The Dead Place (6 page)

“I’m working,” Kate said defensively, self-consciously smoothing her hair.

“So am I,” Margaret said, indicating her hand-tailored brown suit, “but us city folk don’t slop the hogs.”

“I prefer to call it painting,” Kate said, but she couldn’t keep from laughing. Margaret always made her laugh. “I’m so glad to see you!”

“I promised I’d visit your country retreat and here I am.” Margaret hoisted an H&H bag she had resting at her designer-clad feet. “And I came with provisions.”

Kate led her to the kitchen, and while Margaret unpacked bagels and chattered about the charm of “the hinterlands,” Kate made a pot of strong, black coffee just the way her friend liked it.

“They do sell these here, you know,” Kate said, smearing an everything bagel with cream cheese.

“I’m sure they’re a poor imitation.” Margaret took a large bite out of a sesame bagel and picked a seed delicately off the corner of her lip.

They’d been friends for almost eighteen years, longer than Kate had been married to Ian. In fact she owed her relationship with Ian to Margaret, since she’d invited them both to one of the wild parties she’d thrown regularly when they were all in their early twenties and new to New York. At least Kate and Ian had been new. Margaret was a born and bred Manhattanite and swore that she’d never live anywhere else, though she complained often enough about the high cost of living. It was the one area of her life where emotion overcame pragmatism.

“How’s Ian?”

“He’s good. Busy with the new job.”

“I’ll bet he is.” Margaret took a sip of coffee. “Is it all the prestige he hoped for?”

“Ian isn’t like that.”

“Isn’t he? I thought that’s why he had to leave the city.”

Kate took a sip of her tea, hoping the hot liquid would soothe the nervous twisting in her gut. They’d had this discussion before. “You know why we left.”

“You were getting better.”

“I wasn’t.”

“And Grace would have gotten over that boy.”

“She hasn’t.”

“Well, you both would in time. That’s my point,” Margaret insisted, tucking a strand of honey-colored hair behind a perfectly proportioned ear. She was a beautiful woman, but she had yet to find a relationship that satisfied her. “Discriminating” was how Margaret described her attitude toward men, but Kate suspected that deep down she was really afraid of compromise.

“We’re not that far from the city,” Kate said.

“Then why haven’t I seen you?”

“I’m trying to work. I’m overdue with that portrait I told you about.”

“You work too hard,” Margaret said. She’d gone to art school, too, but after three years of struggling had steered her career into the safer, shallower waters of advertising. “Starving isn’t really my color,” she’d said at the time. She finished off her bagel with one large bite and dabbed her mouth daintily with a napkin. “C’mon, show me your new studio.”

“Sure.” Kate tried to sound casual, but her stomach twisted again, the knot of anxiety tighter. She locked the kitchen door behind them and turned to see Margaret staring at her.

“I thought it was supposed to be safe up here.”

Kate flushed. “It is.”

“Then why are you locking the door?”

“Just habit, I guess.” Kate avoided her eyes, moving past her to unlock the studio.

It was obvious that she hadn’t been doing much painting. The portrait of the banker had barely changed, but Margaret just looked at it for a moment without saying anything, before examining the rest of the room.

“It’s got lots of natural light,” she said, stepping over to the window. As she stood there, a screen door slapped and Kate saw Terrence Simnic coming down his back steps with a large, black garbage bag.

“Who’s your neighbor?” Margaret asked watching as he hauled it into one of the metal garbage cans neatly lined up on the other side of the storm cellar.

“Terrence Simnic.”

“He seems”—Margaret seemed to be searching for a word—“colorful.”

Kate laughed, relieved to have something to laugh about. “Yeah, he’s kind of strange.” She told Margaret about the doll collection.

“How creepy!” Margaret said. “Very Norman Bates. Are you sure he doesn’t have his mother stored somewhere in that house?”

“I wasn’t about to stick around and find out.”

“That’s a big bag of trash for one man.” Margaret stepped away from the window and moved over to the shelves Kate had filled with paints and palettes and other supplies. She ran a hand over the brushes and flipped the pages of a drawing pad before looking Kate square in the eye. “How are you really doing?

Her question took Kate by surprise. “I’m fine,” she said, but she felt as if she were lying.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m not sleeping well.”

“Are you taking anything?”

“No!” At Margaret’s surprised look, Kate lowered her voice. “And I don’t want to. I’ve just got to get used to being in such a quiet place.”

“How are things with you and Ian?”

“Fine,” Kate said again, but Margaret just looked at her and Kate cracked.

