Firetrap (16 page)

I'd had all those empty summer weeks to win India's affections from Stone. Whether I'd done it on purpose or whether we'd simply fallen into a trap of proximity and hormones, I was never certain, but over the years I had to live with the sick fact that sleeping with my brother's girlfriend had given me almost as much satisfaction as throwing me out of the tribe must have given him.

32. HOMECOMING

TREY, NINETEEN YEARS EARLIER
>

It's been a long night, and even though an hour ago when I was with India I felt about as good as any man can ever feel, I'm pretty miserable right now. Leery of crabs and wary of sucking tide pools, I've been pacing the beach in the moonlight, standing still and thinking hard when the moon moves behind the clouds, walking and thinking even harder when it comes out and forms a tall shadow in front of me as I dodge slimy rocks and holes near the waterline. The tide is out and the beach is wide and broken and rocky. Even though Stone has either sabotaged or tried to sabotage every relationship I've ever had with a girl, I feel like a total rat for what India and I have been doing behind his back.

We've been thrown together most of the summer because Stone's been off gallivanting for Father's companies, and while Kendra and Echo have been here, too, they're younger and in many ways have nothing in common with India and me. Then there's been the issue of Shelby Junior's car crash and the way I've been handling it, or not handling it, including the afternoon I broke down out in the boat and wept in front of India—just the two of us in the sunshine, as she scooted over and pulled my head into her lap. She'd been comforting me, and then we shared our first kiss, and everything was different from that moment. We'd been distant friends since we were kids, and lately she'd been my brother's girlfriend, the woman whom by all accounts he was fated to marry. But after our lips touched, we were something else to each other and we both knew it—saw it in each other's eyes at the dinner table and when we were goofing around with our sisters, although it was still a week before we kissed again, and another week after that before we drifted out to the gardener's cottage late one evening.

No telling whether it was her plan or mine, though we both felt guilty afterward and said as much, talking for hours about what we'd done and why. And then, predictably, we did it again and then went back to the big house to our respective bedrooms to spend the rest of the night mulling things over. I've always been wary of Stone, probably because he has always treated me shabbily. Shelby was the oldest, and it was Shelby who took me under his wing; Shelby who was my mentor, guardian, and coach throughout my grade school years; Shelby who in fact had at times been more of a father to me than his father had been to him. His death struck the family like a tornado taking off a roof.

India would have been a temptation to any male on the planet, so I didn't have much of a chance against her allure: seventeen, overloaded with testosterone, stranded on an island in the San Juans with nothing to do but keep her and her sister amused for the better part of the summer; my adopted mother urging me to take them out on the boat, to the wreck off the north end of the island for diving, waterskiing, crabbing, fishing. Often, neurotic Echo would opt out, and Kendra, suffering from her usual overblown sense of duty, would stay with Echo and read or listen to music while India, the more adventuresome of the sisters, would go with me.

As I walk back to the house the clouds loom darkly over the night sky. I can see all the lights are still on in the great room, and through the windows I watch figures moving about the rooms. Harlan Overby is visible, gesticulating like a wild man, unnaturally agitated in a manner I don't think I've seen before. Everybody's still awake, which is unusual for this time of night, past one in the morning. When I reach the house, I'm startled to discover Renfrow's girlfriend sitting in the dark on the stoop smoking a cigarette, the only clue to her presence the orange glow of her cigarette tip. When I say hello, she stares past me as if I don't exist. Even though I've known her only a few hours, it's not the first time she's ignored me.

When I open the front door and step into the foyer, my father and mother are sitting near the tall stone fireplace in their accustomed chairs. Kendra and Stone are by the tall window overlooking the dark Puget sound and the distant glow in the sky provided by Seattle's skyline. Renfrow is hunched over a backgammon board rolling the dice and scoring against an imaginary partner. Harlan is strutting back and forth in front of the dead fireplace, and Elaine is beside him with her arms folded tightly across her breasts, lips pursed. India is all by herself in a far corner curled up in the window seat with her eyes closed. Only Echo is missing.

