Warped Page 7

  But you’ve already said sorry to your baby, because it will have no family but you, and it isn’t even born yet.

  Five

  You’d never do this: get so shitfaced you make your fifteen-year-old kid drive you to the store.

  Your kid who didn’t know how to drive. You wouldn’t say How fucking hard can it be or If you make me drive and I wreck it’s your fault.

  You wouldn’t complain the whole way, when your kid who’s never driven before stalled out at a stoplight. You wouldn’t breathe your stink breath on her face and call her a…that word, the one you would never say. You got the car going again, you went slow, the car jerking swerving. Ahead was the tracks. You wouldn’t scream at your kid to floor it because the train was coming shining its big light ahead splitting the night in half.

  If after all that your kid stopped the car on the tracks, you would have known she hadn’t stalled again. You sure as hell wouldn’t have laughed at her and told her she didn’t have the guts, even while she was undoing her seat belt.

  You would have known you’d finally gone too far.

  ##

  HEAVY ENOUGH

  What was heavy?

  Those round landscape rocks would work. But of course the Garden Center was closed—it was 2:37am.

  Sand. Like, for cactus and shit? But that was probably the Garden Center too. And that wouldn’t work anyway, not underwater.

  Bricks. Lead shot. Cannonballs. Fuck, focus.

  The Wal-Mart Supercenter had seemed like a godsend when he saw the sign from the highway, fifty feet up in the air, lit up like Christmas. He’d already come twenty, fifty, eighty miles of nothing, that long empty stretch of northbound up to Graham’s place. He’d made this trip a dozen times. He’d driven it drunk, he’d driven it half asleep, but he’d never driven it like this.

  (Not he, they. Still they.)

  The cabin was another couple of hours but they’d be there well before light, and with any luck at all the lake wouldn’t be frozen over this late in the season. It had frozen back home but that was a shitty little drainage pond, Crooked Lake was decent sized. Eight, ten cabins on the east shore, no one up there this time of year though. Cordwood and kerosene, boat key on the hook by the fridge, house key under that rock—holy hell it better be under that rock.

  Casey slowed the cart in front of an iron log holder. He hadn’t meant for this to happen. It was the way she just kept coming at him, she was relentless, he’d asked her—begged her to shut her mouth. The log holder was heavy, yeah, but what was he supposed to do, tie it around her ass?

  He kept moving. Walking through the aisles, tossing shit into the cart. There should have been more shoppers. Why even keep the joint open all night if no one was going to come in? Hell of a lot of square footage, lights, heat…so far he had a couple cans of cashews, half a dozen cheap plastic hangers, bottle of Windex.

  The breathing—that was freaking him out, he didn’t know how much more of that he could take. Worse than the dent in her skull—come on, a fucking dent, like when you step on a cooler lid. Not big though. Maybe…a couple inches, an inch wide? A cut. Blood, not as much as you’d expect. Yeah, the dent, that was bad. But that fast and shallow breathing and her eyes not shut all the way. He should have put her in the back seat, wouldn’t have had to look at her that way.

  Emergency room would have been the way to go. Only—how was that going to look, with that thing just a month ago? And how fucked up was that, he’d never laid a hand on her before that. Last month was bad, yeah he’d admit it he’d gotten a little out of control, but it was one time, just one time.

  And this—well, she was coming at him. All he’d done was try to push her back away from him, and it was just shit luck that they were in the hall by that fake-country-French hook thing that she wouldn’t let him hang anything on.

  Which is how she got the dent.

  But Christ, what was heavy?

  “Help you find somethin’?”

  The voice scared the crap out of him, but Casey took his time turning around, fixed a smile on his face. “Naw, man, I’m good.”

  The guy shrugged. Greasy hair and glasses looked like he’d had them twenty years, blue vest too big, nametag crooked. Brett. Guy didn’t look like a Brett.

  “Just get off?”

  The smile froze on Casey’s face as his mind ran through the possibilities, racing tumbling panicking.

  “Work?” The guy finally said, helping him out. “Just get off work? Second shift?”

  “Ah. Yeah. Yeah, uh.”

  The guy nodded, pleased to have got it right. He went back to working his little sticker gun, doing something to the price tags on a rack of flannel shirts.

  For a minute Casey just stared at him, heart slamming, hands sweaty. He could ask the guy for help. For directions. Get an ambulance. Get the cops, even, get anyone. A helicopter, get her out of this shithole stretch of nothing, somewhere there was a decent hospital.

  Past the guy’s sloped shoulder, the paint department. Foam brushes, shelves of stain in yellow cans. Plenty heavy, the big cans, anyway…too big for a pocket. But hey…wire handles, and there were belt loops, buttonholes.

  “Gotta stain my deck,” he said, to no one in particular.

  Guy gave him an agreeable nod. “Gonna warm up, too,” he said. “Big thaw next week. And clear. You’ll be ahead of the game, getting it done now.”

  ##

  SUMMER GIRL

  Christine saw trouble coming half a mile away. Kate Coslip, her sister’s husband’s niece, nineteen and driving a Honda Civic as old as she was, lurched along the shore road, speeding or drunk or worse.

