Page 18 of Other Birds
“Did you change your perfume?” Oliver asked Garland as he sat beside her.
“No,” Garland said, putting her wrist to her nose. She had dark red hair, wide-set eyes, and a small nose that didn’t quite fit her face. According to Heather Two, who he suspected didn’t even like Garland despite being her second-best friend, she’d had a nose job when she was seventeen. “Why? Don’t you like my perfume?”
“Yes. No. I mean, of course I like it,” he said quickly, knowing hecouldn’t afford to get on her bad side. The Rondo was at stake. Every single thing he owned was stuffed in his car, which was parked in Garland’s garage right next to her father’s Range Rover, the keys to which her father had hidden too well for Garland to find. She’d lost her license two years ago. “I just thought I smelled something different earlier.”
“I think you smell wonderful,” Cooper said with a wink from his lounge chair to the left of her.
“That’s because you’re always sniffing around her,” Roy said in his imperious way. His face was to the sun and he barely moved his lips.
Cooper barked like a dog.
Garland laughed and threw a lounge pillow at him. “Animal.”
“Have you heard from your dad?” Oliver asked.
Garland rolled her eyes and adjusted the tiny triangles of her green bikini a little farther apart, which drew Cooper’s attention to her breasts immediately. Oliver wondered if he should feel more concerned by Garland’s flirting with Cooper, the way her eyes would slide to him when she thought no one was looking. Did Oliver even have the right to feel jealous? He and Garland were sharing a bed (something of a surprise when she’d shown him to her room when he’d arrived yesterday) but not yet sleeping together (again, a surprise, as she was fairly aggressive and obviously used to getting what she wanted). “No,” she said. “Thank God.”
He had only met Garland two months ago, when he’d driven to Norrie Beach for that interview at the Rondo. He’d thought it had gone well, despite nearly sweating through his only suit. Garland had approached him in the lobby afterward, introducing herself as the owner’s daughter. She had invited Oliver to lunch, and then she’d stuck like glue to him, her reasons still a mystery. She had visited him several times before he graduated, sneaking into his dorm at his tinycollege near Ridgecrest, the one he’d chosen based solely on the fact that it had been the only one he’d applied to on this coast that had offered him a full scholarship. Sometimes she’d want to make out, but mostly she’d wanted to wax on about her two years at UCLA before she’d flunked out. She would take dozens of selfies of them together to send to her dollhouse friends, wanting them to believe, for whatever reason, that she and Oliver were closer than they really were. So Oliver now found himself in the untenable position of not knowing how to maintain her interest, because he didn’t know where it was coming from. She held the Rondo in front of him like a carrot.
“But you said your dad was coming home soon?” Oliver asked.
“Who knows?” Garland shrugged. “The stepmonster will probably keep him at sea for weeks just to spite me.”
“We should join them! They’re sailing near Greece, right?” Heather One said, sitting up in her lounge chair excitedly. Oliver tensed. Oh, God. He didn’t have the money for an overseas trip. He didn’t even have a passport. Until he’d come to California, he hadn’t traveled anywhere except that one time he’d driven Roscoe Avanger to a resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where Roscoe was giving a keynote speech. Roscoe had broken his foot and had asked Oliver to take him. It was the first time Oliver, then sixteen, had ever stayed in a hotel. It had changed his life, knowing that places like that existed, great bastions of comfort and cleanliness. He hadn’t wanted to leave, to go back to his mother’s madness.
“Uh,no,” Garland said. “I get quite enough of the stepmonster at home, thank you very much. She doesn’t even know she’s doing me a favor.”
“Yeah, she’s such a bitch,” Heather Two said, seeing her chance to move up in the pecking order. Heather One blushed with embarrassment.
Garland made no secret of her hatred for her stepmother, Jade. They were constantly at war over Garland’s father’s attention. From what Oliver could gather, Garland’s father played them against each other, and used their mutual resentment to get what he wanted. Garland wanted people to believe she was like her mother, a gentle little East Coast socialite who had died when Garland was ten. But Oliver knew her hotelier father by reputation, and he thought Garland definitely favored him. Not that Oliver would say as much to her. He tried to say as little as possible. Just last night at a trendy, monumentally expensive restaurant in Norrie Beach called Symbiotic, Garland had laughed at him while they were all having a boozy kickoff to their week together. “My quiet,gorgeouslittle Oliver,” she’d said. “Why don’t you say more with that accent? All you do is watch, watch, watch, like you’re taking notes.”
Cooper had laughed and made a toast to him in a mock–Southern belle accent. “To gorgeouslittleOliver.” Later, Cooper had picked up the tab for all the booze, but not the food, and Oliver had had to surreptitiously check his debit card balance on his phone to see how much was left from his college job as a front desk clerk at Motel 6. A job he’d quit to come here.
Heather Two had nudged him under the table and whispered, “Don’t worry. My treat.” And that, if anything, had made Oliver feel worse.
“Whose phone is that?” Garland asked as everyone by the pool reached for their devices at once. “Is it mine?”
“No, it’s mine,” Oliver said, setting aside his coffee and pastry and taking his ringing phone out of his shorts pocket. He’d been waiting to hear from the Rondo for weeks, checking the website several times a day to see if the environmental manager’s position was still listed. When he looked at the screen, he recognized the areacode, but not the number. He debated whether or not to answer. He pressed Accept and put the phone to his ear, not saying anything in case it was her. He hadn’t heard a word from his mother in four years, when he’d changed his number and deleted his contacts.
“Oliver?” the voice on the other end said. “Oliver? This is Frasier,” he added unnecessarily, because Oliver had recognized his old friend’s voice right away.
“Frasier. Hello.” He didn’t ask how he’d gotten this number. Frasier had his ways.
“Son, there’s no easy way to tell you this. Lizbeth has died. I’m sorry.”
Oliver stilled. The smile that had started to form from hearing a familiar voice faded. He stared straight ahead at the diamonds of morning sunlight dancing on the blue surface of the pool. The others were unabashedly listening. He tried not to show his shock, tried not to show anything at all.
“Oliver?” Frasier asked at his silence.
“Yes, I’m here.” He cleared his throat. “How?”
“It looks like she fell off a stepladder and a bookcase landed on her.”
It was always going to end this way, with her world falling down around her. Oliver hadn’t been able to save her, and he hadn’t been able to make her get help, no matter how hard he’d tried. He’d just been a child, so much smaller than the responsibility he’d felt. “Do you need me for anything?” he asked.
“No. But there’s the matter of the condo. Not the contents, of course. She always wanted that to go to Roscoe, lucky sod,” Frasier said. “It’s being cleaned out as we speak.”
“I don’t want anything,” he said.
