Mad River Road (42 page)

Lily waited for the light at Stewart to change from red to green, then crossed, wondering how the story would play out.

“You’re here early,” Emma says, panic flashing through her huge, blue eyes. “I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

“This couldn’t wait.”

No, way too melodramatic. Try again.

“You’re here early,” Emma says, clearly flustered by her friend’s unexpected appearance. “I wasn’t expecting you till later.”

“Something’s happened.”

Emma says nothing. She appears to be holding her breath. The two
women stand facing each other in the middle of Emma’s meagerly furnished living room
.

“One of Jan’s trophies is missing,” Lily says, getting straight to the point
.

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do.”

A long silence, then, “You think I took it?”

“Did you?”

“Of course not. How could you think such a thing?”

“Because you were there yesterday. You were admiring Jan’s trophies. And now one of them is gone.”

“You don’t think it’s possible Jan misplaced it?”

Lily shakes her head. “I might have, if it weren’t for what happened at Marshalls.…”

“I told you that was all a big misunderstanding.”

“Really? What is it I don’t understand?”

“I’m not answering any more of these questions.”

“I think you should.”

“Yeah? Well, I thought we were friends.”

“We are friends.”

“It doesn’t sound like it to me.”

“Emma …”

“No. This conversation is over. I want you out of my house.”

Oh, that’s good, Lily thought. Really good. Start again. Different answers this time.

“One of Jan’s trophies is missing,” Lily says, getting straight to the point
.

A long silence, then, “You think I took it?”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” Emma says simply
.

Much better.

“Why?”

Another silence. Clearly the answer to this question is not as simple as the first
.

“Why did you take Jan’s trophy?” Lily asked out loud. The clothes Emma had stolen from Marshalls, Lily could almost understand, if not justify. Emma had no money, no prospects. She was poor, she was depressed, she’d given in to temptation in a moment of weakness. But Jan’s bodybuilding trophy? What could she possibly want with that? Even were she to pawn it, it was doubtful she’d get more than a few dollars. So why bother? Especially when she knew Jan, knew she was Lily’s employer as well as her friend. It was such a betrayal.

Was Emma’s betrayal any worse than her own?

Lily stepped off the curb, into the path of a red Chrysler Sebring. The driver honked angrily, then threw his hands into the air. “Sorry,” Lily mouthed, although the scowl on the man’s face told her he was far from placated. Sorry about a lot of things, she thought.

If she was ever going to stop feeling sorry, she had to start telling the truth.

How could she expect people to be honest with her if she wasn’t honest with them?

Lily’s thoughts returned to the story unfolding in her head.

“You’re here early,” Emma says, standing aside to let Lily enter. “I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

“This couldn’t wait.”

“Look, if this is about what happened at Marshalls …”

“It isn’t.”

Emma regards her quizzically as Lily shakes her head no
.

Could she do it? Could she really tell Emma everything?

“Do you think we could sit down?”

Emma leads Lily into her living room. She motions toward her brown sofa, waiting until Lily gets comfortable before occupying the seat beside her. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“I know you’ve been lying to me,” Lily begins, trying to ease into her confession gradually. “I know you never modeled for Maybelline cosmetics. I know you never sold a story to
Cosmopolitan
magazine. I’m not even sure your name is Emma Frost.”

“Hold on a second here,” Emma interrupts, jumping to her feet. “Where do you come off—?”

“What you don’t know is that I’ve been lying too.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I’m not who you think I am.”

No. Stop. Way too trite. You can do better than that.

“What? What are you talking about?” Emma demands
.

Lily pats the seat beside her. “If you’ll just sit back down.…”

“I don’t want to sit down. What are you telling me here? That your name isn’t Lily?”

“No, my name is Lily. That part’s true.”

“What part isn’t?” Emma demands, her own duplicity temporarily on hold
.

“Pretty much all of it.”

“What!”

“Let me start at the beginning.”

Dear God, Lily thought. Did she even know where the beginning was anymore?

Should she start with her happy childhood, temporarily shaken by her father’s death from prostate cancer when she was twelve years old? Or with the brother who’d stepped in to fill his shoes, assuming the role of guardian and protector, although he was barely a year her senior? What about the normal rebellion of her teenage
years, the girlfriends she’d made, the boys she’d dated? Was any of that relevant? Or should she start with her first encounter with the man who would change her life forever, their subsequent marriage, and Kenny’s horrible death? Was there any way to condense the last five years, anything she could say that would make them more palatable, easier to comprehend?

“For starters, my marriage wasn’t what you think it was,” Lily begins
.

“What was it?”

“A disaster. Like yours.”

Was it possible? Lily wondered, continuing down the street, oblivious to her surroundings. Could both she and Emma have chosen the same kind of man? Was that what had drawn them to each other?

“What are you talking about? You were married to the perfect man.”

“I was married to a monster.”

“Tell me,” Emma directs
.

Except how could she explain?

It was too easy to say that everybody makes mistakes, although that simple statement was probably as close to the truth as anything. There was nothing in her background, nothing in the way she’d been raised, to predict disaster looming. She had wonderful parents, an older brother she worshipped, friends she adored. And then she’d met a man at a party and fallen head over heels in love. They dated; she got pregnant; they got married. And while her parents and friends had their misgivings, initially everyone had been willing to put those concerns aside, to give Lily’s new husband the benefit of every doubt. Only her brother had remained steadfast in his distrust of the man behind the disarming smile.

Ultimately distrust had given way to disdain.

It was that disdain that had led inexorably to his death.

On the back of a motorcycle.

“You’re losing me,” Emma says impatiently, pacing back and forth across her small expanse of living room. “I thought it was your husband who was killed in a motorcycle accident.”

Lily shakes her head. “I lied. It wasn’t my husband. It was my brother.”

