Barefoot Girls (60 page)

Amy shook her head and said, “No, thank you, sir.”

At the same time, Zooey said, “Yes, please. We’d love to.” She bugged her eyes at Amy who was looking at her with surprise. This was a chance to get inside. Check Keeley’s room and see if there was any evidence of where she was. Maybe she left a note or maybe… Zooey’s thoughts came to a stop, thinking of other notes, last words. No, let her be okay. Let it just be an empty threat.

“Come on,” Mr. O’Brien said, walking toward the kitchen. “There’s always something in the fridge. Hey, maybe my daughter will show up and we’ll all have a nice dinner. That girl needs a decent meal. Won’t eat. Crazy dieting.”

Zooey, who had started to follow him, came to a halt. Did he really think his daughter was on a diet? Was he really that obtuse?

She turned to see Amy making a patting motion in the air. Stay here. Amy nodded at Zooey and tiptoed up the stairs. Zooey was embarrassed to feel relief flood her. She was afraid of what was potentially waiting up there, and her role in it, how fitting it would be for her to find Keeley’s body, more blood on her hands. She shook her head to clear it and followed Keeley’s father into the kitchen.

He was pulling a casserole dish out of the fridge. “Baked ziti. You like baked ziti? Hey, where’s your friend?”

“It’s Amy. That’s her name. Your daughter’s best friend’s name.”

He put the dish on the counter and lifted off the plastic lid. “Yeah, Amy. That’s right.”  He opened a drawer and fumbled around before lifting up a large serving spoon. “This’ll be good.”

There was a thundering down the stairs, the floorboards shaking, and then Amy was behind Zooey, panting. “We gotta go. We can’t stay for dinner, but thank you, Mr. O’Brien.”

“Ah?” Zooey said in surprise, but was kept from remarking further by Amy who was dragging her out of the house.

As soon as they were out the front door, Amy broke away and ran across the yard to Zooey’s car and climbed into the passenger seat. Zooey followed and got behind the steering wheel just as Mr. O’Brien came to the door and waved at them with the spoon still in his hand.

“What? What did you find?” Zooey said, turning to Amy.

“Drive and I’ll tell you.”

Keeley wasn’t there, but her bedroom door looked like it had been kicked in, the cheap wood had scuff-marks and ragged holes in the bottom where someone had kicked into the hollow center. The doorframe was buckled and the metal fittings of the latch had been ripped out, leaving raw wood. Amy had checked and Keeley’s overnight bag was gone, which led her to believe Keeley had managed to escape.

“We have to go to the police,” Amy said.

Zooey shook her head, “And tell them what? We don’t know anything.”

“We’ll report her missing.”

“Isn’t there a minimum time limit for that? Plus, it has to be a relative, I think.”

“Are you trying to be difficult, or it my imagination?”

Zooey sighed. “No, I’m just trying to be realistic.”

They ended up calling the police rather than going to the station. It turned out that Keeley, at eighteen, was officially a competent adult and could disappear legally. They could file a report right away, though, and did not need to be related to the missing person; however the officer on the phone said to check with family and friends first and confirm that she was really missing and not visiting a friend or something equally mundane. Zooey repeated each thing the officer said to Amy, who stood beside her at the pay phone at the downtown Exxon station.

Zooey hung up the receiver and turned around. “Well, he was nice.”

“I think we should still report it. We know it’s her mom,” Amy said.

Zooey shook her head. “No, we don’t. Maybe one of her friends here in town was trying to help her, had to break down the door because she wouldn’t open it. You said her overnight bag was gone, maybe she went to stay with them, once they made her see reason.”

They finally agreed to wait a few days and make some calls. Zooey would call Julie Shaw and check with her. Amy knew the names of a few others and would try to get their numbers and call them, though it was hard as the phonebook listings would be under their parent’s names, which they didn’t know. Zooey drove Amy back to Branford and then went home.

