Saving Ben (10 page)

She shook her head. “I can’t. It’s almost midnight.”

Emma leaned over the back of Archer’s seat. “You mean you still have a curfew?”

“Not a curfew. An early-morning flight out to visit my Gram in Florida,” Archer said to Emma. Then she turned to me. “What about your parents, Kitty? Are they here?”

“They’re already at the river. Please,” I begged. “I won’t get to see you again until Christmas.”

“All right, then.” She turned off the car and grabbed her purse. “But only for a few minutes.”

The guys were at the back of the house, zoned out in front of the television in our family room. Spotty and Reed sat at opposite ends of the sofa while Ben sprawled out in a chair with a bottle of scotch and a tumbler on the table next to him.

“Hey, Ben,” Archer said, tousling his hair.

He looked past Archer and me at Emma. “Where have y’all been?”

“Across the river, at Kit Matthews’s house,” Archer said, plopping down on the sofa between Spotty and Reed. I squeezed in next to her, leaving Emma the only available chair across from Ben.

“Damn, Arch, I almost didn’t recognize you,” Spotty said, tugging on a strand of her hair. “You look hot.”

And she did. In the months since I’d seen her, Archer had managed to tame her unruly strawberry-blonde locks into a shiny mane, and like me, she’d begun to use a little makeup and spend more than a millisecond picking out her clothes.

Beneath the freckles, her face beamed bright red. “Coming from you, Spotty, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He was unable to take his eyes off her. “I’m surprised you haven’t come to see us in Charlottesville. You know Lexington is only an hour away.”

“And how would I have gotten there? Walked?” she teased.

“Duh. Aren’t freshmen allowed to have cars at W and L?”

She nodded her head. “But for whatever reason, my parents wouldn’t let me take mine.”

“Have y’all been here all night?” I asked Ben. “There are parties all over town.”

“We’ve been babysitting your brother,” Reed said. “He’s not much in the party mood.”

Ben poured three fingers of scotch in his glass and swallowed it in one gulp. “Who says I’m not in a party mood?” he slurred, slamming the glass on the table.

“You might want to lay off the Glenlivet,” I said to Ben. “Mom wants us to get to the river early in the morning so you can fry the turkey.”

Reed threw a pillow at Ben. “Sounds like Bobby Flay needs to get his beauty sleep.”

Ben glared at him. “Shut up, you prick.” He glanced over at Emma and saw her covering her mouth to hide her smile. His face flushed and his eyes narrowed. “What’d
you
think is so funny? Should we tell everyone about
your
hobby? About that thing you do with your tongue when you suck my—”

“Okay, Ben, that’s enough.” I moved to the edge of my seat, ready to pounce on him if necessary.

“Don’t worry about it, Katherine. I can handle this.” Emma got up from her chair and walked over to Ben, swaying her hips back and forth in exaggerated motion. She walked her fingers up Ben’s chest and wrapped her arm around his neck from behind, whispering something in his ear that made him smile. Then, in a big show of it, she licked his neck from his collarbone to his ear. When she was finished with her performance, she sauntered down the hall toward the stairs, leaving the rest of us gaping at her back.

“Shit! Looks like the party’s over.” Spotty got up and the rest of us followed him from the room, leaving Ben alone to brood.

I walked Archer to her car, and we hugged good-bye. “I haven’t seen Ben in such a foul mood in a long time,” she whispered to me.

I pulled away from her, removing a strand of her hair from my mouth. “I can’t figure out what’s going on between him and Emma. He’s obviously really into her, but she only pays attention to him when it’s convenient for her.”

“He’s lucky to have you to keep a close eye on him,” she said, pinching my cheek.

Archer was no stranger to Ben’s OCD issues, and she knew how much I worried about him. Certain elements of this situation were reason to be concerned. That Archer felt the same way only made me worry more.

By the time I’d finished locking up and dragging Ben up the stairs to his room, Emma was already in my bed with the lights out. I crawled in beside her, fully dressed, and went right to sleep. But when I woke up an hour later to pee, Emma was gone. I tiptoed down the hall to Ben’s room, cupping my ear against his closed door.

