What Could Be Saved by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Author:Liese O'Halloran Schwarz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The banging on the door wove itself into her dream: it was a drum, it was a dozen drums, it was snakes dancing a conga line around a circle of drums.

“Go away,” she moaned into the bedclothes, burying her head.

Her phone buzzed on the bed surface beside her ear and she swiped her hand around the sheet to find it, peeked with one eye at the blinding brightness of the screen. Then sat straight up in bed and answered the call.

“It’s two a.m.,” she said. “Is that you at my door?”

“Yes,” came the response. “Let me in?”

She went down the stairs at a run.

Her nephew Dean stood on the front step, looking bedraggled. It was raining in earnest now and he was drenched, drops fattening on the tips of his hair and falling onto his shoulders.

“For God’s sake,” she said. “Get in here.” She closed the door behind him. “Kitchen,” she said, and he followed her pointing finger. “Stay,” she said.

She got towels and Adam’s old terry-cloth robe; while Laura stood with robe held open, Dean stripped to his shorts and put the robe on, then bowed his dripping head and let her scrub it with a towel. She put his clothing into the dryer, laid a fresh towel on the seat of one on the bar stools before letting him sit, used another towel to wipe up the water from the hardwood.

“This place is nice,” he said, looking around. “It’s so—empty.”

“I don’t like clutter,” she said, dumping the wet towel into the sink. “Dean. What are you doing here? Does your mom know you’re here?” His face told her the answer. She retrieved her phone, and under his baleful eye told Bea’s voicemail, “I have Dean here, he’s fine and safe, I’ll get him back to you in the morning.”

“I can’t believe you,” Dean said, his voice thick with disappointment, as she clicked the phone off and put it down.

“Dean,” said Laura. “I had to call her. Our brother disappeared.” She watched the accusation fade from his expression: he hadn’t thought of that. “What are you doing here?”

“I was just in the neighborhood,” he said, trying for silly. When she didn’t smile, “I was with someone.”

“On a date?” she said, surprise scaling her voice up unintentionally.

“Sort of,” he said.

Laura felt a sudden sympathy for Bea. How frightening it must be for a parent, when the child whose whole baby skin you knew, whose every moment you supervised for years, develops his own separate, secret life.

“I’m making tea,” she said. She ran cold water into the electric kettle, switched it on, got two mugs down from the cupboard. “So—a date,” she said. Was that why he was here, had it gone badly, had he been dumped? “How did it go?”

“Good.” Uninflected, unrevealing. Still annoyed that she’d phoned his mother.

She found a package of cookies in the pantry, expensive English biscuits a friend had given her, put some onto a plate and set that before Dean. He looked at them, then up at her, then took one, as if conceding a détente.

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