Nowhere Girl
Page 5
“Will this?” In the second it took him to step forward, I thought he was going to kiss me. It terrified and excited me, but he pulled a bouquet of bright-orange marigolds from behind his back.
“Oh, thank you.” I held them to my nose out of habit and smelled their strong, musky scent. “Let me get a vase.”
“I know they’re a little unconventional,” he said as he followed me to the kitchen and set a deli bag on the counter, “but I thought your house could use some color.”
Even surrounded by gray and silver, there was something mildly insulting about this, yet he was right. I filled a cut-glass vase with water, added a teaspoon of sugar to help the flowers live longer, and realized with surprise how relieved I was about the kiss. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe my marriage deserved a chance. “No one has ever brought me marigolds before.” Maybe Brady didn’t even want to kiss me. Maybe this connection between us was all in my head.
“Colette turned me on to them.” He opened a few drawers until he found a pair of scissors. “She suggested I bring you some after I told her I was helping you with the book.” He cut the bottom inch off the stems. “She used to own a flower shop, but now she grows them at our house. She says tending to the garden is calming, almost like meditation.” He set the scissors in the sink.
“Please tell her I love them.” I put the flowers in the center of the black granite island and tried not to sound jealous. I hated that granite. Our designer had imported it from a riverbed in South America. The cross sections of rock were stupidly expensive and ugly. Impressions from smaller rocks left white rings in the black surface that I was constantly mistaking for water marks and would scrub them until I remembered they were supposed to be like that. The flowers were a shock to the granite, like an unexpected wave on a calm ocean.
“They’re so pretty,” I said. How cuckoo could Colette be if she told Brady to bring me flowers? And how into me could Brady be if he was talking to his girlfriend about me?
Brady had brought lunch from the deli, and I took a couple of plates, two cans of Diet Coke, and our sandwiches into the sunroom. Surrounded by windows on three sides and a view of nothing but trees, it was the place in the house where I felt most comfortable.
“I hope you like roast beef,” Brady said as I unwrapped my sandwich.
There was about half a pound of meat piled between two thick slices of sourdough bread. It was sweet and mildly embarrassing that he knew I wasn’t a dainty girl and would eat it all.
I took a bite. “Oh my God, the mustard is delicious.” I wasn’t lying. It was sweet and sticky and tasted like summer.
Through the sunroom doors, I could see the flowers, a reminder that Brady had someone, and he talked to her about me. Which meant I wasn’t a secret or a threat. “You said Colette used to own a shop.”
He finished chewing before he spoke. “She had Pocketful of Posies in Princeton.”
I vaguely remembered it, an expensive shop that had occasionally delivered to Sotto Sopra, my parents’ restaurant.
“That didn’t work out, so now she tinkers in our garden. She occasionally sells arrangements at the farmers’ market in town.”
I took another bite of my sandwich and chewed quickly. “I think working with flowers is an art. I’ll buy a bunch of different kinds at the grocery store and come home and try to arrange them. They end up looking like a toddler did it. But then I see bouquets at weddings, and they’re so beautiful I want to cry. I really wish I had some talent for it.”
He spoke quietly. “Sometimes I’ll watch Colette in the garden, and I swear to you she’s communicating with those flowers. It’s almost like poetry.”
This sounded so odd coming from someone who probably carried a knife in a sheath and drank his whiskey neat that I almost laughed, but something in him had shifted at the mention of Colette. He took another bite of his sandwich. I noticed a bruise on his neck and had a quick, sickening flash of Savannah. Had someone tried to strangle him too? I wondered about the inmates and what his job held every day. I wrote about horror. Brady lived it.
He ducked his head as if embarrassed and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Do you write here?” he asked. “Or do you have an office in New York?”
“No, this is it.” I crumpled up the plastic wrap my sandwich had come in. “Unless Greg’s home.”
He cocked his head at me and quit eating.
