Clean Slate (Kit Tolliver #4) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) Read online

  “Now you can take mine.”

  “Not quite. But this is better. Remember, I told you my lucky number.”

  “Six.”

  “There you go.”

  And just when, she wondered, had six become his lucky number? When she’d acknowledged five partners? Probably, but never mind. It was a good enough line, and one he was no doubt feeling proud of right about now, because it had worked, hadn’t it?

  As if he’d had any chance of failing . . .

  He made drinks, and they kissed, and she was pleased but not surprised to note that the requisite chemistry was there. And, keeping it company, there was that delicious surge of anticipatory excitement that was always present on such occasions. It was at once sexual and non-sexual, and she felt it even when the chemistry was not present, even when the sexual act was destined to be perfunctory at best, and at worst distasteful. Even then she’d feel that rush, that urgent excitement, but it was greatly increased when she knew the sex was going to be good.

  He excused himself and went to the bathroom, and she opened her purse and found the little unlabeled vial she kept in the change compartment. She looked at it and at the drink he’d left on the table, but in the end she left the vial in her purse, left his drink untouched.

  As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered. When he emerged from the bathroom he reached not for his drink but for her instead, and it was as good as she’d known it would be, inventive and eager and passionate, and finally they fell away from each other, spent and sated.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “That’s the right word for it.”

  “You think? It’s the best I can come up with, and yet it somehow seems inadequate. You’re—”

  “What?”

  “Amazing. I have to say this, I can’t help it. It’s almost impossible to believe you’ve had so little experience.”

  “Because I’m clearly jaded?”

  “No, just because you’re so good at it. And in a way that’s the complete opposite of jaded. I swear to God this is the last time I’ll ask you, but were you telling the truth? Have you really only been with five men?”

  She nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “now it’s six, isn’t it?”

  “Your lucky number, right?”

  “Luckier than ever,” he said.

  “Lucky for me, too.”

  She was glad she hadn’t put anything in his drink, because after a brief rest they made love again, and that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

  “Still six,” he told her afterward, “unless you figure I ought to get extra credit.”

  She said something, her voice soft and soothing, and he said something, and that went on until he stopped responding. She lay beside him, in that familiar but ever-new combination of afterglow and anticipation, and then finally she slipped out of bed, and a little while later she let herself out of his apartment.

  All by herself in the descending elevator, she said out loud, “Five.”

  A second round of Rob Roys arrived before their entrees. Then the waiter brought her fish and his steak, along with a glass of red wine for him and white for her. She’d only had half of her second Rob Roy, and she barely touched her wine.

  “So you’re in New York,” he said. “You went there straight from college?”

  She brought him up to date, keeping the responses vague for fear of contradicting herself. The story she told was all fabrication; she’d never even been to college, and her job résumé was a spotty mélange of waitressing and office temp work. She didn’t have a career, and she worked only when she had to.

  If she needed money—and she didn’t need much, she didn’t live high—well, there were other ways to get it besides work.

  But today she was Connie Corporate, with a job history to match her clothes, and yes, she’d gone to Penn State and then tacked on a Wharton MBA, and ever since she’d been in New York, and she couldn’t really talk about what had brought her to Toledo, or even on whose behalf she was traveling, because it was all hush-hush for the time being, and she was sworn to secrecy.

  “Not that there’s a really big deal to be secretive about,” she said, “but, you know, I try to do what they tell me.”

  “Like a good little soldier.”

  “Exactly,” she said, and beamed across the table at him.

  “You’re my little soldier,” her father had told her. “A trooper, a little warrior.”

  In the accounts she sometimes found herself reading, the father (or the stepfather, or the uncle, or the mother’s boyfriend, or even the next-door neighbor) was a drunk and a brute, a bloody-minded savage, forcing himself upon the child who was his helpless and unwilling partner. She would get angry, reading those case histories. She would hate the male responsible for the incest, would sympathize with the young female victim, and her blood would surge in her veins with the desire to even the score, to exact a cruel but just vengeance. Her mind supplied scenarios—castration, mutilation, disembowelment, all of them brutal and heartless, all richly deserved.

  But her own experience was quite unlike what she read.

  Some of her earliest memories were of sitting on her father’s lap, his hands touching her, patting her, petting her. Sometimes he was with her at bath time, making sure she soaped and rinsed herself thoroughly. Sometimes he tucked her in at night, and sat by the side of the bed stroking her hair until she fell asleep.

  Was his touch ever inappropriate? Looking back, she thought that it probably was, but she’d never been aware of it at the time. She knew that she loved her daddy and he loved her, and that there was a bond between them that excluded her mother. But it never consciously occurred to her that there was anything wrong about it.

  He would put her to bed and tuck her in. One night a dream woke her, and without opening her eyes she realized that he was in bed with her. She felt his hand on her shoulder and slipped back beneath the cover of sleep.

