Chapter 42
Bennett
I couldn’t sleep again.
Do you remember “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe? You probably read it in high school. No? Well, let me give you the short version. A dude kills another dude and stuffs his body under his floorboards. He keeps hearing the dead guy’s heartbeat from beneath the floor because of the guilt his conscience lays on him. Either that, or the guy is just nuts—I was never sure.
Anyway, that’s me—with a slight modification. I’m living “The Smell-Tail Heart” by Bennett Fox. I tossed and turned half of the damn night, the scent of Annalise so heavy on my pillow that after two hours of trying to fall asleep, I got up and stripped the bed. I also grabbed a spare pillow I’d had stuffed in the back of my closet—one Annalise had never laid a finger on—and tossed the offending linens into the hall.
Sniff-sniff
Thump-thump.
Lying on a bare mattress, using a pillow with no case, I still fucking smelled her. It couldn’t even be physically possible. But her scent hadn’t dimmed one bit. I beat the pillow with my fist to fluff it up.
Thump-thump.
Eventually, I got out of bed and searched the goddamn room. She had to have left a bottle of perfume somewhere. I pulled everything out of the nightstands, took a whiff of the bottle of odorless lube, and checked under the bed.
No damn perfume.
Sniff-sniff
Thump-thump.
***
The next morning, my ass dragged. At least it was Saturday so I didn’t have to go in to the office. Although I would have preferred that to the thought of talking to Lucas today. I had to be a sadist, or was it a masochist? I always confused those two. Regardless of what you called it, the timing seemed to be a fucked-up coincidence. I was about to hurt the two people in my life I actually gave a shit about.
Fanny met me at the door with a scowl. I couldn’t have been more thrilled when she said nothing, slammed the door in my face, and screamed upstairs in her usual friendly manner.
Lucas was his normal, happy-go-lucky self. He walked out, and we did our customary handshake.
Then his nose scrunched up as he looked at me. “Are you sick or something?”
“No. Why do you say that?”
He hopped down the two steps of the porch in one giant leap. “You look like crud. And you showed up at the house in the middle of the night the other day, and you didn’t sound so good.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
He shrugged. “Grandma said you wanted to talk to me about something.”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah. We have to talk for a little while today.”
After we loaded into my car and buckled, Lucas turned to check out the backseat. “No fishing rods?”
I shook my head. “Not today, buddy. I want to take you somewhere.”
He frowned. “Okay.”
During the drive over to the boat harbor, I attempted to make small talk, but it all felt forced. My palms started to sweat as I parked. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to talk to him about his mother after all. He was still pretty young. Fanny probably had a price to keep her mouth shut. It might take the contents of my bank account, but at the moment, it seemed like a good investment. Putting it off would be best for Lucas—he’s still too young.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, Lucas stretched his arms over his head in a giant yawn. His armpits were covered in hair.
Yeah. Nice try. This was a discussion he’d probably deserved to have years ago, but I’d been too selfish.
We pulled into the parking lot, and Lucas looked out the window at the Bay and nearby jetty. A few people were fishing off the rocks.
“Where are we?” he asked. “Why didn’t we bring a pole?”
“Because today is about listening. Come on, I want to show you some place.”
We walked down the jetty. As we approached our destination, I started to hear the sound and smiled.
“You hear that noise?” I asked.
“Yeah. What is it?”
“It’s called the Wave Organ. This was your mom’s favorite place to go when we were teenagers. She used to drag me here all the time.”
The Wave Organ was a wave-activated acoustic sculpture located along the Bay. Made mostly from the rubble of a demolished cemetery, it looked more like ancient ruins than an art and music exhibit. Twenty-something PVC and concrete organ pipes were located throughout the carved granite and marble pieces, creating sound that came from the water movement beneath.
Lucas and I took a seat on broken rocks across from each other and listened to the subtle sounds.
“It’s not really music.” His face wrinkled up.
I smiled. “That’s what I used to tell your mother. But she told me I didn’t listen well enough.”
Lucas concentrated for a minute, trying to hear something other than the sound holding a seashell up to your ear made. He shrugged. “It’s okay. Would be better with a fishing pole.”
I agreed with his sentiment.
