Someone Else's Love Story (35 page)

“I apologize for surprising you this way,” Clayton Lilli said. “But I can’t live with this. You have to hear my side.”

He fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out a piece of paper, and his tall, skinny build made his movements an awful mimicry. He looked like Walcott taking his crumpled poem out to court me. Oh, but my power move in the park was backfiring. Clayton Lilli had brought me a pocketful of earnest words, too. His were for Mouse Brown’s benefit, not mine. Why the hell had he told his girlfriend?

“You don’t get a side. You get to leave or be arrested.”

Why hadn’t I let things be? I hadn’t been able to live with uncertainty, so what made me think that he could? He had come to find me so much faster, though.

“Call the cops,” Mouse Brown said, so close to him their shoulders pressed. Her thin lips were all atremble. “He’ll read it to them, too.”

“Please. It will only take a minute,” Clayton Lilli said. His voice was flat. He seemed so calm, but I could see how his hands were clamped down on the paper, one on either side, waiting for permission. His knuckles were white. “It’s important that you know the truth.”

“I don’t have a minute,” I said. “And you don’t have the truth.”

I started down the steps toward them, and it pushed them back. They moved away from me, both of them, and this was good. Back toward the gate was good.

“You don’t know this man,” Mouse Brown said. “What you think happened is not possible. It’s not who he is.”

Clayton Lilli began reading. “ ‘On the night of our encounter, my judgment was impaired. I had participated in a rush activity that required me to drink a large quantity of beer in a relatively short period of time.’ ”

I hated how he spoke, the formal grammar so like Natty. Could even that be genetic? William said everything was. It was unendurable, to listen to him talk this way, and time was sliding past, precious seconds squandered. I broke in before he could start the next sentence, saying the first thing I could think of to try to wrest away control of the conversation.

“I have a gun.”

Clayton Lilli looked up from the page, and he and Mouse Brown blinked in tandem at my empty, gunless hands. My sundress didn’t even have a pocket.

“It’s in the house,” I said, as if this would make it better.

The only gun inside, really, was a plastic Star Wars blaster that made
pew pew
noises and had lights along the side. I needed Natty’s dream gun with its awful feet, so if I called it could come running out to shoot them.

In the Circle K, the gun gave Stevie all the power in the room, though he’d been so small and way outnumbered. I wanted to wave one at them, watch their little white tails bounding away over the hills. Then I could drive to Sandy Springs and shoot Bethany in her foot, for putting in the second phone line for me. I would shoot my own foot, too, for correcting Clayton Lilli when he called me Mandy at the park. He could even now be Googling an endless stream of Amandas and A and M Pierces without ever, ever finding me.

“My friend is inside, too. William. The big guy. All I have to do is yell, and he will come out here and break you into pieces.”

That was better. He sure remembered William. I saw it in his sideways glance, the backward shuffle of his feet.

Mouse Brown said, “He’s not here to threaten you or scare you. He’s trying to explain why he . . . went outside the frat house with you.” She was a better advocate than he was, with his stiff paper and his even stiffer face, his inability to meet my eyes. I thought of William saying,
Duplications and deletions,
and of Paula telling me that her Au-tastic Dr. Ashe was a grown-up who knew how to pass.

Clayton Lilli didn’t have it down yet, but Miss Mouse sure loved him anyway. She was a damp-nosed country song, standing by her man, even though her man was a total, raping asshole. What on earth was wrong with women? Now she held her hands up to me like she’d taken a job as his personal supplicant.

“If he’d been sober, he might have realized you were in trouble. He didn’t know. He wasn’t the one who drugged you.”

She’d pulled me into it in spite of time and all my instincts. Oh, it was a smart story. The best lies contain a lot of truth, and he wasn’t trying to blame me. He’d invented a defense that dovetailed with the memories I did have, and with everything I’d said to him at Piedmont Park. In his clever version, he was a random fellow, drunk at a party, who’d been enticed outside with a girl he’d thought was loose and as drunk as he was. The awful part was, it could be true. I didn’t think it likely, but it could be. I had no way of knowing. All my ways of knowing had been taken from me.

