Hers was a unique beauty. She wasn’t pretty. Her features were too intense. Her eyes were too dark and deep, her nostrils too voluptuous, her mouth too full, her cheeks too round. She wasn’t stylishly thin. And she was blissfully oblivious about how she looked. Amazingly, she often said she was jealous of Becky’s blond hair and slender build. She’d once asked Becky’s opinion about whether she should undergo breast reduction surgery, and Becky had convulsed in laughter. Elyse was a C cup. Not that Becky cared one way or the other, but she’d consider it a triumph to fill a B cup with her own pathetic little breasts. Her response to Elyse’s question about surgically shrinking her breasts was, “Shut up and count your blessings. By my calculation, you’ve got two,” she’d added, pointing at first Elyse’s left breast and then her right.
“You’re the math genius. I’m glad you can count that high,” Elyse had said, then laughed and tucked her blessings into a lacy black bra.
Becky couldn’t read Elyse’s mood from the expression Elyse wore as she entered the restaurant. She appeared both tired and energized, her posture slumping and her hair limp but her eyes radiant. Before she was fully settled in her chair across the tiny table from Becky, a waitress materialized with two heavy ceramic mugs and a pot of coffee.
“Thank you,” Elyse said dramatically as the waitress filled her mug. She cupped both hands around it and took a long sip.
Becky lifted her mug to her lips, but the coffee was too hot. Evidently Elyse’s tongue was coated in asbestos.
“Okay,” Becky said once Elyse lowered her mug to the table. “Talk.”
“Let’s order first.” Either Elyse was deliberately dragging out the drama or she was ravenous. Probably the latter, since she ordered a huge breakfast: Swiss cheese and ham omelet, toast, home fries.
Becky requested an egg-white vegetable omelet, handed the waitress her laminated menu, then folded her hands before her and stared hard at Elyse. “I’m waiting,” Becky said.
“Turns out he’s a student at BU,” Elyse said.
“A grad student?” He’d been at least a couple of years older than they were. They were college seniors now; he should have graduated a while ago.
Elyse shook her head. “I don’t know why he’s still in school, but this wasn’t a grad student thing. Everyone I knew there was an undergrad. I saw him sitting in a dark corner, drinking beer. I had no idea who he was, but he was gorgeous. So I went over to talk to him.”
“Naturally,” Becky said with a snort. She had no memory of his appearance, gorgeous or otherwise. She hadn’t seen him at the time of the accident because he’d remained in the car, and she and Elyse and Florie had all hovered beneath the tree, standing vigil around April, trying to will her not to die. The local Wheatley newspaper had published April’s photo after the accident, but not his.
“Dark, curly hair,” Elyse described him. “Longish without being really long. Dark eyes. The thickest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a guy. His face was just beautiful. Like a cherub in a Botticelli painting. A cherub who’d been through hell a few times.”
“So, a cross between Botticelli and Dante,” Becky said.
“Yeah. Lots of pain in his face. I’d love to paint him.” Elyse was a fine arts major. Becky was in awe of her talent. Becky might be a whiz at mathematical theory, but real art . . . Real art took heart as well as brains. Maybe more heart than brains.
In any case, she lacked the heart for it—to say nothing of the talent. “So—what? You just marched up to him and said, ‘I’d love to paint you’?”
“Pretty much.” Elyse shrugged, as if her ability to bewitch men was no big deal.
The waitress slapped their breakfast platters down and topped off their mugs with coffee. Becky ignored her food. “And what did he say?”
“He was out of it,” Elyse reported. “I mean, it was a party at an apartment in Brighton. They had a keg in the kitchen, another keg staying cool on the fire escape, and smoke drifting from one of the bedrooms. I was probably one of the more sober people there, and that’s not saying much.”
