All Unquiet Things (12 page)

I left Carly alone for that entire weekend. As difficult as it was, I didn’t call or e-mail or send her any text messages. When I saw her at school the following Monday, I feared it was all over. We stood at opposite ends of a bank of lockers, staring at each other. I wanted to approach her, but I knew that she had to make the first move. When she eventually did move, she tried to brush past me, embarrassment and regret etched all over her beautiful face. Unwilling to let that be the end of it, I caught her wrist as she passed and pulled her toward me, leaned down, and kissed her deeply. She kissed me back, throwing her arms around my neck. When we came apart, I pressed my forehead against hers and said:

“I love you, please don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry.” “No,” she said, shaking her head.
“I’m
sorry. I love you, too.”

I smiled and kissed the tip of her nose. From behind us came the sound of a throat clearing. We both looked to the side
and saw Finch standing only a couple of feet from us, glaring his disapproval. Wordlessly, he lifted his finger skyward, and at that exact moment, the bell rang.

“That’s enough,” he said. “You’re both officially late for class. And I will be by the library later
to check up on you
, if you know what I mean.”

“Ten-four,” I said. Carly smiled at him sheepishly.

“This better not be how you spend all your time these days,” Finch said, stepping back as we scooted past him on our way to music appreciation. “I don’t want to have to split you two up.”

By the time school ended for the summer, things were looking better—Miranda was responding to the chemo, and Carly’s mood had taken an upswing. Paul had engaged a nurse for his wife, and the whole family was feeling good enough to take a night off from hospitals and IVs and worry and go out to dinner for Carly’s fourteenth birthday. Miranda invited me over Paul’s objections. It wasn’t that he didn’t like
me
, Carly insisted; it was just that he didn’t approve of his daughter having a serious boyfriend at such a young age. My mother had similar concerns, but she mostly kept them to herself; Paul was not as subtle.

The fine dining options in Empire Valley being limited to fast-food restaurants and one moderately priced steak house, Paul took us all up to San Francisco in his brand-new Mercedes. Bored with the innumerable Italian, Mexican, and seafood restaurants the city had to offer, Paul had chosen something different—a tiny, family-run Polish restaurant in
West Portal that doubled as an art gallery. Halfway through our pierogi appetizer, Paul announced that he had news.

“I don’t know how much this will interest
you
, Neily,” he said, taking a swig of Polish beer. “But Enzo’s coming back to town, and he’s bringing Audrey with him.”

“Enzo? Really?” Miranda seemed surprised. “Why?”

Paul shrugged. “Now that it looks like Hilary’s gone for good, I guess he wants to bring Audrey closer to family. My mother called this morning and told me. She teamed up with Hilary’s parents, Louise and Charles Jordan, to put a down payment on a house in the valley for them, and they’re moving in next week sometime.”

I leaned over to Carly and whispered, “Who’s Enzo?”

“My uncle,” she said. “Dad’s brother. Audrey is his daughter. She’s our age.”

“Oh.” It was the first I’d heard of either of them. “Are you close?”

“Not really. They’ve lived in Portland since we were babies, and they don’t visit that often.” She glanced up and noticed her dad staring at us. “Tell you later.”

Once we were back at her house, Carly gave me Enzo’s entire sordid history. After graduating from Brighton as one of the marginal one percent of students who don’t go on to a four-year college or university, Enzo Ribelli had careened from failed scheme to failed scheme for almost ten years, sporadically attending classes at the local community college while dabbling in everything from construction to starting his own lawn-mowing business before hooking up with Hilary Jordan,
a USC junior, during her summer vacation. The day before Hilary was supposed to go back to school, she found out that she was pregnant; she and Enzo married quickly, and he moved down to Los Angeles with her. In her fifth month, Hilary suffered a painful miscarriage, but somehow she and Enzo stayed married.

Several years later, two weeks after Miranda had Carly, Hilary sent word that she had also given birth to a baby girl. For a while, the families made an effort to keep in contact, if only for the sake of the children, but Enzo eventually moved his wife and daughter to Oregon, ostensibly for some job, and the lines of communication collapsed. Now the only way Carly’s parents got news from Enzo was through Paul’s mother. The last time they had heard anything was when Hilary had abandoned her husband and daughter two years earlier. Audrey’s grandparents on both sides were sending money every month, but it had recently become clear that it wasn’t being spent the way it was meant to be, so they had finally convinced Enzo to bring his daughter back to Empire Valley.

It was hard to figure out how Carly felt about Audrey moving to Empire Valley. I tried to draw her out, but she was inscrutable. Later, when we were sitting on the porch, Carly pressing her cheek and shoulder into my chest, I asked her flat out what she was thinking.

She lifted her head. “About what?”

“Your cousin coming to town. You seem upset.”

“I’m not. I just don’t know her very well, and my dad is going to expect me to help her out at school. Mams says she’s not a very good student.” Mams was what Carly called her father’s mother. Her mother’s parents lived in Connecticut, and the Ribellis weren’t nearly as close to them.

