by Various
Aimee had learned to embrace her bare-bones lifestyle as a direct affront to her parents. It was a giant fuck you to the both of them: she hadn’t starved to death like they had expected her to, and she hadn’t crawled back to them for help either. He knew it gave her satisfaction that her parents were irked. They had expected her to fail, to run back home and beg them to take her back.
In fact, Patricia Riley still hoped for this to happen. Jack suspected she was patiently waiting for Aimee to announce the dissolution of their marriage. Patricia Riley was a gambling woman. He’d bet a hundred bucks she had a ladies’ wager on it.
“It’s just the whole thing with the accident,” Jack said. “And now Charlotte is sick. And we’re being forced to use Aimee’s old man’s car until we come up with the money to buy a new one. Aimee’s on edge.”
“So what do you want me to do? Cancel?” Reagan shook his head. “You know that’s going to make us look like shit.”
“I know,” Jack murmured. “We can’t cancel.”
“Then what?” Reagan asked. He paused a moment, then continued: “I mean, if we have to cancel, we’ll cancel. I’m just saying it’s going to look bad. It’s going to piss Sam off. And I’m not really sure if it’s a good idea to piss off the owner of the main club we play, you know? I mean, you get what I’m saying here, right? I’m not trying to be a dick or anything. I’m being realistic. Realism, man.”
“I get what you’re saying.”
“I don’t want to be the bad guy,” Reagan insisted.
“I know.”
“Seriously, it’s like not my intention to make waves between you and Aimee. I’ll even tell her myself. I love her like a sister,” he continued.
“Reagan…”
“Like an incredibly hot half sister.”
Jack pressed his elbows against the weather-warped wood of the picnic table and put his head in his hands.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered into his palms. “You’re so fucking weird, you know that?”
“I know,” Reagan agreed.
“Like just… off.”
“Oh, I know, dude. Seriously, I’m a psychopath.”
“I’ll just deal with it,” Jack said. “She’ll just have to understand. It’s already scheduled.”
“Sure, she’ll understand. And then she’ll rip your balls off.”
Jack smirked and patted Reagan on the shoulder. “That’s all a part of marriage, my friend.”
“And you enjoy this?” Reagan asked, truly curious. “You like this better than hanging out, watching movies, playing video games, making late-night Doritos runs…?”
“Love is pain.”
“Write a song about it.”
“Good idea,” Jack said. “I’ll do that. I’ll have plenty of time while sleeping on the couch.”
Chapter Three
WHEN ABBY came home from school there was a lump on Charlie’s bed. Buried beneath a set of SpongeBob sheets and a matching comforter, Charlie had taken up her favorite position of sleeping with her butt in the air. She’d done it since she was a baby—elbows pulled into her chest, her knees pressed into the mattress, her rear end flying high and her thumb stuck in her mouth. Abby didn’t have to see her to know that was her sister’s exact position.
She dropped her backpack next to the leg of the desk they shared. Most days, if Charlie had homework, she’d do it at the kitchen table with their mom, and Abby would have the room all to herself. Then there were days like these, when Charlie refused to leave the bedroom and Abby would have to do her best to ignore the six-year-old monster on the opposite side of the room.
Squatting next to her bag, she began to rifle through Lisa Frank folders—they were hard to find but Abby’s favorite—searching for her homework.
The lump on Charlie’s bed shifted.
Abby waited for her sister to pop her head out from beneath the sheets. When it didn’t happen, she continued to search for the right notebook—the one with Hello Kitty stickers all over it. She was sure she brought it home.
The lump shifted again.
Abby blinked. “Char?”
Getting no response, Abby rolled her eyes and looked back to her bag, ignoring the next fumbling shift across the room. She had learned from her mother: if Charlie didn’t get a reaction, she’d get bored and stop. But when the lump began to convulse as though the person beneath the sheets were suddenly unable to breathe, Abby stared at it with a startled expression. It was moving in a nearly mechanical way—oddly jerky, like an old wind-up toy.
Less than a year before, Charlie had been diagnosed with asthma after an attack at a local park. She remembered how her sister’s face had turned blue, how she had clawed at her neck with wide, desperate eyes. As she squatted on the bedroom floor, the memory conjured in Abby’s mind and anchored there, forcing her heart to flutter as she pictured her sister beneath those sheets, suffocating while Abby ignored her.
“Charlie?” She got to her feet and swallowed against the lump in her throat, taking a few hesitant steps toward the bed. She was afraid to pull those sheets back, afraid of what she’d see. What if she was too late? What if she yanked the blanket away and Charlie was dead and blue and it was all her fault?
“Charlie, are you OK?” Her question was strained with worry. The closer she stepped toward the bed, the faster the lump panted, as if sensing Abby’s approach. She stopped short, her eyes wide, not wanting to see what was beneath those sheets even if it was her sister. All at once she realized that her mother was home, that all she had to do was yell and Mom would come running.
She opened her mouth to call for help.
And Charlie appeared in the doorway.
Abby’s heart shot into her throat. Suddenly she was the one who couldn’t catch her breath. Charlie, on the other hand, peered sleepily at her sister while clutching a juice box to her chest.
