Visibly shaken—the first time I’d seen her confidence falter—Serena obeyed, and soon the dogs were quiet, padding behind us as we headed for Calder’s room, me leading the way through the formal dining room with its gleaming mahogany table and the den outfitted with a big-screen television and beige sectional. I could still remember the last time I sat on that couch, watching 12 Monkeys on cable, Betty happily sandwiched between Calder and me, his arm around her—but chastely, so as not to make me uncomfortable. Dogs at our feet, Gemini occasionally eyeing the open bag of Doritos on the coffee table and whining, Cassie deep in REM sleep, her front paws racing to nowhere as she gamely chased squirrels in her dreams; Betty’s head on my shoulder, its warm, solid weight an invitation for me to stroke her blonde curls back from her forehead, which I knew she loved. I complied with her silent request; she sighed contentedly as I did so. In four more days I would leave for New York and return to what I considered my real life, but that night—unlights nowhere to be found, thunder rumbling occasionally in the distance, Bruce Willis making his deranged attempt to save the world—I found myself wishing, for the first time I could recall, that my parents had never divorced, that I had never been forced to choose, and that both my time and my allegiance did not have to be split between Maine and New York City.
“Which way is his room?” Serena asked, bringing me back to the task at hand.
“This way,” I said, and led her there.
Holiday fireworks or not, we took no foolish chances. Leaving the overhead light off, I took the flashlight from my bag—I was getting a lot of mileage out of it this summer, I thought—and made a sweep around the room while Serena booted up the computer. The bed was made, navy blue comforter tucked in neatly and the pillows propped up against the headboard. Calder’s lacrosse sticks were leaned against a wall in the corner, his Beck and Clerks posters curling a little around the edges. I scanned the titles on his bookshelves, the typical fusion of assigned classics from English class—Their Eyes Were Watching God, As I Lay Dying, The Sun Also Rises—and the sorts of novels I knew were requisite reading for teenage boys: Trainspotting, Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I looked for the books he’d read to Betty and me, the Roald Dahl and Homer, but they weren’t there.
His yearbook was, however. I pulled it off the shelf and handed it to Serena. “I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t look at all those signatures, everyone wishing him good luck. Can you check it out, see if there’s anything in there that might be important?”
She nodded and paged through it while I made my way around his room. There was nothing under the bed, not even dust or an errant sock. There were no papers on the desk, just the computer and a framed picture of him with Caroline; his dresser was equally disappointing, nothing incriminating tucked behind his boxers or beneath all those expensive wool sweaters that kept him warm during the long, dark winters.
“God, I hate these fucking people,” Serena said, closing the yearbook. She spun around in Calder’s desk chair so she was facing me, backlit by the blue glow of his monitor. “If you thought you could kill him and get away with it, would you?”
“Shit no,” I said, the answer coming quick enough to make it obvious I’d asked myself that very question. I nodded toward the yearbook. “I’d rather kill my fucking self than watch all those people cry over him.”
“Yeah,” she said, somewhat sadly, then turned back to his computer.
I leaned over her shoulder and watched while she opened his documents and folders, finding nothing but schoolwork and his application to Bates.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to see what he wrote his admissions essay about.”
Serena double-clicked. “Why his father is the person he admires most.”
“I’m going to fucking puke.”
I wandered into his attached bathroom and checked the medicine cabinet, something that was quickly becoming habit for me. “Holy shit. Come look at this.”
An entire shelf was lined with those translucent orange bottles I had recently come to covet so much, but the contents were unfamiliar, the names complicated and intimidating. Buspirone, sertraline, fluoxetine—I didn’t recognize the generic names. Diazepam and alprazolam rang some bells. I wasn’t even tempted to take anything; there was always, I supposed, the chance Calder could accidentally overdose on all this shit. Serena plucked one from the shelf—paroxetine—and examined the label.
“This is Paxil,” she said. “These are all for depression and anxiety.”
