The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (4 page)

“So I’m going to give up, not something I’ve done very often in my life. Gerry MacLean has a house near here, just outside Boston—it’s where his wife is getting hospice care. I called someone I used to work with, and he said he’s here this weekend, that he’s been here pretty much full-time now that his wife is hanging by a thread.

“So I’m going to return the money, and I’m going to beg for forgiveness. It’s the only way out of this.”

“That’s why you’re here.”

“That’s why I’m here. I still can’t believe Donnie was in New Essex this morning. You didn’t see anyone else?”

“Just him. Who’s your friend that you’re staying with?”

“She’s more of an acquaintance than a friend. She let me know about the cottage. I liked it because it was hidden and out of the way. She’s also the one who borrowed my car, but when she came back this morning, right after I’d called you, she was pretty sure that she’d been followed. I got scared, tried to call you at the bar, gave up, and drove here to Boston. I thought I was probably being paranoid, but it turns out I wasn’t.”

“And why did you want to see me?”

Liana finished her beer, then put the bottle down with a hollow clink. “I need a favor.”

“You want me to come with you to deliver the money,” George said, guessing.

“No, I want you to deliver the money for me. I don’t want to see Gerry at all. I don’t know how he’d react. But if you brought the money, pleaded my case. . . .”

“And you don’t want to give the money to Donnie?”

“No. God, no. He’s already told me he plans on killing me. It’s not just about the money with him—it’s about punishment. That’s why I want you to take the money to MacLean, ask him for forgiveness, ask him to call Donnie off.”

“What makes you think MacLean would be any more pleased to see me than he would to see you?”

“He doesn’t know you. It would be like a business arrangement. Please believe me that I wouldn’t ask if I thought it was remotely dangerous. Gerry’s an old man. He’s not a danger to anyone, but if he saw me, if he saw me coming to him with the money, I don’t know what his reaction would be. I clearly got under his skin. It would be so much better coming from someone else.”

George hesitated, studied a fingernail.

“I’d pay you,” Liana continued. “The money’s already short, so what’s another ten thousand dollars?”

“If I do this for you, I wouldn’t be doing it for any money.”

“The last thing in the world you owe me is a favor. If you do this, I’d insist you take the money. Otherwise, I’d feel way too indebted.”

“I’m going to need to think about this,” George said.

“I understand. And I’ll understand if you say no.”

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Why me? Am I the only person you know in Boston?”

“There’s my friend with the cottage, but I’d rather return the money myself than send her. She’s the only person I know, besides you. It’s funny. I’ve never been to Massachusetts before, but it’s a place I’ve been thinking about ever since you and I were together. Freshman year. I’ve always imagined it as this special place. I guess I built it up, the way I’ve built up what we had over the years. When I decided to come here, to return the money to MacLean, I knew I had to find you. Somehow I knew you’d still be here.”

“I didn’t get very far.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean in life. I grew up outside of this city. I’ve spent almost my entire life here.”

“We’ve led pretty different lives.”

“I can imagine.”

There was a brief silence. George felt one cold trickle of sweat slide down his ribs. He watched as Liana turned her head, looking around his apartment. He wished it was a little bit cleaner. “You’ve always lived alone?” she asked. She slid her leg out from under her bottom and placed her bare foot on the hardwood floor.

“Pretty much. I lived with a girlfriend in San Francisco. Right after college. It didn’t last long, and I came back here. I’m sure I’ll die here too.”

“Not too soon, I hope.” Liana pinched her blouse at her shoulder blade and pulled it slightly back, then tugged the blouse flat again. It was scoop-necked and low-cut, enough so that George could see the swell of her breasts; there was a faint circular pattern of freckles just under her left collarbone that George remembered. “George, there’s one more thing I want to say before you decide. When I’m out of this mess, whether you’ve helped or not, I would like to spend some time with you. The way we left things . . . it has always bothered me. I can’t tell you how much I think about Mather College. It’s become a little bit of an obsession with me.”