Her brother, Lily repeated to herself, wiping several involuntary tears from her eyes. Kenny had been less than a year older than she was, her twin in so many ways, closer to her than anyone on earth. And in a blind rage that could no longer be contained, he’d gone charging off on a misguided mission to avenge the latest batch of bruises covering his sister’s arms and face, bruises she no longer had the strength or desire to dismiss with a reassuring wave of her hand: “Clumsy me, I slipped; I walked into a door; I tripped over one of Michael’s toys.” Not after a day filled with arguments and threats, a day where she’d finally worked up the courage to tell her husband she wanted a divorce, and his response had been to tell her he’d see her rot in hell first. And when day had turned into night, and his threats had turned into fists, and even those fists had failed to quash her newfound resolve to take her son and flee this travesty of a marriage, he’d thrown her to the floor and raped her, savagely and repeatedly, their son screaming all the while from the next room. And when he was through, he’d left her there, curled up in a fetal position on the cold tile, crying and bleeding. “You’re not going anywhere,” he’d said.

She’d waited until he was asleep before grabbing Michael and running to her mother’s house. Kenny was there, and one look at her told him everything he needed to know. “Please, Kenny. Don’t do anything crazy. He’s
not worth it,” she’d begged. But Kenny was already storming out the door and climbing onto his motorcycle, racing into the rain-filled night.

Even now Lily could hear the sound of his squealing tires as they weaved through the Miami downpour. She felt the vibrations of the large bike as Kenny lost control on a slippery turn, and the motorcycle careened off the road into a giant palm tree. She heard her mother sobbing quietly beside her in the hospital room, her distraught voice reassuring her, over and over again, that the accident hadn’t been her fault.

Lily knew her mother was right. Technically, she wasn’t to blame for Kenny’s rash decision to take off after her husband; she wasn’t responsible for his decision not to wear a helmet, to speed through rain-slicked streets. Still, she’d been unwilling to let go of her guilt, because letting go of her guilt meant letting go of Kenny, and she hadn’t been ready to give him up.

But it was time to stop allowing her past to control her present and dictate her future. It was time for a new beginning, Lily understood now, turning the corner onto Mad River Road.

She saw the blue Thunderbird almost immediately and thought she recalled seeing it there earlier. Somebody has a visitor, she thought, watching Carole McGowan exit her house with her two overweight schnauzers. Carole waved as the dogs pulled her toward Lily. “Hi,” Lily greeted her neighbor, watching each dog stop to lift his leg at the side of the curb. “What are you doing home at this hour?”

“Mortimer was acting peculiar all weekend,” Carole said. “So I took him to the vet’s.”

“Is he all right?”

“Perfect.” She reached down to stroke Mortimer’s back. “Turns out it’s Casper here who has the problem.” It was Casper’s turn to have his ears scratched.

“What’s the matter with Casper?” Lily asked absently, looking toward Emma’s house.

“Turns out he swallowed a chicken bone. He’s such a pig. Aren’t you, Casper? You’ll eat anything, won’t you?” As if to illustrate her point, Casper began chomping on a few blades of nearby grass. “Honestly. You’d think we didn’t feed him. Anyway, the vet said we were lucky the bone hadn’t torn his stomach all to shreds. But he seems to be okay, and all’s well that ends well. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say,” Lily agreed, sensing movement behind Emma’s living room curtains.

“That Emma’s really something, isn’t she?” Carole remarked, following the direction of Lily’s gaze.

What was Carole talking about? Had Jan already phoned her, told her about her missing trophy? “What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s a great addition to our club. She’s smart, and she sure knows her stuff.”

And what she doesn’t know, Lily added silently, she makes up.

The dogs began straining on their leashes. “I guess I should let these guys finish their walk before I go to work.”

Lily watched the woman until she and the dogs were out of sight. “All’s well that ends well,” she repeated under her breath, crossing the street and walking toward Emma’s house.

Of course, not everything ended well. Certainly her marriage hadn’t. Instead, her husband had made good on
his threats to make her life a living hell if she left him, harassing her at work and calling her friends at all hours of the day and night. After several months, Lily’s mother had suffered all she could take and moved to California to be closer to her sister. Lily had been all set to go with her, when a judge served her with an order forbidding her to remove Michael from the state until his custody had been determined by the courts. “Why are you doing this?” she’d demanded of her husband.

“Because he’s my son.” That was when he’d boasted about what happened to people who crossed him, told her about a certain appliance salesman in Miami he’d slaughtered with his bare hands.

“You have to go to the police with this,” her friend Grace had urged.

“They won’t believe me. I’m not even sure it really happened.”

“You’re sure.”

“It’s my word against his.”

It turned out her word had been enough to get the ball rolling. In fairly short order, Ralph Fisher had been arrested and, because he was considered a flight risk, denied bail. Lily consulted a lawyer and had him served with divorce papers almost immediately. Then she’d resumed her maiden name, packed up her son, and headed north. Ralph was currently sitting in a Florida prison, awaiting trial. When the trial was over and Ralph had been safely put away for what Lily could only hope was the rest of his natural life, she’d join her mother in California. In the meantime, she’d decided it was better to keep a safe distance from those she loved. Just in case something went wrong, and he made good on some of his
earlier threats. Her friend Grace had promised to keep her updated with regular e-mails, although Lily hadn’t heard from her in several weeks. Maybe later she’d go over to the Internet Café and drop her a line.

But first things first, she decided, ringing Emma’s doorbell and listening for the sound of approaching footsteps. For several seconds, there was no response, and Lily was about to ring again when she heard the familiar voice.

“Come on in,” Emma called from the interior of the house.

Lily glanced over her shoulder at the empty blue Thunderbird, took a deep breath, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.