by Kaira Rouda
“What?” he yelled, appearing at the top of the stairs.
“Are you still being bullied?”
“What? No. Why?”
“Your lock, it was upside down,” she said, her heart falling as she saw the look on his face. She had failed. He wasn’t ready for the real world; he was still a kid being picked on. Did he know how to do his own laundry? Cook? What other life skills was he lacking? she wondered.
“Oh, I keep it that way now. If you pull it, it opens right up but nobody knows that,” he said.
That wasn’t an answer, not really, Melanie realized, but she let it go. “If it works for you.”
“It does. Anything else?” he asked, hands on hips, looking down the stairs at her. She knew the fingernails on each hand were bitten to the quick. Poor Dane.
“No, nothing,” Melanie said, realizing her thin, six-foot-two-inch son was actually just an anxious child from Ohio living in this strange land of privilege and expectations he could never meet. They should have never moved here, she thought, tears again springing to her eyes.
Melanie walked back into the kitchen, wondering when Keith would be home, wondering why they never had hot, sordid sex in a public bathroom when they were younger. Perhaps that’s where Keith was right now, she thought, tears falling faster with the suspicion. She yanked the kitchen drawer open and grabbed her corkscrew.
Keith had been recruited to become a partner at the fastest-growing litigation firm in Southern California. When he’d come home to tell Melanie about the offer it was a warm summer evening. She’d had enough of the gray days, enough of the town they’d both grown up in, but the warm green summers would make you forget the suffering. But she was ready for a change, an adventure, and pushed him to take the job. But had they thought enough about the effect it would have on the boys?
“Kids are resilient, honey,” Keith had said, his blue eyes sparkling as they shared a drink on the back porch. “They’ll love California. It’s the land where dreams come true, the happiest place on earth.”
“I thought that was Disney,” Melanie had said, standing up from her favorite chair and wrapping her arms around his waist.
“No, it’s wherever we are all together. Let’s do this,” Keith had said, looking into her eyes, looking so much like the young man she’d married years before.
“But Seth will be a junior in high school, and school has already started,” Melanie said, not adding that Dane would be entering ninth grade.
“He’ll love California,” Keith had said. “I’ll call tomorrow and accept the offer. You’ll need to start house hunting.”
And she had, finding their dream home online the next day. By the time November rolled around, the house in Ohio was sold, winter was setting in, and they set off, caravan style, with everyone driving a car, headed west to a new life. Seth hadn’t spoken to them since they’d told him about the move, his anger a silencer. But Dane, ironically, had embraced the idea of a new, fresh start. At their family meeting, as Keith outlined their new lives, Dane had smiled and announced California girls were the hottest on the planet. Seth had glared, fearing he’d never replicate his big-man-on-campus status.
“This is so stupid,” Seth had said, his face flushed and his blue eyes dark. None of them were accustomed to seeing Seth angry. “I’m going to finish high school here. Where we belong. You can all move without me.”
“Son, we’re staying together as a family. If it’s not right for you, I’ll turn down the job,” Keith said, locking eyes with Melanie. But she had suddenly wanted to move, needed to move. It would bring them closer together as a family unit, she knew, and nothing was more important than that.
“I think we should go for it,” Dane had said.
“Me, too,” Melanie had said, wrapping an arm around her youngest son in solidarity as Seth stood up and stormed out of the kitchen.
“Don’t worry, guys,” Dane had reassured his parents. “He’ll be fine. We all will be. It’ll be an adventure.”
Melanie shook her head. Dane used to be so optimistic. He always had been that way, just like each new school year was going to be different, better. But the move, the changes, the pressure of senior year’s approach had changed that. Maybe she had forced that change on him, made him into the socially anxious person he was now. He had become an interesting dichotomy: a natural entertainer and performer, always talking out of turn in class as he had in Ohio and getting in trouble for it, while on the inside now he was full of self-doubt and anxiety, the result of their move to California. The bullying upon their arrival hadn’t helped.
But in actuality, all of this was probably her fault.