I said, “You must have a good idea about who did drug me, then.”

I said it to him, not her. If a different guy really had drugged me, either for himself or to help Clayton off the Emory Football Team, he would have been on the scene.

Clayton looked past my shoulder, his mouth turning down. “I’m not sure.”

“That’s convenient. For you and for your frat brothers,” I snapped.

He faltered, looking to his feet, and Mousy grabbed the flag again.

“They are
not
his brothers. He dropped out in the middle of pledging exactly because of crap like that night.”

Crap like that night, indeed. She sounded prim and disapproving, as if my assault had been a naughty frat shenanigan, equal to pantsing some stodgy professor.

“Please may I read my paper?” Clayton Lilli asked with dogged good manners. “It’s all here in my paper.”

I could feel the clock moving. He would not stop, ever, until I agreed to hear him out. “Fine. But not now. Not here. It has to be someplace public. I’ll listen, but not at my house. If you’re really a nice guy, then you won’t come invade my own house and blindside me and try to make me.” I turned to Mouse Brown, so desperate to get them away from Natty that I would promise anything, threaten anything. “Is he the kind of guy who’s going to make me?”

She stepped up, bobbing her head at me and practically gushing. “No, no, that’s fine. We’ll meet you anyplace you want. Anytime.”

She reached for his elbow, but Clayton Lilli was scrabbling in his breast pocket for a pen. His hair was brushed and he’d put a product in it to try to tamp the cowlick down. It wasn’t working. I bet the girlfriend had picked the outfit, a button-down shirt and khakis, pressed to have a crease. Classic Nice Guy, with a touch of Harmless Nerd. He shoved his thick glasses up with one hand and fumbled for his pen with the other.

“Let me give you my e-mail.”

“Just go. I’ll find you. This is exactly the reason God invented Google, so you could get the hell away from me. Right this second.”

My voice rose toward hysteria, and Mouse Brown tugged his arm.

“He’s on Facebook,” she said. “Clayton Dean Lilli.”

I boggled at her. Did she expect me to friend him? Maybe he could post his note to my wall, and then we’d all three go play Farm Town.

At least they were turning away from my door. They were walking across the lot. The Mouse set a mercifully quick pace. I began remembering how to breathe. They reached the open gate. There was a strip of grass and a flower bed by the entrance, and they turned to go around it. They were so careful not to stamp through the zinnias, exactly like good, thoughtful, nonrapey people. Saving the stupid flowers cost five seconds, and in that span, I heard my front door opening behind me. I felt the push of air-conditioned cold rolling out against my back. At the same instant, Mouse Brown paused. She turned her face over her shoulder, toward me. Maybe she heard the door, or maybe she wanted to say one more thing. I don’t know.

Behind me I heard Walcott saying, “Shandi?”

Mouse Brown was looking back, and I watched her whole body seize. All motion stopped. Her face went salt-white, and that’s when I knew for certain Natty had come, too. She saw Natty, who was even now reaching for my hand, moving up to stand beside me.

I’d known Clayton Lilli was his father almost instantly, though I’d been farther away than his girlfriend was standing now. It was in the body, in the movements, in the cowlicks that stood up on the backs of both their heads.

She’d gone so rigid-still that Clayton Lilli stopped, too, and turned and looked. They stood in the gate, his face expressionless, and hers sizing up my son, doing math. Her eyes got wider and wider. Her mouth unhinged.

“Take Natty in the house,” I hissed at Walcott, but he’d seen Clayton Lilli now, and he stepped up to stand on my other side.

“Is that the guy?” he asked. “Is that the guy? Is that the guy?”

It got fiercer and meaner every time he said it. He was seeing it, too, the pieces that Natty and this man shared, written in their every cell. I could feel the long sinews in his arm hardening and knotting, his whole body becoming something like a coil.

