Nowhere Girl (21 page)

“Is that better?” he asked.

Suddenly drowsy, I let myself lean into him. We stayed like that until a street sweeper came by, blaring rap music from inside the cab.

“Hey,” Brady said when the noise died down.

“Is it time to go?”

A star had come out, and I was trying not to wish on it. But then I felt Brady stiffen, and instinctively I took my head off his shoulder. He was watching the water as though he were bracing himself against something.

“Cady,” he said, still studying the ocean. “I feel like you came into my life for a reason.” My belly turned to water; I didn't move. “That first day I saw you at the prison.” He swallowed. “It was like no time had passed. Like we were supposed to meet again on those steps.”

“I know.” I could feel my heart beating faster. “I can't believe how lucky I got running into you like that.” I'd never told anyone that I'd gone there because of a Savannah dream.

“Maybe it was meant to be.”

I didn't believe anything was meant to be. If I did, then I guess my sister was meant to be murdered. “There's no such thing as divine intervention,” I said quietly.

“Fair enough. I can understand why you feel that way. But I think we were both supposed to be in that parking lot that day.”

I wanted to ask him why, but I felt a clenching in my abdomen, an ache in my lower back and a wetness in my underwear.
Jesus, not now
. “Brady,” I said, “I hate to do this, but I have to go inside for a second.”

He startled as if shaken out of a trance. “Okay, yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

Stores were closed for the day, but there was a port-a-potty next to the ice cream shop. I ducked in it. There was sand on the floor from last season, and the tiny mirror was smudged from too much salt air and grimy fingers. I pulled down my jeans. And there it was, right when Brady Irons was about to tell me he secretly loved me: my period.

*   *   *

By the time I got back outside with a ton of tissue paper in my panties, Brady was standing near the bikes with his helmet on. “You going to be okay with what you have on?” he asked. His tone had changed from when we'd been on the beach. Now it was distant, formal.

“Yeah.” But I was cold, and he seemed to know it.

He opened a compartment over the back wheel and pulled out a leather jacket lined with sheepskin. It was snug on me, but it felt good. I got on the back of the bike.

“There's a seat heater,” he told me through my helmet.

He started the bike. “And you can lean into me for warmth,” he said when we were on the highway.

When we got to my driveway, the house was dark. “Thanks for a great day.” I handed him the helmet and jacket.

“My pleasure.” He folded the jacket and put it in the back storage bin.

I wanted to linger, but he checked his watch. “It was amazing,” I said. “I got over a fear.”

Then he smiled. “Next time, we'll sit in a dark room together.”

“Maybe next time we should do something that scares you.”

He watched me. “Like what?”

“Like coming to my brother's for dinner again.”

“I'll try,” he said. “But the end of the academic year is coming up, so I've been doing a lot of tutoring.” He put the key back in the ignition. “Have a good night, Cady.”

Before he could drive away, I stepped forward, and when I tried to kiss him on the cheek, he turned, and my lips landed on his mouth. He startled, his eyes widened, and something changed, subtly, sublimely, without my consent or wanting. It happened. When my lips brushed against his and I breathed in his clean laundry smell, there was something different, the feel of his mouth, the way I lingered against him a second too long, how my heart felt like it stopped beating for a moment.

Then I quickly started up the front walk. I heard the motorcycle move down the driveway. I didn't turn around. I didn't watch him make a left toward home. I knew as I got to the door and took out my key that I wouldn't stop thinking about standing in my driveway, pretending I was kissing him good-bye the same way I'd done for the last few months. The way his stubble burned my cheek. How he smelled faintly of lavender, as if he had used Colette's body wash that morning.

 

CHAPTER

25

“You got your period?” Gabby almost shouted it, and since I knew she was at the library, this seemed slightly inappropriate. I was on Route 571 heading to a lecture by the hypnotist.

“I didn't try to get it,” I whispered even though I was alone in the car. “I thought I was pregnant. I was excited even if it'd mean staying with Greg.”

“Hell,” she said. She had decided getting a pair of sneakers with tiny wheels on the heels would make her more productive at work, and I imagined her happily swearing while gliding past patrons. “What horrible timing. What do you think he was about to tell you? He must be in love with you; why else would he say, ‘You came into my life for a reason'?”

