The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (6 page)

Spurred by a shot of nervous adrenaline, they run deeper into the alley’s dark interior and away from the bright lights of the main roadway.

For the first time since they’d left home, Albert is actually glad there’s an expanse of wilderness standing between them and the next town. The thought of it makes him feel somehow safer … they’ll be concealed in the dark instead of so obviously lit by streetlights and the other lights of a town at night, where there are so few places to hide.

Once they reach the end of the alley, Albert and Olivia keep up a steady pace, staying in the shadows and snaking in a roundabout way toward the north edge of town. It starts to rain, cold, slushy drops that drip off Albert’s tingling scalp, down his neck and under the collar of his coat. He’s instantly cold to the core. “I hate him,” he half pants, half whispers as they crouch in someone’s back yard, making sure the coast is clear before moving on.

Olivia hears him and says, “Not as much Lily does. Or me.”

“I’m not so sure,” he says, but the words are soft and Olivia has already darted away. He follows.

“Let’s go,” Lily said, slipping her hand into his and pulling him toward the sidewalk in one effortless motion.

It had only been a matter of days since Albert and Lily had become whatever they had become. Boyfriend and girlfriend, Albert guessed was the way most people would put it, but the words lacked a sense of the significance he felt when his mind settled on Lily. “Joined at the hip” was what his mother had already said, more than once and kind of snidely, with a distasteful pursing of her lips after the words were out. Albert would have been okay with being joined to the soft curve of Lily’s hip. As it was, though, he was still getting used to the new pleasure of Lily’s small, cool hand in his.

Albert wanted to ask her what the hurry was, but he also wanted to give Lily a chance to tell him on her own. So he let himself be pulled away from the school grounds and toward Lily’s car. The final bell was still ringing in his ears. He always went along when she pulled him toward something, from the very first time she gave his hand that impatient tug. At first, he followed her because she was a girl, a girl who for some reason dug him. But then he broke through the novelty that she was A Girl and found Lily there. And then … well, he was hooked within days, and with even the smallest crook of her finger she could get him to follow.

“Where are we going?” he asked at last. With Lily you never knew, and she had a way, at least for Albert, of making the most ordinary crap seem exciting.

She gave his hand a squeeze, not meeting his gaze, her mouth twisting into a small, secret smile. “Does it matter?”

“Not even a little.” They fell silent and she led him through the rowdy, roaring sea of high school students who had also just been set free from school for the afternoon.

Once the sidewalk ended and they were stepping off the school grounds, Lily slowed her pace. Albert walked next to her, his arm draped over her shoulder, very aware of her arm snaked around the small of his back and resting on his hip.

“Where’s your car?” he asked after they’d walked about a block.

Lily pulled her arm away from his and waved to a girl crossing the street up the block. It looked to Albert that the girl in the distance looked away when Lily waved, after giving a sort of half-hearted salute in return. “What?” Lily said, looking from the girl to Albert. “Oh, I’m parked around the block. I couldn’t really pull into the school lot when I’d skipped all afternoon. Be a bit conspicuous, you know?”

Albert opened his mouth to ask yet another question, then closed it when he couldn’t decide which to ask first. Finally he asked, “Who was that girl?”

“My sister.” She pushed a strand of hair behind one ear. “She tries to pretend she doesn’t know me.”

“Why?” But he was only asking because he figured he should.

Then they reached Lily’s car, which was parked at the curb in front of a little yellow house. She keyed open her door, saying, “Don’t you want to know why I ditched this afternoon?” Then she was in the car and Albert had to wait for her to reach over and unlock his door.

He slid into the car, picking up the thin thread of the conversation. “Well, yeah. And anyway, why didn’t you bring me along to wherever it was? I could’ve used an excuse to get out of school today.”

She pulled the car away from the curb and onto the road with a jerky jackrabbit leap, and didn’t see that he was laughing at her. Swearing, she swerved to miss a parked car. “I just got my car back not too long ago. After physical therapy, my mom made me take the driver’s test again—just one of the many things I got to relearn after my accident, like writing and using chopsticks. Except I guess I’m still getting the hang of the driving thing. If I ram someone with this car, I’ll be back to where I was after all the stuff that happened—walking or bumming rides.”

