Dooley joined him and looked at everything the man had pointed to.
Twenty-two or twenty-three years ago.
Dooley did the math.
Either his uncle had been wrong, or he’d been lying.
Again.
There were voices in the kitchen—two of them, Jeannie’s and Annette Girondin’s.
“—looking for?” Jeannie was saying.
“They didn’t say.” That was Annette. “All I know is they subpoenaed his bank records.”
“Tessie said they went through his computer at work. What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know, Jeannie,” Annette said wearily. It sounded to Dooley like it wasn’t the first time she’d said it. It also sounded like Jeannie was worried. “If I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”
Dooley heard a sigh. Jeannie.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that—”
“It’s unnerving, I know,” Annette said. “You just have to hang in there. We’ll get this all sorted out. It just takes time.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Jeannie asked Annette if she wanted to stay for supper. Annette declined. Dooley tiptoed out onto the porch. He was standing there, doing his best to look like he was just getting home, when Annette came through the front door a minute later.
“Ryan,” she said, catching her breath. “You startled me.”
“Sorry.” He offered her an apologetic smile. “How’s my uncle? What’s going on?”
“There’s nothing new to report,” Annette said. Jesus, a lie. Why? Because his uncle didn’t want him to know anything? Or was it that attorney-client privilege thing?
“The cops got anything else on him?” Dooley said.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty—”
“I heard they’ve been asking about him and Lorraine when they were kids. About something that went down between the two of them. You know what that’s about?”
She wasn’t surprised by the question. Dooley bet anything that she’d spoken to Jerry Panelli. Maybe she’d talked to Lorraine’s friends, too.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I just want to know—”
“Goodnight, Ryan.”
And that was that. Her high heels clickety-clicked down the front walk and around the front of her car. A moment later, she was gone.
Dooley went inside.
Jeannie had supper waiting for him—grilled salmon and a green salad. Dooley cleaned his plate in three minutes flat. He got up, opened the fridge, and rooted around inside, but it looked like groceries hadn’t been on his uncle’s mind when he’d been putting his affairs in order. He remembered the envelope of money that Annette Girondin had given him and wondered how Jeannie would react if he ordered himself a pizza.
“Can I get you something else?” Jeannie said, not so breezy now. Dooley heard doubt in her voice. He pulled out a container of milk and poured himself a glass.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Jeannie picked at her salmon. “Not enough food for a teenaged boy, huh?” she said. “Are you still hungry, Dooley?”
“No, really, I’m fine.”
She studied him for a moment and then reached for the phone.
“What do you like on yours?” she said, boy, like she was reading his mind.
“Onions, pepperoni, and extra cheese.” It was what he always ordered, unless he knew he was going to be seeing Beth. Then he skipped the onions.
Jeannie smiled and placed the order. It was no mystery what his uncle saw in her. She finished her own meal, accepted when Dooley offered to clean up, then said she had some work to do, if that was okay with him.
It was fine. Dooley spread out on the dining room table—homework and pizza. Well, homework and pizza and Lorraine, twenty-two or twenty-three years ago.
Had she had that photo from the album back then? Or had she found it later? If so, when? Had someone given it to her? Who?
He remembered what his uncle had said: She was one of those girls, they hit puberty and all hell breaks loose.
Was that it? Was it puberty? Twenty-two years ago, Lorraine was thirteen. Or was it something else?
To the best of my knowledge, his uncle had said, they (They? Who the hell were they? His grandparents?) never told her.
Then how to explain that picture? And what about his uncle’s arrest?
I don’t like her because she killed my mother.
Now Dooley wondered: Who had killed whom?
Lorraine, from the outside: a party girl. Always laughing.
Always wanting to be the center of attention. Always looking for some guy to be the one. Drinking, snorting, smoking, shooting up, getting that party high. Dooley knew what that was all about. Get out of your head, out of your skin, out of yourself, out of your life. Kill the emptiness; kill the uncertainty; kill that lurking, aching, sucking feeling, the one that’s always whispering in your ear, You’re not the one. Not the one they want. Not the one to succeed. Not the one to win. Not the one to be happy. Not the one I carry in my heart. Not the one I see when I close my eyes. It’s not you.
It’s not you. It’s not you.
Worse.
It’s someone else.
He thought back.
He had come home that Friday night and had circled around to the side of the house, meaning to go in through the kitchen to get that DVD, then maybe stop in the kitchen again on the way out and check the fridge in the hope that his uncle, who was a good cook, had some leftovers stashed in there. But when he’d got to the door, he’d heard Lorraine’s voice, and it had frozen him to the spot. He’d stood there and listened. Now he replayed every word he had heard.
“You never came around even once,” Lorraine had said to his uncle.
He remembered the day his uncle showed up that first time when Dooley was in detention. Right after Dooley had got it clear in his head just who it was who was sitting opposite him at the visiting table—and that had taken some time because he was still detoxing—he had asked his new uncle about Lorraine. His uncle had snorted.
“Who knows where the hell she’s at?” he’d said.
