Smashed (8 page)

“Let’s get in the backseat,” he said.

But I wasn’t ready for that—not yet.

“Stay here,” I said. “Leave them on.”

“Come on, Katie,” he whispered. “We’re almost there.” He pushed his hand back under the cotton bikinis and started to pull.

“I mean it, Alec, I don’t want to.” I tried to move his hand away, and that’s when he snapped.

“Jesus
Christ
,” he said impatiently. He grabbed my underwear in his fist and pulled. A loud rip followed and then they were gone. He tossed what was left in his hand out the open window.

The world snapped back into place. The mood was more than gone—I was furious. Trembling, I pushed the car door open and jumped out into the dark before he could stop me, grabbing my shorts and cami as I went.

I threw on my top quickly. Shaking, hopping on one leg, I tried to get my shorts back on without losing my balance. I wanted to get home as fast as I could, be safe in my bedroom, but we were at least a mile away from the nearest house and there weren’t any streetlights this far out.

Even with my shorts back on I felt naked. Exposed. I was relieved Alec didn’t flip on the headlights, that he couldn’t see me right now. My hands were on the ground, searching in the dirt and weeds for my torn underwear, but I was lost and confused in the dark. I grabbed something sharp and cried out; I felt a wet spot on my hand that grew sticky even as I wiped it on my cami. Shit. Broken glass. I was done looking.

“Get back in the car, Katie.”

“Take me home,” I said sharply, but my voice quavered.

“Come on, Katie. I’m sorry, okay?” he said. But he didn’t sound at all sorry. “Get back in the car.”

“Only if you’ll drive me home.”

“For Christ’s sake . . .”

“Will you take me home?”

“Yeah. Just get in.”

We pulled into my driveway after one o’clock. He didn’t look at me, didn’t walk me to the door, just stared straight ahead through the windshield. “I’ll see you around,” he said.

My body was still drunk but my mind was wide-awake as I stumbled toward the porch and let myself in, locking the door behind me. What had happened? The shorts had been a bad idea. If I’d worn jeans, things wouldn’t have happened so quickly. Irrational thoughts. Crazy thoughts.

Under the kitchen light, I held out my hands, palms up. One was bleeding and throbbing, cut by what had no doubt been a broken beer bottle on the ground. My hands shook as I washed them. I watched the pink water swirl in the sink and disappear, then grabbed a paper towel and pressed it on the cut, hoping to stop the blood.

Swaying, I moved cautiously toward the cabinet where my mother always kept a couple big jugs of wine. I pulled out the red one, steadied myself, and poured as much as I could into a large glass. Purple liquid sloshed onto the counter; I wiped it up with my good hand. In the living room, I turned the television on loud and sat down to drink the wine.

An hour later I staggered up the stairs, pulling myself up by the banister. My only thought by the time I dropped onto my bed was how to keep it from spinning. I didn’t make it to the bathroom before I threw up.

The only thing to be grateful for the next morning was that it was Saturday and there were no swimming lessons to teach. I threw up again and tried to push Alec out of my mind. Why had I agreed to go to that party with him? What happened to writing him off like a stupid summer fling? Why did I ever start making out with him like that? Why did I ever do
half
the things I did?

Yeah, I was a master of turning over new leaves, all right; my problem was sticking to them. After drinking margaritas at Cheryl’s camp last spring, I’d been so sick, so hungover, that I’d sworn off the hard stuff for good. From then on, it was going to be beer only for me. But here I was, throwing up tequila again. Whatever happened to
that
great idea?

Shit. I took a sip, carefully, from a glass of tap water and looked in the bathroom mirror. Vomit from the night before, dried and crusty, held together several strands of dark hair. My skin was blotchy, my eyes puffy and red as if I’d been crying.
Had I been?
Not in front of Alec, I was sure of that. But after I’d
gotten home and started in on the wine, everything had gotten a little fuzzy.

But Wade—I remembered him. More than I wanted to. He’d been in my dreams half the night, repeating himself again and again:
Your dad lives up to Bangor now. . . . Your dad lives up to Bangor now. . . .

