Best wishes,
Chuck Abel
I stared straight ahead at dry Paris and felt a sort of release, like I was relaxed for the first time in weeks, maybe ever.
I’d have to write back.
I’d have to tell him.
I wasn’t special.
AS I LACED UP MY CLEATS for the semifinal the next morning, Coach Stacey came over with a funny look on her face. “I’m not starting you, Kaylee, so you can relax.”
I kept working my laces. “It makes no sense. I don’t have any crazy powers.”
“I know. But, you bailed on us this week.”
“You bailed on me first.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway. I’ll use you if I have to. But right now. I don’t know. It’s time the other girls find out what they’re capable of anyway, without relying on you to carry them.”
“I understand,” I said.
Aiden had turned up to watch. “How come you’re not pitching?” he called from the bleachers behind me.
“Long story,” I said.
“You going to the club later?” he asked. “My shift starts in like twenty.”
I said, “Yeah, I’ll be there,” and turned back to watch the game. Helen struck out three batters. Lila scored a home run a few minutes later.
They were doing it.
Without me.
So there.
•••
I went straight to the club after the game and dove into the pool and swam a few hard, fast laps, then climbed out, toweled off, and sat in a chair opposite Aiden’s lifeguard chair.
I pictured Crystal, checking her e-mail.
I heard her saying, “How’s she going to prove it?”
I wished for the answer to come to me.
•••
I started to read and time drifted and broke and got lost.
•••
Aiden came and found me on his break. “What are you reading? I tried waving at you to get your attention like twenty times.”
“It’s Chiara’s novel.”
“Chiara’s writing a novel?”
“She’s written it. It’s done. It’s a thriller about a group of friends on a sweet sixteen ‘sail-a-bration’ cruise. And they meet this guy but then he disappears. And they think he fell overboard but no one believes them.”
“Sounds kind of cool,” he said.
“It is,” I said.
He sat down beside me and stretched out his legs and I thought about telling him how I had to somehow prove that the guard was working with Crystal, but all of that had nothing to do with us, not really.
He said, “So what were you doing there with Bennett last night? Is that like a thing again?
“No,” I said. “Not a thing.”
The Miller twins were doing cannonballs and I felt bad about thinking they were jerks when they were just boys, kids.
“Good,” he said. “I mean. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.”
For a second his gaze rested on my stomach and seemed to wake some butterflies in there. He stood.
“Where are you going?” I squinted up at him as the sun slipped under my umbrella, warming my skin with a suddenness that caused me to shiver.
“I need to go talk to Kathryn.” He was, for a moment, a blackened silhouette but when he moved to block the sun from my eyes, leaving me in his shadow, the look he gave me meant everything.
•••
My phone rang early Sunday morning. I picked up.
An automated voice said I had a call from an inmate and did I accept charges.
I said, “Accept.”
“I got your e-mail,” she said.
“And?”
“And nothing. You’re wrong is all.”
“I’m not. I know I’m not. Why not admit that the whole thing when you were a teenager was a hoax? Why not say you’re sorry and that you were young and foolish and let it go?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“Why did you even agree to the podcast? And why did you feel the need to mess with my head?”
In the long silence, I could hear her breathing. Then she said, “Tell Liana the deal’s off. I’m done.”
“What deal?” I said, and my voice sounded small.
“I’m done talking,” she said. “You ain’t gonna believe me anyway. You got a pen?”
I took down a phone number she said to call. Then she hung up. My head throbbed.
My heart, too.
What deal?
•••
I called the number.
•••
“Hello?”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?”
“I’m Kaylee. I’m Crystal’s daughter. She gave me this number.”
“Nothing’s what you think,” he said. “I’m the guard who was there at your visit.”
“You were faking the choking. I’m going to prove it.”
“Good luck with that,” he said.
“Why are you lying for her?”
“The woman is crazy!” he said. “And really, really persuasive-like. I felt like I had to.”
“She’s in prison,” I said. “She doesn’t have any control of this situation. You do.”
“I’m not talking about Crystal,” he said.
“Then who?” I pressed.
“Who do you think?” He coughed. “Who’s really pulling the strings here?”
•••
Who else could it possibly—
•••
“Liana?” I said.
“I’ll deny we ever had this conversation,” he said, and he hung up.
•••
I sat perfectly still.
The house was smart enough to realize it was hot, and the AC turned on.
I went to my closet, dug around until I found the clutch I’d brought to the spoon-bending party. I opened it, saying, “Please, please, please still be here.”
And it was.
A business card for Bill Lauck, Senior Producer at FPR.
•••
I opened an e-mail window but then changed my mind. I’d call first thing in the morning.
•••
Liana was going to wish I’d ignored her forever.
•••
An episode called “The Photograph” went live at midnight, but I didn’t care.