  As the girl rounded the curve of the lake, Christine’s hand on the cedar deck rail trembled. She had the sinking realization that all her hopes to the contrary were pointless: with those crash-and-burn parents and that chaotic childhood, Kate couldn’t have grown up into anything but a beautiful, dangerous disaster waiting to happen.

  #

  Susan Coslip padded barefoot across the porch and handed her sister Christine a fresh gin and tonic. She’d tracked her niece’s approach from the makeshift bar: a couple of two-by-sixes her husband Brent had nailed to the railing, with an old Revere Ware kettle for ice.

  “So at least she’s on time,” she said. “Or close enough, anyway.”

  Christine nodded, crossing her arms and pulling at her sleeves as though it was chilly. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Brad’s wedding.”

  “And how old was she then?”

  “Young. I don’t know, nine or ten.” Ten, watching her father get married for the first time. Knock knees and dirty elbows in a hand-me-down dress. Brad: two years younger than Brent with a taste for poison. Even then he had little time for his changeling daughter, the spoils of a relationship long since excised from family lore.

  “And…she really needs this money.”

  “She does. If she doesn’t go back to school this fall, she might not go back at all.” Unspoken: Brent offering to pay her tuition; Brad, drunk, bellicose—are you saying I can’t take care of my own—this from a man who housed his daughter in a closetless den in a stinking downstate apartment after his latest girlfriend left.

  Susan—Screw him.

  Brent—He’s family. And so they’d come up with this plan. Kate would be a summer girl, watch Christine and Jeff’s little ones, do a little light housekeeping, have a chance to make some money and see how a real family felt.

  “You’re going to love having her,” Susan said now with no small measure of guilt. “Think of it—you can come and go when you want. You’ll have your freedom.”

  Christine turned a troubled gaze on Susan and took a long shuddering swallow. “Freedom—like you have?”

  That stung, but Susan absorbed the blow, owned it—her girls, thirteen-year-old twins, were a terrifying mystery. In Susan and Jeff’s summer house, fifty yards up the road, they were doing whatever it was they did, a coven of two, an ang
ry pair with one hostile voice and a genius for provocation.

  But when they were little, they were vessels leaking a surfeit of manic energy and summers had seemed endless. Christine’s kids—Willow was four, and Riley five—were calmer, preferring to cut paper into strips and tie knots in long hanks of yarn, rather than running around outside or swimming in the lake. At the moment they were lying on their parents’ bed, watching SpongeBob on the big TV. To Susan, their lethargy sometimes seemed more draining than if they’d bit and screamed and thrown things.

  “We’ll get her settled and then it’s happy hour until the guys get here,” Susan offered. “Deal?”

  They clinked their sweating highball glasses in the late-afternoon sun as the Honda shuddered to a stop and the girl got out, shaking her masses of wild hair and blinking those unsettling eyes in the bright light.

  #

  Jeff shouldered the brown grocery bag—four bottles of Chardonnay, two Sauvignon Blanc, two Merlot—and went back out into the parking lot. The sun was making a last stand, burning through the ridge of evergreens down the road. While he waited for his brother-in-law he watched the others like them, the city people on the way to the lake for the weekend, stockpiling provisions the locals couldn’t afford, pre-washed baby spinach and artisan bread trucked in fresh. The Pine Place Market was the last decent grocery before the lake, and it had the advantage of the liquor store next door.

  Brent came out, hefting an armload of groceries, and Jeff opened the hatch on the Explorer.

  “What did they have?” he asked, pushing aside duffle bags and golf clubs to make room. Memorial Day weekend tended to see the place cleaned out.

  “Flank steak didn’t look too bad. One of those pre-made salads, Susan’ll kill me, and I got Bagel Bites and chicken nuggets for the kids. Will Riley and Willow eat that?”

  Jeff shrugged. “If they’re hungry enough, I guess they will.”

  He drove, arm hanging out into the evening breeze, passing few cars on the two-lane road. He loved the last half hour of the drive, Chicago’s Friday night traffic snarl quickly fading into memory, the weekend spooling out full of possibility ahead. Golf tomorrow, then the Saturday night booze cruise across the lake to Henshaw’s for ribs. Maybe take the kids for mini golf, if Christine got on his case again about how little time he spent with them.

  “Thanks for taking Kate on,” Brent said as they got close. “It’s helping more than you know.”

  Jeff nodded. He and Christine were paying double the usual summer girl rates, but it was worth it if it got Christine to lay off him. Besides, Brent’s brother was out of a job and on the bottle again—there wasn’t any way around that. And he liked helping Brent. In some strange way, it shifted the balance back even; he didn’t like to consider it too often, but there had always been something there—a faint shadow of…what? Not inferiority, because Christine was the better-looking sister, and Jeff had passed up Brent’s salary several years ago. Just, a shadow, leave it at that.

  “You said she was reliable,” he reminded Brent now. The one thing he would not put up with was babysitting yet another kid. Busting his hump as one of the youngest partners was hard enough without having to come home on the weekends and put in another shift.

  “Oh, yeah. She got a three-point-eight last semester. Hard worker.” Brent hesitated; Jeff’s radar went up.

