“Did Kaylene call you?” he said.
“If you let go of my arms, maybe I can check.”
Glancing down, Jack registered surprise—or something even worse?—and dropped his hands to his sides. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s going on?” Rebecca fumbled in her pocket, pulled out her phone.
“So you haven’t talked to her?”
“I turned it off so I could sleep.” She pressed the End button and keyed in her passcode. “Wow. She called like twelve times. I forgot to turn it back on. God, Jack, is she okay, what—”
“We were drinking,” he said. “A lot.”
Weirdly, it was the panic in his voice that calmed her. This, it turned out, was the middle of a crisis, and therefore her most familiar place, the closest thing she had left to a home, maybe the closest thing she’d ever had. She clung to that idea as though to the trunk of a tree.
“There was this guy. We were—she was—Rebecca, she was kissing me, and I was sloppy drunk when he showed up, and—”
“When who showed up?”
“Right. Exactly. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know who he was. I don’t even know what happened. I can’t quite remember. But I know he … he was grabbing Kaylene, I mean hurting her, and I wanted to help, I tried to help, but I couldn’t even figure … I mean, I was passing out … I think … and I think she thinks … but I—”
“Jack. Is she all right? Tell me she’s all right.” Even Rebecca was surprised by the evenness of her tone. To her amazement, her calm was spreading, settling not only her but also unfolding over Jack like ice across a lake (and suddenly, she understood something else about Amanda, about why she was the way she was, but she filed that thought away). He quieted and stood there a few seconds, just breathing. He hadn’t quite been looking at her this whole time—he’d aimed his eyes over her shoulder, or down at his feet—but now he met her gaze.
“That’s what I’m here to tell you,” he said. “She is all right. And I’m not.”
“You’re not okay?”
“Huh? No. Wait. Kaylene’s okay. Although I think she actually thinks I … Anyway, she’s fine. And I’m…” He grabbed her arms again, as hard as before. “I need you to know I’m not.”
“Ow. Jack, you’re—”
“Rebecca, I’m so, so not. I mean, it’d be okay if I was, and I guess maybe I could be, or I could have been, except I can’t be—”
“Jack, could you please let go and—”
“—because I’m way too into you.”
Everything in Rebecca went from calm to numb: her arms where Jack was clutching them; her mouth, which had taken to blurting out thoughts she wasn’t even sure she was having; her ears, where Amanda’s parting words still rang like reverberations from a gong.
“What?” she said.
Then Jack did the thing Jack did best, the thing she loved him for: he smiled. The smile looked desperate, too young, helpless, and all the more endearing for that. “Whoops,” he said, sounding so small. “I didn’t mean to just announce that.”
For a while, they stood together on the sidewalk. The late-afternoon town-traffic—mostly bikes, the shop owners locking their doors and heading behind their buildings for their cars—rumbled and buzzed around them. The weak, too-warm daylight weakened further without getting cooler, tinting toward gray. I should kiss him, Rebecca thought, and her cheeks flared as though she’d lit flames under them. But she made no move to do that. He didn’t, either, didn’t seem to want to right this second, despite what he’d said. And she was still sorting through this whole insane day. And whatever she was seeing in Jack’s eyes right now, it wasn’t just hope or affection or attraction or relief.
Was that fear?
In the end, what she told him was, “You look like I feel.”
“Let me come babysitting with you.”
“What? No, I don’t think—”
“Jess won’t mind.”
“You know Jess? How do you—”
“I asked her.”
“You asked her? When did you even…”
There it was again. That helpless, instinctive Jack-grin. A shaft of light, with the dust of everything else dancing inside it. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll meet you at Jess’s. I’m going to get us food. And Operation.”
“Operation?”
“The game. The board game? It’s perfect for this night. No one can take anything more seriously than it needs to be taken while putting someone’s spleen back in their liver.”
“I don’t think that’s where spleens go.”
“Clearly, Rebecca, you have not played enough Operation in your life. I have a cure for that. See you in a bit. Bye.”
