I'll Stay Page 16

  “It’s my officer’s coat.” Lee grinned. “It’s the warmest coat I’ve ever had. And my pockets hold everything—money, keys, and up to six cans of beer, each.”

  Gail burst out laughing, squeezed her shoulder, and said, “Oh, I’ve missed you! Tell me, what’s going on back at the farm?”

  Lee told her about finding Barney tied to a stake outside and then how her mom had made a spaghetti dinner that we all ate at the kitchen table.

  “And you actually sat at the table?” Gail asked. “Like civilized people?”

  Lee glanced over at the bar where the two guys were laughing quietly. On the way here, Lee had told me that she wouldn’t talk to Gail about her mom. I saw the annoyance on Lee’s face as she took a long drink of her beer.

  Gail must have seen it, too, because she leaned toward Lee, as if she didn’t want to miss a single word, and asked, “How’s your film coming along?”

  Lee broke into a huge grin as she talked about Patricia Graceson and the video camera she’d brought home. She wanted to film down by the river before we went back to school tomorrow. I’d heard Lee talk about her film so much that I could repeat everything, verbatim. Gail smiled, her eyes not leaving Lee’s face.

  After that we played pool and drank more beer and laughed a lot. Lee loved Gail and looked up to her—she was the manager of an insurance company in Fort Wayne—and I wanted to like her, too. But something didn’t feel right.

  After a while, Lee went off to the bathroom and Gail and I were alone. She scooted her chair so close to mine that our thighs touched. She said, “So tell me, Clare Michaels. Is Lee doing good down at school?”

  I nodded. “She’s doing great.”

  Gail smiled a little too wide and leaned a little too close. It would be a grave insult to back up and so I held my breath and didn’t move. She didn’t like me. Maybe she was jealous because she knew how close Lee and I were.

  “And the other girls at that sorority house, they’re nice to her?” she asked.

  I tilted my head, unsure what she was asking. “Sure. Everyone loves Lee.”

  “Good. Lee was a star in high school. Unique and talented. Honorable, too. But she was a target. Kids were jealous and mean. She protected herself by not having many close friends. And she’s never had a best friend before.”

  I felt myself stiffen. Was she threatening me? “I haven’t had too many best friends, either. But I wasn’t a star or anything. I’m pretty average.”

  Gail burst out laughing. “Well, you’re honest. That’s good.”

  I took a sip of beer and felt unsettled in a way that I couldn’t describe. Maybe this was some kind of test?

  “Lee and I are close,” she said. “I know how much she looks up to me. And boy, when she latches onto something—and let me tell you, it doesn’t happen very often—she can’t let go. It’s her tragic flaw and I hope it doesn’t dog her all her life.”

  Another warning? I cleared my throat. “Well, you’re like a mother to her.”

  “My sister doesn’t get her. She thinks Lee oughta come back here. But Lee’s like a bird. She has to be free to fly on her own.” She looked over the room and then snapped her head back at me so quickly that I startled. “Gotta admit that I wasn’t sure about you. I mean, what could you two possibly have in common? The only thing I could think of was that you both have mothers who are too wrapped up in themselves to pay attention to either of you. But you’re okay.”

  At the time, I was so surprised that I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t think of two people more different than my mother and Lee’s mom.

  I watched our waitress hurry by with two plates of steaming burritos and thought about my mother on the couch today, completely done in by her editor’s comments. My mother had always been too wrapped up in herself.

  Lee walked toward me, her shoulders slumped and her head tilted down so that I couldn’t see her eyes. I thought about Sarah packing for the weekend and Ducky setting up the hotel rooms and Lynn flying in from Dallas. I felt my stomach seize and wished, suddenly, that I’d had a conflict so I didn’t have to go this weekend.

  Lee sat and we drank our beers and then I paid the bill. Outside, the air was chilly and the street busy. We wound through the crowds and turned down a side street. Tonight we were staying at her apartment and moving her things in the morning. Then we were leaving on an afternoon flight for Chicago.

