A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

  “What? No way. No, I can’t now. I’m home, I’m lit, and I can’t drive.” He paused. “Do not come here. Don’t show up at my fucking house. Come to the diner tomorrow. I don’t want to see you before then.” He hung up but lingered in the kitchen. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see him leaning against the refrigerator, his whole body sagging.

  “You should get a pager,” I mumbled when he rejoined me under the covers, rubbing his cold feet against my calves. “In New York all the drug dealers have pagers.”

  “I’m not a drug dealer,” he said.

  “Keep telling yourself that.” I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  • • •

  Morning was miserable. It was raining and cold. I didn’t want to get up but Owen had to open the diner, and his alarm went off at six. My car was still parked in town; I needed a ride from him or I’d be stranded. It didn’t actually sound like a terrible prospect—sleep in as late as I wanted, spend the day reading books on his couch and listening to the rain—but I hadn’t gone through the contents of Betty’s locker yet. They were still in my messenger bag, shoved into the back of my closet at home. I roused myself and dressed wordlessly while Owen handed me a cup of coffee.

  “Do you have any aspirin?” I asked him.

  “Hangover?”

  I nodded.

  “We’re going to have to build up your tolerance.”

  “That sounds like a long-term project. Right now I need a short-term solution.”

  He went into the bathroom and came back with a bottle of Advil.

  I chased three with my coffee. “Why don’t you feel this shitty?”

  “What do you think we do here all winter? Not quite as much to entertain us as you’ve got down there in the city.”

  One of these days I was going to tell Owen to quit acting like a fucking martyr, but it wasn’t going to be today. I sank onto the couch, facing the seemingly insurmountable task of putting on my shoes.

  “What are you doing later?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’ll—” Something short-circuited in my brain. “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  I looked up at him. “I was about to say ‘maybe I’ll see what Betty is up to.’”

  He had no response to that, busying himself instead with washing out his mug in the kitchen sink.

  “Did you see her around much, last fall?” I asked.

  He sighed, loudly. “I haven’t even been awake for an hour and you’re bringing her up.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “I run one of the only restaurants in town. Yeah, I saw her. I see everyone, every fucking day.”

  “People are saying she seemed different. Did you notice?”

  “Who told you that?” he snapped.

  “It was in the fucking paper, Owen. Jesus.”

  “I don’t know. I guess, maybe. A couple of times—” He stopped himself.

  “A couple of times what?”

  “She made me run lines with her. For Hamlet. She learned all of Ophelia’s lines.”

  “For the audition?”

  He looked at me like I was an imbecile. “After she lost the part. She learned it anyway. Like she thought somehow she’d get to be in the play.”

  I remembered the copy of Hamlet I’d rescued from the Flynns’ basement, all those notes and dog-eared pages, and of course Betty’s lie to me, that she’d be starring in the show. “Rebecca said some people made jokes after she died. About how she got to be Ophelia after all.”

  Owen didn’t say anything, just took a fresh pack of cigarettes from a carton he kept in the fridge, slamming it violently against the heel of his hand, then carefully unwrapping it and throwing the cellophane and foil away under the sink. He lit two and handed me one, then sat next to me, staring straight ahead to where anyone else would have had their television. There were stacks of books reaching halfway to the ceiling. It occurred to me that Owen might slowly be losing his mind, trapped in Williston.

  “Finley,” he said finally. “This has been an incredibly shitty year. I’m glad you’re back, I really am, but if you try to make me relive all the worst parts of it, we’re going to have a problem.”

  “Right,” I replied. “So I can’t ask about Betty, but you can play softball on the same team as the guy who killed her.”

  “Put your fucking shoes on,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s not weird to you? He’s a goddamn murderer.”

  “You think I like it? You think I like serving him his fucking pancakes on the weekends and watching him play center field? But I’m the one who has to live here.”

  “You’re not a fucking hostage, Owen. You can leave anytime you want.”

  “No, Fin, that’s you.”

  “Fine,” I said, angrily tying my shoes at last. “I’ll leave right now.”

  I stormed out the door into the rain, up Owen’s driveway toward the road. The screen door slammed behind him as he followed me.

  “Get in the truck,” he said wearily, standing by the door with his keys in hand. He looked exhausted, like I had worn him out before his day even started. “You’re not walking back to town.”

  I knew what he meant. It wasn’t the rain or the distance—about six miles—but the fact that someone might see me angry and soaked on the side of the road, coming from the direction of his cabin. Word would get around Williston by lunchtime. Owen didn’t like people knowing his business. I stopped walking, trying to decide if it was worth ending up grist for the rumor mill just to make this particular point.

  The ride into town was deeply uncomfortable, both of us seething silently, the only sound the tsking of the windshield wipers. I watched rivulets of water shimmy down my window and thought about drowning. Owen pulled over by my car, reached across me, and opened my door. I started to get out, and he grabbed my arm.

  “You don’t know how fucking lucky you are. You have no idea.”