Just like that, he was gone, head down, gaze lowered as he burrowed straight across the street toward campus and his room, leaving Rebecca in the dimming twilight, hands lifted halfway to her ears. It was as though the summer gnats had found a way in there, laid eggs, and now her whole head erupted in noise, in words, her own, her caller’s, Trudi’s, Jack’s, Joel’s. Amanda’s.
… because I’m too into you … what losing one costs … people worth talking to, staying up late …
Launching herself forward, Rebecca crossed Campus Ave and continued toward the cul-de-sac where Jess and her family had rented their house. She kept wanting to put her palms over her ears, as though that would help, and the third or fourth time she actually started to do that, she realized she was still holding her phone. She glanced at the screen.
Twelve missed calls, all from Kaylene. What had Jack said? “I’m not. I can’t be. I think she thinks…” And why had he looked so scared?
She glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Jack, call him back to her so she could ask what on earth had happened. But Jack wasn’t on the sidewalk or across the street. At the mouth of the path toward Halfmoon House, the evergreens trembled like just-closed curtains. Jack lived on campus, though; he wouldn’t have gone that way.
Raising the phone again, Rebecca finally registered that she was seriously late. “Shit,” she said aloud, and hurried down the block, jamming her phone back in her pocket and willing everybody in her head to shut up. All she wanted was to get to work, get her work done, get Jess’s baby settled. Then maybe she could figure out what the hell was going on with her and, seemingly, everyone around her. Put her spleen back in her liver.
I’m way too into you.
Her heart hurt, and it just kept pounding.
Late though she was, she stopped, as usual, at the foot of the steps leading up to Jess’s porch and took a moment to stare up at the house. It was, in truth, just another two-story clapboard structure, pale blue, essentially identical to all the other clapboard structures in East Dunham and in towns a hundred miles in any direction. The only things that marked it, externally, were the splotchy patches—and Rebecca was convinced there were more of them every time she came, spreading like a rash—where the blue paint had crumbled away, revealing wood that couldn’t actually be as blackened as it appeared. And it really was her imagination that the place seemed to be melting, somehow, sagging at the corners and spreading into its own foundations. It had been inspected multiple times. Rebecca knew because she’d asked, and also because she’d gotten to know Jess. And Jess would never have settled her son here, otherwise.
But Rebecca wasn’t imagining the sounds. She could hear those even from out here. In fact, she could hear them more clearly out here: that whispering with no words, like wind trapped in the rafters; that rustling and settling; scratch-and-skittering. At least she wasn’t hearing any thumps, today. Not yet, anyway. There weren’t thumps, most days, although Rebecca had heard more than one over the course of the past few weeks.
“Squirrels,” Jess had said dismissively, the first time Rebecca had asked. Actually, that had been the second time. The first time Rebecca asked, Jess had said, “Hear what?”
“Squirrels in your attic?” Rebecca had prodded. “You’re good with that?”
“Squirrels. Mice. Whatever. It’s not my house. Don’t go up there. It’s not safe.”
As opposed to Halfmoon House, at the moment, Rebecca thought. Or the Crisis Center. Or her own head, which was the only place she’d been certain was safe for most of her life; the one place she’d truly thought she knew.
Operation, she thought. And, What have I done? And, Jack …
She was still standing there, half-listening to the house, hands crossed over her heart, when the front door opened and Jess appeared. She’d just come out of the shower, apparently, and as usual, hadn’t bothered drying her hair, which drooped, limp and dark, down her neck into the collar of her button-up shirt. She had her functional tan work bag—not even remotely a purse—slung over one small, sturdy shoulder. Her pale face looked grooved, as though she’d just been crying. In fact, Jess always looked like she’d just been crying, though Rebecca had never actually seen her do it.
“Rebecca, where have you been? A-mad-da’s going to kill me, come on, I’m late. And Eddie’s been crying for you. Get in here.”
“A-mad-da,” Rebecca repeated. “That’s … the best nickname I’ve ever heard.” She’d thought she was about to smile, but the smile didn’t come. Tears came.
