Seven Kinds of Hell (4 page)

My control was almost to the point of snapping, thinking of the normal lives we might have had, when it was shocked back into place by two surprises.

The first was the dean, who I’d always thought a little full of himself. “I’m so sorry, Zoe. Nancy was a good friend to us all, and I know she made my job a hundred times easier. If you decide that you want to stay and start a PhD, you let me know. We’ll find a way to make it happen.”

Of all the things I had been expecting from him, that was just about the last. An offer, totally unsolicited, to continue my studies? Past regrets fled in the face of future hope.

Stunned, I nodded. “Thank you, Dean. I don’t know what I’ll do next, but…thank you.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, then joined the two women by a car. I looked up to see the second to last thing I had expected to see. Sean Flax was standing by the door. Used to the jeans, work shirts, and heavy boots he wore when working on archaeological field projects, he was supremely uncomfortable in a suit. I was uncomfortable for him; apart from my graduation, we had never seen each other dressed up. His sandy-reddish hair had been brushed into a semblance of order, his round face scrubbed, his Van Dyke trimmed, his nails clean.

Sean was trying hard.

I didn’t know what to do. I had to talk to him, I wanted to talk to him, but it had been a long time. Where to start? I’d been in love with his best friend, Will; we’d all worked together and we’d all shared an apartment, so shaking hands was absurd. Between us, knuckle-bumps were more likely, but not here, now—

“Zoe, hey.” He shook his head and opened his arms.

I walked into his embrace and cried for what seemed like a hundred years.

“I’m so, so sorry,” he said into my hair. He had to lean over; there was nearly a foot difference between us, and probably a hundred pounds. It was good to hang onto him. If nothing else, Sean was solid. Sean was real.

“I’m glad you’re here. I should have called, but…I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”

He cleared his throat and stepped back from me. “Come on now.”

“Well? We haven’t spoken in a while.”

“No. But this is different, and that other stuff…” He shrugged. “It’s over. Your mother, she trumps whatever other drama we might have had going on.”

His face was blotchy and his eyes were red-rimmed; having lost his mother at an early age, something about Ma had apparently hit him hard. And she’d taken to him right away, too, for some reason, despite her usual caginess. When she visited our apartment, he just liked sitting near her. It took the fire from him, in a good way. Calmed him, I’d thought.

“I’m sorry. I should have called.”

“Yeah, you should have. But I get it. I wasn’t sure I should come, either.”

We both shrugged and looked away, because we both remembered why I hadn’t called, and why he hadn’t been sure. I decided to point out the obvious.

“Does Will—?”

“I shot him an e-mail, but he’s out of the country now, and his connectivity might not be all that great. So.”

So. Having broached the topic of Will, and especially with Sean, it was now impossible to ignore the hundreds of mental snapshots of Will I’d tried to forget: the light-brown hair, cut short to thwart the cowlicks; his good jaw; the way one eyebrow was slightly raised in perennial skepticism. A shade below six feet, Will had a runner’s build augmented by time in the gym he claimed was to
clear his head after classes, but maybe was also habit from growing up in a neighborhood where using your fists wasn’t uncommon. Then there was his smile, which first caught my eye when I was in his class section. A little crooked, but so, so sweet—

I swallowed. “Does Will—is he doing OK?”

“Yeah, he’s fine.” A little of the familiar, stubborn Sean resurfaced, and he frowned. “Zo, I’m not going to get into all that, OK? You guys want to talk, you should decide you’re gonna talk to each other. I’m not getting in the middle of it.”

I nodded quickly. Of course, no question. “But maybe you and me—we’re OK?”

He sighed. “Will’s been my best friend for years. You broke his heart with what I thought was a bullshit excuse. What am I supposed to do? I’m not as angry as I was. It’s been two years. Maybe someday you can explain it to me, we’ll be a hundred percent. But now?” He rocked his hand back and forth. “Maybe eighty-five.”

I smiled. “Thanks, I’ll take it.” I had to take it; no way would I
ever
tell him why I broke up with Will so suddenly. “And I’m sorry I hurt you, too. If I could’ve avoided hurting anyone—”

“Yeah, OK, ancient history, done with it.” He walked a few steps, coughed. “Any chance you could give me a ride back to the train? Call me a cab? My car is in the shop.”