“Okay, they’re not fine. We’re still not doing it. I can’t do it. We haven’t done it in over eight months. Happy?” Tears burned in her eyes, but Kate blinked them back.

There was silence for a moment, and then Margaret gave her a slight smile and said, “Honey, you’re not in high school anymore. You’re allowed to say sex.”

It made Kate laugh, the tears spilling over as she did, and she brushed them away, feeling the knot in her stomach easing a little. “It’s been hard,” she said. “Ian doesn’t understand. It’s not like I want to be this way.”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“You sound like him now.” Kate turned away from her friend, struggling to regain her composure. “I don’t want to see anyone again. It’s so boring. Talk, talk, talk. All the talk in the world isn’t going to change what happened.”

“But it might help you get over it.”

Kate could feel tears threatening again, and Margaret let it go, the way a good friend does, by steering the conversation onto mutual friends. They left Kate’s studio and went back to the house, spending a happy few hours gossiping about everything that had happened in the city since Kate had gone.

When her friend finally left, Kate was sorry to see her go. Margaret was laughing at a final joke as she headed for the shiny Lexus parked at the curb, but she paused and turned back to look at Kate, her face suddenly serious.

“I know you’ve been through hell in the past year, but you can’t make it better by shutting yourself off from the world,” she said. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”

“I promise,” Kate said, and she managed to smile as if that comment didn’t hurt. She stood and stared down the street long after Margaret’s car was gone.

As she walked slowly back up to her house, Terrence Simnic came down his front steps lugging two shopping bags. He set them down to open the door of the brown sedan parked in the driveway. As he shoved one bag in the backseat, the second toppled over and clothes spilled out onto the asphalt. Women’s clothes. Kate stared at the bra and panties tangled up with some sweaters. Terrence Simnic scooped them up, muttering under his breath. As he shoved them back in the bag, he looked over and caught her staring. Kate tensed, locking eyes with his, her body prickling with apprehension. He shoved the second bag into the back of the car, still staring at her, and then, maintaining eye contact, he walked slowly around to the driver’s side.

Kate broke eye contact and ran into the house slamming and locking the door. She stood there, trembling, until she heard the roar of the car engine. When she peered out the front window, his car had disappeared down the street beneath a canopy of trees.

Grace lingered when the bell for second period rang, glancing out the windows that overlooked the front of Wickfield High and then up at the big, round, industrial clock fixed on the wall in the long hallway.

A teacher shooing latecomers into her class paused with her hand on the door to stare at her, and Grace turned swiftly, messenger bag banging against her hip, hurrying away before the woman could ask where she was supposed to be. Spanish class, but that was in the opposite direction, and it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t going.

Damien was coming. He’d promised. “Going to drive on up and get you,” he’d said when she talked to him the day before, calling him from a borrowed cell phone. She couldn’t call him from her own phone. That wasn’t allowed, hadn’t been allowed once her parents knew about him.

“He’s twenty!” Her mother had said, repeating the number as if that meant anything.

“So what?”

“So he’s too old for you!”

“Dad’s five years older than you!”

Her father was quick to answer that. “The difference between fifteen and twenty is much greater than the distance between twenty and twenty-five.”

They’d met Damien exactly once, one time when she stupidly asked him to meet her out front of their building to go to the movies and her parents happened to arrive home together just as he pulled up to the curb in his dark brown Mercedes. They’d been polite, she couldn’t fault them for that, but her father had immediately asked Damien how old he was and her mother had said that Grace wasn’t old enough to date.

Even though they hadn’t had a problem when she went to the eighth-grade dance with Matt Glick.

“Wasn’t that a date?” she’d demanded in the hours-long argument that followed her parents forbidding her to go out with Damien, but her mother hadn’t been moved.

“Matt was your age, Grace. And you weren’t really dating.”

Which showed how little they knew, because she’d kissed Matt Glick in the closet at Emily Neeson’s party, though the quick, wet imprint of his lips against hers had all the romance of a postage stamp. They’d been playing spin the bottle in the family room, all giggling and hush-hush with Emily’s clueless parents just steps away, and someone nudged the bottle after Matt spun it so that it pointed at Grace.

Kid stuff. She could hardly believe that had been just two years ago. Things were so different since she’d met Damien. Not that it was Damien who made her change. That’s what her parents believed, but it wasn’t true. She was ready for change, thirsting for it, and maybe that was why the universe sent her Damien. Like he was her destiny.

