by Kerry Clare
“You knew about this?” asked her mother. “About the two of them?”
“I didn’t know much,” Nicole answered, “but enough to know she’s being pretty generous there. What happened last night?” she asked Brooke.
“What about last night?” said her mother. And Nicole stopped. She’d said too much already.
“Nothing happened last night,” Brooke told them. And everybody made dismissive sounds around her—Brooke had become an unreliable narrator. “Really,” she said. “Nicole took me out to see Derek, and he’d found out about the article, and there wasn’t much to say after that. So I came home. Here, I mean.” Home was still her basement hole on the other side of town. Maybe she should go there.
“And he brought you back here,” Nicole said.
“He got a friend to drive me,” Brooke said. “He was in a difficult spot. If everyone knew I was out there, it would only make things worse.” That was what he’d said.
“But if everyone was going to know already, why did it matter if you were there or not?” asked her mother. It was a question that had also occurred to Brooke, but then there were complicating factors in the situation her mother didn’t know about.
“I think maybe he didn’t want me there,” Brooke admitted. She’d come here to escape from loneliness, but loneliness sounded kind of good at the moment, because her family had her cornered.
“I knew it,” said Nicole, who wasn’t helping. “You made me drop you off halfway up the driveway. I knew it didn’t feel right. I knew I should have stayed.”
“I wouldn’t let you.”
“So it’s over between you and Derek?” her dad asked. “More ‘off-again’ than ‘on-again,’ I mean?” He was frying bacon at the stove now.
“I don’t know where they got that,” Brooke said. “We haven’t been ‘on’ for a while. You probably guessed.” They’d seen her sad and lonely all summer long.
“What happened?” asked her mother. She had even more questions after having read the article. “Is this what brought you home? Things went wrong between you? Because I never knew. It’s made no sense. You’d been on this track so long and you were doing so well, and suddenly you’re back and something’s not right. Did he do something to you?”
Brooke said, “No. I already told you that.” She had to check her tone—she sounded snappy. But she wished her mother would listen to what she was saying, instead of taking the story in all kinds of different directions. “Those women, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe they were even set up, or they don’t even know what they’re talking about. It was a long time ago.”
“So you’re saying he’s innocent,” said Nicole.
“I think he is,” Brooke insisted.
“Well, he’s guilty of something,” her mother said. “Because what’s come over you, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like someone put your light out.”
Brooke said, “I don’t know that that’s a crime.”
Her father cleared his throat conspicuously. “You might find some disagreement with that in this household.”
Brooke said, “But I’m a grown woman.” Except her tone had reached a hysterical pitch, and she couldn’t have sounded more like a child. She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I just mean that you don’t need to blame someone else. I knew what I was doing.”
“But did you?” asked her mother. “He’s so much older. He ought to have known better.”
“But to say that,” Brooke began, frustrated by the way they kept erasing her from her own story, “is to say that I didn’t—know any better, I mean. You can’t say I wasn’t responsible.”
“No one’s saying anything,” said Nicole. “But the dynamics are complicated here.”
“I made my choices,” Brooke said. “And I’m willing to deal with what comes from that.”
“You mean hiding in the house with the curtains shut.”
Brooke asked her, “What else can I do?”
Friday Night
“I told her that you were one of the good guys,” she’d said to Derek the night before in his driveway, imagining she’d done something heroic, something he’d thank her for. She was helping, and she’d been so glad to be able to help, finally. So glad to see him there in the flesh, too, close enough for her to reach out and touch. She had been missing him in a terrible, primal way that she hadn’t properly understood until now, when she didn’t have to miss him anymore, a burden lifted. But also it felt like a dream, the kind you have when someone you’ve lost is standing before you, but as soon as you try to touch them you’ll realize they’re not really there at all.
And it was like that exactly, because he took a step back. “That reporter,” he said, “she was writing about you.” Which had never occurred to Brooke—she didn’t know why. She just hadn’t imagined herself important enough to be a character in this story, plus she’d done all the right things. She’d been quiet and discreet. But then, political scandals come like dominoes, one starts falling and then everything goes, and now it was their turn. Her turn.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“You can see,” he said, “how this makes everything really complicated. You just can’t be here. Not right now, after this week, and everything.”
She said, “I wanted to see you. I’ve missed you.”
He said, “I’ve missed you too. But it’s better this way. We agreed it had to be like that.”
They had agreed, out of necessity, because of her pregnancy, but she’d thought it was just until everything had blown over. And while she knew it was better this way, the situation still came with loss and heartache, and all this time she’d been waiting for him to find his way back to her, but he’d been thinking they were done.
“Can’t I even come in?” she asked him, desperate now. “Just to talk.” She still felt tied to Derek, responsible for his well-being. And how do you go about undoing a knot like that? Was it really possible that she meant nothing to him, after all they’d been through? “Is somebody else here?” she looked up at the windows, at the warmth of the light that had drawn her in.
