Closer Home (30 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dale is good at fixing things, but this is beyond him. Watching Lise’s car disappear down the driveway, he feels helpless and defeated.

Now that the secret is out, he can see how stupid he’s been. Any one of the hundred ways he’d thought of to tell her about Callie would have ended the same. Not for the first time, he wishes he could go back in time. Undo his actions that one night. Only now there is Ariel. He can’t bring himself to wish her out of existence, can’t imagine the world without her in it. Already, she fits comfortably into his heart, as if there was a space ready-made for her there. Now he’s afraid he’s going to lose her, too.

Behind him, the front door opens and footsteps cross first the porch and then the gravel. He doesn’t turn around. It will be his mother, or Nancy, come to see if Lise is okay, and he’s hours, days maybe, away from trying to explain. Scrubbing his sleeve across his face to erase the traces of tears, he swallows hard, steadies his breathing.

“Dale? What’s wrong with Lise?”

It’s not his sister or his mother. It’s Ariel. There’s fear in her voice.

He wants to comfort her. Put an arm around her shoulder, ruffle her hair, tell her it’s nothing to worry about. Lise is having a grief moment and just needs to be alone. For the count of ten, no more, he also considers making a run for it. His truck is right there. The keys are in his pocket. He glances back over his shoulder at the house. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the family comes out. He’s not ready for them yet.

“How about we go for a drive?” he says. “And I’ll tell you all about it.”

Ariel searches his face, and he knows she sees the marks of tears.

“What did you do to her?” she asks, sounding more like the mother of a bullied child than anything.

“Long story. I’ll tell you, but I need to drive while I talk.”

She accepts this and climbs into the passenger side of his truck. Dale breathes in the familiar, calming smell of sawdust and engine oil, grateful that driving gives him something to do with his hands and eyes.

“Well?” Ariel demands, as he turns around and heads out down the driveway.

“She’s upset about a couple of things,” he says, buying time. “For one, a guy came to see her today. He wants official paternity testing, says he thinks he’s your father.”

“But that’s a good thing, right? Which one?”

“His name is Gene Garrett.”

Ariel frowns. “He’s not on the list.”

Dale laughs, a dry scratch in his throat. “Apparently, the list was not complete.”

“He must be the king of all asswipes for Lise to get all upset like that. He must be worse than Kelvin or any of the other guys. Bryce even.”

“Gene’s always seemed like a decent guy. He wanted the money, and that turned her upside down a little.”

“More than a little.”

“She’s worried he’ll try to take you away from her. Especially with everything else going on.”

“Can they do that? I mean, what if he is my father and CPS tries to make me go live with him?”

There’s real panic in her voice, and he’s going to have to tell her. Driving doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore, but there’s no place to pull over.

“How would you like to stay here, with my folks? Or maybe even with me?” he asks, keeping his eyes on the road, trying not to hold his breath.

He can feel her staring at him, but if he looks at her, he’ll lose his nerve.

“If they won’t let me live with Lise, then why would they . . .” Her voice trails off. “Oh,” she says.

“Is there a swab left in that DNA kit?” His words hang in the air between them. When she doesn’t answer, he dares a glance in her direction. Her head is turned toward the passenger window, and he can’t see her face.

“You’re him,” she says, about a mile down the road. “That explains everything.”

It explains nothing to Dale. He’d expected an emotional reaction. Tears, maybe. Anger. Had hoped for excitement. The flatness of her tone, almost a weary inevitability, squeezes his heart in a vise grip.

“I don’t understand,” he says, finally.

“You’re in the journal.”

A shock of cold drills through him, wondering when the media exposure will hit, why it’s taken so long. Well, he deserves it.

“What did she say?” he asks, carefully. “Since I’m not on the list.”

“Can’t remember the words,” Ariel says. “And your name’s not in there. Just something about finally going too far and sleeping with the wrong guy. Figured she meant some super jerk, given all of the wrong guys she hooked up with. But it was you. Because of Lise.”

