Chapter 39
Allie
Allie let herself into the dark apartment. It was nearing four in the morning, and she felt equal parts spent and buzzed.
She closed the door quietly behind her, not wanting to wake Leigh. Took her coat off, hung her purse on the hook by the door.
For as big and bad as Leigh looked—tall and tattooed and deep-voiced—she was a soft little puppy dog on the inside. Never judge a book by its cover, Allie thought as she slipped off her shoes and headed for the bedroom.
She hadn’t moved in with Leigh, but she did sleep over sometimes, and she’d agreed to come here tonight, after her party.
They were going to sleep in as late as they wanted, which was a luxury since Leigh was normally up at five to open the coffee
shop. Leigh was going to make breakfast and they were going to spend the whole day taking it easy, which would mean Bloody
Marys around ten and all-day mimosas after that. Leigh’s friends would be in and out of the apartment, as they always were.
Leigh was that person. The refuge for strays.
In the hush of the small bedroom, the streetlights shone through the slats, casting a pattern on the sleeping figure of her girlfriend of over a year. Leigh’s short hair feathered out on the pillow.
When, two years ago, Leigh had opened The Morning Grind near the school where Allie taught, Allie never would have guessed
that the hot barista who also happened to own the place would end up asking her out, or that Allie would fall head over heels
by their third date.
It had been easy to fall in love with Leigh, and it wasn’t just her beautiful forearms or her sexy tattoos. It was her confidence.
Her wholeness.
Allie stepped out of her dress and grabbed one of Leigh’s T-shirts from the chair where Leigh’s clothes tended to pile up.
Mmmm, it smelled like her—lavender and musk.
As Allie slid under the covers, Leigh turned a little.
“Hey. You’re home.” Her voice was mushy.
“Go back to sleep,” Allie murmured.
“How was the party?”
Allie wasn’t even sure Leigh was actually awake.
“Fine. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”
Not all of it, of course. Just the parts that would fit with Leigh’s vision of Allie—the cute, harmless kindergarten teacher
who, yes, had some baggage, but had mostly come out of her tough circumstances unscathed.
Leigh was propping herself up on her elbow, brushing hair out of her face. “Did you . . . get to hear some good stories? About
Oscar?”
Poor Leigh. She had no idea. No one did, and no one would.
Of course, she had needed to explain to Leigh why she was going to a New Year’s party with a bunch of random middle-aged people
instead of hanging with Leigh and the gang at their friend’s sports bar. But that was easy to explain, since it was mostly
just the truth.
Allie had met Phelps innocently, while beefing up her pool skills with one of her gay guy friends. Leigh was volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club that night and Allie had nothing better to do.
When Phelps started flirting, Allie tried to put him off politely. But then . . . his name rang a bell. Phelps. Phelps. Where
had she heard that before? It was when he started talking about his New Year’s plans that it hit her.
Oh, God. She had just read about these people. In Oscar’s journals.
She didn’t even know her big brother kept journals until she was cleaning out his old room to get her parents’ house ready
for sale, and there, buried in the closet and covered in fourteen years’ worth of dust, was the stack. Allie started reading.
Once she started, she couldn’t stop.
I met someone at Compass today—two people, actually. We got pizza afterward. I think we might become friends! Jenn is from
La Porte, and Will is from Michigan City. So funny that I’m from South Bend and we’ve probably all crossed paths before without
knowing it! College is going to be awesome!!!
Reading his entries was so painful, because despite the exclamation points, the youthful optimism, the unguarded sincerity,
Allie knew how his story ended.
She read about how Oscar started attending a Christian group called Compass with his new friends. Started dating Jenn but
had secret feelings for Will. How he tried to change. To make himself feel the right things and stop feeling the wrong things.
How he accidentally kissed Will at a New Year’s party.
All these entries and more were fresh in Allie’s mind when, in the din of the pool hall with a glass of cheap beer in her hand, Phelps talked about the long history of the New Year’s crowd. Each name pinged in Allie’s head. Doug. Bennett. Will. Jenn.
She had to go. Had to meet these people. Will, who Oscar had kissed. And Jenn, who’d helped destroy him.
Somehow, Jenn found out about the kiss at the party and reported him to the Compass leaders. Allie had memorized Oscar’s final
entry, made three weeks after the fateful New Year’s party.
They’ve told me I can’t lead my Bible study anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to break it to the freshmen. I hate letting
them down. I’m just so embarrassed. My world is crumbling.
I need to call Mom and Dad. If I can just have their support . . .
He didn’t. George and Janey Lucchesi told their son he was no longer welcome in their home. Thus ended Oscar.
Ten-year-old Allie hadn’t understood everything that was going on, but she had understood that her brother was gay, and her
parents had cut him off, and then he had killed himself. So when she was fourteen and starting to think she might be into
girls as well as guys, she played it smart. Played it safe. She waited until her college graduation, when she didn’t need
their money anymore, to tell her parents she was not only bi, but in a relationship with a girl named Lauren.
Of course it still hurt.
What she didn’t expect was to be called back into their lives three years later due to their quickly declining health—stage
four cancer for her mom, early-onset dementia for her dad.
That night in the pool hall, Allie and Phelps traded numbers. But it’s not like she decided to kill Jenn right off the bat.
She researched her first. It wasn’t hard to find Jenn on Phelps’s Facebook friend list, and all her stuff was public. Allie
read through every disgusting post. All her so blessed stuff. Even then, Allie wasn’t sure she could actually kill her. Did Jenn really deserve to die for something she’d done fourteen years ago?
