Gerry walked over and opened the window, hoping to get some air into the room. The floor around the end of the bed was still strewn with old tapes, titled, personalized, and annotated with a story known only between the gifter and the giftee:
Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions for Kennedy
Side One
Screaming Trees: Nearly Lost You
Dead Kennedys: Goons of Hazzard (I had to!)
Dinosaur Jr.: The Wagon
Sebadoh: Wonderful, Wonderful
Killing Joke: Love Like Blood
Soundgarden: Flower
Soundgarden: Big Dumb Sex (Don’t play when your parents are around!)
Side Two
Radiohead: Creep
Bauhaus: She’s in Parties
Lush: Nothing Natural
Jesus and Mary Chain: Reverence
Echo & the Bunnymen: Killing Moon
Jane’s Addiction: Summertime Rolls
Nick Cave: Straight to You
Kim Gordon’s Silver Hot Pants for Berk, xo
Side One
Nirvana: Come As You Are
Suede: Animal Nitrate
Concrete Blonde: Tomorrow, Wendy (Kennedy reference back at you)
Sisters of Mercy: This Corrosion
Cure: Lovesong
Sugarcubes: Leash Called Love
NIN: Something I Can Never Have
Side Two
Skinny Puppy: Chainsaw
Thrill Kill Kult: Sex on Wheelz
Smashing Pumpkins: Rhionceros
L7: Pretend We’re Dead
Pixies: Here Comes Your Man
Iggy Pop: Candy
Siouxsie and the Banshees: Kiss Them for Me
Pavement: Summer Babe
He kneeled down and looked at them. He detested Berk Butler. Until Haley’s death he hadn’t even known his daughters and their friend had been involved with him. Gerry had to admit to himself how distracted he had been that summer, with he and Laine working through things.
The hand lettering on the tape case from Kennedy to Berkeley was loopy and doughy, the o’s and a’s almost square instead of round. The one from the young man to her had thin, tight lettering, as if he had forced himself to print neatly, pressing hard with the black pen. It didn’t occur to Gerry that the fact that there were two tapes was an upset to the usual order—that Berk Butler should still have been in possession of the one she’d gifted him. That either she’d changed her mind about giving it, or he’d given it back. The song names held nothing for Gerry—they brought no winding ribbon of melody to his mind. For him, it was all teenage code. He gently placed the tapes back on the floor beside a milk crate that housed other homemade Maxells.
A woman from the cleaning service was the only other person who had been in Kennedy’s room, but years ago, after Gerry had found some jewelry boxes and notebooks moved, the curling iron and the lava lamp all shifted around, he had switched services. Everything has its spot, he’d told her repeatedly. He’d told the new one not to bother with that room at all.
Now Gerry tentatively unmade the corners of the old bedding, working around the half-spilled crates of tapes and crammed racks of CDs. A button stabbed into Kennedy’s corkboard read Hope Not Fear Clinton Gore ’92. Earlier that day he’d been sure to take down the Obama/Biden sign, one of only two in their neighborhood, before he got a letter from the homeowners’ association about the election’s being over.
The duvet was dark violet with a spray of a lilac pattern across it. Everything had been purple that year.
He recalled the name of the little tub of trouble she’d used on her hair: Manic Panic violet. Kennedy had stained all the towels with each dye job. Gerry remembered Laine had cried over the steeple-gray Williams Sonoma ones blemished with streaks of violet; she shouted that Kennedy didn’t respect her. Kennedy shouted there was more to life than money. He thought he’d have to draft a lawyer’s letter to force the two women to communicate again. The tops of Kennedy’s ears were violet for weeks, like she had a bad sunburn.
Laine and Gerry had hated their girls’ style choices at the time, each new one cutting more, the short, bell-shaped dresses; the clunky, mannish boots; the distressed clothes from charity stores. What were they rebelling so hard against? He couldn’t believe it when he started seeing the Salvation Army on the credit card bill. He took it as a slight against all that he’d worked for. The girls were honors students at the best public school in the county. Even if it had some lower-income residents from Longwood, Liberty High School had a great arts program and athletics, the kind of place that he’d dreamed of attending when he was a kid.
Gerry lifted the duvet up and smelled it. It didn’t smell like Kennedy. The scent was musty, like old cigarettes, though he’d quit and no one had smoked in the house in at least a decade. He still had time to clean it. Gerry stripped the bedding quickly—years since he’d made a bed himself. How was this to be done? He stepped on a cassette case on the floor and felt it crack. Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet, the cassette read when he picked it up. He set it on the bookshelf. He tugged the new mauve sheet over the mattress. After years on a prison cot, a person deserved a well-made bed.
When Gerry was satisfied, he gathered up the old duvet and went across the hallway to his home office. He dropped the duvet in a leather chair and went to the phone on his large carved desk. He had Carter’s cell number programmed into his speed dial, and although she almost always picked up, this time it went to voicemail.
“Carter, it’s Dad,” he said, cringing at his own adherence to tradition; she’d insisted on calling him Gerry since her days in rehab at twenty-two, when she said they needed to deal with each other on adult terms. “I really think you should plan to be here for more than the dinner. Come on the drive out with me. Just come by and we’ll ride together. Leaving at ten.” He hoped the deadline might work.
Gerry set the phone down and scooped up the duvet. Downstairs in the mudroom, he crammed the whole thing into the washing machine, but as he measured the liquid soap, he looked down and noticed a zipper ran along one edge of the purple cover. The cover should probably be separated from the duvet, Gerry realized. He yanked the bedding back out and unzipped the duvet cover, shaking and pulling. The white, fluffy comforter inside tumbled out. With it came a perfectly folded one-by-one-inch square of notebook paper, the end of it tucked inside so it formed a little envelope made out of itself.
Gerry stared at the shape of it against the porcelain tile of the laundry room. He left the bedding where it lay and picked up the tiny note. As he stooped to pick it up, he felt a burning sensation in his fingertips. His cardiologist had warned him about leaning over—avoid raking leaves, or taking the golf bag out of the trunk, the man had said, as if Gerry had had the nerve to show his face at the club in the last fifteen years. His fingers fumbled for the thin paper before grasping it. He breathed deeply and straightened. Holding it between his thumb and index finger, he peered at it like it was a fossil discovered on a beach. If the police hadn’t found it all those years ago, Kennedy must have shoved it so far inside they’d overlooked it—or perhaps it had felt like a tag and they didn’t pull it out.