Equilibrium Page 4

  At Nick’s car, Darcy tried again, although she really wanted to shake Heather till whatever was wrong rattled from her mouth. “Do you want to go, too? I don’t think Stevie has a date yet. Wait, I’m an idiot. It’s Cam, isn’t it? Did something happen? Did he ask you out? Did he not ask you out?” Too bad Cam couldn’t ask Heather to the prom till they were juniors next year.

  Heather leaned against the car and retied her sneakers, as if Darcy were totally clueless. “Just forget it, okay?”

  No, not okay. “Whatever.”

  “Hey, girls.” Nick sauntered into view, Cam trailing behind. “Darcy tell you the good news yet?” He slipped an arm around Darcy’s waist and drew her to his side. “Darcy’s gonna let me take her to the prom.”

  Heather crawled into the backseat, refusing to respond to Nick’s big announcement.

  “What’s with her? Did I do something wrong?” Darcy and Nick slid onto the front seats. Nick twisted toward the back. “What did I do?” he asked Heather.

  Heather pressed her cheek against the window, and Cam just shrugged.

  “Braaar!” Nick shook his wet head, splattering the windshield. He cranked the heater and checked his hair in the rearview mirror.

  “Looks the same as always,” Darcy assured him. How was she ever going to tolerate a boy more high maintenance than she was?

  He smirked. “You’re messing with me again. Come here.”

  He leaned in and clutched her face, forcing a long kiss right in front of her friends that left more than the taste of sweet cinnamon. A shiver thundered through her chest. The pins-and-needles sensation of thawing nerves pierced Darcy’s toes, and Nick’s kiss burned her tongue, like a fireball candy she’d once held in her mouth on a dare.

  Chapter 3

  Years before Jack Klein’s once-lucrative teaching requests had dried up due to his reputation for cutting his own classes, he’d taught his student Laura how to analyze a character’s behavior.

  Mid-afternoon, and Jack’s tax returns still sat on her desk, and the fridge still awaited restocking. Laura couldn’t help herself. If she wanted to find the motivation behind her real-life husband’s suicide, she’d need to study the hours leading up to his death one more time. The thought weakened her foundation, as though she were sinking into a hole.

  Laura wasn’t really trying to torture herself, merely gain closure. She went into the living room and obtained a small measure of stress relief from stirring the woodstove’s coals and squeezing three thick logs through the side door. She opened the flue and watched the pyramid catch fire.

  Jack had wanted ice cream, and she’d run out to Yogi’s to buy a pint. Resurrecting the memory stirred up the sight of her Jack lounging in bed all tousled and sexy, and the coarse texture of his hair beneath her fingertips. Laura inhaled, and then huffed an exhalation. She required a lot more than refreshing the fire to release her angst. Arms clasped behind her back, she bent at the waist and raised her arms until her shoulder blades opened.

  He’d asked for Chunky Monkey, their favorite flavor since their first date. He’d wanted to start over, to go back to a time when he wasn’t sick. And, the thing was, he’d seemed so happy, in a balanced sort of way …

  She tossed on her fleece, laced up her duck boots, and stepped out to the yard. At the shed, she slid the maul ax from its shelf and headed for the woodpile. From beneath the green tarp, she drew a sixteen-inch log and placed her victim dead center on the splitting block. Every single time Jack had messed around with his medication, taking too little lithium or going off it completely, he’d lost control. She raised the maul, set her focus on the log, and released all her energy into the wood, splitting off a satisfying chunk.

  He was sick. He couldn’t take it anymore. The rapid cycling—

  Jack would’ve told her, the most obvious reasons for a character’s action were usually wrong, excuses masquerading as explanation.

  He’d stayed on his prescription that last week, choosing to follow through with a plan he’d hatched when the sun was setting on his mood.

  Jack had asked her to get him Chunky Monkey ice cream, and the tightness in his voice had straightened her spine. Purse on her shoulder, hand clutching her keys, Laura had paused at the edge of their bed. And he’d kissed her. Dear God, he’d kissed her. He’d studied her face, scrambled to her side of the bed, and he’d kissed her.

  He wasn’t sick when he’d killed himself. He’d made a rational decision, and then did whatever was necessary to carry it out. He knew she was looking for a sure sign of his mental health, so he gave it to her.

