Lock and Key (25 page)

Perhaps I was just like my mother. But looking up at Cora’s hand, I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn’t already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to try and prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway.

Chapter Nine

When I came down the next morning, Jamie was out by the pond. From the kitchen, I could see his breath coming out in puffs as he crouched by its edge, his coffee mug on the ground by his feet. It was what he did every morning, rain or shine, even when it was freezing, the grass still shiny with frost all around him. Just a few minutes spent checking on the state of the small world he’d created, making sure it had all made it through to another day.

It was getting colder now, and the fish were staying low. Pretty soon, they’d disappear entirely beneath the leaves and rocks on the bottom to endure the long winter. “You don’t take them in?” I’d asked him, when he’d first mentioned this.

Jamie shook his head. “It’s more natural this way,” he explained. “When the water freezes, they go deep, and stay there until the spring.”

“They don’t die?”

“Hope not,” he said, adjusting a clump of lilies. “Ideally, they just kind of . . . go dormant. They can’t handle the cold, so they don’t try. And then when it warms up, they’ll get active again.”

At the time, this had seemed so strange to me, as well as yet another reason not to get attached to my fish. Now, though, I could see the appeal of just disappearing, then laying low and waiting until the environment was more friendly to emerge. If only that was an option for me.

“He’s not going to come to you,” Cora said now from where she was sitting at the island, flipping through a magazine. The clothes I’d been wearing the night before were already washed and folded on the island beside her, one thing easily fixed. “If you want to talk to him, you have to take the first step.”

“I can’t,” I said, remembering how angry he’d been the night before. “He hates me.”

“No,” she said, turning a page. “He’s just disappointed in you.”

I looked back out at Jamie, who was now leaning over the waterfall, examining the rocks. “With him, that seems even worse.”

She looked up, giving me a sympathetic smile. “I know.”

The first thing I’d done when I woke up that morning—after acknowledging my pounding, relentless headache—was try to piece together the events from the day before. My argument with Cora I remembered, as well as my ride to school and to Jackson. Once I got to the clearing, though, it got fuzzy.

Certain things, however, were crystal clear. Like how strange it was not only to see Jamie angry, but to see him angry at me. Or catching that glimpse of my mother’s face, distorted with mine, staring back from the mirror. And finally how, after I took her hand, Cora led me silently up the stairs to my room, where she’d stripped off my clothes and stood outside the shower while I numbly washed my hair and myself, before helping me into my pajamas and my bed. I’d wanted to say something to her, but every time I tried she just shook her head. The last thing I recalled before falling asleep was her sitting on the edge of my mattress, a dark form with the light coming in the window behind her. How long she stayed, I had no idea, although I vaguely remembered opening my eyes more than once and being surprised to find her still there.

Now the door behind me opened, and Jamie came in, Roscoe tagging along at his feet. I looked up at him, but he brushed past, not making eye contact, to put his mug in the sink. “So,” Cora said slowly, “I think maybe we all should—”

“I’ve got to go into the office,” he said, grabbing his phone and keys off the counter. “I told John I’d meet him to go over those changes to the campaign.”

“Jamie,” she said, looking over at me.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, then kissed the top of her head and left the room, Roscoe following. A moment later, I heard the front door shut behind him.

I swallowed, looking outside again. From anyone else, this would be hardly an insult, if even noticeable. But even I knew Jamie well enough to understand it as the serious snub it was.

Cora came over, sliding into the chair opposite mine. “Hey,” she said, keeping her eyes on me until I finally turned to face her. “It’s okay. You guys will work this out. He’s just hurt right now.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” I said as a lump rose in my throat. I was suddenly embarrassed, although whether by the fact I was crying, or crying in front of Cora was hard to say.

“I know.” She reached over, sliding her hand onto mine. “But you have to understand, this is all new to him. In his family, everyone talks about everything. People don’t take off; they don’t come home drunk. He’s not like us.”

Like us.
Funny how up until recently—like maybe even the night before—I hadn’t been convinced there was an us here at all. So maybe things
could
change. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I really am.”

She nodded, then sat back, dropping her hand. “I appreciate that. But the fact is, we did trust you, and you betrayed that trust. So there have to be some consequences.”

Here it comes,
I thought. I sat back, picking up my water bottle, and braced myself.

“First,” she began, “no going out on weeknights. Weekends, only for work, for the foreseeable future. We strongly considered making you give up your job, but we’ve decided to let you keep it through the holidays, with the provision that we revisit the issue in January. If we find out that you skipped school again, the job goes. No discussion.”

“All right,” I said. It wasn’t like I was in any position to argue.

Cora swallowed, then looked at me for a long moment. “I know a lot happened yesterday. It was emotional for both of us. But you doing drugs or drinking . . . that’s unnacceptable. It’s a violation of the agreement we arranged so you could come here, and if the courts ever found out, you’d have to go back to Poplar House. It
cannot
happen again.”

I had a flash of the one night I’d stayed there: the scratchy pajamas, the narrow bed, the house director reading over the sheriff’s report while I sat in front of her, silent. I swallowed, then said, “It’s not going to.”

“This is serious, Ruby,” she said. “I mean, when I saw you come in like that last night, I just . . .”

“I know,” I said.

“. . . it’s too familiar,” she finished. Then she looked at me, hard. “For both of us. You’re better than that. You know it.”

“It was stupid of me,” I said. “I just . . . When you told me that about Mom, I just kind of freaked.”

She looked down at the salt shaker between us, sliding it sideways, then back again. “Look, the bottom line is, she lied to both of us. Which shouldn’t really be all that surprising. That said, though, I wish I could have made it easier for you, Ruby. I really do. There’s a lot I’d do different, given the chance.”

I didn’t want to ask. Luckily, I didn’t have to.