She texted Phelps about going out for New Year’s together, feeling pretty sure he’d issue a return invitation. He did.
She told Leigh that she’d run into some old friends of Oscar’s randomly at a bar and wanted to go to their party and hear
their stories about her brother. Leigh was immediately supportive.
Allie showed up at Phelps’s house early, to help with the party prep. While he was cleaning the nasty shed he called the Dog
House, she did her magic in the kitchen and mixed her mother’s hospice drugs, the hydromorphone and the haloperidol and the
diazepam, into a special set of “virgin” Jell-O shots for Jenn, who so conveniently didn’t drink.
Then, people started to arrive, and Allie sat back and watched.
At first, Jenn seemed pretty nice, and Allie thought, I won’t do it. She even felt kind of relieved. Then, the night took an ugly turn. Ted accused Jenn of arson over dinner, and it only got
worse from there. As the evidence against Jenn stacked up higher and higher, it was as if karma had shown up, tapped Allie
on the shoulder, and whispered, “See? This is where you come in.”
That’s how she felt. Not at all like a murderer. More like the pawn of karma. In the right place at the right time. An opportunity
dumped into her lap she never would have gone searching for but would be a fool not to take.
“Let’s just say I got the closure I needed,” Allie murmured to her sleepy girlfriend. She knew a sudden pang in her chest,
fierce and squeezing. “The truth is, babe . . .” Her heart felt three times its normal size, huge and pounding in her chest.
Was she going to say it out loud? “I killed Jenn.”
Leigh’s eyes were only half open, but she blinked twice and ran her hand through her hair, making it stand up straight.
“Huh?” she said. “Who’s . . . Jenn?”
There was a moment, like an automatic door opening. Allie could walk through. Or she could take a step back and the doors
would close again.
Allie leaned forward and kissed Leigh on the head. “Go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” said Leigh, heaving a sigh as she turned over. She was breathing deeply soon enough, and Allie doubted she would even
remember this conversation in the morning.
There were so many things she couldn’t tell Leigh. Not just this. Allie couldn’t tell her that when her mother was moaning
with pain from her quickly progressing cancer, instead of giving her the oral hydromorphone or other medications meant to
supplement her CADD pump, Allie would give her liquid children’s Tylenol cut with water instead, and stash the drugs.
Janey Lucchesi had killed her own son. When she kicked Allie out too, Allie wondered if Janey was secretly hoping Allie would
take her own life like her brother. Maybe for Janey it was better for your kids to be dead than gay.
Janey Lucchesi didn’t deserve to die easy.
Allie did give her mother one last chance. One opportunity to redeem herself. While she was lucid one afternoon and Allie
was changing the sheets on her bed, Allie said, “Mom, do you have any regrets about Oscar and the way you treated him?”
Her mother looked vaguely out the window and said, in her feeble cancer voice, “I was just trying to do the right thing.”
When her mom finally died, late in the afternoon on a random Tuesday, Allie had enough stashed drugs to make multiple lethal
cocktails, which she thought about using on her dad, but his mind was going so fast it didn’t feel like she’d really be punishing
him.
The thought of using the drugs for another purpose didn’t occur to her until later.
In the end, what sealed the deal wasn’t all the horrible accusations that Jenn’s friends lobbed at her. It wasn’t even the
powerful feeling of being karma’s pawn. It was hearing Jenn use the exact same words Allie’s mother had used. I just wanted to do the right thing.
Allie was a little tempted, in the basement as Jenn poured out her complaints, to reveal her cards. To say, Guess what, Jenn? I’m Oscar’s sister, and you’re about to die.
But ultimately, there was more satisfaction in letting her die like Oscar. Confused. In the dark. And alone.
The blood? The fall down the stairs? That came out of left field. An added bonus, since Jenn would have died anyway from the
Jell-O shots—but a lucky distraction. Then Doug confessed, and truly, Allie felt protected by some higher power.
She turned toward the window and lay on her side.
She had high hopes for 2020. Hopes of finding her way to happiness, that elusive golden thing everyone talked about so casually,
as if it was as common and attainable as a bunch of bananas at the grocery store.
The thing was, even now, in her amazing relationship with Leigh, Allie couldn’t say she was happy. It was hard to feel happy
when the older brother you adored was gone. It was hard to feel happy when your parents hated you. And it was hard to feel
happy when you came back to take care of your parents in their decline, but even when you saw them weak and helpless and needy,
you couldn’t find any love in your heart, not even an ounce.
It was hard to feel happy. But lots of things in life were hard, and Allie was willing to try on this first day of the new year.
Once the sun came up, maybe then it would feel like a fresh start, a clean slate.
Maybe, when the sun came up, she could stash all the bad things she’d done in a dark closet and mentally throw away the key.
But for now, she lay in the dark, wishing with visceral ferocity that she could be the Allie that Leigh saw: the cute kindergarten
teacher, curvy and smart, bouncy and fun.
Instead she was a wounded lion, a fucking wounded lion who had feasted on her enemies and let someone else take the fall and
hadn’t even felt sorry for a single second.
It was a lesson she repeated to her kindergartners, but they had no idea. Then again, maybe no one ever truly learned it.
Never judge a book by its cover.
She closed her eyes and dreamed of the lion in her closet, invisible, mostly quiet, but scratching at the door, even as the
room turned pink in the sunlight of a fresh day, a fresh year, even as Allie opened her eyes and Leigh did too and their gazes
met and Leigh kissed her softly on the lips. Always scratching.