Equilibrium (14 page)

Chapter 16

I
n the early days of A.S.—after suicide—Daddy’s natural citrus-musk scent had hung heavy in his writing studio and clung to all the surfaces. Back then, Darcy couldn’t tolerate hanging out there for more than a few minutes at a time. Entering with a full stomach pretty much ensured serious muscles cramps, not to mention nausea extending to her fingernails.

Months ago, Darcy had searched Daddy’s desk for his smell and came up with nothing but a nose full of lemon polish.

Today, she knew what she wanted. But first, she needed a snack.

Darcy let the screen door slam, announcing her return. Mom must be losing it. She didn’t pounce on her, asking about her day. Didn’t happen upon her, checking out whether the outfit she was wearing this morning had miraculously transformed into scandalously revealing non school-approved clothing. Okay, so where was she? She’d better be home.

Darcy kicked off her sneakers. Her mother’s giggle reached around the corner. Then another laugh, deep and throaty, a full manly guffaw. Mom’s buddy Aidan was having trouble keeping to his part of the house again. For once, Darcy would take this as a good sign.

Might as well go for it, after that snack.

Darcy peered into the kitchen. Mom was sitting sideways, her legs crossed in faded jeans, her pink-painted toenails shimmering. Darcy squinted. Her mother rarely painted anything except walls.

Aidan was staring at Mom as if she were the most fascinating woman on earth. He was grinning like that goofy kid who’d followed Darcy around freshman year, drooling on his shoes. Hands resting on his thighs, Aidan leaned back in his seat, legs falling apart at the knees in the way only a guy could sit, the designated Y-chromosome position. Give those manly ’nads breathing space.

He couldn’t have seen her, but he stopped laughing and sat straight up as soon as she came around the corner. “Hey!”

Mom uncrossed her legs and offered Darcy an explanation she hadn’t asked for. “Aidan has today off and, lucky me, he happened to pull into the driveway right when I needed help with the groceries.”

Darcy glanced around the kitchen. Mom’s usual Friday lineup of grocery-filled blue canvas bags blocked the cabinets. Okay, and who cared?

Darcy’s stomach churned so loudly that Aidan narrowed his eyes.

“You need a snack, honey?” Domestic goddess Mom flew in to save the day. “I bought a ton of strawberries. I could whip some cream, too, if you like.”

Mom turned to Aidan, and Darcy could’ve sworn she brushed her hair out of her eyes in a soap opera–type gesture. “Low blood sugar.”

Okay, now she felt not only like a gross noisemaker, but a sickly wimp loser. Not that she cared what Aidan thought. She was only putting up with him for Troy’s sake. The guy had totally calmed Troy down when he’d gone off on his Daddy rant during dinner, something her mother hadn’t even been able to do. That had scared the wits out of Darcy.

But she didn’t have to like him.

She’d eat something, and then ask Aidan for what she wanted. Nothing yummy sat out, but Aidan and Mom both had a kind of full look about them—leaning back in their seats, eyes slightly glazed, movements slow. And Aidan kept touching his mouth, as if checking for cookie crumbs.

“Where are the cookies?” Her fingers twitched from more than low blood sugar.

Her mother laughed, then shook her head. “I didn’t bake today, but last I looked, there were still a few chocolate chip cookies in the freezer. Do me a favor and finish them. I can’t trust myself around desserts,” Mom said as much to Aidan as to Darcy. Actually, more to Aidan than to her. He needed to know her mother’s weakness for sweets because why?

Darcy grabbed the freezer container and tossed four cookies onto the bare microwave carousel, glanced over her shoulder to see whether her mother would notice and insist on a paper towel. She pressed the keypad, then whacked the on button with the heel of her hand.

“Take some milk with that,” Mom said without turning around to witness the cookies on a potentially germ-infested surface.

Well, she had been going to take milk, but she hated following her mother’s dumb instructions. The woman acted as though she’d invented cookies and milk.

Darcy leaned against the sink, shoved a cookie into her mouth, and bit down hard. Ah, she felt better already. She got to the third freezer-burned cookie before she gave in to the crumbs clogging her throat and poured a glass of milk. The third gulp dislodged the scratchy lump down her throat and into her stomach. Okay, now she was way too full, but at least her fingers had stopped twitching.

Might as well go for it. “I want to see the apartment,” Darcy blurted out, and then stifled a burp.

Mom blinked at her and pressed a hand to her heart. “Are you sure?” she said, even though she’d been asking Darcy for weeks.

When Mom met her gaze, she felt like crying, and her stupid chin quivered.

