Someone Else's Love Story (41 page)

It was staunchly said, if overdramatic. Maybe she was saying it for her as much as me. She so wanted his version to be true, but Natty must have shaken her faith in him. At the condo they stayed so physically close. Now, each sat slumped in their own chair.

“Go on,” I said to Clayton Lilli.

“I was going up to pass out or vomit. I hadn’t decided. Probably both. But as I came up by you, you grabbed me and pulled me over into the group.”

As he spoke, I tried so hard to let it spark something inside me, some unaccessed memory, some piece of my brain that had gotten buried under whatever the drug was. I waited for an inner
Bing!
of truth to sound, but as he described me paused by the stairs with three boys, described lurching over to us, I could only imagine it in the third person. I saw it like a story I was inventing, not a memory at all.

“You pushed Rog to the side and you grabbed me. And you— Then you— It was you.” He blushed a deep, uncomfortable red.

I felt my cheeks heating, too. “I kissed you?”

Beth dropped her face down into her hands. She didn’t like to hear this part.

“Yes,” he told me. “You did. You kissed me, and you said things to me. It was dark, and loud with music, and I was very drunk, so I don’t remember it all exactly. You hollered a lot of things into my ear. You were happy to see me. You kept saying, ‘Yay.’ It was your idea to go outside. I was drunk, but you were—I’m sorry—you were pretty, and you seemed drunk, too. I didn’t do so well with girls in high school. Pretty girls never grabbed me and kissed me and said nice things to me like that. You were so drunk you had to lean on the wall, and I couldn’t stand up, either. I was leaning on you, so you got pinned. I think the wall was the only thing that kept us standing. You told me that I had caught you against the wall, so you were mine now.”

His whole head, even his neck were flushed deep crimson now. Beth picked her face up out of her hands to translate Clayton into simile. “He felt like it was a game, like you were already playing a game where a girl had to be caught, and he’d walked into the middle of it and somehow won.”

Clayton Lilli said, “When you kissed me, and you said all the nice things, the guys around me were whooping, cheering us on. I felt like I was finally doing something right. Like what my stepdad would do. You seemed like the kind of girl he would have known in college, pretty and wild, getting drunk. Cool. Used to hooking up. Not like me. That’s what I thought you were like. Those guys were cheering, saying, ‘Whoop, Clayton’s getting off the team.’ There’s this thing the Kappas—”

I cut him off. “I know about the Emory Football Team.”

He swallowed, looking unhappy, “They were all slapping my back and I was still leaning on you, and you said the thing again, like I had caught you or pinned you against the wall and now I got to have you. I wanted to get away from the other three. I thought you did, too. I was scared if we went upstairs they would come, too. To watch. For proof about the football team. That made me feel so scared and sick. So I said I was taking you to dance, and we went away from them. We had to help each other walk, we were so messed up.”

“But we didn’t go to dance,” I said.

“No. You wanted to go outside. We were in the kitchen, I remember. It was dark in there, but not crowded like the front room. You . . .” Now he was redder than anyone I’d ever seen. A silly color, tomato almost. Cartoonish and impossible. “You took— You had a skirt on, and you took your panties off. You dropped them off right there around your ankles and when they got stuck in your shoes, you kicked your shoes off, too. We kissed and you had your skirt on, but I knew you’d taken them off and it made a lot of difference. I couldn’t not think about that. That they were gone. That was when you said you loved me.”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said.

“You were really messed up,” he said. “Somehow we made it to the beanbag, behind the grill, in the backyard. We were there and fooling around some but I kept thinking about the thing you did in the kitchen. I thought about that and it made me be done. I thought we didn’t, you know. Not quite. That’s what I thought?”

It was hard to believe this boy who couldn’t even say it was a rapist. But maybe that was the exact kind of person who would drug a girl? He wasn’t a forceful guy. He was red and ruined from talking about it. Maybe uptight and diffident was the exact type to go the roofie route?

