Nowhere Girl (22 page)

The house had felt very still. David was in a beanbag across from me, his arm slung over his head. I'd gotten out of bed and gone back to my room. Still half-asleep maybe, I tried to assure myself that it hadn't really happened, it had been a bad dream, and Savannah was still in her bed, sleeping with her socks on. But it was empty, the covers thrown back like they had been that morning. A half-moon shone in the bedroom, and I'd gone over to the window.

The street was quiet, and the lights made bright cones on the pavement. Otherwise, everything was dark. Across from our house, the land sloped up and was filled with hardwood saplings and dead leaves. The Kampsens lived on top of that hill, a sweet elderly couple with a pool that the neighborhood kids liked to frequent during summer. And in that wood, I saw something.

We had strict leash laws in our neighborhood. Still, the Australian shepherd that lived in the cul-de-sac was a master escape artist, and I thought it was Oxer stealing through the darkness. But when the shadow passed through the trees, I saw it was a figure, moving stealthily, hunched. A man with a hood. I didn't take my eyes off him. I didn't move. The seconds that passed were broad. Time seemed to slow. He stopped behind an ancient stone wall we used to climb as kids. When he got to the road, he looked both ways but didn't cross. The hood was deep, and it hid his face. He pulled at his sleeves, shifted from foot to foot as if cold. It was too dark. He was too far away, but it felt in one instant that he lifted his head and put his hands together as if praying. Then he jogged away unevenly, as if something were caught in his shoe.

I stood too long, watching the empty street, as if he'd been an apparition I was not sure I'd seen. I was frozen. It felt like hours I stayed there, and then I hadn't gone to my parents' room. At sixteen, I didn't think they could fix anything. I believed somewhere in my almost-grown-up world that they were impotent, that it was Savannah and me who really had the knowledge.

“What?” David asked when I sat next to him, still in the beanbag, and shook him. He put his forearm up as if to keep out the light, though I hadn't turned the switch.

“I saw someone,” I said.

“Where?”

“Out there, on the street.”

David sat up. He was wearing a holed T-shirt that read “You Turn My Floppy Disk into a Hard Drive” that my parents forbade him to wear in public. Without a word, he padded down to my room beside me. When we got to the window, the street was empty. He asked all the right questions. Where was he? What did he look like? How long was he there? And even though I felt like an idiot for not calling him sooner, there was some gratification in knowing he didn't doubt me. David, I realized in the dark room where I would not sleep again for a month, was my ally. Even so, I never did tell him the whole truth, that the hooded man came back again and again in my dreams, and I never brought him up. I never said a word to my parents or the police.

“What the hell was that?” I asked Dr. Corcores when I opened my eyes.

“Since you're a Princeton girl, I know you're familiar with the id, the ego, and the superego,” he said.

I blinked, wondering where he could possibly be going with this.

“The ego balances out the narcissism of the id and the cautiousness of the superego. The unconscious mind is like a gatekeeper to things it deems too scary or disturbing for us to deal with.”

“Someone I love was murdered.” I stared at the place on the wall where there should have been a window. “And I see a man in my dreams.”

“Who is he?”

I thought about the voice and how I associated it with a big, burly man. “I don't know.”

Dr. Corcores crossed his legs. “Consciously, you think you don't know him, but your inability to see his face suggests otherwise.”

I studied his handsome features. “You think I know him?”

“No,” he said quietly. “
You
think you know him.”

*   *   *

As soon as I got in my car, I called Patrick.

“Hey,” he said. “I've been thinking about you. We finally got clearance. I've been reviewing the case, and I want to tell you something.”

“What?” I asked.

“I need to do it in person,” he said. He sounded close by; it seemed like he was right next to me. “Terhune Orchards is open this time of year, but no one goes until the fruit ripens. Can you meet me there on Saturday?”

Around me, college kids were heading to classes, laughing, their backpacks slung over their shoulders, and I remembered being here and wondering where Savannah would have gone to school, if she would have been less wild by then, whether she would have been at Princeton with me. We could have shared a dorm room. I sometimes imagined what it would have been like to be heading across the quad after class and seeing Savannah coming toward me, her blond hair flying, her laugh ringing out, a bunch of books balanced in the crook of her arm.