I was tired.
I slept like a baby.
Dreamless and free.
•••
“Kaylee,” Bill said, after his assistant put the call through. “This is a surprise. What can I do for you?”
I explained. He sighed. He said, “I’m sure this has all been very overwhelming for a girl your age and—”
“I don’t see what my age or the fact that I’m a girl has to do with anything.” I was in the kitchen, watching a drop of water cling to the sink faucet. “I’m telling you something important. Are you hearing it or not?”
The drop fell.
•••
In the end, he promised me he took it all very seriously. Liana was working from home today, so that gave him some wiggle room. He would look into the nature of this “deal” that had been cut and get back to me.
•••
I wasn’t feeling very patient. I texted Aiden:
•••
“You have her address?” Aiden asked me.
“Nope,” I said. “That’s where you come in.”
“How do you figure?”
I explained and he groaned but he said he’d do it anyway.
•••
“Hi, yes, I have a flower delivery for someone named Liana Fatone. The sender left this number, but I think I have the address wrong. You’re in Astoria?”
•••
We listened to the podcast on our way.
Liana was interviewing Will Hannity, and I thought back to the spoon-bending party
and how I felt like I’d changed shape since then.
After a while I couldn’t stand the sound of Liana’s voice.
But why was there only one photo?
What do you mean when you say the phenomena didn’t want to be photographed?
She had a crush on you; did you reciprocate that crush? Did she ever, like come on to you?
Like nails on a chalkboard.
I turned it off.
•••
I wasn’t sure I’d ever been to Queens except for the airport, and I’d definitely never been to Astoria. It seemed sort of nice on certain blocks, but then not so nice on others. Like 99 cent stores next to nice restaurants, cell phone shops next to slick-looking bars. We’d stopped for a few minutes a block or so away, when we saw a food truck on a corner with a long line. Aiden had a thing for falafels, so we ordered a platter and then continued to Liana’s block and ate in the car.
“This is unbelievably good,” he said. “The King of Falafel and Shawarma knows his stuff.”
“Yeah, baby,” I said, because it had said that on the front of the truck. All caps with ten exclamation points.
A few spaces up, there was an ironworks van with a model of workers who’d built the Empire State Building and were frozen in time, in steel, eating their lunch. Looking at them I felt a surge of vertigo; I couldn’t imagine munching some sandwich a hundred stories off the ground.
“Are you going to ring the bell?” Aiden asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
There was a small No Soliciting/No Flyers sign dangling from a black railing on the front stoop. Her car was parked at a weird angle pointing down at a garage. Cupcake curtains blocked a window above the white garage door.
Liana appeared at the base of the driveway with her younger daughter in a stroller, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and jeans and sneakers, plus her blue sunglasses. Her pigtailed daughter held a stuffed cat and wore purple sunglasses.
“Now’s your chance,” Aiden said.
•••
“You’ve been playing me,” I said, running to catch up to her, almost stepping in a pile left by a dog.
“What are you talking about, Kaylee?” she said, zero to irritated that fast. “What are you doing here? Why haven’t you returned any of my calls?”
“What did you offer her? Legal help? Money? What?” A man walked past and gave me a look like I was crazy, and I didn’t care.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Liana said. “Is this why Bill left me some cryptic message? What’s going on?”
“Crystal said you had a deal with her. He’s looking into it. I talked to the guard and he said you were in on the whole fake choking thing.”
“There was no deal,” she said, like the word “deal” was somehow ludicrous. “I said I would show up at the parole meeting next week. But it turns out I can’t. Because of . . . things. And I don’t know anything about fake choking.”
“You’re unbelievable. Is there anything you won’t do to have some successful podcast? These are people’s lives you’re dealing with. Actual real life.”
“Kaylee, listen—”
“I’m sick of listening to you. It’s like your voice is all I hear in my head these days.”
“Thanks for trusting me,” she said, shaking her head. “Thanks for coming to me first before fucking everything up.”
“Nice. Curse in front of your kid.”
Liana said, “You know what I remember about being your age, Kaylee?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“I remember thinking I absolutely knew the difference between right and wrong. I was right and everyone else was wrong.”
“Well, you haven’t changed at all.”
“I didn’t make any deal with Crystal. I didn’t make them stage the choking thing. I didn’t even know it was staged!”
“Prove it,” I said.
“Go home, Kaylee.”
“I will!”
•••
“You okay?” Aiden asked, when I got back in the car.
I made him switch seats with me and said, “Just drive.”
•••
We were quiet the whole ride back. I was fighting . . . something I couldn’t name. Some kind of regret, maybe? Some sadness. Not over bad stuff that had happened to me, but over decisions I’d made about who to be. Why did I have obnoxious nicknames for everyone who was different from me? Why was I so quick to anger and judge? And why had I started, like Crystal, to thrive on . . . what? Notoriety? Was that how I wanted to live my life?
