CHAPTER
7
I
’m fine.
I repeated this to myself as I sat in my car, putting on makeup, wearing black. Black shirt, black pants, black apron: the required uniform at the bistro that had been my after-school job, where I now waitressed Wednesdays through Saturdays. The driver’s-side visor was flipped down, its mirror open, reflecting the bags under my eyes and a healing zit on my forehead. I smeared my lips with gloss.
It was my first shift since summer began, a week since the night that left me watching James disappear down the road. A week since I’d found myself alone again, standing in the yard with a headache and his words,
We can still have this summer,
echoing insistently behind him.
I had walked toward the warm glow of my house, yellow light behind wavy glass windows, safe and bright and with family inside. The screen door had slammed behind me. My mother had called my name.
“Do you want dinner?”
My tongue was coated with wool, cottony in my mouth. It had grown hair. The inside of my mouth had never been drier. My stomach was empty.
I walked into the kitchen where she sat, eating from a white container of Chinese food. Gluey fried rice rode the fork to her mouth. The sight of the food, the grease spots on the tablecloth, and the chunks of artificially colored pork made my throat twitch with nausea.
“I don’t think I want any of that,” I said.
“Well good, because I’m not giving you any,” my mom replied, taking another forkful and winking at me. “Your father is late, and I wasn’t sure if you’d be here for dinner or not. Did James go home?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking,
Please don’t ask anything else,
and thinking, too,
Please, ask me what happened
.
“Okay. So, dinner?” she asked again.
I went to the table and sat down with a sigh. A half-f bottle of red wine sat in the spot across from her, as though it had found the seat available and decided to take my dad’s place. Looking at the dreamy look on my mother’s face, I thought that might not be far from the truth. I reached for it.
Other times, my hand would have been swatted away. Instead, Mom just watched with a half smile as I grabbed the bottle by its neck and brandished it, threatening to drink from it.
“That’s what you want?”
“Maybe I feel like drinking.” It was the truth. Not only that, but the thick scent of the wine had wakened my stomach. Its protesting clench, its strike against food, had subsided.
Mom giggled. I was pretty sure that I knew where the top half of the bottle’s liquid had disappeared to.
“Well?” I said, sloshing it at her.
She looked out the window for a second, toward the garden and the hidden incline where James and I disappeared a few hours earlier, and smiled again.
“You’re an adult, right? High school graduate? I think you deserve a drink.”
“What? Really?”
“Just get yourself a glass, would you? I don’t want you stumbling around the kitchen with your lips wrapped around that thing like some kind of hobo.” She giggled again.
“All right.” I tried to hide my surprise as I grabbed a long-stemmed goblet from the cabinet above the sink. No doubt my mother knew that this wasn’t my first drink, but to this point, she and my father had done a good job of pretending my innocence; all I’d had to do was nod, play along, and avoid vomiting in the rosebushes on the nights that I came home wasted.
I sat down again, filled the glass, and took a long sip while my mother grinned at me.
“Nice,” I said. “Do most hobos drink Pinot Noir?”
“Ha!” she said.
“What?”
“I thought you were going to say, ‘Do most hobos drink
pee
!’” She cackled through a mouthful of fried rice.
By the time I teetered off to bed, we’d been sipping for hours, laughing at nothing, until the past twenty-four hours felt like nothing but a hazy, bad dream. Two bottles of wine were empty—drained but for the deep red silt that ringed the depression in their heavy bottoms—my father had come home, and although I didn’t feel particularly adult, at least I could sleep. My head thudded heavily on the pillow and I swallowed hard, trying to combat my body’s insistence that the room had begun to spin. I was dead asleep within moments, oblivious to the heat or the noise of the katydids. I didn’t hear the voices that carried from the kitchen, my mother’s tone raised and shrill.
* * *
And now, I was fine.
Almost.
I had zombie moments; I sat for hours, staring at my college packing list, too paralyzed to even touch my sock drawer. At night, I would stare unfocused at the cordless phone—waiting for his inevitable call, but yelping when the chirruping ring shattered the silence. I had begun to move at half pace, trying to keep steady, trying to keep moving at all.
