After I'm Buried Alive Read online

  But Beth Ellen hadn’t missed my expression. She unexpectedly reached out and touched my arm. “I’m sorry for your loss. Both parents in three years, Vince was devastated by your father’s death. He couldn’t have gotten through it without you. He always said you were indispensable.” She reassured me.

  I nodded and let her comment stand. Vincent’s people at American Interest Insurance were not often given to sentimentality. I suppose it was because they had all heard too many sad stories and were professionally required to make the hard decisions anyway.

  Or it was that their nature first and the insurance industry was the best way to express it?

  Either way, I let her be, for a few seconds, human. I nodded and in turn, touched her arm. “Thank you, Beth Ellen, that means a lot to me.” That she was helping me mourn another person entirely was beside the point.

  I passed my sister-in-law, Tina. She was holding court, gesturing with her half-filled champagne glass. “All the food and drink is gourmet.” She emphasized the word, careful to not accidentally pronounce the T. “It’s not like those enormous ships with the kiddie slides and the all-night entertainment and the all-you-can-eat midnight buffets.” She shuddered. “We will be treated well. It’s very exclusive, you know.”

  I didn’t hear the next question. It was pitched below the appreciative murmurs.

  “Oh, the boys? Of course, we cannot take them out of school. Vic will take care of them. So helpful! She is indispensable, don’t know how we would have pulled this off without her.”

  I shook my head; it was the first I had heard of a cruise.

  I dropped off my glass and more gathered dishes in the kitchen sink. Another compatriot of American Interest Insurance accosted me. “You must be Vic. I’ve heard so much about you these last few years.”

  The woman was much younger, probably early thirties and ramping up her career. She wore no makeup; her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail.

  “I’m Mary Sullivan.” She thrust out her hand and, out of habit, I took it. She pumped it viciously and leaned in to talk to me, as in confidence.

  “What a night, right? Forty years with the same company!”

  “He started when he was twenty-five.” Same year he and his first wife married. It lasted until Vincent, forty-five, and Tina, twenty-five, met at a company party. Love at first sight, a chance at a new life, blah, blah, blah. They leveraged their relationship into the perception of the perfect power couple. She was an attorney; he, rising through the ranks in American Interest Insurance one rung at a time. Hardly anyone stays with one company longer than five years, but these two stuck it out, because they always finished what they start. I’m not surprised they have a plan and that it was so quickly executed; they have been talking about retirement since they met. Needless to say, the surprise gift of Matt and Chris, one after the other, derailed the dream. Tina and Vincent were forced to pivot.

  But the boys also allowed Vincent into our mother’s good graces, Vance already had the girls, precious and precious, now it was Vince’s turn.

  “Look at your brothers, steady jobs, homes. Those beautiful babies.” Mom would lean back in her chair, exhausted by her accolades. “If only you had married, you would know the same happiness.”

  For my new friend Mary, all that leaning in must have pulled something. She winced and settled back on her low-heeled shoes. “Sorry, I pulled a muscle coaching the soccer match yesterday.”

  “You have children?”

  “Yes, two girls. They just made senior-junior varsity team. It’s a traveling team, you know? Every weekend in the car, I barely have time for myself.” She was cheerful about it, I credited her for that.

  “Do you have children?”

  I shook my head and uttered the same phrase repeated ad nauseam during the last three years. “I haven’t been blessed.”

  She frowned, like being child free was a personality flaw. “That’s too bad.”

  No, it’s too bad I had gin for dinner last night.

  Chapter 2

  Suddenly, everything changed.

  I’ve always wanted to say that.

  Not that life hadn’t presented those moments in the past. The day I met Max, the day I met Miranda. The day I locked eyes with Nic, the day my father fell and broke his hip. But Miranda was not a hip, something that wore out, something that could be surgically removed and replaced. Miranda was for always. She was indomitable and unstoppable. A beauty in her youth, she was one of the lucky ones who gathered up her fifteen minutes of fame and parlayed them into a career. She had class, charisma, and two mornings ago, extra color.

