Wild Child: A Novel

by Molly O'Keefe

  “Pick your battles” was more than just a catchy saying. It was going to be his very first tattoo. Words to live by.

  “What are you going to do tonight?” he asked.

  “Hang out.”

  “With anyone, or by yourself?”

  It didn’t occur to him until after he said it how the words might hurt her. At her age, his whole life had revolved around friends, being social. Her aloneness seemed unnatural. And her reluctance to try to socialize was even more troubling.

  She shrugged, and he fought with superhuman effort not to march into the room, pop the bubble, and shake her.

  “You should invite some friends over,” he urged, worried, always worried.

  “I like being by myself.”

  Right. It wasn’t normal, it couldn’t be normal to want to be alone all the time, but if he pushed, she pulled, and then nothing would get accomplished.

  “I’m going out to The Pour House,” he said. “Text me if you’re going someplace.”

  She hummed in her throat, her eyes still on the book, and he waited another second as if she might look up and smile at him the way she used to. But she didn’t, and he knocked slightly on the door before walking away. He got three steps before he stopped and turned back around.

  “You want to go see a movie or something?” he asked.

  That made her stop reading.

  “What?”

  “A movie, get some ice cream …” He shrugged.

  “It’s poker night,” she said.

  “I know, but … I’d skip it if you wanted to go see a movie.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, and in her blue eyes, so like their mother’s, he saw his sister and a total stranger. Gwen was a genius, reading at age three, completing complicated algebra problems in grade five. She’d finished the entire curriculum of her sophomore year of high school, including calculus and zoology, during two and a half months of summer school.

  For about a year when she was twelve he’d been slightly scared of her, even went to Memphis twice a month so both of them could see counselors. The counselor he’d seen had told him to make sure Gwen was still a kid, that she did kid stuff.

  So in between her reading the classics and taking online physics classes at the University of Tennessee, he took her go-carting, as well as mini-putting every weekend. He went fishing with her and to the movies. He invited kids her age, tried his best to make sure she had friends.

  He’d worked hard at it, poured himself into it the way he had law school. Normalizing his sister was a job, and it had been all-consuming.

  Those, he realized now with a bittersweet pang, had been the best years.

  “No thanks,” she said, and bent back over her book.

  He sighed, slightly defeated, slightly angry. Always baffled. “Then I guess I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and as he turned again for the hallway, Gwen shifted and he saw what she was reading. Wild Child. Monica’s purple eyes stared up at him from the author photo.

  Gwen glanced up and saw what he was looking at before he could pretend not to be.

  Without a word his sister pulled the book into bed with her, hiding it in her lap, another secret to keep from him.

  Monica searched through the pink dog carrier’s gazillion pockets for Reba’s leash. She found packets of dog treats. Hair ties and lip gloss. Gum. Two cigarettes. From the side pocket she pulled a long silver strip of condoms.

  “Oh, Jenna,” she sighed, fondness a bittersweet lump in her throat. She tossed the condoms aside to the bed, but a white note floated out onto her shoe. When she picked it up she caught a glimpse of Jenna’s handwriting, and it was so unexpected, she couldn’t breathe.

  Monica, the note said in Jenna’s girlish print, and the grief bit so deep, she had to sit or fall to her knees. Don’t let the haters win. And that includes you. You’re special and you deserve to be happy. It goes so fast. Take happiness where you can find it.

  Ruined, she sat there staring at the note; the circles Jenna dotted her i’s with seemed so profound. A note from beyond the grave. About her sex life.

  Only Jenna. Only Jenna would care.

  Maybe in a few weeks she could laugh, but the best she could do right now was not bawl and put the condoms in the drawer of the bedside table. Where they would collect dust.

  Wiping her eyes, she stood again and dug until she found the small pink bedazzled leash in the side pocket of the dog carrier and advanced on Reba, who quickly dove under the bed.

  “Come on, you can’t live in this hotel room. I have work to do,” she muttered, then got down on her knees to fish the dog out.

