And as my tires hum, rolling rapidly over the asphalt, they seem to speak to me, say the same phrase over and over again: Nica would never, Nica would never, Nica would never.
Chapter Eleven
I return to Damon’s grandmother’s. Holding vigil from my car, which has proven to be a pointless exercise, is especially pointless tonight—watching a house he’s not even in!—but I don’t know where else to go or what else to do.
I park in my customary spot, hunker down in my seat. My sense is that it’ll be a while before a squad car drops him off, so after fast-forwarding through a pair of unlistened-to voice mails from Shep, one left several days ago, one left this morning—him wanting to take my emotional temperature, no doubt, to, barf, “check in”—I play Dad’s.
“Sweetheart, where are you?” he asks in a mild tone, mildly curious, mildly confused, mildly concerned.
The message goes on, but I’ve heard enough. I delete it. After tossing my phone in my bag, I pull out my computer, the ancient laptop Nica and I used to share. If I hold it up to the windshield at a certain angle, I can pick up a faint Wi-Fi signal. And, though it takes forever, I’m finally able to get onto the Hartford Courant’s website. I enter Nica’s name into the paper’s search engine and begin to read the articles covering her death, articles I’ve read before—many, many times before in the last couple weeks—but, hey, another look can’t hurt, and at least it’s a constructive use of my time.
A half hour goes by, an hour, an hour and a half, the clock in the dash glowing a dreamy, pallid green. I stare out the window into unbroken darkness, a darkness so dense it seems to pulse against my eyeballs. I’m awake but barely. The computer is in my lap where I dropped it a long time ago. I’m thinking that maybe I’d better call it a night, am reaching for my keys. Just then, though, a vehicle passes, a set of headlights sweeping the interior of my car, and, for an instant, Nica’s face emerges from the black with startling clarity. And then the instant is over. The vehicle continues on its course, hurtling forward, and everything slides back into dimness and shadow.
For a few seconds I’m too stunned to move or to think or even to breathe. Then I come to my senses, slap the dome light in the ceiling. There she is, cat-curled on the passenger seat, one slim leg tucked underneath her, back slumped softly against the door. Except for the neat little hole with the charred edges on the left side of her abdomen, she looks exactly the way she looked when she was alive. She’s dressed in the cutoffs and halter top she was wearing in Nica’s Dream, only she’s bursting out of them since she’s no longer eleven. A cigarette burns low between her lips.
I know that what I’m looking at is a figment, a mirage, an illusion, the product of my imagination dipping into my exhaustion—a dream, basically—but I also know that it’s real, too.
For a long time we sit in silence. I don’t want to speak first, am waiting for her to begin. At last, though, unable to take it anymore, I say, “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says back.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay. How are you?”
“I’m good,” I say. “I’m great.” And then, “Thanks for asking.”
“Sure,” she says, amused. “Any time.”
I know how stilted my tone is, how inexpressive and lifeless my words, but I can’t help myself. It’s as if there’s so much emotion coursing through my body, there’s none left for my voice; so many things I want to say, I can hardly say anything at all. I’m trying, though. I’m trying.
“It’s good to see you,” I say.
“It’s good to see you, too, Gracie.”
“I’ve missed you. Really.”
She regards me through weighted-down lids, then languorously transfers her cigarette from her right hand to her left, holds the hand up to her nipple, shakes it: titty hard-on. The gesture hurts my feelings but it also soothes them because what could be more normal than her making fun of me? And when another silence descends, it’s a purer, less strained version. Nica smokes and drops cigarette ash into the mouth of the empty Diet Coke can she fished from the backseat, gazes out the window, closed and made into a mirror by the blackness of night. I listen to our breaths, joining and dividing, joining and dividing, one after the other; watch her feet, propped up on the dashboard now, bare and dirty-soled, the polish on the toes chipped, the grubby Band-Aid peeling off her heel, just like in the photograph. I feel myself growing calmer, more peaceful.
