The Keeper (11 page)

“Hi,” Liz said.

Bobby spread his L. L. Bean fleece down on the dusty floor and sat, motioning for Liz to share it with him like a picnic blanket. She did. Steve McCormack spat brown chew into an empty can of Milwaukee’s Best.

“She screws for money, right?” Steve asked. A few weeks ago she’d seen Steve spray painting the side of Susan’s apartment. In red letters he’d written, “Susan Marley sucks cock.” Maybe that was the kind of thing popular people thought was funny. Maybe Steve McCormack was a jerk.

“She’s a witch.” Louise giggled, and Liz guessed she was high, even though she’d never seen someone get high before, never smelled pot before, never even smoked a cigarette or filched her mom’s cheap wine. Louise gestured at the paper mill where they were sitting. “Susan takes me here when I sleep. We go to the basement. People died down here, you know. Lots of them.” Then Louise was laughing convulsively, until she was red-faced and crying.

“What are you talking about?” Bobby called over the sound of Louise’s laughter.

“Susan Marley, she screws for money,” Owen Read jumped in. “Right Liz?”

“Or a free pack of smokes, I hear,” Steve said.

Liz looked at them in the dark mill: Louise, Owen, and Steve. The light flickered under the fire. Their eyes were empty, without intelligence. Feral. Their irises got big, and then small. They bore a resemblance, for just a moment, to Susan.

“Shut up.” Bobby laughed, in that same kind of tone that he had used when mocking April Willow. The tool voice. Like it was all a joke. “Where can I get a beer?”

“None left for a Marley,” Louise answered, still giggling ferociously. Her hand was raised protectively over the full six-pack by her side. Bobby shuffled uncomfortably.

Liz turned to Bobby. “I feel kind of sick.”

Bobby nodded. “I’ll take you home.”

She was already on her feet and walking out the door. She got to his car before him and leaned up against it, trying not to cry. She should have known this would happen. She should never have called him. It was probably all a trick, and even Bobby was in on it. She was the grand prize in a dogfight. Right now, all of them were laughing at the ugliest girl in school.

Bobby came up behind her and opened the door. They drove without speaking. “I’m sorry,” he whispered as he pulled in front of her house.

To her surprise, he called the next day and asked if she’d like to go for a drive. Against her better judgment, she said yes. They took the highway north, crossing that very same bridge, and drove for miles. The rain stopped falling when they reached Penobscot County, and they rolled down their windows. “It doesn’t rain in other places the way it does in Bedford,” he told her.

“Yeah.”

“You ever think Bedford is haunted?”

She shrugged. “By what?”

“I don’t know. By itself, maybe. By the things that happen here.”

Liz nodded. “Maybe people haunt it, too.”

He looked at her for a while. “Like who?”

She shrugged, though it was clear to both of them that she was speaking of Susan.

“Yeah. I guess they can,” he said. Then he nodded at the road. “Sometimes I wish I could just keep driving.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s run away together. We’ll survive by our wits.”

He laughed. Then he said, much to her surprise. “You’re really pretty.”

She looked down at her feet and wondered whether he was mocking her.

“Your smile, I mean. I like it.”

She laughed nervously and tried not to smile. “Thanks.”

“It’s funny. You sit across from me in math. You’re always spacing out. People say things to you. They say not nice things, mean things, and it’s like you don’t even hear them. Sometimes I see you smile to yourself, and it’s like, I want to know someone who can smile like that, even when nobody else is happy.”

This probably should have made her happy. It did, in fact, make her happy. But it also hurt somehow, in a good way, like she wanted to cry. That someone had bothered to watch her. That someone had bothered to think she was worth something. He held out his hand and she took it, and that made her want to cry, too.

“You know, I had no idea those guys would be like that.”

“Like what?”

“At the bridge. I wouldn’t have done that to you,” he said, his voice one octave deeper than his normal speech, like he was trying very hard to do the right thing.

She nodded.

“They like you. I’m sure they do.”

“No, Bobby. They don’t.”

Ahead, they saw a sign for Canada; sixteen miles to go. They had been driving for three hours. “We should go back,” she said. Getting caught out of Bedford when it’s raining is a bad idea. You never know when the bridge is going to go out. You never know if you’ll be able to get back in.

