Lock and Key

by Sarah Dessen

  All the visitor spaces were taken, so Jamie swung his car—a sporty little Audi with all-leather interior—into one in the student lot. I looked to my left—sure enough, parked there was a Mercedes sedan that looked brand-new. On our other side was another Audi, this one a bright red convertible.

  My stomach, which had for most of the ride been pretty much working on rejecting my breakfast, now turned in on itself with an audible clench. According to the dashboard clock, it was 8:10, which meant that in a run-down classroom about twenty miles away, Mr. Barrett-Hahn, my homeroom teacher, was beginning his slow, flat-toned read of the day’s announcements. This would be roundly ignored by my classmates, who five minutes from now would shuffle out, voices rising, to fight their way through a corridor designed for a student body a fraction the size of the current one to first period. I wondered if my English teacher, Ms. Valhalla—she of the high-waisted jeans and endless array of oversized polo shirts—knew what had happened to me, or if she just assumed I’d dropped out, like a fair amount of her students did during the course of a year. We’d been just about to start Wuthering Heights, a novel she’d promised would be a vast improvement over David Copperfield, which she’d dragged us through like a death march for the last few weeks. I’d been wondering if this was just talk or the truth. Now I’d never know.

  “Ready to face the firing squad?”

  I jumped, suddenly jerked back to the present and Jamie, who’d pulled his keys from the ignition and was now just sitting there expectantly, hand on the door handle.

  “Oops. Bad choice of words,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He pushed his door open and, feeling my stomach twist again, I forced myself to do the same. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I heard another bell sound.

  “Office is this way,” Jamie said as we started walking along the line of cars. He pointed to a covered walkway to our right, beyond which was a big green space, more buildings visible on the other side. “That’s the quad,” he said. “Classrooms are all around it. Auditorium and gym are those two big buildings you see over there. And the caf is here, closest to us. Or at least it used to be. It’s been a while since I had a sloppy joe here.”

  We stepped up on a curb, heading toward a long, flat building with a bunch of windows. I’d just followed him, ducking under an overhang, when I heard a familiar rat-a-tat -tat sound. At first, I couldn’t place it, but then I turned and saw an old model Toyota bumping into the parking lot, engine backfiring. My mom’s car did the same thing, usually at stoplights or when I was trying to quietly drop a bag off at someone’s house late at night.

  The Toyota, which was white with a sagging bumper, zoomed past us, brake lights flashing as it entered the student parking lot and whipped into a space. I heard a door slam and then footsteps slapping across the pavement. A moment later, a black girl with long braids emerged, running, a backpack over one shoulder. She had a cell phone pressed to one ear and seemed to be carrying on a spirited conversation, even as she jumped the curb, went under the covered walkway, and began to sprint across the green.

  “Ah, tardiness. Brings back memories,” Jamie said.

  “I thought you could get here in ten minutes.”

  “I could. But there were usually only five until the bell.”

  As we reached the front entrance and he pulled the glass door open for me, I was aware not of the stale mix of mildew and disinfectant Jackson was famous for but a clean, fresh-paint smell. It was actually very similar to Cora’s house, which was a little unsettling.

  “Mr. Hunter!” A man in a suit was standing just inside. As soon as he saw us, he strode right over, extending his hand. “The prodigal student returns home. How’s life in the big leagues?”

  “Big,” Jamie said, smiling. They shook hands. “Mr. Thackray, this is my sister-in-law, Ruby Cooper. Ruby, this is Principal Thackray.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Mr. Thackray said. His hand was large and cool, totally enveloping mine. “Welcome to Perkins Day.”

  I nodded, noting that my mouth had gone bone-dry. My experience with principals—and teachers and landlords and policemen—being as it was, this wasn’t surprising. Even without a transgression, that same fight-or-flight instinct set in.

  “Let’s go ahead and get you settled in, shall we?” Mr. Thackray said, leading the way down the hallway and around the corner to a large office. Inside, he took a seat behind a big wooden desk, while Jamie and I sat in the two chairs opposite. Through the window behind him, I could see a huge expanse of soccer fields lined with bleachers. There was a guy on a riding mower driving slowly down one side, his breath visible in the cold air.