Mom got up and hurried across the kitchen, coming to her rescue when she didn’t want rescuing. “Sometimes, seeing what you’re worried about diffuses the worry,” Mom said. “Most times, nothing’s half as bad as what you’re imagining.”

What did her mother know about what she was imagining? Sure, Mom would often ask her about her concerns, hopes, and dreams. But then, right when Darcy was considering a truthful response, her mother would grow restless with the silence between them, and insert
her
concerns, hopes, and dreams. What was the point of getting real with her mother when she was so good at one-sided conversations?

Darcy made certain she caught Mom’s eye, even threw in a smile for good measure. “It might be weird, but I want to.”

“Cool,” Aidan said, and led the way. He opened his apartment’s unlocked door and stood back to let them enter. “Ladies first,” Aidan said, and Darcy forced herself not to roll her eyes.

She stepped inside, took an exaggerated inhalation, and tried extracting a hit of Daddy’s citrus-musk scent. Walking over to the spot where his desk had sat didn’t help. A leather recliner fit into the corner, cradling Aidan’s guitar. She’d heard Aidan playing at night, even fell asleep to the rock riffs. The guy was seriously good. Not that she’d tell him.

Her mother held a tentative smile. “So what do you think?”

She shrugged. So far, no muscle cramps and no nausea.

Aidan nudged the recliner with his toe. “My living room furniture. Couldn’t wait to spring it from storage.”

Couldn’t wait to get a babe in here. Miraculous, really. Aidan had transformed her father’s writing studio into a bachelor pad. The nearly empty apartment screamed “low maintenance, travels light.” The guitar left accidentally out in the open provided just the right touch.
Shag me, baby.

Wait a second. She would’ve thought the front room would work as a bedroom and the back room adjacent to the kitchen galley would work as the living room. She looked around and couldn’t locate anything resembling a daybed or sleep sofa. Maybe Aidan had fashioned a retractable bed, the kind that exploded out of the wall at just the right moment when he plucked the appropriate note on his guitar.

She left Aidan’s living room and checked out the kitchen. A chunky coffee table, a pile of cushions, and Aidan’s muddy bike took up the entire back room. Maybe the guy slept standing up. It could happen.

“Looking for something?” Mom asked.

Well, all right. She turned to Aidan. “I thought you’d make the front room into a bedroom.”

“I did.” Aidan’s smug smile made him even more irritating. “Look again.”

She pushed past the joker and scanned the front room—floorboards, recliner with babe-magnet guitar. She scanned the walls, then looked up. The loft.

Darcy burst out laughing and scrambled up the ladder. Peeking over the gate revealed not a cliché water bed, but a mattress on the floor and a puffy chocolate-brown comforter.

Daddy had only used the loft for storage. When they were little, she and Troy would sneak up, hide between the cardboard boxes and accordion files, and watch their father gaze into middle space. Daddy would pound his keyboard in a writing frenzy, all the while pretending he didn’t know they were watching.

She and Troy would hide their toys beneath the floorboards as a time capsule treasure chest—origami paper fortune-tellers, handmade spool dolls, painted-bead jewelry. She pressed through the garden fence–style gate beyond the ladder. “I left something up here.”

Mom craned her neck from the base of the ladder. “Darcy, no. I moved all the boxes to the attic. There’s nothing.”

On her knees, Darcy peeked over the gate, like when she was little and needed to stand tiptoe to see over the counter at the ice-cream shop. “Under the floorboards.” She laughed at the bafflement on her mother’s face. “Just some toys Troy and I hid.” Then she added for Aidan’s benefit: “A long time ago.”

Mom started up the ladder.

“Toolbox is in my truck, if you need something to pry up the boards,” Aidan called from below.

She’d never needed tools in the past, but you never knew. Maybe her fingertips had grown too wide to fit between the planks. “Knock yourself out.”

Darcy was already in the corner, bent beneath the sloping ceiling and the skylight’s heat. For old-time’s sake, she closed her eyes and said the special incantation she and Troy had made up. “Shadows and angels.” She dug her not-too-big fingertips through the inch-wide crack, yanked, and then waited while the cobweb dust settled. She spotted the crafted toys right away alongside a completed Lego creation and the tin of Pick-Up Sticks she’d once spent months looking for.

Darcy popped open the cardboard end and looked inside the cylinder. Not a single painted stick, just a folded piece of paper. That didn’t make any sense at all. Odder still, when she slid the paper from its housing, a soft puff of musk and citrus escaped. She smoothed the paper, and the Daddy-scent blossomed. Nausea squirted from her body’s center and trickled down her limbs.

Darcy stared at the creased verse, her chest tightening with every stanza. She couldn’t stop herself from reading through the entire poem, even though she knew every single line of the poem Daddy had made her memorize.

