The Moment Before (13 page)

We are dismissed and the booth clicks shut, leaving Leonard Field to pop a couple of Excedrins.

We’re in the main spine of the “E” and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what just happened, this negotiation and all of this information, and what’s next. As if in answer to that, Mom offers, “I will see you at 3:30 sharp. Dr. Stern’s office.”

I nod. Promise to show up, and watch my mother stride for the door, her stylish Coach handbag looped on her shoulder. And then, I promptly head off to girl’s bathroom, where I’ll stay until lunch.

Somehow I make it through the school day without running into Martha. A small miracle. Mrs. McConnell is particularly animated in Classics. We’re done with
As I Lay Dying
, and this month, we’re delving into Flannery O’Connor. Cathi Serge’s hand gets a terrific workout. She doesn’t get the symbolism in
Revelation
. She wonders why there’s so much violence in
A Good Man is Hard to Find
. But Beverly, Mom’s apparent BFF, is undaunted. She offers quick answers to Cathi’s questions, the type of answers that invite a student to read other great works for a deeper understanding. Plus, I am not kept after class; in fact Mrs. McConnell does not acknowledge me in any way.

Then, as soon as the dismissal bell rings and I head out the main door for my after-school therapy session, out of nowhere, there’s Nick in my face. “We need to have a chat,” he says, gesturing to my sister’s car, which sparkles in the afternoon sunlight in its space in the student lot.

“I have somewhere I need to be,” I tell him.

“Won’t take long, Brady.”

With a weird flip-flop in my belly, I follow Nick down the short, grassy slope to the car. He’s got his lacrosse uniform on, so I know he has somewhere else to be, too. I cringe as I squeak open the heavy Volvo passenger door. This car, as far as I’m concerned, will always be Sabine’s.

“Just what’s your fucking beef with me?” Nick says the second we’re both inside.

He’s tall, but skinny. So skinny. Ichabod Crane skinny. I see his Adam’s apple going up and down like a tumor in his throat. His ever-present sunglasses are plastered over his eyes, but I can still make out a twitch.

I say, “I know more than you think I do.”

“About?”

It occurs to me, sitting in a car that my parents gave to him, that I have a little leverage. “Don’t even go there, Nick. Just, it might be a good idea for you to watch your step around Martha. And, me, by the way. You want me to keep quiet about stuff, you’d better toe the line.”

“What
stuff
, exactly? Who’s been feeding you garbage about me?”

I pull out the phone I think is Sabine’s, but it’s not. It’s mine, and, unfortunately, its screen is speckled with new texts from Connor.

“Connor Christopher? That fuckwad?”

“Nope. Not him. It’s you, you dumb ass. Your voice on my sister’s phone. Do you have any idea what my father would do to you if he heard the names you called her?”

Nick’s a clenched mess right now. He’s almost smoldering.

“My sister’s death is partly on your hands, asshole. And if I could find a way to let the truth of that out without dishonoring her memory, I would.”

Nick grabs the phone from my hand, his lightning fast lacrosse reflexes working overtime. He points to the black screen. “So, you know she was knocked up. Fine. But what you don’t know, apparently, is that this worthless piece of shit was the one who got her that way.”

My phone in Nick’s hand seems poised to hurl my way. It looks menacing, like a stone from Shirley Jackson’s
The Lottery
. My mouth must be hanging open, because Nick says, “That’s right, Miss Know-it-all, this guy you’re all fired up to exonerate? He’s a creep. A liar and a creep.”

This guy is unbelievable. I heard him call my sister names. Heard him threaten her. I hold out my hand, “Give it back, Nick.”

“Oh, so now we’re squirming, are we? Just what have the two of you been up to?” He engages my text history, which, stupidly, I don’t have locked. And he reads.

How’s your day going?

Wanna meet up?

Brady? You there?

My hands work their way to underneath the passenger seat, where Sabine kept pepper spray for those late nights she’d be out at some party in a distant and unknown neighborhood. I don’t feel the spray, but my fingers find a little plastic Ziploc bag of cremains.

No way.

“Meet up? I’m sure your parents would love to know that you and Sabine’s killer have some secret thing.” He flings the phone back at me and it hits my A-cup chest before my hands can find their way out from under the seat.

Nick reaches across my lap and opens the door. “Gotta go. Just watch the trash talk, hear?”

I don’t even have time to take in a whole breath. Suddenly, I’m standing in the parking lot watching Nick leave rubber on the Greenmeadow asphalt. My phone signals another text.

I’ll be at the park later. LMK if you want to hang out
.

