A Straw Man (The Clay Lion Series Book 3) Read online

  “Maybe I should talk to him,” she mused. “Tell him about Branson.”

  It was just like Brooke to want to try to find a solution to the problem. It wasn’t only what she did, it was who she was. Sadly, I knew Nate’s addiction had grown beyond the stage where mere conversation would return him to me.

  And although I hated to admit it, I knew there was always the possibility I had already lost him for good.

  C HAPTER TEN

  FALL SEMESTER – SECOND YEAR

  Nate’s hand rested on my knee and he stared blankly at the watercolor reproduction hanging on the stark white wall of the ER waiting room. He hadn’t spoken since picking me up in the middle of Virginia Avenue, just minutes after Sam was carried away in the ambulance. Instead, he’d been content to listen to me exhaustively rehashing the night’s events.

  “Do you think they’re ever going to tell us anything?” I wondered aloud. “I would bet no, especially since we’re not family. But what about his parents? Do you think they’ve been called? If the police called them when it happened, I’d think they’d be here soon.”

  Nate didn’t respond to my series of rhetorical questions, and I glanced again at the emergency room entrance, watching for Sam’s parents to burst through the doors.

  Frustrated with the lack of communication regarding Sam’s condition, I could no longer control my nervous energy and began pacing the room. Nate remained frozen in his chair while I milled around admissions, hoping to overhear something that would give an indication as to whether our friend had survived the crash. Of course, there was nothing to be heard.

  I headed back toward the empty chair beside Nate, but the room was stifling, bordering on claustrophobic. It was the waiting, the not knowing, that forced me out of the hospital into the refuge of the parking lot and the muggy night air.

  Leaning against the hospital’s brick exterior, I slid my phone from my pocket and called the only person I knew would help settle my nerves.

  Charlie answered on the fourth ring.

  “Mel? It’s late. Is everything okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I replied, attempting to keep the hysteria out of my voice. “But there’s been an accident and my friend Sam was taken to the hospital. A guy who saw the crash told me he was dead, but the police wouldn’t tell me anything at the scene, and now I’m at the hospital and the nurses aren’t talking either. Nate’s gone catatonic and I’m trying not to freak out. I just needed to unload and didn’t know who else to call.”

  “Wait. Were you in the car?” I could tell he was trying to remain calm but he couldn’t contain his panicked tone.

  “No,” I assured him, catching my breath. “But I was nearby where it happened and saw the firemen pull him out of his truck. It was really bad, Charlie. If he wasn’t dead, he was definitely unconscious. I’m hoping someone’s called his parents so I don’t have to. I don’t think I have the strength to have that conversation.”

  Charlie didn’t respond immediately, but I heard him breathing quietly into the phone.

  “I’m really glad you weren’t in the accident,” he said finally. “And if Sam doesn’t make it, it’s going to be hard, but you will get through this. Okay?”

  I closed my eyes. What would I do if Sam was dead? I’d lived through my father’s death and knew I could live through the death of a friend, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be painful.

  “Okay,” I told him, although I wondered just how long it would take to be ‘okay’ again.

  Across the parking lot I saw two figures running toward the emergency room entrance. As they approached the front door and were illuminated by the nearby streetlights, I recognized them as Sam’s parents. I quickly hung up and followed them into the hospital.

  Within ten minutes a weary looking doctor arrived to share the truth of Sam’s fate. His father cried out in anguish as his mother crumbled to the floor. While I joined in their grieving, murmuring words of consolation and concern, Nate stood to the side, motionless and mute. He didn’t move from the corner of the empty triage room, his eyes fixed on the laces of his shoes.

  We stayed at the hospital with Sam’s parents for quite a while, and I continued to mourn with them as they held each other up. When a hospice nurse arrived to take them back to see the body, we realized there was no reason left to stay, and Nate and I shuffled outside to the car. Without knowing where else to go or what else to do, he drove us to his apartment where we curled up in bed together without taking the time to change out of our clothes. He turned away from me, refusing to let me look into his face, so I held him until the tightness in his muscles released and he finally fell asleep.

  And then, in the quiet stillness of the early morning, I wept alone for the loss of my friend.

  Word spread quickly about Sam’s death thanks in no small part to the feeding frenzy of media coverage surrounding Saturday’s nationally televised game, which went on as scheduled despite objections from most of the team. They trudged out onto the field wearing hastily tied black ribbons pinned to their jerseys and watched with bloodshot eyes as the coach gave an impassioned speech just before kickoff on the stadium’s big screen. Kara, Lesley, and I sat in our usual section, fists full of wadded up tissues, as Nate and the others struggled against their opponents, barely going through the motions.

  Although we lost spectacularly, the worst part of the game wasn’t our team’s performance. It was the audacity of the reporters and news media, circling like vultures, giddy with a twisted excitement about the bonus coverage surrounding the tragic death of our team’s starting quarterback the night before. They buzzed around the stadium, searching for soundbites from the student body, parents, and faculty about “the horrors of college binge drinking.” It was all I could do not to lash out when the perky brunette from ESPN cornered me outside the locker room while I was waiting for Nate to emerge.

