“Bobby asked me to come see you,” Elise said. Her voice was husky from too many cigarettes. “You know. Explain who I am and all.”
“His cousin,” Lacey said.
Elise nodded.
“He said he got you hooked,” Lacey said.
Elise smiled and Lacey saw the prettiness hiding inside the haggard face. “He blames himself, but I would’ve gotten hooked all on my own. I didn’t really need his help.”
“He said you’ve gotten straightened out, though,” Lacey said. Her mouth was dry and it hurt to swallow. “That’s good.”
Elise let out a sound, half laugh, half snort. “I’m straight now,” she said, “but sometimes I think it would be easier just to go back. I’d get beat up for sure, but then I could get high again.” She looked dreamy, her expression one of longing, and only then did Lacey notice the tracks on her skinny arms. “Bobby thinks my life was shit,” Elise continued, “but it wasn’t all that bad.”
Lacey wanted to tell the woman she was doing the right thing by getting away from a life on the streets, but the words would require more strength than she had. Instead, she put her energy into shifting in the bed, struggling to find a position that might relieve some of the pain in her legs.
“He’s in love with you, in case you don’t know it,” Elise said. “I mean, every time I talk to him, it’s like, ‘You doing okay, Elise? You clean? Do you need anything?’ and then he goes off on you.”
Lacey tried to smile. “Thank you for telling me that,” she said. “And for coming here.”
Elise stood up, then looked down at Lacey, studying her hard for a moment. “You’re in a shitload of pain, aren’t you,” she said.
Lacey was barely able to nod.
“They’ll give you more if you ask for it.” Elise nodded toward the I.V. pole from which bags of liquid were slowly emptying into Lacey’s veins. “Enjoy them while you can get them,” Elise said. “I’d trade places with you right now in a heartbeat.”
CHAPTER 44
Rick sent an enormous arrangement of flowers to the hospital. He was good with flowers. Ordinarily, they could mend any problem. In this case, though, he knew they would not be enough. Still, he sent them. Even if Lacey had not been hurt by that dog, he would have sent them to her, maybe every day for the rest of her life. He owed that to her, and more.
It was Clay who told him what had happened. Rick had called the keeper’s house for the fourth or fifth time, hoping Lacey would finally pick up the phone and let him apologize, but it was Clay who answered and who chewed him out. Clay told him about Lacey being attacked by the dog, and even though Rick could not possibly be responsible for that horrific event, he felt guilty about it.
“She’s really a fine person,” he told Clay. “She didn’t deserve that. And she didn’t deserve what I did to her, either.”
“I hope your father stays in prison for the rest of his life,” Clay said, and hung up on him.
Rick didn’t give up. He called again two days later, wishing that Gina would be the one to answer the phone, but once again, he got Clay on the line. He asked if he could visit Lacey in the hospital and Clay told him that he was the last person Lacey wanted to see. Again, Clay hung up on him, slamming the phone down so hard, Rick’s ear hurt for minutes afterward.
“She won’t see me,” he’d told his mother after getting off the phone. It was the fourth day of her visit with him.
“You can’t possibly blame her,” his mother had said. “You hurt that entire family by trying to save your own.”
He shook his head. “I feel terrible for Lacey,” he said. “At first she really had no romantic interest in me, and that made it so easy. I didn’t want to…you know, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do if she wanted more from me. But that last night, she was starting to talk serious and…I guess it’s best the truth came out. Just not best for Dad.”
There were so many other ways, better ways, he could have handled his desire to get his father released. Sometimes, he realized, when you were caught up in your emotions, you could do really insane things, and that’s what he’d done with Lacey. When he’d learned that his father was up for parole, he knew Annie O’Neill’s family would be asked to write victim’s statements, and that Lacey’s would be most important. He remembered her from that horrible Christmas Eve in the battered women’s shelter. He knew she had been close to him in age and he thought that he could meet her, befriend her without revealing his identity and influence her through seduction. Women had always been attracted to him, despite his disinterest in them. He was ordinarily an honest man, but the deceit seemed worth it in this case. Lacey, though, had turned out to be a different sort of person than he’d anticipated. He could have appealed to her sense of justice, but he didn’t know that going in, and by the time he realized how good she was, how fair-minded, it was too late. He was already well into the game.
Now, though, he feared his plan had backfired. Her statement would be fueled by her anger at him. He’d hurt his father more than he’d helped him.
The only good thing about the week was having his mother with him. What a way to start things off, though, with her learning that her son was a conniving, manipulative scam artist. They’d talked all night long after Lacey left, never mentioning his father, both of them carefully avoiding the topic. Instead, they caught up on each other’s lives. He was impressed by her: she’d made a name for herself, writing an acclaimed book on pain control. She’d gotten a good education, and she was beautiful. His father had held her back, he thought. Not intentionally. Not in any mean-spirited way. But his father had wanted to live in Manteo, and there had been little opportunity for her to blossom there. He didn’t like thinking about the fact that she had done better without her husband than she had with him, but it was probably the truth.