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  “But, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing,” Brent said. “Not a damn thing.”

  #

  Kate didn’t have much to unpack: clothes, flip-flops, her iPad. A few books, some she’d read already. She turned off her cell phone and tossed it in the dresser with her underwear—there was no one she wanted to talk to.

  The kids weren’t bad. Every kid in her dad’s building was worse—way worse. Left alone with Riley for a few minutes after dinner, Kate scolded the boy experimentally. “No—take your fingers out of your mouth.” Whispering, but putting her all into it. He took his hand away immediately and looked at it with new wonder, as though it had offended him.

  Brent and Susan’s girls came home from some party, got dropped off in an Escalade, the tires spitting gravel when the car pulled away. Emily and Nora. Kate shook their hands, smelled Wintergreen, guessed they’d been drinking. Remembered them in pink dresses with huge skirts at her dad’s wedding.

  It was nothing to get Riley and Willow ready for bed. Kate tidied their room before calling Jeff and Susan upstairs to say goodnight; she didn’t like things to be out of place.

  While the parents talked and drank out on the deck, Kate did the dishes and went through the refrigerator, throwing out everything that had expired. When everything was done, she dimmed the lights and watched them out on the deck, illuminated by an unenthusiastic moon and a dozen little candles in glass cups: the sisters sitting close, pouring wine in each other’s’ glasses; the men laughing loud, with their feet up on the smoldering copper fire pit. Despite the resemblance, it was hard—almost impossible—to believe that Brent was her father’s brother. It was as though his father had been animated by the Disney people; his hard and bruised edges rounded, his hair smoothed into a Ken-doll do, his jerky motions rendered fluid.

  Kate slipped away to her room to freshen up. The T-shirt and cargo pants she’d had on all day were stifling. Kate didn’t mind the heat; the cabin was way nicer than she’d expected, even without air conditioning. It was really more of a house than a cabin. Upstairs, her little room and a bathroom and the kids’ room shared a hall that overlooked the pine-paneled great room below, with its two-story windows with a view of the lake, nothing but an expanse of black now.

  Kate slipped on a tank top and a pair of shorts and pulled her hair up, securing the heavy mass with an elastic. She was halfway down the stairs when she changed her mind, came back up and spritzed perfume between her breasts.

  #

  The women were tipsy and Jeff was feeling fine. The Alan Jackson song, the one where Jimmy Buffet shows up in the middle, played for the second time—Jeff’s favorite. “Pour me something tall and strong,” he sang along. “Make it a hurricane before I go insane.”

  Kate slid open the screen door and she was wearing a lot less than when she went in. There was one of those weird moments where everyone stops talking at once.

  Emily and Nora looked up from where they were painting their toenails in the light of a flashlight. Emily pressed her sister’s shoulder; she was the quiet twin. Nora set down the nail polish bottle and sat up straight, gave Kate a dead-on fearless look.

  “Is your mom black?” she demanded.

  Susan and Christine tripped over each other’s words, scolding, apologizing, but Kate didn’t even hesitate; she walked into the circle and took the empty deck chair.

  “Yes, but she’s dead,” she said calmly.

  “How did—”

  “That’s enough,” Susan hissed and Jeff knew the good times were over for the night.

  #

  It was a measure of his hunger for the headlong rush, more than of his confidence, that Jeff got up out of bed once he was sure Christine was asleep. It didn’t take long; she was snoring on her back the way she always did when she drank.

  He went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror, looking for clues. Finally, he decided the odds were good he’d sleep with Kate before the summer was over.

  As it turned out, it only took two weekends.

  #

  In late July, Kate lay on her bed, staring at the blades of the ceiling fan as they twirled lazily. In the afternoons, the fan did little to cool the upstairs rooms, but she liked to watch it when she was pretending to nap. This time of day, when the children were sleeping in the next room, was the only private time she had.

  Kate rubbed the hot, taut skin of her stomach and thought about Jeff. She loved the high of thinking about him even more than she loved being with him. She loved the helplessness on his face when he was above her, his eyes squee
zed tight and his lips parted. She loved the look he gave her when Christine’s attention was diverted: the violent needfulness of it. The heat. She even loved the deliberate way he refused to look at her on Fridays when the men pulled up in the Explorer, knowing that as he handed packages to his wife and hugged the kids, his mind was filled with her.

  It no longer bothered her to think about Christine. She had Susan, their sister-bond something Kate could only guess at. She’d tried hard to feel guilty for the things she and Jeff did in the boathouse, in the Explorer, even in the upstairs bathroom late at night, but when she looked at Christine she saw a mother, a woman whose nursing-used breasts hung low and tired, whose legs were traced with purple veins, and it seemed to her that Christine had made her choice. Kate’s own mother existed only in a couple of photographs from the late eighties: she would always be twenty-five and gorgeous and laughing and just out of reach.

  #

  On the hottest night in August, Christine stood still and sick in a slash of moonlight, holding a glass of water in one hand and two Advil in the other, and listened to the rhythmic thumping at the top of the stairs. A faint sliver of light shone under the edge of the bathroom door.