“Jeez, Sean, I’ll give you a lift. Just give me a few minutes to change, OK?” A thought occurred to me. “Um, you don’t still happen to have the bag, do you?”

He shook his head. “Not on me. I remembered it about halfway here. I felt like such an idiot. You can pick it up, once you drive me back.”

I glanced at him; I didn’t think he’d forgotten the bag. Maybe he’d said so, because just showing up here with it would have been weird, like he was saying, “OK, your mother’s dead, and here’s the last of her stuff.”

Sean knew the story Ma had told him; that we were hiding from dangerous in-laws. That’s why he’d agreed to hang onto a bag stuffed with insurance papers, the car slip, and other things she wanted to keep safe. He’d been established in his apartment for ages and had a steady job. Ma didn’t trust our flimsy apartment door or want to rely on the schedules of a bank safe.

I drove us back to our apartment. The excuse of the funeral now gone, things got more awkward. We found ourselves trying to reconnect, the reason for us having to do so resting squarely on my shoulders.

He mentioned he’d decided to forge ahead and pursue his doctorate to start his own contract archaeology company. I told some lies about maybe looking into a museum studies program in New York. There was an uncomfortable silence for a few blocks.

“How’s Danny?” Sean asked suddenly.

Danny was my cousin by affection, not blood, but he was all the family I had left now that Ma was gone. I pulled into the drive, switched off the ignition. “Good. He’s working in Cambridge. I helped him move into a nice place there, couple months back.”

“Tech job?”

I paused. “Computational linguistics.”

“Get the fuck out. There is no such thing.”

“There is. And not only is he good at it, there’s money to be made.”

“Well. That’s one way for him to put all those languages to use.” Sean followed me up the stairs. Archaeologists are expected to have a few languages under their belts; Danny put us all to shame. “I wouldn’t have gotten through my Spanish proficiency if he hadn’t helped. But…he wasn’t here today?”

I nodded, sighed. “Business trip, three time zones away. Not much we could do about it.”

Danny’s mother, Louise, and Ma met working at a temp agency when I was young. When their paths crossed a year later, in another
town, Ma decided to accept Louise Connor’s friendship. Not until she asked Sean to hang onto her papers, years later, did I ever see Ma trust anyone like that. Louise and Danny were all Ma and I had for a long time. Junior-high frenemies had made comments about me “having two mommies”; I would have killed for that kind of stability. That’s what friendship is, I guess: Ma and Louise were never huggy-huggy—Louise no more demonstrative than Ma—and we weren’t living in each other’s pockets all the time. But they were always there for each other, and for us, two underemployed single mothers struggling together.

I shrugged, unlocked the door, let us in. “Have a seat. The fridge is empty, but if you want a glass of water?”

“I’m good.”

“Let me get changed, and we’ll get going.”

Sean’s voice followed me to my room. “Zoe, where are you going to go? You got this place cleaned out.”

The reason for my leaving so hastily—another tricky topic. “Um, dunno.”

“Zoe.”

“Yes?”

“What’s up?”

I finished pulling my hoodie over my head and grabbed my backpack. “Um.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“I think my father’s family has located me.” The detail of their similarity to me wasn’t important.

“Shit.” A pause. “So no idea where you’re going yet?”

I knew I had to visit my grandmother, but after that…“Nope.”

“Oh.” He flushed red. “Well, if you want, you can stay with me—”

I shook my head. No way was I going to lead those other Beasts to Sean. “Naw, thanks. I’m going to put some distance between me and them. Then I’ll figure it out.”

“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

I locked up and debated leaving the key. I didn’t know if I’d be staying here tonight, but figured I should hang on to it because I still had to stop by my grandmother’s.

Things got quiet between us again on the drive to Boston. Two-thirds of a team isn’t quite the same when they’re doing their best not to talk about the other third.

“Seeing anyone?” I asked as I negotiated the merge onto Route 128. Driving in Massachusetts was a little like playing
Grand Theft Auto
without the rewards.

“No. Too much going on with the survey. The hours are ridiculous. I come home beat-up, exhausted, and smelling like an animal. No woman wants that.”

I nodded, remembering the laundry the three of us had generated when we were all in the field at once. At the end of one particularly noxious project, working near a Superfund site, we’d buried our work clothes. We didn’t dare burn them and wouldn’t risk leaving them in the trash for a homeless person to find. “All the glamour of working on a road crew with none of the union benefits.”

