by Kim Savage
I exhale a raspberry. Erik gives me an odd look, settling back in his chair.
“You know I tend to go where I’m not supposed to. Your mom will tell you that,” he says. “But tell me something. What kind of person is Mrs. Lapin?”
“For one, she creates these great big fictions about herself. Like she claims she was a catwalk model in her teens and twenties. Except it’s a total lie. She was in department store ads and local pageants. Liv outed her once to me, when we were nosing around her room, looking at all her creepy dried flowers and sashes. This was back when Liv could laugh about her mother. It’s different now,” I say.
Erik nods. “I think I get the picture. I need to ask you a question. Has Liv ever complained about her mother abusing her?”
“As in hitting?”
“There are other forms.”
“If Liv was being abused, why wouldn’t she talk to me about it?” I ask.
“I have no experience in psychology beyond college intro courses. But from what I remember, Liv’s mother’s abusiveness may be part of a lifelong campaign of control. And because people with narcissistic personality disorders are careful to rationalize their abuse, it’s tough to explain to other people what’s so bad about them.” He rushes to add, “That is not to say I’m diagnosing a woman I’ve never met.”
I smile. “I like when you ‘go there,’ Erik. You should go there more often.”
The slider behind us grates open and Mom pops her head out. “Something warm to drink?” Erik checks his technical-looking watch and says he’s due to call the lab.
I crank my head around to watch him angle through the door. “So it’s never really about the kid? When couples don’t make it, I mean?” I call to him.
He freezes in place and looks at my mother, then me. “No. It’s always about the parents. And anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth.”
Erik disappears upstairs and Mom steps onto the deck holding out a steaming mug of ginseng tea. I cradle it in my hands, and she slips into Erik’s chair with a mug for herself.
“People are forever offering me something warm to drink. Why is that?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She presses her own mug to her nose. “Maybe because you always used to seem cold.”
A breeze rustles the tree line and dips low, swirling the crisp leaves at our feet. I pull the blanket up from my legs and stand, wrapping it around my shoulders. “Thanks for the tea. It was nice of you. But I’m taking a walk.”
She puts her mug down fast on the deck plank and stiffens, probably preparing to tent-hug, inject me with a sedative, or both. Then I realize: she’s upset. I just talked to Erik three times as much as I’ve spoken with her in the past week.
“It’s not you,” I say softly. “I just want to be alone.”
Her shoulders relax and she sinks back into her chair. “For the best, probably. There are things I should be better about doing, now that we have a guest.” She lifts her mug and draws it close to her chest. “Dinner, and such.”
I descend the deck stairs and cross the lawn, taking long, glidy steps. I must look dramatic to Mom from behind, I think, my hair blowing straight back like a cape at my shoulders, a heroine crossing the dark moor. At the edge of the tree line, I inhale deeply. Though Mom is still a pindot on the deck, it feels good to be mostly alone. It even feels good to be outside. I wonder about the serpent in my belly, if it went away, slipped out of me when it was no longer needed. Or did it keep rising after I left WFYT, to enervate my whole being? That feels more likely.
chat, play, more
I step more deeply into the swath of wooded land that abuts our yard. I like to be alone with my screams. Branches scatter the ground, snapped off by the heavy rain. I pick one up and walk in deeper. Another, then another, gathering twigs as I go. I don’t know why. The sky is the color of eggplant, and the November air smells of early snow. I come upon a patch of ice needles pushing through the soil in a half horseshoe, short, beautiful shards. Deeper still, on a log, a frost flower blooms, long petals of ice extruding from some plant. Frost flowers are rarely seen; I know this from freshman geology. Am I really seeing these things at all?
chat, play, more
I grip my belly and scream then, leaning back and shaking my head, a howl that could bring police sirens. It still might, given Mom is on the deck, and the Mincuses’ backyard is twenty feet away. When I scream, I imagine a black lava flowing from my mouth, every kind of deadly animal riding inside: lions, tigers, sharks, cobras. When I’m done, a cold sweat runs down my shirt, and my back heaves, hands on thighs. The exhaustion that follows brings peace. Sticks lie scattered at my feet like bones, but for two bunches in my hands. I am Shakespeare’s Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, trimmed and given bundled branches for hands, her tongue cut out, all so she couldn’t bring justice to her violators. But she found a way. She took a stick in her mouth and scribbled their names in the sand. She had her revenge.
