A Good Idea Read online

  We passed the grim row of one-story buildings—general store, post office, ice cream shop and seafood shack, diner, dive bar—that made up the town’s center. Manufactured homes on tiny lots, overgrown yards, a rusting tricycle upended in a driveway, a front porch sagging under the weight of hundreds of newspapers piled up in moldy stacks. That briny tang in the air, sinister now, at least to me. Cold green seawater slapping against rotting, wooden docks; the intermittent clanging of the buoys.

  “So how was your year?” I asked, reclining my seat and propping my feet up on the dash.

  “Go ahead, make yourself comfortable,” Owen said. “How was my year? The same. Besides the whole fucking mess with Betty. The cabin’s roof leaks. The diner needs a new Hobart. My tires are bald. You know the story, Fin. It’s the same every year.”

  “Your parents doing okay?”

  He just shook his head.

  I looked out the window. We were right outside of town now, where the houses were larger and farther apart and set back on multiple acres, long driveways marked by mailboxes where they met the road, hidden under the canopy of trees. Owen was smart; by all rights he should have been at school in Orono, reading Russian literature and studying abnormal psych and getting laid every weekend. But his older siblings had all moved away—he was the youngest of five by almost a decade—and by the time it was his turn to leave, his mother had developed arthritis and his father emphysema. They owned the local diner, and he had opted to stay and help them run it; it had been his choice, but still, I watched him grow more bitter every year.

  “I heard you had some trouble in New York,” he said.

  “My father tell you that?”

  “Frank didn’t get specific. Just said you were having a hard time.”

  That was one way of putting it. My dad had called with the news about Betty the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It was late afternoon, but I was still in bed; my friends in college were home for the holiday, and I had been out all night, drinking forties on stoops in the West Village and listening to their stories about higher education, wondering if I seemed as suddenly young to them as they did old to me. My mother had come into my bedroom, her expression not unlike the one she’d worn when my parents told me they were splitting up—eyes narrowed, lips parted like she was about to speak but couldn’t pick a place to begin. She turned on the light despite my protests, pulled back the curtains, and opened the window, letting in a gust of cold air that made me clutch my blankets around me. Then she held out the cordless, saying my father needed to talk to me, and I tried to take the phone under the covers, but Mom said, “No, Fin, you have to sit up for this,” something in her voice thick and curdled, and I stopped arguing, sat up, put the phone to my ear, and listened to Dad tell me that Betty was dead.

  I walked into school Monday morning like someone doing the Thorazine shuffle—empty-eyed, everything in slow motion, asking anyone who talked to me if they could repeat themselves. My friends were sympathetic in that hyper, almost giddy way, eager to take care of me, constantly asking if I needed anything, was there anything they could do. Most of them were like Betty herself, melodramatic extroverts who appreciated the fact that they would never have to fight me for the spotlight and enjoyed my sarcastic running commentary. They really did want to comfort me, but they were also undeniably exhilarated by their proximity to a genuine tragedy. Soon I felt smothered and shaky and on the verge of something I couldn’t name. I made it to my lunch period before I walked back out the school’s front door.

  Betty and I had sent our applications to NYU a few weeks before. We’d both applied early decision to Tisch—her to the Institute of Performing Arts, me to the Department of Cinema Studies. It was a plan we had hatched together last year, during one of her visits; finally, she would make her escape and join me in New York. Freshman year, we’d live in the dorms together, but after that we’d get a place.

  I still remembered Betty’s first visit to me in New York. The way she bounded down our front stoop every morning, so eager to see all the places I’d told her about—the dog run in Tompkins Square Park, the theater marquees on Broadway, the old dim sum parlor nestled into the curve of Doyers Street in Chinatown. I told her everything was closed at Coney Island, but she wanted to go anyway; we took the F train to the end of the line just so she could take pictures of the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.

  “Haven’t I already sent you postcards from Coney Island?” I asked as I shivered on the boardwalk.

  “Postcards aren’t the same,” she said. “The postcard means you’ve been here. The picture means I’ve been here.”

