Equilibrium (3 page)

He licked the end of the paper with practiced precision, then handed her a nice thick joint along with his lighter.

She concentrated on the glow of flame, slurping it up through the crisp paper until the end lit scarlet on its own. She held the smoke and imagined it billowing across her brain. Her fingers ached for it while Nick took his turn.

“You like it? Grew it myself in Nashua.” Nick inhaled deeply. “Just popped a heater in my grandmother’s greenhouse, started up a new crop here,” he said in a strained voice, without releasing any telling smoke. “She hasn’t used it since my mom and I moved in. I thought, why not get a head start on the growing season? Make a few bucks while I’m at it.” So that part of the Nick rumor was actually true.

The sweet weed lured Cam and Heather. Heather plunked down beside her, cross-legged, not allowing for any space between them. What was wrong with Heather lately? Couldn’t she see how much Cam liked her? He’d seen her red-nosed from colds, freaking out over grades, and beyond comforting when her dog had died. Yet, amazingly, he still liked her.

Darcy could never show a boyfriend how sad her father made her, way worse than a red nose and freaking out. Way beyond comforting. She couldn’t think of Daddy anymore without remembering how he’d died.

Darcy passed the joint to Heather and found a new expression clouding her friend’s features, equal parts concern and eagerness. Nick set up a second jay, twisted the end, and passed it to Cam. “Don’t drool on it, buddy. Okay?”

Nick didn’t have to worry about Cam slobbering all over the joint. Mess didn’t coexist with Cam’s neatness addiction or his neurotic organizing. He tore through more pads of paper than her mother with his perpetual list making. Probably, he’d made sure he got through all of his homework in study hall so he could scratch it off and arrive at number two on the list: getting stoned.

Nick stood and stretched, crossing his arms behind his head. His open jacket and T-shirt rose, revealing the kind of six-pack you only saw in movies. The kind she and Heather watched late at night after Mom was asleep. Darcy would stare straight at the screen with what must’ve been a goofy grin on her face and shift in her seat, like she was doing now.

“Want to go for a walk?” Nick took her hand, and she sprang to her feet.

Cam waved them on, like when her father had sent her off on her first date.
Have her back by eight, young man.
She could still hear Daddy camping it up.

Holding hands didn’t mean anything, but by the time they’d walked to the end of the beach, Nick’s pulse was heating her palm, and her hand was sweating. The snow on the lake glimmered, perfect and white, unlike the graying slush in town. She thought she’d noticed the thermometer outside chemistry edging above freezing, maybe even hitting forty. But that had been midday, when the sun hit dead-on. That had been when Nick wasn’t watching her.

She dropped Nick’s hand and stepped past the shore’s edge, crunching through the untouched snow. The bottoms of her sneakers slid against the ice, and her heart pulsed in her ears. She ignored the cramps in her feet, how her toes ached with cold.

Nick followed her lead and stepped onto the lake. He paused for a beat as if considering his next move, and then picked her up and spun her through a panoramic view of the lake, the pine trees, the shore. She steadied herself against his chest, realizing the effect his homegrown pot was having on her for the first time. The way it gentled her down so she could see things more clearly. The curved line her sneakers sketched into the snow.

“Darcy,” Nick said. His eyelids lowered; his gaze trained on her mouth, and she licked her lips.

Nick edged his whole body closer, adjusting his legs into a wide-legged stance so he wouldn’t be too tall for her. She tilted her chin. His lips curled into a grin before they touched hers, tentative at first. He pressed harder, and she closed her eyes. Sunlight darted across her eyelids, and standing still, she was sailing across the lake.

Flavors slid off Nick’s tongue like layers of a parfait. She expected the slightly bitter beer, the savory pot, but the last layer came as a surprise: a sweet cinnamon candy. She swallowed. A low growl rose in Nick’s throat and vibrated into her mouth like a warning signal of going too far. With the heels of her hands, she pushed him away.

“Wow. You’re a great kisser. Except for the part where you stopped.” Nick’s face had that soft sleepy look, as if he wasn’t sure they’d really stopped kissing.

Darcy slipped from his arms and trudged farther across the lake. Petal-soft snow slid beneath her sneakers. She couldn’t feel her toes, but the rest of her burned with Nick’s kiss.

“Hey, what’re you doing?” Nick asked.

“Snow angel.” She lowered herself to the ice, lay on her back against the snow. She ignored how the sudden shift in temperature weakened her entire body and fanned her arms and legs. Clouds painted milky swirls across the too-blue sky.

