Authors: Robin Wasserman
Pointless patrolling or not, West was in no hurry to get home.
Hayley Patchett and Emily Dunster were leaning against the darkened window of Hot Buns, clearly waiting for the players to arrive. Baz slipped an arm around Hayley. Her slightly less blond and significantly less pretty friend nestled into Matt’s bulk.
“You should have told me West was coming,” Hayley said, with a giggle. She said everything with a giggle. “We wouldn’t have blown off Kaitly.”
“Probably we would have anyway,” Emily said.
“Okay, yeah, probably. But we could have found
someone
for him.”
Baz elbowed West. “Our boy’s not into the ladies, is he?”
Smile,
West told himself.
Grit teeth, laugh, go along, get along.
It was his formula for survival, and it had always worked.
Nick had thought him a coward, though he’d been too kind to say so. West let him think it. That was easier than explaining something he still couldn’t explain to himself.
Someday, I’ll tell Nick the real story.
So he’d promised himself. Someday, in this infinite future they’d pretended they would have together, he would explain that Nick wasn’t the first.
First had come Miles Stoddard, fullback on West’s Pee Wee football team. West, who’d still gone by Jeremiah back then, had been thirteen, a halfback, and just old enough to know better. That hadn’t stopped him, as it hadn’t stopped Miles. They were, after all, thirteen, well practiced at the fine art of getting themselves off but less skilled at suppressing the flagpole when it deemed the most inopportune moments – bus rides, gym class, Sunday dinner with Grandma – a good time to rise. They could, perhaps, be forgiven for experimenting. It was only a few feverish fumbles in the Stoddards’ rec room or behind Jeremiah’s locked bedroom door: harmless. Miles had been a freckled redhead, fond of farting the alphabet and telling jokes about dead cats. He hadn’t yet discovered deodorant. West suspected that the whole thing would have petered out on its own after a few weeks, and then maybe everything would have been different. But instead, Mrs. Stoddard came home “sick” so she could catch a pivotal wedding on her soap – only to discover her half-dressed son with his hands down another boy’s pants.
West had been sent home, and that night, Miles downed the full supply of his mother’s antidepressants. He lived, and was promptly shipped off to his grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. Within a few weeks, the rest of the Stoddard family followed, never to be seen in Oleander again.
Things hadn’t been so stark at the West household. Everyone knew what happened; no one spoke of it. There’d been a private conference with their minister, who’d preached tolerance and understanding and so been informed by the Wests, in no uncertain terms, that he should stick to the Lord’s business and stay out of theirs.
There’d been weekly doctor’s appointments, ostensibly to treat West for the “shock” of his sort of best friend’s sort of suicide attempt. The doctor spoke at first in veiled terms of
hormones
and
control,
and then in horrifyingly less veiled terms of
masturbatory
reconditioning.
These were accompanied by supervised viewings of healthily heterosexual porn.
His parents never asked about the appointments. They didn’t speak to West at all, unless it was absolutely necessary. When he dared speak to them, they generally made an excuse and left the room.
More than once, he came home to find his mother weeping.
And then, just when it seemed the cold war would last forever: a thaw.
A Sunday hunting trip, father and son, just like they’d done in the time he had come to think of as a gone-forever Before. Everything had been normal as they trekked into the woods, set up camp in their favorite clearing, and waited for unlucky deer. It was only once they rested their faces against the sights of their rifles, and there was no chance their eyes would meet, that his father spoke.
“Do you like being a member of this family, Jeremiah? Do you value being a West?”
“Of course, sir.”
There was a silence as his father took that in. Then, “When your mother was pregnant with you, she always told people she didn’t care if you were a boy or a girl, as long as you were healthy. But I cared. I wanted a son. You know why?”
“No, sir.”
“I wanted someone who would grow up just like me. To play football for the Bulldogs. To take my place as head of the household. To run the business when I’m gone. To uphold the West name in Oleander for another generation.” He laughed. “Selfish dreams of a selfish man.”