  “It’s a walk, Reba,” she said as she grabbed the animal under her strange, hairless belly. “Not a forced march. We need exercise. Sunlight.” She clipped the leash onto Reba’s collar, grabbed her purse with her notebook and pen, and headed for the door.

  After that terrible run-in with Jackson last night, she’d come home and, fueled by anger and that four-hour nap, wasted several hours on bad TV, before finally falling asleep near dawn. She’d slept nearly twelve hours.

  So now she was wide awake, and there was work to do.

  You, Monica Appleby, are writing a book about the night your father was shot dead by your mother.

  Jackson’s words, his incredulous horror, still sent prickling chills down her arms. Like the feeling she got when she caught herself from falling, or managed to avoid a car accident, or thought of her mother.

  “Let’s go see the sights,” she said, shaking out her hands, hoping the prickly feeling would go away.

  She dragged the unwilling and surprisingly hard-to-drag Reba out into the hallway. But once she was out in the world, Reba gave herself a nose-to-tail shake and began to prance down the hall beside Monica, who found herself smiling at the little dog’s strut.

  Outside the front door of the Peabody, all the flowers were in bloom, which made the air smell like lotion. Bees the size of hummingbirds roamed the flowering bushes.

  The sun she planned to soak up was sinking low behind the city buildings across the street, and the sky to the east looked dark and bruised. She didn’t remember this town from when her mother brought her here when she was six. They’d been running away, and Monica had only seen the inside of the apartment Simone had grown up in.

  An apartment above a bar.

  The Pour House.

  There had been neon signs in dark windows, she remembered that. Some of them had been broken.

  She turned right at the corner down a residential street where the houses were smaller and closer together. Kids’ toys and bikes lay in yards, dropped when the shout for dinner came. In one yard a dog, chained to a cinder block, chewed on a bone and eyed Reba.

  Unintimidated, Reba worked her strut a little harder, shaking out her back paws as they passed.

  It didn’t take long to find. A few more lucky turns and she stood kitty-corner to a squat yellow brick building. The horizontal windows were black and long, filled with neon beer signs. Above it were the dark windows of an apartment.

  The Pour House was the poster child of dive bars. It was the dive bar other bars wished they could be. The neon o’s in the sign were still burnt out, the way they probably always had been and always would be.

  Monica appreciated a good dive bar, the honesty of a place that knew exactly what it was and exactly the service it provided.

  But this wasn’t just any dive bar. It was her nightmare.

  I’ve got some kind of fucked-up karmic relationship with this place.

  It was there—well, actually behind The Pour House, in the damp alley by the stairs leading up to that apartment—that her mom shot her dad.

  Monica shook her head, denying the memories. Not that there were many, but they were there, just under the surface, dark sharks circling a crippled boat. She was good at denying those memories. Had been doing it for years, pushing them away, drinking them away, fucking them away.

  Not anymore, she told herself, h
er stomach opening up like a black hole to swallow the rest of her organs. You’re writing about it, remember?

  Reba barked once, staring up at her through the white fringe of fur around her eyes.

  “I know. But what else have I got?” She’d accepted the advance. Her editor was “eager to see Monica’s take on such a personal horrific and cultural event.”

  Awesome.

  Before she could let the ghosts win and talk herself out of it, she stomped across the street, poor Reba running to keep up, and pulled open the door to The Pour House.

  Only to stare—slack-jawed—with surprise.

  If the outside was the same, the inside was a revelation. A dive bar reformed. The brass and wood of the bar gleamed in the low light. All the taps—a huge array, like a beer-tap fence across the top of the mahogany bar—sparkled. The dark green vinyl on the bar stools was all intact and showed no sign of duct-tape repair work. The copper lights overhead cast the room in a warm glow. And the blackboard on the far wall announced “Sean’s BBQ, coming soon.”

