For Love (6 page)

‘I know it’s best,’ Elizabeth answers, grownup to child. And then, as though to reassure Lottie: ‘It was just a terrible, terrible . . . just one of those inexplicable,
horrible things. We’re devastated.’

Lottie murmurs something.

‘And no one, not even Jessica’s parents, blames Cam.’ Lottie doesn’t answer. ‘This is between you and me, Char’, – Elizabeth’s voice has warmed
intimately – ‘but she’d been drinking. She stepped right out in front of him. There was nothing he could have done differently. Nothing. In a certain cruel sense – but you
know what I mean – it was her own fault.’

‘I see.’ Behind her, Lottie hears Ryan’s door opening, his heavy footfall in work shoes shaking the tiny house with every step. He turns on the radio in the kitchen –
loud suddenly, manic violins sawing the air – and then adjusts the volume.

‘I’d better go, Elizabeth,’ Lottie says.

‘Yes; me too. Look, I’ll talk to you later, then. I appreciate everything, Char. The car too, by the way. I’m just forever in your debt. You’re an angel.’

‘Okay. I’ll talk to you later.’

When Lottie comes to the kitchen doorway, Ryan is standing in front of the stove, drinking his coffee in regular small sips, as though it were a necessary but distasteful drug. He’s
dressed in splattered paint clothes – torn jeans and a T-shirt he seems to be bursting out of. Printed on the shirt over the spots where his nipples might be, there are two large eyeballs
with spiky lashes. ‘Hi, honey,’ Lottie says.

‘God, Mom.’ He lowers his cup. ‘What is going on around here? The goddam telephone must have rung six times already, and it’s not even eight-thirty yet.’

‘Come on out here, Ry.’ Lottie gestures behind her to the table in the dining room. ‘Let’s sit. I want to talk a minute.’

‘What? Just tell me.’

‘No; come on out and sit down.’ She steps back into the dining room and sits at the table. Papers and books, materials for an article she’s writing, cover it almost
completely.

Ryan slouches into the kitchen doorway. He nearly fills it. He’s tall, like his father. He gets the blondness from him too. Except for the shape of his face, you would never guess that he
and Lottie are related.

‘What?’ he asks. He’s irritated at her, she can tell. Too much melodrama.

‘There was an accident last night, Ryan. An automobile accident. And Jessica? Jessica . . . Laver was killed.’

He walks to the table and sets his cup down. ‘Jesus Christ, Mom,’ he says. He sits slowly, sideways, in the chair opposite her. ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe
this.’

‘I know, honey,’ she says, though in fact she can’t imagine what he might be feeling.

‘Are you sure?’ he asks, absurdly. Lottie nods. They sit without speaking for a few moments. Lottie is intensely aware of the violins, thin and nasal-sounding on her mother’s
old radio in the kitchen.

‘This is so horrible,’ he says at last. His voice is oddly high-pitched. He lifts his hands and covers his face. Lottie stands, but then she doesn’t know whether to go to him
and touch him. He jerks his head up abruptly, and shakes it. ‘Oh!’ he cries. ‘God! She was just a stupid kid.’

He gets up and quickly leaves the room. Lottie can hear him in the little back bathroom. For a while there’s the sound of running water, of splashing. He blows his nose, loudly.

The announcer comes on the radio, and in his maddeningly slow, self-important voice, begins to recite the news. Lottie gets up, nearly tipping her chair over in her sudden irritation. She goes
directly to the radio and yanks the button to Off. She stands breathing heavily for a moment. Then she fills her coffee cup once more and goes back into the dining room, sits down at her place.

After a minute she hears Ryan blowing his nose again. When he finally comes back in and sits down too, his face is pink, his eyes red-rimmed. He clears his throat and then says nothing.

Lottie says, ‘There’s something else, honey.’

‘How
could
there be anything else?’ He slams the table and his cup jumps, slops coffee on to the scarred veneer. ‘Jesus, Mom,’ he says.

‘Well, there is. It was Uncle Cam. He was driving.’

His mouth opens.

‘He was . . . It was a freak thing. He was driving up the driveway, and she just stepped out. He wasn’t even going fast. Apparently she just stepped out in front of him.’

‘Oh, Mom.’ His voice sounds almost whiny, as though he were complaining about Lottie’s exaggeration of something, as though he wanted her to stop now and tell him the smaller,
less dramatic, truth.

‘It’s so awful, I know,’ Lottie says. ‘It’s just . . . Well, it is.’

