Last Seen Leaving (13 page)

“If this meeting is such a big deal,” January returned slowly, “then maybe you should have set it up in the basement.”

Eddie stared at her for a long moment, the darkness rolling in his eyes like storm clouds, his expression one of disbelief. Then, stomping closer, he grabbed for our things. “Where the hell is the remote?”

“Get your hands off my stuff!” January protested sharply, standing up in the tub. Her heated skin was pink around the white straps of her bikini, and she lunged for the pair of shorts Eddie was rifling through.

“Why don't you chill out for a second,” I suggested to the man in a tone more bold than I felt, rising to my girlfriend's defense.

“
You
stay out of this, you little pothead punk—you're nothing but a bad influence,” Eddie snapped. The minute he'd learned about my parents' marijuana activism, he'd declared me a “political liability,” and begun treating me like a case of campaign herpes. Giving my towel a violent shake, he ejected from its folds the remote control that operated the hidden speakers, and the device clattered across the patio. Snatching it up, the man silenced the music immediately.

“Fine,” January snapped, her voice a little shaky, “you got what you wanted. Now leave us alone!”

But Eddie had discovered our glasses of rum and Coke, and as he sniffed them, his eyebrows nearly blew into the stratosphere. “Is this … are you
drinking
?”

Not waiting for a response, he hurled the contents of both glasses out over the railing and into the darkness, and January shouted, “Hey! You can't do that!”

Eddie spun back around, trembling all over, and jabbed a finger into my girlfriend's face. “You listen to me, you ungrateful little bitch! This is
exactly
the kind of dumb-shit teenage fuckery that we cannot tolerate. You get caught drinking underage and it's your
father
who takes the heat! You could cost him this election!”

“He is not my father,” January corrected him coldly, “and I don't really give a shit if he gets elected.”

Through his teeth, Eddie seethed, “If you were my kid, I'd belt the sass out of your smart little mouth.”

“Hey!” I jolted forward, putting myself between him and January. “Don't you threaten her!”

He ignored me completely. Still speaking to January, he snarled over my shoulder, “Someone needs to teach you a little manners and respect!”

“Manners and respect?” January laughed, the sound bright and unpleasant. “You came out here to bully and curse out a couple of teenagers, and you want to talk about manners and respect?”

There was a moment of charged silence, during which it looked as if Eddie might either blast off into orbit or burst into flames, and then he marched past us, toward the doors to the morning room, pocketing the remote. “Someone needs to do something about you—put you somewhere you can't fuck things up anymore! If you can't behave with even an ounce of class, you need to get out of the way.”

The French doors slammed shut behind him, and silence descended on the patio, the only sound the turbulent movement of the heated water that roiled around our hips. January had turned away from me, her blond hair pasted to the wet skin of her back, her posture stiff and ramrod straight. For a long moment, we simply stood there while I tried desperately to think of something to say. “He didn't mean it” would be both inadequate and untrue.

Finally, my girlfriend turned around, her expression a studied blank, and she sank down into the Jacuzzi until the bubbles frothed around her collarbones. Tilting her head back over the lip of the tub, she returned her attention to the stars.

After a little while, in a thick, small voice, she whispered, “I really wish we could just move to California already.”

 

ELEVEN

“FLYNN?” THE SOUND
of my name snapped me back to reality, and I jumped up from the Adirondack chair with a start. Mr. Walker was standing in one of the French doors, his patrician features looking drawn and tired. He wore a white oxford shirt, and his necktie was loosened at the collar. “Why don't you come inside, son? It's freezing out.”

Silently, I assented, following the man into the house. The door closed and locked behind us, and I found myself standing in the morning room, a squared-off space that housed an antique dining table with matching chairs, a nearly wall-to-wall throw rug, and a chandelier made from a wrought iron wagon wheel that threatened to bring down the ceiling supports. The grand room connected through a door to one side, and the keeping room—with its voluptuous armchairs, stone fireplace, and Impressionist art pieces—extended off to the other. I had no idea what the names of the rooms meant; only that the differences were apparently
very clear
and
very important
to January's mother, if to no one else.