At the peak of the George Washington Bridge, smack between two high silver-blue arches, I looked over toward Aiden and past him, to find the whole skyline of Manhattan—a tiny, distant gray silhouette against a pink sunset—and I thought I was going to bawl.
I said, “Sometimes I don’t like who I am.”
Aiden said, “So fix it.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“Of course it is.”
Aiden stopped the car in front of his house after the rest of a quiet drive. “That summer I met you? Right before high school? I had been basically a totally different person up to that point. I didn’t care about school or my parents or anything. And then this thing happened with a buddy of mine and he had to live through this awful time. I don’t want to get into the details because it’s too gory and awful and I don’t ever want to put the images in your mind because they’re horrific, but it made me question everything I thought I was doing right and see how it was all wrong. I was a jerk. I was taking everything for granted and acting like nobody could touch me, like the world owed me something. And I decided I had to grow up and be different.”
He got out of the car and I got out and went around to get into the driver’s seat. “Thanks for coming with me.”
“Of course.” He reached over and squeezed my hand, and when he went to take his hand away I didn’t let him.
I held on tight.
He said, “I broke up with Kathryn, just as an FYI or whatever.”
I nodded. “Sorry.”
He nodded. “Had to be done.
“What now?” he asked, and I wasn’t sure whether he was asking about the podcast or about us. I didn’t have an answer yet either way, but I knew for sure that I had been arrogant and foolish to think I could make someone love me. It was such an enormous relief to know that it either happened or it didn’t. Because how amazing was that?
IT WAS ALL OVER THE news that the podcast was temporarily suspended, possibly canceled, pending an investigation into possible violations of journalistic ethics.
WHO’S HOAXING WHOM?
•••
IS THE POSSIBLE MORE FICTION THAN FACT?
•••
Liana would get whatever she deserved.
I felt bad about it, but I had the moral high ground.
Right?
Because of course she’d deny it.
•••
With the whole podcast being questioned, things calmed down at school. Coach Stacey and my teammates seemed to accept that I was, simply, good at pitching. No funny business. Nothing out of the ordinary.
We played our championship game that following Saturday and we won it. I managed a double and a single in addition to a few good, but unremarkable, innings of pitching, and nobody balked.
“We need to work on building up our other pitchers next year,” Coach Stacey said on the bus ride home, and I thought about telling her I was done with softball, that there’d be no next year for me, but I wanted to keep my options open. I was planning on being a different person by then, shedding layers that no longer fit. I didn’t want to make decisions for the person I had yet to become.
•••
I got a voice mail from Bill during the game—almost a full week after I’d alerted him to the mysterious “deal”—and considered deleting it without listening. I’d moved on! I didn’t care!
But I hadn’t.
And I did.
I called him back.
“Kaylee,” he said. “I wanted you to know. There was no deal, at least not with Liana, nothing offered inappropriately. The warden’s been suspicious of some kind of involvement between that guard and Crystal. So the theory is that Crystal thought the podcast was going to somehow make her rich but only if she proved she had telekinetic powers. Anyway, the warden is reviewing the situation and thinking about next steps. They don’t know how to prove there’s a relationship, since Crystal and the guard are both, of course, denying everything. But Liana’s not at fault here.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I said.
“And thank you,” he said, “for coming to me with your concerns. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, in spite of all this.”
I said, “I’m sure this has all been very overwhelming for a man of your age,” and he said, “Touché.”
•••
Travel time to Astoria
50 min (34 mi)
Fastest route, the usual traffic
This route has tolls.
•••
Liana opened the door and then jolted with surprise that it was me.
“Girls!” she called out. “I’m stepping outside for a minute.”
She came out onto her front stoop and we sat. The air smelled like skunk, which made no sense, then I realized it wasn’t skunk it smelled of but pot. Liana took a deep breath. “The neighbors are a bunch of twenty-one-year-old pot heads.”
I nodded. “I owe you an apology,” I said. “I know you didn’t make any ‘deal’ like Crystal said you did. She was controlling all of us. And I let her. She told me to call the guard, and he confirmed you were involved. But of course he would. They were in it together. Which was what I was trying to prove in the first place. I feel like an idiot.”
“Well, thanks for being big enough to admit you were wrong,” she said, and the air now carried frantic classical piano music our way. “He plays better high than he does not high,” she said.
A guy appeared on the stoop next door with a large dog—a husky. “Hi, Liana!” he said, happily.
“Hi, Steve,” she said, with less enthusiasm.
“I figure she got mad,” she said to me, “because my surgery is the day of the parole hearing. I told her I couldn’t go. So she wanted to get back at me.”
The Possible Page 16
