The Likeness: A Novel (69 page)

need
to be. If Daniel had just listened to us, instead of doing
his best . . .
We wanted to tell you,” he said, swinging round to me. “All three of us. When we found out you were coming home.”
“We really did, Lexie,” said Justin, leaning over the arm of his chair towards me. “You don’t know how many times I almost . . . God. I thought I was going to explode, or disintegrate or something, if I didn’t tell you.”
“But Daniel,” Rafe said, “wouldn’t let us. And look how well that’s turned out. Look how well
every single one
of his ideas has turned out.
Look
at us; where he’s got us.” His hand flying up to all of us, to the room, bright and desperate and cracking at the seams. “None of this needed to happen. We could’ve called an ambulance, we could’ve told Lexie straight off—”
“No,” Abby said. “No.
You
could have called an ambulance.
You
could have told Lexie. Or I could have, or Justin. Don’t you dare put this all on Daniel. You’re a grown man, Rafe. Nobody held a gun to your head and made you keep your mouth shut. You did it all by yourself.”
“Maybe. But I did it because Daniel told me to, and so did you. You and I were on our own here for how long, that night? An hour? More? And the only thing you could talk about was how badly you wanted to get help. But when I said yeah, OK, let’s do it, you said no. Daniel said not to do anything. Daniel had a plan. Daniel would handle it.”
“Because I
trust
him. I owe him that, that much at
least,
and so do you. This—everything we’ve got—it’s because of Daniel. If it weren’t for him, I’d be on my own in a scary underground bedsit right this minute. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you—”
Rafe laughed, a loud, harsh, startling sound. “This fucking house,” he said. “Every time anyone hints that your precious Daniel might not be perfect, you throw the house in our faces. I’ve been keeping my mouth shut because I thought maybe you were right, maybe I owed him, but now . . . I’ve just about had it up to my tits with this house. Another of Daniel’s brilliant ideas, and how well has this one worked out? Justin’s a wreck, you’re six feet deep in denial, I’m drinking like my father, Lexie almost
died,
and most of the time we all hate one another’s guts. All because of this fucking house.”
Abby’s head came up and she stared at him. “That’s
not Daniel’s fault.
He just wanted—”
“Wanted what, Abby? What? Why do you think he gave us all shares in the house to start with?”
“Because,” Abby said, low and dangerous, “he cares about us. Because, right or wrong, he figured this was the best way to make sure all five of us were happy.”
I expected Rafe to laugh out loud at that, too, but he didn’t. “You know,” he said after a moment, staring down into his glass, “I thought that too, at first. I really did. That he was doing it because he loved us.” The vicious edge had fallen out of his voice; all that was left was a simple, tired melancholy. “It made me happy, thinking that. There was a time when I would’ve done anything for Daniel. Anything.”
“And then you saw the light,” Abby said. Her voice was hard and brittle, but she couldn’t keep the shake out of it. She was more upset than I’d ever seen her, more upset even than when I’d brought up the note in the jacket. “Someone who gives his best friends most of a seven-figure house is obviously doing it for purely selfish reasons. Paranoid much?”
“I thought about that. I’ve thought about this a lot, the last few weeks. I didn’t want to—God . . . But I couldn’t help it. Like picking at a scab.” Rafe looked up at Abby, shaking his hair out of his face; the booze was soaking in and his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, as if he’d been crying. “Say we’d all ended up in different colleges, Abby. Say we’d never met. What do you think we’d be doing now?”
“I don’t have the foggiest clue what you’re talking about.”
“We’d be OK, the four of us. Maybe we would’ve had a tough first few months, maybe it would’ve taken us a while to get to know people, but we’d have done it. I know none of us were the outgoing type, but we’d have learned. That’s what people
do,
in college: they learn to function in the big scary world. By now we’d have friends, social lives—”
“I wouldn’t,” Justin said, quietly and definitely. “I wouldn’t be OK. Not without you guys.”
“Yes you would, Justin. You would. You’d have a boyfriend—you too, Abby. Not just someone who shares a bed with you occasionally, when the day’s been too much to take. A boyfriend. A partner.” He gave me a sad little smile. “You, silly thing, I’m not so sure. But you’d be having a lot of fun, either way.”
“Thanks for sorting out our love lives,” Abby said coldly, “you patronizing prick. The fact that Justin doesn’t have a fella doesn’t make Daniel the Antichrist.”
