Dear Debbie, page 17
For a moment, there is a flicker of fear in his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.” I raise my eyebrows. “Anyway, if that person were eighteen or older and were to be caught—and these days, digital footprints make it so easy to get caught—prison would be a rough time for him. Prison is especially difficult for sex offenders. They often get attacked by other inmates to punish them and elevate their own social status.”
Zane takes a step back, nearly stumbling on his own feet. “What?”
“And then when you finally get out,” I continue, “you have to put yourself on the sex offender registry everywhere you live for the rest of your life. You have to let your employers know. Any woman you date can look you up and…well, cancel. And good luck finding a place to live when you have to tell landlords you’re a sex offender.”
“Okay…” Zane is shaking his head, all the anger vanished from his face. He looks decidedly freaked out. “Look, just tell Lexi that I can’t drive her to school anymore.”
“Will do!” I say cheerfully.
I close the door in his face and return to the kitchen, where my sandwich is still waiting for me. I slide back into my chair and pick up my egg muffin.
“Who was that, Mom?” Lexi wants to know.
“Nobody important.”
I take a bite out of the muffin. It’s delicious.
49
COOPER
I’ve been in a fog all morning.
I don’t know where Debbie went last night. I mean, geographically, I know where she went. But I don’t know why she would go to the shipyard in the middle of the night or what she was doing there.
I don’t think she was out there for a tryst with her lover. Debbie wouldn’t do that. She just…she wouldn’t. But if that’s not what she was doing, then what the hell was she doing?
Part of me wanted to confront her in the morning, but instead, I end up avoiding her. I’m dead tired and not in any condition to have a serious discussion right now, and I’m pretty sure this is going to be a very serious discussion.
We do have to talk though. I’ll lay it all on the table—everything I’ve been keeping from her. And if she hates me? Well, I hope she doesn’t hate me. I hope we can find a way to work through it. I’ll do counseling, whatever she wants.
But this needs to come to an end. The lying and sneaking around need to stop.
It’s a miracle that I manage to get to work on time. Ken might still be on his fishing trip, but Mrs. McCauley is keeping track of the exact millisecond when each of us arrive and will be reporting back to Ken when he returns. Not that it matters, considering I’ve already handed in my two weeks’ notice. But I don’t want to give him an excuse to kick me out even sooner. I desperately need that last paycheck.
(Who am I kidding? I’ll probably be on my knees, begging for my job back the second Ken returns to the office.)
When I get to the office, Jesse is standing behind Mrs. McCauley at her desk. The two of them are both staring at her computer screen with identical furrowed brows.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Jesse raises his eyes from the screen. “It looks like there’s money missing from the company account.”
What?
“Money missing?” I repeat numbly.
Mrs. McCauley peers up at me through her spectacles. “I noticed the discrepancy this morning. Quite a bit has gone missing, and it looks like it’s been going on for several months now.”
“Are…are you sure?” I stammer.
“Of course I’m sure!” Mrs. McCauley seems offended at the suggestion that she could get anything wrong. She is very rarely wrong. “I suppose it’s possible that Mr. Bryant moved the money himself. I’ve been trying to reach him on his phone since I got in, but he’s not picking up.”
“Well, he’s fishing,” I point out.
“He usually picks up his phone when he’s fishing,” she says. “You know how he is about not missing calls.”
That’s true.
“It was probably him who moved the money,” Mrs. McCauley says thoughtfully. “Hopefully at least. It does look like it was done internally.”
“Internally?” I repeat. “You mean by someone who works here?”
Jesse looks up at me and grins. “Did you take the money, Coop? Fess up!”
He is joking around, but I have a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. It doesn’t feel like any of this is a coincidence. Ken Bryant randomly disappears on some fishing trip in the middle of the week, and nobody can locate him. And then a bunch of money disappears from the company account, and it looks like an “inside job.”
And where does Debbie keep going in the middle of the night?
“I guess you should just keep trying to reach him,” I mumble. “He’ll want to know about all this right away.”
Maybe I’m suspicious over nothing. But I can’t seem to push away the feeling that a noose is closing around my neck.
50
DEBBIE
I’ve come up with a new idea for a phone app.
It hit me while I was driving back from the shipyard last night. It’s called Punish Your Husband.
I spend the whole morning working on it, although it’s a little more involved than I initially intended. I’ve coded half a dozen apps in the last decade, but this one seems like the sort of app that could really take off. And now that I’m no longer working, I’ve got plenty of time to develop Punish Your Husband. I can’t spend every moment of my day working in my garden, tending to my opium poppies.
If I build the app and sell it, I bet I can make a good chunk of change. We could certainly use the money right now.
I wonder what Cooper will think of it.
I’ve just finished jotting down more ideas when my phone starts ringing. When I see Izzy’s name on the screen, I nearly drop the phone trying to answer it. She never calls me during the day. “Izzy?”
“Mom!” Her voice is breathless. “You’ve got to come pick us up right now!”
