“Don’t be mean,” MayBe says. “Some of those old mountain people can’t afford dental care.”
“And some of them think dentists are government agents come to steal their moonshine,” Pilar says.
Ben shrugs. “Old mountain’s a way of thinking, not just a way of living.”
Pilar gives a hard-edged laugh. “Those old mountain guys you look up to so much, they’d laugh their asses off if they heard you talking. ‘Way of thinking.’ You’re a moron.”
“Pilar,” MayBe says, trying not to laugh.
“What’d I do?” Pilar asks defensively.
“We take care of our own,” Frank says. Cray and Ben nod in agreement.
“God, what does that even mean?” Pilar’s almost shouting. “They take care of their own. And you aren’t one of them. You wouldn’t want to be. And they wouldn’t want you. You think they were happy when all our parents started moving up here? We ruined their way of life, and now the flatlanders are doing the same to us, and we have no right to complain.”
“Whatever,” Ben says. “When our folks came up here, they didn’t shit giant houses all over the land.”
There’s a long pause before I say, “What does that mean?”
The laughter breaks the tension.
Ben blushes. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry, man,” Frank says, laughing still, “but I don’t.”
“But …” Cate starts to speak, but swallows back her words when this time everyone turns quickly to face her. Pilar doesn’t even stifle an annoyed sigh.
“But what?” Frank asks.
“But … don’t you think that maybe the … Drifter … is one of those old mountain people?”
“Oh my gosh,” Thea says with faux earnestness. “Dean and Pesquera never even thought of that! You’ve solved the case! Hooray!”
“They tested them all,” I say.
“There’s really only two families left up there,” MayBe says. “And none of the men were a match.”
“Oh,” Cate says quietly.
“Yeah, ‘Oh,’” Pilar grumbles.
“Do you remember how it started?” Pilar asks, like always. This is how the story starts, and now there is no stopping it. We’ll tell it like we always do, each of us with the parts that only we tell, the questions only we ask. The only thing different now, though, is that Cate is here.
“It started with Frogger, with Clarence, in kindergarten,” MayBe says. We all nod.
Ben chimes in, right on cue. “I thought he had just got lost again.”
“He could get lost on the way out of a bathroom stall,” Frank says, not unkindly.
We all nod. The times before, when Clarence hadn’t shown up to our kindergarten class, we would clamor over one another with hands raised to get picked for the adventure of finding where he’d gone. Whoever got picked would then have a triumphant return, holding Clarence’s hand, and announcing with an almost parental tone of frustration and love that he’d been talking with the cafeteria ladies, or that he’d been in the art room, or he’d been in the janitor’s closet. Clarence would stand in front of the class and smile, totally thrilled with the attention.
“Mrs. Fenderson sent you, right?” Thea asks Frank, knowing the answer.
“Yeah. Miss Donna called the office, and Dylan came with me because …”
Everybody turns and looks at me expectantly.
“Because I blew chunks,” I finally say, and there are small smiles in return; people remembering when barfing in class could count as something truly awful. It won’t be my turn again to talk for a while, and I sink into my own memories of that day in kinder-garten as my friends recount theirs.
The nurse’s office was right next to the main office, and since the nurse was at the high school for the morning, the school secretary, Fran, was the one to have me lie down on the cot with a cool cloth on my head. She left the door between the nurse’s office and the main office open.
“No, he’s not here,” Fran said when she called Clarence’s mom. “We’ve checked. Was he feeling okay this morning? Could you just do me a favor and check around your house?”
I could hear more people gathering around Fran’s desk. I guess she had covered the receiver with her hand because she was saying, “His mom is checking. Did we check the closets yet?”
Mrs. Madea, the principal, answered. “They’re checking now. Let’s delay the bell and keep everyone where they are. Marty,” she said, and I guessed she was talking to the guidance counselor, Mr. Jemson. “Bring Frank back to class and then go classroom to classroom. I want all teachers to know we have a student missing and to keep their kids in class until we say differently.”
