Here We Lie

I laughed at his description.

“Well, what about you? Don’t you have parents, Midwest?” When I hesitated, he covered quickly. “Did I put my foot in my mouth? Sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s fine. It was just too far for my mom to come.”

“What about your dad?”

I shook my head, my throat suddenly clogged. Since coming to Keale, I’d managed to avoid any mention of my dad. It was easier that way, although the omission implied that he’d never existed at all.

“I am an ass,” Joe said. “Remember?”

I stood up quickly, grabbing my frosted red cup. “Be right back.”

By the time our pizza came, we’d already refilled our bottomless sodas twice. Joe laughed as I blotted the top layer of grease from the pizza with a handful of napkins. It’s not a real date, I told myself. It’s pizza and Coke. Beneath the table, his leg brushed against mine, but instead of pulling away like a reflex, it lingered there. Or maybe it is.

While the restaurant filled up, we talked about our jobs. I mentioned the woman who called the switchboard fifteen times in one night, insisting that there must be a problem with the phone lines since her daughter hadn’t picked up. Joe said that a former coworker at the body shop had opened a place in Michigan, and he’d offered Joe a job.

He shrugged. “But, I don’t know. Michigan. It’s pretty far away.”

“Right,” I said, picking off a pepperoni. I felt his loss as keenly as if he’d already packed up the Honda and left. So far, Joe was the only good thing about Scofield. “And you’d have to leave all this.”

“Some things would be harder to leave than others,” he said, and although he wasn’t looking at me when he said it, my cheeks burned. “Anyway—it might not pan out. There are a lot of things to figure.”

“Right,” I said again. Someone at the next table stood, jostling my elbow. The restaurant was crowded now, the line out the door. I recognized some girls from Keale with their families and felt a stab of longing for my own family, back when it had been intact and perfectly imperfect. We would never again order a pizza, bicker over our choice of three toppings, then load up our leftovers to eat later that night in front of the TV.

“Whoa,” Joe said, tapping me on the arm. He gave a subtle head tilt in the direction of a family standing by the door.

I half turned, pretending to casually glance at the line. “Who are we looking at?”

“The guy in the button-down shirt.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

Joe laughed. “With the lady in the sweater.”

“Again, you’ll have to—”

“And the dark-haired girl with legs up to her neck.”

“Ah,” I said, glancing again toward the door. The man was tall with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a striped shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The woman wore a patterned sweater set, a giant diamond glinting from her finger. They didn’t look familiar, but I recognized the tall girl from Stanton Hall. I associated her with the summer camp crowd, as I’d come to think of them, girls who played lacrosse and rode horses and moved around campus in tight cliques. “That’s Lauren somebody. She lives in my dorm, but not on my floor.”

Joe leaned forward, conspiratorially. It was hard to hear him over the general noise of happy families. “Her last name is Mabrey.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“Her father is Senator Charles Mabrey of Connecticut.”

“Seriously? A senator?” I craned around, getting another look.

“Be cool,” Joe said, his thumb and forefinger reaching for my chin, steering me to face him. “People will think you’ve never seen a senator before.”

I burned under his touch. “I haven’t.”

“Well, I suspect they’re just like you and me, only they live in a nicer home—or more likely homes, plural—and they drive better cars if they drive themselves at all, and they’re on a first-name basis with the president of our freaking country, but other than that, no reason to stare.”

“Got it,” I said. We were close enough for me to see a tiny red fleck caught between Joe’s front teeth. “Did you learn all this in your civics class?”

Joe released my chin and reached for his tumbler, taking a long swig. “They’re probably all douchebags, but Mabrey at least seems to be a douchebag of the people.”

I snorted, choking on a bite of cold pizza. “You should volunteer to write his campaign slogans.”

“You know what?” Joe said, wadding his napkin into a ball. “Want to get out of here? There’s a better place down the road, one that won’t be overrun with all these hoity-toity types.”

“Do me a favor,” I grinned. “Say that again. Hoity-toity.”

Instead, he stood up and pulled me to my feet, threading his fingers through mine. I shot a last glance over my shoulder and saw Lauren’s father, the senator, bantering with a cashier. It was the same way married men had talked to me at the Woodstock Diner, as if he were saying, Look how young and virile I still am. In that split second, Lauren turned and our eyes met. She smiled in a faint, pleasant way, as if she didn’t recognize me at all. And why would she? Girls like that moved in their own circles, existed in their own worlds.

