Soul Catcher (11 page)

‘What’s up?’

‘Funny, I was going to ask you the same.’

‘I guess they called you,’ I said.

She sighed. ‘Is there any more of that tuna fish? I’m starved.’

I made her a sandwich. She ate the first half before speaking again.

‘Gene Silvera called me,’ she said.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘That there had been quite a bit of confusion about a boy.’

‘Eddie?’

‘Yes. And another one —’

‘Patrick didn’t do anything!’

Mom was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘Mr Silvera explained that there had been some misapprehension concerning Eddie, and that it’s been cleared up —’

‘How? Did he tell you how?’

‘No, sweetheart, not exactly. But he assured me there would be no problem with your returning to school. He understands that you were quite upset.’

‘How can you believe that pig!’

‘Kate! He is an intelligent man with excellent credentials! Your father and I put our trust in him when we chose the school for you!’

I shook my head. ‘I am not going back to that place!’

‘Kate, darling, you have to go back.’

‘But I can’t, Mom.’

I tried to explain my thoughts of that morning, but it came out garbled and confused. She watched me with what appeared to be a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. She could not bring herself to believe Gwen had had anything to do with it. She was convinced I was exaggerating, that I was emotionally distraught over Patrick, that any misinterpretation of my conduct could be cleared up. She was convinced that Silvera was ‘a responsible, rational man.’

‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Let me stay home.
Please.’

‘Dear,’ she said, shaking her head sadly. ‘I can’t walk away from my life either. You have to face this.’

‘Just let me stay home!’

‘You don’t understand. I’m selling the house. It’s on the market and already someone’s shown interest. My plans are to move into the city to be closer to the office, though I won’t look for my own place until the house is sold. I’ll rent. The divorce is going through, sweetheart, it’s happening. Dad and I agreed that I won’t ask for alimony, and he’ll let me buy out his half of the business for one dollar.’

‘One dollar?’

She nodded.

No wonder Dad had looked so ragged and poor over Thanksgiving.

‘He has a new office. Well, it isn’t
new.
It’s a little run down, but he’ll grow out of it in no time.’ She leaned forward and touched my arm. Looking gravely into my eyes,
the way mothers do when they want you to know they’re serious, she said, ‘It’s better this way. We both want everything completely separate.’

‘What about me?’

‘Well, we both get a hundred percent of you.’ She smiled.

‘How?’ I said. ‘I’m one person, you can’t split me down the middle.’

‘We’ll share you.’ That smile. ‘You have to go back to school, Kate. That’s just the way it is.’

I was full of fight, of determination to win my case, but as I sat there searching for a new angle by which to convince her, her troubled face convinced me instead. She had just come right out and told me that we had no house now. There was no more
we
and no more mutual home. Home now was wherever each of us happened to be. Their divorce had disowned me from their protection. If I ran, I would have to run in circles. There was nowhere to go.

We drove back to Grove in silence. I was sick at the thought of returning to that place, and sicker that it was Mom who was taking me back. I tried to understand why she was doing it, but I couldn’t help blaming her. I kept thinking that she hated me and was abandoning me to a distorted life of lies and misinterpretation. It was no use trying to explain. Home was over.

And so, less than twenty-four hours after leaving Grove, I returned. I had walked away and had been run right back. Patrick was gone. Gwen had betrayed me. Mom didn’t want me. That was how I felt and I could see no reason to sustain an illusion that things would improve. Every connection to love had been snapped. I lay on my bed with my hands folded over my stomach and decided never to move again. I would just lie there until I died.

A vague light strayed in from the lamp on the path outside, and silvery silhouettes emerged on the objects in the room. The longer I stared, the brighter the outlines became, until the room seemed strung with a network of
silver hairs. It was magical. Time stopped and space reformed. I was not in my room at Grove, but in a compartment of darkness within a cloisonne of light.

I could be a metaphysicist, I thought, if I lived.

Then the door burst open and a block of light from the hallway fell across the floor. Gwen barrelled in.

‘Don’t turn on the light,’ I said. ‘I’m going to sleep.’ And I meant: for good.

‘Kate! I am SO glad to see you!’ She bounded onto my bed and tried to wrestle a hug out of me.

I said, ‘Stop it!’ and she pulled back.

Her eyes flitted across my face. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

Didn’t she know? Didn’t she understand that her betrayal had severed our friendship?

