Catherine (15 page)

“That’s creepy,” I said. “Like something a stalker would hang on his wall. I feel
dirty just looking at these.”

Coop snapped off the light, and I followed him into the kitchen. My appetite had disappeared,
but he went back to eating.
“You know why I showed you those pictures,” he said after a while, not looking up
from his plate.

He was right. Suddenly it all made sense: why the very sight of me seemed to make
Hence angry. Before tonight I would have guessed that Hence hadn’t completely gotten
over my mother. But now I knew it was more than that: He was positively obsessed with
her. Even if he did have a girlfriend, he certainly couldn’t bring her to his bedroom,
where she would be faced with his shrine to Catherine Eversole Price. How had he even
gotten that copy of her wedding photo? Had she sent it to him to make him jealous?
And why had she married my father if she still cared enough about Hence to bother?
I was so preoccupied I barely heard what Cooper said next.

“Maybe you understand now why he’s convinced your mother is dead. If he believed she
was alive, he’d have to admit she chose not to come back to him all these years.”

I snapped to attention. “So you think she could be alive?” I didn’t wait for an answer.
“What else do you know about my mother?”

Coop helped himself to yet another slice of lasagna. “Hence talks sometimes. He tells
me things.”

“What things?” I could hear my voice rising with impatience. It hurt to think Cooper
might know things about my own mother that I didn’t.

“All kinds of things. Some would maybe be more useful to you than others….”

“It’s all useful. You’ve got to tell me everything. You don’t understand.” I could
hear that I sounded a little bit unhinged, but
I kept going. “Until I got here, I hardly knew anything about my own mother. My father
kept everything important from me.” Barely realizing what I was doing, I reached over
to squeeze Coop’s arm, as if to keep him from running away. He looked up from his
plate, and I let go.

For a long moment, we sat in silence, until Coop finally got up to rinse his plate.
“I don’t know what time Hence is coming home. I don’t want him walking in on us while
we’re having this conversation.”

So I held back my questions until we were finally up in my mother’s apartment, sitting
on her blue plaid love seat. “Now tell me everything you know.”

“First you have to swear not to let Hence know I’ve told you any of this.”

“I swear.”

So Coop told me about how sometimes Hence would wake him up when he couldn’t sleep
and needed someone to talk to. The conversation always went pretty much the same:
Hence would start out lamenting how my mother had betrayed him, how she’d bought into
society’s expectations that a rich girl had to go to an Ivy League school and marry
into wealth. He’d thought she was above all that conventional bullshit, but he’d been
wrong.

“That’s seriously messed up,” I said. “She wasn’t a snob. My dad isn’t remotely rich.”

“The way Hence sees it, that’s what must have happened. Why else would she marry your
father?”

“Because
he’s
not insane.” I grabbed a throw pillow and squashed it against my stomach. “Keep going.”

Hence would drink as he talked, getting angrier and angrier. Once he’d lost it completely
and punched a hole in the apartment wall. Most nights, though, his rage would give
way to sadness, and he’d talk about how beautiful and brave my mother had been, how
fiercely she’d protected the people she loved. How she was brilliant and talented,
how blue her eyes were, and how she’d saved his life by taking him into her father’s
club. (Was that the corniest thing I’d ever heard or the most beautiful? I wasn’t
sure.) Once, after a lot of whiskey, he’d even said he didn’t understand how my mother
could have married some eggheaded college professor when she and Hence shared a single
soul.

“Whoa,” I interrupted. “He said that?”

“Maybe not those exact words. But something that over-the-top. I know he comes off
as a cynic. But after hearing him go on and on about your mother, I think the Hence
most of the world knows is really made out of… I don’t know… scar tissue. All tough
and gnarly to cover up the hurt.”

I made a face. “He’s gnarly, all right. Oh, God—am I going to have to like Hence now?
I’m not sure I can.” I gave my mother’s throw pillow a punch. “So I’m guessing he
doesn’t have a girlfriend?”

Coop grabbed the pillow from me and tossed it onto the bed. “He has girlfriends. Or
maybe you’d call them groupies. Women who hang around him at the club. He never brings
them up here, and I don’t think it ever gets serious. I imagine it’s pretty much just
sex.”

I couldn’t help grimacing in the face of too much information.

“You want the whole story, right?”

“I’m pretty creeped out right now. But don’t stop. I need to
know everything. Please.”
You’re the only person I’ve got on my side
, I thought.

Coop went on with the story, telling me about Hence’s marriage to Nina Bevilaqua,
the woman I’d seen on the Infamous Groupies website. Despite the fact that Hence barely
even liked her, they’d eloped after Mom had sent him her wedding picture to show him
she’d moved on.

“Are you serious? He married her for revenge?”

Coop’s cheeks glowed red. “He’s made some mistakes.”

“Um, yeah. Why do you stand up for him?” I could feel myself on the verge of getting
carried away with my own argument the way I sometimes do, but I kept going, trying
to wrestle Coop’s loyalty out of Hence’s hands and into mine. “I know he was a great
rock star once upon a time….”

“Not exactly a rock star. Riptide only had the one hit.”

“And now all he is is some guy who owns a nightclub.”

“Who completely shapes the New York music scene. Hence has broken more acts than you
can imagine. And he’s serious about the music. He’s a genius.”

“He’s a stalker.”

Coop winced. “Not technically.”

“I don’t get it. You’re just his employee. He doesn’t even treat you all that well.”

“He’s been good to me. When I got to the city, I didn’t have a place to stay, and
I was running out of money fast. He took me in. Gave me work. He’s been teaching me
about the music industry….”

“Oh! You’re hoping he’ll help make you a star?” I recalled the guitar leaning against
Coop’s cot.

“He’s mentoring me. He’s always doing that—finding promising musicians, helping them
develop their talent.”