* * *

We ended up at a place called Moe’s, too shady for the Keale crowd with its dim, low-ceilinged interior and the haze of smoke that hovered just above our heads. Joe navigated the rowdy crowd at the bar and returned to our table with a pitcher of beer. I thought briefly about pointing out that I was nineteen, and then let it go. It seemed like an incongruous fact, unrelated to this experience. I felt older and wiser, like a more mature version of Megan Mazeros, one who didn’t have to worry about basic rules and regulations.

For a while we drank and watched a vigorous game of darts unfolding between a tiny, dark-haired woman with dead aim and her towering, tattooed companion; with each throw, they razzed and taunted each other. It was like watching an elaborate mating ritual, one based on catcalls and innuendos. When she won, he pulled her onto his lap and whispered into her ear. She stood, tugging him toward the door.

Joe drained his glass. “Do you play?”

“Do I ever.” I slid off my stool, feeding off the charge in the air. We were an extension of the couple who had just left, playing off their energy, becoming more sexualized versions of ourselves. Between throws, Joe’s hand lingered on my elbow, my waist, my hip.

I hadn’t played darts since before Dad got sick, but we used to have a dartboard in the garage, our throw lines taped to the cement. Once I got good enough to be competitive, I’d lost the handicap and he’d eliminated my line once and for all. After a few warm-up shots, Joe and I were evenly matched, going head-to-head, throw for throw. We brushed against each other deliberately, laughing, when we retrieved our darts. When he beat me by three points, I conceded the loss with a mock bow.

“An honor, sir,” I said.

He hooked an arm around my neck, pulling me into him. Our kiss felt effortless, a natural progression of the evening. He trailed one finger down my spine, coiling it in my belt loop. “Want to play another round?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

Our faces were so tight together that I saw his beautiful, crooked grin up close. It was like looking at him through a magnifying glass, all his good parts becoming even better.

* * *

According to the clock on Joe’s dashboard, it was just after nine. He agreed to drive me back to campus, so I could leave a note for Ariana. I didn’t know what I would say, just Sorry I didn’t make it to ice cream or Don’t wait up. I planned to stuff my backpack with toiletries and a change of clothes, just in case. The night was ripe with possibility. At each stoplight on our way out of town, Joe and I kissed like we were perfecting what we’d started earlier. In the parking lot of my dorm, we reached for each other again, his hands inching beneath my sweater, palms hot on the small of my back.

“You know what I like about you, Midwest?”

I murmured, “No.”

“What I like the most is—”

“I meant no, don’t talk,” I said.

“You see? That’s it.”

The car windows began to fog, and Joe’s hand was on my bra, my nipple hard beneath his thumb. It was so close to what I’d imagined that it hardly felt real. Nearby, a car started, headlights springing to life.

“Hold on, cowboy,” I said, pulling back. “Give me five minutes.”

He groaned. “Five minutes is eternity.”

I gave him a teasing kiss and grabbed my backpack from the floorboard. “Five minutes.”

The night was cool, but I felt warm and reckless and happy. I took the side stairs and was breathless by the time I reached the third floor, where I paused to look down at the parking lot. Joe’s car was there, idling with its headlights on. I spotted my reflection at the same time—blond curls wild, cheeks flushed. I’m doing this, I thought. I’m doing it.

In the hallway, I waited for a group of parents to pass. They were chatting loudly about how college had changed since they were in it, how the cafeteria food was better, the exercise facilities first-rate. After I passed, I heard one of the men say, “And the girls are prettier, too.”

Our door was unlocked, although the lights were off. Ariana and her parents must have come and gone, forgetting to lock it behind them. I flicked on the light switch, moving fast. Fresh underwear, a tank top to sleep in, a clean shirt for the morning—if that was how it played out. I hesitated, momentarily frozen by the practicalities. Would he have condoms? Of course. This experience wasn’t the novelty for him that it was for me. Still, I cursed myself for not refilling my birth control. It had seemed a silly, extravagant expense to pay thirty dollars a month for pills I wouldn’t need at an all-girls school.