  Mr. Thackray turned around, looking out the window, as well. “Looks good, doesn’t it? All we’re missing is a plaque honoring our generous benefactor.”

  “No need for that,” Jamie said, running a hand through his hair. He sat back, crossing one leg over the other. In his sneakers, jeans, and zip-up hoodie, he didn’t look ten years out of high school. Two or three, sure. But not ten.

  “Can you believe this guy?” Mr. Thackray said to me, shaking his head. “Donates an entirely new soccer complex and won’t even let us give him credit.”

  I looked at Jamie. “You did that?”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” he said, looking embarrassed.

  “Yes, it is,” Mr. Thackray said. “Which is why I wish you’d reconsider and let us make your involvement public. Plus, it’s a great story. Our students waste more time on UMe.com than any other site, and its owner donates some of the proceeds from that procrastination back into education. It’s priceless!”

  “Soccer,” Jamie said, “isn’t exactly education.”

  “Sports are crucial to student development,” Mr. Thackray said. “It counts.”

  I turned my head, looking at my brother-in-law, suddenly remembering all those pings in his UMe inbox. You could say that, he’d said, when I’d asked if he had a page. Clearly, this was an understatement.

  “. . . grab a few forms, and we’ll get a schedule set up for you,” Mr. Thackray was saying. “Sound good?”

  I realized, a beat too late, he’d been talking to me. “Yeah,” I said. Then I swallowed. “I mean, yes.”

  He nodded, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. As he left the room, Jamie sat back, examining the tread of one sneaker. Outside, the guy on the mower had finished one side of the field and was now moving slowly up the other.

  “Do you . . . ?” I said to Jamie. He glanced up at me. "You own UMe?”

  He let his foot drop. “Well . . . not exactly. It’s me and a few other guys.”

  “But he said you were the owner,” I pointed out.

  Jamie sighed. “I started it up originally,” he said. “When I was just out of college. But now I’m in more of an overseeing position.”

  I just looked at him.

  “CEO,” he admitted. “Which is really just a big word, or a really small acronym, actually, for overseer.”

  “I can’t believe Cora didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “Ah, you know Cora.” He smiled. “Unless you work eighty hours a week saving the world like she does, she’s tough to impress.”

  I looked out at the guy on the mower again, watching as he puttered past. “Cora saves the world?”

  “She tries to,” he said. “Hasn’t she told you about her work? Down at the public defender’s office?”

  I shook my head. In fact, I hadn’t even known Cora had gone to law school until the day before, when the social worker at Poplar House had asked her what she did for a living. The last I knew, she’d been about to graduate from college, and that was five years ago. And we only knew that because, somehow, an announcement of the ceremony had made its way to us. It was on thick paper, a card with her name on it tucked inside. I remembered studying the envelope, wondering why it had turned up after all this time with no contact. When I’d asked my mom, she’d just shrugged, saying the school sent them out automatically. Which made sense,
since by then, Cora had made it clear she wanted no part of us in her new life, and we’d been more than happy to oblige.

  “Well,” Jamie said as a palpable awkwardness settled over us, and I wondered what exactly he knew about our family, if perhaps my very existence had come as a surprise. Talk about baggage. “I guess you two have a lot of catching up to do, huh?”

  I looked down at my hands, not saying anything. A moment later, Mr. Thackray walked back in, a sheaf of papers in his hand, and started talking about transcripts and credit hours, and this exchange was quickly forgotten. Later, though, I wished I had spoken up, or at least tried to explain that once I knew Cora better than anyone. But that was a long time ago, back when she wasn’t trying to save the whole world. Only me.

  When I was a kid, my mom used to sing to me. It was always at bedtime, when she’d come in to say good night. She’d sit on the edge of my bed, brushing my hair back with her fingers, her breath sweet smelling (a “civilized glass” or two of wine was her norm then) as she kissed my forehead and told me she’d see me in the morning. When she tried to leave, I’d protest, and beg for a song. Usually, if she wasn’t in too bad a mood, she’d oblige.