The accident. He knew a bit about that. He also knew that Lily was all over the place today and seemed almost physically incapable of sticking to one line of thought or producing a straight answer to the questions she raised.

“Not having a car sucks. So how did you—” He stopped mid-sentence, backtracking before she could swerve off on some other verbal tangent. “You still haven’t finished telling me where you went this afternoon, or where we’re going.”

Lily stuck out her lower lip, glancing briefly away from the road in order to give him completely fake, sad, puppy-dog eyes. “You’re not pissy with me, are you?”

“Not really.” It was infuriating, how she tried to mellow him out—and how it always worked.

“Good,” she said, stomping on the brakes to barely avoid running a stop sign. “I decided to cut this afternoon at the last minute. I didn’t plan it. I went to a couple of places, which is where I found the thing I want to show you. But you have to wait until we get to my house.”

“Your house?” he echoed.

She glanced over at him and rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, no one’s there. And it’s no big deal, anyway. I wasn’t planning on playing bondage games in the living room.”

“Damn. Better luck next time, Albert my man,” he sighed in a stage whisper.

She just laughed, a happy sound.

The house was empty, as Lily had said it would be. Albert wondered briefly where the sister might be, but forgot about the sister almost as soon as the thought came into his head. Once they were inside, Lily made a big production of hustling him into the basement to wait. While he sat in the afterthought of a room—just a couple of dusty sofas and a couple more dusty armchairs, a cabinet TV that was as old as his parents, and discarded stuff that hadn’t yet made it to a donation box—Lily ran back upstairs.

“It’s actually in the car,” she called down to him. He heard the garage door open and shut a moment later, then again, a moment after that.

Beaming as she came down the stairs again, she handed him a big cardboard square. “Look what I found.”

He looked. “It’s an old record,” he said. She seemed to be waiting for more, so he added, “Cool. I didn’t know you liked vinyl.”

“Not just a record. Charles Trenet.” The name was soft and boneless as it rolled off her tongue. “It’s not an original single or anything, but it is a really early Columbia LP. I found it at the Goodwill for a quarter, and it doesn’t have a scratch.” When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Do you know how much this would cost on eBay?”

“No,” he said. “A hundred bucks?”

She grinned as she pulled a blanket off a big rectangular mass that turned out to be one of those cabinet stereos with the turntable and speakers all inside. She flicked the power switch on and the speakers crackled. “More like ten, but still.”

She held out her hand, expectant, and Albert carefully pulled the record from the cardboard sleeve and then its paper jacket, handing it to her like an operating room nurse hands a scalpel to the surgeon.

“Where’d you get that thing?” he asked, meaning the stereo system.

She tucked her hair behind her ear and blew some invisible fuzz from the needle. “It was my dad’s.”

Albert looked around the gloomy basement. “Why doesn’t he let you put it in the living room, or at least your bedroom?” he asked. “This place is like a storage unit.”

She looked confused for a moment, then her face showed understanding, as well as a rare scowl. “You mean Perry?” she said, saying the name with contempt. “He’s not my dad. He’s my mother’s husband. My dad hasn’t been around for, god, more than ten years. He just left behind this dinosaur stereo system, maybe a few other things, when he took off. I always liked it, so I brought it with me when we moved in here. Neither my mom or Perry wants it junking up the house, so I keep my records down here and I play them when they’re not home.”

“I’m sorry,” Albert began, not really sure what to say.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Now just be quiet a minute. I’m going to play ‘La Mer’ for you, and you’re going to love it.”

Lily lowered the needle to the spinning disk before dropping herself into a chair. Albert leaned against the wall, his arms folded across his chest, the record sleeve still in hand. At first there was just the rhythmic scratch of the vinyl as it rotated under the needle, then he heard a man’s voice singing what seemed like a vaguely familiar tune, though the words were in what sounded like French and so he couldn’t understand them. It was a pretty, wistful little song, with soft vocals and instruments that made Albert think of old radios not tuned right and old people’s houses. He wasn’t sure he liked it. Anything with a fuzzbox and a monster drum kit was more his taste.