“Yes,” I said. “I can be there.”

 

CHAPTER

26

I'd called Gabby that morning in a panic. “What if Brady comes tonight?” I'd asked her. I already had all my jeans out on my bed and was trying to figure out what I should wear.

“So?” she asked. “Isn't that what you want? So you can stop going to therapy and start sleeping with a hunk?”

“Gabby!” I'd stood in my underwear, examining my options even though dinner wasn't for another nine hours. “I'm totally humiliated. I kissed him.”

“You kiss Chandler hello and good-bye all the time,” she'd told me.

“But he's gay,” I'd replied, even though we both wished he wasn't. Especially Gabby.

“Whatever. You're fine. And the only reason it was weird is because you haven't kissed anyone for so long, you don't even know what it's like to be turned on.”

“That is not true, Gabby. I can't have a baby, but I am having sex. Sometimes.”

“I have to go,” she said. “I haven't cleaned my house since the last time you guys came, and I need to get a steam shovel.”

I told myself Brady probably didn't even notice the kiss was anything out of the ordinary. I'd been thanking him for a fun day at the shore. There was no tongue like Gabby pointed out, no second kiss. I was just Cady, someone he barely remembered from high school, a chubby writer who'd had a crush on him. Who didn't?

But still, I felt jittery when I got in my car. I'd deliberated every day about whether to text him to tell him the dinner was at Gabby's. But then I'd tell myself I should wait until he texted to say he was coming. But then what if he showed up at David's and no one was there? Finally, Brady had texted me five days after the motorcycle ride, saying he'd try to come to David's, and I had written back that it was at Gabby's, given him the address, and then stupidly (I wanted to slap myself) said that he could bring Colette. Even though I'd rather lick an electrical outlet than meet his girlfriend.

It was still light as I made my way across town to Gabby's. It had been an unusually warm spring, and when I passed the shops in town, I saw that most of them had already put out their window boxes, and the daffodils and crocuses were blooming. Moving along the streets were the attorneys, shopkeepers, bankers, and café owners who worked downtown. They were all the same, square and clean and if not wealthy then on the verge of wealth. This was the kind of town that did not want to admit people like my sister, a sixteen-year-old girl, could get murdered in an abandoned mansion.

Now that I'd talked to Patrick and the case was getting reopened, Stanwich looked different. And I liked it. The year Savannah died and the curfew was established, kids would complain about it in fierce whispers as I passed by, as if it was my fault she'd been killed.

And yet in my weird way, I loved Stanwich. I was an overweight girl whose sister had been murdered and who made a ton of money writing dark mystery novels, and for that reason, Stanwich left me alone. That made me love my town. I also loved the old-growth trees and church steeples. The town was a true snap of New England in the middle of New Jersey. I also loved how it was laid out around a green, how quickly I could get to the beach and to the city. And, of course, I thought while I parked beside Gabby's motorcycle and in back of Chandler's ancient Volkswagen, the people I loved best were here.

I walked into the kitchen, my hands filled with grocery bags of fresh kale and salmon. Gabby, Chandler, and my brother were standing at the island, chopping vegetables and peeling potatoes. Odion was uncorking a bottle of wine, and Brady, who I secretly hoped would be there, wasn't in sight.

Gabby came over and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled of lemon and peppermint and gave me the knife in her hand. “Chop,” she said, taking the salmon from the bag. “I'll start on the fish.”

It was her turn to cook. She was using a recipe from the first cookbook my parents had published. I knew most of them by heart. This one was all about plum tomatoes and red peppers and garlic.

Chandler kissed both my cheeks, and Odion passed me a glass of wine. I pulled the kale out of the bag and handed it to Gabby. “I know my brother won't touch the stuff, but it is perfect with this recipe. Odion, how was your trip?”

“Honey, it was fabulous,” Odion said.

“Cork,” Chandler said, tossing plum tomatoes and olive oil in a bowl and wiping his hands on a dishrag. “It's the new mahogany.”

