I reached for my cell phone, surprised to see that I had four texts from Selena.
I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he was coming.
He found a search on my computer for LA County Jail. I was looking up how to visit Parker. Please tell me you’re ok.
I’m worried.
Text me back!
It was 8:32 a.m. I’d slept through the night, and I suddenly had a vague recollection of darkness, the wind blowing forcefully through the curtains, muffled voices down the hall.
I’m ok, I texted Selena. But Logan’s going to turn me in.
I got up and went to the bathroom, then walked to the door and opened it a crack. I stood there, listening, not wanting to intrude on Scotty and Marcus. After weeks of isolation, it felt oddly intimate to be in a house with other people, to know that they were moving around, having conversations, cooking and listening to music.
I heard the wind chime again. And then the soft clink of porcelain, the sound of running water from the kitchen. Stepping into the hallway, I followed it to the staircase and descended to the foyer. The wood floors were cool under my bare feet. It reminded me that I was wearing boxer shorts and a tank top. I debated whether to turn around and change.
“I thought I heard you coming down the stairs.” Scotty had spoken softly, but I still jumped a little. “Come into the kitchen. Coffee’s on.”
I looked down again. “Maybe I should change?”
He smiled. “Don’t be silly. We’ve both seen pajamas.”
I swallowed hard at the we. That meant Marcus was awake, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to face the music.
“Grace,” Scotty said gently, “it’s fine. Really.”
We made our way down the first-floor hall to the kitchen. Marcus was sitting at the island with what looked like a Bloody Mary in front of him.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “Sleeping Beauty has awoken.”
I listened for the sound of sarcasm in his voice and couldn’t find it.
“Good morning.” I slid onto one of the stools.
Scotty poured me a cup of coffee. “You could probably use this,” he said.
I took it gratefully and inhaled the earthy scent before taking a drink. “Thank you.”
He nodded and started pulling pans from the cupboard.
Marcus stood, drink in hand. “Let’s go, kid. Time to feed the birds.”
I stood uncertainly and followed him toward the open French doors leading to the deck. I cast a glance back at Scotty. He smiled his encouragement.
Marcus began whistling, then singing a carefree tune as he set his drink down and approached a big wooden container on the deck.
I can live in luxury
’Cause I’ve got a pocketful of dreams
My nervousness grew as he continued to sing. The song was cheerful, too cheerful, and I stood near the outdoor table, still holding my coffee, waiting for him to lower the boom. When he rose from the container, he held a plastic cup full of birdseed and a small silver pouch.
He glanced back at me, the tune waning on his lips. “Well, come on, kid! The birds are hungry!” He looked meaningfully at the container near his feet.
“You want me to help?” I asked.
“Now you’re catching on. There’s another cup. Grab a scoop and let’s go.”
I set my coffee down on the table and scooped birdseed out of the container. Then I followed him down the stairs and onto the lawn.
Marcus approached one of the big oak trees along the fence. He handed me his cup. “Hold this.”
He reached behind the tree and pulled out a folding step stool, then climbed to the top of it and lifted his arms toward a slim red feeder hanging from one of the branches. I remembered watching him, whistling as he filled the bird feeders next door, from my bedroom window at the house on Camino Jardin.
“It’s for the hummingbirds,” he explained as he tipped the silver pouch into the top of the feeder. I watched as the clear liquid inside it slowly rose to the top. “They like sugar water. Some people put red dye in it. Hummingbirds like red, you see. But they don’t need something fake like dye to be attracted. Anything red will do, even a simple ribbon tied to the feeder.”
He stepped down and took his plastic cup from my hand, advancing a few feet down the lawn while holding the step stool in his other hand. He set it down in front of another tree. “Your turn.”
I looked up, spotting the bird feeder nailed to the tree. “What do I do?”
“Climb up, dump some of the seed in. That’s all there is to it.”
I stepped onto the stool and climbed to the top, stretching to reach the feeder. I had just filled it when I caught a scrap of blue and yellow through the trees. I froze, trying to find it again in the dense green foliage.
“Parrot,” Marcus pronounced. “There are three that seem to live around this house. I’d gotten friendly with the ones on Camino Jardin, but I’m still working on these fellas.”
I’d lost the bird in the branches above my head, and I stepped down, still holding my half-full cup of birdseed. “How do you know which ones are which?” I asked.
He picked up the stool and moved to the back of the lawn. “You get a feel for them,” he said. “At first, they all seem the same. Green bodies, a little red near the face. But when you get a better look at them, you see there’s more there than meets the eye: a smattering of blue feathers on the underside of a wing, a little orange on the breast. Then you notice their personalities. Some of them are shy and hang back while the others eat first. Some are bold and will try to come after the seed while I’m still filling the feeder. There’s one here with a yellow ring around its eyes, likes to scare Scotty, dive-bomb him while he’s sitting on the deck with his coffee.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Really?”
Marcus flashed a rakish smile. “Really. I think the damn thing knows Scotty’s a little afraid of them. I have to try not to laugh.”