Seriously?
I didn’t know much about sex, but I knew enough to question whether a man in such an inebriated state as Ben could offer that kind of pleasure to a woman. I returned to my room, where I tossed and turned for a while before I finally surrendered to the bed spins.

I was still alone in my bed when my phone alarm woke me at eight o’clock. I cracked Ben’s door and peeped inside his room. Emma was not there, or anywhere else in the house I discovered after a quick search. I was on my way back to Ben’s room, to wake him up, when I heard the sound of water running in my parents’ bathroom. I tiptoed down the hall to their room and yanked open the door to their bathroom. Dressed in my mother’s cashmere robe, Emma was leaning over the spa tub, watching the last of my mom’s favorite bubble bath—the expensive Lavender Foaming Bath that Ben and I always gave her for her birthday and Christmas—flow down the drain.

Our eyes locked and we stared at one another.

“It’s a good look for me, don’t you think?” she asked, waving her hand around the room. “The robe, the man, the house. Just think, little Kitty, one day I might be your sister-in-law.”

“Over my dead body.”

She stood to face me. “And just what’re you gonna do about it?”

I turned my back on her and headed toward the door. “For starters, I’m going to tell Ben about your little bubble bath. He knows how private my mother is about her space.”

“Oh really? Whose idea do you think it was?”

I stopped dead in my tracks. The Ben I knew would never have allowed his girlfriend access to my mother’s bedroom. I turned back around to face her. “I want you to stop seeing Ben. I don’t think you’re the steady influence he needs.”

She walked toward me. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it now, is there?”

She was right, of course. There wasn’t anything I
could
do about it, but even if I couldn’t prevent it, I had no intention of promoting a relationship between the two of them.

“Funny thing is, Emma, I won’t have to do
anything
about it.” I wandered over to my mother’s sink and studied my reflection in her mirror. “It might take some time, but he’ll get tired of you. It’s always that way with Ben.” My eyes met Emma’s in the mirror and I winked at her before leaving her to pick her jaw up off the tiled floor.

I pounded on Ben’s door several times, and because it felt good to hit something, I beat on it some more. “Get up, Ben. I’m going to take a shower, and when I’m finished getting dressed, I’m leaving for the river. If you’re not up and ready by then, I’ll take my own car.”

Thirty minutes later, I found Emma and Ben waiting for me, leaning against the back of his car, drinking coffee and nibbling on the same muffin. I was tempted to take my own car anyway, but the sight of my brother so vulnerable to Emma’s charm caused me to reconsider. His eyes were bloodshot and he was clearly hungover, but the adoration on his face as he pinched off a piece of muffin and fed it to her was too obvious to miss. After all the years he’d taken such good care of me, the tide had finally turned and it was now my responsibility to look out for him. The only way I knew how to do that was to stay close and hope a committed relationship might actually work for them.

I held my hand out to Ben for the keys. “I’m driving, since I’m guessing you’re still legally drunk.”

He slapped the keys in the palm of my hand and crawled into the backseat. The trip to the river was very much like the one I’d made on Labor Day weekend with me driving while my passengers slept. When we got to the house, Emma presented my mother with a bottle of her favorite wine. She claimed I was the one who told her what to buy. But I only knew three things about the wine she loved—it was expensive, it was Italian, and my father bought it by the case from the Commonwealth Club.

“You’re very sweet, Emma,” my mother said, taking the bottle from her. “This wine is not easy to find.”

“No ma’am, Mrs. Langley . . . um . . . I mean Adele. The wine shop I went to in Charlottesville knew exactly what I was looking for.”

Mom nodded her head in approval. “I’ll have to drop by the next time I’m in Charlottesville shopping.”

“Really, Mom?” I said. “Be sure to drop by and see Ben and me as well.”

“Katherine.” My mother shot me a warning look. “Do you remember the name of the wine shop, dear?” she asked Emma.

Emma stared up at the ceiling as if she might find the name written there. “You know, I can’t remember, but I’d be happy to look it up for you.”

“Thank you, Emma,” Mom said, kissing her on the cheek. She handed the bottle of wine to me. “Be a dear, Katherine, and stick it in the ice maker to chill.”

For the next hour, everyone was preoccupied with dinner preparations. The men were out in the summer kitchen cooking the turkey while the women worked in the main kitchen, buttering rolls and rotating casserole dishes in and out of the oven. Emma and Mom jumped from one conversation to another—food and fashion and holiday gift giving. I ignored them as much as I could, even when we all sat down to eat.

