Lock and Key

by Sarah Dessen

  “Whoa,” I heard a voice say. It was muffled slightly by my hair, and my arm, which I locked around my head in an effort to keep my brain from seeping out. “You okay?”

  I lifted myself up, expecting to see Jamie. Instead, it was Nate, standing in the kitchen doorway, a stack of dry-cleaning over one shoulder. Roscoe was at his feet, sniffing excitedly.

  “No,” I told him as he turned and walked out to the foyer, opening the closet there. With Jamie hard at work on the new ad campaign, and Cora backlogged in cases, they’d been outsourcing more and more of their errands to Rest Assured, although this Saturday morning was the first time Nate had shown up when I was home. Now I heard some banging around as he hung up the cleaning. “I was just thinking about my future.”

  “That bad, huh?” he said, crouching down to pet Roscoe, who leaped up, licking his face.

  “Only if I fail calculus,” I said. “Which seems increasingly likely.”

  “Nonsense.” He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans, and came over, leaning against the counter. “How could that happen, when you personally know the best calc tutor in town?”

  “You?” I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Oh God, no,” he said, shuddering. “I’m good at a lot of things, but not that. I barely passed myself.”

  “You did pass, though.”

  “Yeah. But only because of Gervais.”

  Immediately, he popped into my head, small and foul smelling. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m not that desperate.”

  “Didn’t look that way when I came in.” He walked over, pulling out a chair and sitting down opposite me, then drew my book over to him, flipping a page and wincing at it. “God, just looking at this stuff freaks me out. I mean, how basic is the power rule? And yet why can I still not understand it?”

  I just looked at him. “The what?”

  He shot me a look. “You need Gervais,” he said, pushing the book at me. “And quickly.”

  “That is just what I don’t need,” I said, sitting back and pulling my leg to my chest. “Can you imagine actually asking Gervais for a favor? Not to mention owing him anything. He’d make my life a living hell.”

  “Oh, right,” Nate said, nodding. “I forgot. You have that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “The indebtedness thing,” he said. “You have to be self-sufficient, can’t stand owing anyone. Right?”

  “Well,” I said. Put that way, it didn’t sound like something you wanted to agree to, necessarily. “If you mean that I don’t like being dependent on people, then yes. That is true.”

  “But,” he said, reaching down to pat Roscoe, who had settled at his feet, “you do owe me.”

  Again, this did not seem to be something I wanted to second, at least not immediately. “What’s your point?”

  He shrugged. “Only that, you know, I have a lot of errands to run today. Tons of cupcakes to ice.”

  “And . . .”

  “And I could use a little help,” he said. “If you felt like, you know, paying me back.”

  “Do these errands involve Gervais?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I thought for a second. “Okay,” I said, shutting my book. “I’m in.”

  “Now,” he said, as I followed him up the front steps of a small brick house that had a flag with a watermelon flying off the front, “before we go in, I should warn you about the smell.”

  “The smell?” I asked, but then he was unlocking the door and pushing it open, transforming this from a question to an all-out exclamation. Oh my God, I thought as the odor hit me from all sides. It was like a fog; even as you walked right through it, it just kept going.

  “Don’t worry,” Nate said over his shoulder, continuing through the living room, past a couch covered with a brightly colored quilt to a sunny kitchen area beyond. “You get used to it after a minute or two. Soon, you won’t even notice it.”

  “What is it?”

  Then, though, as I waited in the entryway—Nate had disappeared into the kitchen—I got my answer. It started with just an odd feeling, which escalated to creepy as I realized I was being watched.

  As soon as I spotted the cat on the stairs—a fat tabby, with green eyes—observing me with a bored expression, I noticed the gray one under the coatrack to my right, followed by a black one curled up on the back of the couch and a long-haired white one stretched out across the Oriental rug in front of it. They were everywhere.

