by Deb Caletti
I lifted my camera to my eye, played around with different shots, took a few that weren’t really any good. The book from Jesse sat in the bag beside me, and I thought about opening it, cracking the shiny cover of that book and sniffing deeply, exploring its contents. But instead, I took a breath and let Point Perpetua settle inside me, and when I did, it was Hayden I kept seeing—sitting beside me that day, his head tilted up to the sun, his eyes closed, wearing his favorite green T-shirt. The way he rested his forearms on his knees, the ease he had with his body, the strength you sensed in his man hands and in his shoulders … A man seemed a fine thing to curl up against. A man could seem like shelter.
It felt like a decision, to keep that bag closed, with the book tucked forever inside. And I guess it was.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Martinellis’ house sold in two weeks. On the second Saturday in July, Yvonne Yolanda came back with her real estate lady hair and real estate lady high heels and tacked a SOLD sign on, placing it at a triumphant diagonal. We didn’t know who had bought the house, but I did see a motorcycle there a couple of times, the same one, I was almost sure, that belonged to the driver who had so loved Jeffrey and Jacob’s purse trick. I also saw an old pea-soup-green Chevy Nova parked behind the Pleasure Way once or twice. A woman with long black-gray hair and a long skirt and beaded bracelets got out and spent some time looking around the backyard. She looked like the woman who sold her handmade jam at the Sunday market.
I didn’t see Mr. or Mrs. Martinelli to ask, but I did see Kevin Frink. It was a hot, hot day. I was in the backyard on the lawn chair reading The Psychology of Love, when I heard my name called. I jumped—saw Kevin Frink’s face from the nose up, looking over our back fence.
“Kevin!”
He’d surprised me. I clutched my beach towel to my chest, covered up my body in my bathing suit. Good thing Zeus was with Hayden, or he’d have gone nuts. Zeus could be a good guard dog, even if his alarm buttons were sometimes hard to understand. He’d snarl at a large package but sometimes ignore the doorbell. He disliked certain people for his own reasons.
“I need your help,” Kevin said.
I tossed on my T-shirt, unlatched the gate, and let him in. I’d thought he looked bad the last time I saw him, but now he looked worse. The weight that he seemed to have lost was back on, and a roll of stomach pushed against his T-shirt. You could almost see the frantic shoving of potato chips and ice cream and melting cheese that lay there, the impossible, anxious hunger. A small gathering of chin hairs had been allowed to grow too, an uncontrolled faction, a splinter group maybe; if he ignored them, they might attempt takeover. His skin looked white and fleshy, an underground kind of pale. It made you think of night creatures with scared pink eyes.
“What’s going on?” I said. “Wait, do you want something to drink, maybe? Lemonade? Something?” It was strange to have Kevin Frink in my backyard. I thought of the crime books, a killer disguised as a delivery man. Maybe I shouldn’t have offered to get him lemonade. Kevin Frink didn’t belong there with Mom’s pots of tomatoes and the bird feeder (which needed filling) and the pile of our sandals next to the back door. He brought the pieces of a different life. His mom drove a hearse and they lived in a house where the curtains were never open and the roof was green with a thick layer of moss. He had body odor. We had lotions that smelled like pomegranate.
His eyes shot to our tree, to the noise of a squirrel scratching along a branch. Then, they were back to mine again. “We’ve got to break her out of there,” he said. “You go over, okay? Pretend to ask her somewhere. Shopping. Coffee. Who gives a shit. She goes with you …”
“What do you mean, break her out of there?” He seemed to think I was following along with him inside his head.
“She’s not supposed to leave. Fiona. Especially not to see me. It’s bullshit. She’s eighteen.”
“They can’t keep her prisoner.”
“Exactly. Jesus, it’s hot.”
