Keep You (11 page)

             
It was his least favorite place on earth.

             
“It’s not much,” he said, handing her the present, “but I thought you might like it.”

             
Her trembling hands with their thin, yellowed nails weren’t strong enough to tear through the tape, so he helped her. The wide smile that pulled at the puckered flesh of her face made him want to glance away. “Oh,” she said in a happy, breathless whisper as she unfolded the indigo and violet striped silk scarf across the sheets of her bed. “It’s lovely. Just lovely.”

             
Lovely as she had once been. Tam’s eyes went to the wheeled, metal nightstand on the far side of the bed and the single framed photo she kept there. He was three in the picture, a chubby toddler in a playground swing. Melinda stood behind him, leaning down so her head was above his, her hands on the swing’s chain, her brilliant mane of black hair caught in frozen motion as it swirled around them both in the breeze. Her face was a smooth, pink-cheeked oval the color of cream off the top of a latte, her eyes sapphires framed by black lashes. She was smiling, love pouring out of the image, her adoration for her child like a tangible thing. If he reached out, he would be able to touch it.

             
Tam looked at his mother now, fleshless and failing, and felt his heart get squeezed. He’d always wanted to be angry with her, to blame her for what she’d let Hank do to her all those years. He’d wanted to blame her internal weakness as the source of the breast cancer that had metastasized.

             
But she was his mother and she loved him. And it was his job, as the stronger one, to take care of her where nature and spirit had failed.

             
“You like it?” he asked.

             
She reached with one bony hand to stroke his hair, her touch like that of a ghost brushing against him. “I love it.” She smiled, her eyes fixated on his face. “You’re such a sweet boy, Tameron. Such a
good
boy.” She pulled her hand away and let it fall in her lap. Fat tears spilled over the papery edges of her eyelids and tracked down the grooves in her face. “I’m going to miss you so much while you’re away.”

             
“I know.” He reached for her hand, knowing she wanted it to be held but felt too weak to be the one to reach. He thought her fingers might crumble to dust in his palm. “It’s only for a week, though. You can just pretend I’m working late.”

             
She nodded and offered a brave smile. “Ireland will be beautiful.” Her eyes retracted, became distant, like she was seeing things that existed on another plane. “I always wanted to go there. I want to stay in a stone cottage, with a white fence. A garden full of wildflowers.” She blinked. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

             
“Yes it would, Mom.”

             
Melinda drew in a deep, rattling breath and then seemed to fold in on herself as she exhaled. “I’m very tired.” A frown puckered her face. “I think maybe I should rest a bit.”

             
Tam stood and fluffed her pillows, helped her ease back against them. He offered her a drink of water from a little plastic cup with a straw and drew the sheer drapes shut for her. By the time he pressed a kiss to the silk scarf that covered her forehead, her eyes were shut, seemingly sunken in her skull, and her breathing had evened out into a shallow rhythm.

             
He wondered if she’d still be alive when he came home from Ireland.

12

Then

              Jo always carried a big, shapeless leather knapsack of a purse, practicality over fashion, but Jessica had insisted it wasn’t the appropriate bag to take to prom. She’d let her borrow a tiny, beaded silver egg-shaped bag on a delicate silver chain. Jo fumbled with its little ball clasp in the dark interior of the cab, blinking through a fine sheen of tears that wouldn’t seem to go away.

             
“Twenty-six-seventy,” the cabbie reminded her again.

             
“Damn,” she swore under her breath, clammy fingers grappling with the bag. “I’m trying,” she told him and heard her voice squeak with displaced anxiety and fear. Her stomach was in knots, her esophagus felt full of razorblades with the effort it was taking not to cry.

             
Fucking prom. Fucking Nick Schaffer. Fucking peer pressure. Fucking friends.

             
The purse came open with a pop and she peeled two twenties from the little roll of cash she’d brought along.
Just in case
, her mother had told her. Beth had assumed she and the girls might rack up a big room service bill. She hadn’t thought the
just in case
might encompass a cab ride.

             
“Keep the change,” she snapped, cramming the bills through the designated slot in the Plexiglas seat divider. She gathered up the skirt of her gown in one hand and the purse in the other before flinging the door handle and tumbling out into the driving rain.

             
The storm that had threatened all evening had let loose a half a mile from the Galleria, like someone had unzipped the sky and all its clouds had come plummeting to the earth’s surface. It was a cold, shocking, almost-solid wall of water she streaked through up Walt’s driveway. The blowing rain was more solid than any fog as it swirled beneath the iron lamppost at the corner of the front sidewalk. Its light painted the puddles silver, which was what she noticed when she slipped in one, fell off her shoe, twisted her ankle and went to her knees in the water.

             
“Shit!” she hissed through her teeth. The concrete bit into the skin of her knees and sent a rattling jolt all the way up to the top of her skull. The blast of pain was too intense to ignore and she remained kneeling in the puddle, the rain sluicing over her, matting her hair to her head, plastering her filmy blue dress to her goose-bump covered body.

             
Jo couldn’t believe this was happening to her. In the cab, she’d ridden with her knuckles pressed to her lips, fighting the nausea that came with the replay of the night’s events that kept running in a sick loop inside her head.