Rafe didn’t rise to that, and for some reason that frightened me. “No,” he said. “But think about this for a second. If we’d never met, what do you think Daniel would be doing now?”
Abby gave him a blank stare. “Climbing the Matterhorn. Running for office. Living right here. How the hell do I know?”
“Can you see him going to the Freshers’ Ball? Joining college societies? Chatting up some girl in American Poetry class? Seriously, Abby. I’m asking. Can you?”
“I don’t
know.
It’s all
if,
Rafe.
If
doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got no idea what would have happened if everything had gone differently, because I’m not bloody clairvoyant, and neither are you.”
“Maybe not,” Rafe said, “but I know this much. Daniel would never, no matter what,
never
have learned how to deal with the outside world. I don’t know if he was born this way or if he was dropped on his head as a baby or what, but he’s just not capable of living a normal human life.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Daniel,” Abby said, cold fine syllables like chips of ice splintering. “Nothing.”
“There is, Abby. I love him—yes, I do, I still do—but there’s always been something wrong with him. Always. You have to know that.”
“He’s right,” Justin said, softly. “There has. I never told you, but back when we first met, back in first year—”
“Shut up,” Abby snapped viciously, whirling on him. “You shut your mouth. What makes you any different? If Daniel’s fucked up, then you’re just as fucked up as he is, and you, Rafe—”
“No,” Rafe said. He stared down at his finger tracing patterns in the condensation on his glass. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rest of us—when we want to, we can hold conversations with other people, for God’s sake. I picked up a girl, the other night. Your tutorial brats love you. Justin flirts with that blond guy who works in the library—you do, Justin, I’ve seen you; Lexie had a laugh with the people in that awful café. We can connect with the rest of the world, if we put in the effort. But Daniel . . . There are only four people on the planet who don’t think he’s a full-on freak show, and all four of them are in this room. We’d have been OK without him, one way or another, but he wouldn’t have been OK without us. If it weren’t for us, Daniel would be lonelier than God.”
“So?” Abby demanded, after a long second. “So what?”
“So,” Rafe said, “if you ask me, that’s why he gave us shares in the house. Not to make our lives all sunshiny. To have company, here in his private universe. To keep us, for good.”
“You,” Abby said. She was breathless. “You nasty-minded little piece of work. Where you get the sheer brass neck—”
“It was never us he was protecting, Abby. Never. It was this: his own ready-made little world. Tell me this: why did you ride in to the cop shop with Daniel, this morning? Why didn’t you want him to be alone with Lexie?”
“I didn’t want to be anywhere near you. The way you’ve been acting, you make me
sick
—”
“Bullshit. What do you think he was going to do to Lexie, if she even hinted that she might still sell up, or talk to the cops? You keep saying I could have told her any time, but what do you think Daniel would have done to me, if he thought I was going to step out of line? He had a plan, Abby. He told me he had a plan to cover all eventualities.
What the hell do you think his plan was?
”
Justin gasped, a terrified, childlike sound. The light in the room had changed; the air had tilted, pressure shifting, all those little eddies gathering themselves together and whirling around some huge focal point.
Daniel filled the doorway, tall and unmoving, hands in the pockets of his long dark coat. “All I ever wanted,” he said quietly, “was here in this house.”

24

"D
aniel,” Abby said, and I saw her whole body loosen with relief. "Thank God.”
Rafe eased back, slowly, on the sofa. "Cute entrance,” he said coldly. "How long have you been listening at the door?”
Daniel didn’t move. “What have you told her?”
“She was remembering
anyway,
” Justin said. His voice was shaking. “Didn’t you hear? In the police station? If we didn’t tell her the rest, she was going to ring them and—”
“Ah,” Daniel said. His eyes went to me, one small expressionless flick, and then away again. “I should have guessed. How much did you tell her?”
“She was upset, Daniel,” said Abby. “Stuff was coming back to her, she was having a hard time dealing with it, she needed to know. We told her what happened. Not who . . . you know. Did it. But the rest.”
“It was a highly educational conversation,” Rafe said. “All round.”
Daniel took this in with a brief nod. “All right,” he said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Everyone’s emotions are running high”—Rafe rolled his eyes and made a disgusted noise; Daniel ignored him—“and I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by continuing this discussion right now. Let’s leave it for a few days, really leave it, while the dust settles and we take in what’s happened. Then we can talk about it again.”
