Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (3 page)

Chapter Three

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Mobile, Alabama

I ran, coward that I was, from the party. Away from my angry, confused father, from Wynn’s cold face and Molly Robb’s baffling new look. From Jay and his unbearable kindness.

So that was it. Eleven months of therapy, sharing and learning how to face my problems, not to mention the purchase of a pair of kick-ass boots, and I’d ruined it all. Less than an hour at home, and I’d reverted back to Old Althea.

The busybody dog followed me out the front door and clicked down the front steps behind me like it thought I might want company. I growled at it to stay, and, looking confused, it plunked its miniature bottom down in the grass.

I ran to the head of the path that led into our woods, telling myself to breathe. My father was sick. Alzheimer’s was a terrible disease. He hadn’t laid eyes on me in almost a year. His mind was muddled, pierced with the buckshot of old memories. He didn’t know what he was saying.

Unfortunately, that bit of wisdom didn’t stop me from feeling like the earth had tilted and I was sliding, sliding down a sheer rock face, with nothing at all to slow my descent. To stop me from plunging into the inexorable, yawning chasm below.

It was almost dark. The party had grown louder, and the laughter and voices and clink of glasses drifted out to me now. Wynn had probably gone downstairs, made some quip to clear the air, and now everybody felt like they’d been given permission to have fun.

I hated every last one of those brown-nosing sycophants. Despised them. Which, my therapist would probably tell me if he were here right now, was precisely why I needed to go back inside. But I couldn’t. Dad’s words still echoed in my head.
Thirty’s a bitch. If her mother was here . . .

“I wish she were,” I muttered, then kicked off the cursed boots.

I started down the winding path, deep into the piney woods, steering myself to the one place I knew would make me feel safe, would hide me from the sympathetic eyes and judgment. From my own fear. It was the one spot I had always run to when I’d felt alone as a child. Where I always felt my mother’s presence. The clearing.

When I reached the small, circular patch of spongy green moss and rotted leaves, I stood for a moment, savoring the still, humid air. The mystery of the place. I smelled magnolia blossoms and honeysuckle from somewhere deeper in the woods. That’s what always got me. That very particular fragrance. The scent of my mother.

I closed my eyes and her image rose up before me—dark hair curling wild down her back, eyes that curved up like a cat’s, perfect creamy skin. She was kneeling on the ground. Her gold dress shimmered in the moonlight, making her look like some kind of otherworldly, flashing goddess. She was always wearing the gold dress when I closed my eyes.

I dropped down on the moss, rested my head on my hands, and sighed, cocooned in the stillness and deepening dark. I tried to quiet my mind so I could conjure more of my mother from a different time. A random day, maybe a Christmas morning or summer weekend at the beach. But all I could picture was her on her knees in that damn gold dress in the clearing. Chanting like a loon and shaking.

“Are you okay?”

I bolted up and looked down the path. A shadow, someone tall, blocked the light from the house.

“It’s Jay,” the shadow said. I sat up. He took a few steps forward so I could finally make him out in detail. The thick honey hair, blue shirt open at the neck. I looked away.

He sat beside me and gave my shoulder a friendly, nonthreatening bump. I bumped him back nonchalantly, but my heart was spasming inside my chest. He handed me a bougainvillea bloom he’d picked somewhere along the path. I took it, at the same time sending him multiple telepathic messages not to speak. At least, not until I could settle my heart. If he received the messages, he chose to ignore them.

“I’m sorry about your dad.” I could smell his cologne, his shampoo, his breath. My God, I felt like I could practically smell his soul. Why did he have to sit so close?

“Thanks,” I managed. I was being ridiculous. A child.
You’re almost thirty, Althea. Thirty.

“It’s tough, I guess.”

“Yeah,” I said and cleared my throat several times. “It is.”

“Would you like to go . . .” He hesitated. “Get a bite?” I squished the moss between my feet, stalling, knowing he had just bitten off the words “get a drink,” and sent him another mind message:
Thank you.
So he’d heard the rehab rumors too.

