by Sherri Smith
“Why didn’t you call and tell me any of this?”
“I was going to, when I knew for sure. I just didn’t want to disappoint you if I was wrong. So I started talking to Joanna. I asked a few things about that lake house, who owned it, for how long, did her mom go there too. I guess I started to freak her out, so I just told her I thought I could be her uncle. She was so happy about it. She even thought we had the same nose. We talked about going to St. Roche to do an avuncular test months ago, but it didn’t work out. Joanna had a lot of other things going on, so I didn’t push it, obviously. Plus we kind of built this nice rapport, like I was the cool uncle she could talk to, y’know? She brought it up again a couple of weeks before she went missing, when it seemed she was starting to feel better after everything she’d gone through. She just asked me, don’t you want to know for sure? So I set up an appointment.”
“You know you can send away for those kits? You didn’t have to go to GenTech.”
“The kits don’t hold up in court, and if Peter Russo was our father, I wanted to sue for back payments on child support. It’s just, when I figured it out and called Peter, and he refused to come to the phone, refused, I was just so pissed. I fixated on the money after that. He owed us something. He could at least help us pay for Mimi’s care. I just wanted something from him, y’know?”
“I do, but you didn’t think that could have been misinterpreted? You and a student, alone in a car, headed out of town?”
“I was used to those kinds of rumors. I didn’t take them seriously enough. I mean, there’s one every year about me and some student, so I just decided, what the hell.” He shrugged. “It was stupid, I know that, but I was sure the test would be positive, so if anyone were to misinterpret it, I could say I was her uncle. It didn’t matter anyway because Joanna canceled. She felt so bad about it, she cut off some of her hair and gave it to me. She thought I could use that.”
He shook his head again; a sad little burst of air escaped the back of this throat. “She was just like that, y’know? A good, considerate kid. I kept it, the hair, because it felt wrong to throw it out. Plus, who knows, maybe I could have used it if we never got a chance to do a swab test. Which I guess we didn’t.”
“What about the phone? You should have gotten those kids arrested.”
“Joanna had threatened to kill herself if anyone else found out about what the players did to her. She trusted me.” He touched his chest. He said this with such conviction; I could tell he’d gotten lost in his own sense of uncle-duty. “I felt it was more important that the players didn’t send the pictures around, have it go viral. Even if I did manage to get all the pictures and had the players charged with assault and removed from school and the team, other kids would find out who the girl was and make Joanna’s life a living hell. It’s happened before. She begged me not to do anything, to keep the phone. I had more power over those kids with the phone and the threat of arrest. When I was put on a leave, I brought it all home to hide it.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the police when you were put on leave and tell them about all of this?” A nurse came along, flicking at the end of the needle to inject a sedative that I would normally so welcome, startled when she saw I was awake, and said she’d have to get the doctor. “Could you hold off? Just a little while?” I asked. She glanced at Lucas, a flash of a hopeful, flirty smile, though he didn’t notice, and said she could give me another few minutes, max, and catwalked out. “So?” I prompted. Lucas chewed his bottom lip. It was something we both did when we were worried or thinking hard.
“So. I didn’t go to the police, because the day after Joanna went missing, Madison came to see me. She said she had a message from Joanna, not to worry about her. She just needed a little time to sort things out because she was pregnant. I guessed that was why she canceled St. Roche. I kept thinking, just when it seemed things were turning around for her, this had to happen. I knew all about her bad relationship with her mom. I knew she faked injuries every so often to get out of dancing, and maybe getting pregnant would finally be her way out of whatever pressure Kathy was putting on her. I don’t know, it just made sense she’d stay away.”
“But Joanna was missing for three weeks.” So Kathy wasn’t abusing her daughter. I really was just a cruel knife-twister in her eyes. Not a good feeling. I was wrong, but so was she.