“But I'm fat,” I told her.

Gabby groaned. “You are not fat. You have that peach-perfect skin and that soft hair and those doe eyes that make you look like you're about sixteen.”

I couldn't listen to Gabby's compliments right now. I was too anxious about meeting some freak show fraud who I was certain was going to try to make me do something embarrassing. “I gotta go. I'm at the lecture hall.”

“Don't let him hypnotize you,” Gabby said. “I heard those people do really creepy things to women.”

“Now you sound like me,” I told her, but she'd already hung up.

Every time I got off the phone with Gabby, I wanted to call her up again to tell her what Patrick and Jon Caritano had said, but something kept me from it. And I realized now, parking on Washington Street and making sure I had my mini tape recorder, I was thinking like Fisher. I didn't want to suspect anyone I knew.

It was weird to be on Washington Street again, heading toward Green Hall. I'd had more friends at Princeton than I'd had in high school. There'd been a feeling of being free, of releasing myself from the hold of the Wolfe Mansion and what happened there. In college, people hadn't known my sister, the beautiful, shimmery twin who had been murdered by a stranger when we'd just turned sixteen. And it had been easier to make friends. Back then, I pretended I'd never pressed sharp edges against my most tender parts to feel relief, I pretended that I hadn't been the girl who had done the only thing she knew how to stop the pain and wound up in Sound View Psychiatric Hospital at seventeen. That girl, I left far behind.

I'd pretended I was just a girl who got good grades, edited
The Daily Princetonian,
and loved to attend extra-credit lectures. I was good at moving through syllabi, and I knew how to ace papers, tests, and devour books. Academics, I knew, wouldn't fail me. Sometimes I stayed up all night on the third floor of the library, where they kept the periodicals and where I could buy coffee and snacks from the vending machine, the floor that smelled like ink and parchment and made me feel safe.

Thanks to a street vendor selling hot, soft pretzels, I was a few minutes late, and I opened the door of Green Hall, ready to sit through an interminable hour, listening to some blowhard drone on about Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. At least I'd leave with some fodder for
Vanity Fair
.

As soon as I took a seat in the last row, I knew something strange was going on. The guest lecturer was old, but he was handsome, his hair was silver, and he was wearing a black T-shirt and dark jeans. There were about a hundred kids there, and not one was talking. As I dropped my backpack on the carpeted floor next to me, I noticed that no one was taking notes, either. The entire class seemed to be hypnotized.

Despite my psychic abilities with my sister, I thought hypnosis was a bunch of hooey. There was no way someone could talk me into clucking like a chicken or quitting my two favorite foods—fat and sugar—but I was intrigued by the rapt attention of everyone around me.

Something happened while I sat there and listened to Dr. Corcores talk about centered breathing, clearing the mind, and letting go of tension. As my body got more and more relaxed, I felt an acute fluttering inside. It was vaguely familiar, like the smell of Play-Doh, something you should be able to recognize, but it's so out of context you can't. At the end of the fifty-four minutes, no one strutted half-dressed to the front of the room. None of us were barking like dogs, and I certainly didn't toss my stash of Twix in the trash.

But all the way home, riding the dark roads of Princeton, I kept thinking about the class. I wasn't sure why, but I couldn't get it out of my mind. How had he managed to quiet the entire auditorium? What had happened before my tardy entrance to make so many students still their minds? And what was that strange familiar feeling I had while I sat there?

*   *   *

Greg was sitting up in bed reading when I got back. “Hey,” he said.

I'd told him the night before that I had my period, and he'd said, “Cady, what did you expect?” So I'd been mad at him all day. But now I felt relaxed. In a weird way, what Greg said hardly mattered. I didn't even have that strange pang when I thought of another missed chance at pregnancy. I unbuckled my belt and shimmied out of my jean skirt. I could feel him watching me.

“You seem different,” he said.

“I do?” I asked on my way to the bathroom. Inside, I brushed my teeth and washed my face.

When I walked out, Greg seemed to be studying me. “Happy, relaxed,” he said when I drew back the covers to get in bed.

