Nowhere Girl (6 page)

“So are you.”

It unnerved me when he complimented me like that, and I found myself sitting down in front of all the food, startled and a little bit exhausted. “Don't you ever wish you'd married someone more like you?”

“Geeky and a workaholic?” He took off his glasses and placed them lopsidedly on me. He looked younger, softer without them. “I did.”

If he'd turned me away at the door or ate lunch in silence, I would have been less suspicious. Greg wasn't sweet or playful. He was a scientist. He studied facts, neurons, and numbers. Emotion was of no use in his world. And yet I saw the way he'd looked at Annika as she'd picked up her salad and left his office. It was exactly the way he'd never looked at me.

 

CHAPTER

7

I accidentally on purpose ran into Brady at the Market Fair Starbucks. He'd told me he stopped in for coffee almost every day on his way to work. I'd been there to write a few times when I needed dialogue and couldn't stand that stupid house anymore, and now as I went to pick up a vanilla latte I probably wouldn't drink, I wondered if I'd ever stood behind him or if we'd both been in the comfy chairs on opposite sides of the front door at the same time.

Slipping the cardboard sleeve on my cup, I pretended I didn't see him.

“Hey,” he said, touching my shoulder. He was wearing his DOC jacket, and his hair was still wet.

“Oh, Brady.” His hand felt hot through my sweater. “What are you doing here?” I tried to sound surprised to see him.

“I come here for a double grande something or other on my way to work.” He grinned, glancing at the wall clock. “And I'm late, as usual.”

The barista, a pretty girl with a pierced nose, handed him a drink, and when he took a sip, foam stuck to his lip. I had a sudden urge to wipe it away. He licked it off and then wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“How's the book?” he asked.

“Good.” I watched the line get longer. “It's fine.” In truth, I'd been avoiding it, and Deanna was probably going to be on the next train to Jersey to rip off my head. I needed Brady again, but I didn't know how to ask without feeling like I was hitting on him. “Thanks so much for helping me with it.”

He held up his drink as if to toast. “Glad to.” He glanced at the clock again, and I realized I was holding him up. “Anything I can do.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks so much.”

He put his hand up in a kind of salute, stepped backward once, his eyes somehow sad again, and turned to leave. But when he got to the door, his hand on the metal bar, a plain gold band on his right ring finger reflecting the sun, I caught up to him. “Actually,” I said quickly. “I have a few more questions.”

“You free for lunch tomorrow?” It felt like he'd been waiting.

I nodded, relieved.

“There's a great little deli near Marquand Park.” He touched my arm as if emphasizing a point. “Their honey mustard is amazing.”

I hated mustard, but I knew the deli. It was famous for it. In the summer, I sometimes ate my lunch in the nearby park under the corkscrew branches of a threadleaf Japanese maple.

“Sounds great. What time do you want to meet?”

He lowered his voice as if suddenly aware that people might have noticed us. “I could pick up something there and come to your house so you don't have to interrupt your workday.”

The thought of having him in my home again made me ridiculously happy. “Are you sure?”

“I love talking about my job.” That deep, calm voice, I could have listened to it all day. “Anything I can do to help.”

“That would be fantastic,” I said. “Thank you.”

*   *   *

It was odd how much I thought about Brady when he wasn't around. I knew I was being unfair to Greg, questioning his loyalty and spying on him and his office sprite while I'd been thinking about another man, but I couldn't stop myself. All through my evenings with Greg, revising scenes and picking up Thai for dinner, I thought about Brady. I owed Deanna a chapter I hadn't written yet, but I was going to have to clean. I shouldn't have cared if Brady saw dishes in the sink and Greg's moccasins on the kitchen floor, but I did.

The next morning, I finished vacuuming, skipped mopping, and stuffed two days' worth of coffee mugs and plates in the dishwasher. I'd been dodging Deanna, and I saw her number flashing on my cell, vibrating wildly on the counter. I didn't pick it up. Time was ticking. I put the vacuum away.

