decided the police weren’t doing all they could to find her daughter. Her lawyer handed the case to our chief investigator, Sharon McCone, who passed it on to me, Rae Kelleher.
So on a Monday morning in early November I was sitting in Donna Conway’s drafty living room (God, didn’t she know about weather stripping?), sipping weak instant coffee and wishing I didn’t have to look at her sad, sad eyes. If it weren’t for her sadness and the deep lines of discontentment that made parentheses around the corners of her mouth, she would have been a pretty woman-soft shoulder-length dark hair and a heart-shaped face, and a willowy body that made me green with envy. Her daughter didn’t look anything like her, at least not from the picture she gave me. Adrian had curly red-gold hair and a quirky little smile, and her eyes gleamed with mischief that I took to be evidence of an offbeat sense of humor.
Adrian, Donna Conway told me, had never come home two weeks ago Friday from her after-school job as a salesclerk at Left Coast Casuals at the huge Ocean Park Shopping Plaza out near the beach. Turned out she hadn’t even shown up for work, and although several of her classmates at nearby McAteer High School had seen her waiting for the bus that would take her to the shopping center, nobody remembered her actually boarding it. Adrian hadn’t taken anything with her except the backpack she usually took to school. She hadn’t contacted her father; he and his new wife were living in Switzerland now, and the police there had checked them out carefully. She wasn’t with friends, her boyfriend, or her favorite relative, Aunt June. And now the police had back burnered her file, labeled it just another of the teenage disappearances that happen thousands and thousands of times a year in big cities and suburbs and small towns. But Donna Conway wasn’t about to let her daughter become just another statistic-no way! She would pay to have Adrian found, even if it took every cent of the equity she’d built up in the house.
I’d noticed two things about Donna while she was telling me all that: She seemed to harbor the usual amount of malice toward her ex’s new wife, and an even larger amount toward Adrian’s Aunt June.
On Monday I went by the book: talked with the officer in Missing Persons assigned to Adrian’s case; talked with the classmates who had seen her leaving McAteer that Friday; talked with her supervisor at Left Coast Casuals and the head of security at Ocean Park Plaza. Then I checked out the boyfriend, a few girlfriends, and a couple of teachers at the high school, ran through the usual questions. Did Adrian use drugs or alcohol? Had she been having romantic problems? Could she be pregnant? Had she talked about trouble at home, other than the obvious? No to everything. Adrian Conway was apparently your all-American average, which worked out to a big zero as far as leads were concerned. By nightfall I’d decided that it was the old story: gone on purpose, for some reason all her own; a relative innocent who probably hadn’t gotten far before becoming somebody’s easy victim.
Sad old story, as sad as Donna Conway’s eyes.
It was the memory of those eyes that made me go back to take a second look at Adrian’s room on Tuesday afternoon-that, and the thought that nobody could be as average as she sounded. I had to find out just who Adrian Conway really was. Maybe then I could locate her.
I started with the collage wall. Dark purple paint that had stained the edges of the white ceiling and splotched on the cream carpet. Over that, pictures cut from glossy magazines-the usual trite stuff that thrills you when you’re in your teens. Sunsets and sailboats. Men with chiseled profiles and windblown hair; women in gauzy dresses lazing in flower-strewn meadows. Generic romance with about as much relationship to reality as Mother Goose.
But over all that were the words. They leaped out in bold type: black, white, red and other colors. GO FOR IT! HOT. GONE FOREVER. STOLEN MOMENTS. FEAR. YES, NO, MAYBE. LOST. THE RIGHT STUFF. WHAT’S IN/WHAT’S OUT. FLASH, COLOR, CURVES, SPLASH, JUST DO IT! And many more…
Words as typical as the pictures, but interesting because they seemed important to a young woman who lived in a house where there wasn’t a single book, unless you counted her school texts and her mother’s stacks of mostly unread paperbacks on self-improvement.
Now, I’m no intellectual giant. I scraped through Berkeley by the skin of my teeth, and for years afterwards all I could make myself read were shop-and-fucks. I still don’t read what passes for literature these days, but I do get mighty uncomfortable in a place where aren’t any old dust-catchers-as my grandmother used to call them-lying around. Apparently Adrian was fond of the written word, too.
Tacked, nailed, and glued to the words-but never completely covering them-was the junk. A false eyelash, like the hairy leg of a sci-fi spider. A lacy red bra, D-cup, with the nipples cut out. A plastic tag like the stores attach to clothing to prevent shoplifting. A lid from a McDonald’s carry-out cup, Coke-stained straw still stuck through the opening. Broken gold neck chain, pair of fake plastic handcuffs, card with ink smudges on it that looked like fingerprints. Egret feather, dismembered doll’s arm, syringe (unused). Lottery ticket with 7s rubbed off all in arrow, $2.00 value unclaimed. And much, much more…
Not your standard teenage memory wall. A therapy wall, as Adrian’s mom had put it? Maybe. I didn’t know anything about therapy walls. The grandmother who raised me would have treated me to two years of stony silence if I’d trashed my room that way.
Donna Conway was standing in the door behind me. She must have felt my disapproval, because she said, “That wall was Adrian’s only outlet for her pain. She adored her father. After he left us, she needed a way to begin healing.”
So why didn’t she hire out to a demolition company? I thought. Then I scowled, annoyed with myself. Next thing you knew, I’d sound just like my boss, Sharon McCone. The generation gap wasn’t something I needed to leap yet.
Donna was watching my face, looking confused. I wiped the scowl off and said, “Just thinking. If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend some time alone with the wall.” Then I started to blush, hearing how truly stupid that sounded.
She didn’t seem to notice. Maybe because her daughter had put a private part of herself into the wall, it had become a sort of being to her. Maybe people who were “rediscovering and healing” themselves, as she’d said she was, were either too sensitive or too vulnerable to make fun of other people who expressed sudden desires to commune alone with inanimate objects. Whatever, she just nodded and left, closing the door so the wall and I could have complete privacy.
I sat down on Adrian’s brass daybed, kicked off my shoes, and drew my legs up on the ruffly spread. Them I took a good look at the mess on the wall. It had been a long-term project. Adrian started it, Donna had told me, the day the divorce papers were served. “We made an occasion of it,” she said. “I had champagne and caviar, Adrian had coke and a pizza. We painted. I guess it was the champagne that made me paint the edges of the rug and ceiling.”
Now I replayed that. She hadn’t painted the rug and ceiling because she was drinking champagne; the champagne had made her do it. So perfectly in tune with the philosophies of some of the books I’d glimpsed in passing. This was a household where little responsibility was ever assigned or acknowledged. Not healthy for an adult, and definitely bad for a teenager.
Back to the wall, Rae. You should be able to decipher it-after all, you were a psych major.
First the purple paint. Then the layer of pictures. Idealized, because she was trying to look beyond the bleak not to a better future. Next the layer of words. She was trying to talk about it, but she didn’t really know how. So she used single words and phrases because maybe she wasn’t ready for whole sentences. Hadn’t worked through her feelings enough for whole thoughts.
Finally the layer of junk. Pretty ordinary stuff, very different from the pictures. Her feelings were more concrete, and she was trying to communicate them in concrete form. Unconsciously, of course, because doing it deliberately would be too sophisticated for a kid who’d never been in therapy. Too sophisticated for you, Rae-and you
Back to
I left the room and found Donna in the kitchen, warming her hands around a cup of tea. “What were the last things Adrian put up on her wall, do you know?” I asked.
For a moment she looked blank. Then she shook her head. “I never looked at the wall before she left. It was her own private thing.”
“You never talked about it?”
“No.”
