Son of Destruction (20 page)

‘Fuck that old shit, Chaplin, forget it. It’s over.’

‘That’s not what Walker thinks.’

‘That night is long gone.’ Kalen jams his fists into his mouth, gnawing thoughtfully. Then he looks at Bobby over his knuckles and says cleverly, ‘Besides. How do you know it was me?’

‘Who else did you roll out of the Jeep before you got her to Lands End, Kalen? Buck and Stitch too? Chape?’

‘You were too loaded to know who was there what went down, asshole. Face it, you were drunk. You’re nothing but a fucking drunk.’

My name is Bob Chaplin and I am an alcoholic
. If Bobby had been in his right mind he never would have let Lucy get into the Jeep that night, not after that thing with Jessie Vukovich, which was an abomination. He’d have grabbed the wheel and wrenched the Jeep off the road if he’d been in his right mind, he would have done it before they ever reached the turnoff to Lands End. Bobby groans. ‘I should have stopped you.’

‘Yeah, right. Like you were there at the end.’

‘But Walker was.’

‘Walker, Walker, what does Walker know?’ There is a pause during which Brad casts around for suspects. ‘It was probably Coleman, Buck always had the hots for her. Yeah, everybody knows he wanted that – what do I want to call her – that sweet little piece of . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘Lucy.’

So Bobby lets him have it with both barrels. ‘She has a son.’

Now it is Brad’s turn to shrug. ‘She wasn’t pregnant that summer when she left.’

‘He’s in town.’

‘She wasn’t pregnant when she came back for Thanksgiving, either.’

‘That doesn’t change what you did.’ He means: what we did.

‘Maybe not,’ Brad says genially, ‘but it’s somebody else’s problem.’

‘That’s what you think. He’s been asking around.’

‘Tell him it was Buck.’

‘I don’t lie.’ It hurts Bobby to say, ‘This isn’t about just one of us, Brad, if it was, it never would have happened.’ Bobby was crazy-drunk that night, yes, and psyched to be riding along in the back next to Lucy Carteret, and what would have happened if he’d had her alone, would he have gone too far because he was in love with her? His voice drops a register. ‘It was all of us.’ Grieving, he thinks:
It would have been different. I’m not like them
.

Brad chooses not to hear. ‘Now, if you’ll just get me a cab . . .’

‘You can’t say a thing’s over just because you’re done with it,’ Bobby says gravely. Why is he so disturbed? OK, he loved her, he still does, and when she got into the Jeep that night he thought – he doesn’t want to know what he thought; they were all crazy out of control.

‘So I can get out of here and into some decent clothes. Back off.’

Bobby says, ‘We’re all involved.’

‘You’re standing too close.’

‘I’m responsible . . .’

Brad pushes. ‘Fuck it, Chaplin. Move.’

‘. . . and you’re responsible.’ He pushes back.

‘Shit I am. What makes you think it wasn’t Walker?’

‘Well now, there we have a problem,’ Bobby says. In another minute he’ll either have to back off or suffocate. ‘You pushed her down.’

‘How do you know?’

Bobby’s voice is low and clear. In a kinder world, he could be heard in the back of a courtroom or in balconies far above any stage, but his life went a different way and he’s just-Bobby, here with just-Brad. ‘I saw you.’

Bobby is too close to the truth about himself. He did see, but he was drunk and raving, too trashed to get up off his face.

Brad’s voice is a congested rattle. ‘Like, you think I did all that single-handed?’

‘What did you do, Brad? What happened?’

There it is: that hateful, careless shrug. ‘Beats me.’

Bobby grabs those baggy shoulders and starts shaking. ‘Tell the truth, you fucking asshole.’

And with a practiced, guileless, who-me grin that confirms all Bobby’s suspicions, Brad glides out of his grip. ‘Dude, I was too fucking drunk. How am I supposed to know what went down?’

Slick as a scam artist, Steffy springs her friend Dan from Mom’s lair, a.k.a. the flowered sofa, before the woman can weight him down with a ton of cookies and talk him to death. The way Nenna scowls, you’d think Steffy was running off with her new boyfriend, not saving a helpless stranger from Death by Monologue. When her mom sucks a person into those soft pillows and starts, you can practically see the cobwebs form. Usually it’s one of the hags she hangs out with, but even though the big party was last night, not one of her Lunch Bunch phoned and nobody came by. It’s weird. Unless it’s sad.