For a terribly awkward moment, Mr. Walker and I simply stood there in silence, listening to a giant wall clock keep score of our discomfort from the keeping room. I didn't know what to say, wasn't sure if I owed him my condolences or if it was even appropriate; further, I was afraid to hear one more person assume the worst, out loud, about the discovery that had been made by the search team—even myself.

Self-consciously, Mr. Walker placed a wide hand on my shoulder and, nodding as if we had already shared a Deep Understanding, said, “Thank you for coming today, Flynn. It meant a lot. To both of us.” I mumbled something in reply, and stared at the shining surface of the nearby table. I could see my own reflection in the gleaming wood, my face warped and elongated. “I … it's hard to believe that … well, it's just … awful,” he continued, his voice sounding exhausted and uncertain. For the first time, possibly ever, January's stepdad seemed to be at a loss for exactly the right thing to say, and I could smell alcohol on his breath despite the fact that it was only the afternoon. “Mrs. Walker … Tammy is taking it pretty hard.”

I mumbled a reply, scarcely able to imagine what Tammy must be going through, as I flashed on the bloody sweatshirt and its kite tail of twisted duct tape.

“She asked for you,” Mr. Walker added, and I glanced up in surprise. His expression was both grave and removed at the same time, someone hearing a sad story that had nothing to do with him. “I would appreciate it if you'd talk with her a little. I think … I think it might make a difference.”

I had no idea what this could possibly mean, but I nodded anyway, and Mr. Walker led me to the mahogany door that marked the entrance of the grand room. It was a spacious den that rose up two stories, one wall composed entirely of bowed glass windows that let in a flood of natural light and allowed a view of the pool, the gazebo, and the grassy fields that undulated off to the distant trees. A second stone fireplace dominated another wall, and above it hung a massive portrait of some whiskered military commander from the seventeenth century—probably an ancestral Walker. A third wall was open space, an unobstructed passage into the central hallway, where a double staircase swooped gracefully up to the second floor.

Eddie Sward leaned over an oak desk in a corner of the room, speaking forcefully into his cell phone; when he saw me he scowled unhappily but didn't miss a beat of his one-sided conversation. Slouched forward on an overstuffed sofa upholstered in creamy beige fabric, January's mother had her face buried in her hands. On the low table before her sat a half-empty tumbler of scotch.

As Mr. Walker shut the door behind us, he cleared his throat. “Tammy? Flynn is here.”

Mrs. Walker looked up with a jerk, her eyes swollen and rimmed with red, and when she saw me she attempted a smile that fluttered like a leaf about to blow away in a stiff breeze. “Flynn.”

She reached both arms out to me, and I moved forward to take them, sinking onto the sofa at her side. Her hands were cold, her grip viselike and desperate, and her once-precise coif of white-blond hair was a bristling mess. She looked like she'd aged a hundred years since the morning, and in her narrow, haggard face, I tried to find traces of the warm, scatterbrained woman I'd met when January and I first became friends. It was hard to believe she was even the same person.

“I d-don't—” I started to say, but just like that my chest ballooned, my throat squeezed shut, and the words stumbled out in a pitiful squeak as I began to cry. Tammy yanked me against her, smashing my face into her shoulder, and held on to me like we were on a plane spiraling into the Atlantic.

“What happened?” January's mother rasped plaintively in my ear, her voice a herky-jerky whine through the thickness in her own throat. “What happened to my baby? What happened to our precious girl?”

Her chin dug sharply into my shoulder as she began to sob, great, racking cries that wrenched her entire body, her fingers buried into my back so fiercely it was like she was trying to reach past my rib cage to my heart. After a moment, Mr. Walker intervened, prying us apart and placing Mrs. Walker's drink into her hand.

