The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (22 page)

It’s a particularly bad attack—asthma or panic, he doesn’t know anymore—but it passes even as Albert begins to fear he will never catch his breath again. Olivia follows him out of the boathouse, trying to make sure he’s okay, but he waves her off. So she just stands a few feet away, watching him until the attack seems to finally pass.

“Now what?” she asks.

He shrugs.

After the dead end at the boathouse, there is nothing for Albert and Olivia to do but give up for the night and try to sleep for a few hours. They are exhausted, hungry, and bitterly disappointed. The total effect is that neither of them can stay on their feet any longer. They’ve hit a dead end in more ways than one.

Although the shelter of the boathouse is the most likely place to camp for the night, neither Albert nor Olivia wants to sleep in that creepy and claustrophobic place. In wordless agreement, they find another tarp and a couple of life preservers and carry them to the back side of the old summer cottage itself, a dark nook protected from the wind and from the moonlight by the peak of the roof. Spreading the tarp out as a double bedroll and using the life preservers as pillows, Olivia and Albert huddle close and wait for sleep.

The tarp is stiff and the ground rocky and cold. Albert wants to toss and turn and find a comfortable position, but he holds himself still for Olivia’s sake. He wishes for sleep, but his mind keeps playing over all the things he very much
doesn’t
want to think about.

Like: it would be such a supreme joke if Lily got this far way from Kogen just to get herself killed by some random homeless guy who found her hiding spot first.

I’m not going to think that way
, he tells himself. At this moment, the only thing is sleep. Then, in the morning, they can begin searching again. Maybe some new idea will take root and grow in his subconscious while he sleeps. By the light of morning, maybe this dead-end campout won’t seem like as much of a dead end as it looks right now.

The stiff tarp crinkles as Olivia turns over from her back to her side. She faces Albert, and even in the dimness he can see, by the barest reflection of light in her eyes, that she’s looking at him.

“Still awake?” she whispers.

He lets out a sigh that turns into a shiver. “Yeah.”

He really, really doesn’t feel like talking right now, but apparently Olivia does.

“I didn’t realize how positive I was we’d find her here,” she says, her words coming out in a sleepy drawl. “This
is
her Last Good Place. So if she’s not here, where the hell did she go?”

“We must be missing something. We have to be.”

After he speaks, a few beats go by and he decides she must’ve gone back to sleep.

But then she says, “And even if we do find her …”

“We
will
find her,” he says. He doesn’t want to consider any other outcome. “She’s waiting for us—me, anyway—somewhere. I know she is. I guess I was wrong about where, that’s all. I need to keep thinking.”

“So we find her. So what? Haven’t we been idiotic to think finding Lily will solve everything?” Albert can hear in her voice that thick sound of a person holding back tears. “We don’t know what kind of condition she’s in … what she remembers. She might be strung out on something, or hiding, or still running, or … I don’t know. Even if we find her … the needle in the haystack … and we take her home, that doesn’t protect any of us from Perry, does it? We’ll be going right back to where we started, won’t we, without the journal?”

“Unless Lily remembers,” Albert says. It’s what he’s been clinging to.

“Right. One hell of a thing to hang everything on, though, wouldn’t you say? Last time I checked, Lily was running away from Little Solace so she could
stop
remembering anything. That’s what Lily does when things are bad. She bails.” She sounds angry. “Face it, Morales—she bailed on you. On both of us.”

He doesn’t like to admit to himself how convincing Olivia’s words are, so he rejects them. Instead, he clings tighter to his hope and he isn’t letting it go until someone can use something real, something actual, to rip it away.

“She was scared and she thought no one could help her. But that’s all changed.
We
know about the diary.
We
can help her remember. We’ll convince her to come back and make someone listen to her, and us, about Kogen.” The more he talks, the more confidence he feels in what he’s saying. “Kogen knows that we know what he did to Lily. So it’s not just Lily who’s in danger. None of the three of us is safe until we get Lily to go to the police. Until Lily talks, he has some big reasons to shut us up before the story gets out. But if, if she does talk, he’s screwed.”

“Okay, but when I try to envision everything you’ve said, I can’t see it happening. It’s too big. It’s too hard.”

“We don’t have any choice but to try, though, do we?”

She has no answer to this. After a while, what has been a pause and then a lull in the conversation stretches back into silence. Albert slides into this cold quiet as easily as if into water, and soon there’s no noise in that protected nook in the back of the house except two sets of long, deep breaths.