  Back then, I’d thought my mother made up all the songs she sang to me, which was why it was so weird the first time I heard one of them on the radio. It was like discovering that some part of you wasn’t yours at all, and it made me wonder what else I couldn’t claim. But that was later. At the time, there were only the songs, and they were still all ours, no one else’s.

  My mother’s songs fell into three categories: love songs, sad songs, or sad love songs. Not for her the uplifting ending. Instead, I fell asleep to “Frankie and Johnny” and a love affair gone very wrong, “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” and a bad breakup, and “Wasted Time” and someone looking back, full of regret. But it was “Angel from Montgomery, ” the Bonnie Raitt version, that made me think of her most, then and now.

  It had everything my mother liked in a song—heartbreak, disillusionment, and death—all told in the voice of an old woman, now alone, looking back over all the things she’d had and lost. Not that I knew this; to me they were just words set to a pretty melody and sung by a voice I loved. It was only later, when I’d lie in a different bed, hearing her sing late into the night through the wall, that they kept me awake worrying. Funny how a beautiful song could tell such an ugly story. It seemed unfair, like a trick.

  If you asked her, my mother would say that nothing in her life turned out the way she planned it. She was supposed to go to college and then marry her high-school sweetheart, Ronald Brown, the tailback for the football team, but his parents decided they were getting too serious and made him break up with her, right before Christmas of her junior year. Heartbroken, she’d allowed her friends to drag her to a party where she knew absolutely no one and ended up stuck talking to a guy who was in his freshman year at Middletown Tech, studying to be an engineer. In a kitchen cluttered with beer bottles, he’d talked to her about suspension bridges and skyscrapers, “the miracle of buildings,” all of which bored her to tears. Which never explained, at least to me, why she ended up agreeing to go out with him, then sleeping with him, thereby producing my sister, who was born nine months later.

  So at eighteen, while her classmates graduated, my mom was at home with an infant daughter and a new husband. Still, if the photo albums are any indication, those early years weren’t so bad. There are tons of pictures of Cora: in a sunsuit, holding a shovel, riding a tricycle up a front walk. My parents appear as well, although not as often, and rarely together. Every once in a while, though, there’s a shot of them—my mom looking young and gorgeous with her long red hair and pale skin, my dad, dark-haired with those bright blue eyes, his arm thrown over her shoulder or around her waist.

  Because there was a ten-year gap between Cora and me, I’d always wondered if I was a mistake, or maybe a last-gasp attempt to save a marriage that was already going downhill. Whatever the reason, my dad left when I was five and my sister fifteen. We were living in an actual house in an actual neighborhood then, and we came home from the pool one afternoon to find my mom sitting on the couch, glass in hand. By themselves, neither of these things were noteworthy. Back then, she didn’t work, and while she usually waited until my dad got home to pour herself a drink, occasionally she started without him. The thing that we did notice, though, right off, was that there was music playing, and my mom was singing along. For the first time, it wasn’t soothing or pretty to me. Instead, I felt nervous, unsettled, as if the cumulative weight of all those sad songs was hitting me at once. From then on, her singing was always a bad sign.

  I had vague memories of seeing my dad after the divorce. He’d take us for breakfast on the weekends or a dinner during the week. He never came inside or up to the door to get us, instead just pulling up to the mailbox and sitting there behind the wheel, looking straight ahead. As if he was waiting not for us but for anyone, like a stranger could have slid in beside him and it would have been fine. Maybe it was because of this distance that whenever I tried to remember him now, it was hard to picture him. There were a couple of memories, like of him reading to me, and watching him grilling steaks on the patio. But even with these few things, it was as if even when he was around, he was already distant, a kind of ghost.