“I’ve thought about it so much since I left, how I could have tried harder to keep in touch,” she said, smoothing back a few curls with her hand. “Maybe I could have found a way to take you with me, rent an apartment or something. ”

“Cora. You were only eighteen.”

“I know. But I also knew Mom was unstable, even then. And things only got worse,” she said. “I shouldn’t have trusted her to let you get in touch with me, either. There were steps I could have taken, things I could have done. I mean, now, at work, I deal every day with these kids from messed-up families, and I’m so much better equipped to handle it. To handle taking care of you, too. But if I’d only known then—”

“Stop,” I said. “It’s over. Done. It doesn’t matter now.”

She bit her lip. “I want to believe that,” she said. “I really do.”

I looked at my sister, remembering how I’d always followed her around so much as a kid, clinging to her more and more as my mom pulled away. What a weird feeling to find myself back here, dependent on her again. Just as I thought this, something occurred to me. “Cora?”

“Yeah? ”

“Do you remember that day you left for school?”

She nodded.

“Before you left, you went back in and spoke to Mom. What did you say to her?”

She exhaled, sitting back in her chair. “Wow,” she said. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

I wasn’t sure why I’d asked her this, or if it was even important. “She never mentioned it,” I said. “I just always wondered.”

Cora was quiet for a moment, and I wondered if she was even going to answer me at all. But then she said, “I told her that if I found out she ever hit you, I would call the police. And that I was coming back for you as soon as I could, to get you out of there.” She reached up, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “I believed that, Ruby. I really did. I wanted to take care of you.”

“It’s all right,” I told her.

“It’s not,” she continued, over me. “But now, here, I have the chance to make up for it. Late, yes, but I do. I know you don’t want to be here, and that it’s far from ideal, but . . . I want to help you. But you have to let me. Okay?”

This sounded so passive, so easy, although I knew it wasn’t. As I thought this, though, I had a flash of Peyton again, standing at the bottom of that stairway.
Why are you surprised?
she’d said, and for all the wrongness of the situation, I knew she was right. You get what you give, but also what you’re willing to take. The night before, I’d offered up my hand. Now, if I held on, there was no telling what it was possible to receive in return.

For a moment we just sat there, the quiet of the kitchen all around us. Finally I said, “Do you think Mom’s okay?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. And then, more softly, “I hope so.”

Maybe to anyone else, her saying this would have seemed strange. But to me, it made perfect sense, as this was the pull of my mother: then, now, always. For all the coldness, her bad behavior, the slights and outright abuse, we were still tied to her. It was like those songs I’d heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When I got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn’t make me love them any less. By then, they were already part of me, woven into my consciousness and memory. I couldn’t cut them away any more easily than I could my mother herself. And neither could Cora. This was what we had in common—what made us this us.

After outlining the last few terms of my punishment (mandatory checking-in after school, agreeing to therapy, at least for a little while), Cora squeezed my shoulder, then left the room, Roscoe rousing himself from where he’d been planted in the doorway to follow her upstairs. I sat in the quiet of the kitchen for a moment, then I went out to the pond.

The fish were down deep, but after crouching over the water for a few minutes, I could make out my white one, circling by some moss-covered rocks. I’d just pushed myself to my feet when I heard the bang of a door slamming. When I turned, expecting to see Cora, no one was there, and I realized the sound had come from Nate’s house. Sure enough, a moment later I saw a blond head bob past on the other side of the fence, then disappear.

Like the night before, when I’d been poised with Roscoe at the top of the walk, my first instinct was to go back inside. Avoid, deny, at least while it was still an option. But Nate had taken me out of those woods. For my own twisted reasons, I might not have wanted to believe this made us friends. But now, if nothing else, we were something.

I went inside, picked up his sweatshirt from the counter, then took in a breath and started across the grass to the fence. The gate was slightly ajar, and I could see Nate through the open door to the nearby pool house, leaning over a table. I slid through the gate, then walked around the pool to come up behind him. He was opening up a stack of small bags, then lining them up one by one.

“Let me guess,” I said. “They’re for cupcakes.”

He jumped, startled, then turned around. “You’re not far off, actually,” he said when he saw me. “They’re gift bags.”

I stepped in behind him, then walked around to the other side of the table. The room itself, meant to be some kind of cabana, was mostly empty and clearly used for the business; a rack on wheels held a bunch of dry-cleaning, and I recognized some of Harriet’s milk-crate storage system piled against a wall. There was also a full box of WE WORRY SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO air fresheners by the door, giving the room a piney scent that bordered on medicinal.

I watched quietly as Nate continued to open bags until the entire table was covered. Then he reached beneath it for a box and began pulling plastic-wrapped objects out of it, dropping one in each bag.
Clunk, clunk, clunk.

“So,” I said as he worked his way down the line, “about yesterday.”

“You look like you feel better.”

“Define better.”

“Well,” he said, glancing at me, “you’re upright. And conscious.”

“Kind of sad when that’s an improvement,” I said.

“But it is an improvement,” he replied. “Right?”

I made a face. Positivity anytime was hard for me to take, but in the morning with a hangover, almost impossible. “So,” I said, holding out the sweatshirt, “I wanted to bring this back to you. I figured you were probably missing it.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking it and laying it on a chair behind him. “It is my favorite.”

“It does have that feel,” I replied. “Well worn and all that.”

“True,” he said, going back to the bags. “But it also reflects my personal life philosophy.”

I looked at the sweatshirt again. “‘You swim’ is a philosophy? ”

He shrugged. “Better than ‘you sink,’ right?”

Hard to argue with that. “I guess.”

“Plus there’s the fact,” he said, “that wearing that sweatshirt is the closest I might get to the U now.”

“I thought you had a scholarship,” I said, remembering the guy who’d called out to him in the parking lot.