Wild Child (6 page)

“Monica,” he said, dropping all that charm for the moment, and she saw just briefly the strings he held, the control he was trying so hard to exert. It was so vulnerable she wanted to turn her head away; it was like watching a car crash on the highway. “I cannot express how important it is that nothing jeopardize this
America Today
contest. They’ll be examining us closely this week, and that night … I don’t want them to see that night.”

Monica had very little practice in not doing exactly what she wanted, exactly when she wanted. Outside of taking care of Jenna, she’d spent the last few years answering only to her publishing house. And to what passed for her conscience. She was as spoiled as Reba. So her compromise was rusty and came out petulant.

“Okay, because I understand the situation, even though you’re a jackass—”

“True. Very true.”

“I’ll interview people quietly.”

“Quietly?”

“I’ll be discreet. That’s all you get.”

“Then I guess I’ll take it.”

Sun fell through the window over the door in a box of light, right between them, filled with glittering dust motes and the stench of his judgment. They stared at each other, all pretense gone. That zinging awareness from the backyard had turned sour.

I see you
, she thought.
All the parts you hide behind that smile. And they aren’t all pretty
.

“I liked you better when you were polite,” she said.

“I liked you better when you were flirting with me.”

Like that is ever going to happen again
.

“Goodbye,” she said and passed through that glittering box of sunlight, through his judgment, to the other side and right out the front door.

Turns out The Big House—and Jackson—were a disappointment, like so many others.

Chapter 4

Twilight sank over Bishop, and the Big House always got dark the moment the sun slipped behind the oak trees. Jackson pulled his shirt on over his head and walked the shadowed hallways to his sister’s room.

He knocked lightly on her closed door and since it wasn’t latched, it swung open, revealing his sister on her bed, head bent over a book. Gwen’s natural habitat.

Bubba, the old mutt, lay curled up at the foot of her bed, despite both of them being told dogs didn’t belong on beds.

“Hey,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb, keeping the bubble of distance between them.

The bubble
.

A few months ago, when things got really dicey between them—that was when he noticed the bubble. The distance that lived and breathed between them. If he shifted left, she shifted right. If he walked into a room, she’d walk out. And it had seemed like a new phenomenon. But lately, at night, aware of the silence in the house and its slightly malevolent nature, he wondered if it had been there longer.

If it wasn’t something he’d created years ago, coming home from law school to take care of his eleven-year-old sister after the accident. He’d been clueless and sad and resentful, and maybe … he created the bubble. Considering the most recent example of his dynamic and powerful people skills with Monica, there was a very, very good chance that the bubble was his fault.

And now he had no idea what to do about it.

She just needs to get to college
, he thought.
Spread her wings
. And maybe she was picking up on the fact that he was ready to spread his wings, too.

The thought—and the guilt that came with it—gave him heartburn.

“Gwen?”

She glanced up, her wheat-colored hair slipping down over one eye. One black-rimmed, heavily made-up eye.

“What … what’s on your face?” he asked.

She looked back down. “Nothing.”

“That eye makeup. Were you wearing that at your shift at the hotel?”

She sighed heavily, the sigh of judgment. Condemnation.
Jackson
, the sigh said,
you’re a total jackass
.

Yeah
, he thought,
and you look like a freaking owl with that shit around your eyes
. But he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t her father, as she so loved to point out.

“Pick your battles” was more than just a catchy saying. It was going to be his very first tattoo. Words to live by.

“What are you going to do tonight?” he asked.

“Hang out.”

“With anyone, or by yourself?”

It didn’t occur to him until after he said it how the words might hurt her. At her age, his whole life had revolved around friends, being social. Her aloneness seemed unnatural. And her reluctance to try to socialize was even more troubling.

She shrugged, and he fought with superhuman effort not to march into the room, pop the bubble, and shake her.

“You should invite some friends over,” he urged, worried, always worried.

“I like being by myself.”

Right
. It wasn’t normal, it
couldn’t
be normal to want
to be alone all the time, but if he pushed, she pulled, and then nothing would get accomplished.

“I’m going out to The Pour House,” he said. “Text me if you’re going someplace.”

She hummed in her throat, her eyes still on the book, and he waited another second as if she might look up and smile at him the way she used to. But she didn’t, and he knocked slightly on the door before walking away. He got three steps before he stopped and turned back around.

“You want to go see a movie or something?” he asked.

That made her stop reading.

“What?”

“A movie, get some ice cream …” He shrugged.

“It’s poker night,” she said.

“I know, but … I’d skip it if you wanted to go see a movie.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and in her blue eyes, so like their mother’s, he saw his sister and a total stranger. Gwen was a genius, reading at age three, completing complicated algebra problems in grade five. She’d finished the entire curriculum of her sophomore year of high school, including calculus and zoology, during two and a half months of summer school.

For about a year when she was twelve he’d been slightly scared of her, even went to Memphis twice a month so both of them could see counselors. The counselor he’d seen had told him to make sure Gwen was still a kid, that she did kid stuff.

So in between her reading the classics and taking online physics classes at the University of Tennessee, he took her go-carting, as well as mini-putting every weekend. He went fishing with her and to the movies. He invited kids her age, tried his best to make sure she had friends.

He’d worked hard at it, poured himself into it the way
he had law school. Normalizing his sister was a job, and it had been all-consuming.

Those, he realized now with a bittersweet pang, had been the best years.

“No thanks,” she said, and bent back over her book.

He sighed, slightly defeated, slightly angry. Always baffled. “Then I guess I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and as he turned again for the hallway, Gwen shifted and he saw what she was reading.
Wild Child
. Monica’s purple eyes stared up at him from the author photo.

Gwen glanced up and saw what he was looking at before he could pretend not to be.