I had the music on high and didn't hear Brady come up the driveway or let himself in the front door. He was ten minutes early again. “Sorry the music is up so loud!” I shouted at him when I saw him watching me dancing across the kitchen.

He picked a pen off the counter and sang, keeping one arm awkwardly behind his back. “Show a little faith, there's magic in the night.” It made me like him even more that he was so off-key.

I laughed and clicked the volume on the remote. “You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right,” I sang back to him. “What was Springsteen thinking? That's not exactly going to win over a girl's heart.” I stealthily looked around my house, hoping it was clean enough.

“Will this?” In the second it took him to step forward, I thought he was going to kiss me. It terrified and excited me, but he pulled a bouquet of bright-orange marigolds from behind his back.

“Oh, thank you.” I held them to my nose out of habit and smelled their strong, musky scent. “Let me get a vase.”

“I know they're a little unconventional,” he said as he followed me to the kitchen and set a deli bag on the counter, “but I thought your house could use some color.”

Even surrounded by gray and silver, there was something mildly insulting about this, yet he was right. I filled a cut-glass vase with water, added a teaspoon of sugar to help the flowers live longer, and realized with surprise how relieved I was about the kiss. Maybe I wasn't ready. Maybe my marriage deserved a chance. “No one has ever brought me marigolds before.” Maybe Brady didn't even want to kiss me. Maybe this connection between us was all in my head.

“Colette turned me on to them.” He opened a few drawers until he found a pair of scissors. “She suggested I bring you some after I told her I was helping you with the book.” He cut the bottom inch off the stems. “She used to own a flower shop, but now she grows them at our house. She says tending to the garden is calming, almost like meditation.” He set the scissors in the sink.

“Please tell her I love them.” I put the flowers in the center of the black granite island and tried not to sound jealous. I hated that granite. Our designer had imported it from a riverbed in South America. The cross sections of rock were stupidly expensive and ugly. Impressions from smaller rocks left white rings in the black surface that I was constantly mistaking for water marks and would scrub them until I remembered they were supposed to be like that. The flowers were a shock to the granite, like an unexpected wave on a calm ocean.

“They're so pretty,” I said. How cuckoo could Colette be if she told Brady to bring me flowers? And how into me could Brady be if he was talking to his girlfriend about me?

Brady had brought lunch from the deli, and I took a couple of plates, two cans of Diet Coke, and our sandwiches into the sunroom. Surrounded by windows on three sides and a view of nothing but trees, it was the place in the house where I felt most comfortable.

“I hope you like roast beef,” Brady said as I unwrapped my sandwich.

There was about half a pound of meat piled between two thick slices of sourdough bread. It was sweet and mildly embarrassing that he knew I wasn't a dainty girl and would eat it all.

I took a bite. “Oh my God, the mustard is delicious.” I wasn't lying. It was sweet and sticky and tasted like summer.

Through the sunroom doors, I could see the flowers, a reminder that Brady had someone, and he talked to her about me. Which meant I wasn't a secret or a threat. “You said Colette
used
to own a shop.”

He finished chewing before he spoke. “She had Pocketful of Posies in Princeton.”

I vaguely remembered it, an expensive shop that had occasionally delivered to Sotto Sopra, my parents' restaurant.

“That didn't work out, so now she tinkers in our garden. She occasionally sells arrangements at the farmers' market in town.”

I took another bite of my sandwich and chewed quickly. “I think working with flowers is an art. I'll buy a bunch of different kinds at the grocery store and come home and try to arrange them. They end up looking like a toddler did it. But then I see bouquets at weddings, and they're so beautiful I want to cry. I really wish I had some talent for it.”

He spoke quietly. “Sometimes I'll watch Colette in the garden, and I swear to you she's communicating with those flowers. It's almost like poetry.”