I was zipping up my backpack when I caught the movement from Ariana’s side of the room and jumped a foot. She was in bed, her body a slight hump beneath the covers. Maybe she’d skipped out on ice cream and come back early, exhausted by her parents’ constant nagging.

Then she moaned, a ragged and gasping sound that made me look closer. Her head was turned to one side, hair plastered against her face and half-covering her mouth. Across her pillowcase was a trail of vomit.

Fuck. Not now.

“Ariana?” I asked, then repeated her name louder. When she didn’t respond, I dropped to my knees, shaking her shoulder. “Are you okay? Should I call someone?”

Her head flopped backward, mouth open. Flakes of white powder stuck to the corner of her mouth.

“Did you take something?”

I had to put my ear almost to her face, wincing from the stench of her breath, to understand what she was saying. Your pulse. Yourpilse. Your pills.

My pills.

* * *

Later I told the paramedics about the generic bottle of ibuprofen I kept in my desk drawer, taking a pill here and there for a headache. There had been a hundred pills initially, and I wasn’t sure how many had been there earlier that night. Seventy? Eighty? Ariana had taken whatever was left, as evidenced by the empty bottle on her nightstand. I tried to imagine her swallowing the pills, one by one or two by two, washing them down with water from her Peanuts mug, the one that read The Doctor Is In, 5 cents.

After the lecture, Ariana had told her parents that she needed to study, and they’d gone out for dinner without her. She’d already taken the first pills by the time I met Joe at Slice of Heaven, and she’d finished them by the time we’d begun our game of darts at Moe’s, when her parents were having ice cream sundaes without her. She must have been unconscious by the time Joe and I kissed; she’d vomited later, when Joe and I were in his car, when I was being reinvented by his touch, inch by inch. And I’d found her in time, so lucky, everyone noted. Only I wasn’t sure if Ariana meant for me to find her earlier, or hoped I would only find her after it was too late.

Viv, our resident advisor, kicked into supervisory mode and took charge of the situation—which meant contacting Ariana’s parents and taking care of me. “You cannot blame yourself for this,” she said, taking hold of my shocked shoulders. Until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was responsible. Then guilt kicked in hard: I’d been planning a night of reckless abandon, and Ariana had been trying to end it all.

Worse, I felt just as bad for myself, for the lost possibilities of that night. By the time I’d alerted Viv and the paramedics had arrived, twenty minutes had passed, maybe more. When I finally wormed my way through the cluster of girls and their parents in the hallway to look down into the parking lot below, Joe’s car was gone.

Lauren

Although I hadn’t mentioned it once, somehow everyone at Keale knew my father was a senator. It had started out with a little joke: my resident advisor, Katy, mentioned during our first floor meeting that we all had to follow the rules—whether our fathers were elected officials or not. She said this with a wink in my direction, and I heard the general buzz around me. Who? And he’s an actual senator? Later that week, a mousy blonde girl sat next to me in the Commons and over eggs on toast mentioned that her grandfather had been an ambassador to Ghana, as if that made us related somehow, like second cousins.

“Do you have like, diplomatic immunity or something?” another girl at the table asked.

“No,” I assured her, to general laughter.

Later I thought about it and realized that a more accurate answer would have been yes.

My parents had more or less ignored me since I left for Keale, but they came for Parents’ Weekend, bustling into my dorm room with a towering gift basket from Harry & David, as if I were a client and not a daughter. It didn’t occur to me until I was giving them an abbreviated tour of campus that this was an opportunity to see and be seen. For Dad, it was an unpaid advertisement, a chance to shake hands and trade college stories with other dads, homing in on the ones from Connecticut, his constituents. More than once when we were walking across campus, I was aware of camera flashes, of people catching the three of us in motion—Mom with an arm linked through Dad’s, each of us holding bags from the Keale College bookstore, full of the sweatshirts and visors and coffee mugs that proclaimed them the proud parents of a Keale College student.

I was sure we would show up in future brochures advertising the college, with some kind of pretentious caption: Senator Mabrey, His Wife, Elizabeth Holmes-Mabrey, and Their Daughter Lauren Enjoy Family Time during a Visit to the Fine Arts Auditorium. It wasn’t so much a visit as it was a campaign stop.

We went into town for pizza, but the line at Slice of Heaven was out the door.