“How do you know?”
“My parents tried to put me on some of this shit. Medicate the gay away. I read about the side effects and told them to go fuck themselves.”
“Yeah, they put me on drugs for a while back in New York, but it was nothing like this.”
She put the Paxil back on the shelf and closed the medicine cabinet. We stood there for a second, looking at our reflection, and I was suddenly aware of the damp warmth radiating from her, the goose bumps on her forearms and the fine hairs all standing up at attention, behind the curve of her ear a streak of black dye that she’d failed to rinse away.
“There’s nothing here,” she said finally.
“I want to go upstairs,” I said. “I want to look in Caroline’s room.”
“What the hell for?”
I remembered watching Caroline through the window, horsing around with her brother, and I wondered if she was as untroubled by Betty’s death as she’d appeared. “I’m just curious.”
I kept the beam of the flashlight covered with my palm as I led the way up the stairs, fingers cast in that eerie opaque red. Serena stayed close behind me, so close I could hear her tight, anxious breaths. We stood at the foot of that long dark hallway, lined with framed pictures of the Millers, and I tried to remind myself that what we had done at the high school was much, much worse, so really there was nothing to worry about.
Outside, there was a distant boom—the start of the fireworks—and the dogs resumed their hysterical barking. Startled, I dropped the flashlight, which landed on the hardwood floor with an impossibly loud clatter, and I felt Serena freeze.
We might have turned around and left right then—I was certainly tempted—but there was a beat between the thunder of the fireworks, when the dogs settled just long enough for us to hear something down the hall, a low murmur, a shifting, like someone mumbling and rolling over in their sleep. Serena tugged on my sleeve, eager to abort, but something drew me forward, the same reckless apathy that had governed me for months, and I took her hand firmly in mine and towed her toward the noise’s source.
The door to Caroline’s bedroom was open. Unlike Calder’s, it was filthy—clothes everywhere, a toppled pile of books on the desk, a haphazard collage on the wall above the bed, photographs and pages hastily torn out of magazines. It smelled stale, like cigarettes and dirty sheets, and I was wondering when Caroline had started smoking and how her parents felt about her doing it in her bedroom when I realized she was lying there, in bed, staring at us.
But she didn’t seem to really see us. I stepped gingerly inside; a cigarette was smoldering in an ashtray on her nightstand, and even as she lifted it to her mouth I had a hard time believing she was actually conscious. Her eyes were glassy and she wasn’t at all surprised or disturbed to find me there.
“Finley,” she said lazily. The hand holding the cigarette drifted dangerously close to the bed. “It’s good to see you. Don’t turn on the light.”
“Hi, Caroline,” I said. “Why aren’t you at the fireworks?”
“They can’t take me out in public like this.”
I came closer so I could get a better look at her. On the nightstand, next to the ashtray, were half a dozen lines of chalky blue powder, a hollowed-out Bic pen, and a neat row of pills, waiting to be crushed and snorted. Caroline took another drag of her cigarette. Outside the fireworks exploded again. The curtains were open
, billowing in the salty breeze; the moon cast a frosty light over the room. Through the haze of smoke I could see Caroline’s blue eyes, their pupils pinned as tight as fine, black needles, and her blonde hair greasy against her pillow. The fireworks kept roaring; downstairs, it sounded like the Labs were charging the front door.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Serena whispered from the doorway.
“She’s high,” I said. “Come look at this.”
Caroline’s head sank back into the pillows, and this time the cigarette did make contact with the bed sheet, which flared an angry orange until she slapped it with her palm a few times, sparks filling the air around her, then dying and drifting to the floor as ash. I was stunned to see her like this, Calder’s adorable little sister who’d followed us around like a puppy, so eager to be included and yet horrified if I so much as lit a cigarette in front of her. When had she become another casualty of Betty’s death? I felt sickened by, and inexplicably responsible for, her current state.
“Jesus,” Serena said.