I smiled, and he indicated the stool. I filled the next feeder, already more comfortable with the process. We were working our way up the other side of the lawn when he spoke again. “You’re sure you haven’t told anyone about Scotty and me?” he asked. “It’s okay if you did. We just need to know what we’re dealing with.”
“I didn’t. I told Selena that I had dinner with friends the other night, but she knows I’m used to taking the bus. I could have meant anyone, could have gone anywhere.”
He nodded slowly. “Then we have nothing to worry about, even if Logan does go to the police, and I don’t think he will.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “What makes you so sure?”
We reached the end of the lawn, and he used the step stool to reach the feeder hanging from one of the branches. “If he’d wanted you to go to jail,” he started, continuing as he tipped the seed into the top of the feeder, “he would have called the police with the tip that you might be at Selena Rodriguez’s house. He wouldn’t have risked confronting you and having you disappear.”
“Why do you think he did that?” I asked.
“Well,” Marcus said, stepping down onto the grass, “my hunch is that he wants answers. He wants to know why. Or he thinks he does, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
We started toward the deck, our cups empty. “Most of the time when people ask you to explain yourself, they don’t really want to hear the answer. What they really want is to hear something that justifies their currently held opinion.”
“What do you think is Logan’s currently held opinion of me?”
He spoke without hesitation. “That you’re a terrible person. That only a really terrible person could do what you did.”
“Well, he’s right,” I said softly.
Marcus stopped walking, and the force of his gaze caused me to stop, too. “It’s not that simple, Grace. Life—and people—are all gray area. It’s too easy to say all that matters is what we do, that it speaks for itself. But it’s not true.” He draped an arm a
round my shoulder as we stepped up to the deck. “We’re all works in progress, kid. The things we do are a reflection of our reality at the time. We make mistakes, we learn a little, we correct as we go. You made decisions with the information you had—the situation you had—at the time. That doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you human. I suspect Logan knows that. If he was so sure you were a bad person, he’d want you in jail, and he would have called the police before looking for you. I’m all for personal responsibility, but what Cormac and Renee did to you and Parker was wrong. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to point the finger at yourself that you let them off the hook.” He picked up his Bloody Mary glass and finished it, then rattled the ice. “Fuck. I get too philosophical when I drink these things. Should have stuck with coffee.”
I laughed, and he ruffled my hair on the way into the house.
Twenty-Six
Scotty and I were heading to the Galleria later that day when I spotted another poster, this one stapled to the bus shelter in front of the Town Center, informing Playa Hermosa residents about the upcoming town meeting. I read it as we drove past, wondering if I would be around to see the outcome.
“People are such assholes sometimes,” Scotty said. I turned to look at him, and he raised an eyebrow over his sunglasses. “The peacocks?”
“Do you think they’ll get kicked out?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” he said. “It’s a battle of wills between the people who think they’re above anything that makes them uncomfortable and the ones who fancy themselves ecofriendly because it’s cool. If you ask me, most of the people in this place couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag unless the GPS was working on their Mercedes.”
I laughed even though I knew they weren’t all like that. “What do you think?” I asked him.
“I think the peacocks were here first,” he said. “But that’s never counted for much.”
I nodded sadly.
He turned left at a fork in the road and headed for PCH. Somehow I wasn’t surprised he’d want to take the long way to the mall. It’s what I’d always done, and I remembered Selena laughing, teasing that I was so enamored with the ocean that I’d add twenty minutes to our drive just so I could look at the water on the way.
I still wasn’t sure why we were going to the mall. Marcus had said he had a line on something that might help us, and Scotty had jumped at the chance to keep me busy, claiming he was claustrophobic from the last two days of cloud cover. We were halfway to the mall when I figured out his secret agenda.
“I want you to think about what you need,” he said. “You can’t keep wearing the same two outfits over and over.”
My cheeks felt hot. “I don’t need anything. I’m fine, really. But thank you.”
He stopped at a red light and looked at me as he took off his sunglasses. “Are you really going to deprive me of the chance to buy something for someone that doesn’t involve birds or tropical flowers?”
I smiled. “I appreciate it. I just . . . You and Marcus have already been too good to me.”
Something sad touched his eyes. “What makes you think anything could be too good for you?”
I shook my head. “I . . . I don’t know.”
He turned his eyes back to the road as the light changed to green. “Well, maybe you should think about that, because I don’t think anything’s too good for you, and neither does Marcus.” He glanced over at me. “But it doesn’t matter what we think, now does it?”
I turned my face to the window, my throat closing around the emotion that suddenly rose there.
We arrived at the mall and headed inside, Scotty regaling me with stories about shopping with Marcus. According to Scotty, Marcus’s uniform only changed when the temperature dropped below sixty degrees. Then he would trade his cargo shorts for chinos. He had Hawaiian shirts in every color and pattern imaginable, and he had a near-psychic intuition if one of them went missing.
“So I took the green one out of rotation,” Scotty was saying as we entered the mall, “rolled it up and tucked it in the back of my sock drawer. My eyes were starting to bleed. And would you believe he came downstairs wearing it the very next day?”
