The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon

by Sara Beitia

  She nods, but when their eyes meet the giggling bursts into full laughter and she covers her mouth to mute the sound, shoulders shuddering and tears running down her face. After a moment she gets control of herself, though she keeps hiccuping random giggles.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the clerk asks, taking the money Olivia holds out to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says to Albert. “It’s just that song … it reminds me of something else my sister told me …”

  Albert feels his ears go red. “Yeah?”

  Now she refuses to meet his eyes. “She said that when you two were … that you always liked to play this song …

  every time …”

  The rest of his face turns the same tomato shade as his ears. “I can’t believe you guys talk about that stuff.”

  Olivia’s laughter threatens to come back. “Don’t be embarrassed!” she says. “She said it was romantic. I think it’s sweet.”

  “You can stop now.”

  She’s off again, overcome with laughter. “But it’s just that whenever I hear this song now … and you’re right here …”

  “Please shut up,” Albert begs, feeling a sheepish grin crawl across his face in his embarrassment.

  The clerk gives them a funny look and Albert pulls Olivia out the door in a hurry.

  When they’re outside, Olivia’s fit passes and Albert chooses to pretend it hasn’t happened. They sit on the sidewalk, not talking, huddling close for warmth, their feet in the gutter. As they drink the too-sweet sodas that they don’t really want, the only sound is the fizz bubbling up from their bottles and their teeth sinking into the mushy apples. Olivia stares down at the apple core in her hand, looking at it blankly as if she doesn’t know what it is, before tossing it into the gutter.

  Albert studies her face in the faint light that’s coming through the grocery’s big front window and bathing the sidewalk. It’s a tired, pale face—sharp and thin where Lily’s is soft and curving. Albert can see the resemblance to Lily in Olivia, even so. He thinks how funny it is that the face of a girl he barely knows can be so painfully suggestive of a more familiar one. It occurs to him that it must be hard having Lily as an older sister—she eclipses everyone, all the time, even in her absence.

  Olivia looks up and a shadow passes over her face, as if she’s been reading Albert’s thoughts again. She moves fast, jumping to her feet in a smooth movement and walking away from the store, crossing the parking lot.

  “Hey,” he says, catching up halfway across. “Now we just—” But he’s cut short by Olivia’s sharp intake of breath and her hand on his arm, fingers digging into his flesh right through his coat.

  She swears softly.

  He pries her fingers loose, asking, “What is it?”

  She looks more than ever as if she’s about to collapse. “I think I just saw Perry.”

  “What?” He looks around, as if her stepfather is at his elbow. “Where?”

  She points back across the parking lot. “Over there, going into the store. I saw him through the window, as clear as anything, I swear, before he moved into an aisle and I couldn’t see him anymore.”

  “Are you sure?” But even as he asks, Albert is moving quickly away and reaching for Olivia’s arm to pull her along faster, too.

  She chews a finger. “I don’t know. We have to get out of here. This way,” she says, directing them at a sharp angle around the back of the building and into the unlit alley behind it. Once they’re obscured in the alley’s shadows, they both stop.

  “Did he see you?” Albert asks.

  “I don’t think so,” she says, her legs moving again. “Or he would have come after us. Right?”

  “But he must know we’re here. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise. Somehow, he followed us.” Albert tries to keep his voice calm, but it’s hard. “He’s probably going to talk to the clerk, maybe show her a picture of us.”

  “Calm down. He doesn’t know exactly where we are right now and that we’ve seen him.” Olivia takes his hand and begins to run down the alley, pulling him along and glancing back over her shoulder. “Come on. We can still get out of here before he catches up.”

  Spurred by a shot of nervous adrenaline, they run deeper into the alley’s dark interior and away from the bright lights of the main roadway.

  For the first time since they’d left home, Albert is actually glad there’s an expanse of wilderness standing between them and the next town. The thought of it makes him feel somehow safer … they’ll be concealed in the dark instead of so obviously lit by streetlights and the other lights of a town at night, where there are so few places to hide.

