Sleeping in Eden (30 page)

The early snow had melted and the day of the championship was cold but not unbearable. Meg's breath came in short bursts anyway, as if the temperature was well below zero and it caused her physical pain to inhale. She told herself that it was because she didn't want the football league to end, and she tried valiantly to keep her head in the game. But though she strived to focus on leading her team to victory, the Pigskin Barbies won by a touchdown. Then there were screams and hugs and chaotic piles of girls on the field as they rejoiced in the weeks of their self-made glory. Some girls even cried, and Meg didn't begrudge them their tears. She just hugged them harder and smiled wide to make up for their tear-streaked faces when someone from the sidelines shouted, “Say cheese!”

It was all much, much more than she had ever dared to hope or expect when she had walked into Mrs. Casey's office months ago. Meg should have reveled in the success, taken a few moments to relish the sights and sounds around her, to enjoy the triumph of the GFL that had, in a few short months, become iconic in Sutton. But her heart was already over the berm at
the end of the field, she saw herself holding Dylan for what she feared would be the last time. After all, it wasn't like he could just start coming over to her house or pick her up after dark to take a long drive down a deserted road. It wasn't like she could break up with Jess and let Dylan make an honest woman out of her, so to speak. Dylan had made that perfectly clear.

Meg stayed on the field, pasting a grin on her face for countless photographs and shaking hands when the girls wanted to introduce her to their parents, until the last stragglers found their way to the parking lot. Then she picked up the football that all the girls had signed with a permanent marker She crossed the field with a strange hollowness in her gut, a sense of foreboding that made her petulant and short-tempered as she approached Dylan's shadow against one of the naked trees.

“You were awesome,” he said when she was close enough to hear the low rumble of his voice.

“We lost.”

“Doesn't matter.”

She shrugged to show him that it didn't matter to her either.

Dylan's gaze shifted beyond her, and she saw his eyes narrow as he tried to make out the parking lot. It was already too dark to see across the expanse of field. “I'll miss watching you,” he told her, seemingly buoyed by the fact that they were alone.

“Whatever.” Meg broke away from the line of trees and started down the far side of the small hill in the direction of Dylan's waiting truck.

“Hey,” he soothed her, snaking an arm around her shoulders and giving her a little squeeze. “What's up with you?”

“This is wrong.”

“The end of your infamous Girls' Football League?”

Meg squinted at him in the descending darkness and saw that he knew exactly what she was talking about. She spelled it out anyway. “Us.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“What do you mean?” Meg asked, stepping out of his one-armed embrace.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? You're the one who said this is wrong.”

She bit her lip. “Wrong because I'm still supposedly dating Jess? Or wrong because . . .” She couldn't finish. Or maybe she didn't want to. It was too hard to admit that what he was playing at she had hoped was for real. Kind of like the Girls' Football League. “Forget it.”

Some of the tenderness that Dylan had exhibited the first night in his truck had disappeared with the advent of their less than conventional friendship, and he gave her a playful shove. Meg knew there were terms for this sort of thing, this thing that they were—Friends With Benefits, FTMO, Friends That Make-Out—and they all sickened her to the point of actual, stomach-clenching nausea. When Dylan leaped in front of her and spun her off her feet with a laugh, Meg gritted her teeth and pushed him away.

“What?” Dylan looked surprised, maybe a little hurt.

“This is wrong.”

“You already said that.”

“It's not . . .” She fumbled, trying to encompass everything she felt in one perfect word, something that would fall from her lips like a bomb and explode with meaning at his feet. “It's not honest,” she managed.

“So tell Jess. Or stop seeing me.”

But Dylan had missed the point entirely. It was true that she wasn't being honest with Jess—his phone calls were becoming increasingly uncomfortable for her, and it felt wrong to wear his ring, even though she didn't dare take it off any longer than the span of her football games. And yet she was more concerned about being honest with herself. She hated the lies that she was telling herself: That everything was okay. That Dylan's kisses were meaningless. Fun. A diversion, like the GFL and her entire ruse of an autumn.

“What do you want, Meg?” Dylan demanded, but his eyes were wide and dark and, she imagined, sad.

She opened her mouth and closed it, trying to come up with a way to explain all that she felt and the hurt of having him in bursts. But in the end, she didn't know what to say to him.

They got into the truck in silence, and she didn't slide across the seat to hold him like she usually did. He turned the key and revved the engine just a little higher than necessary, then drove her home without another glance, without a single remark to ease the tension between them, though the air was filled with all the thoughts they refused to voice.

When he pulled into the driveway, Meg sat in the truck as if in a trance, her mind swirling with things unsaid, years' worth of confessions, and what felt like a lifetime of emotion that she had pressed deep and tried to ignore. Now she pictured herself pushing it all back, using her hands to force it down and down, into the dark places that had healed when Dylan's kiss loosed the chains and set every unspoken hope free. But the sea of emotion had grown in the short weeks of their so-called affair, and she knew their furtive romance was the sort of quiet crime that could leave a graveyard of broken hearts in its wake. Her palms overflowed with the breadth of it all. It spilled between her fingers and trickled down over the seat where she had believed, for a moment at least, that everything could change. Didn't he feel it?

But Dylan must not have felt it. He must not have known what it meant to Meg to leave him like she did, wordlessly, without a kiss to ease the parting or even one last touch. He didn't even say good-bye, and neither did she.

L
ucas spent the morning unhinged, blowing in the wind, as if one of the screws that held him together had finally slipped loose. He felt like that more and more these days: undone; falling apart in places that he wondered if he would be able to fix. He had been wrong about so many things. It was disconcerting.

