The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (8 page)

“W hy aren’t you eating your dinner?”

Startled from his daydreaming, Albert looked up from the plate where he was slowly deconstructing a broccoli-and-ham quiche with his fork. “I am eating it, Mom.”

She dropped her fork onto her plate and pressed a hand to her forehead, like his words caused her actual physical pain. “You haven’t taken three bites. What’s wrong with it? You like quiche!”

“
Nothing
is wrong with it,” Albert said, struggling to keep his voice mild. “It’s good. I guess I’m not very hungry.”

She gave his father an impatient look when he made the mistake of looking up from his own plate. “Luis? Are you going to say anything?”

“You’re upsetting your mother,” Albert’s father said. “Stop playing with your dinner and just eat it.”

Lily’s letter was all Albert could think about. When his father had arrived home from work first, Albert’s books were still sitting in the neat pile he’d made on the dining room table when he got home from school, and his homework was still untouched. Ever since then, Albert had been under the observation of one parent and then two, right up until dinner was put on the table. Now, hoping to get them off his back, Albert stuffed bites as large as he dared into his mouth, barely chewing before swallowing. He only choked once. He was hoping to excuse himself as soon as he’d eaten enough to satisfy his mother. While he chewed, his mind turned to the letter hidden between the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson and the melodrama of the message Lily had sent him.

“Albert?”

He was jerked out of his thoughts again to see that his mother was staring at him in an irritatingly demanding way. “What?” he said, still trying to keep the impatience from his voice, if only to avoid a lecture on manners to go with the lecture on proper dinner consumption.

“I asked how your day was,” she said. “Luis?”

“Quit staring off into space and answer your mother,” his father said.

Albert thought about his day: getting tripped in the hall before second period, suffering the super-fun lunch tray disaster, getting a D minus on a geometry pop quiz, and, oh yes, finding something sticky and putrid and definitely dead in his locker at the end of the day, thoughtfully placed on the gravy-stained T-shirt he’d left there after lunch.

“It was fine,” he said.

He had a stomachache and a headache and a heartache, and now he also had some kind of mystery dumped in his lap … one where the stakes were very personal. But he was seventeen and almost six feet tall, and if he mentioned problems he was liable to get a sardonic “aren’t
you
a dainty little orchid” from his father—a remark he’d been chastised with for as long as he could remember, one he’d had the gist of long before he understood the joke.

“It was fine,” he said again, adding “this is good” through a mouthful of food, gesturing at his plate with his fork.

This turned out to be the right answer, and having given it, Albert was allowed to withdraw back into himself. As long as he remembered to eat his food. Not just allowed to withdraw—encouraged. Sometimes he wondered if his parents felt as trapped with him as he felt with them. The older he grew, the more strained their little family became. As far as his parents were concerned, the only right way to be was the way everyone else was. They wanted him to join a team, to dress like a “nice young man,” to keep his hair trimmed, to smile and remember people’s names, to never admit to being anything but happy-go-lucky. To never admit to feeling doubtful or afraid or unhappy. A good son was someone they could brag about but who kept politely in the background and would never give them headaches. He’d been assured once—patronizingly, by an arty old aunt who lived in New York and still dyed a magenta strip into her hair—that this was normal, but he wished he had a brother or a sister, at least, to even out the sides.

Albert’s relationship with Lily had been a threat to his parents’ perfect two-against-one dynamic. Before, Albert had never had anyone who was automatically on his side—but Lily was, always, about whatever. In the first few weeks they’d hung out together, his parents somehow never managed to remember Lily’s name, and they often found reasons why she couldn’t come to the house and even more reasons why Albert couldn’t go out.

That didn’t stop him from seeing her, of course; it just made it harder. But the fact that it was difficult was also somehow exciting. And when he’d realized how strongly he felt about Lily, Albert had also realized that there were far better things to strive for than pleasing one’s parents.

He and Lily never did anything that would’ve sounded exciting if reduced to a list on paper, but it
was
exciting, anyway. And weird. Love—Albert was soon sure that he was in love with Lily, no matter how much his parents hinted that they knew what
that
was all about, even if
he
didn’t yet—was a weird experience. From almost the first time they were together, they could talk about everything—the big things like life and death and love, and smaller things like the music they liked or the movies they dug. They laughed over things only they thought were funny, and it was like they’d always known each other. He felt like himself with her—but smarter and surer and realer, in a way he never did at home.

“Why don’t your parents like me?” Lily had asked him after about a month. She’d dropped it right out of the blue while they were sitting in her room one day after school. “Is it the sex thing?”

At this point, Albert and Lily hadn’t actually gotten to the sex thing. “Well, if you think that would help …”

She’d punched him. “I just mean, you’re their only kid, their baby, and they’re probably not that comfortable yet with the idea of some girl showing up and metaphorically making you into a man. Forcing them to deal with the fact that you’re not their little boy anymore and all that crap.”

He’d kissed her for a long moment, liking the idea of all that crap. She’d pushed him away, looking at him as if she actually expected an answer. He said, “Who cares?”

She’d frowned, not letting it go. “Be serious!”

“I
am
serious. When I’m with you, that’s all there is. Like right now, I’m pretending that I don’t have to be home in the next twenty minutes and that we have all the time in the world. I don’t want to talk about my parents.”