I stuff the phone into my bag and head off for Dr. Stern.

Dad and Mom are in the waiting room when I arrive. Dad’s face puffy, blotchy, he looks up like a puppy at me, cocking his head, then shaking it just a little. “Thank God,” he says, and then stands to give me a hug.

I back away from his outstretched arms, and he sits back down without pursuing it.

“Thank you for showing up,” says Mom, and then takes, what they call in yoga, a deep cleansing breath.

We are three separate people spread out in the therapist’s green room, like disparate guests on a talk show. I pick up a torn and ragged
Good Housekeeping
, and page through it without really looking. It keeps my hands busy. Dad won’t take his eyes off of me, and I know he’s looking at the faint yellow bruise under my eye. Dr. Stern’s door opens and a teary couple ambles out, tissues wadded in their fists. They slink quickly through the exterior door, and our therapist makes an ushering gesture. Out:In. A revolving door of pain and dysfunction.

The three of us settle on the large leather sofa across from Dr. Stern’s squeaky office chair. He leans forward, his elbows on the tops of his thighs. “First,” he says, his eyes over his half-glasses and searing into my face, “I want to acknowledge and applaud your presence here this afternoon, Brady.”

In my head, there’s the sound of cheering, like a laugh-track from an old sitcom. I smile my best good cooperator smile. But really, wedged between my parents, all that’s going through my head is Nick. His,
I’m sure your parents would love to know that you and Sabine’s killer have some secret thing
.

“John, now would be a good time for you to say what you need to say to your daughter.”

Dad starts to reach his hand toward my lap and then stops it in mid-air. I swallow hard and look his way a little, but can’t really bring myself to witness the pain in his eyes. He says, “Brady, I am so very, very sorry that I hit you the other day. There is no excuse for it. None. I’m ashamed of myself.”

I hear Mom uncross and recross her legs. Dr. Stern’s chair squeaks.

“I’m sorry I said that thing about Sabine. And I’m sorry that I didn’t call and let you know where I was that night.”

Mom: It really is a worry to us when you disappear.

Dad: We love you so much.

Mom: But you need to be a little more sensitive to the situation. Less self-absorbed.

Dad: Sonia. Please. Let’s keep this about my apology.

Dr. Stern: That’s a good idea.

Mom: Sorry. Sorry. Yes, you’re both right. So. Brady, clean slate?

Clean slate? OK, I think. You asked for it. Why not? Connor and his
Do you even have any secrets?
butts up against
But what you don’t know, apparently, is that this worthless piece of shit was the one who got her that way.
All I know is that this confession booth is closing in on me. I am tired of secrets. So tired of them.

“I’ve been spending time with Connor Christopher,” I say, just like that.

Not even the squeak of the therapist’s chair. No yipping spaniels from the doggy daycare next door. It’s like it is in church, when the priest raises a goblet of wine up to God and waits for the altar boy to ring the bell.

Finally, “Who?” from Dr. Stern.

“You’re
seeing
Sabine’s …?” says Dad.

“Not
seeing.
Just hanging out with.”

“Brady, why? Why would you do that?”

“To find out more.”

“To find out more, what?” Dad sputters. “More about smoking pot and not giving a shit about anyone but yourself?”

“Dad…”

“Really, Brady, how could you?”

Dr. Stern intervenes with a fingers-in-his-mouth whistle. “Let’s back this truck up right now,” he orders. “Brady, catch me up. Connor is, was, your sister’s stunt partner?”

I nod my head, which feels, suddenly, too heavy for my neck. I close my eyes. “Everyone thinks it was Connor’s fault. The accident. But it wasn’t.”

“The accident.” Dr. Stern says. “Sabine’s fall.” He’s paging through old notes in his leather notebook, fast and furious. “The allegation, or, the assumption, I guess, was that the young man was high, and bungled a crucial move?”

Dad bursts in, “That’s what happened. He was supposed to catch her. I was there. Her mother was there. We saw it. Brady, you saw it too.”

The bone-crushing truth. I was there. But, I didn’t see it. I wasn’t watching.

“And this young man,” Dr. Stern says. “He tested positive for marijuana?”

I chime in, a cheerleader myself for the losing team. “You guys know, right? That weed stays in the body long after its effects wear off. He swore to me he never got high before a meet or a game.”

“I don’t believe this,” Dad mutters, anger gripping his voice. “That little shit. Not enough he takes our Sabine, but now he wants to bullshit the blame onto … who, exactly?”