Without a word his sister pulled the book into bed with her, hiding it in her lap, another secret to keep from him.

Monica searched through the pink dog carrier’s gazillion pockets for Reba’s leash. She found packets of dog treats. Hair ties and lip gloss. Gum. Two cigarettes. From the side pocket she pulled a long silver strip of condoms.

“Oh, Jenna,” she sighed, fondness a bittersweet lump in her throat. She tossed the condoms aside to the bed, but a white note floated out onto her shoe. When she picked it up she caught a glimpse of Jenna’s handwriting, and it was so unexpected, she couldn’t breathe.

Monica
, the note said in Jenna’s girlish print, and the grief bit so deep, she had to sit or fall to her knees.
Don’t let the haters win. And that includes you. You’re special and you deserve to be happy. It goes so fast. Take happiness where you can find it
.

Ruined, she sat there staring at the note; the circles Jenna dotted her
i
’s with seemed so profound. A note from beyond the grave. About her sex life.

Only Jenna. Only Jenna would care.

Maybe in a few weeks she could laugh, but the best
she could do right now was not bawl and put the condoms in the drawer of the bedside table. Where they would collect dust.

Wiping her eyes, she stood again and dug until she found the small pink bedazzled leash in the side pocket of the dog carrier and advanced on Reba, who quickly dove under the bed.

“Come on, you can’t live in this hotel room. I have work to do,” she muttered, then got down on her knees to fish the dog out.

“It’s a walk, Reba,” she said as she grabbed the animal under her strange, hairless belly. “Not a forced march. We need exercise. Sunlight.” She clipped the leash onto Reba’s collar, grabbed her purse with her notebook and pen, and headed for the door.

After that terrible run-in with Jackson last night, she’d come home and, fueled by anger and that four-hour nap, wasted several hours on bad TV, before finally falling asleep near dawn. She’d slept nearly twelve hours.

So now she was wide awake, and there was work to do.

You, Monica Appleby, are writing a book about the night your father was shot dead by your mother
.

Jackson’s words, his incredulous horror, still sent prickling chills down her arms. Like the feeling she got when she caught herself from falling, or managed to avoid a car accident, or thought of her mother.

“Let’s go see the sights,” she said, shaking out her hands, hoping the prickly feeling would go away.

She dragged the unwilling and surprisingly hard-to-drag Reba out into the hallway. But once she was out in the world, Reba gave herself a nose-to-tail shake and began to prance down the hall beside Monica, who found herself smiling at the little dog’s strut.

Outside the front door of the Peabody, all the flowers were in bloom, which made the air smell like lotion.
Bees the size of hummingbirds roamed the flowering bushes.

The sun she planned to soak up was sinking low behind the city buildings across the street, and the sky to the east looked dark and bruised. She didn’t remember this town from when her mother brought her here when she was six. They’d been running away, and Monica had only seen the inside of the apartment Simone had grown up in.

An apartment above a bar.

The Pour House.

There had been neon signs in dark windows, she remembered that. Some of them had been broken.

She turned right at the corner down a residential street where the houses were smaller and closer together. Kids’ toys and bikes lay in yards, dropped when the shout for dinner came. In one yard a dog, chained to a cinder block, chewed on a bone and eyed Reba.

Unintimidated, Reba worked her strut a little harder, shaking out her back paws as they passed.

It didn’t take long to find. A few more lucky turns and she stood kitty-corner to a squat yellow brick building. The horizontal windows were black and long, filled with neon beer signs. Above it were the dark windows of an apartment.

The Pour House was the poster child of dive bars. It was the dive bar other bars wished they could be. The neon
o
’s in the sign were still burnt out, the way they probably always had been and always would be.

Monica appreciated a good dive bar, the honesty of a place that knew exactly what it was and exactly the service it provided.

But this wasn’t just any dive bar. It was her nightmare.

I’ve got some kind of fucked-up karmic relationship with this place
.

It was there—well, actually behind The Pour House, in the damp alley by the stairs leading up to that apartment—that her mom shot her dad.

Monica shook her head, denying the memories. Not that there were many, but they were there, just under the surface, dark sharks circling a crippled boat. She was good at denying those memories. Had been doing it for years, pushing them away, drinking them away, fucking them away.

Not anymore
, she told herself, her stomach opening up like a black hole to swallow the rest of her organs.
You’re writing about it, remember?

Reba barked once, staring up at her through the white fringe of fur around her eyes.

“I know. But what else have I got?” She’d accepted the advance. Her editor was “eager to see Monica’s take on such a personal horrific and cultural event.”

Awesome
.

Before she could let the ghosts win and talk herself out of it, she stomped across the street, poor Reba running to keep up, and pulled open the door to The Pour House.

Only to stare—slack-jawed—with surprise.

If the outside was the same, the inside was a revelation. A dive bar reformed. The brass and wood of the bar gleamed in the low light. All the taps—a huge array, like a beer-tap fence across the top of the mahogany bar—sparkled. The dark green vinyl on the bar stools was all intact and showed no sign of duct-tape repair work. The copper lights overhead cast the room in a warm glow. And the blackboard on the far wall announced “Sean’s BBQ, coming soon.”

All in all, totally different from the dark, scary cave she remembered. This was a nice place, a welcoming bar hiding behind foreboding clothes.

Suddenly, she noticed how quiet it was, and she turned
to see a table of three men staring at her. Including Jackson Davies.

His blond hair picked up the lights and gleamed like gold, his long body was stretched out, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his eyes glittered as they watched her.

And she didn’t want to admit it—wanted to hate it, actually, because he was a rude, judgmental asshole—but she liked his eyes on her. She wanted to preen under that icy gaze, show him everything he was missing out on because he was an idiot.

But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She was a woman, a writer, with a job to do.

And he was not going to like that.