by Nicole Baart
Staring at the computer screen, Lucas gulped back a feeling that ached more than guilt. It was a rawness, a vulnerability that made him both ashamed of himself and angry at Jenna. What right had she to keep that name so close to her when they had agreed that it was best left unsaid?
His eyes clouded as he mouthed it, and when the blue box once again appeared, he tenderly, slowly typed it in: AUDREY.
Access Granted.
Lucas couldn’t stand to read the documents in the house he shared with his wife. It seemed wrong somehow, as if the walls had ears, the lamps eyes, and they would whisper his transgression in an endless round of old-house creaks and sighs. But he printed off every page of his wife’s files on Angela, and when the printer ran out of paper, he used the backs. Then he gathered the thick bundle and crammed it loose-leaf into an unused binder so that he could transport it to his office undetected.
The streets were painted ocher and gray when Lucas pulled into the parking lot of the medical clinic. Another evening spent at work, and Lucas sighed as he made his way through the darkening building. The place was beginning to feel like home, but not in a good way. Behind the four walls of his meticulously clean and organized personal office, Lucas felt trapped and claustrophobic. He didn’t spend so much time at work by choice, but lately he practically lived in the medical clinic because his house with Jenna became less of a home with every passing week. When had everything begun to show cracks?
The binder hit his desk with a thud and Lucas slumped into his chair with the same discarded air. He put his forearms on the smooth cherrywood surface and leaned over with a sharp exhalation that betrayed just how hard his own transgression had hit him. This was just another sin to add to his steadily growing list. A wry smile teased the corner of his mouth. The perfect, dependable, stable Lucas Hudson was about to fall a little further from grace.
To get his bearings amid Jenna’s lengthy notes, Lucas first did a quick survey from the beginning of the stack of papers to the end. He found that his wife had documented every meeting with Angela, from informal coffees to long sessions at her office. The initial report was the longest and most official-looking, complete with sections for Background, Assessment, Intervention, and Referrals. After that, things became a bit more sporadic, and her pages featured bulleted lists and single-paragraph summaries of conversations and interactions.
When the last of the pages had been riffled through, Lucas closed his eyes and pressed his knuckles against the blue-veined lids. As a doctor who took his own Hippocratic Oath very seriously, he wrestled with a sinking feeling of ethical suicide. But the ring still nipped above the knuckle of his pinky, and the pressure against his skin was enough to make him continue.
“Jim,” he reminded himself. “Only references to Jim.”
It helped a little that when Lucas started to read the documents in earnest, his eyes automatically glossed over any personal information about the teenage Angela and lighted instead on every reference to her disreputable father. Lucas had no desire to dirty his hands in the mire that was Angela’s private life; he just wanted to know more about Jim. Who was Jim Sparks? Who did he have ties to? Did he have a violent past? Was he capable of killing his daughter in cold blood and burying her beneath the hard floor of his dilapidated barn?
Before long, Lucas had used the erratic notations and occasional references about Angela’s family situation to piece together a pretty grim picture of life in the Sparks home. He grabbed a new legal pad from the bottom drawer of his desk and began to scratch out random, hurried notes.
Some of the things that Lucas learned merely reinforced the rumors that he had heard ever since moving to Blackhawk. He wasn’t surprised to discover that Angela’s mother had died of breast cancer when her daughter was only four—Dee Sparks’s brief but courageous battle with the disease was common knowledge. Nor was it shocking to read that Jim never remarried or fathered any children he would admit to besides Angela. But there were other insights that made Lucas’s stomach clench.
A need for order in the crumbling chaos of his life caused Lucas to tear the top sheet off his notebook and crush it into a ball that he aimed nowhere in particular. Then, on a fresh sheet of paper, he created a column simply titled “Jim,” and putting aside his emotions, began to jot down anything he considered important.
Single father.
Employed at a chicken processing plant—night shift.
Corporal in the Air National Guard.