Nick’s face smiled down at her. “What the hell.” He lay beside her, fanned his arms and legs, and then scrambled to his feet. When she started to get up, Nick swept her legs out from under her and cradled her knees over one strong arm. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he ran, carrying her across the ice against his shivering chest.

At the shore, he lowered her onto the ground with more care than she’d expected from him. Her whole face throbbed from laughing. His blue lips leaning in for a frosty kiss didn’t slow the giggles. Not even when he found himself making out with her teeth. Now Nick was laughing, too.

“I was gonna ask you something, but I can’t remember what it was. I need another kiss.”

She cupped his pink cheeks and pressed her lips to his cold mouth.

“Okay,” he said. “I remember. Would you—you’re going to think it’s stupid.”

She couldn’t quite believe his sudden shyness, how innocent he looked soaking wet and shivering. His wet hair made him even more striking. Drops of water glistened at the ends of his dark-blond lashes. She touched his jawline, and a fake tear slid down his cheek. “I’m listening.”

“Would you go to the prom with me?”

She took her time gathering her hair over one shoulder into a controllable bundle, and then squeezed until a torrent of melted snow flooded down her arm. Her scalp tingled. “I don’t know, Nick. When is it?”

“It’s the end of May, I think—I could find out—the paper—” He brushed at the snow caking his arms. “Jeez, I lose everything.”

She put him out of his misery. “I’ll go with you.”

“What?”

“I said, I’ll—”

“You were messing with me.”

“What makes you say that? I wouldn’t mess with you.”

“You’re doing it again.” He liked it, judging by the grin running rampant. He got right in her face, flattening his features. “You talking to me? I said,
Are you talking to me
?”

“Robert De Niro,
Taxi Driver
,” Darcy said. “My dad used to do that.”

“Yeah? Mine too. Scared the shit out of my mother. Let her know what was coming next.” Nick clawed at the snow, as if searching for something he’d lost.

Darcy’s dad didn’t look any more frightening when he tried the classic movie lines out on her than the boy shifting snow through his fingers. Daddy’s impersonation of a deviant taxi driver intimidating a baffled stranger always cracked her up. Her father only scared her when he wasn’t consciously trying to.

There he was again, throwing a shadow over her shoulder. No, it was just Cam come to interrupt her moment of improv identification.

“Got any food at your house? Heather and I are starving.” Cam crouched down behind her, glanced over his shoulder at Heather waiting on the rock. “We’ve got wicked munchies.”

“Are you kidding? We always have food at my house. It’s like part of my mother’s religion.”
Thou shalt not go hungry.
Come to think of it, she was hungry, too. Famished. “Want to come over my house?” she asked Nick.

“Like this?” Nick pointed to his sagging, wet jeans.

“My mom won’t be home yet, and I can put your pants in the dryer. No biggie.” A shiver hunched her shoulders.

Nick nodded and took her hand to help her up. “You look cold,” he said. He wrapped an arm around her, but Darcy slipped from his reach and caught up with Heather. “Hey!” Nick called after Darcy, and a laugh cracked his voice.

Heather swiped at the brush, knocking clumps of snow to the path. “So what happened?”

“We made snow angels.” Darcy smiled, not thinking about the snow, but about Nick’s lips and the sound he made when she kissed him back. The path spilled into the property’s yard, and she twirled, actually twirled, into the open.

“Well, duh. I know that—I have eyes. I mean, did he ask you to the prom?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Heather glared at the cottage, the foliage, the hammock beside her. Not exactly the response Darcy had imagined.

“I know it’s silly, but I don’t know—it could be fun. I love to dance and, hey, we can go dress shopping. You can help me with my hair. And—”

Heather was crying.

Heat flooded Darcy’s face and pulsed at her temples. “What’s wrong? What is it? Is it the thing with Vanessa? I only hang out with her so I can tell you all the stupid things Loudmouth says.” Heather used to hang out with Vanessa, too, until she and Vanessa had a disagreement. Heather had found Vanessa annoying and Vanessa hadn’t agreed.

Heather almost smiled, but she wouldn’t give up an answer.

At Nick’s car, Darcy tried again, although she really wanted to shake Heather till whatever was wrong rattled from her mouth. “Do you want to go, too? I don’t think Stevie has a date yet. Wait, I’m an idiot. It’s Cam, isn’t it? Did something happen? Did he ask you out? Did he not ask you out?” Too bad Cam couldn’t ask Heather to the prom till they were juniors next year.

