The Cake Therapist (17 page)

Diane knocked on the door of the house with the big front porch next to the library. Helen’s older brother, Jack, answered.

“I’m going to study, Mom,” he yelled back into the house. “Be home later.” He quickly shut the door before she could answer.

“Pattersons’,” he whispered to Diane.

They ran around the side of his house and cut through the small, narrow backyard, ducking under the clothesline, to a house on the back street. They let themselves in the side door of the old wood-framed garage that smelled of old leather seats and gasoline.

They sat on the old metal glider that Mr. Patterson had been meaning to fix for years. Jack took a pint of Wild Turkey from his inside coat pocket, unscrewed the top, and passed it to Diane.

“How’d you get it this time?” Diane asked. She took a little swig, made a face, and passed the bottle to Jack.

He turned the bottle up and swallowed the cheap bourbon, wincing. “Hinky’s. When nobody’s lookin,’ I top this up with whatever I can sneak from behind the bar when I’m doin’ dishes. Just makes life easier.” He took another swig and passed the bottle back to Diane.

Before she took her turn, Diane looked at Jack. “Does your mom know?”

“Hell, no. She’s usually in bed by the time I get home. And I keep a bottle of Listerine under the front porch. I can swish and spit before I go in the house.”

“Listerine would kill anything,” Diane snorted.

They sat side by side, quietly sharing the bottle. Diane couldn’t believe that a handsome senior like Jack O’Neil, with his auburn hair and green eyes, would want anything to do with a freshman like her. Diane hoped that Jack would kiss her one of these days, but he had shown no sign of that.

Ever since that party over Christmas break, when everyone else was drinking 3.2 beer from the keg in the basement, she and Jack had passed the bottle. That night, they had a special, unspoken understanding. They both needed more.

Plus, as Jack had explained to her at their last secret session, it was drinking alone that turned you into an alcoholic. That was what his mother always said about Jack’s father:
He took to drinking alone.
And then he got really sick, and then he died.

If you drank with other people, you’d be okay, Jack said.

“I wonder if we’ll have better stuff than this in Vietnam?”

Diane didn’t quite know where Vietnam was, only that it was far away and that was where Jack was going after graduation.

But that was way far in the future. It was only Wednesday, with two more long days of school left this week. She took a gulp, then another, and waited for that warm, woozy sensation that would start to set in soon. It made not being a good girl feel better.

“My dad has had a drinking problem since high school,” I blurted into my phone. “
That
must be why he left.”

“Thank you, but I already have life insurance.”

I looked at my phone, puzzled. “Ro, you know this is your ‘get out of date free’ call, but I’m also serious.” I hoped her date couldn’t hear me. “I just dozed off and when I was in la-la land, that’s when it came to me. My dad was an alcoholic who kept trying to hide it until he couldn’t anymore. That must be why he always smelled like Listerine.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but can I get back to you on that?”

“I get it. Glad your date is going well.” Roshonda had heard all my previous theories, including my dad being abducted by aliens, being on a secret spy mission, or being in the witness protection program. But this one rang true.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, later in the day,” she said.

“Woo-hoo. Must be going really well. Have fun.”

There was Ro with this gorgeous guy at a fancy restaurant. I could just picture it.

Here I sat on a Friday night, wrapped up like an old lady in a shawl before a fire. But I had just received incredible insights into my own family as well as Mrs. Amici’s. I felt like a guitar that had just been played and was still thrumming with energy. I had to get outside and burn some off.

I turned off the gas fire. Upstairs, I took off my navy lace dress and put on yoga pants and a T-shirt. I added socks and running shoes. Downstairs, I got my puffy jacket, keys, phone, and wallet. I saw Mrs. Amici’s handbag on my nightstand, right next to the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery I’d been meaning to read.

I was a big fan of that 1930s English detective who did New Age things like meditate and revisit all the people and places she had contacted during a case to clear up any bad energy.

That was it. Revisit.

That was what I needed to do: Make the disparate pieces of this story fit together, and maybe understand what happened to Edie. Perhaps then the terrible sour flavor would stop plaguing me. Some inner force propelled me out of the house, carrying Mrs. Amici’s handbag.

The first stop was just next door. My bakery, which had been the library when Mrs. Amici and her sister—Olive and Pickle—were girls. It had been a place of stories, of letting the imagination soar. It was still that kind of place, but in a different way. No unfinished business there, so I walked the few blocks to Mrs. Amici’s house.

