Meet Me Here (10 page)

“I don’t think he’s in there,” Mallory says, motioning to the house. “I mean, wouldn’t the lights be on?”

“Maybe,” Wayne says, winking. “And maybe not.”

“They could be at the party,” Mallory says.

“He wouldn’t go to a high school party.” Not even when he was in high school, I think. Of course my mind fires right back at me: yeah, but he’s not the same guy, remember?

“Maybe Wayne and Sinclair could go check the party,” Mallory says. “And we can look around the house. Just in case?”

In the distance a song starts, and Wayne nods his approval, begins gyrating and grinding his body to the beat of the far-off music. He slowly makes his way toward Sinclair, still dancing.

“Get away from me,” Sinclair says, laughing and holding Wayne back with both hands.

“I’m a party machine. A party animal. I live to get down.”

He’s still dancing, still moving to the beat, when Mallory gets out of the truck and nods for me to follow her. When I do, Wayne turns his attention—and his dancing—to me. “You’re next, soldier boy.”

Mallory steps in front of him, and for a second there’s a flash of excitement on his face. But that dissolves quickly
as soon as he realizes Mallory doesn’t want anything bumped or grinded. “You’ll hurt his leg. Go check out the party, and we’ll meet up with you.”

Wayne bops his head with the music, throws an arm around Sinclair. “And once we find your brother, then we’re going to have some fun, right?”

Even though I don’t want to, I nod my head and lie to Wayne.

“Yeah, man, whatever you want.”

Wayne stares at me for a second before smiling, pulling Sinclair close, and giving him a kiss on the temple. “You ready for this shit, Sin?”

He gives another excited yelp as he and Sinclair start down the dark road, toward the party. When they’re gone, I start my walk and hobble and stagger down the long driveway, neither me nor Mallory saying a word.

When we get to the end of the driveway, it’s obvious nobody’s in the house: no lights, no sounds. We walk around back, but Jake isn’t on the porch. He isn’t sitting on the abandoned swing set, left over from Becky’s childhood. I want to be disappointed, but how can I be? How can I be surprised by anything now?

I walk over and sit on one of the swings, trying to think.
To rest my leg for a second. When Mallory comes and sits next to me, I don’t say anything, just drift slowly from side to side in the swing, trying to come to grips with the fact that I probably won’t find Jake again tonight.

Headlights fill the yard, and we both freeze. Mallory is poised to run, but then she looks at my leg and doesn’t move. A man and woman get out of the car, both of them scowling. The man shakes his head as he goes toward the front of the house. The woman is an older version of Becky, the same straw-colored hair and thin build. She wipes her eyes before she disappears to the front of the house, too. They don’t even look at the backyard.

I exhale, and Mallory goes to stand up again when lights in the house start popping on, each one higher than the last until the top floor comes alive and the whole house burns. There’s a piano in their living room: black and polished in the corner. Pictures, pieces of art; the whole house could be from a magazine. My eyes drift to the kitchen, its matching silver appliances shining, and I nearly jump off the swing. Becky’s mom is staring at us.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit,” Mallory says.

I expect Mrs. Patterson to scream, to call for her husband or even the police. There’s a butcher’s block of knives
right next to her, another option. Instead, she wipes her eyes, blinking tears away.

I stand up, and Mallory tries to pull me back down. I lift up my hand, slowly at first, testing a hunch. I wave, but she doesn’t respond. She can’t see us.

The yelling starts again, Becky’s dad at an epic level. Every word is audible: “That’s right. I’m the bad guy. I’m always the bad guy. That’s just perfect.” When Mallory says my name, I flinch.

“Should we go to the party?”

“I guess,” I say. As we walk away from the house, the yelling gets even louder, like somebody has turned up the volume. We’re barely out of their yard, walking along the tree line that fences the neighborhood, when Mallory says, “I’m never getting married.”

“Everybody fights,” I say.

“Exactly,” she says. “What’s the point?”

I try to step around a hole and tweak my leg. I bend over and try to breathe through the pain. When I’m back upright, I don’t know what else to say but “You’ll probably end up here in Deerfield, married, with a Labrador. Just like everybody else.”

She stops. “No, I won’t.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to end up here with a fucking dog. Okay?”

