Authors: Kelly Braffet
The man lifted the papers. “The GPS device in her car says she was here last night from ten forty-five to eleven thirty. So you might as well tell me the truth.”
“I’m not lying.” Judging by the guy’s coffee-stained shirt and the grim worry in his face, the truth was the last thing he wanted to hear, anyway. “She was here. She isn’t now. You want to come in, see for yourself?”
“I want to find my daughter,” Elshere said doggedly, but when Patrick stepped back from the door he stepped through it. Patrick offered him a beer and he shook his head. “I don’t drink.”
“That’s right. You’re the minister.”
Elshere sank down on the couch. Everything about him seemed crumpled, concave. “I’m not a minister. I’m a home church leader.”
“Water?”
Elshere nodded.
When Patrick came back, the guy had picked the cable bill up from the table and was staring at it. “You’re Michael Cusimano?” he said, in a tone of faint disbelief.
“Patrick.” Patrick handed him the glass. “Mike’s my brother.”
Elshere studied him. “You’re Patrick.”
“I just said that.”
“I should tell you,” he said, “I know the Czerpak family pretty well.”
Patrick sat down in the armchair. “Yeah?”
“You’re the one who called the police.”
Patrick didn’t say anything to that.
“You’re the one who did the right thing. Eventually.” There was just the faintest hint of emphasis on the
eventually;
the resounding certainty in the way he spoke allowed no room for doubt, either in himself or in anybody else. Patrick saw how it could get old quickly, growing up with that voice in your ear.
“Eventually,” he said.
“How exactly do you know my daughter? You’re quite a bit older than she is.”
“I know her from the night she walked up to me and told me she wanted to be friends because my old man killed the Czerpak kid,” Patrick said. “She hasn’t left me alone since.”
Elshere looked stunned. “She did that?”
Patrick nodded.
“Why would she do that?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say because she knew you’d hate it.”
Elshere’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah.” That note of certainty was gone. “That sounds right.” He stared down at his sheaf of papers, flipping through them, but Patrick didn’t think he was actually seeing them. “Tell me,” he finally said. “When did you know you were going to have to do it?”
“What,” Patrick said, “call the police?”
Elshere nodded. “It must have—” He stopped, and then started again. “It must have felt like such a horrible thing to do. When did you know?”
When had he known? When he saw the car? No. Before that. He’d gone into the garage knowing what he would find. When he saw the old man, crying on the couch, right where Jeff Elshere sat now? That felt wrong, too. When they’d come off shift, all three of them, and the old man had said,
Hey, boys, let’s go hit the Strike;
when Mike and Patrick said, no, they were going to go sleep, they were hungover from the night before, and the old man had gone anyway?
When they’d come home from Patrick’s mother’s funeral?
You boys go find something to do with yourselves. Your old man’s going to get drunk
.
He had no intention of answering Elshere’s question, but—he’d always known. It had to be him. There was nobody else. Mike cruised along. Mike coasted. Mike found the path of least resistance and took it. He had a lousy job, unsteady pay with no security, surrounded by people who looked at him and saw his father; but looking for a new one would be too hard. Like moving out on his own would have been hard, or drinking less, or sorting through the boxes in the garage. Mike didn’t do things that were hard unless somebody forced him. In a way, Caro had been perfect for him: she was easy to look at, she could cook, and she washed a mean load of laundry. She had no family, no friends, no other loyalties. As far as Mike was concerned, she had sprung fully-formed from the tap at Jack’s Bar and Sandwiches, filling the hole that the old man left when he went to prison. Mike could fit himself over her like a wheel on an axle and spin happily away without ever wondering where they were going, if they were moving at all.
“Have you had sex with my daughter?” Elshere asked. “The age of consent in this state is sixteen. Layla’s seventeen. We probably wouldn’t bother with a corruption charge. We—we have bigger problems right now. Layla is—” He stopped talking.
Patrick thought of Layla, of the cut-and-paste sexuality she’d taken straight from the movies. Layla, with whom he’d engaged in two separate acts of explicit sexual congress, and he couldn’t imagine how either had brought her any pleasure and after both he’d wanted her out of his sight so badly he could barely look at her. Layla and her lacy purple bra and the mess she’d let her friend make of her body, the coffin ring and the skeleton earrings and the death fixation and the wild teary look in her eyes the night before.