And of course, as Albert falls into a real sleep for the first time in days, he dreams of the sole thing that occupies his mind. He dreams of Lily.

It was a warm, sunny day and Albert found himself at a park. It was a park unlike any he’d ever been to before, though—the carpet of bright green grass stretched on forever and there were trees and fountains and statues everywhere and he could see a lake off in one direction and a carousel far away in another direction. Of everything, only the lake gave him a familiar tug of recognition. The rest looked like his idea of the grounds at some big old European palace.

He was walking around this unfamiliar park, astonished at how crowded such a large place had become in such a short time. There were people on the lake, crowding the carousel and crowding the lawn. Albert elbowed his way through many happy clusters, focused on heading in a specific, steady direction, but unsure why it had to be this direction and no other.

As he walked, he scanned the faces around him for one face in particular. Lily had come with him to the park, he remembered that very clearly, but somehow they’d gotten separated and he wanted to find her so they could buy ice cream cones. On such a hot day, cold ice cream sounded really good. He was irritated at Lily for disappearing when she had his wallet and he couldn’t have any ice cream until he found her.

The park was vast and although he tried to search it methodically, weaving back and forth toward the carousel, he kept getting turned around. Pretty soon he couldn’t tell where he’d been or where he was going. The sun was right overhead, melting hot, and with so many people crowded together there was no air.

Just when he was sure he’d never find her, but instead spend eternity pushing against the flow of the endless crowd, Albert spotted Lily a few yards away. She was moving quickly away from him, and he had to really push to catch up to her. He was beginning to think this was one of those dreams where you chase and chase what you want without ever catching it—and it was then that he reached out for her arm and actually caught hold of it.

He pulled her toward him, spinning her around somehow. “Why did you run off like—” he began, but the sentence died on his lips.

The person he’d grabbed wasn’t Lily at all, but a much older woman—
she looks French,
he thought irrelevantly—and she was giving him the dirtiest of looks. She jerked her arm out of his grasp and advanced on him, abusing him in a language he didn’t recognize but the meaning of which was obvious. Soon she wasn’t just forcing him backward but poking an angry finger into his chest to punctuate her words.

Shortness of breath, Albert’s old friend, settled in his chest and pretty soon he was swooning from stress and heat and claustrophobia into another asthma attack. He felt a fuzzy wave of fresh anger as he remembered that Lily had his inhaler, too … that she’d probably left him here in this hot crowd with no inhaler and no money on purpose. Nearly fainting, he looked around for a shady patch to lie in until this horrible suffocation passed, but he was surrounded by people and all of them were Lily, all these Lilies turned away from him.

As soon as this passes
, he thought, still fighting for breath. She could reject him all she wanted—he wasn’t going to stop—

Albert wakes up with a start, sitting up, breathless and sweating in the cold. He can’t have been asleep long, since it’s still pitch black out. His throat aches from that soundless screaming people do when they’re having a bad dream. When he looks down next to him, he can see that Olivia is curled into a tight ball, sound asleep. It takes him a minute to separate reality from his dream, which had been so vivid. He is breathing just fine, which is good.

Lying back down in the cold dark, Albert moves as close to Olivia’s warmth as he can. He feels like sleep is far away again, no matter how tired he still is.

Where is she?

He turns the question over and over in his mind, trying to see what he’s missing.

Albert sat by himself in the crowded lunchroom, trying to act like he was totally engrossed in his sandwich. It was his first week at this new school and his fifth meal on this plastic bench at a nearly empty table in the far corner of the lunchroom. He couldn’t wait until he was finally able to stop counting out the days like hash marks on a prison wall … until he stopped being the new guy.

But at least there was something different today. There was a girl, and now that he’d really seen her, he couldn’t help staring.

Once Albert noticed that he was crushing his soggy peanut butter sandwich as he stared, open-mouthed, at the girl a couple tables over, he ducked his head, feeling himself blush. He was the sole person at his table since the two Korean exchange students and the weird kid who wore a green bow tie every day and drank soup from a thermos had already finished their lunches and left this particular loser table. There was no one around to make fun of how uncool he was. The girl herself hadn’t seemed to notice Albert’s creepy staring; she was standing a little apart from the crowd around a nearby lunch table, staring at nothing as if she was thinking hard about something.