             
Nick Schaffer had been asking her out for weeks, dropping compliments during her microbiology class, trying to catch her eye across the crowded cafeteria. He was very blonde, very athletic, very fond of inappropriate jokes in the middle of class that earned him detention and, according to her friend Megan, a very good catch. Jo hadn’t put much thought into his advances until she’d bumped into Tam and some redheaded bitch at the grocery store one afternoon. Tam had tried to play it off casually later, telling her she was more mature than to be upset over whoever he was dating. “You should be dating too, you know,” he’d told her, voice laced with venom, like he was put out with her adoration.

             
So, fine. She would date. She would go out and live life and make out with boys who weren’t Tam on dark couches. She would take Nick up on his offer. She would go to prom with him and agree to meet him in his hotel room after the dance.

             
But when Nick whispered sweet nothings in her ear, that was just what she felt: nothing. No butterflies, no excitement, no forbidden tingle of delight.

             
In a small part of her brain, she was grateful for the driving rainstorm. Maybe it would wash away the phantom feel of his clammy hands on her. Take away the beer-flavored kisses he’d slobbered all over her face.

             
When she could stand, she pushed shakily to her feet and no longer rushed to the door, but picked her careful way between the puddles up to the relative shelter of the front stoop. She’d been too mortified to call home and tell her mother what had happened, and hadn’t wanted to take a cab all the way back to Marietta, but Walt and Gwen and their boys lived close, so it was to her big brother that she’d run. They lived in a brick and siding two-story in a new subdivision, the yards small, the trees still saplings. Gwen had been busy planting the pine straw beds on either side of the walk and the rain pattered down against snapdragons that were loaded with water and dipping like drunks on their stalks.

             
It was after one in the morning, but she could see a light on in the kitchen through the sidelights on either side of the door. She pushed her sopping hair back off her face, took a deep breath and rang the bell. Footsteps thumped across the hardwood and a shadow came toward her down the front hall.

             
“I’m so sorry,” she said as the door swung open, feeling like her voice might crack. “I…”

             
The man in gray sweatpants and a white tank top who appeared in the threshold was not her brother, his hair a messy nest of black spikes, his eyes a vivid blue.

             
“Tam!”

             
He looked just as shocked to see her. “Joey?” Concern etched his features. “What are you doing? Shit, you’re soaking – come in.” He cracked the door wide and she came into the house like a landed mermaid, every part of her dripping down onto the pretty floral rug in the foyer.

             
“What are you doing here?” he repeated as he shut and locked the door. “Where’s your car, where…” She watched his eyes move over her and wanted to crawl under a rock. He was a mixture of shock and worry she hadn’t ever seen before.

             
“Is Walt home?” she asked instead of answering any of his questions.

             
“No.” His eyes continued to move up and down her bedraggled prom dress, his hands held up at his sides like he was trying to figure out how to help her. “They all went to Gwen’s brother’s kid’s christening or some kinda shit. I’m house sitting.”

             
She had a fleeting thought that without any pets of any kind, there was nothing at Walt’s house that needed sitting, but that was pushed aside by the embarrassment and sheer joy of seeing him that were tumbling over one another in their haste to be felt. “Oh,” she said stupidly, blinking against the rivers of water pouring out of her hair and down her face.

             
Tam regarded her a long moment, frowning. “Why don’t you go take a shower, find some clothes, and then you can tell me what happened.”

**

              Mom was in the hospital: sedated, a cast encasing her left arm, full of pain meds and being closely monitored because it wasn’t enough that she was battling breast cancer – she’d battled her ex-husband too. She’d served him with papers finally, at Tam’s urging. And he’d arrived home at six that morning, in from the night shift, ready to begin his week off in his two-weeks-on-one-week-off rotation, to find Melinda a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor. Both her blue eyes ringed with purple bruises. Her arm bent the wrong way. And through her mumbled tears, she’d defended Hank.

The hospital wanted to keep her overnight to monitor her concussion. Tam had needed to find some solace somewhere that wasn’t at her bedside because looking at her was making him want to murder his father.

He hadn’t come to Walt’s empty house because he wanted to see Jo. No, her arrival on the front step looking like some washed-up sea nymph had been a shock, and not a good one.

Tam sat at one of the barstools around the butcher block island in Walt and Gwen’s kitchen, nursing a whiskey rocks, the only sounds those of the shifting ice cubes in his glass, the rain on the roof, and the steady drumming of his bare foot against the bottom rung of the stool.

He’d seen Jo upset before, but never like this, never with saucer-wide, startled doe’s eyes and an ashen face. Whatever had happened to her, it wasn’t pretty. He was already strung-out over Melinda; running the possibilities of Jo through his mind was threatening to unravel him.

Or maybe that was just his third drink doing the thinking for him.
Whatever.

A soft
thump
issued from overhead as the water was shut off. Ten minutes later, Jo’s small, bare feet came padding down the staircase and through the living room until she appeared in the threshold of the kitchen. She’d put on a pair of black yoga pants that had to be Gwen’s and Walt’s gray UGA t-shirt. He could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her face was scrubbed clean, her skin looking blanched, her blue-green eyes luminous and unsure. She’d made a go at drying her hair, but it was still damp and curling at the ends. She propped a shoulder in the doorway, folded her arms and stared at him a moment.

Tam threw back the last of his drink. “Better?”

Her nod was slow in coming and not convinced.

“I thought tonight was prom,” he prodded.

“It was.” Her eyes dropped to the floor, her lower lip quivered.

Panic was starting to build, sure and swift, and he needed some answers. Any little piece of info that would allay his fears that something really terrible had happened
to her. He heard the bite in his voice and couldn’t seem to hold it back. “Joey, what’s
wrong
?”