“Maybe next winter, when we’re out of the field and in the office.” Sean hitched and squirmed. The suit fit fine but was wool, and it was warming up outside.

The closer we got to Boston University, the easier and harder it became for me. The traffic was even worse than I remembered, but I felt like I was fitting myself back into the flow of the area. The university might have been attended by smarter and more important people, but it belonged to me. The last year I was there, I’d been able to live on campus, which was new to me, despite my six-year undergraduate tour of public institutions in three states. Until Ma got the steady gig at BU, we’d moved so much, my transcript was a patchwork of classes from colleges up and down the East Coast. Living on campus was a revelation: in the cafeteria, you could eat all you wanted, and if you were quick about it, you
could sneak food out. Other students might grumble about the food’s quality and doing unfamiliar chores, but I shook my head in wonder. They’d never been as hungry as I’d been on occasion, or they would have concentrated on eating, not bitching. And you don’t complain about doing laundry if you’ve ever had to wash your clothes with the same bar of soap you showered and shampooed with.

The archaeology department might not have had the biggest budget in the world, but if you can do 90 percent of your work with a few old shovels and buckets and handmade sifting screens, you don’t need much else. Same for the lab: I learned I could do a passable job of conservation with distilled water, old cardboard beer flats, a toothbrush, rubber cement, masking tape, and some marking pens. Give me a gift card for the drugstore and I’ll work miracles.

I’d never had much, and given just a little—a little instruction, a few materials—I learned how much I could accomplish. I learned how far I could go with just the smallest encouragement.

And the libraries—there were lots of them and they were open almost continuously. A major chosen and a degree nearly within reach, I dove into my studies, excelling for the first time. They let you take out all the books you wanted. For free. The world was at my fingertips.

The hours I’d spent there allowed me, for whole stretches at a time, to forget the Beast.

In those two years, I’d found friends and, eventually, a boyfriend. People smiled when they saw me, asked me to work with them on their weekend research projects. I made money, I got skills, and I felt normal for maybe the first time ever.

I, the rootless wonder, the girl blown about by the wind,
belonged.

I missed the place terribly.

Luck smiled on me, and I found a parking space on Commonwealth Avenue. It was several blocks from Sean’s street, but a
parking space in Boston is a gift from the gods and I no longer had a valid parking sticker.

“Um.” Sean looked really uncomfortable now. “You want to wait here? I can go and—”

“No, I’ll come with you. I need to stretch my legs.”

“If you’re sure.”

We got out, and habit caught me glancing down the street to the faculty and graduate student lounge, otherwise known as The Pub. I’d celebrated my twenty-second birthday there with Will and Sean.

That’s when I began to worry. I’d felt better coming to Boston than I had in weeks, but I hadn’t counted on the other memories that would come back with the scenery.

We played
Frogger
with the traffic and trolley tracks, and then I started to realize it wasn’t such a hot idea going to the apartment with Sean. As we crossed St. Mary’s Street, my heart pounded. I tried to stay calm, but memory is as powerful a drug as anything on the market today. The more I recognized, the more I remembered, and the worse it got.

I did some breathing exercises, trying to calm myself. The Boston University student ghetto was no place for the Beast. It was no place for me, either, and the faster I got out of there, the better it would be for everyone.

I could have found my way up the weathered granite steps to the foyer, the elevator, the third floor, blindfolded. If memory is a drug, smell is the trigger. Maybe it was just my senses playing tricks on me, but Sean’s apartment was identifiable from down the hall.

Very little had changed since I’d last been there two years ago, when my life had gone to hell. The living room looked like a garage sale had exploded, but that was Sean all over. When Will had been here, there’d been a modicum of order, and when I had lived here, there’d even been acceptable levels of hygiene. Now there were
only pathways from the doorway to the kitchenette, the couch, and the bedroom. The rest of the space was piles of clothing, tools, and books, all very orderly, but out of place in a living room. There was a desk somewhere under a mountain of paper and notebooks. I had to assume it was a desk, based on the topography, but it could as well have been a stack of snow tires. Sean was ready, at a moment’s notice, to run a dig out of this apartment. On several occasions, the three of us
had
run a dig from this apartment.