West thought it might be the longest speech of his father’s life.
“I was mistaken,” he added.
“No, Dad, I —”
“You’re a man yourself now, Jeremiah, or at least you’re getting there. And a man gets to choose who he wants to be.” His father paused, and even now, five years later, West could still remember how that moment had felt, the sliver of hope between one sentence and the next. He’d lived an entire life in that pause for breath, a different life of possibilities he’d never let himself imagine. It was an impossibly short time to possess something; even now, five years later, he still felt the loss.
“So you need to choose,” his father continued. “Do you want to be a member of this family? Do you want to be the kind of man who follows in his father’s footsteps? Do you
want
to be a West?”
After that day, he’d stopped going by Jeremiah. The new nickname was a persistent reminder of his choice, and the reasons behind it. He’d vowed not to let himself forget – and then he had, and there had been consequences.
It didn’t seem fair that Nick was the one who’d had to bear them.
“Admit it, West,” Hayley said now, with a pointed wink. “If the
right
girl came along…”
Baz gave her shoulder a warning squeeze. That was territory he’d already marked, which made it definitionally the wrong girl for anyone else.
“Not my man West. He’s holding out for a conjugal visit, am I right?” Baz said. “After a year behind bars, even Cass Porter might get desperate enough to let someone in her pants.”
Hayley’s giggle took on a tinge of faux shock. “You’re terrible!”
“The only thing getting into Cass’s pants is that perma-stick up her ass,” Emily said. Then, as if realizing she might have overstepped the Hayley-laid lines of propriety, not to mention committed the worse crime of being surpassingly clever, she giggled herself. “I mean, not that it matters. You wouldn’t
really
… with a
murderer.
Would you, West?”
“We don’t know what really happened,” West said. The baby killer’s boyfriend, that’s who he’d been after the killing day. If he seemed to be acting strangely, a little distant, a little
not
there,
it was easy enough to ascribe it to the shock of discovering that the girl he’d dated on and off for the last two years, hypothetically scrabbling at her virginal defenses, was a cold-blooded killer.
“It could have been an accident,” the girls chorused with him.
“Well, it could have,” he said, but it was halfhearted. Everyone knew she’d done it. He supposed it indicated some defect of personality that he couldn’t bring himself to hate her for it. They’d never been close, even in those early months when he’d done all he could to push things forward, proving something to them both. It wasn’t until she was gone – or, maybe more to the point, Nick was gone – that he realized the shallow relationship was more honest than anything he had left.
“If she’s so innocent, why did she run?” Hayley said. “Innocent people don’t try to escape prison.”
“Or nuthouses,” Emily added.
“Who cares where she was?” Hayley said. “What matters is she’s
back.
Jamie Meriden’s mom saw her crossing Fourth Street during the storm.”
Baz snorted. “Jamie Meriden’s mom snarfs so much Percodan she probably sees
elephants
crossing Fourth Street on a regular basis.”
“Chris Tapper saw her, too, when he was trying to get off the road,” Emily said. “He saw her heading into the woods.”
“I heard that old lady who lives by the cemetery saw her heading
out
of the woods,” Matt said. “And since when do you talk to Chris Tapper?”
Emily cleared her throat. “I’m just saying, she’s back. Everyone knows it.”
“So what?” West said, hoping it wasn’t true, that Cass wouldn’t be that bold or that stupid.
Emily gave a dramatic shudder. “So it freaks me out, thinking about her lurking around somewhere. I mean, she
killed
a
baby.
All those times we hung out with her, like she was totally normal or something. A week before it happened, she slept over! What if she’d…?”
Matt gave her a hug. “I’ll protect you, babe.”
Emily kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, babe.”
Hayley rolled her eyes.
“What?” Emily said. “It’s creepy, okay? And why would she even come back? Do you think she has, like, some kind of plan?”
