“I’m not as good as she was,” she said, annoyed at her self-deprecation the moment the words left her mouth. “Or at least, I’m different. I work mostly in her old studio in Kill Devil Hills, but I use the sunroom here, sometimes. Do you remember the studio?”
He took another pull on the cigarette. “I do,” he said. “The guy with the ponytail, right?”
“Tom Nestor.” She wasn’t ready to tell him that Tom was the man who’d turned out to be her father.
“I think it’s very cool that we both ended up being artists,” Bobby said. He was smiling to himself, his gaze on the horizon. He held his cigarette in his mouth while he reached down to reroll one wet leg of his jeans, and removed the cigarette without taking another drag. “So, how’s it been, having Mackenzie here?” he asked.
“I don’t like her.” The words slipped out before she could think. “God. That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds honest,” he said.
“It’s so strange.” Lacey watched a speedboat as it bounced across the water in the distance. “I usually like everyone,” she said, “but she really is a little twit. I’m honestly thinking about letting Nola have her. She wanted her at first. Planned to fight for custody and everything. But I don’t think Nola’s having much more luck with her than I am.”
“Nola, ugh.” Bobby shivered with what was—perhaps—mock horror, and Lacey had to laugh. “I’d tried to forget about Jessica’s mommy dearest,” he said.
“She’s not that bad.” Lacey felt strange defending Nola, but she was coming to feel sorry for the older woman. They were both in the same bind.
“What makes Mackenzie a little twit?” he asked. His cigarette had reached the point of needing to be crushed out, but he held it between his fingers, letting it burn itself out instead of crushing it on the lighthouse stairs. “You said on the phone that she was obstinate and that she stole from you. What else?”
“Like that’s not enough?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Is there more?”
“Well, if I say black, she says white. She’s very negative.” She would not tell him about Mackenzie’s most recent escapade: just that morning she’d found her vibrator in the center of the kitchen table, pointing up toward the ceiling, and knew that the girl had gone through her night table. She was glad she’d been the one to find it and not Clay or Gina. “I caught her lifting false eyelashes at the Kmart, and who knows what else she’s stolen that I haven’t discovered.”
“False eyelashes?” Bobby laughed. “At least she’s original.”
“You think it’s funny now, but just wait till you have to deal with her yourself.”
“You never shoplifted when you were a kid?”
“No, I didn’t,” she said with some indignation. “I know you did, though.”
He smiled at her, that crooked smile that she simply could not look at for more than a second without her legs turning to jelly.
“You were a good kid, weren’t you?” he asked. “I mean, deep down. You really were. That’s why—”
“That’s why what?”
He rubbed his hands over his thighs. “I liked you a lot back then,” he said. “More than I liked Jessica, at first. But there was something so vulnerable about you. So trusting. I just felt like you were too young and innocent for me to corrupt.”
He’d liked her more than Jessica? She wanted to ask him for details about his attraction to her, but stopped herself. What did it matter now?
“You were right about me,” she said. “I was trying to act tough, but I was actually a pile of mush inside.”
He looked suddenly serious, turning his head from her slightly, and she saw a tightness in his jaw.
“What?” she asked him, knowing something dark had come into his mind.
He gave her a quick, apologetic smile. “I have to tell you the truth, Lace,” he said. “I’m not convinced I’m Mackenzie’s father.”
She felt him backing out. She could hardly blame him. She would back out herself if she could.
“Jessica said you were,” she said.
“I understand,” he said. “But…my girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend—Claudia and I wanted to have a child. We tried hard for a couple of years and were tested and everything. I have lazy sperm. That’s what the doctor said. It upset me more than it did her, I think. I really wanted a kid.”
“Well, maybe your sperm wasn’t so lazy when you were seventeen.”
“A possibility,” he acknowledged.
His phone suddenly rang, the sound a simple, quiet brrring coming from his shirt pocket. He made no move to answer it. “They can leave a message,” he said.
She waited for the ringing to come to an end, then spoke again. “So what are you saying?” she asked. “Do you want a DNA test?”
“No. Not unless you insist on it.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why not?”
“I’m afraid if I have the DNA test that I’ll discover she’s not really mine, and I don’t want to know that. Is that crazy?”
“Uh…yeah.” She smiled. “She’s so difficult. You only talked to her for a few minutes. You don’t know. Why would you take on a problem kid if you didn’t have to?”
“You know who she reminds me of?” he asked, without answering her question.
“Who?”
“You. The way you were back when I knew you.”
Lacey frowned. “She’s nothing like me,” she said.
His smile looked secretive now, as if he knew something she did not, and it annoyed her a little.
“Why do you think she is the way she is?” he asked her. “Belligerent, as you say. Obstinate and oppositional.”
“I think that Jessica was not the best mother.” Lacey was sorry for maligning her friend, but she was beginning to believe it was the truth. “She always sounded like a good mom when she’d tell me about the things she was doing with Mackenzie, but now that I know Mackenzie—” she shook her head “—I think Jessica spoiled her. She let her get away with too much.”