Becky opened her mouth to lecture Elyse on safety. Then Becky thought better of it and silenced herself with a bite of omelet, a crunchy strip of grilled egg white wrapped around a broccoli floret. By the time she was done chewing and swallowing, the urge to yell at Elyse for picking up guys when she was wrecked had passed. She’d given that speech to Elyse before, and Elyse wasn’t stupid. She knew she was flirting not just with guys but with serious danger. It was a conscious choice, and nothing Becky said would alter that.
Elyse dug into her own heaping plate, stabbing a chunk of omelet and waiting for the thread of cheese connecting her fork to the plate to thin and finally break before she lifted the fork to her mouth. She chewed, swallowed, and smiled happily. “So, we started talking, the usual getting-to-know-you shit. He was majoring in psychology, he’d taken some time off from school, he just had a few credits to go, he was working part-time in a supermarket, he used to work for a carpet store, blah-blah-blah. And he was so beautiful, Beck. I just wanted to jump his bones, right there, in that crowded living room smelling of stale beer and weed.”
Becky managed an indulgent smile and picked at her omelet. Why had she ordered it? At the moment, she doubted she could swallow a bite of dry toast. She wasn’t sure what unsettled her: that Elyse could be so nonchalant about jumping a guy’s bones, that she could wolf down a linebacker-size breakfast so enthusiastically, or that she’d spent the night talking to the boy who’d killed April and she actually seemed jazzed about it. That she kept emphasizing how beautiful he was.
Becky knew he’d been exonerated. She’d witnessed the accident; she accepted that he wasn’t at fault. But still, in her mind, he was a monster.
“So eventually we got to the where-are-you-from part of the conversation. And he was being real evasive.” A long, glossy lock of Elyse’s hair had drooped forward, the tips sweeping perilously close to her plate, and she repositioned the lock with a graceful toss of her head. As far back as middle school, Elyse had known how to toss her head, how to make her hair float outward and then settle exactly the way she wanted it. Before she’d even been conscious of boys as anything other than loud, dirty, obnoxious creeps, she’d flaunted her femininity in a way Becky could only admire. Tossing her head, getting her hair to do pretty things, exuding allure—it all seemed innate with Elyse, something she’d never had to learn or practice.
“I mean—” she lowered her fork only to reach for her mug “—why wouldn’t he say where he was from? I couldn’t figure it out. So I told him I was from Wheatley, and he flinched. Literally. Like this.” She jerked her shoulders as if someone had touched a Taser to the nape of her neck.
“So you figured he must be from Wheatley.”
“I figured he had some issue with Wheatley, one way or another. He started cursing, and then he said he needed to drink something stronger and asked if I’d like to go upstairs to his apartment.”
“Of course you said yes,” Becky muttered.
Elyse moved her shoulders again, this time in a normal shrug. “I was ready to jump his bones. Why wouldn’t I go to his apartment?” She speared some home fries with the tines of her fork and devoured them before continuing. “So we went upstairs. His apartment was directly above the party. We could hear muffled music and voices rising through the floor. But his apartment-mates were out—maybe they were all at the party, I don’t know—and it was pretty quiet. Especially compared to downstairs. He pulled out a bottle of bourbon and filled two glasses and told me, ‘I’m from Wheatley and I’m never going back.’”
“That sounds melodramatic.”
“Hey, I’m not so crazy about Wheatley, myself.” Elyse eyed Becky’s plate. “Why aren’t you eating?”
Becky dutifully consumed another nibble of omelet.
“Wheatley is . . . you know. I don
’t like going home. The situation with my parents is pure shit. They want to get a divorce, fine, get a divorce. But my father buying the Parker house, just across the street from my mother’s? That was just plain sick.”
“He wanted to be close to Katie, I thought.”
“Close, sure. But right across the street? So he can see when my mother’s boyfriend comes to visit?” Elyse shuddered. “Honestly, they’re both so fucking dysfunctional. I include my mother’s boyfriend under that heading, too.”
“The Toad.” Becky knew that was the nickname Elyse and her sister Katie had given him. Not because he had warts or bug-eyes, not because he was jumpy or slimy, but simply because they hated him.