If things had been normal, someone might have seen my raw eyes and slack expression and asked me whether everything was okay.
But nobody did—not my friends, not my family, not the head chef at the restaurant outside of which I sat and stared at my own pallid reflection. I was temporary. I had a sell-by date, good only until the end of the summer. My dark moods, my nervousness, my paralysis in the face of the future—they were all understandable. If I seemed to be fading, they thought, it was only natural. I was on my way out, moving on, already gone.
The dead girl on the side of the road had yet to be identified; with the question of who she was and how she came to be there still hanging in the air, the almost-ghost that I was attracted no attention.
The visor snapped shut under my hand. The car door slammed behind me.
* * *
I had always liked waitressing: the constant movement, folding napkins and filling drink orders, the hours flying by while I paced the dining room. But tonight, I couldn’t concentrate. Knives slipped through my fingers and left gouges on the floor. Tables full of summer people, giddy and boozy at the three-day reprieve of the Fourth of July, laughed and smiled beatifically when I forgot to bring bread or beer. One woman even patted my arm, saying, “Don’t you worry, dear—I’m sure you’ll be off to school soon anyway.”
Halfway through my shift, I stood up too suddenly in the busy kitchen and dropped a full bottle of ketchup on the dirty tile. It shattered, splattered, shards of cheap glass with a viscous red coating skittering across the floor and under the sinks.
Tom, the chef, clapped me jovially on the shoulder and left a five-fingered grease stain on my shirt.
“Ten points!” he called.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I licked ketchup off my finger.
“Hey, I understand,” he said, waving a hand at me. He smelled like garlic and sweat. “You were thinking about some boy, yeah?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I bet!” He winked. “Well, there you go. Everybody’s gotta break one thing before they leave.”
My occasional forays into the world of the living dead had sapped my conversation skills. I couldn’t banter or chitchat—not with Tom, not with the dishwasher, not with the cashier at the XtraMart who would charge me $1.25 for a Coke on my way home. I muttered something about having gotten it out of the way.
“Ah, yeah,” he said again. “I understand! And don’t you worry about that ketchup, one of the boys will clean that up. Don’t wanna send you off with a nasty cut. Travel healthy!”
“I’ve got a few more weeks,” I said, but it was lost in the clatter of pans and the hiss of steam as the kitchen moved to life again. Tom, a good guy, a handsome man who flirted with the older waitresses because he knew that it made them feel good, was already handing a mop to the guy who washed the dishes.
“You get that, Manny, will ya?” he said, and turned back to the stove. He clapped the lid onto a pan with a resounding clang.
“You guys hear about that girl?” he announced, to no one in particular.
There was a chorus of “What?” from every corner of the kitchen. Nobody said,
which girl
. Everyone knew who he was talking about.
I grabbed a new bottle of ketchup, skirting the broken glass as I turned to leave.
“Still no idea who she is,” Tom said. “But I heard something, from a guy who knows one of those cops. You know what he said? Said they think somebody came in and messed around, screwed things up in the crime scene.”
“Somebody like who?” said Manny.
As I slipped through the swinging door to the dining room, Tom’s voice floated after me.
“Dumb kids, probably,” he said. “They do stupid shit like that. Walk all over things. They don’t think.”
The door closed behind me.
CHAPTER
8
W
hen the time had come, I hadn’t looked at political science programs, or Greek life, or student body size. I ignored all of that, the picking and choosing, the quick criteria they said would help me to narrow down my overwhelming field of potential futures. Instead, I took a map of New England and a compass, set its piercing metal leg on the black dot of Bridgeton, and drew a wide, red circle around everything within a two-hundred-mile radius.
“What’s that?” my father had said, looking over my shoulder at the bleeding arc, the towns and counties now hidden under a thick, dark ribbon of ink. When I lifted the compass, I saw that it had marred the paper—a stab through the small, black heart of my hometown—and smiled.
“That,” I said, “is everywhere I’m not going.”
“Planning your escape, are you?” he grinned back, then pointed at a larger dot on the map. “But what about Boston? That’s a nice, big city, and an easy trip home on the weekend.”
I shook my head. “It’s not about living in a city.”
