A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

  It took me a second to realize he meant Caroline’s odds of surviving.

  “Tell her I’ll come tomorrow.”

  He nodded and looked back toward Mrs. Flynn. “I’m sorry about Betty.”

  “Thank you. I’ll keep your sister in my prayers.”

  He turned to leave, but something captured his attention on the other side of the room. I followed his gaze to the junior prom picture above the mantel. He started toward it, and people shrank from him as he went by, as if a skinny, drunk, emotionally disturbed lion were suddenly roaming the Flynns’ home. Halfway across the living room, Owen stepped in—fucking finally— halting Calder by planting a hand on his chest.

  “Seriously,” Owen told him. “You better get back to the hospital.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Calder said.

  Owen lowered his voice and tried to say something soothing, but Calder cut him off.

  “Why are you acting like you’re scared of me?”

  “I’m not scared of you,” Owen said.

  “What about the rest of them? I see how they’re looking at me. Like I’m some kind of monster.”

  “They’re looking at you like that because you’re loaded, in the middle of the day, at a funeral. Come on, it’s time to go.”

  Calder laughed. “Owen Shepard. Williston’s favorite son. Why do you get to be here, and I have to leave? I know all about you. I know what you do. Everybody knows. You see how they’re looking at me now? Soon they’ll be looking at you like that.”

  I laid Betty’s clothes on the arm of the couch and hurried to Owen’s side. “Last time I checked,” I said to Calder, “you were hardly an outcast.”

  “God, Finley, what a hypocrite you are. So self-righteous, now that you’re here. Where were you last fall when she needed you?”

  I slapped him across the face, so hard my palm stung and the sound echoed through the living room. “Don’t you ever imply that I had something to do with Betty dying. It isn’t my fault that she’s dead.”

  “If you’d been here, you’d understand. It’s nobody’s fault that she’s dead. It was an act of mercy.”

  I don’t know how long Serena and Jack had been watching, but suddenly they were both there, flanking Owen and me, so it was the four of us facing down Calder in the Flynns’ living room, Jack’s brothers hovering just in range.

  “Get out of here,” said Serena, “before an act of mercy happens to you.”

  Slowly, Calder backed toward the front door. Everyone watched with trepidation, like they were afraid he might burst into flames. As soon as he stepped outside, I heard an engine turn over; his ride, I figured, and I was relieved he wouldn’t be driving himself home in that condition. With Calder’s luck he would sideswipe a Saturn carrying a family of four and walk away without a scratch while the kids were being scraped off the pavement.

  Out of curiosity, I sidled up to the window, wondering who it was, what asshole would drop off someone that drunk at a funeral. Who set Calder loose on us like that?

  And then I saw the Dodge Ram pull away from the curb, and I stepped away from the window and hoped the driver hadn’t seen me. Owen was already on his way to the patio, cigarettes in hand, so I followed him out.

  “Owen,” I said. “Owen.”

  “Jesus, Finley, now what?”

  “Please. Tell me. What the fuck is Calder doing with Silas?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

  THERE WAS ONE person who had been noticeably absent at the service, the burial, and the reception, but I knew where to find him. Danny was working, of course, behind the counter at the trader, and it was about time for me to buy a new carton of smokes anyway.

  “Oh, no,” he said when I came in. “Please. Seriously, Finley, just go away.” He buried his head in his hands.

  “I know how you feel, Danny, believe me.” I threw down my license and some cash. “Another carton of Marlboros, please.”

  “Take them and go,” he said. “I’m begging you.”

  “Hey, you came looking for me last time, remember?”

  He sighed. “How was the funeral?”

  “Worse than I expected.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “You’ll hear about it soon enough. Let me ask you something.”

  He glared at me. “I knew you weren’t just here for cigarettes.”

  “I’m multitasking.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  I glanced at the security camera over his shoulder. “That doesn’t record any sound, right? Just video.”

  “Yeah.”

  I leaned in anyway, and lowered my voice. “You said Betty asked you to do something. That she asked Owen and then you.”

  “I can’t believe you remember that. You were so fucking high when I told you.”

  Surprised, I flinched before I could stop myself.

  “Christ, Finley, half this town is hooked on that shit. What, you think I can’t recognize the signs by now?”

  “You told me you’d seen a ghost. What can I say, the conversation stuck. Whatever, yes, I remember.” I took a deep breath. “Danny, did she ask you to kill her?”

  He looked so tiny, hunched over the counter, greasy hair falling into his eyes, a pale sliver of skin showing through the place in his T-shirt where the collar was coming unstitched. I felt sorry for him, this boy who truly thought he was haunted.

  “Fuck you,” he said, with a vehemence that actually made me take a step back. “Everything was fine until you came back to town.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I snapped. “If someone goes around asking people to kill her and eventually finds a taker—then no, Danny, everything is not fine, no matter how much everybody wants to pretend it is. Now tell me, what did she say to you?”

  “If I do, will you leave me alone? Find another place to buy your cigarettes until it’s time for you to go back to New York?”

