Maybe he thought I’d meant we should sit down to duck out of the sight line of the camera. He certainly seemed intent on touching me. God, this was so weird, and the golf ball banged inside my head. “There are cameras all over the house,” I clarified, nodding toward another above the entrance to the kitchen. “This morning my dad’s going to Hawaii for a week. I won’t be eighteen until January, and he didn’t think it was proper to leave me alone for that long until I’m a legal adult. So he had the cameras installed as babysitters.”
Doug kept tracing around the very edge of too much. His fingers slid past my bangs to my ear and found the back of my hair, usually smooth and straight, now hopelessly tangled with rain and sleep. He didn’t mind. Stroking there, he whispered, “How about your bedroom?”
“No cameras in my bedroom. There’s just one trained on the door so my dad can see if someone goes in there besides me.” My dad wasn’t a perv. Well, I guess he sort of was, doing it with a twenty-four-year-old. But he wasn’t a perv to me. And then, by degrees, I realized what Doug was getting at. He wanted to go into my bedroom with me.
I should have been outraged. I wasn’t. I gaped at him, wondering where in the world this desire for him had come from, and blinking hard every time the golf ball whacked the inside of my skull.
“Damn,” he said, like it was a bummer we couldn’t sneak into my bedroom together. Not like this was a bizarre proposition for him to make in the first place. “Your sister seems pretty cool. Isn’t she staying with you while your dad’s gone?”
I laughed, which made my head hurt worse. “Ashley? That’s my dad’s girlfriend. She lives here.”
“Oh.” Doug’s hand stopped in my hair.
“But he’s making an honest woman out of her. Next Wednesday at exactly eight P.M. , she’ll become my stepmother. She figured out the time change from Oahu for me so I can think of them and celebrate simultaneously. I am so thrilled.”
Doug raised one eyebrow at me. “Is that sarcasm? You are not sarcastic.” He detangled his fingers from my hair and put his hand on the knee of my damp jeans. The warmth of his body soaked through the fabric and started me tingling again. “I woke you up coming over, didn’t I? I wanted to make sure you were okay. Are you okay?” He looked straight into my eyes.
I wasn’t sure of the answer to this question. So I asked, “How about you?”
He extended his leg with the brace and gazed ruefully at it. “It was just my fibula, the smaller bone, which they said only bears ten percent of the weight in your leg.”
“That’s lucky,” I sighed, feeling a lot less guilty. “So you got a brace instead of a cast.”
“No, the splint’s on just until the swelling goes down. They’ll put a cast on it in a few days. I should have it off again in six weeks.”
I ticked off calendar days in my head. “Six weeks! That’s a few days before State!” Doing well at the State swim tournament was the only way for Doug to get his scholarship to FSU.
He shrugged, but I saw the tension in his shoulders. It crackled down his arm to his hand on my knee.
I asked, “Did you hurt your leg worse by pulling me out of the car?”
He shook his head no without looking at me, so I knew the answer was yes. “And Mike’s okay. They didn’t even take him to the hospital.”
“And the deer?”
He smiled and squeezed my knee. Again I was struck by how weird it was that he touched me like this. But I got lost in his green eyes that crinkled at the edges as he grinned. “You and that damn deer. You and Mike both missed it and hit each other.”
Leaning closer, he rubbed my knee. Hard. A deep-tissue massage. Sparks shot through my thigh. “We’re safe from killer ruminants when we stick to the coastline,” he said. “This morning we can crash together, ha ha.” Here was something I’d never seen: Doug nervous. He made jokes all the time, but he never looked nervous when he did it. “Then later, if you’re feeling better, we could get some dinner, go see a movie, hang out after.” His eyebrows went up briefly like hang out after held hidden meaning, but I figured this was a tick of his that I hadn’t noticed before. I’d hardly exchanged a word with him since the ninth grade except this week:
Me: You’re late for swim practice.
Doug: You’re not the boss of me.
And in years past, before we were on the varsity swim team together:
Me: Stop copying off my math test.
