How to Disappear (26 page)

I say, “That was beyond.”

She opens her eyes wider. “You’d better not be slut-shaming me. Now that I know where you keep the knives.”

“I’m
thanking
you. Oh God. Whoever that guy was, he should have held on to you.”

She looks pissed off in her playful mode of pissed off, not her lethal one.

“That is so sexist and wrong. I was underage. He was a creep. Worse than a creep. He totally had another girlfriend. His
real
girlfriend.”

She shifts the sheets she’s cuddled up in, and there’s a quick flash of a breast. This is a marathon of being
uncontrollably
(thank you, Grandma’s soaps), capital
O
, On. Holding up my end of the conversation is an act of pure will. That’s how bad it is.

I say, “Jesus, what happened?”

“It kind of blew up. One minute he’s got me in the back of his car, this red Camaro, stoned out of his mind, and he’s all in love with me, sure he is, and then—”

I’m so jealous of this creep, it’s ridiculous. I go over to the other bed, two feet away, and grab her. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to visualize it.” She makes her sour-lemon face. I ask her, “Was that wrong to say?”

“So, so wrong.” I think she’s joking, but you can’t always tell with her. “But I forgive you because now I redid it with a guy I
wanted
to give it up to.”

“Happy to oblige, but do you want to stop saying ‘give it up’?”

“Make me. I don’t know what I want. Figure it out.”

I spend the rest of the morning, until after checkout time with the maid pounding on the door, trying to figure it out.

Nick starts rolling her things into her backpack at the speed of molasses.

Then, not thinking, I slap her on the butt and tell her to hurry up.

Jack is shocked out of his mind. And also grateful. It’s very sweet. Everything about it. Every second.

Sweet and fierce.

Then the maid starts banging on the door, and he freaks.

I say, “What was
that
?”

“What?” Jack looks dazed and confused, but I know he’s not. “
That?
That was a pat on the ass. Sorry.”

“That was more like a
swat
.”

Jack sits down on the unmade bed. Buttons his cuffs. Looks insanely cute. Looks flummoxed. Then looks angry. “I would never
swat
you. That was a
pat
.
You
pummel people for fun, so you might miss the distinction.”

“Laugh at me all you want. But that felt slightly like getting hit.”

Jack sits there, pressing his fists into the mattress, looking like a guy who just got punched in the stomach for real.

I go, “Jack? What did I say? What just happened?”

“Let’s see.” He’s buttoning his shirt up to his neck. “Two minutes after . . . we’re together . . . like that . . . you think I’d
hit
you?”

“That’s not what I said! I said that was slightly too hard of a swat—that’s all I said!”

He’s packing up like a crazed shirt-folding robot. “I’ve hit five people in my life. You’re not on the list.”

“Who?”

He stands up. Looks away. As if the effort of counting the five is beyond him.

“My brother.” He won’t even look at me. “He was all over me when we were kids. My best friend, once. The drunk in the parking lot. That asshole I downed in my apartment.”

“That’s four.”

There’s a long pause. “And my father.”

“No way!”

He’s still examining the headboard, talking to the wall.

I can only imagine what happened next. I mean, I saw what happened next, I’m pretty sure. On his back.

I say, “If anybody hurt my kid, I’d kill him. If you take the guy out at the first swat, he never gets to carve up anybody.”

“Yet you look so much like a sane girl.” Jack can be so condescending sometimes. “Did anybody ever tell you about turning the other cheek?”

“Why would I do that? I’m already going straight to hell. Why not take some scum down with me?”

“You know that’s crazy, don’t you? Nicolette—don’t you?”

“You thought it was
fine
to get rid of me when you thought I was scum.”

Jack pulls me toward him by the upper arms. Hard, so not a romantic experience. He says, “I never thought it was fine.”

“I’m sorry!” I’m standing right in front of him, wedged between the two beds. “I was nicer before. But if someone was going to hurt my kid, or me, or my family, I’m not in a place where I’d turn my cheek. I’m in the place where I’d take care of it.
You
should know.”

