My dad found my mom in the church bathroom, when she was trying to get me to breathe again. He wanted to call for an ambulance, but she wouldn’t let him. She said, She’s okay, Marty, shell be okay. I remember my dad looking at me in a way he never had before. I was saying, The boy can’t breathe. Let him out of the water, Mommy, he can’t breathe. I could see my own distorted reflection in the metal paper-towel holder, my chin stretched out, my eyes black holes. I still think that’s what he saw. I still think that maybe that’s what I really look like. A monster. He said, She has it, doesn’t she? And then, three days later, he was gone.
The last picture is the same picture of Clarence that I just took from the photo album. The one from the envelope is more faded, but the one from the album is curved from being peeled off the adhesive. I place one of the Clarence pictures on one knee, and the picture of Tessa, smoothed out, on the other. You can’t tell, from looking at the pictures, that they are linked forever now. I think, I am linked to them too. My stomach clenches when I think of the fourth figure, linked to all of us, no matter how hard I may try to sever the invisible tendon tying us all together.
That night, when I dream of the desert, I try again and again to turn around, finding myself either facing in the same direction or unable to move at all. The footsteps get closer and closer, but there is never a cold hand on my shoulder or a hard shove sending me into the hole. The fear is too much. Wake up, wake up, wake up. I do.
Six
Mom bangs on the bathroom door the next morning, telling me that Gate is waiting for me outside. I take an oversize Band-Aid from the medicine cabinet and carefully place the photographs of Tessa and Clarence in its center. Then I press the Band-Aid over my heart.
“Did you know she was riding the bus with you this morning?” Mom asks when I get downstairs.
“Yeah,” I lie. “Didn’t1 tell you?”
“No,” she says firmly.
I get out the front door as quickly as I can.
“Hi,” Gate says, turning to look at me from where she sits on our front steps.
“Hi,” I answer, closing the front door behind me.
“My dad had to come back up here this morning. He said I should ride the bus with you.” Gate stands up and walks down the steps. She waits for me at the bottom.
We walk in silence to the bottom of the driveway, where we stand stomping our feet against the cold. I wish it would just snow already.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she says.
“Why would you be sorry?” I ask. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I shouldn’t have laid all that on you.”
She shrugs. “It must have felt good to finally tell someone.”
I snort. “Not really. It actually felt pretty rotten.”
“Maybe at first,” she says, “but I bet you felt better afterward.”
“I guess I did,” I say, “but I shouldn’t have even told you in the first place.”
“But you did tell me,” she says quickly. “And sorry, sister,” she laughs, “but you can’t get that cat back in the bag.”
I wave to Dottie as she passes by us toward the dead end. “Nope. I guess I can’t.”
She smiles at me. “You know, a secret is only half as heavy if you have someone to carry it with you.”
I look at her. All of the darkness that clouded her face last night is gone. There is only a cautious smile left, and I have this almost giddy feeling, the same sort of slipping, falling feeling that I get before a vision, but this time I’m the one deciding to take the jump. “Wow, Cate. That was a really sweet thing to say.”
“I know!” she crows. “I thought of it last night! I felt so bad for freaking out at you, and I thought about how hard it must have been for you to tell me, and how I told you about my mom being in the nuthouse, which, by the way, nobody knows about, and how I felt better as soon as I told you. So there. We both know each other’s biggest secret. Cool, right?”
“Right,” I say, realizing maybe it’s true.
“And I can ask you about your secret and you can ask me about mine.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She keeps on smiling and nodding at me.
“Do you want to ask me something?” I finally ask her.
“Yes! I have, like, a million and one questions.”
“Maybe you can start with just one,” I say.
“Oh, come on. Just one?”
“Yep,” I say, enjoying this. “Just one.”
“How about,” she says, her eyes widening with an idea, “one every day. On the way to school—my dad can drop me off every morning. You can ask me one and I can ask you one. And we have to answer. That’s the rule.”
“Okay,” I say, glancing up the street. “You have twenty seconds before Dottie gets back down here.”
“Okay,” she says, narrowing her eyes and screwing up her mouth like she’s thinking really hard. “When was the first time you had a vision?”
My hand flutters automatically to my chest, touching my sweatshirt in the place where the Band-Aid lies beneath. I laugh. “That was a total waste of a question! I told you last night. When I was five, in kindergarten.”
“That was the first time?”
“Yep.”
“What was the time after that?”
“Too late!” I say. “You had your one question already.”
“Oh, man!” Gate says, stamping her foot. “You’re right. Okay, your turn.”
We step back from the driveway so Dottie can pull up.
I wait till we’re settled on the bus to ask.
“How old were you when your mom went into the hospital?”
“Five years old,” Gate says. “Weird, our questions both had the same answers! What do you think that means?”
“Most likely that you’re a psychic.”
Her eyes widen. “Really?”
“No.” I laugh.
The bus stops in front of Ben’s house, and this time he gets on with his brothers, JJ and Tye. I wonder if he and Frank had it out or something.
“What’s up?” he mumbles as he passes us on his way to the back of the bus.
“Morning!” Cate says.
“Neighbor,” I say.
