“Eleven years older than me.”
“Get out!” She leaned back from the table to stare at me. “You’re crazy!”
“I know.”
“You better talk to your shrink about this before you do something stupid.”
What did she mean by something stupid? Set a fire?
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” I said. “I’m in control.” I was desperate to turn the conversation around to her. “So, how about you? Do you have a boyfriend? Have you met any guys while you’ve been hanging out on the beach?”
“Not really,” she said. “Just to say hey to.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw a woman approach our table, and I knew it wasn’t our waitress because this woman wore a skirt. I was afraid to look up in case it was Georgia Ann.
“Maggie Lockwood?”
I braced myself and looked at her. She was middle-aged with short fluffy blond hair and blue eyes, and she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She stared at me, and I went stiff, ready to be spit at or worse.
“Yes.” My hands tightened around the napkin in my lap. I thought Jen was holding her breath.
“I’m Lurleen Wright,” she said. “Henderson Wright’s mother?”
Oh, God. Henderson Wright was the boy killed in the fire. I remembered his picture blown up poster-size at the memorial service. He and his family had been homeless. They’d lived in a car.
“I’m so sorry.” My tongue clicked against the roof of my mouth, it was so dry.
“I just want you to know that me and my husband forgive you,” she said calmly. Her hands were folded in front of her, her purse dangling from them. “I know some people are still hangin’ on to their anger, but we ain’t.”
My cheeks burned. I’d been so ready for an attack. An attack might’ve been easier to hear. This was like a gift I didn’t deserve. I felt Jen’s eyes on me.
“Thank you.” It came out a whisper. “I’m still…I wish I could undo—”
“I know.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “I know you do. You ain’t evil. Jesus tells us to forgive others to find our own salvation.”
I nodded. My neck felt like it was made out of wood.
“And listen,” she said, “I know you’re not religious. I remember your daddy’s church from long ago…that seekers place?”
“Free Seekers,” I said.
“Right. And I know that must’ve had a right terrible influence on you coming up. But if you want to come to our church with us some Sunday, we’d love to bring you. You’d find your own salvation there, Maggie. I’m sure of it.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
She reached into her purse and brought out a postcard. “We had these made up,” she said, handing it to me. “You might want to have one.”
I looked down at Henderson’s face. Smiling. Not like the scared picture of him they used at the service. Beneath it, it said, God needed another angel. Henderson Emery Wright. 1992–2007.
“Thank you,” I said again. They were the only words I seemed able to find.
“Okay, honey. You call me if you want to come to church. We’re in an apartment now. In the phone book.”
I nodded, and she walked away smiling to herself. I was paying for their apartment with the restitution money, I realized. Probably for their dinner here at Sears Landing, too. I was glad. That was the way it should be.
“Bizarre,” Jen whispered. Her eyes were wide.
“That was nice of her,” I said. “I mean…I don’t deserve it, but she’s the first person to say anything like that to me.”
“She wants to convert you,” Jen said. “That’s why. Would you go to church with her?”
I shook my head, although I felt drawn to that word she’d used. Salvation. I remembered Dr. Jakes congratulating me for arranging the job at the hospital myself: This is the first step in saving yourself.
“What did she mean about your father’s church?”
“Daddy built a chapel at the north end of the Island before I was born,” I said. “He wanted people to be able to, you know…worship…any way they wanted. So it wasn’t connected to any religion.”
“Is it still there?”
I shook my head. “Just the foundation and a few of the walls.”
All of a sudden, my mind suddenly leapfrogged from Daddy to Ben to Dr. Britten. Bam Bam Bam! It hit me all at once. Ben was big and dark-haired and cuddly. Like Daddy. Like Dr. Britten. I flashed back to Uncle Marcus telling me long ago that Ben reminded him of my father. And now Dr. Britten reminded me of Ben. It was all one long chain.
“Oh…my…God,” I said, leaning my head back to look up at the ceiling.
“What?” Jen asked.
“I am so screwed up.”
We pulled up in front of my house an hour or so later. All the lights were on inside, and the house gave off the warmest, most welcoming glow.
“Come in and meet my mom and Andy and Kimmie.”
Jen stretched her arms out over her steering wheel. “Not tonight,” she said. “I’m sleepy.”
“Come on,” I said, disappointed. “Just for a few minutes.”
“Next time,” she said. “But thanks for the tour earlier. It’s a great house.”
“Okay.” It would take her nearly a half hour to drive back to Serenity Point, and she did look tired all of a sudden.
I got out of the car just as Andy walked from the house onto the front porch.
“Maggie!” he shouted. “Kimmie’s here!”
“Come here and meet Jen, Andy,” I said, but before I even finished my sentence, Jen stepped on the gas and pulled away, the passenger-side door not even fully closed.
I stared after her, glad I’d at least been clear of the car when she took off. I felt suddenly worried about her, hoping she was okay to drive the fifteen miles home in the dark.
I didn’t know it was really myself I needed to worry about.
Chapter Forty-Four
Keith
“HANGIN’ OUT WITH YOU IS GONNA KILL ME, BUDDY!” MARCUS laughed as we carried our boards back to the tower after surfing. The surf sucked, so we’d only caught a few waves, but even though Marcus had to keep in shape because of being a firefighter, he looked totaled. “It’s gotta be ten years since I surfed,” he said.
