Stunned and speechless, I sank back down onto the sofa beside him, numb and unsure of what to say. He saved me the trouble.
“Cancer. I found out a few months ago, right before Grace… I never even got a chance to tell her.”
I stared at a ball of lint on the beige carpet, trying to reconcile myself to his confession, and internalize what it meant for Lacy.
“I was going to get treatment, but now that Grace is gone I’ve decided to let God do his will. Without her, I have no reason to live.”
“But Jer-”
“And even if I changed my mind, which I won’t, it’s too metastasized now to treat without making me sicker than I already am, if it worked at all. At this point, my doctor gives me three to six months.”
“Do my mom and dad know?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. If either of them had known, they would have called to tell me by now.
“I haven’t told anyone. And I don’t intend to,” he added pointedly, turning a sharp eye on me.
“Lace deserves to know, Jerry. She misses you.”
Jerry shook his head, his serious frown a testament to the vehemence of his wishes. “If you tell her then she’ll want to come back. I don’t want her here. I get confused and distracted enough as it is. It’s already spread to my brain, and the more it spreads the worse I’ll get. I don’t want to take the chance of getting confused and making a mistake again. You have to swear you won’t tell her, son. Swear it.” I faltered, not believing that he truly intended to let himself die without seeing Lacy to reconcile and say his final goodbye. He clamped his hand on my forearm and urged me with more force, “Swear it!”
What could I say? I didn’t want Lacy coming back to Claryville any more than Jerry did. I didn’t want her in the same room with him, much less living under his roof again, and she would insist on doing just that if she knew he was sick. She would want to come back home to help take care of him, be with him through his final months. Almost as much as I didn’t want her coming back to her demented father, I didn’t want her coming back to Kevin. If she knew Jerry was sick and decided to come home, it would only be a short matter of time before Kevin ingratiated himself back into her good graces. And how better than under the guise of wanting to support and comfort her through the imminent demise of her father?
No, Jerry was right. Lacy couldn’t come home. I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell her. Whether my motives were selfish or not, Jerry’s weren’t, and that was justification enough.
“Are you sure about this, Jer? Are you absolutely positive you don’t want Lace to know? Because if you have any doubts, you better tell me now before I set this whole thing in motion. When she finds out… I mean, if she learns that we both knew but kept it from her…”
“She’ll hate us both,” Jerry finished for me with dark certainty. He stared at the coffee table, considering the consequences of what he was asking of me. “It’s the only way, Nick. I’d rather her be upset with me after I’m gone for keeping it from her than to have her remembering me for the man I’ve turned into since Grace died. I don’t want her to see me like this, much less when I start getting worse. And even if that weren’t reason enough, I can’t be trusted with her. You have to keep her away, and the only way to do that is to not tell her.”
When I still hesitated, knowing deep down that this deception crossed the line of how low I would ordinarily have allowed myself to sink—even at my most conniving—Jerry swung his frank stare from the rug up to me. “You have just as much to lose as I do. You don’t want her coming back to Kevin, do you?”
My eyes widened, not realizing that he was aware of my true feelings for Lacy, especially in his current, self-absorbed state.
He scoffed over my shock. “You do a good job of fooling everyone else, Nick, but Grace and I have suspected as much for a year or two now. And if I’m right, then I know neither one of us want her going back to Kevin after what he did to her,” Jerry declared firmly, with absolute resolve, surprising me yet again with the revelation that he had been aware of Kevin’s betrayal as well. “Hangin’ out at Kenzie’s, you hear the kids when they gossip,” he explained, when I couldn’t disguise my confusion over how he knew.
“Okay, Jerry, but if you know how much I love her, then you know you can’t ask me to keep this from her. You’ll be gone; you won’t be the one having to live with the pain it’s going to cause her if she finds out I betrayed her like this. I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Since I don’t intend to tell anyone that I’m sick, she’ll never have to know that you knew all along. Unless you get an uncharacteristic attack of conscience and decide to tell her.”