  I found Nate on an enclosed back porch where five carriers were lined up on a table. Each one had a Polaroid of a cat taped to it, a name written in clean block lettering beneath: RAZZY. CESAR. BLU. MARGIE. LYLE.

  “So this is a shelter or something?” I asked.

  “Sabrina takes in cats that can’t get placed,” he said, picking up two of the carriers and carrying them into the living room. “You know, ones that are sick or older. The unwanted and abandoned, as it were.” He grabbed one of the Polaroids, of a thin gray cat—RAZZY, apparently—then glanced around the room. “You see this guy anywhere?”

  We both looked around the room, where there were several cats but no gray ones. “Better hit upstairs,” Nate said. “Can you look around for the others? Just go by the pictures on the carriers.”

  He left the room, jogging up the stairs. A moment later, I heard him whistling, the ceiling creaking as he moved around above. I looked at the row of carriers and the Polaroids attached, then spotted one of them, a black cat with yellow eyes—LYLE—watching me from a nearby chair. As I picked up the carrier, the picture flipped up, exposing a Post-it that was stuck to the back.

  Lyle will be getting a checkup and blood drawn to monitor how he’s responding to the cancer drugs. If Dr. Loomis feels they are not making a difference, please tell him to call me on my cell phone to discuss if there is further action to take, or whether I should just focus on keeping him comfortable.

  “Poor guy,” I said, positioning the carrier in front of him, the door open. “Hop in, okay?”

  He didn’t. Even worse, when I went to nudge him forward, he reached out, swiping at me, his claws scraping across my skin.

  I dropped the carrier, which hit the floor, the open door banging against it. Looking down at my hand, I could already see the scratches, beads of blood rising up in places. “You little shit,” I said. He just stared back at me, as if he’d never moved at all.

  “Oh, man,” Nate said, coming around the corner carrying two cats, one under each arm. “You went after Lyle?”

  “You said to get them,” I told him.

  “I said to look,” he said. “Not try to wrangle. Especially that one—he’s trouble. Let me see.”

  He reached over, taking my hand and peering down at it to examine the scratches. His palm was warm against the underside of my wrist, and as he leaned over it I could see the range of color in his hair falling across his forehead, which went from white blond to a more yellow, all the way to almost brown.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I should have warned you.”

  “I’m okay. It’s just a little scrape.”

  He glanced up at me, and I felt my face flush, suddenly even more aware of how close we were to each other. Over his shoulder, Lyle was watching, the pupils of his yellow eyes widening, then narrowing again.

  In the end, it took Nate a full twenty minutes to get Lyle in the carrier and to the car, where I was waiting with the others. When he finally slid behind the wheel, I saw his hands were covered with scratches.

  “I hope you get combat pay,” I said as he started the engine.

  “I don’t scar, at least,” he replied. “And anyway, you can’t really blame the guy. It’s not like he’s ever been given a reason to like the vet.”

  I just looked at him as we pulled away from the curb. From behind us, someone was already yowling. “You know,” I said, “I just can’t get behind that kind of attitude.”

  Nate raised his eyebrows, amused. “You can’t what?”

  “The whol
e positive spin—the “oh, it’s not the cat’s fault he mauled me” thing. I mean, how do you do that?”

  “What’s the alternative?” he asked. “Hating all creatures? ”

  “No,” I said, shooting him a look. “But you don’t have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.”

  “You don’t have to assume the worst about everyone, either. The world isn’t always out to get you.”

  “In your opinion,” I added.

  “Look,” he said, “the point is there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. So you’re left with a choice. Either hope for the best, or just expect the worst.”

  “If you expect the worst, you’re never disappointed,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but who lives like that?”

  I shrugged. “People who don’t get mauled by psycho cats.”

  “Ah, but you did,” he said, pointing at me. “So clearly, you aren’t that kind of person. Even if you want to be.”

