Leah Nola. I sat down on one of the steps. So she had been there. She was still there, pressed in between the cracks of my memories.
“It’s probably the smallest, lowest-budget fair in the country, but, man, I thought it was cool back then.” Jamie propped his fishing pole against the stairwell. He looked like he wanted to sit down but was conflicted since I was already occupying the stairs.
I wanted to keep the easy, comfortable feeling growing between us. I wanted to hear more about Leah Nola. “Tell me the truth. Was I a weird kid?”
“Come on. Would I have been friends with a weird kid?” He laughed. “Okay, don’t answer that.”
I fought back a smile. “Didn’t you think it was strange that I had an imaginary friend?” I pressed. “I mean, I was in first and second grade at the time. That’s a little old to be playing with pretend little girls.”
Jamie shrugged. “I was only six when we met. What did I know?”
I tried to fathom the strange dynamic that must have existed between the three of us. Had Jamie tried to share Leah Nola with me? I could imagine him making incorrect assertions about her whereabouts and behaviors: “Leah Nola wants to go to the river,” or “Leah Nola fell asleep on the deck,” and my bossy, seven-year-old self setting the record straight. I wondered if he’d given up trying.
“You know, that’s wrong,” Jamie said softly. He gazed off in the direction of the leafy trees separating the Cardwells’ property from their neighbors. “I do remember. It didn’t seem weird to me, it seemed amazing. I mean, there I was, an only child in this boring neighborhood with absolutely no children, and all of a sudden, this girl shows up next door who’s super imaginative and always assigning me roles in her elaborate games, and on top of it, she tells me that she has a secret friend who no one else knows about or can see but she’s going to play with us too? It was awesome.” His eyes flicked back briefly to meet mine. In the fading daylight, his irises looked like melted chocolate.
I let his compliment sink in. I’d been labeled a “problem child” so frequently by my mom that it was nice to have someone else remember me as a kind of gift. “Thanks, Jamie.” I patted the space on the step next to me, and to my surprise, he actually sat down. It was a tight squeeze. His hip was only inches away from mine.
We were hidden together in the stairwell, frozen halfway between coming and going. Carly probably assumed I was long gone; Sam had maybe given up hope of Jamie showing up to the bonfire. It was rapidly approaching nightfall, and the cicadas had already started their frantic buzzing. I needed to get home to tell David a story, but I didn’t want to leave just yet. And something told me Jamie didn’t want to either. I thought about saying something apologetic about high school—my coldness toward him my first day of school and thereafter, that horrible homecoming prank—but he spoke up before I had the chance to.
“Look, I know you’ve probably heard some rumors, and I’d prefer you hear the truth from me.” Jamie leaned forward, clasping his hands tightly between his knees. His leg brushed mine.
I considered playing dumb. I considered being a good friend and saying, You don’t need to tell me anything. I knew they were all lies right from the start. But my curiosity got the better of me. “Okay. But it’s really not necessary. I mean, who am I to judge? You know I haven’t led a life of sainthood—the whole town knows it.”
“What you think matters more to me than what the town thinks.” He stood up and started pacing on the small landing. My perch on the steps felt suddenly lonely and much too spacious.
His pronouncement was flattering, but I tried to focus on the issue at hand. I contrasted Duffy’s “verified” gossip that Jamie was filling his mom’s pain meds for his own purposes with Winston’s unwavering faith in him. My own instincts were more muddled. I wanted to believe in Jamie because he was Jamie, the gentle-natured boy I’d known since I was seven. Unfortunately, I also knew from too much experience that good people sometimes did bad things.
“Then tell me.” My hair had dried in tangled waves, and I gathered it together and pulled it over one shoulder.
He spun on his heel and continued his pacing. “My big plan was to drive out West, hiking and camping in all the National Parks—Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, the Arches, the Grand Canyon, all the way to Yosemite and the Redwoods. I’d saved up some money, and I figured every so often I’d settle down for a month or so, get a job, earn some cash for food and gas, and then just pick up and go. But I didn’t get very far.