“If she did come back, we’ll make her regret it,” Baz said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“Can we get back to business?” West said.
“Aw, Jeremiah wants us to shut up about his killer girlfriend,” Baz said. West tried not to wince. At some point in the spring, Baz had started calling him by his first name – always with a twisted smile suggesting he knew exactly how uncomfortable it made West and would keep poking until he could figure out why. “Don’t worry, buddy, for your sake, we’ll go easy on her.”
Hayley laughed. “Not
too
easy, I hope.”
“No. Not too easy.” Baz wasn’t laughing.
They “patrolled.” This meant they meandered up and down the street, flashlight beams dancing on the concrete, girls whining that they’d been promised a more engaging evening, boys exchanging boasts about beer consumption and who would do what with whose mother. West trailed them by a distance that widened with every lap of the block, lost not in his own thoughts, but in the effort to avoid them. The wind had picked up, and thrummed in his ears.
It sounded like West’s name – his real one.
It sounded like Nick’s voice.
It had been happening a lot lately. Ever since the storm.
Jeremiah.
Just a whisper, easily imagined, if you were the kind of loser who imagined the wind whispering your name in the voice of your dead lover. It was a kind of loser West resolutely willed himself not to be.
But:
Jeremiah.
Jeremiah, I’m waiting.
Waiting
in
the
dark.
He’d never had much of an imagination. West hadn’t been able to imagine the two of them together, not until the very moment that he’d pressed his lips to Nick’s for the first time and slipped his hands under Nick’s shirt and tasted sweat and sweet and felt muscle flex beneath slick flesh. Even then, he’d lacked the vision to see what to do next. To see how they could be what they needed to be to each other. To imagine his life as anything other than what it was.
And then Nick was gone, and West couldn’t have imagined what that would be like, either. The worst of it – the worst of the black despair that sucked him down and down and down – was that he now couldn’t imagine escaping it.
He certainly couldn’t imagine Nick back to life.
But: The wind. The whispers.
I’m cold here.
I’m alone here.
Here
in
the
dark.
Waiting
for
you.
There was a crash of broken glass, and West swallowed a scream. But it wasn’t a vengeful ghost. It was just an idiot punching his fist through a window. “What the hell?”
Matt had, at least, been smart enough to wrap his T-shirt around his fist before slamming it into the rainbow display window of Green’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Shoppe. He shrugged. “Emily said she wanted ice cream.”
“I
said
I wished it was open,” she gasped through her laughter.
“Now it is.” Baz widened the hole in the glass enough to reach through and unlatch the door. The consummate gentleman, he held it open for Hayley.
“I thought the whole point of this was to
stop
looters,” West said.
“Do you see any looters?” Baz said, looking up and down the street. “Then job well done. Seems like we deserve our just desserts.”
But the freezer was empty – and the store wasn’t. A scrawny guy with black glasses and hair gelled into the approximation of a miniature Mohawk emerged from the back room, shouting and threatening to call the police.
West knew him: Jason Green. Everyone knew him, just like everyone knew Bob and Jesse who ran the gourmet sandwich place and Popeye Pete who ran the tattoo parlor and Ellen Choi who served coffee at the luncheonette and taught knitting on the weekends and Farah and Kitty who’d been “roommates” for more than sixty years. What people guessed about Nick, they knew about Jason, who made sure they didn’t forget it. He was fearless. This year he’d tried to start a gay-straight alliance at the high school, but the only person who showed up to the meeting was an English teacher who’d been ordered to under penalty of firing.
Or so West had heard. He averted his eyes from people like Jason, for fear anyone might notice him noticing.
“I’ll do it!” Jason shouted. “I’ll call the cops!”
“Good luck,” Baz said. “Last time I checked, no phones. But if you do get through” – he tapped his badge proudly – “tell my dad Deputy Demming says hi.”
“You have to leave here. Now.”
“Why should we?
You’re
here.”