“I’m not really hungry,” I said.

“Me neither. I just thought you might want to get out of here. And talk.”

For the first time I let my gaze linger on him. It was disconcerting—looking at the kid I’d grown up with, the boy down the river who’d been my best friend, and seeing a man. He looked like him, but at the same time, not. The skin on his face was rougher, more textured somehow. I could see he had a few early strands of gray at his temples, but his body was as trim as ever. It looked like through the years he’d settled into his tall frame, filled it out. He seemed at ease in his body. Unlike me.

I thought I had heard he was married. Not that he couldn’t be out here talking to an old friend if he was married. Not that I cared.

I didn’t care.

He raised his eyebrows, and I felt another flutter of nerves. How would I talk to him? After all that had happened, what he’d just witnessed, what was there to say?

“I could eat,” I said, hoping I would somehow be rewarded for my leap of faith. Maybe there was a reason Jay had found me. The idea seemed far-fetched, and I realized I was probably getting nice shoulders and trustworthiness confused with one another. But what the hell. I could do worse.

“The River Shack?” he asked, and I nodded. “I’ve got my boat. Grab your shoes.”

We pushed off from the dock in Jay’s father’s old outboard. The wide river was dark, calm, lit in places by dockside lights reflecting off the water. Once we were clipping through the waves, the motor growling, I snuck a glance at Jay. He drove the boat like his father always did, standing up, slouched against the arm of the chair. A memory flashed, then—Jay and I, swimming up under the boat’s bright-blue hull, scratching our initials in the wood with his pocketknife. Forgetting, of course, that Mr. Cheramie would see it when he raised the boat in the lift.

We passed a houseboat—a tin lean-to lashed together with bungee cords and faded rope. Jay slowed and waved at a guy sitting on a webbed lawn chair. The guy doffed his captain’s hat in response, and Jay opened the throttle. I closed my eyes and savored the lift of my hair in the wind.

I’d have to fill Jay in on the essentials of my life: rehab, the halfway house, how Molly Robb and my brother had just thrown me out of the only real home I had. I was glad for the loud motor. It gave me time to plan my strategy.

As we approached the River Shack wharf, Jay leapt out of the boat and tied us up, then offered to help me out. When I laid my hand on his, my skin prickled deliciously. As we headed up to the plywood shack strung with white lights, I wished desperately I could plunk down at the bar like a normal person and have a beer, just to take the edge off. My nerves were shooting out painful, alarm-like jolts through my arms and legs.

H.A.L.T., I reminded myself. Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. It was one of those Twelve Step clichés they’d endlessly repeated in treatment. Well, I was definitely all four of those. Which meant I needed to stop whatever it was I was doing and take care of myself. Not that that was even possible at this point. Surviving the day was probably the most I could hope for.

We sat at a picnic table in the far corner, and I glanced around. It had been a while since I’d bartended here—one of the many short-term, alcohol-themed jobs I’d held in the past, oh, too many years—but blessedly, I didn’t recognize a soul either behind the bar or among the tables. The owners were the same, a crusty couple in their sixties, but they usually stayed in the back room, playing poker and barking orders through the window at the limp teenage kitchen staff.

“Two sweet teas,” Jay told the waitress, then he turned to me.

“You look beautiful.”

I touched my chest, shocked by the compliment. The truth was I was pale, too thin, and twitchy. Recovery isn’t a good look on anyone.

“You’re being nice.”

“Well, I am, but I mean it. You’re prettier than you were when you were eighteen. Not that you weren’t pretty. It’s just that you’re . . .” He trailed off. “Never mind.”

I flushed. Eighteen was an eternity away, and I wasn’t so naive to think the hard years and chemicals didn’t show on my face. But the way he was looking at me, clear eyed, open faced, a slight smile on his lips, I felt a twinge of hope. Maybe he could still see something good and innocent inside me.

