“Bring me copies of those pictures!” she called after me as I sprinted away down the sidewalk. “Don’t forget!”
I ran the length of the block as if Carla were chasing me. I had the awful feeling that I’d never outrun that image of her, her craziness framed forever in my mind. I intended to run all the way home, but suddenly a man came out of the bank and I had to swerve to avoid smacking right into him. In fact, I did clip him on the shoulder and we both whirled in a circle.
“Whoa!” Cooper Thorne grabbed my shoulders before I toppled over. “Where’s the fire?”
“Sorry! Oh, it’s you! I’m sorry!” I stopped to catch my breath and looked back over my shoulder.
“Are you running away from somebody?”
“No, I . . . well, sort of.”
Cooper smiled but didn’t question me further. I tried to calm down and act like a normal person.
“You on your way home?” he asked.
I nodded. “Weren’t you just at the Center?”
“Had to get to the bank before they closed. I’ll walk you home, unless you’re training for a marathon or something.”
Cooper lived in the other direction, across the street from JSAC, and I was flattered that he wanted to walk with me, but I was still kind of freaked out about Carla. My smile felt wobbly.
Cooper narrowed his eyes. “Is something wrong? You look a little strange.”
“I am a little strange,” I said. I was trying to make a joke of it, but it came out sounding like a confession.
“You want to go somewhere and talk?”
The kindness in his voice made me want to lean against him, to follow him anywhere. I looked directly into the abyss of his eyes. “I would. Yes.”
He put his hand on my waist, lightly, and led me on a sandy path between two buildings and down to the bay beach. The wind had picked up and we were heading right into it.
“There’s this place I like to go sometimes, to be alone and think about things,” he said.
Right away I thought of the cabins. Where else could you be alone in this part of town?
“Are you cold?” Cooper asked. “You’re shivering.”
“A little, I guess.” I zipped up my jacket even though I knew it was nerves, not weather, making me quake. The peculiarity of this rollercoaster day was never-ending.
“It’ll be good to get in out of the wind.” He took my hand gently in his and my panic subsided. Cooper always seemed to show up just when I needed him. Maybe he was just being nice to a silly kid, but I didn’t care. My hand felt sheltered in his.
“There are these old cabins down here that get closed up as soon as the season’s over,” he said. “But it’s easy to jimmy the door and get in.”
I smiled. “Dugan’s Cottages.”
“You’ve been there?”
“I grew up in Provincetown. My friends hung out in Cabin 5 for years.”
“What a coincidence. Cabin 5 happens to be the one that’s easiest to break into.”
We ran the rest of the way. When we got there Cooper took a pocketknife and wedged it into the doorjamb near the rusty lock. The door popped open.
“Wow,” I said. “That was fast. We always took the boards off the bedroom window to get in. You obviously have more experience at breaking and entering.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m quite the slippery hoodlum,” he said, twirling an imaginary mustache. “You have no idea.”
He left the door half-open so sunlight could drift into the dank space, but the cabin was still a lot more shadowy than I remembered it. When we were kids it never seemed scary to play here, even though the cabin was dark, but now the place had an eerie, lifeless feeling to it. Thin, watermarked curtains hung crookedly over the boarded-up windows, and one glass waited to be washed in the old stained sink.
“Do you come here a lot?” I asked.
“From time to time. Even in summer the cabins aren’t always rented. They’re not exactly luxury accommodations.”
Cooper opened a closet door and pulled out a blanket to throw over the ancient couch. “If you don’t cover it first, the dust asphyxiates you,” he said as he sat down.
I wasn’t sure if I should sit next to him or not. I didn’t want to make any wrong assumptions about what we were doing here. What were we doing here? Just talking, right? There was no law against sitting next to the person you were talking to.
He patted the blanket. “Sit down, Jacqueline. Tell me what’s going on.” His concern wrapped around me and made me feel safe. In a funny way, he reminded me of Lorna—they were both good-looking, of course, but it was the way they radiated confidence that drew people to them. I sat down next to him.