“I’m not OK,” Charlie said. Abby had posed the question seconds before; Charlie had certainly been out of earshot. Yet there she was, answering the question as though she’d been standing next to Abigail the entire time. “Didn’t Momma tell you I’m dying?”
Stepping around Abby, Charlie crawled onto her bed, that lump of sheets now nothing more than exactly that.
Abby shook her head, backing away from SpongeBob’s smiling face and crazy eyes. What had always been a pleasant character now looked positively evil.
Charlie shot her sister a skeptical look. “Are you OK?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Abby said quietly. “I just… have a lot of homework.” She turned away, sank to her knees, and pulled her backpack to her chest, desperate not to cry.
• • •
Dinner was tense that evening. Jack picked at his pasta while trying to figure out how to break the weekend news, Aimee watched Charlie from across the table with a look of concern, Abigail sat on only half of her chair—the half farthest away from her sister, and Charlie appeared more serious than usual.
“There’s someone living in the closet,” she announced matter-of-factly. “I’m pretty sure because today I saw him, and when I went to check, the door closed by itself.”
Jack and Aimee looked at each other, then looked to their daughter.
Abigail’s breaths were shallow as she sat as still as she could. Jack saw her perk up, alert for noises—for the subtle creak of the closet door to see whether Charlie was telling the truth.
“I think he’s the guy who’s making all those scratchy noises,” Charlie continued. “You know the noises?”
“What noises?” he asked.
“Scratchy ones,” Charlie repeated. “Like scrrrrr…” She lifted both hands to make tiny claws, scratching at the air to show her dad what she meant.
“Probably just an animal,” Jack told her. “A raccoon or something.” He pursed his lips, then looked down to his plate and poked at his pasta, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation.
Aimee exhaled an annoyed sigh.
“All right, what’s wro
ng? Is it no good? Why isn’t anyone eating?”
“I’m not hungry,” Abby said softly.
“I’m sick,” Charlie whined.
“Reagan scheduled a gig,” Jack mumbled.
The room went silent.
Of the fights he and Aimee had, the biggest ones always started with that very phrase. Their arguments were always about the band, about how much time Jack spent away from the girls on weekends, which, beyond the occasional night Jack didn’t offer to work late at the shop, was the only time they really got to see their dad at all. The gigs were erratic, and Aimee had expressed her displeasure with Lamb’s mysterious schedule a dozen times before. But now, with the accident, the strain on their marriage was undeniable.
Abby chewed on her bottom lip and rolled a piece of penne back and forth with the prongs of her fork. Charlie put her fork down and put her hands in her lap, which she stared at silently.
“I didn’t know,” Jack said quietly. “He only told me today.” It was a half-truth. There was the e-mail. The voice mail. But Reagan knew Jack never checked that stuff. If it had been so damn important, he should have called again, should have called until Jack had answered.
Aimee said nothing.
“I told him it was bad timing. I told him Charlie is sick.”
“Dying,” Charlie whispered.
“And?” Aimee raised an eyebrow.
“And if we cancel on Sam it’ll look bad, Aimes. He already put us on the schedule for this Saturday. The lineup is posted all over the Quarter by now.”
“Oh.” Aimee calmly pushed her chair away from the table and gathered up her plate.
“I didn’t know. If he had said something sooner…”
“Then what?” Aimee asked, snatching Jack’s plate off the table.
“Then I could have kept it from ending up on the schedule.”
“Really? Because you’ve kept so many gigs off the schedule.”
Lamb never missed a gig. Rain or shine, if they were booked, they played. They had even made the journey out just before Katrina. Jack had made it out of town a mere four hours before the first levee broke. That one nearly made Aimee go ballistic—but gigs were becoming few and far between. Letting them slip through their fingers was as good as disbanding altogether.
“What do you want me to say?” Jack asked, desperate for a little leeway. He hated fighting with her, hated that it was happening more often now than ever. “I didn’t know this week was going to end up like this. I didn’t know we were going to have an accident or that Charlie was going to end up sick. How was I supposed to know?”
“You just know,” Aimee snapped, dropping the plates into the sink with a clang. “That stupid band shouldn’t be your priority. Your family should be.”
“Reagan is my family.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Can I be excused?” Abby asked. Her request went unheard.
“It brings in money,” Jack reminded Aimee.
“Well, we both know we wouldn’t need it if—” She stopped herself.
“Right.” Jack sighed. “We wouldn’t need it if I’d just grow up, right? We wouldn’t need it if I’d screw the whole thing and get a real job.”
“You have a real job, Daddy,” Charlie piped in. “You fix boats!”
“Can I be excused?” Abby repeated. Again, she received no reply.
“Fixing boats isn’t going to get us out of this house,” Aimee said. “Fixing boats isn’t going to fill up our savings account. It isn’t going to get us anything but this life, over and over again, forever.”
Jack’s tone became bitter. “You chose this life.”
Stepping back to the table, Aimee grabbed the girls’ plates and marched them to the sink.
“Once upon a time, you liked this life,” Jack told her.