I want away, I want out. Justinian hurts me but he’s the only one who loves me
. “What?” Patrick was surprised at the challenge in his voice. “Layla is what?”
“I’ve made abstinence my life’s work. You said it yourself. She does things just because I hate them. Even if those things ruin lives. Even if one of those lives is hers.” He looked at Patrick and his eyes were tired. “I know I’ve failed her. All I want to know is how badly.”
As if he couldn’t see that just as easily by taking one look at Layla, by listening to a tenth of what came out of her mouth. “Pretty fucking badly, I’d say,” Patrick told him, and was satisfied to see that the guy at least had the decency to wince. “You tried the clearing in the woods?”
Elshere nodded. “There, everywhere. All of her friends’ houses. I even drove into Pittsburgh. I’ve been driving all night.” He shook his head. “Layla is so
smart
,” he said, and the mystification and hurt in his voice was so great that even Patrick felt a little sorry for him.
“I hope you find her,” he said. “I really do.”
The business card he gave Patrick before he left said,
Price Above Rubies. Treasure your teen for all she’s worth
.
TWELVE
Caro’s car died Wednesday night. This time, all the jumper cables in the world couldn’t bring it back to life. Darcy tried, Gary tried, a drunk guy who’d been slamming back martinis at the bar all night tried. But no matter which battery they hooked the Civic up to, when Caro turned the key there was nothing.
Somebody said it was probably the starter coil, or the fuel pump, or the something else. Caro wasn’t listening. She sat behind the unresponsive wheel of her corpse of a car, which had taken her away from Margot and Pitlorsville and Columbus and Athens and who knew how many other places, she didn’t, not anymore. It had been her shelter and her refuge and her friend, it had waited for her in countless parking lots like other people’s mothers waited for them at bus stops in grade school, but when it died she was surprised by how quickly it became nothing to her.
She left it in the parking lot and got a ride home with Darcy, who said, “That car’s been giving you nothing but trouble as long as I’ve known you. Sayonara, garbagemobile. Right?”
“Right,” Caro said, and climbed her exhausted way up the incredibly
steep and dangerous front steps to the Cusimanos’ house. Her feet and back and shoulders shrieked in three-part harmony. A tall, narrow window was set into the wall on either side of the front door; they were both dirt-spotted and shrouded with cobwebs, but through one of them she could see Mike asleep on the couch. Passed out, more likely. He and Patrick had gone to Jack’s that night. By now Patrick would be at Zoney’s but judging by the open cooler on the floor next to the coffee table Mike had come home and continued the night’s good work. His boots were off, his feet propped on the arm of the couch. The bottoms of his socks were ashen. His jaw hung slack and through the walls she could hear his snoring, and the television laugh track.
Drive that boozy look from his face and slap the dust off his jeans, and he would be the Mike who had danced with her, joyful and laughing, under the disco ball at Jack’s. Who had found out the next morning that she was sleeping in her car, looked outraged, and said,
Like hell you are
. One night she’d had a bad dream—not just an eek-I’m-falling dream but a Margot dream, a real scorcher—and he’d stroked her back until she stopped shaking and could get back to sleep. She remembered how gladly she had burrowed into his chest, how grateful she had been then for his safe solid bigness.
And—still standing on the porch—she also remembered the night of the Great Apocalyptic Mistake (although maybe she couldn’t call it that anymore, since she’d made that mistake half a dozen times since), when she’d stood exactly here and looked through the dirty window exactly as she was now. To the couch where Patrick had been lying, almost exactly as Mike was now, but awake. She’d had a bad shift, not unlike the one she’d just finished, with her feet and her back and her shoulders and all of it. Patrick played his cards close. Most of the time his expression was cool and removed or cool and amused or just cool, but watching, always watching, with those dark-water hazel eyes of his, so impossible to read. But that night, from the darkness, she had looked into his face and seen keen, intelligent
despair, and while she thought she appreciated Mike’s optimism and cheerful determination, what she saw in Patrick reached into her and held her. Because Mike’s optimism was the stubborn kind and it felt increasingly like a lie, a willful ignorance in the face of all the facts. It made her feel like she didn’t know what she knew, like the world wasn’t what it seemed to be, and it made her feel crazy. What she saw in Patrick was what she felt in herself. She had walked through the door and bitched about the lock and watched him eat pasta with his fingers, and all the while she had known what would happen. Mistake or no. Apocalypse or no.