“Aren't I usually?” I climbed in.

“Actually, no,” he said. “But I never really realized it until this evening.”

I don't remember answering. When I woke up, the sun was rising. Greg was still asleep, and out the window, the violet dawn of morning was spread across the sky. I understood what I'd been feeling in Dr. Corcores's class. It was the same feeling I got when Savannah visited me in my dreams. I padded downstairs in my nightgown, sat at the counter with my iPad, and e-mailed Dr. Corcores, introducing myself and asking when we could meet. As I was brewing coffee, my iPad dinged, and he said I could come back to campus that day.

*   *   *

His office was bare and colorless. “Colored walls and paintings may plant foreign thoughts in the minds of people who come to see me,” he said when I walked in.

“Okay,” I said tentatively.

“Have a seat.” A beige wing chair was pushed up against the wall across from his desk.

He picked up a pair of thick glasses and cleaned them on his shirt but didn't put them on. “So you're writing an article,” he said. He wasn't as old as I'd thought the day before. Save a few lines around his mouth and eyes, his skin was smooth, almost perfect.

“I am.” I leaned forward and drew my pen and notebook out of my purse.

He gave the pad an amused smile. “But really you want to know something far greater than you will ever put in a
Vanity Fair
article.”

I stopped trying to find a blank page. “I do?”

He had a slow way of blinking, somnolent, not sleepy, not bored, but sort of somewhere in between. “Yes, you do,” he said.

I couldn't remember exactly what I'd written in my e-mail, but I was certain I didn't tell him the reason I wanted to see him. “And what would that be?” I asked.

“You want to know how to access the unconscious. How to see the unseen. How to understand the messages from the realm outside our minds' perceptions.”

I felt heat in my cheeks. “Am I that obvious?”

He laughed, and I felt more at ease. “I'm that good.”

“You're a genius.”

“Well, now you're just flattering me.”

“Can I ask a stupid question?” I shifted in my seat, suddenly aware it was warm in the windowless, square room.

“There are no stupid questions.”

“That's very kind of you.”

“Ha,” he said. “I was going to say there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.” Then he winked at me.

I laughed and felt an instant rapport. “I'm curious. Do you think people who have died are part of that vast unconscious you were talking about during the lecture?”

Dr. Corcores watched me. “Yes,” he said finally. “It's not scientifically proven, and that bothers people in my field. But yes.”

He didn't ask me any questions about who this dead person might be, at least not at first. Instead, he talked conversationally about his work with people who were stuck. In bad relationships, unhealthy habits, the monotony of their own lives. “You see, Cady, a person cannot take a suggestion to which he or she is not already open. So the smoker who claims she wants to quit but won't admit to the pack of emergency cigarettes in the glove compartment of her car won't get anything out of hypnosis. Or the man who arrives for his appointment with a Yodel in his front pocket won't lose any weight.”

I clutched my bag, hoping he couldn't sense that I had a Ho Ho stuffed in it.

“Close your eyes,” he said suddenly.

And because I liked him, because I believed Dr. Corcores could help me, I did.

When he started talking, I didn't hear the words exactly. I knew he was giving me instructions about breathing and the conscious mind, but something else took over I couldn't later explain. I went back in time to the night Savannah died, the night my mother mashed up a sleeping pill and mixed it into my cup of hot chocolate.

I lay in the double bed in David's room. He was still in the basement with his girlfriend, but it made me feel safer, sleeping there. I listened to people in the living room downstairs, my parents' best friends, my grandparents, my mother's brother, and Todd Spencer, the chef from Sotto Sopra.

In real time, Dr. Corcores was saying words about my unconscious giving my conscious permission, but all I felt was that strange humming from the night before. It was as if I were really there, waiting in the dark in David's room, my eyes heavy. Finally, I must have fallen asleep. I woke with a start, a gnawing feeling in my chest. The fact of Savannah dying hit me slowly, in increments. First, I knew something was terribly wrong, and then I remembered waiting in the school lobby, and then it all came back—the blue turning lights on the walls, Patrick Tunney, Captain Fisher, the ambulance. I touched the necklace at my throat.