“You’re worried that Paul’s going to make you tutor her?” I raised my eyebrows. That didn’t sound like Carly.

Her shoulders drooped, and she sat up. “Maybe you should go home now. It’s getting really late. I’m tired.”

“Carly—” I held fast to her wrist.

“Neily, let go.”

“No. Carly, this is getting ridiculous. Ever since we found out about your mom, you’ve been so weird with me.
Talk
to me.”

“Don’t say ‘we’ like it’s the same for you and me,” she warned. “You stay up half the night holding her hair back while she throws up from the chemo, then you get to say things like ‘we.’”

“I would help if you asked me to,” I told her. “I’d do anything. I’ve been trying to give you more space, but if you need me I’m here.”

Carly brushed at her eyes. “I know.”

But I felt like I had to keep saying it. “No matter what happens, I’m always going to help you if you need me.” It was these words I remembered the morning of the day Carly died, the ones that made me call her back, seek her out. I wanted to be the sort of guy who made good on his promises.

“What can I do?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

“Come on. There has to be something.”

Carly looked at me. “Well, maybe you can help me with Audrey.”

“How?”

“I have a feeling it’s going to be really awkward with her,” Carly said. “Her dad and my dad have been on bad terms since they were kids, and I haven’t seen her for a really long time. I’m afraid she’ll hate me.”

“Why would she hate you?”

Carly shrugged. “I don’t know. People tend to.”

“People don’t hate you.” It was true, Carly and I didn’t have many friends at Brighton, but that was as much our fault as anybody else’s. Our contact with other students in the program was sporadic. As for the nonprogram students, we knew them from elective classes and cocurriculars, but only in the most casual way. Honestly, on the whole I would’ve said that people hardly gave us a passing thought, and my mother had always told me that people have to care about you to hate you.

“Do we go to the same school?”

“People don’t hate you,” I repeated. “They’re intimidated by you. They know that you’re smarter than they are.”

“Well, I don’t want Audrey to feel that way about me,” Carly said. “I want her to like me.”

“And how am I supposed to help with that?”

“Be friendly to her. Maybe punch me in the arm when I’m being too clever or too patronizing,” she suggested light-heartedly.

I laughed. “I’m not going to punch you.”

“Pinch me, then,” she joked.

“We need a signal that doesn’t involve physical violence, or you’re on your own,” I said, kissing her.

“Okay.” She pursed her lips in thought. “How about if you tap your nose with your finger if I’m being obnoxious?”

“Sure. That I can do.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“No reason.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s just very you. Secret gestures and everything.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small blue box. The
white ribbon that the woman in the jewelry store had tied around it was a little smashed. “Happy birthday, Carly.”

She took the present and slipped the ribbon off with excitement. She brought out a little blue velvet bag and dumped its contents into her hand. There, glinting in the fading light, was the bracelet. I had saved up my allowance for several months in order to afford it and had the store engrave it with her initials.

“Do you like it?” I asked softly.

She lifted her eyes to mine. “I
love
it,” she said, putting her arms around me and giving me a soft, tender kiss. I felt a tear fall from her cheek onto mine. She wiped it away with her thumb. “It’s wonderful.” And Carly smiled—for the first time in a long time—a big, genuine smile.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

Senior Year

T
wenty minutes after we arrived at San Quentin, we were seated in a room filled with inmates and their visitors, separated from Enzo Ribelli by a small table and a thick plate of fiberglass.

“Neily,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

I jerked my thumb at Audrey. “Ask this one. The last thing I remember was my Coke tasting funny—when I came to, we were pulling up to the gate.”

“Audrey?”

“I wanted him to hear your side of the story,” Audrey said.

Enzo sat back in his metal chair and stared up at the ceiling, letting out a deep breath. I didn’t know him very well.
When Audrey and I had been friends, her relationship with Enzo had been in tatters. He was almost never at home, and Audrey spent most of her time at Carly’s house; she even had her own bedroom there. I probably hadn’t seen him more than a half dozen times, but I knew his face from the media—scores of old photos filtered into the local news stations and the newspapers, each one showing a man who, thanks to the ravages of destructive habits and a life of hard knocks, had changed a lot since high school—and during the trial. But prison life seemed to agree with him. His formerly chiseled face was still scored with deep wrinkles, his head was completely gray, and there were bags under his eyes, but he seemed healthier. Gone were the alcoholic abdominal bloat and hollowed-out heroin cheeks—he was well fed, clean, and sober. It even looked like he’d been working out. You could say what you wanted about our correctional system, but imprisonment had improved Enzo’s life to a certain degree. It was freedom—or his inability to control himself when he had it—that had destroyed him.

At first, Enzo seemed reluctant to open up old wounds, but I suspected that Audrey was talking to him about Carly’s murder every time she came to visit. He was probably used to going over it again and again—she could be very persistent. Finally, he nodded and heaved another deep sigh.

“Okay.”

“From the top,” I said.