“He’s not there?” Fran was talking into the phone again. “Okay. Now I need you to stay put. We’re still looking here and we’re checking the school buses, too.”
Fran called Clarence’s name again over the intercom, and the air in the office thickened and crackled with every minute that went by with Clarence not answering.
“I’m calling Sheriff Dean,” Fran said, and nobody disagreed.
When she got him on the phone, she said, “Sheriff Dean, it’s Fran at the elementary school. Clarence Lacie didn’t come to school today. His mom said he left the house, and he’s just not here, and he’s not at home, either.”
I’d never met Sheriff Dean or Deputy Pesquera before that day. They peeked into the nurse’s office, and Sheriff Dean winked at me. “Headache?” he asked. They both had their hands resting on the guns in their holsters, and from where I lay they looked impossibly tall and almost alien in their uniforms. Sheriff Dean stayed in the doorway while Deputy Pesquera looked under the cot I was lying on, and in the cabinet in the corner.
“Feel better,” Sheriff Dean said, before walking out of the room.
They forgot about me the rest of the day, and I fell into a heavy hot sleep. When I woke up, it was late afternoon, my mom was in the office, and Fran was thanking her for coming down. My mom was someone you called in times like this. She was telling Fran she’d use the cafeteria, and to send the volunteers there to register. While I’d slept, the police had found Clarence’s green glasses smashed by the side of the road, and the beanie hat he always wore to hide his lumpy head.
“Well, hello,” my mom said as she glanced into the nurse’s office. “Fran, you didn’t tell me Dylan was here.” Her voice had a soft punishment in it. She came in and sat next to me on the bed.
“Oh my goodness!” Fran almost screamed. “I forgot. I can’t believe it. I just …” She practically pushed my mom out of the way to stand next to my cot. “Dylan, are you okay?”
My mom put her hand on my forehead. “You’re not warm.” Was she lying? I was burning up right in front of her.
“Fran, will you be here for a while?” Mom asked.
I was to stay in the office, now with Fran popping her head in every few minutes and saying “I forgot she was there” to anyone who’d listen.
My dad took off work the rest of the week to stay home with me, so my mom could run things down at the school. My dad. He is here in this memory, like the cool side of the pillow.
They found Clarence three days later. It was MayBe’s mom, leading the deep-woods search team, who saw his little hand in the snow. “Bare little fingers,” she had said. “Not even a mitten.”
“My mom found him,” MayBe is saying to Ben.
He answers, “In the woods, right?”
MayBe swallows. “In the woods. She could see the edge of his hand. She said it was almost lit up in the sun.”
“Like his glasses,” Frank says, gravely.
“Yeah, I guess. Lit up like his glasses.”
We have a communal threshold for pain, and when we get to the part about Clarence’s hand lit up in the sun, we’ve reached it.
It’s time for Cray to turn to me and say the only thing he ever says when we tell this story: “And you slept through the whole damn thing.”
I’m the l
ittle sister in this, the one who slept through Christmas, who played with the box instead of her present, who thought the moon was made of cheese, who asked the librarian why she smelled like feet. My role in this story we tell again and again is to make my friends laugh, to break the tension, and as they look at me with laughing but desperate eyes, I do.
I croon, “I ate bad candy! I couldn’t help it!”
They laugh at this, even if it’s not funny, and so they won’t be laughing at me, I laugh too. Their laughter is my punishment for not being there when the principal came into their class and whispered in Mrs. Fenderson’s ear and made her cry. For not being there when everyone’s parents came early to pick them up from school. For missing the most important part of our shared childhood. I’m one of them and I should have been there in that classroom with them when they realized something was really, really wrong. Of course it’s not my fault. But I take the punishment that they think is because I wasn’t there, but I know it’s because I was there in a way I’ll never be able to tell them.
“Can we … can we talk about it?” Cate asks quietly when we get off the bus in the village and head toward her apartment.