Like Lavinia, I will figure out a way to make my greatest offender known. It won’t be public, but it will count. I will create my own kind of justice.
THIRTEEN
366 Days After the Woods
The skate park should be the perfect place to perform an extreme stunt. Where else to explain my seeming alliance with the person bent on taking down the Shiverton police department? To make amends for being Paula’s instrument? To stoke my courage, I catch snowflakes on my tongue. In the half hour that I’ve been waiting for Kellan, I’ve tested my resolve by exposing different parts of my body to the cold. Ankles, wrists, earlobes, lower back, tongue.
I let the snow dissolve. Granular, tolerable, gone. In the distance, steps approach, boots crunching in the cold dust.
“You came,” I say.
“I came.” Kellan shambles to me, shoulders hiked to his ears. The light poles cast a pewter glare. His eyes are coated with mistrust. Am I too late? Has disappointment calcified into hate?
“I suppose you think I’m a traitor,” I say.
He cocks his chin and stares at the sky, which is worse than an answer. This is the opposite of the skate park where we celebrated before, dark and upside-down. I clear my throat, starting over. “I asked you here so I could explain why I agreed to an interview with Paula Papademetriou.”
He jams his hands into his pockets. “Don’t think you can.”
I wasn’t expecting such an absolute shutdown. Flummoxed, I stall. “How did you get out so late?”
“Snuck.”
“Me? I used the front door. I’d planned something more dramatic, but it turned out to be overkill.” I wait for a smile, but his mouth is set. Around us, the first snowflakes of the year fall sparsely. Everything is blurring, the seasons overlapping. It’s a wavy-mirror world that suits things perfectly. “Please sit with me.”
“No thanks.” He says it with an edge, breath swirling from the side of his mouth. “So you said yes when Paula asked to interview you?”
“I had no choice,” I reply.
He winces at the sky. “Did she hold you hostage?”
It would be easy to give him the story I gave Mom, to lie, say I was ambushed. But I have to make him understand that Paula is my last resort. “We’re working together. Paula’s helping to make things right.”
His eyes flare with disbelief, which is awful, but better than the dull veil of before. “How can screwing the police department be right? Don’t you get it? If my father loses his job, it’s bad, for him and for my family. Why do you think I left St. John’s? Things are tight. If you haven’t noticed, we don’t live on your side of Shiverton.”
“Paula is trying to change a broken system,” I say.
“That broken system saved you,” he says.
“A guy riding his bicycle by the watchtower saved me. That broken system got me abducted. Donald Jessup’s ankle bracelet told the police he was lurking around the high school, the track, and Liv’s house, and still he slipped through the cracks.” I say it steadily, without emo
tion or inflection. Just the facts.
“My father didn’t create the system. He’s a good guy. He cared about your case, not only for the two days they were searching for you and Jessup—and he was out there, on the ground, in the woods—I’m talking months and months after. Your case might have been officially closed, but my father always believed there was more to it.”
“Your father isn’t the one who looks bad. Chief Pantano is taking the fall,” I point out.
“Is that what Paula says? Your new BFF?” he spits.
“Paula is the only one who can help me. There’s a lot you don’t understand. Ever since the woods, something’s not right with Liv.”
“Somehow the fact that this is about Liv Lapin makes it so much worse.”
Kellan angles his body away from me. Beyond us, traffic thrums and beeps, and the cheesy gym next door leaks riffs of music. But inside the cement bowl it’s just us and the patter of snow. The air smells metallic, lustrous and charged. I wonder how I can do this, remain seated and totally still, while Kellan twists and turns to stay warm, beating at his sides and shifting from foot to foot.