Shut up, Wade
. I said to the mirror. Then another voice, my own:
Don’t shoot the messenger.
True, it wasn’t Wade’s fault. He was just trying to be friendly. Wade didn’t know I’d convinced myself—even now, five years after his disappearance—that my father would have been in touch with us if he possibly could. That something serious must have prevented him from calling. The idea that he lived just three hours away—and that other people knew it—was more than I could bear.

I needed to clean up the mess in the hall, then take a shower and get the smell of puke off me. I needed to sleep. After that, I had a phone call to make. Wade didn’t know better, but there was another person who should have. I had a few questions for my mother.

*     *     *

By late afternoon, I’d slept a little. My hands had stopped shaking. I’d kept down a couple bites of toast. Next to the phone in the kitchen, scraps of paper covered with numbers my mother had left on the answering machine littered the counter. I shuffled through them, discarding the ones that looked old or with names that I never heard anymore, asking myself for the tenth time why she didn’t get herself a damn cell phone like everybody else.

“It’s too expensive,” she always said. “And half the time there’s no signal out here. I’m not paying for that.”

Months ago, when I’d bitched to Cassie and Matt about how she wouldn’t get herself a phone, Cassie had been furious. “It’s the least your mother could do if she’s just going to leave you here by yourself. You know you can always call my parents if you need anything, if you ever can’t find her.”

“I know.”

“I wish we could just adopt you.” Cassie was half-serious.

I smiled. “I’m used to it, Cass.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Matt said.

“I always find her,” I’d said. The truth was, the whole thing made me feel like crap and I didn’t like talking about it. I wished I’d never mentioned the cell phone to begin with.

Here’s the one,
I thought, holding up a bright blue sticky note with
Ken/Mom
and a phone number written on it in my mother’s hand. My stomach churned. I was afraid of what my mother would say. Suddenly, my hands were shaking again. I punched in the numbers three times before getting them right.

A man’s voice answered on the fourth ring.

“I’m looking for Sandra Martin. It’s her daughter,” I said. “Is she there?”

“Sandra,” he called out. “I think it’s your daughter.”

“I just said I was, you moron,” I muttered, but he was gone. The phone had clunked down on a hard surface and all I could hear was the sound of a baseball game on television.

“Hi, honey,” my mother said. “What’s up?”

I was not in the mood for small talk.

“Mom, where does Dad live?”

“What?”

“Where does he live? I want to know.”

“Honey, we’ve been over this. I don’t know where.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, it’s the truth, darlin’.”

“Yeah? Then why did I meet a guy last night who says he knows you and who says Dad lives in Bangor?
Wade
somebody.”

“Wade . . . Wade
Dwyer
?”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

Silence.

“Mom, why didn’t you
tell
us?”

My mother cleared her throat.

“You okay, Sandra?” the man’s voice said.

My mother’s hand slapped over the receiver, muffling her voice.

“Katie,” she said into the phone, whispering now. “Can we talk about this when I get home?”

“Right, whenever
that
is!” My face flushed and my whole body trembled. She had never made me so mad. “This is important, Mom. I want to know
now
.”

She must have heard the craziness in my voice because finally she answered me.

“Yes, your father lives near Bangor. He doesn’t want to see us,” she said. “That’s why I never told you.”

A flash of heat ripped through me. My heart stopped for an
instant, then pounded forward, faster than ever before. I was yelling now.

“Maybe the one he doesn’t want to see is
you
!”

I hung up the phone and sobbed like I was twelve all over again.

*     *     *

A week had passed and the morning was sweltering. An unrelenting sun beat down from a hazy blue sky. For four days it had been boiling hot and humid, over ninety-five degrees. I stood up to my waist in the water while I taught, dunking under between classes to wet my face and hair, but the water was warm now, and the effect was fleeting.

Around ten o’clock, something shifted. The air changed. Clouds started rolling in, dark and ominous, and the wind picked up, straining the leaves on their branches and turning them back. Then the sun disappeared and the sky turned an eerie gray green, a color that I’d seen only once before, when a small tornado came through town in July three years ago, leaving behind a twenty-foot-wide swath of destruction. A chill ran through me; it had all happened so quickly then, and it was happening quickly now.