As I enter the house, everybody in the room stops whatever it is they've been doing and looks up at me. Suddenly I feel like a kitten in a room full of mad dogs. If I didn't know better, I would guess they all hate me, all except Stone, who actually does hate me but who gives me a look I can't figure out until later.

“What?” I say, turning to close the front door behind me, only to find Renfrow's girlfriend staring at me. “What?”

Harlan jogs across the huge room, but stops ten feet away, his face tinted with rage, the veins under his eyes standing out. He looks like a man who's just lost a diamond ring down a drainpipe and believes I'm responsible. “Were you out in the gardener's shed with my daughter?”

I swallow hard and glance across the room toward India but cannot judge by the blank look on her face what the climate of the room is or what I should say. I have no idea what she might have told them. Whatever it is, it's made Harlan angrier than I've ever seen him. Elaine, too, who is behind him glowering at me.

“It's not a shed. It's the gardener's
cottage,
” I say stupidly, trying to remain calm and gain time to think. I've had sex with three girls in my life, but until now I've not been confronted by any of their fathers. It's unnerving, especially with my whole family watching.

“Were you out there with my daughter?”

“I…Yes.” I see him coming at me but don't realize he's going to release all the fury in his tightly coiled body until it's too late and he's struck me across the face with the back of his hand. I've been hit harder by brush while riding my dirt bike around the island, but I back off anyway, worried he might do worse. He tries to strike me again, but I sideslip, and then Father flounces across the room and takes hold of Harlan's arm. Neither man looks at the other; all eyes in the room are on me.

“She already told us everything, but we want to hear it from you. Did you have sex with her?” my father asks.

“Yes, but…” Overby wrestles my father for a few moments, two middle-aged men engaging in the roughhouse behavior of their youth, and then Renfrow approaches and together they hold Overby at bay. “It wasn't like that,” I say.

“Oh,” says Elaine, her voice curdling with disdain. “Just how was it?”

“It was…” I glance one more time across the large room to India, looking for a clue or for some help, for some hint of how she wants me to respond. I feel as if I am betraying her as badly as the two of us have already betrayed Stone. When she doesn't give any sign as to what she might have told them, I glance at Stone to see how he's taking this, but instead of a look of injury on his face, I am surprised to see triumph. Or am I imagining it? Why would he be amused that I slept with his girlfriend? And why am I taking all the heat for this? There were two of us in the cottage.

Elaine walks over to a coffee table and picks up a watch, dangling it by one finger. “Is this yours?” she says.

“If it's a Corum, it is. Father gave it to me for my birthday.”

“You bastard,” Overby said. “You stupid bastard. You're going to prison. You're going to spend years behind bars, you bastard.”

“She went down there with me. She wanted to do it.”

Harlan practically explodes in my face. “You lying misfit! You raped my daughter.”

“Now, now, Harlan,” Father says, holding him firmly. “We made a deal. Remember?”

“He needs to go to prison.”

“You know what we agreed. At least give me this.”

“Rape? I didn't rape anybody. We were…together…she wanted to. Tell them,” I say, looking imploringly at India, but before she can utter a word, her mother steps forward, my watch still dangling from her finger as if it were a dead reptile, and attempts to launch a gob of spittle at me. She isn't much of a spitter, and the saliva drops to the carpet between us. For some reason her efforts and the hate in her pretty eyes shock me more than anything else.

“How dare you say it was consensual. How dare you.” She glares at me.

“But I…”

“I suppose she asked you to beat her up, too?”

“Beat her up? She's not beat up.”

“Come now, big sports hero. We've seen Echo. We saw what you did.”

“Echo? But I…Echo?”

“I saw you leaving the cottage, little brother,” Stone says. “Sorry. I had to tell them. I saw you leaving.”

“Sure, I left the cottage a while back, but…I never saw Echo.”

“Liar,” said Elaine.

“It's time to get this bastard out of the building,” says Harlan. “Get him out of here. You're right. We made a deal. You go through with your portion of it before I call the police—or kill him.”

It is hard for me to figure how this has all come about. Echo. India. Am I going crazy? I glance from face to face in the room and register looks I've never felt before, but which I know will follow me to my grave.