I stick out my tongue to test a snowflake again.
He squats, forearms resting on his thighs, and for the first time looks me full in the face. “You once said what happened in the woods made you morbidly fascinating, a freak-show oddity. But you don’t get it. I never looked at you until the woods.”
If the woods could create a snake in my belly, why couldn’t it make me irresistible to Kellan? Maybe the cold forced my body to burn fat, turning me into a lean, hard fighter. Perhaps learning to hide my footfalls in the crunch of telltale leaves gave me agility and grace. Seeing through rain sharpened my vision, let me see people for who they are.
I scramble onto my knees. “Make me get it.”
“When the abduction happened, I knew it was a terrible story in a vague way, because you and Liv went to Shiverton, and we were in the same grade, and the dude was from Shiverton, which was scary. It kept my father from coming home at night, and that sucked, but it wasn’t the first case that’s consumed him. Still, I didn’t get what the big deal was until my father explained to me that you weren’t an ordinary girl. You threw yourself in front of danger to save your friend’s life. Then you outwitted the guy, came back, and got him arrested. Dad called you the bravest human being he’d ever met.”
I hold my hand on my belly, like there’s something there I need to protect, something the woods created that I don’t want to let go. Not yet.
“I fell for you without knowing you. And then, when I finally talked to you, I found out you were sarcastic and funny, and dark and dry. Tough. Not just physically, but your mind, too. It’s like this terrifying, shiny thing that can take anyone down. I told my father Donald Jessup never stood a chance.”
I start to smile, but the sadness in his eyes makes me stop.
“And now, it’s like you’re an instrument of the enemy. I have to ask myself: Were you playing me?” he says.
My stomach drops. “I wasn’t playing you. Not ever.”
“Five minutes ago, you said the police let Donald Jessup slip through the cracks. That sounds vengeful to me.”
“The reason I’m working with Paula has nothing to do with vengeance.” I hold my head in my hands. “Donald Jessup and Liv are connected, but I can’t prove how. Is that enough to make you understand?”
“So this is all about Liv.”
“Actually, yes.”
He takes my chin in his hand. “I can’t share your heart with Liv. Half of Julia isn’t enough for me.” He rises, throwing out his hands, and paces. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since that day I grabbed your waist and threw you in my car. I’m insane about you. The crap you say. The way you look at the world. The fact that you’re utterly unafraid of anything. Being with you is like injecting this rush that makes me feel alive. When I’m not with you, you’re all I want. I can barely breathe.”
I want to take his jaw in my hand and drag his mouth to mine, consume him whole, I ache for his mouth on mine so much, and what the heck, what difference does it make? I don’t care if he throws me off of him, tells me to go to hell, that I’m a father-wrecking, home-wrecking career-wrecker. I’ve had worse.
He is far away now, far enough away that he might leave. He calls to me.
“In the woods, when you said ‘come with me’? You meant to the place where Ana Alvarez died, but in my mind, you were asking me to fall for you. And it was already too late. I was all in.” He turns and walks toward the alley.
I leap up and run toward him. He spins around just before I tackle him, wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him toward me. His lips are cool and the tops of his cheeks feel wet, and he holds back at first, the muscles in his chest and shoulders unyielding, and I let go a little, but then he comes in fast, and I fall to my knees and then the ground, and he crawls on top of me.
“In case you were wondering, this is not one of those surreal moments,” Kellan says.
“So no audience?” I say, breathless.
“No audience. But we can pretend, if you’re into that.” He nuzzles my neck, and the vibration is delicious.
Long, scraping noises. A bright beam swoops and bobbles over us like a spastic searchlight. Kellan follows my stare toward the source, a half-pipe over the ridge of the bowl.
“Kids on skateboards wearing headlamps,” Kellan says.
“So we are being punked,” I say. “This is probably not the best idea.”
“The idea is excellent. It’s the execution,” he says. “Next time, indoors.”