  After the group vet appointment—during which Lyle scratched the vet, the vet tech, and some poor woman minding her own business in the waiting room—we went back to Sabrina’s and re-released the cats to their natural habitat. From there, we hit the dry-cleaners (where we collected tons of suits and dress shirts), the pharmacy (shocking how many people were taking antidepressants, not that I was judging), and One World—the organic grocery store— where we picked up a special order of a wheat-, eggs-, and gluten-free cake, the top of which read HAPPY FORTIETH, MARLA!

  “Forty years without wheat or eggs?” I said as we carried it up the front steps of a big house with columns in the front. “That’s got to suck.”

  “She doesn’t eat meat, either,” he told me, pulling out a ring of keys and flipping through them. When he found the one he was looking for, he stuck it in the lock, pushing the door open. “Or anything processed. Even her shampoo is organic.”

  “You buy her shampoo?”

  “We buy everything. She’s always traveling. Kitchen’s this way.”

  I followed him through the house, which was huge and immensely cluttered. There was mail piled on the island, recycling stacked by the back door, and the light on the answering machine was blinking nonstop, the way it does when the memory is packed.

  “You know,” I said, “for someone so strict about her diet, I’d expect her to be more anal about her house.”

  “She used to be, before the divorce,” Nate said, taking the cake from me and sliding it into the fridge. “Since then, it’s gone kind of downhill.”

  “That explains the Xanax,” I said as he took a bottle out of the pharmacy bag, sticking it on the counter.

  “You think?”

  I turned to the fridge, a portion of which was covered with pictures of various Hollywood actresses dressed in bikinis. On a piece of paper above them, in black marker, was written THINK BEFORE YOU SNACK! “Yes,” I said. “She must be really intense.”

  “Probably is,” Nate said, glancing over at the fridge. “I’ve never met her.”

  “Really? ”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s kind of the whole point of the business. They don’t have to meet us. If we’re doing our job right, their stuff just gets done.”

  “Still,” I said, “you have to admit, you’re privy to a lot. I mean, look at how much we know about her just from this kitchen.”

  “Maybe. But you can’t really know anyone just from their house or their stuff. It’s just a tiny part of who they are.” He grabbed his keys off the counter. “Come on. We’ve got four more places to hit before we can quit for the day.”

  I had to admit it was hard work, or at least harder than it looked. In a way, though, I liked it. Maybe because it reminded me of Commercial, driving up to houses and leaving things, although in this case we got to go inside, and often picked things up, as well. Plus there was something interesting about these little glimpses you got into people’s lives: their coat closet, their garage, what cartoons they had on their fridge. Like no matter how different everyone seemed, there were some things that everyone had in common.

  Our last stop was a high-rise apartment building with a clean, sleek lobby. As I followed Nate across it, carrying the last of the dry-cleaning, I could hear both our footsteps, amplified all around us.

  “So what’s the story here?” I asked him as we got into the elevator. I pulled the dry-cleaning tag where I could see it. “Who’s P. Collins?”

  “A mystery,” he said.

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “You’ll see.”

  On the seventh floor, we stepped out into a long hall lined with identical doors. Nate walked down about halfway, then pulled out his keys and opened the door in front of him. “Go ahead,” he said.

  When I stepped in, the first thing I was aware of was the stillness. Not just a sense of something being empty, but almost hollow, even though the apartment was fully furnished with sleek, contemporary furniture. In fact, it looked like something out of a magazine, that perfect.

  “Wow,” I said as Nate took the cleaning from me, disappearing into a bedroom that was off to the right. I walked over to a row of windows that looked out over the entire town, and for miles farther; it was like being on top of the world. “This is amazing.”

  “It is,” he said, coming back into the room. “Which is why it’s so weird that whoever it belongs to is never here.”

  “They must be,” I said. “They have dry-cleaning.”

  “That’s the only thing, though,” he said. “And it’s just a duvet cover. We pick it up about every month or so.”

  I walked into the kitchen, looking around. The fridge was bare, the counters spotless except for one bottle cap, turned upside down. “Aha,” I said. “They drink root beer.”