He liked to talk about things like that, philosophy and stuff. Just because he didn’t go to college didn’t mean he wasn’t smart. Damien was really, really smart. She’d seen his acceptance letter to Princeton, so she knew it was true that he’d gotten in, and so what if once he got there he realized it wasn’t the place for him. Conformists, he’d told her. Conformists and wannabes, all of the students he’d met and most of the professors. “There wasn’t an original idea in the place.”

She’d told her parents this, thinking that they’d understand, that her mother, of all people, would share that sentiment, but her lips had tightened into a thin line and her father had said, “What a crock of shit.”

She hadn’t told Damien that, hadn’t told about the other words they’d used, like “posturing” and “insecure.” It wasn’t true, any of it. They didn’t understand Damien and they didn’t want to.

Grace walked quickly down one hallway, then another, both of them leading to the back of the school and the parking lot adjacent to the playing fields where she’d told Damien she’d meet him. Exiting the school was the easy part. She’d already scoped out the door near the gymnasium that she could use. Second period was good because for some reason no class had gym before third period.

The door to the gym teacher’s office stood open. Grace peered through the crack and saw Coach Wally Pembroke looking into the file cabinet, his broad back facing the door. She tiptoed past softly enough that she could hear his wheezing. He was supposed to be some sort of legend at Wickfield High. She’d heard other parents tell hers about how great it was that he was still teaching and how these kids were the third generation he’d taught in the town. Like it was some sort of accomplishment just to hobble about shouting, jowly cheeks turning red from the effort. He should be on an oxygen tank.

At the double doors, Grace shifted her bag and took one last look back down the hall before pressing carefully against the handle and exiting the building. She held the door so it wouldn’t slam closed, before walking quickly along the side of the brick building until she came to a corner where, with any luck, nobody looking out a window would be able to see her. She walked feeling as if there were eyes boring into her, half-expecting someone to call her name before she got as far as the parking lot, but nobody did.

She headed for a cluster of cars toward the rear, hunkering down between a dusty red pickup and a blue BMW, which just about summed up the differences in the town’s demographics, and slipped off her messenger bag to rest beside her. She wrapped her arms around her legs and tapped the toe of one sneaker against the asphalt. It would take Damien at least an hour and a half to get up here from Manhattan. And that was on a good traffic morning. All you needed was one slowdown and it could turn into a two-hours-plus trip.

The sound of an engine made her pop up, but it wasn’t Damien’s car pulling into the lot. Some ugly old green car belching out smoke from its exhaust pipe. She slipped back down between the cars, this time lying back, bag wedged under her head like a pillow.

It was a beautiful day. She hummed a cheerful Mozart sonata, playing the notes on the ground until she got caught in a tricky section and couldn’t remember the next measure. She looked up at the big puffballs of white clouds moving lazily across a bright blue sky. She shaded her eyes and made out the shapes in the clouds, remembering doing that with her mother when she was little.

They’d been lying on a beach then, up at Cape Cod, with the sand gritty between their toes and the sun like a blanket on top of them. “Do you see the alligator, Gracie?” her mother had said, pointing. “Look at its sharp teeth.”

She could remember the feel of the breeze against her skin and the distant caw of seagulls and how her father had been sitting nearby immersed in a book, his dark head bent over its pages. She had her own little yellow bucket and a blue shovel and she laughed as her mother sprinkled water over her head, cooling her off.

“What do you see in the clouds, Gracie?”

Her mother’s voice lilting somewhere above her, and she could remember the feel of a warm kiss pressed against the top of her head. What had she seen in the clouds? She couldn’t remember. Grace closed her eyes, tired of squinting. She had to have seen something, but all she could remember was her mother describing the things that
she’d
seen. Always the artist, nothing Kate Corbin ever saw was ordinary. Jungle animals, five-layered wedding cakes, an Aladdin’s lamp. What had Grace seen?

“I see a dog.”

“What kind of dog?”

“I don’t know, just a dog.”

“Greyhound? Boxer? Terrier?”

She could remember shaking her head, shaking off her mother’s insistence as if it were a touch.
“No, no! Just a dog!”

“Oh, Grace. You need to have more imagination.”

Grace frowned at the memory.

“Are you going to sleep all day?”

Her eyes flew open. Damien was standing above her, leaning casually against the Mercedes, looking hot just like always, tight jeans and cool black T-shirt and those silver aviator glasses that she loved. His blond hair was cut brutally short. A smile played on his lips.

“Hey!” She scrambled to her feet and grabbed her bag. “I didn’t know you’d arrived.”

“You were in la-la land, baby.” He accepted her quick kiss, but when she lifted her lips from his, one of his hands reached out and pinched her right nipple, popping out of her bra and against the thin fabric of her knit shirt.