I blew my whistle. “Everybody out!” I yelled. There was no lifeguard at our beach; I’d have to do.

No one needed convincing. The beach grew quiet quickly as mothers pulled their kids out of the water, put them into cars, and drove out of the dirt parking lot across the road, their wheels sending swarms of dust into the hot air. Lightning lit
the sky, then vanished. The wind stopped as quickly as it had started, and now everything was dead calm: silent, still. I needed to get out of there, too. I looked around. Everyone was out of the water. I ran for my backpack, then sprinted toward my bike. Large drops of rain started down from the sky, pelting my face, my head, my back. I wondered if it would hail.
Better that than another tornado,
I thought. I grabbed my bike from under a tree and ran.

Then I saw his truck.

Alec stopped quickly in the road next to me and jumped out. “Get in,” he said. I started to lift up my bike but he grabbed it, throwing it in the back of the truck. “Get in!”

Inside the cab, I took out my towel and dried my face. Goose bumps rose on my skin. The temperature had dropped quickly. “Thanks,” I said, not looking at him.

“Don’t you listen to the weather reports?” His tone was nearly parental. I felt scolded, like a child.

“Well, I guess nobody did, because everyone showed up for class today,” I shot back.

What are you doing here, anyway,
I thought,
if you assumed everyone would have heard the weather and stayed home?

Large pieces of hail began striking his windshield, ice the size of golf balls that made it hard to see. It would have been nearly impossible to get home on my bike in this.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, and passed him my towel. He wiped his dripping face and hair.

“You’re welcome.”

Neither of us looked at the other; neither of us spoke. Minutes later, I was home.

We were in my driveway, truck idling, wipers sweeping rhythmically across the glass. The hail had stopped as suddenly as it started, and now it was just pouring rain.

“I have to get back to work,” he said.

“In
this
?”

“I’m painting a bathroom.”

“Oh.” I shoved my towel in my backpack and reached for the door handle. Alec jumped out of the truck, retrived my bike, and ran it into the garage while I sprinted toward the porch.

A moment later, Alec ran back to his truck. He lifted one hand to wave as he pulled out of the driveway, and then he was gone.

That afternoon, I turned the scene over in my mind: Alec appearing, lifting my bike into his truck, driving me home in the storm.
Maybe he just happened to be driving by at the right moment
, I thought, but that made no sense. The beach road was a dead end. Had he been working when the storm struck and come from wherever he was to check on me, to make sure I was okay? He’d heard the weather reports—he’d made that clear. He often listened to the radio when he worked.

Whatever had happened, he’d been there, helping me out. After the party in Bethel, it was the last thing I expected.

I was just beginning to understand how unpredictable he could be.

Megan and Cheryl and I were going to the party at Haley Pond together; we’d planned it weeks ago. It was our annual last-act-of-the-summer ritual. When Megan called at four o’clock the day of the party with some lame excuse and said she couldn’t give me a ride after all, I was furious. The beat-up Escort my mother let me drive was in the shop for a couple days—Megan knew this. I had no car of my own. And who wants to show up at a party alone, anyway? There was no way I was going by myself.

“You’ll find another ride,” Megan said. “We’ll catch you there.”

“Probably not,” I said, but she’d hung up already.

From the table next to the phone, I picked up a postcard from England that had arrived a couple days before. It was a photograph of a guy with a Mohawk and about twenty piercings leaning against a bright red phone booth. On the back, Cassie’s scrawl:

Hey Girlfriend,

I think I’m in love. His name is Simon. (This is NOT him).

More soon—

Love, Cass

If Cassie were here right now, no other plans would be necessary. She was my partner for all nights out. Not to mention someone I desperately needed to talk to.
God
, I couldn’t wait until she got home.

I dropped the postcard and dialed Stan. Whoever he was going with, he’d haul them out to Westland to pick me up. That’s the way Stan was—generous, easygoing, always willing to help out. To him, no favor was too big for a friend. But Stan didn’t pick up his phone.
Damn it.
I slammed the receiver down. I was getting desperate.