“I made it to Sioux Falls. South Dakota. The Badlands was going to be my first stop. But I never got there because I got into a car accident. A sleep-deprived trucker drifted into my lane and ran me off the road. I dislocated my shoulder, cracked some ribs, and strained my back pretty good. I was laid up in the hospital for a week, and that drained my savings.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, imagining him lying in a hospital bed in an unfamiliar state, all alone. “Did you call your mom?”
He paused mid-stride and pressed his lips together. “What could she have done? She’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at that point and had to give up her driver’s license. Knowing would have just made her feel helpless.”
I hadn’t seen Wendy Presswood since I was sixteen, and it was hard to picture her as anything other than her strong, independent self. Jamie’s dad had left when he was four, and Wendy had filled the “father” void—playing catch with Jamie, mowing the lawn, cleaning out the gutters, changing the oil on her car. Occasionally Duffy would send Winston over for a particularly challenging, two-person task, but otherwise Wendy took care of things herself. Until Jamie had gotten old enough to help around the house. Once she’d been diagnosed with MS, how had she been able to spare him? How had she managed to let him go?
“They prescribed oxycodone for my pain,” he continued. “It was amazing. It did more than just take away the pain. It made life more bearable. It made the prospect of my road trip ending—before I’d even seen anything—and returning to Wisconsin, to my mom’s illness, more bearable. But then the prescription ran out, and they wouldn’t refill it.” Jamie ran his hand through his shaggy black hair. “Around that time, the insurance settlement from the trucking company came in. I moved into a motel room I could pay for by the week, and I found someone who could sell me oxycodone under the table.”
So, he had been a drug addict. Not just taking the pills for his pain, but addicted to the high they had given him. Maybe he still was. He was watching me, trying to gauge my reaction. I stared back at him with a mild expression (I’d gotten quite good at my poker face living with Patrick), waiting to see if the story had a happy ending.
“That went on for longer than I care to admit,” he said. “But then I met a guy, Mike Mueller, and he gave me a job at his nursery shoveling mulch, watering flowers, that kind of thing. I really needed the money at that point. I worked hard for him because he was a good guy, but also I was working to pay for more OC. Then one day, he called me into the back room to tell me he knew about my addiction. He didn’t want to fire me, he said, but he cared about me and wanted me to get my life back together. He’d researched some rehab facilities, and he wanted me to sign myself into one. He said my job would still be waiting for me when I got out.”
“So you went?” I asked.
“I went. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” Jamie slouched against the wall as if just the memory of it was exhausting. “The program encouraged me to get in touch with my mom, so I called her and told her where I was and how I was doing. She was pretty bad off at that point and had a nurse coming for a couple of hours every day, but it didn’t sound like enough. Still, I just couldn’t bring myself to go back yet. I stayed on with Mike a few more months, and then finally, I decided it was time to come home. So here I am.”
His tone of finality told me the story was over, but was it really? I wanted to ask him if he was really clean, but I remembered how important my opinion seemed to him, and I didn’t
want him to think I didn’t trust him.
“I’m glad,” I said, and I really, really meant it. When I’d packed up and left Milwaukee, Jamie Presswood had been the furthest thing from my mind. But seeing him in my grandparents’ backyard had been bizarrely comforting and reassuring, a steady link to my past, like Duffy and Winston. Talking to him like this made me feel trustworthy and on less shaky ground.
“I wasn’t at first,” he said. “My mom’s condition had worsened so much, it was shocking, and I felt so guilty for leaving her like that. I felt like such a failure coming back here in so many ways.”
That made two of us.
“But then you came back,” he said and turned to face me. His tone sounded almost accusatory. His face was half hidden in shadow and somehow at the same height as mine. Everything was suddenly too quiet—even the cicadas in their desperation to mate had paused in their relentless humming—and all I could hear was the steadily increasing tempo of my heart. His eyelids were lowering, his full lips were softening, and I started to think that he might kiss me. And that I might kiss him back.
