A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

  The door at the bottom of the stairs opened and closed, and I recognized my father’s tread as he made the ascent. Quickly shoving the folder into my bag along with Betty’s application, I hurried to replace everything else in the drawer. By the time he was standing in the doorway with a confused look on his face, I had the phone receiver pressed casually to my ear as I swiveled back and forth in his chair. As soon as I looked up and saw him, I put it back in its cradle.

  “There you are,” I said. “I was just calling the house to see if I could find you.”

  “You looking for me?” he asked, dubious. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. I just wanted to see what you were doing for dinner.”

  “I was going to cook,” he said. “Spaghetti carbonara. I picked up groceries on my way home, but then I remembered I left the coffeemaker on. So I came all the way back.” He headed toward the kitchenette.

  “I did it already,” I said. “Turned it off as soon as I walked in. Sorry you wasted the trip. Come on, let’s go home. Spaghetti carbonara sounds perfect.”

  “You’re just one step ahead of me, aren’t you, Fin?” he said.

  I just shrugged my shoulders and followed him out the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE.

  DAD’S NOTES WERE a mess. I spent the next morning on the porch, drinking coffee and smoking, trying to make sense of them. He’d interviewed the police after Calder’s confession, but all they did was confirm that he’d admitted to drowning her. I couldn’t bring myself to read anything about his conversation with Betty’s parents or the obituary he’d begun drafting; it was the anonymous sources that interested me the most. Dad hadn’t used their names in the paper, but he’d taken down their information so he could follow up and fact-check later.

  I compared the names with the contact list from Hamlet I’d found in Betty’s ASM binder; Shelly, the stage manager, had been one of the sources. I thought about calling first, to make sure she was home, but finally decided to just get in my car. If I wasted a trip, so be it; it wasn’t like I was so busy.

  Shelly lived several miles out of town, at the end of one of those long, shaded driveways, in a large two-story house made of white bricks. The front door was painted bright blue. I rang the bell and waited.

  As soon as she answered, I knew I’d made a mistake. She flung open the door, shouting something back down the hallway at a group of people I couldn’t see. Smash Mouth was playing on the stereo and Shelly was holding a beer; she was hosting some kind of party in the middle of the day while her parents were presumably at work. She finally turned to me, looking understandably puzzled. I hadn’t been invited.

  “Hey, Shelly,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  Before she could respond, Rebecca came tearing out of the back room, shouting my name.

  “Finley! What are you doing here?”

  She was drunk enough to have forgotten my slight in the woods at the graduation party, but there was no way I could ask Shelly about Betty now. I could turn around and leave, or lie.

  “Oh, you know. I got bored, heard there was a party.” I shrugged, trying to seem casual.

  “Come on in! It’s so good to see you again!” As she embraced me, I realized we were having an exchange nearly identical to the other night, before I started acting like an asshole.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” I said, and let Rebecca lead me inside.

  I joined the dozen or so kids oscillating between the den and the back deck, grabbing a beer from a cooler and wishing I had one of Serena’s blue pills to get me through this.

  I drank instead, let myself be introduced to people whose faces were familiar but whose names I instantly forgot, smoked a cigarette on the deck, and took a hit off a joint being passed around. Rebecca did seem genuinely happy to see me, and this time I didn’t ruin it; she talked about going off to Amherst in the fall and I asked all the right questions: did she know who her roommate would be, had she thought about a major, were the boys cute. And the whole time I tried to stay focused, thinking about Betty’s NYU application collecting dust in the guidance counselor’s office since November, and reminded myself I was here on a reconnaissance mission and not simply to get lit in the middle of the day.

  Rebecca was rambling on about the pros and cons of an English major when I overheard some of the other kids talking about the fire in the theater.

  “How could they not know how it started?” Shelly was saying. “I think it’s really weird. I know that theater inside and out, and I’ve never seen anything that could just randomly combust like that.”

  “I saw plenty of weird shit this spring,” another girl said. “Believe me, I wasn’t surprised at all.”

  “What kind of weird shit?” I asked. Everyone looked at me. “I just got back to town, I’m not up to date.”

  “Just—things,” the girl said. “Lights flickering. Strange noises. Once the fire alarm went off for no reason.”

  “Sounds like something with the electrics,” I said. “A problem with the wiring could have caused the fire.”

  The rest of the group glanced around at one another uneasily.

  “I don’t think it was the electrics,” she finally said.

  “Then what?” I pressed.

  She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Someone changed the subject. I could feel them closing ranks. Shelly went inside to get more beer, and I followed her into the kitchen.

  “Need a hand?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “There’s a bag of ice in the freezer. You can grab that.”

  “So how was senior year?” I asked her. “Everything you hoped it would be?”

  “Yes, it was,” she said frostily. “This might all seem lame to you, keg parties and drama club and signing yearbooks. It’s not like going clubbing in Manhattan, but we like it. Okay?”

  “I don’t actually go clubbing,” I said.

  “Whatever.”