  “Lucky?” I said.

  “Because you weren’t here. You get to remember her like she was. If I were you, that’s what I’d be trying to hold on to. You can slash all the tires and set all the fires you want—yeah, I’m not a fucking idiot—and she’ll still be dead and he’ll still be going to college in September.”

  “Did people really hate her that much, O?” I said softly.

  “Maybe she was easier to love from four hundred miles away. Did you ever think about that?”

  I stared at him until he let go of my arm and looked away.

  “I have to go to work,” he said.

  “Go to hell instead,” I told him, and I got out of the truck and slammed the door, and stood there shivering like a wet dog, and I knew I wasn’t done slashing tires and setting fires, not even close, not even a little. If it ever stopped raining, I might just burn the whole fucking town to the ground.

  • • •

  I went home to bed, where I slept restlessly until midafternoon, dreaming a series of heavily plotted, unsettling dreams I forgot immediately upon waking but that left me agitated anyway. It was still raining.

  Downstairs, I put on water for the French press; my headache was mostly gone, but the fight with Owen lingered like a bad taste in my mouth. He was not turning out to be the ally I’d hoped for. The light on the answering machine was blinking; I waited a minute before pressing play, briefly entertaining the fantasy that it would be him, calling to apologize.

  When I heard Serena’s raspy voice, my disappointment vanished. She didn’t say much, just asked me to call her back, which I did, immediately.

  “Hey, it’s Finley,” I said when she answered.

  “Hey.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You called?” I said.

  “Yeah. I just wanted to see what you were up to t
oday.”

  “Actually, I was finally going to take a look at the stuff from Betty’s locker.”

  “Really?” she said. “Have you started yet?”

  “No, I just woke up,” I said, looking at the clock and cringing. It was almost three.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t judge.”

  “Why don’t you come over? We can go through it together.”

  I gave her directions, and we hung up. I deleted her message, out of some vague sense of paranoia—we had, after all, set the high school on fire—but not before I listened to it a couple more times, just to hear her say my name. While the coffee steeped, I raced back upstairs, making my bed and throwing open the window. Finally, I dug my messenger bag out from the back of the closet and set it in the center of the floor.

  While I waited for Serena, I watched television and drank too much coffee. An hour passed, and then another, and just as I was considering getting started without her—I was vibrating with nervous energy—I heard a car pull into the driveway. I ran over to the window and watched her run to the front porch, hood pulled over her head, trying to stay dry. I waited for her to ring the bell before I opened the door and ushered her inside.

  We went upstairs and sat on the floor beside the messenger bag. I opened it up, gently removed the contents, and made several neat piles. Serena picked up a chemistry book, idly leafing through it while I sifted through a stack of papers, mostly old exams. Betty had never been a straight-A student, but this steady stream of Cs and Ds wasn’t like her either.

  “How was the game last night?” Serena finally asked.

  “Weird.” I told her about the pitcher nailing Calder in the gut.

  “I’m sorry I missed that,” she said.

  “It was pretty great,” I admitted.

  “I can’t wait to get the fuck out of this town.”

  “Are you starting college in September?”

  “Just at Orono,” she said. “But I’m hoping to transfer to Smith in another year. What about you?”

  I told her about NYU, the whole story, how Betty and I had planned to go there together and how I’d almost lost my spot after she died.

  “Have you ever been to New York?” I asked her.

  “Are you kidding? The East Coast capital of sin? Not exactly my parents’ first choice when it comes to family vacations.”

  “You’d like it,” I told her. “Come down sometime, after you start at Orono. Your parents will never have to know.” Serena would prefer the East Village to the West, it was obvious.

  “Careful, I might just take you up on that.” She paused. “So, what’s the deal with you and Owen?”

  “Owen?” I said, surprised.

  “I saw you guys looking at each other in the diner the other night. Is he your boyfriend or something?”

  “It’s not like that. I’ve known him since I was a kid. His family lives a few houses down.”

  “So you guys are just friends?”

  “Right now I would say ‘friends’ is an overstatement.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “We got into a fight. About Betty and Calder.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if that explained everything, and it occurred to me that she’d probably had many similar arguments over the last few months.

  “What about Calder?” I asked. “Everyone seems to agree that Betty was acting different before she died, but what about him?”

  “I’m sure you knew him a lot better than I did, but I didn’t notice anything, except that he went out of his way to avoid Betty. And the more he avoided her, the harder she tried to get his attention.”

  “Do you think—” I hesitated. I had imagined the most gruesome and minute details of Betty’s murder many times, but rarely out loud. “Do you think he just snapped?”

  “I don’t know. If he lured her out to the beach to meet him, that seems pretty premeditated, doesn’t it? Unless she got him to meet her there.”

  “The nightgown,” I said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “In the paper, my dad wrote that she was last seen wearing her nightgown and a robe. I don’t know if they ever found the nightgown. In the house, I mean. Wouldn’t that have been sort of strange, if she’d gone to meet him in her pajamas? In November?”

