Alek’s father could have sent him to university anywhere, even Ivy League, but had kept him at home to attend the small one with no real reputation in the next town over. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, but not so much to recommend Addison U either (oh, it’s got “University” in its title, but it’s really just a college). There’s a pretty campus, solid syllabi, decent teachers, no big scandals so far, small class sizes, and a relatively low-level drug problem. Kids who go there do so mainly on one-year transfer programs to Syracuse or Cornell or Princeton. Of course, more than one girl from a disadvantaged background attends there on the Laura Lane-Howard Scholarships Reid set up in the wake of his wife’s leaving.
Alek doesn’t seem to mind. Reid handed down the black Mercedes C-300 Coupe for him to drive, and he doesn’t need to over-extend himself to achieve at Addison. He doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere else; the boy’s without ambition.
An easy ride is fine if your life doesn’t change, Valerie thinks. But life does change, as she knows all too well. It changes when you’re not looking, or even when you are looking but you’ve got your hands full with other stuff. At some point Alek’s going to find life kicking his ass to the curb with a vengeance. Deprived of a mother’s love, with an absentee father, the kid’s so desperate for affection and attention that he applies girls to his ego like they’re nicotine patches.
But he’s not a bad kid, she thinks, for all that. He’s just coping the way he knows how, following a need the only way he thinks he can. She suspects he doesn’t like that echo of emptiness most folk experience in their lives. Some recognize it, embrace it; some ignore it, flee from it. Some days Valerie thinks she hears the sad chimes of his hollowness dueting with hers, just when she thinks she’s got it beat. Truth is, the boy’s an anchor for her and she hadn’t realized how badly she needed one.
She pours a cup of coffee, breathes the aroma deeply as it fills the kitchen in a way that seems too big to come from such a small receptacle. It’s magic, she thinks: the smell of it, the ritual of making, the effect it has on the senses. Strange that something so bitter can make you so content. She sits down and sorts the letters into piles. She opens the bills first; they’ll get paid with the credit card Reid gave her. She pushes the pink envelope to the corner of the table for Alek to find when he gets home later tonight.
Valerie eyes the pink rectangle, wondering idly about the latest. She’s always kind of amazed when the boy looks at her like she’s some sort of witch every time she says, “What’s this one’s name?” Like he’s some great man of mystery. Lord, sweetheart, she thinks, for a smart boy you are dumb. She could tell him he’s predictable, and only the names change. She could tell him she sets her watch by him. But she doesn’t.
When she first moved into the Howard Estate, Valerie would sometimes meet the girl for coffee and whatever cake grief required after the inevitable happened: Alek lost interest in the she-of-the-moment. Valerie’d listen to the crying and/or ranting; she’d nod then tell the girl how life was likely to be. There’s no great harm in Alek, she’d say, but he’s a heedless boy. You don’t want a heedless boy; they never notice what you need, or if they do they probably won’t give it to you unless they can see an advantage in it for themselves. And heedless boys become heedless men, unless they get taught hard lessons early on.
Not all men, Valerie’d say, but enough of them to make life fucking difficult.
“You make your choice,” she’d tell them. “Do you want to be the one to teach him those hard lessons? Coz I can tell you now, he’ll listen but he’ll start thinking of you as his mother, and trust me: no man wants to sleep with his mother. Those that do are not the ones you want to sleep with. Or do you want a man who’s already had his lessons taught him by someone else?”
She’d never had one of those girls decide she wanted to be the one to teach Alek his lessons, although one did accuse Valerie of being an enabler. When she’d finished laughing, Valerie said, “What’s enabling about encouraging a girl to walk away? If I tell you to stay and fight, to bang your head against a wall trying to force someone to love you, what the fuck kind of favor am I doing you? Enabling is sending a battalion of girls back over and over again like cannon fodder because they think they’re going to win. You keep going back then what’s he going to learn about consequence? Enough women walk away, maybe he’ll wake up to himself.”
She’d shaken her head and finished with, “One day you might have kids and you need to remember that you’re the one who teaches your son how much shit a woman will put up with.”
Eventually, though, she got exhausted by the stream of girls and told Alek to stop bringing them home until he found one he thought he wanted to marry. Really though, she knew somewhere deep down that fighting to force anyone to make better decisions was a lost cause.
Valerie likes to think that her daughter wouldn’t have needed that sort of advice. Valerie likes to think her daughter would have been too smart to put up with that kind of juvenile shit. Valerie likes to imagine her life in Mercy’s Brook if Lily hadn’t gone, although “likes” probably isn’t the right word. It’s more like mental cutting. She doesn’t pull her own hair, tear at her cuticles; she doesn’t drink or smoke or do drugs; no, Valerie’s self-harm is imagining better days that’ll never ever come.
Lily would have graduated high school; she’d have gone on to university in New York or Boston. She’d have decided on being a doctor, lawyer, architect: she had all the choices in the world. Maybe she’d have come home to Mercy’s Brook; maybe she’d have settled elsewhere and Valerie would have gone to visit. Maybe Chase would have come too; maybe Chase wouldn’t have started drinking if their daughter hadn’t disappeared. Maybe Valerie wouldn’t have started an affair with the man who ran the drugstore. Maybe if they’d had some answers about Lily’s fate the other stuff wouldn’t have happened.
Or maybe it all would have happened anyway.
Valerie rubs a hand over her face and yawns. She’s not sleeping well; the dreams have come in force. They always do around this time. Even if she didn’t look at a calendar, she’d still know the date was on the horizon for the physical and psychic effects its forward march caused. It’s not helped this year by the sense of helplessness that’s crept over her. Every avenue seems to have closed down, not a clue left behind as to what happened to Lily.
Sighing, she reaches for the sole envelope with her name on it. She examines again the familiar old-fashioned handwriting, a style learned under threat of a ruler to the knuckles. Valerie’s about to slide a long nail under the edge of the flap and begin the delicate process of working it open when the doorbell rings.
* * *
Alek lied about the late lecture, and he’s surprised he got away with it. Normally Valerie knows his schedule like the back of her hand, but she’s been tired lately and when she’s tired, she gets distracted. Alek turns left instead of right, heads around the outskirts of Mercy’s Brook instead of through the middle so there’s less chance of being seen.
Valerie nicknames his various girlfriends after weather phenomena with a weary boredom. Hurricane Suzie. The French Tempest. Cyclone Elaine. He asks her every time how she knows he’s got a new one and she just gives him the look, which is part of why he lied about tonight.