  “Pull the frame back a bit and let’s bring the boom a little closer,” she instructed her cameraman as she approached. Then she turned on the sweetness, feigning concern for my loss.

  “Did you know the deceased, Sam Murphy?” she asked me, brows furrowed, head tipped to the side.

  “Yes,” I replied, turning my shoulder to convey I had no interest in speaking with her.

  “And were you aware he had a problem with alcohol?”

  I set my jaw and ignored her, my eyes set on the locker room door.

  “Do you think the team was aware of his issues?” she continued, addressing Kara who was barely holding herself together.

  “He didn’t have any issues!” Kara spat at the reporter. “He was just upset. He made a mistake. He was an amazing quarterback and a terrific guy. It was an honor to call him my friend,” she concluded, taking me by the hand to guide us out of the stadium and away from the madness.

  In the days that followed, Nate and I existed in a hazy fog, both of us moving in slow motion – our only goals were to make it through the next minute, hour, sleepless night. I was the one who made arrangements for our trip to Sam’s hometown where the viewing and funeral would take place while Nate was content to stay in bed.

  “Sam’s father called to ask if you would be a pall bearer,” I said when I discovered him in his bedroom, prostrate under a blanket Monday afternoon. I waited for him to reply, but instead of a response, all I got was a grunt.

  I threw the covers back and poked at him with a lacrosse stick I picked up off the floor. “We need to leave in an hour if we’re going to make it to the viewing by six. I got us a hotel room so we don’t have to drive back for the funeral tomorrow morning. Sam’s parents offered to let us stay with them, but I didn’t think you’d want to do that so I told them we already had a place.” I paused, waiting for him to acknowledge me, but he simply rolled over, burying his head beneath his arm.

  “Nate,” I said, sitting on the bed beside him. “Talk to me.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” he murmured. “I’ll get ready. I just want to be alone right now.”
<
br />   And so I left him alone.

  I left him alone during Sam’s funeral where he carried his best friend’s body down the aisle in a mahogany box. I left him alone when we returned to school. And by the end of the week I could already feel the subtle shift in my relationship with Nate.

  C HAPTER ELEVEN

  SPRING SEMESTER - FIRST YEAR

  I reread the same sentence for the tenth time. My vision glazed and the words became a blurry mass of unrecognizable symbols on the screen before me. My fingers tapped impatiently on the keyboard, and as I willed them to type something coherent, I glanced at the lower right hand corner of the screen to peek at the clock. I was hoping it was getting close to noon so I could legitimately excuse myself from my self-imposed confinement for lunch.

  It wasn’t even 9am and I was over it. I yawned, stretched, and reworked my hair into its disheveled ponytail. After working on my sociology paper for the better part of a week, I was close to finishing, but a reasonable conclusion eluded me. I was just about to return to the computer when I heard the first tap.

  It was a cracking sound. Tiny and without a definite origin.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered to Lesley, who I assumed was still asleep, curled up beneath her down comforter on the top bunk. “Les?” I called again.

  She groaned loudly and rolled to face where I was now standing in the center of the room.

  “What?” she asked, unable to mask the irritation in her voice.

  “Did you hear that noise?”

  “What kind of noise?”

  “I don’t know. Like a weird tap.”

  Just as she was about to respond, I heard it again.

  “There it was!” I cried. “Did you hear it that time?”

  “Yeah,” she said, rising from the bed. “It almost sounded like it was outside.”

  I disagreed. “No, it was definitely here in the room.” I cringed at the thought of what was making the sound. “I hope we don’t have a mouse.”

  By the time we heard the noise a third time, I realized Lesley was right. I hurried toward the window to peer out into the crisp, spring morning.

  Below me, smiling brightly, was Nate. I fumbled with the ancient window locks and wrestled open the sash.

  “What are you doing?” I called down to him.

  “Trying to get your attention,” he replied, holding up the fistful of pebbles in his hand.

  I shook my head at his childlike behavior. “Why not just text me, silly?”

  “Texting just seemed an awfully conventional way to start the very unconventional day I have planned for us.” He was beaming at me.

  I imagined I could hear my unfinished paper heckling me from the computer screen.

  “What kind of day do you have planned?” I asked, resting my elbows on the sill so I could lean my head out the window.

  “I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise, but I need you to get ready fast because we need to get where we’re going by ten. You need to dress warm and comfortably. Can you be ready in 20 minutes?”

  My paper taunted me. I knew I needed to finish.

  But life wasn’t all about work.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Awesome. Hurry up. I’ll wait here.” He blew me a kiss and made himself comfortable on the stoop.

  Lesley raised an eyebrow at me as I latched the window shut and hurled myself across the room toward my closet.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Nate’s taking me somewhere. We have to leave in 20 minutes,” I replied as I stripped off my oversized t-shirt and replaced it with a tank top and hoodie.

  “What about the paper you got up early to finish?” she teased.