  She loved the city with a fearlessness surprising for someone from such a small town, and her frequent visits always included trips to places I never would have considered. When we talked about going to college at NYU, we skipped past freshman year as if it were an afterthought, arguing the merits of an apartment in the West Village (her preference) versus the East (mine). It was a constant battle made no less heated by the fact that the actual decision would not be made for two more years, although in the months before she died she’d been harder to bait during our conversations, as if her enthusiasm for our proposed future together were waning.

  I mailed my application at ten thirty P.M. from the main branch of the post office, the one by Penn Station that never closed, so it would be postmarked November 1. And while our guidance counselors always warned us during those interminable assemblies that your admission could be revoked if your grades fell off too much, it seemed like one of those myths designed to keep the senior class from disintegrating into a complete state of anarchy by springtime. So when my acceptance letter and financial aid package came that first week in December, right after Betty was killed, I took it as permission to give up completely.

  I stopped going to school; instead, I would take the train out to Coney Island and wade into the ocean, jeans rolled up, shoes in my hands, until my feet and ankles were numb; I’d use my fake ID to buy beer and drink it right there on the beach out of a paper bag, until the cops came along and wrote me a citation; later on, I’d tear it into pieces, scattering them over the subway tracks and leaving them to the rats.

  Every morning that winter, I left the apartment with my messenger bag strapped around me and a thermos mug full of coffee, just as if I were going to school, and used my student MetroCard to travel all over the city in a numb haze. I took the tram to Roosevelt Island and wandered around the crumbled remains of the old smallpox hospital; I rode the Staten Island Ferry and hiked through Freshkills Park, trespassing through the abandoned monastery and Willowbrook State School; I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and kept going until I got to Red Hook and the old sugar refinery. I skipped tests. I failed classes. I didn’t care. I just had to keep moving.

  Some days it didn’t feel like it was about Betty at all. Some days I was just a misanthropic truant who would rather go up to Fort Washington Park and take pictures of the lighthouse than go to school. Some days I didn’t think about her until I was in bed trying to sleep and her face would flash behind my eyelids and I remembered, and I’d realize it was the first time I’d thought about her since I’d woken up that morning, and I’d wonder what that meant, and if I could go eight hours without thinking about her, then maybe I could sit through a little bit of school. But something always stopped me—the next day would be a Saturday, or unseasonably warm, or I would have a dream where Betty called me on the phone to wish me a happy birthday and I could hear her voice so clearly, smooth and honeyed, perfect diction, slightly nasal on every n, and I would cry into the receiver about how much I missed her until I woke up, gutshot all over again.

  And then NYU got word that I had practically dropped out of high school, and I was violently whisked out of my silent reveries along the various New York City waterfronts and into office after office, with my mother and the principal and the NYU assistant dean of admissions, and various guidance counselors a
nd therapists, where I kept having to explain how depressed I had become after the murder of my closest childhood friend. It took more convincing than I thought it would. Grief they could understand; my way of grieving, not so much. If I had stopped eating or tried to kill myself, I probably would have seemed more sincere. It was my winter of sightseeing that confused them.

  I had to start seeing a psychiatrist, who prescribed anti-depressants I pretended to take and who eventually wrote a compelling letter about my progress to the NYU admissions board. My record was otherwise spotless, my grades and SAT scores impressive. I had never been particularly rebellious; unlike Betty, who’d constantly chafed against her family and church’s repression, I lacked compelling reasons to act out. The shrink suspected I was “subconsciously harboring some serious resentment” toward my mother, whose unhappiness had defined most of my childhood and who then had forced me to choose between my parents and uproot my entire life, but even if he was right, I was perfectly happy to keep shoving those feelings deep down inside, in keeping with my New England heritage. The point is, I made a convincing case for being a good kid going through a hard time, and it worked. As long as I stayed in therapy and attended all my classes for the final quarter of the school year, NYU would still take me. I never found out if Betty had been accepted.

