34
Daisy
Todd and I take a cab to Avenue X, the restaurant where he works. It’s on Newbury Street, where I’ve been a handful of times as a tourist, a few blocks away from Berklee College of Music. I came to this part of the city when Connor had his audition his senior year; the year he was rejected, the year that everything started to change for him.
That afternoon, while Connor was having his interview and audition, Caroline and I browsed the expensive boutiques. It was December, a few days before Christmas, and the streets were crowded with people doing last-minute holiday shopping. The stores were decorated with silver and gold tinsel, the trees bejeweled with twinkling white lights. People hurried past carrying their offerings in colorful bags, and the whole street had an otherworldly feeling, the people and shops sparkling like the inside of a snow globe.
Until Connor called to say he was ready for us to pick him up.
He sulked the whole drive home, answering Caroline’s questions with one-word responses.
How was the interview?
Fine.
What about your audition?
Okay.
Are you all right? Did something happen?
No.
Nothing.
I’m fine.
But he wasn’t. He plugged his earbuds in and ignored us for the rest of the drive home. Caroline kept meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror, asking me silent questions that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what had happened any more than she did.
He didn’t tell me that day or the next, not till several weeks later, at the tail end of our winter break. We’d gone to a movie in Egret and afterward to a coffee shop. The crumbs of a muffin lay on a napkin between us, and Connor began to tell me the story.
“I choked,” he said. “During the audition. I got on stage and I couldn’t play a damn thing. It was like my fingers were sausages. Everything I tried to play came out terrible.” His face was pink with the remembered humiliation. “I got it eventually, finally hit my stride. But you only get fifteen minutes. I wasted almost ten of mine. Didn’t even get to the second song I’d planned.”
“How was the interview?” I asked. The interview was after the audition.
“Not much better. They kept asking me about stage fright. How long I’d had it. But I’ve never had it before. You’ve seen me. I’ve played in front of audiences a bunch of times.” He shook his head in frustration.
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve never had a performance that mattered so much. It freaked me out, and I blew it.” He pressed his lips together, and stared out the window at Main Street.
Already I was thinking about what this would mean for him. Deadlines for schools were less than two weeks away, and Berklee was still the only college he’d applied to. I don’t know if it was false confidence or fear that had kept him from applying to other schools, but every time I pressed, he’d told me that Berklee was the only place he wanted to go. I assumed that now things had changed.
“You still have a week to apply to other schools.”
“I can try again next year.”
Irritation prickled at my neck—at his short-sightedness and his naive assumption that things would work themselves out as the universe intended.
“At least throw your application into UMass,” I urged him.
“I don’t want to go to UMass.”
“Well, you don’t want to go nowhere, either, do you? The last thing you want is to get stuck here. Like me.” I already knew I wasn’t going to college in the fall. My mother had said I could work for her and save money to take classes at Cape Cod Community College in the spring.
“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” Connor met my eyes across the table and squeezed my fingers. As much as I wanted him to stay for selfish reasons, I didn’t want him to do it like this.
“You’re going to get stuck here,” I said.
“I’ll reapply next year. It won’t be the end of the world.”
We didn’t talk about it anymore, and he didn’t apply anywhere else. When the rejection letter rolled in a few months later, it wasn’t even a surprise.
From the window of the cab, I see Berklee, its gray concrete pillars glowing in the dim light. I wonder what life would be like if Connor had a different audition that day, if instead of a rejection letter, a fat acceptance package arrived in the mail. Who would he be now?
Todd reaches for my hand and places it in his lap.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“Just looking at the city.”
“Different from Great Rock, huh?”
“It’s another world.”
And it is. I will myself to be here, not in the dusty memory of the past, or the long-gone possibility of a future that didn’t come to be, not back on the island, but here. For at least this moment, only here.
A little while later we’re sitting at the bar of Avenue X. Todd was wrong; I’m totally underdressed compared to the other girls in the swanky bistro who are wearing sparkly tank tops and fishnet stockings, despite the freezing night. After the first drink, I don’t care. Todd orders for both of us in a way that’s authoritative without being obnoxious. The bartender brings me a pale green drink in a martini glass with a cucumber floating in it. When I take a sip, it tastes like spring, a bright green possibility laid out before us. The server brings out plate after plate, each dish more delicious than the last. Todd introduces me to people, and we order more drinks and I’m caught up in the whole scene, the glittering orange lamps and loud chatter of customers, the prettiness of everyone here, the crowded warmth. I sip my drink and laugh as the rest of my life falls away, the lonely island of Great Rock sitting abandoned in the ocean. Outside, it starts to snow.
35
Caroline
“Told me what?” I ask again, turning from Connor to Jack. Neither of them looks at me, though something unspoken crackles in the air between them.
“I saw you,” Connor says to Jack. “I saw you.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack barks. His face is unreadable. I blink, my lips forming words I’m unable to speak, trying to make sense of what Connor is saying. I look to Jack but his eyes are on Connor.
“I saw you follow her to the beach. She ran down there to get away from you. I stayed by the sea wall.” Though Connor hasn’t identified the she that he’s talking about, somehow we all know. Layla Dresser has been in this house since Jack came over to tell me the news of her murder.
