Project Pallid (12 page)

“Thanks,”
I said.

“No,
thank you.”

And
that was the extent of our acknowledgment to it—our first
kiss—before we headed back to school, hand-in-hand.

“So,
what do you think happened with your dad?” I asked.

“Who
knows. He doesn’t tell me anything about work. He’s always been like that; he
barely says a word about it.”

“Why’s
that? I mean, why do you think he’s so secretive?”

Her
response was totally casual and like she’d wanted to say it all along, but
needed the prodding I’d been so cautious to provide until then. “I think it all
comes from when he worked for the government. You know. They’ve got to be all
secretive and stuff. He can’t seem to let it go. It doesn’t matter that he only
works at the hospital now; he’s still the same.”

“Your
dad used to work for the government?” I asked, startled. The surprise of it
stopped me in my tracks.

“Yup.
Before we moved here, he worked at some lab outside the Capitol.”

“What’d
he do there?” I was genuinely intrigued.

“Medical
research. Drugs and pills and cures and things.”

“Oh.”
My response was surprised, even though I knew he was Head of Medicine at
Madison General, so her revelation wasn’t far-reaching. “So why’d he stop
working there?”

“He
didn’t stop. They made him stop. At least, that’s what
I
think. And then they gave him this job here. One minute we
were living in Baltimore, the next Madison. I got home one day and all our
stuff was packed; the movers had it on the truck before I even knew what was
happening. A day later, we were on a plane to Madison.”

Catee’s
profession threw up red flags left and right. As much as I’d learned about her
in the short time we’d been together, I’d somehow barely scraped the surface.
No wonder they were in therapy together. What, with her mom dying, her dad’s
job reassignment, his time spent at work, and their continually growing
distance, it was no surprise. My life, as complicated as I wanted to make it in
my own head, compared nothing to hers. My struggles were tedious and laughable
in comparison.

“Well,
now that you’re here,” I said, “I’m never going to let you go.”

“I
like that,” she replied with simple profundity, as we climbed the stairs and
entered the lobby, hand-in-hand.

October
27
^th
:

We
took a week off after that—at least in terms of post-school rendezvous at
her place—to allow her dad time to cool off. If we were lucky, he’d
forget about us entirely.

I
asked her what he’d said about me, post run-in, but she said he hadn’t
mentioned a word about it since. To him, I was nothing more than a fly: swatted
and gone, I was unworthy of an afterthought. But then, like now, he
underestimated my ability to sustain. I’m more like a post-apocalyptic
cockroach than anything else; but he’ll learn that soon enough.

Throughout
that week, Catee went out of her way to persuade me that it didn’t matter what
her dad thought. She was committed to me, and she repeatedly insisted that it
was safe to resume our regular routine. I was obviously skeptical.

As
well as she knew him, I don’t think she ever grasped where his head was at. Her
reading of him was wrought with naiveté. She saw him as a daughter sees a
father, not as a damaged man with heavy baggage of his own. She couldn’t fathom
those things that lay beyond rational thought, and she couldn’t possibly
understand the capabilities of a man who was driven to madness by grief.

“I’m
not so sure I want to risk running into your dad again, Catee,” I cautioned.

“Damian,
relax. It’s no big deal. He hasn’t mentioned it since. I bet he doesn’t even
remember it by now.” It’d barely been a week since our encounter and, while I
would’ve liked her words to be true, they were optimistic at best.

“I
don’t know, Catee. I’m not sure I can risk it again. Did you see the look in
his eyes? He would’ve killed me if he could’ve gotten away with it. Next time,
he might.” It sounded extreme, but it seemed entirely possible, even back then.

“Damian,
just relax. It’s no big—”

“Ms.
Laverdier? Mr. Lawson? Do you have something you’d like to say?” Mr. Atkins
stopped his lecture and turned from the board to face us. Catee had
repositioned herself to my side of the horseshoe two weeks before, and she sat
by my side. Justin, who’d been jaded too many times already in his pursuit of
her, had been shooting us death stares ever since. He did little beyond that
though; he was more afraid of her than he’d ever be of me.

“No,
Mr. Atkins. Sorry. Damian was just helping me with this new formula.”

His
impositioned stare softened. “Oh. Well, can I help to clarify anything for
you?” he asked.

“No,
thanks. I think I’ve got it now.”

“Excellent.
Just raise your hand if you need anything else, all right?” He phrased his
instruction in the form of a question more for the feeling of a democracy than
for the establishment of one.

“I
definitely will, Mr. Atkins. Thank you.” Her words, start to finish, came out
flawlessly unaffected and convincing. Catee’s ability to manipulate came with
such ease that I questioned if I wasn’t just another game piece of hers, but I
quickly banished the thought from my head; it’s too painful to take such
considerations in mind when your heart’s so deeply involved.

With
his attention redirected to his lesson, Catee took to scrawling out hastily
written notes to finish our conversation. The first one slid across my desk a
minute later:

Believe
me on this. Everything’s all right. We’ve got no worries. Plan to stay after
school again starting on Monday
,
she wrote.

I
looked pensively at her before writing back:

I
don’t know, Catee. We didn’t see him coming last time. How’s next time going to
be any different? He’ll
KILL
me if he catches me in your house again!!!

And
she returned:

That’s
not going to happen. We’ll be ready for him this time. I’ll push you out a
window if I have to!

The
image of me leaping from her bedroom window—even if it was just a
single-story to the ground—was a ridiculous one. I hoped and trusted he’d
gone back to his regular routine and that it wouldn’t come to it. Still, I
replied:

I
trust you. I’ll tell my mom to start picking me up again on Monday. Promise.