Once I and my mike were out of the house. Before I could say anything, Rafe asked, “Why?” Something in the roll of his head, the slow lift of his eyelids, as he turned to stare at Daniel: it hit me, with a vague shapeless warning, just how drunk he was.
I saw Daniel realize the same thing. “If you’d prefer not to resurrect it,” he said coolly, “believe me, that’s fine with me. I’d be delighted never to have to think about this again.”
"No. Why leave it?”
“I told you. Because I don’t think any of us are in any state to discuss this rationally. It’s been an excruciatingly long day—”
“What if I don’t give a fuck what you think?”
“I am asking you,” Daniel said, “to trust me. I don’t often ask you for anything. Please do me this favor.”
“Actually,” Rafe said, “you’ve asked us to do a lot of trusting you, this last while.” He put down his glass on the table with a sharp little click.
“Possibly I have,” said Daniel. For a fraction of a second he looked exhausted, drained to the last drop, and I wondered how exactly Frank had kept him for so long; what they had talked about, the two of them alone in a room. “So a few more days can’t really do that much harm, can they?”
“And you were listening behind that door, like some gossip-starved housewife, for long enough to work out exactly how far I trust you. What are you afraid will happen, if we keep talking about this? Are you afraid Lexie won’t be the only one who wants to leave? What will you do then, Daniel? How many of us are you prepared to kill off?”
“Daniel’s right,” Abby said crisply. Daniel coming home had calmed her down: her voice sounded strong again, certain. “All our heads are wrecked; we’re not making sense. In a few days’ time—”
“On the contrary,” said Rafe, “I think I may be making sense for the first time in years.”
"Leave it,” said Justin, barely above a whisper. “Please, Rafe. Leave it.”
Rafe didn’t even hear him. “You can believe every word he says is gospel, Abby. You can come running when he snaps his fingers. You think he cares that you’re in love with him? He doesn’t give a damn. He’d get rid of you in a heartbeat, if he had to, just like he was ready to—”
Abby finally lost her temper. “
Fuck
you, you self-righteous bloody—” She shot up off her chair and fired the doll straight at Rafe, one fast vicious move; he threw up a forearm reflexively and smashed it away, into a corner. “I warned you. What about
you
? Using Justin when you need him—you think I didn’t hear him going downstairs, that night? Your bedroom’s under mine, genius. And then when you don’t need him, you treat him like shit, break his heart over and over and—”
“Stop it!” Justin shouted. His eyes were squeezed tight and his hands were pressed over his ears; his face looked like he was in agony. “God, stop it,
stop
—”
Daniel said, “That’s enough.” His voice was starting to rise.
“It’s
not!
” I yelled, loud enough to cut straight across everyone. I’d been so quiet the last while, letting them run with it and waiting for my moment, that all of them shut up and whipped round to look at me, blinking, as if they’d almost forgotten I was there. “It’s not enough.
I
don’t want to leave it.”
“Why not?” Daniel inquired. He had his voice back under control; that perfect, immovable calm had slammed down across his face the instant I opened my mouth. “I would have thought you of all people, Lexie, would want to get back to normal as quickly as possible. It’s not like you to obsess over the past.”
“I want to know who stabbed me. I need to know.”
Those cool, curious gray eyes, examining me with detached interest. “Why?” he repeated. “It’s over, after all. We’re all still here. There’s been no permanent harm done. Has there?”
Your arsenal,
Frank had said. The lethal last-resort grenade Lexie had left me, passed from her hand to Cooper’s to mine; the jewel-colored flash in the dark, bright and then gone; the tiny switch that had set all this in motion. My throat closed up tight till it ached even to breathe, and I shouted through it, “I was pregnant!”
They all stared at me. It was so quiet all of a sudden, and their faces were so absolutely still and blank, I thought they hadn’t understood. “I was going to have a baby,” I said. I felt light-headed; maybe I was swaying on my feet, I don’t know. I didn’t remember standing up. The sun streaming across the room turned the air a strange, holy, impossible gold. “It died.”
Silence, still.
“That’s not true,” Daniel said, but he wasn’t even looking to see how the others had taken it. His eyes were fixed on me.
“It is,” I said. “Daniel, it is.”
“No,” said Justin. His breath was coming as if he had been running. “Oh, Lexie, no. Please.”