Desperate to the Max (22 page)

Max smiled. “Actually e-mail’s a great way to get to know people.” Max herself hadn’t used e-mail in years, but it used to be a nice concept. “You can be more honest. Nobody says anything in haste. You’ve always got time to reread it and change what you don’t like. Not like speaking where you’ve blurted it all out and pissed ’em off. And if they do piss you off, you’ve always got it in writing, too.”

Freddy cocked his head and peered at her through a fringe of hair. “That’s what Bethany used to say. She always wanted to make sure she had it in writing. She didn’t like using the phone—” He cut himself off, as if she’d caught him in a lie.

Max knew she was on to something. Had Freddy known what she did late at night? Had he called her himself, pretending he was someone else? Achilles? The thought made her dizzy with possibilities.

“She hated using the phone?” Max prompted.

If he’d had the top button of his shirt done up, he’d have been pulling at it. Instead, he cleared his throat. “For company stuff.” Max couldn’t ignore the specificity of his language. “She said everyone always got it mixed up. She only used the phone when she had to, like with Mrs. Pratt, who doesn’t even own a computer.” His shoulders slumped and disappointment crept into his voice. “Bethany never told me she used it for anything but her business.”

It. The phone? The Internet? Both?

Watching the play of emotions across Freddy’s face, Max got a head rush. As if some strange force had come to life in her. As if Bethany suddenly had.

Testing, pushing, she took a step closer, letting him take a nervous step back.

“She had lots of friends on the Internet, Freddy.” That was another murderous angle Max hadn’t even thought of. She’d look at that, too, but another time, another place.

Freddy looked up, his cheek pulling in where he’d bitten himself on the inside. His backpack slid down his arm and bounced against the side of his leg.

“She didn’t tell me about that.” The injured tone implied he thought Bethany had told him everything about herself.

“You two were good friends, weren’t you?”

“We talked sometimes,” he admitted cautiously, one hand behind his back, the other still clutching the nylon strap of his pack.

“Did you like her even though she was fat?” Her question was blunt, almost painful, and better to dig out the truth. Bethany shriveled several dress sizes inside her.

Freddy shot up straight. “She wasn’t fat. She was ...”

What were the words Ladybird had heard him use? “A cheap fat bitch, maybe?”

Freddy leaped back, tripped over the edge the curb, stumbled, then caught himself. “I never said that.”

“Not even to your friends?”

“Well ...” A car whooshed by, traveling far too fast for a parking lot. Freddy looked at his bike, then licked his lips. “A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.”

“Did you tell
her
that’s how you saved face when your little pals made fun of your job and your boss?”

“Bethany didn’t expect me to defend her. We were friends on the—” Again, he truncated his words. “We didn’t have to broadcast it to the world.” A world that didn’t understand what it was like to be an outcast. Or a teenager.

God forbid he should admit any of this to his buddies or his parents.

“You used to spend hours on the phone with her, didn’t you, or e-mail, when you were supposed to be studying up in your room?”

He swallowed, his Adam’s Apple bobbing along his throat. “Yeah, we talked on the phone, played with e-mail. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“What’d you talk about, Freddy?” She spoke softly, moved in for the kill, stopping her slow forward momentum when she was within two steps.

“Just stuff.” Again, the nervous swallow. He stared at the building facade, the concrete at his feet, and the stinking trash can behind her left shoulder.

“What kinda stuff?”

He looked at her then, straight into her eyes, suddenly and unexpectedly defiant. “You already know. She told you. I can tell. So what are you asking me for?”

No, Max didn’t know for sure. From the red seeping into his cheeks and the flush creeping up his neck, she had a damn good idea. She did not, however, say a word. She let Freddy hang himself.

His nostrils flared. He stood taller, then leaned closer. He might have believed Bethany betrayed him, but still he defended her, looking over Max’s shoulder to make sure he couldn’t be overheard, lowering his voice. “We didn’t talk about sex.”

Then again, maybe he was defending himself.

Max closed her eyes a moment, listened to all the voices in her head, past and present. Bethany on the phone with Achilles, with the other men, Max’s own voice seducing an unseen man in the cab of her imaginary Dodge Ram.