Zooey called Julie right away and she answered the phone, covering the mouthpiece and yelling at her younger siblings to shut up, she couldn’t hear. Julie hadn’t heard anything, hadn’t even seen Keeley since they graduated. She said she’d call Zooey if she found anything out and took her number.

 Amy called a lot of wrong numbers the next day before finding two different friends Keeley had mentioned, both dead ends as far as Keeley’s whereabouts. Amy called Zooey to tell her and, after talking to Pam, the three girls decided they would meet at Friendly’s again in two days if they hadn’t heard anything, stop by Keeley’s again to make sure she wasn’t there, and file the report in person.

Zooey had missed classes to come home for both visits, and used the wait to catch up on her studies and do her assigned reading. When she’d offered her house to Keeley, she’d been prepared to put off school, but when the offer was refused, she decided to go to school after all. It was one of her better decisions. Home was lonely and depressing. Wellesley was exciting and challenging, filled with bright young female students who were friendly but intellectually competitive and professors who didn’t give away easy A’s. She loved the beautiful Gothic stone buildings, the park-like campus, and the dorm parties where revelers quoted Camus rather than Bruce Springsteen.

The evening after their decision, Zooey was stretched out on the couch in her father’s den reading a novel by a different famous author, Eudora Welty, and occasionally stopping to press her nose against the couch cushion and breathe in the lingering smell of her father’s cigars. It was the only room that smelled of them, and only faintly as he enjoyed one rarely, saying they were bad for him but he loved them too much to quit. Her mother had forbidden him to smoke anywhere else in the house, so the scent was concentrated there. When Zooey breathed in with her nose against the cushion and closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that he was simply in the other room, had just stepped away, could hear the echo of his resonant voice down the hallway.

She was engaged in this fantasy when she heard the doorbell and her eyes flew open. She lifted her head to look at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was nine o’clock at night. No one she knew would visit this late. Who could it be? She put her book down on the coffee table and stood up, joints crackling from being stationary for hours. The doorbell sounded again, this time sounding eerie, ominous. What if it was someone who knew she was all alone in the house? A murderer or a robber?

She stepped out into the hallway and looked toward the front door. She couldn’t see anything through the decorative glass panes on either side of the door; the front porch light was off and it was pitch black outside. She swore under her breath. She wished she’d put the light on. Now she’d have to go right up to the switch near the door to turn it on and whoever it was would see her. The doorbell sounded again, making her startle.

She walked slowly down the hall and looked in the living room. The phone wasn’t far. She could run for it and call the police before anyone could get in. Wait, had she locked the back door? She couldn’t remember. Damn. She’d gotten too lax, too comfortable being alone. What if…

The doorbell rang again.

“Okay! Okay!” She walked over to the switch and flipped it on, looking out the glass pane to see who was there and tensing to run.

Illuminated by the dull yellow glow of the hanging antique lantern, Keeley stood looking like a shriveled aged version of herself, worsened by her lopped-off hair that appeared to be a home job done with a pair of garden shears, her head lumpy with shorter and longer chunks of hair interspersed on her scalp.

“Oh, my God!” Zooey said and rushed to throw open the front door. “Keeley!”

Keeley croaked out a dry little sound and stepped forward, her knees buckling.

Zooey rushed forward just in time to catch her. Keeley was remarkably light, her weight that of a young child in Zooey’s arms. She smelled sharply of hard liquor with an undercurrent of foul body odor.  Zooey half-carried, half-supported Keeley over to the nearest couch in the living room and helped her lie down on it. Then she focused on getting Keeley some kind of sustenance.

Keeley slurped a little of the chicken noodle soup Zooey had heated up, took a gulp of the ginger ale Zooey had poured into a glass, and then let her head drop on the couch with a moan and was immediately asleep. Zooey propped up Keeley’s head with a pillow, covered her with a quilt, gathered up the barely touched food, and turned off the light in the living room before going to call Amy and then Pam, apologizing to each irritated parent that answered the phone before explaining.