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore.’

‘What the fuck do you mean, it doesn’t matter anymore? Will you at least listen to me? I had to do it. I
had
to. I didn’t have any choice.’

I rolled over and faced the window. Kids were heading down for study hall.

‘Okay,’ she said, standing abruptly. She shut the door with a bang and it was dark again. She stood in the middle of the room and stamped her foot twice to get my attention. ‘I never went to New Jersey for Thanksgiving.’

I closed my eyes. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

‘I had an abortion in New York. Kate, are you listening? Listen.’

My stomach lurched. An abortion? But what did that have to do with Eddie, or me, or Patrick, or any of this? I squeezed my eyes tighter.

‘I’m telling you the truth,’ she said, ‘so listen.’

‘Liar.’

‘No. I am telling you the
truth.
I couldn’t before, Kate, no one knows the truth about me.’

‘Great, and everyone knows lies about me.’

‘Eddie gave me the money for the abortion.’

Nothing was clear. ‘You mean you slept with Eddie?’

‘No way! It was a guy last summer, late August, just one of those things. But I knew Eddie had money. He was selling dope to Patrick, Kate —
listen
— that’s just the fact. Maybe not recently, but before. That’s how Patrick got his stuff. And Patrick was covering for Eddie. Eddie told me himself.’

‘You believe him?’

‘Maybe not. I don’t know. But the deal was he’d give me the money if I would sleep with him. I said sure, okay, but you have to wait two weeks after an abortion to heal. We made a date. I got back to school the other day and I couldn’t do it. I knew all this weird stuff was happening with Eddie. I wanted to nark on him. I wanted to get him into some more trouble so he’d forget about sleeping with me. Not that I was ever going to sleep with him, I’d
never
do it with Eddie! He’s such a sleaze. I told him about the party and he typed up his name a couple of times and I tossed the slips in the box. I swear, I was just as surprised Lee Lee did it too, for Laura. I knew about those letters from you, and kind of figured the rest out. It was really just a wild guess. After the party, I went to Silvera and told him about Patrick and Eddie and I said Eddie was onto a whole bunch of girls. Silvera ate it up. So I thought, well, if I just add a little fat to the fire, Eddie will be expelled. The next thing I knew, Pam pulled me into her room and started asking me questions about you and Patrick. It was like they were trying to count up all the rules he ever broke. I didn’t mean it to go that way, Kate, I really want you to believe me. Eddie must have told them Patrick was still taking dope. I know he wasn’t. Jesus, everyone in Drug Group knows that.’

‘I know that too.’

‘I had to keep the questions away from myself. So I told her I didn’t know about you two, that for all I knew you were sleeping together, but I couldn’t vouch for it. I told her you borrowed my black negligee because Patrick was coming home with you for Thanksgiving.’

‘Asshole!’

‘Good, let it out. Get mad at me. I deserve it.’

‘Give me a break, Gwen.’

‘I didn’t know Silvera was going to say what he said. I swear, I would have warned you. I figured he’d say something about Patrick, that was all.’

‘That was more than enough.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

‘So now you’ve gotten fifteen million people expelled and no one knows you had an abortion.’

‘Just you.’

‘Why did you tell me? What makes you think you can trust me?’

‘Can’t I?’

‘Not necessarily.’ I sat up. ‘In fact, maybe I’ll just go tell Silvera all about it. Maybe I’ll do what you did and fuck things up for you so I can get Patrick back into school.’

‘They’ll never believe you,’ she said. Then she smiled and sat on my bed. ‘Besides, he’s already back in. He talked to Silvera and proved he hasn’t been using drugs. He never even left campus.’

‘
He’s
here?’

‘Yup.’

‘Does he know I’m back?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t know you were back.’

I sat on the edge of my bed next to Gwen. I didn’t know if I believed her story or, if it was really true, if I’d be able to forgive her. I couldn’t help feeling hurt.

‘Hit me,’ she said. ‘Go on, do it.’

I shook my head. I didn’t even have the emotional energy left to curse her out.

‘Promise you’ll do something really mean to me later?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ Then I smiled, just a touch of forgiveness, and said, ‘If you’re good.’