  “Fine.”

  He turned around and looked out the front window, across the street at the spot where he’d sworn Betty had appeared to him. He spun back toward me, his face tortured. “Yes, okay? Last fall. I didn’t think she was serious. She brought me up into the catwalks one afternoon at school, in the theater, after rehearsal. I was excited—like an idiot, I thought maybe she’d finally come around and wanted to make out or something. But instead she said she’d been trying to screw up the nerve to throw herself off the catwalk, but she couldn’t do it. She asked me if I would push her. And I laughed and she didn’t, and I realized that she meant it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I asked her what was going on. She got all pissy—you know what I mean—and told me to forget it, that she’d find somebody else. I wanted to know if she’d asked anyone besides me yet, and she said yeah, Owen, but he was a real jerk about it.”

  “Because he wouldn’t do it?”

  “Right. And I asked her if this was about Calder, and I tried to give her some shitty pep talk, you know, there’ll be other guys and all that, but she just laughed and said I wouldn’t understand. I said, ‘Try me’—I wanted her to talk to me, you know—but she just went back down the ladder and never mentioned it again.”

  “When was this? How long before she disappeared?”

  “I don’t know, like a month? They were already in rehearsals for Hamlet, but the show hadn’t gone up.”

  “Did you ever talk to Owen about it?”

  “And say what? I barely know the guy.”

  “So who did you tell?”

  “I might’ve mentioned it to Rebecca, but not until after Betty disappeared.”

  “And that’s it?” I tried to remember if Rebecca had told me when she’d heard about it. And hadn’t she specifically said that Betty had asked Calder?

  “I know this so
unds weird,” Danny continued, “but I didn’t really think about it much afterward. It was just this brief, strange moment, and then it was over. I mean, what about you, Finley? Didn’t you talk to her last fall? Did she ever say anything to you?”

  I was about to snap at him—what kind of stupid question was that?—but then I caught myself. Maybe it wasn’t such a stupid question, after all. No one else had listened to Betty, why should anyone assume I was different? I had spoken to her during the months before she vanished, and it did sound like something was bothering her, but other than a few clumsy attempts to learn what it was, I had let it go. We’d talked a week before Hamlet went up, when I’d offered to come to Williston.

  “You know I love watching you perform,” I’d said.

  “Seriously, don’t worry about it. Don’t bother,” she said, trying to sound cavalier.

  “Are you angry at me? Did I do something?” The physical distance between us didn’t make it any less likely that I could have offended Betty without realizing it.

  “No, you didn’t do anything.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “Nothing. It’s not you.”

  “I take it Calder hasn’t come around.”

  Silence.

  “Does he have another girlfriend?” I asked gently.

  “No. Shelly’s been sniffing around him in a pretty big way, but he doesn’t seem interested. I don’t think he’s fooling around with anybody.” If anything, she sounded even more despondent.

  “Isn’t that good news? Doesn’t that mean there’s hope?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t. Rather than offering encouragement, I should have been telling her to move on. Fuck Calder—in less than a year, she’d be living in New York, where there would be more cute boys in one acting class alone than there were in all of Williston. Once she left, she’d realize that he was a provincial hick not worth another second of her time, someone who was unimportant outside of hometown and high school. I knew she would thrive just as soon as she had the bigger stage she needed.

  “I think it’s almost worse this way,” she said. “If he were with somebody else, at least I could take a good look at her and know what I’m up against. But he’d rather be alone than be with me.” She sighed. “Being with me was really that bad?”

  “Being alone isn’t all that awful,” I said. I was a bit touchy about this subject. I hadn’t had a boyfriend since Tad, and other than the occasional make-out and groping session—at a party in someone’s apartment while their parents were at the country house for the weekend, in the crowd at a show—Owen was the sum total of my sexual conquests.

  “I know you think it’s, like, pathetic that I’m not over Calder yet, but don’t act like you’re any better when I know you’re down there pining away for Owen. Believe me, Owen isn’t sitting around Williston missing you.”

  I swallowed hard and forced myself to ignore that last shot. “I never said I thought you were pathetic.”

  “It is though, it is pathetic. God, I’m so sick of myself,” she went on. “No wonder he won’t even talk to me. I can’t believe you haven’t hung up on me yet.”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t we just pull the self-pity bus over to the side of the highway, turn off the engine, and get out and stretch our legs, okay?”

  She gave her throaty chuckle, and I slumped against the wall of my bedroom with relief. “You’re right,” she said. “I know, I know you’re right.”

  It seemed I had successfully dispatched the unlights, at least for now. “Okay, I’ll ask you one more time. Are you sure you don’t want me to come up this weekend and see you in Hamlet?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’ll come down over winter break, how about that? We can go see the windows on Fifth Avenue and do something for New Year’s. A weekend wouldn’t be enough. I need a longer visit.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  “It’s not just about Calder, you know.”

  “Is it the unlights?”