“Okay,” George said, his voice sounding a little hoarse. He knew he was going to say yes, that he was going to help Liana return the money. He’d known he was going to say yes to Liana even before he knew what it was that she wanted. He’d known the moment he’d let her into his apartment. He also knew that Liana was as trustworthy as a startled snake, a fact that would have been wildly obvious to any five-year-old, but the thought of what Donnie Jenks would do to her had brought out his protective side. He felt alive, his senses heightened. He did not know what was going to happen next. It was an unusual state to be in. And a welcome one.

Knowing that he was going to say yes, George still felt the need to at least delay his answer. He excused himself and went to his bathroom, where he found he wasn’t entirely prepared for the sight of blood in his urine. His knees went weak, and even though he’d read enough pulp novels to know that it was a side effect of getting punched in the kidneys, the sight of the pinkish stream of piss set off another wave of nausea. He nearly threw up again.

“What do you know about kidney ruptures?” he asked Liana when he returned to the living room. His forehead was dotted with sweat.

“Peeing blood?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a friend who’s a nurse. I can call her if you’d like.”

“That would be great, and Liana—”

“Yes?”

“I’ll do it. I’ll bring the money to MacLean and see if I can get him off your back.”

She stood, a wide smile on her face, and George felt for a moment like she was going to come across the room and hug him. She didn’t, but she did say, “My hero.”

Chapter 5

T
hat first night of college, when George went back to his dormitory room to frantically flip through the freshman guide, the name he had been looking for was not Liana Decter, but Audrey Beck. That was the name she had given him when they met at the keg party in McAvoy, that was the name that he found in the orientation guide, that was the name of the girl he fell in love with that fall, and that was the name that had filled his head like a mantra during the longest Christmas break he had ever known.

Audrey.

That January of freshman year, George had taken the train back to school from Massachusetts. His father had dropped him off at South Station, where he’d had just enough time to buy a pack of Camels before racing to catch his train. He hadn’t smoked over Christmas break, so as not to upset his parents, and when he finally smoked one—on the platform at New Haven Station during the ten-minute break when the train was switched from diesel to electric—the nicotine had spread through his body like wildfire. He felt vaguely ill but was determined to finish the cigarette anyway. The dizzying punch of the smoke reminded him of his life at college.

It was early dusk, and flakes of snow hovered and spun in the dry air. He’d left his jacket on the train, and the hand that wasn’t cupping his cigarette was jammed into his jeans pocket for warmth. He looked up and down the platform to see if he recognized anyone; it was the day before the second semester began, and he assumed that any train on the Northeast Corridor would be full of fellow students, other members of his class. But no one looked familiar. He took one last lungful and ground the butt out under his heel.

Back on board he cracked his book—
Washington Square
—but couldn’t concentrate. He was playing and replaying variations of what it would be like to see Audrey again. She’d mentioned to him that maybe she would call him over break, but she hadn’t, and part of him had begun to feel that he’d imagined her, that he’d imagined his entire first semester of college.

To get to his dormitory from the train station he splurged on a cab, one from a line that idled and spilled plumes of exhaust into the whipping air. The cab took him the mile and a half down empty city streets, up Asylum Hill to where Mather College perched, a steep stronghold of brick and slate, a two-hundred-year-old private university of just under one thousand students.

All the dormitories had combination locks, and as George approached the double doors of North Hall, the combination he’d memorized the previous semester went out of him like air from a balloon. He looked around for passersby to ask but saw no one. Experimentally, he pressed his index finger to the metal clock-dial of numbers, and the combination came to him, as if by instinct. Four, three, one, two.

His roommate was a six-and-a-half-foot kid from Chicago named Kevin Fitzgerald, whose father was a florid-faced giant of a man who worked in city politics. Kevin’s own face, fat and with a chin the size of half a loaf of bread, was destined to be as red as his father’s one day, just as his frame was destined to support a basketball-size gut. Kevin, at eighteen, was less interested in politics than in sports, beer, and
The Late Show with David Letterman.
George got along with Kevin as well as any two freshmen with no shared interests could get along.

Swinging open his door, he stepped into his empty dorm room, a charmless square of painted concrete and linoleum floor. Two single beds lined either side of the room, and one window bridged the gap between two pressed-wood desks. Kevin, not there, had clearly gotten back earlier—his bed was stacked with freshly laundered clothes, a basketball still in its box, and a humidifier.

