A hurricane might have been kinder. Peter’s mattress had been separated from the box spring and stuffed into the adjoining bathroom. His antique highboy had been flung across the room like a weightless thing, and the teak bookcase was unburdened of every last one of its law texts. Copious pages had been torn loose, shredded, balled up, and strewn across the room, along with half of Peter’s pinstriped wardrobe and bits and fragments of a shattered antique lamp (a hundred-year-old Harper heirloom). But the coup de grâce, what really gave Clay a fright, was that the vandal had found a vial of lipstick (Essie’s presumably) and drawn a stark portrait of a woman with her fingernails bent into murderous claws, eyes slitted with ill intention, hair flying around, mouth agape in a mute shriek of rage.
“For the record,” Peter grunted behind him, “I don’t think it looks a thing like Essie.”
No. Although it’s a spot-on Deidre McGee, Clay thought. She had, after all, gone to CalArts on Boyle’s dime, exhibited at MOCA and other LA galleries. Did I sleep through all this? Or did she redecorate while I was at the hospital?
“We came here because Essie thought you’d be lonely if we didn’t have breakfast with you. If I even suspected you’d embarrass me like this…” Peter bit it off, too disgusted to finish.
“Petey, don’t get so bent out of shape,” Essie said softly. That she thought he’d trashed the room because of her only made Clay feel more awful. “It was probably an accident.”
“An accident!” Peter’s voice cracked with pubescent rage. “A broken glass is an accident. This, this is insanity.”
“Well, I’m a pretty good judge of character,” Essie insisted. “If it wasn’t an accident, it’s certainly a misunderstanding. When we calm down a little, maybe we’ll grasp the whole story. Am I right, Clay?”
Clay nodded dutifully.
“Nevertheless,” Peter said, “I made an appointment with your therapist. This morning.”
“Okay,” Clay managed, if only to end his silence.
“And we’re going to talk to him about that”—Peter gestured at the shrieking figure, then spun and fingered the wall behind Clay. “And that!”
Clay didn’t want to look. Slowly he turned to discover additional lipstick. Large slanted letters. And while they might have had context if Clay had been the vandal, he didn’t understand the message coming from Deidre. suck the mans dick!, it read, and Clay bent his head, embarrassed and incensed.
And behind him, Essie made a small sound. Almost like a laugh.
Thus, Peter spent the first fifteen minutes of their session with Dr. Alexander—Payton, gentlemen, I answer to Payton—presenting a blunt and damning account of how Clay had wrecked havoc, while the therapist sat with his fingers steepled, his face a tabula rasa. “…to top it off, he painted her face on the wall over the headboard.”
Reclined in his La-Z-Boy, Clay shut his eyes and let the rant go on.
“I knew he was upset, and sure, it wasn’t the best decision to have Essie over without telling him first. But to come home to such a tantrum—your mother raised you better, Clay.”
“Yes, my mother. Who’s cooling in her grave while you’re screwing the flower lady.”
It was a cheap shot, but Clay couldn’t help himself.
“I never planned for it to happen,” Peter sighed. “Essie just makes me feel alive, and I want to feel alive again. I loved your mother, always will—but life has to go on eventually.”
“Payton, just the other day my dad warned me not to get involved with a girl too soon,” Clay said. “Why does he get to live by a different standard?”
“I was talking about that girl. That group of people. And by the look on your face, you didn’t take my advice. Is that who put you up to destroying my room? Her and her gangster brother?”
Payton’s eyes had drifted to the buoyant peace of his aquarium. “Let’s focus on the two of you for now.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m trying to give my son a chance out here,” Peter said. “He had this girlfriend back in Philadelphia. Renee. He fell head over heels. She snapped her fingers and Clay literally jumped. Then his grades slipped and he quit varsity track and debate and she convinced him to start experimenting with drugs.”
Clay sat up in his recliner. “You knew?”
Again that expression stole over Peter’s face: Concern barely concealed beneath the anger. As if he saw the whole sorry tragedy of his son’s life laid out before him and could do nothing about it. “I told you, Clay, I know what a— what someone using drugs looks like. It’s just that when it’s your own child you don’t want to believe, no matter how clear it is. Your mother wanted us to sit you down together, but I knew you’d listen to her if it was a secret between you two. When I get involved, you shut down. And it worked, didn’t it? Mom told everyone you were in Europe and shipped you to rehab. You got rid of the drugs, and Renee—and short of a lack of academic ambition, things have been pretty okay with you… until now.”
Clay nodded, hoping Payton didn’t ask him to confirm these facts. Because, while that story might have been the one he chose for The Official Clay Harper Biography, it wasn’t entirely accurate. Because—and it still broke his heart to think about—he had returned from rehab (and not your walk-in-the-park seashore retreat either, but an inner-city facility full of ex-cons hooked on Opioids and diseased-looking meth-heads that Tracy knew would scare the bejesus out of him) and he’d stared his ever-loving mother in the eye and told her, “I’ve learned my lesson. Renee got me into this, but I’ll get myself out. I’m ending it with her tonight.”
Except all he had done when Renee answered the phone was let her
