The Dead Place

by Rebecca Drake

  He folded his hands in front of him on the table, an unpleasantly eager look in his eyes. There was no ring on his left hand. It was at that moment that Kate decided she hated him.

  “Things are fine at home,” Ian said, though the stiffness of his voice betrayed that as untrue.

  Kate added, “All families have problems,” and wished she hadn’t when Mr. Trowle nodded.

  “Yes, yes, of course they do. However, we do find that students with a habit of skipping school have more trouble than most. I know that you recently moved. Perhaps she’s going through a transition period?”

  Was Grace really so unhappy? Kate thought of the conversations she’d tried to have about school and how Grace had blown them off. Everything was always “fine.” She felt a pang of guilt—should she have tried harder, understood that what she’d assumed to be a hormonal teenager’s surliness might be unhappiness?

  Something the counselor said was niggling at her, though, some small, salient detail that was nevertheless important. What was it? He’d said that she was leaving campus in other friends’ cars, that she’d been seen leaving campus…

  “Mr. Trowle, did you say the car was brown?”

  “Yes.” He looked down at his notes. “A brown sedan.”

  Ian looked at Kate. “What?”

  “She’s seeing him again. He drives a brown Mercedes.”

  The color fled from Ian’s face. “But we told her it was over. She promised us.”

  It was Kate’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, and she gets on the bus every morning with the promise that she’s going to school.”

  Grace had fallen asleep on the bench outside the administration offices. She looked younger somehow, more vulnerable curled up on her side with one cheek resting against her arm and her lips slightly parted. Ian shook her roughly awake.

  “What?”

  “Get up, right now.” He grabbed her arm and Grace jerked away. Ian’s lips thinned and he reached out to grab her again, but Kate blocked him.

  “Ian, stop.”

  “Don’t tell me to stop! She’s been lying to us for weeks!”

  “I know, but that isn’t going to help—”

  “Give me your cell phone!” Ian demanded holding out his hand to Grace. “Right now!”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t. We pay the bill for that, it’s ours.”

  Grace dug in her backpack with deliberate slowness. When she emerged with the phone, Ian yanked it from her hand. He flipped open the lid and began punching buttons. Kate knew he was trying to search the call history.

  “We know you’ve been seeing Damien Rattle,” she said.

  Grace’s face went pink, then white. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Don’t bother lying about it.”

  Ian said, “You’ve told enough lies.” He snapped the phone shut. “So he’s changed his number, right? That’s why I’m not seeing it here? Very clever, but I’m going to find out what it is and see just how many calls you’ve made to that loser!”

  “He’s not a loser!” Grace’s voice was similar in timbre to her father’s and held his entire wrath. Her hands balled in fists. “People don’t understand him.”

  Ian laughed, just as he had at Harold Trowle’s comment. An ugly laugh, short and harsh. “Oh, I understand him all right.”

  “You don’t even know him!”

  “We know him well enough to know that we don’t want you seeing him,” Kate said.

  “But I love him!”

  “You’re not old enough to love anybody,” Kate said, but she couldn’t summon the anger of the other two. Instead, she felt a sick twist in her gut. The prayers of a desperate mother veered between Please let her not be sexually active and Please let them be using condoms. It shocked her to even be having these thoughts. Like most things in parenting, it came before you were ready, before you’d adjusted to the idea that your child would walk, would bike, would run away from you with every means at their disposal.

  “I think we all need to take a breath,” Mr. Trowle said. He stood outside the circle just a little, his fleshy face looking from Ian to Grace and back again. “Let’s try to understand Grace’s perspective.”

  “She doesn’t get a perspective. Not on this.” Ian’s face was red, his fingers tapping against his side in a way that suggested he itched to put them on Grace. Kate looked from him to Harold Trowle, and saw an expression of intensity and anxiety in the counselor’s face that suggested someone witnessing child abuse.

  Except that Grace wasn’t abused, far from it. They’d given her all the love and nurturing any two parents could provide. Until a year ago, Kate had held onto the illusion that if you fed and clothed your children and put them in safe schools and provided them with every opportunity that you could afford, that you’d keep your child safe from the Damien Rattles of the world.

  “Let’s all just take a deep breath and we can go back inside to talk.” Harold Trowle’s smarmy smile was in place, but the way he was fiddling with the cell phone attached to his belt made Kate wonder if he had school security on speed dial.

  “Ian, he thinks you’re going to hurt someone,” Kate muttered, tugging on her husband’s arm.

  Ian blinked, seemed to come out of his pater familias mode and really see the others. Kate linked her right arm through his and then her left through Grace’s. She looked at Harold Trowle with a bright, fake smile of her own.

  “Yes, let’s do that.”

  A further thirty minutes of humiliation followed, during which Harold Trowle laid out the school policy. Wickfield High would not suspend Grace, not this time, but she would have to serve Saturday detentions for the number of days she’d skipped, during which time she’d make up the class work she’d missed.

