“Calder won’t talk to me. He was going to break up with me anyway. I could tell. He was getting tired of me.”
“So, what, it was like a ‘fuck you’? Humiliate him before he could humiliate you?”
“If that was my intention, it seems to have backfired,” she said ruefully.
“I can see that Jesus camp was a real morale booster.”
“Everyone in town knows. At church people look at me like I’m the goddamn whore of Babylon.”
“Fuck those miserable hypocrites. Maybe you were the one getting tired of him.” I sat down on the couch and snuggled up next to her.
“You fall in love with Owen yet?” she mumbled into my shoulder.
“Not all the way.”
“What percentage are you at?” We tracked my emotional attachment to Owen with various numbers and formulas.
“Coming up on eighty.” This was a record high.
“Looks like you’re leaving just in time.”
“Yeah.”
“If you guys did ever really get together, you’d never cheat on him. You’d never get tired of him.”
“It’s easy to think that when I only see him ten weeks out of the year.”
“Will you get tired of me, too, when we’re sharing our apartment in the West Village?” She put her head in my lap and looked up at me with those stormy blue eyes. “Am I going to wake up one morning and find you gone, having fled across town in the middle of the night?”
I sighed and stroked the stray hairs from her pasty forehead. “Hopefully when it is finally time for us to blissfully cohabitate in the East Village, you will have recovered from all this Catholic guilt bullshit. What the hell happened to you? Did they brainwash you or something? Or is this just the unlights talking?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “Sometimes it gets hard to tell the difference. You know what the worst thing was? That it worked, for a little while. They’re good at what they do. For a few weeks, at least, I thought if I just prayed hard enough, believed hard enough, memorized enough Bible verses, that I could change. Or I would be changed. But it didn’t happen. I’m still Betty. More and more every day.”
So I left her there, in Williston, alone, without me or Calder to help her fight off the unlights. I tried to entice her down to the city for a visit, but she’d demurred, claiming she was too caught up in drama club and rehearsals for Hamlet and trying to make up with Calder. Now I wished I’d tried harder, or that I’d come back to Maine just once that fall. If I’d spent Thanksgiving with Dad instead of my mother—but that hurt too much to even think about.
“I miss her now,” I said to Serena. “I miss her so much.”
“Yeah.”
“Did she know how you felt about her?”
She smiled faintly. “I flirted with her a lot. She liked it, liked the attention. She’d flirt back, just enough. I knew nothing would ever happen. It was just something to pass the time. When school started again, she kept her distance. She was so focused on getting Calder back, like if he were her boyfriend again, it would restore her reputation or something.”
“Is that why she was so obsessed with being cast as Ophelia? Just so she could be close to him?”
Serena shook her head. “No, that was something else. She seemed—I don’t know. She seemed really fucked up. I think she thought if she got to play Ophelia, everyone would see how much pain she was in. People were pissed—she’d already caused a lot of trouble. Slept with too many people’s boyfriends, started too much drama. They just ignored her. I didn’t know her as well as you did, but I knew her well enough to know she’d hate that more than anything.”
Pulling her pant legs up above her knees, she stood and walked into the shallows, letting them wash around her ankles.
“It’s cold,” she said, wincing.
“How cold?”
“Like, heart attack cold.”
I got up and followed her. I gasped when the ocean made contact with my calves. “Fuck.”
My feet burned and went numb in the freezing water. I tried to imagine a world where Betty was still alive, where it was the three of us standing on the beach, summer stretched out in front of us as seemingly vast and endless as the ocean, but all I felt was her absence, the ragged, gaping wound of her loss, and under my grief a simmering rage that intensified every day.
The pill was kicking in; Serena had been right, it didn’t feel small. A luxurious heaviness settled over my limbs, and something warm and good spread through my chest.
“If we knew why he killed her,” I said, “maybe we could prove it somehow. Or at least get the police to start investigating again.”
“Finley.” She turned, fixing her wide gray eyes on me. It was the first time she had said my name. “Nobody cares. Nobody cares but us.”
• • •
That night I went to the softball game in the park off Main Street. The park wasn’t much, just a rickety playground in one corner, swings with rusty, squeaky chains and rubber seats, an aluminum slide made slick and shiny from years of use, and a merry-go-round that I had once, as a child, ridden until I threw up. The rest of the park was consumed by a baseball diamond lit by sodium lights and bleachers lined up against the chain-link fence. The Williston Sandpipers were in the dugout when I arrived, the ground at their feet littered with empty Narragansett tallboys and cigarette butts. The same firefighters and police officers who had rushed to the high school last night were now flexing their hands inside their mitts and taking practice swings. I spotted Owen by the number eight on the back of his shirt; his cap was pulled down low over his eyes, and if he saw me arrive, he gave no indication.
Dad was sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers, taking notes on a steno pad. The seats above him were filled with locals—Principal Moore was there, the bartenders from Charlie’s (half of the team was composed of the regulars), most of the town council had shown up, including Calder’s father. The field’s scoreboard was lit, although several of the red LED bulbs needed replacing; the second I in VISITOR was dark, but there was no mistaking the fact that they were housing us, ten to two. It was only the fifth inning.
