So Shelly (27 page)

In spite and with gusto, Gordon joined Shelly in the second verse as she continued her dance, oblivious to her father’s ocular presence.

He soon disappeared inside the room, and Gordon stopped singing as Shelly finished the song and dance and collapsed to the dock, pulling Gordon down with her, laughing.

In her giddiness, Shelly failed to hear the gears grinding in the clocklike machinery of Gordon’s head as he considered Neolin’s threat to what Gordon believed to be his own
rightful place at the top of Shelly’s hierarchy of affection. He wondered what, if anything, he could or should do about it.

Exhausted from their singing and dancing, recounting their summers passed, and sharing emotional catharses, Gordon and Shelly lay down side by side on their backs on the earth, watching the moon beginning its descent from its teeter-totter top as the sun continued its ascent behind them.

“I’m glad you’re back, Gordo.”

“Me too. I missed you, Shell.”

Minutes of silence passed. They rose and hugged.

“Talk later?” Shelly asked.

“Talk later.”

Then they set out on their separate paths to the back entrances of their respective homes. Midway to his door, Gordon called out to her, “And I don’t just mean this summer. I mean all these years since we were kids and have kind of gone our own ways. I mean it. I’ve missed you.”

Shelly stopped abruptly. In the slowly advancing light of dawn, she studied his face for any sign of sarcasm, but his emotion seemed, for once, to be unequivocal and genuine. “Thanks, Gordon. That really means a lot.”

“No problem,” he said.

They turned and walked on.

“Hey, Shell,” he called, stopping her one more time.

“What?” Shelly returned through the laughter of mock exasperation.

“I love you.”

Gordon disappeared inside his screened-in back porch, leaving Shelly standing frozen, slack-jawed, with her flip-flops dangling from her hand.

Still attempting to rescue her heart from the flash flood of emotions Gordon’s declaration had unleashed, Shelly entered the downstairs kitchen, where she found her father, Mary Jane, and Claire all seated at the kitchen table. Claire and Mary Jane had clearly been crying, and her father wore a grave expression.

“What?” Shelly asked, assuming that she was the cause of their chagrin.

Then a second tidal wave struck.

“Claire’s pregnant by that Byron boy,” Mary Jane said, breaking into a dramatic show of convulsive sobbing, and throwing her arms around her daughter.

No longer able to conceal her “baby bump,” Claire had been forced to confess her pregnancy to her mother and stepfather. Surprising to all, except Shelly, who knew that her father’s right to moral indignation had been forever relinquished, Mr. Shelley made no bellicose show of anger. Although, clearly, he detested Gordon’s self-insertion into the Shelley family sphere.

Shelly looked directly into Claire’s eyes. “Does Gordon know?”

“I haven’t been able to talk to him alone yet. You had him all night,” Claire said before letting go another barrage of tears.

Shelly rolled her eyes.

“When Mommy noticed my belly this morning,” Claire continued, “I had to tell her. Oh, Shelly, Gordon will answer
your
call. Could you …”

Shelly didn’t wait for Claire to finish her request. There was no more to hear or to say. It was all so Gordon.

As she exited the kitchen, Shelly heard Mary Jane comforting Claire by assuring her of the “cute selection of maternity clothes available for expectant mothers these days.” And she raved about how “the upstairs guest room will make an adorable nursery.”

Despite Claire’s claims of loving Gordon, she was forbidden to see him. Although the likelihood was light-years beyond the planet Remote, should Gordon demand them, there was little that the Shelleys could do to deny his rights as a father, but they were under no such obligation to welcome him into their already-dysfunctional-beyond-belief family. Regardless of whether Gordon embraced the role of father or not, the Shelleys would insist that he provide his share of financial support. Through the machinations of his attorneys, however, as of this writing, Gordon has yet to accept his paternity or to take the test that would condemn him to it, financially or otherwise.

Even for Shelly, Claire’s pregnancy was so egregious as to severely limit their already-marginal sisterhood.

Initially, Shelly believed that, should Gordon be the father, her choice of Neolin over Gordon would be easy. However, as Gordon vehemently denied his guilt and she, as in all things, believed him, Shelly’s lifelong store of love for Gordon weighed heavily in her decision-making.