I shot him a contemptuous glower that he chose to ignore.
“Please, Nick, you’ve been like a son to me your whole life. I know you, and I know that you’re a good man. More importantly, I know you love my daughter. Consider this my dying wish. I don’t want your brother to have another opportunity to hurt her again, and if you love her as much as I think you do, I know you’ll do everything in your power to make her happy when I’m gone. You’ll love her as much as I loved her mother. Now, swear you won’t tell her.”
I sighed. My shoulders sagged. Right or wrong, selfish or not, Jerry left me no choice.
“I swear.”
Nick
An hour after leaving Jerry’s house, I sat on a barstool at Kenzie’s beside Chris, searching the bottom of my whiskey glass after filling him in on the latest with Jerry.
“Fuck that, dude,” he said with a grim frown. “You gonna tell her?”
“How can I?”
Chris tipped his chin toward Curtis, who correctly interpreted the gesture and carried over a bottle to refill our glasses.
“I don’t know what to tell ya, man. I feel bad for Lacy, though. If she doesn’t snap out of it soon, I think you’re gonna have to consider the possibility that she might be more fucked up than you thought.”
Silently staring into my glass, I had to admit that perhaps Chris was right. Lacy had been living with us for a month now. Instead of school and her music helping lift her out of her depression, she seemed to be sinking even deeper into her inner abyss. She had always been a dainty, lithe creature, but now she was becoming too thin. Her fair complexion that once held a rosy glow was now sickly and pale. Dark circles seemed a permanent presence to her otherwise beautiful eyes. Smiling had become so foreign to her that I feared she had forgotten how. I needed her to snap out of wherever she had withdrawn to within herself. I had to find a way to bring her back to life, back to me.
In true form to the depths of our friendship and the brother-like bond we had spent our entire youth developing, Chris correctly guessed the path of my thoughts and offered a surprising proposal. “You know, Valentine’s Day is coming up in a few weeks. Chicks dig that shit, man. Why don’t you take her out and do that whole ‘wooing’ thing? Take her mind off shit.”
I guffawed at the idea until I saw that he was serious.
“No, man, she’s not ready for that yet.”
“Well, with the way she is now, she ain’t ever gonna be ready if you leave the ball in her court.”
I mulled over the merit of his suggestion with careful consideration for a few moments before shaking my head with uncertainty. “I don’t know…”
“What have you got to lose at this point? If she’s whacked in the head, you puttin’ the moves on her ain’t gonna make her any worse, and if she’s not screwed up beyond fixin’, it might just be what the doctor ordered.”
I rubbed my stubbled jaw in thought, inspiration and hope bursting to life for the first time in weeks. “You just saying this to get me off my ass?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I know how you think. You’re afraid of scaring her off if you move too fast. But I don’t think subtlety is going to work on her, man. She’s got so much going on in her head right now that she probably wouldn’t even notice. I think you just have to jump in there and start being bold. Make some moves, d
ude.”
Chris was the expert on women, not me. Claire was the only girl I had ever dated or slept with. As much as I felt like a romantic idiot over Lacy Dalton, I had absolutely no idea how to court her, subtly or overtly.
With Claire, our entire relationship had revolved implicitly around sex. All special occasions had been celebrated in the sack. Even in the beginning, when we were seventeen and first started seeing each other, we had ended up in the backseat of my mom’s car at the end of our first date, which had set the tone for our entire relationship.
Because of my lack of experience, planning an effective seduction would be eminently more difficult than engineering her breakup with my brother. I needed to come up with a date that would feel normal and natural for us both, yet still push the boundaries of our relationship. But it couldn’t be too forward, not in her current fragile state.
I needed something to make her happy, something that would make her smile and laugh again.
I conceded with a thoughtful nod. “Okay. You may be right.”
“I am,” he said confidently, bringing his glass of whiskey to his lips.