“You didn’t get it all the way in.” I said it for him, and he glanced at his girlfriend.

“That’s what he told me,” Beth said. Her color was high, too. “He told me this story a long time ago, when we started dating, and we talked about our pasts. He told me about that night the way he’s telling it now, if that helps. He said the two of you didn’t get all the way to . . .”

She trailed off. She meant Natty, but none of us were ready to have him in the conversation yet. Thank God. But I wanted to act in good faith here. I wanted to tell the truth, in case he was.

I said, “We didn’t. Not all the way. I mean, he finished, but we didn’t.” I’d gotten equally wound up in embarrassment and euphemism, but plain, brown Beth seemed relieved to have this part of his story verified. She also looked puzzled. “It’s possible,” I said. “Not likely, but it can happen.”

We all knew
it
meant pregnancy. We all knew
it
was Natty.

Clayton picked his story back up. “Right after, I was embarrassed, but then I was also really nauseous from being so drunk. I got up and tried to walk away to be sick, but I couldn’t even walk. I crawled. I crawled on the grass with my pants down. I crawled until I started throwing up. It’s likely I had alcohol poisoning. I weighed maybe a hundred and fifty pounds?” He didn’t look to me like he weighed any more than that now, but I kept my mouth shut and let him finish. “It was a lot of beer. I threw up, and then I crawled away from that place, too. I crawled until I passed out. I woke up half under the bushes in the side yard with my pants still down. It was early morning. I went around back to the grill, but you were gone.”

The three of us looked at one another. I remembered none of it, but I hoped this part was true. I hoped he did wake up with his bare ass pointing skyward, as vulnerable as he’d left me.

“I wish I could believe you,” I told him. “I want it to be true, for a lot of reasons. But none of it sounds like me. I can’t see myself doing any of that. Ever. I’ve never in my life told a guy I loved him. I wouldn’t say that to some stranger, no matter how effed up I was. It was still an asshole move, going off to the backyard with a superdrunk girl you just met. It’s gross. I mean, who acts like that? But it’s not illegal, and I could sort of empathize. I want it very badly to be true, but it . . . it’s not a thing that I can gamble on.” And once again, we all knew the
it
in question was my son. “I have to know, for sure. Can’t you tell me something, show me something, that would prove the smallest piece of it?”

I knew even as I said it, it was hopeless. I was asking for a miracle.

“I’m sorry. All I can tell you is what I remember.” He went back through it, ticking the points off on his fingers in a way so like William it made me uncomfortable. “You kissed me first, and in the kitchen you were saying that you loved me. You said I caught you on the wall, so I got to have you.” He pauses, forehead creasing as he concentrates. “I remember, it was weird, how you said that part. You said you loved me because I had you pinned.
Because
I caught you on the wall.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “You came up to me, you said. I wasn’t running.”

“No,” he said unhappily. “It didn’t make sense. I had you pinned, though, because we were both leaning. You said it in a weird way. Maybe wall-pinned? Like the frats pin girls? But no, that wasn’t it. It was a weird word, though. I remember that.”

“Wall-caught?” I guessed, and then I heard what it sounded like, out loud.

“Yes! That’s it,” Clayton said. “Wall-caught. One word almost, very archaic sounding. I remember wondering if being wall-caught was a cultural thing I didn’t know about. Like handfasting.”

“Walcott? I said it like one word? I said ‘Walcott,’ and then I said I loved you?”

He nodded, and then his eyebrows knitted up all puzzled as wild color rose in my face and I clapped both hands over my mouth. I stood up, my body unable to contain itself even with a whole sofa to itself.

I’d called Walcott earlier that night, when the drugs first hit. I must have been looking for him. Of course I would be so happy to see Walcott, if I had three boys angling me up some stairs while I was feeling sick and off, or drunk and wrong, or even just loose and crazy. In the loud, dark party, drugged and reeling, if I saw someone so long and tall, someone with those spider arms, I might well hope it into being Walcott.