“How could you take advantage of a fifteen-year-old girl?” my father says, stepping forward until we're nose to nose. I haven't moved since coming into the house, am stuck to the spot as if I'd stepped into a glue trap.

“I didn't see Echo.” India is refusing to look at me. “I never saw Echo. I saw—”

“Echo says you did, and you just admitted it yourself,” says Elaine, stooping to mop up the spittle off the carpet with a damp rag she's had in her hand all along. “Echo says you did, and that's good enough for me.”

“I saw you leaving,” says Stone. “I mean, I'd like to lie for you, bro, but with something this serious and the Overbys being such good friends and all, I don't see how I can. I did see you leaving the cottage, didn't I?”

“I left it. But—”

“That's what I was afraid of,” says Stone.

“Let me talk to Echo. She can't be saying I did anything, because I didn't.”

“You admitted you had sex with her,” my father says. “Stone saw you leaving the cottage. Renfrow found your watch. Echo said you were the one. What else is there to talk about? The subject is exhausted.”

“But I never saw Echo.”

“You just said you had sex with her.”

“I said…” I glance around the room, my eyes lingering on India for just long enough to realize she isn't going to speak up and may not confirm what I want to tell them. Maybe she believes I actually did this, that I waited out there in the dark until Echo happened along and jumped her. “Why don't we bring Echo out here? Get this out in the open.”

“Not on your life,” says Harlan. “You're not going to lay eyes on her ever again. Not if I can help it. Not in this lifetime.”

I glance around the room, and India finally gives me a look she might have given a small animal her school bus has crushed. We'd been in love for a few days, at least I'd thought so, and I expect her support. I suppose it's too much to hope she'll defend me when it would mean admitting we were in the gardener's cottage making love for an hour and a half. I wonder if she's sacrificing me because she thinks I'm guilty, or if she's merely trying to protect her own reputation. And what the hell did happen to Echo?

For a while nobody speaks. Kendra won't stop sobbing. My father appears to be the most shocked and possibly the most tormented of the lot. He is clearly shattered by this whole situation.

“But I didn't do it.”

For a few seconds a white father looks at his black son as if he believes him, but at the end of the look the window of doubt closes and the father's eyes grow even more sorrowful and he takes on the mien of a man who is about to put down his favorite horse.

“What about the time on the boat?” asks Elaine.

By now I am in tears. I know what she's referring to and so does Kendra, but I had no way of realizing Echo had blabbed to her parents about the incident. Weeks earlier we'd been out on the boat looking at starfish on the bottom, maybe twenty feet down, when I took hold of the gunwale and started rocking the dory. Kendra thought it was funny because she was used to my humor and she was a good swimmer and we were all in suits, but Echo began crying, and even when I stopped rocking, she wouldn't stop. Her crying grew hysterical and was, I thought, out of proportion to what I'd done, and I knew Kendra thought so, too. After that I tried to treat her like the delicate flower she apparently was, but the damage had been done, and the story of my malfeasance had spread. “I admit I might have gone too far, but I was just teasing.”

“She said she cried for hours.”

“So what? I didn't rape her.”

“Let's get this over with before we change our minds and have him jailed.” Overby turns to Shelby. “I still don't understand why you adopted this black bastard.”

“Let me handle this, Harlan. Son, we've made a deal, and in order to stay out of jail, you're going to agree to this. You'll go upstairs and pack whatever you can carry, and then you'll leave the house. You'll leave the house and you'll leave the family.”

“And go back to the house in Seattle?” I ask.

“No. Don't ever go back there. Just leave and don't come back. Ever. We don't want to see you again.”

“I do,” said Kendra, weeping.

“If you think I did this, call the police. Because I didn't.”

“You don't want that,” Stone says. “Trust me. You don't want the police involved.”

“You're getting a good deal here,” Father says. “Don't throw it away, son. It's the best offer you can hope for. It wasn't easy, but we've convinced the Overbys not to press charges. We'll keep this inside the families. The stipulation is that you have to leave. Pack your belongings and move out. Tonight. Whatever you can carry. Anything else, we'll give to charity. Trey, you've shamed me and your mother, and you've done damage to a young woman who deserves only the best from this family. You've disgraced us all.”