The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (11 page)

It was a full five minutes before Albert was able to shake himself out of a state of self-pity and paralysis. He was here, and he was almost certainly going to catch hell for skipping school anyway, so he might as well make something of it. As tempting as it was to sink into the bed and bury his face in the naked pillows to try to catch the scent of Lily’s hair, he needed to focus his attention. He needed to find something that would help him find her.

The only thing to do was just what the police had probably done: sift through everything and see if anything helpful turned up. Maybe they’d missed something significant. Obviously they had no idea that she was lying low at that lakeside cabin of her best childhood memories, or they’d have gone after her already, as Albert was planning to do. A nagging voice asked whether it was just a matter of time before they figured it out, too.

The next couple of hours were frustrating and useless. He began his search in the obvious places: under the mattress, behind the drawers of her desk, and on the mirror over the dresser. The rather mysterious nature of another person’s collected belongings hit him—how much junk people save, the meaning known only to them. But there was nothing about The Last Good Place—no pictures, no notes, not even a restaurant matchbook or a souvenir map. He flipped through Lily’s school notebooks, the sight of her tight, private scrawl doing funny things to his stomach. It was like catching a glimpse of her in her underwear when she didn’t know anyone was looking—something he wouldn’t want to be caught doing. One by one he pulled the books from her shelves and shook them, hoping for something to flutter out, but nothing did.

After giving up on the room itself, Albert kicked aside the open box blocking the closet and stepped inside. It was a small walk-in and when he opened the door wider, a light went on over his head, startling him. About half of Lily’s clothes had been pulled from the rod, hangers and all, and left in a pile on the closet floor. He could see the back wall, a dingy off-white that had probably matched the rest of the room at one time. He ran his hand over the shelves above his head, even though the shoeboxes and other junk that had been on them were all now on the floor just outside the door and the shelves were empty.

He dropped to the floor and sat in the pile that had been scattered there. No box or bag had been left unopened, and even the shoes from her shoe rack had been pulled from their cubbies. Albert could imagine cops poking rubber-gloved fingers into the toes of each pair. It occurred to him that he was leaving fingerprints everywhere, but he supposed it didn’t matter much now. He continued to feel the wall, down below the line of clothes left hanging, for a cubby or some secret passageway to the land of Narnia for all he knew. But all he found was the nothing he expected.

Since the shoe rack was flush with the wall, Albert couldn’t get his hand behind it. He decided to be thorough, though he knew it was pointless, so he shouldered the rack aside in order to finish his ridiculous pat-down of the walls. The floor back here was the only bare spot in the closet, which pulled his eyes down.

After a moment, he looked down again. This time it was more than a glance, as his brain struggled to catch up with whatever had caught his eye.

Two of those boards did look a little bit, well,
different
from the others—their lines were slightly off, and the color was off as well.

He reached down and gave one a test push. He thought he felt a slight give under his palm, but it was so slight he could have imagined it. These boards were pretty tight after all.

Rocking from his heels to his knees, he bent down for a closer look. He pushed again, and again he couldn’t tell. It really would have been too easy. If he expected this to be anything, then he probably really was dumb enough to think there was the map with the big red X Marks The Spot on it. All that and Narnia, too.

But still. He couldn’t quite let it go.

He left the closet long enough to find something he could use as a lever, and came back with a letter opener he’d found in the desk. He stuck the point of it in where the boards looked off and pressed down on the end.

With a small squeak the board came up, pretty easily, he felt. Trying to keep down his excitement, he pulled at the boards around it. Only one came loose, exposing an opening that was barely wide enough for him to get his hand through. He hesitated very briefly, then pushed aside the deep disgust he felt at sticking his hand into a place he couldn’t see. He put his hand through the hole in the floor and felt around. His fingers got only air. Grunting, he lowered himself more, in order to get his arm farther in. His face was on the floor and he could smell the cool, almost damp smell coming from the hole. Slowly he extended his arm more, not want to whack it on anything he couldn’t see.

