The Rules of Survival (18 page)
Read The Rules of Survival Online
Authors: Nancy Werlin
“How does Nikki work it, exactly?” I blurted. “She meets some guy and then says, ‘There’s this man I’d like you to go after for me’? And they’re willing to do it? Why? Are they desperate for sex or something? Are they high? Crazy? What?”
Aunt Bobbie folded her hands flat on top of the newspaper. Pink touched her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wondered.”
Aunt Bobbie hesitated. “I wonder, too. But I don’t have an answer for you.”
“It’s pretty amazing, you have to admit it.”
“Most men,” Aunt Bobbie burst out, “are idiots about women.” Fury passed briefly over her face. “I’m quoting Nikki, actually. She’s always said that. It’s the one thing I agreed with her about. It’s that simple.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Even though that was a good explanation in some ways, it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know how she did it. I wanted details. I decided to ask Ben.
I saw quite a bit of Ben that January and February. We’d taken to meeting for breakfast at least once a week, after he got off his night shift and before I went to school. He was meeting Callie often, too. At first he was reluctant to talk to me about what he called “Nikki’s methods,” but I kept after him. I wondered if he had once been like the men Aunt Bobbie described. One of the idiots. Had Murdoch been an idiot, too? Was he still? Was it just the male condition? Were we all doomed?
Finally, early one morning over breakfast, Ben told me.
“Suppose you meet a woman,” Ben said. “At a bar, let’s say. You’ve had two or three or four beers. She’s pretty, sexy, and she seems into you. You want to impress her.” He shrugged.
I waited for more, but Ben simply drank his coffee and then looked around for the waitress.
“That’s it?” I said finally, incredulous. “These guys she finds just want to impress her?”
“Well, that’s the main thing.” Ben looked down into his now empty coffee mug. The waitress had waved at him but hadn’t come back yet. “The wanting to impress.”
“But how does it work, exactly? Does she just bring up that there’s somebody she wants you to hurt, and that if you do it, then she’ll be impressed? Would she say it just like that—straight out? To some guy she just met in a bar?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Well, not so explicitly, no. But it’s still clear.”
“How is it clear? Does she say,
Do this for me, and then I’ll
—” I hesitated. “You know.
Do something for you
.”
Do this for me, and then I’ll
—” I hesitated. “You know.
Do something for you
.”
Ben shrugged and said nothing.
“I can’t picture it,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“Good,” said Ben.
“But I want to understand,” I said.
Ben’s coffee refill arrived.
“Ben,” I said. “Look. You’re my father. I think it’s your job to tell me. This is like—like life skills.”
He seemed to find this convincing.
“Okay, Matt. Suppose the pretty, sexy woman sitting at the bar next to you lets you buy her a drink or two and then she gets all sad. She tells you this real horrible story. She’s being tortured by this man. He’s her ex-boyfriend, or her ex-husband, whatever. She’s afraid of him. He’s jealous and he’s mean. She tells you stuff that’s really awful about this man. He beat up her kids, or maybe he hit on her little daughter. He beat her up, too. She can show you a bruise. The police are no help. She’s scared all the time. She’s maybe had a drink too many, and you know that. But you listen. She’s so pretty, and she’s, uh, cuddling up to you.
“And finally you say, ‘Somebody ought to teach that man a lesson.’ And she says, ‘I wish somebody would. My ex is a real coward. If somebody would just stand up to him, he’d back right down, I know he would. Especially a big, strong man like you.’”
Ben looked at me straight on. “That’s it, Matt. That’s really all there is to it. That conversation might happen at a bar some night. It might happen later, in bed. So, now you know.”
“Aunt Bobbie was right,” I said. “Men
are
idiots.”
are
idiots.”
Ben shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. But it can be powerful stuff when a pretty woman asks you for help.”