He said, “There’s no one. It’s not like that. I’ve just had this week—you’ve got no idea what it’s been like.”
She said, “I’ve been watching. Reading.”
“You don’t even know.”
“You could tell me.”
He said, “I can’t.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to get you a ride.” As though he could give her this one thing, like it was favor. But she didn’t want it.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll walk.” Because there wasn’t a person she could call to pick her up in this entire town. She was so lonely. Derek had been the only thing keeping her from realizing how bad it had been all these months, but it had only been the idea of him, an illusion. The Derek in her mind bore very little relation to the Derek who stood before her now, this stranger who was refusing to touch her or even to listen to anything she had to say.
“Not a taxi,” he said. It was humiliating. If she had to suffer this indignity, the very least he could do was drive her home, but he said he couldn’t. “They know my car,” he said. “Everyone’s watching all the time now.” So what? she thought. If he drove her home, they would be able to get right back to where they used to be, Derek in the driver’s seat and her riding along beside him. Maybe then he’d remember how much sense they’d made together. If they got in the car, she could make him see. But perhaps he knew that, because he wasn’t going to get in the car. He wasn’t budging. “Besides, I’ve been drinking.”
He started texting. And she felt so far away from him, like she didn’t know him at all. It had only been a few months, but that time had changed everything.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Why couldn’t he talk to her? They could sort this out together if he’d just
give her the chance.
He said, “I’m texting Brent.”
Brent, Derek’s lackey. “What does Brent have to do with any of this?” And what kind of a solution was Brent going to propose to Derek’s problem? Would he send in a bouncer and have Brooke thrown out over the fence?
“He’ll get someone. Someone to drive you.”
“I don’t need someone. I’ll walk,” Brooke insisted. She really meant it, her restive legs that wanted now only to move. She even wanted to prove she’d walk, but she didn’t have the courage to leave him behind just yet. She didn’t want to accept that this was over.
He told her, “You can’t walk.” Still texting. “It’s far, and dark and dangerous.”
Brooke said, “Since when do you care what happens to me?”
“I care,” he said. Looking up from his phone, finally—perhaps the tone of her voice was what had done it. His first strong reaction since she’d turned up at his place—he’d been keeping the lid on his panic until then. But this was a step too far. Because he did care. In his own way, detached, like she was a problem to be solved. Actual empathy, for him, might be too much to ask. Instead he took care, which was not the same as feeling.
She wanted him to feel.
But for him, it was about being demonstrable. Feelings weren’t important. For him, it was about doing his own particular version of the right thing. It was paternal, awful, the way he insisted on staying out there with her while the minutes passed as they waited for Kirsti to arrive, even though she wished he would disappear, the only option if the earth was so unwilling to open up beneath her feet and swallow her. Derek’s presence, which had always been so powerful—now it meant nothing. Worse than nothing. It felt like an assault, and she wondered how long this could go on. Was this torture? Such a silence, because he wasn’t in the mood for small talk, though she wouldn’t have been able to stand it if he were.
Finally she could see headlights coming down the road, and she decided to seize just one more opportunity to explain. As though the failure had been hers, and she needed him to absolve her.
“I thought if I could reach you,” she told him. “If we could sit down and talk.”
He said, “It’s too late for that.”
“For what?”
He said, “For everything.”
She said, “I’m sorry,” because it felt right, but it didn’t sound right, once the words left her mouth. It was all so wrong. Her whole life had been in disgrace before his was, and he hadn’t said sorry even once.
The Daily Observer (from Saturday’s paper)
“DEREK MURDOCH’S GIRLFRIEND SAYS HE’S ‘ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS’ ”
…ELLIS DID NOT RESPOND to follow-up messages asking for clarification and further details about the nature of her relationship with Murdoch.
The Observer has learned that she also accompanied him on several trips across the country, as well as to a handful of international destinations, which would be unusual for someone in the role of a junior staffer. It is unclear who paid for her travel, or whether her role on these trips was in a personal or professional capacity…
Sunday Morning
That morning Brooke woke up in her own bed, back underground, her old familiar burrow. Never mind that it was in a room that still felt like someone else’s, with its blank walls and the passing feet outside—at least it was at an address that wasn’t listed in the phone book, where reporters couldn’t find her and knock and knock and knock. Nicole had driven her back the night before after a long and surreal day at their parents’ with the curtains drawn. To avoid the news, they’d turned off their phones and the radio and the television, playing board games, Clue and Boggle, and it felt more like her childhood than anything had in a decade, except that she and Nicole weren’t dressed in matching pajamas, and also she hadn’t been implicated in a sex scandal back then.
“You’re not implicated,” her family had insisted, fervently defending her honor and trying to carry on like everything was fine. Her dad had gone in to the restaurant that day, but stayed only an hour or so before leaving his assistant manager in charge because everybody kept hounding him. Her family knew the stakes now, that Brooke wasn’t just blowing things out of proportion—but they also didn’t understand just how wrapped up in it all she truly was.