  Once they reach the end of the alley, Albert and Olivia keep up a steady pace, staying in the shadows and snaking in a roundabout way toward the north edge of town. It starts to rain, cold, slushy drops that drip off Albert’s tingling scalp, down his neck and under the collar of his coat. He’s instantly cold to the core. “I hate him,” he half pants, half whispers as they crouch in someone’s back yard, making sure the coast is clear before moving on.

  Olivia hears him and says, “Not as much Lily does. Or me.”

  “I’m not so sure,” he says, but the words are soft and Olivia has already darted away. He follows.

  “Let’s go,” Lily said, slipping her hand into his and pulling him toward the sidewalk in one effortless motion.

  It had only been a matter of days since Albert and Lily had become whatever they had become. Boyfriend and girlfriend, Albert guessed was the way most people would put it, but the words lacked a sense of the significance he felt when his mind settled on Lily. “Joined at the hip” was what his mother had already said, more than once and kind of snidely, with a distasteful pursing of her lips after the words were out. Albert would have been okay with being joined to the soft curve of Lily’s hip. As it was, though, he was still getting used to the new pleasure of Lily’s small, cool hand in his.

  Albert wanted to ask her what the hurry was, but he also wanted to give Lily a chance to tell him on her own. So he let himself be pulled away from the school grounds and toward Lily’s car. The final bell was still ringing in his ears. He always went along when she pulled him toward something, from the very first time she gave his hand that impatient tug. At first, he followed her because she was a girl, a girl who for some reason dug him. But then he broke through the novelty that she was A Girl and found Lily there. And then … well, he was hooked within days, and with even the smallest crook of her finger she could get him to follow.

  “Where are we going?” he asked at last. With Lily you never knew, and she had a way, at least for Albert, of making the most ordinary crap seem exciting.

  She gave his hand a squeeze, not meeting his gaze, her mouth twisting into a small, secret smile. “Does it matter?”

  “Not even a little.” They fell silent and she led him through the rowdy, roaring sea of high school students who had also just been set free from school for the afternoon.

  Once the sidewalk ended and they were stepping off the school grounds, Lily slowed her pace. Albert walked next to her, his arm draped over her shoulder, very aware of her arm snaked around the small of his back and resting on his hip.

  “Where’s your car?” he asked after they’d walked about a block.

  Lily pulled her arm away from his and waved to a girl crossing the street up the block. It looked to Albert that the girl in the distance looked away when Lily waved, after giving a sort of half-hearted salute in return. “What?” Lily said, looking from the girl to Albert. “Oh, I’m parked around the block. I couldn’t really pull into the school lot when I’d skipped all afternoon. Be a bit conspicuous, you know?”

  Albert opened his mouth to ask yet another question, then closed it when he couldn’t decide which to ask first. Finally he asked, “Who was that girl?”

  “My sister.” She pushed a strand of hair behind one ear. “She tries to pretend she doesn’t know me.”

  “Why?�
� But he was only asking because he figured he should.

  Then they reached Lily’s car, which was parked at the curb in front of a little yellow house. She keyed open her door, saying, “Don’t you want to know why I ditched this afternoon?” Then she was in the car and Albert had to wait for her to reach over and unlock his door.

  He slid into the car, picking up the thin thread of the conversation. “Well, yeah. And anyway, why didn’t you bring me along to wherever it was? I could’ve used an excuse to get out of school today.”

  She pulled the car away from the curb and onto the road with a jerky jackrabbit leap, and didn’t see that he was laughing at her. Swearing, she swerved to miss a parked car. “I just got my car back not too long ago. After physical therapy, my mom made me take the driver’s test again—just one of the many things I got to relearn after my accident, like writing and using chopsticks. Except I guess I’m still getting the hang of the driving thing. If I ram someone with this car, I’ll be back to where I was after all the stuff that happened—walking or bumming rides.”

  The accident. He knew a bit about that. He also knew that Lily was all over the place today and seemed almost physically incapable of sticking to one line of thought or producing a straight answer to the questions she raised.

