The Vanishing Season

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  “You should break up with him if you don’t like him,” Maggie said.

  “I know, I know.” Pauline looked at her. “I’m kind of just . . . coasting. He makes everything easy.”

  James came back with plates full of food, and Pauline devoured hers. “Dance?” he asked. Some of his friends were dancing in a group at the right of the dance floor.

  Pauline shook her head. “I feel a little hot actually.”

  “Wanna leave?” He looked a bit overly concerned, as if she were a baby or a delicate flower.

  Pauline shook her head. “No, that’s okay. I’m just gonna go walk a little and see the rest of the hotel. I’ll be back. You guys stay and hang out.” She took off down a plush, carpeted hallway to the left.

  Maggie and James stood in silence, Maggie feeling awkward because she had nothing to say to him. “My Humps” came on, which made it even a little more awkward when a couple in front of them started grinding.

  “So you and Liam,” James said, after a while.

  “Uh-huh,” Maggie replied. What else was there to say to that?

  “Wasn’t he into Pauline for a while?”

  “Probably not something you ask someone’s girlfriend.”

  “So you’re his girlfriend?” James pressed.

  Maggie wasn’t sure what to say to that. She could feel herself flushing with annoyance at having her personal life invaded. “Oh, that’s right. Pauline says you don’t like to reveal very much. She says you hold back.” Maggie tried to ignore the slight hurt that Pauline had said something like that about her.

  James smiled, seeming completely at ease. “I can tell you don’t like me.” Maggie looked up at him but didn’t argue. “Sorry to be pushy. I just don’t think Pauline always knows what’s best for her. I just don’t think Liam Witte is what’s best for her, even as a friend. That dude is seriously messed up. Sorry.”

  “You’d make a really good Taliban boyfriend,” Maggie said. “You should put her in a burka.” James smirked and rolled his eyes.

  “She’s just so beautiful,” he finally said. “I’ve been obsessed with her since, like, seventh grade. I mean, half the guys in my class are. She makes the other girls at our school look like nothing. If you have any hints about . . . I dunno, how I can win her over . . .”

  “I gotta pee,” Maggie said, turning abruptly for the hall.

  She was so annoyed and so over the conversation, she didn’t notice a figure at the corner of her eye coming out into the hallway through the double doors that led to the kitchen. The figure crossed the back of the room with two trays, taking a shortcut to a convention room across the hotel. Only as it disappeared out the rear glass doors did she register that it was someone she knew.

  * * *

  Here is a moment that sparkles hard like a diamond.

  Pauline Boden walks out into the plush, green-carpeted hotel lobby, then out onto the empty veranda in back and crosses to the railing. Leaning over the side, she shivers in her eggshell dress but doesn’t go inside. She watches the clouds roll along and reflect in the water and rubs her arms. A squirrel scurries up a tree across the lawn, and there is the faint echo of music coming from one of the weddings inside.

  Suddenly, hearing footsteps coming across the deck, she turns. Liam stands there looking uncertain, paused with two empty trays in his hands, frozen in place. He puts them down.

  Pauline opens her mouth to say something, but instead, on impulse, she takes a step toward him. She puts her hands on his shoulders, and he winces.

  She leads them into a dance in time to the faint music, polka steps, but slow and easy. Liam, unsure, puts a hand on her waist. He looks lost. He watches her in confusion. His fingers tremble a little on her waist.

  The sun is setting and filtering through the strange clouds, and it makes the sky seem closer, like if they swam off the edge of the porch, they could reach it in twenty strokes or so. Liam pulls back and looks at her.

  “You never wrote me,” he says. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”

  Pauline shakes her head sadly. “I’m not your friend.”

  Her lips tremble. She looks like she wants to cry.

  Liam doesn’t ask her why. Maybe he knows. He smooths a piece of hair back behind her ear nervously, as if she might slap his hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  Liam looks down at his feet.

