Covet (9 page)

Tessa bit her bottom lip worriedly. “I think about that a lot. And I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that my social worker is pretty overwhelmed with her case load. She told me that when I first met her in October. And she was incredibly relieved that I’d managed to find a place to stay since the agency apparently has a huge wait list for teens needing foster homes. She would have had to place me in this group home over on Grant Road – the same home that just got shut down last month.”

“I read about that,” recalled Peter. “I don’t remember all the details at the moment, but it sounded pretty bad, lots of abuse and neglect, regular kids being thrown in with ones that were mentally ill or just out of juvie. And they were going to put you in a place like that?”

She nodded. “So you can understand why I’d rather live in my car. At least I feel safe there. Relatively so, I mean.”

Peter motioned to their waitress for the check, and refused Tessa’s offer to split the bill with him. “Where do you, uh, hang out at night? Park your car, I mean.”

“I move around a lot,” she admitted. “Never the same block or even the same neighborhood two nights in a row. That way none of the neighbors or police get suspicious seeing a strange car night after night. And I always make sure it’s a good area, nice homes and all that. And I try to leave as early as possible in the morning before people start heading out to work and school so that no one notices me.”

He gave her a sympathetic look. “You can’t keep doing that forever, Tessa. One of these times a cop will spot you, or someone might even try breaking into your car while you’re still inside. And I get the part about not wanting to stay in a shitty group home. I’d rather live in my car or even on the streets before I’d willingly trust the system to look out for me. Don’t you have any relatives somewhere you could live with? What about your father?”

Tessa looked down at her lap where she was nervously clasping and unclasping her hands. “I don’t know anything about him,” she admitted. “My mom – I told you about her bipolar disorder, right?” At Peter’s nod, she continued hesitantly. “Well, one of the many symptoms when a manic-depressive is in a manic phase is, well – they, uh, have a lot of – um, sex. One of the articles I read called it hyper-sexuality. She apparently experienced one of these episodes around the time I was conceived, and never had any idea who my father was. From the little information I was able to pry out of her, it could have literally been one of a couple of dozen different men, none of whom she bothered to learn anything about.”

“Holy shit.” Peter stared at her in disbelief. “That’s – wow. I was about to say crazy, but then I realized that your mom really was – uh -”

“Crazy,” finished Tessa, nodding. “Not crazy, exactly, but mentally imbalanced. Except for the very short periods of times when she would actually take the medications they prescribed for her. But those times never lasted for very long. My mother hated being medicated, always claimed the drugs made her feel worse, that she wasn’t herself when she was taking them. She loved being in a manic state, was convinced that’s when she was at her most creative, and she’d literally go without sleep for a couple of days or more at a time and fill up an entire notebook with her writing.”

“What sort of a writer?” inquired Peter. “Writing is my big passion, you know. Eventually I want to be a journalist, work for one of those big news agencies, and travel around the world covering stories. Probably never going to happen, but it’s been my dream since I was in middle school.”

“Never say never,” she corrected him. “If you want it badly enough, I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it happen. As for my mother, she wrote fiction. She actually had three or four books published when I was still a little girl, and we lived off the royalties for a few years. And then her illness started getting the better of her, and the stuff she wrote was just a bunch of gibberish – nothing that made the least bit of sense.”

“Do you still have copies of her books? I’d be interested in taking a look at them sometime.”

Tessa shook her head. “We may have had a copy of one or two of them, but they would have been destroyed in the fire along with everything else. We moved around a lot over the years, and always left stuff behind when we did. All in all, I really didn’t lose all that much in the fire since there wasn’t a lot to begin with. Except,” she added morosely, “for my mother.”

“Yeah.” Peter gave her hand a comforting little squeeze. “It sucks to be all alone in the world, doesn’t it? I know exactly how that feels. I mean, my mom is still alive, of course, but she’s never been there for me, never took care of me the way she should have. There are things – well, no family horror stories tonight. Let’s just say that I’ve been looking out for myself for a long time now so I understand what you’re going through.”