A second car passes, its headlights hitting Nica full in the face, illuminating that shard of gold in her iris, changing the brownish hazel to a clear, brimming green.
“I’m pregnant,” I say, and then inhale sharply, shocked that I blurted it out like that, that I blurted it out at all; it was supposed to be something unspoken between us. In a panic, I look over at her.
Her expression doesn’t tell me what she’s feeling, is a cool blank. Slowly, she brings her cigarette up to her mouth. “Pregnant?” she says, expelling a silvery stream of smoke, watching it twist and writhe in the warm still air.
I nod, anxious.
“You do realize that you have to have sex to get pregnant.”
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what I thought, too.”
We’re still laughing as the dome light above our heads flickers, burns out.
I’m in the dark again but the quality of the darkness has changed, is a medium gray rather than a heavy black, the streetlamp a dozen yards ahead making things glow dimly. I hear a noise—the click of the passenger-side door handle. Nica must be getting out. I need to stop her. We’ve haven’t had a chance to talk yet, not really, have only cleared the air so real talk is possible. I whirl around and look. With relief I see a body entering the car, not exiting it. And then the head does a half rotation, coming around to face me. Damon. My disappointment is so sharp I feel as if I’ve been struck.
“You’re awake,” he says.
I say “What?” in a way that makes the word rhyme with Huh.
“I kept calling your name. You didn’t move.”
I’m slumped way down in my seat. Dried drool cracks on my chin when I say, “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Yeah, I sort of figured. I knocked on the window too.”
Jesus, all that yelling and banging. No wonder Nica took off. I’m so angry, I can hardly bear to look at him. “Well, I’m up now.” I push myself away from the seat with the backs of my elbows. I feel slightly dizzy, and there’s a weird kind of high-pitched wailing in my ears.
“You mind?” he says, reaching for the box of Saltines in the back.
I shake my head.
He opens the cellophane sleeve with a combination of fingers and teeth. Pops a few crackers in his mouth. And for three minutes, according to the dash clock, we sit there in silence except for the sound of his chewing and the wailing in my head, like a teakettle at full boil.
“So are you going to tell me what this is about?” he says, and smiles at me. It’s the first unguarded smile I’ve seen from him, the first smile period practically, and I’m surprised I’m the cause of it. And then it dawns on me that I’m not, that any pleasure he’s experiencing is likely due to tonight’s professional success, and that the feeling’s just spilling over onto me.
“What what’s about?”
“You, parked outside my grandmother’s house at three in the morning.” And when I don’t respond: “Are you waiting up for me, making sure I get home safe?”
He’s kidding, of course. He’s not saying what he actually thinks I’m doing. At the same time, though, he is saying what he actually thinks I’m doing, his light tone and relaxed manner telling me he doesn’t believe it’s anything he need worry about, anything potentially threatening or harmful to him. He probably imagines I’m still jittery from the encounter with Luis, and that I’m coming to him without even knowing why, am acting purely on instinct, reduced by fear to the lowest, most primitive level—a little animal scuttling around on all fours looking for protection, understanding that its
survival is in danger and nothing else.
He keeps talking, teasing me. And I realize that I’m not going to be able to hold back much longer, am not going to be able to approach him with subtlety or a strategy in mind like I’d planned. My emotions are too raw for nuance. Or safety. If he did kill Nica and he thinks I know about it, what’s he going to do to me, alone with him in a car in the middle of the night? Work my face over with his fists until it looks like a sponge dunked in blood? Whip out his .45, ventilate my stomach? How would I stop him? With what? That rinky-dink stun gun, not even in my hands, in my bag in the back?
The wailing is getting louder and louder, crazier and crazier, drowning out every other sound. A wave of nausea hits me and for a second I’m certain I’m about to be sick. And then I say, “I know,” the words bursting out of my face in a near scream. They stop Damon cold, midsentence. For a long moment there’s dead quiet in the car. No wailing, no breathing even. “I know,” I say again, calmly this time, and I look at him. His eyes are closed. “About you and Nica. I know.”