  Jack had used her.

  She squinted through the glaring sun and rolled her shoulders. Damn you, Jack! She gave herself a split second to aim, then swung the maul and nailed the sucker. Whack!

  “Man!”

  She whirled around, ax guarding her chest, and found a stranger standing a few feet away from her, grinning as if he’d witnessed the ninth wonder of the world. She sized him up. Young, somewhere in the middle of his twenties, and fit, too, judging by the shape he took beneath a gray-and-white wool sweater. But she had the home turf advantage. The stranger was on her property, and she had a sharp-edged maul she wasn’t afraid to use. She could take him.

  The stranger raised his hand and produced not a weapon, but a stack of papers he offered to her. “Elle said you’d be home.”

  “Elle?” Laura laid the ax down beside her, hands shaking from the adrenaline rush of her body preparing for battle. She took the papers from his hands and flipped through the thick pile—completed rental application, verification of employment, credit check. The stack even included a personal note from Beth at Hometown Real Estate stating that she found no record of court proceedings against the applicant. So Elle had found herself an accomplice. Or, more likely, Elle had left Beth in the dark, too, claiming she was doing Laura a favor by helping to rent out Jack’s studio.

  “Aidan Walsh.” The man offered his hand and left it between them while she juggled the paperwork.

  Oh, okay. Elle’s friend from her spinning class. Not at all how Laura had pictured him. She’d imagined someone who’d recently experienced a reversal of fortune, a middle-aged man with a face like an English bloodhound. This young guy was almost too good-looking. “Laura Klein.”

  He kept hold of her hand longer than necessary, maintaining that irritating grin, as if he knew something deliciously gossipy about her. Well, join the club.

  “What a surprise.” She’d told Elle she’d talk to her friend. She didn’t expect a prescreened tenant, hadn’t even allowed the idea of renting out Jack’s studio to fully form. Now she’d better think fast. She glanced down at the first page of the application and noted that someone—either Elle or Beth—had highlighted eight hundred dollars, so Laura couldn’t miss it.

  “Sorry about that, surprising you,” he said. “I don’t usually sneak up on women splitting wood.”

  “Good to know.” The nearest Laundromat was forty-five minutes away in Milford. A tenant would have to use the laundry room off the kitchen, right in the middle of her family’s personal space. She must be nuts even considering this. Still, eight hundred dollars.

  “Let me ask you something.” Heat from splitting wood thrummed down her arms, but a subtle chill laced her spine. “What exactly did Elle tell you about the apartment?”

  His grin faded, and he shifted in place. “I’m very sorry about your husband’s death.”

  At least Elle had the common sense to offer up the truth. “And you’re all right with that?” Plain logic hit hard. This guy might be the only person in all of the Monadnock Region willing to rent out the studio where her husband had killed himself.

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”

  The idea of death in general and a self-inflicted death in particular not bothering this man cast him into a tiny minority. Most people did their best to shield themselves from gruesome reality, covering their eyes like kids at a horror flick. Tell me when the scary part
’s over. This guy didn’t even flinch. Perhaps, like her, he didn’t believe in ghosts. Memories were enough of a challenge. “Right this way then.”

  The stranger, Aidan Walsh, followed her across the snowy yard, keeping a respectable distance until they came to the mudroom. Laura unlaced her boots and peeled off her fleece. She was about to ask him to take his shoes off, but he beat her to it. He set a pair of broken-in work boots on the rubber mat. What the heck was his story? She’d noticed Memorial Hospital listed on his application but had missed his occupation. Maybe he was a young intern, needing a place to crash in between graveyard shifts. That would make sense.

  She turned the skeleton key and assisted the studio door with her hip, then glanced over her shoulder and found herself staring into Aidan’s dark brown eyes.

  For her, Jack’s studio was like a memorial. But to what? Jack giving up? Maybe if she disassembled Jack’s studio, her family could move past the dark side of Jack’s history. Renting out the studio could provide both financial support and an emotionally cathartic spring cleaning.