  “I’m tired of doing this,” she says. “I’ve always felt like I could just live in the moment, with everything but you. It’s too important, and if I lose you . . . if you lose me . . .” She rolls her eyes up at the sky, tears welling along her bottom lashes. “It’s so tiring trying not to love you, Liam.” She looks uncertain, scared that the words are out.

  Clouds cross the sun like a warning. Liam looks at Pauline’s trembling lips for a while, and then she startles him, sliding forward and pressing her lips against his. He pulls away, looks angry. But after a moment, he pulls her in tight and kisses her back. They lean into each other as if they’ve been on a long journey, as if they’re exhausted.

  The moment feels familiar, like I already knew, and yet it comes as a surprise.

  Now, at the back of the porch, I see her, looking through one of the dark glass doors of the hotel. The air shifts, shudders—I feel the past rearing up at me, and then it slips away. Only it leaves a residue of something . . . a piece of myself I’m scared to know. I’m terrified, for a moment, that I’ve done something terrible, but I can’t remember what.

  From beyond the glass, Maggie Larsen watches them kiss, looking like she could sink beneath the ground.

  I turn away, agitated. I float out above the woods. Despite not breathing, I need the air.

  And here, I find them. Deep in the pine woods, above the trees, I arrive at the ball of ghosts. They’re twirling in the air, iridescent, glowing, windblown.

  The ghosts of Door County are making the lightning dance. They’ve come together, as if someone sent a memo. They’re trying to dance with one another.

  I float to a woman with a long, thin face, but my words fall on deaf ears, and her mouth moves with no sound.

  I fly to a man with a crooked neck. He barely looks at me.

  And finally I realize what I have for a while suspected. We ghosts aren’t living among one another at all. We must be written on different slices of time or pieces of air. We’ll never touch, and we’ll never talk. We’re all alone.

  The moths dance around us, almost like they’re their own circle of moonlight.

  It’s a crescendo. It’s tragic. Because I know what it means. It means we are—I am—a piece of the past. And I can’t save anyone on Water Street.

  It means I’m only here to watch.

  I drift out and away again. I turn my face away from the world.

  This is no place for anyone with a heart.

  * * *

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  20

  A WHITE WIND SWEPT THE SNOW IN LATE THAT FEBRUARY. IT COVERED DOOR County like a blanket, as if it wanted to lay a sheet over the horror. Another girl dead, and the peninsula had turned inward for the rest of the winter. Adults stayed indoors or retreated to wood-paneled bars to sit by roaring fireplaces. The young people sought each other out at one another’s houses or occasionally snuck out to stand huddled in the snow and talk with their breath puffing out in the air, daring the darkness. This was the time of year when it felt like maybe time wasn’t moving and the whole world would be stuck below freezing forever. It was like the earth was no longer in orbit but only hovering somewhere far from the sun.

  Maggie hadn’t told Pauline what she’d seen. But the fact that everything had changed had been unspoken among the three of them on the way home from the dance—the silence in the car, the tension when they’d all parted in the driveway, James and Pauline going one way and Maggie the other. She a
nd Pauline hadn’t talked since. Maggie hadn’t returned her calls and hid when there was a knock at the door, telling her parents to say she wasn’t home.

  But she could sit up in her window, watching it all: Pauline and James arguing in the yard, and James finally driving away. Pauline in the passenger seat of her Subaru while Liam drove, probably riding to the diner so they could sit for hours leaning across the table toward each other, hands darting together and apart. The shaft of light across the yard as Pauline snuck out to meet Liam after curfew. Pauline leaving her window cracked open all night, letting in the cold air and waiting till the rocks hit her screen announcing his arrival. It was hard to watch, and it was hard not to.

  On a normal year in Door County, Elsa said, February could break your heart. You were into the season as deep as you would ever be out of it, and it seemed that all signs of life, any sign that summer had ever existed or would ever exist again, had vanished. The sky lay low over Lake Michigan, and there were no surprises, no new faces downtown. Everything—the days themselves—only moved ahead, one foot in front of the other. And Elsa was right. The days looked the same each morning when Maggie woke up.