His father had been a simple man, content to sell boogie boards in a shop that catered to tourists, to live in a little village where he knew most of the natives by name and where the simplicity of his life had enabled him to keep his mental illness in check. Rick had always felt that his and his mother’s escape to the shelter had thrown his father’s carefully maintained stability out of balance, and he’d suffered a meltdown.
He’d been a loving father. He’d never said those words, “I love you,” to Rick, although he said them all the time now. But it didn’t matter. His father had taken him on fishing expeditions and never missed a Little League game, and Rick had known how much he was treasured.
He told his mother about getting his law degree and how much he enjoyed teaching. He told her he’d known he was gay from the time he was in elementary school. And he told her about Christian.
“Did he know what you were truly doing here?” she asked.
“No,” he said, once again tapping into his overabundant supply of guilt. “He would have talked me out of it. He’d tell me I was acting irrationally, and I already knew that. I didn’t want to hear him reinforce it.”
Whatever his mother’s feelings about his behavior toward Lacey, that first night she’d been careful to keep them to herself, as if she knew they needed to avoid potentially combustible topics as they got to know each other again.
It wasn’t until their second evening together, when they were preparing dinner in the tiny kitchen of his cottage, that they began to work their way into the difficult topic of his father.
“What is he like?” she asked without even identifying who she was talking about, but he didn’t need to ask her for clarification.
He was washing lettuce in the sink, and he kept his eyes on the task. “He’s contrite,” he said. “He’s been contrite for many years. He was sick, Mom.” He looked over to where she was chopping onions for the chili. “If he could have changed what happened, he would have. He’d give up his own life to change it.”
She said nothing, the chopping and the running water the only sounds in the kitchen.
“I think he needed to live in Manteo,” he said. “He knew he
wasn’t well. He told me once that when he had any change of routine, or when he traveled anywhere, even to Elizabeth City, he started feeling scared and out of control.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was hard to get him out of Manteo, but I just thought he was being stubborn.”
He waited a moment before he spoke again. “Would you like to see him?” he asked.
“No,” she said quickly. “Whether he’s really changed for the better or not is no longer my business. He’s a part of my past, Fred.” Her hands stopped chopping the onions and she looked at him. “I know he’s your present, though. And your future. I understand that, but I don’t want or need any part of him.”
He nodded, disappointed but not surprised. If she saw his father, she would know how dramatically he had changed. But it was too much to ask of her, just as it had been too much to ask of Lacey to try to forgive the man who had wreaked such havoc on her life.
“Are you still angry with me for going to the shelter that night?” his mother asked.
Rick shook the lettuce leaves dry and began tearing them into pieces over the salad bowl. “I know you thought you had to,” he said. “I know you had information from the neighbors that led you to believe we were in real danger. I just don’t think he would have flipped out the way he did if we hadn’t left.”
His mother scraped the chopped onions from the cutting board into the pot on the stove. “I guess that’s something we’ll never know,” she said.
By the time he drove his mother to the airport in Norfolk, he felt nearly at peace. He may have harmed his father’s chances at parole, and he was certain he would never be given the opportunity to truly apologize to Lacey, but there was one thing of which he was certain: he was never going to lose his mother again. Nothing he did would ever drive her away.
CHAPTER 45
“So,” Bobby said as Mackenzie climbed into his VW bus in front of the school, “how was it?”
“Awesome!” Mackenzie said, hugging her backpack to her chest. She had a glow in her eyes he hadn’t seen before. She waved to a couple of girls, dressed as inappropriately as she was in their too-low shorts and too-high tops, and the girls waved back at her. One of them shouted to Mackenzie, “Call me!”
“Looks like you made some friends,” he said as he pulled away from the curb.
“Could I ask them over?” She was still waving to the girls, her neck craned to look back at them. “They want to see the keeper’s house.”
“Sure,” he said with a smile. Suddenly the keeper’s house was an asset rather than a liability.
“They have the cutest boys here,” she said. “And I heard one of them talking to another one about me. He said, ‘That new girl is hot.’”
Oh, God, Bobby thought. It was starting already. Lacey would have to have the sex talk with her, and probably very soon.
“And I remembered not to say anything about how much better Phoenix is,” she said. “But people asked me about it. And there’s another girl who used to live there.”
“How are your classes?” he asked.
“Awesome,” she said. “The teachers are really nice. Except one, who’s a total loser.” She wrinkled her nose.
“There’s always got to be one of those,” he said. “It’s a requirement.”
She reached for her cell phone, then remembered it was not attached to her waistband and let out a dramatic groan. “I can’t stand that they won’t let us have cell phones in school,” she said.
“It makes sense, though, don’t you think?”
“But what if there’s, like, a disaster or something and I needed to call you or Lacey?”
He smiled, guessing this was the argument the kids were using to get the authorities to change the rule. “I suppose it would be like in the old days,” he said. “We’d just have to sit around and worry about you until we found out you were safe.”
“Half the boys have earrings,” she said, then she looked at her watch. “Clay’s got a new dog coming at four. It’s an eight-month-old Border collie. I can’t wait to meet her.”
From boys to dogs, all in one breath. Eleven-year-old girls were complex little creatures.
