Sight

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  “I guess,” Pilar says.

  “Her mom went into a hospital close to where Cate and her dad lived, and the rest of the Croondons settled a few hours away. They were all from that area to begin with. She and her dad weren’t really moving here, you know.”

  Pilar looks at me in surprise.

  “The family elected her dad to come out and take care of selling off the land to developers, the same people who built the Willows. It was only going to take a month or so, and Cate begged him to let her come too. She says when she came back here, the thing inside of him—the monster—woke up.”

  Pilar shakes her head and we walk in silence for a while more. “I heard her mom was, like, catatonic? In a hospital or something.”

  “She’s in a hospital, but she’s aware of what’s going on. The aunt that Cate’s staying with lives close to the hospital, and Cate’s gone to see her mom a couple times. She says her mom will only talk for a couple minutes, usually about Cate and Clarence in the playpen.”

  Pilar shakes her head. “You think Cate’s mom knew? About her dad?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, slowly answering the question I’ve asked myself a million times. “I think maybe when Clarence died something got severed in her brain. So maybe even if she knew, she didn’t know she knew, you know?”

  Pilar feigns confusion at my explanation, and then says, “Yeah, I know.”

  I pull a faded photograph from my pocket and hand it to Pilar.

  “God, they do look alike,” she says, staring at Cate’s and Clarence’s slobbery and laughing faces, their pudgy baby hands gripping the side of the playpen. “Do you think she really remembers Clarence at all?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Me too,” Pilar says, handing me back the picture. “Her poor mom. I can’t even imagine what that must have felt like. To lose your baby like that.”

  Something catches in my throat, and I blurt out the first thing that comes into my head. “You’re a mom!” I don’t mean it to sound accusing, but it does.

  She sighs. “I know.”

  Neither of us says anything for a long while; we just keep clomping through the snow.

  I make a squeaking sound in my throat, trying to keep my words inside. Pilar looks at me.

  “Well, it’s just weird!” I finally say, trying to keep my voice low. “I mean, you pushed a whole human body through your hooha! AND you had sex!”

  Pilar stifles a sigh, waiting for me to finish.

  “Not necessarily in that order,” I mumble.

  “I …,” Pilar says.

  “You didn’t tell me!” I’m yelling now. “How could you not tell me that, Professor? That’s, like, the most major thing that’s ever happened to you, and you didn’t even tell me about it! You just let me go on … like a stupid idiot, like a stupid idiot kid while you had this major grown-up experience! Didn’t you trust me? Didn’t you trust me enough to tell me?”

  I feel so far away from her, even standing right here, yelling in her face. It’s like a thick clear wall of goo has come between us, like well never truly be together again.

  Pilar says calmly, “Remember when I first got to Montana, that summer I went away with my parents? I e-mailed you when I first got there and said there were no cute boys.”

  I nod, the hot pulsing of my heartbeat slowing down as she talks.

  “Well, Nate came a week later,” she says with a shy grin. “And I full-on swooned over him. The way he wore a T-shirt and his cowboy hat, the way he cracked his knuckles, the way he stretched his back so that you could see the trail of hair on his belly under his T-shirt, the way he said ‘All right’ when something was good. He’s in the same grade as us. He grew up close to the university and volunteered to be the climbing instructor for my dad’s class, show the students how to climb up trees to get samples.

  “You would have died, Dylan, the way I flirted with this guy. I just … When he was around, I didn’t even feel like myself. I felt better than myself. Braver. And …”—she pauses, like she still can’t believe it—“he would flirt back! We started eating lunch together, and then we started going on walks together after class, and —God, my parents teased me about it nonstop. At that point they still thought it was cute. Nothing had really happened, we hadn’t held hands or kissed, I could barely even look him in the eye. So then he asked me if I wanted to go on a hike one Saturday. I mean, that would have been enough for me to, like, live on for months, the fact that we were hiking together. But when we got to the waterfall and sat down on a rock, I had this hope, hope, hope that something would happen. And we sat there, and he said, ‘I don’t want to mess this up.’ I didn’t say anything back, and he said, ‘I like you. I think about you all the time. I like your family. I like everything about you.’ And then he asked if he could kiss me.”

  “And?”

  “I kissed him and … You know the way you described the first time you and Ben kissed?”

  “We were nine.”

  “Well, yeah, but you said it was like you had fireworks going off in your heart.”

  “I said that?” I laugh. “Jeesh, I was a corny kid.”

  “You were right, though, because that’s what it felt like.”

  “Wow.”

  “And we started dating. I mean, he asked my parents first. Called them ma’am and sir. And they liked him, a lot. And I liked him”—her voice breaks—“so much. When he was around, I would pray for a chance to touch him, for him to touch me. By the third month, the end of the summer, we were pretty—”

  “Hot and heavy?”

  She laughs. “Exactly. And we were getting more and more serious and it sort of morphed from that crush-lust to something … more. Like, I was thinking about dropping out of school and moving to Montana and living with his parents—who were like the sweetest people ever—”

  “Wait. You were going to move?”

  She shrugs. “I was in love.”

  “Who cares! You can’t move! At least not until we go to college.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She groans. “College.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “It broke. The stupid condom broke. I mean, does that actually happen?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “apparently. We tried not to worry at first, but then I was late, and my parents found the pregnancy test because they were full-on going through my things at that point, and the shit just totally hit the fan. There were these awful meetings between our parents, and they would end up yelling and fighting and … Nate and I, we tried to stay out of it. Isn’t that weird? We tried to stay out of these unbelievably major decisions about our life. And all the while I’m not allowed to tell anyone. Especially not you.”