“Try to breathe, sweetheart.” He guided the drink to Tammy's lips, and she swallowed a mouthful of booze, choking and then gasping for air. She slumped back against the cushions, and Mr. Walker set the glass on the table again.

“Why is this happening?” Tammy moaned at last, staring out the towering windows at the magnificent view. Her hand found mine, and she turned to me with glazed, forlorn eyes. “Why my baby? It isn't fair!”

“I don't know why,” I whispered.

She let out an exhausted breath, squeezing my hand so hard I thought the setting of her baroque diamond ring was going to draw blood, and tremulously averred, “All I've ever wanted was for her to be happy. That's all a parent ever wants. It's the only thing. You … you have this perfect, little, tiny
person
in your hands, and you say,
I will never let anyone hurt you, I will never let you be sad, I will do anything in my power to make you happy
. And then…” She shrugged, then shuddered, and then coughed violently. “I don't understand. I just … don't.”

“We don't know anything for sure yet,” Mr. Walker pointed out with automatic diplomacy, although even I could tell his heart wasn't in it. “Try to remember that.”

“It was so hard when her father walked out on us.” Tammy ignored him, speaking listlessly to the windows. “I was young and alone and scared, and it was such a struggle. The sleepless nights, the double shifts, the sacrifices … it took everything I had in me to hold us together, to give her the best life. And now …
this
. It feels like a punishment! What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening?”

An uncharitable shadow passed across my sympathy for Tammy Walker as I watched her lay effortless claim to center stage in the unfolding drama—a move no less disappointing for its familiarity. I couldn't count the number of times her skirmishes with January had ended with the tearfully self-involved demand,
Why are you doing this to me?
—as if the girl's every quasi-insubordinate act were part of some grandiose revenge plot against her mother, rather than a simple expression of her own independence.

“It isn't your fault, Tams.” Mr. Walker sounded exhausted. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

Narrowing her eyes at her husband through a cloud of tears and alcohol, Mrs. Walker snapped, “She hated it here.”

“That's not your fault, either,” Mr. Walker returned, a little more firmly, “and it isn't the reason she . . the reason for … for any of this.”

“I wanted her to be happy, and now she's—” Tammy choked on the end of her statement and shuddered, unwilling or unable to finish the thought. “She hated this house, she hated her school, she hated
me
 … and you tell me that I didn't do anything
wrong
?”

“All teenagers resent their parents,” Mr. Walker returned shortly, his eyebrows drawing together. “It doesn't mean anything! I'm sure January knew—
knows
how lucky she is.” His gaze turned to me, and I finally understood the real reason I'd been summoned into the house. “Isn't that right, Flynn?”

He wanted me to tell Tammy that January's anger was just a by-product of meaningless, pop-psych-approved Teen Rebelliousness, and that—deep down—she was truly appreciative of all the unstoppable changes overtaking her life. Maybe I didn't entirely get why my ex-girlfriend loathed this mansion and her gorgeous new school so much, but the fact was that I didn't have to spend any more time in them than I wanted to. No one had forced me to move and leave my friends behind; no one had demanded my gratitude for making peremptory decisions about the way I would live my life, and no one had treated me like my opinions on the subject were irrelevant obstructions. I couldn't pretend that January hadn't been filled with legitimate resentment, because she had.

Lucky for me, I didn't have to reply. Savagely, Mrs. Walker hissed, “She wasn't
all teenagers
, she was my daughter! My little girl! And she
hated it
here!”

“She was
difficult
!” Mr. Walker finally snapped in return, slipping firmly into the past tense while grabbing his own glass of scotch from the desk, where Eddie was still jabbering into his cell phone. “There was no making her happy, because she didn't
want
to be happy! I don't see why you can't grasp that.” He guzzled what was in his tumbler and then immediately refilled it, booze sloshing out of a bottle of Glenmorangie. “Nothing you did would ever be good enough, because she didn't want it to be.”