The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (5 page)

More hours later, Albert’s dad got home from work and came into his room. He sat on the edge of the bed and Albert sat up, still dopey from sleeping the day away.

“Your mother told me about …” He gestured vaguely. “About your girlfriend. You want to talk about it?”

Albert didn’t, but it didn’t matter, since he was pretty sure his dad was actually hoping they
wouldn’t
have to talk about it. His dad didn’t go for talking about stuff, especially the big stuff,
especially
if feelings were involved.

Echoing his mother, his father said, “Your mother and I know you didn’t have anything to do with her going off.”

“Her name is Lily. And no, I didn’t, if you’re asking.”

“Of course I’m not,” his father said, his tone a warning. “She’s a sweet kid, she is, but I’m not sure she’s the best influence on you, given your history.”

“Dad—”

Albert’s father gave him a rough pat on the shoulder. “The fact stands that she’s gone off somewhere, and the police are involved, and you’re involved, too, because you were sneaking around when you should’ve been at home. And so you’re grounded until we get this sorted out.”

“Why?” Albert protested. It was automatic. He wasn’t actually surprised.

“I would think it would be pretty obvious—you’ve defied our rules and managed to get yourself in what looks like a hell of a lot of trouble. Apparently we need to keep a closer eye on you, because your judgment isn’t great.”

“My judgment is—”

His father waved an impatient hand. “I’m sorry about
… Lily, and I truly hope she comes home safely to her family. But you were out when you shouldn’t have been, against our rules. That’s bad enough. If she doesn’t show up soon, it’s all going to get much worse. Do you understand the trouble you could be in?” His voice was soft, but very serious.

“I don’t care.” It wasn’t like it mattered.

Albert’s father gave him a pitying look. “For what it’s worth, I know how it feels with that first love, how you think you’re never going to get over it.”

“Dad, please,” Albert said, and he could feel his face get hot as he tried to keep his temper. The hot prickling in his skin didn’t go away until his father had sighed, heaving himself from the edge of the bed, and left.

Albert skipped dinner—the idea of pork chops and mashed potatoes with his parents and the giant elephant that was Lily’s disappearance in the room made Albert’s stomach clench. No one came to call him to the table. Instead, he forced himself back to sleep.

When he next lifted his head from where it was buried in his pillow, it was just after seven. He had about fourteen hours before he had to face the world again. Covering his head with his pillow to block the familiar sounds of his parents eating dinner—dishes clanging, the small black and white TV in the kitchen tuned to the local news, the sounds of their muffled conversation—Albert closed his eyes.

What is the
matter
with you?

Albert tried to roll off his stomach and open his eyes, but he was in that sort of sleep paralysis state, at the line between dreaming and waking. He recognized the voice as Lily’s. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t do that either.

I’m impressed with your handling of this situation
, she said in his head. Wry, as she often was. He felt her weight on the edge of the bed.
It’s good to know that
this
is what you’re like in a crunch
.

It’s been a rough day.

The ghost of a chuckle.
Tell me about it.

Now he imagined his hand snaking out from under the covers, searching out and finding hers. Giving it a squeeze.
Where did you go?

But apparently the conversation was over. Soon he went deeper into sleep and there were no dreams there.

“We have a statement from the neighbors that places you at the scene the night Lily disappeared.”

They were in a small cinderblock-walled room at the police station downtown, a bare little office with a high window, not the grim interrogation room Albert had imagined from too many
Law & Order
reruns. He squirmed in the hard plastic chair that Detective Andersen had pointed him to after leading him, alone, from the front desk down a hall to this room. Albert’s response to the detective’s remark that was really a question was a frustrated, “I already said I was at her house that night. I told you that yesterday.”

He’d gone through the day with his mind all muddled, and now he was an hour into giving his official statement, and it seemed like the interview was turning, in a not very subtle way, into an interrogation.

Andersen looked down at some papers on the table in front of him, like he was consulting notes. “Both Mr. and Mrs. Fermacelli say they were awakened sometime around two a.m. by loud arguing—a male and a female voice—which they both say was coming from the Kogen house. The racket came to an abrupt halt several minutes later. Mr. Fermacelli states that he, uh”—Andersen looked at his paperwork—“‘couldn’t stand it’ and went outside to look around. He saw no one, but states that he saw a car driving away that he believed came from the Kogen driveway and which he also believed to be Miss Odilon’s vehicle.” Andersen stopped, watching Albert for a reaction. “Did you and Miss Odilon argue?”

