“Seems like she’s your number-one fan, Mr. C.,” said Owen as Walker scooped up Zoe and placed her on his shoulders.
“She’s my buddy,” he replied. “Best pal, this little gal. Right here.” Owen flashed me a smile and, when Walker’s back was turned, reached behind him for my hand, helping me up the last few stairs. Was he chivalrous? Was he some kind of lady-killer? Or—it hardly seemed possible—did he like me? What had he been about to tell me? He’d sounded so . . . serious. So sad. I forced the questions out of my head when I realized one important fact: it didn’t matter. Right in that moment, he was holding my hand. He gripped it a few seconds longer than necessary and gave it a little squeeze before letting it drop. My heart felt like it was about to explode. It was beating so forcefully I was sure everyone in the house could hear it.
Dinner raced by after that. Every time I took a bite of mashed potatoes or reached for my water glass, Owen was there to distract me: His hand, reaching for the serving knife. His eyes, meeting mine over the table. His voice, his grin, his smell. It was like my senses were on overload. While we were at that table, Owen was everywhere. He enveloped me in a warm, protective shield. He wasn’t mad at me; not even close. There was still a chance.
I was so distracted by the dynamic between Owen and me that I didn’t even notice Libby’s cold silence through the meal. I finally recognized that something was amiss when she stood up from the table halfway through dessert, claiming she had a splitting headache and needed to lie down. But it still didn’t seem all that unusual. Maybe it should have, I don’t know, but that’s what happens when you start to fall in love. Love blinds you to everything. All the signs you should see, all the details you’d never normally miss—they give way to the only thing you really want to see: his face. And the warnings, the things you would have perked up to in the past? You don’t hear them, because they’re not the sound of his voice. Love is a very beautiful, very dangerous thing.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
SUNDAY WAS MY DAY OFF, but I had way too much homework to actually take a day off. By the time I woke up at ten A.M., got dressed, and wandered downstairs, Walker, Libby, Zoe, and Jackson were already gone. Libby had left a note for me on the kitchen island. “Back around 4,” it read, without the usual details or smiley face.
It was good that they were gone, though. I had a lot of homework to finish, and Owen and I had made tentative plans to hang out that night. We’d seen each other only a few times since he and his parents had come over for dinner, but those few times were enough to make it hard to concentrate on anything else. And I had a critical essay due the following week in my lit class. To my surprise, the feminist unit had quickly become my favorite. As a whole, the class was far and away more interesting than the Elements of Design class I was now only taking because I felt terrible letting Libby down.
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories was really good so far, but I’d only just started reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” itself, and that was supposed to be the basis for my essay. We’d been talking about a period of female oppression in which women were sent to asylums for pretty much any reason at all—for being “slutty,” even if they were victims of rape; for having anxiety; for being troublesome—and this story was supposed to illustrate the feminine psyche being driven mad. We’d talked a lot in class about mental illness as a product of the era and environment rather than chemical imbalance, and how it was used as an excuse to control women who bothered to speak up or act in a manner that was considered rebellious.
The Yellow Wallpaper, my professor said, was interesting because it was written by one woman who was nearly driven mad by the real-life advice of the doctor who was treating her. Then when she wrote the story—about a woman whose husband prevents her from working and encourages isolation and bed rest as a cure for depression/nerves—it changed the way that doctor treated his patients from then on. So in her own way, this writer made huge strides for women.
I was really into the background—I was interested in literary theory as a whole—and I was psyched to sit out on the upper balcony of the Cohens’ house, with its gorgeous view of the Pacific, and drink iced tea and read the story. What I wasn’t prepared for was how creepy the story would be.
Half an hour in, I was sufficiently freaked out. The heroine in the story had begun to see a creeping woman behind the pattern of the wallpaper. By the end of the story, I was so jittery it may as well have been midnight and not midday. I actually missed Zoe’s normalizing—if slightly whiny—presence. The woman in the story had become convinced that she was the woman trapped in the wallpaper. She crept around the room, dragging her shoulder against the wallpaper, and she tore the paper off the wall in shreds. When her husband finally found her, just a day from leaving the awful prison of the room, she’d already gone completely crazy. She’d turned into a literal creeper. It almost made me grateful for the lack of privacy in my own room.