Doug: You think awfully highly of your math skills, Miss Commander.
“I can’t drive until I get my cast off,” he went on. “You can drive my Jeep. I feel stupid asking you to drive, but I really want to see you. Or we could stay in and watch TV if you’re not up to it. Zoey?”
His tone had turned to concern because I’d closed one eye against the throbbing in my head. I was a bit slow on the uptake this morning. But I finally understood. Strange as the last twelve hours had been, they’d just gotten a lot stranger. Doug Fox was asking me out.
Something didn’t add up. I fished for more information. Pressing my fingertips to my eyebrow above my glasses to keep my brain from spilling onto the upholstery, I asked, “If you can’t drive, how’d you get here?”
I felt terrible about Doug essentially giving up his chance at State by saving my life (or not). I felt almost as guilty about him losing his ability to drive. Most things to do in our town were lined up along the beach where the tourists could reach them in the summer. Because the beach houses and condos were so expensive, the population of our town was centered a few miles inland where the land was cheaper, along with downtown and the high school. And though thousands of tourists swelled the population in the height of the season, now that it was September and they’d left, the town was small. Too small for public transportation. Not a bus or a subway or a taxi in sight. If Doug couldn’t drive, he was stuck.
“My brother brought me,” Doug said.
I leaped up, snatching my knee away from his hand. I crossed the room and heaved open the heavy front door.
Our porch looked over our garden, which my mom had hired a landscaper to design with native grasses and flowering vines that could survive the hot summers. Six other houses had similar porches and gardens sloping to a common courtyard paved with local stone. In the center of the courtyard idled a pickup I recognized from around town, with a man’s bare feet sticking out the passenger window. Not the police car I’d expected, but after a long night of responding to his brother’s wrecks and patrolling for rogue deer, Officer Fox must be off duty.
And suddenly, staring at that pickup, I understood all the problems that were throwing the golf ball as hard as they could at the inside of my skull. Last night Doug had rescued me from my car, feeling like a hero to my damsel in distress. I’d lain on top of him in a thunderstorm and snuggled with him and let him put his hands in my hair. And he’d taken that seriously, even though this had happened just a few hours after I very possibly had sex with Brandon for the second time.
Or, in an alternative scenario so awful that I hardly dared consider it, Doug’s invitation for a date was some kind of blackmail. He sure was being nice to me after my dad’s threat to his brother. And his brother sat in his pickup in the center of my neighborhood’s courtyard. He had come to our home and stuck his feet into the ocean breeze as if to say I know everything about your mother.
The door banged shut behind me. Only then I realized I’d left it open. Doug and I stood in a bubble of escaped air-conditioning in the hot day. His hot finger traced a Z on my back, through my T-shirt. Every one of his touches had been a quirky brush against an unexpected part of my body. But this time I was determined to keep things cold.
I turned to him. As I spun, he kept his finger at the same level so it trailed around my shoulder and across my breast, making me shudder. His fingertip centered over my heart as I faced him.
This had gone too far. I had a new relationship with Brandon that I didn’t want to ruin. And if Doug did have some wild blackmail scenario in mind, reminding him I wa
s with Brandon might make him think twice.
I grabbed his hand, pulled it down to waist level, and squeezed it. “Doug, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but Brandon is my boyfriend.” Of course, in rejecting Doug, I was giving him yet another reason to hate me, and to get revenge on me by telling the whole town about my mother. I hoped against hope he would be reasonable for once. I looked down, past our clasped hands at the expensive faux-weathered wood floor of the porch.
My mom had told me it was important to look people in the eye, especially men, when you were trying to control a situation.
I was scared to see the expression on Doug’s face, but I forced my eyes upward from the rubber tips of his crutches, his one tanned foot in a battered leather flip-flop, and the other splinted leg he held awkwardly a few inches off the ground. Upward to his cargo shorts, loose around his waist. Like me, he must have lost weight since competition started. The heathered gray waistband of his underwear peeked out above his shorts. His FSU SWIMMING T-shirt was so old and loved, the dark red had faded to a doubtful magenta.