It wasn’t. Back then, it wasn’t just about getting away. It was about not coming back. It wasn’t just the size and sensibility of this place that made it unbearable, but its pull—the weird magnetism that could sap your ambition, clip your wings, leave you inert and fascinated and sinking ever deeper into the choking quicksand of small-town life. I’d seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you’d see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they’d been somewhere else . . . or maybe it was only a dream.
When I found myself home at the end of the day, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I would look in the mirror and see that same dimmed-out dream, losing its luster somewhere behind my own eyes.
* * *
Inside the house, the atmosphere was heavy with things undiscussed: Dad’s continued absences in the evening, the empty bottles that seemed to appear overnight in our trash bin, the lines that formed around my mother’s eyes. The dead girl was there, too—she had taken up residence in our house and in my head, drifting in from her resting place on the side of the road to look over my shoulder. At night, I would sometimes dream of her—that she was there with me, head resting gently on the pillow, staring at the ceiling with eyes like peeled grapes, whispering a gravestone verse from one of the monuments in our town’s old boneyard.
Stop and think as you pass by, she hissed. As you are now, so once was I.
She was. She had been. She had died that night, less than a mile from the wide-open field where I’d parked with James. She had died, probably, just as I had gone to sleep. I lay awake and stared into the dark. I wondered who had killed her, whether she’d known him, loved him. Whether he’d loved her.
Not all of the empty bottles in our trash belonged to my mother. I had gotten a taste for cheap red wine, the heavy, grapy stuff that my parents uncorked at parties once everyone was too drunk to appreciate something more refined.
* * *
The crunch of gravel in our driveway alerted me to James’s arrival, and I padded down the stairs. In the kitchen, my father was shaking his head with trademark disapproval.
“. . . a real piece of work,” he was saying. “Gave the chief a bunch of attitude and wouldn’t let anyone in. They had to come back with a warrant, just to search the damn yard.”
“James is here,” I said.
“Call us if you’ll be out late,” my mother said, her voice tired, without looking up.
James leaned against the truck, arms folded, as I slipped out the front door and waved with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. My hand floated through the hot, hazy air.
“What’s up?” I asked, padding across the thirsty grass to stand in front of him.
“Party tonight at Craig’s place,” he said. “Want to come?”
“I haven’t seen you in more than two weeks,” I said, folding my arms to mimic his stance. “This is what you want to do tonight?”
“I thought it might be better for you. Ease back into it, sort of.”
I snorted. “Being around Craig doesn’t exactly relax me.”
James looked hurt. “I’m trying, Beck. We don’t have to go. I just thought it could be fun.”
I touched his forearm.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry. I know you’re trying.”
“You don’t have to decide right now.”
* * *
We drove out of town instead, weaving from asphalt to curb as James fishtailed through the rough gravel, brick-colored dust that had scattered itself over the road in tiny, hastily rolled dice. I barely noticed. Moments earlier, I had reached into the glove compartment, looking for cigarettes, and instead pulled out a filthy bandanna stained with what looked like blood.
“What the fu—” I’d started, then yelped as James’s hand suddenly slammed the compartment closed. “Hey!”
“What were you doing?”
“I wanted to
smoke
,” I said, exasperated. I held up the bandanna. “What the hell is this? Is this yours?”
He looked at me for a long time—too long—then sighed and refocused his gaze on the road.
“James?”
“It’s mine,” he said.
I waited for an explanation, but none came. I watched James grinding his teeth and realized that the scenery outside had blurred, that the truck was beginning to rattle as his foot grew heavier on the pedal.
“I’m not proud of it, okay. But that night, after . . .” He looked uncomfortable for a moment, then swallowed and spat out the words, “I punched out a window.”
“What?” Disbelief made my voice rise in a sharp-pitched crescendo. “What the hell? Why would you do that?”
The discomfort deepened; he squirmed in his seat and wouldn’t look at me.
“I was . . . I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, you know? I just felt angry and I wanted to break something.”
I shook my head. “Apart from my heart, you mean.”
He looked wounded; I felt simultaneously stupid and helpless. I couldn’t seem to stop bringing up that night, tossing it out like a grenade whenever things started to feel normal again. As though he needed reminding of what he’d done.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Shitty joke.”
