White Oleander - Janet Fitch [192]
Why couldn’t he sleep here and paint there? Other artists had studios. If it was too small for him, he could at least come home at night. She was afraid to think it was just an excuse. That he’d decided, finally, he didn’t want to be with her anymore. She yearned to call him but hated the sound of the phone ringing, ringing, knowing that he might be standing right there, not picking up, knowing it was her.
She sat in his chair by the window, overlooking the hills, Echo Park, Silverlake, and beyond: the Hollywood sign, Griffith Park. The observatory’s green copper domes stood out perfectly clear against the pale blue winter sky. She loved to sit in this chair with him, her arms around his neck, drinking his smell. She pressed her face to the waffled coarseness of the chair back, trying to smell it, her eyelashes fluttering against the skin of her cheek. Catching then losing it.
Still stoned from the Spider, she shuffled back into the kitchen, drank a glass of milk standing up at the sink, peeled a finger-sized banana. She tried not to look at the wooden breakfast nook with its cutout hearts, where they ate their meals, and the painting that hung there, her at the old stove, the light from the kitchen window pouring over her. When he was the one who did all the cooking. She couldn’t do more than heat soup from a can.
She went into the bedroom and lay on the bed, the fragrant linens that still smelled of their last lovemaking, their painting of Montmartre on all the four walls. She kicked off her shoes and crawled under the covers, white on white in the colorless light. It was almost Christmas. She needed to finish making his shirt, with the stripes cut horizontally, to make it unusual. Green to match his eyes. Maybe she would find him some sheet music at one of those little places on Hollywood Boulevard, dirty Twenties blues, all new jelly roll and cakewalking babies from home. She could decorate the house in paper snowflakes, hang them from the ceiling, thick as leaves. How surprised he ’d be when he came through the door and saw them. Of course he’d be back. Just another day or two.
She was thinking about the snowflakes when the phone rang out in the living room. Flinging herself out of bed so fast her head reeled, she got to the phone and grabbed it before the third ring. “Michael, thank God, I —”
“Excuse me, this is Inspector Brooks . . .”
Some government fuckhead.
“I’m from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. To whom am I speaking, please?”
Fuck. Oh, Jesus. The crank. The last time she’d seen her sister, Luanne had been down to ninety pounds. Though it could be Jimmy, or Tommy. Any of them. “This is Josephine Tyrell. What happened?”
“Your phone number was found on a motel registration. We’re in the process of running fingerprints, but tell me, has there been someone missing?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
She heard the shuffling of papers. “White male. Registered as Oscar Wilde.”
All she heard was the roar of blood in her ears.
“Miss Tyrell?”
She could barely hold the phone. All the strength had gone out of her arms.
“Do you have any idea who this person might be?” said the voice on the other end, as if nothing had changed.
“Yes,” she said. “No.” She sat down on the furry couch before she fell. “I don’t . . .”
“The person you’re thinking of, how old is he?”
She searched for her voice. “Twenty-two.”
“Height?”
“About six feet,” she whispered.
“Weight?”
She didn’t know his weight. They’d never had a scale. “Skinny.”
“Eye color?”
“Green.” Please let him say brown.
“Scars or tattoos?”
She thought of his body. She ran her mind over it like fingers. “A scar, on his right hand. Between the thumb and first finger.” She rubbed her face, trying not to drop the phone, trying to listen through the roaring static in her head. “A mole, on