“Ow!” She pulled back, but his other hand wrapped around to hold her pressed against him.

“You miss me?” He increased the pressure on her nipple, all the while smiling at her.

It hurt, but she liked it, too. She could feel heat flooding her face. “Yes.”

“Show me.”

She kissed him again then, tentatively pushing with her lips dry against his, and then he let his lips part and her tongue darted forward like a bird dipping into an open flower.

He circled the nipple with his finger and pushed against it as if it were a button. She moaned against his mouth, pressing up against him instinctively. Along with her love for Damien was a bit of fear. Not that she was really afraid of him, not that, but just a little anxiety about what he was going to do next. She knew he was capable of doing anything. Wasn’t he proving that now by kissing her in this lot and touching her so intimately out here in plain sight where anybody could see them?

She wriggled out of his grasp, and this time he let her go. “We have to leave before someone sees us,” she said.

She hurried around the side of the Mercedes, noticing that the panels were coated with dust and the wheel wells and tires were rimed with dirt. Damien took his time getting into the car and adjusting the side mirrors before he pulled out of the lot.

“You’re going to get me suspended,” Grace said as he sped out of the parking lot and out onto the road. Damien drove fast, weaving in and out of traffic and slipping through traffic lights in that split second between yellow and red.

“You afraid?” His gaze jumped back and forth from road to rearview mirror. She knew he was keeping an eye out for police.

“I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Then don’t come with me.” It was said matter-of-factly, but Damien suddenly spun the wheel and the car sped over onto the side of the road, tires crunching through leaves, before jerking to a stop. He looked at her coolly, his face set. She could see her own face reflected in his sunglasses.

She tried not to squirm in her seat. “What?”

“Either you’re coming with me or you’re not. I don’t have time for this shit, so decide.” The voice was cool and disdainful. She’d heard him use that voice before, but never with her.

“I’m coming with you,” she mumbled.

Without a word he spun the wheel again and jerked the Mercedes back into traffic. She wondered what he would have done if she’d said she’d changed her mind. Would he have left her on the side of the road?

“Why’s the car dirty?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

“Had a little detour,” Damien said. He didn’t explain what that had been, and she didn’t ask, but a little smile played on his lips again. The squirmy feeling in Grace’s stomach eased.

“Where are we going?” she asked when they’d driven another few miles. Damien had turned on the radio and was tapping his hand along to the pulsing beat. She hoped it was back to the city. Maybe they could go to Bleecker Street Records. That’s where they’d met. She’d gone there with Campbell, the two of them having fun looking for some new music, but not so much fun that they hadn’t noticed Damien and his friend. Nobody could overlook Damien; he was too good-looking. She’d been aware of him the way you’re aware of light, a sudden presence in the store, and she’d looked up and seen him walking toward her, his hands reaching out to trail lightly across the racks of CDs.

She was sure he didn’t notice her, though she’d stolen glances at him, giggling with Campbell when she mouthed the word “hottie.” At some point Damien and his friend left and Grace could remember feeling a little bit let down, but then when she and Campbell left about ten minutes later, they found Damien and his friend smoking outside, and then Damien offered her a cigarette.

“You smoke?”

Those had been his first words to her. There wasn’t anything sexy about that, except that it was Damien who’d said them, his gray eyes cool and appraising, dirty blond hair falling forward over a chiseled face, a cigarette stuck between his own pouty lips.

And even though she’d never smoked, she nodded and took one from the outstretched pack, and then nudged Campbell, who took one, too. Later, when he kissed her for the first time, she’d tasted the smoke on his tongue.

Despite what her parents thought, they hadn’t slept together. As in intercourse. She’d done other things with him, gotten as far as what Campbell still stupidly called third base, but she couldn’t go for home. She was scared of it. She’d heard it could hurt the first time, but mostly she had this overwhelming fear that protection would fail and she’d be toting Grace Junior along with her to geometry class.

Damien didn’t pressure her much, which just showed he was straight up, not that her parents would ever listen. He’d taken to calling her virgin queen, but he said it with a smile so she didn’t really care.

She cared more about the other girl she’d seen him kissing. It was just two days before she’d been forced to leave the only home she’d ever known, and the piano movers had already been and gone so she couldn’t vent her feelings like she usually did through her music. She’d skipped out on the packing and taken the train uptown to surprise Damien. It had been a really hot day and the subway was a steam bath. By the time she’d walked the final blocks to his building on the Upper East Side, she felt like the ice sculpture she’d seen melting at an outdoor wedding, all shabby and unrecognizable as it dissolved into a puddle of nothing.