They sighed simultaneously as he turned around at the next exit and headed south toward Bedford. “They’re not always nice to me, either,” he said, and it occurred to her that she might not be the only person looking for a way out.

T
he summer after they started dating, they had sex for the first time in the back of his car. She hadn’t expected it to hurt. She was sore when they were finished and she didn’t bother to pretend she liked it. She thought maybe he was sticking it in wrong. Sex could not possibly be that unpleasant. They were dazed when they drove home that night, neither talking very much. They had each hoped that it would be perfect, and somehow, it wasn’t.

But they tried again. And again. And again, until one day, she liked it. A month after that, she really liked it. A month after that she told Bobby that next to roller coasters, sex was her favorite thing in the whole world.

They called each other every night. Sometimes he told her he could smell her on his sheets. He said that it made him happy to go to bed because he could smell her with him. Almost every afternoon when he was done with basketball practice, they went to the Dugout (Liz always had a Diet Coke, he had a root beer and a double order of cheese fries that she picked at), and they sat and talked or didn’t bother to talk at all. When the other kids came around, sometimes saying hello to Bobby, never saying a word to Liz, they pretended that they were in a world all their own. A world they had created where only they lived.

In the fall Bobby would enroll at Bowdoin, and if she kept her grades up in chemistry, UMO was giving her a free ride her freshman year. Sometimes they invented silly names for the children they’d one day have. Bobby liked Dylan with the middle name Thomas. Liz liked Perciville Sweetwater, so the kid would have a sense of humor. But she knew the plans they made were pretend. Every once in a while, she would remind herself of that. She would look in the mirror in the morning and tell herself: This won’t last. Don’t depend on this. But for now, she was happy to take it while she could.

B
obby Fullbright loved cigarettes. He especially liked Lucky Strikes. That’s what they used to smoke back in the old days when movies were good and Humphrey Bogart was king. He only smoked occasionally (even if all that stunt-your-growth crap was just Big Brother hype, he didn’t plan on staying five-foot-four forever), but he carried a stale, half-smoked pack in his front jacket pocket wherever he went. After he and Liz had sex in the back of his car, he’d always take them out, tap on the pack until just one fell loose, and bite on it like a toughie. “Come with me, my warm little potato, and I will show you the world,” he’d tell her in a perverted Frenchman’s accent while she giggled.

Tonight he had the idea that he would not be smoking any postcoital Luckys. No one visited Susan Marley, not even her family. No one wanted to. He didn’t want to. The girl was a total freak.

He still wasn’t sure if Liz was pulling his leg about tonight. He’d almost asked her why she’d decided on tonight of all nights—the first night of rain—for some family reunion, but then he remembered that it was the fifth anniversary of her father’s death and he’d sort of understood. They were family, after all. Not a bit alike, but they were family.

He’d called her a little while ago to let her know he was going to be late because he had to put his twin brothers to bed. “Do you mind?” he’d asked her.

“No, it’s fine,” she’d told him, but he could tell from the distant tone in her voice that nothing was fine. He’d realized, in fact, that she’d been especially spacey all day, and if she wanted to visit her whack-job sister tonight, something had to be very wrong.

And so, he tried to hurry the evening along.

“Okay, what story?” he asked the twins, both of whom were squirming above their Spider-Man sheets. He was thirteen when they’d been born, and thought of himself as more of a close uncle to them than a brother.

“A scary story!” Alex said. The more outgoing of the twins, he jumped to his feet and bounced on the bed. “Tell a scary story, like last time.”

“No. No scary stories. I hate scary stories!” Michael bellowed from the other bed.

Bobby waited for them to settle down. He would not tell a scary story because, while Alex loved them, Michael would not be able to sleep, and would eventually climb into their parents’ bed. Bobby’s father had recently ordered him not to tell stories about bloody roses or men with hooks for hands anymore, and it left him with the disturbing yet incontrovertible evidence that his parents led an active sex life.

“A scary story,” Alex said while looking at Michael with a perverse smile on his face. “Bobby, tell a scary story.”

“No, a book. You both have to agree on a book. Just one book, no more than that. I’m going out with Liz tonight.”

“I hate Liz,” Alex said.

He’d just started using the word “hate,” and threw it around like a preposition. “Well I think you smell,” Bobby said.

Alex howled. “I do not! I don’t! She’s bad and I hate her. She goes to the graveyard at night. She digs up the people.”

