Girl in the Rearview Mirror Page 19

  Philip didn’t move. He stared at some point on the back wall, not the minister, casket, or flowers. I wanted to sit beside him, hold his hand between mine. Warm skin in the cold church.

  The music tapered. The minister stepped to the podium and shook back his billowy sleeves to open the Bible.

  I slid into a pew. Enormous floral arrangements lined the aisle. Formal, stiff flowers, visibly expensive and throwing off a sickly smell. I would have chosen sunflowers or daisies, flowers that bounced when you swung them by the stem. Flowers Amabel would have liked.

  The piano began to play, notes rippling loudly in the empty church. The minister sang, his voice obnoxiously strong. I couldn’t hear the Martins, though they stood, and their mouths moved.

  Ammy had been afraid of the dark. It had seemed fanciful—she enjoyed the drama of monsters in the closet and worked herself into real anxiety. Before bed, I tucked stuffed animals around her, a tight perimeter of fuzz and fluff, and she lay perfectly still like a mummy. I wanted to tuck her in now, fling away those prickling roses, the stiff lace. My face was hot and wet.

  The Martins didn’t cry. Didn’t even flinch. They stayed fixed in position, listening politely, solemn and wooden. They didn’t touch each other. They didn’t slump. They’d always been masters of ceremony.

  I’d never been one of them.

  I dropped my head. An industrial gray carpet covered the floor, surprisingly ugly. My eyes wandered the maze of the herringbone pattern. The minister kept his sermon brief, impersonal, with none of the usual platitudes about angels and souls. When he called for a final viewing, the Martins filed past the coffin, each pausing, even lingering, but it was still over quickly.

  I stayed hunched in place.

  Teenaged boys in robes emerged to carry the casket out, and the Martins proceeded after it in a grueling slow march. I kept my head down.

  I let several minutes pass. Or it felt as if I had. But when I went out into the lobby, Marina was waiting for me.

  My feet stuck to the ground. She’d pinned a small square veil over her face. She approached me, her usual calm walk, her new haircut making her older.

  “Finn.” She held out a hand to shake. “How nice of you to come.” A cool, peppermint voice. My own mouth seemed stuffed with cloth. I was surprised by her pleasant lie, after she’d been obviously displeased to see me.

  “Nice service,” I managed.

  She murmured agreement. “We’re going on to the cemetery, but I wanted to thank you for coming.”

  I laced my hands together, useless. “I’m going home, I guess.”

  “I heard that.” She started for the door, and I went along. The Snoops, I saw, had left their posts, probably to go ahead with the Senator. “Back to Minnesota, was it?”

  “Illinois,” I provided automatically, though I’d only meant home to my apartment. I glanced at her profile, her lowered chin and stiff posture, and wondered why she’d assumed I’d meant the Midwest.

  “It’s a good idea,” she was saying. “A change of scenery will do you good. Be with your family. Think about the future . . .”

  “I heard you’re going to Europe,” I said.

  A discordant shiver of tension grabbed her shoulders. She touched her veil to her nose. “Philip has never been to Greece.”

  Outside, the full glare of the sun stopped us both. We blinked in the light.

  Marina unexpectedly took my elbow. “It’s Wednesday. What would you have been doing Wednesday afternoon?”

  “Riding,” I said.

  She crinkled her nose. “Those horses.” Shaking her head, she laughed a little. “I was afraid of them.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She released me. “Take care, Finn.” Rubbing her ear, she trotted down the steps and into her car, pulling away as instantly as if she’d left it running.

  25

  I never thought of the past, but now it flooded back.

  The smell of lilies, sweet, throat-coating. I carried two dozen wrapped in cellophane. Why is it always so sunny, the day of funerals?

  The quiet lane was lined with cars, the shiny sedans of city friends, the dusty SUVs of the local set. The hose was stretched over the grass to water the maple. It had been a dry summer. Mrs. Everett doted on the roses, Mr. Everett on the trees.

  The front door stood open, the screen shut against flies. The noise of conversation drifted out, subdued but strong, almost like a party.

  I hesitated on the stoop. I hadn’t been invited, after all.