Steffy might stop to feel sorry, if she wasn’t in such a rush. Poor Mom was spilling her troubles to a stranger because her friends don’t call and she’s had a shitty week. God, how embarrassing! She probably went off on Dad in gross detail, up to and including the humiliating fact that he has to drag his pillow downstairs after Steffy goes to bed, like they don’t think she knows that he’s slept on the rollaway ever since the fight.

Please God, don’t let her complain about the sex. Mom is so pissed off right now that she doesn’t care what comes out of her mouth. Right now it looks like she’s quit caring what she does. The woman is flat-out flirting, when she needs to get her ass to a marriage counselor and buy lessons in putting everything back where it belongs. She can vent for $150 an hour
and
do something useful at the same time and, boy, does her mother love to vent. Steffy read a book once that had a whole chapter called ‘The Human Swamp.’ Well, that’s Mom.

‘Hey, Dude!’ She storms the room and Dan lights up.

‘Steffy. Hey!’

‘So, Mom,’ Steffy calls, releasing him from the sofa. ‘Dan and I have a Thing we have to do.’

‘Wait! Oatmeal cookies!’

Steffy nudges Dan through the door with a bright, ‘He’s going, Mom.’

Behind them, Mom bulks up like Swamp Thing, all waving tendrils and mournful eyes. ‘Where?’

‘Emergency,’ he chokes, clicking his cellphone open and shut to prove it. ‘I’m sorry, and thanks.’

Bingo, zot, it’s like magic. They’re out the door.

Out of nowhere, Sallie Bellinger says, ‘If you want to know the truth, I always thought it was a gang bang.’

Oh shit
,
Jessie thinks. Just when she was getting comfortable, chattering over coffee with the Lunch Bunch.
Let’s don’t go there.
‘I thought we were talking about . . .’

Sallie’s voice drops. ‘Shhh! Here she comes.’

Rounding up the usual suspects at the club’s beachfront annex, they’d agreed to skip Nenna this time because she, and not Brad Kalen, was topic A. That dress! The way she ricocheted from man to man, making all those desperate ex-wife moves, they should warn her, but her best friends can’t say anything or ask her about it because she hasn’t told them. And here she is, coming in all la-la-la, like Davis isn’t a philanderer and everything’s just fine. Like every woman at this table but Jessie, she’s practiced at glossing over life’s dirty parts.

Entitled insider that she is, Nenna nudges Kara aside and slides into the banquette. Jessie’s pleased to be included, but, wow. Last night’s party lies like a patient etherized upon a table, but this patient is kicking and screaming because the anesthetist didn’t show up and the dissection is well under way. The sunlight is dazzling even through layers of tinted glass. The water glistens and from here swimmers bob like lazy ants in the gentle swells. Dolphins and egrets and gulls wheel against the cloudless backdrop, but given all they have to talk about, nobody but Jessie sees.

‘Jessie?’ Sallie Bellinger elbows her.
You’re on.
‘You were saying what he’s like.’

‘Who?’

Betsy does that thing with her eyebrows. ‘You know. Lucy’s son.’

Sallie serves a hard ball. ‘If he really is her son.’

Cathy Rhue enters the game. ‘Is Carteret really his name, or is it some kind of scam?’

‘It was on his credit card, Cathy.’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but. Does he look like her?’

‘Yes.’ Jessie’s uncomfortable with this, but if she wants to stay, she has to play. ‘Same hair, just a little darker. Green eyes.’

Sallie serves. ‘Wonder who that comes from.’

‘Oh, the father, I suppose.’

Betsy hits it over the net. ‘Whoever
that
is.’

‘As a matter of fact, he looks a lot like Lucy. I should know.’ Heads whip around. Nenna! Jessie has to admire the woman; she knows she was topic A. before she walked in, but she volleys like a pro. ‘He was at my house!’

Score! New to the game, Jessie slips. ‘No shit!’

Nenna grins. ‘We were having iced tea.’

‘Get out!’

‘And my oatmeal cookies. That’s why I’m late.’

‘You’re not late, you’re . . .’

Cathy says kindly, ‘Just in time. We were just starting.’ Never mind the empty coffee cups and pastry crumbs and ruined paper napkins; they’ve been at it since ten.

‘Good thing I baked last week.’ Nenna glows – not like she’s lost her man, more like she just scored a shiny new one. ‘He ate about a dozen.’

‘What’s he doing in Fort Jude?’

‘He’s here on some big story.’ In training since nursery school, Nenna waits a beat before she adds, ‘For the
Los Angeles Times.
’

‘Is he really Lucy’s son?’

