The Rules of Survival (12 page)

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Authors: Nancy Werlin

BOOK: The Rules of Survival
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“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go now.” She opened her car door and got in, and I had to stand back. I moved to the sidewalk and watched her pull out of her space, and then, just before she drove off, I saw her take out her cell phone. And I’m not the slightest bit psychic, but sometimes you know things, and I knew she was calling Murdoch to tell him about me.
Still, I didn’t expect what happened a minute later. I didn’t expect Julie’s front door to open again, or for Murdoch to come out through it. He was holding his own cell phone.
“Matt,” he said wearily. I stared up at him as he stood on the stoop of Julie’s house.
“Hi,” I said. And then, in horror, I felt that I was exactly one second from tears. And it wasn’t about Nikki or Rob or the black eye that I could see Murdoch had, or the brace on his left wrist. It was, instead, about Julie, his neighbor.
Nikki had been replaced.
We had all been replaced.
25
 
MURDOCH’S DEMONS
 
I didn’t cry. Instead I said, “Are you all right?”
Murdoch nodded. “Yes.” He looked at me for a bit. Finally he said, “Come on in, Matt. We’ll talk.” He closed Julie’s door, checked it to make sure it was locked, and turned to his own front door next to it. I followed him into his territory, familiar with it, but painfully aware that I didn’t belong there in his house, not anymore. But the smashed truck windows, and Murdoch’s black and blue eye, and the brace he was wearing on his left wrist kept me anchored in the moment. There were things that had to be said.
I sat down at Murdoch’s kitchen table when he invited me to. I watched him measure coffee into the coffeemaker, fill it with water, and press the Start button. Then he turned, his back against the counter, and looked at me again. “What’s up?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. For a bare second, I glanced at his face, his wrist. Then away.
“You didn’t do anything.” Murdoch didn’t sound angry, just tired.
“
She
did,” I said. The word came spitting out, and then I couldn’t stop talking. “That was
her
last night. Did you realize that? That was her. My mother. That guy, she brought him home. She wanted him to beat you up. His name’s Rob. She did it. She did it all.”
Some expression moved behind Murdoch’s eyes. I couldn’t read it.
“Did you realize that?” I demanded again.
“No,” Murdoch said finally. “I just thought he was some drunken madman.” He shifted, lifting his left wrist. “The wrist is just an old work injury, by the way. It aches sometimes and I need a little support.”
“What’d you do to him?” I asked. “It can’t have been too bad, because he was over last night afterward—” I stopped. Then I said, “But actually, I didn’t see him. I just heard him.”
“I don’t know what I did, exactly,” Murdoch said. “I hit him a few times. I convinced him to go away. That’s all I know.”
“He’s big,” I said doubtfully. I wasn’t sure I believed that Murdoch didn’t know where he’d hit Rob, and how hard, and exactly what kind of damage it had done.
Murdoch shrugged. “So? Last night, he was also drunk and slow. Some big men never learn how to fight, Matt. They think they don’t need to, because of their size. He’s one of those. There was really no problem.”
“But—”
“Really, Matt. You never have to worry about me in a fight. Believe me.” There was an ease to him as he talked about this. I remembered the convenience store, and believed him.
“Your truck, though,” I said. “The glass.”
“Insurance will take care of it.” He sounded calm. “It’s just an inconvenience.”
“I don’t think you’ve understood what I’m saying here,” I said. “She did this. Don’t you get it?
She
did it!”
“I understand, Matt,” Murdoch said mildly.
The coffeemaker beeped. Murdoch turned to it, reaching for two mugs with his right hand. I leaped up to help, got the mugs away from him and poured the coffee. He let me. “There’s milk in the fridge,” he said. I got the milk out, and paused to look at a picture on the refrigerator of an elderly couple. It hadn’t been there when we used to come over to Murdoch’s house before.
“Is that your parents?” I asked.
“No,” said Murdoch. There was an edge to his voice.
“Oh,” I said. Somehow, the tension in the room had risen.
Murdoch sighed. He took in an audible breath. “Well, here’s one way to look at it. Your mother was getting her rage out of her system. One black eye and some broken glass are a pretty small price to pay.”
I think it was a few weeks after the Rob incident that I found out about the abusive phone messages Nikki had been leaving regularly on Murdoch’s voice mail. Once I knew about that, I understood that he’d been downplaying his reaction for my benefit. Or maybe he really did believe she would stop now. But at the time, hearing Murdoch seem to shrug off what had happened to him and his truck, I was furious. It seemed to me that he didn’t get it; wasn’t taking it—wasn’t taking Nikki—seriously enough.
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. It’s not out of her system. She’s just getting started. She’s got other plans for you.”
“Have a seat,” Murdoch said.
I ignored him. I gulped down a mouthful of coffee and milk and sugar. “She’s just getting started,” I said again.
“Well, I’m going to sit,” Murdoch said. “You can join me if you like.” He turned the chair away from the table so that he faced me as I paced in the small area of the kitchen. I walked back and forth, back and forth. The coffee sloshed perilously around in my mug.
“You’d better believe me about her,” I said. “You have to believe me. You didn’t get hurt enough last night to make her happy. She’s nowhere near through. I don’t even know what would make her happy.”
“Me dead?”
I scowled. “That’s not funny, Murdoch.”
“I wasn’t laughing. I was asking. What exactly should I be afraid of here?” He still sounded only slightly interested; nowhere near as worried as I wanted him to be. As, actually, he should have been.
“She won’t want you dead,” I said. “That’s no fun. No fun at all.”
His eyes flickered then. I think it was the word
fun
. Nikki’s word.
“What would be fun for her?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Seeing you hurt. Seeing you sorry. Seeing you in trouble. Seeing you worry. That would all be fun.”
“Fun for your mother.”
“Yes!” There had been an odd note in his voice. I blurted: “Who else do you think I’m talking about here?”