“I told you that I loved you,” I said into my hands. They couldn’t understand me, probably, but I didn’t care because I was speaking to myself. Was Walcott right? Had it always been between us, like a present we were waiting to unwrap when we were older? I couldn’t remember it that way. But I had been so terribly derailed.

Now Beth looked as puzzled as her boyfriend.

I took my hands off my mouth and said to them, “I might know a way to find out. I might know a way that would let me believe you.” None of us knew what to do with that. “I have to go home.”

I started for the door.

“But then what?” said Beth. She meant Natty. She meant we couldn’t stop this conversation until we found a way to talk about him. I wasn’t there yet, not by half. It was possible, it was even likely, that Clayton Lilli hadn’t set out to hurt me, four years ago in the Kappa Nu house, but oh, I could see a hundred ways that he could hurt me now. And I had to be sure.

I stopped at the door and said, “Let’s pause, okay? For now? Let’s all agree right now to not do anything fast. I don’t know you, and I don’t trust you. You don’t know me, either, but I can promise if you push me now, it’s going to get so ugly. You don’t know what all I’m capable of doing. This is . . .” And then I put it all right out in the open. “This is my kid we’re talking about. You need to let me think.”

This could go bad, so fast. I knew it, and they had to as well. Between us, the threat of jail for him, the loss of sole custody for me. I could go back to my story, insist he was a rapist. I’d have Walcott’s testimony and Clayton’s DNA to back me up. His story was good, though. He could win, and end up with half of Natty’s life in his untrusted hands. Also, his financial future, he must have been thinking of that. I could sue him for child support.

But I looked at their faces, and his was earnest. Hers was frightened, but also relieved. They both looked just as young and scared as me.

Clayton nodded. “Going slow is right. It’s good.”

I said, “Slow, or even nowhere. I start school next week, so I will be in town a lot. You can decide if you even want to talk more. That’s the first thing. We could all walk away from this. It’s an option, and I believe you enough to be open to it. We all cut our losses and walk away. It may be best, even. But it’s possible I could be open to other things, if you let me go home and think. If we are very slow. Slow and very careful. Because for me, the only person who matters in all of this is Natty.”

That made Clayton sit up straight. “That’s his name?”

Beth got up and crossed to Clayton’s chair. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Yes,” I said. “His name is Natty. Nathan.”

“Slow,” he said. He looked up at his girl. Her restored faith in him had pinked her cheeks. She looked less dour and beige, at least. I wondered if his story was really true, and if I was in love with Walcott. I wondered if I could ever come to trust Clayton. I wondered if I could stomach a person named Beth.

“We can do that,” Beth said for him. She looked to him when she said it, though, and he nodded.

I dug in my bag and wrote down my cell phone number for them.

“Call me next week, if you decide you want to talk,” I told them both, and then I left.

Maybe they would walk away. That would be easiest. But maybe they would want to be involved in Natty’s life, in one of a hundred possible capacities. If I came to believe him, we might step toward that, eventually. Maybe I would even go after those three boys and find out which of them put chemicals into my Coke, taking away my memories and my choices. That person should be made to pay. But I didn’t have to decide anything right now.

I didn’t know how it would unfold. I didn’t even know how I wanted it to. All I could do was go home and see what happened. My heart was divided. It mostly hoped Clayton would never call, but the small slice left hoped in a frailer way that he might come to be a good thing in my son’s life.

The only thing I could hope with my whole heart was that we would all be slow and very careful with one another. So I hoped it, and I went home, to Mimmy and my baby.

I didn’t call Walcott. Too much had happened. My brain couldn’t think and decide if I had, when drugged and helpless, looked for him so hard that I had seen him in the first long, tall shape that had come toward me. That I had told him I loved him. That I had said his name into a stranger’s mouth. I was too blank and scared and tired and hopeful all at once to know if I had loved him my whole life or not. It was all I could do not to pass out from exhaustion and run off the road into a ditch.