I wasn’t as good a surfer as I was before the fire, and my ankle was still sore from my escape from the police on Saturday night, so I figured we’d been about equal out there.
It blew my mind when Marcus told me he used to surf. I didn’t know why I was so surprised, since he grew up near the ocean and everything. But I just couldn’t picture it. When he dragged out his old board and I saw how dinged-up it was, I was convinced he’d actually used it a few times.
We peeled off our wet suits on his deck. He pulled a couple of bottles of water from an ice chest near the back door and tossed me one.
“Sit out here for a while, or is it too chilly?” he asked as he dropped onto one of the lounge chairs.
“It’s good.” I sat on the other lounge chair and stretched out my legs while I twisted the cap off the water bottle. Didn’t have quite the same snap to it as twisting the cap off a bottle of beer, but it was only day three at the tower and I wasn’t going to push my luck. And luck was the word of the day. We’d just heard from DSS that I could stay there. I was supposed to go back to school, but Marcus wasn’t pushing me. At least not yet. I was starting to feel safe. I liked Marcus. I liked the dude a lot. I couldn’t help it. He was on my side. I’d known him most of my life, but I realized now that I’d never really known him. He was just this older dude who was a bigwig in the fire department. But he had a story. I guess everybody did. People walked around with this thick dark film sticking to them and until you scratched it, you had no idea.
He took a pull on his water bottle. “How’s your ankle?” he asked.
“Not bad.” I looked down at my bare ankle. Just a little swollen. A little bruised looking. “It’s okay.�
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“And how’re your arms?” he asked.
“They suck,” I said honestly.
“We’ll get that pain under control,” he said. He’d already made an appointment for me with a pain guy in Wilmington for next week. Till then, I told him I was cutting down on the Percocet, but that was only half-true. I was trying, but I needed that stuff.
“I could use a beer,” I said, testing the waters, so to speak.
“You’re seventeen,” he said, like that was a logical response.
“So, how old were you when you started drinking?” I asked.
“Thirteen,” he said.
“Whoa.” Even I didn’t start drinking till I was nearly fifteen, though I smoked dope when I was twelve. My lungs wouldn’t ever be able to handle smoking anything again, thanks to my charming half sister. “Did you do drugs, too?” I asked.
“Not much. I just liked drinking. It was a nice escape.”
“Tell me about it.” The water bottle crackled when I took another swallow. “What did you have to escape from?”
“Small potatoes, compared to what you’ve been through,” he said. “My brother—your father—couldn’t do anything wrong. I couldn’t do anything right.”
I was stuck on the words your father. They sounded so strange to me. I’d known for over a year that Jamie Lockwood was my father, yet the words still got stuck somewhere between my ears and my brain.
“Your father was one of those genuinely righteous people,” Marcus said. “You know what I mean? And, man, it could be rough having someone like that for a brother. He set the bar high. My parents thought he was the next Dalai Lama.”
I wasn’t totally sure who the Dalai Lama was, but I got the idea.
“I wasn’t as smart,” Marcus said, “or maybe I was as smart, but I was dyslexic—still am—and school came harder for me. And I wasn’t nearly as nice. Plus, I didn’t have goals. Ambitions.”
“Did he?” I barely remembered Jamie Lockwood and I really knew next to nothing about him. I found out he was my father the same day as the fire, and the next year went into recovery, not into long talks with my mother about her adultery.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Marcus said. “You know about the church he started?”
“Yeah.”
“I think he was born wanting to start that church. He had lots of things he wanted to do and he just took them on, one after another. The chapel. Managing the Lockwood properties. Being a firefighter. Having a family.”
“Or two,” I muttered.
Marcus laughed.
“It’s fucked up,” I said.
“One way to look at it.”
“So, did you hate him?”
“Jamie? Not at all. I had those complicated sibling emotions about him. I idolized him. Resented him. Wanted to be like him. Wanted to be nothing like him.” He shrugged. “The usual.”
“And he’s why you started drinking?”
“Can’t blame that on anyone but myself,” he said, taking a final swallow from his water bottle. “I didn’t feel good about myself, and I got in with friends who were into music and alcohol and drugs.” He tossed his empty bottle into a recycling bin on the other side of the deck. Perfect shot.
“Two points,” I said.
“So, how about you?” he asked me. “When did you start drinking?”
I felt a wall instantly go up between me and him, but I decided to take it down—for now, at least. “A little older than you did. My friends were all doing it.”
“That makes it hard to know when it’s a problem.”
The wall came up again. Stayed up this time. “It’s not,” I said.
He looked at me, shading his eyes with his hand. “Be careful, okay? Your liver’s taking a beating enough with the Percocet. Beer can only make that worse, and beer at ten in the morning like that day I came over to the trailer is not a good sign.”
So much for the buddy-buddy chitchat. “That was unusual,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” he said, like he didn’t quite believe me.
“Why’d you stop?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. “Long story. In a nutshell, I could see I was screwing up my life and I didn’t want to. I got into AA.”