“I just ran into Lorna Trovato’s mother,” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know her.”
“You’re lucky. She’s usually drunk and always crazy. For some reason, today she freaked me out even more than usual. I felt like she’d been waiting for me. Like I’d never be able to get her out of my life.”
“That’s why you were running? I’m so sorry.”
“She made me take pictures of her. Look.” I pulled my camera from my bag and Cooper leaned over to see. “She had this wild look on her face, can you tell? And she was wearing . . . well, you can see.”
He took the camera from me and scrolled through the recent photographs. “Wow, she looks like an older, nuttier version of her daughter, doesn’t she?”
Did she? She had last week when she was wearing Lorna’s old clothes, but did she look like her even when she wasn’t trying to? I scanned the pictures again, even though they gave me the creeps. The highly arched feet that seemed to be running in place, the drama of the decapitating scarf, the fearless you’ll-never-take-me-alive look on her face—suddenly I recognized them. There was no doubt Lorna had been Carla’s daughter.
“I forgot you knew Lorna,” I said.
Cooper shrugged. “Not well. She was always with Finn so I saw her around the Center. You should print some of these photos. They’re amazing.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“At least show them to Elsie.”
“Maybe.” But I knew I wouldn’t. What if Elsie wanted one in the show? No, these were not going to hang on a gallery wall.
Cooper took my chin in his hand so I couldn’t look away from him. “You don’t have tons of self-confidence, do you, Jacqueline Silva?”
I grinned half-heartedly. “What was your first clue?”
But he didn’t smile back this time. “You’re full of talent and potential, but you don’t seem to believe it. Elsie’s giving you a show at JSAC! Do you get what that means?”
“I know, but . . . I guess I’m not used to being the one people notice. That was Lorna—she was always out front. I followed her. I liked following her.”
His eyes bored into mine for a long moment. I wanted to look away, but that seemed even more awkward than holding his gaze. Finally he said, “You know, Jacqueline, Lorna didn’t put you in second place. You put yourself there.”
My tears sprang up out of nowhere, unexpected. “I did?” I asked, blinking in embarrassment.
“Yup, you did.” His voice was like a caress. “Oh, you,” he said, shaking his head. “I knew I should have stayed far away from you.” His eyes softened as he leaned over and gently kissed me. Finally he kissed me! I felt like I’d been waiting for it forever. He tasted like apples and smelled like Earl Grey tea. I hoped I didn’t taste like a salty, weepy baby.
“You probably don’t believe you’re beautiful either, do you?” he whispered in my ear. “Do you want me to convince you?”
“Yes,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound like such a little girl.
But when Cooper kissed me again, deeply this time, I didn’t feel like a child anymore. I felt like I was being rescued by the one person who could do it. I even felt I deserved to be rescued.
“Jacqueline,” he whispered and the name had half a dozen syllables, each of them strokin
g me like a cat’s tongue.
In seconds he’d managed to split my brain in half. Cradling my head, he laid me down on the blanketed couch. He kissed my neck as he unzipped my jacket. As his hands slid underneath my T-shirt, my brain shut down and I was all body, all sensation. Tentacles of joy spread out from every spot Cooper touched and radiated through my whole body. Now I understood it. This was what love felt like: an unbelievable thrill that spread from nerve to nerve until you were, finally, entirely alive.
Cooper lowered his body onto mine, my shield against the world. My back arched to meet him. And then his hand slipped beneath the waistband of my jeans, touching bare skin, sparking wave after wave of excitement.
But as quickly as it began, it was over. His hands stopped moving, his body became as still as stone. He groaned and pushed up onto his knees, then propelled himself to the other end of the couch.
“God, I’m so sorry,” he said, his electric fingers pushing the hair out of his eyes. “I didn’t mean to take it that far. I just . . . once I kissed you . . . it was hard to stop.”
For a minute I was too shocked to respond. It had been so beautiful. Was it really over?