  She’d lie awake, pretending to be asleep, and at last her door would ease open and he’d be in her room, and he’d stand there while she pretended to be asleep, then get into bed with her. He’d hold her and pet her, and his presence would somehow give her permission to fall genuinely asleep.

  Then, when she was thirteen, when her body had begun to change, there was a night when he came to her bed and slipped beneath the covers. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “I know you’re awake.” And he held her and touched her and kissed her.

  The holding and touching and kissing was different that night, and she recognized it as such immediately, and somehow knew that it would be a secret, that she could never tell anybody. And yet no enormous barriers were crossed that night. He was very gentle with her, always gentle, and his seduction of her was infinitely gradual. She had since read how the Plains Indians took wild horses and domesticated them, not by breaking their spirit but by slowly, slowly, winning them over, and the description resonated with her immediately, because that was precisely how her father had turned her from a child who sat so innocently on his lap into an eager and spirited sexual partner.

  He never broke her spirit. What he did was awaken it.

  He came to her every night for months, and by the time he took her virginity she had long since lost her innocence, because he had schooled her quite thoroughly in the sexual arts. There was no pain on the night he led her across the last divide. She had been well prepared, and was entirely ready.

  Away from her bed, they were the same as they’d always been.

  “Nothing can show,” he’d explained. “No one would understand the way you and I love each other. So we must not let them know. If your mother knew—”

  He hadn’t needed to finish that sentence.

  “Someday,” he’d told her, “you and I will get in the car, and we’ll drive to some city where no one knows us. We’ll both be older then, and the difference in our ages won’t be that remarkable, especially when we’ve tacked on a few years to you and shaved them off of me. And
we’ll live together, and we’ll get married, and no one will be the wiser.”

  She tried to imagine that. Sometimes it seemed like something that could actually happen, something that would indeed come about in the course of time. And other times it seemed like a story an adult might tell a child, right up there with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

  “But for now,” he’d said more than once, “for now we have to be soldiers. You’re my little soldier, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  “I get to New York now and then,” Doug Pratter said.

  “I suppose you and your wife fly in,” she said. “Stay at a nice hotel, see a couple of shows.”

  “She doesn’t like to fly.”

  “Well, who does? What they make you go through these days, all in the name of security. And it just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it? First they started giving you plastic utensils with your in-flight meal, because there’s nothing as dangerous as a terrorist with a metal fork. Then they stopped giving you a meal altogether, so you couldn’t complain about the plastic utensils.”

  “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? But it’s a short flight. I don’t mind it that much. I just open up a book, and the next thing I know I’m in New York.”

  “By yourself.”

  “On business,” he said. “Not that frequently, but every once in a while. Actually, I could get there more often, if I had a reason to go.”

  “Oh?”

  “But lately I’ve been turning down chances,” he said, his eyes avoiding hers now. “Because, see, when my business is done for the day I don’t know what to do with myself. It would be different if I knew anybody there, but I don’t.”

  “You know me,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he agreed, his eyes finding hers again. “That’s right. I do, don’t I?”

  Over the years, she’d read a lot about incest. She didn’t think her interest was compulsive, or morbidly obsessive, and in fact it seemed to her as if it would be more pathological if she were not interested in reading about it.

  One case imprinted itself strongly upon her. A man had three daughters, and he had sexual relations with two of them. He was not the artful Daughter Whisperer that her own father had been, but a good deal closer to the Drunken Brute end of the spectrum. A widower, he told the two older daughters that it was their duty to take their mother’s place. They felt it was wrong, but they also felt it was something they had to do, and so they did it.

  And, predictably enough, they were both psychologically scarred by the experience. Almost every incest victim seemed to be, one way or the other.

  But it was their younger sister who wound up being the most damaged of the three. Because Daddy never touched her, she figured there was something wrong with her. Was she ugly? Was she insufficiently feminine? Was there something disgusting about her?

  Jeepers, what was the matter with her, anyway? Why didn’t he want her?

  After the dishes were cleared, Doug suggested a brandy. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t usually drink this much early in the day.”

  “Actually, neither do I. I guess there’s something about the occasion that feels like a celebration.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Some coffee? Because I’m in no hurry for this to end.”

  She agreed that coffee sounded like a good idea. And it was pretty good coffee, and a fitting conclusion to a pretty good meal. Better than a person might expect to find on the outskirts of Toledo.

  How did he know the place? Did he come here with his wife? She somehow doubted it. Had he brought other women here? She doubted that as well. Maybe it was something he’d picked up at the office water cooler. “So I took her to this Eye-tie place on Detroit Avenue, and then we just popped into the Comfort Inn down the block, and I mean to tell you that girl was good to go.”

  Something like that.

  “I don’t want to go back to the office,” he was saying. “All these years, and then you walk back into my life, and I’m not ready for you to walk out of it again.”