I
asked you for help, I thought suddenly. I asked and asked, and you said no. To me, to Callie, to Emmy, you said no. And what are you saying now? That in a bar, to a strange woman, you’d want to say yes if she was pretty?
asked you for help, I thought suddenly. I asked and asked, and you said no. To me, to Callie, to Emmy, you said no. And what are you saying now? That in a bar, to a strange woman, you’d want to say yes if she was pretty?
“I understand,” I said to my father. But I didn’t. I still don’t.
38
CRASH
In the predawn hour of a Saturday morning in early spring, our phone rang. I awoke immediately.
It was Aunt Bobbie.
“Matt, can you come down here?” she asked.
I did. Callie had woken up, too, and she came with me. You were still asleep, and we left you alone. Nikki, of course, was out.
Aunt Bobbie opened her apartment door to us. She had a threadbare terry cloth robe wrapped around her, and one hand was touching her throat.
I’m not entirely clear on what Aunt Bobbie said that night. I think that I have to just explain what happened—the full truth, as I finally knew it—and not what I learned first, second, and third, as information trickled in.
Aunt Bobbie had gotten a phone call from Boston Medical Center. Nikki was in the emergency room there. She had been in a car crash, but she was going to be fine.
However, the other person in the crash was not going to be fine. That other person was Julie Lindemann, Murdoch’s next-door neighbor. Julie had been seriously hurt. She was going to live, but that was a miracle, because, among other injuries, her neck was broken.
It’s very possible that Aunt Bobbie didn’t learn about Julie right away. Probably we only heard about Nikki’s car crash at first, and that someone else was hurt. I don’t remember exactly when I learned what. But I must have heard more than the simple fact that “someone” was badly hurt, because if so, I’d have thought it was Murdoch. That, I would remember.
Murdoch wasn’t home that night at all. He had driven out to the western part of the state with a friend who wanted renovation advice on a house. Murdoch had taken great care to make sure Nikki didn’t follow him, as she often did.
So when Nikki got to his house that night, she found his truck gone and his windows dark. She had parked and waited. Watching. Drinking coffee. And then, sometime near eleven o’clock, Julie came out and got into her Beetle convertible, and Nikki decided to follow her.
There was no restraining order to keep Nikki a hundred yards away from Julie Lindemann. Nothing to keep her from having fun, terrorizing another driver on the icy March roads of Boston until that other driver panicked.
Emmy? Here’s the thing. This—this horrible accident—was our big break. Yours, mine, Callie’s. It was the mistake Murdoch had been hoping to goad Nikki into making. Only, in the end, it was innocent Julie who provoked Nikki, and Julie who paid. Julie is never going to walk again.
Murdoch says that what happened was this. Julie saw Nikki sitting out there in her car, watching his house, waiting for him. And she decided to draw her off, because she thought the whole situation was like something in a suspense thriller.
She didn’t realize it was real. She didn’t take your mother seriously.
I have never seen Julie again, Emmy. I don’t want to. I’m afraid to. We owe her so much, and I keep imagining that she sits in her wheelchair in Virginia Beach—where her family is and where she lives now—and hates us for ruining her life. How could she not?
But she testified against Nikki, who went to jail again. It was only a short jail stay because, incredibly, Nikki had committed only a minor crime called “reckless endangerment.” But that didn’t matter. Ben and Aunt Bobbie moved into action. They sued for joint custody of the three of us—with Bobbie’s presence neatly solving the potential issue of Emmy not being Ben’s daughter. Nikki fought, but the judge wasn’t sympathetic to her, and all in all, it was easier than I would ever have believed. All that was required from Callie and me was five minutes in front of the judge, with Ben and Aunt Bobbie standing by and looking very normal and responsible.
We had won our freedom. But it wasn’t at all what I’d thought it would be. It didn’t make me feel completely safe, the way I’d dreamed.
Nikki was still out there.
39
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
That spring was a really strange time.
Nikki spent five weeks in jail waiting for her trial, and then was sentenced to an additional thirty days on the reckless endangerment charge. Even though I knew she’d be released fairly soon, that alarm was softened somewhat by the promises that Ben and Bobbie were making. Everything was changing for us, fast.