Just as I was reaching the end, my cell phone rang. Hoping for Owen, my heart leaped; ever since the dinner party, we’d been back on texting terms. But a call would have been a new thing. I looked eagerly at the name lighting up the display: Libby Cohen.
“Hey, Libby,” I said, trying to mask my disappointment.
“I need you to do something for me,” she said without bothering with a greeting. “Turn on the oven to three-fifty and throw in a pot roast, okay? The meat and vegetables are in the fridge and you can just grab a can of stewed tomatoes from the pantry. It shouldn’t take longer than fifteen minutes.” I knew it would take longer, but that wasn’t my concern.
“Will you be home to take it out?” I asked.
“Why, will you not?”
“I’d planned to meet Owen at—”
Libby sighed loudly from the other end. “Fine. Just hook up the slow cooker. It won’t be as good, though. God, I haven’t used that since . . . ever. It’s at the bottom of the pantry, toward the back. Just hook it up and I’ll take care of it when I’m home.” She made it sound like I was doing her a disservice by allowing her to “take care of it” herself. And besides, wasn’t the point of slow cookers that they do all the work themselves?
I sliced up tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, potatoes, and zucchini for the stew. I hoped that would be okay. I added some stewed tomatoes from a can and a little salt and pepper. I sliced the meat into cubes and added a dash of rosemary. I’d used a slow cooker many times before, all those times when my mother couldn’t. I’d woken up early before school and thrown everything in so that Dean would have something to eat when he got home from the parts store in the afternoon. I didn’t even have to think about what I was doing anymore.
By the time I finished, I needed a change of pace. I could work on my paper later, I decided. Why not go find Owen right then? It was kind of ridiculous that we didn’t see more of each other, given that he lived right next door. Unless he didn’t like me? The thought was ridiculous; I hated how insecure I was about Owen. It’s not like there had been any other girls coming and going over the past few weeks—I knew very well there weren’t, because I’d become a vigilant spy in my downtime. But there was something about him that was so confident, so secure—it had the very opposite effect on me. It derailed me. It made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.
I swallowed my paranoia—the awful fantasy I had of showing up unannounced and finding him with another girl—and threw on my swimsuit. I’d pack a picnic, and maybe we could drive down to the shore.
I packed us two turkey sandwiches on focaccia, some cheese, a bunch of olives, fresh cherries, banana bread, and San Pellegrino. One of the benefits of living here was that Libby was a food nut, but she didn’t eat any. She was obsessed with buying good food and always foisted it on me, hating to see it go to waste. As a result, I’d eaten more types of cheese in the last month than I previously knew existed. It kind of put those billowy shirts from the garage in perspective . . . if they were in fact hers.
I was halfway down the drivew
ay when my phone rang again. I switched the picnic basket awkwardly over to my right hand, fumbling in my jeans pocket. I picked the phone up just as it went to voicemail. Libby again. I pressed “call back” before she could leave a message.
“Nanny, I’d appreciate it if you would pick up the phone a little more promptly when I call,” she told me. I bristled. I’d gotten to it as fast as I could, and . . . had she really called me Nanny again?
“I’m sorry,” I told her through gritted teeth.
“Before you leave, I really need you to make sure Zoe’s lunch is packed for tomorrow morning’s play-date,” she said. “Who knows what time we’ll be back tonight, and I don’t want to have to worry about it before bed.”
“Okay,” I said, sighing inwardly. “Is there anything else?”
“No,” she said, after a pause. “Not right now. But I’ll call you if I think of anything.”
I decided to leave the picnic basket in the driveway while I prepared Zoe’s lunch. When I finished a few minutes later, it was only a half an hour ’til I’d planned on meeting Owen in the first place. I wondered briefly if I should just wait it out in the house, but decided I didn’t want to lug that picnic basket any more than I had to.