“No,” I said finally. “I wanted you to do that.”
“Jacqueline, how old are you? Eighteen?”
I pulled myself into a sitting position and straightened my clothes. “Well, not quite.”
He groaned again. “I’m terrible. We have to forget this ever happened. It can’t happen again.”
I could feel the delight flowing out of my body like dirty water down the bathtub drain. “I don’t want to forget it!”
“I don’t know what I was thinking. You make me a little bit crazy, Jacqueline,” he said, leaning forward and petting my hair. “But the last thing I want to do is hurt you.”
“You aren’t hurting me,” I said, my breathing still fast and rough. I wanted to say more, to tell him what he’d made me feel, but I didn’t know how to say it, I didn’t know what words to use, and I didn’t have the nerve.
“Sssh.” He scooted close to me and held me against his chest, rocking me back and forth until I was lulled into a desperate happiness.
“It’s getting late,” he said finally. “Look how low the sun is.”
We untangled ourselves and stood up, but I felt awkward now. I’d been lying in a dark cabin making out with a thirty-year-old man whom I wanted to fall in love with, if he would only let me. I’d never been in a situation like this before. What should I say?
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said.
He smiled his softest smile. “No one would believe you anyway. A catch like you with an old guy like me.”
“That’s not true!”
“Jacqueline, you should go home,” he said, a little sadly.
“Okay.” In order to postpone walking out the door for one more minute, I grabbed the blanket off the couch and folded it up. Cooper opened the outside door wide to let in the last, horizontal streak of sunlight. I was shoving the blanket onto a shelf in the closet when a sharp beam of light cut across the space and lit up a piece of cloth stuffed into a back corner. It glowed in the sunset. I reached in behind dusty linens to pull it out, but I already knew what it was.
Lorna’s white jacket.
18.
I showed the jacket to Lucas and Charlotte the next morning as we stood in front of my house waiting for Finn to pick us up. They were stunned into silence and had barely begun to babble their questions when Finn pulled up and rolled down his window.
“I see the whole entourage is coming,” he said, glaring at Lucas.
“They want to help out.” I stuffed the jacket into my backpack for the moment.
Charlotte gave Finn a nervous smile, but Lucas kept his eyes on his Bigfoot boots.
“Charlotte can come. He can walk.”
The bombshells of the day before—from the promise of the show at the Center, to my emotional session with Cooper in Cabin 5, to the shock of finding Lorna’s coat stuffed in the closet—seemed to have blown away the cautiousness I’d felt around Finn for months. “Don’t be a dumb-ass,” I told him. “You can’t be mad at Lucas forever.”
He looked surprised by my bluntness, but he didn’t back down. “Sure I can.”
Lucas bent over to look in the window. “Look, man, I’ll apologize as many times as I have to. I’m sorry I slept with her. I’m sorry I left without telling you. I’m sorry about everything. I mean that. Isn’t there some way we can put it behind us?”
“Not that I can think of,” Finn said. He looked like he was barely containing himself from leaping out of the car and pounding Lucas. “Jackie, why are you hanging out with this asshole when you know what he did?”
“He’s not an asshole, Finn. He’s our friend. I forgave him.”
“Well, I guess he didn’t sleep with your girlfriend, did he?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, he screwed up!” I yelled. “Haven’t you ever screwed up, Finn? Lucas has been miserable for months. Isn’t that enough punishment? Besides, we have more important things to think about now.” I opened the front passenger door and crawled in with my portfolio and backpack.
“Nothing is ‘more important’ to me.” His voice was knife sharp.
“Not even this?” I pulled out the crumpled white jacket with the embroidered black diamonds on the collar and cuffs. “Don’t even consider telling me this isn’t Lorna’s jacket.”
Speechless, Finn reached out to touch the grimy, stained coat. Lucas and Charlotte got in the backseat quietly, without further invitation.
“It can’t be,” he said, as he took the coat out of my hands. He buried his face in it and breathed in the mildew. “Where did you get this?”