“Caroline, are you okay?” I asked.
“Never felt better.”
“Where did you get these?” I picked up one of the pills. It looked identical to the one Serena had shared with me that day on the beach, the ones I had looked for at Shelly’s party. Crushing up and snorting them was not something that ever would have occurred to me. Where the fuck had Caroline gotten the idea? “Who did you get this from?”
“From Owen,” she said. “That’s where everybody gets them.”
I sighed and turned to Serena, to ask if that was where she got hers, too, but she was looking at the closet, its doors wide open. She snatched the flashlight from my hand and turned it on, shining it on the racks of dresses. Dresses we both recognized. I had zipped Betty into them myself, many times.
The bengaline leopard print, the blue wiggle dress with the matching bolero, the polka dot halter with the full circle skirt—it wasn’t the whole collection, but it was more than I’d ever hoped to see again. I fingered the hem of a black tulle skirt with rosettes sewn into the fabric.
“I saw them at the Goodwill,” Caroline said. “After Betty’s mom made her give them all away. It seemed like such a waste.”
Suddenly I had the grisly idea that if I flung back the covers I would find Caroline clad in the outfit Betty had last been seen wearing, the silk nightgown and the matching robe. For a minute, I considered actually doing it, but Caroline saved me the trouble, getting out of bed and revealing a plain black tank top and underwear. She stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom to vomit. It took a while; it sounded as though she retched long after she was empty. Then she returned as if our exchange had never been interrupted.
“I bought as many of her dresses as I could find,” she said, climbing back into bed and lighting another cigarette. “Nobody knows I have them.”
“We won’t tell anyone. Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked again.
“When I’m this high even the puking feels good.”
“Do you ever get high with Calder?” Serena asked.
Caroline laughed. “He gets his drugs from the doctor. They’re not nearly as much fun as mine.”
“Why did he start going to the doctor?”
She sat up, barely, struggling to prop herself up on her pillows. “Hey, why aren’t you guys at the fireworks?”
“I have phonophobia,” Serena improvised. “It’s a fear of loud noises.”
“Bummer,” said Caroline.
“I know. It’s the worst.”
“You know there are people who are afraid of tinfoil? I saw something about it on a talk show.” She turned her murky gaze to me. “What are you afraid of, Finley?”
“Drowning,” I said.
“He has nightmares about drowning.”
“Calder?”
She nodded.
“Nightmares where he’s drowning? Or nightmares about drowning Betty?”
“He didn’t kill her.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s my brother, Finley,” she said, something hot and nasty in her voice, just beneath the listless drawl of the opiates. She set her cigarette in the ashtray, leaned over the nightstand, and snorted another line. “I know he didn’t kill her, because he’s my brother.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“We won’t tell anyone about the dresses,” Serena said.
“I won’t tell anyone you were here,” Caroline replied. “But I think you’d better go now.”
“Be careful, Caroline,” I said, nodding at the nightstand as I backed toward the doorway.
“You be fucking careful,” she said, petulant and childlike.
Serena and I were headed for the stairs when she called after us. “He didn’t kill her, but sometimes I think he thinks he did.”
“I don’t even know what the fuck that means,” Serena whispered.
“We can reflect on it later. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
In the distance, the fireworks were reaching their crescendo. Gemini was cowering under the dining room table, whimpering, while Cassie pawed at the front door, her claws scratching frantically at the wood, barking in pained, clipped yelps that hurt my ears. Serena and I ran for the back door, flung it open, and scrambled to find our shoes. My hands shook as I struggled to tie my laces.
In our haste we left the sliding door ajar, and like a bad dream I watched helplessly as Cassie flew past us, a brown streak that disappeared across the yard and into the woods even as I grabbed for her and came away with nothing but air. The fireworks had gone silent, and I could hear Cassie sprinting into the woods until she, too, was gone.
“Shit!” I whispered. “Shit shit shit!”