“What?” Is it some sort of half day that I’m not aware of? Random half days seem to occur with alarming frequency. “Why?”
“Because,” she says, “a kid smashed his car into the school!”
“What?” That was the last thing I expected her to say. “How did that happen?”
“I have no idea,” Izzy says. “It was some senior guy, and I heard he was really drunk. I don’t know what happened, but they’re sending everyone home. There’s, like, an ambulance and a fire truck and everything.”
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t think so. I heard he’s pretty badly hurt.”
“Where’s Lexi?”
“She’s in her classroom,” Izzy says. “We all are. They won’t let us leave the classrooms that we’re in until someone comes to get us. So you have to come get us.”
“I’m on my way. Don’t move.”
“I can’t, Mom! They won’t let us!”
I go into emergency mode. I send Lexi a text message to let her know that I’m on my way, because I’m sure she’ll be calling next. Then I grab my keys and head for my car. All the while, I try to convince myself that this isn’t what I think it is, even though the evidence is concerning.
A boy smashed his car into the school, drunk at nine in the morning. A kid who obviously wasn’t thinking straight. He was a senior.
Is it possible that the senior who crashed his car is…
No, it couldn’t be.
Although…
I hop in my car and drive as quickly as I can in the direction of the high school.
51
I make great time driving to the school, but as soon as I get there, it’s a mess. There are cars backed up several blocks away, and it only seems to be getting worse. I could have walked to the school ten times over in the time it takes me to drive there.
It looks like they have evacuated the kids from the building, but now they’re standing in clusters outside the school with their teachers. When I finally get to the pickup area, a teacher comes to my car window and asks me the names of my children and their grades.
“Isabel Mullen, tenth grade, and Alexa Mullen, twelfth grade,” I tell her.
The woman has a clipboard in her hand, and the process happens faster and more efficiently than I anticipated. I thought I’d receive a few wrong kids before my own showed up, but only a minute later, Lexi and Izzy are being herded in the direction of my car. I expect the usual fight for the passenger seat in front, but Lexi goes right for the back seat without a word. Izzy slides into the seat next to me.
I peer in the rearview mirror at my older daughter. Like last night, her eyes are swollen.
“It was Zane!” Izzy announces, her eyes wide. “Zane was the kid who crashed his car!”
“He…he was?”
Despite everything, I’m stunned. After my conversation with Zane, he must have found something to drink and got toasted.
“I heard he got an email calling him to the principal’s office,” Izzy continues her story without missing a beat. “I guess he was in trouble for something—I don’t know what. But we all heard the crash when his car hit. The whole school shook.”
Wow, I must have really freaked him out with my story about being a sex offender.
“Is he dead?” I ask.
Izzy just shakes her head, and I can hear Lexi sniffling quietly in the back seat. I guess nobody knows. But the fact that an ambulance came seems to indicate that he’s probably still alive. For the moment.
“Lexi honey?” I say. “Are you all right?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she just sobs, tucked in on herself. I don’t understand why she’s crying. That asshole was blackmailing her. He was threatening to ruin her whole life.
We drive in silence the rest of the way home, broken only by the sound of Lexi’s sobs. I don’t know what to say, and my experience as the mother of teenage girls is that everything I say is always wrong, so it’s better to keep my mouth shut. As they say, it’s better to remain quiet and have your teenagers think you’re an idiot than open your mouth and say something they can text their friends about.
When we get back into the house, Izzy does that thing where she walks through the door and scrolls through her phone at the same time. After a moment, she looks up.
“He’s alive,” she says as she perches herself on the edge of the sofa. “They took him to the hospital.”
“That’s good,” I say, and I mean it. Well, kind of.
“But he’s badly hurt,” she reports. “Jana says he broke his neck.”
At this new revelation, Lexi bursts into hysterical tears. Shockingly, she’s even more upset than she was last night. Her face is buried in her hands, and her whole body is shaking with sobs.
I don’t understand it. Zane was horrible. He tricked her into giving him naked pictures of her, and he threatened to show them to the whole school. He was blackmailing her into having sex with him. What part of this makes her sad that he’s hurt?
“Lexi honey.” I put my arm around her shoulders to attempt to comfort her. “Why are you crying?”
“Why am I crying?” she repeats incredulously. “My boyfriend has a broken neck!”
“But last night, you had a problem,” I point out, “and now it’s fixed.”
Lexi looks up at me with her tearstained face, which is frozen in an expression of horror. “Not like this,” she chokes out.
With those words, she squirms out of my half embrace and runs up the stairs two at a time. The last thing I hear is the door to her room slamming shut so hard that the windows rattle.
Well, I don’t get it. She had a problem, and I fixed it. I wish somebody had done that for me when I was in trouble. Maybe my whole life would have been different.