“I know I should know!” Jack shouts. “Don’t you think I wanted him gone? But wanting someone gone is different from seeing him lying on the garage floor in a pool of blood because you fingered him.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

His head is in his hands. I try to hold him, but he leans away from me. I say, “Even if you’re the one who put him there, he deserved it.”

I mean this. It’s completely all right with me if he flat-out killed him. That’s how much I hate the man who did this to him.

I say, “Like you didn’t actually
do
it, right?”

“Jesus Christ, who do you think I am?” He’s rolling his head around like it’s too heavy for his neck. “But I might as well have. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt says, ‘Where did Art run off to?’ and I say, ‘He’s in the garage, getting more charcoal.’ I
pointed
.”

“That’s not the same as killing him. Jack, it’s
not
.”

He looks straight at me. “I’ve already thought of every excuse there is. People in that line of work make enemies, it’s inevitable. But if I hadn’t pointed . . .”

“You were a
kid
.”

“I was fourteen. Old enough.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yes, it is! If I didn’t know how bad it was, I would have owned up to it before now.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! What is it with guys owning up and confessing and being a man and taking responsibility? What’s the point of telling people, ‘By the way, I might have gotten my dad killed’?”

This makes him cringe. Good going, Nicolette.

“Maybe if I did that, I’d get what I deserve.”

Oh God, he’s so completely effed up for a smart person.

I say, “I spent my life being totally bad, Jack. I swear. I ignored five or six rules a day. Sneaking around. Taking my clothes off for a college boy who was totally into someone else and completely depraved. I mean, I’m a good person. I’m like the
opposite
of a mean girl. But I’m close to being the daughter
from hell. And Steve never even acted like he wanted to hurt me. Not once.”

Apart from the time he said he was going to get rid of me (and I believed him), but this wouldn’t help my argument.

I say, “I wish your mom had taken him out. I truly do. Then he never would have gotten a chance to slice you up.”

Weakly, Jack says, “She wasn’t in a position where she could call the police.”

“She could have stopped him and plead self-defense when they got there.”

He says, “You’re locked and loaded, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t used to be. I told you. I used to be nice.”

“The nice daughter from hell? What are you now, the scourge of God?”

I climb onto the other bed and take his hand. I wait for him to look at me, his face that rigid mask he has sometimes. I say, “One of us has to be.”

Jack puts his arms around me, his face in my hair. “Sometimes you make my blood run cold.”

But I know he likes the way I am, or why is he leaning back into me? Why is he cupping his hands on my head like a bulletproof hat? Why is he holding me like this, like I was blowing past him in a tornado and he has to hold on tight to pull me out of the vortex and into his shelter?

I’m a very persuasive guy. In Model UN, whatever country they gave me took over the world. But the closer we get to Ohio, the harder it is to persuade Nicolette of anything. By now, you’d think she would have figured out how into her I am and how I’m trying to look out for her.

“Could you at least lay out what I’m supposed to do?”

“You’re supposed to have my back,” she says. “That’s it. You don’t like it when the girl makes the plan, do you?”

“Give it a rest. I wasn’t ecstatic when my brother made the plan either.”

“That was a
bad
plan. This is a
good
plan.”

“Will you at least entertain the possibility that having me wave a gun at Mendes could escalate the situation?”

“For
you
. What about for me? How does sending a guy to throw me off a cliff get escalated? Just because you’re reformed, you think the next
guy he sends after me is going to think I’m adorable? Because I don’t.”

The problem isn’t that she’s wrong about how bleak her situation is, it’s that she doesn’t see how storming the stronghold of the man who made it bleak—her stepfather, the deadly force behind Don’s errand—could get us killed.

Nicolette puts her hand over my hand. “All I want is for you to do this one thing for me. You know how to work that gun, right? If you have to.”

I look over at her, and she’s dead serious. “Yeah, but it’s not like I’ve been in combat.”

“Or hunted. Or shot skeet. Or a moving target.”