“We could bring it back to my dorm,” I suggested. “There’s a little kitchen down the hall.”

“It’ll be like old times, Liz,” Dad said, draping his arms around Mom’s shoulders. She smiled up at him, and I wondered how much of this was genuine, and how much was for show, another chance to impress Scofield’s voting public. Photographic evidence of my parents in their twenties did exist, but I’d never seen snapshots of them eating pizza out of a cardboard box, sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the photos I remembered, they were at important dinners, separated by centerpieces and goblets and place settings with three different forks, Dad in a suit, Mom’s hair in a complicated updo held together by a million bobby pins.

I recognized a few other people in the pizzeria, including Cindy Hardwick, a girl from my dorm. We’d only exchanged the occasional hello as we passed in the hall, but she bounded over to shake Dad’s hand and then, for good measure, Mom’s. She lingered for longer than necessary, beaming up at them. “You must be proud. Lauren is so talented,” she said. I tried to steer her away with an arm on her elbow, but it was too late. “I love her work.”

Worse than the explanations that I would have to provide were the subtle frowns on my parents’ faces, their hesitant glances between Cindy and me, as if to confirm she was in fact referring to their daughter.

“Lauren hasn’t told us much about her classes, actually,” Mom said, the question mark buried in her words.

“It was going to be a surprise,” I said.

Cindy’s perky face fell, her cheeks literally deflating. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

Mom touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. Lauren’s so modest. Why don’t you tell us, honey, so we can all be on the same page?”

Dad’s smile was nervous, his focus drifting around the room. This conversation wasn’t part of the scheduled event, not even a bullet point on his agenda.

“I’m putting together a photography portfolio for one of my classes,” I said.

“It’s so brilliant,” Cindy gushed. “She takes the best pictures—she really does. I can barely hold a camera steady...”

One of the pizzeria employees called a number, and Dad stepped forward to collect our order.

“Maybe you can show us some of those photos before we head back,” Mom suggested. “It was wonderful to meet you, Cindy.”

We gathered plates and napkins and little packets of Parmesan cheese and smiled our way stiffly out the door and down the street to Mom’s Mercedes. The street was clogged with cars, and it took Dad a while to find an opening.

I popped the lid of the pizza box and put a slice of pepperoni on my tongue, relishing its salt and heat.

“I don’t remember signing you up for a photography class,” Mom said.

I chewed the pepperoni slowly, deliberately.

Dad’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Well? Your mother asked you a question.”

I shrugged. “It’s for a class called Introduction to the Arts. We study visual art, music—”

“You’re taking that in addition to your other classes?”

“No, I dropped the biology class.” I’d also switched out of math, but this didn’t seem like the best moment to mention it.

In the front seat, Mom’s mouth was set in a tight line. “You need to be taking your general education requirements, Lauren. You’re not just here to try a little of this and a little of that. There’s an educational plan—”

“It’s one class,” I repeated. “And I’m thinking of studying fine arts, so it’ll be part of the requirements for my major.” This much was true, although I had been planning to wait as long as possible—at least another semester or two—before announcing it to my parents. Before their visit, I’d carefully packed away my Leica and slid my burgeoning portfolio underneath my bed.

Dad sighed, adjusting the visor so the setting sun didn’t blind him. “At least your friend seems excited about your work. She said you were very talented.”

Mom couldn’t let it go. “Everything’s always a lie with you. It’s always about sneaking around behind our backs.”

I leaned forward, my head between their bucket seats. “It’s my education, Mom. You can’t control the classes I take, like you did at Reardon.”

“If I hadn’t intervened there, you never would have graduated,” Mom snapped.

I rolled my eyes. I’d earned mostly B’s at Reardon, with the odd A and a few C’s, yet the arrival of my report card in the mail had always felt like doomsday, as if I’d brought shame upon the family for not being as brilliant as my siblings.

A car slowed in front of us, and Dad braked suddenly, the motion shooting us all forward against our seat belts. The pizza box slid from the back seat onto the floor, but thankfully the pizza in all its greasy gooeyness remained inside the box, folded over on itself. I lifted the lid to inspect the damage and said, “Still edible.”