He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his arm. I pictured Mr. and Mrs. Saint George keeping Fiona locked in her room until she agreed to go to Yale, bringing her sparse meals on metal plates. I had a vision of stone walls, like in medieval prison movies. Then again, they didn’t seem that horrible. Mr. Saint George would bring in Clive Weaver’s garbage cans for him. Mrs. Saint George grew geraniums. They both were scientists over at the Marine Science Center. I doubted you could be too cruel if you studied sea life. “So, why did they ground her exactly?”
Kevin Frink picked at the plastic around the edge of our table. “It was dumb.”
I waited.
“You don’t need to look at me like that,” he said. “Big deal. My mom caught us in the back of the hearse.”
I’d never seen the back of a hearse, but my mind flashed a series of pictures. Maroon carpeting, quilted satin, a single creepy, curtained window. The slick bottom of a casket, slid inside. Kevin Frink’s big white whale flesh. I shuddered.
He stared at me. “For God’s sake, no one was in there,” he said. “It’s just a car.”
I didn’t want to help him and Fiona, not at all. Not anymore. I felt a little sick, from the sun and hot heavy air and from my intentions, which seemed right then stupid and innocent. They had gotten away from me, had become something else. All of my intentions had. The thing is, you open doors, but you never necessarily know what will come through them.
I wanted to back out of my actions, to sneak away in guilt, the same as that time I once knocked over a container of yogurt in the grocery store when I was maybe ten, leaving a splotch of white on the linoleum floor that I didn’t tell even my mother about. “I can’t do what you want,” I said.
“We just need to get her out of the house. That’s all. That’s all I’m asking.”
“What then?” I was afraid to know.
“She doesn’t want to go to Yale. She said she wasn’t even sure.” The high whine of a saw started over the back fence, and Kevin pulled at his ear distractedly as if the pitch bothered him. The radio started up. Do you re-mem-ber … The twenty-first night of Septem-ber … “Fucking Earth, Wind & Fire,” he said. “My mom listens to that shit.” He flicked the nail of his middle finger with his thumb over and over again. Click, click, click.
I wanted to say that not being sure about Yale wasn’t the same as not wanting to go at all. I wanted to say that I was sorry for leading him into a place he wasn’t really ready to be in. And that I was sorry too for abandoning him now in that place. But I didn’t say any of those things. “I can’t, Kevin.”
“You’re kidding, right? I thought you were my friend. I thought I could count on you.” He kept flicking that nail. It was making me nervous. I wanted out of there. No, I wanted him out of there. This was my place.
I was quiet. I felt that thick curl of guilt again, the one that got in the way whenever there was something I most needed to say. “I am your friend,” I said finally.
“Whatever.” He headed for the gate. He stopped the nail thing, but he was shaking his head.
“Kevin.”
“Whatever.”
The gate slammed behind him, and the latch shut with a clatter. The smell of him hung around a while until it, too, decided to go.
I stood there in the backyard among cheerful things—Mom’s watering can, the doormat with the sunflowers on it—and I listened to Kevin Frink step on the gas of his Volkswagen, listened to the screech and scream of his tires as they rounded the corner of our street.
I could tell the night would bring bad things the moment I heard Juliet’s voice. I had never known a world without Juliet in it, and so when she was angry I could tell before she even said a word. When she was happy or guilty or planning something terrible, I could read it in her gestures and the spaces between her breath, and in the way she held her shoulders. When we gathered in the kitchen that early evening for our own various reasons, and when her voice sounded like bells—sweet and unreal—there was no question in my mind th
at whatever commitment she had promised Hayden the night before was about to be snatched back and destroyed. She was holding the bomb in one hand and the matches in the other, I knew.
And, I knew, too, because I had seen Hayden’s latest note. It held the kind of relief and certainty Juliet was destined to crush, was crushing right then as we stood there.
Juliet—
Commitment.
When you said the word to me last night, I became sure of one thing: I’m the luckiest man alive.
Juliet’s hair was up from the heat. She wore the lightest dress, white, as thin as a curtain. She smelled like perfume. “I’ll be so glad to see Melissa again. She’s only here for two days… .”