As she opened another bottle of wine, she realized she quite possibly had ruined her youngest son’s life by pushing for them to move here and that she herself had no plan, no idea what she would do with herself once Dane’s miserable senior year was over and he was off, doing God knows what in the world. Because she was certain he would be out of here, out of this town, and out of this house one way or another. And would Keith still be by her side? Was he now?
What was she going to do with the second half of her life? Melanie wondered as she walked into the family room to wait for her husband to come home.
WILL
Will Parker loved his wife.
He knew he would be lost without her. Utterly unanchored. Carol told him as much.
“No one else would put up with the likes of you, my Peter Pan,” she’d say on good days, with a smile and that twinkle in her eye that had made him fall in love with her in high school. High school. Twenty-nine years ago next month.
Along the way they’d accumulated two kids, several dogs, and a small home filled with cream and beige furnishings and surfaces. Carol could never decide on a color to paint any of their walls, so they never changed from the cream color she’d selected when they’d bought the “charming, tree-street bungalow.” If the walls appeared beige in places now, Will knew, it was due to dirt, not shade selection. Will glanced at himself in the hallway mirror as he dropped his keys into the “key bowl,” literally labeled as such by Carol and her trusty labeling gun. He looked good, he thought, checking out his right cheek dimple, his signature green eyes, and his still thick, dark brown hair. Noticing a lipstick mark on his neck, he used a finger to rub it away. He flexed, proud of his biceps, his body lean and muscular thanks to hours at the gym and his penchant for riding his bicycle whenever and wherever possible.
As long as Carol granted him permission, of course, by marking a longer bicycle-to-and-from-work commute on the calendar in his color, green.
Because she had been an administrator all of her career, and in fact was now principal of Crystal Beach’s middle school, Carol was detail-oriented. Their family’s scheduler. She was so organized that Will didn’t worry about a single detail of their life, or his own. She told him where to be, what to do, which child to drop off, pick up, what groceries to buy and where to buy them. She told him when it was time to have his teeth cleaned and when it was time to buy her a Christmas present. She kept a master calendar of their life. Will need only consult it for direction on any given day.
Tonight he’d returned home from Parents’ Night at the high school and walked into an empty house. As he stood in their beige kitchen, staring at the calendar, the long month of September stretched out forever, only a few days Xed-out so far. He wondered where Marni was, suddenly aware that she might be his responsibility tonight since Carol and Piper were both at the middle school’s back-to-school night.
“Marni?” Will yelled. Inside their house, a small yell covered the entire property, most likely spilling over into the neighbors’ homes. They were packed tightly together here on the “charming” tree streets—which meant more affordable but still incredibly expensive—of Crystal Beach.
Will consulted the calendar in front of him, looking for Marni’s color. Blue. There it was: Marni to Hewletts’. Babysit 7 to 9 p.m. Will’s color—green—appeared in the box below:
Will picks Marni up at 9 p.m. It was 9, Will realized looking at his new watch—a present from Lauren that Carol hadn’t questioned. He grabbed his phone and car keys and hurried out the door. Where did the Hewletts live? he wondered. As he ducked inside his forest green Subaru—I love this car, he thought with a smile—he saw that his phone displayed a reminder: Hewletts. 534 Skyline.
He loved his wife. She thought of everything. He pulled out onto Coast Highway, marveling at how light the traffic was. To his right, the ocean sparkled in the moonlight and Will reminded himself how blessed he was to be living in this place. His housing inspector job wasn’t glamorous, and he certainly wasn’t king of any industry like most of the other guys in town; but the hours were flexible, and with Carol’s benefits package they were doing just fine.
Will squinted at the number illuminating his phone screen. It was Lauren, even though the contact name on the screen read Butch, a running joke between the two of them.
“Hey, gorgeous, I’m on my way to pick up Marni, so I can’t really talk, sweetie,” Will said, using what he realized was a somewhat artificial tone of voice. Where did that come from?
“Yes, well, I’m sitting in my bedroom, alone, missing you,” Lauren said. Will could imagine her stroking her chest as she spoke, a habit he found both strange and sensual.
“Where’s David?” Will asked, hoping he wasn’t in the other room. She kept being so careless, as if she wanted to be caught. But that just couldn’t happen. No, everything was perfect the way it was. He had his wife, his life, and his romantic partner compartmentalized just fine.