  The snow had piled up too deep for her to run at all. She spent a lot of time wandering the house and the yard, because there was nowhere else to go and only so much schoolwork to keep her occupied. Elsa gave her a pair of used snowshoes that had come into the antiques store—which she miraculously hadn’t reclosed yet, and which Gerald Turner had returned to, without a word to anyone about what had happened. (He’d just walked back in one morning and resumed his regular routine.) Maggie tromped around the woods in the shoes, but only on the side farthest from Pauline’s. Back home, she would have been happy to read, but this was one thing Pauline had changed in her life: She no longer loved to just sit still. It made her feel, now, like she was missing something.

  She bought a book on birds and tried to track and identify all the birds in the woods around her house. And she threw herself into finishing up the interior of the house. She sanded the banisters and helped her dad stain the floors that hadn’t been done yet. Together they repainted the upstairs hallways and replaced the cabinets in the kitchen with cabinets her dad had gotten on sale at a reclaimed home-goods store in Green Bay. Day after day, the final pieces of their house came together.

  She hid in the back rooms when Pauline knocked on the door. Only Abe was a regular visitor. Now that Pauline was back, he was confused about who to protect, and he spent most of the days jogging back between the Larsens’ and the Bodens’ to check on both houses and make sure everything was secure.

  Maggie tried to put everything else out of her mind. She retreated inside herself like she’d done in the past—when her mom had lost her job, when they’d had the car accident long before that.

  But she couldn’t forget. She couldn’t forget Liam’s hands on her skin or his breath in her hair or how it had felt like her whole body was filled with thudding drumbeats when he touched her.

  “Wounds make you deeper and bigger,” her dad said, one night in front of the fire, even though she hadn’t told him what had happened. “The bigger the challenges you face, the bigger and deeper your soul gets.” Maggie smiled at him as if the words were encouraging. But she felt the opposite: like her heart had turned small and hard. It surprised her that she couldn’t stop the ache in her chest. At night she gazed at the ceiling and obsessed over whether Liam kissed Pauline exactly like they’d kissed. She tried to think of other things, like reciting the alphabet backward, but inevitably she was bleary-eyed each morning when she came down to the kitchen, and her mom looked at her across the table in concern.

  One of these mornings, while Maggie was looking for one of her snowshoes, which had somehow wandered off from its mate, her mom announced that she had an interview in Chicago. Maggie turned to her in shock and sat back on her heels from where she’d been kneeling to reach under the couch. Her whole body lit up.

  “You mean, we’d move home?” she asked, disbelieving.

  Mrs. Larsen shrugged. “If I got it. I don’t know how many people they’re interviewing. Don’t get your hopes up yet.”

  But Maggie’s heart beat rapidly. It seemed like a perfectly timed escape. She could put Pauline and Liam and the fear that had bloomed all over Door County behind her, go back to Jacie, the familiar streets, her old, comfy, safe life. She smiled for the first time in days and, ensuring the snowshoe was nowhere to be seen under the couch, walked down the hall toward the last place it might be.

  She opened the door and walked down into the musty cellar. The one ceiling bulb cast only a dim circle of light, leaving shadows in the corners of the room. Maggie looked under the stairs, moving a few boxes around before giving up, and then stood for a moment, listening. She tried to decide whether the silence was an empty one or a waiting one. She tried to imagine the life of the house before her and wondered if it had been easier then, like Pauline believed. Maggie glanced at where she’d hidden her letter under the cinder block and decided she’d leave it there forever.

  Pauline was waiting in the hallway when she got to the top of the stairs.

  “I tricked my way in.”

  Pauline had a handful of pine branches wrapped in a red ribbon and shoved it into her hands. Her cheeks were bright pink, and her coat wasn’t zipped. She was glowing, but her heart looked to be in her mouth.

  “Please accept this expensive bouquet as a peace offering.”