“I don’t remember Melissa,” Mom said. “Melissa who?” But she was distracted. She was looking for something in her purse. You’d have thought she would have heard the bells in Juliet’s voice too, but she didn’t. She never heard those things. She always seemed to listen with hope instead, the hope that everything was just fine.
“Melissa Beene?”
“You were never really friends with her,” I said. “You didn’t even like her. You shared a locker one year, that was all.”
Juliet ignored me. I noticed that she had painted her toenails, too. They had gone from a chipped pale state to a shiny pink, some statement of intention that shouted more loudly to me, even, than her own voice. “She came over that time when we were working on our senior project, remember?” she said to Mom. “Went on to college in California? Brown hair? We used to go over before school to that bakery that went under.”
“Once!” I said. “If that.” I felt anxiety building inside, felt it pacing somewhere in the area of my chest. You feel joy in your heart and fear in your stomach, but your chest is the place you feel things going wrong.
“Right,” Mom said. “Right. You don’t try to compete with Honey B’s. You just don’t. Ahh, I can’t believe this heat.” She looked up as if there were a cool breeze to be found high up somewhere.
“Anyway, she said she’d buy me dinner, and God knows, I eat like a horse lately.” Juliet smiled. Hayden was getting a beer out of the fridge. He twisted off the top and took a long swallow.
“Okay, so where is this Honey B’s? I love a good cinnamon roll,” he said. Hayden was always game when it came to food or talk of food. His shirt was loose, and he was barefoot.
“Oh, they’re huge,” Juliet said. “Even you couldn’t finish one.”
“I take that as a challenge,” Hayden said. He didn’t hear the bells in Juliet’s voice either. He and Mom both listened with hope. He was at ease, just holding that cool beer, and he didn’t know he shouldn’t have been. It was unfair to let him think everything was fine, to not even warn him. That seemed particularly cruel of Juliet. I wanted to say something, something that would stop all this right here, but nothing came. I could think only about Juliet and Buddy and Juliet and Buddy and Juliet and Buddy, and something I’d been trying not to think about at all. That day I’d asked Juliet about Buddy and Jitter. How she’d never actually given me an answer.
“You’re on your own for dinner, then,” Mom said to me. “I’m going out myself.” She finally found what she was looking for in her purse—a wad of bills, which she handed to me over the table where I sat.
I didn’t want those bills. I didn’t want anything from Mom then, because she sounded guilty too. Both of them were guilty, already guilty, and they hadn’t even left our kitchen. I knew exactly where Juliet was going—that skanky apartment Buddy Wilkes lived in above the Friedmans’ garage, less than a mile away. And I knew where Mom was going—toward some future involving that black velvet box. I understood something else, too—that premeditated acts were always the worst ones.
“I don’t need money,” I said. “I’ll eat something here. Actually, I’m not feeling too well. I think I’m sick.”
Mom put a distracted hand up to my forehead. “You feel fine,” she said. “It’s the heat. Take some vitamins. Go to bed early.”
“I might be really sick. I might need you,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “You?” She laughed. “You’re fine.” She was right. I wasn’t the sort who needed things. Even when I was sick, I felt a pride about getting my own ginger ale and Kleenex.
“Hot date, huh,” Hayden said to Mom. He caught my eye, tightened his jaw in fellow Dean hatred. He had no idea. I noticed that the ring box was missing from the counter where it had sat for weeks. It was in her purse, I guessed. Her fingers had probably touched it as she had rummaged inside. By the end of this night, she’d be wearing that ring.
“Dean and I are having dinner,” Mom said. I could smell her perfume. Her hair looked stiff from hair spray and was high off her neck like Juliet’s. She wore a slinky black sleeveless blouse. It wasn’t the kind of blouse you wanted your mother to wear. It was a blouse with ideas.
“When you recover from your sudden illness, you and Hayden can order a pizza,” Juliet said. Of course—you made plans for other people only when you wanted them busy and out of your way.
“Yeah, come on, sister-in-law. We can watch some stupid television. Distract ourselves from the fact that it’s a hundred degrees out.” Hayden tipped the last of the beer into his throat.