I don’t let myself blow up. I say, “That’s all the more reason we shouldn’t be doing this.”

She’s tiny, but she got the gun away from me, held it on me, and humiliated me completely. What’s Mendes going to do, fold his hands in his lap?

“You just have to stand there and look scary,” she says, as if showing up armed were an everyday occurrence, like getting the mail and putting on your pants.

I’m gone. I shout, “Do you not see that invading the place with a gun makes it likelier someone gets shot?”

She has complete, steely focus and equally complete irrational determination. “It’s my house! And he says
I’m next
? Think again. I live in that house, and nobody gets to make me scared to be there.”

“Nick! If someone in there wants you dead, you’re supposed to be scared.”

We park by the lake and walk into the woods. The sun is starting to set, the sky lavender and orange, the path dappled with shafts of dying light.

Home.

I touch the moss on the trunks of the beech trees, hear the water lap against the shore as we hike toward Green Lake. Smell the almost moldy, loamy aroma of the place. The remnants of a campfire.

I live here.

I’m not hiding out in a converted garage in California ever again. Or wherever. No one is driving me out of here. My life is my life.

I want it back.

If everything goes right, this ends tonight.

Nicolette, one. Challengers, zero.

If it goes wrong, God help us. Literally, that’s what it would take.

Jack says, “Slow down.”

He’s the one loaded for bear this time, prepared to break into a fortress. He has ropes and knives and, for some reason, an Allen wrench. Weighted down by instruments of mayhem.

I tell Jack, “I’ve been sneaking in and out of here since I was thirteen. You can offload a bunch of that stuff.”

I know where the spare key is and which door you can open with a credit card. How to run across the dark part of the yard to slip back in at night. Which windows squeak and which don’t.

“You really weren’t a very good girl, were you?” Jack says. “You said, ‘Night, Pops,’ and cut out through the back door?”

“I said, ‘Night, Papa.’ ”

“You called Mendes
‘Papa’
?”

“What was I supposed to call him? Plus, who doesn’t sneak out occasionally?”

“Try sneaking out past my mother,” Jack says.

I’m trying to stay strictly focused on what we’re doing. To avoid consideration of what God or anybody else would think about it.

To avoid thinking about the Steve who was my mostly nice dad and focus on the one who helped bury a body and
said
he was going to kill me.

To blot out the memory of him buying me pink summer dresses or signing off on notes that said I talked in class.

To avoid thoughts that might lead to crying. Anything that could keep me from getting this done.

But when I think about going in through the French windows (which I’ve done a thousand times), seeing his back at the desk in his office, I feel mushy. Thinking about how much I missed home, and him, and being in a family. How much I wish I didn’t have to put him through this.

Then I think about the dead girl and how she got that way.

When we get in there and things go even worse than Jack imagines, I can’t be that mushy girl.

When things go bad, I have to be on top of it.

This is what Jack is for.

He’s so pissed at his scumbag brother and everyone who had anything to do with this thing, he’s good to go.

He can talk up peace and love and backing down all he wants. But bottom line, if some guy threatens me, he’ll take him out. I think.

Jack says, “Anytime before he sees us, you can bail. We don’t have to do this.”

I’m literally pulling him toward my personal horror show. “Let’s just do this. I want to hear him admit it to my face. Then I can die happy.”

Jack says, “You’re not dying tonight.”

It’s all on me.

I can’t let anything go wrong.

I picture Steve clammy and corpselike, and I start to shake. I hear the words,
It’s not my kid
, echoing in my ears.
It. Useless. Whore. It.

Tear my insides out through my eardrums, why don’t you?

What was I supposed to think?

I’m glad that I’m in front of Jack because my face is crumpling. Tears are streaming down my cheeks.

This better go just right.

At the edge of the woods, the trees thin out at the clearing where our house stands in the middle of a lit-up lawn.

Jack says, “Odd to say this when we’re in a reasonable facsimile of a yellow wood, but you could still take another road. You could still walk away. But if I use this gun on Steve . . . no matter what he did . . . Just think about it, okay?”