  I don’t remember how or why the visits ceased. I couldn’t recall an argument or incident. It was like they happened, and then they didn’t. In sixth grade, due to a family-tree project, I went through a period where the mystery of his disappearance was all I could think about, and eventually I did manage to get out of my mom that he’d moved out of state, to Illinois. He’d kept in touch for a little while, but after remarrying and a couple of changes of address he’d vanished, leaving no way for her to collect child support, or any support. Beyond that, whenever I bugged her about it, she made it clear it was not a subject she wanted to discuss. With my mom, when someone was gone, they were gone. She didn’t waste another minute thinking about them, and neither should you.

  When my dad left, my mom slowly began to withdraw from my daily routine—waking me up in the morning, getting me ready for school, walking me to the bus stop, telling me to brush my teeth—and Cora stepped in to take her place. This, too, was never decided officially or announced. It just happened, the same way my mom just happened to start sleeping more and smiling less and singing late at night, her voice wavering and haunting and always finding a way to reach my ears, even when I rolled myself against the wall tight and tried to think of something, anything else.

  Cora became my one constant, the single thing I could depend on to be there and to remain relatively unchanged, day in and day out. At night in our shared room, I’d often have to lie awake listening to her breathing for a long time before I could fall asleep myself.

  “Shhh,” I remembered her saying as we stood in our nightgowns in our bedroom. She’d press her ear against the door, and I’d watch her face, cautious, as she listened to my mom moving around downstairs. From what she heard—a lighter clicking open, then shut, cubes rattling in a glass, the phone being picked up or put down—she always gauged whether it was safe for us to venture out to brush our teeth or eat something when my mom had forgotten about dinner. If my mom was sleeping, Cora would hold my hand as we tiptoed past her to the kitchen. There I’d hold an old acrylic tray while she quickly piled it with cereal and milk—or, my favorite, English-muffin pizzas she made in the toaster oven, moving stealthily around the kitchen as my mother’s breath rose and fell in the next room. When things went well, we’d get back upstairs without her stirring. When they didn’t, she’d jerk awake, sitting up with creases on her face, her voice thick as she said, “What are you two doing?”

  “It’s okay,” Cora would say. “We’re just getting something to eat.”

  Sometimes, if she’d been out deeply enough, this was enough. More often, though, I’d hear the couch springs squeak, her feet hitting the hardwood floor, and it was t
hen that Cora always stopped whatever she was in the midst of—sandwich making, picking through my mom’s purse for lunch money, pushing the wine bottle, open and sweaty, farther back on the counter—and do the one thing I associated with her more than anything else. As my mother approached, annoyed and usually spoiling for a fight, my sister would always step in front of me. Back then, she was at least a head taller, and I remembered this so well, the sudden shift in my perspective, the view going from something scary to something not. Of course, I knew my mother was still coming toward me, but it was always Cora I kept my eyes on: her dark hair, the sharp angles of her shoulder blades, the way, when things were really bad, she’d reach her hand back to find mine, closing her fingers around it. Then she’d just stand there, as my mother appeared, ready to take the brunt of whatever came next, like the bow of a boat crashing right into a huge wave and breaking it into nothing but water.

  Because of this, it was Cora who got the bulk of the stinging slaps, the two-hand pushes that sent her stumbling backward, the sudden, rough tugs on the arm that left red twisty welts and, later, bruises in the shape of fingertips. The transgressions were always hard to understand, and therefore even more difficult to avoid: we were up when we shouldn’t have been, we were making too much noise, we provided the wrong answers to questions that seemed to have no right ones. When it was over, my mother would shake her head and leave us, returning to the couch or her bedroom, and I’d always look at Cora, waiting for her to decide what we should do next. More often than not, she’d just leave the room herself, wiping her eyes, and I’d fall in behind her, not talking but sticking very close, feeling safer if she was not just between me and my mom, but between me and the world in general.

  Later, I’d develop my own system for dealing with my mom, learning to gauge her mood by the number of glasses or bottles already on the table when I came home, or the inflection in her tone when she said the two syllables that made up my name. I took a few knocks as well, although this became more rare when I hit middle school. But it was always the singing that was the greatest indicator, the one thing that made me hesitate outside a door frame, hanging back from the light. As beautiful as her voice sounded, working its way along the melodies I knew by heart, I knew there was a potential ugliness underneath.