When his elbow was about half bent, his fingers touched something solid, like concrete, maybe two feet down. His hand crept farther along and found something hard and rough, then another something, soft and papery. He pulled the soft thing out first: it was a crumpled old paper bag. When he went back for the second thing, he came up with a book.

He felt like he’d won something—obviously no one had discovered Lily’s clever little hiding place.

Moving the book and the bag out of the way, Albert carefully replaced the shoe rack and tried to settle the mess back the way he’d found it, as best he could. Then he turned his attention to what he’d found. Unrolling the top of the small paper bag, Albert wasn’t surprised to see a lighter, an empty bottle of airline-sized vodka, and a nearly empty baggie of what looked like very old weed. He smiled at this trace of Lily’s party-girl persona, the ghost of whom he’d rarely seen since he’d met her. Nothing useful there, so he dropped the bag and turned his attention to the other discovery. The book was smallish and plain, a brown color not much darker than the paper bag.

Barely hesitating, he pulled at the little lock—more for show than a real lock—and it gave easily. He flipped the pages and saw steady handwriting across unlined paper. The script filled less than a quarter of the book and most of the pages were still crisp and blank. The first page was dated in November, over a year before. Though it was more crabbed and dark than usual, as if she’d been trying to push the pen right through the paper, he recognized Lily’s handwriting.

Thinking perhaps he shouldn’t, he read the first lines anyway:

Perry was sleepwalking last night and he came to my room. I’m so embarrassed. I can’t tell anyone.

Albert stood on Lily’s doorstep, waiting for someone to answer the door after he rang the bell. It was only the second time he’d been to Lily’s house that her parents knew about, the second thing you could actually call a date: two concert tickets and a car, rare mercy from his dad. Also, the second time he’d used the front door to get in.

The word “date” was possibly the skin-crawlingest word Albert could think of for hanging out with a girl. “Date” made him think of things like ironed slacks and corsages and polite chitchat with adults … and that joking-but-still-serious “have her home by eleven!” command of the sitcom dad following them out the door.

“Date” made Albert think of some douchy sport coat, and actually a very real sport coat was balled up in the backseat of his car at that very moment. A sport coat that his parents had insisted on buying for him when he made the mistake of asking for the car for his and Lily’s first date, and that they insisted he take tonight, even though (a) his parents had already decided this Albert/Lily thing was a temporary annoyance to be put up with until it ran its course, and (b) only a complete dork would wear a sport coat to an all-ages show, anyway. But it wasn’t worth arguing about and risking the loss of the car for the night, so Albert wore the jacket right up until the time he tossed it in the backseat while he drove, about a block from home.

“Date” was formal and old-fashioned, and he didn’t think those things applied to Lily.

As he was getting himself all worked up and wondering if he should ring again, the door finally opened. His nervous stomach flopped, but it was Lily on the other side, looking as uncomfortable as he felt.

“Come in,” she muttered, pulling him inside, “and let’s get this over with so we can go.”

There was a tiny flash of light at her throat as she turned, and he saw she was wearing the little heart necklace he’d given her.

The first time he’d picked Lily up to take her out, her mother had been on her way out the door; he’d met the woman only in passing and she didn’t seem too interested in her daughter’s boyfriend. The husband had been waiting for her in their car, and Albert’s introduction to him had been his brief wave as he drove away.

Lily led Albert into the kitchen. He’d prepared himself to have to meet the whole family, but now that he was here it didn’t actually look too bad. There was no sign of the sister or stepfather, only Lily’s mother. Her back was turned as she stood tiptoe on a little step stool so she could water the plant that was hanging above the sink.

“Mom, you remember Albert,” Lily recited quickly as she grabbed her bag from the counter. “We have to jet if we’re going to make it before the show starts.”

Her mother stepped gracefully from the stool and set her watering can on the counter, running her hands over the nonexistent creases in her pants. “Honey, it’s barely six. What time does this concert begin?”