I had an image of them fighting. Two stretched-tall, skinny fellows tearing at each other with their spider arms. Poet versus accountant. Walcott would destroy him.

“What guy?” Natty asked, and the sound of him broke Walcott’s gaze.

“Please take him inside. Please,” I said in a tiny voice that had no breath behind it.

Walcott sucked air in between his teeth. He took Natty’s hand and pulled him back behind me.

I said, “We all have to go inside.” As if this would help.

Natty said, “That lady is throwing up on all our zinnias.”

I herded them in, following, slamming the door shut, my fingers fumbling for the bolt. As if the door that had been opened up between us could be closed.

“Now what?” Walcott said.

I leaned on the door, panting. I didn’t know. I looked to Walcott, desperate, but he didn’t know, either. Natty stood by him with his eyebrows knit together. Natty had no understanding of what had happened, but he clearly knew that something had.

“Mommy, are you sick, too?” he said.

“No, I’m super,” I said by rote. I was the mom, and the mom had to be super and have the answers. Even if she was the one who had called the monster to the doorway. Especially then, actually. I didn’t have any answers, so I had to be extra super and come up with at least one.

Then I did have an answer. Just one, but it was a place to start. I could, right this second, put about a hundred miles of Georgia between my son and Clayton Lilli. This idea felt so much better than standing here and panicking.

“Natty, do you want for us to move back home? To Mimmy and the yell-y frogs?”

“Really?” Natty asked. “When?”

“Really. Now,” I said. As a long-term plan, it wasn’t great, but getting Natty to an address that Clayton Lilli didn’t know was step one in my not going crazy.

“Let’s get packing!” Walcott said, in a hearty, big voice, instantly on board. He’d become extra super, too.

Natty acted like I’d handed him a hundred puppies on the first day of summer. He stomped in a circle, yelling, “Hurray! Oh, hurray! It is the moment of our great return!” with his odd, precise diction.

The formal way he talked had always made me smile, and it was a joy to know it still did, even now. I’d hated hearing Clayton Lilli speak that way, but he couldn’t taint this. In my world, Natty had owned this way of talking first.

I took Natty up to the master bedroom and told him he could watch as much Nick Jr. as he liked. Once he’d been sucked into
Bubble Guppies
, I holed up in my bedroom with the walk-around phone. Walcott came with me and started covering small batches of my hanging clothes in garbage bags and tying off the ends while I called Mimmy.

She picked up on her cell phone; she was en route to her candy shop. I got her up to speed in a ragged whisper. It was strange, to be referencing truths we both knew but that had never been discussed between us. Walcott and his momses had done my talking for me, and then I’d pretended it away. Now, considering the hell I’d led to my doorstep, saying these words to Mimmy was so easy it was nothing.

As I spoke, telling Mimmy a truncated version of the hunt for Clayton Lilli, finding him, and how he found me back, Walcott stopped packing and sat down on the bed, listening. I told her everything, even the awful, discordant defense that he had mounted, with enough truth in it to be remotely credible. I told her that now he knew there was a Natty.

“Can we please come home?” I asked her.

“Baby, of course,” she said. “I’m coming now to help you pack.”

“Walcott’s here,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

I wished she would, though. I felt so small and scared right now. I didn’t want to be the mommy by myself. I wanted her to come and help me be it.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve been pointed toward you driving for the last twenty minutes.”

That meant we had less than two hours until she came. Walcott and I started stuffing everything I owned back into the laundry baskets and my duffel and a slew of black plastic trash bags. We did it fast and sloppy; it would never all fit back in the Bug in such a tumble. It didn’t matter. We had Walcott’s car, too, and if that ran out of room, we could cram the rest in Mimmy’s tugboat of a Buick.

We loaded Walcott’s Subaru up first, and I saw no sign of Mouse or Clayton Lilli in the parking lot or on the road outside. They’d retreated to regroup, rethink, or maybe just break up. Natty’s existence must be playing hell with her faith in his carefully typed story. I had no idea what their next move would be. All I knew was, Natty could not be here when or if they made it.