The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (14 page)

“
Step
daughter.”

“I don’t make that distinction.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.” Albert reached behind his back and skimmed a hand over the book under his shirt for courage.

Kogen changed his approach. “You’ve been seeing Lily for a couple of months now, haven’t you? So you must be aware that the poor girl isn’t quite right up here.” He pointed at his own head. “She is, in fact, quite troubled. Well before the accident that caused her head injury—the accident she had at my clinic with a bunch of her delinquent friends where they almost burned the place down. Everyone knows I was a victim there. Being a stepparent is a thankless job, sometimes.”

“Don’t you
dare
—”

Kogen held up a hand. “Can we talk reasonably? Think about how things look—which is what matters. I don’t think the police are going to look favorably on my delinquent stepdaughter’s delinquent boyfriend breaking into
my
house to cause this family more trouble in an already difficult time. You’re already looking pretty bad in their eyes,
mi amigo
. Whatever you think you know doesn’t matter. Nobody is going to believe anything you say, being some nobody punk kid, while I’m a somebody with plenty of friends in high places. As for Lily … she has been a wild, unpredictable embarrassment to both her mother and myself.
Any
accusation, even if the little runaway turned up to make it herself, would look like the horrible girl was trying to cause her poor family even more grief.” He paused to let it sink in. “Do you get the position you’re in?”

“I know exactly how things stand. I’m not sure you do. Let’s wait and see who’s right, yeah?”

Kogen jabbed a finger into the middle of Albert’s chest. “Drop it, or I’m going to make your life unbearable. And I can.” He reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and Albert flinched, until he saw that Kogen held a cell phone. “Maybe I’ll just call the cops right now and report a break-in. Twenty dollars missing off my kitchen table.”

Albert thought he was bluffing. He wished the guy would just do it … Olivia would back him up anyway. They could lay all their cards out right now. “Go ahead.”

“Show me what you’re hiding,” Kogen said suddenly, grabbing Albert by the forearms. He lowered his voice. “I know you took something.”

“Albert Luis Morales!”

Albert heard his name, called in a furious bellow, even before he heard the growl of his mother’s beat-up old Ford as it rattled up behind Kogen’s sweet ride. His arms were suddenly free and Kogen backed up a pace. Albert’s mother’s face was furiously peering through the windshield, but he was still glad to see it under the circumstances. She was motioning for him to come to the car. He did. To his dismay, Kogen followed him.

“Where have you
been
?” she demanded once Albert was within scolding range. “The school called me at work to ask why you weren’t there today. I had to take time off and I’ve been driving around looking for you for over an hour!”

Albert’s heart sank. “Mom, I—”

She plowed on, really working up a head of steam, “And now I find you out on the street bothering Dr. Kogen!”

Kogen stepped in. “Really, Mrs. Morales, it’s fine. We’re just having a chat.”

Struggling to control her rage at Albert, his mother said, “I’m so sorry if he’s done anything distressing. My son is a good boy, but this thing with your daughter—well, you understand. We’re all upset about it.”

“Please don’t waste a moment worrying on my account. Lily has a lot of problems and I think her association with your boy hasn’t necessarily been the best for him, in terms of influence.”

Albert’s mother actually blushed. “She’s a lovely girl …I mean, I don’t want to speak ill …”

She would have continued sputtering if Kogen hadn’t added, “But I think Albert and I understand each other now, don’t we, Albert?”

“Go to hell,” Albert muttered.

“Albert! That’s
it
—get in the car.
Now
. We’re going home.”

Albert thought about dropping the dime on Kogen right then and there. His mother was so pissed at him right now, though, that if she found out he had skipped school to sneak into the man’s house, poke around, and actually steal something too, the last thing she would do before her head actually exploded would be to make Albert turn over Lily’s journal, sight unseen, apologizing for Albert’s behavior as she did.

“No,” he said, letting this vivid picture dissipated. “I feel like walking.” He was too close to cornering Kogen to risk it now. He could wait a few hours, take a bit more screaming from his mother. It would be worth it.

He turned on his heel and walked past Kogen, though not without a hard shoulder bump. In a low voice just for Kogen, he muttered, “Stay away from me unless you want to get hurt.”

