Page 16 of Ringer
“Please listen to me.” Gemma spoke in a whisper. Her throat was raw from crying. “My name is Gemma Ives. I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I have parents. They’re looking for me.”
She couldn’t tell whether the woman was even listening. This part of the airport was almost completely dark: a runner of cheap battery-pack lights lit a narrow aisle of floor, like those on an airplane designed to help you find your way to the emergency exit. Around them furniture was lumped and piled and stacked in the darkness. It looked like a whole warehouse had been emptied. The smell was terrible, too. It was so bad it had weight, and form, and even movement. They paused briefly in front of a set of plastic shelves piled with cheap T-shirts and plain cotton pants, laundered to the point of stiffness.
“Laundry day’s Friday,” the nurse said. “You’ll get a replacement soon as you turn in this pair.”
“Please,” Gemma said. She found herself speaking in a whisper, as once again fear flooded into her, poured down her throat like the taste on the air, like the grit of human skin and nails. “I don’t belong here.”
Someone moaned. Then a cry in the dark, quickly stifled. But the sound seemed to find Gemma, to burrow deep in her chest, like a hook. And at the same time her eyes adjusted, she realized that what she’d mistaken for piles of furniture were really people, girls: hundreds of girls, dressed identically, some of them visibly wounded, others so thin they looked like a wreckage of bones; sleeping on the floor, on mattresses, on piles of fabric and tarps, on stacked blankets.
“Nobody belongs here, child,” the nurse said. She was holding her throat. Gemma saw a small gold cross nested between her fingers. “Not even the devil himself.”
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Lyra’s story.
PART II
TEN
KRISTINA IVES SPENT THE FIRST day of her fifty-first year crying, and picking the cuticles of her fingernails until they bled, and then shivering damply in bed, waiting for the Xanax to take effect, and the second day counting all the ugly things she could find on the way to Nashville, Tennessee.
A dead deer, mangled on the side of the highway. A house punched in by age and neglect, spilling its rot onto the porch, as if it had been gutted. Billboards advertising strip clubs, XXX stores, erectile dysfunction clinics.
Since having Gemma, she’d hardly ever traveled: she liked to be home with her things, in the beautiful house with the rugs that wenthush hush, with Rufus and the cats and the pool in summertime where she could lie out with a book, her feet damp with dew and new grass, the hum of a lawn mower in the background like the pleasant buzz of one of her pills.
They had a house in Vail and Geoff hosted clients there several times a year, but she hadn’t been, not since Gemma was a toddler. Though Geoff had urged her to learn to ski, she could never see the point in it, the suiting up and the rentals and the waiting in line to crank all the way to the summit only to plunge down the mountain again.
One time, only one time, he’d convinced her to put Gemma in ski school. She was maybe four years old, so young even she didn’t remember the experience, and Kristina had stood with a crowd of other parents in the lodge while outside a group of fluorescent children made pie-wedges with their skis. No one else was worried—the other mothers and the scattered father drank spiked hot cocoa or went off on runs of their own—but Kristina had stayed at the windowpane, her breath misting the glass, watching the little gob of purple that was her only daughter, funny-faced and precocious with cheeks so fat Kristina had to stop herself from biting them.
She’d read once that during World War II many of the Jews had sewn their precious belongings, jewels and watches and things, into the lining of their coats before fleeing, and she’d immediately understood: Gemma was like that, like a secret, precious thing sewed not into the lining of her coat but into who she was deep down, at her core, as a person.
She saw it even before it happened. Saw Gemma’spuffy-coated arms begin flapping frantically, saw her teeter on her tiny skis. And she saw, at the same time, beneath Gemma’s coat and beneath her skin, to the webbing of her narrow bones and all the fragile organs tucked among them, so easily punctured, ruptured, burst; and she was out the door and running, calling for Gemma to stop, be careful, stop, so that Gemma, looking up at her mother, lost her balance and fell.
So Kristina didn’t go to Vail anymore. They had a place in the Outer Banks, but there, too, she rarely went. Gemma loved it, but Kristina could never keep down images of Gemma drowned in the waves, pummeled by sand, her lungs bloated with seawater. And she had another fear—that she would have to bring Gemma to an unfamiliar hospital, that blood would be drawn, or bones x-rayed, and somehow, the doctors would know. That evidence of Kristina and Geoff’s crime might be encoded in every single one of Gemma’s cells, embedded in the filaments of her DNA.
She’d been in the kitchen, rinsing out stray wineglasses that Geoff must have collected from the deck, when the call came in. Sunday: her favorite day. She never minded washing dishes, even though they had help to do that. She liked the sound of rushing water, the soap-steam clouds, the way the glasses chimed when she tapped them with her nails.
“Gemma?” she answered the phone automatically. No one else would be calling so early on a Sunday.
But it was April. And as soon as Kristina heard the sound of April’s voice, she knew.
“Ms. Ives?” That was a tell, too—April never called her anything but Kristina, not since she was in third grade. “I’m worried about Gemma.”
And then, in a rush, April had told her everything: that Gemma had not, in fact, slept over; that she had gone with Pete to see Lyra down in that tragic little shoe box her husband had shoved Rick Harliss into; that she should have been back already.
She wasn’t back, though, and she wasn’t picking up her phone, and Pete wasn’t picking up, either.
By some miracle, Kristina had managed to locate a telephone number for Rick Harliss, scrawled on a notepad and wedged deep in the junk drawer, along with all the other miscellaneous things they couldn’t stand to look at but knew might prove useful someday.
Rick’s home number just rang and rang, and his cell phone went straight to voice mail.
She went right away to Geoff, as she always did, as she had been trained to do. He had the idea to check Gemma’s debit card activity and see whether she had taken out any money. In the very early morning, Gemma had purchased tickets from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Nashville.In the afternoon, she had taken out two hundred dollars from an ATM in Crossville, Tennessee. Around midnight, someone used her ATM card to check into a Four Crossings Motel in Nashville, and although by this morning that proved to be a false lead—the girl and boy in room 22 had obviously stolen Gemma’s wallet, although they claimed simply to have found it.
Still, they must have stolen itfromGemma. Which meant she had gone to Nashville.
But why? For what reason? And why was her phone dead, and Pete’s too?
Where, for that matter, was Rick Harliss?
You promise you know absolutely nothing about this?she had asked Geoff, after a terrible, sleepless night, half drowning in barbiturate dreams.You swear you had nothing, nothing at all to do with it?