  “You look a little green around the edges.” I squinted at my computer screen.

  Out of the blue she had pinged me and set up a Skype chat. She looked like she too had been drinking gin for dinner. Who do you think I learned it from?

  She twirled something just below the camera and seemed to scrutinize her monitor as closely as I had.

  She ignored my comment about her appearance. Models needed to do that; otherwise the criticism is so crushing it’s difficult to get out of bed.

  “How are you? Wasn’t last night Vince’s retirement party? And,” she rushed forward as she did. “Shouldn’t it have been yours as well? We discussed this.” She frowned, but after years of Botox, it was hard for her to make a really intense scrunchy face.

  We had. She was one of my first calls after Mother died. What would I do? I think I asked that question in a reasonable tone, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I was pretty strung out. It felt like not only was I abruptly an orphan, I was abruptly unemployed.

  “You can come back here darling.” Miranda immediately offered.

  “But you always take me in.”

  “Of course, for an old lover there is always a bed.” She batted her full eyelashes. I did not take the hint.

  “I can’t. The boys need me. And I’m not sure I should just return. Wouldn’t it be like moving backwards?”

  “The place is the same. Beautiful people, fabulous wine.” She tried to entice me. But I couldn’t. And I had been right. Vince and Tina needed me to clear out the family home, help show and sell the same and move in with them to care for the boys. Well, mostly Chris.

  I explained that again and Miranda nodded as if she hadn’t heard my excuses over and over for the last five years.

  “Remember that model?” She moved to a new distraction.

  “Which one?” As a photographer’s assistant, I had managed many, many models.

  Miranda shrugged. “Beautiful faces, few names. To keep her in line, you finally had to point out that there were hundreds of beautiful girls lined up to take her place.”

  “But there are not hundreds of aunts to care for Chris and Matt.” I squinted at the screen. Behind her was something rather black and looming, a sculpture? Over her bed? It didn’t look like her typical purchase. I opened my mouth to ask but she cut me off.

  “Not hundreds of aunts, but you, my love, are most certainly replaceable.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You are replaceable. You were not the only person who could care for your parents, and you are not the only person who can care for those enormous boys. It doesn’t need to be you.”

  “That’s not much of a compliment.”

  “All right then, never mind. You are irreplaceable, one of a kind. And while we’re at it, is this?”

  She was breathless, her face distorted over Skype. She thrust a blue object towards the camera. It loomed so large I couldn’t make it out.

  I squinted. “Is that a statue of a hippo? It looks like something out of the National Geographic holiday catalog.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. She glanced down and turned it in her hands. “It could be.”

  She gave me a sunny smile, one that had melted my heart and encouraged participation in too-many-to-count unplanned and ill-advised activities. A smile that still got to me. Why had we broken up? Ah, her girls. Demanding little things.
So many beautiful faces.

  “You think it’s just a knockoff?” She sighed. “I was so sure it was one of those artifacts you and Nic were always digging up in Egypt. Would it be worth something if it were?”

  “Were what?”

  She held up the item again. It was blue-green, decorated with thin black markings. From what I could tell, it was simply a small blue statue.

  “If it were genuine, you know, the real deal? Would it be worth anything?”

  I leaned back on the couch and adjusted my laptop to fix the angle of the camera. I looked like shit, but it was early in the morning; I always looked like shit first thing in the morning, what fifty something woman doesn’t? I shouldn’t take Miranda’s calls before my second cup of coffee.

  “If it is real.” I hadn’t used my brain in years; it was disconcertingly slow to boot up. I sipped more coffee and considered her question.

  “If it’s real, it needs to be authenticated, where it was found, where is the dig? Are there more?”

  I pulled my laptop to me and tried to get a better look. “Miranda, are there more?”

  Her face sagged, and for a second, she looked all of her sixty-seven years. Not even her two facelifts could disguise the years reflected in her eyes.