“You’re a promising musician?” Why did everyone seem to have a special talent but
me?

“Hence seems to think so,” Coop said, blushing again. “I just know I have to try.”

“What does it feel like?” I asked. “Knowing what you want?”

He laughed. “You’re the most determined person I’ve ever met. You tell me.”

“I’m not. This thing with my mother is different.” But I couldn’t help wondering if
Coop was seeing some part of me that I couldn’t see. “It doesn’t count.”

“Of course it counts,” he insisted.

After that, we shared an awkward moment, with him wiping his hands on his jeans and
me not knowing what to say.

“Would you play your guitar for me?” I asked, in part to break the silence and in
part because I was curious.

But something in his eyes stopped me short. He looked startled, even shocked. It took
me a few seconds to realize he wasn’t reacting to my question, but to something he’d
heard: the elevator creaking up to the fifth floor and coming to a stop outside the
apartment door.

It could only be Hence. He knocked on the door once, twice. I froze, not sure what
to do next. The look on Coop’s face told me he’d been caught doing something that
would displease his boss.
Would Hence realize Cooper had been giving his secrets away? Would Coop lose his job
over me?

“I know you’re home,” Hence growled on the other side of the door. “I’m looking for
Cooper. Open up or I’ll break the door in.”

I looked at Coop for a sense of what he wanted me to do.

“Open it,” he said in a resigned voice.

I unlocked the door, and Hence looked past me into the room. His gaze came to rest
on the love seat, where Cooper sat upright, his position oddly stiff. “What is this?”

“We were talking,” Cooper said quietly.

“He was telling me about the New York club scene,” I lied.

But Hence wasn’t worried about his secrets. “In her bedroom?” he demanded of Cooper.
“You know how this looks, the two of you alone up here at midnight? I don’t pay you
to sneak around with girls, and especially not with her.” He pointed at me like I
was Exhibit A.

“I’m not on the clock. This is my free time,” Cooper said, which struck me as way
beside the point.

“We weren’t sneaking around,” I protested. “Hooking up with him is the last thing
on my mind.” I gestured toward Cooper and saw the expression on his face, like he’d
been slapped. Too late, I realized how mean that last part must have sounded, even
though it was the truth: I hadn’t been thinking about hooking up with Cooper. We’d
only just met. And I did have other things on my mind.

But Hence had barged in on our conversation, sneering down at us, acting morally superior.
Once again I was struck by the strangeness of it all. How had my mother ever loved
someone so
horrible? With his pathetic wall of ancient photos, who was he to judge me, anyway?

So many thoughts were colliding in my head that all I could do was sputter and fume
as Cooper stomped off past me and Hence hurried behind him out the door. I heard yelling
from the floor below mine, and a slamming door. Then, for a long time, silence.

After Hence and I kissed, the world seemed to stand between us, keeping us apart.
As usual, I would hang around the club after school, pretending to do homework but
completely unable to concentrate, and sometimes our eyes would meet, but with Dad
or Q or the bartenders around, that would be it. I was starting to think I’d imagined
the other day, that I’d invented the current in the air between us ever since. Then,
one afternoon when nobody was looking, Hence passed me in the hallway and pressed
a tightly folded note into my hand. I waited until I was alone in the elevator to
read it, my heart fluttering:
CHRISTOPHER PARK, 4:15 PM TOMORROW
.

As a meet-up spot, Christopher Park wasn’t foolproof. As far as I knew, none of Q’s
friends lived near there, so he was unlikely to be passing through, but anybody from
Idlewild Prep could wander by and see me. I disguised myself in sunglasses and a
trench coat and stood as deep in the park as I could get, leaning against the wrought-iron
fence near the garden. At 4:17 he showed up, coatless, rumpled, and breathless, and
we stood there for a moment, shy and unsure of what to do next.

He broke the silence. “I’m so glad you’re here. I wanted to be alone with you again…
but I didn’t know where or how.” Then, before I could think or speak, he wrapped his
arms around me and pulled me close. A heartbeat later he was kissing me, the park
around us—the people walking their dogs, two shrieking toddlers chasing a red rubber
ball—all evaporating into mist.

We didn’t have long together. Hence was on his break, and if he was late getting back
Q would hear about it and get suspicious. “Tomorrow?” he asked. “Same time, same place?”

I nodded. After he’d hurried off toward the subway, I lingered on a park bench, savoring
the tingle on my lips—the only sign that our kisses had really happened, that I hadn’t
simply imagined them.

A few days later, I took Jackie aside in homeroom. “I need your help. Hence and I
have been meeting at Christopher Park, and yesterday two of Q’s friends from high
school passed right by us. If they had seen us, it would’ve been the end.” I had told
Jackie about the promise Q had extracted from me, but I’d left out his comment about
Hence not being white because I knew how much it would hurt her feelings, and because
I was embarrassed my brother was such a cretin.

“But Christopher Park is so public. Why are you meeting there?”

“Where else could we meet? Q
will
catch us. It’s just a matter of time. One of his friends, or one of these people”—I
made a sweeping gesture at the room full of our classmates—“will see us and start
gossiping. Hence could lose his job and his home, and it would be all my fault.”

Jackie jiggled her foot like she knew there must be more to my request.

“But if I could meet him at your house, it would be so much safer. Your mom will be
at work, and—”

“At my house?” Jackie sounded exasperated. “You mean you want the three of us to sit
around together and do what? Watch TV? You, your boyfriend, and Jackie the third wheel?
Are you going to make out in front of me?”

I inhaled sharply for courage. “You wouldn’t have to watch us.” When Jackie started
to protest, I grabbed her hand in both of mine. “Shhh! People will hear.”

Jackie lowered her voice to a hiss. “They’ll hear that you want to use my bedroom—”