Murdoch drank some coffee. Then he said, very gently, “You’re angry at me yourself, Matthew.”
It took me a few seconds to grasp what he was—sort of—asking. And when I did, it was as if I were the one who’d been hit.
“You’re wrong,” I said at last. “I’m just trying to help.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“I didn’t come here because I wanted to see you hurt. It’s not
fun
for me. Okay? I’m not—I’m not at all like her. Same with Callie and Emmy. It’s you we—” I stopped.
It’s you we love.
I didn’t say it out loud, but Murdoch looked away anyway. I knew he understood.
I also knew he didn’t want it. It was a burden.
“There’s something else,” I said, after a minute. I was forcing myself to talk.
“Take it easy,” said Murdoch. “It’s okay.”
“No. It’s actually not okay. And I hate when people say that, when they say it’s okay even though it’s not. It’s better to tell the truth.”
Silence.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t apologize,” said Murdoch. “You’re right. It’s not okay. I won’t pretend that it is anymore.” Something in his voice—just the weariness, maybe—made it possible for me to look over at him. And when I did, I realized that he was taking me seriously after all. He had put down his coffee mug and dropped his elbows onto the table. He was clasping his hands in front of him, watching them, not me, and his eyes, even the one that wasn’t swollen, were nearly shut. To my disbelief, I realized that he was on the verge of tears.
Not so strong after all. I was astonished, and alarmed. I could feel the alarm like a twist in my gut.
“I should be the one apologizing,” Murdoch said. “I get it. I sort of promised things to you and Callie and Emmy. I didn’t mean to. I thought I was just being a friend to you kids. But—”
He looked up and so did I. Our eyes met.
“But you need a father, Matt,” he said softly. “A real father. All of you do. And it wasn’t okay that I stepped in there and pretended for a little while. Not when it wasn’t real, and I knew it wasn’t real.” And now he
was
crying. He was actually crying. “I’m sorry,” he said. He kept right on talking, just as if there weren’t tears on his face. “I had no business doing that, and I see that I hurt you. All of you. Which I never meant to do. I never meant to hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt us,” I said uncomfortably. “It was—we like you.”
“But I did hurt you. I led you to expect . . . ” He trailed off. Shrugged. “You know, Matt.”
I wanted to say no, no, no, he hadn’t led us to expect anything. That I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I was the one who had insisted on the truth a minute ago. After a few moments, I managed to say, “I have a father. I know you haven’t met him, but he exists. He cares about us. And I did want a friend.” I cleared my throat. “I still do. We—Callie and Emmy and I—we actually need a friend now. Right now. Someone who—who—” I wasn’t able to articulate it at first, and then I found the right words. “Someone who will believe us about her. She’s crazy, Murdoch. I could tell you—there’s stuff I could tell you . . . anyway. You know. I think you know. Do you?”
Murdoch nodded. “Yeah.” He met my eyes and looked into them. I saw that he did know.
But then he looked away from me and got up. “Excuse me, Matt. I’ll be back in a minute or two. We’ll go on talking. I don’t mean to cut you off.” He left the room. I heard him blow his nose. I heard him using his cell phone, saying to someone that something had come up, he’d be there later on, and he’d call when he was on the way. I heard the water running in the bathroom sink.
I sat at his table. When he came back, I said quickly, before he could say anything himself, “Murdoch, look. There’s something specific I have to tell you. About her. It’s—it’s hard to say it. I’m embarrassed, but you need to know. Even though I won’t let it—I won’t let it happen, actually. I even told Nikki that.”
“What is it?” Murdoch had taken his abandoned coffee mug and dumped out its contents into the sink. I said what I had to say quickly, while his back was turned. I had rehearsed it in my mind so that I’d need as few words as possible.
“She told me she could accuse you of having molested me. If she did that, of course I’d say it wasn’t true, but I thought you should know she was thinking about it. As a way to hurt you.”
I looked at Murdoch when I finished. I was glad not to be able to see his face. What I
could
see was that his right hand had paused midair, just above the kitchen faucet. I counted five seconds while it hung there, suspended. Then it continued on its way, turning the faucet neatly on, holding the coffee mug under it for rinsing. Eventually, he turned the faucet off. I heard the soft clink of the coffee mug being put down in the sink.
Murdoch’s expression, when he did turn, was the twin of our mother’s in one of her worst rages. I even thought I saw, in his eyes, those same demons, fighting for dominance, before he got control over them again.
I realized that I had seen his demons before. In the Cumberland Farms store.
Then, weirdly, he grinned. It was the strangest smile I’ve ever seen in my life. I still don’t know exactly what he was thinking about, behind that smile. I just know now that it was only in part about us, and about what I had just told him. There’s so much I do not know about Murdoch, even now. He keeps secrets. But still, I think that was the moment. That was it. That was the very second when he—and this is an odd word, but the right one—engaged. I think that was the exact moment when he said yes to helping us.
And you see—this is the point I have to make: He didn’t commit to us because of what Nikki had done. He didn’t do it because of Rob and the smashed car windows and the black eye; or because of the nasty phone calls that I didn’t know about then. And it wasn’t because of what had or hadn’t happened between him and Nikki before, when they were together.
It was because of what I told him.
If I had kept my mouth shut, if I had not told Murdoch . . . what then?
I held my breath until he spoke.
“God help us,” he finally said, mildly enough. “That’s bad.”
I said then what I had said to my father. “We can’t be with her. We can’t stay there. It’s not safe.”
And then Murdoch said what I needed and wanted to hear, and it wasn’t,
Things usually work out okay
or
Just pretend things are normal
. “Yeah,” he said simply. “You’re right.”

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