Never Have I Ever(37)

By the time I got back to my neighborhood, it was past one, and I had to pick up Oliver. I didn’t want to take the baby to Roux’s, but Char had that appointment. I left my car at the house and walked two blocks farther down to the cul-de-sac to collect him, not even stopping to clean up the mess I’d left in the pantry or change. I was mostly dry by then anyway.

I thanked Char profusely, promising to pay her back the time with interest. Oliver’d gone down for his big nap, passed out in his bucket seat. I snapped it into the top of the stroller without waking him and wheeled him two doors down.

The red car was gone, but I could hear faint music playing inside. Somebody was home.

I rang the bell, and almost instantly I heard footsteps coming. Roux jerked open the door. Some kind of jazz was on in the room behind her, janky and discordant. She was barefoot, wearing low-rise yoga pants and a workout top that barely covered more flesh than a bra. She was not as calm as I was, her mouth set in an angry line, her forehead furrowed as much as her Botox would allow.

“Come in. I sent Luca to run errands, so we have the place to ourselves.” She stepped back to let me push the stroller in.

I found myself in a dingy living room, crammed with the kind of ugly, durable furniture that ends its life in rental houses. I got an instant case of déjà vu, and yet I’d never once set foot inside the Sprite House. It was dim, mostly because a thick gray blanket had been tacked up over the picture window, but as my eyes adjusted, I could see Roux staring at me with big, wet eyes, both furious and wounded.

She was still in character.

“I can’t believe how long you kept me waiting. Considering.”

“Stop it,” I said, the way I might tell Mad to stop clicking her spoon against her teeth in that enraging habit she had while eating cereal. “You are not Lolly Shipley.”

Roux’s wounded eyes went high-beam. “How can you say that? I saw the whole thing—”

“Not from inside the car. Plastic surgery isn’t a time machine, Roux,” I said, bald and mean. “You’re pushing forty, I would guess.”

A fraught pause, and then she straightened. All her accusing sorrow, it slithered off her like a cape she’d been wearing. I could almost see it puddling at her feet. Her anger stayed.

“I’m not forty,” she snapped. “I could easily—”

I cut her off. “Lolly Shipley died.” Simple. Bare. I kept my eyes on hers, steady. I did not allow my voice to shake.

That took her down a notch.

“Well, shit,” she said. “When?”

“She was five. She drowned,” I said, as calm as I could be, considering.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Roux said, a different kind of pissed now. It was as if this information had inconvenienced her. She stood looking at me expectantly.

I didn’t want to say another word. The last thing I wanted was to hand her the keys to more of my guilt. After Mrs. Shipley’s death, Mr. Shipley hadn’t done well. Drinking. He’d lost his house, his business. They’d moved to Milton, Florida, to a crappy neighborhood with one amenity: a shared pool.

I skipped the history and simply said, “Paul, the baby, walked into a pool when he was two. Lolly jumped in after. To try to save her little brother.”

I said it as flatly as I could. I didn’t tell her that Mr. Shipley had been right there, four feet away, asleep in a deck chair. I didn’t tell her that he’d been drinking. I stopped talking, and I stopped thinking, too. It was a discipline, long practiced, never to think of Lolly—of any of the Shipleys—past this moment. The blue. The bubbles. I let her go down into them.

It was not a bad place, under. It was the place I felt most at home in all the world. I paused, breathed in, breathed out. Strange to tell this story with my own sleeping baby in the room, so wholly innocent.

Roux turned from me, muttering, “Shit! I should have followed up on that.”

She paced away, toward the switchback stairs on the other side of the room. I took the moment when her back was to me to scrub fast at my eyes. When I looked up again, my sense of déjà vu got stronger, and yet I’d never been here before. Not in this house, and certainly not in this position. Maybe it felt familiar because on some level I’d been waiting for it, for truth to come at me in some shape or another, suspended between fear and hope for all my quiet years.

“I don’t remember any Rouxs from the neighborhood. Is that your married name?” I asked when she turned to face me. Her gambit had failed, but she had seen me get out of the Ambassador on the driver’s side. She had a good hold on my past, which meant she had a hold on me.

She took a long time before she answered, and I recognized the expression on her face. I had just felt it cross my own. She was trying to decide how much she needed to tell me.

“Not important. You know I was there. You know what I saw,” She walked toward me, around Oliver’s stroller, until we were face-to-face. “You know enough to give me what I want.”

“Which is?” I said, although I was pretty sure I knew that, too.

She smiled. “Take your clothes off.”

She said it as if this were our obvious next step. My arms crossed, instantly, protectively.

“I’m not doing that,” I said, confused but vehement. Money we could talk about, but this?