  A sense of synergy flowed into her body as natural as the day’s first wide-awake breath. While Maggie would explain this everyday miracle as descending from the universe itself, Laura simply attributed her luck to the intensity of Elle’s love for her coupled with especially good timing. “I could empty it out pretty fast, if you need to move in right away.”

  A few minutes ago, renting out the studio as a one-bedroom apartment wasn’t even a wisp of a thought in her mind. Now she was inviting a strange man into her home. Elle and Beth had screened him for her, but so what? If he were an especially clever serial killer, he wouldn’t even have a police record, just a trail of unexplained murders dotting every town he’d ever graced.

  Laura waited by the desk, giving Aidan the opportunity to discover the quirky apartment on his own, beginning at the far reaches of the studio and working his way backward. She could hear him open and shut the rarely used outside door leading to the side yard. He tried the water in the small but ornately tiled bathroom, checked the cabinets in the galley kitchen, and then climbed up into the loft overlooking Jack’s office space.

  The gate at the front of the loft creaked open, and he climbed down the recycled library ladder, whistling during descent, as if each wrung inspired a unique note. “Really nice. I even like the paint color. Reminds me of pumpkin pie.”

  “I think so, too.” Sometimes, just gazing at the walls inspired her to whip up the dessert, even in mid-July.

  Aidan made his way over to Jack’s computer desk and studied the collage of black-and-white family photos. “These are your kids? Elle told me you had a son and a daughter, but I imagined them as toddlers. You must’ve been a child bride.”

  Was he trying to butter up his potential landlady? She’d given up associating herself with the word young a long time ago. Whenever she looked into a mirror, she half expected to see an elderly woman staring back through timeworn skin. Fortunately, the effects of stress weren’t quite so harsh.

  “Yes, I was a youngster.” She left it out there, couldn’t resist waiting until he squirmed a little, no doubt visualizing her barefoot and married to her first cousin at age thirteen. She even placed a hand on his arm. Laura didn’t usually tease strangers, but the look on his face was too priceless to give up.

  “I was eighteen, fully legal.” Laura slid her hand from his arm. She didn’t usually touch strangers, either.

  “Uh, okay. You got me.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, tried finding a place to rest his gaze. “So anyway.”

  What was wrong with her? Surely, she was scaring the poor guy away along with his rent money. The prospect of eight hundred much-needed dollars a month must’ve sent her over the edge of propriety, setting her in the camp of overeager. “Are you interested?”

  He smiled, raising a curve to the left of his mouth.

  “In the apartment.” She couldn’t let him think she was flirting, even for a second. She did not flirt. “I mean it’s a large space, but no laundry room. We’d have to share mine off the kitchen. I’d need to chart a schedule, do an every other day thing.”

  Relax, Laura. It’s only laundry. She hardly recognized the sound of her voice, the singsong cadence. She was stumbling about verbally, vacillating, working out her decision in public. The last time she’d babbled in front of a strange man, she was a college freshman sitting in the front row of Jack’s Creative Writing 101 class, biding her time until she could get him alone. All her logic had gone out the window, every ounce of common sense discarded as quickly as she could shed her clothes in Jack’s campus office. She’d just had to have him.

  Aidan cocked his head, stared at her as if she were a 3-D puzzle. “I’m used to a separate laundry room. You’d only have to tolerate me, say, once a week. I’m not a clothes kind of guy.”

  What was he then? A nudist?

  Great, so now she’d need to decide and erase the pulse-quickening thought of him naked. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee or tea?” Sipping a cup of joe would give her time to go through the application more thoroughly and bring up any questions that came to mind.

  “Coffee’d be great.”

  She led him into the kitchen and motioned to a ladder-back chair pushed away from the table, as though waiting in readiness. She flipped on the filtered water, left the carafe in the sink, and leaned against the counter.

  “I’m having a little trouble switching back and forth between day and night shifts,” he said. “Not exactly looking forward to rotations and an additional thirty hours a week, but I’ll live.”

  “Intern?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Not an intern?”

  “Guess again.”

  She poured the filtered water into the coffeemaker, scooped grounds into the filter basket, and flipped the switch. “I don’t have to guess.” She went for the application package she’d left on the kitchen table, sat down across from him, and skimmed her finger down his verification of employment. Emergency medical resident, second year. That set Aidan at about twenty-eight, a bit older than she’d guessed. Something about this guy beggared her mind. Rugged male labor EM resident seeks apartment in home of local widow. There was a piece missing here, probably several. “What brought you to emergency medicine?” Laura asked.