“Your father isn’t around, either?”

Peter made a horrible face. “No. But that’s a good thing. A
very
good thing. He ditched us when I was around six years old, and I was happy to see him go. He was an abusive bastard, drank too much, shoved my mom around, didn’t hesitate to give me a slap or a spanking when something irritated him.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tessa told him sorrowfully. “It sounds like both of us had less than ideal childhoods, though at least my mom never once hit me or even yelled at me. She was a good person, just not a very good mother.”

Peter paid the dinner check with cash, and then grabbed a paper napkin from the dispenser. “Do you have a pen handy?”

She nodded and fished one out from her backpack, regarding him curiously as he began to write on the napkin.

“Here.” Peter handed her both the pen and the napkin. “Those are driving directions to my house. Try to follow along behind me when we leave in a minute, but in case we get separated it shouldn’t be too hard for you to find the place. I wrote my cell number there, too.”

Tessa raised a puzzled gaze to his. “I don’t understand. Why am I following you to your house?”

“You’ll see,” he told her mysteriously. “I’ve got an idea for you. It’s not the greatest, but anything has to be better than what you’re doing now. We’ll talk more after we arrive. You ready to go?”

“I, um, need to use the ladies room first,” she acknowledged reluctantly. “It might take me a few extra minutes since – well, I need to wash up for the night.”

She could tell by the expression on Peter’s face that this particular dilemma had likely not occurred to him until now – that sleeping in one’s car meant you didn’t always have ready access to a bathroom when you needed one. Tessa had become quite adept over the past couple of months at washing her face, brushing her teeth, and changing clothes in the backseat of her Toyota.

During the short drive to the house where Peter lived with his mother, Tessa couldn’t help but wonder what the idea he was getting ready to propose to her might be. She shivered as the wind whistled through her broken window, and realized they still had to tape up the gaping hole until she could get it fixed. She just hoped it wouldn’t be too costly, as she really was trying to save up every penny she could pinch. Though, if Peter was in fact correct, she now had another whole year in which to save up for a security deposit and first month’s rent.

The very thought of living this way for thirteen more months was more than Tessa could bear at the moment, and she refused to dwell on the matter. For quite some time now – and especially since she’d left the Wallace home in February – she had focused solely on living one day at a time, getting through from one day to the next, and doing the best she could to cope with a situation that would have sent most people spiraling into despair. There were times, however, when she broke down in tears or felt immensely sorry for herself, or, worse, had to fight off an overwhelming wave of depression. Those were the worst times – when she anxiously fretted that she was going to become like Gillian; that she, too, might succumb to the darkness one day, or have to battle mental illness all of her life. She’d begun more and more to watch herself for those types of signs, and to fret each time she felt a bout of depression threaten to come on.

Tessa was puzzled when Peter drove right past the house that bore the address he’d given her, continuing on until the end of the block where he made a right turn. At the end of a much shorter block, he turned right again into what looked like a narrow alley of some sort, and then pulled into a mostly hidden driveway located at the back of a house. She followed along obediently, parking next to him as he got out of his car.

“Is this part of your house or something?” she asked. The partially lit driveway was cracked and uneven, with straggly weeds growing up in between the cracks.

“It’s an in-law unit attached to the main house,” explained Peter. “Except that it hasn’t been rented out to anyone in more than five years. There was a bunch of water damage caused by a leaky roof, and it shorted out the electrical circuits. My mother couldn’t be bothered to get it fixed up, so now she just stores a bunch of her junk inside.”

Tessa had briefly felt a surge of hopefulness surge up when Peter had mentioned the in-law unit, but her heart sunk just as rapidly when she realized the place was likely uninhabitable. “I’m not sure I understand why you had me follow you here,” she told him uncertainly.