“‘Neighbor.’ That’s cute,” Cate says. “Do you guys always call each other that?”
“I guess,” I say, still wondering why Ben looks so glum.
“This school is the best,” Cate says, laughing.
“Where were you?” I ask, after finally finding Pilar by spotting her black high-tops under a bathroom stall door. There’s a flush, and she comes out of the stall.
“Hello to you, too.” Pilar yawns and turns on the faucet.
I lean against the mirror by the sink so I can face her. “You weren’t in homeroom. Listen …”
“I overslept. Listen to what?”
“That girl, Cate, came to my house this morning, and we rode the bus to school together,” I rush out.
“And?”
“And I think she’s really lonely and she’s going to sit with us for lunch again.”
“Oh, cool.” She looks at me. “Anything else?”
“Nope. That’s all.”
Pilar washes her hands in silence before turning to me.
“So you came in here to warn me? You think I was going to make her cry again? I didn’t do it on purpose, you know.” She actually sounds defensive.
“Don’t be a goober!” I say, poking her playfully in the arm. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Well, thanks for telling me.”
“So, she’s sitting with us at lunch.”
Pilar turns to me. “I heard you the first time.”
“I know,” I say. “I just …”
“You want me to be nice to her?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Fine. She’s not coming this afternoon, is she? To Thea’s?”
I’d actually been planning on inviting her, but—“No, of course not. it’s just us four.”
>
“Good,” Pilar says, hip checking me out of her way.
Pilar’s taken her new pledge to be supernice to Cate really seriously. She insists on carrying Cate’s tray through the lunch line, and pointing out the food she least suspects to be laced with mouse turds. “You really should just brown-bag it,” Pilar says when they get back to our lunch table.
“Or,” MayBe says with a smile, “you could use this.” She pulls a folded canvas bag out of her backpack and hands it to Cate. “I found it in the crawl space under our house. Thought maybe you’d like it.”
“I love it!” Cate shouts, holding the bag out for us to see. The Open Earth logo is a circle with a baby picture of MayBe right in the middle. “Made with Love” Cate reads aloud. “Thank you! I really, really love it.” She hugs MayBe.
“You should have seen them all last night,” Thea says. “MayBe’s mom and dad pulling out all of the old stuff from the company. All these notebooks with handwritten soap recipes, and rough drafts of the stories that ended up on the labels. It was, like, the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“What do your parents do now?” Cate asks.
“They’re Internet investment bankers,” MayBe says. “They sort of lost their taste for organic products.”
“Why?”
I look at MayBe. It’s the same question she asked her parents again and again when they sold Open Earth. She cried and cried and begged them not to sell it.
“They said they stopped believing that products made with love could really change the world. And of course they wanted to make enough money to put surveillance cameras up around our property and to put an alarm system in.” Thea touches MayBe’s arm and MayBe stops talking. She looks at Cate. “We had a tragedy up here when we were in kindergarten. It changed things.”
“She knows,” I say, holding my breath beneath the heavy stares of my friends, until Pilar shrugs and says, “So, she knows, then.”
There is a long, quiet moment and then Cate says, “I’m really sorry about what happened on your mountain. That must have been really terrible for all of you.”
Thea and Pilar shrug, and MayBe says softly, “Thanks, Cate.”
I don’t say anything; I just wait to see what will happen.
“But why?” Cate asks. “Why couldn’t they catch him? I mean, nobody had any idea who did it?”
“Oh, everyone had ideas about who did it,” Pilar says darkly.
“God, that’s right!” I say, remembering. “People thought it was Sheriff Dean for a while.”
“Or Mr. Sheboa,” Thea says. “People suspected Fran’s husband, too.”
“People suspected everyone’s husband,” MayBe says, “and my dad.”
“And my dad,” Pilar says.
“Every man on this mountain was a suspect,” MayBe says. “It was awful. We weren’t allowed to go to each other’s houses, we weren’t allowed to play outside….”
“But none of them was the Drifter?” Cate asks.
“Nope. They had evidence. And they tested it against every single man up here, and none of them matched.”
“That’s when they came up with their Drifter theory.”
“It wasn’t just that, though. It was that they found his camp.”
“That could have been anybody’s camp. There’s lots of people camped out in these woods—”
“So he’s still out there?” Cate asks, interrupting.
Thea shrugs. “I bet he’s long gone.”
“Why?” Cate asks.
“Because it’s been almost eleven years, and he hasn’t come back yet, so …”
“So what?” Pilar asks.
“So, he’s not up here anymore, that’s what!” Thea says loudly.
“But he could be in the desert,” Pilar says. “It could have been him that got that little girl in the desert.”
“And it could have been the Easter Bunny, too!” Thea says loudly. “You guys are depressing me. I’m going to the library.”
MayBe leaves with her, and then Pilar, who says she has a headache, goes to lie down in the nurse’s office, saying she doesn’t need me to go with her, before I can even offer.
Cate looks at me across the empty table. “I guess we know how to clear a room.”
“Guess so,” I say absently, wondering when Sheriff Dean is going to make the announcement about the metal shavings. I wonder what will change when he does. Sometimes I think people up here are as strong as the mountain we live on, and sometimes I think the littlest thing could make us all crumble down into the flatlands.