“Those women,” she told them, “his accusers—they’re anonymous. So there aren’t any photos of them to stick on the front page. They only have the ones of Derek looking guilty, but those are all used up now, so it’s my turn—I’m a proxy. Which means that whoever sees my face after this is going to be thinking about whatever Derek was getting up to out by the garbage bins ten years ago.”
“Which was nothing,” my mother said. “That’s what you said.” She seemed desperate for this to be true.
And Derek blamed Brooke—that was the galling thing. The uncomfortable feeling she’d been sitting with all day, not even waiting for him to call anymore or having to pretend that she wasn’t waiting, because she knew that it was never going to happen. The look on his face as she came up the driveway, and the way it made her feel: besmirched. She’d finally looked it up, “smirch,”—not online, because her phone was off, but in the dictionary on her mother’s desk—and discovered the word meant “stained.” Related words: disgrace, stigma, taint.
Standing there in the driveway on Friday, something had shifted in her, an awareness, but it was the kind of revelation that requires processing. So she’d let the feelings come on gradually as the hours unfolded after Brent Ames’s sister dropped her off on her parents’ doorstep, and it wasn’t so long before it was hard to admit she hadn’t always known it. Derek wasn’t ever coming back, maybe she’d never even had him anyway, and everything she’d been holding out for was only an illusion. A delusion. She felt like a fool, but it would be more foolish to still be deluded, so there was that, even though this all meant that by Sunday morning she was drowning in a sea of despair—which is never a good idea for a person living in a basement.
The curtains were closed so she couldn’t see the weather outside, or the footwear. It didn’t matter, because she wasn’t planning on going anywhere that day.
“You’re really going to hide away from everyone forever?” her sister had asked the night before as they sat in her car in the driveway, engine idling. Brooke didn’t want to get out because it was warm in the car and she could pretend it was the whole wide world. Nicole didn’t want her to get out either, and had offered to take her back to her place and let her sleep in the spare room, to stay as long as she wanted. She promised to leave her alone there, give her space the way their parents never would be able to. But Brooke didn’t want anyone’s spare room, and Nicole’s concern was as claustrophobic as their parents’, and maybe worse, because Nicole could read her mind.
Brooke told her, “Maybe. I won’t hide away forever, but definitely for the weekend at least. Until it all blows over.” Lately a day or two was all it took before some other poor girl showed up on the front page of the paper in abject humiliation, somebody else’s scandal. The newspapers in the library would be removed from the rod, and placed in a pile, and eventually in an archive. Her colleagues had seen that day’s papers, though, and now she never wanted to see them again.
“You know we’re on your side, right?” Nicole asked her. “I don’t like this, how I just keep dropping you off in strange places. You don’t have to do this alone.”
“But I do,” said Brooke. “You guys can only play Boggle and try to protect me for so long. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to open the curtains.”
Not today. Even though it would be harder for reporters to find her here, a person could theoretically kneel on the sidewalk and peek in the window and find her lying in this bed, four walls bare, the room mostly empty save for the bench press in the corner. She wasn’t taking any chances. She could just imagine tomorrow’s pape
r:
DEREK MURDOCH’S ON-AGAIN, OFF-AGAIN GIRLFRIEND LIVES IN A DEPRESSING HOVEL: SEE PAGE 3 FOR PHOTOS
And what if he saw it? She would be so embarrassed that this was her life.
She could hear Lauren in the kitchen, and decided to go find her. Sunday was the only day they both had off work, and while they usually spent it avoiding each other, today Brooke wanted company. The evening they’d been drunk together, just days before, had felt as low as things could go, but now Brooke looked back at it with nostalgia. How innocent she’d been at the time. What would she be looking back fondly on in a few days? What a week.
Lauren said, “I texted you—when you didn’t come home. I was worried.”
“I was staying at my parents’.”
She said, “You never texted me back.”
Brooke said, “I haven’t been checking my phone.” Her phone was just one more reminder of the outside world, and she didn’t need it, especially when the only person she wanted to hear from was never going to call. She remembered the cocoon of her sister’s car, the rain on the windows obscuring the view. How much she’d once taken anonymity for granted. Even when she and Derek were together, she hadn’t properly understood what it meant, somebody always watching. She realized now why he’d required her to be so careful all the time, and what the stakes had been. She thought she’d understood before, but she hadn’t. “Sorry to worry you.” She hadn’t thought about Lauren. If Lauren didn’t come home one night, would she even notice? Were they at that point in their friendship? Did they have a friendship?
“I thought maybe you’d heard from him, your boyfriend.”
“What?”
“When you didn’t come home. That he was back in town.”
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” Brooke said. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Lauren.
Brooke said, “Coffee?”
