“Tell me about it,” Brandon had replied. “You got some girl tucked away at home?”
And so he’d offered up Phoebe. His own dear Phebe. His oldest and best friend in Barnsbury. The only person he’d been able to talk to about his self-doubts and confusion. His sense of being nobody inside. Phebe, his own personal confessor and counselor. The only person in the world who really knew him. But it was because he could count on her, he told himself, that he felt free to embroider on their relationship. She’d understand, wouldn’t she? She’d probably laugh out loud if she heard the way he described her physical attributes as if he knew them intimately. In fact, the more Brandon questioned him, the further Liam embellished upon the truth.
“So she really puts out, huh?” Brandon asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Liam said. “She’s been putting out for me since seventh grade.”
“Didn’t you tell me that she was babysitting your sister tonight?” Carey asked. He’d hardly said a word since they’d left the diner, since Brandon and Liam had gotten their “early start on the holidays” by snorting a couple of lines of the crushed OxyContin in the parking lot. Instead, Carey had sat in disapproving silence as they drove north, staring straight ahead while Brandon and Liam passed the bottle of scotch back and forth between them.
“That’s right,” Liam said, though he’d forgotten all about it until that very moment. Until it was too late. Phoebe was going to be right there waiting for him! Oh, man, he’d really fucked up. The last thing he wanted was for Phoebe to see him in this condition. After all his promises.
“She’s the babysitter?” Brandon said, slapping the wheel. “That’s just too great! You don’t mind if I give it a shot, do you, man?”
Liam opened his mouth to protest. Of course, he minded. And, besides, Phoebe wasn’t his to give away. She was her own sweet, innocent self. No! He’d made a mistake. He needed to fix this, he told himself. But his thoughts kept slipping away from him, shimmering past like headlights. Blinding him. He needed to concentrate. He attempted to focus on the bright cold stars glittering above the mountains on the horizon, but they wouldn’t stay still. They shot like tracers through the dark, leaving ghostly contrails in their wake. Something was very wrong. He tried to sit up. He needed to pull himself together. Clear his head. He had to set Brandon straight. There was something he wanted to clarify. Something he really needed to explain.
• • •
Someone was jiggling Liam’s foot. He still had his boots on, though the laces on the right one had obviously become untied. Someone was tugging at them, pulling the boot back and forth.
“Hey!” Tilly whispered. “Are you still asleep?”
“I was,” Liam said. Those two words alone took a tremendous effort on his part. His mouth was a furnace. His throat raw. He rolled over on the bed, blocking the morning sunlight with his arm. His temples pulsed with pain.
“So why are you already dressed?”
“I didn’t—,” he began to say, but then he stopped himself. The truth—that he’d never actually undressed—would, of course, only lead to further questions on Tilly’s part. She was always full of questions for him. Five years younger than he was, she’d been following him around her whole life, badgering him with a seemingly endless litany of whens and wheres and how comes.
“What’s the matter?” she asked now, leaning over the side of the bed. “Are you sick or something? Carey said you might not be feeling well. You and Brandon.”
“Yeah,” Liam sighed, closing his eyes. Jumbled pieces of last night floated around in his brain. The diner. The ziplock bag. Stars streaking across the sky.
“We cooked these really cool pancakes,” Tilly went on. Her piping voice made his ears ache. “They’re like everything pancakes. We put in blueberries and chocolate chips and walnuts and raisins. We made bacon and sausages. Carey’s like the best cook. It’s all ready. We’re waiting for you downstairs.”
“Okay,” Liam said. He could smell the bacon now. It turned his stomach. He thought he might actually gag just thinking about the greasy strips of smoked meat.
“So, you’re getting up, right?” Tilly said.
“Soon,” Liam said, turning on his side. The room swayed.
“No, now, Liam!” Tilly insisted. “Or everything’s going to get cold.” He could hear the little quiver in her voice. She’d missed him a lot, he knew. She’d written him at least once a week the whole semester. Her loopy longhand filling page after page of yellow legal paper, reporting on her friends at school, her ice hockey team, the doings of Puff Daddy—their border collie—and their aging cat, JLo. She’d ended every missive with, “I can’t wait for you to come home!!!!!” God, was he really going to start the holiday disappointing everyone again?