“Argue?” echoed Albert, bewildered. “No. He’s mistaken. I never left Lily’s room until later, when I realized she was gone. I didn’t hear a car, and I didn’t hear any arguing.” He looked down at his hands, his words hanging in the air. The overhead light gave off a low buzz.

“Was there anyone else in the house?”

“Like I told you,” Albert said, “it was just us.”

“Dr. Kogen, in his statement, said that he’s witnessed several arguments between you and his stepdaughter.”

“I don’t know why he’d say that. I’ve only met the guy, like, twice!” Albert rubbed his eyes until little stars burst behind his eyelids. “Why would he say that?”

Andersen ignored the question. “You ever been arrested?”

“No.” Which was technically true.

“Ever been in trouble?”

“No.” This, on the other hand, was a lie.

“Tell me something. I have two witnesses who heard arguing, another witness who claims you and the girl were known to argue, and you yourself admitting to being the last person to have seen her. What would you think if you were me?”

Albert knew it looked bad, whatever
it
turned out to be, but he wasn’t about to say so. The air seemed to go out of the little room.

Andersen pressed on. “Are they all lying?”

“I just don’t understand why her stepfather would say that.”

“So
he’s
lying, is that it?” Andersen’s eyes were a flat gray-blue and when they met Albert’s, they were cold. “Perry Kogen is a friend of mine. I’ve known him for years. I’ve known you for about ten goddamn seconds. You’d better level with me, and right now.”

“I
am
,” Albert insisted, cringing at the way his voice cracked. He kept picturing Lily’s empty car. “I’ve told you everything I know.” He looked around the windowless room, and he was afraid. He was afraid of the cops … afraid for Lily … afraid something big was happening.

Andersen’s eyes flashed before they went dead calm again. He sighed. “Let’s go through your story again, from the beginning …”

The burger joint they’ve hurriedly left is on the outer edge of town. Now they’re about a mile down the road from its neon sign. The way is amazingly dark and has the feel, to Albert, of absolute wilderness. They’re only a couple days’ walk from home but the environment is really different: the scrubby trees and brush Albert has gotten used to since moving to Little Solace are gone, replaced by tall pines that are just shadows in the gloom.

Olivia leads and they walk in silent single file. Whenever they hear a car coming, the two of them crouch down, as still as possible, until they have the road to themselves again. After the car passes, they continue walking. It’s become routine. Occasionally they hear an owl’s hoot or a rustle deeper into the trees, but these night noises are part of the background and after a while, they stop jumping at every sound.

Lulled by their rhythmic steps, Albert lets his mind go off on its own and he stops worrying about what they’re doing. This marching, the back of Olivia’s coat a few paces in front of him, the smell of pine and frost in the dark, the thunder in his cold ears of his blood pumping, and his own heavy breathing, are all that he knows. There is just the present.

Gradually the trees that have choked the road thin out. Soon there is open meadow on either side of the highway, sloping down to the forest. Albert looks up at the clear dark sky, imagining what little heat there’d been during the day escaping into the perfect glittering night. He feels small and adrift, like he might lose his gravity and float off into cold space.

Olivia’s practical voice cuts the silence. “We have to get off the main road,” she says, her breath coming out in a cloud of cold vapor. “There’s no cover here.” She turns to Albert and points to the tree line across the flat grass. “There.”

“How are we going to follow the road from that distance?” he asks.

“I haven’t been this way in a while, but I remember a set of train tracks this side of the trees. If we follow the tracks, that should take us into the next town. I’m pretty sure the rails go the same way, and we won’t have to worry about cars spotting us.”

“Naw, just about getting run down by a train. Or murdered by hobos out in the woods.”

Olivia’s wry smile is very faint in the dark, but Albert can hear the mockery in her voice, a darker echo of Lily that gives him a twinge. “I’m not worried about it. It’s too goddamn cold for anyone to be out tonight. Besides, I don’t think it’s that far, honest. Just over the next little rise, I think.”