Dad smiled, meeting my eyes quickly in the rearview mirror before returning to the road. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. He didn’t seem to understand all the intricacies of being a Mabrey, although all of our lives revolved around him. He was the one who would have to drive back to Simsbury with Mom, after all, listening to her complaints about my thoughtlessness.

In the parking lot outside Stanton Hall, I unclipped my seat belt and Dad did the same. Mom sat stony, staring ahead.

I gestured to the pizza. “Aren’t you coming inside?”

“Now that I think about it, we probably have to get on the road,” Mom said.

“Liz, we have food to eat. We might as well—”

“I don’t think I’m particularly hungry.”

Dad sighed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

I scooped up the pizza box. No point in letting perfectly good food go to waste. “It’s a class,” I repeated. “A stupid fucking class. That’s all.”

Mom said, “You will not talk to us that way—” And I knew there was more, but I wasn’t going to stick around to hear it. I’d already slammed the door behind me and was walking fast across the parking lot, pizza box in hand. I waited for them to do something—for Mom to come after me or for Dad to pull even with me in the Mercedes, but none of that happened.

In my room, I moved some papers out of the way and set the box on my desk. Erin was still out with her parents, probably having the sort of happy family meal that regular people had, laughing and reminiscing and making plans for the next time they would see each other. But maybe there was no such thing as a normal family, a happy family meal. Maybe everyone was secretly, deep down miserable and they only put on brave faces for the rest of us.

More out of spite than hunger, I ate half the pizza and lay down on the bed, still dressed in my jeans and sweater in case Erin and her parents came back. I must have fallen asleep with the overhead fluorescent light still beaming down because the next thing I knew there were people running past my door, their footsteps echoing down the hallway.

“What’s going on?” I called to a girl who stood near the elevators, a hand over her mouth.

“Someone on the second floor took a bunch of pills,” she said. “It’s horrible.”

“Is she...” I faltered. “Is she going to be...”

“I don’t know!”

No one seemed to know anything, but after a few minutes the paramedics rushed past, a girl on the stretcher. She was struggling against her restraints, and there was an audible sigh of relief. At least she was alive.

“Her name’s Ariana Kramer,” another girl called. “She’s in my organic chem class.”

“Oh, my God, really? She’s so smart. She’s always in the library—”

I went back to my room, changed into my pajamas, turned off the light and crawled under the covers. Maybe my theory was right after all.

* * *

The week before Thanksgiving and a return visit to Holmes House, I came back to my room to find Erin sitting on her bed and Theresa, a girl from across the hall, sitting on mine. They both turned stony faces to me.

“Hey,” I said, placing my camera bag gingerly on my desk. “What’s going on?”

In her hands, Erin was holding a stack of prints, and she thrust them in my direction like they were evidence. I spotted an old Kodak paper box, where I stored most of my eight-by-eleven prints, open on the floor and instantly I knew what she’d found. I’d promised Dr. Mittel that I would get Erin’s permission to use her photos in my portfolio, but in all the weeks since, I hadn’t managed to ask her. No matter how I approached her, she would have been horrified—the same way she looked right now.

“Those are private,” I said, my voice thin, the objection weak.

“They’re pictures of me, you weirdo,” Erin spat. “So yes, they are private.”

“How could you even—” Theresa said, shaking her head in disgust. “And why would you...”

“Theresa,” I said. “Could I talk to Erin for a minute? I want to explain.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you, you nutcase. She found the photos, and she called me over. How long have you been stalking her?” Theresa’s voice rose dangerously, threatening to get the attention of other girls on our floor. Living in such close proximity to each other, we were always alert for a catfight, ready to take sides.

I snorted. “Stalking her? We live in the same room. I took some photos—okay. Erin—” her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes narrowed, lips trembling “—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, especially not without your permission. But it just—I was trying to capture this beautiful moment. That’s all.”

Theresa threw up her hands. “What are you, obsessed with her or something? You’re a lesbian, aren’t you? I knew it. I said it from the first time I saw you, there’s something up with that girl!”

If the situation wasn’t so fragile, I would have burst out laughing. Theresa was just another Keale clone, blindly defending her friend’s honor. “I let you borrow my shoes last week!” I reminded her. “I came in here to find you looking through my closet, and I still let you borrow my shoes! Now you’re digging through the rest of my stuff—”

“Because we knew you were hiding something,” Theresa said.