“It was hidden in a closet in Cabin 5 at Dugan’s.”
“At Dugan’s? What were you doing there?”
I felt my face heat up. “What difference does that make? The important thing is I found it.”
“But she was wearing it . . .” Finn said.
“I know! I mean, I don’t know. Why do you think it was in the cottage?”
Charlotte leaned forward. “All the reports in the paper mentioned the white jacket,” she said. “If somebody found it right away, wouldn’t they have turned it in to the police?”
“Maybe somebody found it over the summer,” Lucas said. “A tourist who was staying at Dugan’s. Somebody who didn’t know what happened.”
“But why would they stuff it in the corner of the closet?” I asked. “Besides, it’s all moldy. It’s been in there a while.”
“I can’t believe it was in Cabin 5,” Finn said. “It’s too freaking weird. That was our cabin.”
“So you believe me?” I asked Finn.
“Well, I believe it’s her jacket,” he said, “but I don’t know what else to believe.”
Lucas sat forward and spoke to the back of Finn’s neck. “I just want to remind you that you said it was ‘our cabin.’ That includes me, and always will.”
“But, sadly, not me,” Charlotte said.
Ouch. Charlotte carried a hidden knife too. “See,” I said to Finn. “I screwed up too. I was a lousy friend to Charlotte, but she forgave me and now we’re friends again.”
“Charlotte, did Jackie sleep with your boyfriend?” Finn asked.
“Well, I didn’t have a boyfriend in the fourth grade.”
“Why is that the only unpardonable crime?” I said. “For God’s sake, Finn, there are other ways to be shitty to your friends.”
Finn chewed his lip. Nobody said a word. Finally I looked at my watch. “It’s almost ten o’clock. Elsie and Cooper are waiting for us. We’ll talk about the jacket later.”
“I can’t even think about anything else now,” Lucas said.
Finn turned around and glared at his old friend. “You’re still in my car.”
I sighed. “He’s still in your life, Finn. Get over it.”
• • •
Elsie was thrilled to see more willing workers arr
ive. “With this many people, we should be able to get the painting done by Monday, Tuesday at the latest. I’ll book the guy to refinish the floors on Wednesday, and they’ll be dry enough for us to start hanging pictures Friday afternoon.”
Before she started the Spackling demonstration, Elsie sent me off to look for Cooper. “He’s in the print shop. You two can decide what to mat.”
I grabbed my portfolio, glad to escape the tense atmosphere in the gallery. Finn was snorting and stomping around like a bull waiting for the rodeo to start, and Lucas was mostly trying to stay out of his way. Of course, I was nervous about seeing Cooper, after yesterday. Were we more than friends now? Were we something other than friends? Were we in some kind of a relationship now, or was I an idiot to think that could happen? Maybe I was blowing the whole thing totally out of proportion. I had no idea, but I knew I wasn’t ever going to forget what it felt like to be kissed by Cooper Thorne.
As I approached the print shop, I heard a high-pitched giggle coming from inside. My hand froze on the doorknob and my stomach flipped over. Someone was in there with Cooper. Had the new Fellows arrived already? My imagination conjured up a petite beauty, someone just Cooper’s age, with whom he had everything in common.
The giggle burst into a wholehearted laugh. Whoever Cooper was with was certainly enjoying herself. I started to feel ridiculous standing outside eavesdropping, so I grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door open before I could have second thoughts.
Cooper was sitting on a high stool and grinned at my entrance. But Tess, standing beside him, was surprised by the interruption and jumped a little, her laughter cut short. “Oh, Jackie, it’s you. God, you scared me,” she said, pulling at the raggedy hems of her very short jean shorts.
Immediately I understood what was going on. Tess was flirting with Cooper, and it was kind of adorable. Ever since she’d turned thirteen, all she could talk about was how she wanted a boyfriend, and she was obviously dressed for the hunt today. I could just imagine the argument she’d had with Elsie this morning before she got out of the house wearing those shorts.