Thoughts of Angela and the ring underscored every moment of the long hours before his lunch break. Had he done the right thing? It was the question that seemed set on continuous play in the sound track of his life. Always there, always demanding more than he was able to give.

“Do the right thing,” Lucas's father had said, repeating his own personal mantra as if it was enough to keep his son on the straight and narrow. And Lucas did as he was told. He lived life clean and simple, trying to keep people and circumstances in careful order within the world that he so painstakingly constructed around himself. Jenna was an aberration. So was Angela, the ring, his fixation on the woman in the barn. Was it a fixation? An obsession? Or had he, like always, just hoped to do the right thing?

When lunchtime finally rolled around, Lucas locked himself in his office and riffled through his notes about the missing women. Their names slipped beneath his fingers as he fanned the pages, their stories blurred into one long lament. It felt so hopeless, so completely impossible to find one single, forgotten
woman out of thousands who had vanished that Lucas was ready to throw the entire heap into the garbage can. He couldn't save Audrey. He couldn't save his marriage. And he couldn't save this broken, nameless woman.

The stack of papers made a dull thud at the bottom of the plastic recycling bin. Lucas stared at the top sheet for a moment, then shifted a pile of old envelopes off the edge of his desk and watched them flutter down to obscure the evidence of his research. He felt a brief stab of hope that Angela was doing better with the ring than he had done with the missing women.

The ring. Suddenly Lucas was gripped by the certainty that he hadn't looked into it enough. He hadn't given the piece of jewelry much attention—mostly because he harbored the hope that it was Angela's until the moment she dismissed that notion. But maybe it wasn't a common Black Hills gold ring at all. Maybe the ring was the key, not the woman.

It felt strange not to have the ring in his pocket, and he battled a brief regret that he had given it to Angela. MKD could stand for dozens of different things, but it was possible that if he could trace the origin of the ring, he could find out who had bought it. Or, at the very least, where her story began.

A few minutes later, Lucas tore a sheet of paper fresh from the printer and shot Angela a text as he swung out the clinic door. He would fly out to the farm, maybe ask Mandy to rearrange his schedule a bit for the afternoon . . .

But he didn't make it out of the office parking lot.

“We're playing today,” Alex told Lucas, slamming his car door just as Lucas dug his keys out of his pocket.

Caught off guard by Alex's sudden appearance, Lucas shook his head determinedly and folded the piece of paper in his hands. Stuffed it into his back pocket. “Racquetball? Is that today? Can't do it. Too busy. Too much going on.”

In spite of their hectic schedules, Lucas and Alex tried to meet at least once a week to play racquetball. It began as a way to work off a little aggression, a midweek release that kept them fit and focused. When Angela showed up in town, Lucas begged
off their regular court date for a week. Alex let it slide once, but apparently he wasn't going to forgive a second time.

“I'm not taking no for an answer,” Alex grunted. He threw a duffel bag at Lucas, and the nylon bundle slammed into his chest.

“Uncalled for.” Lucas glared at the police chief, but it was hard to be mad at Alex. Especially since he was trying to be a friend.

“Shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes . . .” Alex ticked off all the necessary items on his thick fingers. “I even remembered your ugly brace thingy.”

“It's a safety strap for my glasses,” Lucas told him, bending to retrieve the duffel. He unzipped it to make sure that Alex hadn't tampered with anything.

“My condolences.”

“Because I wear glasses?”

“I wouldn't be caught dead in that ridiculous stretchy doodad.”

“Doodad?”

“Four-eyes.”

“You're infantile,” Lucas complained. “And you have glasses, too, in case you've forgotten.”

“Shhhh!” Alex shot Mandy a quick look. She had pulled into the parking lot during their exchange and was making her way slowly toward them. “I don't want Mandy to know I'm not perfect in every way.”

“Let me refresh your memory,” Lucas said in a stage whisper. “You wear bifocals. For reading. Because you're an old man, Kennedy.”

“Shut up.”

“He's old,” Lucas told Mandy, jerking a thumb in Alex's direction and shaking his head as if it was a sorry thing indeed.

Mandy laughed. “You two are worse than kids. You're worse than my boys, and they're downright primitive. Neanderthals, I swear.”

Alex winked. “Caught me.”

“Stop flirting with my nurse.”

Mandy consulted her watch. “You've got just under an hour,” she said, ignoring Lucas's comment. “Have fun.”

Lucas grabbed a handful of his friend's shirt and dragged him toward his car. “Fine,” he said, certain that if he refused Alex would know that something was wrong. “Let's go.”

“You're playing? It's because I packed your duffel, isn't it?”

“You got my bag out of the trunk of my car. Remind me never to leave my keys in the ignition again.”

“Oh, but you didn't. I used the extra set you hide in that magnetic case under the wheel well.”

The lone racquetball court in Blackhawk was in the basement of the community center. A heavy, double door opened on a low, narrow hall with a popcorn ceiling that more likely than not boasted enough asbestos to turn their lungs black with cancer. The lighting was limited to sparse sunlight that filtered through the frosted-glass window in the door, the floors were sticky, and the walls seemed to ooze a shade of orange that always made Lucas feel like he was descending into the belly of a beast.

It was a far cry from the streamlined, modern gyms that Lucas enjoyed during his school years, but there was something masculine and inviting about Blackhawk's version of a fitness center. Since it was so decrepit and unkempt, Jenna and her ilk avoided it as if it were some seedy bar. But for Lucas, it was veiled in mystery, dark and secretive—the perfect place to say things that couldn't be voiced in the comfort of a warm kitchen or beneath the glow of a sunlit sky. Over the years, he had admitted many things to the concrete walls of the racquetball court. And Alex, always the friend, promptly forgot them the moment they emerged from the dark.