Clean Slate (Kit Tolliver #4) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (4 page)

Something like that.

“I don’t want to go back to the office,” he was saying. “All these years, and then you walk back into my life, and I’m not ready for you to walk out of it again.”

You were the one who walked, she thought. Clear to Bowling Green.

But what she said was, “We could go to my hotel room, but a downtown hotel right in the middle of the city—”

“Actually,” he said, “there’s a nice place right across the street.”

“Oh?”

“A Holiday Inn, actually.”

“Do you think they’d have a room at this hour?”

He managed to look embarrassed and pleased with himself, all at the same time. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a reservation.”

She was four months shy of her eighteenth birthday when everything changed.

What she came to realize, although she hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time, was that things had already been changing for some time. Her father came a little less frequently to her bed, sometimes telling her he was tired from a hard day’s work, sometimes explaining that he had to stay up late with work he’d brought home, sometimes not bothering with an explanation of any sort.

Then one afternoon he invited her to come for a ride. Sometimes rides in the family car would end at a motel, and she thought that was what he planned on this occasion. In anticipation, no sooner had he backed the car out of the driveway than she’d dropped her hand into his lap, stroking him, awaiting his response.

He pushed her hand away.

She wondered why, but didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything, either, not for ten minutes of suburban streets. Then abruptly he pulled into a strip mall, parked opposite a shuttered bowling alley, and said, “You’re my little soldier, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“And that’s what you’ll always be. But we have to stop. You’re a grown woman, you have to be able to lead your own life, I can’t go on like this . . .”

She scarcely listened. The words washed over her like a stream, a babbling stream, and what came through to her was not so much the words he spoke but what seemed to underlie those words:
I don’t want you anymore.

After he’d stopped talking, and after she’d waited long enough to know he wasn’t going to say anything else, and because she knew he was awaiting her response, she said, “Okay.”

“I love you, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’ve never said anything to anyone, have you?”

“No.”

“Of course you haven’t. You’re a soldier, and I’ve always known I could count on you.”

On the way back, he asked her if she’d like to stop for ice cream. She just shook her head, and he drove the rest of the way home.

She got out of the car and went up to her room. She sprawled on her bed, turning the pages of a book without registering their contents. After a few minutes she stopped trying to read and sat up, her eyes focused on a spot on one wall where the wallpaper was misaligned.

She found herself thinking of Doug, her first real boyfriend. She’d never told her father about Doug; of course he knew that they were spending time together, but she’d kept their intimacy a secret. And of course she’d never said a word about what she and her father had been doing, not to Doug or to anybody else.

The two relationships were worlds apart in her mind. But now they had something in common, because they had both ended. Doug’s family had moved to Ohio, and their exchange of letters had trickled out. And her father didn’t want to have sex with her anymore.

Something really bad was going to happen. She just knew it.

A few days later, she went to her friend Rosemary’s house after school. Rosemary, who lived just a few blocks away on Covington, had three brothers and two sisters, and anybody who was still there at dinner time was always invited to stay.

She accepted gratefully. She could have gone home, but she just didn’t want to, and she still didn’t want to a few hours later. “I wish I could just stay here overnight,” she told Rosemary. “My parents are acting weird.”

“Hang on, I’ll ask my mom.”

She had to call home and get permission. “No one’s answering,” she said. “Maybe they went out. If you want I’ll go home.”

“You’ll stay right here,” Rosemary’s mother said. “You’ll call right before bedtime, and if there’s still no answer, well, if they’re not home, they won’t miss you, will they?”

Rosemary had twin beds, and fell asleep instantly in her own. Kit, a few feet away, had this thought that Rosemary’s father would let himself into the room, and into her bed, but of course this didn’t happen, and the next thing she knew she was asleep.

In the morning she went home, and the first thing she did was call Rosemary’s house, hysterical. Rosemary’s mother calmed her down, and then she was able to call 911 to report the deaths of her parents. Rosemary’s mother came over to be with her, and shortly after that the police came, and it became pretty clear what had happened. Her father had killed her mother and then turned the gun on himself.