  So that’s what I did. I went to school, and I went to counseling. The charges against Calder were dismissed on a technicality. He would go off to Bates in the fall, and I would be back in New York, but for one final summer we’d overlap in Williston.

  “Yeah,” I said to Owen now. “Things got pretty dark for a while. It was a long winter.”

  He grunted, I assumed in agreement.

  “Are you working today?”

  He shook his head. “Got a family barbecue later. For the graduates, you know. To celebrate.”

  “You don’t look like you feel much like celebrating.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I thought they’d say something,” I said. The weed had me all confused; I struggled to find my words. “I don’t know, sing a song for her, something.”

  “How could they?” Owen said. “With him sitting right there?”

  “Still,” I said finally, “it’s not right.”

  Owen shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.” He tightened his fingers around the steering wheel. “Finley, I want you to listen to me. As far as this town is concerned, there’s no proof she’s even dead. You weren’t here when it happened. I was. Everyone in Williston is on his side. They think his confession was some coerced bullshit and that she ran off with some dude. Leroy had Emily fired and now there’s, literally, a new sheriff in town who does whatever Leroy says.” Emily Shepard, one of Owen’s many cousins, had been sheriff since I was in elementary school. Leroy Miller, Calder’s father, was mayor of Williston. He owned the gravel mine just outside town, which had closed the year before so he could focus on opening a local factory that would make computer parts or something. Owen looked at me. “It’s over, okay?”

  But it wasn’t over. Not for me. Not for Serena. For us, it was just beginning.

  • • •

  After Owen dropped me off at home, I found the keys to my Subaru, a hand-me-down from my father that stayed in the garage ten months a year until I came back in the summers and reclaimed it. She was covered in a thick layer of dust, so I backed her out into the driveway, gathered Armor All, sponges, and a bucket, hosed her down, and gave her a thorough scrubbing. I even washed the tires and the license plates.

  The sun was still out, the mosquitoes were mostly dormant, and the thrumming white noise of the cicadas was all around me, punctuated by the occasional call from a mourning dove. In the last few hours I’d added car keys and clasp knife to the list of items in my pockets, and that’s how I knew I was home.

  After I’d dried off the Subaru and changed into clean clothes, I was ready to go. The gas tank was half-full, courtesy, I imagined, of my dad. The radio was still tuned to the classic rock station. Being back behind the wheel gave me a small thrill of satisfaction; none of my friends in New York even knew how to drive. The Subaru was a manual and I was definitely rusty, stalling before I’d reached the end of our driveway, but I took a deep breath and remembered the advice Owen had given me when I was first learning. “Think of the stupidest person you know,” he’d said. “That person can drive a car.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting—that it would look haunted, I guess, the lawn overgrown and tangled with weeds, paint peeling off the front porch, the wooden steps rotted and sagging. But Betty’s house was exactly the same as I remembered, the lawn groomed to perfection and the petunias blooming in the flower boxes. The front door was open, and I could see through the screen door into the house, where Montel Williams was on the television and someone was bustling around in the kitchen, turning the faucet off and on, cabinet doors being open and shut, everything so usual and familiar I expected to hear Betty come flying down the stairs—it was the parking brake on my car, she said, that always tipped her off to my arrival, so loud she could hear it from her bedroom on the second floor—and see her appear in the crosshatching of the screen, a darker, obscured version of her, and then, flinging the door open and rushing onto the porch to greet me, she would be revealed in full daylight as the bright, shining, ridiculous creature that she was.

  I rang the doorbell and wondered if I should have brought something, flowers, a casserole, but then Mrs. Flynn was letting me into the house with a genuinely delighted look on her face—“Finley! Hello! What a welcome surprise!”—and I was being swept along into the living room.

  Mrs. Flynn was blonde, like her daughter had been, although her hair was run through with coarse silver strands. She was soft without being matronly, and even though she was just doing housework she wore a smart pair of navy slacks and a white shell blouse. She turned off the television and sat down on the couch, gesturing for me to join her.