Serena shoved her feet into her Docs and grabbed my elbow. “Let’s go, Finley, move your ass now!”
“We have to go get her!”
“She’ll come back on her own, they always do.”
“But they’ll wonder how she got out.”
“Caroline is nodding out upstairs, I’m pretty goddamn sure she’ll be the prime suspect. Now go!”
We ran. At least the rain had stopped. We headed south, but it was impossible to tell if we were on the same path we had taken to get there, and I was afraid to use the flashlight, scared it would call attention to us in the darkness. I tried to keep our pace up—when we were running, all I could hear was my blood pumping thickly in my ears and my labored breath and the bass drum of my heart keeping a steady, frantic beat. When we slowed down, the sounds of the forest found their way in, and I wasn’t having that.
It was Serena who brought us to a halt, bent over with a stitch in her side.
“Just give me a minute,” she said, panting.
I leaned against a tree and closed my eyes. I kept seeing Caroline lying in her bed, the flare of the sheet igniting, the fleeting shower of sparks as she smothered the flame with her hand. I took a deep breath.
“Do you smell that?” I whispered to Serena.
“Smell what?”
I sucked in another lungful of air to be sure. “Eucalyptus.”
“What?”
“Smell,” I said.
She inhaled obediently and nodded. “Where is it coming from?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, and then a gust of wind blew through the trees, carrying with it the bracing, soapy scent. “Wait. Over there.”
I crept through the forest toward the source, Serena following me this time. In addition to the eucalyptus, I could smell a fire burning somewhere nearby, and hear the soft rush of a small creek. Soon we were following the flickering light until we were right outside a small clearing. Inside was a squat round structure that looked like it was covered in tarps, and a few feet away was a campfire in a pit circled with rocks. There were voices, or at least one voice, coming from inside the hu
t. I couldn’t make out the words, but there was a weird rhythm to them, like someone was singing or chanting.
“What the fuck is that?” I whispered.
“I think it’s a sweat lodge,” Serena said.
“A sweat lodge?”
“It’s a Native American ritual. You heat up rocks in the fire, bring them inside and pour water on them, breathe in the steam, sweat like crazy.”
“So why is there one in the middle of the woods?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where we are, I don’t know whose property we’re on.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I started to walk away, but Serena grabbed me, pulled me behind a tree with her, and put a hand over my mouth.
“Shh,” she whispered. “Look.”
Someone had thrown open the flap covering the entrance to the lodge. Three naked men emerged, glistening with sweat and shivering in the night air.
“Jesus,” one of them said, gasping. “I thought I was going to fucking suffocate.”
“Price of doing business,” one of the others said.
A fourth man came out of the lodge, and unlike the others, he didn’t seem to be in any distress. He was tall and sinewy; he stretched his arms over his head and I could see his muscles working beneath his skin. He, too, was naked, but wearing a beaded necklace and some kind of pouch around his neck; he had matted blond dreadlocks as thick as my wrist. Even from where I stood, they looked filthy.
I gently removed Serena’s hand from my mouth. “That guy,” I whispered, “does not look Native to me.”
“How many more rounds to go?” one of the other men asked him.
“As many as I decide,” he said.
“In that case, I better go take a piss.”
The guy wandered to the edge of the clearing; Serena and I huddled together, silent, afraid even to breathe, as he unleashed his stream into the darkness. We exhaled simultaneously when he finished and turned back toward the fire. The dreadlocked blond was already ushering the others back inside the sweat lodge. Before he followed them in, he gave the woods a long, searching look, and that look terrified me. He seemed like just some dirty hippie poser playing at being Native, but somehow I knew he was more than that; something about him felt dangerous. He took a step away from the lodge, and another, past the fire and closer to the edge of the clearing. I felt Serena tense next to me, her whole body getting ready to bolt. I clutched her more tightly. I had no doubt that if we ran, he would catch us.
A Good Idea Page 11
