Those That Wake (2 page)

All four of them stood in front of the door, staring at it. Staring at the eyehole.

Mal pulled his head back.

"Jesus," he whispered to himself. "What the hell?"

A minute of silence passed. The lock fixture had been decimated, and without being able to lock them out, he felt like a hostage in this small place. He turned, gave up the door, and addressed his prison.

It was a tiny place. There was a kitchen alcove, a sink piled high with dishes, and a refrigerator filled with cans of beer and soda. One corner of the apartment had a table with two chairs, and another held a bed with a lit lamp near it and a window with a spider web of cracks in it. Tommy's apartment, his own apartment where he lived by himself; no Sharon, no George, no Fosters. A fleeting squeeze of jealousy tightened Mal's heart.

The last Mal knew of Tommy, he was charged with anger and it kept tripping him up. Tommy could always push things too far, but he could never stick with them; could always pick a fight, but always backed down when trouble really started. Mal was frankly surprised that Tommy could get it together to find and keep a place of his own.

Tommy was not here to explain it, but a picture of him with his arm around a pretty girl at the beach was propped near the lamp. When Mal came to it, he couldn't take his eyes off it. At eighteen, Tommy was barely a year older than Mal, and he had Mal's young face, but without the mask of scars over it. Tommy's wounds were inside his head. He had Mal's dark hair, too, though it was long and shaggy on the older boy. But he'd never had Mal's ability to contain his anger and
use
it. Even without the scars, even with the boyish hair, Tommy's face looked hard, challenging, even in that moment, which must have been a happy one.

The place wasn't exactly tidy, but it wasn't trashed, either. No one had overturned furniture or plowed through drawers. It meant those guys hadn't been looking for something Tommy had or something he owed them; they were looking for Tommy himself. This, in turn, meant that it was good Tommy wasn't here after all. Imagine, Mal thought, just imagine coming in and finding Tommy's ruined body. Mal's face grew hot, thinking about that.

He stormed back to the door, pulled it open hard, clenching his fists. But the hall was empty, and in their wake they had left only the quiet squalor.

He could go after them, see what they wanted with Tommy. But that would just get him into the fight he'd managed to avoid in the first place. He was here for Tommy, but all it took was a tick of the imagination and he was ready to throw down; eager to, even. And what good would that do Tommy? What good would it do Mal? Less than none, considering his condition.

He closed the door, went back, and sat down on the bed a minute to think about it. He could wait here; maybe Tommy would turn up. Maybe that would mean not being back when his foster parents woke up. Go looking for Tommy now? Where did he hang out? Where did he feel safe?

Mal hadn't seen him in two years, hadn't even really
known
him long before that. He couldn't answer those questions any better than he could come up with the name of the pretty girl in the picture. He looked back at the picture and smiled at her and Tommy. She was a nice girl, he would bet. Maybe she was what kept Tommy together, if he still couldn't manage it himself.

He pulled his aching body off the bed and went back to the Fosters' house, where the guilt could eat him alive in peace.

WHEN LAURA'S EYES OPENED
, they were looking at the small pink clock on the table by the side of the bed. The hands of the clock said it was 4:20, though light streamed through the shades and lit the corner of the room behind the clock. If it was 4:20 p.m., then she had slept something like sixteen and a half hours. If it was 4:20 a.m., then—

She shot bolt upright, crawled over the bed to the dresser, and grabbed her watch from the top of it. Her clock had broken at 4:20 a.m. Her watch told her it was 9:35.

She was showered and dressed by 9:50, and only four minutes after that she was in the family car, speeding down the highway faster than her parents would ever have allowed. This left her one remaining minute to cover ten miles, find the right street, then the right address, and report for her interview.

It took her twenty-five minutes before she stepped into the dry, climate-controlled outer office. The lady behind the desk was sour, aged beyond her years, dried out by the artificial, regulated air.

"You're late," the lady said. "You're going to have to wait for the next slot."

"Of course. I'm so sorry." Laura bowed her head low as she said it.
You old bag
was how that sentence ended in her head. She didn't bother making excuses; this wasn't the person to make them to anyway, and excuses to the receptionist would just make her appear tense.

It wasn't as though her entire college career, and thus her entire future, rested on this interview. It wasn't as if her parents had chosen the worst possible time to take their annual long weekend in the city. It wasn't like if her mother had been at home this morning she would have been certain to rouse her on time. Come to think of it, had she slept through her parents' good-luck phone call? If not, this would mark the first time in her life that her parents had not kept their full focus on her until the very last second before an important event. And strange timing, if they had chosen this moment to ratchet up her independence: just when she didn't want them to.

Laura sat down and did what she could with her hair in the camera app of her cell. The receptionist let two others in while Laura stewed and shuffled through the files on her cell: high-school transcript, application form, recommendation letters. Attached to one of them, on the Post-it app her father used for these small surprises, a message: "Don't forget to tell them about the college courses!" A little more than half an hour later, the receptionist deigned to look her way again.

"Laura Westlake," she said, "you can go in."

Laura rose, absently touching her hair, and went into the office. It was larger and brighter and greener than the reception area, thanks to the lime carpeting and matching trim. The man behind the desk was as slim and sharp as a razor, polished with a cold fastidiousness, right to the stiffness in his collar. It was just plain remarkable, she thought as she took a seat across his desk, that some people looked exactly like the part they played in life. The plaque on his desk said he was "Martin Stett."

"Ms. Westlake," he said, fingering the touchpad of the screen on his desk that contained all the information Laura had sent along. He looked at the screen with his eyes but didn't turn his head toward it.

"Yes, sir." She smiled, willing her already bright blue eyes to light up even more.

"I like your grades and extracurricular activities," he said, clearly scanning them for the first time. His eyes found her suddenly. "You know, our last intern was a young man."