He stayed quiet for a long time.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said, finally. “I wish . . . I wish you
couldn’t
. I wish I could go back and make everything about that night disappear.”
The truck swerved around another turn, hugging the road this time. James’s mouth kept twitching, little creases forming and unforming at the corners where cheek met lip.
“So I guess they have a suspect or something,” I said, finally, changing the subject. “For the mystery girl? My dad was saying something about some guy, and a warrant.”
James shook his head too quickly, a dismissive motion that never failed to set my teeth on edge.
“It’s not a suspect.”
“Oh yeah? How can you be so sure?”
He coughed.
“Because it’s Craig.”
My jaw dropped.
“What?! They think he—”
“It’s not like that,” he interrupted. “That space, just back from the road, that’s his property. Or his grandmother’s. But he’s the one there, so . . . I don’t know, the cops just wanted to search it for evidence, like, if something blew over there—”
“And he wouldn’t let them,” I finished. “That’s what my dad was saying. He told them to go get a warrant.”
James shrugged. “He’s allowed.”
“He’s
allowed
?” I cried. “He’s an asshole! What if there was something there, evidence or something? And,” I added, suddenly remembering, “I heard someone saying that the cops think the scene was tampered with.”
James stiffened in the driver’s seat.
“You heard
who
saying that?”
“Um . . .” I looked down at the floor and muttered, “Tom.”
“What?”
“Tom,”
I said, exasperated. “At the restaurant.”
His posture relaxed again. “Okay, and what does Tom know about anything?”
“I don’t know. The cops go in there, all the time. I’m sure he hears things.”
He looked at me, sidelong and with skepticism, emphasizing each word to make it sound ridiculous. “He. Hears. Things.”
“Stop being a jerk. Just tell me, really—they’re investigating Craig?”
“No,” he said slowly, as though talking to a toddler. “They’re investigating Craig’s
yard
.”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
I folded my arms, stewing, and looked out the window.
“Rebecca,” said James. “Hey, Becca, come on.”
I clenched my teeth together so hard that they squeaked. James made an exasperated sound.
“All right, yes. Okay? If it makes you feel better to say it that way, they’re investigating Craig.”
“Wonderful.”
“But anyway,” he continued, “it’s just a technicality. If there was something important back there, something that might help, then it wouldn’t have taken them two weeks to get around to searching.”
“In another town, I’d agree with you in a heartbeat.”
“Oh, no faith in the hard-working men of the Bridgeton Police Department?”
“I’m sure they’re doing the best they can, but how on the ball do you think they are? It’s not like they have practice.”
“They’re getting help,” he said. “And they’ve had murders before.”
“Not like this.”
James waved a dismissive hand and fell silent, chewing his lip. Outside, fields full of high-growing, starved yellow grass blurred by as the truck rumbled past. The brittle stalks waved and snapped, thirsty, straining toward the sky in search of rain that hadn’t come for weeks.
I was quiet for a minute, thinking about Craig—smug, superior Craig. So convinced that in our drab little town, his seasonal residency and California birth certificate gave him the inalienable right to say, do,
take
whatever he wanted.
“I just don’t think your asshole friend should be doing things that make their lives harder.”
James sighed, exasperated.
“I’m tired of talking about this. You need to let it go,” he said.
“Why?” I snapped. “If he has nothing to hide—”
“Becca,” he said, so sharply that the rest of the sentence died instantly before reaching my lips. “Enough.”
We drove in silence, until the sun was nearly gone. The last light in the sky was dusky, purple. James turned the truck onto County Road 128 and headed toward the mountains.
“Becca, I just don’t want to talk about it. The dead girl, the investigation, any of it. I just want to focus on this summer, I want us to start fresh, and that means focusing on us. Just us.”
The exhaustion in his voice was palpable, and I felt suddenly ashamed. He was doing everything he could to make things right, and I was doing everything I could to hold us back.
“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “I understand.”
“Okay. Will you give me that rag, now?”
I was still clutching it, creasing it with the heat from my clenched fist.
“Why?” I asked uneasily, but handing it over.
James tucked the bandanna into his pocket and rolled his eyes.
“Because I want to hold your hand.”