AMELIA
H
e drove them north, up the turnpike and then through the Holland Tunnel, until they were deep in the crawling traffic of Chinatown. Outside the window, the scenery shifted—from far-off oil refineries whose insectlike steel structures towered over the landscape, to the immediate grit and dirt and noise of the city. She looked at Luke’s pinched expression, more squinty with each passing minute, and tried not to laugh.
As they sat in the crowded thoroughfare of Canal Street, the light turned red and the cars ceased moving.
“You okay over there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re being pretty quiet.”
“I’m enjoying the ride.”
Outside the car, pedestrians swarmed and tumbled through the street. They jostled for position on curbs, endlessly moving in and out of stores whose high walls were covered with cheap T-shirts, gold jewelry, knockoff handbags, mugs and postcards and shot glasses with renderings of the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty.
“You haven’t asked what we’re doing here,” Luke said.
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
“Oh.” She paused. “I wasn’t thinking about it, I guess.”
Luke made an exasperated snort.
“What?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just that you’ve been off in la-la land ever since graduation. I mean, I take a detour into New York and you don’t even ask what’s up? You’re a million miles away. It’s weird.”
“I was . . .” She had already said, enjoying the ride. “I just wasn’t concerned.”
“You weren’t concerned, or you weren’t paying attention?”
She smiled at him, reached for his hand. He’d always been an antsy driver, had always been prone to picking fights in the car. She had found it infuriating at times, but today, she seemed to have a limitless well of patience and understanding for Luke’s little idiosyncrasies. He let her intertwine her fingers with his.
“How much attention should I be paying? We’re not in a hurry to get anywhere. I like driving around with you. I like being with you, period.”
He smiled at that.
“So I’m just relaxing,” she said. “I trust you to get us where we’re going, wherever it is.”
Up ahead, the light flashed green and the cars inched forward. Luke maneuvered around another pedestrian, an angry-looking woman who had stepped off the curb and close to the car as though daring someone to run over her foot.
“That woman has a death wish,” he muttered.
“Or some really amazing self-confidence,” Amelia said.
“She won’t be feeling so confident when someone crushes her toes with a tire.”
“Ouch.”
Behind them, the woman darted between two standing cars and vanished.
Luke made a quick right-hand turn and the car cruised up a narrow side street.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Where are we going?” Amelia said.
“I have to stop at home.”
“Ooooh, so we’re headed for the Upper East Side palace,” she said. “Are your parents there?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. He looked sidelong at her. “Got something in mind?”
She grinned. “Dunno.”
He stroked her arm, deliberately trailing his fingers along the sensitive, blue-veined skin on her inner wrist. She felt her pulse quicken. His touch was exciting, almost unfamiliar—she tried, and failed, to recall the last time they’d slept together. Ten days, maybe twenty? In the final weeks of the semester, as she tried to prepare, pack, tie up each and every loose end, things had cooled between her and Luke. The love was still there, she thought, but circumstances were making things difficult. He was busy and frustrated, staying up late to study, coming out for parties or dinners only when she begged—and then, when he did, standing sullen and resentful in a corner.
He was consumed by the pressing responsibilities of the present. But she felt the future, with all of its untraveled roads and unexplored possibilities, unfurling slowly in front of her. She had even thought the unthinkable,
Maybe college relationships aren’t meant to last,
but had always kissed him good night and then trudged back across campus to her own bed without asking to talk.
She could bide her time.
She was on the edge of a precipice, one that she could leap from at her leisure. She was free to go anywhere, to see Japan or Europe or even a cornfield in Iowa—if that was what she wanted.
Even now, sinking deep into the car seat and feeling the comfort, the safety and stability of his presence, she wasn’t sure whether this trip together might be their last. But the feel of his fingertips, and the memory of nights spent in his arms, was making her breath come faster.
“You’d better watch the road,” she warned.
“Okay,” he sighed with mock-regret, “but when we get there, prepare to be ravaged.”
In spite of herself, she giggled.
CHAPTER
9
T
he yard was a minefield of tossed trash: oil cans, car parts, cigarette butts, the carcasses of cars in differing states of decay. We picked our way around the mess. The front door of the house banged and boards groaned heavily as Craig stepped out on the porch.
“Jeeeeesus,” I said, my voice floating out from clenched teeth.
James elbowed me.
“Stop that,” he hissed.
“But look at him,” I hissed back. “What happened?”
Craig had once had the kind of sturdy heft that made people think of football players, big calves and bracing shoulders and a leather-strap-snapping neck that supported a head just slightly too small for his body, a face with deep-set eyes that peered from beneath a heavy, furrowed forehead. Now, he was padded with pendulous flesh that seemed to pool around his ankles, choke his wrists, strangle and chafe at the bases of his fat fingers. As he waddled across the porch and saluted us, he just looked like a . . .
“Giant baby,” I muttered. “Holy shit, he’s a two-ton infant.”
James snorted violently but shot me another, angrier warning look.
“Hey, man,” Craig called. I hung back, feeling nervous. He looked at me and shifted uncomfortably. “Hey.”
