Page 64 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

I rack my mind, trying to remember every little detail she’d once shared with me. All the life stories she’d told me. All of them were lies, probably. I sift through them anyway. She’dhated her mom and never knew her dad, just like me. Was that real? Maybe. What else? Her mom was neglectful. Always leaving her to be looked after by someone else while she went out with a different guy every night. Someone else. Her neighbor. She’d mentioned her name three, four times, back when we were in Oxford. Aunt Claudine. Claudia? Claudette. That’s it. And she’d said—what had she said about Aunt Claudette? That she wasn’t actually related, but that she was the only family Thalia had, and that she was closer to her than she ever was to her own mother. She’s mentioned her last name before, something starting with a Cl-. She’d joked that it made her sound like a porn star even though she looked nothing like one. And that night, at Skye Bar, she’d mentioned a relative who lives in Brooklyn. It’s a long shot, but maybe she was referring to Aunt Claudette?

I take out my phone and do a search for “Claudette Brooklyn.” Google spits out the results, and ugh, there are a ton of Claudettes in Brooklyn. I scroll down the page and—

Claudette Clovis. That’s it. That’s her. It’s a Facebook page of hers. I click on it, and bless her heart, Aunt Claudette is one of those old women who overshares. She lives in a retirement home in New Jersey, a swanky place called Golden Years Estate. I order a Lyft and drain my coffee before going outside.

I have no idea what I’m going to say to Aunt Claudette. I know I’m grasping at straws, but know what’s worse than grasping at straws? Grasping at thin fucking air. The whole drive there, I go over and over what I might say to her, but by the time I get to Golden Years, I still have no clue. The driver drops me off at the front, a thoroughly impressive grand entrance complete with a fountain and a massive doorway.

I walk inside and approach the receptionist, an altogethertoo-shiny young man who looks like a living, breathing Ken doll, which is a lot more creepy than it sounds.

“Good afternoon, are you here to visit one of our residents?”

“Um. Yes. Claudette Clovis?”

His face breaks into a smile, and I’m half blinded by the whiteness of his teeth. “Oh, Ms. Clo, of course. May I ask who’s visiting?”

For a moment, I freeze. Then I manage to spit out, “Uh. Jane. Just Jane.”

“Okay, I’ll let her know you’re here.” He picks up the phone and dials a number. After a few moments, he says, “Hi Ms. Clo, it’s Aaron.” He gives a simpering laugh. “Oh, Ms. Clo, you’re so bad. I have a visitor here for you, a young woman named Jane. Yes.” He glances at me and my stomach lurches. She’s going to refuse to see me. “Jane, what’s your last name?”

“Morgan.”

He tells Aunt Claudette this and nods. “Okay, I’ll send her right up.”

Relief floods through me, followed quickly by suspicion. Why did she agree to meet with me? Maybe she’s bored, I tell myself as I walk after Aaron. Yeah, she’s probably just bored out of her mind in this place. We walk past a living room that opens up to a beautiful courtyard where I can see a handful of old men and women playing croquet, and a game room where more people are playing chess and other board games. My mind is half-wild with anxiety by the time we get to Aunt Claudette’s room. Aaron knocks on the door, and when she calls for us to come in, he smiles at me and says, “Go ahead. Just call the front desk if you need anything.”

With a deep breath, I check on my phone in my bag, making sure it’s recording. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, keeping arecord like this. What am I expecting to hear? I open the door and step inside.

Aunt Claudette’s room is exactly as I pictured it would be—bright and airy and beautiful but with a smell of death about it. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but despite the canary-yellow walls and the bright turquoise touches, there’s a sense of heaviness in the air. Aunt Claudette, the large, white-haired old woman sitting in a wheelchair with her papery hands folded on her lap, is dying. I know this immediately.

“Hi, Ms. Clovis, I’m Jane.”

“Jane,” Aunt Claudette says, smiling warmly at me. Behind her glasses, her eyes are overly bright, and I wonder if she’s been put on medication. “Please, call me Aunt C. That’s what Thalia calls me. I assume you’re here because of her.”

The back of my neck prickles. It’s the way she says it. Not a question. More a resigned statement, like she always knew that I would one day show up.

“I am, actually. Yeah.” I move closer, peering at her carefully.

Aunt Claudette’s mouth puckers with displeasure and she nods. “None of the others ever showed up, you know. I kept waiting, and waiting, so certain that one day, one of you would come here asking about her.”

“The others?” I say, sitting down.

“Her ‘friends.’ ” She puts air quotes around the word, and I know then that she knows exactly what Thalia is. The question is: Is she on Thalia’s side? I don’t say anything, and she fills in the silence. “She has so many of them, you know. Well, I’m sure you do.” She sighs and gestures to her dresser. “Do me a favor, will you? Open that—yes. And take out that box down there, yes, that’s right. Lovely. Now let’s see...” She takes the box fromme and opens it. Inside are photo albums and a yearbook. I’m getting impatient, jittery. I’m not here to look at old photos.

“I actually have a few questions—”

“Here she is,” Aunt Claudette says, opening the yearbook and pointing at a photo. “Beautiful, wasn’t she?”

I hold back a sigh and look at where she’s pointing. Eighteen-year-old Thalia. She was gorgeous, but I can’t help noticing that her hair is a very dark brown. It looks strange on her. “Yeah.”

“That was the year that her mother’s boyfriend was reported missing.”

All of my instincts prick up, my mind going from bored to a high-pitched alarm. “Missing?”

Aunt Claudette closes the yearbook with a sigh. “Her mother tried so hard with her. But Joanne wasn’t a very bright woman, bless her soul. From when Thalia was little, you could already tell Joanne was outmatched. She loved Thalia in her own way. Wanted to do right by her. She didn’t have much, but she was beautiful—oh, movie-star good looks. Where do you think Thalia got her looks from? She was always on the hunt for a husband. A dad for Thalia, she said. I tried telling her that what Thalia needed wasn’t a dad, but one of them brain doctors, but she just couldn’t see it.” She opens one of the photo albums and flips through the pages. “Ah, here he was. Jackson Giles.”

I frown down at a photo of a woman resembling Thalia, her arms around a blond man.

“Dated Joanne for—hmm, three months? Before he abruptly broke up with her and disappeared. Thalia was twelve at the time.” She flips through more pages. “And this one... Matthew something or other. Went out with Joanne for almost a year before leaving suddenly.”

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