“He likes to practice his awful bassoon or listen to Bach on high while he’s catching up on patients’ notes. I mean, I always write with music playing, but not flutes and cellos, and I need to hear myself read out loud without listening to something that makes me want to stick a steak knife in my ear.”
Brady smiled. “I’m pretty sure it’s big enough for both of us,” Greg had said when I complained about the noise, but there was no place to hide in our house; with its cathedral ceilings and marble floors, sound bounced off the walls. I couldn’t even talk on the phone in the kitchen without Greg hearing me upstairs.
“So sometimes I write in public,” I told Brady. “I get good material people watching. And believe me, I need all the help I can get.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m not naturally creative,” I told him. “I have to rely on conversations between people standing behind me at the post office or the girl on her cell phone in the bathroom at the library, how she cocks her hip in one direction or the other while she waits in line, how men who are introduced to women rarely offer to shake hands. Coffee shops are great places too. I sit there and write down everything I see and hear.”
“I’d say you’re pretty creative. I’ve read all your books,” he said quietly. “I especially loved Alibi.”
This surprised the hell out of me. I almost couldn’t speak. Out the window, I could see a squirrel suspended on a branch. “That was more of a memoir than a novel,” I said. “Except I changed the names and made my character forty pounds lighter.”
Brady looked at me, not straight at me but sort of sideways, as though giving me space.
“It wrote itself. I couldn’t not tell the story. I needed to get the words out of me to stay alive.” I’d tried to tell Greg once, but I felt like he was analyzing me. “I didn’t write it to get published or because I wanted to be a novelist. I needed to somehow pay…” I couldn’t think of the word, I wasn’t even sure I was talking—I had thought this so often to myself. “Homage to her,” I finally said. “I needed to remember my sister.”
“I may be being dense here, but the main character in Alibi accidentally killed her brother. You didn’t have anything to do with your sister’s death.”
I was grateful that he hadn’t spoken her name. “Didn’t I, though? She was my identical twin. I should have known what was happening to her.”
Silence spread between us like a fog. This was too much to tell him now, yet I couldn’t stop myself.
“Anyway, thanks for bringing lunch.”
After we ate, he told me about prison slang. I sat next to him on that hideous white couch and wrote down everything he said. Understanding prison talk, he said, was like learning a whole new language. I’m doin’ all day meant a life sentence. All day and a night—life without parole. Back-door parole was to die in prison. Dance on the blacktop meant to get stabbed. They called their orange jumpsuits peels, and psychiatric meds were brake fluid. What struck me was how they’d softened everything. An entire life became a day. Dying was only a back door. Stabbing turned into dancing.
“I never thought of it like that,” Brady said.
“What do you think of them? Is it just a job? Or do you ever feel any kind of connection or sympathy?”
The clock ticked the seconds by, and he didn’t answer. His face had gone still. Finally, he met my gaze, and his blue eyes were serious.
“I feel lucky.” He swallowed. “Some of them are in there because they made one stupid mistake.”
He watched me in a hard way that made me feel completely naked. I had the odd feeling I wou
ld reach over and touch him, his throat, his cheek.
“We all do stupid things,” he said. I saw him swallow. “Things we regret, wish we could take back. I guess I feel lucky that something didn’t land me in there with them.”
I was trying desperately to figure out what to say. I could feel the warm air from the wall vent on my back and outside. Stanwich’s church bell rang once.
“I’d better go.”
“Do you want something?” I asked. “For the road?”
“No, thanks.” He patted his stomach—which, as far as I could tell, was rock hard.
I followed him through the kitchen and into that cavernous foyer. I wanted to say something to keep him there. “Thanks for everything,” I said lamely.
Brady turned at the door and touched the handle. He had a way of standing on one hip that was movie-star sexy. As I was about to close the door behind him, he spoke. His tone was different, almost cold.
“I’m not sure I should come here,” he said. I felt myself almost step back as though slapped. “I don’t know, Cady.” He looked at me one more time with those smoky eyes. “I’m a little fucked up inside.”