“Just the girl I was hoping to see.” Owen swung the door open seconds before I pressed the doorbell. “And bearing food? How did you know this was my fantasy?”
I laughed. “How did you know I was at the door?” I asked. “Stalker.”
“It’s just that we’re so connected,” he replied. “Plus, I happened to see a strange basket lying abandoned in the middle of your driveway.
“Oh. Right,” I said.
“Ohhhh, someone thought I was keeping an eye on her! Getting cocky, are we?” He flashed me a playful grin that illuminated his green eyes.
“So I just swung by to ask if you had any soda,” I said seriously. “I was bringing this picnic to a guy down the street and I realized, gosh darn, I’m clean out of refreshments. . . .”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get it. I’ll stop. Assuming you’re joking about Mystery Boyfriend, where shall we go?”
“You got wheels?” I asked. “Hanging out at your place has been great, but I’m dying for a tour of this city. It seems all I do these days is work.”
“At your service, madame. Just give me a sec.” I nodded, moving into the foyer as he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I liked Owen a lot. I liked that for all his banter, he was open and honest. I liked that he wasn’t afraid to show me he liked me. Maybe it was because he was twenty. Maybe older guys were just like that. But then I thought of Dean, and somehow I doubted he was the exception. Owen emerged from the kitchen a minute later carrying a Ziploc bag full of cookies. I tried unsuccessfully to hide my giddy pleasure. He’d thrown on a button-down shirt over his T-shirt and shorts, and he’d rolled up the sleeves over his tanned forearms. He was so different from the guys I’d dated back home. They’d had a raw, sexy energy, but Owen was real, and he was sweet, and he was good. It all combined for a more powerful want than I’d ever felt.
“You dressed up for me,” I blurted out. And instead of saying something witty back, it was his turn to blush.
“Just didn’t want to embarrass you,” he said mildly. “So, these are my mom’s famous chocolate chip cookies.” He extended the bag toward me, obviously eager to change the subject.
“What makes them famous?” I wanted to know.
“They just are. Once you taste them, you’ll get it.” Owen gestured toward the front door and we walked out together, climbing into his Jeep. I loved that Owen was probably the last guy on the planet to drive a Jeep Wrangler. It made him even cuter.
“But did you ever notice that the word famous automatically makes a thing more appealing?” I asked him. “Like, if I were going to open my own restaurant, I’d call all of my creations ‘Annie’s Famous Green Beans’ and ‘Famous Apple Crisp’ or whatever.”
“What are you running, a Southern diner? I’ve got news for you, little lady. These cookies actually are famous. They won the Hershey’s bake-off in 1987.” I burst out laughing; I couldn’t help it. “Hey now.” He looked faux-wounded. “It’s a big deal! They fly you out to New York for those things.”
“I believe it,” I said soberly. “What was the grand prize?”
“Cash award,” he said. “Plus a cookbook with recipes from all the other contestants.”
“So basically . . . a cookbook with all of the losing entries,” I clarified.
“Yep. I’d say that’s pretty much it.”
“Hopefully the cash award was generous.”
“It’s not polite to discuss money,” he said. He was only kidding, but his words reminded me of the incident in the Cohens’ garage.
“Ugh,” I said aloud. My resolve weakened, and I reached in the bag for a cookie. “Oh my god! These are amazing!” I wasn’t lying. The chocolate chips were somehow still melty inside the soft, chewy dough. Yet the cookie itself was cool, like they’d been baked hours or maybe even a whole day before. How did the melty chips exist within cool dough? It was a science miracle.
“Why the ‘ugh’?” Owen wanted to know.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, waving it off. “Just something you said reminded me of this thing that happened a while back. I accidentally stumbled across some files I wasn’t supposed to see, and I almost got fired over it.”
“Unbelievable,” Owen said, visibly bristling.
“What? I shouldn’t have been snooping through their stuff.”