“This is demoralizing,” I said, taking a seat next to my father. “Who are we playing anyway?”
“The Pullman Raptors.”
“Raptors? Seriously? Like velociraptors? We’ve got sandpipers and they’ve got raptors? No wonder we’re getting our asses handed to us.”
“Their team captain is a big Jurassic Park fan. Anyway, it’s just a game, Finley,” he said. “All in good fun.”
But it didn’t seem like anyone was having fun. When the next player got up, he visibly wobbled for a moment as he settled over home plate, using his bat like a cane to steady himself. It seemed like a prodigious amount of alcohol was being consumed—even for Williston—both in the dugout and the stands. The batter swung wildly at anything that came his way; it took him barely a minute to strike out, and he threw his bat to the ground as he stormed back to the dugout, cursing while the crowd booed viciously.
Something felt off. Maybe it was the drugs. I wished Serena had come with me, so I could ask her if she felt it, too, but she hadn’t wanted to come. I had dropped her off at her house around dusk. The sky was overcast, and I could hear the melancholy bleat of foghorns coming in off the ocean.
“What’s going on?” I asked Dad.
“There was a big crowd of people at Charlie’s before the game,” he said, “talking about the fire. I’m afraid our team is at something of a disadvantage tonight.”
“Come on, these guys play better drunk than sober.”
“It’s not just the alcohol. They’re distracted.”
Calder was the next at bat. I hadn’t seen him in the dugout and the unexpected sight of him made my breath catch in my throat. Even Dad seemed to tense.
“You didn’t tell me he was
on the team now,” I said, annoyed.
“I heard he wasn’t playing tonight. I guess he changed his mind. I’m sorry.”
At least Calder seemed sober, unlike the rest of his teammates. He brushed the dirt off home plate with his cleat and raised the bat, settling into a flawless stance—hands up, front shoulder down, knees and ankles flexed—that brought me back, however briefly, to my childhood, to Owen teaching me how to hold a bat in his backyard, gently underhanding pitches in my direction while his beagle, Marty, ran circles around my feet and stole every ball I missed.
I looked in his direction again. His eyes were fixed on Calder, but then he blinked, shook his head, and turned away. When he saw me in the bleachers, he smiled weakly and gestured with his chin in the direction of the parking lot. I understood his wordless instructions perfectly; he wanted me to meet him by his truck after the game. I nodded my assent—not too eagerly, I hoped—and turned my attention back to Calder just in time to catch what happened next.
The other team’s pitcher wound up, but instead of a typical softball pitch, he threw an overhanded fastball that hit Calder directly in the solar plexus, dropping him to the ground as swiftly as if he’d been shot.
An uneasy quiet fell over the field and the stands, the same kind that had happened at graduation when Ann had the seizure. Calder’s groans were audible; slowly, he came up to his hands and knees, and only when he lifted his head to glare at the pitcher did the crowd finally stir and make the requisite disapproving noises. Behind me, Leroy Miller was trying to climb down from the bleachers, swearing at people to get out of his way.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Dad softly. “Are both teams drunk?”
Calder staggered to his feet. With a strangely languid movement, he reached up and took the cap from his head, letting it fall to the ground. At the same time, Dad whispered, “Shit,” and handed me his steno pad and pencil.
“What?” I said.
Before he could answer, Calder was lunging toward the pitcher’s mound, his strides clumsy and uneven. The pitcher threw his mitt aside and held his ground, ready to fight. Who the fuck is this guy anyway? I wondered; the name Emerson was plastered across the back of his shirt but it didn’t ring a bell. He looked around Owen’s age, but I couldn’t remember if I’d seen his face around town before. I turned to ask Dad if he recognized the guy, but Dad was already on his feet, racing to the mound.
Calder shoved the pitcher, planting one hand firmly on each shoulder and pushing with all his strength. Leroy had finally made it down from the bleachers, but Dad was still going to arrive there first. I was waiting for the pitcher to haul off and throw a decent punch—Just one, I thought, I’ll settle just for one—but instead he raised his hands above his head in an “I surrender” gesture, and I was supremely disappointed. Calder pushed him again, and then Dad was there, inserting himself between the two players, forcing them apart, and Calder’s voice called out a strident “What the fuck?” just as his father reached him and whispered something—what, I would have given anything to know—in his ear.
And, just as quickly, it was over. Calder came back to himself and looked into the stands, where everyone was staring at him. His father put an arm around his shoulders and steered him back toward home plate, stopping briefly so Calder could pick up his cap. I thought maybe they’d keep going, all the way out of the park, but instead Leroy just deposited Calder back in the dugout, where he sat on the other side of the bench from his teammates, hunching his shoulders and staring down into his hands. Even though no one had thrown a single punch I was still pleased, almost grateful, like Calder had done me a favor by reminding everybody himself what they were all trying so hard to forget—that he could be dangerous.
Dad took his seat next to me, and I returned his pad and pencil.
“So,” I said, “are you going to put that in the paper this week?”
CHAPTER FOUR.