“Talk about what?”
“This morning. With all of you telling the story about Clarence. It felt like … like I was there.”
I don’t say anything; I just wait behind her as she punches a code into the heavy iron gate that blocks the apartment complex’s driveway. The gate swings open, and she walks through. It takes her a second to realize I haven’t followed. She takes two exaggerated giant steps back to where I’m standing, tips her head to the side, and bites her lower lip.
“Too many questions?” she asks, cringing.
I nod.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “No more questions. I promise.”
She takes my hand, and I let her pull me through the gates. I can’t go home to my too-quiet house, or to Ben’s, or to Pilar’s.
“And just knowing,” she says, “what was really happening with you, right at that moment. I can’t believe that none of them knew.”
The apartment Cate shares with her dad is nicer than most houses I’ve ever been inside, including Pilar’s. It has superplush carpeting and fancy kitchen appliances and polished counters and overstuffed furniture that’s not mismatched.
“None of this stuff is ours,” Cate says, dropping her backpack onto the couch and motioning for me to do the same. “Our stuff’s all in storage back east until we build the new house. Do you want something to eat?” I follow her into the kitchen. “I wish Newman was here, but he’s out at the house site with my dad. You’d like him, even if he’s a fart-a-holic.” She laughs. “Newman, I mean! Not my dad. My dad just burps. This is us,” she says, taking a picture off the shiny new refrigerator. It’s the only thing on the refrigerator, held there by a magnet reading PATRICK PHARMACEUTICALS, TALUGA COUNTY. There’s something familiar about that name, but I don’t know what it is. I think how the picture looks kind of lonely on the fridge, compared to ours at home, with its layers of Chinese food menus and report cards from when I was seven.
In the photograph, Cate and her dad are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon wearing matching THAT’S ONE BIG CANYON! T-shirts and grinning for the camera. I can tell her dad is holding the camera himself, his arm stretched out in front of them to make them both fit into the image. Cate’s dad’s hair is even redder than hers, and he wears giant black sunglasses. There is something familiar in their faces that I never noticed just looking at Cate. Something in the sharp point of their chins, the freckles that on her dad have deepened to a warm brown.
“We took that on the way out here,” Cate says. “We were going to stop at every landmark or silly roadside attraction we could find, but my dad really wanted to get out here. I practically had to beg to get him to stop at the Grand Canyon. He has to wear those stupid sunglass, even in winter. Sensitive eyes,” she says, rolling her own.
“So what’s your dad do?”
She laughs. “Good question. I mean, I know his title—Senior Vice President of Manufacturing Operations—but I don’t even think he knows what it means. All I know is some days he has to wear a suit, and some days he wears work boots and jeans because he has to walk the floor, which I think means he walks around the plant where they make these little electrical widgets to make sure that the thingamabobbers are being filed down to the right size so they can fit into the doohickeys. So,” she says, taking a deep breath and giggling, “your guess is as good as mine.”
I hand the picture back and take the glass of soda she just poured. “You guys look alike,” I say. “Same freckles.”
She groans. “I know. I’m destined to look like a five-year-old till I’m a senior citizen.”
“Your place smells so clean,” I say, realizing that because of the absence of any sort of odor, I can actually smell the soda we’re drinking.
“I know. I hate it,” she says, laughing. She looks around the room, a lost expression on her face. “It just doesn’t smell like home, you know? Not like your house.”
“Um, thanks?”
“You know what I mean!” She laughs again, pinching me lightly. “Your house always smells like cereal and the woodstove and the shampoo from your shower. It smells like people actually live there. Want to see my room?”
Cate’s room is enormous. “This place actually has two master bedrooms, so I have my own bathroom and fireplace,” she says, “which is really romantic for me and Newman.”
