“I’d like you to leave now.”
“Sure.” He indicated the door. “Open or closed?”
When she didn’t answer, he closed the door behind him anyway.
Claire ran to the bathroom and threw up.
CHAPTER 4
Lydia tried to concentrate on the road as she drove her daughter to an away game. She had lasted twenty-four hours before the full impact of Paul Scott’s death hit her. The emotional hangover from her ensuing breakdown was breathtakingly awful. All day, she’d felt weepy and exhausted. Her head throbbed with every heartbeat. The coffee she’d gulped down to stave off the headache had made her fidgety. She hated the feeling of being punch-drunk and she hated it even more that her first thought when she opened her eyes this morning was that a bump of coke would even her out.
She wasn’t going to give up seventeen and a half years of sobriety for that asshole. She would throw herself off a bridge before she did something so stupid.
But that didn’t stop her from hating herself for even thinking of using. And it didn’t stop her from crying like a baby last night.
She had wept in Rick’s arms for over an hour. He’d been so sweet to her, stroking her hair and telling her that she had every right to be upset. Instead of making her talk it out or driving her to a meeting, he’d put on John Coltrane and fried some chicken. The chicken was good. The company was better. They had started arguing about which was the best Coltrane solo, “Crescent” or “Blue in Green,” and right in the middle of it Dee came out of her room and gave Lydia the greatest gift a teenage daughter can ever give her mother: she had agreed with her.
The cordiality had been short-lived.
Dee was currently slumped in the minivan’s passenger seat in what Lydia thought of as her Phone Posture (automobile). Her sneakers were on the dashboard. Her elbows and forearms were flat to the seat like a kangaroo’s feet. She held her iPhone two inches from her nose. The seat belt would probably decapitate her if they were in an accident.
“OMG!” Dee would text as they waited for the ambulance. “Decapd in car ax!”
Lydia thought about all those times her own mother had told her to stand up straight, stop slouching, hold the book away from her face, moisturize, wear a bra to bed, always suck in her stomach, and never hitchhike, and she wanted to slap herself for not following every single stupid piece of advice that had ever come out of the woman’s mouth.
Too late for that now.
Rain started to spit onto the windshield. Lydia turned on the wipers. The rubber part of the blades skittered across the glass. Rick had told her last week to come by the station and get the wiper blades changed. He’d said the weather was looking bad, and Lydia had laughed because no one could predict the weather.
Metal scraped glass as the shredded rubber flopped in the wind.
Dee groaned. “Why didn’t you get Rick to change those?”
“He said he was too busy.”
Dee gave her a sideways glance.
Lydia turned up the radio, which is how she used to fix strange car noises before she dated a mechanic. She shifted in the seat, trying to get comfortable. The seat belt insistently pushed against her gut. The plump rolls of fat reminded her of a popped can of biscuits. This morning, Rick had gently suggested that she might want to go to a meeting. Lydia had agreed this was a good idea, but she’d ended up going to Waffle House instead.
She’d told herself that she wasn’t ready to share what she was feeling because she hadn’t had time to process Paul Scott’s death. And then she reminded herself that one of her more unsung talents was that she was really, really good at denial. Maintaining a three-hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit took a certain level of self-delusion. Then there was the shortsighted conviction that she was never to blame for the consequences of her own actions.
The addict’s credo: It’s always somebody else’s fault.
For a while, Paul Scott had been that fault for Lydia. Her touchstone. Her mantra. “If only Paul hadn’t . . .” prefixed every excuse.
And then Dee had come along, and Lydia had righted her life and she’d met Rick, and Paul Scott had gotten shoved into the back of her mind the same way she had pushed back all the awful things that had happened during what she thought of as The Bad Years. Like the many times she’d found herself in county lockup. Or the time she’d woken up with two skeevy guys in a Motel 6 and convinced herself that trading sex for drugs wasn’t the same as doing it for money.
At the Waffle House this morning, she’d almost ignored Rick’s call on her cell phone.
He had asked, “You feel like using?”
“No,” she’d told him, because by then, the desire had been stifled by a tall stack of waffles. “I feel like I want to dig up Paul’s body and kill him all over again.”