“You go to those meetings and stand up and say, ‘I’m Marcus the alcoholic’ and everything?”
“I did. I don’t go much anymore. Maybe a couple times a year to see old friends or to get someone else into it. But I went nearly every day the first few years. Sometimes twice a day.”
“Shit. Could you drink now without becoming an alcoholic again?”
“I’m still an alcoholic,” he said. “Always will be. And no, I couldn’t drink again. Sometimes people think they can, that they have it all under control, and then they start slipping back into it. That’d be me. So it’s better just to forget about it. It’s not a part of my life.”
“So…like, would it bother you if I kept some beer in the fridge?” I asked. “Just a six-pack?”
“Being around it doesn’t bother me,” he said, “but you, my friend…my nephew—” he grinned at me “—are not legal.”
“Oh, dude, that’s weak.”
“No booze in the house,” he said, and I knew he meant it. He got up and pulled another water bottle from the ice chest. Back in the lounge chair, he twisted it open and took a drink.
“So, Keith.” He put the bottle on the deck and stretched his arms over his head. “Tell me about this girl.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Andy
“THIS IS THE BEDROOM I STAY IN WHEN I SLEEP OVER SOMETIMES,” I whispered to Kimmie. I wasn’t sure why I whispered it. No one was home at Uncle Marcus’s, because I planned it that way.
“Is the bed made?” Kimmie asked.
Anybody could see the bed was made. It had a dark blue bedspread on it, all tucked under the pillow like it was supposed to be. “Yes,” I said. “That blue thing is the bedspread.”
“No, I mean is it made up.” She pulled the bedspread down a little and I figured out she meant were there sheets on the bed. “Oh. Good,” she said.
There were blue-and-white striped ones under the bedspread. I remembered when Uncle Marcus and I bought them. He said they were musculine sheets, or something like that. The room that Maggie stayed in sometimes had yellow sheets that were girlie. That was the room where Keith lived now, so maybe he got different sheets.
Kimmie sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded up while I got the condom out of my pocket. I looked at the date again to be sure it was the same as before. I didn’t know if I should open it now so it would be totally ready or not.
“Should I open it?” I asked.
She nodded. “I think so.” Kimmie usually uses a lot of words, but not now.
The condom package was easy to open. Kimmie took it from me. She peeked inside and then put it on the corner part of the table.
People said I couldn’t plan good, but I planned this out totally. Uncle Marcus was at work and Keith wasn’t there because he was at a date. Mom said that. She said she asked him to come to dinner since Maggie was out late. Keith and Maggie don’t like to see each other. Keith said he had a date, so I knew the tower house would be empty. I couldn’t figure out how me and Kimmie would get there, though. Kimmie said, did Maggie have a bike? I was only thinking about my bike. I forgot about Maggie’s. It needed air in the tires but we had a pump. Then I lied to Mom about how we were going for a bike ride. That wasn’t a big lie because we did go for a bike ride. I just didn’t say where to.
“Should we get under the covers or on top of them?” Kimmie asked. Usually she told me what to do.
It was pretty warm in the room. “On top,” I said.
She took off her glasses and put them on the table. “Should we take off our clothes first?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Uncle Marcus gave me lots of rules but it turned out he didn’t give me enough. The people in Max’s magazines were already naked when
I saw their picture. “I think so,” I said.
She got on her knees to shut the window things. Then we started getting undressed. It took me, like, one second to get off my shirt and my jeans, but it took her, like, one whole minute to unhook the buttons on her shirt. I felt funny watching her. I sat on the bed and made like I was folding my clothes up neatly instead. I still had my boxers on. I didn’t care about hiding my hard-on this time, because we were going to have sex.
She got off all her clothes and then I looked at her. She was so pretty.
“Don’t stare,” she said. She closed her arms over her breasts so I couldn’t see them.
“I’m not,” I said. She was right, though. I was staring. I really liked how dark and smooth all her skin was. She had way more public hair than me. Max said a lot of girls shaved theirs, but Kimmie didn’t.
“I want to get under the covers now,” she said.
“Okay.”
She got under the bedspread while I took off my boxers. Then I got under the bedspread with her. I kissed her right away. I put my tongue in her mouth, but she didn’t put hers in mine like she usually did. That was okay. I just wanted to get on top of her and put my penis in her. I started to get on top and then all of a sudden remembered the condom.
“The condom!” I said. I got it out of the pack and it went on perfect like it was supposed to because Uncle Marcus showed me a long time ago on a zucchini, which was so funny.
I got on top of Kimmie, then, but her legs were hooked together.
“You’re supposed to put your legs apart,” I said.
“I’m too scared,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. “You said you wanted to do sex with me.”
“I don’t want to now.”
I had to do it now. “Please, Kimmie!” I said.
She didn’t answer me. I couldn’t see her face very good, but I heard her crying.
I got off of being on top of her. She didn’t exactly say no, but that’s what she meant. Now I was supposed to go jerk off.
She turned toward the window. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I rolled off the condom and tried to stick it back in the pack, but it wouldn’t go. I was angry and sad and everything because I planned it so good and for nothing. I didn’t even feel like jerking off.
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