The Accidentals(21)

I duck from behind Haze’s body. Pointing my feet toward the parking lot, I begin to walk.

“Rachel, wait.” He hurries to keep up. “Don’t walk away like this. Don’t choose that asshole over me.”

I stop walking, but I’m too upset to look him in the eye. “That is so not fair. Don’t put it like that.”

He crosses his arms. “Is there any other way to put it?”

“I’m going to California, and you’re not going to be nice about it. Are you?”

He hangs his head. With my heart pounding, I walk to the car. An unfamiliar driver opens the door for me. I slide in next to Frederick, who is all dressed up in a suit and tie.

When the car slides into reverse, I close my eyes. Part of me wants to yell, Stop the car! It’s wrong to walk away from Haze in the middle of a fight. But if I go back to him, we’ll just have the same argument over again.

“Remind me why you’re nice to that guy?” Frederick asks. “Every time I see him, he’s yelling.”

That’s when I finally snap, because neither of them has it right. “But he sat beside me for ten days straight while I watched her die! In that effing hospital!” And where the hell were you?

In the silence that follows my outburst, there is only the purr of the engine.

I’ve earned the startled look on Frederick’s face. But even so, it gives me a pang of fear. I turn the other way, looking out the window.

After a minute of quiet, I hear him take out his phone and put it to his ear. “Yes Madeline, I believe you can help me. I’m currently staying in room 408, and I need an upgrade. Can you shake loose a two bedroom suite? My daughter is joining me.”

Daughter. It’s the first time I’ve heard him use that word.

“I’m glad business is so good. But please take a look at my account. Who’s your best customer this month? Right. See what you can do.”

On our way out of the parking lot, we passed Haze’s old blue car. I wonder if I’ll ever ride in it again.





Chapter Eight





Less than forty-eight hours later, I get into the backseat of the car again. This time to leave Florida.

“The airport, if you would,” Frederick says to the driver. “Thanks.”

The car pulls away from the curb, and a Ritz-Carlton concierge bellhop waves goodbye with a gloved hand.

Once Frederick won his custody suit, everything happened really fast. He contacted the guidance counselor at my high school, who rushed my final grades through. Even my half-finished take-home exam in government was awarded a quick A.

Yesterday, my father’s new hired car pulled up outside my old house on Pomelo Court, where a sullen Haze had been waiting to help me pack up my room.

I’d asked my father to wait in the car. “It’s a small space,” I’d told him.

But the truth was I didn’t want him in my mother’s house, because it felt like a betrayal. She’d worked so hard to pay for our tiny place so that I could be in the very best school district, and I didn’t think she’d want Frederick to step inside.

So he’d read a newspaper in the air-conditioned backseat while I went inside.

Meanwhile, Haze helped me put everything in boxes. I’d thought it would take a long time, but it went depressingly quickly. One box for clothes I wanted at Claiborne. One box for books, etc.

Mary will pack up the rest of the house and put some things into storage for me. I labeled one box for storage, containing what my mother had called “the altar.” It was a double stack of all Frederick’s CDs.

I’d bought every one of them with my babysitting money. While downloading was fine for other music, for his I’d wanted to read the liner notes.

When I was younger, I’d assumed that every song Frederick wrote was the literal truth. I would listen to a new album from start to finish, and believe that in the past eighteen months he’d broken down by the side of a desert road while reflecting on his life, missed an airplane that would have brought him to his true love, caught his lover leaving him before dawn, and wondered a lot about why young men had to die in Afghanistan.

If he sang, “I meant for you to stay awhile,” I assumed that he’d written down the exact words he’d said to someone in real life.

The lyrics were my only way to hear his thoughts, and I took them at face value. It never occurred to me that he might embellish or invent. I even tried to figure out if “Wild City” was a real place.

Shocker, it wasn’t.

When I got older, I learned not to take everything so literally. Even so, I’d spent many hours lying on my bed, scrutinizing the printed lyrics to his songs, always listening for allusions to a girlfriend named Jenny or a long-lost daughter.

I never found one.

When my room was packed, Haze taped up the boxes while I tiptoed into my mother’s room. It had always been a spartan place, with few decorations. Last year’s school picture was framed on the dresser. I didn’t like how it had turned out. My smile looked plastic. Beside it, I found my mother’s Timex, so I picked that up.

“Make sure you take a few things of sentimental value,” Hannah had advised me. “If your mother had a favorite pair of earrings, save them. It might not seem like much, but one day you’ll want them. I have my grandmother’s gaudy Christmas brooches, and they are some of my favorite things.”