  “That’s mine,” Nate said. “I left it there last time as an experiment, just to see if anyone moved it or threw it away.”

  “And it’s still here?”

  “Weird, right?” He walked back over to the windows, pulling open a glass door. Immediately I could smell fresh air blowing in. “I figure it’s got to be a rental, or some company -owned kind of deal. For visiting executives or something. ”

  I went into the living room, scanning a low bookcase by the couch. There were a few novels, a guide to traveling in Mexico, a couple of architectural-design books. “I don’t know,” I said. “I bet someone lives here.”

  “Well, if they do, I feel for them,” he said, leaning into the open door. “They don’t even have any pictures up.”

  “Pictures? ”

  “You know, of family or friends. Some proof of a life, you know?”

  I thought of my own room back at Cora’s—the blank walls, how I’d only barely unpacked. What would someone think, coming in and seeing my stuff? A few clothes, some books. Not much to go on.

  Nate had gone outside, and was now on the small terrace, looking out into the distance. When I came to stand next to him, he looked down at my hand, still crisscrossed with scratches. “Oh, I totally forgot,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small tube. “I got something at One World for that.”

  BOYD’S BALM, it said in red letters. As he uncapped it, I said, “What is this, exactly?”

  “It’s like natural Neosporin,” he explained. When I gave him a doubtful look, he added, “Marla swears by it.”

  “Oh, well. Then by all means.” He gestured for me to stick out my hand. When I did, he squeezed some on, then began to rub it in, carefully. It burned a bit at first, then turned cold, but not in a bad way. Again, with us so close to each other, my first instinct was to pull back, like I had before. But instead, I made myself stay where I was and relax as his hand moved over mine.

  “Done,” he said after a moment, when it was all rubbed in. “You’ll be healed by tomorrow.”

  “That’s optimistic.”

  “Well, you can expect your hand to fall off, if you want,” he said. “But personally, I just can’t subscribe to that way of thi
nking.”

  I smiled despite myself. Looking up at his face, the sun just behind him, I thought of that first night, when he’d leaned over the fence. Then it had been impossible to make out his features, but here, all was clear, in the bright light of day. He wasn’t really at all what I’d assumed or expected, and I wondered if I’d surprised him, too.

  Later, after he dropped me off, I came in to find Cora at the stove, peering down into a big pot as she stirred something. “Hey,” she called out as Roscoe ran to greet me, jumping up. “I didn’t think you were working today.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said.

  “Then where were you?”

  “Everywhere,” I said, yawning. She looked up at me, quizzical, and I wondered why I didn’t just tell her the truth. But there was something about that day that I wanted to keep to myself, if just for a little while longer. “Do you need help with dinner?”

  “Nah, I’m good. We’ll be eating in about a half hour, though, okay?”

  I nodded, then headed up to my room. After dropping my bag onto the floor, I went out onto my balcony, looking across the yard and the pond to Nate’s house. Sure enough, a minute later I saw him carrying some things into the pool house, still working.

  Back inside, I kicked off my shoes and climbed onto the bed, stretching out and closing my eyes. I was just about to drift off when I heard a jingle of tags and looked over to see Roscoe in the doorway to my room. Cora must have turned on the oven, I thought, waiting for him to move past me to my closet, where he normally huddled until the danger had passed. Instead, he came to the side of the bed, then sat down, peering up at me.

  I looked at him for a second, then sighed. “All right,” I said, patting the bed. “Come on.”

  He didn’t hesitate, instantly leaping up, then doing a couple of quick spins before settling down beside me, his head resting on my stomach. As I began to pet him, I looked down at the scratches Lyle had given me, smoothing my fingers across them and feeling the slight rises there as I remembered Nate doing the same. I kept doing this, in fact, for the rest of the night—during dinner, before bed—tracing them the way I once had the key around my neck, as if I needed to memorize them. And maybe I did, because Nate was right: By the next morning, they were gone.