‘He says he is.’

‘I could say I’m the queen of France, but would you believe it?’

‘Where else would he get
The Swordfish
from our year?’

‘He had
The Swordfish
?’

Topic A. when she came in. Now look at her, with yellow feathers in her teeth. ‘Bobby’s, actually,’ she tells Betsy and Jessie relaxes, but only a little bit.

‘He knows
Bobby
?’

‘I saw what you wrote to him in
The Swordfish
, Betsy. And I thought you were my friend.’

‘Houseparties. It was a crazy time,’ Betsy says, propelling Jessie into a bad place.

Kara’s from Chicago, but that doesn’t stop her. ‘I hear they were pretty wild.’

Sallie says, too fast, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’

‘You’re the ones who laid it all on me, how crazy it got, especially the last night when your friend Lucy showed up . . .’

‘We were never really friends.

‘Lucy kept to herself until that night.’

‘White bikini, see-through shirt, you might call it her coming out party.’

Resentment crackles in the room. ‘Like she was asking for it.’

And Jessie’s automatic censor breaks down. ‘Nobody asks for a rape.’

‘A
rape
! At
houseparties
?
Don’t even
think
it.’

‘Puh-
leeze.
’ Sallie’s smile scrapes Jessie raw. ‘People like us don’t do things like that.’

Don’t
, Jessie thinks.
Just don’t
, but she’s sliding into the zone. Everybody who was anybody was at the beach the week before graduation, running around crazy, like it was the night before the Battle of Waterloo, and this was the Last Good Time. She hadn’t exactly been invited to camp out in one of the beach houses because she had, OK, she had a reputation, so she crashed at home and slipped into the parties in all those houses after it got dark, stayed up all night when the parties spilled out on the beach and never left until the last dog was hung and the last of them staggered off to bed and, man! It was almost like she belonged.

So she was at the bonfire on the famous last night when Lucy showed up for the first time ever, all gorgeous and sexy and brash. She sneaked out. That grandmother kept her on a short leash.

Jessie knows how her own night ended –
Don’t go there
– but Lucy? The girl was everywhere, she danced with everybody, all these aging girls’ boyfriends, captains of this and that and a bunch of guys that nobody knew. They rolled in from Broward and Sarasota and as far away as Tarpon Springs. Fort Jude houseparties were that famous. By the time the night ended Jessie knew why Sallie and Betsy and all were so pissed off at her, she just didn’t know who Lucy left with or what happened after that, and the rest? She jerks herself back into the present, where it’s safe.

Fucking Sallie is going, ‘These things do happen. Just not to people you know.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

And as if she knows what Jessie’s thinking, Betsy scowls. ‘Probably one of the Pierce Point boys, you know, like the Horshams or the Ackleys, Lanny Rucker or the Pikes.’ Take
that
.

And Sallie drives in the stake. ‘People like that don’t get invited to our things, they just don’t.’ She covers her mouth like a priest crossing himself after the stake goes in. ‘Oh! Sorry, Jessie. Wade is soooo
not
the same person now. He was much, much different back then.’

‘So was I.’

‘No offense!’

Jessie does not back off with the traditional, ‘None taken.’ She won’t. But leaving is out of the question. All she can do is sit, waiting for this to end.

As if to make up for what she just did, Sallie Bellinger diverts the pack. ‘I wonder if Brad’s OK. Brought down in front of all of us, and by . . .’ It’s a close thing. She almost says, ‘Pierce Point trash,’ but substitutes, ‘Walker Pike.’

‘Poor Brad!’

‘We ought to go check on him. He could be a danger to himself.’

‘Brad hates these things, now tell me he didn’t get belching, puking drunk so he wouldn’t have to come.’

‘And he wouldn’t, if Walker hadn’t dragged him kicking and screaming. We should be over at Patsy’s, apologizing.’

‘Frankly, I don’t think she wants to hear from us. We talked her into that humongous party, and now look.’

‘Cecilia would have died.’

‘I bet Brad’s ashamed.’

‘Humiliated, I hope.’

‘He ought to check himself into rehab.’

‘Or do us all a favor and hang himself.’

‘Oh, he’s much too self-centered to do that. Like, what would Fort Jude do without studly, stupid old Brad?’

‘Who would we have to talk about?’

It’s interesting, watching Nenna writhe, Jessie thinks, but after a lifetime with these women, she’s expert at the quick save. ‘But if he
did
do anything drastic . . .’