“You saw nothing,” Jack snaps, though his voice lacks some of its usual authority.
“Connor,” I say sharply, and they both turn, surprised to find me still here. “You’re confused. You don’t know what you saw.”
“Are you so stupid? Are you really so blind?” Connor asks, his voice rising in anger and frustration.
I look to Jack, waiting for him to clarify, to explain. He doesn’t answer, but his eyes are hard and bright.
“It was dark. I couldn’t see you, but I heard her scream.” Connor’s voice cracks, his face crumpling. He swallows hard, regaining control. “I waited by the sea wall, but you didn’t come back. You must have kept walking down the beach, over the jetty and to the other side. I didn’t realize you killed her. Not until the next day.” Connor’s eyes are wild—with rage, but there’s fear there too. He’s always been afraid of his father. Maybe all along he saw something that I didn’t.
I shake my head silently back and forth. I won’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense. Over the years, Jack has made me angry with his silent stoicism in the face of my unrest. I’ve questioned my choice to marry him, to move to Great Rock, to raise our son here. But never, in all of the years I’ve been with Jack, have I ever been afraid of him.
I put the wine down too hard. It spills over the rim of the glass into a red pool on the table that begins to drip onto the rug. No one moves. There’s a ringing in my ears, and my head feels full of water. I can hear the sound of that
poor girl screaming, and I know I’ll never be able to forget it. I reach out a hand, to Connor, to Jack, for someone to catch me before I fall, but neither of them even looks at me. I bring my trembling hand back into my lap and stay where I am, motionless, watching our life collapse around us. I focus on the steady drip of red wine onto the pale blue rug, unable to rise for a cloth. It will leave a stain.
“Jack?” My voice is barely a whisper.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack says, his eyes on Connor.
“Will you just tell her, Dad? Please, just tell her.” The anger is gone from Connor’s voice, and now he just sounds tired and desperate.
I already know it’s true. I can tell by Jack’s silence and by Connor’s confusion and fear. I can tell because none of us in this room wants it to be true, yet it is. Jack rises from his chair and heads to the kitchen. I hear the refrigerator door open and the hiss of a bottle being opened. He returns to the living room, but doesn’t sit down, draining nearly half the beer in one gulp. He sinks to his knees before the couch, rests his large hands on my lap. I’ve never seen him look so vulnerable, so broken.
“It was an accident,” he begins, and I feel the bottom fall out. For a moment, I’d been hoping he’d deny it and we could pretend to start all over. “You have to believe that. I never meant for this to happen.”
On his knees before me, he is a shattered man. How long has he looked like this, hair thinning, wrinkles deepening in the furrow of his brow and around his mouth? He didn’t look like that when I met him, a fresh-faced cop on the harbor, eyes shiny with hope. Life has chipped away at us slowly, day by day, chink by chink, so incrementally that we didn’t even notice what was lost along the way.
“Jack?” I catch his hand, and he squeezes it so tightly that I feel the fragile bones in my fingers. “What happened?”
He’s crying now, and Connor and I watch, horrified, as Jack’s face contorts in grief. I’ve never seen him cry before, in all our years of marriage, not even when his father passed away last year. I realize the strangeness of this as Jack buries his face in my lap. I rest my hand against the warm skin of his neck, the stubble of a recent cut prickling my palm. I smooth his cropped hair down, just as I once did to Connor’s stubborn cowlick, though Jack’s always kept his hair so short that there’s never a strand out of place.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The words are muffled against my body. Connor watches us, frozen in place beside me on the couch.
I hold Jack’s head firmly and force it up so I can see his face. His eyes are bloodshot and his skin a mottled red. “What happened?” I repeat, louder this time.
Jack takes a shaky breath that looks like it takes all the energy he has. He pushes himself up and sits down on the edge of the coffee table, hands on his knees, as if trying to steady himself. Running his fingers along his face, he begins.
“Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?” He waves his hand at Connor, then wipes at his eyes. “Do you think I don’t know what drugs look like? I can see it all over you.” Beside me, Connor looks dazed and stunned. Jack’s right. I can see the drugs all over him too, now that I’m actually looking. Jack continues. “Twenty years I’ve watched drugs come to this island. I’ve watched them destroy good people, turn honest people into thieves. I’ve seen parents have to identify their kids at the morgue.” Connor’s eyes are wide, the empty look in them finally gone. “Do you remember Patty Larkin’s daughter who died of a drug overdose last year? And the Sullivans’ son—remember him?”
I remember Patty Larkin, a single mother who lost her younger daughter to heroin and is now raising her four-year-old grandson. And I remember the Sullivans’ son. His friends dumped him outside the hospital after he overdosed and then drove away. It was twenty degrees out. He was almost dead by the time the hospital staff even knew he was there. Last I heard he was in and out of rehab places off-island. I’ve heard about these people and their stories, but I haven’t seen it the way Jack has. Their stories haven’t touched me; not really, not beyond a fleeting moment of sadness and pity.