“I know. I would obviously have done things differently now. But at the time, Madison kept coming to my classroom between classes, feeding me bits of information like Joanna was about to go back home. She was about to tell her mom she was pregnant, but was afraid Kathy would make her have an abortion. Then something else would happen—Joanna decided herself not to keep it and was going to return after she got an abortion. Then she’d change her mind again. There was something too about how Dylan was going to meet up with Joanna and they were going to live at his mom’s house. Then that plan fell through. She was always on the verge of coming back and then something would happen. I was being fed a line of shit, and I fucking bought it,” he said, incredulous.
“Didn’t you ask where she was?”
“Of course I did. Sheesh, Mia are you going to let me tell you or not? I feel like I’m in another police interview.”
“OK, sorry.”
“I asked Madison over and over, but she wouldn’t tell me where Joanna was staying. She’d drop hints, but then say Joanna had moved on to someplace else. Some other friend’s house or a cousin. Whenever I pushed Madison to tell her mother or the police or else I would do it for her, she would just shut down. I’m talking a hyperventilating tantrum. Crying, rocking back and forth. She said if I told, then I’d be the one responsible for killing her sister because Joanna would commit suicide for sure—how fucked up is that? But Joanna committing suicide, it really wasn’t that far-fetched. I knew Joanna was in a fragile state. She was pregnant. She had a troubled relationship with her mom. This girl was feeling increasingly depressed and trapped. In the meantime my truck was trashed; people were really starting to talk. When I was put on a leave and the police asked me to come in for an interview, I told Madison that was it. I was done. I was telling the police that she knew where her sister was. She begged me to give Joanna the weekend. She looked at me with these big, watery eyes and promised that Joanna would be back on Monday. I never would’ve thought—” Lucas let his head droop forward, clawed his forehead. I couldn’t see his face, but I guessed it was full of self-loathing. “I gave her the weekend.”
“It’s not your fault.” Yes, he should have done things differently, but he couldn’t blame himself for what Madison did.
He looked up at me, his cheeks bloodred. “Yes it is. You want to know the most pathetic part?’
“Lucas.” I hated how much he was blaming himself. I wanted to stand up and hug him and tell him none of this was his fault.
“I was actually thinking somewhere in the back of my head that when Joanna did resurface, she would probably tell people how I’d protected her from the players, from herself, that I’d helped her get some space from her family before she did something more drastic than fake a twisted ankle. I kept picturing Peter hearing about it, about me, and thinking I was a better man than him. That I was a good guy.” Lucas stared at something on the floor. His forehead went veiny. So that was it. That was why his actions were so off. So out of sync.
“That’s not pathetic. You felt rejected. Look at me.” He did. “You’re not pathetic.” He gave me a headshake that said he’d need more convincing, but not now. Blew out a gust of air and threaded his hands together loose between his knees.
“Madison already knew I was her uncle, you know. I don’t know when Joanna told her, but she knew.”
I had a flash of Joanna’s last moment. Literally pleading uncle to her sister just before Madison started to tighten the scarf. “What happened next?”
“Next thing I knew, Bailey showed up at my door Sunday afternoon saying Joanna was in the basement and wanted to talk to me. When I got
there, it was Madison. Madison.” He said her name again, slowly, like it was some foreign word he’d just learned. “I had no idea she had a crush on me. Sometimes she said inappropriate things, wore revealing clothes. I’d find her waiting for me at my car, sitting in my chair, or she’d lean across the desk, trying to be provocative, but she wasn’t that different from the other girls in her crew. She’s fourteen. Eric said girls that age were test-driving their sexuality and to ignore it—”
“Eric’s an idiot.”
“I just didn’t think…” He shuddered. “Fuck, and that whole time that little psycho had killed her.”
“They made bracelets out of her hair. Bailey and Madison. I don’t know which one is more terrifying; Bailey, who went along with it for the fun and fringe benefits of having a popular, rich friend, or Madison, who could kill her own sister over an infatuation with someone she could never really have.”
“They both scare the shit of me. I didn’t even know Joanna was dead until Garrett told me. She was such a bright girl. She reminded me of you. I knew she was going to be OK, once she got out of this town. Away from her mom.” He went quiet.