He squinted at me, opened his mouth as though he meant to say something else, then changed his mind and looked back at James. “Everyone’s out in the yard.”
We tripped gingerly up the creaky porch steps and walked through the house. One step over the threshold revealed a wrecked place: stuffing erupted from the upholstered sofa; strips of flypaper thick with the bodies of bluebottles hung from the ceiling; the smell of garbage floated just beneath the cheap sugary odor of a vanilla-scented air freshener.
“What have you been doing up here for the past week? This place looks like shit,” said James, warily but not without affection.
“Supposedly, I’m ‘packing up the house,’” said Craig grinning. “Someone had to clean out all the old-lady crap after Grammy Mitchell croaked, right? So I flew out, and I settled in, and I’ve been waking up drunk since last Tuesday.”
I looked around the room, a landscape littered with Chinese takeout containers and pizza boxes and empty beer cans that teetered on windowsills or nestled in the cushions of the couch.
“And never going to bed hungry, apparently,” I said. James shot me another look.
“I mean, which is AWESOME!” I added, shooting one back and forcing a smile that I hoped looked enthused.
Craig fixed me with narrow eyes, then relaxed and grinned.
“Yes, yes it is,” he said.
“What about your parents?” asked James.
Craig’s smile disappeared.
“You know they won’t come within five hunded miles of this place if they can help it.”
Nobody replied and he looked suddenly, fleetingly uncomfortable—staring at the floor, rubbing the toe of a grubby sneaker against a caked-on reddish splotch that might have been pizza sauce and that flaked away from the linoleum.
A breeze blew through the house, banging the screen door lightly and carrying the scent of charcoal and meat to where we stood. My stomach kicked once and then settled. I swallowed. My tongue felt thick.
“Grill’s on,” Craig said, perking up and clapping James on the shoulder. “Come on.”
He turned, avoiding looking at me, and clomped down the hall toward the back of the house. James offered a beckoning finger and followed, moving lightly in the shadow of Craig’s enormous girth.
* * *
In another life, another time, another town, it wouldn’t have been like this. Craig would have been too cruel, and James too smart, for their coincidental friendship to have ever lasted so long. But here, where James felt so trapped, Craig was exotic. Interesting. Something different, half outside and half in. Bridgeton blood, but a big-city dressing. He straddled the line between here and there, showing up each summer in the last weeks of school, disappearing again in the last days of August. He was living proof of a life lived elsewhere; there had even been a time, before I knew him better, when I’d thought we might be friends.
Richard Mitchell, like any small-town smart kid, had moved on and made good, never looking back. College in another state; a life on another coast; an aging mother whom he never came home to see but who couldn’t be prouder of her absent boy.
“My Ricky,” is what Bea Mitchell would say—clicking her dentures, so pleased and proud, hands together and with her white-whale bingo arms sagging against her housedress. “Did I tell you, my Ricky is in California?”
To me, Ricky was only a ghost. An urban legend, a face in a yearbook, a guy who had left and never come back. But his son was real enough—sent back to stay with Grandma by his parents at age twelve, and for every summer thereafter, when it became obvious that he was what guidance counselors and kiddie shrinks tactfully referred to as “difficult.” Smart, manipulative, a little too good at lying, and a little too given to “accidentally” harming his younger sister. During the year, he could be kept safely away—turned over to more capable hands, closely watched from September to May by the staff at expensive boarding schools.
But there was still the summer to contend with, and it was a good idea, they all agreed, to remove him to a place with fewer opportunities for trouble—a bomb dropped in the remotest possible location, with the hopes that all the surrounding nothingness would damper its effects. And while the previous generation’s namesake had fled for bigger things, his son had been drawn back in—straddling the line between outside and inside, finding a sense of home here in the town that his father had turned his back on. It wasn’t hard to see what drew Craig to Bridgeton. Despite his outsider upbringing, the powerful otherness conferred by his California birth certificate, they had so much in common. My earliest memory of him was at someone’s birthday party in the weeks just after ninth grade; he’d been sitting on a patch of grass, surrounded by a pack of kids in thrall to his summertime strangeness, pulling the legs off a beetle with methodical focus.
Even with every opportunity, even with a big house to play in and a faraway city to call home, Craig’s favorite pastime had always been to destroy things.
* * *
We emerged through the back door onto a haphazard patio. A couple kids were sprawled on lawn chairs, the rest piled onto a stained couch that looked as though it had been left outside all winter.
“Rebecca!” A shrieking girl disentangled herself from the couch pile, spilling her beer, and launched herself at me.
“Lindsay,” I said, catching her as she tripped over the leg of a patio chair. She grinned and breathed yeasty air into my face.
“Heeey,” she said, “watch out for my tits!”
Lindsay had been gifted with enormous breasts on an otherwise average-size body, and it was a constant topic of conversation—because Lindsay liked it that way. She’d been thrilled when someone nicknamed her “Titsy,” and signed everyone’s yearbook with a P.S. that read,
Don’t forget to come back and visit me and my two girls!
I helped Lindsay regain her footing. “Do you and your tits need another drink?”