“So, I’m telling Mark all this, figuring it’ll make him open up or something. And he’s knocking back one bourbon after another. And then he suddenly blurts out that he killed a girl in Wheatley. And I knew.”
Of course Elyse knew. Girls didn’t get killed on a regular basis in Wheatley. In fact, April was probably the only girl who’d ever gotten killed there, at least since colonial days, when a girl might have been killed by a bear or caught up in a skirmish between the Wampanoags and the settlers. Or she could have gotten hit by a horse and wagon. Even in colonial times, children chased stray balls into the road.
Becky nodded. The odds that Elyse would run into the driver at a BU party were not that low. Lots of kids who graduated from Wheatley High wound up attending colleges in the Boston area. Lots of BU students lived in a relatively small neighborhood of Brighton, and they went to parties and got wasted.
“So, we both wound up drinking a lot of bourbon and talking. Once he found out April and I had been close friends, he wanted to know everything about her. At least he said he did. I’d tell him something, and he’d start crying, and then he’d have another drink and say, ‘Tell me more.’”
“What did you tell him?” Becky asked, a surge of anger rising into her throat and making her voice scratchy. How could Elyse tell this boy about April? How could she share April with the bastard who’d killed her? Just because he was good-looking and Elyse wanted to have sex with him didn’t mean he was entitled to anything about April—her sweet, slightly whispery way of talking, her tawny hair, her equanimity. Her age, her family, her ability to put a wicked spin on a tennis ball with her backhand. Her dreams of becoming a lawyer, marrying Tommy Crawford, and having four children. Her fondness for the color pink, and her embarrassment about that fondness, because pink was so girly.
Mark Gottlieb, the son of a bitch, was not entitled to know any of this.
Elyse must have heard the edge in Becky’s tone, because she gave Becky a hard stare. “Beck, he was devastated. The accident destroyed his life every bit as much as it destroyed April’s.”
“He’s alive. April is dead.”
“Okay. Every bit as much as it destroyed our lives. He lives with it every day. He’s a basket case.”
“Good. He deserves to be.” Becky was surprised by how bitter she felt. She wasn’t used to sitting in judgment of others, but at that moment, she was furious—not just with Mark Gottlieb, but with Elyse for giving him access to April.
“The boy is in pain,” Elyse said firmly, then resumed eating her breakfast with a gusto that contradicted her abundant femininity. “April’s death means something different to him than it does to us, but it means something. I ached for him.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Becky muttered. She nudged away her plate, no longer willing to pretend she had an appetite. “He killed April. That’s the bottom line.”
“No,” Elyse said firmly. “The bottom line is, it was an accident.”
“Fine.” Becky practically spit out the single syllable. “So . . . what? Are you going to sleep with him?”
“This isn’t about sex,” Elyse defended herself, although with her, at least fifty percent of everything was about sex. “I did sleep with him last night—with my clothes on. We talked until, I don’t know, two o’clock at least, and then we were so exhausted from talking and crying and all that bourbon that we cuddled on his bed and fell asleep. We held each other. We both needed to be held, and that’s what we did. If you don’t like it—” Elyse shrugged again “—fuck you.”
She didn’t say it nastily. Unlike Becky, she seemed to feel no rancor. This was all just an interesting adventure for her. Meeting April’s killer. Telling him April’s life story. Keeping her clothing on all night, even though he was gorgeous and she wanted to do him. That was undoubtedly a novel experience.
“You don’t look very wrinkled,” Becky noted.
Elyse glanced down at her sweater and jeans. “I woke up around seven, said good-bye, and went back to campus. What, did you think I would have called you from his room?”
“I don’t know. You blabbed all about April to him. You might have blabbed about me and Florie, too.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Her plate clean, she took a long swig of coffee. “You’re perfectly safe.”
Becky wasn’t safe. She wasn’t safe from cars speeding down the road, she wasn’t safe from pain or loss, she wasn’t safe from the ugly whims of fate. Sometimes she believed the reason she stayed with Emerson was that he was safer than most people. He could never hurt her.