Lily’s stepfather gave him a hard clap on the back as he walked away and said in an equally low voice, “You’ve started a war you can’t win.”

But Albert wasn’t so sure. Leaving both Kogen and his mother behind, he set off once more toward home, balancing his steps on the curb with a calm he didn’t really feel and a confidence that was at least half bluster. He was aware of his mother’s car a little ways behind him, where it stayed all the way home. He wasn’t looking forward to the next few hours and trying to explain himself to his parents. He’d had to do a lot of that lately, and they were definitely as tired of it as he was. Though he suspected that it wouldn’t dampen his mother’s enthusiasm for yelling—she had to be fuming as she chugged along behind him at five miles per hour—nor his father’s for using the words “unbelievable” and “dink.”

It was all too much, and threatened to overwhelm him. His life these days sucked worse than he ever would have believed. But the spine of Lily’s journal was still poking him in the small of the back, reminding him what was at stake. And that was something.

Albert might be the one whose strength is almost tapped by something as stupid as an asthma attack, but Olivia is the first to drain to zero.

“Let’s stop a minute,” she says when they arrive in the town. They drop themselves onto a bench in the cove of a bus shelter. The best they can say about it as a resting place is that it’s dry, at least, and out of the wind. That’s good enough for Olivia. Within a few moments of what’s supposed to be a short break, she’s slumped against Albert, deep in sleep.

He looks down at her upturned face, smashed into his shoulder. Snores and humid breath come from the open hole of her mouth. Placing a hand under her cheek, he lowers her down to the bench while scooting himself out from under her weight. She stirs a bit and tucks her feet up onto the bench, but she doesn’t wake up.

Albert is very tired, too, but sleep is about as far away as Antarctica. Watching Olivia drop off like a little kid, he envies her the ability to do that. At least one of them is getting some rest.

Maybe it’s because he’s tired, or maybe it’s an effect of constant worry, but when Albert closes his eyes he can see himself floating up above the bus shelter. He looks down and he sees himself and Olivia below. With their frizzled heads and rounded shoulders they look small and ridiculous, and definitely not what anyone would hope for when expecting the rescue to come riding in. They are just two teenagers slumped on a bench in the middle of the night, far from where they were going and still farther from home.

Albert opens his eyes, and he is himself again. Pathetic.

For a few minutes he lets himself just wallow in his misery. His legs bounce up and down in a jerky, nervous rhythm, and he has that speed-freak adrenaline that surges on the strangely alert other side of exhaustion. Unable to take it any longer, he stands up, and Olivia slumps farther down the bench as he does.

“I’m just going to take a walk up the block and back,” he says to her even though she’s now asleep, totally beyond the reach of his voice.

Albert has to move, that’s all—he’s too worked up to sit and watch Olivia sleep. If he just goes up the block and back he’ll be able to keep his eye on the bus shelter the entire time, but still work off some of his nervous energy. He’s afraid that if he doesn’t move his legs will give out on him, like machinery pushed until their springs pop and the whole thing jams.

By this time of night, the town is shut down. Nothing seems to be open, and even the traffic light has gone from timed cycles of red and green to a steady, blinking yellow. Pacing the sidewalk in an unfamiliar town while the rest of the world sleeps, Albert is the loneliest he’s ever been.

As he walks, his pace is purposely slow. There’s just this block and back to go, and he isn’t eager to burn through the only distraction he has while Olivia sleeps awhile. He doesn’t have anything to read, not even one of those free newspapers that seem to litter the street until someone actually wants one. He passes a thrift shop storefront with bars on the windows and old manikins in the shadows, and then the front of a narrow Chinese restaurant. When he comes to an alleyway and peers down its dark opening, he sees that all the brick buildings are squatty behind their tall fake fronts. He passes a couple more windows, all of them dark, of course, and comes to the corner. Since there’s no traffic, he’s able to cross.

The other side of the street isn’t much, either. Albert walks by a heavy wood door set back in its building, a neon sign reading
The Prospector
buzzing over the dark entryway. He pauses there a moment, thinking he can hear a faint hum of music from inside. It’s a small sign of life that he savors for just a moment, even though he’s hoping no one comes staggering out of the place while he’s standing there like a dink. He glances toward the bus shelter to make sure Olivia is still fine.