He sighed, squinting at the horizon as if the early evening light was too bright for him. “I think you’re smarter than that, Lacey,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
She felt him turn to look at her, but she did not meet his eyes. He was too close; his eyes would be too blue. “Do you remember what it was like when your mother died?” he asked.
“All too well,” she said.
“So, how’d you feel back then.”
“Alone. Unbelievably sad. Scared.”
“What were you afraid of?”
She hesitated, remembering. “How uncertain and unsafe the world was,” she said. “What was going to happen to my family. What would happen to me, now that I was the responsibility of my father, who seemed to barely notice I existed.”
“And if someone who didn’t know you—know the real Lacey—was witnessing your behavior back then, how would they have described you?”
“Like I said, I pretended to be tough and rebellious, so no one could see the scared kid inside me.” Suddenly, she understood. It was so simple, and the realization brought tears of sympathy to her eyes. “Mackenzie’s just scared,” she said, daring to look at him.
His face was serious and sad, and he nodded. “She’s got to be terrified,” he said. “And it’s even worse for her than it was for you. You still had your father and brother and friends and house and neighborhood and school, and she has nothing familiar around her at all. Just this stranger—practically a stranger, anyway—who came and took her away.”
“So what do I do?” she asked.
“I’m not great at this, either, Lace,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m still a work in progress myself. But whenever I find myself disliking the way someone acts, I try to think about their motivation and I can usually see that it boils down to fear. That helps me feel a little more sympathetic towards them.”
“Well, I can try to do that,” she said, but she tho
ught of her vibrator standing at attention on the kitchen table and knew it was going to be a challenge for her to equate Mackenzie’s incendiary behavior with fear.
The cigarette was cold and dead now, and Bobby pulled out the pack of Marlboros again, this time slipping the butt beneath the plastic wrapper before returning the pack to his pocket.
“There’s something else I have to tell you,” he said.
“What?” The breeze kicked up and she caught her hair in her hand and held it against her shoulder.
“When I was twenty-four,” he said, “I was in a car accident myself. It was my fault. I was drunk on my ass, and I killed the parents of two little kids.”
“Oh, God, Bobby.” She felt disgust and sympathy, in equal measures.
“I spent some time locked up, which was the best thing for me because it forced me to get sober and it gave me time to think. When I got out, I tried to contact the grandparents of those kids to see how I could help, but they didn’t want any part of me. So, when you called and told me Jessica was killed by a drunk driver, I just felt like…like this is my chance. Do you get it? I don’t really care if Mackenzie’s mine or not. I don’t care if she’s a little bitch. I just want to help.”
She nodded slowly, letting herself truly look at him for the first time since climbing to the top of the lighthouse. He was not the same person he’d been years ago, and it wasn’t just his lack of hair and his muscular frame that were different. “You’ve changed so much,” she said.
“Not really,” he said. “I’ve just grown up. Haven’t you?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said.
He looked at his watch. “The sun’s going down,” he said. During the time they’d been sitting on top of the lighthouse, afternoon had shifted to evening.
“I love watching the sunset from up here.” She let go of her hair to circle her knees with her arms. Although the sun was actually setting behind them, from this vantage point, it colored the entire world.
He looked toward the horizon again, where the clouds were beginning to turn a deep purple. “I’d better get going,” he said. “I’ve got the directions from Rick, but it doesn’t sound like an easy place to find after dark.”
“It’s not,” she said, standing up. She felt her hair blow wild in the breeze and caught it in her hands again.
“Sit,” he said, giving her shoulder a little nudge as he got to his feet. “Stay up here and enjoy your sunset. I can find my way down.”
“All right,” she said, taking her seat again. “Thanks for coming, Bobby.”
He looked down at her, the fiery light of the setting sun in his eyes. “You have grown up, Lace, whether you know it or not,” he said. He bent down and brushed his lips across her cheek. “You’re a beautiful woman, you know that?”
CHAPTER 24
Bobby’s head and gut—his entire being, really—ached with the need for caffeine. Sitting across from his host at the little table in Rick’s kitchen, he poured himself a second bowl of cornflakes, his eyes on the coffeemaker on the counter. He’d checked for coffee earlier, but had found none in any of the four old knotty pine cabinets in the kitchen. Plenty of wine in the refrigerator, though. Wine no longer tempted him, but it still gave him a jolt to see it. He’d had no alcohol in his own house for years.
“You’re not a coffee drinker, huh?” he asked Rick as he poured himself a glass of orange juice.
“No, sorry,” Rick said, swallowing a spoonful of cereal. “I take it you are?”
Bobby nodded. “I’ll buy some today, and replenish the OJ. Anything else you need while I’m at the store?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
So far, their breakfast table conversation had been comfortable, if mundane. They’d talked about where they grew up, where they’d traveled, what their families were like. Bobby tamed some of his answers, not wanting to get into anything too heavy. What he really wanted was to get a sense of Rick’s relationship with Lacey. Lacey had downplayed their connection, but still, she was obviously involved with him, and Bobby didn’t want to complicate her life any more than it already was. The truth was, he hadn’t expected to feel such a pull toward her the day before. Yes, he’d been drawn to her once upon a time, but he’d been a different person then, attracted to anyone with breasts and a sense of abandon. The connection he’d felt with her this time, up on the lighthouse stairs, was something else. He had certainly taken stock of her beauty and the way her body had blossomed into something far more inviting than it had been at fourteen, but it was her goodness that touched him, her struggle to do what was right for a child she did not even like.