Callie was smiling like crazy those days. It was like she couldn’t help herself. I caught myself looking at her one morning as she buttered some toast, and I thought:
She’s actually pretty, isn’t she?
It was a huge surprise.
She’s actually pretty, isn’t she?
It was a huge surprise.
I have to say that you weren’t so happy right then, Emmy. It was a confusing time for you, I guess. I think it was mostly about the fact that you didn’t really know Ben, and suddenly we were all talking about how the three of us were going to live with him. You got really clingy. You were restless and tense, unless you were being held by me or Callie or Aunt Bobbie, who you had attached to firmly in the previous few weeks. And if you were alone for even a few minutes, even if one of us was just in the next room, you would do something. Throw a tantrum, break something. Anything for attention. We started getting calls from your school. You chased down and punched two little boys and kicked the teacher. One day at school, you screamed for an entire hour without stopping and I had to leave my school to bring you home.
Every couple of days, too, you would ask again where Mom was. It was as if you couldn’t remember—or wanted reassurance, maybe? Honestly, Emmy, I don’t know what exactly was going on with you. I just remember hoping it would pass, once things settled down into our new life. That was what Aunt Bobbie said would happen.
I would have asked Murdoch his opinion, because he had always been so good with you. But he had gone down to Virginia Beach to be with Julie. Occasionally I’d hear that he had spoken with Bobbie or Ben. They were consulting with him as they planned our new life. And he left a message for me once, just saying hello.
But I didn’t talk to him directly. His cell phone was turned off the times I tried to call, and somehow I couldn’t just leave a message. I felt too guilty. What was he thinking, feeling? Did he blame me for what had happened to Julie? Would he come back?
When I dared to think about Julie, I blamed myself. And yet, I wasn’t sorry. How could I be? I carried a terrible secret: I was glad that it had been Julie who was hurt. Not one of us. And not Murdoch.
One night, I went to Murdoch’s house. I just felt this need to have some contact with him. But as I skulked around outside looking for signs of him, it came to me how much I resembled Nikki. Or maybe it was she who resembled me, because hadn’t I started all of this, two years before, by stalking Murdoch?
But still, I couldn’t leave. I looked at the blankness of the front bay window of the house next door to Murdoch’s. Julie’s window. I thought about how she would never come back. Her condo couldn’t be entered in a wheelchair, and it sounded like she would be in one for the rest of her life.
I sat there for a while, on Julie’s front stoop. I stretched my legs out in front of me and looked at them—and then grabbed them compulsively, hugging. Legs. My legs that worked. I thought about your chubby, competent little legs, Emmy, the ones you’d just used to kick your teacher.
What had I set in motion when I pursued Murdoch? It was so strange. I had gotten what I wanted: We were free and whole. But Julie wasn’t.
I stayed on Julie’s stoop for a long time that night. And to this day, Emmy, I think often about Julie and what my desires and my actions did to her and her life. I suppose she was the one who made the decision that night to go out and play games with Nikki. But even so, I believe my fingerprints are all over Julie’s wheelchair. Mine more than Murdoch’s, although, like I told you, he blames himself, too.
He visits her. Do you know that? About every six months, he goes down to Virginia Beach for a long weekend.
I wonder what they have to say to each other these days. I wonder if she wants to know how we’re doing—the Walsh kids.
And sometimes I wonder if I should go and see her. To hear whatever it is she might have to say to me. And maybe, to apologize for Nikki, and for us.
40
FAMILY MEETING
While Nikki served her time, Aunt Bobbie and Ben were busy making plans for us, figuring things out for the future. It felt odd to have these two adults taking charge, when always before I had been so alone. I figured out then that I somehow couldn’t relax into trusting them completely. Maybe if I hadn’t missed Murdoch so much, or if I hadn’t felt so guilty about Julie, I would have been happier—maybe unreservedly so, like Callie. Or maybe, somewhere in me, I knew it wasn’t over.
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