  “Kind of. I don’t know, not really. I just feel invisible lately, like this specter that nobody can see.”

  I could tell she was gearing up again, and I knew I needed to get off the phone before my patience wore out altogether. “Betty, in a week you’re going to get onstage and perform in front of the whole goddamn town. How much more visible do you need to be?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “You’re right. I know. Thanks for listening to me. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. Break a leg next weekend. Let me know how it goes.”

  What an asshole I felt like now, thinking of that conversation. Betty feeling invisible—I should have known how dangerous that was, what it might lead to.

  “I’m just trying to understand,” I said to Danny now. “Why would she want to die? She was so close to getting out of here.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe she wasn’t as close as you think. Just because she was supposed to go to NYU with you doesn’t mean she would have gotten in—or if she had, that her parents would have let her go. They sent her to that crazy Jesus camp last summer. Do you honestly think they would have let her go live on her own in the city?”

  “She didn’t need their permission. If they didn’t want to pay for it, she could’ve taken out loans or something. Maybe she would have gotten a scholarship. We talked about it. She had options.”

  Danny looked at me sharply. “Maybe she didn’t have as many options as you thought.”

  “It’s a pretty big leap from not being able to go to NYU to wanting someone to shove you off the catwalk to your death.”

  “I’m not saying it makes sense. I’m just telling you what I know, like you wanted.” He handed me my smokes and pointed to the door. “Now. It’s your turn. To do what I asked.”

  • • •

  I didn’t have to go far to find Owen. He was in the alley next to the Halyard, pacing and smoking. He rolled his eyes when he saw me stalking toward him.

  “Not now, Finley, whatever it is.”

  I shoved him, hard. He dropped his cigarette.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Betty? About what she asked you to do?”

  “Oh, Christ—”

  “I’ve been making myself crazy trying to figure out what happened to her, and it didn’t occur to you to mention that she asked you to—” I went to push him again, and he grabbed my wrists.

  “Not here,” he said. “Not outside.”

  He dragged me into the diner through the kitchen door, brought me around the counter, and sat me firmly on one of the stools. Then he circled back so he was on the other side, filled two mugs with coffee and a third with water. Only when he lit another cigarette did I glance around and realize that there was nobody else in the restaurant. The booths were empty, and the sign hanging in the front door had the Open side facing toward us.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, confused. “Why are you closed in the middle of the day?”

  “We got shut down by the health department,” Owen said.

  “What? Why?”

  He ashed into the mug of water. “Leroy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The police dropped the arson charges. They had to. I was here the whole time, I was able to give them a dozen names of people who saw me working when the fire started.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Don’t you get it? Leroy couldn’t catch me dealing, he couldn’t frame me for the fire, so he switched gears and shut the place down. He probably figures without the diner, I’ll have no choice but to start selling again, and this time the cops will be paying attention.”

  “So don’t start selling again,” I said.

  “The
n what the fuck am I supposed to do?” he snapped.

  “I don’t know, we’ll think of something.”

  “There’s no ‘we,’ okay, Finley? You’re leaving in a month, remember? There’s just me, doing it all by myself, as usual. I’m the one who’ll think of something. ‘Owen Shepard, Williston’s favorite son.’” He snorted. “But you didn’t come here to talk about my problems, right? You came here to talk about Betty.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest; I wasn’t going to budge. “I just want to know the truth.”

  “Fine.” He dropped the butt into the water. “I started sleeping with her last fall, after you left. That was my first mistake. Then I started selling to her. That was mistake number two. I didn’t want to, okay? She was getting it from somewhere else, and then her supply got cut off and she went into withdrawal.” It was torture for me to hear this, picturing Betty dope-sick and desperate, and me, oblivious, hundreds of miles away. “She was sick, really sick, so I gave her a bunch of pills. She was supposed to use them to taper off. Instead, she took them all at once. I woke up and found her facedown on my bathroom floor, and I couldn’t wake her up. I didn’t know what else to do, so I called Silas. He brought over this medicine they give people when they overdose on opiates, and he helped me give it to her. And you know what she said when she finally came to?”

  “What?”

  “She was pissed. She said she didn’t want to wake up, that she wanted to die, and that she’d finally found a way to do it that wouldn’t hurt. I said if that was the case, why do it in my house where I could stop her, and she said because she didn’t want her parents to find her. Silas helped me talk her down. After that, I wouldn’t sleep with her or sell to her, but it was too late. She’d already met Silas, and he’d taken a shine to her, and she didn’t need me anymore.”

  “Why would Silas keep selling to some girl with a death wish?”

  “Because he’s fucking insane, don’t you get that?”

  “Of course,” I said, my voice rising. “Believe me, that shit is abundantly clear.”

  “She came to me once, maybe a week after that night, and asked me if I would do it.” He did not have to explain what “it” was. “She said she could find somebody else if she had to, but she wanted it to be me—someone she knew, someone she trusted. Of course I said no, and then a month went by and she didn’t mention it again, so I figured she was okay.”