The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [15]
Charlotte’s neck stiffened as she pummeled the pillows. Swatting at the blizzard of feathers that tickled her neck and face, she wiped the beads of sweat off her forehead. The pillows looked as if they’d been disemboweled. Enough. Enough feeling sorry for yourself, Charlotte. Dragging the dry cleaning into her closet, she wrenched the plastic sheet off a wool jacket and reached for a padded hanger.
Cry me a river, build me a bridge, and get over it! Isn’t that what Vicky’s daughter had said to her mother the night Vicky complained, yet again, about being so frantically busy and tired?
“Busy doing what, Mom?” the girl had asked, eyes flashing with one exquisitely manicured hand on her hip. “Taking care of yourself? That’s pretty much all you do all day, isn’t it?”
Charlotte was stunned. Even if it were sort of true, that wasn’t the point. With a kid like that, Charlotte herself would also be up and working out at the crack of dawn with a body talk practitioner, a yoga instructor, a Reiki teacher, and a guy who rolled hot rocks across her back. In fact, she’d probably bury the kid in hot rocks.
The phone was ringing. Let it go, Charlotte thought. It’s been a long day. Take a bath. Then it rang again. What if it was Pavel, calling from Moscow? She ran into the bedroom, bumping her shin so hard on the edge of the bed that her eyes watered as she picked up.
“Hey! Charlotte, darling. It’s me.”
“Hi, Vicky. I got your message but …”
“Forget the message, Charlotte. I spoke to my daughter this afternoon, and I’m worried sick.”
“Vicky, you’re always worried sick about Rose.” Rubbing her bruised shin, she sat down on her bed. If only she hadn’t picked up … Vicky’s calls went on forever.
“She was caught shoplifting at Bergdorf’s, okay?”
“Jesus,” Charlotte whispered. The kid had just returned from some chaperone-escorted, Shop-Till-You-Drop tweenie tour of Paris. What the hell was she doing shoplifting?
“So what’d she steal?” Charlotte asked, innocently.
“Two 80-dollar books on Buddhism,” Vicky replied. “From the Home department on 7.”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “My God! At least, she has a sense of humor, Vicky. I mean, c’mon! Stealing books on Buddhism?”
“It’s not funny, Charlotte. She told me they were a thank-you gift for Paris.”
“Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts,” Charlotte said, picking up a pair of clippers from inside her bedside table drawer and clipping a hang nail on her pinkie.
“You don’t have children, Charlotte. You can’t imagine how disturbing all this is.”
Charlotte took a deep breath and exhaled. What if Amex really did cut her off? Maybe she could borrow the eight grand from Vicky. The two of them never talked about money, of course. It wasn’t that the rich didn’t enjoy talking about money. They did. They talked about it all the time. But only amongst themselves.
“The thing is,” Vicky was saying. “I’d really like to talk to my daughter, that’s all. Not just about the shoplifting. She’s not eating, either. The other night, she was talking about how cool it was to be ‘ano.’ ”
“Ano?” Charlotte queried.
“Anorexic. They abbreviate everything.”
“ ‘JK, Mom, JK,’ she said after. Just kidding. But honestly, Charlotte. I don’t know what to do. We can’t seem to communicate. She tunes me right out.”
Charlotte laughed out loud. “What planet are you living on, Vicky? Nobody her age communicates, anymore. Not face-to-face.”
Moving into the bathroom, she squeezed her tooth-whitening gel on her mouth plate, still cradling the phone next to her ear as Vicky chattered on. It was faster and easier to plug into iPods, log onto Facebook, or IM or blog and compulsively text while chatting on cell phones. The whole experience of communicating had become, literally, disembodied. But Charlotte was a visual person, so it didn’t bother her that in moving