  The street was lined with brownstones and buildings in various degrees of disrepair. Several had crumbling cement stairs. Another had wood boards covering the windows. The one to our left had no stairs at all, just a giant hole beneath a picture window. Empty plastic cups and Styrofoam containers, cigarette butts and beer cans littered the sidewalk. From somewhere nearby, a car alarm blared. I kept looking over my shoulder—it was dark and I had a foreboding sense that someone was following us—as we walked.

  “What makes you most nervous about going back?” Lee asked, her eyes on the sidewalk in front of her as we walked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What about you?”

  When she didn’t answer, I glanced at her. We were under a streetlight and she was staring at me as we walked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Every time I ask a question, you answer with asking a question,” she said. “I don’t get it. Why can’t you talk about yourself?”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I answer questions.”

  “Not really. It’s been happening for a long time now.”

  I stopped walking. “Okay, ask me a question.”

  “What makes you most nervous about going back?”

  Just the other day, we were all sitting around the table at the house, laughing about some party the night before. Now Ducky was selling real estate in downtown Chicago and Sarah was in medical school. Amy was working in marketing and Christopher was in politics. I was a bored graduate student, a mediocre waitress, and a lousy tutor. Our friends were going to be so disappointed in me.

  “Everyone has great jobs.” I used to know what I wanted. I used to be certain. Right?

  “You’re in graduate school and you’re going for your doctorate and that’s big,” she said. “And you’re a good friend.”

  What did it mean to be good?

  We turned the corner and up ahead I saw her apartment—her shitty, dark, two-bedroom apartment that she shared with Tina, a copyeditor at The New York Times who worked all night and slept all day, and her creepy boyfriend Markus, a pot-smoking guitar player who used Lee’s laundry detergent and ate her Cheerios.

  I wanted to go home. But Ben was most certainly working late and I couldn’t imagine sitting with my parents as they plotted revision strategies.

  “Know what I’m nervous about?” Lee’s voice was so soft it was almost a whisper. “That Ducky and Sarah will want to talk about Florida.”

  I glanced over my shoulder again but no one was there. When I turned back around, I saw a light turn on in her apartment and then someone was in the window. Markus? But surely he’d gone out by this time.

  “Do they ever talk to you about it?” she asked.

  If I told Lee that they never asked, she might think they didn’t care. But if I told her that Sarah asked about her every damn time we talked—and that she always wanted to know if Lee had ever told me what, exactly, had happened that night—would that make her feel worse?

  “I hardly ever talk to Ducky,” I said. “And Sarah is busy with school so I don’t talk to her much, either. But she always asks how you are. She always does.”

  Lee nodded.

  In the window again, a dark figure moved in and out of the light. The last time I was here Markus sat at the kitchen table smoking, drinking beer, and smirking at me as he made up stupid, creepy songs about princesses and prostitutes. Thank God Lee was moving in the morning and wouldn’t have to put up with him anymore.

  “So, do you think they don’t want to talk about Florida?” she asked.

  I glanced at her. The scar on her l
ip was not so noticeable in the dim glow of the streetlight. In our first year out of college, she cried a lot on the phone about nightmares, problems with the internship, and crazy things that kept happening (the lights are getting brighter in my bathroom! There are noises in the closet!) but never about what happened that night. Since then, we’d talked about it. Although now, trying to remember what was said and when, I couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Nobody knows what to say,” I said.

  She nodded and raised her hand to the side of her face. “Sometimes I feel like it’s all I ever think about. Do you have that feeling, too? That it’s always here?”

  A wave of heat roared up my throat and burst into my cheeks. I didn’t always think about it. Not anymore. It was like something you took off the shelf and put away in a drawer. Where it belonged. But this analogy didn’t feel quite right.

  I looked up at the window again. Markus! See? I’d been right. How could I concentrate on anything Lee was saying with him standing there?