Then, like it just occurs to Mom, the solving of a mystery, she
ahas
her way into the conversation. “That’s where you were yesterday? On your way to meet Connor? Instead of at school? Brady, tell me you’re not romantically involved with this boy.”

“What?” bellows Dad.

It’s all much too much. It’s crazy and fucked up and out of control, right here in the sanctuary of Beaverton Grief & Family. I gather my stuff—my book bag, my jacket, and rip myself off the therapist’s couch like a patch of Velcro.
Brady, wait,
I hear behind me as I scoot out the door. “Let her go,” says Dr. Stern, and those are the last words I hear before popping out to the humid and heavy May air. When I pull out my phone, more texts from Connor. I text him back,
Witch’s House. OMW.

In the end, Natalie couldn’t take the stepkid thing. But that’s not how it was spun. The version of Johnsaffair that hovers on the mantel above the Asian crockery mother ship of Sabine’s ashes is the lie that Mom and Dad settled on. One that was acceptable because it allowed Dad to move back in and life to go on as if Natalie never happened. And the kernel of the lie was, John and Sonia loved their girls too much to split up.

For us, for Sabine and me, it was a free pass. They’d put us through hell that summer, and so, all that fall,
Sure, why not?
was the party line when we asked to stay out past curfew. Mom and Dad had various date nights and took photography and cooking classes together—trying to reinvigorate their relationship. He taught her how to golf, and she hauled him along to her open houses. They stopped short of a ceremony to renew their vows, thank God, but all we had to do if one of them refused to let us go to a party or a school event was to pout and shed a tear about the crappy summer just past, and, like magic, the verdict of
no
was reversed.

Walking up to the park to meet Connor, I wonder more about whether Mom is trying to even the score.
Eye for eye
, like Nona says. Is Mom seeing someone to get even with Dad? And, years ago, did she marry Dad, a non-Catholic, to punish her parents? Did Bowerman contact the
Portland Journal
reporter to get back at Greenmeadow’s administration? Is Martha trying to prove something to Sabine, even now that she’s gone? And Nick. Did he tell me that lie about Connor to ensure my silence, or because he really believes it? It can’t be true, after all. I want to believe it isn’t true. I need to believe that Nick is the liar. That Connor wasn’t lying when he told me he never had sex with my sister.

The sidewalks are still covered in fallen blossoms, but now, instead of fresh pink, they’re greyish or brown. It’s all so fleeting, how beauty screams loud, then withers and dies. How one day everything seems possible, and little cubes of happiness tinkle around inside you like ice in a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade, and then, just like that, the ice melts and the beverage grows a skin of mold. My backpack is grinding into my shoulder blades. My feet are the next round of blisters. I’ve done so much walking these past weeks.

The park is full of dog-walkers and joggers. An entire track team from Lincoln High School runs down the trail in a line. Rhododendrons bloom their ridiculous hues of magenta, fuchsia, and clot the edges of the park. A bee hovers over a patch of tiny daisies. Warm spring evenings, Forest Park is as busy as a mall at Christmastime. Boy Scouts earning badges tear ivy from fir trunks. Moms trying to burn off belly fat push all-terrain strollers up the path, their ponytails bobbing and wagging behind them. Everyone in Portland is here today, it seems.

I trudge the half-mile up to the Witch’s House, and instead of Connor, there’s a little kid’s birthday party. A blanket spread out, and helium balloons tied to the lower branches of a nearby tree. Small children with missing front teeth, cone-shaped party hats on their heads held tight by elastic bands on their chins, are playing hide-and-seek all around the demolished structure. Their anxious moms yelp,

“Be careful around those metal spikes.”

“Tommy, tie your shoe.”

I reach in my pocket for my phone, and text,
It’s a zoo up here. Where are you?

But he doesn’t text back, because he’s coming up the path now, and I hear his voice, that perfect blend of tenor and baritone, low, soft. “’Bout time.”

When I turn around, any lingering worry about Connor melts. The tee-shirt that hugs his chest, the muscles on his arm. That dimple the size of a grain of rice. Those lips. But we don’t kiss, not yet. We are still shy with each other. That after-the-first kiss shy that’s like early blossoms, not quite unfolded all the way. But what he does do is so sweet. He pulls my heavy backpack off of me. Loops it over his own shoulder, one of them, because it’s too small to stretch over both.

“Where to?” he asks.

I don’t want to be in this crowd. I want Connor all to myself, plus, there’s so much I have to say to him. Nick, my parents. Where to begin?

Into my non-answer he says, “Got my stepdad’s truck. Let’s jet.”