  “Not having a car sucks. So how did you—” He stopped mid-sentence, backtracking before she could swerve off on some other verbal tangent. “You still haven’t finished telling me where you went this afternoon, or where we’re going.”

  Lily stuck out her lower lip, glancing briefly away from the road in order to give him completely fake, sad, puppy-dog eyes. “You’re not pissy with me, are you?”

  “Not really.” It was infuriating, how she tried to mellow him out—and how it always worked.

  “Good,” she said, stomping on the brakes to barely avoid running a stop sign. “I decided to cut this afternoon at the last minute. I didn’t plan it. I went to a couple of places, which is where I found the thing I want to show you. But you have to wait until we get to my house.”

  “Your house?” he echoed.

  She glanced over at him and rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, no one’s there. And it’s no big deal, anyway. I wasn’t planning on playing bondage games in the living room.”

  “Damn. Better luck next time, Albert my man,” he sighed in a stage whisper.

  She just laughed, a happy sound.

  The house was empty, as Lily had said it would be. Albert wondered briefly where the sister might be, but forgot about the sister almost as soon as the thought came into his head. Once they were inside, Lily made a big production of hustling him into the basement to wait. While he sat in the afterthought of a room—just a couple of dusty sofas and a couple more dusty armchairs, a cabinet TV that was as old as his parents, and discarded stuff that hadn’t yet made it to a donation box—Lily ran back upstairs.

  “It’s actually in the car,” she called down to him. He heard the garage door open and shut a moment later, then again, a moment after that.

  Beaming as she came down the stairs again, she handed him a big cardboard square. “Look what I found.”

  He looked. “It’s an old record,” he said. She seemed to be waiting for more, so he added, “Cool. I didn’t know you liked vinyl.”

  “Not just a record. Charles Trenet.” The name was soft and boneless as it rolled off her tongue. “It’s not an original single or anything, but it is a really early Columbia LP. I found it at the Goodwill for a quarter, and it doesn’t have a scratch.” When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Do you know how much this would cost on eBay?”

  “No,” he said. “A hundred bucks?”

  She grinned as she pulled a blanket off a big rectangular mass that turned out to be one of those cabinet stereos with the turntable and speakers all inside. She flicked the power switch on and the speakers crackled. “More like ten, but still.”

  She held out her hand, expectant, and Albert carefully pulled the record from the cardboard sleeve and then its paper jacket, handing it to her like an operating room nurse hands a scalpel to the surgeon.

  “Where’d you get that thing?” he asked, meaning the stereo system.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear and blew some invisible fuzz from the needle. “It was my dad’s.”

  Albert looked around the gloomy basement. “Why doesn’t he let you put it in the living room, or at least your bedroom?” he asked. “This place is like a storage unit.”

  She looked confused for a moment, then her face showed understanding, as well as a rare scowl. “You mean Perry?” she said, saying the name with contempt. “He’s not my dad. He’s my mother’s husband. My dad hasn’t been around for, god, more than ten years. He just left behind this dinosaur stereo system, maybe a few other things, when he took off. I always liked it, so I brought it with me when we moved in here. Neither my mom or Perry wants it junking up the house, so I keep my records down here and I play them when they’re not home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Albert began, not really sure what to say.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Now just be quiet a minute. I’m going to play ‘La Mer’ for you, and you’re going to love it.”

  Lily lowered the needle to the spinning disk before dropping herself into a chair. Albert leaned against the wall, his arms folded across his chest, the record sleeve still in hand. At first there was just the rhythmic scratch of the vinyl as it rotated under the needle, then he heard a man’s voice singing what seemed like a vaguely familiar tune, though the words were in what sounded like French and so he couldn’t understand them. It was a pretty, wistful little song, with soft vocals and instruments that made Albert think of old radios not tuned right and old people’s houses. He wasn’t sure he liked it. Anything with a fuzzbox and a monster drum kit was more his taste.