“You shouldn’t read that.” Mom’s voice, so soft now, speaking as if each word caused her pain, the way she’d spoken on the day Daddy had died.

Darcy felt her mother kneel down beside her, and she glanced over her shoulder. Mom was clasping her hands prayerlike before her.

“You know the poem?” Darcy asked, although she already knew the answer. Only thoughts of Daddy at his worst could bend her mother that way.

Mom lowered her eyelids.

Darcy kept her gaze on the Daddy-scented paper, willing the verse to vanish. For the first time, she realized how much she hated that Shakespeare poem, had always hated its scary-sick warning Daddy made her keep from Mom.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead.
The sharing of the poem and the ritual recital had weighted her with first dread, and then guilt. The shame of keeping a dangerous secret that wasn’t really a secret, just a twisted lie. For so long, she’d thought keeping Daddy’s secret about the morbid Shakespeare sonnet had maybe not caused, but contributed to his death. Turned out, Daddy’s game was all about testing her loyalty.

She never could have saved his life.

“You can tell me how you know about the poem,” Darcy said. “I already know all the bad stuff. I saw all the bad stuff.”

Mom sighed.

“Please.” Darcy took a cue from their earlier conversation and flipped it around to the reverse side. “You’re right. Sometimes imagining is worse. I just want the truth.” That should do it. Use Mom’s recently spouted wisdom and toss in The Truth, her life’s mission.

Mom laughed weakly, as if she detected Darcy’s less than covert debate methods, but she gave in anyway. “It was an unhealthy obsession. He read it over and over, memorized it, decided it was all about him. He even wanted me to say it with him. No way I would go along with that one and become an enabler to his self-perpetuating darkness.”

So Darcy was an enabler. And a second-choice enabler at that. They’d never shared a just between them poem. Daddy had saddled her with an obsession Mom knew all about, words so tortuous he’d hidden them beneath the floorboards. Daddy should’ve known telltale hearts never remained silent.

Darcy handed the poem to her mother. “ ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead than you shall hear the surly sullen bell give warning to the world that I am fled—’ ”

“Did you just memorize that?”

“ ‘From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.’ ”

“Angel, I am so sorry.”

She couldn’t stop; she had to get it out. Her throat burned, as if she’d swallowed poison. “ ‘Nay if you read this line, remember not the hand that writ it, for I love you so.’ ”

“Damn him.”

“ ‘For I
love
you so.’ ” Darcy stopped, suddenly wishing for a dictionary. She questioned the meaning of everything she’d believed before this moment. The father who’d claimed to love her had sucked her into his sick, paranoid obsession and called it love.

And she’d believed him.

Chapter 17

A
wood knot on the outside of the bathroom door stared at Laura, taking on human characteristics in the low light of the upstairs hallway. “Are you all right?” Laura asked Darcy through the closed door, although unmistakable retching sounds had precipitated her knee-jerk question.

“Great. Just tossed my cookies.” Darcy laughed, the kind of giggle more appropriate for late nights turned punchy than the middle of the afternoon. “So that’s where that saying comes from.”

“Guess so.” Laura splayed her fingers wide against the door, a poor substitute for stroking her daughter’s hair. “Daddy loved you. What he did doesn’t change that. But he never should’ve asked you to keep a secret from me. That put you in an unfair position.”

“I’m not feeling so good.”

“You shouldn’t—” The shushing sound of running water silenced Laura voice.
Feel guilty.

“Brushing my teeth,” Darcy said.

She sighed and leaned against the wall.
Back off, Laura.
She could open the unlocked door and barge in on her daughter, insist that Darcy confide in her and accept her help through the latest Jack-related trauma. But getting to the other side of the door wouldn’t break down the real barrier between them. She could lead her daughter to conversation, but she couldn’t make her talk.

Laura had always tried to strike a balance between telling her children the truth about their father’s illness and shielding them from the effects of such knowledge. How could she have known he’d enlisted their daughter to keep part of the truth from
her
? Even now, diplomacy was crucial. Shame the parent; shame the child. Laura couldn’t exactly tell Darcy every unfiltered thought she was having about her father. The information Darcy had revealed enlarged his diagnosis to include sociopath. If Laura had known Jack was making Darcy feel responsible for his emotional and physical well-being, Laura would’ve put a stop to his inappropriate behavior. She would’ve stepped between Jack and Darcy, and offered herself as a sounding board for the dark poem he’d wielded against their daughter. Words as weapons.

She’d thought incorrectly that the relationship with her husband would end with his death, his self-inflicted one-way road trip. The ultimate book tour. How could a dead man stir up such trouble? Hadn’t he caused enough problems when he was alive?