  All in all, totally different from the dark, scary cave she remembered. This was a nice place, a welcoming bar hiding behind foreboding clothes.

  Suddenly, she noticed how quiet it was, and she turned to see a table of three men staring at her. Including Jackson Davies.

  His blond hair picked up the lights and gleamed like gold, his long body was stretched out, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his eyes glittered as they watched her.

  And she didn’t want to admit it—wanted to hate it, actually, because he was a rude, judgmental asshole—but she liked his eyes on her. She wanted to preen under that icy gaze, show him everything he was missing out on because he was an idiot.

  But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She was a woman, a writer, with a job to do.

  And he was not going to like that.

  She turned toward the bar, smiling.

  When Monica walked into the empty bar, the atmosphere changed. As if a storm were approaching, all the hair on Jackson’s arms stood up. He was always a little loose at poker night and tonight more so than usual, because no one else had come out for it. So it was just him and his friends—Brody was in town, on a brief layover between security jobs—and the mood was so easy, he’d had two pints of beer.

  Well, he corrected, glancing down at his half-empty glass, two and a half.

  And looking at Monica—wearing those tight black workout pants women seemed to wear all the time now, and a loose green shirt that slipped over one shoulder revealing her collarbone, the delicate curve of her neck—he was fully aware that he needed to apologize for his behavior yesterday, and also painfully, completely aware that before he’d blown it, she’d been flirting with him. And he’d been flirting back, and the yard had been ripe with the kind of sexual awareness he’d practically forgotten about.

  I want her. And before I acted like an idiot, she wanted me, too. Or at least was interested in wanting me.

  “Hello, boys,” she said, her voice like scotch, rough and smooth all at once.

  The rat at the end of her leash barked.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Jackson asked.

  “Reba’s my Seeing Eye dog,” Monica said. “Who runs this place?” she asked.

  “I do.” Sean stood as if he’d been called out by the principal.

  “You did all this?” She twirled her finger around the room.

  Sean glanced behind him at Jackson and Brody. “I.… ah … had help.”

  Damn right you did. Jackson and Brody shared a manly fist-bump.

  “Well, you did an incredible job.” Her smile, without a word of exaggeration, was like the sun coming out from behind clouds.

  “Thanks,” Sean said, standing a little straighter. “I … we … worked hard on it.” He hustled behind the bar, remembering his role as bartender. “You’re Monica Appleby, aren’t you?”

  “I am.” Again that smile, and Sean paused, mid-step. Jackson knew exactly what was happening to his old friend. The way his brain was struggling to catalog all her beauty in one go.

  Sean leaned over the bar toward Monica as if they were Cosmo-drinking girlfriends. “I loved your book.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “He only read the sex parts,” Jackson said.

  “Don’t listen to him. I read it cover to cover. Though I might have reread the sex parts a couple of times.”

  “You’re only human.” She said it as if she were flirting, but he knew when Monica Appleby was flirting; he’d been the recipient of those sideways glances, the blush on her cheeks, the nervous dance of her fingers over her glass. This wasn’t that. This seemed … practiced. Careful. Brittle. And he realized, watching her, how skilled she was at letting people think they were getting close while in reality she was keeping them at arm’s length.

  Something prickly ran up his neck, an awareness.

  I do that, too.

  Or maybe he was just experiencing some beer wisdom. Or maybe he just wanted that connection he felt to her to mean something. To mean he was special.

  “So, can I get you something to drink?” Sean asked, slapping the bar. “I can make a Cosmo, or one of them froufrou drinks. I got some of those umbrellas around here. Or maybe you’d like something more rock star?”

  “Soda water with lime.”

  Sean nodded sagely. “Very rock star.”

  Monica sat down on one of the stools, crossing her legs. The small rat/dog at the end of her leash curled up under her stool. Her shirt dipped farther down her arm, revealing the bronze sheen to her skin, the small dent of her muscle.