Poised for its demolition duty, a bulldozer sat in the side yard like a dog made to wait with a treat resting on its nose until given permission to eat by its sadistic master. Stapled to trees, to the remains of a wooden fence, and to the pilings of the dismantled dock, cardboard signs with garish orange letters on a black background warned “No Trespassing!” Strips of tattered and limp yellow crime scene tape still hung, knotted to the front screen door handle and around several pillars on the porch. Entering the compound, catching our breath, and eyeing our surroundings, Gordon and I stopped and exchanged dubious looks. He had forgotten his pledge to jump immediately into the lake for a cool, cleansing bath.

The circling plane that had caused our mad dash had flown off without landing at the airstrip. Although it was only midmorning, swampy heat had descended and mercilessly accelerated the pace of our fast-diminishing personal hygiene. We were more than twenty-four hours removed
from a shower, and our deodorants had finally punched out after pulling overtime shifts. With our teeth unbrushed, dress shirts pit-stained and wrinkled, pants dust-covered and tattered at the cuffs, and shoes pretty much totaled, the possibility of running water and toiletries left behind inside the farmhouse was far more alluring than the prospect of crossing through the death scene before us was dissuasive.

We climbed the steps, tiptoeing around the indelible once-red-now-brown stain that lay in frozen cascade from the porch down over the first two steps to where the blood must have pooled on the bottom one. A pink flier, issued by the Ottawa County Housing Authority, declared the house condemned. All the windows had been boarded shut with plywood sheets, including the one through which the tear gas canister had been launched. Desperate for refreshment and relief from the direct heat of the sun, Gordon kicked in the front door. After he had set the boom box on the sawhorse table next to a box of odds and ends and I had put Shelly down on an upturned milk crate, our efforts were rewarded by the discovery of cold water, still trickling through reluctant pipes to the kitchen sink, where we took turns rinsing out our mouths.

After washing, we walked solemnly around the completely unfurnished first floor, sharing the stale remains of a tattered plastic sleeve of saltines, which I’d found in an otherwise empty cupboard. Scattered mice droppings inside the cupboard and on the countertop indicated on whose leftovers we were feeding. The air was stifling, but it was still a relief to escape the sun.

“Look,” I said, pointing to a single bullet hole in the wall that separated the “parlor” from the dining room. Long since removed, the bullet had frayed the wallpaper before lodging in a two-by-four stud. Tiny remnants of wood shavings and drywall—most likely from when detectives had dug out the bullet—still piled on the floor beneath the hole among scattered shards of window glass. Our heads turned in unison, following the .308-caliber round’s reverse journey, from its temporary home in the wall, through the now boarded-up windowpane, the side of Neolin’s head as he’d emerged onto the porch, across the front yard, to the verge of the tree line, and back into the womb barrel of the sniper’s rifle.

“Just think of the horror story that bullet could tell,” Gordon said as we stood in silent contemplation.

“How did this happen?” I asked.

The question was rhetorical, but he answered anyway. “This is what happens when you care too much.”

Mindlessly, I began rooting through a box of stuff on the table: a few books, pens and pencils, and an old-fashioned pirate’s spyglass. Then I saw Shelly’s portable DVD player inside its leather case.

“Check this out!” I said.

Gordon immediately understood the cause of my enthusiasm and pulled the stowaway DVD from his pocket. “Let’s play it. Find out whatever the fuck it is she wanted us to see so badly.”

I removed the player from the case and slid the power switch to the on position. The amber-lit power indicator immediately blinked a distress signal to warn of its low battery.

“Hurry,” I said, opening the maw of the player for Gordon to slip in the disc, whose revolutions whirred complainingly when I pressed play.

On the eight-inch screen, a pair of a young man’s legs, shown only from the knees down, in brown dress slacks and shoes, descended a fancy staircase.

Gordon, recognizing the scene immediately, laughed.

Confused, I asked, “What is it?”

“Just watch,” he said.

In the bottom left corner, the title
Harold and Maude
appeared, followed almost immediately by the slightly palm-muted strumming of opening guitar chords beneath the tinkling cascade of high register piano keys that begin Cat Stevens’s infectious “Don’t Be Shy.”