The house was dark. I heard Barney barking. Barney! I called the police department from my cell phone and told the dispatcher to contact Bobby—hopefully at home in the trailer park—and let him know that his grandmother was in the hospital and her dog needed to be taken care of. I looked for a key under the front doormat, and found one. I let myself in. The house had a mild odor of vinegar, just like the inside of Mrs. Amici’s purse, but it didn’t choke me like it had before.

Barney barked furiously, growled, and backed away from me as I put her handbag on the little hall table. In a few seconds, he caught a whiff of cake, and it was all good. I petted him, rubbed his ears, and let him sniff around a little more. I checked his food and water in the kitchen. As I walked from room to room, I spotted Frank’s faded purple armchair, Mrs. Habig’s dressmaker dummy, and the old kitchen table I had seen in flashes of story. Time had stood still here, but not Barney.

I found his leash by the front door and took him for a much-needed walk. I would check back with him again in the morning, unless Bobby was here by then.

When Barney and I were finished, I locked up and put the key back under the mat. I walked to the corner of Benson and Church, the old location of Amici’s. Over time, the little store, once at the corner of a long brick row house, had been absorbed by the big sprinkler company where Aunt Helen worked; it was now office space.

I walked to the middle of the bridge to Lockton and looked over the side. The Mill Creek was just a trickle, but the banks were still steep. I could see upstream to the oxbow bend, but it was too shallow for any message to echo down the water. I hurried away.

The old mattress factory was being dismantled, brick by brick, one of the nineteenth-century factory sites that had been declared a brownfield. An early-evening moon cast a chilly blue glare on what had been the Friendly Café, now a thrift store.

I picked up the pace and jogged onto a back street, through the alley, to where Shemuel’s salvage yard was enclosed by a corrugated aluminum fence with a sign painted on it:
Whyte’s. We Pay Cash for Recyclable Materials.
The piles of old mufflers, factory fan systems, and copper pipe that peeked over the top must be valuable for them to keep the yard lit up like a baseball field.

I jogged back to where I felt safer on the main street and then the overpass where the traffic on I-75, the old canal, thundered beneath. Lockton had always been a place cut in half, first by the canal, then by the highway. Now that the factories had closed, both sides had withered, leaving a tannic flavor like dried tea leaves.

The answer to the mystery I was seeking wasn’t here, although I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to find. The only place left was the train station, where Edie’s story had ended. But she had to have gone somewhere from there. She didn’t get on the train. She didn’t go back to town. The only other direction was up the convent hill. Maybe Edie had found the same peace that I had experienced in Bernadette’s grotto. But what difference would that make to Mrs. Amici’s situation now?

I licked my lips and noticed my mouth was starting to feel parched. That told me there was still unfinished business, a worry—somewhere. When anxiety came through, it revealed itself as salty and dry rather than as an actual flavor, because it was fear that kept repeating itself.

I walked the few blocks back from Lockton, passing all the colorful bridal windows along both sides of Benson Street. I debated whether to stop off at my house and get a bottle of water, but I needed that parched sensation, as unpleasant as it was, to direct me.

I also debated whether to jump in my car and drive up to the hilltop, but no, this felt like something I needed to do on foot, perhaps retracing Edie’s steps from the train station to Bernadette’s grotto.

When I got to Vine Street, I remembered that the train station had been torn down last year. There was no building now, just an open grassy area, although the tracks still ran parallel to Millcreek Valley Road.

I crossed over the tracks to where Vine Street dead-ended into the old convent entrance. The tall, ornate wrought-iron gate was still padlocked with a loop of thick chain, but I was able to squeeze through the opening. I got out my cell phone and found the flashlight app that I turned on to guide my way.

The left side of the circular drive had not been cleared in a long time, since no one used this entrance anymore. Concrete had come loose from the old brick paving underneath it. I stepped over downed tree branches and shuffled through patches of old, wet leaves, climbing toward the grotto. This could have been the path that Edie took all those years ago.

I heard the raucous call of a wild goose flying overhead, probably a straggler. Maybe this one was joining the other geese camped out around the convent fishpond farther up the hill. A light came on in a window at the back of the nuns’ residence. I saw a woman’s silhouette. Maybe she had heard it, too.

In a few steps, I reached the upper section of the old drive that was indirectly lit by the nursing facility and the parking lot, so I turned off my flashlight. As I approached the grotto, I heard glass breaking, as if someone was angrily sweeping glasses off a table. The sound echoed in a weird way.

And there was no light in the grotto. The salty bile rose in my throat.

I called 911.

I texted Ben, so someone knew where I was.