Back down the trail we go, toward the small semi-circle parking lot. It occurs to me that I must look like hell. My emerald hair has faded to puke green, and I can see the pickety strands of it pointed down over my shoulder to my no-boobs-to-speak-of chest. The hole in my Keds is frayed the size of a big toe. I’m wearing an old dress of Sabine’s, paired with polka dot leggings.

And then, halfway back down, he reaches for my hand. His fingers weave with my fingers. The awkwardness of two different sized people on uneven ground holding hands. My palm sweats. And before we even get to the truck, I ruin everything by blurting, “I need you to tell me the truth.”

“About?”

“Sabine. You. The two of you.”

He keeps holding my hand, but his eyebrows squinch. “I did. Tell you the truth.”

I realize that every step I take with him down this trail makes it harder to face the possibility that I’m being played for a fool. What if I’m wrong? What if Connor is a liar and Nick is telling the truth?

Listen to your gut
, says Sabine.

Two men barrel past us, looking at the insides of their wrists at fancy sport watches while they huff and puff. I pull my hand out of Connor’s and fold my arms as though suddenly chilled by the breeze made by bodies running past. Connor has to be who I think he is. He just has to.

It takes a couple of tries to start the engine, and then we’re sputtering along the 30, headed to Heron Island, a few miles northwest of town. He’s made a deal with his parents, Connor tells me. He’s got a couple yard jobs, and he gets to pee in a cup every once in a while, and as long as he’s clean, as long as he makes enough money for gas and insurance, he can live at home. He seems pretty happy about it, this new plan. And, I can’t help but be happy too. Until I replay the conversation with Nick, and the scene at Dr. Stern’s.

We cross the bridge to the island, and head to Heron Lake where Connor tells me the coolest birds live. “The way you are about colors, you’ll be amazed,” he says. “They’re like this brownish-red with fluorescent green stripes.”

I nod and lean back, happy to not be walking. The truck is noisy and bouncy, there’s a lawnmower and weedwhacker in back clunking against the metal sides of the pickup. But the sound is somehow soothing in its realness, and just for a minute I imagine what it would be like to live out here on one of the farms we’re passing. Spending the day watching birds and driving a tractor through all the furrows and dips of the land.

The early evening sun is a ball slowly sinking, and it doesn’t even matter to me where we are heading and when we’ll get there. There are more pink blossoms out here. Darker pink than in town, fringing the branches of wilder, bigger trees. Connor’s hand is busy with the shifter, but in between gear-changing, he rests it lightly on my leg. It feels old fashioned, sort of. Like one of those Saturday Evening Post photographs all sepia and sentiment. Or maybe a Hallmark card. A low, slow jet flies overhead. A “V” of geese shares the sky with the plane. Their honking pierces the noise and clunk of the truck. It occurs to me that we’ve been driving for a while. “Why all the way out to Heron Lake?”

He says, “We can see all three mountains from out here. And the water birds.”

Sabine and I spent some time here last summer. A couple of parties. Then, I remember. “You waterskied here. Last August, right? At the cheer retreat weekend?”

He smiles, and points to his ear, where Sabine’s earring wags just below his lobe. “That’s when she gave me this. Made me wear it, a girl’s earring. I lost the bet we had that she wouldn’t get up on one ski by the end of the day. She did, so I had to agree to wear this forever more.”

Ah. A bet made with a lie. “Connor, you’re a rube. Sabine’s been skiing on one ski since she was eight.”

He seems genuinely surprised to hear this. A little sad, too, his eyebrows squinch up again.

We pull off the main road and onto another, smaller road, and drive under a canopy of enormous oaks, half-naked with leaves just beginning to dot the lacy branches. The road turns to gravel, and gets one-lane narrow. Connor shifts to second and I feel my body jiggling around inside my clothes. After weaving around potholes and nearly squashing a big yellow racer slithering across the road, we come to a small, gravel lot. Connor cuts the engine and the truck knocks and rattles a couple of times. Behind the bench seat is a little basket, and Connor lifts the lid of it and takes out a plastic Subway bag and a couple bottles of flavored ice tea.

“A picnic?”

“You do eat, right? I saw you inhale that voodoo doll yesterday. Don’t know where you put it, but, hey. Hope you like ham.”