She looked back at him, more surprised that he paused after the statement, waiting for some kind of response, than she was surprised at the statement itself.
Well, a man will do in a pinch.
She almost said it.

"That's interesting," came out instead.

"Mmm." His eyes flicked back down to the file.

He was quiet long enough that she began to tussle with the idea of offering an excuse for her tardiness. She opened her mouth with the first word of it just as he looked up and spoke. As they interrupted each other, he stopped and actually scowled at her.

"I'm sorry." She motioned with her hand for him to continue.

"I see you've applied to Yale," he said. "My son attends the law school. Why Yale?"

"Their psychology program is ranked among the ten best in the country, and I'm very serious about pursuing psychology as a career." Did she sound too proud about it? How could she soften it a bit? "It's also just a few hours away from home."

"Yes, I hear it's an excellent program. Do you suppose they particularly mind if you're thirty minutes late for all your classes? Or, later, when you have a private practice, do you think your patients will mind if you show up after half their sessions are through?"

Shocked by his unpleasantness, she blinked very slowly and reigned in the response held just behind her lips.

"I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Stett." It sounded just a little tight. "My father is out of town, and my mother came down with something very harsh last night and I had to get her to the doctor rather unexpectedly."
Too many details,
she scolded herself. Cramming in details always weakened a lie. "I'm really never, never late like this."

"Well," he said, taking his eyes off her once again, "that's provably false, isn't it?"

She held her tongue for a moment longer, debating whether or not her entire future actually
did
rest on this interview.

"You understand this is a six-month internship," he said, "specifically for our hospital statistics study. What do you think you could contribute to this study?"

"I've done three years of advanced placement work in psychology," she said without preamble, prepared to move on if he was, "and last summer I took a psychological statistics course at SUNY Stony Brook."

His eyes began to wander as she spoke, to a note on his desk, a picture on the wall.

"I've been a volunteer at the Stony Brook Medical Center for three years, too," she soldiered on, "and I know they figure prominently in your study. And I believe very strongly in the purpose of your research." He was through. He didn't want her from the beginning, either because she was late or because she wasn't a young man. It was plain now as he considered her flawless qualifications with squinting unkindness.

"I don't think so, Ms. Westlake." He finished it like a hit man firing a bullet into the back of a head, quick and cold and without a glimmer of remorse. "We're looking for someone with a more dynamic variety of interests."

"More dynamic. I see," she said to that stream of nonsense. She stood, but rather than strolling casually out, held her position.

He stared silently, waiting for her to disappear and the world to resume its natural order. She had so much to say to him. She could feel it bubbling in her stomach and trembling at her jaw.

"Was there something else?" he asked, begging her,
begging
her to say it.

She didn't.

Sitting in the car, numb, she called her parents. She was shocked to have the call go straight to her mother's voicemail. They knew exactly when her interview was. Why would their cells be off now? Why, in fact, had there not been a message from them waiting on her own cell?

But it was
their
long weekend, and if that was more important than
her
interview, Laura could grudgingly, albeit confusedly, grant them that. She voice-texted something artfully vague and drove herself home.

Mookie bounced around manically as she came into the house. In Laura's rush this morning, she had failed to feed him, and now she paid the price as he whined and slobbered at her feet. She stripped off her nice clothes and stuffed them angrily into the hamper, then pulled on the frumpiest sweatpants and sweatshirt she had. Then, and only then, did she saunter into the kitchen and unload a can of the meat slop Mookie favored into his bowl.

Standing in the kitchen, she began to fume again. Despite wanting to yell at Mookie for no reason, to scream at her parents for good reason, to jump up and down and throw a fit, her reputation as the calming voice of reason and harmony among friends and family haunted her even when she was alone. She pulled out the soothing peach tea instead and opened the cabinet to fetch her mug. As she pulled it out, her eyes caught on the long jagged crack that had formed, spontaneously it seemed, down its side. The mug, shaped into a lumpy surface by her own eight-year-old fingers once upon a time, had the words "I LOVE YOU MOMMY," with hearts standing in for all the
Os,
carved into its rusty brown surface beneath a shiny glaze. She had created it in art class as a gift for her mother, but by the time she got home and spent a month hiding it, it became clear that it had to be her own. Finally, tearfully, she confessed her terrible secret. Since then, it had been holding her milk, orange juice, and tea every day of the intervening nine years. But not anymore. The crack was so deep, she could see light through it if she angled it properly. The glaze was flaking away around it, and shards of hard clay were already crumbling from the surface.

So Laura cried it out, leaning over the sink, the poor maimed mug hanging shakily off her finger, with Mookie dumbly munching away by her feet.

If her parents had been here, this would not have happened, that was for goddamned sure. Even her mug would probably be okay if her parents had been here, because then she would have been up on time and had orange juice this morning and that would somehow have saved her mug; it wouldn't have felt abandoned, forlorn, and thus given up the ghost.

Of course, didn't her parents always take this long weekend on their anniversary every year? Hadn't they, in fact, had their reservations long before the appointment for this interview had even been a possibility? Had it not been Laura herself who insisted they keep their date when they realized it would mean their absence during the interview? It had been a mad push for the independence they sometimes seemed so reluctant to give her that had now blown up in her face.

And what was more frustrating, really: that her parents weren't here or that she so desperately wanted them? It was as if no accomplishment was real until they had acknowledged it; no failure could be confronted without them to hold her hand. All this talk about giving her the independence to make her own way ... when was she going to learn how to forge that path?

As the last tears began to dry on Laura's face, Mookie started thumping against her shin with his shaggy head.

She knelt down and rested her forehead on his and rubbed the sides of his belly.

"Sorry, dude. Just because the rest of the world is filled with assholes doesn't mean you have to live with one."