Saving Ben (19 page)

The next morning when Blessy got to work, she summoned my parents into my father’s study where they stayed for more than an hour. Placing a glass against the wood-paneled door, I tried to hear what they were saying, but the only thing I could make out was that Blessy was the one who was doing all the talking. Whatever she told them, however detailed her account was of the happenings at home in their absence, she got through to them. They came out of that meeting stunned, with cloudy eyes and trembling hands. My father left right away for a last-minute lunch meeting at the Commonwealth Club while my mother wandered around the house in a semi-state of delirium, looking at Ben and me as though she recognized us but couldn’t quite place us. Late in the afternoon, I discovered her in the family room surrounded by old photo albums, either searching for the years she’d lost or reacquainting herself with the children she’d forgotten.

Mom went to bed that night in a comatose state and woke up the next morning a new person. Or an old person, really—the mother I remembered before I went to kindergarten. She made blueberry pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast, and sat with us while we ate.

“I owe both of you an apology,” she said, a real tear trickling down her cheek. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but the biggest one was assuming that the two of you would come to me when you had a problem and needed guidance. When you never did, I assumed everything was fine.” She rose from the table and searched in the junk drawer for a pocket-size pack of tissues, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “If you’ll let me, I’d like to try and make it up to you.”

Ben and I both shrugged, unable to make sense of our mother’s overnight transformation.

“According to my calendar, you still have a couple of weeks before you head back to school. Do you think we can manage a long weekend at the river? Just the four of us.”

It took some juggling and compromising but we finally agreed on four days and three nights during the third weekend in August. It was the only vacation Ben and I had taken all summer, and once the plans were made, we were excited at the prospect of a change of scenery and a break from the demands of our jobs. As soon as we got to the river on Thursday afternoon, we jumped in the boat and sped across the creek to the Turners’.

I almost didn’t recognize Mrs. Turner when she answered the door. The plump, rosy-cheeked woman I’d always known had grown old over the summer. Her hair hung in gray limp strands around her face; and even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon, she was wearing an old flannel robe with faded blue flowers, the once-white background now yellowed with age. When she pulled the robe tighter around her, I noticed her waist was thinner, nearly three dress sizes if I had to guess.

“Ben, Katherine,” she said, holding the door open a little wider. “It’s so nice to see you. We’ve missed you this summer.”

Ben and I took turns leaning in to kiss her cheek, apologizing for not getting down to see her sooner.

“Is George home?” I asked.

“No, dear, he’s out of town.” She stepped onto the porch and spread her arms wide. “There’s a nice breeze today. Would you like to join me on the porch for a glass of lemonade?”

Ben and I nodded our heads with enthusiasm. Mrs. Turner made the best homemade lemonade in the Northern Neck—freshly squeezed with a mountain of sugar and real floating lemon slices—and she never served it without her oatmeal raisin cookies.

She smiled. “Well then, why don’t you make yourselves at home out front on the porch and I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

We wandered around the side of the house to the porch where we could see up and down the creek for a mile in each direction. We waited in silence, side by side in metal rocking chairs, a thousand memories on our minds. Curling up in their hammock and listening to the rain ping against the porche’s tin roof was once my favorite lazy-day pastime.

Mrs. Turner joined us fifteen minutes later, dressed in a pair of white shorts and pale pink top with her hair pulled back in a clip at the nape of her neck.

“How long will George be gone?” Ben asked her.

“At least another week, possibly two.” She lifted the crystal pitcher from her tray and poured three glasses of lemonade. “I’m hesitant to tell you this, but I think George would want you to know. His father and I . . . well . . . we had to send him away for professional help. He’s having a hard time dealing with Abigail’s death.”

I looked over at Ben, whose face was pinched in anguish. All summer long we’d been focused on our own problems—Ben with Emma and me with Ben—while our good friend was suffering. “That explains why he’s been ignoring our calls,” I said.

Mrs. Turner nodded. “He’s not allowed to have his phone.”

“I’m so sorry we didn’t try harder to get in touch,” I said, close to tears. “We should’ve realized things were bad for him.”

Mrs. Turner stirred her lemonade with her finger and stared into her glass, as if it were a crystal ball with the answers she needed to put her family back together again. “There’s nothing anyone could’ve done. He’s just so angry, and his drinking got way out of control.”

I could feel Ben’s eyes on me, and I knew he was thinking about his own alcohol abuse and anger management problem.

Mrs. Turner looked away from us and stared across the water at a group of kids sailing their Sunfish back and forth across the creek. “It’s so hard for him to have to see those girls around town all the time,” she mumbled, more to herself than to us.

Ben and I exchanged a knowing look. These
girls
were surely the same bitches George had been talking about the night before Abigail’s funeral.

“Mrs. Turner,” Ben started in a gentle voice. “Katherine and I don’t really know that much about Abigail’s problems, only that they began after she broke her jaw.”

“It would really help us to hear more about what she went through,” I added.

Mrs. Turner stared first at me and then at Ben before settling back in her chair. She let out a deep sigh. “I’d just assumed George had told you everything. My daughter’s problems actually started a couple of years before the accident with her jaw. We didn’t know it at the time, but she was being bullied. There were four girls, the same ones she’d known since kindergarten, making her life a living hell. They called her Abs Big Butt because of her weight.”

“That’s just cruel. What grade did all this happen in?” Ben asked.

Expert that I am on the behavior of adolescent girls, I answered for Mrs. Turner. “In middle school, right, Mrs. Turner? When girls are at their meanest.”