Laura could never really relax unless Jack was sound asleep. Even then, she’d move cautiously, tiptoe downstairs to read or fix a snack for herself. If he awoke in the middle of the night, who knew what reassurances he’d require, how much he’d expect from her? Talk therapy, physical therapy, sex therapy. Jack knew no boundaries. Hang on. Reverse that notion. She knew no boundaries. You showed others how to treat you.

A creak from behind her, and Laura turned toward the stairway.

“Laura?” Aidan walked through the upstairs hallway, the sight of him incompatible with the second floor of her house. He was carrying steaming tea in one of her pink mugs.

Laura had left Darcy for two minutes and had raced downstairs to set peppermint tea in a mug, water in the kettle, and—

She held her hand over her mouth. “I forgot—I don’t know how—I didn’t even hear the whistle.”

“Done it myself a few times.” He dunked the tea bag, then handed her the mug. “Thanks for giving me an excuse to see how she’s doing.”

Ten minutes ago, Laura and Darcy had flown from Aidan’s bedroom loft to their upstairs bathroom. Laura didn’t think Aidan deserved a mess in his bathroom. Or a cookie tossing.

The toilet flushed.

“She’s been better,” Laura said.

“She vomited?” Aidan asked, and Laura nodded.

Aidan’s gaze went to the door. “She’s still upset I’m living in her dad’s studio.”

“Not exactly.” Darcy had been worried seeing her dad’s studio might be weird, and it turned out she was right, but in a way neither of them could’ve predicted.

“This then?” From Aidan’s back pocket, he slid out the folded poem. “Dark stuff. Jack wrote this?”

“William Shakespeare.”

“A tragedy.” Aidan started to unfold the poem, and Laura held up a hand. “Do me a favor and burn it,” she said.

Aidan slid the paper back in his pocket, his mouth firmed with what Laura imagined were unasked questions about the mysterious sonnet hidden beneath his floorboards. “The poem—Jack used it as a weapon,” she began.

Laura gnawed her lip, and Aidan waited for her to gather her thoughts.

She stepped away from the bathroom and waved Aidan nearer to her, lowered her voice so Darcy wouldn’t hear through the door. The best she could, Laura tried to explain to Aidan what made so little sense to her. About the poem and what it meant to Jack. About how he’d tried to use it against Laura. About how, when that hadn’t worked, Jack had whittled away at their daughter, a roundabout way to get to Laura.

The whole time Laura told the tale, Aidan stood perfectly still. His head angled to the side, and he looked at her as if she were the most important person in the world.

“And that’s my sad little story,” Laura said. “One of many.” Laura tried a smile. Clutching the mug, her fingers trembled, a dead giveaway to her mood. Tea splashed onto her shoe.

Aidan wrapped his hands around hers. He steadied the mug, steadied her. “Why don’t we give this to Darcy while there’s still some left?” he said, and Laura grinned.

“Darcy, can I come in?” she called through the door.

“It’s your funeral,” Darcy said, her voice a muffled croak.

Laura opened the door and found her daughter kneeling over the toilet, white-faced and staring into the bowl. She crouched down next to her, set down the tea, and gentled a hand onto her back. “Oh, Darcy.”

“Can I help?” Aidan asked from the doorway. Laura nodded, and he entered the room.

“I want a washcloth, Mom,” Darcy said, and the effort sent her over the edge. Dry heaves growled from her gaping mouth.

“I’m on it.” Aidan found a washcloth on the rack and waited for the water to run ice cold.

Darcy fell back, then groaned. Her eyes watered. She rested her head against the wall, and her eyes drifted shut.

Aidan wrung out the washcloth, folded it in thirds. He bent down and smoothed the cooling cloth across her daughter’s forehead. His eyes softened toward Darcy.

Aidan had a gift, the gift of caring.

Darcy blinked her eyes open. When she shifted to rise, Aidan took her hand and helped her to standing. Laura imagined Aidan at the hospital, tending women with sick and broken bodies. She imagined those same women, pain-stricken and scared, falling a little in love with Aidan.

“I’m going to lie down,” Darcy told Laura. “Can you wake me for dinner? I’ll do my homework later.”

Laura nodded. “Sure, angel. Whatever you want.” How could she make up for how Jack had tormented their daughter, how he was likely still tormenting her?

Laura didn’t mind nursing the kids back to health when they got sick. Preparing endless cups of Jell-O, bowls of soup, and cooling compresses made her feel useful while their bodies healed themselves. But she’d always wished for another set of helping hands. She’d always wished for a man who’d listen to her sad little stories, instead of creating them.