  Grace barely communicated, giving one-word answers to the questions put to her by Harold Trowle, who dug deeper and deeper into his arsenal of teenage jargon and pop psychology pablum in a futile attempt to reach her. “You’ve got to give a little to get a lot, are you down with that?” and, “Honoring your feelings is fly, but parents are people, too.”

  It was hard to sit through, and at the end Kate wasn’t sure who she was more annoyed with, her daughter or the counselor. Ian waited until they were all in the car to pronounce sentence, predictably heavy-handedly.

  “You’re grounded. No cell, no computer. It’s school and home for you. Oh, and your lessons with Dr. Beetleman of course.”

  Hunched over in the backseat, Grace might have been made of stone. She stared out the window and didn’t reply. Equally predictably, this enraged her father.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m not deaf.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, young lady. You really don’t want to push me right now.”

  No response, but Kate saw the eye roll. She had a sudden desire to leave them both to fight it out, tired of listening to their endless arguing. It was one thing to understand that the reason they butted heads was because they were so alike, but it was quite another to have to listen to it.

  It wasn’t that she disagreed with Ian. Something had to be done. Grace was in trouble and they had to act. But they’d acted this way almost a year ago and what had it gotten them? They’d thought that by moving to Wickfield they could sever the relationship between Grace and Damien Rattle, but it hadn’t worked. And he was bad news, of that she was convinced.

  She’d had his number within minutes of that very first meeting, seeing that slouching, indolent overgrown boy, with his expensive car and bad manners, touching her child. She knew his type, every woman had met at least one, the bad boy who appealed to some people because he was dangerous, to others because he was different.

  Had they kept Grace too sheltered? Kate thought she and Ian had been giving their daughter a full but safe childhood. It had seemed especially important, since they lived in a huge metropolis, to protect her as much as possible from the ugliness of life. They’d limited TV viewing, kept careful tabs on her fri
ends and their families, and placed a premium on art and education so that she would learn early what to value.

  And it had worked. For years it had worked. Grace had immersed herself in her music and seemed content moving within the bubble of home, school, and music lessons. The bubble burst when she met Damien Rattle.

  And no amount of telling Grace that this college dropout was not worthy of her had made a difference. She’d been hit by first love and hit hard, and maybe Kate and Ian’s desire to protect her had done more than they intended and kept from her the shrewd ability to recognize fakes.

  “After your grounding’s over, you can see Damien,” she said.

  “What?” Ian and Grace spoke simultaneously, male and female versions of the same voice.

  “But,” Kate said loudly to be heard over them, “and this is a big but, Grace, you can only see him at our house.”

  “I don’t want that kid setting foot in our house!”

  “He doesn’t want to come to our house!”

  “Forbidding her to see him hasn’t worked,” she said to Ian, and then turned to look at Grace. “You are much younger than he is, Grace. If he really cares about you, he’ll respect your parents’ rules for you. We’re not comfortable with you seeing a boy that age without one of us being present.”

  “I’m not comfortable with her seeing that boy at all!” Ian protested.

  “Damien won’t agree to that! It’s like you don’t trust him!”

  “We don’t,” Kate said.

  They’d turned onto their street; home in record time thanks to Ian’s heavy foot on the accelerator. The Toyota purred, the only one to sound contented, as they pulled in the driveway.

  “How long?” Grace asked as they walked in the house.

  “How long what?”

  “How long am I grounded?”

  “I’m not setting a time,” Ian said. “We’ll start with a month—”

  “A month!”

  “—and go from there.”

  “That’s crap!”

  “No, Grace, that’s called natural consequences! You lied to us, you skipped school, you continued to see a boy we’ve forbidden you to see—what did you think was going to happen?”

  “At least Mom’s going to let me see him!”

  “At our house,” Kate repeated. “Only at our house, only with us present.”

  “I don’t have to put up with this crap!” Grace shouted.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” Ian said. “As long as you live under our roof you’ll follow our rules.”

  “I’ll find somewhere else to live!”

  “Until that happens you’re grounded.”

  Angry tears swam in Grace’s eyes. “I hate you!” She ran up the stairs, and the slam of her bedroom door echoed through the house.

  “Well, that was a fun day,” Kate said. “I don’t know about you, but I could really use something to drink.”

  She headed into the kitchen with Ian on her heels. “I can’t believe you said that. What the hell were you thinking, suggesting that she see that boy again?”

  “It didn’t work forbidding her to see him, she did it anyway.”

  “So you reward that deception by giving her exactly what she wants?”

  “It’s not exactly what she wants—she has to see him here.”

  “Do you think you might have consulted me before announcing that?”

  Kate slammed the cupboard door. “Yeah, Ian, apparently as much as it occurred to you to consult me about grounding her.”

  “C’mon, it’s not the same thing at all.”

  “It’s not working, Ian. All the threats and punishment are not getting us anywhere.”

  “It’s not surprising, given that you’ve hardly been present the last year.”

  Kate choked on her drink. She coughed and set it down, surprised to see that her hands trembled. “What does that mean?”

  “Do the math, Kate. When did Grace start having trouble? Right after you were attacked.”

