The Woman Next Door (31 page)

“It’s Lee’s,” Amanda murmured. “Karen mentioned it.” She raised
her voice. “You don’t want to use that, Jordie. It’s unnecessary. Nothing is that bad.”

Jordie didn’t argue. He simply continued to stare out at the forest.

Amanda moved closer to Graham. As wet as his shirt was growing, a warmth came from beneath it. She didn’t stop this time to remember other instances when she had sought his warmth out in the wild this way. Now, she just swallowed. “How do we get him down?”

“We don’t. It’s too dark and too slippery. The rescue squad gets him down.”

“I’ll run back.”

“I’ll go. I run faster. You stay here and try to get him talking. You do that better than me.” His eyes met hers. He touched his fingers to her mouth, followed them with his eyes for the space of a second, then set off.

His absence was sudden and visceral. Amanda felt it deep inside. Looking up at Jordie, she had to work harder to distinguish him from the stones. It was a typical spring rain, steady now but mercifully gentle. Pushing back wet strands of her hair, she moved closer.

“I wanted to talk today,” she called up. “I e-mailed you several times.”

“Where’d Graham go?” Jordie called down in a distrustful voice.

“To let your parents know where you are. They’ve been beside themselves with worry.”

“I’ll bet,” he muttered.

She might not have heard it if she hadn’t been expecting it. Jordie had issues with his parents—it didn’t take a counselor to see that. Amanda had the added advantage of knowing Karen and Lee. She also knew what it was like growing up with battling parents,
knew what it was like to feel a churning in her stomach each time she walked in the door of the one place that was supposed to be a haven.

“They love you,” she called, but the rain suddenly fell harder, and her voice didn’t carry as far. Sheltering her eyes with both hands, she put more effort into it. “Why the tower, Jordie? Do you really want to spend the night up there?”

He didn’t respond.

“Talk to me,” she called, because that was key. He needed to vent and curse and share his fears. On the parent front, she knew where he was coming from. On the Quinn front, she could commiserate. She had to be closer to him, though. She wanted to be sitting beside him.

Going forward, she climbed through a hole in the fence and went to the side of the tower where the rocks served as steps.

Jordie called out a warning. “Don’t come up.”

“I can’t talk to you from down here,” she called back, testing the rock with one hand and a foot. The granite was slick, but her hiking shoes had good treads. Scraping the soles free of wet leaves, she raised herself onto the first step. Grasping the stone above with both hands, she steadied herself and moved up another two steps. One foot slipped. She caught herself, held still for a minute to let the pounding of her heart ease, then rose another eight inches.

“I’ll jump if you come,” Jordie called.

He didn’t mention using the gun. That was good.

She couldn’t see him now. He was on the other side of the tower. Increasingly, between the rain and dusk, she had trouble seeing even the rocks above. She could feel them, though. Her hands led the way.

She raised her left foot to the next stone, found rocks to grasp with her fingers, climbed up. The incline of the tower gave her help
with gravity. Her right foot found the next step. Her palms closed over rocks to the right and left. Heart racing faster with each step, she rose higher.

“Amanda?” Jordie called, sounding as though he wanted to know where she was and couldn’t decide whether he was frightened or angry.

“If you jump,” she called back, “I’m apt to fall, in which case my death will be on your conscience.” She was apt to fall anyway. The ground was growing farther and farther away. The thought was chilling.

“If I’m dead,” he charged, “it won’t matter.”

“You don’t want to die.” She had to believe that. “There are too many things in life you love.”

He didn’t respond.

Taking shallower breaths, ignoring the fear she felt, she kept climbing. Oddly, the higher she went, the easier the stones were to find, but that was part of the lore. The tower gods hooked you and pulled you up, it was said, and Amanda was ready to believe it. Her foot slipped as it had below, only she was higher now, making it more dangerous. She cried out, braced herself for a fall, miraculously found her footing again. Several more steps, and she nearly slipped again when, groping for a hold, her shoe knocked out a rock. She didn’t fall this time, either. But she did hear the dislodged rock tumble over stone to the ground. The sound was not reassuring.