And
that was the moment when the Damian Lawson I used to know, officially died. The
guy who worried too much about everyone else became only a memory, and the new
Damian emerged: a guy who’d finally found the connection he didn’t think he
wanted, but needed more than anything else after he’d stumbled across it. My
commitment to Catee was resolute, even in the grim-set face of death.

I
caught Catee again at our locker that afternoon and, because the rotation of
busses had moved mine to last, I had time to walk with her to parent pickup for
her Friday, family therapy. I was more pensive and hesitant about the trip to
the front that day. I knew her dad would be waiting there, and I worried he might
want to finish the rebuke he’d delivered me, only a week before.

Not
surprisingly, the emerald green Mercedes was there: parked ominously at the
bottom of the concrete steps instead of at its usual resting spot, further
along the curb. My heart rose to my throat when its door whipped open and his
head rose from inside. At full, imposing stature, and with the engine idling,
Mr. Laverdier took long, hurried strides our direction.

Before
she had a chance to react, and before we could say anything, his hand cuffed
around her forearm, and he was dragging her to the car.

“Let
go of me!!” she yelled and wriggled to shake free. When that didn’t work, and
when they were only steps from the passenger door, she began to wildly slap him
with her free hand. She sprayed profanities and tried to desperately unhinge
the manacle-like grip he had on her, but her struggles were fruitless. With the
passenger door open, he tossed her across the front seat like a rag doll.

“If
you open that door,” his threatening finger jabbed at the air, “I’ll have you
pulled from this school for good! You’ll be enrolled in Saint Catherine’s by
the morning!” he barked. And with a slam of the door, he turned back to me.

“You!”
If his finger were a laser, it would’ve burned a hole right between my eyes. I
pointed at myself, feeling innocent in everything, but understanding how his
perception could’ve been the exact opposite.

“Me?”
I quizzically asked.

He
remained motionless in front of the door to bar Catee’s escape should she have
chosen to go against his orders, and he summoned me with a hooked finger.
“Yeah, you. Don’t just stand there with that dopey look on your face. Get over
here!”

My
mind raced. Pavlovian response told me to do as I was told: to respect his
demands and to go to him. Sensibility told me to stay where I was and to avoid
venturing any further into the lion’s den. And so I chose a conciliatory
approach and moved only a few steps closer, to close the divide but keep safe
distance.

“Damian!
I’m sorry!!” Streams of mascara tears raced down her face, and her voice turned
pitchy and frantic. “I’m so sorry!!!”

Mr.
Laverdier whipped back to pull at the door handle.

Locked.

He
reached through the window’s gap
to open it from
the inside while Catee helplessly swatted his hand, and I tried to wrap my head
around how it’d all escalated to that point. Nothing happened to necessitate
such an exchange between them, and it might’ve been entirely laughable if it
weren’t all so tragic.

With
the door open, his body half inside, and Catee backed into its driver’s seat,
he half-spoke and half-yelled at her. I couldn’t make out what he said, but the
fight in her subsided after that. Enough that he was able to calmly roll up the
vintage crank of the window before he closed the door and walked to meet me,
face-to-face.

“What’s
your name, son?” he asked. The hate that had dominated his words, only seconds
before, was replaced with a serene and almost therapeutic tone.

“Damian.”

“Damian,”
he repeated. “Damian what?”

“Damian
Lawson, Sir.” I replied cautiously, sensing that I might be stumbling into some
sort of trap. I looked around him to the Mercedes, hoping to catch Catee’s
escape from it—to catch her running across the playing fields and to
safety. But there was no movement. No sound. No indication that she was in the
car at all.

“It’s
a pleasure to meet you, Damian,” he said with an extension of his hand. “I’m
Mr. Laverdier. Catee’s Dad. But then, you already knew that. You can just call
me David.”

With
little alternative, I extended my hand and watched as it entirely disappeared
into the folds of his own. Had he wanted to, he could’ve clamped onto it and
surgically removed it from my body. I knew it. He knew it. But he didn’t.

Instead,
an odd thing happened.

He
smiled at me.

One
of those ear-to-ear, Cheshire Cat types of smiles that are superficially
pleasant but wrought with deep undercurrents of malevolence. If I saw it today,
I’d punch a perfectly round, cartoon hole right through his teeth.

“I’m
sorry if we got off on the wrong foot, Damian. Why don’t we take a step back
and start fresh? How does that sound?”

I
looked skeptically up as I tried to formulate my response.

“Relax,
Damian. It’s not me you’ve got to worry about.” My look must have turned even
more perplexed at that, because he immediately began to explain himself.

“I’m
going to level with you, Damian, man-to-man.” Her dad had a way of playing off
people’s weaknesses and exploiting exactly what they wanted to hear. I saw it
first, then—he was working me. “And you look to me like a man with a
pretty good head on his shoulders.”

“Uh-huh.”
My reply was more an acknowledgment for him to go on than it was an agreement.

“Well,
Catee’s been through a lot lately. What, with her mom passing away and all,
then with us moving here.”

“I
know,” I agreed, and looked around him to the car again, hoping for some sign
from her. Some clue as to what I should do. Again, there was nothing.

“And
as men, Damian, sometimes we have to ignore our own feelings and put our own
urges aside.”

“Okayyyyy
… ” The intonation of my response told him I still wasn’t sure where he was
going with it all.

“What
I’m trying to say, Damian, is that this isn’t the best time for you to be
getting involved with my daughter. She’s got a lot of things that she … well …
we … need to work through … as a family.” I knew he was spitting a load of
crap, even then.