Chapter 64

“What happened? How scary,” Hannah said, leaning in so close that Zooey could have leaned across and kissed her. Maybe she should, while she had a chance. The truth was about to come out. How would Hannah react?

“The haircut was self-inflicted, something she did one day when she caught herself admiring her reflection in the mirror in her bedroom. She said when she realized what she was doing - she had been preening a bit, combing her hair and thinking about washing it - she freaked out. Michael was dead and she was thinking about herself?”

Hannah made a sad sound and said, “But, of course she needed to take care of herself.”

Zo shook her head. “She didn’t see it that way. She took all the blame for Michael’s death, ravaged herself with her own words from the night he died. When she realized she was thinking about herself, something she’d promised herself she would never do again, she went and got some paper scissors and hacked all of her hair off. And it was a hatchet job, let me tell you. In some places, she had cut all the way down to the scalp, and it looked naked and sad, all bare like that.”

“Poor mom. But why did she leave? Where did she go? What happened to her bedroom door? Was it a friend?”

Zo took a deep breath and dived, bracing herself.

The whole terrible story came out the next morning. Amy and Pam arrived early that Saturday bearing fresh bagels and coffee and the four of them sat down at Zooey’s kitchen table to talk. Keeley was talkative for the first time in a long time, though she was a horror to look at, her body and face so emaciated she looked like an animated skeleton, worsened more by her crazy patchwork haircut. She wore a clean pair of pants and a blouse that Zooey had loaned to her, both of which swam on her. Her dirty clothes were in the washing machine, which chugged and sloshed away down the hall in the utility room.

After the haircut incident, Keeley had gone on hiding in her bedroom and waiting to die. She admitted that was what she wanted at the time. She hated a world where someone like Michael could die and someone like her could live. What changed her plans was the day her mother came knocking, and all hell broke loose.

Up until that day, they’d ignored each other. It was easy to do. Keeley remained locked in her room and didn’t ask for anything. Her mother continued her schedule of cleaning and cooking and errand running in the mornings and afternoons engaged in church-related activities, with the exception of Sundays, when she spent the entire day at church. Her father was only home late at night, when he’d rummage in the fridge for a late dinner before falling into bed in the guest bedroom where he’d been sleeping for the last few years.

Just before noon that Thursday, Keeley had been lying in bed as usual, when there was a knock at the door. It was her mother, saying she needed to clean Keeley’s room. Keeley sat up in bed and called back that she would clean it herself.  Her mother knocked again, insisting she needed to do it. Keeley didn’t want to leave the room, and for the first time since the accident, didn’t just go along with the flow. She pleaded and promised she’d clean it well, that it would be up to her mother’s standards, just leave her alone. There was quiet on the other side of the door, so Keeley thought her mother had agreed. She lay back down.

That was when the pounding started, making Keeley leap out of the bed. She shouted through the door to stop, but her mother kept kicking at the door. Keeley could hear the wood giving in. When the frame started to shake and splinter, Keeley started to realize that if her mother got in, she might try to kill Keeley again. And that was Keeley’s turning point. There in her darkened bedroom, the fear coursing through her while watching her bedroom door buckle under her mother’s assault, she saw the light. She wanted to live.

She dressed as quickly as she could, grabbing jeans and the first clean shirt on top of a pile that had been stacked neatly in her drawer in the spring when her mother still did her laundry and cleaned the empty room her daughter rarely inhabited at the time. Slipping on shoes and grabbing her wallet, she snatched up her overnight bag that still contained the dirty clothes and other items from her summer on Captain’s when the doorframe gave and the metal lock snapped. Her mother stumbled into the room, her hands out in claws and Keeley ducked behind her, feeling her mother’s intention like a thunderstorm, lightening ripping through the room. She heard her mother gasp, and knew she’d been spotted. She ran.