In Broken Places (22 page)

“Her dad must have trusted you.”

I laughed out loud before I could stop myself. But I could tell from Scott’s expression that it hadn’t been a very humorous sound—again.

“No, Scott, he didn’t really trust me.”

“So . . . who was he to you?”

“You know, that’s probably a question best left for another day.” Shayla, bored with the bed idea, kicked the pile of leaves and giggled as they rained down around her, a dull-brown waterfall. “But she’s mine now—and we’re here. And I don’t think I’d change anything about that part of the story.”

“You think she’ll ever call you Mom?”

“When she’s ready.”

He stood, shoving his hands into his pockets and turning to look out over the valley. “You must have gotten a lot of questions around BFA with her calling you Shelby and all.”

I shook my head. “Actually, I haven’t gotten many. I think Bev and Gus did a pretty good job of telling people I was a single mom and leaving it at that.”

“But . . . she calls you Shelby,” he repeated.

“And if people ask, I’m happy to tell them it’s an arrangement that works well for us. Period. Some of them seem to think it’s weird, and that’s okay. Any more details would require more explanations than I’m willing to give right now.”

“What do the students call you?”

“Miss. Mrs. It depends. Half of them think I’m divorced.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Sure. I know what the truth is, and when Shayla understands it, we’ll be able to make it a little more public.”

“Sounds wise.”

“I try.”

“You’re a good mom.”

“Yeah? You’re a good hiking coach.”

“Sorry you came?”

“Ask me tomorrow when my calf muscles are screaming for mercy.”

“Make sure you stretch them before bed and first thing in the morning.”

I looked at him in fake exasperation. “Don’t go all basketball coach on me. I need a friend, not a tyrant.”

“Well, you’ve got that,” he said, sitting beside me again and pulling me in for a quick squeeze.

“The friend part or the—”

“The friend part, Shelby.”

“Well, good, ’cause the tyrant part reminds me of that time in fourth grade when Miss Nicholson sent me to the principal’s office because I’d drawn a picture of her backside with flowers growing out of it and—”

“You’re not going to start the talking thing again, are you?”

I bit my tongue and counted to twenty. That squeeze had done weird things to me. I didn’t like it. The side effects, that is. The squeeze itself, I didn’t mind.

I pushed off the wall and walked over to put Shayla’s hat back on her head. It had fallen sideways onto her shoulder, exposing a matted mess of blonde that made me itch to grab a brush. She protested right on cue as I set the hat straight and tied its strings under her chin.

“Wanna go up the tower again?” This from the guy who’d nearly not made it up with her the first time.

“Yeah!” On the decibel scale of agreement, her answer ranked right up at the top.

He slung her onto his back and took off toward the thick metal door at the bottom of the tower, turning to wink at me just before they disappeared inside.

Triple salchow, double lutz, and a mind-numbing axel. My stomach was getting good at the ice-skating thing.

THE PLAY WAS
coming together well, much to Meagan’s excitement, and we were closing in on the last two weeks of rehearsals before Christmas break. I’d been seeing a lot more of the cast than just during our practices, as some of them had acted on their threats and invited themselves over for the occasional dinner-and-games evening. It was apparently a common thing in this place where half the student population was in the boarding program, but I’d never encountered anything like it in other schools where I’d worked.

Because the students came from all over the world to study, they were given fewer but longer vacations, which allowed them to fly home at Christmas and Easter to spend much-needed time with their parents. So there was a three-week break coming
up—in which I hoped the actors’ talent and memorization wouldn’t atrophy—followed by just five weeks of rehearsals before their two performances.

Given that timeline, it was with renewed focus and drive that I approached our pre-Christmas practices, though my focus seemed increasingly undone by random and not-so-random encounters with a certain sandy-haired coach. My frantic monologues had subsided and I now faced our times together with a mixture of expectation and dread. Expectation because I really enjoyed spending time with him—in a daydreaming-then-smacking-myself-upside-the-head kind of way. And dread because, in the back of my mind, it was always Saturday and my dad was singing in the shower again and there was a faint whiff of chocolate chip pancakes in the air.

The actors had grown accustomed to Scott’s impromptu visits, and I had grown accustomed to ignoring the meaningful glances and eyebrow wiggling that went on while he was there. The visits had been coming more frequently lately, and I wondered who was teaching the boys how to throw big balls through little hoops in the gym while their coach was loitering downstairs in the auditorium. He’d always have a word or two for me, like asking about Shayla’s tummyache or planning a trip to the hot baths nearby (“Ix-nay on the athing suit-bay” had been my immediate reply). Then he’d get drawn into whatever argument or deliberation or joke-telling contest the actors were involved in. He had a casual way with students, entering into their lives without losing his authority, and I loved to watch them being drawn to him like . . . well, like Shayla. He’d become something of a fixation for her, and she never drew anything, learned anything, or lost anything that she didn’t want to tell Scott about. She clung to his attention and hung on his words and responded to his remonstrances better than she did to mine. And that chocolate-chip-pancake part of me feared for her heart.
But I just kept shoving down the fear—forcing it away—because the Scott I saw at school and out, as a teacher and a friend, was not the singing-in-the-shower type.