“You know I’m right,” she’d said, wrapping her fingers in his and looking at their hands.

“The thing with my parents and you is, like, a turf war. They don’t want anyone else to mean anything to me. They don’t want me to think more of you than of them.”

“Thank god you’re their son and not their daughter,” she’d laughed, the crease between her eyebrows finally smoothing out. “They’d have you in a veil and a chastity belt. And good thing for
my
parents I’ve already set the bar so low. ‘Lily’s not in jail? Super!’”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“So you
do
like me the best?”—as if she didn’t already know the answer.

Albert did like her the best, and he could see that it drove his parents nuts. They told him he was too young to know his own heart, that he was too young to be so set on the first girl he’d been serious with, that they’d only known each other for such a short while. Sometimes he recognized the truth of what they said, but he never admitted it to them.

Because even if they were right, even if he was stupid, it didn’t matter.

On a normal weeknight, Albert would have hurried through his dinner so he could get away—either borrow the car to go see Lily, or shut himself in his room and talk with her on the phone for hours at a time. On a normal weeknight, his parents would be grumbling and banging on the door, sometimes yelling, and usually riding him, too, about whether his homework was done … On a normal weeknight, Albert and his parents sure wouldn’t have been having such a deadly slow and polite dinner.

They’re probably enjoying this
, was Albert’s thought as he scraped the last rubbery bit of egg and pie crust from his plate and into his mouth.
They don’t care where Lily is or wonder what might have happened to her. They don’t want to hear about it from me—all they want is for me to cooperate with the police and get it over with fast. And forget about her.

“Did you hear me?”

He looked as his mother and realized that she’d been talking to him yet again, and yet again he’d missed it.
Damn.
“No. What?”

She shook her head, really irritated now. Her voice shook a little. “I wish just once that we could have a pleasant meal in this house. I really do.”

“You know what I wish?” Albert said suddenly, the words coming out loud and abrupt before he knew he was going to say them. “
I
wish you’d ask me how I’m doing and actually want to hear the answer.” He thought of the sideways call for help Lily had sent and the thought prodded him to go on. “
I
wish you’d say something about Lily.”

“Don’t start,” his mother said, her diction becoming emphatic and her tone shrill, like it did when she was working herself into a real temper. “We’ve been walking around on eggshells all week, trying not to upset you. Have we pressed you about your chores? Have I made you clean up that disgusting pigsty you call a room? Have I mentioned how much I
detest
that vulgar shirt you’re wearing, even though I’ve asked you a dozen times to get rid of it?” She paused for a breath. “And I should know you wanted to talk about Lily? I would think that’s the
last
thing you’d want to talk about!”

“Whatever,” Albert muttered, knowing he was pushing his luck.

She wasn’t done. “Not to
mention
the position it’s put you in! Have you forgotten being questioned by the
police
? Have you forgotten that you were out
sneaking around
when all of this happened?”

“All you care about is how things look!” Albert shouted before he could help himself.

“That’s about enough out of you,” his father said, and this was as far into the debate as he was usually willing to go. Two red patches had developed on his cheeks.

Albert pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “I’m going to my room.”

They ignored him, which he took as a frosty signal that he was totally and gladly excused from dinner.

At the last moment before his fingers left the edge of his bedroom door, Albert resisted the urge to slam it shut behind him. He went over to the tiny TV on the desk across from his bed and turned up the volume high enough to hear, but not so much that it would be distracting or grounds for an angry pound on the door. After a moment, he swept a pile of CDs from the chair at his desk and carried the chair over to the door, jamming it under the doorknob as quietly as he could. If his parents tried to come in without knocking they were going to be pissed, but at least they wouldn’t get the door open in a hurry.

A chill worked its way from his scalp, down his back, and all the way through both his legs, as Albert finally did what he’d been dying to do: he went to the bookshelf and shook Lily’s envelope from its hiding place. The little paper rectangle fluttered to the floor, the envelope and the postcard coming apart as they fell, and the letter landing a little apart with the writing side up. The fragment
but I’m going to the last good place. Don’t tell anyone
caught his eye.

He hadn’t understood this line when he read it, but like a switch flipping from off to on, it made sense to him now. Suddenly he was sure he knew where she was—sort of, anyway. “The Last Good Place” wasn’t just some metaphor, but a real place from the last happy summer of her childhood. He imagined her there, hiding like a scared rabbit, probably trying to decide whether to stay put or keep running … and if to run, where to find her next hiding place.

The image of Lily as a frightened animal was an unpleasant one, and Albert blinked, as if this would erase the picture from his head.

His brain working, he stretched out on his bed with the letter in his hand, staring at it. He wasn’t even reading the words anymore. He had them memorized. The paper was a talisman, as if staring at it long enough would give him an idea.

A plan.

The TV droned. Random sounds from the other rooms in the house, a voice or a door or a toilet flushing or steps in the hall, made Albert’s pulse race. He set the letter on his pillow and went over to check that the chair was wedged firmly under the doorknob. Then he sat heavily on the edge of his bed and rubbed his face with his hands. Something bothered him as he tried to put together, in some meaningful order, Lily and her accident and her stepfather and her disappearance. He couldn’t quite see the whole picture.