“You sensed that something was wrong,” Rosemary’s mother said. “That’s why it was so easy to get you to stay for dinner, and why you wanted to sleep over.”

“They were fighting,” she said, “and there was something different about it. Not just a normal argument. God, it’s my fault, isn’t it? I should have been able to do something. The least I could have done was to say something.”

Everybody told her that was nonsense.

After she’d left Lucas’s brand-new high-floor apartment, she returned to her own older, less imposing sublet, where she brewed a pot of coffee and sat up at the kitchen table with a pad and paper. She wrote down the numbers one though five in descending order, and after each she wrote a name, or as much of the name as she knew. Sometimes she added an identifying phrase or two. The list began with 5, and the first entry read as follows:

Said his name was Sid. Pasty complexion, gap between top incisors. Met in Philadelphia at bar on Race Street (?), went to his hotel, don’t remember name of it. Gone when I woke up.

Hmmm. Sid might be hard to find. How would she even know where to start looking for him?

At the bottom of the list, her entry was simpler and more specific.
Douglas Pratter. Last known address Bowling Green. Lawyer? Google him?

She booted up her laptop.

Their room in the Detroit Avenue Holiday Inn was on the third floor in the rear. With the drapes drawn and the door locked, with their clothes hastily discarded and the bedclothes as hastily tossed aside, it seemed to her for at least a few minutes that she was fifteen years old again, and in bed with her first boyfriend. She tasted a familiar sweetness in his kisses, a familiar raw urgency in his ardor.

But the illusion didn’t last. And then it was just lovemaking, at which each of them had a commendable proficiency. He went down on her this time, which was something he’d never done when they were teenage sweethearts, and the first thought that came to her was that he had turned into her father, because her father had done that all the time.

Afterward, after a fairly long shared silence, he said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered.”

“What it would be like to be together again?”

“Well, sure, but more than that. What life would have been like if I’d never moved away in the first place. What would have become of the two of us, if we’d had the chance to let things find their way.”

“Probably the same as most high school lovers. We’d have stayed together for a while, and then we’d have broken up and gone separate ways.”

“Maybe.”

“Or I’d have gotten pregnant, and you’d have married me, and we’d be divorced by now.”

“Maybe.”

“Or we’d still be together, and bored to death with each other, and you’d be in a motel fucking somebody new.”

“God, how’d you get so cynical?”

“You’re right, I got off on the wrong foot there. How about this? If your father hadn’t moved you all to Bowling Green, you and I would have stayed together, and our feeling for each other would have grown from teenage hormonal infatuation to the profound mature love it was always destined to be. You’d have gone off to college, and as soon as I finished high school I’d have enrolled there myself, and when you finished law school I’d have my undergraduate degree, and I’d be your secretary and office manager when you set up your own law practice. By then we’d have gotten married, and by now we’d have one child with a second on the way, and we would remain unwavering in our love for one another, and as passionate as ever.” She gazed wide-eyed at him. “Better?”

His expression was hard to read, and he appeared to be on the point of saying something, but she turned toward him and ran a hand over his flank, and the prospect of a further adventure in adultery trumped whatever he might have wanted to say. Whatever it was, she thought, it would keep.

“I’d better get going,” he said, and rose from the bed, and rummaged through the clothes he’d tossed on the chair.

She said, “Doug? Don’t you think you might want to take a shower first?”

“Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I guess I better, huh?”

He’d known where to take her to lunch, knew to make a room reservation ahead of time, but he evidently didn’t know enough to shower away her spoor before returning to home and hearth. So perhaps this sort of adventure was not the usual thing for him. Oh, she was fairly certain he tried to get lucky on business trips—those oh-so-lonely New York visits he’d mentioned, for instance—but you didn’t have to shower after that sort of interlude, because you were going back to your own hotel room, not to your unsuspecting wife.