  CHAPTER 11

  Markus sat at the tiny wood table next to the bathtub that was next to the water heater that was next to the front door. I was on the couch across from him, pretending to sleep but with one eye open just enough to watch him. It was early the next morning, a little after six, and he’d just gotten home. He stared at the wall, his eyes glassy, his head bobbing side to side. I didn’t know if he was wasted or just tired from being up all night. Lee insisted that he was harmless, just filled with a lot of disappointment and hot air, but I wasn’t taking any chances. If he even took one step toward me, I’d scream. I didn’t care if I woke up the entire block.

  He tipped his head back and closed his eyes, his mouth falling open. He had a scruffy black beard, mustache, and dark, curly hair that covered his head, the tops of each hand and knuckle. He wore heavy, scuffed black boots with a dark green bandana tied around his right ankle, a tight white T-shirt, and a brown blazer, ragged around the cuffs and collar.

  I could tell by the way his chest rose and fell that he’d fallen asleep. Ben could easily fall asleep like that, too. But this was all they had in common.

  I glanced at the small window above the sink. A thin streak of light shone through it, puncturing the air in the middle of the room and falling across the baseboard on the far wall. Even in the middle of the day it was always so dark in here. Would more windows help? The apartment needed everything—paint, carpet, and appliances. The furniture was old and falling apart—holes in the cushions and chairs missing backs. How many times had Lee found cockroaches in her shoes?

  At least she was getting out. Today. In a few hours. I’d been hounding her to leave for months, since the last time they were burglarized. She’d lost three hundred dollars—why hadn’t she taken that money to the bank?—and a new Walkman. I didn’t know how she found her new apartment, maybe the same way she found the others. Through friends of friends of friends. Lee wasn’t excited about it, she kept saying the new place was too sterile, but anything was better than this.

  Lee walked out of her bedroom, dressed in running shorts and a T-shirt, both I recognized from college. Her legs were skinny and bird-like; the muscles had shrunk. It was too hard to run in the city, she always said. Thank God she wore flip-flops. Who knew what she’d catch walking barefoot on this floor.

  Markus jerked awake and slapped his hands on the table. He watched as Lee walked to the sink and filled a glass of water. Last night, on his way down when we met him on the stairs, he smirked at me and said, “The princess has arrived.”

  Such a jerk.

  “So this is it,” Markus said. “You’re leaving.”

  “Yep,” she said. “In two hours.”

  “There’s still time for you to kiss me,” he said. “Tina isn’t home yet and Princess over there is still asleep.”

  My heartbeat quickened but I didn’t move.

  Lee drank the water, washed the glass with a sponge and soap, and put it back in the cabinet. Her actions were slow and steady, as if she hadn’t heard him. Or maybe she was used to it. Maybe he said this kind of thing all too often.

  “That bedroom better be clean before you go,” he said. “I think I’ll do the white glove treatment. You know, if a speck of dust shows up on my glove you have to clean all over again.”

  “You don’t own a white glove,” Lee said.

  “The bathroom, too,” he said.

  “I’ve cleaned the bathroom the last four times,” she said.

  “I don’t remember that. The kitchen needs cleaning, too.”

  Lee turned to the sink and filled it with soapy water. Then she began washing the dirty plates and glasses that were stacked on the counter. This wasn’t her mess—she’d told me this last night—so what was she doing?

  “You’re sexy when you clean,” he said. “It counters that awkward tomboy look. Maybe you should try a little harder. Buy a push-up bra. I could help. I—”

  I sat up.

  “She’s awake!” Markus reached for a pill bottle, opened it, and pulled out a joint. He lit it and passed it to Lee. She hesitated and glanced at me before shaking her head. He arched his eyebrows in surprise and handed it to me. “You need it, sweetie. It’ll help loosen you up.”

  “You’re such an asshole.” I pulled the sheet across my lap and folded my arms. He was a loser, too; a bouncer in a bar in Chelsea? What kind of future was there in that?

  He grunted, tipped back in the chair, and took a drag on the joint. I frowned at Lee. Why didn’t she tell him off? Was she getting high with him in the mornings? And why was she doing their dishes?