I swore, turning back to Erin. She was looking down at an image of herself—her mouth slightly open, her face relaxed. “I’m sorry I took the pictures. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about them afterward. But my professor—he thinks they’re really beautiful—”

Erin gasped. “You showed these to people? Look at me! You can see—”

Theresa’s laugh cut her off. “What else is he going to say? Your dad is a fucking United States senator! Oh, yes, they’re brilliant, because you’re a Mabrey. Do you think that gives you permission to do whatever you want?”

I don’t think I’d ever hit anyone before, except MK sometimes when we were fighting, which he always started. But I was mad enough to do it this time. I could almost feel my fist connecting with Theresa’s nose, could almost see the resulting dribble of blood.

Erin was trembling with anger, shaking all the way down to her fingertips. The prints in her hands were crumpled beyond repair. “I know who you are, you know.”

I had a brief, horrible flashback to Marcus, the drugs, my court-ordered community service and fake bout of mono. Did Erin know somehow?

She made a fist around the photo, her sleeping face disappearing into a crumpled ball. “You think you’re so privileged, you think you can do whatever you want. You don’t give a shit about anyone else.”

“That is not true,” I insisted, although it was true enough that I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

“You violated her!” Theresa yelled, eager to draw herself back into the fight. “You’re some weird sicko stalker and you just need to admit it!”

A cluster of girls had gathered openmouthed in the doorway. Maybe she was playing for the audience, or maybe she’d been planning to do this all along, but Erin looked down at the stack of prints in her hands, at all the lovely, sleeping reflections of herself, and began to rip through them. Theresa grabbed a stack of other prints from my photo box—prints that weren’t even of Erin—and began shredding them, too, the pieces falling down in the air around us like confetti. Then she went for the negatives, pulling them out of their plastic holder, the film fluttering to the ground.

“Stop it,” I yelled. “You bitch!”

By the time our resident advisor arrived, I had Theresa in a full headlock and Erin was on her hands and knees, ripping the pictures into ever smaller pieces. Katy banished us to the corners of the room like overaggressive boxers, as if we were each champing at the bit to get back in the ring. She looked around the room in horror—a lamp had been overturned, its shade punctured. Clothes and books and shoes, whatever we could get our hands on, littered the floor. One of my fancy flannel sheets had been ripped, and the potted plant Erin’s parents had brought her had tipped over on her desk, soil spilling on top of her homework.

“Holy fuck,” Katy said, her eyes wide. “And I thought this would be a quiet night.”

Later, Katy moved Erin’s belongings into the spare bunk in Theresa’s room, while I gathered the ruined scraps of my photography, my heart still pounding. Katy had heard the story by then, and she wasn’t showing me any pity.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked, imagining some kind of suspension or expulsion from Keale. What was the punishment for taking pictures of someone without their permission, even artsy and mostly innocent ones? I imagined myself getting booked on a misdemeanor at the tiny jail in Scofield, using my one phone call to contact Mom, who would either come to pick me up or refuse to help. Either way, I had earned another notch in my belt as the family fuckup.

Katy’s eyes slid coolly over me. “If it were up to me,” she said, and I knew the rest of the answer before she said it. Nothing would happen, effectively: it was the Mabrey get-out-of-jail-free card. Erin and Theresa and I would be officially or unofficially warned about fighting, but that would be the end of it. The dean would encourage Erin not to pursue her complaint any further on the unstated grounds that I was a Mabrey and that was important here.

“Wait,” I tried again. “Just tell me. Housing-wise, what happens to me? Do I just stay here?”

Katy’s arms were loaded with the last of Erin’s shoes, and she didn’t meet my eye. “What happens,” she said, “is that we’ll find you another roommate.”

And that was how I met Megan Mazeros.

Megan

The phone call from the housing department came over Christmas break, when I was staying at Gerry Tallant’s house in Woodstock and trying not to feel like a third wheel in the relationship between my mother and her boyfriend. I’d been jumping at the phone every time it rang, convinced that Joe was trying to track me down, to apologize for that night and all the nights that had come after, when I had missed him like a phantom limb. This was illogical, of course; I wasn’t sure Joe even knew my last name, let alone how he would have traced me to Gerry Tallant. If he’d wanted to talk to me, I was easier to find in Scofield.