  “But why?”

  “Because of the plan our genius parents came up with. My mom would raise Grace like she was her own baby, and Nate would spend his last year of high school at military school, and the two of us would never see each other again.”

  “Oh my God, Pilar.”

  She sniffs. “I just didn’t think it’d be that hard. But watching Grace call somebody else Mommy. It just … I couldn’t do it.”

  “So where’s Nate now?”

  Pilar looks at me and bursts out laughing. “In our guest room.”

  “Shut up!”

  “I threw a total fit when my mom said she wasn’t going to tell him what had happened to Gracie. He was working back on his parents’ ranch and caught a bus out here as soon as he heard.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know,” she says, blushing and laughing. “My parents don’t let us sleep in the same room, though.”

  “So, what are you guys going to do?”

  “I have no idea,” she says, sighing. “Part of me thinks maybe I’ll be with him forever, and then part of me is, like, wait, I’m sixteen, and how can the teenage brain even fully comprehend what ‘forever’ means? So basically, I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

  We fall silent again
, Pilar’s words and story echoing loudly in my head. I try to figure out how it makes me feel, if having the puzzle pieces is enough to make something whole again.

  “So that’s the story,” Pilar says.

  “Some story,” I answer. I can’t think of anything else to say. I want to feel something, the same feelings of friendship that I’d always felt, but all I feel is confusion.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” she says. “But you lied to me, too.”

  “I know.” Of course. The confusion makes sense. Pilar’s not the only one who put up the wall.

  We’ve finally come to the beach and are greeted by a squealing four-legged, four-armed ball of flannel and leather.

  “Do you mind?” I ask Pilar, just before MayBe and Thea tackle us. “They really want to see you.”

  Pilar smiles but can’t answer with anything except for “Oooof” before we’re a tangle of hats and scarves and giggles and tears.

  “We miss you!” MayBe finally says, working her way into Pilar’s lap.

  “Yeah, and Dylan won’t stop mooning over your chair at lunch!” Thea says, flopping back in the snow. “She’s, like, useless without you.”

  Pilar and I glance at each other. For a moment the wall is gone.

  We pull one another upright, and then there are hugs and some tears, and then we realize we’re freezing and in dire need of hot chocolate.

  “My mom called just before you guys got here,” Thea says. “She’s in the parking lot. We can go to my house, if you want.”

  Our walk back up the trail goes quickly. I walk next to Thea, behind MayBe and Pilar, listening to MayBe list the organic baby products she’s been making and storing in her kitchen for Grace.

  “How’d it go?” Thea whispers.

  I shrug and swallow back the lump in my throat.

  “It’ll get better,” she says, nudging me. “You guys just have to be okay hating each other a little bit. It makes it easier for the love to come back that way.”

  We sit around Thea’s table, her mom nervously piling cartons of cookies and ice cream in front of us until Thea says, “Ma, please …,” and her mom leaves.

  Left in the quiet, familiar kitchen, MayBe and Thea keep looking at Pilar, and then at me.

  “Fine,” Pilar says, turning to me. “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know,” I say, laughing nervously and stealing a glance to gauge her reaction. “Psychic.”

  She smirks. “How’s that going for you?”

  “She set my socks on fire just by looking at them,” Thea says. “Just kidding. Dylan, go ahead. Tell her about being psychic.” Thea hands me a cookie, like it will help me along. She looks at Pilar. “She barely tells us anything. She wanted you to know first. Ask her if she can set things on fire just by looking at them. That’s what I want to know.”

  Pilar’s laugh is thin, but it’s there. She looks at me. “Can you set things on fire just by looking at them?”

  No.

  Thea jumps in. “Can you make cats bark and make it rain tampons?”

  No.

  “I told you,” MayBe says to Thea. I don’t join their giggles. I just watch Pilar watch me, her face drawn.

  “So what can you do?” she asks.

  “I can see dead kids,” I answer. The giggling stops. I take a breath. “I can see kids that have been taken. Sometimes they’re alive, but most of the time they’re dead.”

  I’ve said that same thing a lot of times since what happened with Cate. I said it to my mom, and I said it on the phone to my aunts Ruby and Peg, who told me I needed to come visit this summer and be theirs for a while. I even said it to my grandma, who still refused to talk to my mom. I said it to myself, in the dark of my bedroom before I slept. I told my secret all those times, but none of them felt real, not until now, when I am saying out loud what I haven’t even said to myself.

  “I could have saved Clarence.”

  Thea and MayBe moan in protest, reaching for me. I pull away, still looking at Pilar.

  “I could have saved all of them, but I didn’t. I was too afraid to know what I could do.”

  “You were a kid,” Pilar says. “You are a kid. It’s not your fault, what you didn’t know.”

  “What if-if I didn’t—,” I stammer. “What if Gracie …”

  Pilar grabs my hand. Hers is ice cold. “But you did. You did see her, Dylan. You weren’t strong enough before, but you are now. You saved her. You saved my Gracie.”

  “Oh my God, please just hug already!” Thea says, pushing me toward Pilar. We fall awkwardly into each other’s arms. Pilar’s grip on me is sudden and surprising, and it takes me a second to wrap my arms around her, to hold her against me, and to cry.

  About The Author

  Adrienne Maria Vrettos grew up on a mountain in southern California, where she rode dirt bikes and made a mean double-mud pie. Her first novel, Skin, told through the perspective of the younger brother of an anorexic girl, was published to great acclaim and named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, and a New York Public Library Top 100 Books for Reading and Sharing selection. Adrienne lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.