Heather leaned against the car and retied her sneakers, as if Darcy were totally clueless. “Just forget it, okay?”

No, not okay.
“Whatever.”

“Hey, girls.” Nick sauntered into view, Cam trailing behind. “Darcy tell you the good news yet?” He slipped an arm around Darcy’s waist and drew her to his side. “Darcy’s gonna let me take her to the prom.”

Heather crawled into the backseat, refusing to respond to Nick’s big announcement.

“What’s with her? Did I do something wrong?” Darcy and Nick slid onto the front seats. Nick twisted toward the back. “What did I do?” he asked Heather.

Heather pressed her cheek against the window, and Cam just shrugged.

“Braaar!”
Nick shook his wet head, splattering the windshield. He cranked the heater and checked his hair in the rearview mirror.

“Looks the same as always,” Darcy assured him. How was she ever going to tolerate a boy more high maintenance than she was?

He smirked. “You’re messing with me again. Come here.”

He leaned in and clutched her face, forcing a long kiss right in front of her friends that left more than the taste of sweet cinnamon. A shiver thundered through her chest. The pins-and-needles sensation of thawing nerves pierced Darcy’s toes, and Nick’s kiss burned her tongue, like a fireball candy she’d once held in her mouth on a dare.

Chapter 3

Y
ears before Jack Klein’s once-lucrative teaching requests had dried up due to his reputation for cutting his own classes, he’d taught his student Laura how to analyze a character’s behavior.

Mid-afternoon, and Jack’s tax returns still sat on her desk, and the fridge still awaited restocking. Laura couldn’t help herself. If she wanted to find the motivation behind her real-life husband’s suicide, she’d need to study the hours leading up to his death one more time. The thought weakened her foundation, as though she were sinking into a hole.

Laura wasn’t really trying to torture herself, merely gain closure. She went into the living room and obtained a small measure of stress relief from stirring the woodstove’s coals and squeezing three thick logs through the side door. She opened the flue and watched the pyramid catch fire.

Jack had wanted ice cream, and she’d run out to Yogi’s to buy a pint. Resurrecting the memory stirred up the sight of her Jack lounging in bed all tousled and sexy, and the coarse texture of his hair beneath her fingertips. Laura inhaled, and then huffed an exhalation. She required a lot more than refreshing the fire to release her angst. Arms clasped behind her back, she bent at the waist and raised her arms until her shoulder blades opened.

He’d asked for Chunky Monkey, their favorite flavor since their first date. He’d wanted to start over, to go back to a time when he wasn’t sick. And, the thing was, he’d seemed so happy, in a balanced sort of way . . .

She tossed on her fleece, laced up her duck boots, and stepped out to the yard. At the shed, she slid the maul ax from its shelf and headed for the woodpile. From beneath the green tarp, she drew a sixteen-inch log and placed her victim dead center on the splitting block. Every single time Jack had messed around with his medication, taking too little lithium or going off it completely, he’d lost control. She raised the maul, set her focus on the log, and released all her energy into the wood, splitting off a satisfying chunk.

He was sick. He couldn’t take it anymore. The rapid cycling—

Jack would’ve told her, the most obvious reasons for a character’s action were usually wrong, excuses masquerading as explanation.

He’d stayed on his prescription that last week, choosing to follow through with a plan he’d hatched when the sun was setting on his mood.

Jack had asked her to get him Chunky Monkey ice cream, and the tightness in his voice had straightened her spine. Purse on her shoulder, hand clutching her keys, Laura had paused at the edge of their bed. And he’d kissed her. Dear God, he’d kissed her. He’d studied her face, scrambled to her side of the bed, and he’d kissed her.

He wasn’t sick when he’d killed himself. He’d made a rational decision, and then did whatever was necessary to carry it out. He knew she was looking for a sure sign of his mental health, so he gave it to her.

Jack had used her.

She squinted through the glaring sun and rolled her shoulders.
Damn you, Jack!
She gave herself a split second to aim, then swung the maul and nailed the sucker.
Whack!

“Man!”

She whirled around, ax guarding her chest, and found a stranger standing a few feet away from her, grinning as if he’d witnessed the ninth wonder of the world. She sized him up. Young, somewhere in the middle of his twenties, and fit, too, judging by the shape he took beneath a gray-and-white wool sweater. But she had the home turf advantage. The stranger was on her property, and she had a sharp-edged maul she wasn’t afraid to use. She could take him.