They set out across the open field toward the dark shadow of the pines, and this time Albert insists on leading the way.

“Just in case,” is all he gives for an explanation. He’s serious about the hobos.

The ground slopes unevenly and the distance over it is longer than it looks. But as Olivia had predicted, just this side of the trees is a raised line of railroad tracks stretching off in either direction, parallel with the road.

Olivia eyeballs the slope up to the tracks. “Think we should cross over to the other side, closer to the cover of the trees?”

“No,” Albert says. “No one is going to see us so far off the road in the dark. It’s probably safer if we stay on this side.”

“Safer … ?”

He doesn’t want her to know how jumpy he feels and how much he doesn’t want to disappear into the choking black of those trees. So he says, “I think it’s better if we can see the highway.”

For once, Olivia doesn’t argue.

The train tracks actually do parallel the road for a while and they’re able to cover a lot of ground by following them. As they walk, they see a couple of cars in the distance but they don’t bother hiding, confident that they’re far enough away to be invisible. They stop when the highway and the tracks seem to branch off from each other—the road taking a gentle curve to climb a rise and cut through two low hills; the tracks barreling straight ahead through the darkness and, it looks like, into the hill itself.

“Now what?” Albert says. He wishes he has something to drink and makes note of it for when they get to the next town, if they actually find the next town.
If
they don’t spend the entire night just wandering in the woods.

Olivia uses her forearm to push her bangs out of her eyes. She gestures toward the black rise ahead. “I still think this way is our best bet.” When Albert says nothing, she adds, “I don’t think it’s that far to the next town—Midvale or Melville or something like that. If we were standing up there, I swear we would see lights right below us.”

“How sure are you?” he asks.

“Pretty. I just don’t want to stick with the road and then get caught out there—picked up by a state patrol car or something.”

“Okay then.” It’s his turn again to follow her lead.

The distance into town is farther than it looks from where they’d started, but eventually they come out of the wilderness and find themselves in civilization, more or less, just as Olivia had said they would. Looking down from the rise at the town, Albert sees it as a neon sea roaring out the names of diners, motels, truck stops, and all-night drug stores.

By the reckoning of the vague map in Olivia’s head, there’s a long stretch of empty highway after they pass through this town and split off north to the next one. Albert has to trust her recollection. This is all new and strange country to him—even the trees are unfamiliar. He wishes he knew the names of even a couple of them; it’s frustrating, he reflects, how much he doesn’t know about anything at all.

“Coffee?” says Olivia as they cut through a dark convenience store parking lot toward the main drag, which merges with the highway on the way back out of town.

“If I’m going to keep this up, yeah, I guess I could use something hot and caffeinated.”

She yawns. “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep going with just a few minutes of rest here and there.”

“We’ve been over this,” he says. “We have to get to her
first
.”

“I know!” she snaps. “I’m keeping company with a suspected murderer and I’ve probably become an accessory at this point, and a runaway besides. So don’t tell me what I
need
to do. I’m
doing
it.”

Albert experiences a funny moment that pretty much defines the contradictory way he feels about Olivia: on one hand, given that some of her mannerisms and facial expressions echo her sister’s, being with her is comforting, like she’s carrying a piece of Lily. But at the same time, Olivia is so prickly and sarcastic and hardened that the contrast just makes him miss Lily’s unrealistic cheeriness.

“Fine.” They’re standing at an intersection. The light turns green and they cross, for no other reason but that movement has become automatic to them.

She sighs. Then, as if she can read his mind: “I’m just so tired.”

As they make their way downtown, a few cars pass them but the sidewalks are pretty much empty. The wind picks up and the night becomes even colder. When Albert turns abruptly to pass through the automatic sliding doors of a twenty-four-hour grocery store, Olivia is right behind him. An electronic beep announces their arrival. The place seems deserted, with just one checker at one register counter up front and no customers. There are warm globe lights, dim, but they can still see that the store isn’t very clean. The automatic door slides shut behind them with a sucking sound, and soft elevator music drifts from somewhere overhead.

The checker looks up when the door beeps, but when she sees Albert and Olivia her interest seems to die, a big yawn pulling her mouth wide.