Lise. The vise grip on his heart tightens with physical pain at the mention of her name.

“You were right the first time,” he says. “Super jerk. King of all asswipes. That’s me.”

“Because you had sex with Mom? Or because of Lise?”

“Both. And because I let Callie convince me to keep it secret.”

Ariel finally turns to look at him. Slow tears roll down both cheeks. His heart cracks right down the middle. He’s never felt so helpless as he does now, not even when he watched Lise drive away.

“I asked her,” Ariel says. “Over and over, I asked her who my dad was. She knew all the time it might be you, and she kept you from me.”

“I’m so sorry. Oh God, please don’t cry.” Dale reaches out and puts his hand on her shoulder, half expecting her to pull away.

She doesn’t. Her shoulder is thin, but solid. She is anything but fragile. They drive in a silence broken only by an occasional sob from Ariel.

“I can see why Lise went into meltdown when you told her,” she says after a while, scrubbing at her face with both hands.

Dale wants so much to be the good guy in the white hat, but he shakes his head. “I didn’t tell her. Watching you with my family, she figured it out all by herself. You’re a dead ringer for my dad. Not a doubt in my mind where you belong.”

“So, do you want me?” she asks, in a small voice.

He squeezes her shoulder. Wants to hug her, but he’s driving, and he’s not sure if she’s ready for that anyway. “More than anything in the world. I should have been there for you. I—”

Ariel sputters, a laugh and a sob meeting halfway in her throat and choking her up. She waves her hand at him that she’s fine, and when she can breathe again, she says, “Mom kept you away. I know her better than anybody. And it’s not like you knew then, right? I mean, you didn’t know for sure?”

“When I saw you at your grandpa’s funeral, you looked more like your mom. I didn’t see it then . . .”

“Oh my God. You have to talk to Lise. She’s going to hate you.”

“Too late, she already does.”

“Fix it!”

Dale sighs. “I would if I could. Believe me. I tried. She won’t talk to me.”

“You didn’t try hard enough.”

“Ariel—”

“You love her, right?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty. How old were you? When you and Mom—well, you know.”

“Nineteen. Old enough to know better.”

“Yeah, right. Sex. It’s all boys think about.”

“It’s more complicated than that. She was only sixteen—”

“I’m sixteen.”

“I’m well aware of that.” God. Just the idea of some horny asshole laying a finger on her sets his teeth on edge and his blood to boiling.

Ariel does an eye roll that puts Callie’s version to shame. “Don’t be stupid. No guy is ever going to get it on with me unless I want him to. God, you and Lise make it seem like Mom was this helpless child or something.”

“Helpless” and “child” are not words he would connect with Callie’s behavior on that night. In his mind, he’s twisted it, somehow, increasing his guilt. Eliminating hers. Now the memory rolls over him again, complete with the state of his emotions.

A knot in his gut untwists. He feels lighter, despite the condition his heart is in.

“You have to talk to Lise,” Ariel insists. “Now. Tonight.”

Dale shakes his head. “There’s no point. She won’t forgive this.”

“Please,” Ariel says. He’s stupid enough to look at her, to see all of the pleading in her face, the tears trembling on her lashes. “I finally find you, and now it’s going to be horrible because you and Lise won’t be speaking to each other. Please fix it, Dale.”

“Maybe,” he says, turning the truck around to take her back so they can tell his family. “Maybe I will.”

He’s wary of making any promises right now, but he knows damn well he’s going to do pretty much anything Ariel asks.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I can’t go into the old house.

It’s not the paparazzi that stops me, although I’m pretty sure most of the cars parked in the street don’t belong to the neighbors. What keeps me sitting in my car staring at the old house is Callie.

Never in all of my life have I wanted so deeply to beat on somebody with my fists, to punish living flesh, to feel the crunch of knuckles on bone. But she isn’t here to fight, won’t ever be. She’s gone where I can’t reach her with love, or guilt, or rage. For a long time, I sit in my car, looking at the old house. When I find myself wondering where she and Dale created Ariel, I know there’s no way in hell I’m going in. If I try to sleep, I’ll picture them in her bed, on the couch, even up against my piano.