The stranger raised his hand and produced not a weapon, but a stack of papers he offered to her. “Elle said you’d be home.”

“Elle?” Laura laid the ax down beside her, hands shaking from the adrenaline rush of her body preparing for battle. She took the papers from his hands and flipped through the thick pile—completed rental application, verification of employment, credit check. The stack even included a personal note from Beth at Hometown Real Estate stating that she found no record of court proceedings against the applicant. So Elle had found herself an accomplice. Or, more likely, Elle had left Beth in the dark, too, claiming she was doing Laura a favor by helping to rent out Jack’s studio.

“Aidan Walsh.” The man offered his hand and left it between them while she juggled the paperwork.

Oh, okay. Elle’s friend from her spinning class. Not at all how Laura had pictured him. She’d imagined someone who’d recently experienced a reversal of fortune, a middle-aged man with a face like an English bloodhound. This young guy was almost too good-looking. “Laura Klein.”

He kept hold of her hand longer than necessary, maintaining that irritating grin, as if he knew something deliciously gossipy about her. Well, join the club.

“What a surprise.” She’d told Elle she’d talk to her friend. She didn’t expect a prescreened tenant, hadn’t even allowed the idea of renting out Jack’s studio to fully form. Now she’d better think fast. She glanced down at the first page of the application and noted that someone—either Elle or Beth—had highlighted eight hundred dollars, so Laura couldn’t miss it.

“Sorry about that, surprising you,” he said. “I don’t usually sneak up on women splitting wood.”

“Good to know.” The nearest Laundromat was forty-five minutes away in Milford. A tenant would have to use the laundry room off the kitchen, right in the middle of her family’s personal space. She must be nuts even considering this. Still, eight hundred dollars.

“Let me ask you something.” Heat from splitting wood thrummed down her arms, but a subtle chill laced her spine. “What exactly did Elle tell you about the apartment?”

His grin faded, and he shifted in place. “I’m very sorry about your husband’s death.”

At least Elle had the common sense to offer up the truth. “And you’re all right with that?” Plain logic hit hard. This guy might be the only person in all of the Monadnock Region willing to rent out the studio where her husband had killed himself.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”

The idea of death in general and a self-inflicted death in particular not bothering this man cast him into a tiny minority. Most people did their best to shield themselves from gruesome reality, covering their eyes like kids at a horror flick.
Tell me when the scary part’s over.
This guy didn’t even flinch. Perhaps, like her, he didn’t believe in ghosts. Memories were enough of a challenge. “Right this way then.”

The stranger, Aidan Walsh, followed her across the snowy yard, keeping a respectable distance until they came to the mudroom. Laura unlaced her boots and peeled off her fleece. She was about to ask him to take his shoes off, but he beat her to it. He set a pair of broken-in work boots on the rubber mat. What the heck was his story? She’d noticed Memorial Hospital listed on his application but had missed his occupation. Maybe he was a young intern, needing a place to crash in between graveyard shifts. That would make sense.

She turned the skeleton key and assisted the studio door with her hip, then glanced over her shoulder and found herself staring into Aidan’s dark brown eyes.

For her, Jack’s studio was like a memorial. But to what? Jack giving up? Maybe if she disassembled Jack’s studio, her family could move past the dark side of Jack’s history. Renting out the studio could provide both financial support and an emotionally cathartic spring cleaning.

A sense of synergy flowed into her body as natural as the day’s first wide-awake breath. While Maggie would explain this everyday miracle as descending from the universe itself, Laura simply attributed her luck to the intensity of Elle’s love for her coupled with especially good timing. “I could empty it out pretty fast, if you need to move in right away.”

A few minutes ago, renting out the studio as a one-bedroom apartment wasn’t even a wisp of a thought in her mind. Now she was inviting a strange man into her home. Elle and Beth had screened him for her, but so what? If he were an especially clever serial killer, he wouldn’t even have a police record, just a trail of unexplained murders dotting every town he’d ever graced.

Laura waited by the desk, giving Aidan the opportunity to discover the quirky apartment on his own, beginning at the far reaches of the studio and working his way backward. She could hear him open and shut the rarely used outside door leading to the side yard. He tried the water in the small but ornately tiled bathroom, checked the cabinets in the galley kitchen, and then climbed up into the loft overlooking Jack’s office space.

The gate at the front of the loft creaked open, and he climbed down the recycled library ladder, whistling during descent, as if each wrung inspired a unique note. “Really nice. I even like the paint color. Reminds me of pumpkin pie.”