She’d been right about the lighting in Rick’s cottage; it was going to be very poor to work by. Earlier that morning, he’d walked out on the rickety back deck for a cigarette. Through the gaps in the trees, he could see that the sun was shining on the water of the sound, although the inside of the cottage was still dark. Just sitting here at the tiny kitchen table necessitated having the overhead light on. He would have to buy a good halogen lamp, at the very least.
The run-down cottage appealed to him, though. It was funky and rustic, so different from all the new construction on the Outer Banks. In spite of the lighting problem, he liked how the woods had grown up around the house, concealing it from the world. His bedroom was fine. He didn’t care that the double bed barely fit inside it or that the mattress smelled musty. He had slept in far worse places.
Best of all, he was not that far from Elise. The opportunity to come to the Outer Banks had seemed like a small miracle to him, and Elise had hungrily agreed to his plan. She would stay with old friends in Kitty Hawk, he’d suggested, and he would find a place somewhere near Kiss River. Rick’s cottage in Duck put him even closer to her. It was perfect. The only problem was that he could not call her, and he knew already that waiting for her calls was going to drive him crazy.
“I like your house,” Bobby said to Rick, returning his attention to his surroundings. “It has character.”
Rick laughed, looking around him at the grimy cupboard doors and the old linoleum floor that ran through every room in the cottage. “I guess that’s one word for it,” he said. “Your room okay?”
“It’s a palace compared to some places I’ve been.”
He’d expected Rick to be a tight-assed conservative lawyer, but—except for the fact that he kept no coffee in the house—the guy was really okay. Rick had even told him he could smoke in the cottage if he liked, but Bobby’d declined. Even at home he only smoked outside, his theory being that if he had to go out to smoke, it would keep the cigarettes to a minimum.
It had surprised him that someone like Rick would spend a summer in a cottage like this, but since it belonged to a friend it probably cost him very little in rent. Maybe nothing at all. Rick was there for the whole summer, and even a lawyer didn’t make enough to afford a decent place in the Banks for that long. He wasn’t sure if Rick was fastidious or if the neatness of the place—especially the bathroom they were sharing—was merely a product of preparing the house for a guest. At any rate, Bobby would have to remember to pick up after himself. He wasn’t a slob, but he could let things pile up without really noticing what was happening. If it was a choice between working on a piece of scrimshaw or putting away the cereal box after breakfast, there was no contest.
“Lacey said you knew her when you were kids,” Rick said, and Bobby saw his opening.
“Yeah,” he said. “I hadn’t seen her in years.” He moved the cereal around in his bowl, deciding to test the waters. “She’s great, isn’t she?” he asked.
“She is,” Rick agreed, and Bobby tried to quantify the light in his eyes to determine the level of his attraction. Rick poured more cornflakes into his bowl. “You might pick up another box of these, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“I will,” Bobby said, hoping that was not the end of the conversation about Lacey. It was not.
“She’s got a lot on her plate this summer, tho
ugh,” Rick said, dipping his spoon into his bowl.
“Yeah,” Bobby shook his head in sympathy. “Having a kid suddenly dumped in your lap has to be rough.”
“Well, she’s getting dumped in yours, too,” Rick said.
“Not to the same degree,” Bobby said. “I could walk away if I chose to. Lacey can’t.”
Rick raised his eyebrows at that response. “I hope you won’t,” he said.
“I have no intention of walking away,” Bobby assured him. He thought of going into his doubts about Mackenzie being his, but it was just too much for breakfast conversation with a man he barely knew.
“It’s not just the whole Mackenzie thing,” Rick said. “Do you know about the parole hearing?”
“Parole hearing?” Bobby lifted the last spoonful of cereal to his mouth.
“The guy who killed Lacey’s mother is up for parole. Lacey and her brother and father are fighting it, and I think it’s tearing her up. Opening old wounds and that sort of thing.”
“Are you representing her?”
“Oh, no,” Rick said. “I’m a tax attorney. I’m just trying to provide her with a sympathetic ear.”
Finished with his cereal, Bobby leaned back and the legs of his chair creaked beneath his weight. “I didn’t know her mother,” he said. The whole murder issue had gone over his fuzzy-brained head, for the most part. “I met Lacey the summer after it happened. She was pretty screwed up, although I don’t think I knew the depth of it at the time, since I was pretty screwed up myself.”
“Well, I’m only telling you about the parole hearing so you’re aware of everything she’s dealing with,” Rick said. He looked like the type of guy who’d never been screwed up a day in his life. “It’s my personal—and professional—opinion that she needs to let the whole parole thing go,” he continued. “According to the prison documents, the guy’s been a model prisoner who presents absolutely no danger to anyone if he’s released. I think Lacey’s beating her head against a brick wall, but she still seems to feel a need to fight it. I hate to see her suffer through all of this only to lose in the end.”