Finally my gaze reached his clean-shaven jaw locked in anger, his angry eyes. He glared down at me with exactly the look he’d given me last night at the game.
Hastily I dropped his hand.
And then he took a slow breath. His chest expanded and his broad shoulders rose. He exhaled through his nose. The anger left his eyes. He gave me a small nod. “You mean you need to break up with Brandon officially? You want to tell him in person to get closure? I mean, yeah, but, you’re not going out with him tonight, are you? You don’t need to go out with him to break up with him.”
“I’m not breaking up with him.” The porch was shady, but even the sunlight beyond us in the courtyard was too bright and fueled the throbbing in my forehead. “Doug, Brandon is my boyfriend. I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad Mike’s okay. I’m grateful to you for pulling me out of the car. But I’m with Brandon.”
“I don’t understand,” Doug said coldly.
“I don’t know how to make it more clear.” The golf ball in my head grew to billiard ball size. “Last night doesn’t change the fact that you’ve hated me since the ninth grade.”
He rocked backward and shifted the pads of the crutches under his arms. “No, I haven’t,” he said innocently. He might have used his customary honeyed sarcasm. I couldn’t tell because the billiard ball had grown to a bowling ball inside my head.
“You made fun of me to the swim team at the football game,” I reminded him.
“When? No, I didn’t.”
He seemed so adamant, I wondered whether I could have been wrong. I hadn’t actually heard the boy half of the swim team make fun of me. But this much I was sure of. “You told me I’m a spoiled brat!”
He gaped at me. “I already apologized for that, Zoey.”
I didn’t remember him apologizing. Now brain damage was etched across the bowling ball banging against the inside of my skull. “Look, I have a headache, for real. Thanks for checking on me.” I took a step back from him, giving him room to move down the porch steps to his brother’s truck.
He stared blankly at me with those beautiful eyes for a moment more. Then he said, “If I weren’t still high from the drugs the hospital gave me intravenously, I think I would be very angry with you right now.”
“What’s new?” Saying it made me realize what was new. This misunderstanding with Doug might do more than make our relations worse. It might ruin what I had with Brandon too. “Oh God. You didn’t tell anybody about last night, did you?”
“I haven’t had time.”
“Well, don’t!” I shrieked. “Doug, you can’t say anything to Brandon. Promise me you’ll tell Mike and your brother not to say anything to anybody.” Brandon was laid back, but I couldn’t expect him to understand my behavior with Doug in the grass last night when I didn’t understand it myself. I couldn’t lose him just because Doug had dragged me from the wreck!
“Fine.” Doug heaved himself across the porch and down the first step. Tall though he was, he was one of the most agile boys I’d ever seen. It was bizarre to watch him miss the next step with his crutch and stumble forward.
I leaped to catch him.
He caught himself with the crutch in time. My hand on his elbow was unnecessary. He was so much heavier than me, I wouldn’t have been able to prevent him from tumbling into the sea oats anyway. In full sunlight now, he moved out from under my fingers, across the stone courtyard, without looking back.
I almost ran forward to help again as he struggled to open the truck door while balancing on one leg and one crutch. The bare feet disappeared from the window, and Officer Fox leaned across the seat to open the door. Doug tossed his crutches into the payload, hopped a few times, and dove into the truck, wincing as he dragged his broken leg after him. He never looked up at me. Officer Fox shook his head. He glanced behind him to back the truck in a turn, then drove forward and made a fast, sharp, un-policeman-like turn onto the road.
As soon as the gate folded shut behind the truck, I dashed back inside and ran through the house to my bathroom to double-check the counter and drawers for a prescription painkiller bottle. Nothing. And there was no way something like that would have gotten lost under the surface. I’d just moved back in, after all, and I kept my room and my bathroom neat so I never misplaced anything.
I sank onto my bed, reached for my cell phone on my bedside table, and held it facedown in my lap for a few seconds, wishing. I needed my mother right now. If I hadn’t checked my phone since the football game last night, this was the longest I’d gone without making sure there was no message from her. I actually crossed my fingers and turned the phone over.