I laugh. He rolls to his side, and the loss of his warmth and weight feels like it might kill me. I peel myself from the ground and brush off, every inch of my body screaming, the air around us throbbing with frustration. He pulls me to his chest and holds me there for a second, the two of us standing in the middle of a big empty cement bowl against a psychedelic backdrop of light beams swooping and dancing as if to music.
He tips my chin to see him, a trick appealing to us tall girls, I expect. His eyes are soft and sad. “Seeing Yvonne Jessup wasn’t safe. She could have been as sick as her monster son. She could’ve hurt you.”
“I brought Alice.”
“Of course. The famous Alice. I’m starting to think Alice is your imaginary friend.”
I pretend to sucker punch him and in the process kick over my messenger bag. The junk inside spills on the asphalt, along with my notebook and the gifted sketch. He deserves to understand. I kneel down and lift the sketch. The girl’s strange broad forehead catches the light, and Kellan’s eye.
I hand it to him, and he tilts it, trying to see, head cocked. I expect him to make a guy face, a pure, unfiltered reaction to a picture of a girl who isn’t the prettiest. But his eyes flutter all over it. Deep in my chest something plinks—jealousy?
“Cool,” he says, crouching next to me and handing it back. “Who’s the artist?”
“Donald Jessup.”
His head jerks back, like I’ve slapped him. “How—”
“Yvonne Jessup. She gave it to me,” I say. “Aren’t you going to ask who the girl is?” Because that’s the important part.
“Who’s the girl?” he says slowly.
“You know her,” I say. A dusting of snow smudges the charcoal. I blow the sketch with a soft puff, adding, “Just not as well as I do.”
FOURTEEN
367 Days After the Woods
“Mother prefers the green foil paper with the Spirograph snowflakes.”
Liv only calls Deborah “Mother” around Deborah. We are wrapping gifts under Deborah’s surveillance, gifts for Leland’s family, which will be mailed well ahead of Christmas to France; a gift for Father Carl, who is expected any minute; and Liv’s gift for Shane, which she is in charge of because it’s heavy and the corners may tear. Tonight has been declared Early Christmas by Deborah, who has the power to schedule holidays prematurely in her own house, since the
Lapin girls will be in Bolivia for actual Christmas. Besides the calendar-warping, the evening is made weirder by the fact that I have been dropped into a scene straight out of Barbie and Skipper’s Holiday, with Deborah in full makeup and a red rabbit-collared suit, and Liv in a matching red dress. I am apparently styled after little green plastic army men, in jeans, a camo Henley, a puffy vest, and the black military boots I’ve taken to wearing every day.
Deborah’s surveillance extends to our conversation, so I cannot ask Liv about the charcoal sketches, or how she feels about my publicly outed visit with Yvonne Jessup, or how she will manage missing a month of school. We speak nothing of my interview on Dateline; I can only assume that its national nature has piqued Deborah’s annoyance. As much as she supposedly hates the media attention, she hates me getting media attention even more. So the subject is closed, which suits me fine.
Even my pointed looks at Deborah’s outfit get censored. “Pretty makes her happy, and her happy makes everything easier,” Liv explains quietly.
Christmas music sung by an aging pop star screeches out of the Bose radio. Rolls of paper are spread across the dining room table—too many, since the gift count is low. I finish wrapping Father Carl’s gift and set it aside. Father Carl is coming to talk to Liv and me, a “check-in” following our recent exploitation by the media. But giving him a present deflects the attention back to Deborah, and he deserves a present, she insists. What you buy a priest I cannot imagine, and I don’t ask what’s in the generic box, although she wants me to.
Deborah scrapes the length of a red ribbon with the edge of her scissors until it snaps into a tight curl. She steals a look at Shane’s gift box in Liv’s hands. “Should I guess what you’ve got in that box?”
“Oh, I don’t think you can guess,” Liv says, folding the corners into careful triangles. “It’s a toughie.”
“There’s nothing you can give me that would equal the love and care I give you,” Deborah says, arranging a pile of curlicue ribbons on top of her wrapped box for one of Leland’s other children. “Besides, what can you afford?”