“Okay,” he told her. “I’ll be down in just a sec.” But, after she left, he lay in bed for a while longer, staring at his bedroom ceiling, trying to piece together what exactly had happened the night before. He couldn’t recall arriving home. Or climbing the stairs. Or falling into bed. His last, fleeting memory was of headlights swimming past him—and the sound of Brandon’s voice.
• • •
“You were right about old Phoebe,” Brandon said. Tilly and Carey had just left to take Puff Daddy for a walk, leaving the two boys alone at the kitchen table. Liam’s plate sat in front of him, a pool of syrup coagulating around his half-finished stack of pancakes. He felt nauseated just looking at it, so he got up and cleared his plate. He stood at the sink, looking out the kitchen window. Tilly and Carey were playing catch with a tennis ball as they walked down the driveway, Puff Daddy racing between them, barking, and jumping up and down as he tried to intercept the ball. Every bone in Liam’s body seemed to ache.
“What about her?” Liam asked, turning back to the table.
“She’s got some incredible body.”
“Yeah,” Liam said. Phoebe. He remembered now. She’d been asleep on the couch. She’d been wearing a lavender sweater.
“But she’s a fucking tease, man,” Brandon said, crumpling his paper napkin and tossing it onto his empty plate. “I was like this close—” He lifted his right hand, thumb and index finger about an inch apart.
“That close?” Liam asked. Winter sunlight flooded the spacious kitchen, bouncing off the glass panes in the cupboards. Liam felt as if someone had attached a vise to his head and was slowly tightening the screws. He couldn’t think in this state. He couldn’t work out what Brandon was trying to say. Something about Phoebe. Oh, God! He realized now that she must have been there last night. She would have seen how totally out of it he’d been. Why? she’d asked him. He remembered now. She’d looked down at him with pity in her eyes and asked: Why? He needed to call her. No, he’d text her—it would be easier to explain things that way.
Puff Daddy started to bark. A car horn sounded outside. Liam turned back to the window to watch his mother’s Volvo wagon pull in beside Brandon’s BMW. Tilly came running up the drive with the dog, followed by Liam’s tall, skinny roommate. He watched as his father and Carey shook hands, as his mom stood on tiptoe to kiss Carey on the cheek. There was the kind of son they deserved, Liam thought, someone trustworthy. Someone you could count on. Not the total screwup he was turning out to be. Michael Bostock loped toward the house, his overnight satchel slung over his shoulder. He was smiling, his step quickening with anticipation. Liam knew how deeply his dad cared about him. How torn his dad had been about the Moorehouse decision. How his father took pride in even the smallest of his son’s accomplishments. But that morning Michael Bostock’s love felt like a burden almost too heavy for Liam to bear.
4
Phoebe’s mother totally bought her story: Phoebe had come down with the flu. She’d first felt sick at the Bostocks’. Her mom had been asleep by the time Phoebe got home, and she hadn’t wanted to worry her. But Phoebe had spent the rest of the night going back and forth to the bathroom.
“Did you tell Mrs. Bostock you were feeling sick?” her mom a
sked.
Phoebe hadn’t mentioned that the Bostocks, who normally would have driven her home, would be away overnight and that she planned to walk back. In the fantasy she’d spun for herself, she imagined Liam walking with her, the two of them holding hands.
“No,” Phoebe mumbled, as her mom pulled the thermometer out of her mouth.
“Well, you should have,” her mom said. “And you should have woken me up when you got home. You look like death warmed over. But at least you don’t have a fever. Are you hungry at all?”