He picks up his cup and holds it. After a moment he sets it down. He runs his finger through the spilled coffee, spreading it on the table’s surface. Involuntarily, Lottie’s hands
lift a little, as if reaching to protect her papers. ‘I don’t know what to feel,’ he says. ‘I don’t.’ He looks up at his mother. He’s frowning. ‘I
never knew someone who died before. I mean, someone my age.’

‘Well,’ she answers, straining for any sympathetic response. ‘And you knew her too.’

The way he’s looking at Lottie changes abruptly. It sharpens. Something you could not quite call a smile lifts the corners of his mouth. He wipes his hands slowly on his pants. ‘I
didn’t
know
her, Mom,’ he says. ‘I hardly knew her at all. I know Uncle Cam about sixty times better than I knew Jessica.’

‘Oh, I understand that. I just mean . . .’ She trails off.

He’s sitting up straighter and staring directly across the table at Lottie. His face is closed to her in the way it seems he’s grown expert at making it sometime in his teens.
‘You just mean I fucked her, right?’

Lottie looks back at him.

‘Right? That’s what you meant, wasn’t it, Lottie?’

Lottie swings her head in confusion. ‘Look, honey,’ she begins, hoping he’ll give her a chance to start over. ‘I know that I don’t really understand how you felt
about Jessica . . .’

‘That makes two of us, then, thanks,’ he says. He stands up and carries his cup into the kitchen.

Lottie sits alone at the dining room table. She lets a rush of air out of her lungs. From her chair she can see the abandoned furniture in the living room. She has dropped the opened newspaper
on to one of the chairs, though she can remember doing no such thing. It seems to float there, tented over the chair like a huge bird just landing on a nest. In a minute, she thinks, I’ll
have to get up and pick that up, start to work.

Abruptly she feels a tug of revulsion at herself for being this kind of person. For moving cowlike, thickly, through chores as she has all this summer –
puttering
– while real
sorrows, real tragedies, play themselves out around her. How has she let this happen to her?

Then the kitchen explodes in a crash that dwindles to the sound of a few things rolling to the corners of the room. Lottie’s heart has already seized as she moves to the doorway. In time
to see Ryan turn and bend and clear the table too, everything flying and smashing. ‘Fuck!’ he yells. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’

She crosses the room in two steps and grabs his arms from behind, speaking his name. He freezes in her grasp, waiting; she feels a muscle jerk spasmodically under her grip, and she releases him,
lets her own hands drop. She’s discovered in that moment that she’s afraid of him.

He steps a few feet away from Lottie and stands there, his back to her. His breathing is uneven and loud. Then he drops suddenly to his knees and starts to pick up the junk scattered on the
floor. Lottie looks down at him as he moves around, blindly grabbing stuff and putting it on the table. His shoulders are shaking. He coughs, and then sobs.

Lottie crouches quickly next to him. ‘Darling,’ she says.

‘Don’t comfort me, Mom,’ he says in a ragged voice. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did this. But I can’t stand for you to comfort me.’

For a moment more, Lottie watches him work. Then she shifts forward to her knees too, amid the broken glass and tins and plates and bowls, and starts to help him clean up. Silently they work
together. Every now and then Ryan shudders or wipes his face with the back of his hand, and Lottie stops, helpless, and watches him. They’ve nearly finished, stacking all the things on the
table, when she looks over and sees that his hand is bleeding, that he’s smeared blood on his face and jeans.

‘Oh! Ryan,’ she cries, and when he looks up at her, she points at the blood.

He looks down at his hand as though it bears no connection to him. ‘Forget it,’ he says.

‘You need a bandage or something, though,’ she says.

He stands up and walks to the back door. He pulls the hem of his T-shirt up and wipes his face, then wraps the fabric around the heel of his hand. ‘For
get
it,’ he says, and
goes outside.

For a moment Lottie kneels there alone on the littered floor. She can hear her son outside, hear the bang of the big aluminum ladder, hear the metallic clatter as he raises it. She pulls herself
to her feet and goes upstairs to the bathroom she shares with Richard Lester. There’s a box of Band Aids in the medicine chest, jumbled with Richard’s many bottles of prescription
pills. She carries it back downstairs, through the kitchen. She’s just opening the wooden screen door when Ryan shouts from up on the ladder, ‘Don’t come out here with any Band
Aids, Lottie! I told you I don’t want a fucking Band Aid!’