“Um, okay,” I say, not sure why this is so contentious. Why she’s getting all pissy about Deerfield. The garages here are nicer than the house either of us lives in. She curses under her breath and rubs the back of her neck.

“I’m sorry. I think I’m just tired.” When her phone rings, she laughs and shakes her head. “Right on time.”

“Hey, I appreciate your help. But maybe you should go home. I’ll find him eventually, and I’m sure Wayne will drive me around. Then you can call Will and fix all of this.”

She bites her lip, nods again. For a moment everything about Jake falls away. Mallory looks broken, the way Jake looked when he first came home. Like something is missing. “Are you okay?”

She nods again, two quick movements, and says, “I’m fine. I promise. Let’s go to the party and find your brother.”

But I don’t move. She was always there for me, always willing to look past the idiotic things I did. She never cut me loose, not really. We were unconditional, and maybe
we still are. Maybe that’s something that never goes away no matter how poorly you maintain it.

“You don’t look fine,” I say. “You look like you should probably go home and sleep.”

She forces a smile. “I can’t leave you with those two dumbasses. You won’t have working arms or legs by sunrise. Besides, Jake’s probably at the party with Becky.”

I try to believe it as we start walking again.

Mallory puts her arm around my shoulder as the sounds of the party get louder. It doesn’t take a genius to see how her face is crimped and anxious. When her phone rings again, she pulls away to silence it, and when she does, I see the digitized picture of Will and Mallory smiling, a self-portrait of them in the mountains. Leaves—or maybe muted flowers?—swirl behind them. The screen dies, and Mallory sighs.

“So . . . why did you hit him?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she says.

“Try me.”

She looks straight ahead, smiling sadly into the growing light from the party. She squeezes my shoulder once and says, “Not tonight. Okay?”

We move slowly because of my leg, but soon enough
we’re on the porch of the house. People look past us, their party still going strong. I expected them to point, to relive Mallory’s dramatic exit immediately upon our arrival. Instead, they drink and laugh with the same enthusiasm as earlier in the night.

“I’ll go see if Jake’s here,” I say. “That way you don’t have to go inside.”

Mallory looks around the front lawn, the party having expanded outside the house. “I’d rather just come with you. Safety in numbers and all that.”

She laughs weakly.

We don’t get three steps inside the door when Wayne and Sinclair tumble through the crowd, pulling Becky Patterson behind them. My heart jumps. She’s pretty and popular, and if you had asked me before I heard her parents fighting, I would’ve told you her life was perfect. Perfect clothes. Perfect hair. Perfect BMW convertible in the school parking lot. Perfect.

Wayne takes a swig of the beer he’s holding. “Tell him.”

“Your brother was acting like a total freak—no offense.”

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“I left him at the Wilco. He started talking with Clem.
That guy who’s always down there. He once told me—” Wayne doesn’t like the circular way she’s telling the story because he shakes his head and cuts her off.

“Your brother went with Clem,” he says. “Do you know him?”

“Nope,” I say.

“He lives in a trailer out near Sherrills Ford,” Wayne says, taking a beat and another pull from the bottle. “I’m, uh, surprised Jake knows him. He hangs out with my brother and . . .”

Wayne looks like his beer has gone sour, a feeling I’m trying to fight myself. Wayne’s brother was a prick when we were younger, the kind of guy who’d hold you down and punch your arm until it went purple. Not much changed as he got older. The last time I saw him he was beating a guy unconscious in the parking lot of SuperMart. I’m pretty sure he got thirty days in the county jail for it, too.

“Okay. So that means you know where Clem’s trailer is?” I ask. “Right?”

“Yeah, but—”

I turn to Mallory. “I can take you home first. Or you can come with us. Whatever you want.”

Before she can answer, Wayne steps closer to me, a hand
on my shoulder. “We’re not going to Clem’s. Forget that.”

“Why not?” Mallory asks. “If Jake’s there, we need to go get him.”

“Yeah, I hear that, but”—he takes another drink of beer—“this ain’t the kind of place where you just show up, you know? How about I call Jerry Lee and see if Jake’s there.”

Wayne pulls out his cell phone and dials a number. Whenever people pass by our circle, Mallory shoves her hands in her pockets and stares at the hardwood floors like it’s her calling in life. Wayne pulls his phone from his ear, and I say, “Well?”

“No answer. But I can keep trying.”