In any case, I don’t regret what I did. I never told Zane to get drunk and smash his car into the school, for God’s sake. Yes, I did indicate how bad it would be to be labeled a sex offender, and I’m sure when he got that email from the principal, it spooked him. But he was the one who crashed his car. I didn’t have my foot on the gas. Everything that happened was simply…karma.
52
Lexi doesn’t leave her room for the rest of the morning and the early afternoon.
I check on her a few times. I knock on the door, and when she snaps at me to go away, I feel better. If she is angry at me, that’s a healthier emotion than feeling sad over that loser who she never should’ve been dating in the first place. He was never good enough for her. She’s an honor student taking four AP classes! As far as I can tell, he barely even bothered to go to class at all, and I overheard him mocking her for wanting to stay in to study.
Good riddance.
I intermittently check the news for updates on Zane. The website for the Hingham Household is still just porn, but there are plenty of other news articles about the accident. All the articles I find confirm the story I heard from Izzy. They don’t mention that Zane had been called to the principal’s office for a disciplinary issue, but I imagine that’s something they’re trying to keep quiet.
The articles also confirm that he is very much alive, although his injuries do sound serious. One of them mentions a broken neck and says that he has been rushed to emergency surgery.
At about two o’clock, I head upstairs to check on my girls.
I find Izzy studying in her bedroom. She is sitting cross-legged on her bed with a pencil in her mouth. It’s actually something that Cooper does, and I find it weirdly endearing that she has picked up this habit from him, either from environment or genetics.
“Izzy,” I say. “I have to run an errand. I’ll be back in about two hours.”
“Okay,” she says without looking up.
“Could you keep an eye on your sister for me?”
“Sure, Mom.”
“Thanks, sweetie. You’re the best.”
Izzy has always been the easier child. I fixed her little problem, and she was grateful. She didn’t run to her bedroom and sob for hours because Coach Pike got arrested.
I stop at Lexi’s door next. She still has her door closed, and I knock gently. She doesn’t answer, so I knock again.
“Go away,” Lexi mumbles. It sounds like her face is stuffed into a bunch of pillows, which it may very well be.
“I’m going out for a bit,” I say. “I just wanted to let you know.”
“Okay,” she says through the door. “Try not to kill anyone.”
I stifle a smile. She has no idea.
There is one very big problem I need to fix, and after I do that, maybe I’ll be able to sleep through the night again. After nearly half a century of life, I’ve realized that the only person who is truly looking out for my best interests is myself.
53
The trip takes about an hour and change, driving up I-95 north through the South Shore. It will be longer on the way back, but if I can be finished before rush hour, it might not be too bad. If I get stuck in rush-hour traffic, it will take an eternity.
But I’m not in a hurry.
I haven’t made this trip in the entire time I’ve been living on the South Shore. We’re far enough from Cambridge that there’s no reason to. And although Cooper doesn’t know why I left MIT, he senses there’s a reason I don’t want to go back, and he has never suggested it.
But today, I am on the highway, headed in the direction of Cambridge. Except I’m not going to the MIT campus. I’m going to an off-campus house. One that I never thought I would return to.
Zeta Pi. The fraternity house that has haunted my dreams since that night during my freshman year.
I’ve gotten so good at pretending that the night that ruined my life never happened. But over the last year, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s become an obsession for me. I feel like I’m losing my mind.
I need to do this. I will never feel at peace while this house is still standing.
It’s just after three o’clock when I pull up in front of the large house on the border between Brookline and Cambridge. There’s a parking spot just down the street, and I snag it before anyone else can or before I change my mind. I kill the engine and then sit there in the car, summoning up all my courage.
I’m braver than I was when I was nineteen. I’m stronger too. I can do this.
So I grab my purse and get out of the car.
The house looks different than I remember. It’s smaller, for starters. When I walked in there the night of that party all those years ago, it seemed gigantic. But now it doesn’t seem so much bigger than any other on the street. It’s made out of grayish-brown bricks with white columns lining the entrance. The doors are a stark white color, and there’s a sign over the entrance with the words Zeta Pi in calligraphy with the Greek letters beneath. There are five steps to the front door, and my legs feel heavy as I climb them.
When I reach the door, I press my index finger into the doorbell. The chimes ring throughout the house. And I wait.
The door is eventually opened by a clean-cut young man wearing a navy MIT T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. His hair hangs a bit in his eyes the same way Hutch’s did on the night I can’t forget. I hate the kid instantly.
“Hey,” the boy says. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I say in a chipper voice. “My name is Nicole Quint, and I’m writing an article for the Cambridge Chronicle about MIT fraternities. Would it be okay if I came in to chat a bit?”
The Chronicle is a weekly paper that mostly does puff pieces and definitely no hard-hitting journalism. I had been slightly concerned the boy might quiz me on the article before letting me in, and I had prepared answers on the way over, but instead, his face creases into an eager smile.
“Sure!” He steps aside to let me enter the frat house. “Come on in!”
I smile up at him as I enter the house where I experienced the worst night of my life. “Thank you very much.”
