The Drifter(51)
Betsy couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked her mother for help, or even the last time she had told her the truth. She knew she would judge her. She knew she would use the exact tone that was vibrating through the receiver. Betsy pictured her mom standing in the tiny Venice kitchen, a kettle taking forever to boil on the electric stovetop, that low wall of 1980s-era glass blocks behind her that distorted anything you saw through it. She had never been able to talk to her mom about the ugly stuff, the complicated, gritty side of her life that would have made her look like a failure. The fact that Betsy was moving to New York to live with her boyfriend was not information Kathy would share with pride.
“I know,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
“You’re too scared to go back to Gainesville, but you’ll move to New York on a dare? With a boy you barely know? That’s taking care of yourself? Betsy, I just don’t understand you.”
“He’s an adult, Mom, not a boy. I’m twenty-one years old. How old were you when you got married, anyway? Twenty-two? You can’t call the shots for me anymore,” she said, shaking with nerves and rage. New York seemed less terrifying because there was enough noise and plenty of distractions to drown out whatever was in her head, like New Orleans. Maybe there were killers there, but Betsy was convinced it would be easier to spot them or to hide from them. There were other threats back home that her mother wouldn’t understand, and Betsy couldn’t explain.
Their plan had been hatched after Thanksgiving. Betsy floated the idea in one of her letters, and had been shocked when Gavin asked to hear more about her fantasy life “up north.” In the long, rambling letters they’d exchanged during the months she’d spent in Venice, they’d constructed the Big Plan, though all it really amounted to was a rough departure date, a AAA TripTik with driving directions from Jacksonville to Manhattan, and a forced invitation to sleep on someone’s lumpy pullout sofa. There was a part of Betsy that never imagined either of them had the guts to pull the trigger.
By mid-December, she had mailed her final papers, stored a couple of boxes with her belongings in the back of her closet, stashed her warmest clothes in a duffel bag, and boarded a bus to Jacksonville. She told her mom that she was spending Christmas vacation with Gavin’s family and then she’d decide what was next after that. Kathy stood in the parking lot of the bus station with her arms folded, certain her daughter was making a mistake of some kind but unable to pinpoint exactly why.
“You can always come back when you need to,” she said, offering the most discouraging of all parental send-offs.
The day after Christmas, which was celebrated in the Davis household, with his parents and younger brother, Jay, with a cheese log and a HoneyBaked ham, Gavin and Betsy bought a bottle of Cuervo and sat on the beach, wrapped in blankets, passing it between them.
“Let’s do it,” Gavin said after his final swig. “Neither of us is getting any younger.”
“And then I have to say, ‘Or any smarter,’” Betsy added, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders. “I have to.”
Five days later, she was staring at Gavin as he filled the hallway/kitchen of Ari’s place, deep in a fake argument about the Clash with Ari’s boyfriend. Gavin, for no reason other than to piss off this total stranger, was firm on his position that Mick Jones could kick Joe Strummer’s ass. And his adversary’s stuttering response made him smile wide, turn to Betsy, and wink. Betsy mimed drinking a glass of water to Gavin, hoping he’d get one for her, and then she was horrified to realize that he might not know her well enough to know what she meant.
“So Ari tells me that your best friend was murdered,” said the sullen girl with deep burgundy-lined eyes, who had been chain-smoking Parliaments on the pullout couch where she and Gavin would later sleep. She extended the pack, with two forlorn cigarettes lingering in the bottom. “Want one?”
“Uh, yeah,” Betsy answered, struggling to keep her voice from cracking in her throat, which was parched from heat, smoke, and exhaustion. She had kept her anxiety in check as they crawled up the coast, silent through a snowstorm near the Virginia border. Her muscles tensed as the population density increased and the traffic grew thicker until they were at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, struck dumb by the icy lower Manhattan skyline. She could barely eat. Every couple of hours she’d look over at Gavin, when he was behind the wheel of the car, or last night when he was huddled with her on the pullout under a slick polyester sleeping bag, and freeze in terror. What have I done? she thought. She waved to get his attention, and motioned for him to get her a glass of water again, tipping an imaginary glass to her mouth. Ginny would have known what I meant.
“So you’re saying that Big Audio Dynamite II is your favorite band?” She heard the poor sod plead with Gavin to use reason. “And you’re totally OK with putting that information out into the world?”
“So it’s true?” the Parliament girl said to Betsy, over the Love and Rockets song Ari was playing on repeat. They’d all split the handful of ecstasy tablets Gavin had offered, stolen from his brother, and driven across many state lines in his backpack, in exchange for a few nights room and board. Ari’s kicked in first, and she was having her moment in the corner, vigorously petting her cat, listening to “No New Tale to Tell” over and over again. “Do you know who killed her?”