Help was coming, but I couldn’t wait. I put my phone in my pocket, picked up a sturdy stick, and opened the grotto door.

My heart thudded. My mouth was so dry it felt like my tongue would split open. But I had to go on.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. As the moonlight flooded in and turned the dark to gray, I could see the head and shoulders of a body curled in the fetal position on the stone floor, shards of broken glass and bits of white candle everywhere.

I bent down and felt the neck for a pulse. It was weak.

When I straightened up to get my phone out of my pocket again, a dark shape lunged forward from the grotto’s dark recess. I screamed as it knocked me over.

I fell hard against the half-opened door, then flat on the cold ground. I yelped as a heavy workman’s boot trampled my left arm as the man ran away.

I heard his heavy breathing and his footsteps as he lumbered up the path to the parking lot. Cradling my injured arm and tingling hand, I pulled myself up to a sitting position. My head was spinning, but I could still hear a truck revving up and roaring off, the pings of gravel spitting out from its wheels—the same sound from the January night I had rescued Jett.

Oh, God, no.

With my good hand, I found my phone and turned the flashlight app on again. Its bright white light made everything look even more surreal. I maneuvered myself up on my knees and shuffled closer to check the body. Spiky dark hair. The eyes bruised and puffy, a cut over one eye, mouth bleeding, but I recognized the dusting of freckles and that nose ring.

Oh no.

I aimed the flashlight down the side of her body. Her jeans and panties had been pulled below her hips. I saw a dark stain that could be blood. Oh no. Please, no.

I placed the lighted phone on the floor and held Jett’s limp, cold hand with my good one.

“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s all over. You’re safe with me. Help is coming. They’re on their way.”

She was still unconscious, but I kept repeating those words, squeezing her hand, as much for my benefit as hers.

I heard a police cruiser screech to a stop.

In the time that followed, I told my story over and over again. To Daniel, who had also responded to Diane’s tantrum in front of Rainbow Cake. To Sister Josepha and Sister Agnes, who were in their robes and slippers; Josepha had her arm protectively around the older nun. To Ben, who took off his coat and put it around my shoulders. To Jett’s mother and brother, who came after I called them.

“I’ll get that no-good bastard,” Jett’s mother growled, and then howled in frustration. “Who would hurt my baby?”

For all her bravado, she looked scared, too, an older biker-babe version of her Goth daughter, with mascara running down her cheeks. She brushed tears away with the backs of her hands. Jett’s junior high brother, pimply and underweight, shrank behind his mother.

An ambulance took Jett to the hospital. Jett’s mother and brother followed in their car.

“I need to go, too, see if Jett is all right,” I told Ben.

We were sitting in Ben’s SUV while the police crime-taped the grotto and shepherded the nuns back inside with an admonition to lock up tight. They waved us on as well.

“He didn’t . . . touch you . . . did he?” Ben asked carefully as he drove me home.

“No, no. But, Jett . . .”

“I understand, Neely. Of course I do. But there’s nothing we can do to help her right now,” he said. “She’s getting the care she needs, and her mother and brother are there for her. It would be better to see her when she’s conscious and you feel better. Tomorrow.”

I nodded, closed my eyes, and said a silent prayer that Jett would wake up and be all right.

“Why were you at the grotto? You shouldn’t be walking around by yourself in the dark.”

I bristled at that.

Okay, Ben was just being Ben: good-hearted, concerned, protective. Would it be so terrible to have someone watching out for me for a change? No, it wouldn’t. But I had to make myself clear to Ben. I wasn’t the resident ditso. I had lived in New York, for God’s sake, and managed to get around when Luke was away, which was most of the time. I was independent. I refused to be limited anymore—I had to be my full self. The person who colored inside the lines married to someone who didn’t recognize them. The dimpled daddy’s girl without a daddy. The cake therapist who couldn’t figure out her own life. And now was as good a time as any to start.

“I appreciate your concern, but I’m not the victim here,” I replied, a little too forcefully. “I was the one who tried to save the day. I’m not some weak, hand-wringing damsel in distress that you had to rescue.”

Ben flinched as if I had slapped him. “Oh, no?” He turned to look at me. “Then what am I doing here?”

“Well, I called you
after
I called nine-one-one. I could have had Daniel take me home.”

“Right,” he said sarcastically. “Daniel.” He shook his head. “You won’t admit you’ve had me on speed dial since second grade.
I’ve
answered every time you called the Damsel Rescue Hotline.”

“You act like I’m some flake.”

“Well, you’ve done a pretty good impersonation of that for the past few years.”

Now
I
was mad. “How can you
say
that?”