“Rebecca, what on—”
“It’s okay,” she said. Jess had to go. And inside the house, Eddie was crying. And it really was possible, Rebecca realized, that he was doing that for her. Sweet little boy. Jess’s sweet, lonely little boy.
Blowing breath—and guilt, and hurt, and words, and noise, and whatever else she could rattle loose—out of her mouth, Rebecca nodded. “I’m coming,” she said, and started up the stairs.
14
(THREE WEEKS EARLIER)
That whole day after they left Concerto Woods, during their endless, shadeless crawl up the freeways, Sophie crouched as best she could against the passenger door and kept her suffering to herself. But after the eighth or ninth stop so Jess could once again feed Eddie, cuddle Eddie, try once more to shut the poor kid up, Sophie couldn’t take it anymore.
“Please,” she said, modulating her voice, trying her best to sound like she remembered herself sounding. As far as she could tell, she got pretty close. “Jess. Can I sit in back? I’ll be good. I promise. I mean it.”
“No.” Jess buckled Eddie back in his car seat. He was hiccupping, fussing, but not screaming right that second. That was something, anyway.
“Why not?”
Still leaning into the car, Jess reached out to brush Benny’s bushy head with her fingers. Then, for the first time since leaving the grave they’d dug, she looked at Sophie.
“Why?” Her voice came out absolutely steady, not a trace of waver. She didn’t even wipe her face as more tears poured down it.
Sophie started to whimper, but curbed that immediately. This was Jess she was talking to. “More shade. Hurts less.”
“Then definitely no,” Jess snapped. But she paused there, bent at the waist like a tipped-over tree that hadn’t quite been chopped through. Almost, though. She had a hand on both of her boys and her eyes closed.
In another life, Sophie thought—the one she’d had a month ago—the sight of Jess like that would have broken her heart. Even now, the words bubbling up in her brain seemed to come from some primal place, somewhere so fundamentally Sophie that not even her own son’s death could drown it. Let alone her own.
I’m so sorry. Mom.
That’s what she thought, and didn’t say.
Letting go of her boys, Jess pushed upright. “Know what? Fuck it. I can’t stand you next to me anymore.” She moved fast around the front of the car and yanked Sophie’s door open. “Unbuckle.”
Sophie did, then stuck out her arms like a little girl asking to be carried. Jess just stepped back, arms folded. Gingerly, Sophie swung down from the seat onto the gravel shoulder of the road, into the merciful shade of an overhanging oak. Only then did it occur to her that Jess might have parked in this spot on purpose, to give Sophie shade. Was that possible?
From the look on Jess’s face, Sophie doubted it. As a matter of fact, Sophie now wondered if Jess was about to leave her here. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, all things considered. She pictured herself hanging out in this spot awhile, until evening, then leaning out of these shadows to hitchhike: a tree stump with thumbs and teeth.
Abruptly, she laughed.
Safe in the shade, she watched Jess half-lift, half-drag Benny to the front. He wasn’t going to be any more comfortable up there than she was, Sophie realized. She watched him settle, try to squirm into a position that didn’t hurt, find none, and give up. There he sagged, Jess’s sweet and fluffy lawn-gnome of a man, all buckled in and helpless. He was looking not at Jess but around her, at Sophie, as though he thought she might eat him. As though at least some of him wanted her to. He couldn’t help that, of course. Poor, hurt little lawn-gnome man.
“Hop up,” Jess directed, pointing Sophie into the space next to Eddie’s car seat. “You so much as touch my kid—”
“Natalie’s kid.”
“You so much as look at him—”
“You think I’d hurt Eddie? My dead best friend’s son? My dead son’s best friend? The one friend he got to have in his entire life?”
“You touch him, I’ll burn you alive. Got it?”
Grinning, Sophie knew, was a bad idea, a rebellious-teen impulse, the kind of snotty response she’d always trained on her own mother, never on Jess. But at that moment, she couldn’t help it. “So. His side, my side. Got it.” She clambered back in the car.
“Good.”