“Yuck, no,” Phoebe said. She doubted she’d ever be able to eat again. What she did crave, though, was her mother’s solicitude. Just having her linger at her bedside, straightening the comforter and plumping up her pillows, helped relieve the misery a little. She felt as soiled and torn as the cashmere sweater of her mom’s that she’d stuffed in the back of the bathroom closet the night before. She suffered bodily, as well: her head felt swollen and her stomach churned. The marks that Brandon had left on either side of her neck and along her arms ached and she’d had to pull on a turtleneck to hide the darkening bruises. But her heart ached a whole lot more. She felt violated. First by Brandon and then—though she could hardly bear to think about it—by Liam. Her Liam! How could he have said that about her?
“Are you crying, honey?” her mother asked her, sitting down beside her on the edge of the bed. Mother and daughter shared many of the same physical attributes—though Wanda was a blonde—as well as a sweet, empathetic nature. “Is it really that bad? Maybe I should call Dr. Davis.”
“No!” Phoebe said. “It’s that—I usually feel so good, you know? I guess I’m just not used to feeling so awful.”
“Oh, I know,” her mom said, brushing back Phoebe’s hair. “And I wish I could tell you that you won’t ever feel this way again. I wish I could protect you better. But feeling bad sometimes? I’m afraid it’s just something you’re going to have to get used to in life.”
As her mom left the room, Phoebe’s eyes welled up again. Hot tears ran down her cheeks. Of course, her mom had been talking only about being sick. But her kind words made Phoebe wonder if her mom wasn’t somehow able to sense that the true source of her daughter’s distress lay in her heart. After all, this was emotional territory that Wanda Lansing knew all too well herself.
A little over four years ago, when Phoebe was eleven, Wanda discovered that Troy Lansing, her high school sweetheart and husband of nearly sixteen years, had been cheating on her. Not once, as he had first claimed when Wanda saw his battered pickup—how stupid and trite can you get!—parked outside the Mountain View Motor Inn. No, after some checking around—after discovering that well-meaning friends and family had been sheltering “poor Wanda” from the truth—it turned out that Troy was a serial philanderer. A longtime skirt chaser. A moral failing that, in a bold play on Troy’s part for sympathy and forgiveness, he’d tried to turn into a personal affliction by claiming that he was the victim of a debilitating sexual addiction. Despite this last-ditch plea for understanding, Wanda—pretty much to everyone’s surprise, including a stunned and repentant Troy—demanded and eventually received a divorce.
“The bastard,” Wanda told her older brother, Fred. “He thought that—just because I loved him so much—I’d put up with anything. He was counting on me not making a fuss. To go along to get along, the way us Hendersons usually do.”
Fred had told Wanda that he was proud of her. She knew he understood what a tough time she had standing up for herself. Hardworking, gentle-natured, and frugal, the first Hendersons had settled in the Barnsbury area over a hundred and fifty years ago and had quietly prospered. By the turn of the last century, Henderson Orchards had been one of the biggest apple growers in the western half of the state. Then, as farming began to die out, members of the extended family began to gravitate to desk jobs in insurance and financial services in the larger towns of Harringdale and Northridge. After the divorce, Wanda, who’d worked part-time as a bookkeeper before her marriage, took a position as an administrative assistant in the business office at the Deer Mountain public school system.
Fred, in fact, was the one anomaly in the current generation of Henderson pencil pushers. After doing a couple of tours of duty in Iraq, he’d come home to Barnsbury to find that the police chief had retired and that the position was up for grabs. Fred didn’t hesitate when it was offered to him. It paid a little better than other career opportunities at the time and allowed him to continue to carry a gun and wear a uniform.
In a rural backwater like Barnsbury, law enforcement was pretty much a matter of ticketing traffic violators, investigating security-system false alarms, and mediating domestic disturbances—Saturday night drunken shouting matches and the like. What bothered him more, he’d confided to Wanda, were the kinds of social problems hiding in plain sight: the bullying teens, the alcoholic young mom, the half-blind grandmother who was still behind the wheel. And, though he didn’t come right out and say it, she was aware that Fred was also concerned about her ongoing relationship with Troy.
“He spends more time at the house now,” Fred recently pointed out to Wanda, “than he did when you two were married.”
“Well, you know, he still can’t find work,” Wanda replied. “Construction’s just dead, and he needs something to do or he’ll go stir-crazy. So I asked him to fix up the basement. He’s putting in a kind of den down there.”