  “I don’t know the origins. And there was only the one hippo, I bought it for twelve euro. A steal, I’m sure…”

  “I hope it wasn’t a steal.” I was the one who was reassuring and supportive but sometimes in the face of Miranda’s constant bargain hunting, it was a challenge to always put a good face on it. She loved to discover soon-to-be famous art and obscure and certainly valuable objects. Like Max, she had the money to purchase anything that caught her eye. Unlike Max, she was often wrong, and we ended up just storing a lot of “precious” junk. Like the “overlooked” Rothko that hung over the dining room table and the tiny Seurat study of the woman and girl from A Sunday on La Grand Jatte, which didn’t look all that convincing. But the hunt gave her pleasure and purpose. She loved nothing more than to spend a whole Sunday combing locals flea markets, then when those were exhausted, traveling to Paris to shop more flea markets and small galleries. If she couldn’t be Peggy Guggenheim in quality, she made up for it in volume.

  I had delivered the wrong answer.

  “Nicholas said the same thing.”

  My heart jumped. “You called him?”

  “I gave this party.” Her parties were legendary. Not even the survivors remembered the details: just a whirl of color, light and laughter. I miss her epic parties; no balloons, no streamers, no flowers jammed into plastic vase. Just a lot of booze, and other festive adult substances.

  Miranda and I did not meet at a party, we wouldn’t have remembered enough to re- connect. We had met on a shoot in Paris. She was the model; I was the photographer’s assistant whose main job was to explain the harsh reality of indispensability to the models. We bonded, in more ways than one, and before I knew it, I was Alice to her Gertrude, a seductively comfortable role. Miranda knew everyone, and everyone knew her, and if they didn’t know her personally, they knew her photos and her lavish parties. Venice in the '80s was one big colorful fever dream, drugs, sex and rock and roll. It was a lot of fun.

  I grew up under the gloomy prophecy that any good time inevitably carries unpleasant consequences, and so it did.

  “Nic said it could be from a dig. It could be the real thin, he doggedly insisted.

  “That’s great right? You have a real artifact.” My eyes wandered to take in my own surroundings. The thick wood shelves surrounding the pale brick fireplace were layered with precious collectables treasured by my mother. What would an archeologist think of this stuff? Were blue hippos the Egyptian equivalent of bourbon bottles shaped like turkeys or figurines from the Franklin Mint collection, guaranteed to increase in value? Not even Elaine, Vance’s wife, wanted them. In two thousand years will these be unearthed and given their own acrylic box in a museum show? The tiny museum label printed religious object the catch phrase for we have no clue why this was manufactured in the first place.

  I sighed, I had to clean the house. The real estate agent Vincent had engaged was due here this morning.

  I dragged my hands through my curls and almost upset the computer.

  “If it is real, it’s stolen.” I insisted. Don’t get me started. While my affair with Miranda was comfortable and plush, my years with the aforementioned Dr. Nicholas Ratzenberg were not. Exciting yes, thrilling, dirty, and sandy, yes. Years of sex and history lectures sometimes simultaneously. With Nic I earned the equivalent of an MA in tolerance. Every third day of excavations I got an earful about stolen artifacts just in case I hadn’t been listening the night before. I traded Murano chandeliers and wine for tents, bugs and terror. It wasn’t my brightest move, but it was exciting. Anyway. Nic.

  “He’s still working? I thought by now someone would have shot him or mauled him or buried him in another unproductive tomb.”

  “He does stick his head into the wrong holes now and, then doesn’t he?” Miranda played with the statue, it fit perfectly in her two hands, like an oversized worry bead.

  I swallowed. “You saw him?”

  She shook her head. “He couldn’t get away; had a project he was consulting on in Luxor.”

  I relaxed, he was nowhere near, and since he was single minded, one could charitably call it obsessive, the odds of me seeing him again were very low. I self-consciously patted my unfortunate hair. Maybe I’d have time today for a mani-pedi. Maybe pigs would fly.