“Sure thing, Mom.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Hey, Mom,” Sophie said, as Jess yanked the seat belt as tight as it would go across Sophie’s chest. “Got a spare top? This one’s a little”—she flicked at one blood-soaked shoulder with a thumb and forefinger—“crusty.”
Jess just slammed the door shut, went around back this time. But she stopped on the other side, opened that door, kissed Eddie, then rummaged in one of her duffel bags and flung Sophie a T-shirt without looking at her. The shirt was a Walgreens special, Sophie would have recognized it anywhere: pastel peach, scratchy cotton, no doubt bought half price, or maybe half of half price, given Jess’s employee discount. It had probably come off the exact same rack where Jess had gotten almost all her own clothes and most of Natalie’s, at least before Natalie discovered Goodwill and decided she had taste, and that taste mattered.
My clothes, too, Sophie remembered, when my mother was too horsed up to bother, which was most of the time.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said once more, to the slamming door, with only a little of the irony she was sure Jess heard, if she heard Sophie at all.
Sophie unbuckled long enough to peel her own blouse off her skin. It came away with tiny popping sounds, as though she were unzipping. There was still dried blood all over her body. But the gouges and bite marks the Whistler had left in her shoulders and breasts were already healing, on their way to gone. She ran a hand over her ribs, which were cold in the open air but broiling in the spot where the sun lapped against them.
Then the car was moving. And Benny was looking at her again, using the mirror; he was also desperately trying to avoid looking at her, trying so hard that the veins in his neck had popped up in his skin like winched cables. On impulse—after all, it was torn and bloody, too—Sophie unhooked her bra and slid it down her arms. Smiling, she lowered Jess’s shirt over her head, taking her time, stretching high. It was way too small, of course, and had never before in its cheap-shirt life been filled the way she filled it now. Hideous little poor woman’s shirt, scratchy on her skin, and yet impeccably clean. How, even in these circumstances, did Jess keep everything she owned so clean, like new skin?
And right then, for the first time since the graveside, Sophie felt absence in her arms again, and on her chest, in all the places where her Roo had rested.
She glanced sidelong at Eddie, whose eyes were
open, drinking in the trees and the sky. Already, he was turning as watchful as his grandmother, though nowhere near as silent.
Goddamn you, she thought, the words a rifle blast aimed at everyone, all of them, everything. Then the moment passed, and the sun seared into her neck, and Sophie hunched as low as she could go and closed her eyes.
Every time the road turned, sun splashed across her arms or her stumps. It never even soaked into her skin, just sizzled atop it like oil on scorched pavement. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore, unbuckled again, and somehow slid down the door until she was flat on the seat. Out of desperation, for distraction, she reached out, shoved aside one of Jess’s clanking bags of crap, found her legs, and started stroking them. They were cold, and even crustier than the rest of her. She’d been stroking for some time before she realized she could feel herself.
Not her legs under her fingers, but her fingers on her legs, shooting off tingles everywhere they touched. That sensation transfixed her for so long that she didn’t even notice right away that Jess was talking. But Jess was, and once she’d started, she couldn’t seem to stop.
She was telling Benny everything, Sophie realized. Trying to explain what had happened on the beach, and why she’d murdered her daughter. That was certainly interesting, in its way, worth listening to, and became even more so when she looked up and caught Benny stealing another glance over his shoulder at her. This time, he looked mostly terrified, like a little boy eying the lioness at the zoo. He looked away the instant he realized she’d noticed. But a few seconds later, he did it again. And that was an amusing new game, something else that took her mind, for just a few more seconds, off the sun pouring in the driver’s-side windows, searing the open ends of her stumps without cauterizing them. Eventually, Sophie squeezed her eyes shut again, forced herself still, and made herself listen to Jess, because listening—to anything—was so, so much better than feeling.
Also it really was remarkable how much Jess had right, how much she’d intuited or maybe been told. Maybe she and Natalie had had one last confab-gossip session back on the beach—Natalie always had told her mother way too much—right before Jess shot her in the face.
Good Girls Page 13
