No Safe House

Eight Terry

She told me I could find her in a small store attached to a gas station at the corner of Gulf Street and New Haven Avenue. I tried to get her to tell me what was going on, but all she’d say was that I should hurry.

And one last thing.

“Don’t tell Mom.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, then clicked back to Cynthia. “Hey.”

“I wondered when someone would say, ‘Your call is important to us.’ Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “There was a problem with her ride, so she’s asked me to pick her up.”

“If you want, I could pick her up, bring her home.”

“No,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. “That’s okay.”

I was thinking about those two words Grace had said. Something’s happened. Just what a parent wants to hear. The mind races. If she were old enough to drive, I’d have guessed fender bender or a speeding ticket. But I could rule that out, given that she was only fourteen, unless she’d decided to get behind the wheel of one of her friend’s cars illegally.

Jesus, don’t let it be that.

Maybe she’d been stopped by the cops for drinking underage or having alcohol in her possession. Maybe she’d smuggled beer into the movie theater. I wasn’t naive enough to think Grace was an angel in that regard. A year ago, when she was thirteen, her mother had discovered a liquor store receipt in the front pocket of her jeans while doing the laundry. We needed the intervention of a UN peacekeeping team after that one. We finally got her to confess she’d gotten a girlfriend’s much older brother to buy her some Baileys Irish Cream — the girls felt very sophisticated adding it to their coffee — and he’d given her the receipt so she knew how much to pay him back.

Yeah, it could easily be something like that tonight.

And even though Cynthia had said she didn’t need to be protected, that she could handle it if there was a problem with our daughter, she sounded fragile tonight and she didn’t need this. If I took Cynthia up on her offer to pick up Grace, we might be into World War III within the hour.

“Are you sure?” Cynthia asked. “I don’t mind.”

I thought of inventing some excuse. Telling her we might be coming down with the flu and there was no sense exposing her. But if that were the case, why had I allowed Grace to go to the movies? Anything I could think of seemed incredibly lame, and I didn’t want to start spinning a whole web of lies over something that, for all I knew, and hoped, wasn’t that big a deal.

Besides, I needed to get going. I’d been off the phone only a few seconds with Grace but was feeling an urgency to get in the car and fetch her.

“No,” I said firmly. “I got this. But thank you.”

“Okay, then,” Cynthia said, sounding slightly miffed.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said.

“Sure, fine, whatever. Go get our girl.”

She hung up.

I grabbed my keys out of the dish and bolted out the front door. I hit the remote to unlock the Escape, got behind the wheel, and backed onto Hickory. From there, it was a short distance to Pumpkin Delight Road. I headed north on it to Bridgeport Avenue, then east, down through the Milford Green, and in only about five minutes was at New Haven and Gulf. The gas station was on the northeast corner.

As I wheeled into the lot, Grace came charging out of the convenience store. Head down, brown hair hanging down over her eyes. She ran to the car. She pulled on the door handle before I had a chance to unlock it. I hit the button, but she grabbed for the handle too quickly and a second time couldn’t get into the car.

“Wait!” I shouted through the glass.

She dropped her arm, waited to hear the click, then swung open the door and got into the front passenger seat. She wouldn’t look at me, but the brief glimpse I had of her face revealed damp cheeks.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“Just go.”

“Where’s your friend? How did you end up here? Why are you alone?”

“Just go,” she said again. “Just drive. Please.”

I drove out between the pumps, got back onto New Haven, and headed west.

“Grace,” I said, firmly but gently, “you can’t expect me to drive out to some gas station in the middle of the night to pick you up without your offering up some kind of explanation.”

“It’s not the middle of the night,” she said. “It’s only after ten. Ten fifteen. You always exaggerate.”

“Okay, it’s ten. What’s going on? You said something happened.”

“I just want to get home. Then... maybe... I can tell you.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way. I kept glancing over at her. Her head hung low, her hands were in her lap, and she appeared to be studying her fingers, which she laced together, took apart, laced together again. It looked to me like she was trying to keep them from shaking.

She was getting out of the car before I had it in park, then made a beeline for the front door. By the time I’d caught up to her, she was trying to unlock it with her own key, but her hand was shaking so much she couldn’t slide it into the lock.

“Let me,” I said, edging her out of the way and using mine.

Once the door was open, she ran up the stairs as fast as she could.

“Grace!” I shouted. If she thought she was going to hole up in her room and close the door and avoid an interrogation, she was very, very wrong. I chased her up the stairs, but she didn’t run into her room. She was in the bathroom, on her knees in front of the toilet.

She attempted to pull back her hair as she retched once, then a second time. I had mixed feelings about whether to help her. When your kids experiment with drinking, maybe they need to endure the consequences without sympathy. Although if Grace had been drinking, surely I’d have smelled it on her breath when she got into the car. I hadn’t noticed anything.

Grace gave it a third try, but hardly anything came up. I handed her a thick wad of tissues to blot her face, squatted down next to her, and reached over to the handle to flush the toilet. Grace slid back from the toilet and propped herself up against the wall.

It was my first real look at her, and she did not look good.

“You going to be okay?” I asked her.