And before I could tell him I needed his help, I enjoyed his company, why didn’t he join us for a Thursday dinner, he was halfway to his truck.
Out the door’s beveled window, his taillights went on, and then he headed down the driveway and took a right toward the prison. I realized he’d added to that fantasy man I’d made up in my head. Not only was he the tortured bad boy, he’d given me the feeling that I might actually be able to save him.
* * *
After being with Brady, I felt different. I wanted to blame Gabby for telling me I should have an affair with him, but even before she’d said it, I’d been drawn to him in a way I couldn’t explain, and when he left, I didn’t feel like an overweight girl who by some dumb luck was a bestselling author. Running water in the bath after Greg got home that night so I could be alone with the feeling a few minutes longer, I felt beautiful, if that were possible, my cheeks flushed like those pretty pregnant ladies at Stop & Shop I saw on school day mornings, my normally dull hair a bit brighter. Brady seemed to leave me in a humid perspiration.
I never talked to Greg about my books, because he was too clinical with his input, too removed, so there was no reason for me to mention Brady. But also, Brady was a secret I wanted to keep. I let my head sink under the honey bath. If I said his name aloud, especially to Greg, that feeling I got when we were together, that melted feeling from those stupid romance novels I used to read as a kid, would have disappeared.
I was fantasizing, of course. And I didn’t blame myself. Brady was the kind of guy girls dreamed about, the tough guy in leather who knew how to fight but could also recite the words to Shakespeare sonnets. The kind of guy that all my life I’d close my eyes and imagine saying my name, except I wasn’t me. I was some other skinny, shiny girl with gorgeous eyes and to-die-for skin, the kind of girl Savannah would have been.
I relaxed in the bath for a long time, and when I finally got out, I thought about the flowers Brady had brought and how relieved I was they weren’t daisies. The first summer Savannah and I had been allowed to walk to town by ourselves, my mother had given us five dollars each to go to the dollar store. I’d picked out a set of bangles and cherry Lifesavers. Savannah had bought five packets of daisy seeds. When we got home, she threw them like confetti on the lawn. A month later, daisies haphazardly dotted our yard, waving their happy faces in the breeze. From then on, Savannah loved daisies—daisies stuck in the buttonholes of her shirts, in her barrettes, between her toes when she sunbathed, and, little did my parents know, a daisy tattoo on her left hip she’d gotten after she’d bribed one of those senior girls to drive her to Dark Side Tattoo and lend her an ID.
CHAPTER
8
David was away at a model car workshop, and Gabby was in Florida with Duncan for Hoka Hey training, so I tried to work on my novel. I took my laptop into my office and closed the door even though Greg wasn’t home. I was so used to him blaring classical music or practicing his bassoon that shutting myself in my brightly lit office was habit now. I sat at my desk and opened my computer. It came on, dim for a second, and then brightened like an old friend smiling at the sight of me. Writing was a solitary thing, not that I minded. For so many years after Savannah was murdered, I craved being alone. What could have been worse than running into an acquaintance on the street, both of us groping for benign and appropriate words? Even now, after I’d had countless offers to join and then lead writing groups, teach workshops, and head the English department at a small community college, I preferred to work alone.
My problem was that with every scene I wrote, I was starting to like the best friend in Devils and Dust a little more. Isabelle killed Susannah. And Hopper, Susannah’s brother, a CO in a high-security prison, was bugging me because he kept getting the shit kicked out of him by corrupt guards. It was accurate in terms of the reality of prison, but it wasn’t really good to have a main character who appeared like a victim.
By the time Thursday-night dinner rolled around again, I was exhausted and worn out from working and wondering about Brady. I knew I should have been more concerned with whether Greg was fucking his receptionist, but I hardly noticed him anymore. I kept thinking about Brady saying he shouldn’t come to my house. His prison notes were tucked in my computer bag, and whenever I pulled them out for reference, I got a sort of wavy feeling thinking about him. Even though Gabby would never approve, I texted him. “Going to David’s for dinner at 7. You should come.” And then I wrote my brother’s address. He responded right away with “At Hope’s Place now. Will try to make it.”