  “Are you here for my world-famous Pour House poker night?” Sean asked, and Monica took a long, slow glance around the empty bar. “Well, usually we’re a little more full, but Jackson’s scared everyone away with reminders of all the freaking yard work they need to do.” Sean shot him a disgusted look.

  “It’s important, Sean,” Jackson repeated for about the hundredth time tonight.

  “Hardly more important than community togetherness, not more important than tradition.”

  “I’m with Sean,” Monica said, swiveling around to face him. Flirting again, or just angry? It was hard to say with that gleam in her eye, but the smart money was on angry. “Community togetherness is way more important than yard work.”

  “Luckily, authors just passing through don’t get a vote,” Jackson said.

  “Too bad,” Monica pouted, and Jackson shifted in his seat. There was something really obscene about how he reacted to that mouth of hers. “Why the yard work?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Sean wiped down his bar like it was a vintage Mustang convertible. “We’re going to be saved by a TV show.” He raised his hands to the ceiling. “Saved!”

  “Calm down, Sean,” Brody said. His deep voice made Monica turn around.

  She slipped off the stool and approached, her hand held out to Brody. “I’m Monica.”

  Brody stood. As all six feet four inches of him came up out of his chair, he had to duck under the low light over the table. Sean’s parents hadn’t been able to have kids, so they adopted Brody when he was six, but three months later they were pregnant with Sean—their miracle baby. Sean inherited all of his mother’s Irish looks, but Brody had Filipino and African American bloodlines. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and something wild simmering just under a calm surface. He didn’t smile at Monica; not that it was anything personal. Brody was just really an unsmiling kind of guy. Part of his job, Jackson supposed. Bodyguards didn’t do a lot of smiling.

  “Brody Baxter.” Even his voice was badass.

  “I like your mom’s show,” Sean said, pulling Monica’s attention away from Brody. “What Simone Wants.”

  “And I will try not to hold it against you.” Monica said it like a joke, but it rang with bitter truth.

  “I liked the show you did with your mom like fifteen years ago. Remember that one?” Sean asked and whistled. “You were like the original Kardashians.”
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  Jackson was watching Monica, unable to take his eyes off her, so he saw the small muscles around her lips flinch, as if just the memory of the show had the power to wound her.

  “What was it called again?” Sean asked, obviously unaware that Monica was not enjoying this train of conversation.

  “Mommy Dearest,” Monica joked, deadpan.

  “No, that wasn’t it,” Sean said, oblivious. “You must remember, you were on the damn thing.”

  Jackson stood and walked behind the bar, compelled to stop this conversation, all because of a lip twitch.

  Sean let him back there with only a scowl; part of Jackson’s payment for the blood, sweat, and tears he’d put into the bar was free beer. And Jackson liked to work the taps.

  “So what brings you to town?” Sean asked, distracted from trying to remember the name of Monica’s reality TV show.

  “Working on a book,” she said.

  “More sex, drugs, and rock and roll?” Sean asked, his eyebrows wiggling.

  “No. I’m going to write about my father’s murder.”

  The buzz of the neon signs in the windows was suddenly deafening.

  “Really?” Sean practically squeaked in surprise. He jerked his thumb at Jackson. “Stalin here is letting you walk around asking questions about your dad’s murder?”

  “I am … in fact.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook. Jackson gaped at her audacity. “I was hoping to ask your father a few questions. He ran the bar then, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he here?”

  Was she nuts? She couldn’t walk into this bar, with him in it, and just start asking questions. No way. When Sean glanced sideways at Jackson, Jackson didn’t even feel bad about shaking his head.

  Monica saw it and jumped like she’d been bitten on the butt. “Jackson doesn’t have anything to do with this. And I certainly don’t need his permission to ask your father a couple of questions about that night.”

  “No, but you do need mine.” Sean grabbed a napkin and a pen from behind the bar. “Here,” he said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow morning. You call him around noon, before he starts watching the baseball game.”

  Sean slid the napkin across the bar toward her.