“Do you have homework?” he asked, amazed to hear the parental words coming out of his mouth. He glanced at her bulging backpack. “That backpack looks pretty full.”
“I have a little,” she said. “I’ll do it after dinner, okay? First I want to see Lacey and tell her everything about today. Then I’ll meet the dog. Then we’ll eat. Then I’ll do some homework. Then I’ll read Rani a bedtime story. Then I’ll do some more homework.”
She looked so pleased with herself that he wanted to stop the car and pull her over for a hug.
“And when are you going to fit in all the phone calls you have to make?” he teased her.
She rolled her eyes at him. “You are, like, getting to be such a dad, with lame dad humor and everything.”
He wondered how she knew about “dad humor,” having never had a dad before.
“You don’t have to drive me tomorrow,” she said. “Everyone takes the bus. It’s cool.” She’d insisted he drive her that morning, anxious about taking the school bus, uncomfortable in her newness.
She chattered nearly nonstop all the way to Kiss River, and when he pulled into the parking lot, she hopped out of the VW and ran toward the house, backpack swinging from her shoulder. He knew she was anxious to tell Lacey about her day.
He moved more slowly than she did, reaching into the back seat for the two bags of groceries he’d picked up on his way to the school. He walked past the blessedly empty kennel, wondering if he would ever be able to pass it without remembering the previous week, when he’d come home to the bleeding child he adored and the nearly dead woman he loved. He would never forget all the blood on the sand, or the feeling of strength in his muscles as he lifted Wolf into the air, or the sound of the dog’s neck cracking as it hit the doghouse. The best he could hope for would be to be able to pass the kennel without feeling sick to his stomach. That would be progress.
Inside the house, he found Mackenzie in the living room with Lacey, who was relaxing in the recliner they’d bought so that she could keep her bandaged legs elevated. She’d had surgery two days earlier and might need another some time in the future, but she was recovering very well, by all accounts.
He put away the groceries in the kitchen, listening to Mackenzie recount to Lacey all the news she’d just told him. Lacey was better at that sort of conversation than he had been. She asked Mackenzie a lot of questions and made sounds of appreciation and wonder at her answers, as though Mackenzie was the most interesting and amazing child on earth.
Once Mackenzie had gone upstairs to her room, Bobby brought Lacey a glass of lemonade and sat on the sofa. “Looks like the first day of school was a success,” he said.
“Better than expected.” Lacey nodded.
She was so pale. He knew she was still in a good deal of pain that the medication could not control. Or rather, she would not take the amount of medication needed to control it because it put her to sleep, and she seemed to want to be awake all the time, as though she might miss something important if she was not.
They were pampering her, waiting on her hand and foot, and she deserved it. There was a lot of guilt in this house. Clay was filled with it for having Wolf there in the first place, and Bobby knew that Mackenzie had cried herself to sleep at least two or three nights for having gone into the kennel when she’d been warned not to. But Lacey seemed to bear no grudges. “I am so happy to be alive,” she said, so frequently and with such fervor that he thought the meds might be frying her brain just a little.
“You’re going to need to talk to her about sex soon,” Bobby said now.
“Already?”
“The boys are cute, they wear earrings, they think she’s hot.”
Lacey let out a giggle.
“I think she’s taken the school by storm,” he said.
She smiled at him. “You look like you’re feeling some fatherly pride.”
He nodded. “I’m proud of her,” he said slowly. “And I love her. But she’s not my daughter, Lace.” He shook his head. “I wish she were, but she’s not.”
She raised her head a few inches from the back of the recliner. “Why do you still think that?” she asked.
It was time to tell her. There was no point in keeping the truth to himself any longer.
“Look at her eyes,” he said, “then look at mine.”
She frowned. “You both have blue eyes,” she said.
“Then—” he felt his heart start to race “—look at your brother’s.”
CHAPTER 46
Lacey started to tell Bobby that he was being ridiculous. Clay could not possibly be Mackenzie’s father. But before she even opened her mouth to speak, the evidence began to pile up in her mind. It wasn’t just Mackenzie’s eyes, although she certainly did have those translucent blue eyes that belonged to both her brother and father, while Bobby’s were a deeper blue, and Jessica’s had bordered on green. It was also the lanky body that was an O’Neill trait and that neither Jessica nor Bobby possessed. It was the shape of her teeth and the arch of her eyebrows. Still, it seemed an outrageous idea.
“Clay would never have slept with Jessica,” Lacey said. “He couldn’t stand her—or me, for that matter. We were nothing more than little annoyances to him that summer. And he had a girlfriend. Terri. The woman he married when they got out of college.”
Bobby gnawed on his lip, looking unsure if he should say any more.
“What makes you think he is?” Lacey prodded.
Bobby leaned toward her, resting his elbows on his knees. “When I first saw Clay here at the keeper’s house, he looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. I just figured that I must have met him somewhere that summer, since you and I were hanging around together all the time. But a few weeks ago, Mackenzie and I were out in the yard talking to…to Wolf’s owner and Clay. Wolf had just arrived.” He looked apologetic for mentioning the dog’s name. “The sun was really bright, and at one point Clay turned around to look up at the house and the sunlight was in his eyes and they looked so…”