About halfway up, she reached the point of no return, where, according to legend, she couldn’t have gone back down if she’d tried. Reaching it now, she wasn’t sure whether it was the cutoff between further adventure or sheer terror. She certainly felt the last. She didn’t look down, didn’t look up other than to search for handholds. Gripped by that terror, she told herself she was an imbecile—
told herself she should have waited for the rescue squad— told herself that she was absolutely, positively going to die. But Quinn was dead, and Jordie was up there with a gun, and even if she had wanted to turn back, it was too late. Physically, she couldn’t do it. She had no choice but to keep going, finding one foothold after the next, climbing higher and higher.

“Jordie?” she called in a shaky voice when she sensed she was nearing the top. She refused to think of how high she was, refused to think of how far she would fall. “Are you still there, Jordie?”

The derisive sound he made came from a spot not much higher. “Where would I go?”

Like his threat to jump rather than shoot, the self-derision was telling. She wanted to think he realized that he’d made a mistake but didn’t know how to right it.

She continued to work one foot after the other until her hands reached open space. Her stomach dropped at the void. For a split second, she was dizzy. She may have even whimpered, though the sound of the rain swallowed it up.

“You’re crazy,” Jordie said.

Climbing a step higher, Amanda said a high-pitched, “You and me, both.” Bracing her hands on the top circle of stones, she had moved her feet high enough so that she could bend over that top row and rest her legs, but, for the life of her, she didn’t know what to do next. Her knees were shaking. Her stomach was twisting. She was calling herself every kind of fool for having done this.

Jordie must have heard the element of panic in her voice, because he said, “There’s a ledge to stand on about two feet down on the inside.”

She eased a leg over and groped blindly—lower, then lower— until her shoe touched the ledge. It didn’t feel any too wide to her,
but it did seem sturdy. Carefully, she slid the other leg over. She held on for a minute, bent over the top. Gingerly, she inched sideways until she reached Jordie.

He was soaking wet. Though the light was dim, she could see that—and the fact that he was no longer holding the gun. That was some relief, along with the fact that visibility was so poor now that she couldn’t make out the area below the tower. Pretending that they were only three feet off the ground, she carefully slid a leg over and straddled the rock.

“Graham’s going to kill me,” she said, because it was the first thought that came to mind. “These stones are treacherous. I’m not good at treacherous things.” With a bit of leftover breath, she asked, “Where’s the gun?”

Jordie didn’t answer.

“I don’t want it accidentally going off.”

“I know how to use it.”

“I’m sure you do,” she said. What she didn’t say was that any
moron
could point a gun at his heart, pull the trigger, and make his point. She wasn’t giving him any ideas.

“You shouldn’t’ve come up here.”

There was a cracking sound, then the thudding of another rock as it careened down the tower’s side. Imagining that if enough stones fell out under their weight, the tower might just crumble and bury them alive, Amanda said in a mildly hysterical way, “I didn’t want you feeling lonely.” She repositioned her hands, one in front and one behind her. They were less than cemented to the wet granite, but the bracing made her feel marginally more secure.

“How do you know what I’m feeling?” Jordie asked. “You’re not me.”

“No. But this is what I do.”

“Read minds?”

“Feel.” She let that sink in for a minute. “Is it Quinn?”

Silently, he looked out into the rain and the fast-falling darkness.

“Quinn needed help,” she said.

“I helped him,” Jordie muttered bitterly. “I gave him the vodka. He said he wanted it for a party. I thought he meant a weekend party. I thought it’d be cool to go. So I told him my dad had a stash in the basement and wouldn’t miss a bottle. I brought one to school.”

“And you feel guilty about that.”

In a rush of angry words, Jordie said, “If I hadn’t given him the stuff, he wouldn’t have been caught drunk, and if he hadn’t been caught drunk, he wouldn’t have been punished, and then there wouldn’t have been anything in the paper, and he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

“Oh, Jordie. It wasn’t just the piece in the newpaper. It was other things.”

“Yeah. Like his parents. At least they were together.”

She couldn’t miss his meaning. “Your parents are together.”

“Barely. They fight all the time. If that’s what together means, I don’t want it.”

“All marriages have rocky times.”

He looked at her then. Even as dim as the light was, she could see his incredulity. “They
hate
each other.”