“So,” Lily said, once the final scratchy note had sounded and all that was left was the whispery hum of the needle on vinyl again. “Isn’t that gorgeous?”

“Awesome.”

“Are you just saying that because you think I want you to like early twentieth-century French pop music as much as I do?” Laughing to herself, she unfolded her legs and rose from the rust-brown sofa, going to the turntable and lifting the needle arm gently from her new find.

“Yes. I mean, no. Why would I do that?”

She gave his arm a playful punch. “Because you’re just goopy over me,” she said, kissing her finger and pressing the finger to his lips. “So goopy, in fact, you’ll even pretend to like Monsieur Trenet just because I do.”

“Goopy?”

She laughed again, her mood so good it was almost disturbing. It seemed to Albert to hint at one of the manic upswings he was already able to see coming. “Totally and completely goopy. Liked a melted ice cream cone. And everyone knows it.”

He glanced down at the record sleeve in his hand, the words “Long Playing Microgroove” catching his eye. “What ‘everyone’? I don’t know everyone. I don’t know anyone. No one at all knows I’m melted ice cream gaga in love with Lily Odilon.”

“Not no one,” she said, taking the album from his hand and placing it on top of the record player. She took his wrists and drew his arms around her.

“I would tell the world if I could,” he said, feeling how dorky a thing it was to say as he was saying it. He kissed her forehead to cover his embarrassment, murmuring again, “The whole damn world.”

She smiled up at him, her eyes sparkling. “The world doesn’t care.”

By the time the tenth shoulder slammed into his in passing in the school halls and the hundredth pair of eyes sent venom his way, Albert stopped taking it in. Not that he didn’t notice each time he caught a shoulder blade, but it was as if his body had absorbed all it could and was done working the same information over and over again. He just shrugged a tired mental shrug and pushed on like it hadn’t happened. Some of these came from people he’d thought were okay—who he thought didn’t hate him, at least—but apparently that was one of the may things about which he had been wrong.

That was Tuesday.

By Wednesday, news of Lily’s disappearance and her abandoned car was not only all over school but the biggest topic in town. The local news stations kept showing footage of the cops surrounding her old 1989 Toyota Corolla, as it sat calmly in an out-of-the-way parking lot west of town “like a little dog waiting patiently for its master’s return,” as one reporter described it. Ugh. Albert couldn’t stand to look at the pictures and always made sure to be out of the room when his parents watched the six and ten o’clock news on TV.

“No evidence of a crime” was the phrase the helmet-haired anchors kept repeating and the newspapers printed in the story’s daily migration farther back in the pages.

“No evidence of a crime.” It was a phrase that Albert held on to against the fact that he didn’t know what
had
happened.

There was nothing that proved Lily had run into some violence, nothing—in spite of the argument the Kogens’ neighbors claimed to have overheard—to make anyone think Lily had taken off for any reason but her own. Albert finally realized that this was not the story people wanted to hear. He felt like everyone was waiting for a body to turn up so they could hear about a nice, juicy murder mystery starring a hometown Wild Girl and her boyfriend, The New Guy in Town. So they could say they knew someone who knew someone who went to the same school as the girl, or who had the same hairdresser as the girl’s mom. They wanted some good shots for the evening news and the front page of the paper—meaty stuff, not just Lily’s empty old car without even a smear of blood. Albert almost felt guilty just because people seemed to suspect he’d done something. Everyone—not least of which, the cops—seemed to think Albert knew something about what had happened to Lily.

And man, he wished he did.

After the long and miserable days at school were over, Albert hurried home to hide, and when his parents came home from work, he avoided them, too. His heart pounded every time the phone rang, and his fear was that it would be Lily’s parents, calling to demand he tell them what he knew—or worse, some catastrophic news coming from the other end of the line, something he didn’t even dare name. And everywhere he went, he felt watched. He was sure the police were keeping tabs on him, and every day his father kept shooting angry glances, through a crack in the closed front drapes, at a van parked across the street.