He passes a few more lifeless plate-glass windows, whatever goods inside them completely invisible in the dark, until he comes to a bank of windows that aren’t black. He didn’t notice it before because the light inside is only a dim gloom. Looking up, he sees a sign that reads
The Rinse Cycle All-Nite Laundromat
. There are banks of molded plastic chairs all along the window, and also opposite the wall of stacked washers and the bank of dryers. The black and white tiled floor looks gray in the bluish gloom of the two fluorescent lights still shining far in the back, next to the vending machines.

The place isn’t exactly appealing, but it’s probably warm enough, and definitely better than a bus bench in February.

Albert presses his face against the glass and sees just one person in the place—an older guy wrapped in a long scarf and wearing a stocking cap. He looks like he’s asleep, and Albert doesn’t see any laundry basket near him.

Good enough. Time to retrieve Olivia and regroup somewhere warm.

A flicker and a glow from inside catch his eye, and Albert sees a high wall-mounted television to his left, in the front corner facing the dryers. Onscreen, a man and a woman are sitting behind a desk and he figures the local station is replaying the ten o’clock news. The camera focuses in tight on the woman, a picture-within-the-picture hovering over her left shoulder. There are two still photos in the box next to the woman’s head. Albert sees the girl first, and she looks familiar. Next to the photo of the girl, he sees himself, a picture cropped from a framed snapshot of him and his father.

Olivia Odilon and Albert Morales, their pictures right up there on the TV in the all-night laundromat.

He can’t read the newswoman’s lips and there’s no caption under the pictures. And while he should’ve known people would be looking for them—not the least of which, the police—seeing their likenesses like that is badly startling.

As he stares through the window at the TV screen, Albert has a sudden uncomfortable feeling that someone is right behind him. He whirls around, half-expecting someone to point from the television to him and back and yell for the police to come arrest the fugitive. But when he turns there’s no one there, not even a burger wrapper fluttering in the gutter. He is just as alone as he’d been a few minutes before.

Quite jumpy now, Albert hurries away from the laundromat window and cuts a diagonal across the wide street between him and Olivia, a sudden superstitious dread driving him to hurry back to her.

“Get your butt in your room and don’t come out until I tell you to.”

His mother’s command drilled into Albert’s back as she followed him through the kitchen door once they’d arrive home—him getting there on foot, her just behind him in the car. When she spoke, her voice was cold. His mother was a no-nonsense type of woman, and although once in a great while she could be surprisingly cool about things, this was not one of those times.

“I’ve just about had it with you,” she said, slamming a cupboard.

Her tone was disgusted, something Albert had gotten used to the past four or five years. When his mother was like this—not just her regular exasperated bluster, but truly pissed off—her eyes became narrow lasers shooting out from under furrowed eyebrows, and her lips were pinched almost out of existence. Then there was her voice. Even though she’d quit smoking two years ago (it was an excruciating couple of months for Albert and his father), her voice still turned sandpapery when she was bitching someone out. Right now she was too angry to hit him with a lecture, but Albert knew that wouldn’t last.

Let her be mad,
he thought. He was mad at her, too. Tired of her never giving him the benefit of the doubt, and the nagging. He glanced over his shoulder, his glare enough to bore a hole into his mother’s back. As if she could feel it, she whirled around and caught his eye. Her expression was poisonous, like she was trying to vaporize him with it. He dropped his gaze first.

“I’m sorry,” Albert finally said, taking the safest approach he could think of. There was a lot more he wanted to say; he wanted to yell at her, and the desire to explain himself, to show her she was wrong, was almost unbearable. But he didn’t know
how
. They stared at each other—him waiting, her watching, that one muscle under her left eye twitching. He couldn’t really do anything with the journal poking him in the small of the back. He had to hold it all in just a bit longer.

“Yeah, you’re sorry.” His mother reached into a low cupboard and pulled out a frying pan, slamming it onto the stove. “I don’t care. In barely more than a week you’ve been sorry for sneaking out of the house,
sorry
you were pulled out of class for police questioning, for god’s sake—and sorry
now
for skipping school.”