We climb out of the truck and I follow Connor along a path, and then we bushwhack a bit over dead blackberry vines. Newly born blackberry vines are sprouting fiercely from the dead ones. Large flowers—again, pink ones—pop out the ends of the prickly vines, which are tender, but even so, they catch Sabine’s dress and my leggings and snag as I rip through. At the end of a short trail, we’re there, at the edge of Heron Lake. It’s late enough, so all the hikers and birdwatchers are gone. Just a couple of older guys in hip-waders sinking their fishing lines into the overgrown pond. But what’s most amazing, when we find a flat rock to settle on, are the mountains. In the faint glow of daylight, there’s the cone of Mt. Hood, backlit and majestic and still covered in winter snow. And to the left of that, the flat-top of the volcano that rocked the world a few years before I was born. Mt. Saint Helens. And furthest away, in between St. Helens and Hood, is a big hump that you might mistake for a fluffy cloud unless you knew it was Mt. Adams. The reason the cheer team came here for their retreat is obvious. The Cascades and their bigness, the way they make you feel resurrected and lucky to live here. Those mountains are what the squad aspired to. Heights. Domination. Awe.

My stomach is a knot of sorrow, and it happens so suddenly. Just as quickly as the miracle of this setting seeps into my bones, I’m left empty. Drained. And it’s because of this I need to scoot closer to Connor. I need to feel the solid weight of him against me. Reassurance that the earth hasn’t deserted me. He opens an arm and locks me up tight against him. Separate:Together. Herons teeter in the rushes. The teals with their cinnamon and green heads sit on the quiet surface of the water, occasionally dipping their beaks in for a drink. More geese, overhead. We sit there for a few minutes, sharing food.

And then, because I have to, I tell Connor about earlier in the afternoon. About Nick and what he said. I tell him about the horrible therapy session where we had to relive the accident. Talk about
that day
. I know I’m crying without thinking about not crying, which is a weird feeling. It just comes, the tears. The sobbing, choking blubber sounds from my throat. “I can’t stop missing her. I keep waking up every morning, and have to re-realize she’s gone.”

“Brady,” Connor says, holding me, squeezing me, really, against his ribcage. “Do your parents have any idea about…this? About us?”

I’m trying not to sob, but it’s not working. In between blubbery bursts I try to explain how my parents are still locked up in the idea that they have to blame someone for Sabine’s death, and it’ll take a while. Especially if we’re keeping her pregnancy and all the Nick stuff secret.

“You do believe me, right? Brady?”

I nod, even though I’m still not completely sure.

He puts both his hands around my shoulders and pivots so we’re eye to eye. “I don’t want you to think less of your sister. Hear me? I mean, she is, she was, amazing. In so many ways. But underneath all that toughness, that having-the-world-by-the-balls way about her? She was fragile.”

“Fragile? Sabine? Not a chance.”

“Brady. There’s more to it. Sabine, and how she got caught up in a sort of game with Nick.”

“What do you mean,
game
?”

And then, Sabine’s cheer partner tells me more.

It’s dark by the time we get back to the truck. There’s a full moon, and it’s a close one—bright white. It rises like the reverse of the New Year’s Eve Times Square ball as we drive back across the island bridge. The bank of trees on the other side of the highway is outlined by the moon, and I’m wondering how I could sketch this. It would be a study in negative space. Shades of black and gray and just tiny bits of white.

We are quiet with each other, Connor and me. The clank of the yard tools in the truck bed is an oddly soothing sound. For the first time, my sadness for Sabine has moved away from me missing her, to me feeling sorry for her. More than
sorry for her
, really. I reach for an SAT word that means pity.
Abject
pity. With anger thrown in. Pathos? Sabine will always be my frozen-in-time teenaged sister. The milestones I’ll get to that she never will. Legal drinking age, college. If what Connor says is true, she was pretty mixed up about things. Untrusting, competitive, vengeful. I don’t want to believe those things about Sabine. I want to believe Nona’s rendition of her. The electric candle version. The Saint Agatha pureness of her. Not this
Fuck
nerian image of a girl who would pit people against one another. A girl who would try and make her boyfriend jealous by using her so-called best friend as a … a what? A patsy? A tool? She told Nick that Connor could be the father of her baby.
Could be
, she’d said. And Connor, poor Connor, was caught in the middle.

Whatever betrayal Connor may or may not feel, none of that came out when he told me that Sabine used him to get at Nick. That she wanted to test Nick’s love for her by lying about their relationship. Love? How could Sabine think that what she and Nick had was love? And how could Connor let her do that to him?

Cheerleading, Sabine told me once, is about raising belief. Making anything possible. Down by three touchdowns? No problem. Give me a “G.” The smile never leaves. No matter what. “People want to be transported,” Sabine said. “They want hope kept alive. That’s my job.”