Elyse could—but that was because Becky loved Elyse.
The waitress approached their table with the coffee decanter. Becky asked her to wrap her barely touched omelet. Emerson would eat it.
She had to leave. She had to think. She needed quiet time, alone time, time to figure out why the thought of Elyse spending the night in the arms of the guy who’d killed April made Becky tremble with rage. She wasn’t the raging type. She prided herself on being level-headed, letting her brain rule over her emotions. Emotions hurt. They made a person not safe.
Outside the cafe, she hugged Elyse. No matter how Elyse had spent last night—how she spent any night—she was the closest Becky had to a sister. Closer than a sister. They were permanently bonded, Becky and Elyse and Florie. Emerson stood outside their circle and always would. So would Mark Gottlieb. Anger couldn’t change that.
Even so, as Becky walked back toward the BU bridge, her leftover breakfast encased in a white foam box, she couldn’t stop reciting the syllables, wishing they would bring her solace.
Apra apra dida may. Apra apra dida may.
Chapter Twenty-Two
THE BEST WAY to get through a modeling session was to think about something else.
Not that Elyse was embarrassed or inhibited. This was an art class, after all, not a strip club. Her body was her body. Naked or dressed, she had nothing to be ashamed of—but naked paid a lot more, so she modeled naked. Since she did her modeling at MassArt, not BU, no one she had to face in class tomorrow morning would be in the studio today, staring at her exposed boobs and crotch.
The difficult part was remaining motionless for long stretches. She was allowed a break every twenty minutes—every fifteen minutes if she had to pose standing up—during which she could throw on a robe and drink some water or munch on crackers. Then she’d remove the robe again and have the teacher arrange her on the chair or table or floor so she was in exactly the same position as she’d been before the break.
Today, the life drawing professor had perched her on a stool, one foot resting on a higher rung than the other, one arm braced on her higher knee. She had twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her head so the students would have an unobstructed view of her neck and shoulders. They orbited around her, sketching her from different perspectives, their charcoal hissing across the paper.
That it was Sunday didn’t matter; the school seemed to need models every day of the week, and as much as they needed models, Elyse needed money. Whenever she could squeeze in a modeling session, she grabbed a slot. Sunday afternoons, she could model for several hours and earn enough to cover her food for the week.
Because her parents were divorced and maintaining two households on one income—why her mother couldn’t get a job, Elyse didn’t know—BU had come up with a semi-decent financial aid package for her. But this year, Katie was attending college, too, and money was tight.
Holy Cross. Katie liked all the Catholic shit. She was actually toying with the idea of becoming a nun. That way she’d never have to deal with sex and passion and heartbreak. Elyse thought she was nuts, but no crazier than the rest of the Fabiano family.
Elyse had worked in Boston all last summer—modeling gigs at MassArt, along with a part-time job gathering discarded clothes from the fitting room of a boutique on Newbury Street and returning it to the racks and display shelves—but she’d managed to travel home to Wheatley a couple of weekends, mostly for Katie’s sake.
Becky had gotten a research grant and spent the summer at MIT, which had given Elyse someone to ride the train home to Wheatley with on those weekends, and to hang out with once she got there.
Florie had spent the entire summer in Wheatley, working as a counselor at a day camp run by her church. Mostly wiping runny noses and organizing relay races, as far as Elyse could tell. Florie didn’t strike Elyse as the counselor type—Elyse couldn’t picture her refereeing an argument among six-year-olds or comforting a tyke with a scraped knee. But Florie had seemed content with the job. It helped her feel closer to God, she said. Florie had become awfully pious at college this past year. Elyse ought to put her in touch with Katie. They could become nuns together, if Florie was willing to convert to Catholicism.
Elyse wondered whether Florie would have reacted better than Becky had to the news about Mark Gottlieb.
She couldn’t have reacted worse.
Becky was just so . . . contained. So shut down, so sealed off. She couldn’t even access her own pain, let alone Mark’s.
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