I’d always been a spit it out, say what’s on your mind kinda guy, but I couldn’t figure out how to dive into the conversation I’d brought him here to have. Apparently, Lucas knew something was on my mind.
He picked up a small rock and tossed it into the water. “Are we gonna have the birds-and-the-bees talk or something?”
I chuckled. “I wasn’t planning on it today. But if you want to, we can.”
“Tommy McKinley already told me all about stuff like that.”
“Is Tommy the pimply kid who smells like a hamster that we took to the movies a few months ago? The one who tied his own shoelaces together and fell over.”
Lucas laughed. “Yeah, that’s Tommy.”
Oh, we definitely needed to have that talk. “I’m guessing Tommy’s experience with girls is pretty much zilch. So why don’t we have that talk next week. I wanted to talk to you about your mom today.”
“What about her?”
I suddenly felt lightheaded. How did I tell this kid I adored that I’d ruined his life? My mouth went dry.
“You know that your mom and I were best friends, right?”
“Yeah. Even though that’s weird. Who wants to be best friends with a girl when you’re a kid?”
I wilted a smile. There wasn’t an easy way to confess to this kid. I’d rather a giant wave wash over the rock I was sitting on and take me out to sea than finish this conversation. But I looked over at Lucas waiting.
Like a coward, I looked down. “You know your mom died in a car accident.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember it, though, really. Just a lot of people kept coming to our house.”
I nodded. “Yeah. A lot of people really loved your mom.”
When I got quiet again, he asked, “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
I looked up and found Lucas’s eyes so full of innocence and trust—trust he’d had in me for eleven years, trust I was about to shatter.
“No, buddy. I need to tell you something about the accident.”
He waited.
There was no putting the cork back in the bottle after this. I took one last deep breath.
“I should have told you this a long time ago. But you were too young, or I was too afraid to tell you, or maybe both.” I looked away, then back at Lucas to deliver the blow. “I was the one driving the car the night of the accident. Your mom and I, we’d just had a big argument and… It had rained a lot. A big tree needed to be cut back and was partially covering a stop sign. I didn’t see it until we were almost on top of it. I hit the brakes, but the ground was wet…”
The expression on Lucas’s face changed immediately. It seemed to take forever for him to swallow what I’d said, to allow it to fully register. But when it finally did, he stood.
“Is that why you spend all this time with me?” His voice was full of hurt, and the more he spoke, the louder he became. “You feel guilty for killing my mother? That’s why you come visit me every other week and pay off my grandmother?”
“No. That’s not it at all.”
“You’re a liar!”
“Lucas…”
“Just leave me alone!” He took off running down the jetty.
I called after him a few times, but when he stopped down the path to pick up rocks and hurl them into the water, I thought it might be better to give him some headspace. He didn’t usually get upset talking about his mother, but what I’d told him was a lot to absorb and probably opened a lot of old wounds, along with creating new ones.
Lucas didn’t speak to me for the rest of the afternoon. But he also didn’t ask me to take him home early. So I didn’t. Instead, I stopped at the store and picked up a cheap rod and some tackle and took him to a lake to fish. If I asked something, he growled a one-word answer. I found a certain amount of comfort in knowing that even when he was upset and angry, he still didn’t completely ignore me.
As we got close to his house, I knew he wouldn’t leave me any time to talk to him once we arrived. He’d hop out the minute I stopped and slam the door behind him. Hell, I would’ve done the same at his age. Which is why I eased up on the gas and said my piece during the last five minutes of the drive.
“I understand you’re upset with me. And I’m not looking for you to talk to me right now. But I need you to know that none of the time I’ve spent with you was borne out of guilt. Do I feel guilty about what happened and wish it had been different? Every damn day of my life. But that’s not why I come visit you. I come visit you because I loved your mother like she was my sister.” I started to get choked up, and my voice broke. “And I love you with all of my heart. You can hate me if you want for what happened. I deserve that. But there’s nothing more honest in my life than what I’ve got with you, Lucas.”
We pulled up in front of his house, and I turned my head to try to hide wiping my tears. Lucas looked over at me, stared into my eyes for the longest time, and then turned and got out of my car without a word.