“I think so, too.” Sometimes, just gazing at the walls inspired her to whip up the dessert, even in mid-July.

Aidan made his way over to Jack’s computer desk and studied the collage of black-and-white family photos. “These are your kids? Elle told me you had a son and a daughter, but I imagined them as toddlers. You must’ve been a child bride.”

Was he trying to butter up his potential landlady? She’d given up associating herself with the word
young
a long time ago. Whenever she looked into a mirror, she half expected to see an elderly woman staring back through timeworn skin. Fortunately, the effects of stress weren’t quite so harsh.

“Yes, I was a youngster.” She left it out there, couldn’t resist waiting until he squirmed a little, no doubt visualizing her barefoot and married to her first cousin at age thirteen. She even placed a hand on his arm. Laura didn’t usually tease strangers, but the look on his face was too priceless to give up.

“I was eighteen, fully legal.” Laura slid her hand from his arm. She didn’t usually
touch
strangers, either.

“Uh, okay. You got me.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, tried finding a place to rest his gaze. “So anyway.”

What was wrong with her? Surely, she was scaring the poor guy away along with his rent money. The prospect of eight hundred much-needed dollars a month must’ve sent her over the edge of propriety, setting her in the camp of overeager. “Are you interested?”

He smiled, raising a curve to the left of his mouth.

“In the apartment.” She couldn’t let him think she was flirting, even for a second. She did not flirt. “I mean it’s a large space, but no laundry room. We’d have to share mine off the kitchen. I’d need to chart a schedule, do an every other day thing.”

Relax, Laura. It’s only laundry.
She hardly recognized the sound of her voice, the singsong cadence. She was stumbling about verbally, vacillating, working out her decision in public. The last time she’d babbled in front of a strange man, she was a college freshman sitting in the front row of Jack’s Creative Writing 101 class, biding her time until she could get him alone. All her logic had gone out the window, every ounce of common sense discarded as quickly as she could shed her clothes in Jack’s campus office. She’d just had to have him.

Aidan cocked his head, stared at her as if she were a 3-D puzzle. “I’m used to a separate laundry room. You’d only have to tolerate me, say, once a week. I’m not a clothes kind of guy.”

What was he then? A nudist?

Great, so now
she’d
need to decide
and
erase the pulse-quickening thought of him naked. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee or tea?” Sipping a cup of joe would give her time to go through the application more thoroughly and bring up any questions that came to mind.

“Coffee’d be great.”

She led him into the kitchen and motioned to a ladder-back chair pushed away from the table, as though waiting in readiness. She flipped on the filtered water, left the carafe in the sink, and leaned against the counter.

“I’m having a little trouble switching back and forth between day and night shifts,” he said. “Not exactly looking forward to rotations and an additional thirty hours a week, but I’ll live.”

“Intern?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“Not an intern?”

“Guess again.”

She poured the filtered water into the coffeemaker, scooped grounds into the filter basket, and flipped the switch. “I don’t have to guess.” She went for the application package she’d left on the kitchen table, sat down across from him, and skimmed her finger down his verification of employment.
Emergency medical resident, second year.
That set Aidan at about twenty-eight, a bit older than she’d guessed. Something about this guy beggared her mind. Rugged male labor EM resident seeks apartment in home of local widow. There was a piece missing here, probably several. “What brought you to emergency medicine?” Laura asked.

“Ever since I was thirteen years old, I’ve wanted to work in the ER, almost as much as I wanted to become a professional baseball player,” he said. “Figured I had a better chance as a doctor.”

The blips from the coffeemaker gurgled to a stop. “Just a sec.” She jumped up, poured two mugs of coffee, plunked them on the table along with cream and sugar, and then returned to the exact sitting position she’d vacated.

The more this guy talked, the more questions he brought up. At thirteen, most boys were learning about the basics of adolescent body changes, not pondering a career as specific as an emergency room doctor. “I don’t usually speak for my thirteen-year-old son, but I’m positive he has no interest in emergency medicine. So what happened?”

“What happened?” he said. Surely, the guy was playacting, noticing her eagerness and delaying story gratification.

She rested her chin in her hands and inched forward. “What happened to make you interested in emergency medicine?”

“Oh, that.” He held up his index finger, dug in his back pocket, and produced a worn leather wallet. He unfolded a newspaper clipping and smoothed it flat before sliding it across the table.