“Well then, you won’t mind my asking you to disappear that weekend. Give me some time alone with her to work my Martin charm.”
He hung his head and chuckled. “I fucking walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
I laughed, giving him a good-natured slap on the back. “You did, but to show my appreciation, I’ll buy you one more round before we go.”
Lacy
My third week of school, the week following my call home to Kevin, couldn’t have passed more slowly than if time had completely stopped altogether. I spent each day after school serving the detentions I had racked up from Mr. Holland over the gruesome locker incident.
It wasn’t until the next Monday, marking the start of my fourth week—almost an entire month—before I was finally able to begin practicing on the piano in the auditorium in the afternoons. Just when I thought that perhaps the other students had tired of tormenting me at last, it was also that very same Monday when I received a painful reminder that I would never fit in or feel welcomed by my peers.
Unfortunately, the timing of my monthly period that started over the weekend couldn’t have been worse. Someone had apparently seen me discarding personal hygiene items in the bathroom. By lunch, the gossips were back in business. Instead of my period being proof that I wasn’t pregnant, it only flamed more rumors that the bleeding was, in fact, the result of the abortion I had allegedly received over the weekend.
I would’ve sworn those kids had caused me to cry my last tear over the condom incident. I was wrong.
Throughout the week they tainted my locker with pictures of baby caskets, drawings of baby-sized skeletons, a sonogram of a fetus with “murderer” written across it in blood-red ink, culminating in the image which greeted me this morning, Friday: the gory photo of a real, aborted fetus. I had run to the restroom to throw up and stayed there crying for the duration of my homeroom class, tormented by the twisted depths of their malice.
Also, as the day wore on, the customs and traditions of Valentine’s Day became more than just a mere holiday, but rather a day of exacting torture, reminding me of Kevin as other young girls in my classes received flowers and balloons from their boyfriends. There would be a dance tonight in honor of the lover’s holiday, and I wouldn’t be there.
Had I still been at home, Kevin and I would have attended our school Valentine’s Day dance together. He would have taken me to dinner first, and afterward, he would have given me a pretty necklace or bracelet, same as he had done last year. If I were still home with Kevin, I would have been one of those lucky girls receiving roses and teddy bears and helium-filled, heart-shaped balloons. Our parents had extended our curfew after the dance last year, and Kevin had parked his car at the end of our driveway on the way home, where he diligently tried coercing me into the back seat. At the time, it had seemed like sex was the only thing he thought about, and the more he pushed me, the more I denied him. Perhaps if I had given in just once, he wouldn’t have wanted or needed Claire. That night wouldn’t have happened. The following morning wouldn’t have happened. Nothing since that morning would have happened.
My life would still be charmed.
Fearing my tears would return if I pondered the state of my pathetic life for one more second, I straightened my back and held my chin up high as I waited for Nick to pick me up. He looked as handsome and charming as ever when he stopped the car by the curb and leaned across the seat to push the door open for me. He settled with his arm casually tossed over the back of the seat while he waited for me to climb in.
“Well?” he prompted, as he veered the car back onto the road. “How was your day?”
It was the same question he asked each day, and just like every other day, I would invariably lie, the same as I had been doing for weeks.
“Good.” I tried to deflect his attention from the details of my day to his. “How about you?”
“Very good. Very good and very productive,” he amended sheepishly, rousing my curiosity.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, it’s a surprise.” Before I could press for more explanation, he sabotaged my opportunity by casually saying, “Chris went home for the weekend, so it’s just you and me.”
I tried not to appear as excited as I felt, and when I couldn’t think of an appropriate way to respond without belying my delight, I simply replied with, “Oh. Okay.”
He cast me a furtive glance. “I suppose you already have a slew of prospective new boyfriends at this school?”
I almost choked on my laugh.
“I take that as a ‘no’?”
“A really big ‘no,’” I confirmed, still chuckling over the absurdity of his question.