“Once upon a time,” Aimee agreed. “And maybe once upon a time I should have listened to my mother.”
Jack went silent. He bit his tongue and stared down at the grain of the table.
There was a tense pause. Aimee finally broke it: “Whatever,” she said, turning on the faucet. “You just do whatever you want to do, Jack. I’ll hold the family together while you’re out playing your little songs.”
Jack’s nostrils flared. His jaw went rigid.
“Daddy?” Charlie stretched a scrawny arm across the table.
“What is it?” Jack asked almost inaudibly.
“Will you play us a song tonight, for bedtime?”
He gave Charlie a weak smile and nodded once in agreement.
“That sounds like a great idea,” he said. “Abby?”
Abby looked up from her empty place setting and, after a moment, nodded as well.
“As long as it’s one of yours,” Abby said.
“Maybe ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ just once,” Charlie added. It was her favorite song.
With her back turned, Jack heard Aimee inhale a shaky breath. She used to ask him to play her lullabies when they had first met. Now she resented him for picking up the guitar—something she’d loved about him a dozen years before. Jack was the same Jack he’d always been.
It was Aimee who had changed.
• • •
Charlie knew all the words to Journey’s biggest hit, and she sang it at the top of her lungs while using her bed as a stage. Despite Abby’s slow-growing apprehension, she laughed as her little sister bounced around like a monkey, using a toilet tube for a microphone. After Charlie’s performance, Jack tucked them in, strummed a lullaby on his guitar, and left the door open a crack. The light from the hall slashed through the darkness of the girls’ room like a beam of hope.
As soon as her dad left, Abby shifted her attention to Charlie’s bed, remembering what she had seen when she had come home from school. She wondered how she’d ever sleep again.
• • •
Aimee was already in bed when Jack returned from entertaining the girls, reading Les Misérables for what seemed like the eighteenth time since they had met. It was her favorite book—a poverty-stricken romance; a story she could see herself in if Louisiana were somehow magically transformed into France. She’d always wanted to see Paris but doubted she would. Maybe when the girls grew up, when they went off to college or got married and had kids of their own; maybe then she and Jack could take the honeymoon they never had. She wanted to walk the Champs-Élysées arm in arm with Jack, a beret atop her head—tipped just so. She wanted to sip café au lait and eat chocolate-filled croissants and ride a bicycle with a wicker basket, brimming with fresh-cut flowers. Maybe if they had enough money to visit they’d have enough money to stay, move to a tiny countryside town. A girl could dream.
Aimee didn’t look up when he entered the room, still determined to be angry. But after a few minutes of Jack rummaging around in the bathroom—brushing his teeth, getting ready to turn in for the night—she lowered her book and allowed her head to fall against her pillow.
“You know,” she said after a moment, “if I wasn’t big on the idea of a husband running around with his band for the rest of my life, I probably shouldn’t have married a musician.”
Standing at the closet door, Jack paused when she spoke, then peeled off his shirt and tossed it into the hamper in the corner of the room. Jack’s tattoos were all in places that could easily be hidden; she found them sexier that way. She was the only girl in the whole world who knew them all in intricate detail—at least, she hoped that was true. The most pronounced one was emblazoned across his back—a tattoo he had gotten long before they had met. That one had scared her the first time she saw it. It crawled across his shoulder blades and down his spine: a wicked-looking beast with black, leathery skin and glowing eyes. A razor-sharp grin was spread across its horrible face, as if laughing at a joke that only it and Jack knew. The first time she saw it, he had played it off as nothing but rock and roll—a stupid decision made under the influence; booze and tattoos didn’t mix, especially when there were rowdy bandmates egging you on.
But Aimee knew better. That tattoo must have taken months of repeat visits to a parlor to complete. She was sure Jack had spent hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours beneath the needle, etching the nightmarish image into his skin.
“You probably should have listened to your mother,” he said.
Aimee stuck her bookmark between Victor Hugo’s pages and sighed.
“I probably should have,” she agreed. “But it was either endure the pain of being your wife, or run the risk of my darling mother arranging a marriage for me.”
“Well, there is one good thing about your darling mother,” Jack said.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Aimee tried to bite back a smile, but the corners of her mouth betrayed her.
“She married an Oldsmobile man.”
Aimee exhaled a laugh.
“The guy has excellent taste,” Jack insisted.
“Mm, he does, doesn’t he?”
“Velveteen upholstery. A tan paint job…”
“Beige,” she corrected. Her father hated the word “tan”; “beige” was somehow better. Arnold Riley was particular about vocabulary. “Tan” was boring. “Beige” was more sophisticated. Vanilla wasn’t acceptable, but French vanilla was just fine. He watched motion pictures, not movies. He ate rocket, not arugula. Jack had once joked that Arnold wasn’t anal; his father-in-law just had a constipated disposition.
“Potato, potahto. It’s tan.” Jack moved to the bed. “And you know, I’m not knocking tan.” He crawled onto the mattress, slinking toward his grinning wife.
“You’re not?”
“Why should I?” he asked, his palms pressing into the mattress on either side of her sun-kissed shoulders. “Tan is my favorite color.”