I watched him order for both of us. He was so easy, so unselfconscious. Stupid-handsome, if I were to be honest. I had to remind myself how it was we’d never slept together. I’d been scared, for many reasons, the primary one being my father had told me if I ever had sex he would kill me, and then he would find and kill Jay. This was no idle threat. My dad had that Clint Eastwood glint in his eye, a man you didn’t want to test.

The other reason I had never slept with Jay, the secret I’d held so close inside me, for so long that the poison from it felt like it had seeped into my blood and bones and psyche, was Rowe Oliver. That human cesspool who lived in the basement of his parents’ massive columned house upriver. The man whose name tasted like dirt in my mouth.

To teenage Jay’s credit, he took my ongoing and inexplicable sexual rejection like a champ. He never asked any uncomfortable questions, never pushed me beyond the point where I was willing, just kept showing up on my doorstep with a smile and another invitation to go get ice cream or see a movie.

One thing about Jay: he definitely knew how to play the long game.

When we were eleven and had snuck out to shoot contraband fireworks filched from Mr. Cheramie’s Fourth-of-July stash, he told me so. We were crouched in the woods behind his house. He was flicking a stolen lighter below a mildewed Roman candle when he told me that he’d been thinking it over and had decided it would be smart if we got married. Not anytime soon; later, maybe, like when we were twenty or something. We could still go to whatever college we chose, but we’d never have to bother with the hassle of dating other people.

I think I probably said, “Cool,” or something similarly profound, then he hooked one hand around a sapling pine for balance and leaned over to brush my lips with his. It was the first time he’d kissed me, and it felt sacred, like we’d sealed a solemn pact. In the subsequent years, I came to believe that pact was the main reason Jay stuck with me. He couldn’t have really believed I was the person I pretended to be. I embarked on my long downhill slide and began to avoid his calls. There was no way I was going to be able to keep our pact. There was no way I was going to let him see the real me.

As we ate at the River Shack, he acted like sitting there with me was the most natural thing in the world. Like events had, in fact, worked out precisely as he’d planned. Like this was meant to be.

He caught my eye and grinned. “Mind if I bring up the elephant?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“I thought you did your ninety days. Why is your dad being such a hard-ass?”

“He doesn’t mean to be. It’s the disease. The Alzheimer’s.”

Jay didn’t look convinced.

But my father had good reason. In his tenure as attorney general in the eighties, he’d joined the war on drugs and proceeded to clear the streets of every low-level drug dealer and street-corner jockey the police could snag. As a result, Mobile’s police department had doubled in size and income, and my father got a reputation for being a tough, unyielding son of a bitch. Not to mention a huge, fatherly monkey wrench in my teenage drug-procuring efforts.

“I deserve it,” I added. “I’ve put him through a lot.”

“Screw that. You’re his daughter.”

I looked into Jay’s eyes. How easy it would be to tell him everything, to pour out my soul. And what a relief to do it with him. He seemed like a priest, therapist, and puppy all rolled into one. He’d never betrayed me, never screwed me over, not once. He’d been a solid friend, once upon a time.

I looked away. For nearly twenty-five years, I’d resisted the lure of dozens of psychologists, counselors, well-meaning friends. I hadn’t told anyone what had happened between my mother and me the last night I saw her alive. Where would I even start?

“I’ve got plenty of room at the house, Althea,” he said. “You can stay with me if you’d rather not go back.”

I laughed. Shook my head. Laughed again.

He raised his eyebrows. “You think I’m kidding?”

“No. I just think you have no idea what you’re saying. You don’t know anything about me.”

“So tell me.”

“I’m a liar and a thief,” I said evenly. “An addict—pills mostly, but whatever I can find that’ll get me buzzed will do. I’m bad odds.”

There was silence; then he spoke.

“I don’t know how much you’ve heard—but I’ve been in New York. Worked on Wall Street,” he said, like he hadn’t heard a word of my confession. “I got laid off one day, and my wife moved out the next month. She said I didn’t want it enough.” He wiped his mouth, folded his napkin, and tucked it under his plate. “Whatever
it
is. So I just moved back home too. Looking after my parents’ place while they’re out of the country.”