So I drive back to my place. There are two or three suspicious cars in the street, but I don’t care. Don’t even bother to try to hide my tear-swollen face. Compared with this last secret, there is nothing out there that can hurt me.

Once inside, I still can’t settle. I try everything. A warm shower leaves me shivering. I try to read but can’t focus. When I walk into the music room, remembering all the love I felt while writing “Color You Gone,” the rage crescendos into a wave that makes me want to break things. It’s not safe to be in my music studio in a mood like this. I walk out, slamming the door behind me so hard the sound echoes through the house.

That feels good and gives me an idea.

In my bedroom, stashed at the bottom of a dusty box shoved back under my bed, is an unopened CD of Callie’s
Closer Home
album. She had the nerve to send it to me, right after the damn thing went platinum. I never opened it. Certainly never listened to it. And now it’s the perfect item to smash.

I fetch my hammer and set the CD case in the middle of the living room floor. Callie smiles up at me, and I take the hammer to her with all my strength. The plastic crunches beautifully. Another blow, and it cracks and shatters. The damn CD, though, is near indestructible. After beating on it for a few minutes I start to feel better, even if it doesn’t break. I also start to feel like a child having a tantrum.
Grow up, Lise. Face the reality. Clean up the mess.

When I go to throw the pieces in the trash, I find myself holding the insert. For some reason I turn the page to look inside, something I’ve never done before.

In black felt marker, Callie has written: “For Lise: Thanks for the loan. It’s not like you were using it.”

I drop the paper like it’s burned me. It’s a thing she used to say, half an irritation and half a joke between us. I’d complain about a missing sweater, and she’d say, “It’s not like you were using it.” Mostly, when she’d drop that line and give me a hug, I’d melt, unable to hold on to my anger. Mostly, she was right.

What it means is that she tried to tell me she was sorry. And I didn’t forgive her, didn’t even hear her. No wonder she went along with telling everybody her family was dead.

My emotions are all over the place now. Grief, rage, laughter, love, and hate, all swirling around and taking turns at running the show. Maybe I’m the one who needs a counselor. Or a padded cell. An hour later, I’m pacing from one side of the house to the other, still trying to get my turmoil under control.

A knock at the door startles me half out of my skin. I ignore it. There is nobody in the world I want to talk to right now. The knock comes again. And again. Every time it makes me jump, pulls me out of the rhythm of pacing, raises my anxiety level. Finally, I look out the peephole.

On my porch, distorted by the uneven curve of the glass, stands Dale.

“Let me in,” he calls.

“Go away.”

He knocks again. “Lise, let me in.”

I don’t answer, just stand there, hands against the door, breathing. “Go home, Dale.”

“I can’t. Ariel won’t let me,” he says. “Not until I talk to you.”

He’s told her, then. Whatever he is going to say, I don’t want to hear it. Words can’t fix this. I turn my back on the door and return to pacing, my nerves thrumming, my heart in my throat.

I love you.

How dare he say those words to me? They follow me around the house, from one room to another, step after step. He had sex with Callie. Asked her to marry him. All these years, he’s held that secret.

I love you.

The words eat away at my resolve, force me to see that the underbelly of my rage is heartbreak and hurt.

I love you.

The words carry me back to the front door. When I peer out this time, he’s gone. All is quiet and dark. Nothing moves. I open the door to step out onto the porch and breathe the cold night air, and Dale almost falls in. He’s been sitting with his back to the door and barely catches himself with his hands.

“This secret’s been burning me up for sixteen years,” he says. “The least you can do is listen.”

“Get a therapist,” I retort, but he’s already across the threshold and I can’t slam the door on him.