  Mrs. Everett’s voice carried from inside. “It’s open.” Seeing me, a shutter fell over her face. In her black, she was years older than I’d last seen her.

  Mr. Everett joined her at the door. She shooed him away. “Go to the gardens. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I watched him disappear, knowing his path so well. Down the tiled hall, past the carved banister and the closet under the stairs, which held rain boots and fishing poles, into the sunroom with its curved glass roof, and finally out to the flagstone patio, where the smell of mulch overpowered the roses. What I would have given to follow him.

  Mrs. Everett stepped closer. The crosshatch of the screen was like a veil over her face as she whispered what she thought of me.

  I left with my lilies. I threw them into the lake, from the pier outside the hotel. Technically I wasn’t meant to go on the property. I’d been fired, allegedly for missing my shifts after the accident, but I knew the manager had heard what happened. His loyalty was with the Everetts.

  The Swiss house in my photograph was, of course, the Everetts’. The girl in the picture was me, Natalie, after a work shift. Mrs. Everett snapped the photo casually, the end of a roll. She’d be furious if she knew I kept it in my wallet still. If she knew I told people I’d grown up in her house, perhaps she’d pity me.

  Not long after I left, the Everetts sold that house. No doubt they couldn’t stand the ghosts. The noise of the lake lapping at their pier all day and night; the catspaws rushing in on windy afternoons; the roar of motors and shouts of fun.

  After Ammy’s funeral, I drove. My spare tire droned loudly over the asphalt. I stopped by a liquor store and bought vodka, soda, a candy bar. I sat in the parking lot awhile, eating the toffee, softened in the heat, my teeth sticking together. Nobody else came or went. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I should be in a hot barn, pitying the horses as they trod their slow circle, shaking their necks to ward off flies. I started up my car and idled a minute, racking my brain for somewhere I wanted to go.

  At home, I made a drink. I knocked a few ice cubes into the cup and drained it too fast for them to make a difference. I sucked the melting ice with its dregs of sweetness. It was only midafternoon, I had a long way to go.

  Erica Everett had her back to me, the first time I saw her. She wore green shorts and blue sneakers with yellow stripes across the toes. Around her, moving close and away with the nervous energy of electrons around a nucleus, girls vied for her attention, whispered, giggled, tugged the ends of their ponytails over their lips.

  The first track practice of the season, and winter clung to spring. The breeze cut through our flimsy T-shirts. I crossed my arms, trying to pass off my dejection as boredom. I’d moved from Chicago and missed the city. The suburbs were cartoonish, so much grass, such large garages, no sidewalk and nowhere to go if you did walk. I felt in my legs the pent-up energy of a month spent at home. We jogged around the track twice, warming up. Rows of pine trees, brown with winter burn, screened off the road. I’d spent my lunch hours loitering under those trees, kicking at the cigarette butts scattered over the dry needles like stubby bits of chalk.

  The coach blew his whistle, and we lined up for the hundred-meter trials. Erica stepped up, and her posse followed. She faced ahead, her shoulders drawn in tension. I let my gaze settle on the pavement in front of me, the yellow paint of my lane number, 8, dissolving into the track.

  At the whistle, we sprang forward. In seconds, most girls dropped behi
nd me. The noise of feet reduced to a few sets. I ran so hard the air I breathed was hot in my throat. For a moment, I seemed to lift away from my life. I was angry at the rising lump of my mom’s stomach while Caleb was barely one, her eager attitude toward Ted, the cramped house that smelled like diapers.

  I sprinted past the finish, riding out my momentum. When I turned, I wasn’t alone. Erica was close behind me. She’d dropped her hands to her knees, gasping.

  I tapped her shoulder. “You don’t want to lean like that. Put your hands on your head.”

  She looked annoyed, but she obeyed. She was four inches shorter than me, but absolutely domineering. Her neatly muscled legs were smooth as a doll’s. A silver bracelet glinted on her wrist, and a slippery layer of peach brightened her lips. She occupied her body calmly, with grace, which set her apart from the rest of us, the arm-crossers, the hair-twisters, the nail-biters.

  When she’d caught her breath, she said, “How fast are you?”