“What’d you guys do for fun when you were little?”
“What?”
“Like, for fun. What’d you do?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Normal stuff. Played in the woods, went to the Niner for birthday parties, made bird feeders out of pinecones and peanut butter …”
“What’s the Niner?”
“The Miner Forty-Niner. You pass it on your way up the mountain; it’s that restaurant that looks like it’s about to fall over the edge.”
“The one with the giant horseshoe hanging over the door? Please,” Cate says, her hands gripping the table, “tell me it’s a restaurant with a gold rush theme.”
I laugh. “Matter of fact …”
“Yes!” she squeals. “Do you want to go this weekend? We can invite MayBe and Thea and Pilar, too.”
“That place is crawling with flatlanders now,” I groan. But the way Gate is holding her breath makes me say, “But yeah, let’s go this weekend. It’ll be fun.”
Cate wiggles in her seat. “So awesome.”
“She could have come with us!” MayBe says, as we wave out the bus window to Cate. “Dylan, why didn’t you invite her?”
“Oh, come on,” Pilar says, “she’s lived up here for a minute and a half. We don’t need to adopt her.”
“So that’s why!” Thea says, poking Pilar in the side, “You’re jealous of freckle face.”
“Shove it,” Pilar says, putting her backpack between her and Thea. “I’m not jealous. I just wanted it to be us four today. Is that so wrong?”
“Is that so wrong?” Thea laughs.
“It’s sort of sweet, actually,” MayBe says, smiling at Pilar. “You like us!”
The plan is to meet up with Thea’s mom in the center of the village before going back to Thea’s so she can cut my hair. We go to the pharmacy first, so Thea can pick up some supplies for her mom, which for some reason Thea seems really annoyed about. Pilar and I sit on the bench outside of Mountain Candy, the overhang sheltering us from the rain, and let MayBe go into the pharmacy with the fuming Thea.
“The Niner? What is she, a six-year-old?” Pilar’s not exactly thrilled with Cate’s Miner Forty-Niner plan. She scowls at me, and then scowls at the Christmas-light-wrapped evergreen trees that now bookend the bench we’re sitting on, along with the other benches in the village and every other non-moving object. Even though it’s only four o’clock, it’s already dark enough for the lights to be turned on. “This place looks like Rudolph threw up on it.”
“Oh, come on, Professor, it’s a winter wonderland,” I say, offering her the bag of Sour Patch Kids we just bought. “You know you love it.”
“It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!”
“Thems the rules,” I say, sucking on a candy. Last year, in order to “extend the holiday buying season,” the Village Business Association voted to put the holiday decorations up two weeks before Thanksgiving, instead of waiting till the day after, like they usually did.
I love the way it looks, and I think Pilar does too. Even the headlights and taillights on the cars, shining against the rain-wet pavement, give me a cozy feeling.
Pilar rifles through the candy bag and pulls out a bunch in her hand. I take the green ones from her, my favorites, and leave her the rest. She pops them all into her mouth at once.
“You’ll come, though, right? To the Niner tomorrow?”
Pilar pulls another Sour Patch Kid out of th
e bag and holds it between her teeth and says, “Whshe ish matter sho you.”
“Because it’ll be fun,” I say. “That’s a green one.”
Pilar spits out the green Sour Patch Kid. “Fine. I’ll go. But if she wears some creepy six-year-old party dress, I’m vacating the premises.”
Thea and MayBe come out of the pharmacy and I tell them about the Niner plan.
“Sweet. That place has good curly fries,” Thea says.
We huddle under the overhang for a few minutes more, delaying the moment when we have to run across the street in the rain to where Thea’s mom is shopping at Old Sheboa’s, which is what everyone’s decided to call the grocery store.
“I wish it’d just snow already.” MayBe sighs.
“‘First snow’s coming and he’s coming back,’” Thea says, pulling her hood up over her head. It takes her a second to realize we’re all looking at her. “What? We always say that.” It’s true; we’ve been saying that before the first snow for years. It has sort of lost its meaning. Thea snorts. “What? All of a sudden we realize how creepy that stupid song is?”
“It is kind of creepy,” MayBe says, looking at me.
“I hate that song,” Pilar says. Why’s she looking at me too?
“Me too,” I say. Thea snorts again, but doesn’t say anything.
We wait for the traffic going through town to slow, and then we run across the street, our feet slapping wetly against the asphalt. In the grocery store we find Thea’s mom in the fruit department, filling a bag with green apples.
“You girls get what you needed?” she asks.
“Yes, we got what you needed,” Thea says, and the vein of darkness when she speaks pushes MayBe, Pilar, and me to start sampling imported cherries on the other end of the aisle.
MayBe watches Thea and her mom start to argue, a cherry bulging out her cheek as she chews. “You know that I love it when Thea stays with me,” she says quietly. “I just wish she and her mom could get along.”
Pilar spits a cherry pit to the floor and kicks it under the strawberry display. “They’ll be fine,” she says. “My mom and I barely talk anymore, and we actually get along better now than before.”
“You didn’t tell me that!” I say.
Sight Page 10