“Well, since I’m in the same boat myself, and since it’s Valentine’s Day, I made the executive decision that we should do something together by way of diversionary effort.”
No matter how enticing the prospect of spending the entire weekend alone with Nick, the part of me that felt guilty for wanting it with such ardor tried to protest for the sake of a clear conscience. “Oh, Nick, I don’t know…”
“No,” he said with finality. “I wasn’t asking. I was telling you that we’re going to do something fun tonight. We’ve both been on this pathetic, self-indulgent pity party long enough. By staying home alone and not doing anything tonight—tonight, of all nights—it’s the same as admitting that they’ve broken and ruined us. Speaking for myself, that’s not the case.”
When I still wavered, he put my doubts to rest. “Do you think either of them are sitting home alone curled up in front of the television tonight?”
A spiteful part of me that Kevin and Claire had both helped create hoped they were. In all honesty, though, I couldn’t see Claire pining the nights away without Nick. Even though I hadn’t come right out and called off the engagement when I spoke to Kevin two weeks ago, I had left things open-ended enough that he could date other people free from guilt if he wished. There was nothing to stop him from moving on with someone new. Would that someone be Claire? They hadn’t been able to resist each other before. Nothing was stopping them now.
The thought made me so furious my jaw clenched. Nick must have noticed. “You know I’m right, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I sighed, his knowing, cajoling smile drawing my acquiescence more effectively than his arguments. “So, what did you have in mind?” I asked, as he pulled into our driveway and stopped the car.
“First of all, I want you to unwind and enjoy a nice hot bath before we go out. You’re tired and stressed out and need to relax. I’ll draw up the tub while I shave and clean up. While I’m doing that, you pick out something to wear and have it ready for when you’re done. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Lacy
Even though Nick made me promise to take my time and relax in the tub, I was too excited knowing he had more in store for later, and
climbed from the bubble bath long before the water had cooled enough to warrant doing so.
I had already picked out an outfit beforehand, but as I stood at the foot of the bed in my bathrobe eyeing the ensemble, I reconsidered my choice.
I had never felt such nervous excitement dressing for a date with Kevin! Kevin seemed to have had a one-track mind, and as a result, I grew into the habit of always wearing modest outfits that wouldn’t entice or encourage him in any way. Perhaps that was to my own detriment. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to appear prudish and reserved for Nick. I didn’t want him to look at me or treat me as his honorary little sister anymore. I wanted him to notice that I wasn’t the same scrawny little girl that used to run around in our backyard playing with his kid brother. I was grown now.
After sizing up the ankle-length floral skirt and the bulky cable-knit sweater I had chosen to wear with it, I returned them to the closet. Instead, I found a simple black dress that was shorter than any I typically wore, and paired it with a baby-blue cardigan sweater that I knew accented the blue of my eyes most flatteringly. I pulled my hair back into a loose ponytail hitched low on one side to drape over my shoulder, the way momma had always worn hers when she wanted to look her most beautiful for daddy. With a spritz of my mother’s jasmine perfume and a touch of lip-gloss, I was ready.
As I studied my reflection in the mirror, I succumbed to gut-wrenching insecurity. I wasn’t sexy or beautiful like Claire. My small breasts seemed nonexistent under the thin sweater. I had lost so much weight over the past few weeks that instead of Claire’s sexy curves, I was just plain skinny. I wasn’t as tall or as leggy as Claire either. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh or cry over my absurdity for thinking Nick might ever think of me as a real date after being with the likes of Claire. All I could do was put forth my best effort and hope he noticed.
Judging from the way his gaze swept over me in slow, thrilling, nerve-wracking appraisal when I joined him in the living room, I wondered if perhaps he didn’t indeed notice. His eyes finally met mine and a warm smile curled the corners of his full lips. “You look beautiful, as always.”
Breaking Lacy (Nick & Lacy Book 1) Page 14
