“I feel like I’m in a movie,” I said. “Like I’m echoing.”
He laughed too loudly. “I’m high, like, all the time in school,” he said. “I can’t stand it otherwise. I think I’m not cut out for it, you know?”
“Sure you are,” I said, touching his ankle with mine. It was thrilling, like passing a finger through a flame. Kevin drew his leg back and wrapped his hands around it protectively. “Don’t you want to feel close to me?” I said.
“I don’t know anything about you,” he answered, but his eyes crinkled. “You got any older brothers?”
“An older sister,” I said. “Leslie.”
“Oh, with the…” Kevin held his hand to his chin.
“Pageboy,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I knew her. She was an upperclassman in the junior high when I started. Looked like a kid.” He eyed me. “You don’t look like a kid.”
“She’s not a kid,” I said, inhaling. “She used to lock me up, you know.”
“Lock you up where?” He leaned forward to take the joint from me.
“In the guest bedroom.” I closed my eyes. “She stole the key out of Daddy’s desk. Whenever she didn’t want to watch me anymore…or didn’t want to talk to me…I’d spend hours in there. Looking at the ceiling.”
“My brother locked me in a closet one time,” Kevin said. “It’s like a rite of passage.”
“No,” I said dreamily. “It wasn’t to mess with me. It was over and over. Like I wasn’t really human to her.” I opened my eyes. “She pretends to be a good person. But she locked me in there like a dog.”
“Jesus,” Kevin said.
I patted his hand. “Do you feel closer to me now?”
I think he did; Kevin’s brother went to prison the next year, and by the time I was in high school Kevin was dealing. Discounts for me, because I was his first. We never had sex, but he liked to watch me get high, lying beside me, his face next to mine. I fed him stories that way, like putting my tongue in his mouth; as intimate, if not more. Should I call him a boyfriend? I’d rather call him my priest. I only ever told him the truth.
32
Mary
The house on Riviera squatted by the road, dull-eyed. I’d seen the big pink stone next to the door when Leslie had taken me here to pack boxes, and I’d been right about it: when I nudged it with the toe of my sneaker, the spare key lay underneath, grimy with dirt.
Inside, the old man’s smell still clung to everything. Spoiled vegetables and cigarettes underneath a hospital varnish of antiseptic gel. I wrinkled my nose and started searching.
Leslie’s room first; why wouldn’t she hide her secrets in among the rest of her stuff? It was the first room down the hall, painted a sunny, virtuous yellow. But it was empty save for a white bed frame and several sealed cardboard boxes. I examined the boxes. TOYS, two boxes of BOOKS, and VINTAGE CLOTHES. Were ’00s clothes vintage? Who was going to buy Leslie’s old low-riders and bedazzled tees?
I scratched at the carpet where it met the baseboards, but each corner was stapled down tight, no way to access the flooring underneath. Whatever it was, she wasn’t keeping it under the floor. Crawling on my hands and knees, I checked the underside of the bed frame—dead spiders and dust balls.
I shuffled back out into the main part of the house and turned toward the old man’s study. There was an ancient IBM desktop, from the time when powered-off computer screens were gray, not black. At the very least, I bet I could play King’s Quest on it, no problem. I pressed the power button and the modem wheezed, rousing itself into a gradually increasing pitch, like an airplane taking off. The screen remained gray. I poked at the mouse and pressed a few sticky keys. Nothing. I felt around the back of it for the cord and followed it with my fingers down to the modem. It was plugged in, the computer was running, and yet nothing showed on the screen. I held down the power button and tried again. The monitor was dead.
Okay. I glanced around the study. Dust motes drifted in the faint light from the blinds. Bookcases, mostly empty. Boxes here and there. A closed door on the opposite side of the room, maybe leading to the second hallway. An outdated globe, scattered office detritus: plastic in- and outboxes, chunks of Post-its. The wedding photograph was back on the desk.
There were a lot of little drawers in the desk—maybe in there. I opened them one at a time. Mostly they were badly organized documents, things that should have been in the filing cabinet across the room—mail from the bank, tax documents, the carbon copies of dozens of checks. Here and there I found household things like packs of playing cards and pencils and old spare keys, and one little drawer held nothing but a fragile-looking glass-blown Christmas ornament still attached to its gold hook. Another held a few childish construction-paper drawings of houses and cats. The longest drawer had a lock on it, and it wouldn’t open when I tugged. I looked closer.
The handle had no dust on it. No—one side had a wad of gray, as if someone’s thumb had dragged all the way across the handle, gathering up the dust as it went. And it was recent enough that I could still see the track.
That was it.
I tried the spare keys in the lock, but they were all too big. I stuffed them in my pocket in case I needed them in the rest of the house. There weren’t any other keys lying around the rest of the study that I could see, and most of the books were in boxes, so I doubted the drawer’s key had been in any of those. I crawled underneath the desk and craned my neck, but there wasn’t anything taped to the underside of the wood, and pushing on the bottom of the drawer from below did nothing but rattle whatever was inside.
I stood up and opened the little drawer with the Christmas ornament, carefully removing the gold hook. I’d picked a couple of locks before, but I wasn’t an expert by any means, and I had no idea whether the hook would work. I fitted it into the lock and tried to feel for tumblers, jiggling it up and down.
There was a click. My breath caught.
The drawer slid open. What a shitty lock. I could have opened the drawer by yanking it hard enough, I thought—but then Leslie would be able to tell someone had broken in. This way was better.
Inside were more documents, crumby Hostess wrappers, a very nice Montblanc, and—
A cellphone.
My heart was pounding. I took out my own phone charger and plugged the phone in, waiting as the screen came slowly to life. It was a BlackBerry-style cell with a physical keypad, one of the ones you paid twenty bucks for at Best Buy. No password. I used the navigator arrows to select the text-message icon.
There was only one exchange in the phone, between the user and a number that hadn’t been added to Contacts. A 505 area code, local. I clicked on it.