Amanda felt shades of the familiar. Years of agonizing over her parents’ relationship hadn’t produced any answers. She had finally learned to let it go, though that was more easily done intellectually than emotionally. “Whether or not they do, they love you kids. Do you doubt that?”

Jordie didn’t answer. Instead, turning half around in anger, he blurted out, “Why was he with Gretchen?”

There was a grating sound from below, a minuscule shudder, the clatter of what sounded like a cluster of small rocks tumbling down the side of the tower.

Amanda held her breath, didn’t move, didn’t say anything until the sound died without follow-up. In the aftermath, she imagined she and Jordie hurtling down the tower, bumping against the side just as the rocks had done.

Where is Graham?
she cried silently, feeling like a coward but not caring a bit.
What was
taking
him so long?

“You’re not answering,” Jordie taunted.

“I didn’t know he had been with Gretchen,” she managed. “Are you sure about that?”

“It won’t have been the first time he’s cheated on my mom. And don’t tell me I’m wrong. I hear them fighting. I’ll give you names if you want.”

“Did he say he was with Gretchen?”

“No, but my mom thinks he was. She gets so angry, she scares me.”

Amanda imagined she felt a tremor under her, a tiny aftershock, the resettling of the stones. Feeling an incipient nausea, she said, “I worry about that gun, Jordie. If you’ve stuck it in your waistband and it goes off by accident when these rocks shift again, I’d hate to think what it’d hit.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” she insisted. Focusing on Jordie, because he was a more stable point of reference than the darkness behind her lids if she closed her eyes, she took a slow, deep breath. She needed to keep Jordie talking until help arrived. “How does your mom scare you?”

“She’s someone else when she talks to him. I don’t care what you say, she hates him, and it’s Gretchen’s fault. She should’ve moved
away when Ben died. She didn’t have any cause to stay and if she did, she should’ve taken care of herself, instead of letting my dad and Graham and Russ fuss over her. If she hadn’t lured them in, none of this would’ve happened.”

“None of what?”

“My parents’ fights. There were fights before, but they were okay before this.”

“That’s like saying Quinn killed himself over the newspaper article. It’s too simplistic an answer.”

Jordie sat there with his jaw tight, seeming to resist until the words just spilled out. “So why did he kill himself?”

“He was deeply troubled. He didn’t have anyone to talk to. He felt pressure to succeed. It was just too much.”

“Everyone feels pressure to succeed. That’s what getting grades in school is about.”

“He felt pressure to be at the top.”

“Because of his brothers?”

“Possibly.”

“But he was at the top.”

“He felt pressure to stay there. The pressure grew. He wanted to succeed. He pretended to be confident and self-assured, when inside he wasn’t feeling that at all.”

Jordie thought for a moment. “So he killed himself because he wasn’t perfect? How does that make the rest of us feel? We aren’t anywhere
near
being perfect.”

“And Quinn wasn’t anywhere near perfect either. But he felt such pressure to achieve perfection that he became helpless and gave up. His biggest problem was that the helplessness took away all his strength. But you’re still strong, Jordie—you’re still fighting. Quinn gave up. He
wasn’t
strong.”

“He was so. He couldn’t have been all the things he was if he wasn’t strong.”

“Class president? Starting pitcher? Mr. Congeniality? Life is full of choices, Jordie. None of those things involved tough ones. The one time Quinn faced a biggie, he did it wrong. Death is not a good choice. Not when you’re young and healthy. Not when you have potential. Not when people love you.”

“It isn’t that simple,” Jordie muttered and looked quickly back toward the path.

Amanda heard the same sound he did, the thud of approaching footsteps. Seconds later, the beams of large flashlights converged on the ground below.

“Shit,”
Jordie muttered.

“Amanda?” Graham called around the ground level.
“Amanda?”

“Up here,” she yelled down. The only thing she could see of him was the yellow rain slicker he had put on, and that, only as the beams of other flashlights crossed his body. Suddenly, all of those beams were aimed up, hitting their eyes. Instinctively, she put a hand up to shield hers from the glare, but the movement caused a shift in the rocks. Grasping them, she screamed,
“Lower the lights.”