No, now was definitely not the time to add breaking and entering to the list of complaints she had against him. He was stunned by what he’d learned today, and by the nasty meeting he’d had with Kogen on the street.

“
Sorry
isn’t doing your father and me much good, is it? Not doing you any good, either. When you just keep screwing up anyway? But don’t worry, we’ll definitely discuss it further when your father gets home from work.” Now she was rummaging violently in the fridge. “We’ve already grounded you, but apparently that’s about as useful as your
sorry
.”

While her back was turned, Albert started toward the hallway and his bedroom, remembering that she’d originally commanded him to get out of her sight.

“Hold it,” she said. He stopped and turned around to see her glaring at him, a package of bloody hamburger oozing in her one upraised hand. “On second thought, I heard a mouse in the basement this morning. Make yourself useful and go get the mousetraps from the garage and set them around down there.”

Chores as a prelude to punishment—familiar territory. This one was pretty weak, but it was the middle of February and there weren’t any hedges to trim or gutters to be degunked. Though he wouldn’t admit it to her, Albert was actually glad to have something to do besides wait in his room for whatever real punishment his parents chose to hand down.

“Can I change my shoes first?” he asked. It was a stupid question, especially since he was only going to the basement, but his mother only rolled her eyes and went back to terrorizing the hamburger. Albert took this for a yes and hurried across the house to his bedroom.

Figuring he only had a few moments before his mother couldn’t stand it any longer and came after him to yell a bit more, he pulled Lily’s diary from his waistband and looked around for a place to put it.

He felt a pressure to hurry that made him panicky, and he settled for slipping the little book under the pillow of his unmade bed. He wished he didn’t have to hide the journal right now, that instead he could just show it to his parents so they could help him. But his mother was so
mad
, and when his father got home, he’d yell at Albert, too, and there’d be a whole lot more of the yelling when he had to explain
how
he got the journal. It would be forever until they calmed down enough to listen to him. And even then, even if they would consent to just
look
at the thing, they would probably think Lily was a liar. “Troubled,” as Kogen had said to Albert’s mother.

Pulling the covers up a little on the bed, he thought,
screw ’em, then
. His parents could read about Kogen’s arrest in the local paper like everyone else. He wouldn’t bother them until it was all settled—after he and Olivia had taken the journal to the police as evidence of what had really happened. If the cops believed it, his parents would have to, too.

It was a good thing he’d hidden the diary immediately, because he didn’t even have both shoes off before his mother came stomping down the hall to yell at him more. He jumped off his bed, slid his feet into a pair of dorky clogs he’d gotten for Christmas, and left his bedroom. He shut the door tight behind him.

After grabbing the peanut butter and a plastic knife from the kitchen, then the box of traps (after some searching) from the shelf in the garage, Albert hustled downstairs to his chore. As he was baiting the traps and setting them in all the corners around the three rooms of the basement, he tried not to think about the cute little creatures getting themselves squashed by the spring lever when they tried for the peanut-buttery goodness.

He set a loaded trap in the corner behind the water heater. At least these spring-loaded things killed them quickly.

Beyond the furnace and water heater was the back room where his family kept old stuff they couldn’t bear to throw away. This was stuff they’d brought here over hundreds of miles. Besides the unmarked cardboard boxes, his dead grandmother’s old canning jars, Christmas decorations, a rusty exercise bike, and several pairs of Luis Morales’ worn-out work boots, there were several boxes marked
Albert
on a low shelf behind the door. There was
Albert: Schoolwork
,
Albert: Toys
and even
Albert: Baby Clothes
, all written on the boxes with black permanent marker in Vanessa Morales’ tight block printing. His mother refused to get rid of the remains of his childhood junk, and the older he got, the more she seemed ready to bring his old Legos and OshKosh overalls upstairs and put Albert down in the basement in a box marked
Albert: Not So Cute Anymore
.

The shock and hostility of the day had drained Albert’s energy, and he slowly crossed to the fruit room at the other end of the basement to set the last mousetrap. Any rodents looking for a snack would get a spring-loaded metal bar through the head instead.

When mice got into their old house a few years ago, his father had bought glue traps, but it had been too horrible. Though it was more humane in theory, in reality, watching the mice—there had been four that time—struggling and slowly dying in the gluey mess was deeply depressing to the eleven-year-old Albert.