Dooley used to think about her from time to time. He’d been pretty sure that if she had died, someone would have told him. So what he decided was that she must have taken off. But that Friday, there she was in his uncle’s kitchen saying, “You never came around.”
You never came around.
His uncle had said something else, too. Dooley tried hard to recall the exact words. He couldn’t. But it was something that had led him to believe that his uncle had been surprised to discover that he had a nephew. He remembered thinking that it was just like Lorraine not to have bothered to mention to her own brother, the only living relative she had, that she had a son. She also hadn’t bothered to mention to Dooley that he had an uncle. No, she had left it to Dooley to find out on his own, which he did when he was well and truly fucked and locked up on account of it. And then who had showed up to see him then? Not Lorraine. No, it was some stick-up-his-ass, used-to-be-cop-turned-dry cleaner who was all of a sudden in his face, giving him a thorough once-over before breaking the news: I’m your uncle. And there was Dooley, trying to look like he didn’t give a shit while he processed what this surly guy had just told him. Uncle? He had an uncle?
It turned out his uncle was as hard a case as Dooley. He was always busting Dooley’s balls about something—was he cooperating in his group sessions; was he doing what he was told and keeping his nose clean; was he doing in his schoolwork; what the hell was he doing with his spare time; was he pissing it away playing stupid games; why didn’t he try reading a book, for Christ’s sake; his uncle had never met a nonreader who knew squat about anything important, whereas people who read were people who were curious, people who wanted to find out about the world, people who had a life, not an existence, but a real honest-to-God worth-living life. The guy never let up. But the whole time, underlying it a
ll, it was like he was sending a message and was hoping that Dooley would get it. And Dooley was pretty sure he did get it. He was pretty sure the message went like this: If I’d known, things would have been different, you would have been different, your life would have been different. But it’s never too late. You can turn your life around, Ryan. You can make good. You can do good.
And then Lorraine had showed up in his uncle’s kitchen, telling his uncle, You never came around, like the choice to get to know Dooley had been there the whole time, like it had been up to his uncle to make a move in that direction, and his uncle had declined the opportunity.
Dooley picked up the phone and called Annette Girondin. To his surprise, she answered, even though it was late. When he said, “I want to see him,” she didn’t hesitate. She said she would get back to him.
He lay awake until he heard Jeannie close the door to his uncle’s bedroom. He waited another half hour, just to be safe. Then he tiptoed out into the hall. His uncle’s bedroom was completely dark. No light seeped out from under the door. Dooley crept down the hall and listened. Nothing.
He slipped into his uncle’s office and closed the door. He flicked on the small desk lamp, turned on the computer, and waited for it to boot up. He probably wouldn’t be able to get into it. Knowing his uncle, everything would be password protected.
But no. A couple of minutes later, he was double-clicking on the spreadsheet icon on the desktop and watching in amazement as the program opened. He poked around the listing of files inside until he found one that looked like it might be the one he wanted. He double-clicked on it and, just like that, there it was, his uncle’s financial life right there on the screen for everyone—well, for Dooley—to see. At first Dooley couldn’t figure out why his uncle didn’t protect it. Maybe he didn’t think he had to. His uncle had lived alone for most of his life. Usually there was no one around to look into his stuff. Not until recently.
He wasn’t surprised to see how detailed the accounts were. Everything was recorded, every bill payment, every purchase made on Dooley’s behalf, every psychologist’s bill itemized. And then that one line. It looked innocuous at first, like it was a payment for a utility bill. But it was different from all the other amounts entered into Expenses. Instead of odd amounts that varied from month to month, this was a nice round number—one thousand dollars—paid on the last day of every month. The heading on the entry was different, too. Instead of Gas or Hydro or Property Tax, this one read L.M.
L.M.
One thousand dollars on the last of every month.
Dooley stared at it and thought about what Lorraine’s neighbor had said.
He pulled up the previous year’s file and the one before that—for at least a couple of years now. Maybe more. He wanted to check back further, but there were only two years’ worth of records that he could find. He went back to the first file and stared at the entry again.
One thousand dollars.
Lorraine’s party money.
The next afternoon, Dooley had had enough. He’d barely slept. He couldn’t concentrate, either. He kept thinking about everything he knew and everything he didn’t. He left math class at the sound of the bell, just like the rest of his class, went to his locker to ditch his math text and grab his copy of 1984, which was what they were reading in English, and started for the stairs because his locker was on the second floor and his English class was on the first floor. But instead of making a left at the bottom of the stairs to go down the east corridor where his English class was, he made a right and headed for the front door. He had to get out of there, now. He had to breathe. He had to think—and school was the last place to do that.