Mind you, he wasn’t exactly perfection incarnate either. There were days when he was preoccupied and barely even verbal, and there were times when his energy seemed too diffuse to do anyone any good, and there had been one occasion, when one of his players had been suspended for drinking, when it had taken every bit of persuasion in me to get him to gain some perspective again. The irony. But Scott was a good man, and getting to know him had been fascinating and stimulating . . . in a completely terrorizing kind of way.

Life was . . . Could I say “good”? Not yet. There was too much expectation attached to the word. So I stashed it away in my “to be determined” file, along with “I am a good play director,” “I can be a good mother,” and “Losing control over my heart could be a good thing.”
Good
—it was a word that bore investigation.

Kate and Seth were at it again on this particular day, but we’d all come to the conclusion that this was merely the way they functioned best, so we allowed the friction and oddly supportive disagreements. Off to the side of the stage, Thomas, the sole member of the cast who had British blood, was trying to teach a bunch of American boys how to speak with convincing accents. I’d found that the students often resorted to good-natured ribbing about the limitations and peculiarities of the multiple cultures represented in the school, and that habit had extended into the auditorium on this noisy afternoon.

“Ben!” Thomas yelled in exasperation—he was a bit dramatic that way. “You’ve got to sound bored. Terminally bored. Otherwise, you’ll sound American.” His phlegmatic accent took all the authority out of his instructions.

“What—are you saying Americans are less bored than Englishmen?”

In a long-suffering voice, Thomas responded, “The English sound polite and bored, and Americans sound obnoxious and way too friendly. It’s not a good or a bad thing; it’s just the way it is!”

“Hey!” Kate said from the stage, pausing in a conversation with Seth to address Thomas’s declaration. “Just because we’re friendly doesn’t mean we’re obnoxious!”

Thomas threw his hands up and said, “Just say the line like you’re a stuffy old Englishman, Ben!”

Ben did his best to say, “Where men have intellect, women have soul,” in a convincingly bored British accent, but he failed so miserably that a chorus of dejection went up around him.

I left Thomas to his ranting and approached the stage, where Kate and Seth had been working on a critical scene in which Joy found out she was dying of bone cancer and Lewis discovered how deeply he cared. Kate had lived up to the potential she’d shown during tryouts. She’d come to the play with the fiery temperament her character required, but she’d learned in the weeks since then to modulate her strength and mollify her bluntness, and her acting, in turn, had become infused with the heart of a tough American woman coping as best she could with imminent death and the tender, sweet bloom of love. She was mesmerizing.

“You ready to run the scene again?” I asked. The two actors nodded and stowed their scripts under their chairs. I stepped back and gave the rest of the cast a be-quiet look. Seth and Kate whispered something to each other, then marked a pause and began.

“Can I say anything I want, Jack?” she asked softly, resting her hand on Seth’s arm and inflecting her voice with just enough roughness to express her illness.

“Yes.”

“Anything?”

“Yes.”

“You know it anyway.”

Seth covered her hand with his and paused a moment. “Yes.”

“I’m still going to say it.” There was a bit of humor in that last statement and I loved Kate for it.

“You say it.”

“I love you, Jack.”

Seth seemed startled by the words, as if he’d never read them in the script before, then he grasped her hand more tightly on his arm and, blinking away an invisible fog, masked his own need with his concern for her by gently asking, “Better now?”

“Better,” she said.

Trey was determined to get better. And by “better,” he didn’t just mean “over it.” He meant stronger in every way than he’d ever been before. He was so diligent in his recovery that I worried about his mental health for entirely different reasons. He faithfully downed his happy pills and was on time to all his appointments. He attended two support groups like elderly women go to bingo. He even started going to church occasionally. He was the poster child for suicide recovery, and I knew it was because he’d faced off with his demons, thrown himself into their hades, dared them to take him, and somehow survived. They hadn’t destroyed him, and he wouldn’t allow them to maim him anymore.

He still had down days occasionally. He’d get a little too quiet—his face would seem to harden and shrink, and his eyes would fade back to dirty-swimming-pool gray—but those times never lasted long. He’d learned what to do with them, I guess. I was so proud of him for that.