Mrs. Turner nodded. “But these girls got even nastier as they got older. But I’m getting ahead of myself,” she said, reaching for her glass of lemonade. “She lost a lot of weight . . . what with her jaw wired shut and all. Her new figure gave Abigail a confidence she’d never known before. She was so proud of that first bikini. I remember it well—red with little white polka dots.”

Mrs. Turner set her lemonade down and picked a daisy from the bouquet in the center of the coffee table, plucking the petals off one by one. When all the petals were gone, she tied the stem in a knot and tossed it over the side of the porch. “The same girls who’d bullied her wanted to be her friend,” she continued. “For Abigail, it was like being the new girl in their grade. Boys were calling and texting her all the time. It didn’t take Abigail long, though, maybe a month or two, before she realized she didn’t belong in their group. They were drinking and smoking marijuana, and Abigail wasn’t ready for any of that. She wanted out almost as soon as she got in.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Mm-hmm. These girls were not the type to be ignored.” Mrs. Turner pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe her tears. “As you know, Abigail was a very private girl. She never told us about the torture she endured, even when she started seeing her psychiatrist and was going for weekly weigh-ins at the pediatrician’s office. I’ve asked myself time and again why wouldn’t she have confided in us?”

“Pride,” Ben answered.

“That’s exactly what the doctors said, Ben.” She reached over and squeezed his hand. “Knowing how close you are with your sister, I’m sure you can imagine the anger George feels toward these girls.”

“Did George know these girls before?” I asked.

“Yes. Since preschool. One of the girls’ brothers is actually a close friend of George’s. He was at their house the night he—” Her voice caught on a sob, preventing her from continuing.

I gave her a moment to compose herself and then asked, “The night he what, Mrs. Turner?”

She stood and wandered over to the porch railing. “The night he punched the maple tree in our front yard and broke several bones in his hand. Only the good Lord knows what that girl said to set him off so.”

Ben and I joined her at the railing. And for a long time, we watched the activity on the creek in silence, each lost in our own thoughts of Abby and George.

We left Mrs. Turner a little while later with our well-intentioned promises to come and visit her often. Instead of going home, we took the boat out into the river. We rode all the way to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and then back again to Urbana.

As much as I’d been trying to get my mind around it, my heart had refused to accept Abby’s death. It was only now that I was beginning to understand she wasn’t just off at Camp Mont Shenandoah or visiting her favorite cousin in Charleston. She wouldn’t be coming home tomorrow, or even next week. I would never see her kind eyes again or watch the freckles spread across her nose when she smiled. From now on, if I wanted to connect with her, I’d have to come out here, in the river, where the sun glistened like diamonds across the water.

My heart ached for George and all he was going through. Learning to live without his sister was one thing, but having to face the girls who were indirectly responsible for her death was another matter. In the small community where the Turners lived, George no doubt frequently encountered those girls at parties or at the gas station or out in the boat on the weekends. And every time he saw them, he would have to face the brutal reality of Yabba’s death all over again.

Why would those girls have chosen someone as kind and humble as Abby to destroy?

Fuck those bitches.

I leapt off the end of the porch and sprinted across the lawn to the pool, managing to catch up and then bypassed Ben. I stripped down to my bathing suit and dove into the water before he even reached the gate.

“Be sure to toss me one of those floats when you have them ready,” I yelled at him, backstroking the length of the pool. “And don’t forget to turn on the pool lights.”

We floated on our rafts under the glow of the full moon. The tree frogs croaked and the crickets chirped, competing every now and then with the putt-putt of an outboard motor as it made it’s way past our property. Too much time had passed since I’d spent such an evening at the river. It was as lovely as it was bittersweet.

“Is it just me or is it impossible to be here and not think of Yabba?”

Ben rolled over onto his stomach, but when his float started to sink, he flipped back over again. “It would be easier for us to deal with her death if we lived down here all the time, but since we don’t face the things that remind us of her on a daily basis, it’ll take us longer to sort through our grief.”

“It seems like all I’ve done this summer is think about her, but it’s ten times worse being here now. Her death is so fresh, like it happened yesterday instead of four months ago.”

“It sucks, doesn’t it?” Ben climbed out of the pool. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He grabbed a couple of towels out of the pool house, then tossed one on a nearby lounge chair for me and wrapped the other one around his waist. He snuck around the front of the house and down the hill toward the tackle room, returning a minute later with an armload of beers.

“Well, aren’t you the boss?” I said, paddling over to the side of the pool nearest him.

He popped the top off two beers and handed one to me. “Cheers,” he said, holding his bottle out to mine.

I tapped his bottle once and then again. “To new beginnings.”

Ben set his bottle down on the edge of the pool and cannonballed into the water. He swam back over to the side next to me. “George has every right to be pissed off at those girls for what they did to Yabba, but at least George had the sense to hit a tree instead of one of them. I have no excuse for what I did to you, Kitty, only that I let my anger get the best of me because of the drugs. I reached for whatever I could find to make me feel better, to help me forget. I wanted to be numb, to exist on planet oblivion. Alcohol was effective for a while, but then I needed something more, something stronger. And it snowballed from there.”

“I understand, Ben, and I admire how hard you’ve worked to make amends and get your life back on-track.”

He hung his head. “If you want to know the truth, I’m scared to death of what’s going to happen when I go back to school.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, bracing myself. In order for Ben and me to finally put everything behind us and start fresh, we needed to talk about Emma. Only I wasn’t ready for it yet. Our new bond was way too fragile.