  “You were stage manager on Hamlet, right?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “No reason. I just heard there was some weirdness between Betty and Calder while you guys were working on the show. And then, you know, what happened after.”

  “Oh? And what did you hear?”

  “I heard he confessed to killing her,” I said casually.

  She snorted. “That was bullshit. The cops got him in a room alone, probably scared him to death, until he said whatever they wanted him to say. He’s lucky he was able to get his dad to straighten everything out before he got into real trouble. Betty was practically stalking him the whole time we were working on the play. She wouldn’t leave him alone.”

  “If Calder wanted to get away from Betty that badly, why’d he even audition? Didn’t he realize she’d try out for Ophelia?”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “His dad took care of that, too. Once Calder decided he wanted to play Hamlet, his dad made a few calls, made sure Betty wouldn’t get the part. Since she was in drama club, Mr. McCartney had to throw her a bone. No one thought she’d actually go through with being ASM. We thought she’d be so pissed that she’d just quit. That’s how obsessed with Calder she was—she’d wear a headset and watch me call the cues, just to be at rehearsal with him every day. If you ask me, he’s the one that was scared of her.”

  “No kidding,” I said, adjusting the bag of ice under my arm.

  “Look, I know she was a friend of yours. I had nothing against her. But something wasn’t right.”

  “Last fall?”

  She shook her head. “I think it started before that. In the spring.”

  “When Calder broke up with her?”

  “It was the other way around. Calder broke up with her because something wasn’t right. She got brought home by the cops for fooling around in some older guy’s car, and everybody knew. Calder was humiliated, but I think, I don’t know, he was
almost—”

  “Relieved?” I said.

  “Maybe.” She sighed. “He seemed really into her when they first got together. Anybody who saw them in the hallways together could tell. But at junior prom? I went outside to have a cigarette and they were screaming at each other in the parking lot. She’d pick fights with him, test him, and I think after a while he got tired of it.”

  “But he was still humiliated.”

  “Not humiliated enough to kill her, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Then what do you think happened to her?”

  “She wasn’t herself, Finley. And she hadn’t been for months. She was moody and depressed and a couple of times I even thought she might have been on drugs. She was miserable here. When she started talking about running away, I figured she was serious.”

  “Who was the older guy? The one the cops caught her with?”

  “His name never got out.”

  “So Betty got publicly shamed and sent to church camp, and nothing happened to him?”

  “You can’t possibly be surprised.”

  “I’m not.”

  There was a silence. “You really don’t think there’s any chance she’s still alive?” she finally asked.

  I had tried so hard to convince myself of this and failed. “I really don’t.”

  “I met her parents a few times, when they came to see her perform, and it can’t be that shocking to you that she’d want to split. I’ve heard that camp they sent her to was no joke. Look, I’m sorry about Betty. But she had problems, okay? Problems that had nothing to do with Calder.”

  “So where is he, then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why isn’t Calder at your party?”

  Shelly shrugged indifferently. “I don’t know, he’s probably coming later.” She was a little too breezy about it, a little too eager to make like she didn’t care if he showed up or not.

  She carried the case of beer out to the deck, and we refilled the cooler. I meant to leave after that, I really did, but then she handed me a fresh beer. The deck was built into the side of a hill, overlooking a steep drop onto a cluster of mossy green boulders; I stood by the railing and imagined the whole thing collapsing—the splintering wooden planks and screaming, the floor disappearing beneath our feet, that falling sensation I felt so often in my dreams, the impact on the rocks below. Would we feel it? Would it hurt? And would everything end there, or would I wake up somewhere else, confused and groggy and dusting myself off? Would Betty be there? Was she still here somewhere, haunting the theater like everyone had implied, watching my half-assed, halting investigation with impatience? Get it together, Fin, I could hear her saying.

  Give me a minute, I thought. Let me just finish this beer, and then I’ll get back to business.

  But it took more than one beer to drown the image of us all plummeting to our deaths on Shelly’s back deck. The party wasn’t winding down; it turned out Shelly’s parents were out of town, not at work, and as it started to get dark more people were arriving. Practically pulling myself up the stairs by the banister, I went inside to find a bathroom.

  There was one closed door on the second floor, which I knew had to be the master bedroom. Closed, but not locked; I let myself in.

  I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Serena’s tiny blue pills. I didn’t know what they were called, but I knew I’d recognize them.

  The medicine cabinet was a disappointment. I checked the drawers under the sink; among the tweezers and tubes of hand cream I found a consolation prize, an expired, half-full bottle of Vicodin that no one would miss. They weren’t blues, but they’d do. I stuffed the bottle with toilet paper so the pills wouldn’t rattle in my pocket as I walked, and then I went downstairs to say my good-byes.

  “Finley, you’re leaving?” Rebecca said. “Are you okay to drive?”

  I wasn’t. Quickly running through the list of people I could call—Owen, my dad—I realized I had alienated almost all of my potential rides. There was one person, though, who might still be glad to hear from me.