  I glared at her. “It can wait. I still have all day tomorrow to finish,” I said, justifying my decision to blow off my scholarly obligation in favor of spending the day with Nate.

  In less than fifteen minutes I was dressed and ready to go.

  “Have fun,” she called after me as I breezed out the door.

  I found Nate still sitting on the front steps of the building, looking quite pleased with himself.

  “Hey, Mel.” He rose from the stoop, towering above me like an oak, and reached out to take my hand. For months I tried in vain to weave our fingers together as I’d done with prior boyfriends, but eventually came to realize his were simply too thick to fit comfortably between my tiny fingers. Now, my entire hand fit snugly inside of his as he swung my arm playfully at his side. I always felt safe beside him. Protected from the evils of the world. Surely no harm could come to someone so formidable.

  “So where are we going?” I asked finally as we approached the parking lot where his car waited.

  He pressed the button on his key fob to unlock the doors. “I’m not going to tell you,” he replied.

  I continued giving him the third degree as we slid into our seats and headed off Grounds. Within five minutes we were on I-64 heading east out of town.

  “My only point,” I persisted, “is that you can’t know if I’m going to like something unless you tell me what it is in advance that we are going to do. So to that end, you should just tell me what it is that we are doing.”

  He remained stoic behind the wheel, unwavering in his stubborn insistence that our destination remain a surprise. “Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me.” He took his eyes from the road to risk a sideways glance in my direction.

  I made no excuses for my dislike of surprises. My life had been full of unpleasant ones and I was always wary of the unknown. “Pleeeeeease,” I begged.

  “This is really driving you crazy, isn’t it?” he laughed.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, reaching across the console to grab his bicep with both hands and shaking it with all my might. “Tell me, tell me, tell me!”

  “In due time, my child,” he teased. “I promise though, you’ll like it.”

  I pretended to pout as we continued toward whatever exciting adventure awaited us. Although I protested loudly when faced with the unknown, I was getting used to Nate’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to life which was so different from the environment I’d grown up in.

  ********

  From the time I was a baby, my days had been structured, full of purpose and discipline. I’d been a serious child who concentrated solely on the things my parents thought were important. Good grades. Clean room. Tidy appearance. I worked diligently to ensure their happiness which wasn’t difficult since I always knew what was coming next.

  The predictability of my life was both a comfort and a bore. Charlie and I attended the same private school from pre-K through twelfth grade with the same children and the same daily routines. There were never any unplanned family vacations or spontaneous decisions. Every part of my life was carefully choreographed by my father so we could be the family the world expected us to be. Such was the life of a politician’s daughter.

  After my dad died, the pendulum of my existence swung to the opposite end of the spectrum, and I lost sight of everything he valued to focus instead on fun. His death brought unexpected chaos into our lives. One minute we were Senator Phil Johnson’s Family and the next we were just The Johnsons. Faced with an identity crisis, my mother, Charlie and I went into a state of flux. We were allowed freedoms we’d never experienced before and it was a strange and wondrous thing. Out from beneath my father’s thumb, Charlie used the opportunity to explore the truth of his adoption and found many secrets hidden in our family’s proverbial closet. He made mistakes, large and small.

  But then again, so did I.

  Without my father’s reins to guide her every move, my mom enjoyed a sort of renaissance. It wasn’t that she didn’t miss my dad, but she allowed herself to do the things she hadn’t been permitted to do when she was the senator’s wife. She went out without makeup. She wore sweats to the grocery store. She ate cereal for dinner and stopped apologizing for things that were out of her control. She started taking photography classes at the community college and joine
d a group of bird watchers on the weekends to hunt for warblers and owls. She was never at home, always off on an adventure or social outing with a stream of new friends or long forgotten ones. My mom thrived in her new reality and assumed I would blossom just as beautifully on my own without her constant supervision.

  Unfortunately, this was not the case.

  Charlie’s companionship helped me to navigate my path in the immediate aftermath of dad’s death, but when he eventually accepted an internship in Washington DC after graduation, I found myself untethered in a world in which I had always been chained to an attentive warden. My mom was never around, off exploring her own pursuits and I felt abandoned and alone. For the first time in my life, I was left to my own devices.

  Around the same time I became aware of the depth of my father’s transgressions. After taking my grandmother to a doctor’s appointment on our side of town, my mom brought her back to our house for lunch. The three of us ate together, but I excused myself soon after finishing so I could return to the final chapters of my overdue library book. From the next room I couldn’t help but listen in on their conversation, and my ears piqued when my grandmother commented on my father’s “indiscretions.”

  “I still can’t believe he lied to you for all those years, leading you to believe adopting Charlie was an act of mercy when all along he was just covering up his own mistakes.”

  “Charlie wasn’t a mistake, Mom,” my mother replied. “I have to believe there’s a reason why I was allowed to be the one to raise him. He’s as good for me as I am for him. Especially now that we both know the truth.”

  “The truth about what a monster his father was.”

  Instead of a reply, I heard only the telltale clanking of dishes being piled on top of one another as Mom cleared the table. Finally she spoke in a voice that betrayed her true feelings.