AFTER THAT WHATEVER remained of Williston’s morale evaporated, the players phoning it in without much conviction and the crowd growing steadily more intoxicated. When the game was over—final score thirteen to four, Dad next to me with his head in his hands, everyone in both the stands and the dugout rushing to their cars and in turn, I imagined, to Charlie’s—I met Owen by his truck.
“Come on,” he said, opening the passenger door for me. “I could use some cheering up.”
Enough of the crowd had dispersed that I felt comfortable giving him a kiss, which he returned with an eagerness that came perilously close to an actual display of emotion. “I didn’t realize you were that invested in softball,” I said.
“I’m just having a day. Let’s go back to the cabin. I need a drink.”
“You don’t want to go to Charlie’s with everyone else?”
“No,” he said. “Fuck those people.”
“You really are having a day.”
“The Hobart finally died, and the guy can’t come fix it until next week. We had to do all the dishes by hand.”
I climbed into the truck, settling comfortably into the thick layer of dust that covered the passenger seat, and lit a cigarette as I waited for him to come around the other side.
“Can I have one of those?” he asked as he started the engine.
“Take this one,” I said, handing it to him and lighting another for myself. “If you need help in the kitchen, you know, it’s not like I’ve got anything to do all day.”
“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see.”
We drove silently out of town, Owen’s hand on my thigh, removing it only when he needed to shift gears. For him this kind of behavior bordered on clingy, but I didn’t complain, not even when he turned off a couple of miles before his cabin and pulled into an unfamiliar driveway, just far enough that his truck wouldn’t be spotted by anyone on the road, but not so close that I could actually see the house. Like I said, Owen was smart. He killed the lights but left the engine idling; reaching over me, he took a battered brown envelope from the glove compartment.
“Stay here,” he said. “I just have to run inside for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared into the darkness almost immediately. I rolled down my window, listening to his footsteps shuffling toward the house I couldn’t see. I thought I heard a voice, a door opening and closing, but that was all, and then there were just crickets and the trees shivering in the breeze and all the woodsy noises I’d grown up with that now scared the shit out of me. I closed the window and turned on the radio so I wouldn’t have to hear them. I really had become a city girl.
Owen kept his radio tuned to the classic rock station, too. I listened to Cheap Trick while I rolled a joint from the eighth I knew Owen always had in the center console, hidden in a film canister, and wondered what he was selling. It probably wasn’t weed—too conspicuous, too hard to carry around discreetly, too much weighing and measuring. Pills would be easiest, but still I worried. The Williston police had already proven to be pretty incompetent, but Owen never had any kind of luck but bad. I had no moral issue with him moonlighting as a small-time dealer to make a little extra money; I was more concerned about what it might cost him. By the time he returned, I had smoked half the joint myself and hotboxed his truck.
“Jesus,” he said, coughing as he took his seat beside me.
“That’s what you get for leaving me alone in your vehicle.”
“Hand it over, at least.”
I waited for him to take a hit before I spoke. “Seriously, O. Do you know what you’re doing? I mean, with all this.”
He exhaled thoughtfully. “Honestly? Probably not.”
“Great. I feel much better now.”
“Tough shit,” he said, backing out of the driveway. “Tonight you’re supposed to make me feel better, remember?”
• • •
Owen’s cabin was set deep in the woods. It had been his grandfather’s, a
fisherman who died when we were young, someone I recalled vaguely—plaid shirt, weathered Carhartts, a long gray beard that reached his sternum. Owen told me once that he had never seen his grandfather’s chin. After he died, the cabin had gone uninhabited for years, slowly falling apart, until Owen grudgingly decided to stay in Williston and run the diner. He’d also taken on the not-insignificant task of making the cabin livable again. It was that or stay at his parents’ house, in his childhood bedroom.
The place had always reminded me of the inside of a small boat, with its paneled walls and uneven pine floor, the round window in the kitchen that looked out on the front porch like a porthole with a view of forest instead of water. A taxidermied sturgeon hung over the couch, which was a forlorn, faded blue badly camouflaged with flannel throw blankets. The table lamp had a scarred mermaid as a base, her hands stretched above her head to cradle the bulb. The place was tidy; it smelled like Murphy’s Oil Soap, and the bed was neatly made.
I sat on the couch. Owen brought a bottle of Fighting Cock from the kitchen and placed it on the coffee table with two glasses.
“Say when,” he said, and poured.
I waited three beats longer than was prudent. “When.”
He didn’t clink his glass to mine, just sort of leaned it in that direction before bringing it to his mouth and draining the contents. I did the same, even though it made my stomach lurch; for a brief, paralyzing moment my mouth filled with saliva and I thought I might be sick. In the end it stayed down, and Owen refilled my glass.
“You trying to get me drunk?” I asked.
“I’m trying to get us both drunk,” he said.
It worked.
• • •
We were passed out in bed when the phone rang. I didn’t know what time it was, but the sky outside was still dark; we were firmly in middle-of-the-night territory. Owen stirred but didn’t get up. There was no answering machine to pick up so the phone just kept ringing.
I kicked Owen in the thigh. “Make it stop.”
He staggered out of bed and into the kitchen. His side of the conversation was all I needed.
A Good Idea Page 7