“David is in his office, watching the history channel or old videos of his original set of kids. Oh, and drinking scotch. What else?”
“You should go watch with him. I really think you two can make it, you have something special,” Will said. He pasted a smile on his face, hoping his cheer would spread to Lauren through the speaker. It had been fun in the bathroom tonight, he thought, feeling an erection coming on. He needed to think about the cold, dark ocean.
“Yes, right, just like you and your wife have such a special bond. No I shouldn’t be with him. I should be with you,” Lauren said. “Tomorrow can’t come soon enough. That was so crazy, what we did in the bathroom. We’re so lucky no one came in, and we should definitely do it again.”
Ocean, moonlight, Lauren. It was hopeless, he was getting turned on. “Okay, well, I’ll see you around 12:30. Same place. I’m pulling up to the house where Marni’s waiting,” he said, lying as he sat at a stoplight downtown. He needed to hang up. She was turning him on and he was picking up his teenage daughter. It was all wrong, so wrong.
“Okay, see you tomorrow. And Will, I love you,” Lauren said.
“I know,” Will said, hanging up. He pushed the button and cranked the air-conditioning. This had to stop, he knew. Carol had forgiven him the first time, but she’d made it clear that absolution was a one-time deal. She’d ruin him. Take the kids. Turn them against him. And do you really think you could survive without me running your life? she’d asked.
Could I? The “break,” as they both refer to it, happened ten years earlier when Will had an affair with a woman named Elliot, a brilliant, beautiful writer for Orange Coast Magazine. She’d been researching a story about building codes and housing inspection and she’d found his name online. They had agreed to meet for coffee and sparks flew between them from the moment she walked into Starbucks. Tall, brunette, feminine, and wearing the highest heels he’d ever seen. She shouldn’t write for a magazine, she should be modeling in it, he had thought as she sat down across from him. It hadn’t been his fault. Will hadn’t planned it, not at all. Their coffee meeting stretched into the afternoon, ending with a stolen kiss in the back of the parking lot. A kiss Will could still feel and taste if he closed his eyes. Elliot was single, living in a tiny house on the peninsula, directly on the water. She invited him over, just for an inspection, she’d said. They both had known what that meant.
“But I love my wife,” Will had told Elliot as he ran his finger down her thin arm. They sat side by side on the warm wood planks of her deck, dripping wet from their ocean swim.
“Do you?” Elliot had asked, as she had dropped the pink towel from her body and sprawled on the deck, stretching out in front of him in her impossibly tiny white bikini.
A horn blasted behind him and Will stomped on the gas. Thinking about Elliot was never a good idea, he reminded himself, squeezing the steering wheel as if it were someone’s neck. Not a good idea at all.
Marni sat on the curb, covering her eyes from the blinding headlights as he drove up the otherwise dark street. She yanked open the car door, dropping her backpack on the floor in front of the seat, and climbed inside.
“How’d you do?” Will asked, the pretend smile back on his face.
“Why are you always late? How hard is it to be on time?” Marni demanded, teenage arms crossed in her huff, the lights of the dashboard reflecting off of her glasses. She looked haunted, and quite angry. Oddly, Will thought, she smelled like frozen waffles just out of the toaster. Maybe she’d made them for the kids, or maybe Will was hungry. He needed to focus.
“Buckle up, honey. And I’m not that late,” Will said. He knew he sounded defensive. She was right. He was always late, and wrong, and a disappointment to his entire family, not just Carol.
“You are. I had to lie and tell the Hewletts you were here twenty minutes ago, and run out the door or they would’ve kept feeling like they had to entertain their babysitter. Which is ridiculous,” she added, clicking the seat belt into place. “Parents’ Night? Did you make it to my classes?”
“Of course. All of them,” Will said. He was lying. He had missed her first class and daydreamed through sixth period, trying to figure out where to meet Lauren for a quickie. A bold move, he thought, congratulating himself.
“What did you think of Mrs. Sawyer?” Marni asked, turning her attention to her father, dark blue eyes framed by black glasses that Will thought were too big, and too dark, for her face. What did he know, though?