  You were the one who walked, she thought. Clear to Bowling Green.

  But what she said was, “We could go to my hotel room, but a downtown hotel right in the middle of the city—”

  “Actually,” he said, “there’s a nice place right across the street.”

  “Oh?”

  “A Holiday Inn, actually.”

  “Do you think they’d have a room at this hour?”

  He managed to look embarrassed and pleased with himself, all at the same time. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a reservation.”

  She was four months shy of her eighteenth birthday when everything changed.

  What she came to realize, although she hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time, was that things had already been changing for some time. Her father came a little less frequently to her bed, sometimes telling her he was tired from a hard day’s work, sometimes explaining that he had to stay up late with work he’d brought home, sometimes not bothering with an explanation of any sort.

  Then one afternoon he invited her to come for a ride. Sometimes rides in the family car would end at a motel, and she thought that was what he planned on this occasion. In anticipation, no sooner had he backed the car out of the driveway than she’d dropped her hand into his lap, stroking him, awaiting his response.

  He pushed her hand away.

  She wondered why, but didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything, either, not for ten minutes of suburban streets. Then abruptly he pulled into a strip mall, parked opposite a shuttered bowling alley, and said, “You’re my little soldier, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “And that’s what you’ll always be. But we have to stop. You’re a grown woman, you have to be able to lead your own life, I can’t go on like this . . .”

  She scarcely listened. The words washed over her like a stream, a babbling stream, and what came through to her was not so much the words he spoke but what seemed to underlie those words: I don’t want you anymore.

  After he’d stopped talking, and after she’d waited long enough to know he wasn’t going to say anything else, and because she knew he was awaiting her response, she said, “Okay.”

  “I love you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve never said anything to anyone, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you haven’t. You’re a soldier, and I’ve always known I could count on you.”

  On the way back, he asked her if she’d like to stop for ice cream. She just shook her head, and he drove the rest of the way home.

  She got out of the car and went up to her room. She sprawled on her bed, turning the pages of a book without registering their contents. After a few minutes she stopped trying to read and sat up, her eyes focused on a spot on one wall where the wallpaper was misaligned.

  She found herself thinking of Doug, her first real boyfriend. She’d never told her father about Doug; of course he knew that they were spending time together, but she’d kept their intimacy a secret. And of course she’d never said a word about what she and her father had been doing, not to Doug or to anybody else.

  The two relationships were worlds apart in her mind. But now they had something in common, because they had both ended. Doug’s family had moved to Ohio, and their exchange of letters had trickled out. And her father didn’t want to have sex with her anymore.

  Something really bad was going to happen. She just knew it.

  A few days later, she went to her friend Rosemary’s house after school. Rosemary, who lived just a few blocks away on Covington, had three brothers and two sisters, and anybody who was still there at dinner time was always invited to stay.

  She accepted gratefully. She could have gone home, but she just didn’t want to, and she still didn’t want to a few hours later. “I wish I could just stay here overnight,” she told Rosemary. “My parents are acting weird.”

 
; “Hang on, I’ll ask my mom.”

  She had to call home and get permission. “No one’s answering,” she said. “Maybe they went out. If you want I’ll go home.”

  “You’ll stay right here,” Rosemary’s mother said. “You’ll call right before bedtime, and if there’s still no answer, well, if they’re not home, they won’t miss you, will they?”

  Rosemary had twin beds, and fell asleep instantly in her own. Kit, a few feet away, had this thought that Rosemary’s father would let himself into the room, and into her bed, but of course this didn’t happen, and the next thing she knew she was asleep.

  In the morning she went home, and the first thing she did was call Rosemary’s house, hysterical. Rosemary’s mother calmed her down, and then she was able to call 911 to report the deaths of her parents. Rosemary’s mother came over to be with her, and shortly after that the police came, and it became pretty clear what had happened. Her father had killed her mother and then turned the gun on himself.

  “You sensed that something was wrong,” Rosemary’s mother said. “That’s why it was so easy to get you to stay for dinner, and why you wanted to sleep over.”

  “They were fighting,” she said, “and there was something different about it. Not just a normal argument. God, it’s my fault, isn’t it? I should have been able to do something. The least I could have done was to say something.”

  Everybody told her that was nonsense.

  After she’d left Lucas’s brand-new high-floor apartment, she returned to her own older, less imposing sublet, where she brewed a pot of coffee and sat up at the kitchen table with a pad and paper. She wrote down the numbers one though five in descending order, and after each she wrote a name, or as much of the name as she knew. Sometimes she added an identifying phrase or two. The list began with 5, and the first entry read as follows:

  Said his name was Sid. Pasty complexion, gap between top incisors. Met in Philadelphia at bar on Race Street (?), went to his hotel, don’t remember name of it. Gone when I woke up.

  Hmmm. Sid might be hard to find. How would she even know where to start looking for him?