This sounded so odd coming from someone who probably carried a knife in a sheath and drank his whiskey neat that I almost laughed, but something in him had shifted at the mention of Colette. He took another bite of his sandwich. I noticed a bruise on his neck and had a quick, sickening flash of Savannah. Had someone tried to strangle him too? I wondered about the inmates and what his job held every day. I wrote about horror. Brady lived it.

He ducked his head as if embarrassed and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Do you write here?” he asked. “Or do you have an office in New York?”

“No, this is it.” I crumpled up the plastic wrap my sandwich had come in. “Unless Greg's home.”

He cocked his head at me and quit eating.

“He likes to practice his awful bassoon or listen to Bach on high while he's catching up on patients' notes. I mean, I always write with music playing, but not flutes and cellos, and I need to hear myself read out loud without listening to something that makes me want to stick a steak knife in my ear.”

Brady smiled. “I'm pretty sure it's big enough for both of us,” Greg had said when I complained about the noise, but there was no place to hide in our house; with its cathedral ceilings and marble floors, sound bounced off the walls. I couldn't even talk on the phone in the kitchen without Greg hearing me upstairs.

“So sometimes I write in public,” I told Brady. “I get good material people watching. And believe me, I need all the help I can get.”

“I don't follow.”

“I'm not naturally creative,” I told him. “I have to rely on conversations between people standing behind me at the post office or the girl on her cell phone in the bathroom at the library, how she cocks her hip in one direction or the other while she waits in line, how men who are introduced to women rarely offer to shake hands. Coffee shops are great places too. I sit there and write down everything I see and hear.”

“I'd say you're pretty creative. I've read all your books,” he said quietly. “I especially loved
Alibi
.”

This surprised the hell out of me. I almost couldn't speak. Out the window, I could see a squirrel suspended on a branch. “That was more of a memoir than a novel,” I said. “Except I changed the names and made my character forty pounds lighter.”

Brady looked at me, not straight at me but sort of sideways, as though giving me space.

“It wrote itself. I couldn't not tell the story. I needed to get the words out of me to stay alive.” I'd tried to tell Greg once, but I felt like he was analyzing me. “I didn't write it to get published or because I wanted to be a novelist. I needed to somehow pay…” I couldn't think of the word, I wasn't even sure I was talking—I had thought this so often to myself. “Homage to her,” I finally said. “I needed to remember my sister.”

“I may be being dense here, but the main character in
Alibi
accidentally killed her brother. You didn't have anything to do with your sister's death.”

I was grateful that he hadn't spoken her name. “Didn't I, though? She was my identical twin. I should have known what was happening to her.”

Silence spread between us like a fog. This was too much to tell him now, yet I couldn't stop myself.

“Anyway, thanks for bringing lunch.”

After we ate, he told me about prison slang. I sat next to him on that hideous white couch and wrote down everything he said. Understanding prison talk, he said, was like learning a whole new language.
I'm doin' all day
meant a life sentence.
All day and a night
—life without parole.
Back-door parole
was to die in prison.
Dance on the blacktop
meant to get stabbed. They called their orange jumpsuits
peels
, and psychiatric meds were
brake fluid
. What struck me was how they'd softened everything. An entire life became a day. Dying was only a back door. Stabbing turned into dancing.

“I never thought of it like that,” Brady said.

“What do you think of them? Is it just a job? Or do you ever feel any kind of connection or sympathy?”

The clock ticked the seconds by, and he didn't answer. His face had gone still. Finally, he met my gaze, and his blue eyes were serious.

“I feel lucky.” He swallowed. “Some of them are in there because they made one stupid mistake.”

He watched me in a hard way that made me feel completely naked. I had the odd feeling I would reach over and touch him, his throat, his cheek.

“We all do stupid things,” he said. I saw him swallow. “Things we regret, wish we could take back. I guess I feel lucky that something didn't land me in there with them.”

I was trying desperately to figure out what to say. I could feel the warm air from the wall vent on my back and outside. Stanwich's church bell rang once.

“I'd better go.”

“Do you want something?” I asked. “For the road?”