Trey also took stock of what he wanted from life in the months after
his hospitalization, and that led him to do some major purging. No more borrowed soccer dreams for Trey Davis. He gave up his full-ride sports scholarship, quit college, and enrolled in a prestigious school of culinary arts in Chicago. I guess he figured he’d rather be in debt up to his ears and in flour up to his elbows than kick a ball around a soccer field in honor of a man who’d abandoned him years before. It seemed like a logical conclusion to me.

As the end of my freshman year of college approached, I got busy with my own career plans. Well, kinda. It was more like tiptoeing around my options and hoping a vocation would rear up and smack me in the face. The problem was that I had absolutely no ambitions. I didn’t have a burning need for recognition or a passion for, say, stocks and bonds. And I didn’t want Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection any more than I wanted Donald Trump’s fleet of private jets. I was actually quite happy with one nice pair of pumps and Trey’s hand-me-down Civic.

Trey and I seldom saw each other during the week, as he was a commuter who spent too much time on trains going in and out of Chicago. But we always made it a priority, at some point on Saturdays, to crawl up to our hut and solve the world’s problems.

“The problem with soufflés,” Trey said on one rainy afternoon as we gazed up at the sagging sheet above us, “is that they’re incredibly finicky.”

“Uh-huh.” It was my standard response to Trey’s culinary monologues. Not that I wasn’t interested, but my fascination with food was more practical than theoretical. I wanted to eat it, not discuss it.

“If you don’t pull it out of the oven at exactly the right moment, it’ll either fall or overcook.”

“I liked you better when you were a sports geek,” I said.

He turned his head. “You did?”

I nodded. “Our talks made me less hungry.” I popped a Reese’s Pieces into my mouth.

“So have you decided yet?”

“I think Tom Cruise. He’ll make a better husband than Bruce Willis because he’s shorter—therefore he has more to prove.”

“Oh, good. I was afraid you’d settle for Rob Lowe.” He came up on his elbow. “I mean,” he said patiently, “have you decided on a major?”

“The serious answer or the sarcastic answer?”

“I have a choice?” He seemed genuinely surprised, which made me wonder if I didn’t overdo the sarcasm sometimes.

“I’m going to major in nutrition—the donut variety; minor in potatoes—the deep-fried variety. And if I get bored, I might do an independent study on the health hazards of slimness.”

“So I didn’t have a choice.”

“Nope.”

He smiled. I liked it when he smiled. It reminded me of those months when all he’d done was snarl and sneer and generally be un-Trey. This post–
Looney Tunes
version was a vast improvement. I felt healthier when he was happy.

“I think I might need another decade or two before I decide on a major,” I said.

“You have a year, max.”

“Don’t pressure me.”

“What do you like to do?”

“We’ve been over this before.”

He sighed and tried again. “What do you like to do other than eat and watch
I Love Lucy
reruns?”

“I like to read. And I like to watch you bake. But as far as I know, a person can’t major in Erma Bombeck and minor in vicarious baking, so . . .”

“Shell.”

“Well, science and math are out. That narrows it down.”

“And underwater basket-weaving is a made-up thing, so that’s out too.”

“Really? Darn.”

“That leaves . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow and waited for me to fill in the blank.

“That leaves way too many options.”

“Your adviser’s got to hate you.”

“I think we’ve come to terms with it. She doesn’t tell me I have to make a decision quickly, and I don’t tell her plaid went out with the ’70s. It’s a great arrangement. Tell me more about soufflés.”

He laughed and plopped back down on his back. “You don’t care about soufflés.”

He was right. I really didn’t. But I did have an issue that I’d been tangling with for a while. I figured this was as bad a time as any to raise it, and I dove right in.

“Does life scare you?”

He didn’t laugh or sigh or anything like that. He pursed his lips and thought about it. That was one of the things I loved most about Trey. He only laughed at me when I was being really stupid. The mildly stupid stuff, he actually considered.

“There are things about life that scare me,” he said after a while. “But life in general? Not really—not anymore. I’ve learned a few lessons that have kind of de-scary-ized it for me.”

I pushed myself up into a cross-legged position, my mussed-up hair touching the lowest part of the Huddle Hut’s sheet. “I’d like a Trey Davis tutorial on de-scary-izing, please.”

“Tutorial?”

“On what you’ve learned. The main lessons. Maybe if I get those out of the way, I’ll be able to concentrate on choosing a major rather than sitting around waiting for the sky to cave in.”

He smiled and squinted at me. “You know you’re a nutcase, right?”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“The lessons I’ve learned . . .” He pondered the concept, concocting an answer.