  “Can you ask your dad?”

  “I will.”

  She stared at me.

  “Like, now? Like, call him at work?”

  “Can’t you?”

  I wasn’t at all eager to speak with my father, considering I hadn’t made it home the night before. “We kind of had a fight, too,” I lied. “I might need to wait a day.”

  Serena smiled, a brilliant flash that called attention to its rarity. “You really have a way with people, don’t you?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I think they call it charisma.”

  “You and Betty must have made quite the pair. I wish I could have seen you together.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  We worked quietly after that, methodically making our way through all of Betty’s notebooks. Serena never asked what we were looking for; she knew, like I did, that we’d know it when we found it. I was hoping for something obvious—an angry note from Calder, a threat demanding he leave her alone, a link between them that started at his end, instead of the other way around—but there was nothing that helpful, just warnings from her teachers about poor grades, handouts from history class, pop quizzes on Virginia Woolf.

  “What’s this?” Serena said finally, pulling a thick, sealed priority mail envelope from a yellow spiral notebook whose metal coil had been partially undone.

  I knew what it was before she even handed it to me, before I looked at the address printed on the front and saw “NYU Office of Admissions” in Betty’s handwriting. I had mailed my college application in an identical envelope, handing it over to the postal clerk while my heart pumped like a fist inside my chest, as if I could will my admission into Tisch.

  “It’s her NYU application,” I whispered. “She never mailed it.”

  “Because Calder killed her first?” Serena asked cautiously.

  “Early admission. It was due November first.”

  Her eyes met mine across the books and papers strewn over my bedroom floor. “She never told you?”

  I shook my head, bewildered. “No. She never told me.”

  Serena reached out and plucked the envelope from my hand, but as she was about to rip it open I snatched it back with a vehemence that surprised me.

  “What?” she said, annoyed. “Don’t you want to see what’s in there? It might not even be her application at all.”

  I couldn’t explain it. Here we were, shamelessly going through Betty’s belongings, just as I had done in the Flynns’ basement, but somehow this felt just too much like an invasion of her privacy. And I trusted Serena, I did, but a strange proprietary feeling had asserted itself. Betty was mine, I had thought to rescue her belongings from the school, and so by proxy the NYU application was mine now, too. I would decide if and when to open it, and I would do it alone.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think her transcripts and recommendation letters are what matter. It’s that she never mailed it. Like lying to me about being cast as Ophelia. What was going on with her last fall? Did something else happen at that camp?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Things didn’t get really bad until after that, anyway, when we were back at school and she realized it hadn’t blown over like she thought it would.”

  “What, cheating on Calder?”

  “Yeah, and all of it, really. People were sort of sick of her shit, I guess, and since she wasn’t with Calder anymore they could just ignore her, and they did.”

  I could imagine no worse fate for Betty than being relegated to near-invisibility, except, of course, for the o
ne she’d been ultimately dealt.

  • • •

  After Serena left I got into my car and drove into town, Betty’s NYU app on my passenger seat; I looked over at it occasionally, still in disbelief. I tucked it protectively into my sweatshirt to keep it dry and ran up the stairs. The police reports were off-limits to me, and Calder’s confession was so inaccessible it was worthless, but my father had notes of his own somewhere, notes that might shed light on the identities of the unnamed sources in his articles, sources he would never reveal to anyone, not even me. Williston’s Messenger may have been just a small-town paper, but Dad still took the rules of journalism seriously, and that meant keeping anonymous sources just that. Maybe not everything had made it into the paper.

  I let myself into the office. The red light on the coffeemaker was still glowing; Dad had left it on, and now the place smelled even more like burnt coffee than usual. I turned it off, not wanting to be responsible for another fire.

  Dad’s system was incredibly basic. After he put out each week’s paper, he gathered whatever legal pads and scraps of paper he’d used to research the stories, printed out the final versions of all the articles, and shoved everything into a manila folder along with a copy of the finished issue. These folders were arranged in the file cabinets more or less according to date, but the folders for the weeks surrounding Betty’s death were missing. I went through each cabinet several times just to be sure.

  I paced the office, looking again through the boxes of old newspapers, checking the cabinets above the tiny sink, pulling books off shelves at random, even rummaging through the closet where he kept the plunger and extra office supplies.

  Frustrated, I sat down at the desk. I knew Dad wouldn’t have thrown those notes away; they were too important. The slim top drawer of his desk was filled with stacks of unused Post-its, errant paper clips, and rubber bands, and in the bottom drawer were two thick phone directories for our county, one residential, one for businesses. I was disappointed that he didn’t keep a bottle of whiskey hidden away in that drawer; in the movies, that was mandatory for all reporters.

  I reached into the back, behind the phone books, and my fingers brushed against a stack of paper. I had to empty the drawer to pry it loose, but when I did, there it was. Dad’s file on Betty’s death.