Lucas shook his head at the last bit of information. Though he saw Jim in his uniform from time to time, it was always a little unbelievable that the same man who couldn’t muster the energy to pull his trash can to the road on garbage day had maintained the rank of corporal in the Air National Guard. And it was even more implausible that he actually showed up at the 114th Fighter Wing in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, sober, on time, and in a clean and neatly pressed uniform every weekend he was scheduled for duty.
It didn’t seem right that someone with Jim’s position of responsibility and respect could also earn the final notation that Lucas wrote in his careful column.
Abusive.
True, Jenna’s notes didn’t specifically say that Jim abused his daughter, but it all came down to semantics as far as Lucas was concerned. The neglect that Jenna chronicled was more than enough evidence of the dead man’s crime.
According to the pages fanned out across Lucas’s desk, Jim had severely physically neglected Angela when she was a child. Inadequate food, clothing, and sanitation, as well as lack of supervision contributed much to the problems that Angela experienced in high school and beyond.
“Mr. Sparks cannot determine his daughter’s needs because he lacks the knowledge and empathy for child rearing,” Jenna wrote. “The home is unsanitary, Angela’s personal hygiene has been neglected, and empty bottles of Black Velvet litter the kitchen and living room.”
It was no secret that the cheap Canadian whiskey was Jim’s drink of choice. Lucas could almost smell the sickly sweet scent that oozed from Jim’s pores, and he added another bit of information to his list.
Alcoholic.
Staring at the word for a moment, he gave in to his own cautious prudence and reached to carefully pen a question mark behind the written accusation. As far as he knew, no one had ever proved that Jim was an alcoholic. Proof? The thought made Lucas grunt. What did he want to see? A test with a big, red F? He scribbled over the question mark with a heavy hand.
“Mr. Sparks’s expectations are unrealistic.” Jenna continued on another page. “He refuses to access local support systems, even on behalf of his daughter. Offers from neighbors to help him with Angela are ignored, and though I’ve tried on several occasions to convince him to apply for state-funded medical insurance, he refuses. Therefore, Angela does not get proper medical or dental care.”
Lucas discovered that Jim had left his daughter alone for hours. Sometimes days. Angela recalled fending for herself as she lived off boxes of dry cereal and cans of generic pop with names like Yee-Haw and Dr. Thunder. And Angela admitted that things were only worse when Jim was around. Her father was harsh and denigrating, and he used every opportunity to reject both his daughter’s presence and her needs. She was blamed for everything from bad weather to empty cupboards.
“Mr. Sparks uses Angela as a perpetual scapegoat. And because she attracts his blame, she is inattentive, uninvolved, and withdrawn. Her passivity at school and difficulty comprehending day-to-day work sometimes translate into feelings of anger and, according to her teachers, a desire to act out. She feels defenseless. She feels helpless and alone.”
Beneath the typed paragraph, there was a single line, a late notation that Jenna had chosen to highlight in a band of bright yellow. Lucas read and reread her private speculation, wishing he could talk to her about her years-old assessment.
“Is Angela telling me everything?” Jenna wondered in writing. Lucas felt like he could hear the quiet rise and fall of her voice in the cryptic words. The
n, “Is Jim more violent than his daughter is willing to let on?”
“Yes,” Lucas wanted to say. “And in a matter of days, everyone will know.”
It was little comfort.
8
MEG
Meg Painter didn’t believe in gray. In her world, everything was either black or white, right or wrong, hot or cold. She was unapologetically all or none, and when Dylan walked away from her after his transformation in the Sutton High spring production, she turned her back on him and did everything in her power not to look over her shoulder. Brave intentions aside, her self-imposed exile proved weak and ineffective.