  “Ever since I was thirteen years old, I’ve wanted to work in the ER, almost as much as I wanted to become a professional baseball player,” he said. “Figured I had a better chance as a doctor.”

  The blips from the coffeemaker gurgled to a stop. “Just a sec.” She jumped up, poured two mugs of coffee, plunked them on the table along with cream and sugar, and then returned to the exact sitting position she’d vacated.

  The more this guy talked, the more questions he brought up. At thirteen, most boys were learning about the basics of adolescent body changes, not pondering a career as specific as an emergency room doctor. “I don’t usually speak for my thirteen-year-old son, but I’m positive he has no interest in emergency medicine. So what happened?”

  “What happened?” he said. Surely, the guy was playacting, noticing her eagerness and delaying story gratification.

  She rested her chin in her hands and inched forward. “What happened to make you interested in emergency medicine?”

  “Oh, that.” He held up his index finger, dug in his back pocket, and produced a worn leather wallet. He unfolded a newspaper clipping and smoothed it flat before sliding it across the table.

  The boy’s baseball cap in the old photo caught her eye first, then the smile with the curved dimple set to the left. The boy was sitting next to a girl propped in a hospital bed with a bandage covering her lower arm. Laura read the caption: Resourceful thirteen-year-old Boy Scout, Aidan Walsh, saves ten-year-old sister Anna’s life by applying a tourniquet after girl puts arm through a glass door.

  Well, that said it all. At the age of thirteen, the younger version of the man sitting across from her must hav
e gotten permanently hooked on life and chose to spend his days, and nights, saving lives. The precipitating event. She took a second glance at the photo, and then passed the clipping back to Aidan.

  He regarded the photo with fresh interest before putting it back away.

  “So you keep the old photo to explain to curiosity seekers why you chose emergency medicine?”

  “Well, sure, it works okay for that, but mostly I keep it to remind me.” He sipped his coffee, and she waited for clarification.

  “Say on a day when I’m getting burned out, the magic is lost from it. It’s like, oh heck, not another blunt force trauma. I haven’t had my lunch break yet.” He tapped his pocket. “Take out the photo to remind me the woman on the gurney is more than an injury or disease. She’s someone’s mom, a daughter, maybe even a goofy little sister. Then I’m right back there in a world of wonder, and nothing else matters.”

  A world of wonder. Not the kind of eloquent speech she’d expected from a young guy, even a doctor. “So how’s little Anna doing?”

  He grinned. “Arm works great. Got a free ride to UMass on a softball scholarship. Swings a bat like a pro.”

  He stood, pantomimed a killer swing, and then held his hand like a visor, gazing past the sun’s glare at the fast-moving softball. “Yup, over the wall again! Go, Anna!” Aidan Walsh was a proud older brother and a physical storyteller.

  His unbridled enthusiasm spilled over, and she couldn’t stop smiling as she riffled through the application, looking for his current and past housing situations. He was staying with a couple in Greenboro he’d listed as friends, and until a few months ago, he’d been living with a woman in the North End of Boston. Probably his love interest, although he’d left the relationship line blank. Unless this Kitty—God, she hated that name—was a platonic housemate. She went by a different last name, but these days, that didn’t prove a thing. Laura tapped the blank line next to Kitty’s name. “Kitty is, was, your wife?”

  He shook his head, and the exuberance drained from his face, as if Laura had siphoned it out herself. “Girlfriend.” He drank down the rest of his coffee. “So, yeah, I figured I’d rent in Greenboro for a while, see if this is the kind of town I’d like to settle in before I look for a house to buy, put down roots. I visited my old college buddy Finn here a couple of years ago, really liked it, but it wasn’t the right time. Things changed, and then I got an offer from Memorial, so I just had to jump, take my chances.” Bing, bang, boom. He spilled the rest of the story, no longer inspired to drag out the details. This Kitty must’ve been quite a girl. Where had the spirited storyteller gone? She wanted to lure him back onto the stage of her kitchen. Encore, encore. Tell me more.