Sometimes on my way to David’s, I thought of driving with my mother down High Ridge Road while she frantically dialed her cell phone. It had been getting dark, and I could only vaguely make out the ghostly shapes of the oaks and maples along the side of the road. “Carol,” she’d said into the phone. “Tell David to wait outside. I am going to stop the car in front of the house, and he has five seconds to come out. No, everything’s not all right.” She’d thrown the phone down between us, but it slid off the console and landed on the floor by my clunky sneakers. Savannah wore cute canvas Tretorns on gym day, and she always made fun of my sensible shoes. When she twisted her ankle playing volleyball, she said it didn’t matter as long as she looked good doing it. I thought of that and tried not to know what I knew.
My brother was waiting in Chandler’s yard when we drove up, jeans belted around the middle of his ass, hat on sideways, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Get in,” my mother said. Miraculously, David did. He smelled like pot. On the way to the hospital, he kept asking what happened. No matter how many times my mom told him Savannah had an accident, he kept saying, “But what happened?” until my mother finally said, “I don’t know, David. Jesus, don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?” And then he shut up, because she never talked to us like that.
I’d been in the ER at County General one other time when I’d had an asthma attack in seventh grade after someone brought some kind of weird hamster to class. The school nurse dialed 911 while I lay wheezing on the small cot pushed up against the cinder blocks in her office. Three doors down in English class, Savannah was having a coughing fit.
It seemed so different now, disorganized, frantic. The last time, they’d laid me down on a bed behind a blue curtain and given me an albuterol nebulizer. When the doctor came in to recheck my pulse ox, I was at 100 percent, back at school by fourth period. But now, the loudspeaker was paging doctors to oncology, to labor and delivery. In the waiting room, a man was holding a towel to his bleeding head, a girl was cradling a crying baby, and an old woman, oddly slumped in a chair, was completely still.
Officer Tunney and the other cops were in the hall, standing around our pediatrician, Dr. Bassett, and when we got there, they made a break in their circle for us. Dr. Bassett touched my mother on the arm. “Come with
me,” she’d said. My father had appeared, and the four of us, missing Savannah, left the cops behind and followed Dr. Bassett. I remember wishing Officer Tunney would come with us, but it was a vague thought, as though something buried deep in my subconscious knew I would be safer with him there. He was the only one who’d believed me that I knew where Savannah was. David, my parents, and I stood in a small room with suede furniture and southwestern art on the walls. None of us sat down.
Dr. Bassett pushed up her rimless glasses. “Lyndie, Bob,” she said to my parents. “Savannah was hurt very badly.”
My father had a spot of red sauce on his white oxford. It was Thursday, pasta night at the restaurant. He usually brought home leftover cavatappi, a chunky bolognese sauce, or vegetable lasagna layered with mushrooms and broccoli.
“Did she fall and break something?” he was asking. “Did she have an accident?”
My dad, the youngest of four and the only boy, had thought every little boy let his sisters dress him in frilly skirts and paint his fingernails a sparkly pink. His father traveled a lot, selling leather to companies like Coach and Gucci, so he’d spent his childhood surrounded by women and girls and girls becoming women. A self-described mama’s boy, he cried at chick flicks and sappy commercials. He cried when I fell out of our tree house and broke my arm. But now, as Dr. Bassett’s silence told us everything we needed to know, he stood stoically. I could see his fingertips digging into my mother’s shoulder, but otherwise, he was as still as a soldier at attention.
My mom didn’t move. She didn’t seem to be blinking. I leaned against the wall and watched Dr. Bassett take off her glasses. Years later, I would understand she didn’t want to see my mother’s face when she said what she said next.
“It appears Savannah was attacked, sexually.”
I was having a hard time breathing.