Patrick had heard I was back. I went to the lobby windows and saw him standing in front of Girls Dorm with that incredible patience of his, that slow sexy
waiting
of which he was a master. I felt as if I were waking up from a nightmare.
Yet a nightmare, real or not, leaves behind a bitterness, a telltale exhaustion. I felt half-relieved and half-unbelieving, half-deceived by half-truths. My reality was shifting to include illusion, deception, lies. Who was Patrick, and why did he love me — and did he love me? — and was he really standing out there waiting for me? If I went downstairs, swallowed up by the stairwell in the process, would he be there when I arrived or would he,
poof,
be gone?

He waved. He said something that exuded a cloud of frozen breath, but I couldn’t understand. He motioned for me to come outside.
Come, come, I’m waiting.
As I walked down the stairs, I prepared myself for him not to be there when I arrived.

But he was.

He smiled and laughed when he saw me. ‘Okay?’ he said, reaching out his arms.

I shook my head. ‘I’m not going to study hall,’ I told him.

‘You don’t have to. Silvera gave us permission to stay up here together. I didn’t even ask. He told me you were back.’

‘Permission? But you kneed him.’

‘I panicked. He understands. I spent hours talking my way back in last night. He knows I’ve been straight, he believes me. I’m not messing my life up again, Kate. I really meant what I said in the meeting, that I don’t have anywhere else to go.’

‘Neither do I, that’s what I found out today.’

He lay his hand gently on my waist. ‘None of this should have happened,’ he said. ‘Did you talk to Gwen?’

I told him I had.

‘She was mysterious about it,’ he said. ‘But all day she kept saying she’d be able to explain.’

‘She didn’t tell you?’

He shook his head.

‘Maybe I’ll tell you later,’ I said. I was tempted to betray her, to advertise what she’d worked so hard at hiding. But I wasn’t sure. We could all go on betraying each other and the
pain would never end. It had to stop somewhere and I knew if I wanted, it could stop with me.

‘So,’ he smiled, ‘I heard about what Silvera said about you.’

‘Oh
God:

‘No one ever believed it, anyway.’

‘Patrick? Why did you do that for Eddie, with the letters? Why did you lie to me —’

‘I didn’t mean to lie. He lied to
me.
He said they were jokes, you know, anonymous love letters, just to get the girls excited. I never read them.’

‘The fat man said you typed them.’

‘Eddie typed them. I just said I’d ask you to get them to the girls.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me they were jokes? If that was all you thought, I mean.’

‘Eddie said not to. He said you’d just tell the girls.’

‘But what about Louise? Didn’t you wonder — ‘

‘Kate, I swear, I thought she’d laugh it off. I didn’t know.’

I
n the beginning, the excitement of Patrick touching my arm, looking at me googily-eyed, kissing me impulsively, was all that mattered. But love gets wise. Three months, though not a long time, was long enough to understand what he had said when he first got expelled from school. In answer to my courageous assertion of love — saying the words — he had turned before stepping into the cab and said, ‘That’s not the point anymore.’ And that wasn’t the point anymore. Shades of doubt and anger had blended with the innocence of our love for each other. It wasn’t just a matter of passing time and building experience, it was the drugs. Using or not, he was an addict. As with an alcoholic, stopping use of the drug did not cure the disease. The disease was the desire for heroin, the physical knowledge of how good it felt, the craving, the crazy release. Addiction was a yearning stronger than love. You could look at another girl, or into a bottle, or through the eye of a needle and feel the same thing: an insane chemical lust.
Using
as an addict — using sex or wine or smack — is like chaining yourself to the heavens: all you have is that brief moment of freedom, that instant release, and then you’re shackled again to the observation of life from the cloudy distance of
your pain. Some heaven! I yearned for freedom too, but looked for it in Patrick. He was my addiction; I needed him to need me, and believed that with my support he could become healthy and free. I was wrong about that, of course; addicts can only be freed by themselves. But I didn’t know that then, I was totally ensconced in him and in us; and so, in a way, his addiction controlled me, too. It was a hopeless fight which I was determined to win. I came to think of my foe — his addiction — as another girl, a seductive force with the power to pull him away. When he craved
her,
his imagination wandered away from me. When I suspected he was starting to drift, when I sensed it or saw it in his eyes, I became jealous. Jealous of
her,
of the drug, of his desire to be released from his body to heaven. To be released from me, because I tended to bind him to reality, which was, for him, a hell.