Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (19 page)

Jonah didn’t call often. Normally, Lauren phoned him. He always seemed glad enough to talk to her, and if she let too much time pass between phone calls, he sometimes acted funny. But rarely was he one to initiate a chat.

So when her cell phone rang and Jonah’s name appeared on the screen, she answered it immediately—with a quick apology to Will. He’d been talking about dating old furniture by the shape of the nails, and he stopped, mid-sentence, when she turned away.

“Are you okay?” she asked her brother.

“The better question is, are you?”

She glanced at Will. Above them, the wind was blowing the leaves of the trees this way and that, so the pattern on the forest floor danced like sunlight on the bottom of a pool. Will had stopped talking, speckles of sun and shade fluttering over his face and chest. His heather-gray T-shirt was slightly frayed around the neck; his jeans were ripped at the knees, faded nearly to white. He was looking at her with an expression caught between concern and uncertainty—whether he should stay or leave her alone.

She held up a finger, apologizing with her eyes and mouthing, “One minute.” Then she began to walk away. Last year’s oak leaves crunched under her feet.

“What do you mean, am I okay?”

“I know about your heart,” Jonah said. “The palpitations.”

She stepped around an old green sink that had been tipped on its side and left to the elements. “Oh, that. It’s no big deal.”

“Come on.” Jonah’s voice was pinched with annoyance. “Think about who you’re talking to for a second here.”

She came to stand under a tall tree, and when she turned around, she saw that Will had wandered in the other direction to give her some privacy. She thought:
I really do like him
. She watched him bend down, pick something up off the ground, his whole body tense with focus and deep thought. Even as Jonah spoke, she continued to watch him, the lean bend of his torso, the lift of his shoulders and neck.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Jonah demanded.

“So my heart is giving me a little trouble. It’s not a big deal.”

“You know I’m the last person to get on anyone’s case, but there could be serious consequences if you don’t get this under control. Unless of course you
want
to have a stroke and lose all feeling in the left side of your body.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“If you think this is bad, wait till you hear from Dad.”

She leaned against the old tree with its thick ribbed bark. Fifty feet away, Will was leaning with his foot propped on a stone, his head bent reverently to whatever he held in his hand. “How did Dad find out?”

“Burt called and asked how you were doing.”

“Crap.” She turned and picked a fleck of dried bark from the tree trunk. “I wouldn’t have told Burt about the heart thing—except that the alternative was worse.”

“What was the alternative?”

She laughed at herself. “The alternative was trying to explain that I had a ‘nervous breakdown.’ Don’t tell.”

“They still have those?” Jonah said.

“Apparently.”

“I thought they were called panic attacks now. Sounds more edgy and hard-core that way. You know,
panic attaaaack!
”

“Call it what you call it—I might as well have told Burt I couldn’t work on the Dautel case anymore because my dog ate my homework.”

“You’re right. Dad wouldn’t understand a nervous breakdown. You know I’ve been supportive of your going down there, right? You know Dad went stomping out of here the other day because I told him to leave you alone?”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “But thanks.”

“The thing is, I’m worried about you. I’m worried you think that telling Arlen you’re sorry might somehow . . . undo what happened to me.”

“Of course I don’t think that.”

“Well—I didn’t mean you thought it
literally
. I more meant, in a cosmic way.”

Lauren leaned her head back against the tree.

“You should come home,” Jonah said. “If Arlen doesn’t want your apology, then you can’t torture yourself over it. Come home, and let’s get you healthy.”

“It’s only been five days. And besides, I wrote him something. A letter. It could make him change his mind.”

“But you can always go back down there if he decides he wants to see you.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to do this. If I thought there was any real danger to my heart, I wouldn’t be here right now. But I talked to my doctor about trying to, um, deal with my stress levels on my own, and then we can go to plan B.”

“Please?” he asked. His voice was sweet now—that tone he took when he wanted her help. “Lauren, if something ever happened to you, I . . . I don’t know what I’d do.”

She wished she could see her brother, to reassure him. And yet, she understood just how he felt because after his car accident, and after he’d been arrested, she felt as if she’d lost him—and a part of herself with him. When they were kids, Jonah had always been her best friend. He’d understood her when no one else could because—like her—he could see the world beneath the world.

“Jonah, listen to me,” she said in her courtroom voice. “I really believe that if I can just . . . get things under control down here, then my stress level will go way down and I won’t have any more episodes. My heart will be fine.”

“
Fine?
Fine like when Dad was
fine
, when he had that cough he ignored and ended up in the hospital for a week?”

“It’s not like that at all. I’m already feeling better. Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t had any
big
episodes since . . . since last Monday. I really think that coming down here for a while is what’s helping. And I’ve got to follow my heart on this one.”

“I’ll pardon the pun, but only because you’re not in your right
brain these days.” She heard Jonah sigh. “Just tell me this isn’t about me.”

“It’s not,” she promised. She heard the beep of her call waiting, and when she glanced, she saw that her father was on the other line. “I’ve got to go. Dad’s calling.”

“Ignore it,” Jonah said. “He is not good for your stress level.”

“Nice thought. But he loves me. So he’s got as much right to lecture me as you do.”

“Fine, fine. Call me later.”

“I will.”

Above her head, a squirrel was jumping from branch to branch, shaking the limbs like an animal twice its size. The sun had taken on a gold-green hue in the underbelly of the woods, glinting off rusty car motors and porcelain. Will was sitting on a tree stump some distance away, his head tipped back as he drank from a vintage canteen.

Though she knew she was about to be yelled at by her father—not only for being sick, but also for embarrassing him in front of a colleague who knew more than he did about his own daughter—it occurred to her that it was actually a very nice afternoon. And that she was glad to be outside. In light of—and in spite of—everything, she felt strangely optimistic.