Cate goes into the bathroom, and since there’s nothing to look at on the walls or the bookshelves or even the bedside table, I sit on one of the overstuffed armchairs by the fireplace. This place is so quiet, even with the low hum from the bathroom fan. It feels … lonely. I see the corner of a book sticking out from under Cate’s bed. I don’t know why I walk over and pick it up, I just do.
It’s a photo album, stuffed so full its yellowing pages fan out, even when closed. When I pick up the book, a piece of paper slips out of it and flutters to the floor. I lay the album on the bed and bend over to pick up the piece of paper.
“What are you doing?” Cate asks, stepping quickly from the bathroom.
“Wait,” I say, glancing at a familiar image on the paper as she snatches it from me, “What is that?”
“Nothing.”
She tries to slip the paper back into the album, but I grab hold of the edge of it before she can. For a moment we stand there, looking at each other, each holding one end of the paper.
“Let me see it,” I say, pulling a little. “Cate, let me see.”
She lets go of the paper and leans heavily against the bed.
“Where did you get this?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Online. It’s just a printout.”
I look again at the paper in my hand. The article is ten years old, from the Pine Mountain Gazette. It has a picture of Clarence, the same one from my photo album. The headline says MISSING BOY FOUND DEAD. I don’t read the article. I hand it back to Cate, and without opening the album on the bed, she slips it back inside, still leaning against the bed.
“Why-”
She interrupts me. “Because I wanted to know.”
“Know what?” I lean next to her on the bed.
“To know what happened. What it was like for you guys. I mean, you don’t understand. What happened obviously cinched you all together in a way that I’ll just never be a part of….”
“Cate, you wouldn’t want to be a part of it.”
She looks at me and gives me a sad smile. “I like you. All of you. And I just thought that maybe if I understood what it is that made you all so sad …”
“We’re not sad.”
She laughs ruefully. “Maybe not all the time, maybe not on the surface, but you and MayBe and Thea and Pilar, even the guys—there’s a sadness that you don’t think you show. But I can see it. I thought maybe if I understood what it was like for you guys, then we’d all be better friends. I’d be more a part of
the group.” She flops back onto the bed and stares at the ceiling. “I know how it looks. Like I’m sort of freakily obsessed or something. I’m not, though. I’m just tired of being on the outside.”
I move from the bed and curl into the overstuffed chair, tucking my legs beneath me and resting my head on the chair arm. For a long time there is only the sound of us breathing. “I’m sorry if you feel like you’re on the outside,” I finally say.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I know you guys don’t mean it.”
“You just came up here at a weird time.”
“I know. I wish I’d moved here a long time ago, so we could have all been little kids together. I wish I’d had my sixth birthday at the Niner, I wish I’d got kicked out of Girl Scouts with you and Pilar, I wish I could have had the chance to go over to MayBe’s with you guys and make up recipes for shampoo in the blender.” She sits up and wipes her eyes. “I guess I just feel like I missed out, is all.”
“You’re exhausting,” I say, my head still on the chair.
She laughs a little. “I know! My dad is always telling me that I wear him out.”
I sit up. “I see what he means.”
“Are we still friends?” she asks.
“Yes. No.” I laugh, shaking my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we can be friends if you can’t let this thing with Clarence go. It’s too much, to keep talking about it. Especially now. Especially since—”
“The Drifter’s back?” she asks brightly.
I groan. “Yes, especially since the Drifter’s back.”
“You could catch him, you know,” she says.
I bang my head a few times against the soft arm of the chair. “Why are we still talking about this?”
“Because you’re scared. I bet you could see lots of things, if you’d just let yourself.”
I think about my dream, the same dream again and again, the same details that tell me nothing. “I wish you were right.”
“Me too,” she says, almost too softly for me to hear.
We walk down to the lake, to the beach I used to go to as a kid but haven’t seen since they put the gates up. It’s raining, but I’ve always liked the beach in the rain. We walk up and down the beach until we’re totally soaked, and then go back into Cate’s apartment and sit by the big fire—which you “light” by flipping on a light switch—to dry off.
Sight Page 13