I was starting to need whatever the nurse had in that syringe. “So I met Dad.” I said it all breezy, or as breezily as I could manage, like Lucas and I were having lunch in some café. I didn’t want us to be sucked into the vortex of whatever PTSD might be on the horizon, not yet.
He looked up. “What a dick, huh?”
“A total dick.”
“Well, maybe Peter’s not a total ass.” He pulled an envelope off the table. “This is for you.” He brought it up close so I could watch as he opened it for me. A card with purple flowers coated in a sparkly dust.
GET WELL SOON.
I realize any apology is lacking, especially one made here, but it must be said: I am sorry. I would like to get to know you, if you’ll let me.
—Peter Russo
Lucas unfolded the paper that was inside it. A check. Not a set-for-life check but definitely an amount that changed life as we knew it. It was probably hush money, but we’d never have to worry about paying for Mimi’s care again. We wouldn’t have to worry about a lot of things if we cashed it.
“I got one too.” He flashed a hard grin at me.
“Should we accept it?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
So he didn’t know. I told Lucas an abbreviated version of my meeting with Peter. He hunched forward, listening, nodded once with a fleeting look of satisfaction that he finally knew the truth about Mimi’s accident, but it didn’t last and was quickly replaced with wariness. I was suddenly sorry I’d told him; I’d ruined the money for him. But he had to know.
Lucas kept his elbows on his knees, thinking. When he looked at me again, he said, “What would Mimi do?”
It was a rhetorical question. An exit to the moral dilemma of accepting money from the man who had faked our mother’s car accident.
“Yeah, what would Mimi do?”
“Keep it,” we said at the same time.
“So, what’re you going to do with it?” I asked Lucas. “Get that prime real estate in Wayoata you’re always going on about?”
“Maybe. If I do, it’ll have an impressive guest room. Even get that new-finagled electricity everyone’s talking about?” He did his hillbilly impression, the one he did when he was trying to call me out for being Chicago-snooty.
“OK, first you’re using the word ‘finagled’ completely wrong, like, totally wrong. You teach English, right?” Lucas laughed. “Or maybe you can get something close to your sister in Chicago.”
“That’s an idea. Really, it is.”
“And don’t forget Tom Geller’s cut.”
“Geller? I owe that guy five hundred bucks, and not until the end of the month. I was stupid. I placed a few bets, lost, and haven’t done it again.”
“Five hundred? He tried to shake me down for four grand.” I told him how I’d thought Geller had smashed in my back window.
“Sounds like Geller. Skeeze-bag. I’m done gambling. Really.”
I’d push him later on to make sure he meant it. Send him pamphlets on Gamblers Anonymous programs or whatever. Now wasn’t the time. The nurse was back with a vexed-looking doctor, both ordering me to rest.
Lucas stood up again, rearranged his gown. He came in close, pressed his scabby lips to my cheek, saying, “I’ll be back later,” and started a slow shuffle out of the room, one hand clutching the back of his gown. I watched him go, framed between the crook of the nurse’s elbow and the doctor’s hip. Noticed just as he reached the door, sparks of cherry-red, dazzling amid the hospital’s bile-green color scheme, his high-top LeBrons. He turned back, gave me that chin-up nod that we’d given each other countless times before, a nod that said, We’re OK.
28
SIX MONTHS LATER …
Lucas stood on Mimi’s bed and draped a string of Christmas lights around her window. When he finally got them to stay put with some strategically placed Scotch tape, I plugged them in, and the riotous colors beamed into the room. Mimi clapped her hands and jumped up and down. I’d forgotten how much she loved Christmas. Not just as she was now, but always. (This was why Lucas had stuck that old photo to his fridge—it reminded him of Mimi at her best. He always was more sentimental than me.) Tufts of tinsel were draped everywhere, on the TV, her dresser, and unwisely, in her secret ashtray (we’d deal with that before we left). I kept glancing at a pill bottle on her nightstand and fought the urge to check it out to see if it was something I’d like. I hadn’t touched anything since my last painkiller (prescribed, by the way) three months ago. I won’t lie. It hasn’t been easy, going without the fine tweaks that pills offer, but I am doing it. Whenever a craving bites into me, I lift up my shirt and stare in the mirror at the knife scars that stipple my skin. “You lived, don’t waste it.” I say this to myself out loud. For some reason this works.
