True Places(75)

The room fell silent except for the sound of Whit panting in furious impotence.

“Brynn.” Suzanne’s voice faltered for the first time. “The party was at Robby’s, is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“He invited you?”

“Yeah.”

“Who else was there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Any of your friends?”

Brynn sighed and dropped her head onto her arms. “Sam. Ophelia. Lisa.” She uncrossed one arm and pointed at Reid.

Whit scowled at his son. “You didn’t tell us.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of that going around.”

“You saw your fifteen-year-old sister at a college party and you didn’t do anything?”

Reid scraped his stool back and stood up. “I’m not going to be the fall guy, okay? You can’t make this about me.” He started to leave and turned in the doorway. “And who says I didn’t do anything? Why do you always assume the worst? No one forced Brynn to go. No one forced her to get drunk and climb all over that guy.” He spun away.

“Reid!” His son walked off. “Christ!” Whit swiped at the air in front of him. “Suzanne, did you know about this?”

She was crushing the sponge in her hand, and her mouth was a grim line. “About Reid? No.” She paused, opened her mouth and closed it again, appearing to change her mind about what direction to take. She went to the breakfast table and sat across from Brynn. “Do you know where the police found you?”

Brynn lifted her head an inch.

“On the lawn.” Suzanne’s voice thickened. “Someone, Robby probably, dumped you on the front lawn.”

Brynn sat up and pulled her sleeves over her hands. She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes.

“Brynn, are you remembering something?”

Their daughter scanned the room. “Where’s Iris?”

“Upstairs.”

“Is she all right?”

Suzanne leaned closer, her voice trembling. “Do you honestly care, Brynn? Do you?”

Their daughter lowered her lids, exhaled loudly, and dropped her head again.

Whit waited a moment for Brynn to answer or for Suzanne to repeat her question or pursue a different line of questioning. The silence grew too large for him to bear, but he couldn’t leave. That would only make things worse, if that was possible.



Suzanne gave up on Brynn, who was too hungover to be communicative, and retreated upstairs. She curled up in a chair in her bedroom facing the window. A light drizzle shrouded the view, muting the vibrant green of the newly leafed trees. Her limbs sank, heavy with weariness, so heavy she was numb. She would’ve crawled into bed were it not for the anxious, heated energy coursing through her. She could not relax. Sleep, as desperately as she needed it, was out of the question. She was far too furious to sleep.

She waited for Whit to come in. When she’d left the kitchen he had stayed with Brynn, and cowardice was keeping him there. The longer she waited, the hotter her anger grew, as if she were an incinerator and the thoughts and feelings she could access by simply sitting still were a kind of fuel. She thought about asking Whit to come upstairs so she could say what she had to say, but when she imagined herself at the top of the stairs, calling to him, she knew she would scream his name and keep screaming it. In the bedroom, at least, the door could be closed. She might contain her fury.

Suzanne rose and paced the room, lifting logical thoughts, rational plans from out of the overheated slurry in her mind, considering what she was going to do. Her life had become intolerable. It might, indeed, have been intolerable for a very long time, but she was only now acknowledging the fact. The timeline, the road that had brought her here, didn’t matter. What was important was to change course. In her mind the image of a glacier arose, a mile-thick slab of ice sliding inch by inch across the earth, transforming what had been cold but alive into something hopeless, crushed, and frozen solid. She had been overtaken and crushed by a glacier.

The door opened and Whit entered. Suzanne stopped pacing and returned to the chair, where she would be more controlled and have something to hold on to.

Whit lifted his hands. “Before you say anything, Reid did not get the story straight, the one about the photo. You know how he is.”

“No. Tell me.”

“He’s idealistic and he’s stubborn. Once he sees something a certain way, he never reevaluates.”

“And what, exactly, was he supposed to see differently?”

He stepped closer, sensing a chance to explain his position. “What that photo seemed like to me, last Sunday, a week ago. Not now, obviously. Not with hindsight.” He spread his hands in innocence. “You didn’t see his attitude when he told me about it at the club. He’d spent the day doing something he didn’t want to do, and it seemed to me he was taking an opportunity to rile me.”

Suzanne clenched her teeth and measured her words. “It was about you? Your son tells you about a photo he saw that he thinks is Brynn, and your first thought is that he’s doing it to score points.”

“At the time, yes. That photo could’ve been anyone, Suzanne. It could’ve been anyone.”

“Then it could’ve been Brynn.”

Whit jammed his hands into his pockets. His cheeks flushed and he turned away.