  Maggie took the bouquet and laid it on the step.

  Pauline looked nervous enough to vomit.

  “They’re doing an all-night movie lock-in thing at the Avalon next week, for all the young people. A chaperoned kind of thing. Old movies. Snow White and . . .” Pauline trailed off. “I was wondering . . .”

  Maggie stared at her.

  “Hit me. Yell at me. Something. Anything.”

  Maggie felt herself burn like a cool flame. She covered the icy anger that swelled up with an expressionless face. She looked at Pauline flatly, like she didn’t know her. Her hands trembled, but she steadied them on the banister so Pauline wouldn’t see.

  A tear dribbled down Pauline’s left cheek. “I know it’s crazy. I know what I always said. About how I felt about him.”

  Maggie just went on looking at her coldly.

  “Say something. Don’t you care?” Pauline, who wore everything on her sleeve, couldn’t recognize that some people had feelings that were deep and as still as glass.

  Maggie led her down the hall, through the kitchen, and opened the door for her.

  Pauline bit her lip, another tear squeezing out. A moment later she was walking off into the snow, Abe running behind her. Maggie could swear two birds circled her head and then flitted off. Like goddamned Snow White herself.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  21

  ASIDE FROM THE OCCASIONAL GIANT BILLBOARD FOR HOTELS OR SUBWAY OR cheese curds, the highway was flat and featureless on the drive to Chicago. Slowly buildings and then the city rose up ahead of them and replaced the humble pines of Door County with the towering buildings of the Gold Coast section of town where Maggie had grown up.

  Climbing out of the car in front of her old, redbrick, eighteen-story apartment building, the first thing that struck Maggie was how loud it all was. Cars zoomed past, and two lots away a new building was going up, complete with the sound of jackhammers and bulldozers breaking concrete and beeping in reverse.

  “See you tonight,” her mom said, before pulling away. Her interview was in a little over an hour. Maggie turned and faced her building again. She hadn’t expected to feel so nervous and giddy at the same time.

  The hallway and the elevator seemed smaller than she’d remembered; everything seemed to have shrunk in the months since she’d left, like she was Alice in Wonderland. She pushed floor five and waited.

  At t
he end of the hall on the fifth floor, she knocked. The door opened, and a familiar face beamed at her.

  “Jacie,” she breathed. The two girls sank into a hug.

  She and Jacie spent the first hour catching up on what had been happening with their old friends: breakups, arguments, one or two new people who’d moved into the building. Jacie was animated as she related the latest news.

  It struck Maggie with a shock that, really, it had been only six months since she’d left, and nothing had changed all that much in Chicago: The same people were dating, the same people were fighting, and everyone was doing the same things on the weekends and after school.

  “You have to come back,” Jacie said. She’d lightened her curly, dirty-blond hair, gotten a tiny bit heavier. “I miss coffee at Meredith’s and shopping at North Bridge. We could watch Housewives again.” Maggie had secretly hated Housewives, but Jacie loved it. It had always been weird to her that Jacie loved to see people fight on TV.

  Still, she felt weirdly floaty while they talked. All the time she’d been getting to know Pauline and Liam and the isolated beauty of her little peninsula, Jacie—and probably most of her friends—had been mostly steady, in a holding pattern. Suddenly, for the first time, Maggie felt happy that she’d left and—at the same time—a gnawing sense of loss.

  “Are you scared to go to sleep at night?” Jacie asked. “With everything going on, I bet you’re freaked out.” Jacie was the same old Jacie: full of questions, bubbly and uncomplicated, rarely worried about too much. Even the killer seemed like a salacious detail to her.

  Maggie nodded. “Kind of. I don’t know. I guess I just think it couldn’t happen to me. I think there’s some philosophical name for that.”

  “You’re the main character of your life,” Jacie said. “You’re too important to die. That’s how everybody feels.”

  “Yeah, I’m too important to not be invincible,” Maggie said.