Although she struggled to leave her former best friend behind, Meg couldn’t cure herself of him. She couldn’t stop herself from falling all over again every time he entered a room. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about him in the quiet moment before she drifted into sleep, when her mind was still and soft, submissive to thoughts that she tried to repress all day long. And though it was tacitly understood that they were no longer what they had been—contentedly inseparable, two halves of the same—Meg and Dylan continued to see each other all the time, especially when school started again in the fall and she had to pass him in the halls every day. If Meg could have excised the corner of her heart that seemed to beat for Dylan alone, she would have done it without pause. But ridding herself of the ache of his loss wasn’t as simple as a sudden amputation.
The one small blessing that Meg could ascertain in the slow decay of her life as she knew it was that no one else seemed to notice that everything was not as it should be. Her days were more or less normal, though the space that Dylan had occupied felt dry and barren, cracked in the places where Meg had planted daydreams like a hopeful gardener. No one heard the echo of her loneliness against the walls of the chasm that marked what might have been. Least of all Dylan, who gave up on the girl who had played Celia soon enough and turned to Lisbeth, his beloved Rosalind. And then to some girl almost farcically named Candi. More specifically—as she liked to point out—Candi with an i.
In early September, when Jess started a band in his garage and asked Dylan to play bass, for some unfathomable reason he made sure that Meg was invited, too. Her place in the revels was ingenuous, but it felt cruel to Meg all the same.
“Do you play?” Jess had asked her one afternoon as they shot hoops in the cul-de-sac. The Painters had put up a basketball hoop on their side of the circle when Bennett turned ten and his father still had high hopes for his physical prowess. Not to be outdone, Jess’s parents soon followed suit and erected an identical hoop on the opposite corner. The improvised basketball court was enormous, but it allowed for teams as big as the growing neighborhood could devise. Meg spent hours pounding a ball against the pavement, but Bennett never really used it. Conversely, Sarah never touched a basketball, but her brother, Jess, could be found most afternoons taking shot after shot. Meg learned to do the perfect layup from watching Jess.
“Basketball, BMX, Bloody Murder . . .” Jess continued, teasing. “I know you’re athletic, Meg, but do you have an artistic side, too?”
“I played the recorder in third grade,” she told him, straight-faced. “You should hear my rendition of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ ”
Jess laughed and tossed her the ball.
Meg lined up behind a crooked, spray-painted free throw line and took her time measuring the angle. Dribbling a few times, she straightened and let the careful shot arc from the quick flow of her arms. Nothing but net.
“Though I’m sure your recorder skills are impressive, I don’t think that’s quite the sound we’re going for.”
“Too bad.” Meg caught the rebound and bounced it back to Jess. “What are you going for?”
He grinned a lopsided smile that pulled one corner of his mouth into an attractive dimple. It caught Meg by surprise, but before she could marvel at the realization that Jess Langbroek was more man than child, he told her: “We’re the original Sutton grunge band.”
It was Meg’s turn to laugh. “Cover tunes?” she asked. “Or will you write your own stuff?”
“All original, of course.” He shot and the basketball slammed off the backboard and careened across the cement.
Meg chased it down, then spun on her heel and threw it back toward the hoop in a hard, fast curve. The ball rode the rim for a spin or two and tipped through the net. “We should be playing for money,” she grumbled.
“You’d clean me out, Meglet,” Jess joked, using a nickname that she hadn’t heard in years. She was about to bite off some witty retort, but before she could, Jess snagged the rebound and threw the ball at her with more force than necessary. Even though she caught it, it thumped against her chest.
“Oh,” she moaned, not bothering to disguise her good-natured sarcasm. “You’re too tough for me Jess, too manly. Where’s Sarah?”
He seemed taken aback, but shrugged it off. “Dunno.”
“Maybe I’ll go see if she’s around,” Meg said, lobbing the ball back at him granny-style.
Jess watched her go, but as she neared the garage door, he called, “Where’s Dylan?”
Meg lifted her hands, admitting she didn’t know without uttering a word. Her gesture seemed casual, but the truth was that she didn’t trust her voice not to betray how she felt about Dylan’s growing absence.
