit the five-year mark and no Tara, we had to... we had to accept the worst. Maybe if I'd been with her more that fifth anniversary day, Dot might have got past it, and she'd still be up and about today. But everything must have looked too black to go on-maybe just for a few minutes or an hour, but that was enough. So now Jimmy was motherless and his father still wasn't paying attention to him, what with all that Dot needed.' Portman rubbed his face, as if massaging his jowls. 'Jimmy's first bust-the first of many-was at age thirteen for selling marijuana and it was all downhill from there.'
Gia felt a growing knot in her chest. The pain this man, this family had been through... no wonder he was on medication.
'Then I learned I had to divorce Dot.'
'Had to?'
'To save the house and-so I hoped at the time-to save Jimmy, I had to divorce her. That way she'd be without support and could qualify for welfare and be covered by Medicaid. The irony of it is, if I'd waited a couple of years it wouldn't have been necessary.'
'You mean they changed the law?'
'No.' He smiled, but it was a painful grimace. 'I stopped going to work. Jimmy was in a juvenile detention center at the time and I was alone in the house, and I just couldn't get myself out of bed. And if by some miracle I did, I couldn't leave the house. I kept the shades down and the lights off and just sat in the dark, afraid to move. Finally the bank let me go. And then I lost the house, and wound up on welfare and on Medicaid, just like Dot.'
Almost numb from the torrent of pain, Gia placed the photos back in the trunk and looked around for something that might elicit happier memories. She picked up a short stack of vinyl record albums. The cover of the first featured a close-up of a cute red-haired girl with a wistful stare.
Gia heard Joe Portman let out a short laugh, not much more than a 'Heh.'
'Tiffany. Tara's favorite. She played those records endlessly, from the moment she got home.'
Gia flipped the top one over. She remembered Tiffany, how she toured shopping malls at the start of her career. What were her hits? She did new versions of old songs. Hadn't she redone an early Beatles tune? Gia scanned through the song list...
She gasped.
'What's wrong?' Portman said.
'Oh, nothing.' Gia swallowed, trying to moisten her dry tongue. 'It's just that I'd forgotten that Tiffany remade 'I Think We're Alone Now.''
'Oh, that song!' Portman groaned. 'Tara would sing it day and night. She had a great voice, never missed a note, but how many times can you listen to the same song? Drove us crazy! But you know what?' His voice thickened. 'I'd give anything in the world-my life-to hear her sing it again. Just once.'
If Gia had harbored any subconscious doubts that the entity in Menelaus Manor was Tara Portman, they'd vanished now.
She dug deeper into the trunk and came up with a plush doll she immediately recognized.
'Roger Rabbit!'