“Mom’s got a huge collection of old videos now,” Juliet said.
It was the second time she had used the word huge. If there was a time to believe in the subconscious, maybe this was it. Huge described what she was about to do. Enormous, disastrous, monumental. Buddy Wilkes must have changed his mind about Elizabeth Everly. Juliet and his history together, whatever it had been, and whatever it still was—I guess it was just too powerful to let go of.
Mom was right—sometimes the bad guys did win. Sometimes, even if you tried your whole life to keep things going in their best direction, to hold things in their truest places by your sheer will, rightness could slide through your fingers so fast, you could feel the actual strength of badness. You could stand there in your own kitchen one summer night and find that all of your control had suddenly run out, the way a car with a broken gauge suddenly runs out of gas in the middle of some dark nowhere.
Hayden and I were alone for the night, then. It was hard not to be aware, aware, aware of this. The heat made sweat gather at the base of my neck, behind my legs. I worked on the Clive Weaver project, made my nightly, unanswered call to Nicole, but I felt restless. I looked for Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen, which was not out by the curb or anywhere on the street, as far as I could tell. My window had been repaired from Jeffrey and Jacob’s rocket, but with all the windows in the house open, I could know if he was driving up. It seemed important to hear Kevin Frink coming.
“Scarlet!” Hayden called up the stairs. “Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s too hot to stay inside.”
I was no different, maybe, from my mother or sister, who had walked right into something destructive to themselves or others. I didn’t do the responsible thing and mentally argue the pros and cons of going with him on that night in particular. I knew where my sister was, that she was taking something that wasn’t hers, or giving away something of hers that she couldn’t or shouldn’t give away twice.
“One sec!” I called back to him. I actually hurried. So fast that I caught the toe of my sandal on the carpet and nearly lunged forward. The edge of the bed caught me; I did not catch myself. I rushed on a swipe of lipstick. Mascara. A clean-smelling perfume I had snitched from Juliet’s drawer a long time ago, when she was still living here.
“You look great,” he said when he saw me. Both he and Zeus looked up at me from the bottom of the stairs. I flushed. “You’re going out with a piece of crap.” He pointed to himself, in his ragged shorts and T-shirt.
“No worries,” I said. I thought he looked great too. He was one of those guys who looked even better the messier he got. After he mowed the lawn and he was unshaven and his hair was damp with sweat … You didn’t mind the smell of outside and motor oil and grass that
he brought back in. You wanted it.
“I’m not even in the mood for pizza,” he said.
“Neither am I,” I said, although I didn’t care what we had. I wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was the heat, but more likely it was the moment, which filled every bit of me, even my stomach. My body was humming oddly, more awake than awake, conscious of every one of his movements. He put down the back of his truck for Zeus to get in, and Zeus leaped up.
“Careful. Hot,” he said to me of the vinyl truck seat, and he was right. I could feel the sear of heat through my dress on my thighs and back.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Here.” He tossed me a towel, and then leaned over to hold it against the seat so that I could set my back against it. His face was right near mine. I could see the places where the stubble grew from his cheeks. “That’ll help,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“What do you want to eat? Burgers? Fish?”
“Anything is fine.”
“There’s that great burger place by the docks.”
“Pirate’s Plunder,” I said.
“Annoying treasure boxes on the napkins?”
I nodded. “Sounds great.”
We rode with the windows down. I felt uneasy, but it was stupid because feeling easy with him was one of the things I liked best. No one else was feeling guilty tonight. He turned on the radio, some cowboy song that he knew the words to, and he sang loudly, a show for me. He kept looking at me sideways, to make sure I was appreciating the fineness of his terrible voice.
“So, why do you think dogs can’t see themselves in a mirror?” His voice was raised over the wind and the radio.
“Or feel music,” I said.
“Right. That, too.”
“The eternal questions.”
“And maybe they can talk, but they just choose not to.” He was grinning.
“Messing with us.”
“They talk to each other behind our backs,” he said.