“Cork furniture?” Gabby was laying the salmon out in a glass cooking pan. “That sounds ugly,” she said.

Her house smelled like garlic and wine and musty perfume. It was thoroughly bohemian with beaded lampshades and carpets from Turkey and richly colored pillows thrown everywhere and a hookah pipe in the corner that once in a while she brought out after dinner, though lately she wasn't smoking because she said she heard pot slowly eroded the libido.

“No!” Odion said. “Is lovely!”

And he and Chandler told us all about how Cameroonians managed to make cork beautiful, and I chopped the same pepper until it was almost pulverized, wondering if Brady would show up. I remembered how, when we were in high school, Brady was never at the cafeteria. We both had second-period lunch, except he'd disappear somewhere. I followed him one day and watched as he ended up in his old yellow Mazda, sitting behind the wheel and eating.

“What's he doing out there?” I'd asked Gabby the fall of our sophomore year. We'd been in school two weeks, and I was already so gone on Brady, Gabby said I'd been lobotomized. “Let's find out,” she'd said. And so we'd sneaked out to the parking lot and hung around the bike rack, pretending we were trying to unlock one and whispering to each other about him. “He's reading,” Gabby had told me.

“He's not reading,” I said back.

“Yes”—Gabby had perfect vision—“he's reading.” We fought back and forth until finally Gabby, in her curly bob and her retro kneesocks, had, against all my fiercely whispered protests, left me alone and knocked on his window.

From my perch at the bike rack, I saw him roll down his window, and then he looked at me briefly, and my skin went hot. They'd talked for a while. I could hear their voices but not the words. Finally, Gabby came strutting back to me. And I started walking away from her, so she had to run to catch up. After I'd told her how crazy and embarrassing and downright horrible she was, she told me he had been reading.

“Reading what?” I asked her.

“A biography of Kierkegaard,” she'd said. “And listening to head-banging music that made my ears hurt.” This had made me love Brady even more. It was amazing to me that now I actually could text Brady Irons. That Brady Irons might be about to walk into my best friend's house, where every single candle was lit as if we were about to have a séance. Or an orgy.

The paring knife was so dull the peppers took twice the time to cut, and I wondered vaguely whether Gabby kept it dull for my sake. But probably, I thought as I scooped the peppers into a pile, it was dull because she didn't give a damn. Chandler and Gabby were testing Odion on his citizenship exam, and David was in the living room, trying to find the game on Gabby's ancient TV. I tried to remember all the words to “Sundown” as I chopped so I wouldn't think about Brady. I did not want to think about him like that. I'd end up feeling stupid and totally heartbroken. A guy like that didn't go for girls like me.

I'd finished cutting the peppers and was working on opening the wine when I heard the doorbell ring.

“Guess who decided to show up,” Chandler said.

I saw him through the kitchen door, peeking out the window.

“Cady, your dreamboat's here!” Gabby yelled in to me.

“Fuck off,” I called back.

“Leave Cady alone,” Odion told her. “A writer has a very sensitive spirit.”

Chandler headed for the front hall, but Gabby cut him off. “He brought wine!” she yelled over her shoulder when she opened the door. “And calla lilies. Holy shit, you're a good guest.”

Brady was wearing a worn blue T-shirt the same color as his eyes. “Hey,” he said.

David muted the TV. “Hey,” he said.

“Welcome,” Gabby told him.

Odion gave him a glass of wine and took the flowers.

“We'll open yours later,” Chandler said, pumping Brady's hand.

“Pretty, right?” Odion said, holding the flowers. “Now we need a vase.”

Brady looked like a boy at his first high school dance, standing there, and I didn't know how to make him feel better. In the kitchen, Odion started searching through the cabinets. Gabby came up behind him.

“To the left,” she told him. “Near the fridge.”

“Ah yes, here.” Odion brought down an intricately cut vase. “So lovely.” His huge black hands wrapped around the crystal. “This man Brady has nice taste,” he whispered.

Gabby giggled. “I particularly like his taste in women.”