No response.

“What did you drink? I didn’t notice anything on your breath.”

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“Grace.”

“Nothing! Okay?”

Maybe she really was coming down with the flu or something, and I was giving her hell for being sick.

“You sick? Did you eat something bad?”

“I’m not sick,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.

I said nothing for the better part of a minute. I took the wadded tissues in her hand, tossed them in the basket, then ran a washcloth under a cold tap. “Here,” I said. She wiped her mouth again, then put the cool cloth on her forehead.

“It’s time,” I said.

Grace fixed her wet eyes on me. I thought I saw fear in them.

“You weren’t with Sarah,” I said.

“Sandra.”

“Okay. You weren’t with Sandra, were you?”

Her head moved side to side half an inch.

“And you didn’t go to the movies.”

“No.”

“Who were you with?” I asked. When she didn’t respond, I added, “What’s his name?”

Grace swallowed. “Stuart.”

I nodded. “Stuart what?”

She mumbled something.

“I didn’t catch that,” I said.

“Koch.”

I had to think a second. “Stuart Koch?”

A furtive glance my way, then she turned away. “Yeah.”

“I taught a Stuart Koch a couple of years ago. Tell me it’s not that Stuart Koch.”

“It might be,” she said. “I mean, yeah, it is. He went to Fairfield, but he dropped out this year.”

That was the Stuart I knew. “Jesus, Grace, how did you hook up with him?” I was trying to get my head around it. Stuart Koch was the kind of kid who’d ask you how to spell DUI. A chronic underachiever if ever there was one. “Where’d you meet him?”

“Does it matter?”

“He’s a lost kid. Hopeless. Going nowhere. Honestly.”

She shot me a look. “So what are you saying? He wasn’t worth saving because he’s not a girl?”

Her aim was good with that one.

I knew that was a reference to a student I’d had seven years ago. Jane Scavullo, her name was. A troubled kid, always getting into fights. No one on staff had any use for her. But I’d thought there was something there. It came through in her writing assignments. She had a real gift, and I ended up going to bat for her. Of course, there were some extenuating circumstances, too, but those aside, Jane had struck me as a kid who could amount to more than she herself could have imagined. She ended up going to college, and not that long ago, I’d run into her.

I’d talked about her from time to time with Grace, so she knew the story.

“It’s not that,” I said defensively. “Jane had... potential. If Stuart has any, it wasn’t evident to me at the time.” I hesitated. “If I’ve misjudged him, feel free to set me straight.”

She had nothing to say to that, and I let it go — I sensed there was a more immediate problem involving this kid. Were they going together? If so, when had it started? How long had this been going on without my knowledge? Had they had some kind of fight this evening? A breakup?

“What were you doing at that gas station?”

“I walked there,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “I walked for, like, ten minutes or so, and when I got there I figured it would be an easy place for you to find to come get me.”

“Was Stuart driving?” A nod. “But he left you to walk on your own at night, to that gas station? That sure as hell speaks well of him.”

“It’s not like that,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand because you haven’t told me anything. Did Stuart hurt you? Did he do something he shouldn’t have?”

Her lips parted, as if she was about to say something, then closed.

“What?” I asked. “Grace, I know that maybe some things would be easier to talk about with your mother, but did he... did he try to make you do things that made you uncomfortable?”

A slow, torturous nod.

“Oh, honey,” I said.

“It’s not what you think,” she said. “It wasn’t... it wasn’t that kind of stuff. He knew about this car.”

“What car?”

“A Porsche. He knew where there was one that he wanted to take me for a ride in.”

“But it wasn’t his car?”

Grace shook her head.

“Did it belong to someone he knew?”

“No,” she whispered. “He was kind of going to steal it. I mean, not forever, but just for a little while, and then he was going to take it back.”

I put a hand to my forehead. “Good God, Grace, tell me you and this boy didn’t take someone’s car for a joyride.” My mind made several leaps in a nanosecond. They’d stolen a car. They’d hit a pedestrian. They’d fled the scene and—

“We didn’t steal it,” she said. But she didn’t say it in a way that gave me any reason to feel relieved.

“You got caught? He got caught? Trying to take the car?”

“No,” Grace said.

I folded the lid down on the toilet and took a seat. “You gotta help me here, Grace. I can’t play twenty questions with you over and over until we get to what happened. Tell me that when Stuart went to take this car, that’s when you walked away.”

“Not totally,” she said, and sniffed. I handed her more tissues and she blew her nose. Even if she wasn’t sick, she looked terrible. Eyes red and bloodshot, skin pale, her hair in tangled strands. An image of her when she was five or six flashed before my eyes, when Cynthia and I took her to Virginia Beach and she was covered in sand from head to toe, building a castle at the water’s edge, flashing a smile with three missing teeth.

Did that girl still exist? Was she still here? Buried deep inside this one curling in on herself in front of me?

I waited. I could sense her steeling herself. Getting ready to tell me, and then face the music after I knew what she’d done.

“I think...”

“You think what?”

“I think...”

“Jesus, Grace, you think what?”

“I think... I think I might have shot somebody.”