“Whoa! Didn’t know anyone was up here!” A loud voice broke our silence. Colin. He held up his hands in mock surrender as he surveyed the scene. “Sorry if I interrupted anything! Forgot my tackle box in my trunk. Pretend I’m not here.” He met my gaze as he climbed past me on the stairs. His eyes said, I knew you were a slut.
I hugged my arms across my chest and waited for him to leave so we could continue our talk, but Jamie was already stooping to retrieve his fishing pole. He stood up, his back ramrod straight. “I’d better go,” he said in a hollow voice. “They’re waiting for me.”
I searched his face for a clue to his sudden change in demeanor. It was Colin, of course—the reminder of Carly and Sam’s party—What else would explain you hanging all over a douchebag like Colin Bentley? Jamie had asked. But it seemed like there was more to it. I tried to analyze the tense moment between us before Colin had bounded up the stairs. Jamie had nakedly confided in me because my knowing the truth mattered to him. How could that feeling of intimacy dissolve so quickly?
“Excuse me again. Carry on!” Colin ran past us, this time carrying a battered green tackle box. We could hear him shout down the hill to Sam and Marshall, “Guess who’s finally here, guys! Presswood!”
Now there was no turning back for Jamie, but it was time for me to go anyway. I hoped that David was still awake so I could give him another installment of Mona and Wolfy’s latest adventures. This time, I decided, they would fly to Planet Hot/Cold, where freezing ice cream mountains mingled with boiling hot fudge springs and they never knew where they stood or what kind of trouble they were going to get themselves into.
CHAPTER NINE
Duffy pulled a retractable clothesline from the shed and clipped it to a metal hook screwed into the tree trunk. “That’s what Winston said too, more or less,” she said. “Now be a biscuit and help me hang these sheets.”
I hadn’t wanted to betray Jamie’s confidence, but trying to straighten out my grandmother’s vendetta against him seemed even more important, so I’d told her a (somewhat edited) version of the truth, emphasizing the horrific car crash and intolerable pain, his kindly paternal boss, the successful rehab, and his heroic return to take care of his ailing mother.
I lifted the first wet sheet from the laundry basket. It was the top sheet from my own bed, pale yellow with tiny pink rosebuds. With two clothespins and two efficient movements, Duffy had it hung up. I bent to retrieve the matching fitted sheet.
“Then why did you warn me to stay away from him? He’s changed, Duffy. Just because he’s had troubles in the past doesn’t mean that you should totally write him off as a bad guy.”
“No, of course not,” Duffy mumbled around a wooden clothespin in her mouth, “and I’m sorry if it seems that way to you.” She lined up the sheet to allow it to share a clothespin with the previous one. “I just don’t want to see you get involved with another troubled young man. Especially for David’s sake.”
“Get involved? We’re just friends.” I handed her the navy blue sheets from David’s bed and tried not to think about the scene Colin had stumbled upon last night. The interrupted kiss—which had seemed so inevitable at the time, so large and magnetic that it filled up the stairwell and squeezed my drumming heart—seemed like a distant dream now. Something silly and probably misremembered. “I always have David’s best interests in mind. Don’t confuse me with my mother.” I glanced quickly to the deck where David was playing a complicated game involving his pirate action figures, the Lincoln logs, the hula hoop, and one of Vivien Leigh’s cat toys. It was such a relief to see him playing with something other than his dinosaurs for once.
“Listen to me, cupcake. You may look like Kimberly, and sometimes you’re both a little too stubborn for your own good, but there the similarities end. Believe me, I know.” She laughed and scooped the laundry basket up from the grass, balancing it on her hip. “You’re a loving, doting mother, and you deserve to be loved and doted on too. Those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. One day you’ll meet someone, and it will be a clean slate for you. No more tears, no more drama. I just don’t think that someone is Jamie.”
“Will you stop bringing him up? I already told you we’re just friends.” I looked over my shoulder at the Presswoods’ empty backyard.
“Are you sure he feels the same way?” She squinted at me skeptically. With her white blond bouffant and pink-and-green paisley print apron, she looked like a seventies housewife.