He felt like he was wriggling in a giant glue-trap himself now, some awful place between childhood and adulthood. His parents treated him like a little kid. And when he was around them, he felt like one. When he was with Lily, he felt like a real person. She knew nothing about what he used to be like, and she didn’t need to know what he was supposed to become. She just took him as he was, as he took her. That she was wrapped up in something worse than he could have imagined didn’t change the way Albert felt about her—didn’t change the fact that life seemed exciting and somehow open when they were together.

He wanted to save her.

He wanted to save her, because that would prove he loved her better than anyone, prove he was worthy of her love.

He would never admit it, though. It was stupid and desperate. He sat on the bottom step, sighing hard.

As Albert finally stood to shuffle up the stairs, his mother appeared at the top, about to shout that he should wash up for dinner. Next to her was his father, just home from work.
Goodie
. Albert dared a look at his father’s face, trying to guess how bad his father’s mood was after learning about Albert’s latest dumb move.

Blank-faced, his father reached out as he walked past and flicked him on the forehead with one thick, callused finger. He said, “You’re on your third strike, boy.”

Stars in front of his eyes, Albert slumped and looked down at his feet. It felt like there was a mountain of crap threatening to bury him and this was just another shovelful. The mountain menaced from every direction—Lily’s disappearance and her terrible secret … the police … his parents … Kogen, too, who was a double problem. Not only was Kogen a danger to Lily and the cause of everything, but he was suspicious of Albert, too. To what degree, Albert wasn’t sure—another problem. And of course, if Kogen somehow knew that Albert had taken something from Lily’s room because of the conversation he’d overheard, then he must be suspicious of Olivia as well—which put her in danger.

Thwump
. Albert could almost feel the dull thud of another load of crap falling on him. He splashed his face with cold water from the bathroom faucet and went to face his parents in the dining room.

Dinner was painful, as he’d known it would be. His parents dropped a tag-team attack on him. The whole meal was an unrelenting barrage of

“—respect our rules as long as you’re living under—”

“—don’t keep up in school, you’ll never get into a good—”

“—think you’re in love, but—”

“—have to take care of yourself—”

“—throw your life away for the first girl you—”

Albert knew better than to interrupt either of his parents, so he had to act like he was listening and apologetic for all the trouble he’d been in lately, while eating a plate of spaghetti—two tasks that were actually kind of hard to do at the same time. A constant chorus of
this sucks
marched through his brain while he was sitting there.

“I just don’t understand,” his mother was saying. He looked up from his plate and saw that she’d put down her fork and was glaring at him. “I thought you were really back on track—you haven’t been in any trouble since we moved here. I thought last year’s screw-up was firmly in the past.”

Albert flinched. He’d known this was going to come up eventually. It had been over a year since he’d gotten into trouble with Chris and Danny and those guys, that weekend they all went upstate without telling their parents. Jake’s uncle—the guy they’d boosted the car from—decided not to press charges, so at least he hadn’t actually been arrested. Albert really didn’t know they didn’t have permission to use the car (though his parents never believed that), but still, he’d known it was dumb when they were doing it. He just hadn’t cared enough to let that stop him. He’d been paying for that weekend ever since. His parents still wouldn’t let him get his own car or a cell phone, and they didn’t like to let him go out. Even though he’d kept in line—which was pretty easy to do after they’d moved away—he couldn’t get their trust back.

They weren’t likely to loosen his leash even an inch now that all this Lily stuff was happening. The fact that he’d sneaked out—although just to see Lily, not to commit some crime—had made them pull the leash even tighter. It was like it proved their distrust of him was completely justified. He didn’t know how to tell them he wasn’t headed for some kind of criminal life; he could see flashbacks to that stupid weekend in his parents’ eyes now, and he knew they weren’t likely to trust him again anytime soon.

“… she hasn’t been good for you.”

Albert dropped his fork and it clattered loudly on his plate. “Just shut up about Lily, okay? Honestly, I can’t believe you’re talking about her like then when she—” He was talking too loud and too fast. “Did it ever occur to you that it’s not Lily? That I just realized that my big goal in life isn’t to keep you happy?”