“You don’t have to come,” I say. “Just tell me where it’s at.”

Wayne looks at Sinclair, then Mallory before he levels his eyes on me. “I can’t,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t look confident as he says it, but when I open my mouth, he shakes his head and turns around as if he’s going to disappear back into the party. As long as I’ve known Wayne, he’s never been coy about anything. He’s the hard charger, the guy most likely to get arrested for a public disturbance. The hesitation worries me even more
because I really don’t have any idea why Jake is out with this guy, but I can’t focus on any of that. I shrug.

“Then I’ll go down to Wilco and start asking people,” I say. “Somebody’s got to know him over there. I’ll keep asking until I find out where he lives, man.”

I spin around on my good leg and head for the door, but Wayne jumps in front of me, talking low. “Let me call Jerry Lee one more time. You don’t know what you’re getting into with this.”

“You don’t understand,” I say, and my voice sounds too loud—as if everybody in the party can hear me. I lean closer to Wayne. “I have to find him, man. I can’t leave him out there alone.”

Wayne scratches the back of his neck and, in a moment of clear resignation, tosses his empty beer bottle at a recycling bin in the kitchen.

“Well, shit’s about to get interesting.” He points at me. “I’m the one who’s going inside, and that’s it, all right? We’re getting your brother, and then we’re leaving.”

Wayne runs to get my truck while I wait with Mallory at the party. When he comes roaring up the street, I move as fast as I can to the passenger side, and Mallory climbs in the back with Sinclair. Whenever we stop at a light or slow down to make a turn, Wayne turns his head to the window like he’s going to be sick.

We pull onto a gravel road, and the outlines of about five or six trailers are visible in the distance. A few have porch lights, and a large flat-screen television plays through the window of another. Normally Wayne would get on Sinclair, ask him if this felt like home. But he’s dead quiet, nearly hanging his head out the window now.

“Clem’s is the one at the back,” he says, pulling the truck to the end of the long gravel road. I open my door at the same time as he does, and he looks over at me annoyed. “Hell, no. You’re staying in the truck.”

Wayne’s big, the nose tackle on the football team. He could easily put me down, leg or not, even if I could rush for the door. But Jake is my brother, and I’m the one who’s supposed to bring him home.

“He won’t know who you are,” I say. Whether it’s true or not, I can’t say. But I set my face, trying to convince him.

“You’re not hearing me,” he says.

“You’re right, I’m not,” I say, trying to get out of the truck.

Mallory calls my name from the back. “Maybe you should let Wayne go. If Jake’s in there, he’ll find him.”

“I need to do this,” I say, ending the conversation as I lower myself carefully to the ground, ignoring Wayne’s cussing. When we’re standing in front of the truck, I put my hand on his shoulder. “In and out, I swear.”

The trailer is set off from the rest of the park. Its windows are papered in thick black, and the yard is littered with metal folding chairs. Half an engine is propped up
on cinder blocks, and a grill, covered with beer bottles, is filled with dirty water. The whole place smells like eggs. Before we come up on the porch, Wayne stops me.

“Thomas, for real, these guys aren’t the type who like dudes just showing up.” He hesitates and says, “So don’t look at anything, don’t say anything. No matter what. Cool?”

I nod, and Wayne steels himself, making fists with his hands and then releasing them. He breathes deeply once before knocking on the door, a flimsy, almost cardboard thing that shudders with each rap. Nobody answers right away, and I’m about to push in front of him and knock louder, harder when the door flies open.

Jerry Lee, who looks like Wayne, but with a sharper face and a shaved head, appears in front of us. When he sees Wayne, he grabs him by the neck and drives us both off the porch. The pain is like a spike in my leg as I try to keep myself from falling in the dirt. A large dog runs to the door, barely getting past the frame before a piece of plastic cord jerks him back inside. He goes nuts as Wayne stumbles to his feet and pushes his brother.

“What the fuck, Jerry Lee?”

“Me? The hell
you
doing here?”

“We’re looking for his brother, jackass,” Wayne says.

Jerry Lee stares at me, wiping his nose with the side of his hand. “And who the hell are you?”

“He’s—” Jerry Lee cuffs Wayne on the side of his head once, laughing when Wayne raises up like he’s about to throw a punch.

“I didn’t ask you.” He turns back to me. “Well?”

“Thomas Bennett.”