I’d once considered Thanksgiving my favorite holiday. The simplicity of preparing a meal together and then sitting down at the big table to offer our thanks and celebrate our loved ones appealed to me. It hadn’t been the same for me since my grandparents passed, but on this particular day, I could barely bring myself to make nice.

When the table was cleared and the dishes put away, Ben hit the sofa with the remote. He was snoring, five minutes later, when the rest of us left to go on a boat ride.

As is often the case in November in Virginia, it was a mild day, sunny with temperatures in the lower sixties, but we still needed a fleece to protect ourselves against the wind and the dampness from the water.

Breathing in big gulps of air, I asked my dad, “What is it about the salt air that’s so calming?” We were standing together on the dock as he lowered the boat into the water from the lift.

“It’s one of God’s many mysterious gifts.” He handed me the line to hold while he boarded the boat. “So many aspects of nature restore the soul, but for me, being on the water is the most cleansing.” He started the motor and we all climbed on board, Mom and Emma settling into the bow seats up front while I climbed onto the pedestal seat beside Dad behind the wheel.

“What’re you looking at?” he asked me as we circled around to the front of our dock.

“The Turners’. Their house looks so deserted. Don’t they usually have all their family in for Thanksgiving?”

Dad nodded. “Enough to field two football teams. Normally they’d be out on the lawn by now.” Both his tone and his expression were sad and reminiscent.

Dread seized my stomach and spread throughout the rest of my body. “Abby came and visited me a couple of weeks ago, but she hasn’t responded to any of my texts or calls since then. What do you know that you’re not saying?”

Dad shifted toward me, resting his arm on the back of the seat. “I wanted to wait until after we’d finished eating to tell you this.”

“Tell me what?” I asked in full alarm mode, every hair on my body standing to attention.

“I don’t have all the details yet, but it’s my understanding Abigail’s parents have taken her for treatment at a facility in Maryland that specializes in anorexia.”

“What?” I jerked my head around, looking back up at their house, wanting more than anything to see Abigail running down the hill. “That can’t be right. We talked a little about her disease, and she politely told me to mind my own business, but I had no idea she was in such bad shape.”

“That’s the biggest part of her problem. She refuses to open up to anyone. Not her parents or her friends or the therapists.” He squeezed my shoulder. “They can’t help her, honey, if she won’t help herself.”

“This can’t be happening.” I put my feet up on the console, propped my elbows on my knees, and rested my head in my hands. “Can people die from anorexia, Daddy?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that just yet, sweetheart. That’s for extreme cases, for people who don’t seek the help they need.”

“Does Ben know?” When Dad shook his head, I said, “Then let me be the one to tell him. We need to try and get in touch with George.”

On this special day of thanksgiving, it was hard for me to feel grateful with my friend suffering and my brother being tortured by a devil in Barbie disguise. With the windshield blocking us, I couldn’t hear what Emma and Mom were saying as they huddled together against the wind. They were so captivated by one another that we could’ve driven them out to the bay and left them stranded on a bell buoy and neither one of them would’ve noticed.

As much as I wanted to confide in my mother about my recent discoveries, she was way too enamored with Emma to believe she was anything less than perfect. And she never would’ve believed I found Emma floating in a cloud of
her
lavender bubbles. My mother had a long history of accepting another person’s word over mine. Like the time last summer when she insisted I fly with her to Maine to visit some of her old college friends. On the second night at the Claytons’, their daughter, Ellie, who was the same age as me, insisted I go with her to a party at a friend’s house. The scene was unlike any I’d ever experienced. Lines of cocaine were laid out on the dining room table and two girls were practically having sex on the sofa in the middle of the crowd. Ellie left me to fend for myself for more than two hours while she disappeared upstairs with her boyfriend. Being the sober one, I insisted I drive home. When Ellie puked all over her parents’ oriental rug, just inside the front door, the Claytons maintained that nothing like that had ever happened before. Never mind I swore on my grandmother’s grave I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol, instead of defending me, my mother accused me of being the instigator. No way the beautiful and popular Ellie could’ve been telling a lie.