Understanding Bethany the way she did, Max lowered her voice as Freddy had and took a stab at home base. “She described the best way to go down on a woman, Freddy. She wanted to teach you to do it right. Wouldn’t you call that talking about sex?”

He sucked in a breath, hurt fogging his eyes. “She talked to you about me?”

“Not
about
you, Freddy. Not to hurt you. She cared very much about you. She was ...” She played Freddy’s own game, cutting herself off, forcing him to ask.

“She was what?”

“She was concerned that you were so young. That she ...”

“She what?”

“That you might be thinking you and she could be more than ... friends. That you could actually meet her sometime.”

He bit down on his inner lip, pulling it in. His gaze turned inward. Then he swallowed and looked back at Max. She knew she was right. He’d never even seen Bethany. She’d paid him by check, through the mail. She’d called him to run an errand, or sent him an e-mail. She’d been a seductive voice on the phone, beguiling words on a screen, and a prurient fantasy in a teenage boy’s mind.

“How did you know she had a weight problem, Freddy?”

He took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. “She told me.” He paused. Max waited. “Some guys in the neighborhood saw her when she first moved in. So I knew before she said anything.”

She doubted he believed in Bethany’s real size. He’d convinced himself his friends had exaggerated, that Bethany herself had exaggerated. “
Did
you ask to see her?”

He answer indirectly. “I knew she didn’t like how she looked. That she was more than ten years older than me. That my friends would have beaten the crap out of me for even thinking about her. That my parents would have had her arrested for statutory rape ... or something, if they found out ... what we talked about.”

“You loved her anyway, didn’t you, and you wouldn’t have cared what anyone said if she just opened the front door to you?”

Lips half closed, he clenched his teeth and drew in a deep breath between them, but he didn’t balk at her use of the word love. “She never did let me in.” At least not into her house. Again, Freddy hesitated; again Max waited for him to go on. His eyes clouded with a hint of tears. “She was the sweetest, kindest person I ever met. And she loved me. She never expected anything from me. She never talked down to me. She always answered my questions without acting like I was stupid. She ... taught me things just by telling me how to do them. It was innocent stuff, just talking.”

Yeah. Bethany was the sweetest, kindest person. Yet she’d been teaching a beautiful, mixed up, underage kid how to intimately pleasure a woman.

It was frightening, all the more so because, inside her, Bethany didn’t even understand what she might have done wrong.

Had Freddy known about her late night activities? Had he somehow engineered a way to call her without anyone finding out?

Could he possibly be Achilles?

Or was he a jealous kid who killed her when he found out she was doing the real man of her dreams nightly on her phone sex line?

* * * * *

Witt hadn’t called.

Parked outside Prunella Shale’s office, Max took the cell phone out of her purse and stuck it in the glovebox where she usually kept it. Wouldn’t do to have the thing going off in the middle of the group session.

Why hadn’t he called?

Not that she’d wanted or expected him to. She’d slept with lots of guys who hadn’t called the next morning. She hadn’t wanted them to, of course.

She didn’t really want Witt to call either. He’d yell at her about ... something. Better to leave the phone off and in the glovebox. Better not to hear his silly questions about why she pushed him away or why she didn’t know how to make love. Why, why, why.

So why wasn’t she completely and utterly happy that he hadn’t called?

Chapter Twenty-Six

Prunella Shale’s
therapy
room, for lack of a better title, was cool, too cold for the fall day. Max, though she’d chosen to sit on the sunny end of the sofa, pulled on her black blazer over the sleeves of her white shirt.

She’d been the first to arrive. Three more had straggled in. At 102 pounds in her stockinged feet, Max outweighed them by a good twenty pounds. She almost felt fat.

Three girls, ranging in age from early to late twenties. Girls. Funny how one always referred that way to females as small as these three, but they were women, though almost sexless in their thinness. Not likely to be blood relatives, they were sisters in the way their skin stretched to cover their cheekbones and bare throats, identical in their short, shaggy haircuts, their baggy dress code, their gangly wrists devoid of jewelry, even a watch, their fingers unadorned, as if the extra weight couldn’t be tolerated. Hair and eye color was what differentiated. Without that, these
girls
could have been triplets.