She clicked over to the other line. “Hi, Dad,” she said.

Will had never been squeamish about garbage. He spent more time than most thinking about the concept of trash—of
keeping
. And while he’d met other people—like the long string of his almost-but-not-quite girlfriends—who turned their noses up at thrift stores, he personally had never cringed to pull a gently used sweater over his bare shoulders on a fall afternoon. Most often, he merely felt grateful to have a sweater at all.

Back when Lauren had been a public figure—rather than a woman who had dozed off in his car this morning—she’d seemed like the kind of person who would be squeamish about garbage. But she’d surprised him. Now they worked together inside a building that had once been a mechanic’s shop but which had been turned into a giant storage shed. Through glassless windows, the sky had turned the same gray as the cinder-block walls, and moss had begun to grow in the cracks of the concrete floor. He paused a moment to watch Lauren work. She was sifting through a tangle of plastic beads and costume jewelry that swelled over the sides of a large cardboard box. Necklaces were knotted with bracelets, jewels, and pins, but she dug through patiently.

“I didn’t know you were into antique jewelry,” he said.

“I’m not. But my niece is four, and she is all girl. Anything pink or sparkly. She’d go crazy for this stuff.”

“I’m guessing your niece is responsible for your bracelet there?”

Lauren laughed and plucked at the threads around her wrist. For weeks she’d been wearing a bracelet that Dakota had made for her. “Not exactly professional. But I love it.”

“Do you see her a lot?”

“Not as much as I’d like. But as often as I can.” She held up a handful of costume jewelry: a turquoise and red necklace, a gaudy stone bracelet, a giant owl pin. “Can we add these to the bag of loot?”

“By all means,” he said.

She straightened up and tucked the jewelry into a cotton tote. “It’s amazing what people hold on to.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Me? I don’t keep anything, hardly.”

“You must keep some things.”

“No,” she said. “I go through my condo about once a year. And if there’s a thing I haven’t used or appreciated in the last twelve
months, off it goes.” She looked around, hands on her hips, at the sprawl of
things
around her. “All this stuff, though . . . it’s like treasure and garbage at the same time.”

Will murmured an agreement. Then, in silence, they went back to work, turning over picture frames and opening boxes to see what was inside.

Lauren seemed to enjoy picking, more each day. She’d tackled the job with real enthusiasm and even hunger—Will guessed she approached everything that way. And yet, her enthusiasm would probably wane once she got back to Albany. The unexpectedly pleasant days he spent with her would be condensed into a few anecdotes to tell to friends at dinner meetings or bars. This—the cobwebs and mouse poop, the sunburn and sore muscles, the picks and pans of new finds—this was a diversion for her, a detour from life in the fast lane.

Will bent down and halfheartedly lifted a board to see what was underneath it. He wasn’t usually so glum. In fact, he normally considered himself to be a cheery sort of guy. But, funny enough, the more interested Lauren became in picking, the less his own heart was up to the task.

Watching her reminded him of when he’d first started going through other people’s things, when his mother would take him back-to-school shopping at the local thrift store. He would stand among racks of musty-smelling clothes, hangers scraping metal rods as he pushed them from side to side. One year, he’d picked out an oat-brown sweater that had looked good as new except for a hole near the hip. The sweater had pleased him; he thought it gave him a shot at looking trendy and fitting in.

But the day he wore it for the first time, a classmate recognized it—hole and all—as the sweater he’d donated last year
to the poor
, and soon the whole school knew where Will Farris got his clothes.

He’d had a choice that day: He could embrace other people’s
things, commit himself fully, publicly, and unapologetically to loving their castoffs. Or he could be embarrassed, for himself and for his mother, who worked so hard and who wanted him to be proud.

He began to spend more time at the thrift store and even got a job there over the summer, to show he made no secret of his affection for recycling stuff. And he began bringing in fun finds to show off to his friends—skull-shaped lighters and old movie posters with aliens and buxom heroines. As long as he offered a steady stream of curiosities, he could sometimes pass for marginally popular despite being dirt poor. Gradually, he forgot the point he was trying to make, and what had once been a decision about what he stood for started to become who he was.

He picked up an old alarm clock, which might have worked or might not have. He’d been accused on more than one occasion of thinking too much about thrift, about waste. But sometimes, he walked into a store—a dollar store, perhaps—and he was overwhelmed by the notion that what he was looking at was little more than an organized landfill. At some point, each purchase—a toothbrush, a book, a frying pan, a wedding dress, a lamp—would make its way to a garbage can. The only difference between one person’s garbage and another person’s bargain item was a matter of time, place, and semantics.

When Will drank too much with friends who indulged him, he tended to go off about the inherent
wrongness
of it all—how the instant a person purchased a new car, its value plummeted simply because it was no longer considered
new
.
Used
did not necessarily mean
soiled
—as if a person’s decision to purchase an object fundamentally tainted it. He knew his ideas made people uncomfortable, and so around strangers, he kept them to himself.

But now, with Lauren standing not a few feet from him, bent down and looking with absolute focus at the box full of plastic trinkets, he found himself thinking again about those old convictions,
and he wondered what she would say if he showed her who he really was.

“Oh wow. Look at this!” She stood up from the box. Her eyes were bright with pleasure.

“What is it?”

“It’s a ring!”

She was holding a huge, red glass ring—a fake stone so big it was the size of his thumb. It caught the light and sent ruby sparks flying against the walls. Lauren held it and laughed, delighted as a child hunting Easter eggs.

“What kind of person would wear a ring like this?” she asked, turning the fake gem back and forth. “Good Lord. Talk about ostentation!”

He smiled. “Does it fit you?”