Albert felt claustrophobic and alone. He wished there was someone he could actually talk to about it. But when he’d moved away the few friends he’d left behind had all gradually dropped him, and his best friend from what he thought of as “back home” was overseas, no longer his high school buddy Chris but an enlisted man. He hadn’t seemed able to make any new friends in this town, a situation not likely to improve under the circumstances. He couldn’t talk to his parents, either—he hadn’t confided in them about anything important since he was a pretty small kid. They loved him, he knew, but they had a narrow idea of the way things were supposed to be done, and neither of them had approved of his getting involved with Lily in the first place.

“That girl is too fast for you,” his mother had said after the first and only time he’d brought Lily to meet his parents.

“She was in some trouble last year,” his father had added, “and I’ve heard she has problems. You don’t need that. Find someone else to go out with.”

Albert had wanted to knock their heads together, and wondered if Lily’s parents were saying the same kinds of things about him to her. But he dealt with his parents’ nagging like he always did: he clenched his jaw and kept his mouth shut—at least, whenever he could manage it. After the fun little conversation with his parents, he avoided mentioning his new girlfriend to them whenever possible.

So it turned out that Lily’s disappearance was solid proof to Albert’s folks that she meant nothing but trouble. As Albert dragged himself through the week following her vanishing act, he knew he was in deep trouble because of it. Yet when he wished for someone to talk about it with, he wished first for Lily. Whatever happened, he couldn’t help that.

He couldn’t sleep at night, and getting out of bed in the morning was almost more than he could pull off. Whatever people thought he knew about Lily, he knew nothing after the moment she’d left him alone in her bedroom the night she’d disappeared. And not knowing was awful. But even worse was the tidbit that the cop, Andersen, had given him—that the neighbors claimed to have overheard Lily arguing with someone just before she drove off. It was driving him crazy.

Because if the neighbors were right and they had overheard an argument, it hadn’t been between Albert and Lily. And if Lily had been one half of the argument, then there had to be someone on the other end.

That
was the person the cops needed to find.

Albert couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if he’d been the one to overhear the shouting instead of the neighbors—who were apparently nosy enough to listen, but not concerned enough to check it out or even just call the cops. Or if Lily’s bedroom had happened to overlook the driveway instead of the other side of the house. Or if he hadn’t slept through whatever had happened.

What might have been different?

Sluggish from lack of sleep and what he guessed was depression, Albert found himself zoning out in misty fantasies where the what-ifs were wiped out and he rushed in to save Lily from whatever, or she returned home safely—either way, there was always a storybook happy ending. The fantasies only made him feel worse when he came back to reality. Then, at other times, he tried to imagine where Lily actually was now, but he never got too far in this before his heart began a painful, uneven thumping. He stopped paying attention in his classes or to anything else. He didn’t have time for the present; he was obsessed with the might-have-been and the what’s-to-come. And he kept waiting for some signal from Lily that would finally put things right.

So Thursday at noon, Albert didn’t even notice that there was something brewing in the lunchroom until it was already happening and he was at its center. A senior he recognized but whose name he didn’t know reached under the lunch tray Albert was carrying and slapped it up out of his hands. Brown gravy splattered Albert’s face and the front of his shirt, and the tray itself landed with a loud crash in a wet pile of the stuff it had been carrying. The sound of the plastic tray landing was deafening; the entire lunchroom went still when it clattered against the concrete tile floor.

Dazed, Albert looked down at the floor and his ruined lunch, then up at the guy who’d done it. He was very aware that everyone seemed to be staring at the two of them. Then he saw that they were not alone in the center of attention but surrounded by a bunch of other guys, mostly seniors, at least half of them muscle heads from the baseball team. His eyes and the eyes of the tray-slapper met. Then Albert lost the contest and was the first to drop his gaze, settling it back to the vaguely meat-and-potato-shaped mess at his feet. The silence in the lunchroom stretched on, and Albert’s only thought was to wonder how he would ever travel from this side of the moment to the other.