“I saw her that night at Moby Dick’s. I wasn’t on duty and everyone was doing crowd control for the festival, but I saw her, and I knew why she was there. She’d been bringing drugs over since the summer. Hell, I almost arrested her a few months ago, but we didn’t have enough on her. We knew what she was doing.” His eyes are glassy.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt her. I just wanted to catch her with the drugs. When she left the bar, I followed her. She was outside with Ian. They were arguing, and her lip was bleeding, though she claimed she slipped.” Jack shakes his head in disgust. “I don’t know what Evvy ever saw in him anyways. He’s a mean little man.”
“But it wasn’t Ian,” I say softly. Jack shakes his head.
“Ian left and I searched her. I wasn’t even on duty and she hadn’t done anything, but I knew why she was there. I knew.” He looks up at me imploringly, as if begging me to understand. “But she didn’t have anything. Not even a purse. She laughed at me. When she started to walk away, I grabbed her. I must have scared her because she started to run. I’d been drinking, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I thought maybe I could get her to admit to bringing the drugs, but she ran down to the beach. I followed her.” He slumps into the easy chair, the fight finally slipping away.
“I just wanted to get her to admit what she was doing. But when I caught up to her, I was so angry. Someone needed to stop her.” There’s a hard determination in his words. “I was thinking about Connor, about what could happen to him.” Though Connor is inches away, Jack’s talking to me. He’s explaining this story to me.
“I grabbed her. Around the neck. And I just started to squeeze. It was dark and I couldn’t see her face. I wouldn’t have done it if I could see her face.” His voice cracks, and I don’t know why he says this, why it matters. “I left her there, and I ran down the beach. I didn’t mean to kill her. I keep wondering if maybe she wasn’t dead yet. If she’d still be alive if I’d called an ambulance.” He leans forward on his knees, buries his face in his hands, and I watch his shoulders shake with silent sobs.
Connor gets up from the couch and paces the length of the living room, fists stuffed deep in the pockets of his sweatshirt, his whole body jangling. None of us speaks for what feels like minutes on end.
“What did you do?” I finally ask. My voice is barely a whisper. Jack speaks into the refuge of his hands.
“I’d seen her with Ian. I knew his history. It wasn’t that hard to make sure he was a suspect.”
“She was having an affair with Ian,” I say.
Jack looks at me, his face folding into a frown. “I don’t know about that. But Ian was the one who’d pick up the drugs. She’d leave them on the boat somewhere for him. Something must have gone wrong that day if she still had them on her at the end of the night.”
I feel like I’m floating in the room, suspended midair. Everything I thought I knew, thought I understood, has fallen away.
“What now?” I ask.
Jack raises his head and his eyes are red, his face still flushed, but when he speaks, he sounds more like himself. “I turn myself in. I’ll go in tomorrow and give a statement.”
The words land in the air with a dull thud. There is no other possibility.
“Dad.” Connor’s voice holds a plea, though I don’t know what he’s asking for. There’s nothing for Jack to give.
“It will be okay,” Jack says.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have stayed quiet.” It hits me then that Connor’s been carrying this around by himself all week.
“No. It’s not your fault.”
I turn to Connor. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can still salvage the wreckage. “Did you tell anyone?” He shakes his head. “No one at all? Not Daisy? Not Keith?”
“No. No one.”
I turn back to Jack. “We don’t have to tell. We’ll pretend Connor wasn’t there. No one k
nows.” Even as I say the words, I know I don’t mean them. I can’t stand by and let Ian go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I can’t do that to him, and I certainly can’t do it to Evvy. I’m grasping, scrabbling at straws in the sand.
Jack leans forward from his spot on the coffee table and holds me gently by the forearms. “No, Carrie. I need to turn myself in.” I nod and the tears begin to streak down my own face. The secret is too big for this room. Already it’s pushing at the windows, the weight of it leaning against the doorframe.
Jack turns from me to Connor. “What happened that night?” Connor doesn’t answer and Jack speaks louder, asserting the authority he’s so comfortable with. “What happened, Connor?” Connor doesn’t sit, but he begins to talk.
“I saw Layla at the bar. I knew her from the summer. She was wasted. She got up to go to the bathroom and left her purse on the chair. I took it.” He lets out a short bitter laugh. “So stupid. I screwed everything up.”
“How did you know she had drugs in there?” Jack asks.
“I didn’t, but I knew she was dealing.”
“How did you know that?” Jack asks.
Connor looks at him in confusion, as if he can’t believe Jack doesn’t have the whole picture straight by now. “Scott Lambert set the whole thing up. The drugs go to him. In the kitchen of Moby Dick’s.”
I think of the empty restaurant in the middle of February, how Connor’s worked there since he was in high school.
“What did you do?” Jack asks.
“I stuck her purse under my coat. I was just looking for a few pills. I didn’t realize how much would be in there.”
“So what happened next?” Jack asks.
“I went into the bathroom with the bag and saw what was inside. I freaked. I didn’t know what to do. When I got out of the bathroom, she wasn’t at the bar anymore. I thought about dumping her bag somewhere, so I headed to the beach. I saw you going down the stairs. I thought you were meeting someone. I didn’t even realize it was Layla until the next day.”
Everybody Lies Page 22