  I heard footsteps in the hall, a key in the lock, and then Tina opened the door. She was tall with thick hips, long, kinky brown hair, and giant, round glasses that sat on the tip of her nose. She was homely and attractive at the same time and I was so intimidated that I could barely speak around her. I flinched when she threw her bag onto a chair and kicked her sandals into her bedroom.

  “Really, Markus? This early?” She pointed to the joint.

  He shrugged. “It helps me sleep.”

  She grunted at me and turned to Lee, who was rubbing her soapy hands along the sides of her running shorts. Half of the clean dishes sat upside down on a dishtowel next to the sink. The other half was still in the sink. Tina began counting on her fingers. “You’ve got the deposit, you’ve put in a change of address form, and you’ll leave the keys when you finish moving out.”

  Lee nodded. “I think we’re all set.”

  The room was so small and tight that I felt high just breathing the air. Or maybe I was still a little unnerved by Markus. And Lee’s lack of reaction to him.

  “How was work?” Lee asked.

  “I spent two fucking hours working on an article about Benazir Bhutto that was riddled with errors and then they pulled it at the last minute. But thank you for asking.” She shook her hair out of her face and loosened the belt around her waist.

  “Benazir who?” Markus asked.

  “Possibly Pakistan’s next prime minister,” Lee said. “The first woman.”

  I looked at her. How did she know that?

  “At least Lee reads the paper every day.” Tina glared at Markus, picked up her bag, and walked into her bedroom. Then she stuck her head back out. “Good luck, Lee. Markus, are you coming?”

  “In a minute.” He held the joint between his lips and folded his arms. He was trying to prove something by staying, either to Tina or Lee or possibly to me. But I was no longer quite so afraid of him. Lee was right. He was full of hot air. I couldn’t imagine why Tina kept him around.

  “Let’s get breakfast,” Lee said to me. “Jimmy won’t be here until eight thirty.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What about me? Do I get to have breakfast, too?” Markus took the joint out of his mouth and blew a smoke ring above him.

  “Goodbye, Markus,” Lee said. “Have a nice life.”

  I was fairly certain that she was sincere.

 
“Markus! Fucking get in here!” Tina screamed from behind her door.

  He frowned as he jammed the end of the joint into a flowered saucer, chipped along the rim, on the table. Then he stood, pulled down the sleeves of his blazer, and slipped into the room. The door clicked when he shut it, then locked. Sex could be the only reason Tina wanted him and that felt completely repulsive to me.

  Lee turned back to the sink and stuck her hands in the soapy water.

  “What are you doing?” I jumped off the couch and hurried over to her. “Let’s just go. They’re both jerks, especially him. Don’t do their dishes.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Well, you should mind!” I hissed. “He treats you like shit. What was all of that crap about kissing him? Does he say that to you all the time?”

  “Don’t be so loud,” she said. “They’ll hear you. And it’s not a big deal. He’s just kidding around.”

  “I don’t care if they hear me!” I said. “He has a girlfriend. And it’s abusive the way he treats you. How can you not see that?”

  Her hands were hidden in the suds and her arms weren’t moving. She turned to me, her lips parting. Three long worry lines stretched across her forehead.

  “Abusive?” she whispered finally.

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “Sometimes I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real,” she said. “Like I’m living in a dream and I see what’s going on around me but I can’t react. Or maybe it’s that I don’t feel anything. I don’t know. It’s like I’m still there. But not there.”

  Still where, in the dream? I stared at the faint purple scar that ran down the middle of her upper lip. The health center doctor said it would heal and the scar would eventually disappear but he’d been wrong. Dead wrong. I hated when she talked about living in a dream because I didn’t understand it. And it scared me. Lee was better, wasn’t she? She wasn’t still there, wherever there was. We were in New York. We were going to breakfast. And this afternoon we were going to Chicago.

  “You’re not doing their dishes.” I pulled her hands from the sink and handed her a napkin. A fresh towel would have been better but this was the best her apartment could offer. “Come on.”