Nothing. I was still alone.
So I headed out back to the pool on a fact-finding mission. When my parents built this house a few years ago, I’d said, and my mom had agreed, that it was silly to build a pool overlooking an ocean. Wasn’t the ocean good enough for us? Wasn’t that why people vacationed in Florida in the first place? Building a pool at your oceanside house was like the theme restaurants in town—Jamaica Joe’s, Tahiti Cuisine, California Eatin’—all evoking a different place on the ocean as if the place we already had on the ocean was somehow inferior. Jamaica and Tahiti and California probably had restaurants named Florida Foodie. It was like my dad and Ashley living in a beach house on the Emerald Coast and flying to Hawaii to get married.
But my mom had said people who’d grown up with money, like her, and me, didn’t care about showing off that they had it, whereas people who’d grown up without it, like my dad, cared very much. All the other houses in the neighborhood had a pool overlooking the ocean, so my dad needed one too. He also needed a Benz, a Rolex, a flat-screen TV that took up his entire bedroom wall, a mistress, a love child, and a divorce. And now, with a wedding in Hawaii, a trophy wife.
“Good morning!” Ashley called brightly as I dragged myself out the back door. She and my dad, wearing matching robes, lay in cushioned teak lounge chairs in the shade of a potted palm. The roar of the ocean, which my dad had moved here to be near, could hardly be heard over the wall protecting the pool. My dad stubbed out his cigarette.
“Good morning!” I replied even more brightly. Normally I tried to stay out of Ashley’s face. I didn’t want to be the spoiled brat my dad expected me to be. However, a post–car crash greeting as enthusiastic as hers begged for such a response. Doug was right: I’d become sarcastic overnight. Or maybe it was just the headache. I sat down on the foot of the chair next to my dad’s.
Still grinning at me, she reached for my dad’s hand. He did her one better and massaged between her fingers with his thumb. Like I was a threat to their relationship and they needed to show solidarity.
I didn’t care. My head was about to fall off. “Where are my pain pills?”
They looked at each other. At least, they turned toward each other, but I couldn’t see their eyes behind their his-and-hers designer sunglasses. They turned back to me. My
dad said, “The hospital didn’t give you anything. You’re not supposed to take anything stronger than Tylenol because it might mask symptoms if there were something really wrong with your head. They told you this four times last night!” He sounded angry with me, and then I understood why. He spat toward Ashley, “There goes Hawaii. We have to take her back to the hospital. And another hurricane’s forming in the Gulf. God knows how long we’ll be grounded if we miss this flight.”
I found myself concentrating on how handsome he was, how manly and tall and tan, as he said to me, “You’d better be damn sure you have amnesia.”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. The pain in my head brought tears to my eyes, but through the throbbing I was beginning to realize I was in big trouble with my dad. “What?”
He let go of Ashley’s hand, leaned forward with a creak of the lounge chair, and counted off the offenses to him on long, shaking fingers. “Ashley and I plan this trip,” first finger, “and your mother picks that very week to crack up,” second finger, “you total your car the day before we leave,” third finger, “and now you have amnesia ?” He moved his extended pinky finger close to my face. “If that’s your story, I will take you back to the hospital.” He made a fist. “But by God, I will make sure they lock you up in the loony bin with your mother.”
5
In my mind I was back in my mother’s bedroom, trying to fix everything, but I just sat there, helpless, with one hand pressed to the throbbing in my head, watching my mother die quietly.
Ashley shook her head at me and rolled her eyes as if my dad was being silly. As if what he had just said to me could be considered a silly, impatient thing to say to his daughter when he was under a lot of stress with a Hawaiian vacation planned.
Then she reached for my dad’s hand and spoke in that calming, motherly tone I did not like at all. “Clyde. They said the concussion confused her and that’s very common. They said she might not remember the entire night, and if she didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything they could do.” She turned back to me. “You don’t remember last night?”