  I shrugged.

  “No one’s ever beaten me.” She eyed me. Then her friends surrounded her again.

  But at the next practice, she joined me during the warm-up. We began running together on Saturdays. By the summer, we were inseparable. It was as quick, and lucky, as the flip of a coin. Erica picked me, just as Amabel had, the same queenly approval, and I’d been thrilled to go along.

  When I showed Bryant and Ammy the picture of Erica’s house, I never told them about the lake. But the house was on the shore, and all the best rooms looked out at the sweep of navy water freckled with tiny, wooded islands.

  I hated thinking of the lake.

  Erica and I did our homework in her frilled bedroom. We swam. Sunned ourselves on the deck. We went for rides in the family sailboat, and sometimes in the jaunty red speedboat, thrillingly quick and sleek. When I spent the night, I slept in a spare bedroom, the canopy bed piled with feather duvets, the dressing table lined with antique perfume bottles.

  Her parents were as enchanting to me as her house. They loved me. Erica was irritated by them, secretive, private, standoffish. I was the same way with my mom and Ted, but when Erica acted that way I was genuinely shocked. Her parents were smart, generous, interesting. I happily helped with the cooking and cleaning up, if it meant hearing Mrs. Everett talk about the town houses she made over, the shows she saw. She was elegant, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. Mr. Everett was droll and sarcastic. He taught me to water-ski, let Erica and me drink beer on the boat.

  At fourteen, Erica was sweet, curious, impatient. By sixteen, she was beautiful, cunning, and perpetually, lethally bored. I was content to be at her house, to swim with my now-expert crawl, to drop a ski and zip over the water on a single slalom, to paint our nails and drink endless Diet Cokes in front of the rec room’s big screen. Erica roved her house as if it were a cage. She tried on every dress in her closet and left them on the floor. Turning up her stereo, she swallowed caffeine pills, which she claimed to be addicted to, and blew cigarette smoke out the window. Once, she climbed down the trellis to the yard, in the early evening, mosquitoes swarming over her legs, bruising her knees and cutting her palms, for no other reason than to see if she could.

  We spent less time in the house and more time out, wandering, looking for something. If we found excitement—say, college boys invited us to a party—she’d want to up the stakes. Get drunk. Smoke something, and dance, with each other, then with boys, then kiss, then more, more. The next morning, waking with a dull hangover, she’d be bored, disappointed. Whatever she was searching for had eluded her again.

  Her mother tried to enlist my help. When we were wiping dishes, or met in the hall while Erica took one of her endless showers, she’d casually ask how Erica was. Is everything okay? She seems so unsettled.

  I pretended not to know what she meant.

  Worse, she’d sometimes ask Erica, Why can’t you be more like Natalie? I doubt Natalie talks to her mother this way.

  Bewildered, I allied with Erica. What else could I do? I couldn’t admit that what I most loved about Erica was her house, her family, her life. I had to pretend, even to myself, that I loved her, her wildness, that I was the same way.

  Erica took up shoplifting. She goaded me until I did it, too. The first time: a green cashmere sweater was balled on the dressing room floor. When I tried it on, it turned my torso into a sculpture. I put my clothes over it, buttoned my coat to my throat, left the store. Alarms blared, and Erica held up her bag, politely slowing down. The clerks waved us on, unconcerned.

  After that it was easy. Tights tugged from their cardboard sleeves. Tank tops crumpled up in my fist, springy and dense as tennis balls. Lipstick, perfume. What a rush, leaving the store, and even better, having the new things, which I scattered around my borrowed bedroom as if they were nothing.

  Erica wasn’t a good thief. She was overconfident, too blasé. One day, while leaning over a department store jewelry counter, asking the clerk to pull out this and that, pushing rings over her already-baubled fingers, Erica slipped a bracelet into her purse. Instantly, a security guard appeared behind us. He ushered us to a miserable basement office, where we had to empty our bags onto the desk.

  We did fifteen hours of community service, picking up litter from the highway. Erica thought the whole thing was hilarious. I was humiliated, and furious with her for getting caught. Mrs. Everett’s friendliness toward me dropped. For the first time, the Everetts knocked on Erica’s door to remark that it was getting late, and maybe Natalie had better go home.

