Page 12 of The Thinnest Air
Day Two
A woman with latex gloves runs swab sticks along the inside of my cheeks as I’m seated in a metal folding chair in Ronan’s office. From here, I can see past the doorway, where he’s fixing himself coffee from a stained machine on a counter next to an almond-colored fridge in a break room.
He takes it black. No cream, no sugar.
My favorite customers back home take their coffee black. They’re the ones who don’t have time for bullshit. They don’t stand at the counter making chitchat about the weather or their upcoming vacation to the Hamptons. They get in line, pay their five bucks, and walk away with their perfect, steaming cup of high-quality caffeine.
I resolve to try to like this detective, as unseasoned as he may be, because he could very well surprise me.
If Harris were here, he’d tell me to stop judging. And I’d remind him that I judge when I’m anxious. When I lose control of my surroundings, I fixate on other people, picking them apart if only for the distraction it provides my frazzled mind. It’s a terrible habit, one I’ve been meaning to break over the years.
“All done, Ms.Ambrose,” the woman says, sealing the swabs in a plastic sleeve.
I don’t thank her. She doesn’t thank me. Gratitude is for happy occasions.
When Ronan returns, he takes a seat at his desk and fires up his computer, which chimes a melancholy jingle, the black screen flickering. The woman leaves a moment later, closing the door behind her, and I watch as he checks his e-mail.
“Were you able to contact that lead?” I ask.
“What’s that?” He peers over his screen at me, as if he’d forgotten I was here. I can only hope he’s so consumed by this case that he’s wrapped up in his own thoughts and unplugged from reality.
“The lead. You got a call ... the tip line ...”
“Right,” he says, tapping his fingers on the desk and directing his attention to me. Grabbing one of those squishy stress balls, he makes a fist around it before leaning back in his chair and scrutinizing me, like he’s trying to figure me out. Maybe it’s a detective thing. Maybe they do it to everyone: stare and examine. Only Ronan still looks like a nice guy, and when a nice guy does an assholeish thing, it takes everything I have not to scream. Closing my eyes for a moment, I think of Harris, imagining him taking my hand and telling me to breathe like he used to do, back when we’d opened our third shop and my neuroticism was at its peak. “They didn’t answer. I left a message. Gave her my cell.”
I couldn’t hide my disappointment if I tried.
He squeezes the ball tighter in his hand, his watchful gaze yet to retire. “You don’t look like her.”
“We’re half sisters,” I say. “She takes after her father’s side; I take after mine.”
Neither of us looks like our mother, and I’ve counted my lucky stars for that every day of my existence. Not that our mother isn’t a sight for sore eyes—she’s beautiful. I just wouldn’t want to look in the mirror every day and see ... her.
“Born and raised in New York,” he states, as if that amuses him, like we’re novelties.
“How do you know?”
“I remember when I talked to her a few years back,” he says. “Said she was from Queens, and I asked her why she didn’t have an accent.”
“Not all of us have accents.”
“Yeah, but it was what she told me that stood out, I guess.” His eyes squint. “She said your mother used to make you watch the nightly news and practice talking like the anchors.”
My eyes fall to the ground as I recall all those dinners around the scratched oak table with the news blaring the day’s tragedies in the background, our mother dishing out Hamburger Helper and rambling on about the importance of speaking like the educated socialites we were never going to be.
“People hear you talking like you’re from Queens and they’re going to judge you, make assumptions about you,” she would say. “And if they’re not judging you, they’re going to be annoyed by you.”
Meredith was a natural, but she was younger. I had eight years on her, which meant eight years of unlearning everything about the way I spoke and replacing it with what felt like an accent.
“That’s Brenda Ambrose for you,” I say.
“You guys close? You and Meredith and your mother?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant to finding my sister.”
“Just trying to examine the case from all angles,” he says, tossing the stress ball on his desk. It rolls behind his keyboard, disappearing. “Evidence is everywhere.”
“Yeah, well, my sister went grocery shopping and vanished. I highly doubt our mother—or my relationship with her—had anything to do with that.” My words slice through the stale office air. “Now, if you’d kindly start looking for my sister and asking important questions to people who might actually know what happened, that’d be great.”