Inside, Mike slept on.
Caro felt like she was driving on rims. She was afraid all the time. When she lay on Patrick’s pillow she couldn’t relax, because what if she left a hair, what if Mike came in and found it there, long and dark and obviously not his brother’s? When she lay on her own pillow, she couldn’t relax, either, because what if Mike wanted to have sex and what if sex with Mike was the right thing, what if the right thing was just to let this mess with Patrick go and fall back into her old life? Sex and takeout and Jack’s Bar and Sandwiches. Could she even do that, if she wanted to, or had things gone too far? Making out in stolen moments the way she and Patrick did was for kids. The co-brushing of teeth, the payment of bills, poking Mike when he snored to make him roll over—that was grown-up life, that was stability, that was what she’d wanted as long as she could remember. A world that didn’t change between going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning. How much was she willing to give up, she’d wonder, what was she willing to lose?
Then Patrick would just—be there—watchful, aware, his eyes growing murky with tension. And she would think: maybe, maybe … but wasn’t that always the way, didn’t she always think
maybe, maybe
when she met a guy? Wasn’t it the potential of the relationship that caught her heart and the drudgery that dulled it? Would Patrick, in time, come to seem just as clumsy and predictable as Mike sometimes
did; would he turn out to have a thing for car sex or baby talk or sexy nurse costumes that at first seemed harmless and easily indulged but that grew and grew and pressed and pressed until she wanted to scream?
Caro walked around to the back door. She took off her shoes, opening the screen door slowly and carefully so that it wouldn’t sing or cry, and then she crept upstairs to their bedroom, lay down on the bed, and pulled her knees to her chest. Closed her eyes, tried to sleep, eventually succeeded. Sometime in the night she felt the bed move as Mike lay down. All the way on the other side of the mattress, as far away from her as he could get.
On Thursday night, Mike wanted Patrick to go drinking with him again. Patrick was clearly running on fumes but Caro begged him to go. She told him she was worried about what would happen when Mike got drunk, at Jack’s or elsewhere, and Patrick wasn’t there to run interference. Which was true, but even truer was that when Patrick and Mike were drinking together, neither of them was with her. She was tired of being confused and torn. As the night passed at the restaurant, she started to think: if she could get her car fixed, she could just leave the whole damn mess behind. Chalk Patrick up to Wrong-Place-Wrong-Time and add Mike to the long list of Boys. The Boys were the true division of Caro’s life. Schools blurred together, because she’d start the year in one and finish somewhere else and a year later find herself back in the first, but the Boys came one after another in a steady march, occasionally overlapping but never repeating. Before Mike there was Scott and before Scott there was Andrew and before Andrew there was Dave, the burger-bar guy from Columbus; before Dave were Robbie, Matthew, Steve, Bryan, on back to Brent, who had been their landlord when Caro was in sixth grade. The things she hadn’t known then, the things she hadn’t known. Brent had bought her dinner sometimes—Boston Market in
a flimsy plastic container—and given her a couch when Margot got too wild. After the first time they’d had sex, she’d thought he was her boyfriend.
Are we going to get married?
she’d asked him, once. Imagining a sort of dollhouse life, with turkey dinners and lawn sprinklers and lots of cute clothes. Not the shabby thin-walled duplex where they both lived, where sometimes he had to tell her to turn it down so her mother didn’t hear how much fun they were having (although it hadn’t been that much fun, she’d only made noise because she thought she was supposed to). He’d laughed at her, and then grown quiet, and not long after that they’d moved and he’d hung up on her when she called him.
Lately, she found herself thinking about Brent a lot, and for the first time, feeling angry. Because she had been twelve years old and all she’d wanted was a safe place, and now she was twenty-five and she wanted the same thing, and life shouldn’t be so fucking hard, you shouldn’t have to give so fucking much up.