airplane. I almost expected a voice-over to say 'Mourners in rows twenty-five and higher may now view the body.' Stupid thought, but I let my mind dodge and veer. Anything to get away from this.
Squares stood behind us, last in line. I kept my eyes diverted, but as we moved forward, there was that unreasonable hope again knocking at my chest. I don't think this is unusual. It happened even at my mother's funeral, the idea that it was all somehow a mistake, a cosmic blunder, that I would look down at the casket and it would be empty or it wouldn't be Sheila. Maybe that was why some people liked open caskets. Finality. You see, you accept. I was with my mother when she died. I watched her last breath. Yet I was still tempted to check the casket that day, just to make sure, just in case maybe God changed his mind.
Many bereaved, I think, go through something like that. Denial is part of the process. So you hope against hope. I was doing that now. I was making deals with an entity I don't really believe in, praying for a miracle that somehow the fingerprints and the FBI and Mr. and Mrs. Rogers's ID and all these friends and family members, that somehow they were all wrong, that Sheila was alive, that she had not been murdered and dumped on the side of the road.
But that, of course, did not happen.
Not exactly anyway.
When Edna Rogers and I arrived at the casket, I made myself look down. And when I did, the floor beneath me fell away. I started plummeting.
'They did a nice job, don't you think?' Mrs. Rogers whispered.
She gripped my arm and started to cry. But that was somewhere else, somewhere far away. I was not with her. I was looking down. And that was when the truth dawned on me.
Sheila Rogers was indeed dead. No doubt about that.
But the woman I loved, the woman I'd lived with and held and wanted to marry, was not Sheila Rogers.
49
I did not black out, but I came close.
The room did indeed spin. My vision did one of those in-and-out, closer-and-farther things. I stumbled toward, almost landing in the casket with Sheila Rogers a woman I had never seen before but knew too intimately. A hand shot out and gripped my forearm. Squares. I looked at him. His face was set. His color gone. Our eyes met and he gave me the slightest of nods.
It hadn't been my imagination or a mirage. Squares had seen it too.
We stayed for the funeral. What else really could we do? I sat there, unable to take my eyes off the stranger's corpse, unable to speak. I was overcome, my body quaking, but nobody paid any attention. I was, after all, at a funeral.
After the casket was lowered into the ground, Edna Rogers wanted us to come back to the house. We begged off, blaming the airlines for the tight flight schedule. We slipped into the rental car. Squares started it up. We waited until we were out of sight. Then Squares pulled over and let me lose it.
'Let me see if we're on the same page here,' Squares said.
I nodded, quasi-composed now. Again I had to block, this time muffling the possible euphoria. I did not keep my eye on the prize or the big picture or any of that. I concentrated on the details, on the minutiae. I focused on one tree because there was no way I could handle seeing the whole forest.
'All that stuff we learned about Sheila,' he said, 'her running away, her years on the streets, her selling drugs, her rooming with your old girlfriend, her fingerprints at your brother's place all that '
'Applied to that stranger we just buried,' I finished for him.
'So our Sheila, I mean, the lady we both thought of as Sheila '
'Did none of those things. And she was none of those things.'
Squares considered that. 'Styling,' he said.
I managed a smile. 'Most definitely.'
On the airplane, Squares said, 'If our Sheila is not dead, then she's alive.'
I looked at him.
'Hey,' he said, 'people pay big bucks to soak in this kind of wisdom.'
'And to think I get it for free.'
'So what do we do now?'
I crossed my arms. 'Donna White.'
'The pseudonym she bought from the Goldbergs?'
'Right. Your people only ran an airline check?'
He nodded. 'We were trying to figure out how she got out west.'
'Can you get the agency to widen their search now?'
'Sure, I guess.'
The flight attendant gave us our 'snack.' My brain kept whirring. This flight was doing me a ton of good. It gave me time to think. Unfortunately, it was also giving me time to shift realities, to see the repercussions. I fought that off. I didn't want hope clouding my thinking. Not yet. Not when I still knew so little. But still.
'It explains a lot,' I said.
'Like?'
'Her secrecy. Her not wanting her picture taken. Her having so few possessions. Her not wanting to talk about her past.'
Squares nodded.
'One time, Sheila' I stopped because that was probably not her name 'she slipped and mentioned growing up on a farm. But the real Sheila Rogers's father worked for a company that made garage-door openers. She was also terrified at the very idea of calling her parents because, put simply, they weren't her parents. I took it all to mean a terribly abusive past.'
'But it could just have easily have been someone in hiding.'
'Right.'
'So the real Sheila Rogers,' Squares went on, his eyes looking up, 'I mean, the one we just buried back there, she dated your brother?'
'So it seems.'
'And her fingerprints were at the murder scene.'
'Right.'
'And your Sheila?'
I shrugged.
'Okay,' Squares said, 'So we assume the woman with Ken in New Mexico, the one the neighbors saw, that was the dead Sheila Rogers?'
'Yes.'
'And they had a little girl with them,' he went on.
Silence.
Squares looked at me. 'Are you thinking the same thing I am?'
I nodded. 'That the little girl was Carly. And that Ken might very well be her father.'
'Yeah.'
I sat back and closed my eyes. Squares opened his snack, checked the contents, cursed them.
'Will?'
'Yeah.'
'The woman you loved. Any idea who she is?'
With my eyes still closed, I said, 'None.'
50