Peter sighed, running a hand through his shaggy hair. “I told you it wasn’t an ideal situation, and probably isn’t a whole lot better than what you’ve already been doing. But, well, I thought at least that you could park your car here every night. That way you don’t have to keep moving around so much, and definitely don’t have to worry about a neighbor or cop bothering you. As you can see, this driveway is pretty much hidden from sight. Hardly anyone even knows it exists and no one would notice your car back here.”

“Oh.” Tessa tried hard not to betray the disappointment she felt, having harbored a momentary hope that Peter was actually going to invite her to stay at his house, and forced herself to paste on a smile. “You’re – you’re right, of course. That would be a relief not to have to move around so much, and to have a regular place to park. Your mother won’t mind?”

Peter shook his head. “First of all, she works the swing shift, and usually doesn’t get home until almost one in the morning. And, second, she never comes back here, always leaves her car in the driveway. She’d never even know you were here.”

“Well, if you’re sure she won’t mind, then that would be great. Thanks, Peter. It’s definitely a lot better than what I’ve been doing.”

“There’s more.” He hesitated for a few seconds. “It’s possible that the bathroom in the in-law unit might still be functional. I mean, the electrical system got fried but I don’t know about the plumbing. We – you and I – could try checking it out to see. If the plumbing still works, and we give the place a good cleaning, then you could at least have the bathroom and shower to use when you needed it. Where have you been showering these past couple of months anyway?”

Tessa gave a little shrug. “During the week at school after gym class. Weekends are a little tougher. I have to, uh, get creative.”

He frowned. “I’m not sure I even want to ask. And I’ll warn you right off the bat. We’d have our work cut out for us getting the bathroom in decent shape. Provided we can even find our way in, that is.”

She looked at him curiously. “What does that mean?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “You’ll see. Let’s go have a look. We’ll have to use a flashlight so keep close.”

He took a flashlight from inside his car before unlocking the door to the in-law unit and carefully easing it open. “Watch your step. It’s more of a disaster in here than I would have imagined.”

Tessa’s eyes widened as she tentatively followed him inside the darkened room that positively reeked of mold and mildew. It wasn’t, however, the odor that caused her jaw to gape open in shock. Rather, it was the stacks and rows of cardboard boxes, plastic storage bins, and overstuffed shopping bags piled on every square inch of the floor, all the way up to the water stained ceiling.

“What
is
all this stuff?” she asked in bemusement.

Peter looked revolted. “
This
is part of my mother’s little shopping compulsion. The compulsion that turned into full-on hoarding a few years back. And this is nothing. You should see the main house and the garage. She’s got way more stuff crammed in there. In fact, the only two rooms in the place that aren’t overloaded with her junk are my bedroom and bathroom. And that’s only because I’ve put locks on both doors and she doesn’t have a key.”

Tessa stopped in her tracks as Peter impatiently moved a stack of boxes aside so that they could walk through. “What does she buy? I mean, to have this much stuff, plus what sounds like three times as much inside the house, she must shop constantly.”

“Yep, that pretty much sums it up,” agreed Peter, sounding both resigned and disgusted. “And she buys everything from toilet paper to socks to books. She spends her weekends hitting up every garage sale and flea market she can find, and brings back boxes of junk each time. She visits several thrift stores on a regular basis, and spends hours every week shopping at Walmart and Target and the dollar store. She used to order stuff constantly from those home shopping networks on TV until they shut down her accounts.” He made a sound of disgust. “She’s maxed out all of her credit cards, probably owes close to a hundred grand on them, and still she keeps shopping. You see, while your mother had a bona fide mental illness, my mom is just nuts. Here. This is the bathroom.”

With the help of the flashlight, Tessa was able – just barely – to make out the outlines of a toilet, sink, and shower stall within the tiny, darkened room. The bathroom, too, was piled from floor to ceiling with more of Mrs. Lockwood’s junk, and Tessa realized it would take a good amount of physical labor just to clear the room out. She could only imagine the poor condition the bathroom fixtures must be in after years of neglect.