I remembered the way he had hustled off, desperate to get away from me, after Colin had discovered us. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
David clambered down the steps, delighted by the sight of the sheets billowing in the breeze. “Let’s play hide-and-seek, Mommy!”
“What fun!” Duffy said, bending down to ruffle his hair. “I wonder where a little grasshopper like you will hide.” She gave me an exaggerated wink over his head. “That reminds me. Edna Franklin and I were talking the other night about setting up a play date with her grandson, Gunner. Isn’t that a nice idea? Poor Davey’s been cooped up with only us old folks for company this summer. Wouldn’t you like to play with someone your own age for once?”
David shrugged before disappearing behind the fluttering partition of bed sheets.
“Sure,” I said. “It will be good for him.” Even if Gunner sounded like an oddball to me with his morbid Titanic obsession, I still thought it would be wise to get David interacting with other children again. Perhaps his fascination with his dinosaur playmates would wane. Maybe by the time kindergarten started, the phase would have run its course. (Unless he turned out to be a late bloomer like me—four more years of this was inconceivable!)
“Excellent! Edna will be so pleased,” Duffy trilled. “Oh, and Anna bean, I’ve been meaning to ask you to warn Davey from playing too close to my flower bed. Some of my petunias got positively trampled the other day. I’m sure it was an accident, but if you wouldn’t mind reminding him to be careful.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen again.” Their backyard was a veritable Garden of Eden of uninterrupted grass for him to play on, and of course, my son had chosen the one forbidden flower bed to clomp through. I raised my voice. “David. You heard Grandma Duffy. You need to be extra careful around her plants, okay? No setting foot in the flower bed.”
“Okay,” he sang out from behind the clothesline, and my grandmother seemed satisfied.
I turned around, covered my eyes with my palms, and started counting to ten out loud. I could hear Duffy creaking up the patio steps and closing the door behind her, the soft thwack of the damp sheets as the wind kicked them up, and David’s giggle not far away. “Nine. Ten. Ready or not, here I come!” I called.
At the end of the clothesline, on the far right, I could see David’s silhouette through my grandparents’ ivory, queen-size sheets. His dingy sneakers poked out beneath the
hem.
“Where could he be?” I asked myself aloud theatrically. “Is he inside the shed?” I poked my head through the shed’s open door, which housed the lawnmower, some extra lawn chairs, gardening equipment, and miscellaneous tractor parts. “Nope. Not in here! Well, I’m stumped. Where else could he be?”
I marched back to the row of sheets, swelling like sails. “Could he be hiding behind here?” I raised the edge of my rosebud top sheet, peeked behind, and let it drop. “No. I guess not. Oh, no. Is he lost? What if I never find him?” I pretended to cry. More giggles came from behind the ivory sheet at the end of the clothesline.
I lowered my voice an octave, doing a version of my Wolfy voice, which was just about the only male voice I could impersonate. “Where are you, David?” I growled. “I’m going to find you…I’m going to get you…”
I dramatically flapped David’s navy blue sheet and found myself face to face with yellow eyes so close to mine I could see a sliver of myself in their narrow black pupils. My nose was inches away from a ridged snout. He huffed through his nostrils, and a warm, foul-smelling current wafted toward me. King Rex.
I almost screamed my lungs out but was able to repress the sound into more of a panicked yelp. I stumbled backward, landing painfully on my tailbone in the grass. The sheet came unpinned, hanging crookedly like a door off its hinge. The Tyrannosaurus rex stepped through this new gaping space, looming over me. I scuttled on my hands and backside until my head collided with the deck railing. My heart was jittering in my chest like a wind-up toy, and useless tears were leaking down the side of my nose. I had felt its breath.
“Mommy?” David called tentatively, still in his hiding place. I tried to reply, but the fright and my fall had knocked the wind out of me. I hastily wiped at the moisture on my cheeks. David’s disembodied head appeared between the sheets. His lips were trembling as if he were about to sob. But there was something else wrong. As he stepped between the sheets, his body seemed to have a shadowy aura around it.
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