Jerry Lee gives a theatrical laugh. “Oh, shit, soldier boy’s your brother?”

I take a step toward the porch—I’ll push my way through the door if I have to—but Wayne stops me with a look. It’s angry but mixed with something else I don’t at first recognize: fear. He holds his hand out, like he’s approaching a wild dog. “Becky Patterson told us he went with Clem, so I thought—”

“You thought? Nah, you didn’t think,” his brother says. “If you were thinking, you wouldn’t have brought him here.”

Wayne shakes his head but doesn’t respond. I try to look past Jerry Lee, into the trailer. When I do, he jumps toward me. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“I want to talk to Clem,” I say.

As soon as I say the words, Wayne groans.

Jerry Lee looks at Wayne and shakes his head. “You’re a goddamn idiot. But fine. You guys want to talk to Clem? All right, let’s go talk to Clem.”

He holds the door open without ceremony. I limp past him, but Wayne hesitates, only following after Jerry Lee starts to leave him outside. The trailer is small, a long rectangle of rooms stacked side by side like a railroad car. The dog drops its head and walks toward us, whining. When neither of us reaches for it, it turns around and lies down on a dirty pillow underneath the window air conditioner unit. Everything in the room is on: the television, the microwave, every light in the small trailer.

“Clem’s in the back,” Jerry Lee says. Wayne tries to follow me, but Jerry Lee stops him. “You’re not looking for your brother. Sit down.”

He points to a ripped-up couch, covered in dog hair, and then points me down the hallway. “Go on.”

I follow the hallway and slide open a fake wood door when I reach the end. A skinny shirtless man is sitting on the bed, arranging the contents of a large gray cooler at his feet. Plastic tubing. A bottle of starting fluid. And boxes upon boxes of what looks like cold medicine.

Clem looks up but isn’t surprised to see me standing there. Two bulldogs, like sentries, draw blood just below his collarbones, and something in old English is inked across his stomach. A silver cross hangs from his neck.

“Well?” He closes the cooler and looks at me.

“I’m looking for Jake Bennett.”

Clem doesn’t act like he knows Jake. He stands up, puts a foot on the cooler, and stares at me. “Am I supposed to know you?”

“I’m Thomas, his brother.”

“Okay, Thomas. But why are you here?”

Emotions collide. Why is Jake hanging with Clem? How does he even know this guy? I study the carpet, dotted with stains. “Just tell me where he is, and I’ll leave.”

Clem bends down but doesn’t answer. He grabs a small Thermos and sticks it in the cooler. “Why do you think I know where your brother is?”

“You were with him.”

“Correction,” Clem says. “He asked me for a ride, and I gave him one.”

When he stands up from the bed, I’m spinning the pieces of what’s happening in my head, trying to make them fit. Clem goes to his closet and pulls out a length of
rope, wrapping it around his closed fist in big loops before setting it on top of the cooler.

“Well, did you bring him back here?”

Clem slams his hand down hard on the cooler. “Am I your brother’s fucking baby-sitter?”

When I don’t answer him, he picks up one side of the cooler and pulls it out of the room, leaving me there. I don’t immediately follow him, but when I hear a crash in the living room, followed by yelling, I stumble out of the room and up the hallway as quickly as I can. By the time I get outside, Wayne and Jerry Lee are on the ground, wrestling. Mallory and Sin are standing just outside the porch, both of them taking cautious steps toward the melee as if they want to break it up. Wayne spins and ends up on top of Jerry Lee, pushing his forearm into his brother’s throat. At the last second Jerry Lee pivots his hips and throws Wayne off. Before Wayne can get close again, Jerry Lee pulls a large knife from the back of his jeans and points it at Wayne like a gun.

“This is your fault,” Jerry Lee says, breathing hard. “What the fuck are you thinking, bringing all these people here? Soldier boy’s brother is bad enough, but I come out here and you’ve got two more sitting in this truck? Hell,
no. You got to learn a lesson.”

“Good lesson, genius.” Mallory looks angrier than I’ve ever seen her. “Because now we’re all stuck here.”

“Y’all’s feet work just fine, I’m sure,” he says.

“You want us to walk?” Mallory says. “It’s ten miles back to town!”

“Walk?” I say. But as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I see the way my tires have sunk to the ground, four puddles of empty rubber. “What the hell?”