They wander down the aisles in a weird hurried daze, and the music seems to follow them. There’s no hot coffee for sale in the small grocery store, so they settle for two bottles of soda—something sugary and neon yellow for Albert, a diet cola for Olivia—and a couple of soft apples from the tiny produce department along the front side wall, opposite the doors.

The soft music coming from above switches from “You’re So Vain” to the Stones’ “Wild Horses.” Snuffling noises are coming from Olivia, and Albert looks up from where he’s setting their drinks onto the counter. He’s expecting tears, but instead he’s surprised to see that she seems to be holding in some fit of giggling.

“Are you all right?” he asks, totally confused.

She nods, but when their eyes meet the giggling bursts into full laughter and she covers her mouth to mute the sound, shoulders shuddering and tears running down her face. After a moment she gets control of herself, though she keeps hiccuping random giggles.

“What’s the matter with you?” the clerk asks, taking the money Olivia holds out to her.

“I’m sorry,” she says to Albert. “It’s just that song … it reminds me of something else my sister told me …”

Albert feels his ears go red. “Yeah?”

Now she refuses to meet his eyes. “She said that when you two were … that you always liked to play this song …
every time …”

The rest of his face turns the same tomato shade as his ears. “I can’t believe you guys talk about that stuff.”

Olivia’s laughter threatens to come back. “Don’t be embarrassed!” she says. “She said it was romantic.
I
think it’s sweet.”

“You can stop now.”

She’s off again, overcome with laughter. “But it’s just that whenever I hear this song now … and you’re right here …”

“Please shut up,” Albert begs, feeling a sheepish grin crawl across his face in his embarrassment.

The clerk gives them a funny look and Albert pulls Olivia out the door in a hurry.

When they’re outside, Olivia’s fit passes and Albert chooses to pretend it hasn’t happened. They sit on the sidewalk, not talking, huddling close for warmth, their feet in the gutter. As they drink the too-sweet sodas that they don’t really want, the only sound is the fizz bubbling up from their bottles and their teeth sinking into the mushy apples. Olivia stares down at the apple core in her hand, looking at it blankly as if she doesn’t know what it is, before tossing it into the gutter.

Albert studies her face in the faint light that’s coming through the grocery’s big front window and bathing the sidewalk. It’s a tired, pale face—sharp and thin where Lily’s is soft and curving. Albert can see the resemblance to Lily in Olivia, even so. He thinks how funny it is that the face of a girl he barely knows can be so painfully suggestive of a more familiar one. It occurs to him that it must be hard having Lily as an older sister—she eclipses everyone, all the time, even in her absence.

Olivia looks up and a shadow passes over her face, as if she’s been reading Albert’s thoughts again. She moves fast, jumping to her feet in a smooth movement and walking away from the store, crossing the parking lot.

“Hey,” he says, catching up halfway across. “Now we just—” But he’s cut short by Olivia’s sharp intake of breath and her hand on his arm, fingers digging into his flesh right through his coat.

She swears softly.

He pries her fingers loose, asking, “What is it?”

She looks more than ever as if she’s about to collapse. “I think I just saw Perry.”

“What?” He looks around, as if her stepfather is at his elbow. “Where?”

She points back across the parking lot. “Over there, going into the store. I saw him through the window, as clear as anything, I swear, before he moved into an aisle and I couldn’t see him anymore.”

“Are you sure?” But even as he asks, Albert is moving quickly away and reaching for Olivia’s arm to pull her along faster, too.

She chews a finger. “I don’t know. We have to get out of here. This way,” she says, directing them at a sharp angle around the back of the building and into the unlit alley behind it. Once they’re obscured in the alley’s shadows, they both stop.

“Did he see you?” Albert asks.

“I don’t think so,” she says, her legs moving again. “Or he would have come after us. Right?”

“But he must know we’re here. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise. Somehow, he followed us.” Albert tries to keep his voice calm, but it’s hard. “He’s probably going to talk to the clerk, maybe show her a picture of us.”

“Calm down. He doesn’t know exactly where we are right now and that we’ve seen him.” Olivia takes his hand and begins to run down the alley, pulling him along and glancing back over her shoulder. “Come on. We can still get out of here before he catches up.”