“She’s great. History, right?”
“No, she’s a bitch and she teaches marine biology. She has that point system where you start losing points the minute you walk in the door.”
“Right. Mrs. Sawyer. Of course,” Will said, smiling at his angry daughter, hoping to lighten the mood in the car. Hoping she wouldn’t tell Carol he had been late.
“Why are you smiling? You look like an idiot,” Marni said.
Will just smiled tighter. Broader. “Isn’t the moon nice tonight? The water is sparkling,” Will said, thinking of Elliot’s bathing suit, of her smooth young skin, thinking of Lauren and her amazing butt.
“Whatever,” Marni huffed, reaching down between them to turn on the radio. Will decided not to react no matter what song she decided to torture him with.
“Say, Marni, could you not tell your mom I was late? Please. I don’t want to have any strife at home tonight. Just do me that favor?”
Marni snorted, but didn’t say anything, apparently now tuning him out and enjoying something that sounded like music being created by an angry teen girl. Fitting, he supposed. They drove the rest of the way home like that. Will stared at the moon whenever he could, while Marni stared straight ahead, looking at anything but him.
It was remarkable, he thought, as he steered the car into the driveway, what two people could create. He and Carol had made love to create this angry person sitting next to him. As they both climbed out of the car, Will looked up and through the window saw Carol standing in the brightly lit kitchen. She had her hands on her hips and seemed to be looking directly at him. But that was silly, he knew. Outside it was dark. It would be impossible for her to see him.
CHAPTER TWO
Wednesday, September 24
JUD
The sun was shining on another glorious day in Diamond Bay. The most perfect place to live in the nation, Jud thought, staring out the master bedroom window.
>
His oceanfront home, which he had a heavy hand in designing, was one of the most-photographed, most lusted after contemporaries in all of Crystal Beach. It was located inside the premier gated community in Orange County for starters, but beyond that, the architecture was stunning. He was proud of his home’s manly angular lines, its sleek stance perched on the edge of the ocean. This house was a symbol that he had arrived. He smiled and walked across the room and opened the door to the master bathroom complex—complete with his and hers showers, tubs, vanities, and bathrooms, sitting rooms, and changing areas.
Jud was leaving for a trip this morning. To Paris he’d told Sarah. He had the packing process down to a science, or was it an art? He wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, he was good at it. It helped that all of his dress shirts were dry-cleaned, and hanging up by color and weight in his closet. His pants, T-shirts, and even his shorts were just as orderly. All he had to do was place his suitcase on the center island of his walk-in closet and stroll the perimeter pulling items for the trip, placing them carefully in their designated spots in his suitcase. It was an art, he decided.
He did love Paris in the fall, the trees changing colors in the Tuileries, the lessening of the crazy summer crowds. Wearing scarves—he’d practiced how to tie them until it was natural—and lightweight jackets against the hint of winter in the air. The conference itself was only two days long, but he had bookended it, arriving two days early and departing two days after. Plenty of time to enjoy everything, he thought in anticipation.
“Almost time for breakfast, Dad,” Ashley said, peeking in the closet and giving him a shy smile. She was his finest accomplishment, he realized, polite, gorgeous, athletic. She was another important part of his entire life package. He gave her a big smile.
“Thanks, honey,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute.” Jud zipped the suitcase closed and took time to look at himself in the mirror. He’d need Botox soon, he realized, frowning and examining the lines between his eyebrows. They were returning and he couldn’t have that. He liked speaking around the world, and he knew part of his appeal, besides his expertise on the patent-covered surgical procedure he’d invented, was his appearance. He flexed his bicep and watched it bulge under the fabric of his white dress shirt. He opened his iPhone and called Tom, his assistant. The man was a late sleeper, Jud knew, shaking his head as the call rolled to voicemail. Even though he’d see him later, he left a message asking him to block out a half hour in his schedule after the trip. He was so busy, he had Tom insert lunches, visits from his tailor, workouts, and physical appearance maintenance into his calendar. Otherwise his schedule would be all work, no play. His packing and preparation complete, he grabbed his suitcase and headed downstairs.