  Kate’s head reeled. Was it really true? She tried to remember when they’d met Damien, what month had that been? What filled her mind instead was the memory of that afternoon, the shock of someone else in her studio, the sound of his voice, the paint dripping onto the floor, the feel of the table hard against her back. She pushed it away.

  “And you’re blaming me for that?”

  “Not for the attack. Of course not.”

  Kate picked up on what he wasn’t saying. “But for Grace? You blame me for her troubles?”

  “I’m just saying that if you’d been more present this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

  Dinner was pizza, grabbed individually by unspoken consent. Kate took hers out to her studio, carefully locking herself in like she always did, to sit and stare at the canvas she’d begun. At least it was beginning to work. Lily Slocum’s face stared out at her, the only thing she’d fleshed out, the rest of her body and the water rushing about that body outlined in pale charcoal. She chewed her single slice without tasting it, and set it aside without finishing. She perched on a stool, paintbrush clutched in hands held tight in her lap. It wasn’t until she felt something wet on her hands that she realized she was crying.

  She dreamed she was caught in the river, her pale body being sucked into the dark water’s murky depths. Large hands held her down as she struggled to escape. “It’s your fault,” the owner of the hands said, and she looked up to see Ian above her. He pressed a hand against her head and she was going down, down into the bottom, she couldn’t breathe.

  She woke in a sweat, her head pressed against the headboard. Ian, as usual, slept on peacefully beside her. She left him breathing deeply on his side of the bed and headed down to the kitchen.

  When she was younger, in those few years before she’d met Ian, when she’d shared a small apartment in Brooklyn, sleepless nights had meant more time in her studio. She’d enjoyed walking the streets of New York at night, convinced in her naïveté that she could outrun anyone who gave her trouble, or knee a man in the groin like she’d learned in a college self-defense course. It had never occurred to her that she could be surprised, that a man could so easily overpower her. She’d been invincible in the way that only the young can be invincible.

  Later, when she and Ian were settled in their apartment in Manhattan, she’d had the comfort of his body next to hers when she woke up. Sometimes, she snuggled against him and fell back into more pleasant dreams. If sleep still evaded her, she’d take out a sketch pad she kept in a bedside drawer and make drawings until her body relaxed and she drifted off. Sometimes, Ian would wake while she was sketching and would smile sleepily at her. Sometimes, they’d make love, another nice distraction, his sleep-warm body wrapping around hers, his skin like a cocoon, slipping into hers with a comforting familiarity.

  She took milk out of the refrigerator and poured it in a saucepan along with a dash of rum. It wasn’t good to drink alone. It was an especially bad habit for an artist to find solace in alcohol. Kate decided the picture of Ian and Grace on the fridge counted as company, and poured a second shot into the saucepan.

  Alone at the kitchen table with her spiked milk, she gave way to the worst of her thoughts, that Grace would end up pregnant or infected from this creep and that she and Ian were imploding, their relationship heading into trouble that she couldn’t have anticipated even a year ago.

  It occurred to her that she was probably clinically depressed, and that made her remember her promise to Ian that she’d find another therapist. The thought of suffering through yet another meeting with an overly solicitous person asking, “What do you think of that?” made her take a drink straight from the bottle of rum.

  A sudden flash of yellow light skated across the breakfast nook, startling her. Kate glanced out the window and saw Terrence Simnic’s boxy brown sedan pulling into the driveway. She ducked down, afraid he’d see her in the glare of the headlights.

  She watched through a gap in the curtains. When the lights turne
d out it was hard to see, but she distinctly heard the sound of a car door slamming and then an echoing slam a few seconds later. There was someone with Terrence and this late at night? Keeping low, Kate switched off the small overhead light framing the table where she sat and pressed her face close against the window.

  It was definitely Terrence, she recognized his hulking profile even in the dark, but it looked like someone shorter was standing just in front of him. She heard footsteps crunching across the driveway, and then silence as the shadows moved up the walk and onto his porch. The jelly-jar porch light was on over the door. The shadows stepped into it. A young woman stood in front of Terrence Simnic, long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Kate caught a glimpse of a pale face, and then the girl was stepping inside the house, Terrence Simnic’s hand on her shoulder.

  Kate’s heartbeat rushed like water in her ears. She stood up, pressing her hands against the glass, and watched Terrence Simnic step into the house after the girl. Seconds later, the porch light went out.

  “God, oh, God, oh, God,” Kate moaned, stepping back from the window. What should she do? Call the cops. She forgot the chair in her way, and knocked it over. It fell backward with a loud thud. Kate scrambled over it and ran for the phone. Only it wasn’t in its cradle. Jesus Christ, why was she the only person in the house who ever remembered to put the portable phone back in its cradle? If she pushed the seek button, it would ring on every phone in the house.

  She searched the counter blindly with her hands, frantic to find it. The kitchen lights suddenly went on and she screamed.

  “Jesus, Kate!” Ian stood in the doorway, hand pressed to his chest. “What the hell are you doing?”