Albert had seen her a couple of times in the halls. He didn’t have any classes with her and he didn’t know her name. He had seen her before, but not really noticed her until today. As he was eating his lunch in complete solitude, not cool enough for the Korean girls or Mr. Bow Tie even to hang out with, a loud clattering had startled him to attention. He looked up to see this girl standing perfectly still, face white with two red splotches on her cheeks, after apparently dropping her lunch tray on the table. Albert watched as this part of the room went silent for about one entire second before swallowing up the girl and her loud tray in the general din. He watched as the girl and the girl she was with exchanged a few words before sitting down at the crowded table to eat.

And then it hit him that this girl was very pretty.

He spent the next twenty minutes trying not to look at her. But he found himself searching for a better look at her face among the shoulders and faces of the other people at her table. When he was looking she never seemed to be talking to anyone. She didn’t seem to be there at all.

But then, Albert thought, he might have been projecting his own loneliness a little. In the couple of weeks since he and his parents had moved to Little Solace, he’d sent off two postcards and five emails to his friends, and he’d received exactly one return email. He was forced to conclude that his old friends had forgotten him already. And no one here seemed to like him, either. He was shy, he was unsure of himself, he was gawky and geeky and not even knowing what it was about himself that was putting out the gawky, geeky vibe. Whatever it was, people here had picked up on it immediately.

After a week at this school, Albert was still as out of place as if he’d been flown halfway around the world and dropped from an airplane with nothing but a map, a water bottle, and a Swiss Army knife. As it was, he’d come from halfway across the country, from a school of several thousand to one of several hundred. The teachers here knew all the students by name, had had these kids’ older siblings in class, or were on a bowling league or in church group with their moms or dads. As for the students … they’d all grown up together and didn’t easily let an outsider into their little world. Or at least, not Albert. He’d had a secret hope when he left his real home that he might start his new school as the cool city guy, but after a week he gave that up. He had no idea how he was going to make it through nearly two years to graduate from this stupid school.

“Forgot my handkerchief,” said a voice nearby.

Albert turned his attention back to the table and saw that Mr. Bow Tie was back. “What’s that?”

Bow Tie waved a tiny white square at Albert. “My handkerchief. It’s one of my favorites. Monogrammed.”

Albert gave him a neutral nod, thinking, This guy’s a freak —with an immediate wave of guilt for turning on a fellow freak. “It’s nice,” he added, turning his attention back to the girl.

“What are we staring at?” Bow Tie asked, actually sitting down at the table again.

“Nothing,” Albert said quickly. He turned to see Bow Tie rolling his eyes. “Do you know that girl’s name?” he asked.

“Who?”

Albert pointed her out as subtly as he could, which wasn’t very, wishing he hadn’t asked.

“That’s Lily Odilon. She’s a dinosaur.”

“A what?” Albert couldn’t tell if Bow Tie was a weirdo or if he himself was just not up on the local slang. The girl’s name seemed to ring a vague bell.

“She’s George Washington High’s oldest senior. Kind of a local legend, actually. Lily Odilon? You don’t know that story?”

“No,” Albert said, wishing Bow Tie didn’t have such a loud voice.

“She used to be a real party girl, at the cool parties every weekend, Miss Popularity. She partied too hard a while back and apparently it broke her brain. She was out for months and now she’s back. Sort of,” he added, turning contemplative, as if sorting this out while unaware of Albert’s presence. “I mean, it’s her, but not the same her. Got to hand it to her for sticking it out, though, right? No one thought she’d come back after all that stuff with the laughing gas and the police and the hospital. She’s kind of …” he said, making a whirling gesture at his temple with his finger.

“Thanks,” Albert mumbled, getting to his feet and thinking privately that a seventeen-year-old with a green bow tie and monogrammed hanky probably shouldn’t be judging other people’s sanity.

He took a couple steps in Lily Odilon’s direction before he realized that he didn’t know what he intended to do. Introduce himself? Talk to her, in front of all those people? What he did was stop moving toward her before it was too late and he made an ass of himself. He made a sharp turn toward some distant garbage bin instead. He made throwing away his lunch sack into as lengthy a thing as he could manage, just to be doing something.

But he didn’t stop watching her. She looked so apart and kind of sad, and he felt drawn to her, misfit to misfit. Then the other girl gave Lily Odilon’s shoulder a squeeze and left her at an empty lunch table as the rest of the group left, too.

Albert exhaled gustily, then walked toward her before he could stop himself.

“Hi,” he said once he was in front of her. When he spoke, his words came out rushed, not at all smooth. “I’m Albert. I’m new and I don’t know anybody here.”

Her eyes widened at his voice, and she looked up as if she hadn’t really seen him before that moment. Then she smiled. “I’m Lily.”