Slowly his eyes open. He shakes his head, smiling to himself a little ruefully, like he’s just heard a funny joke only he’s the butt of it. “Oh,” he says, and turns away.
I watch him as he stares out the window at the empty street. His reaction is a lack of one, and I have no idea how to proceed from it. My resolve, the anger that’s carried me this far, is gone, vanished without a trace. Worse, I have the nagging sense that I’ve got it wrong somehow, that I’m missing something, some crucial piece of information. So when I say to him, “Will you tell me about it?”, my voice is shy, almost timid.
“About what?”
“The relationship.”
“Nica made me swear I wouldn’t say anything to anybody about it.”
My heart sinks.
And then he shifts in his seat, starts rubbing his eyes tiredly with the heels of his hands. “I suppose, though, the promise doesn’t hold anymore. And you have a right to know.”
“I do?” I say, scarcely daring to believe.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” he says, but he doesn’t say anything after that. Just rolls up the Saltines sleeve on his lap and carefully fits it back into the box, wipes his fingers on the leg of his jeans.
“Damon,” I say, after a bit.
He looks up at me, nervous or embarrassed, and laughs. “Sorry. I just don’t know where to begin.”
“At the beginning.”
He laughs again. Says, “Right,” but nothing more.
“Don’t think about it, just talk. Forget that I’m her sister.”
“Okay,” he says, nodding. “Okay.”
He was in his car, on his way home from a date that had gone badly. He’d been seeing a girl, a day student a year below him, Vanessa Medina. Vanessa was pretty and smart and great and he liked her a lot, but it was a casual thing. He was graduating in a couple of months and had no interest in getting involved in anything serious, as he’d said from the start. She’d said she wasn’t interested in anything serious either. He sensed lately, though, that that was no longer true for her, if it ever had been. He’d tried to tell himself that he’d never been less than straight with her, and that her emotional well-being was her responsibility not his. But when the night was over he’d wind up feeling guilty just the same—like a user and a sleaze. It wasn’t worth it. So he’d been attempting to subtly cool it, keep the relationship from ending in bitterness and tears.
He’d just taken Vanessa to a movie, though. Had driven her directly home afterward, and when she’d joked about her parents’ nine o’clock bedtime, he’d pretended not to notice the implied invitation, then said he was working for his uncle in the morning so planned on turning in early that night too. She’d slammed the door behind her, her movements angry but her eyes hurt. And now he realized that bitterness and tears were inevitable, that he’d been kidding himself to think otherwise.
Damon’s headlights arced across the landscape as he turned onto Farmington, and out of the darkness reared a figure, pale and perched on the hood of a car. A girl, he saw as he got closer. Nica Baker.
Damon knew Nica from school. Knew who she was, anyway. She was too good-looking for him not to. Her dad worked at Chandler. Her mom, also, that sexy art teacher. And she had a sister, older but younger acting, and quiet. Without quite meaning to he’d been keeping tabs on Nica, watching her in Stokes and the snack bar. She was usually at the center of a group—laughing, talking, holding court. There was a solitary quality to her, too, though. He’d sometimes see her wandering the halls in the middle of the day, one hand clutching a bathroom pass, the other trailing along the wall, her expression distracted, dreamy, and when she happened to look at him, his heart would start to beat wildly, wilder with every second she held his gaze. But there was never so much as a flicker of recognition in her face, and he didn’t think she even saw him. He was just a place to rest her eyes.
He pulled up in front of her, got out of his car. As he walked toward her, he saw she was wearing a jean jacket, unlined, way too skimpy for the weather, over a thin shirt. The rims of her nostrils were pink with cold. A cigarette dangled between her fingers. “Did you break down?” he asked.