After sliding his bag of clothes to the foot of his bed, George unbuttoned his coat then picked up the phone to dial Audrey’s room. After four rings, the machine clicked on: Audrey’s voice and the same message from the previous semester. He hung up, lay back on his bed, and lit a cigarette. He heard footsteps from outside in the hallway, then voices—one he recognized as Grant from down the hall. He assumed that this hall’s freshmen—there were seven altogether—were gathered in one of two quads at the south end.

Normally, he would have made his way down there, flopped on one of the three cheaply made sofas in the common room, done a bong hit, and shared Christmas war stories. But he desperately wanted to reach Audrey first and make a plan to see her later that night.

“Foss, you in there?” came a yell, accompanied by a pounding on the door.

“No,” he yelled back and dialed Audrey’s number again.

“Get your ass down to the quad.”

There was no answer again.

He shed his jacket, pocketed his cigarettes, and followed the pungent smell of pot to the quad. The door was open, and all four roommates were in there, plus Tommy Tisdale, another freshman from two floors up.

“Foss.”

“Fossy.”

“Look what Cho got for Christmas.” Grant held up a baggie of bright green pot.

Cho was currently taking a long, bubbling pull from Holmes, his two-foot purple bong. The Dead noodled from the stereo.

After a bong hit and a lukewarm can of Stroh’s, George returned to his room and called again.

“Hello.” It was Audrey’s roommate, Emily, her voice clipped and familiar.

“Hey, Emily. It’s George. How was your break?”

“Hey, George. It was . . . Where are you calling from?”

“North Hall. What’s wrong? You sound weird.”

“Did you hear? Have you heard about Audrey?”

George’s stomach twisted, and his mind leapt to images of Audrey with a new boyfriend, Audrey fornicating with the entire senior class. “No. What’s going on? Is she there with you?”

Emily took a long, audible breath. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be talking to you about this.”

“About what? You’re freaking me out, Em.”

“Apparently . . . I just found this out . . . she’s dead, George. That’s what I heard.”

George walked, jacketless, to Audrey’s dormitory, Barnard Hall, and encountered a surreal scene. Barnard was one of the newer dorms, built exclusively for freshman women, and a large common area had been constructed on the first floor so that all the dorm rooms were on the second floor or above. Rounding a short, flyer-plastered hallway, he entered a high-ceilinged fluorescent-lit room, filled with couches and soft chairs, to a hubbub of female voices. The space was crammed with at least two dozen freshman girls, many of whom were crying.

Their faces turned to George; they were like pale balloons that bobbed, indistinguishable from one another. He scanned them, unable to stop himself from looking for Audrey, trying to pick her features out—hair the color of wet hay, dark eyebrows, long neck, and slim shoulders. One of the balloons floated toward him. It was Emily, preppy, snobbish Emily, mouthing words and putting her arms out as if to hug him.

She gripped his elbow, and he felt like a pinned butterfly, trapped between her terrifying presence and the invisible wall behind him that kept him from bolting back the way he had come. She said, “Join us,” and then he knew it was real. Audrey wasn’t coming back.

T
he following day George answered his ringing telephone at five minutes past nine.

“Is this George Foss?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, George, it’s Marlene Simpson. I’m dean of students.”

“I know.”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

“I heard.”

“You heard about Audrey Beck?”

“I heard from her roommate, Emily. Plus everyone on campus knows.”

After agreeing to join the throng at Barnard Hall the day before, George had spent a disorienting hour among the girls, some of whom seemed genuinely upset and some of whom seemed to be enjoying the dramatics, like vultures jockeying near a fresh kill.

It turned out that Emily had received a call at her home in upstate New York the previous morning. It had been the president of the college, and he had told her that Audrey Beck was dead, apparently by suicide. She had been found in her parents’ garage, the car still running, asphyxiated.

Audrey’s friends and acquaintances all had the same questions for George. Did you have any idea? Why did she do it? Did you speak with her over break?