Max couldn’t remember their names. One, two, three, they’d entered, been introduced, looked her up, then down, silently guessed at her weight, glared at her, and finally taken a place on the blue velour sofa, the overstuffed chair, and the plushly carpeted floor. Different positions, different places, all three had grabbed a pillow and hugged it to their bodies. For comfort. For disguise.

Max wanted to do the same thing. A pillow would hide the size of her stomach. It wasn’t self-consciousness. It was Bethany. Anorexia terrified her in much the same way obesity terrified Prunella’s current patients. Terror that they could some day, some way, be what the other one was.

It was all about comfort zones. It was all about food. It was all about control.

Watching them, Max realized the afternoon sun through the windows didn’t quite reach them. She also realized they probably wanted it that way.

Dr. Shale still wore the pink and black suit, but she’d removed the jacket, the rose-colored blouse beneath soft and feminine. She glanced at her watch. Max did, too. Five after three. She wondered if Jada was chronically late.

Just as Prunella opened her mouth, presumably to speak, the door burst open. Jada flew in, flung herself across the room, and landed in the chair opposite Max’s seat on the sofa.

Sitting forward on the edge of her seat, Max glanced from Jada to Prunella and back again. She tilted her chin forward, did her best imitation of shock and hoped to hell it worked.

It took Jada a full ten seconds to notice her. A hell of a long time, Max’s facial expression felt frozen to her bones.

The emotions washed across Jada’s gaunt features. She did a double take, her mouth fell open, and her eyes widened. Shock, wonder. Then came pissed. She narrowed her gaze, her brown eyes flared, and her lips thinned.

Her voice, when it came, was brittle as glass. “Did my mother send you here?”

“Your mother?” Of course, that was the last thing Max had expected her to say. She couldn’t help the repetition.

“You two know each other?” Prunella. It was unexpected turn for her, too.

“She’s gonna marry that cop.”

“The one next door?” one of the three popped out with.

So they all knew about Witt, had probably heard tales of his naked, gleaming chest in the hot sun while he slaved at dusting the leaves of his mother’s plastic plants.

“What other cop do I know?” Jada answered with a lacing of sarcasm.

“Ladies, why don’t you let Max talk?” Ah, Prunella, giving her fledgling patient the chance to sink or swim.

Max looked straight at Jada as she spoke. “Your mother doesn’t have anything to do with this. I had a problem, I took it to the good doctor, she let me come here. End of story.” She sounded defensive, which she figured was exactly how she’d sound if this had truly been divine coincidence.

Jada swept her gaze from head to foot. “Why don’t you stand up and show us how much of a problem you’ve got?”

Max was ready to do it. She wasn’t ashamed of her weight, at least not most of the time.

Prunella Shale figuratively stepped in. “I invited her, Jada.”

Jada glared. “Well, you didn’t ask us.”

Prunella met the glare head on and kept her voice soft but firm. “Just like I didn’t ask the others a few weeks ago when you came here right out of the hospital.
I
make those decisions.”

So Jada had been in the hospital. Well, that provided an answer to at least one of Max’s questions; the reason why she hadn’t attended Wendy Gregory’s funeral. Perhaps the reason why Virginia hadn’t either. She was looking after her daughter.

“Now let’s move on.” Sitting in the only straight back chair in the room, the doctor crossed her legs in a let’s-get-down-to-business gesture. “I’d like to devote this session to you, Jada. I think your feelings about what happened to your sister bear talking about.” You, your; Prunella’s carefully chosen words kept the focus on Jada, not Bethany. That’s what she’d gone through umpteen number of years of schooling to learn.

“Bethany? What the hell for?” Jada’s words were harsh, her tone flippant.

“Your mother told me she died on Wednesday.” Jada’s lip twitched at Dr. Shale’s mention of Virginia. “How do you feel about that?”

She took a deep breath, turned to look out the window, and then, like the others, she pulled a pastel pink pillow across her middle. “We didn’t get along. I’m sorry she’s dead. But we weren’t really friends.” She tipped her head and looked Prunella in the eye. “Do I lose points for not being distraught?”