I laughed. I don’t know what was funnier to imagine, the look of satisfaction on Marcus’s face or Scotty’s surprise.
“We need a warm-up,” Scotty announced, leading the way to the second floor.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I followed him past several stores until we came to an arcade. Lights flashed, electronic music and voices spilling from inside the darkened space. Scotty turned into the storefront, stopping when he saw that I was lagging behind.
“Don’t tell me you don’t like video games,” he said.
“No, I do. I just . . .”
“Didn’t think I’d like them?” he smiled. “Don’t get too confident. I will totally kick your ass at DDR.”
He got change from the machine and proceeded to beat me in three games of Dance Dance Revolution. I was sweating by the time we were done, but he looked like he’d been sitting in the shade, enjoying an umbrella drink. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Need a break?” he asked with a satisfied smirk.
I shook my head, still catching my breath. “Let’s just make the next one a sitting-down game.”
He grinned. “Deal.”
We played a racing game (I finally beat him after four tries) and then moved onto an old-fashioned pinball machine. By the time we finished, we were tied.
“I’ll get you on the tiebreaker next time,” he said.
We were leaving the arcade when Scotty stopped cold. “Oh, yes. We are definitely doing that.”
I followed his gaze to the photo booth, its dingy blue curtain half open to reveal an unoccupied stool. I shook my head. “I can’t . . . I don’t . . .”
“What?” He looked legitimately confused.
“It’s one of the rules. We don’t take pictures.”
He took my hand. “Well, we do.” He sighed, and I could tell that he was struggling to find the right words. “Listen, Grace. I’m not a fan of Marcus’s former business endeavors, but there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. You can’t live like a ghost, caring about people only because you need them for a job, forgetting about them as soon as you leave, never taking pictures. . . . That’s all the stuff that makes life fun. Getting attached and falling in love and making friends and taking pictures.” I looked around, wondering if anyone could hear what Scotty was saying, if anyone even cared. But the sound of the arcade muffled everything else, and even if it didn’t, what would people hear? Scotty talking about a job that could be anything. Talking about life. I turned back to him as he continued. “You might as well be dead. And you have your whole life in front of you with lots of friends to make and boys to fall in love with and pictures to take. Try to be excited about that. Don’t let the past dictate the way you live from here on out. There’s no limit to how many times you can reinvent yourself you know.”
I nodded and let him lead me into the photo booth. We took two sets of pictures, making goofy faces and vamping for the camera. When the two strips came out of the little slot on the outside of the machine, Scotty handed me one.
“The first of many pictures you’ll have to remember the good times.”
The words scared me, like they were some kind of jinx against a future that didn’t involve jail or the con.
Scotty asked me which stores I liked as we left the arcade, but I hadn’t been shopping enough in California to really know, so I just picked ones that I hadn’t visited with Selena. The tiniest seed of hope had blossomed inside me. I didn’t want reminders of the past. Not today.
Scotty was patient while I agonized over what to buy. It had been a long time since I’d chosen anything to wear without a mark or con in mind. I wasn’t even sure what I liked, if I even had a style I could call my own. In the end, I got a couple of pairs of shorts, a new pair of capris, two sundresses, and a few tank tops
and T-shirts. I thought we were finished after Scotty insisted on a new pair of sandals and tennis shoes, but he led me to Victoria’s Secret instead.
My face got hot as he handed me his credit card. “Honey, don’t be embarrassed. Believe me, I can appreciate the importance of nice underwear, even if it’s not something I’ll ever see Marcus wearing.” I burst into laughter at the image as he continued. “Just get what you need. I’m going to sit out here and check my email. Or play Candy Crush. I’ll never tell which.” He walked away before I could protest.
I bought new underwear and three new bras, then left the store and looked around for Scotty. He was nowhere in sight. My breath caught in my throat, the familiar tingling sensation hitting my head as things started to blur around me. I hurriedly scanned the benches for Scotty as my vision started to cloud. I didn’t see him, and everything suddenly got worse, my vision blackening at the edges. I was feeling for the railing that looked down on the first floor of the mall, hoping to brace myself, when Scotty came into view. Concern washed over his face when he saw me, and he pressed a button on his phone and hurried over.
“Grace? What’s wrong?” He took my arm and led me to one of the benches. “Deep breaths . . . come on, just keep breathing.” He breathed with me, and I tried to slow down to match his breaths. A couple of minutes later, my head started to clear, and my face didn’t feel quite as numb. “Better?” he asked.
I nodded. “Better.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I came out of the store, and I didn’t see you. . . .” It was the first time I’d made the connection. Did I think that Scotty had left me? That I was alone all over again?
“Oh . . . oh, Grace. I’m so sorry.” He put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him. “I just went into the stationery store across the way to get you this.”
I looked down at the bag in his hand. “What is it?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” he said.
I looked inside and saw only tissue paper. I stuck my hand into the bag and felt past the tissue to something flat and hard. When I pulled it out I saw that it was some kind of notebook or journal, its cover adorned with green-and-blue paisley.