“For what? Who has time to enjoy a den besides him? You’re not paying him for this bullshit, are you?”
“Don’t worry about us, Fred. We’re fine.”
Phoebe, too, noticed how often her dad was stopping by the house these days. After a year or two of hardly seeing him at all, he now seemed to be around all the time: programming the flat-screen TV, putting up the storm windows, rotating the tires on her mom’s car. And Phoebe’s father was a man who made his presence felt. He wasn’t shy about giving his ex-wife and daughter the benefit of his opinions and advice.
Phoebe’s mother didn’t seem to mind, though. True, there were times when Phoebe thought she saw Wanda flinch at something her dad said. Or when she sensed that her mom was retreating back into the shadows that had enveloped her after the breakup. But, for the most part, Phoebe got the feeling that her mother, by insisting on the divorce, had somehow gained the upper hand on her ex-husband—or, at least, leveled the playing field.
Despite the bad feelings and tough times, though, Wanda had never let her anger at Troy spill over and pollute Phoebe’s own feelings toward her dad. And Phoebe really respected that about her mom: she tried like crazy to be fair. In fact, the first time Phoebe had fully registered her mother’s strength of character was when she stood up for Phoebe’s right to work for the Bostocks. It was just before her parents broke up, and Brook had asked Phoebe if she wanted to help out with Tilly in the afternoons. Troy had been dead set against it.
“I don’t trust him,” he said. “And I don’t like them. I don’t mind Phoebe picking up some extra money after school, but just not from the Bostocks.”
“Well, I think that’s your problem,” Wanda said. “I know you’ve got this thing about Michael. But Brook is offering Phoebe three dollars more an hour than she’s going to get anywhere else—and, besides, Phoebe likes Brook and the kids. I do, too, and I think you’re wrong about Brook believing she’s better than us.”
“Well, you just don’t see it,” Troy told her. “You’re never able to see the bad in other people.” Which was a prescient statement, considering what Wanda was going to discover about Troy himself a month or two later.
Troy had his failings, for sure. Even Phoebe recognized that her father could be belligerent and overbearing. But he also doted on his only child. She was his pride and joy, his “sunshine.” Though her dad didn’t talk about it much, Phoebe knew that his younger sister had drowned when she was about the age Phoebe was now. She sometimes wondered if his tendency to be controlling and super protective wasn’t wrapped up in that tragedy.
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Troy often complained about his lot in life. He’d been forced to take whatever low-paying menial jobs he could find since construction had dried up when the recession hit the area. And he bemoaned his unemployed status to anyone he could buttonhole long enough to listen to him. But he ended every one of these litanies of woe the same way: “I’ve got the best little girl in the world, though. No one can take that away from me.”
• • •
Phoebe gradually became aware that her parents were arguing. From the slant of sunlight through her bedroom window, she figured it was early afternoon. Still nauseated and exhausted from the night before, she drifted in and out of sleep, only half-hearing the rise and fall of her parents’ voices down the hallway. Until the pitch rose abruptly.
“I’ve never even worn the thing! I’ve no idea why it’s even . . .”
“Who do you think you’re bullshitting here? I’d know that smell anywhere. . . .”
“And could you please explain what you’re doing rummaging around inside my closets . . . ?”
“I had to turn the hot-water spigots off to work on the sink downstairs. You think I’m looking for fancy sweaters covered with your puke, for chrissakes?” Troy’s voice now carried clearly down the hall. “You think I want to find out that my wife is dolling herself up to go out drinking—God knows who with and where—and getting so fucking drunk that she—”
“Shut your mouth!” Wanda hissed. “I’m your ex-wife! I do not go out drinking. And keep your voice down or Phoebe will hear you. She’s sick as a dog, and I don’t want you waking her up with your nasty, crazy accusations!”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She says she has the flu,” Wanda replied. “But I think it’s just a stomach bug. She came back last night from the Bostocks’ feeling . . .”
A Place For Us Page 4