“Well, were you? Actually snooping, I mean?”
“No. I was trying to move some boxes in the garage, and one of the boxes broke and everything fell all over the place. But I should have been more careful about letting my eyes wander where they shouldn’t have been.”
“Well, what did you see?”
“Just some financial information,” I hedged. “Nothing terribly personal.”
“I can’t believe they’d fire you over what was obviously a total accident,” Owen muttered. We were driving along Highway 1, watching the coastline breeze by. Owen was an expert driver, dodging traffic with confidence, one arm resting on the open window.
“What? It’s not like they actually fired me.” I hadn’t even told him the bad part, but his mood had turned darker within seconds.
“You’re right. Just a knee-jerk reaction, sorry. I think they’re good people, I just . . . I don’t know what it is. Something doesn’t sit well. But I’m probably just reading into it.” He turned up the music, nodding his head along with Fun. But in my periphery I could see his eyebrows knitting together, the way he rubbed his bottom lip with his index finger, controlling the wheel with his opposite hand. And then my phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket and motioned for Owen to turn down the music.
“Hey, Libby,” I said, with a pointed look in Owen’s direction. He pursed his lips disapprovingly. “No, I’m with Owen. No, we’re pretty far away right now. Yeah. Okay. All right. It’s not a problem. I put the green one in the wash yesterday. All right. Okay, thanks, sorry for leaving it out. Yep. Thanks. Bye.”
“What?” I asked defensively when I hung up. “She needed to know if one of Walker’s shirts was clean. And I guess I left my lit reading on the deck, and she brought it inside for me.”
“They make you do housework too?”
“Not really. Just light stuff here and there when the maid cancels, or if it builds up before her day off. They cut her schedule back a little since I can do a lot of it myself pretty easily.” I avoided his eyes, knowing what he’d have to say about that.
“Did she give you a hard time for leaving it outside?” he wanted to know. “It sounded like you were apologizing.”
“Not really, she just doesn’t love it when there’s clutter. I totally get it,” I said defensively.
“Are you their babysitter or their maid? And isn’t this supposed to be your day off?”
“You’re acting sort of weird,” I inf
ormed him. “Just relax.” He let out a frustrated noise akin to that of a baby lion in distress. A bereaved sort of growl that made me laugh. I liked how Owen was just Owen around me, no pretension, no real efforts at being someone other than whom he’d always been. I’d only known him a few weeks, but I already felt closer to him than I’d ever been to anyone, really. I’d hung out with a couple of guys in high school, and of course I’d had those few months with Daniel, but those other guys were just faces. Bodies. Ways to pass the time. It was hard to explain, but those people were just hands holding my hands, lips pressed against mine, people to watch movies with and go to parties with and make out with. Owen was different: more and better in ways I didn’t fully understand. And then it hit me: I didn’t feel like an outsider around him. I didn’t feel damaged, bad, deformed. But he doesn’t know about Lissa, said the ever-persistent voice in my head. He doesn’t know who you are, not really. And what will he think of you then? I decided to ignore the voice for as long as I could. Besides, Owen was different from Daniel. I could let Owen in.
“And you know, even my dad was a little offended,” Owen went on. “She was kind of critical. And I mean, she’s, like, twenty-four. My mom’s in her fifties. She knows a little more about life than Libby.”
“Wait, what?” I’d zoned out while he was talking. “Who’s twenty-four?”
“Libby. You didn’t know that? God, just look at her.” He let out a low whistle.
“Um, obviously you have.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not into hyper-maintained women. I mean, Jesus. She probably sleeps in her makeup. She’s definitely not my type.” I thought it over. I’d thought Libby was around thirty. The way she dressed, the way she carried herself . . . she just seemed thirtyish. She was beautiful and young-looking, sure. But twenty-four? It seemed impossible.
“She can’t be twenty-four,” I argued. “That means she graduated from college, like, three years ago. Walker’s not that creepy. And Walker is definitely not twenty-four.”
The Ruining Page 12