He spotted Mr. Rektor standing outside the auditorium, which was directly across from the school’s main doors, and saw Warren emerging from the west corridor. Warren was in the same English class as Dooley. Warren raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Dooley,” he called. Dooley was aware of Mr. Rektor turning to look at him. So what did he do? He tossed his copy of 1984 to Warren who, being Warren, got flustered and, in an effort to catch it, which, of course, he didn’t, dropped his binder and a couple of other books he was holding. Then Dooley went right out the front door and kept on going. For the first time since he’d been released, he flat out didn’t care that Rektor would get on the phone to his uncle—well, to Jeannie—or that he was also perfectly within his rights to report him to Al Szabo, Dooley’s youth worker. He didn’t care that, technically, ditching class was a violation of his supervision order. He walked until he was out of sight of the school and then he caught the bus that ran north. He was standing outside Beth’s school ten minutes before it let out.
Beth had toured him around the school grounds one weekend, but this was the first time he’d been there on a weekday, mostly because it took forty minutes and two buses to get to, and his school let out only twenty-five minutes before hers. He stood on the sidewalk looking at the ivy that covered the whole front of the place, and the lawns and playing fields that surrounded it, all of it in a nice, peaceful neighborhood filled with big houses set back from tree-lined streets. Beth told him one time how much tuition cost. Dooley couldn’t believe it. Only rich people could afford to send their daughters to a place like that. Beth’s mother was financing Beth’s tuition from the insurance payout she’d got after Beth’s father died. Beth felt bad about that, which is why she took school so seriously. She was even more serious now that her brother was gone. It was like she felt that all of her mother’s hopes were riding on her and that she owed it to her mother to make good. Dooley didn’t get it, but that was probably because he couldn’t imagine Lorraine having any hopes for him, much less himself giving a shit if she did.
He heard a bell, and girls in uniforms—white blouses, some of them with V-neck navy sweaters under their navy blazers, and plaid skirts, some of them hiked up so high all you could see was thigh, all under open coats—started to pour out the main door. He scanned faces and legs and was surprised to see how good-looking all the girls were. There wasn’t a dog in the bunch. Most of the older girls sauntered to a parking lot on one side of the school, laughing and talking, hips swaying, car keys in their hands. A lot of the younger ones walked in pairs or groups or alone to the line of mostly SUVs, mostly driven by women whose skin color didn’t match whatever girls got into their vehicles.
And then there was Beth, swinging out of school, one of five girls, all laughing about something. Dooley was about to raise his hand to wave at her when a car horn tooted somewhere off to his right and Beth’s eyes and the eyes of the girls with her all went there. So did Dooley’s. And don’t you know it, there it was again, the midnight blue Jag.
Dooley tracked back to Beth and saw that all the girls around her were giggling and nudging her toward the Jag. But Beth’s focus was somewhere else. She was looking at Dooley, and she was smiling. She said something to her friends, and then she skipped down the wide stone steps and ran along the flagstone walk over to where Dooley was standing. Dooley looked back at her friends. They were talking to each other, but they were watching Beth. Mostly they looked baffled.
Beth reached him and looped one of her arms through his and started to walk him away from the school.
“What a surprise,” she said. She smiled up at him. She looked happy enough, but if that were true, how come he was sensing that he’d done something wrong, that the surprise wasn’t a pleasant one?
“I’m not messing up your plans, am I?” he said.
“No.”
“I mean, if you were going somewhere with your friends—”
She shook her head.
“Or maybe with Nevin.” He couldn’t stop himself from saying it, but now that it was out there, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He came off sounding like a jealous kid.
“I didn’t have any plans,” Beth said. She nuzzled in close to him. She didn’t mention Nevin—why he was there, why he had honked his car horn like that, why the girls with her had all giggled when he d
id it, why they all seemed to be nudging her in his direction. He glanced back over his shoulder. Nevin was standing beside his Jag now, surrounded by girls, but he was looking at Beth, at the back of her walking away. His eyes met Dooley’s. He smiled, his lips like ice. He said something to the girls, and they all turned to look at him, too. They weren’t giggling anymore.
They went to Beth’s house where Beth made tea for herself and a sandwich for Dooley. They didn’t talk much. There were a lot of times when they didn’t talk much. That was one of the things Dooley liked about Beth. She didn’t mind when things were quiet. She didn’t mind that he just sat there and watched while she put the kettle on and put a tea bag in a mug, while she got out the bread and peanut butter, moving so gracefully even when all she was doing was pouring milk into her mug, her legs long and slim under her skirt, which was short but not hiked up as high as some of the girls who went to her school. She didn’t mind that he watched every move she made, and when she caught him at it, she smiled. She put the sandwich down in front of him and sat across the table from him with her tea. She didn’t ask him why, for the first time since they’d known each other, he had showed up unexpectedly at her school. He wondered about that. He wondered what she really thought. He got a hint when she looked down at the sandwich on his plate. He hadn’t touched it. He wasn’t hungry. She got up then and took his hand and led him down the hallway to her bedroom.
In her arms, he forgot about Lorraine. In her arms, he forgot about his uncle and Jeffie. In her arms, there was only softness and sweet smells and acceptance. In her arms, he was in a magical place where there was no Mr. Rektor, no school, no Kevin, no video store, no minimum-wage monkey-shit job, no twitchy reminders of how high it was possible to go, no crash-out-aw-shit-now-what moments at the come-down. In her arms, he could forget.
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