He’d answered their questions as best he could, preferring the mechanics of talking to the mechanics of thinking. One of the girls, a rectangular brunette with a long, thin chin, had brought some terrible scrapbook she’d made of her first semester at college. There were pictures in it, but none of Audrey, although some of the girls thought they could pick out her sleeve in a party shot, the back of her head from a shot in a crowded dorm room. George noted the absence of photographs because he didn’t have any of her either, and already, four weeks after he’d last seen her, he was starting to worry that he’d forgotten what she looked like.

Later, Emily had walked George back to North Hall. He’d been relieved to enter his room to the beery snores of Kevin, who had been half in love with Audrey himself. George had no intention of waking Kevin up and going over it one more time.

“I’d like to meet with you this morning,” the dean of students said. “Would ten o’clock work?”

“Okay.”

“Do you know where my office is?”

She told him, and at ten o’clock George was there, having avoided anyone from his hall. He hadn’t been able to bear the idea of going to the dining hall, knowing that all conversations would be about Audrey and all eyes would be on him, so he’d bought a cup of coffee at a convenience store just outside of school limits.

He’d also managed to avoid Kevin, who had probably been in the shower when the dean called. He’d learn soon enough.

Dean Simpson’s office had windows that faced the main quad of the campus, a slanting frost-bitten lawn split by a line of elms. It was still cold that morning, but there was not a cloud in the sky, and patches of snow and ice glittered from all around the campus. Bundled-up students crossed the quad, mostly in pairs.

“I’ve asked Jim Feldman to drop by in a little bit. He’s one of our counselors, and he’d like to make an appointment to see you. We can’t require you to see him, but we’d all be relieved . . . we’d like it if you did. We all know how close you were to Audrey.”

George was unclear on who the “we” was, or how the college knew anything at all about his relationship with Audrey, but he simply nodded, then said, “Uh, sure. I’ll talk with him.”

Dean Simpson was somewhere in her fifties, and just tall enough to not be considered dwarf-size. She wore a purple sweater decorated with silver thread. A cloud of gray hair billowed around her head and shoulders.

“Good. This is such a shock to us all. We’re just now receiving details from Florida, and our primary concern is that those who were closest to Audrey remain safe. We’d like you to stay here with us at Mather for this semester and continue your classes, but we understand if you would find that hard. That’s what Jim would like to talk with you about.”

“Okay.” He’d barely thought about his immediate plans. The prospect of leaving Mather to mourn was horrific, until it was overtaken by the more horrific thought of staying at Mather without Audrey.

“Also, while I have you here, I was wondering what you could tell me about Audrey’s other friends. We’ve spoken to Emily of course, as you know, and there’s been contact made with some of the other girls in Barnard, but we know how traumatizing something like this can be, and we don’t want anyone to feel like it’s something they have to get through on their own.”

George nodded, wondering when Jim Feldman was going to drop by. The bright sun pulsed against the window, and a clock audibly clicked in the office. “I don’t know. Sorry,” he said, already forgetting what it was he didn’t know.

“And you don’t have to think about this now, but it would make sense to have some kind of memorial service for her here at Mather. I was hoping you’d agree that that is a good idea.”

George shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile.

The dean jutted out her lower lip and tilted her head. “Maybe now would be a good time to call in Jim.”

“Okay.”

She picked up her phone, and in less than thirty seconds Jim Feldman knocked once on the door and pushed it open. He shook George’s hand, placing his free one on his shoulder and squeezing. The dean excused herself from her own office and left them alone.

Two hours later, George was by himself in his room when he heard the unmistakable clop-slap of Kevin’s footsteps in the hall outside. It was early afternoon, and he had yet to see his roommate since his return from Boston. The door swung open, and Kevin swayed in its frame, already drunk; a twelve-pack of Genesee Cream Ale dangled in one of his ungloved hands.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “You have anything to do with this, I swear . . .” He took two rapid, unsteady strides across the room and grabbed George by his shirt, pulling upward and ripping out a button.

“Jesus, Kevin. What the fuck?”

“You break up with her?” Kevin pulled on George’s shirt again, and the collar ripped.

“What are you talking about? No!” George grabbed Kevin’s wrist with both hands in an attempt to pry him loose.

Kevin, his eyes red from alcohol and crying, held on to George’s shirt, and for the first time since he had heard the previous evening, George began to cry, pledging to Kevin that he’d had nothing to do with Audrey killing herself.