“We’re going to grab a quick bite first,” Lily replied. To Albert she said, “Say ‘hi’ fast, because we’re out of here.”

“Wait a minute,” said Lily’s mother, smiling at her daughter and wagging a finger at her. “I didn’t get a good look at the boy the first time around. Let me give him the once-over, at least.”

Albert stood between the two females, an afterthought to them both in this moment, and he was unsure of what was safe to do. So he said, “Nice to see you again, ma’am.”

“Encantado! Estás en tu casa,” Lily’s mother said, brushing his arm with one hand. Albert just smiled and nodded, and before he could think of what to say, she rapid-fired another string of words in what sounded to Albert like pretty good Spanish. Though he couldn’t be sure, since he didn’t speak the language.

Lily’s mom looked at him, and her smile stopped before it got to her eyes, which were probing. She was taller than Lily, and her hair was dark blonde and pulled up away from her face. And though she was a very pretty older version of her very pretty daughter, Albert noticed she was wearing more makeup at home than his mother put on for even the fanciest going out.

“Mom,” Lily said, laughing, “he doesn’t know what you’re saying. He does speak English, though.”

Albert’s face was starting to hurt from fake-smiling and he wished they could leave already.

Her mother looked confused for a moment, but recovered quickly. “Run along, then, and have a good time. But don’t stay out too late, all right?”

Albert could see Lily stifling an eye-roll as she gave her mother a quick kiss on the cheek and then tugged his hand. They were almost to the front door when her mother’s voice stopped them.

“Before I forget,” she said from the kitchen doorway, “your father—”

Lily turned her head sharply. “You mean Perry?”

“Honestly, Lily,” her mother said, her voice sounding a lot more brittle than it had a moment ago. “I don’t know why you have to be so combative about everything. Your stepfather, then, wanted me to remind you to leave your car keys on the table so he can check the fluid levels when he gets home. He does so much for you”—her voice rose a pitch—“and honestly, you have so little appreciation.”

“Mom …” Lily pleaded, looking from her mother to Albert and back again. After no one said anything, she said, “I’m sorry, okay?” She didn’t sound very sorry.

Her mother sighed. “I’m sorry, too, honey, that I snapped at you. I’m just so tired, and I have fifty thousand things to do and not enough hours in the day, you know? I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

The fact of Lily’s apology, if not how she said it, must have been enough to smooth things back out, because she and Albert were finally free, almost racing to the car to get away from the claustrophobic scene in the immaculate white house.

Later, on the drive home after the show, their ears still ringing from the amps, Albert took the long way, as best as he could remember it in this new town with roads he was still learning. Avoiding the freeway that would shoot them pretty much straight back to Lily’s doorstep in about thirty minutes, Albert found the two-lane highway and the back roads. He tried to stretch the evening out as long as he could, going nowhere in particular, just prolonging the ride as much as possible. He drove faster than he should have, because Lily laughed wildly whenever they had to lean into the turns and her hand crept up his thigh. He himself felt a pleasant sense of being close to out of control.

Later still, after they came to the unspoken agreement that they couldn’t put it off any longer, Albert slowed his driving down and finally turned the car toward Lily’s house.

They approached the familiar roads of the neighborhoods close to Lily’s, and as they did, something in their mood was disappearing. Lily turned her face to the window and rolled it all the way down. She rested her arm on the metal frame, letting her fingers dangle outside, and the rest of the evening seemed to be rushing out the window, too. The incoming air was cold, and cleared the last of the giddiness from the car along with the heat.

“I don’t want this night to end,” she said after a moment. “I don’t want to go home.”

“Me either,” Albert said. The engine shuddered when he said it, as if in sympathy. He snaked a hand across the space between them and found her hand.

“Let’s just pretend,” she said, “that we’re not going home at all. Let’s say we’re just going to keep driving forever.”