“I thought you . . .” he cocked his head at her for a moment, and Meg was convinced she could see wheels spinning behind the cool watery blue of his eyes. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nah. Just come to practice tomorrow night. If you can’t play an instrument, we’ll try you on vocals.” Jess began dribbling the ball, concentrating on the basketball hoop instead of Meg. “Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“I’ll get you a pack tomorrow. I like the husky smoker sound.”
Meg flipped him the bird, and though he was watching his ball as it collided against the rim and recoiled from the net, he gestured right back at her. She opened her mouth to yell at him, but even at a distance, she could tell that he was smiling.
The next night, Meg didn’t head over to the Langbroeks’ garage until nearly an hour after the so-called music started. Mostly the sounds bleeding from beneath the far-from-airtight doors were comparable to some form of primitive torture—Meg could easily imagine giving up all her secrets if subjected to such tuneless nonsense for any amount of time. But she had told Jess that she would come. Sort of.
Whether or not she cared to admit it, Jess had nothing to do with Meg’s decision to partake in the inaugural festivities of his little wannabe band. She knew that Dylan was there. She had heard the throaty rumble of his brother’s pickup when Dylan was dropped off. His presence was more than enough reason for her to endure any off-key attempts at music, but not convincing enough to make her run across the cul-de-sac the moment the first withering note pierced the night.
When Meg did finally decide to grace the guys with her presence, she slipped into the garage unnoticed and stood for a few minutes with her back to the door, taking it all in. The group didn’t have microphones, but a few of them had shoddy-looking amps that boasted long cables like the curling tails of fantastical creatures from some Dr. Seuss book. Dylan was one of the boys with an amp, and he sat straddling a short stepladder, one foot resting on the piece of equipment with a possessive air. His bass sported a crack in the side and a hand-me-down veneer, but he had the instrument spread across his knees almost lovingly. Every once in a while he plucked a single string, and the resonant hum of a low, deep note would pool like water beneath the cacophony of other instruments. Meg could feel the reverberation of it in her heart.
Tearing her eyes from him, Meg found Jess at the center of the space the guys had cleared between a tarp-covered car and the tangled row of Langbroek family bikes. He seemed to be tuning his acoustic guitar, the pick between his teeth as he tried to get each note just right. Meg doubted he had the faintest clue what he was doing.
&
nbsp; The rest of the band seemed equally unqualified for the task before them. There was a drummer who appeared to be more interested in twirling his drumsticks than using them to encourage a steady beat into the din, and a guy with an electric guitar whose tongue peeked from between his clenched teeth as he struggled with chord after chord. A fifth member looked instrumentless, directionless, and completely clueless. All in all, Jess’s band painted a very sorry picture in the musty garage, and Meg groped behind her back for the door handle and escape. It was just too much: too much noise and testosterone and striving. Too much uncertainty. She felt distinctly out of place.
But just as she was about to leave, Jess looked up and noticed her. The line etched across his forehead cleared and he said something, but Meg couldn’t hear him over the ruckus. Reluctantly, she let go of the door and cupped an ear.
Jess turned to his band, using his arms to hush them. It took a few moments, but they eventually caught on, and in the ensuing silence Meg could feel the ripples of phantom sound waves like static in the air.
“You came,” Jess said, breaking the blessed peace.
Meg pursed her lips and nodded once. “But I can’t stay,” she began, tipping her thumb over her shoulder as if the reason for her leave-taking stood just out of sight. “I’ve got . . . uh . . .”
“You can’t go,” Jess broke in. He glanced quickly at Dylan and said in a stage whisper, “Dylan needs you to focus, he’s really screwing things up here.”
“Uh-huh.” Meg rolled her eyes and was momentarily thrilled to see Dylan do the same. His lips pulled into a desultory smile, but he didn’t wink at her like he once would have.
“Come on,” Jess urged. “Stay. I bought you smokes, just like I promised.” He reached into the breast pocket of his button-down shirt and threw a pink-and-white pack of Virginia Slims at her.