  • • •

  Serena showed up a half hour later. She didn’t come inside, just pulled into the driveway and honked.

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” I said.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked, annoyed, I assumed, that I’d been consorting with the enemy.

  “Research. Here,” I said, opening the bottle and shaking a few pills into the cup holder. “For your troubles.”

  “Where am I taking you?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Around eight.”

  Dad would be at the house. I couldn’t let him see me like this again. “Anywhere but home,” I told her.

  She put a tape in the stereo and pressed play. It was a band I’d never heard before, a punk rock outfit helmed by a woman with a gorgeous, bluesy voice. I stared out the window and listened as darkness enveloped Williston. Serena drove around aimlessly for a while, avoiding the town’s center and sticking to the back roads; still, I had the strong feeling that she was zeroing in on a target.

  After about an hour she pulled onto a familiar street, killed her headlights and the stereo, and put the car in neutral.

  “What the fuck are we doing here?” I whispered, sinking farther down in my seat.

  She didn’t answer, just stopped the car outside the Millers’ house. Inside, all the lights were on; the whole family was there, on display, as if onstage, clearing plates from the dinner table and ferrying them into the kitchen.

  “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “They can’t see us.”

  “Do you do this a lot?”

  Again, she didn’t answer. Instead she reached into the cup holder and popped several Vicodin. “Doesn’t it kill you,” she said, “knowing that he’s right there, and he has all the answers?”

  I took a couple of pills myself, chewing my medicine thoughtfully, choking down the chalky paste as I watched Calder rinse a dinner plate and hand it to his younger sister to load into the dishwater.

  “My dad tried to get the cops to show him the confession, but it’s sealed,” I said.

  “I’d give my left tit to see that thing.”

  “Seriously.”

  “What were you doing at that party, anyway?”

  I explained to her about Dad’s notes and what Shelly said about Calder’s confession being coerced.

  “So you really were doing research.”

  “I told you. Getting drunk, that was, like, my cover.”

  She looked over at me and smiled. “Clever girl.”

  I shifted in my seat, closer to her so our shoulders were almost touching. Her crucifix glinted in the dim light. I reached out and held it between my fingertips; it was warm from lying against her skin. Suddenly I felt almost sober.

  “Why do you wear this?” I asked. “If you don’t believe.”

  “I never said I don’t believe.”

  I waited for her to elaborate.

  “I stopped wearing it after Bible camp, but after Betty died—not just after she died, but after they let Calder go—then I put it back on. I don’t believe the same things my parents believe. I don’t believe there’s a bearded man in the sky, like, monitoring our thoughts and willing to send me to hell for masturbating or liking girls. I don’t believe in fate, and I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. Betty’s dead because Calder held her down in the ocean until she stopped breathing. And I don’t believe that God will punish Calder if nobody else does.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because otherwise I’ll never see her again.”

  I didn’t have a response to that. We sat silently while his parents finished clearing the table, his mother packing the leftovers neatly into Tupperware and stacking them in the fridge and his father pouring
himself a drink, Calder and his sister laughing as they splashed each other with soapy water. It was strange to feel such an irrational surge of hatred toward Caroline, whom I had always liked; she’d worshipped Betty and tagged along with the three of us whenever we let her. Her company kept me from feeling like a third wheel and rounded us out to a more comfortable foursome, but her relentlessly cheerful demeanor and endless attempts to impress Betty made me feel invisible, like an outsider, even as they endeared her to me. Calder was unusually inclusive with Caroline, often encouraging her to join us instead of shooing her away, like I thought older brothers were supposed to do with their younger siblings.

  One afternoon, during the summer between sophomore and junior year, we were all gathered in Betty’s room. The Millers were having some kind of grown-ups-only luncheon at their house, so Calder and Caroline had escaped to Betty’s, where until their arrival the two of us had been lying on her bed talking about sex. More specifically, I was pestering her for advice about sex. My relationship with Owen was close to crossing that threshold and I was determined not to let my inexperience show when it happened. When the Miller siblings showed up, I hid my consternation; Betty’s exegesis on the finer points of blowjobs would have to wait for another day.

  Calder kissed Betty hello and I instinctually moved from the bed to the rocking chair by the window.

  “You don’t have to get up,” he said.

  “I don’t mind,” I said, and I meant it.

  Caroline sat down at Betty’s vanity, where her makeup and vintage opera gloves and rhinestone jewelry were all scrupulously arranged. Caroline tried on a black fascinator and batted her eyelashes at us from behind the netting.

  “What do you think? Is it me?”

  She was wearing khaki shorts, tennis shoes, and a white V-neck T-shirt. In short, no, it wasn’t her, but the rest of us were too polite to say so. Caroline lacked the drama necessary to pull off Betty’s look.

  “Here,” Betty said, leaping off the bed. “This one might be a little more your style.” She pulled back some of Caroline’s blonde hair and pinned it with a hair clip made from peacock feathers.