up, because I worked early in the morning.”
Jane said, “Okay. You shouldn’t have done it, even though they probably deserved it. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because that was in another life. That wasn’t you.”
Rita gaped at Jane in disbelief. “Of course it was me.”
Jane shook her head. “I’ll say this another way. Rita Shelford’s life is like a book, and you just read the last page and closed the back cover. It’s over. You can’t go back in and fix anything to make it a prettier story. Starting now, you’re in the next life. In this one, you don’t just have a new future, you have a new past, too. You’re Diane Arthur, and you’ve always been Diane Arthur, so you have to make up what’s happened to Diane Arthur until now, and it will be the only truth.”
“Why can’t Diane Arthur stay with you and Bernie?”
Jane winced. “Why would you want to?”
“I didn’t tell you what it was like to work at his house. The house was big, so they had a nice maid’s room. It had its own bathroom and a window that looked out on the part of the back yard by the fence where nobody but me ever went. The job wasn’t hard. Bernie didn’t go out and get muddy shoes and walk on the carpet. And we liked each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“I would try to clean the places where he wasn’t, and then stay in the kitchen cooking, or at least be out of the living area. But a few times a day we would run into each other. He would drink a cup of coffee, and then bring it in himself and put it in the sink. He’d see me and say, ‘How’s it going, kid?’ If I was doing something big, like waxing this huge floor in the living room, he’d say, ‘It’s too hot to do that today. Why don’t you take a load off? Nobody sees how shiny that is but me.’ ”
Jane noticed that Rita had a good ear. The voice she gave Bernie was unmistakably his. “That’s not exactly a close relationship.”
“But it is,” Rita insisted. “Don’t you see? There were all these other men. There were the two who were always around, younger ones like Danny, but not nice. I don’t know what to call them … ”
“Bodyguards.”
“I guess so. They never talked to me. It was like being a ghost again. And whenever they talked to each other, it was ugly: fuckin’ this, and fuckin’ that, like the word didn’t mean anything at all, just a sound. And the others, the ones who came about once a month, they were worse. They always acted as though they didn’t trust anybody, even to be alive. If I walked through a room while they were in it, they would whirl around and glare at me.”
“They were probably bagmen. They had good reasons to be jumpy.”
“They were the enemy. Bernie and I were on one side, and they were on the other. They didn’t seem to like him any better than they liked me. It was almost as though we were prisoners in our own house.”
“You were,” said Jane. “You just didn’t know it because you didn’t try to leave.”
“But we did know it, sort of. That was how we got to be friends.”
“He said that too—called you his friend,” said Jane. “It’s kind of unusual to see two people so different who feel that way.”
“He’s a special person. He doesn’t seem to look down on you just for being young. He can tell you things—all kinds of things—that you wouldn’t find out unless you were as old as he is and remembered everything. I used to get him to play cards with me, just so he’d tell me stories. He’s so good at games that it doesn’t use up enough of his attention, so he talks and talks. And he remembers so much that it’s just like a movie, only you can stop it whenever you want, and he’ll show you another part that you’re curious about, or go back and let you see everything about one of the people, only it’s all true.” She chuckled at the memory of it. “Pretty true, anyway. And I could tell him things, too, and never worry that he would embarrass me, or tell anyone else. I would get him to go out in the yard with me, like he was taking exercise, and he would listen as long as I wanted, and never give me his opinion unless I asked for it.”
Rita sat in silence for a long time, thinking. “He doesn’t want to act like it in front of you, but he’s the best friend I ever had. Look at the risk he took to find me. How many people would do that?”
“In his profession? Not many,” said Jane.
“Bernie doesn’t have a profession,” said Rita. “He has a good memory. That’s what’s so horrible about those people. They watch you to see what they can take away.” She fell suddenly silent.
“Did they harm you?” asked Jane.
“You mean did they make me have sex with them, don’t you?”
“I guess that’s what I mean,” said Jane.
“They didn’t. Most of them acted like I wasn’t human. One of them—one of the bodyguards—started talking to me, and I would see him staring at me sometimes. He would ask me questions, like whether I had a boyfriend, and stuff. I could tell he was thinking about it.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him about living with the boy from home in Tampa, only I added some things.”
“Like what?”
“That after I left I heard he had AIDS, so I was a little worried because I got tired so easily. After that he didn’t talk to me much.”
Jane said nothing, but she began to feel more optimistic. Rita had an instinct for trouble and an ability to think quickly. Some runners had lived for a long time on less than that.
“I never told Bernie. I didn’t want to worry him.” She sighed. “I miss him.”
“I understand.”
“Then we can go back now?”
“No,” said Jane.
10
Jane took the key out of her purse and unlocked the door of the apartment, then waited for Rita to push the door inward and enter. When Rita was inside, Jane walked to the refrigerator, opened a can of cola and handed it to her, then sat down to wait.
It was like moving a cat from one house to another. The trick was to put butter on the cat’s forepaws. While the cat licked it off, her keen senses would be working, assuring her with every second that the new place was not worse than the old, and was certainly superior to being in a moving car. By the time the butter was gone, she would have given the place her tentative approval.
Jane watched Rita sipping her cola as she walked the living room, examined the kitchen, then climbed the stairs to explore the bedroom. She heard her push aside the blinds in the upper window, and after a few seconds heard the blinds clack against the sill as she released them.
Rita came halfway down the stairs and sat, still sipping. “What am I supposed to say? You already rented it.”
“It’s not a lifetime lease,” Jane announced. “Unless you make a mistake. I was here a couple of years ago, and I remembered it as the sort of place for you. The manager told me there are young women in the other apartments in the building right now, most of them older than you, but not by much. You won’t stand out. There are no obvious attractions in the vicinity for people who might be aware that you’re worth money, or how to cash in: no prostitutes, no street drug sales, no bar scene. The draw is the view of the ocean, which you know, since I heard you move the blinds to look at it.”
“But who am I supposed to be?”
Jane said, “You’re Diane Arthur. You’re a young woman who just moved in. You’re looking for a job, but at least for the present, you’re picky, so you won’t do much except circle ads in the paper. If you talk to your neighbors, don’t exaggerate. You graduated from high school, but you haven’t decided what to do with yourself yet. You’re eighteen, not twenty-five. You’re not an heiress traveling incognito, or an Australian tennis champion recovering from a failed love affair.”
“So I’m supposed to stay dull.”
“Not dull, just not unusual enough to get in trouble. You want to be the sort of newcomer who doesn’t make a great topic of conversation. When people mention you, you’re cute, pleasant, funny. You don’t cause any phones