“You’re the only one I ever wanted to tell. And the one I couldn’t.” He holds me in place with a gaze so intense I can’t even blink. His eyes and his hands and the whole strong length of him and memory of his lips on mine are overwhelming. I wrench my gaze away and lead the way into the living room, sinking into the chair that’s across the room from everything else. At least, I can put some distance between us.

Dale doesn’t sit. He paces from one side of the room to the other. He doesn’t look at me as he starts talking.

“We need to talk about what I did with Callie.”

“Is that what this is about? That one’s easy. She was sexy. She was willing. Same reason as Kelvin and Bryce and all the rest of the crowd.”

“And that’s where you’d be wrong.” He comes to a stop at the window and stands looking out, his back to me. His voice is low and intense. “You were the one I wanted. I was so crazy about you I couldn’t see straight.”

“So you slept with my sister. Makes perfect sense.”

He swings around then, turning the full force of his gaze on me. “Let’s not forget that you didn’t want me. You dropped me like a bad penny the minute somebody else asked you out. I was young and stupid enough to think that was the end of everything. I had no hope you’d come around. And I figured I’d ruined even our friendship by asking you in the first place.”

I open my mouth to say something, but he holds up a hand to stop me. “Let me finish, all right? For God’s sake, let me spit it all out.”

He turns away again, the only sound in the room our breathing. His voice is quieter now. “It was Callie’s idea, the prom thing. And then after . . . She wanted to get back at you for bossing her around and making her feel like a little kid.”

“So you’re going to blame Callie now?” I know it’s not fair, even as I say the words. I’ve been blaming her all night in my own head.

“No. I’m not blaming anybody. Just telling you how it was, as fairly as I can.”

I close my eyes against the pain in his face, but then remember him sitting on the windowsill on prom night, see the way he was looking at Callie. The way she claimed him, like property. A conquest. The boy in my memory is young. Conflict is written across his face as she takes his hand and leads him away.

“Anyway,” Dale’s voice goes on—the man’s voice, not the boy’s—and I open my eyes again. The disconnect makes me feel like the room is spinning. “I wanted to tell you—”

“Was it prom night?”

He nods.

“Before or after I came home and found you?” I need to know if it happened in my room. In my bed, or Callie’s.

“After. I think, maybe, if you hadn’t come home when you did, I might have been stronger. Maybe I would have told her no.” He tries to smile, but it doesn’t get past a quick hitch of the corners of his lips. “At least, that’s what I’d like to believe.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Doesn’t it? I was nineteen. Heartbroken and, let’s face it, horny. Callie was all over me, and then you come in, your dress ripped half off and soaking wet, like you’d been ravished in the rain. Kelvin had this stupid bet going, and I thought you fell for it, let him . . .”

Time slows again, as I replay his words in my head and try to shape them into something that makes sense. “You thought . . .” It’s too absurd. I can’t even say the words. “Kelvin got drunk,” I tell him. “He attacked me. I beat him with my shoe. Trust me, there was no ravishing.”

He wavers a little, as if the ground has moved beneath his feet. “I heard a car.”

“Timothy. Knight in shining armor. He’s got the scars to prove it.”

Dale looks blank and a little lost. I know the feeling. Long-held beliefs that turn out to be so far afield you don’t know what to do with them.

“Dear God,” he says, finally. “So you escaped from hell and came in to find us . . .”

“I can’t believe you didn’t hear about the thing with Kelvin and Timothy. Pretty sure there was a lot of gossip.”

“The story that Kelvin and his buddies put out was that once wasn’t enough and you begged for seconds. Hell, he said you were ready to take on the whole gang, but he fought them off to keep you for himself.”

“And you believed that?”

“I figured it was exaggerated plenty. But I guess I thought there was a grain of truth in there somewhere. I mean, surely you knew that’s what he was after when he asked you.”

His face settles back into the deep lines I’ve been assuming were all about grief over Callie. “I wanted to tell you. At least once a week I’d call her, tell her we had to fess up. And she’d say that if you ever found out, you’d never forgive either of us. She got me to promise not to tell, right after prom night, and then always held that over my head.”