Back at work, certain pills no longer made my mouth water. During my time off, while on my “disability leave,” I’d realized I missed my job. Missed my quirky, overnight clientele. Helping that sleep-deprived mother who staggered into the pharmacy, blinking under the hard lights like a feral cat, choose the best medicine to quell her child’s fever and cough. Or gently explaining to a teenage boy, close to dying of embarrassment, that over-the-counter wart remedies don’t work quite the same down there.
There was a pharmacy on every corner for a reason. I was needed.
Mimi insisted we eat our turkey dinners in her room. “You’re here to see me, not those wack jobs.” So here we were, Christmas in Mimi’s room. It was easier this time. Being here. We sat in a little circle, our TV trays angled toward one another. The turkey and instant mashed potatoes and cauliflower and canned beans were all blanketed with the same salted taste, so we kept knocking back the apple cider from our small plastic cups. The Weather Channel (most watched station in Wayoata) was on and playing a steady stream of Christmas carols. Sober Christmas. Almost nice.
The Wilkeses had sent us a Christmas card. A single-sided glossy photograph, with Kathy, Ian, and Ben in matching Christmas sweaters. Ben (wearing stuffed reindeer antlers and maybe an ever-so-slight smear of day-old mascara?) held a framed picture of Joanna. Kathy signed it “The Wilkeses,” which I took to mean no longer included Madison. So we were on their Christmas card list. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t. Either way, it was a surprising gesture.
I’d talked to Garrett too, a lot, over the last few months. First there were visits in the hospital, then over e-mail, and on the phone. Conversations about the upcoming trials mostly but sometimes about life in Chicago, sometimes about life in Wayoata. Garrett wasn’t such an asshole when he wasn’t trying to arrest my brother.
He called both of us immediately when the paternity results came in and Joanna’s unborn child did not match any DNA samples on file. Paternity would be marked unknown. I felt this was a win for Joanna, who’d confided in Eric about seeing an older man s
he didn’t want to get in trouble. Whoever he was, he wasn’t in trouble.
“Here.” Mimi handed us two rolled-up canvases, decorated with Christmas ribbons, made curly by the drag of something contraband-sharp. Two paintings. She gave us each a portrait of ourselves. Lucas received Mimi’s rendering of one of the stock photos that was constantly circulating when he was being accused of murder. The one that was taken when he was coaching, in which he had a furrowed, angry glare, and that was meant to intimate this teacher had a dark side. The one of me was clearly from the press conference.
Lucas made a face. “Really, Mimi? This is what you picked to work with?”
Mimi nodded, full of brimming excitement. “It’s because you’re both so famous. Everyone tells me that.”
“These are nice,” I managed, nudging Lucas with my elbow. Yes, the choices of images were terrible, but it reminded me, in a way, of that feeling I got years ago when she’d just finished getting me ready and we both kissed the tissue. There was care put into getting me just right.
And the painting of me was not a shabbier, rushed version of Lucas’s. It was equal. And I had that thawing feeling again. I wished she hadn’t had the accident. I wished all kinds of things had turned out differently for Mimi. But here we were, and I was thawing.
Dessert was microwaved apple pie. After that, Mimi demanded we sit for another portrait and so we spent the next ninety minutes being accused of moving and getting stiff backs until she said she was tired. She walked us to the door, taking the longest possible route through all the various rooms so she could parade us in front of the other residents. We stood outside the LightHouse, waiting for Mimi to get back upstairs and wave us off through her bedroom window. It was a new thing she had to do; Lucas said if we didn’t wait, then there could be an issue. So we waited. A heavy wet snow was falling like icy licks on our faces, and we had to keep stepping side to side to stay warm.