  “So,” Lily said, once the final scratchy note had sounded and all that was left was the whispery hum of the needle on vinyl again. “Isn’t that gorgeous?”

  “Awesome.”

  “Are you just saying that because you think I want you to like early twentieth-century French pop music as much as I do?” Laughing to herself, she unfolded her legs and rose from the rust-brown sofa, going to the turntable and lifting the needle arm gently from her new find.

  “Yes. I mean, no. Why would I do that?”

  She gave his arm a playful punch. “Because you’re just goopy over me,” she said, kissing her finger and pressing the finger to his lips. “So goopy, in fact, you’ll even pretend to like Monsieur Trenet just because I do.”

  “Goopy?”

  She laughed again, her mood so good it was almost disturbing. It seemed to Albert to hint at one of the manic upswings he was already able to see coming. “Totally and completely goopy. Liked a melted ice cream cone. And everyone knows it.”

  He glanced down at the record sleeve in his hand, the words “Long Playing Microgroove” catching his eye. “What ‘everyone’? I don’t know everyone. I don’t know anyone. No one at all knows I’m melted ice cream gaga in love with Lily Odilon.”

  “Not no one,” she said, taking the album from his hand and placing it on top of the record player. She took his wrists and drew his arms around her.

  “I would tell the world if I could,” he said, feeling how dorky a thing it was to say as he was saying it. He kissed her forehead to cover his embarrassment, murmuring again, “The whole damn world.”

  She smiled up at him, her eyes sparkling. “The world doesn’t care.”

  By the time the tenth shoulder slammed into his in passing in the school halls and the hundredth pair of eyes sent venom his way, Albert stopped taking it in. Not that he didn’t notice each time he caught a shoulder blade, but it was as if his body had absorbed all it could and was done working the same information over and over again. He just shrugged a tired mental shrug and pushed on like it hadn’t happened. Some of these came from people he’d thought were okay—who he thought didn’t hate him, at least—but appa
rently that was one of the may things about which he had been wrong.

  That was Tuesday.

  By Wednesday, news of Lily’s disappearance and her abandoned car was not only all over school but the biggest topic in town. The local news stations kept showing footage of the cops surrounding her old 1989 Toyota Corolla, as it sat calmly in an out-of-the-way parking lot west of town “like a little dog waiting patiently for its master’s return,” as one reporter described it. Ugh. Albert couldn’t stand to look at the pictures and always made sure to be out of the room when his parents watched the six and ten o’clock news on TV.

  “No evidence of a crime” was the phrase the helmet-haired anchors kept repeating and the newspapers printed in the story’s daily migration farther back in the pages.

  “No evidence of a crime.” It was a phrase that Albert held on to against the fact that he didn’t know what had happened.

  There was nothing that proved Lily had run into some violence, nothing—in spite of the argument the Kogens’ neighbors claimed to have overheard—to make anyone think Lily had taken off for any reason but her own. Albert finally realized that this was not the story people wanted to hear. He felt like everyone was waiting for a body to turn up so they could hear about a nice, juicy murder mystery starring a hometown Wild Girl and her boyfriend, The New Guy in Town. So they could say they knew someone who knew someone who went to the same school as the girl, or who had the same hairdresser as the girl’s mom. They wanted some good shots for the evening news and the front page of the paper—meaty stuff, not just Lily’s empty old car without even a smear of blood. Albert almost felt guilty just because people seemed to suspect he’d done something. Everyone—not least of which, the cops—seemed to think Albert knew something about what had happened to Lily.

  And man, he wished he did.

  After the long and miserable days at school were over, Albert hurried home to hide, and when his parents came home from work, he avoided them, too. His heart pounded every time the phone rang, and his fear was that it would be Lily’s parents, calling to demand he tell them what he knew—or worse, some catastrophic news coming from the other end of the line, something he didn’t even dare name. And everywhere he went, he felt watched. He was sure the police were keeping tabs on him, and every day his father kept shooting angry glances, through a crack in the closed front drapes, at a van parked across the street.