“Oops,” the guy said. All his friends were laughing, though the rest of the room was still quiet. “Need a hand?”

Albert just looked at him.
Dave Jensen
, he thought, the name suddenly popping into place.
This guy’s name is Dave Jensen.

“Sure you do. Here,” Dave Jensen said, dumping the food from his own tray onto the floor. “Guess you’d better clean that up.”

“Go to hell,” Albert muttered, dropping to one knee and trying to scrape up the mess from the floor onto his tray.

Jensen moved closer and ground Albert’s hand under his sneaker. “What was that?”

Lubricated by gravy, Albert’s hand was easy to slip out from under the guy’s foot, though not before his knuckles cracked painfully. He stood up. “What’s your problem?”

“I think you know what my problem is.”

“Yeah?” Albert flicked his hand, and a tiny wad of gravy and mashed potatoes landed on Jensen’s cheekbone, right under his eye.

The guy shoved up his sleeves to expose his alarming forearms and stepped closer to Albert. “This is going to be fun.”

Something came loose in Albert’s head, and just like that, he didn’t care if these guys beat him bloody as long as he hurt somebody first. His bony, long-fingered hands balled up tight and he was already anticipating the satisfaction he would feel when his fists started pounding this guy’s face. “You do whatever you have to do,” he said, “and so will I.” All the while he was thinking,
One good hit to flatten his nose or bust up his eye. I just want to feel something break before he kills me.

“There are at least half a dozen cops hanging around this place these days,” Jensen said softly. He was smiling. “But I don’t see any of them here now. So if you want to go, killer, let’s
go
.”

“Stop it!”

They both turned to the source of the voice.

It was Olivia Odilon, Lily’s sister and a girl Albert barely knew.

“Why don’t you stop acting like a Neanderthal?” she said to Jensen. “We all know you can kick his ass. Good enough, okay?”

There was a tense moment when Jensen turned his attention to Olivia, but she just stood there, almost like she was bored, until Jensen rolled his eyes and walked away. He said something rude, something no one but his buddies could hear, and they laughed at whatever it was.

Albert felt like he should say something. It was humiliating to be bullied like a third-grader and then defended by his girlfriend’s little sister. But he was saved from having to come up with something to say to her because she walked off in the other direction, now that she’d chased Dave Jensen and his jock squad away from Albert.

At the same time, someone had apparently gone for a lunch lady, because by then she and the janitor had arrived to find Albert and the gooey mess at his feet. The spell of silence was broken by the arrival of the two adults, and gradually the room was buzzing with normal chatter and a little something extra. Albert felt bad leaving the mess for someone else to clean up and he was too embarrassed to face walking through the lunchroom anyway, so he bent down and tried to help scoop the mess into the janitor’s bucket.

The lunch lady pushed him aside impatiently. “Just get out of the way, will you?” she said in a voice that was gentler than her words. “It’s fine.”

The janitor winked at him and jerked his head toward the exit.

Albert straightened up, unsure of what to do now. There were at least fifteen minutes until the next class period. He saw Olivia still standing a few feet away. The corners of her mouth were turned up in some kind of smile, but she didn’t look happy. She looked tired, he thought, maybe as tired as he was.

“Come with me,” she commanded when their eyes met.

Not knowing what else to do, he followed her through the lunch room. “Where are we going?”

She ignored his question until she stopped at an empty table on the edge of the large room and plopped herself down in a chair. She hooked another one with her feet and pushed it out for Albert. “I’m going to give you half my sandwich,” she said.

“Thanks.” He took what she offered—peanut butter and banana—and ate it in about three bites. “I guess I owe you two, now.”

“Gawd, you stink like old spaghetti,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as she picked at her half of the sandwich.

“I think it was pot roast,” Albert said, looking down at the wet brown stain soaking through his shirt.

“Don’t you have a shirt you can change into before next period? You look like you wiped diarrhea on yourself.”

“Lovely.”

“Seriously,” she insisted. “You’d better find something, because they’re not going to let you into class like that.”

“Okay, okay,” Albert said. “I think I have a sweatshirt in my locker.”