“She was good at guilt.”

“And then she got pregnant and I figured, if it was mine, I owed her. Maybe never being with you was the penalty I’d have to pay for my mistake. It was torture sometimes, with you right there in front of my eyes. Sometimes I thought maybe you cared about me, more than friends, but I couldn’t ask you out, couldn’t tell you how I felt, because I always knew what I’d done.”

“God, Dale.”

“I settled for friendship. Every time you hooked up with some guy, I’d think this was it, I’d finally lost you. And then feel relief when it was over. When Callie died, God help me, one of my first emotions was relief. I was thinking we could make things work somehow. Maybe I’d finally tell you and you’d forgive me. But when we came back here, she was everywhere, in every room of the old house. And if I could forget about her for a minute, there was Ariel to remind me. I knew you were going to find out; it was just a matter of time. After that dick of a kid stole the diary, I was waiting for it to come out on the news. I would have told you then, but you were out of reach. No phone. I didn’t want you to hear it from some reporter or Internet gossip.”

“But you still came to get us.”

He shrugs that away. “You needed me.”

His words resonate. It’s not often that I let myself need anybody. Thinking back, I’ve worked hard to shut him out. To keep the walls between us. But all of my walls are down now. No more secrets. Nothing left to hide behind. The last man I dated, a genuinely nice guy, tried his best to break through. And in the end, when he was leaving and I asked him why, he’d told me, “I need to be needed, Lise. Not all the time. But every now and then.”

Sitting here, looking across the room at Dale, all of the versions of him come together. He’s the man I know and the boy I remember, not a saint or a hero or a loser. He’s both more and less than each of these things. What I feel for him is complicated. Love and rage, friendship and desire, sympathy and judgment, and other more nuanced things for which I have no words.

“Thanks for listening. Maybe it was selfish, but I needed you to know.” He smiles, and the tortured look is gone from his eyes.

In return, I need to tell him some of what I feel, but as usual I don’t have the words. At my silence, he nods once, as though I’ve said something profound. “I should let you get some sleep,” he says, and heads toward the door.

He doesn’t say so, but I know as surely as I’ve ever known anything that if I let him walk away, I’ll have lost him. We’ll still talk from time to time. We’ll be friendly over Ariel and maybe have dinner together at his parents’ place. His words echo back to me from the other night. “I can’t do this, Lise. All these years . . .”

And I know, for certain, that he is going to finally let me go.

He stands with one hand on the door, about to walk out of my life.

“I wrote a song.” The words surprise me. They come up straight out of my heart, bypassing my brain.

“That’s wonderful.” His lips curve into a smile. It looks sad, though. I want to see it reach his eyes.

“I want you to hear it.”

“Some other time,” he says. “It’s late.”

“It has to be now.”

I take his free hand, daring to touch him, lacing my fingers through his. He feels stiff, resistant, and my heart sinks. But then his hand softens, just a little, his fingers closing around mine, and he lets me lead him back into the music room. As we walk, I’m thinking I’ll just put the recording on for him, but at the last minute I sit down at the piano and run my fingers over the keys. My heart flutters crazily, and I play a few bars of “Closer Home” while I build up my courage, and then modulate over to the slow ballad tempo of “Color You Gone.”

There are four verses. One for my father, one for my mother, and one for Callie. The last is for Dale, for this separation that I’ve felt coming between us. He’s behind me, listening. I can feel him there. And when I begin his verse, I hear the hitch in his breath. My voice cracks once, and I think I’m not going to make it to the end, but I do.

“I want a take-back,” I say, when all of the music has ebbed away.

“What?”

I spin around on the bench to look up at him. His eyes are wet. There are tears on his cheeks.

“Callie never took anything I didn’t give her. The music. You.” My throat closes over the last word, and it comes out with a little tremor. “Can we—”

I don’t get to finish the question. He bends down and scoops me off the bench and into his arms.