Gordon’s face could barely contain his smile. “So fucking Shelly,” he said. “She loved that movie.”

The battery ran out and the disc spun to a stop before the end of the first verse, and before the camera had panned upward to reveal Harold.

The screen went black.

I reached for the eject button but Gordon’s hand stopped me. “Don’t,” he said. “Leave it.” He snapped the lid closed. With fingers lingering and tracing slow circles against the player’s hard plastic cover, he lost himself for a moment inside thoughts or memories, before finally ejecting the disc himself and returning it to the case.

A slow-dropping awareness of the world outside entered the room in the form of a fast-approaching roar.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?”

“That noise?”

Tilting his ear toward the still open front door, Gordon said, “A boat. A big boat.”

We ran to the door and looked out past the dock toward the north, where we could see a cigarette boat, at least forty feet long, with its bow high out of the water and throwing a massive wake as it sped directly toward us.

“Get that …” Gordon hesitated, not sure of the word. “That pirate thing out of the box.”

“The spyglass?”

“Yeah. Get it.”

“Do you recognize the boat?” I said, handing him the spyglass.

“Not sure.” He extended it to its full length. “Shit!”

“What?” I said. “Who is it? Coast guard? The police?”

“No. Just who I thought it would be. It’s him. Shelly’s father.”

“Who? How could he know?” I was panicking, betraying my fear. I had never been in trouble before. “Why wouldn’t he just call the police?”

Gordon lowered the spyglass. “The plane must have spotted us after all and radioed to him on his boat. Trust me, he wants nothing to do with the police,” he added.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. I was on the verge of a complete meltdown.

“We’re going to finish what we came here to do. That’s what.” He spoke with such matter-of-fact conviction that it immediately calmed my nerves.

“But how? He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“That boat’s too big for what’s left of this little dock out
front here. He’ll have to go clear around to the marina. By then, we’ll have done right by Shelly, but we can’t waste any more time.” He took a deep breath, turned to me, and smiled that Gordon Byron smile that betrayed just how much he enjoyed being him, betrayed his complete self-assurance that no matter how things turned out, he’d be just fine. “Let’s go, Keats. Let’s finish this.”

With that, he scooped up Shelly and the discs and left me carrying the boom box and chasing him out the front door, down the steps, and toward the wood line.

“Where are we going?” I called.

“You’ll see.”

Gordon’s dawn profession of his love sent Shelly reeling—the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her.

I saw her that day at new student orientation. Mr. Robbins had asked us to set up and man a booth for the
Beacon
at the Clubs and Organizations Fair in the just-completed new gymnasium, which had been largely funded by Shelly’s father’s donations.

In the two years I’d known her, I’d been conditioned to Shelly’s flightiness, but I’d never seen her so distracted. She constantly checked her cell phone for phantom texts and missed calls.

During occasional breaks in the steady stream of girls in braces, short shorts (both athletic and khaki), and form-fitting belly-baring spaghetti-strapped tops of varying hues that advertised their brand-new boobs (uniforms were not required for orientation)—all of the girls asking, “Where’s Gordon? Is he gonna be here?”—Shelly dropped the bombshells of
Gordon’s declaration of his love, Claire’s pregnancy, and her feelings for Neolin.

“So, what are you going to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

Once it was clear that Gordon wasn’t coming, few of the attendees paid any attention to us nerdy wannabe writers; instead, the Warriors-to-be queued in long lines at the foreign language club booth (cool trips), the student government booth (looks good on a college application), pep club booth (awesome postgame parties, and they were handing out candy bars), and the Teens for Christ booth. (Rumor had it that Father Fulop, as club advisor, took seniors on small-group retreats to his cabin on some lake in Michigan, where he provided alcohol and some first-rate weed.)

“Does Gordon know about this Neolin?”

Shelly’s crestfallen appearance revealed the answer, as she fell under the weight of an irony avalanche caused by Gordon’s profession of love just when she thought she’d been able to move past him and into a relationship with a non-soul-sucking boy.

“What am I going to do, John?” She turned the question on me.