I take a step toward Jerry Lee, but Wayne moves between us, putting his hands against my chest. “Just tires, man. Just tires.”

And I know. But everything about tonight comes rushing into my body like a wild animal. It’s Jake’s not being here. My dad. The frustration of never being in control, ever. And now this. My body won’t stop shaking.

Wayne is in my ear. “Not worth it. All right? Just tires.”

Jerry Lee smiles as he wipes the blade on his shorts. “You should’ve had more sense than this, Wayne. Coming around here and expecting there wouldn’t be consequences. And now I’ve got myself a brand-new truck for the trouble. So maybe I should thank you?”

“New truck?” I repeat.

I fight through the pain, taking step after step until I’m right in Jerry Lee’s face. I wish I could take the knife from him, could twist it out of his hands, and put him on the ground the way I’ve seen it done in the movies. How many times? Instead, I push him. As hard as I can. He stumbles backward, smiles.

“Big balls on this kid,” he says to Wayne.

“You’ll see how big if you don’t fix my truck,” I say.

Before Jerry Lee can say anything, Clem strides from behind the trailer, his scarecrow chest still shirtless. When he sees everybody, the truck in the distance, he says, “The hell is going on out here, Jerry Lee? And put that damn knife away. What if a sheriff’s deputy comes driving by and sees that Rambo-ass thing?”

I refuse to break eye contact as I speak, my heart like a jackrabbit.

“He cut my tires.”

“And he was about to come at me,” Jerry Lee says. “If he’s man enough.”

Clem gives Jerry Lee an annoyed look. Shakes his head. “Will you shut the hell up? What were you thinking?”

When he turns back to me, his smile isn’t friendly. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

Jerry Lee laughs, even harder when I take a few steps at Clem and my leg buckles underneath me. Clem doesn’t laugh, just stares at me coldly. Mallory steps forward, talking directly to Clem.

“We can’t walk home, not with his leg.”

Clem’s eyes flash, just for a second, as he looks around the gravel road. “You guys come here uninvited. Walk into my house, asking questions and making demands. And now this?” He turns to Wayne. “Get your friends the fuck out of here before I really do something.”

Wayne doesn’t wait for another word. He comes over to Mallory and Sinclair, trying to corral them. But I don’t move. “What about my truck?”

Clem covers the five feet between us in two steps. He’s right in my face, his breath like old cheese. But before he can say or do anything—and God, I’m so ready for somebody to finally give me permission to let go, to get unhinged—I hear my name.

Jake’s coming down the driveway toward us. At first I can’t believe it. He’s so thin, so pale that he must be a ghost. But then he says my name again, and I snap out of the dream.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Me? Are you kidding?”

“Get this kid out of here,” Clem says to Jake. “For real.”

Jake tries to grab my arm, but I push him away.

“Hell, no. I’m not leaving,” I say. “You left me in the hospital! Do you realize how long I’ve been looking for you?”

Jake tries to pull me away, but I put all my weight into my good leg. He can still drag me forward, but it takes some effort. Behind us, Mallory, Wayne, and Sinclair watch us. Normally I’d be embarrassed, I’d want to take Jake to the side of the trailer so nobody could see this happening. But fuck it, I won’t hide anything for him anymore.

“Let’s go,” he says, loudly, once again trying to guide me away from Clem. It’s a momentary flare of his former self, something that I know won’t last.

“Look what they did to the truck. Do you even care?”

Jake turns for a second, considering the wheels. He used to love that truck as much as I do. The day he turned sixteen and Dad gave him the keys, there wasn’t a happier person in all of North Carolina. Now he only shrugs.

Shrugs
.

And that’s it.

I pull away from him and walk up the gravel driveway,
toward the road. I keep walking, ignoring the pain in my leg and Mallory, who’s chasing after me, calling my name. Jerry Lee yells out, “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of your truck.”

But I don’t care.

I don’t care about the truck or Jerry Lee’s laughter. I don’t care about Mallory, pleading with me to stop, worrying about my stitches, and the tears of anger and pain coming down my cheeks. I don’t worry about Jake, who doesn’t jog to catch up even though I’m halfway out of the trailer park by the time he takes his first step. I’ll walk all the way across this country if I have to. And there’s not a damn thing Jake or anybody else is going to do about it.