  “I really thought you and Nicholas would make a go of it.” Miranda looked up at me, meaning something else entirely.

  “You and I were a stronger couple.” I assured her.

  She nodded. There was too much to say. I loved her. I loved everything about her. It wasn’t her income, yes Miranda was from money, which was the only way to really make it in Fashion, with a capital F. I was from Lincoln, CA, with a BA degree from FIDM in San Francisco. I was the biggest, more awkward wannabe the fashion industry had ever witnessed. But I worked hard, I showed up and learned the lighting and equipment and by sheer force of will made myself indispensable to both photographers and later, designers. Miranda, for some inexplicable reason, admired that quality. I suppose she exploited me, but at the time, the compensation for such exploitation was not only reasonable, it was fabulous.

  But that life was all over. I was back home and incontrovertibly embedded in the Sacramento area. The address was desirable—Vince and Tina bought a house in Sacramento’s Fabulous Forties, the nicest residential district in town. Their home was well over 6,000 square feet which engendered their need for my help as well as what they considered an irresistible enticement: my own private suite on the ground floor. Suite. I have lived in larger tents.

  The bedroom was small with a minuscule closet (for re-sale value) attached to a powder room expanded into a full bath by dint of punching a square into the garage and installing a Home Depot fiberglass shower. But it was rent-free. I would never again experience any needs or wants. All I had to do was care for my teenage nephews. A little light cooking. Pick up a bit. The time clock at the top of my screen ticked away. I needed to prepare for the agent’s walk through.

  “I have to go, what can I do Miranda? It’s just a statue, probably just a nice replica. If you don’t want it, sell it back to the store. Or post it on eBay or Craig’s List.”

  “Nicholas seemed interested.” She held it up so I could see it more clearly. A blue hippo. Well, not that blue, green. Those particular hippos are manufactured by the tens of thousands for distribution all over the world. They all look exactly the same, like the mascot for the Metropolitan Museum. She stroked it and turned it in her hands.

  Nicholas. She had shown it to Nic. I didn’t even know she kept his number. I drew in a shuddering breath and willed my heart to slow.

  “I’ve never seen you nervous about something so small.” I pushed away the thoughts of Dr. Nicholas Ratzenberg, those
days too, were over and gone. One could even say abandoned.

  “There’s just something…,” she started.

  I had half hour before the appointment. The older you are, the longer it takes to get ready for public consumption.

  “Gotta go. Just sell it or toss it.”

  “You are probably right.” She stopped worrying the little statue. “I should just throw it away, right? That would solve everything.”

  I had no idea what she needed to solve, but I waved cheerfully before signing off. She blew me a kiss.

  Twenty-four hours later I was seated in business class on a direct flight from SFO to Venice. It wasn’t just Vince and Tina who considered me indispensable. According to her surviving daughters, I was named the executor of Miranda’s estate. I suspected it was because I was the only person left on Miranda’s favorites list who was willing to pick up her call.

  Miranda had been found (I couldn’t say body because as soon as I thought about the term body what popped into my brain was my mother in that black vinyl bag) by a friend who stopped by Miranda’s apartment first thing this morning to cajole Miranda into a jog around the lagoon. Miranda hadn’t answered the door or her phone. The friend, knowing where the extra key was kept, barged right in. Thank the gods.

  Tiffany, Miranda’s oldest daughter, immediately called me and coerced me into joining her in Venice. Tiffany was like her mother in one thing—she just assumed. Answering the phone at 12:00 A.M. must have been the indicator that I would acquiesce to her demands. I’m not special mind you; Tiffany didn’t even like me. But I was the only one available at the last minute.

  Retirement is like that. You become available. Maybe even indispensable. Maybe both.

  Chapter 3

  Venice, Italy is not Sacramento, California. Not even with the California brand to help Sacramento along, can Sacramento be anything but a small town in a big state. Venice, however, was once a state all by itself. Built on the solid foundation of intrigue, power and trade, the very air is invigorating, artistic. Damp.