“A flat.” Her eyes were on him, but their expression was that blurred one from the Chandler hallways, and he was pretty sure she didn’t know who he was. It was past midnight on the side of a deserted road, and here he was, some strange guy approaching her, and she wasn’t in the least bit scared and, weirdly, that made him scared of her.
“We go to school together,” he said. “I’m in the class ahead of you.” When she didn’t respond, react in any way, “Can you change a tire?”
She shook her head.
“Do you have a spare?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are the keys?”
She looked at him blankly. “The …?”
He found them in the ignition, pulled them out, and walked around to the back of the car. It annoyed him that she was just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along and help her, not even asking for help, automatically assuming it would be given. It annoyed him even more that he was proving her right.
Thirty seconds later, he walked back around to the front. “You have a spare but it’s on the car. Do you belong to AAA?”
She shrugged.
“Have you called someone yet? Your parents?”
“No.”
“What about your boyfriend?” he said, allowing himself to sneer a little. He knew she was with that Jamie guy, the one who had the face that was pretty like a girl’s face was pretty and the lazy, stoner, rich-kid way of talking.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said.
He pretended not to notice the way his heart went fast and kicky at this information. “Look, maybe you should just have your dad take care of the car in the morning. Why don’t I give you a ride home? It’s dangerous for you to be out here by yourself.”
Now she was looking directly at him, her gaze clear, focus having at last burned through the fog. “I’m not by myself, Damon. I’m with you.”
So she did know who he was. He wondered if she knew he sometimes watched her, too. Feeling his face go hot, he said, “Make sure you lock the doors,” and tossed her back her keys, returned to his car to wait.
They were on the road. He was going to tell her that she couldn’t smoke in his car, but she’d stubbed out her cigarette before she got in. She’d retreated back into vagueness and distance, staring out the window at the passing utility poles, picking at her chapped lips. The silence began to work on him, turning him nervous, edgy. He decided to break it. “So, what are you doing out so late?”
“Just driving around.”
“You like to drive around at night?”
“It clears my head.”
“Of what?”
She might have shrugged. He wasn’t sure.
Silence fell again. It was about to turn into another long one when she said, “I don’t
want to go home.”
Startled, “Where do you want to go?”
No answer.
“We’re not far from Talcott Park. Should we check out the old water tower?” It was only as he spoke that he remembered the water tower was a popular make-out spot, at least among public school kids. Embarrassed, he looked at Nica, expecting to see a knowing smirk on her face. But she seemed barely to have heard him. Irritated now, and determined to get a response, he repeated the question.
She turned up a palm, meaning, he guessed, he could do what he liked. Not wanting to but feeling obligated, he changed direction.
Fifteen minutes later he was pulling onto a patch of gravelly dirt—empty, thank God—at the foot of a small hill, atop which sat the antique water tower. He looked at it through the windshield. It was one of the first steel water towers built in the United States, and over eighty feet tall. Nica didn’t seem to notice it, though. Didn’t seem to notice anything.
Damon’s edginess was increasing by the second, and he was about to flip the car into reverse, get the hell out of there. Who cared if she didn’t want to go home? That’s where he was taking her. And the sooner he did, the sooner he could start trying to forget this weird shitty night ever happened. He was just reaching for the gearshift when she turned to him and said, gesturing to the tower, “Want to climb it?”
She was kidding. Had to be. Only the thing was, he knew she wasn’t. Half hopefully, though, he kidded back. “Why do you think I brought you here?”
Without another word, she opened her door, started up the hill. He watched for a couple seconds, blinking, then followed. Moments later they were at the base of the tower, standing in front of a ladder, narrow and rickety, that went all the way up to the top, seemingly all the way up to the stars. He glanced over at her, his eyes already dry and burning from the wind. Her hair, pure black and alive looking, whipped around her face and throat. He could see the outline of her breasts, the sharp little nipples in her tight-fitting shirt. She was grinning at him. And with a sick-sinking sensation, he realized they were actually going to do this.
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