The last time Lydia had seen Paul Scott, she was practically crawling out of her skin from withdrawal. They were in his stupid Miata that he cleaned every weekend with cloth diapers and a toothbrush. It was dark outside, almost midnight. Hall & Oates was playing on the radio. Private Eyes. Paul was singing along. His voice was terrible, but then any noise had felt like an ice pick in her ear. He seemed to sense her discomfort. He smiled at Lydia. He leaned over and turned down the radio. And then he put his hand on her knee.
“Mom?”
Lydia looked over at her daughter. She feigned a double take. “I’m sorry. Are you Dee? I didn’t recognize you without a phone in front of your face.”
Dee rolled her eyes. “You’re not coming to my game because we suck, right, not because you’re still mad about the permission slip?”
Lydia felt awful that her daughter could even think such a thing. “Honey, it’s all about your poor performance. You’re just too painful to watch.”
“Okay, as long as you’re sure.”
“Positive. You are terrible.”
“Question answered,” Dee said. “But since we’re being brutally honest, I have something else to tell you.”
Lydia couldn’t handle one more piece of bad news. She stared at the road thinking, pregnant, failing biology, gambling debts, meth habit, genital warts.
Dee said, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.”
Lydia felt her heart seize. Doctors had money. They had job security. They had 401(k)s and health insurance. “You don’t have to decide anything right now.”
“But, I kind of do, because of the undergrad of it all.” Dee slid her phone into her pocket. This was serious. “I don’t want you to freak out or anything—”
Lydia started to freak out. Sheep herder, farmer, actress, exotic dancer.
“I was thinking I want to be a veterinarian.”
Lydia burst into tears.
“Deedus Christ,” Dee mumbled.
Lydia looked out the side window. She had been fighting tears off and on all day, but this time she wasn’t upset. “My dad was a vet. I wanted to be a vet, but . . .” She let her voice trail off, because that’s what you did when you were reminding your daughter that a felony drug conviction prevented you from being licensed in any state. “I’m proud of you, Dee. You’ll be a great vet. You’re so good with animals.”
“Thanks.” Dee waited for Lydia to blow her nose. “Also, when I go to college, I want to start using my real name.”
Lydia had been expecting this, but she still felt sad. Dee was making a new start. She wanted a new name to go with it. She told her, “I went by the name ‘Pepper’ un
til I changed high schools.”
“Pepper?” Dee laughed. “Like Salt-N-Pepa?”
“I wish. My dad said it came from my grandmother. The first time she looked after me, she said, ‘That child has hell and pepper in her hair.’ ” Lydia saw this required further explanation. “I was a handful when I was a kid.”
“Wow, you’ve really changed a lot.”
Lydia poked her in the ribs. “Julia’s the one who started calling me Pepper.”
“Your sister?” Dee’s head had turtled down her neck. Her voice sounded tentative.
“It’s okay to talk about her.” Lydia willed her lips to turn up into a smile, because talking about Julia was always hard. “Is there anything you want to know?”
Dee obviously wanted to know more than Lydia could tell her, but she asked, “Do you think you’ll ever find her?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. It was a long time ago.” Lydia rested her head in her hand. “We didn’t really have DNA back then, or twenty-four-hour news cycles, or the Internet. One of the things they never found was her pager.”
“What’s a pager?”
“It’s like text messaging, but you can only leave a phone number.”
“That sounds stupid.”
“Well.” Maybe it sounded stupid to someone who could hold a tiny computer with access to the entire world’s knowledge in her hand. “You look like her. Did you know that?”
“Julia was beautiful.” Dee sounded dubious. “Like, really beautiful.”
“You’re really beautiful too, sweetheart.”
“Whatever.” Dee took out her phone, ending the conversation. She slowly sunk back into the Posture (automobile).
Lydia watched the wipers valiantly battle the rain. She was crying again, but not the humiliating, sobby cries that she’d been struggling against all morning. First Paul Scott and now Julia. Today was apparently her day to be overwhelmed by old memories. Though, admittedly, Julia was never far from Lydia’s mind.
Twenty-four years ago, Julia Carroll had been a nineteen-year-old freshman at the University of Georgia. She was studying journalism, because in 1991 there was still such a thing as having a career as a journalist. Julia had gone to a bar with a group of friends. No one remembered a particular man paying closer attention to her than the others, but there must have been at least one, because that night at the bar was the last time anyone ever reported seeing Julia Carroll again.