  Home, to the bed and dresser pushed in a basement corner, because Ted said I wasn’t around enough to need a proper room. The cheap carpet unrolled over the concrete floor, the brick walls painted a bluish shade of white. My mother had been upset about the stealing, but she’d been surprisingly quiet, saying only, “You don’t have to do everything Erica does, you know.”

  Summer came. We were seventeen, one year from freedom. I had my job at the resort, which gave me a good excuse to stroll over to the Everetts’ every night.

  In July, Erica met two brothers from across the lake. She claimed the charming, curly-haired elder, and I was left with the shrimpy younger.

  On a Wednesday night, around ten-thirty, Erica and I picked them up in her speedboat. The night smelled richly of summer: motor oil, lake water, sunscreen, leather upholstery, glass cleaner. One of the mansions was having a party, and a reggae beat carried over the water.

  Erica cut the motor, and we sat quietly awhile, passing a joint, listening to the waves slapping the hull. Apart from our lights, and a few windows onshore, the night was inky black. There was no moon.

  “Turn off the lights,” I said. “Let’s look at the stars.”

  Erica reached and snapped them off, and our boat plunged into darkness. The stars glittered. They looked so close, as if we could walk up into them.

  Erica and her boy disappeared into the nose of the boat, their usual routine. The brother and I stared for a while, finishing off the joint, throwing it into the water. He had a habit of slouching over his knees and rocking back and forth, an annoyingly insistent rhythm. I pretended to be mesmerized by the stars. I didn’t know their names, and lost interest in searching for patterns. I followed the swing of the satellites, reassured by their winking presence.

  The noise of another motor carried over the lake, first loudly, then fainter. We were drifting in deep water, near one of the dark islands.

  The scrawny brother set his slightly sticky hand on my shoulder and leaned in. His lips were soft, and he tasted like sour weed. I shut my eyes and gave myself over to kissing, feeling desired, at least.

  I still heard, nagging as a mosquito, the whine of another motor on the lake.

  When the boy reared up to make himself more comfortable on the bench, I stole a glance toward the nose. I couldn’t see anything, but the occasional giggle slipped out. Nobody else was concerned. The boy above me was frowning in concentration, trying to work his way under my shirt. I lay back and close
d my eyes, as if I could will myself into the sort of person who lost herself in the moment.

  The noise of an engine got stronger. Louder. It didn’t fade away. I opened my eyes. Erica reared up out of the nose and lunged for the steering wheel. Her face was open in a scream.

  The force of the collision threw me airborne. A confusion of noise, and a light swinging in the dark, and no idea where I was until I hit water. The wet jolted me alert, and my body began to move, kicking, arms churning.

  I was facing the shore, the party house. A few yards away, the speedboat was smashed up in big pieces. Shards floated across the water. Farther away, another boat had keeled over but stayed intact. It hung sideways, slowly sinking, its running light pointing up at the sky. It was huge, twice the size of Erica’s boat.

  I yelled for her.

  Under the music, there were sucking noises as water filled the boats. I thought the engine might explode, the gasoline, and I kicked away. Erica must have been thrown in the other direction. I kept swimming, breathing so heavily I was already exhausted.

  Three dark blots bobbed nearby. I called out, and they waited for me.

  “Your lights were out,” one said. He was a blank face and white teeth, shoulders bulging with a life preserver. “Your fucking lights were out!”

  The other two were the brothers. They were silent with shock. The younger one let me hang on to him as we swam to the island. We sat breathless in the weeds, the curly-haired boy crying, the stranger swearing, the younger brother’s teeth chattering. I alone stood and stared at the wreckage. “Where is she?”

  We were rescued within minutes. The crash had echoed around the lake, and a pontoon boat came over directly, honking, long loud blasts as it approached. The police arrived soon after. When I asked about Erica, they hushed me. In the ambulance, they hooked me up to an IV and I flipped off, pure blackness. Then it was the morning, a hospital bed, the police questioning me for an hour. Who had been driving? Were we drinking, doing drugs? Who had turned off the lights?