  There were pictures of Betty everywhere. I guess I should have been prepared for that. Even the picture of Betty and Calder from the junior prom was still on the mantel above the fireplace. There was little physical evidence of their overzealous Catholicism—no crucifixes mounted on the walls, no pictures of a bleeding Jesus wearing a crown of thorns—but I knew how fervently she and Mr. Flynn believed.

  Mrs. Flynn asked a flurry of questions—how was my mother, was I excited to be starting college in the fall—and I tried to answer all of them as honestly as possible without going into detail about just how fucked up my year had been.

  “So,” she said, after exhausting all the usual innocuous topics, “what brings you by?”

  “I just came by to offer my condolences in person,” I said.

  Her face darkened, as if up until now this had just been a friendly visit and I’d spoiled it. “Thank you. And thank you for the card you sent, that was very thoughtful of you.”

  “I can’t imagine how hard this has been for you. I just wanted to say if there’s anything I can do, now that I’m back—”

  “I appreciate that,” she said, more polite and composed than she had any right to be, “but honestly, Finley, we’re just trying to put all of that behind us now.”

  “I was wondering if—I don’t want to impose, but—would it be okay if I went up to her room?”

  Mrs. Flynn paused for a moment, took a sip of her iced tea like she was stalling for time. “Of course, honey.”

  As I followed her upstairs, I thought I detected a hint of sheepishness in the cast of her shoulders. When she led me into Betty’s bedroom, I understood. While it was somewhat intact—the same furniture, her big sleigh bed still made up with its creamy lace duvet, mirror hanging over the vanity, the little stool tucked underneath it just so—what remained of Betty’s belongings had been packed into a couple of cardboard boxes and shoved, unceremoniously, into a corner of the room. The walls and s
urfaces were all bare, a thin, grimy layer of dust covering all that mahogany furniture.

  “Is this everything?” I said, unable to keep the judgment out of my voice.

  “Everything from the house,” Mrs. Flynn said quickly. “There’s a box of her things at the school. Her notebooks, a few costumes. The guidance counselor has been holding on to them for me. I keep meaning to go pick them up, but, well, I guess I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  She retreated, leaving me alone. I sat on the plush carpet, unfolding the flaps of the first box and spilling its contents out beside me so I could sift through them.

  There were old play scripts with her lines highlighted and notes about blocking in the margins, class photographs from elementary school—Betty’s blonde hair in perfect curls, hands folded primly in her lap. Dried rose petals in a small plastic sleeve, the kind meant for preserving baseball cards. The sheer scarf, the color of lilacs, that matched her dress from the junior prom. Postcards I’d sent her from New York, Playbills from the Broadway shows we’d seen together.

  I went through everything, repacking the first box when I was finished and opening the second. Here was a paper she’d written on To Kill a Mockingbird; the ruffled white dress she’d worn for her first communion; her Bible, the red satin ribbon marking a page. I opened it eagerly, reading a passage from the Book of Matthew before I decided the page had been saved at random. There was no hidden meaning, no secret message, no insight granted into Betty’s heart. One thing was clear, though: no matter what the official story was, Betty’s parents didn’t think she was coming home.

  Her copy of Hamlet was tattered, several cracks in the spine, a number of the pages flagged with small pink Post-it notes. She’d been cast as Ophelia in last fall’s production. Her name was written on the first page, and that neat, feminine cursive brought me back to middle school, all those notes we passed in class and slipped into each other’s lockers during the hours we were apart; all day, we would correspond, and still spend hours on the phone at night, receivers wedged between our ears and shoulders, sometimes watching the same movie, one eye trained on the television as we talked, sometimes absently doing our homework, comparing our answers and providing synonyms or correct spellings when needed. Usually my parents were fighting in the other room—their arguments, once begun, were like runaway trains, steadily gaining momentum until they were disaster-bound and unstoppable—and Betty, sensing that I needed a distraction, was unparalleled at keeping a conversation going indefinitely. Now, sitting in her bedroom, I tried to remember what we had talked about for all those hours, and I couldn’t.