“Ha-ha! Come sit!” she chirped, taking my hand. I settled next to her, waving at everyone else. Jenna Kent, who had been in my English class and whose hair was now platinum blond after having grown steadily lighter throughout the year, gestured at a grimy-looking cooler.
“Beer?”
“Sure.”
I took it, sipped, and tried to ignore the lurch in my stomach, and looked toward the grill. James and Craig stood next to it, deep in conversation. Craig frowned at whatever James was saying and poked at a slowly blackening hot dog with a pair of tongs.
“Hey, Rebecca, where’ve you been?” Lindsay asked, leaning forward to maximize the view of her cleavage.
Getting my heart broken,
I thought.
Watching my parents not talk to each other.
“Nowhere.”
* * *
By midnight, the lengthening shadows in the yard had become pitch-black and impenetrable. James was on the couch with me now. He had put his arm around me in spite of the heat. Everyone was drunk. The conversation was noticeably quieter—partly because Lindsay was gone, had slipped away with Craig somewhere beyond the halo cast by the back-porch light. And partly because the subject was murder.
Jeff Francis, brother of Jack, privy to overheard conversations about the police investigation into the girl’s death, was holding court.
“You know how there was all that blood in the road?” he had said, and sat back with a satisfied smile. “It all came out of her head. Her skull was, like, totally crushed on one side.”
“Ew,” someone said.
Jenna’s eyes glittered. “Is that how she died?”
Jack nodded and looked into the distance, and the smile drooped at the corners. He swallowed hard. I wondered whether his inside information included things that weren’t so much tantalizing as
terrible
. . . things he wished he didn’t know.
“Jeff?”
He sighed.
“Probably. They won’t know until the autopsy is done. But, I mean, she was beaten to hell, you guys. Broken bones everywhere . . .” He took a long swig of beer, then sat back and muttered, “You know what? I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
Jenna looked exasperated, and Jeff refused to meet anyone’s eyes. James cut in.
“Well, it’s all speculation anyway,” he said. “No point in talking about it, right? If they knew what happened, someone would have said something by now.”
Hot, sweating, and feeling the buzz of my second beer, I looked pointedly at him. “They’re gonna have a hard time knowing what happened, as long as people keep getting in the wa—”
James shot me a furious look, but I never finished; the close, hot space of the backyard was suddenly filled with the reverberating squall of Lindsay’s high-pitched scream.
I whirled and looked toward the door. James leaped to his feet, brandishing an empty bottle by the neck. There was another scream, a series of thumps, and then she burst from the house. She’d lost her shirt somewhere; her “girls” flailed meatily inside a polka dot–patterned bra as she cleared the porch stairs in a single leap. The door banged hard behind her, shaking the house and unleashing a cascade of grit from the gutters.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Jenna demanded, also jumping to her feet.
Lindsay looked around at us, wild-eyed, then crossed her arms over her chest and turned back toward the house. Her mouth opened and closed once. We stared at her.
The door banged again. Craig stood on the steps in nothing but a pair of boxers, his face wrinkled in an expression that looked like a cross between misery and disgust.
He was holding a grease-stained Chinese food box in his hands.
“Oh my God!” Lindsay screamed. “Get it away!”
Craig grimaced and then snapped, “Would you shut up? You’re not fucking helping!”
Jeff stood up from the couch, swayed a little, sat back down. “What’s going on?”
“Oh my God, you guys,” Lindsay said urgently. Everyone stared.
The Chinese food box was full, very full, of noodles.
They were moving.
James stepped forward, peering at the box, and addressed Craig. “Dude, what’s in there?”
Craig looked at the ground and muttered something unintelligible.
“What?” said James.
“I said, ‘worms,’” said Craig.
Lindsay shrieked again. Craig gave James a long-suffering look, then turned to her and said, “Seriously. Shut up.”
Walking to the garbage cans that lined the patio, he kicked the top off one and dropped the box onto the brimming heap of trash. Even in the low light, the contents could be seen writhing around inside. There was a chorus of disgusted sounds from the gathered group.
“Dude,” said Jeff.
Craig turned on unsteady feet and sat heavily on one of the patio chairs, looking dazed.
“Hey, man, maybe you should get dressed,” James said, making an ambiguous gesture toward the porch door. Craig looked at him, looked down at the ample rolls of his gut, and then disappeared into the house.
The door slammed. All eyes fixed immediately on Lindsay.
“Oh my God,” she said, and sat heavily on the couch. “That shit was sitting on the arm of the sofa; he went to take his shirt off and knocked it onto my
arm.
”
People began to giggle. Lindsay glared at us and opened another beer, wrapping her lips around the top and sucking with exaggerated vigor. The door to the house banged open and Craig emerged, pulling a shirt over his head and grunting back down the porch steps.
“You didn’t have to scream like that,” he said to her.
“Oh, really?” she replied, sitting forward and sneering at him. “I’ll remember that the next time I
cover you in worms
.”
Jenna leaned against the house with her arms folded, watching mosquitoes get fried one by one in the electric-blue light of the bug zapper. Lindsay looked up at her.
“What’s going on here, did I miss something?”