This is what his brothers had learned in kindergarten; the alphabet, blocks, and how to hate the Marley family, because no one seemed to care that Liz was not Susan.

Bobby glared. “Sorry,” Alex said. He might have started his lecture about how nice people don’t listen to losers, but he looked at his watch and saw that it was almost nine o’clock. He thought again about Liz’s voice, and how its coldness had reminded him of their first date, if that’s what you’d call it, at the paper mill. How she’d sat straight as a corpse on the drive home, trying to pretend that it had never happened at all. Of course he’d called her the next day; he couldn’t let it end that way. And then he called her the day after that. And the day after that. And then, almost without his knowing, they were going out.

Bobby directed his words at Michael because he knew that Michael would be an easier convert. “I have to go out tonight. Aren’t you guys my friends? Don’t you want me to have fun? I thought you were my friends.”

Michael looked torn, like he was deciding between his favorite stuffed animal and his left arm. “Friends want each other to have fun, don’t they?” Bobby asked.

“Yes,” Michael answered.

“We’ll pick a book,” Alex agreed.

They picked a book. It was
The Three Billy Goats Gruff.
Bobby pretended to be the oldest goat, stomping across the room and neighing while reading the story. He made a quick exit afterward, before they could convince him to read it again. This was their logic: one book, read twice.

In the hall, he passed his sisters, both of whom were primping in front of the bathroom mirror. They were in the seventh and eighth grades and considered themselves paragons of fashion. Margaret had dark hair and pale, powdered skin. She wore black nail polish that was always chipped, and her corduroys hung loosely off her hips.

Bobby leaned into the bathroom doorway. “Hey kids.” He smiled.

“Kids,” Margaret scoffed. Katie grinned from ear to ear.

“Painfully Deep Goth Chick,” Bobby said, raising his chin at Margaret.

Margaret slammed the door in his face. “Shut up, shortie,” she yelled and he laughed.

He stopped in his parents’ room next. He found them sitting at their desk. His mother was punching numbers into a computer. She was wearing her favorite velour leisure suit, the one she always wore around the house like she thought she was a middle-aged J-Lo. It was light blue and had elastic at her plump waist, her wrists, and her ankles.

His father turned. He still had on his white jacket from the hospital. He sometimes wore it and his stethoscope around the house like he was trying to prove he was employed. “Mom’s trying to teach me how to use Quickbooks.” His father pointed at the computer.

“My mom, or yours?”

“My son the smart ass.”

“Unlike you, Adam,” his mother said, not looking up from the screen. “Now look, it’s easy. See, just pull down adjusted total under tools with the mouse and it all comes up.”

“Now you’re talkin’,” his father said, the sentiment laden with sarcasm.

“I’m going out with Liz for a while,” Bobby told them.

“Okay, be careful,” his mom said.

“He took sex ed,” his father added.

“Adam!” his mother shrieked, and then the two of them started that bantering that made Bobby feel like he was invisible and he closed the door behind him.

Though they’d made it clear from the start that they didn’t like Liz (his father said she was too fragile, and his mother said she dominated his time, but Bobby knew that, really, they just didn’t like her connection to Susan Marley), they never asked him where he was going or when he’d be back. They knew he wouldn’t wind up in some hospital getting his stomach pumped like Owen Read, and no way he was stupid enough to smoke meth like the kids on the south side of town who’d started a lab. He wasn’t into anything heavier than pot, especially now that he dated Liz, who thought a half can of beer was life on the wild side. Only once, at fourteen, had he ever staggered into the house and puked his guts out. But he’d also cleaned it up, and risen at the crack of dawn to make breakfast for the girls while his parents had fed the twins their bottles. He was the oldest, and responsibility was part of the job. But still, this trust they gave him sometimes made him feel like one of those dorks who stacks books at the Corpus Christi Library to make a few extra quarters.

Bobby walked outside and into the rain. The cold air made his teeth chatter, and to stay warm, he jogged to the Explorer his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday. Feeling wild (what the hell, basketball season was over—not that he ever got off the bench), he lit a cigarette and popped in some old school Nirvana. As he pulled out of the driveway, he looked at his house. Through the windows he could see his sisters and his parents, the soft glow of the twins’ nightlight. He thought about how nice it was that he owned all the people inside it, that they belonged to him. And then he thought about how much better it would be once he got out of here.