Lottie lets the door bang shut and turns around. She stands in the kitchen, uselessly holding the little metal box. The bright sunlight lies over the pots and pans, the ancient cookie tins and
rusty flour sifter, the cracked rolling pin. The glass on the floor glitters, and reflected pinpoints of light dance on the walls. A minute passes, or more, she can’t tell. She feels as
though she were frozen.

But then the doorbell rings, and she sets the box down and steps across the bits of broken glass to go and answer it.

‘Well, come into my parlor,’ Lottie says, and she gestures into the living room. The policemen laugh. It looks, she suddenly realizes, like a derelict
doctor’s waiting room, the way the sprung, worn-out chairs are pushed in a row against the white wall. She snatches the newspaper up off the chair that was her mother’s, and the
policemen pull two other sagging chairs forward a little so they’ll all be more or less facing one another. They’re agreeable and loud, middle-aged, and Lottie appreciates their careful
politeness to her, though she knows it’s automatic for women her age. Even dressed as she is, she’s ‘ma’am’ to them.

‘You’re redoing things, then,’ says one of them, looking around at the freshly painted, bare walls, at the emptied rooms. He has a red face; the flesh of his cheeks is angrily
cratered, seared by acne. A difficult youth, Lottie thinks.

‘It was my mother’s house. We’re going to sell it. You interested?’

He laughs. ‘I might be if I didn’t have a guess as to what you were going to ask.’

They joke about real estate prices, about how outrageous they are. How that won’t last. Lottie can’t keep the nervousness out of her voice. When she laughs, it sounds like a
whinny.

The other policeman is big too, but not as beefy. Tall and thick around the middle, like someone who played basketball in his youth and has gone to seed. Danehy, he said his name was. Lottie
didn’t get the larger man’s name. Danehy shifts in his chair now, and the leather of his holster creaks. ‘Your brother,’ he says. ‘Mr Reed?’

Here it comes. Lottie tenses. ‘Yes.’

‘You say you don’t know where he is at the moment?’

‘No. I’ve actually been looking for him too. I’ve called his work and his home . . .’ She turns her empty palms up. ‘Nothing.’

‘Anyplace else you can think of he might be?’

‘No. I don’t know. He’s not in trouble about the accident, is he?’

‘No, ma’am, nothing like that,’ the beefy cop says. ‘He did seem’ – he pauses – ‘
distraught
, the officers said, last night.’

This odd, elegant word leaps up at Lottie, and she imagines Cameron as she’d seen him a few times in adolescence: white-lipped, silent, his eyes moving too fast. He punched a hole in the
living room wall once, in such a state. It was after he was too big for their mother to hit anymore.

‘So we wanted to let you know that.’

Danehy speaks up. ‘You know, that it might be good to kinda keep an eye on him when you find him. It’s a terrible thing, a young girl like that. He must be feeling terrible. You have
no idea where he is.’ It’s a statement.

‘No,’ Lottie says. And then because she suddenly imagines that this might cause them to go in search of him, she says quickly, ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up,
though.’

‘
Oh
, yeah,’ Danehy says. ‘Probably out driving around. Trying to shake it off, you know.’

Lottie decides not to mention the car left in the driveway. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I expect he’ll be in touch.’

‘He knew the girl?’

Lottie nods. Then adds, ‘Well, not well, really. But yes, he knew her some. Elizabeth – Mrs Butterfield? She was . . . well, we all grew up together. On this street, actually. She
was a friend. And so we all knew Jessica a little. Just because she was around, essentially.’ Though none of this is untrue, Lottie feels somehow that she’s lying, and it seems to her a
guilty heat must be visible in her face. She shrugs, stupidly.

The bigger man, the beefy one, takes over again. ‘Well, we just had a question or two that we needed to ask. Just routine stuff. Somebody screwed up the paperwork.’

‘Yeah,’ Danehy says. They’re both grinning, as though this were a familiar story; but now he sobers. ‘And then there was the family – the girl’s
family?’

Lottie nods.

‘They wanted to talk to him. And we wanted to clear that with him, giving them his number and all.’

This alarms Lottie. ‘What do
they
want?’

‘Oh, it’s not that they think it was his fault,’ Danehy says quickly. ‘They understand that it was, you know, like the officer explained to them, unavoidable. But I think
it’s just he was the last one, really, to see her alive. And they just wondered, you know, the stuff we’d all wonder about: did she suffer, did she speak, was she conscious for just a
few seconds? Those kind of things. The doctor already told them no, that the injury was massive. Death was instantaneous. But I think they just needed to know that, direct from him.’ His
heavy hands lift from his thighs. ‘And then we just have these few loose ends.’