I don’t believe in predetermination. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe that certain people are “susceptible” to messages from the other side.
But every night before something disastrous has happened to me, I’ve dreamed of Hal Liston smiling his troll smile. Only, in my dreams, the salt water has had its way with him. His eyes are black holes from which hermit crabs crawl. His stringy hair is green kelp. There are Penn Cove mussels growing on his bones. He creeps ashore, and his fingertips look like tentacles, grabbing hold of everything they touch. He gnashes his teeth and whispers, I’m not done training you yet, and he’s not talking about our dog. He’s talking about me.
With one tentacled hand, he reaches for Patience, and then he crunches down on her with sharp barnacle teeth. He spits out her bones. And then he reaches again.
I am next.
Like that day on the driveway, I’m too afraid to run or fight back.
He grabs me with a slimy tentacle, dragging me toward his open mouth, which smells of bleach and dead things and abandoned hope.
Dean is the one who wakes me up on nights like this. Sometimes he slaps me; sometimes he dumps Clamato juice on my face. His methods aren’t subtle, but they work. He looks down at me, thrashing on the bed, and says, “You’re howling again. Why do you howl?”
Because something is coming, I want to say. But I never do, because that would mean admitting to fear—something my brothers and I never did.
I dreamed of Hal Liston the night before I met Henry Shepherd and his little brother, Grant.
I dreamed of Hal Liston the night before, six years later, the Shepherds came to our door and Grant wasn’t with them.
two
HENRY
The ferry slump,” Meredith and I used to call it. Even though it wasn’t the ferry slumping—it was my father’s shoulders.
If you keep up with your financial news, you know that Dad, the bazillionaire venture capitalist, is a decent guy. My sister and brother and I will have to work for a living, and the rest of his money Dad’s going to give away to make the world better.
But he has a weakness. He likes fast cars. And he likes to drive them fast, even our beige Lexus SUV—a vehicle so huge it takes up two lanes on the freeway. And there’s the thing you probably don’t know about, which is that he likes to argue with law enforcement once he’s been pulled over.
There are 31.2 miles between our house in Medina and the Whidbey Island ferry. I don’t know how much those thirty miles have cost us in terms of speeding tickets, since Dad refuses to look at bills (he has people for that), but they’re worth it, because once we paid the toll and maneuvered onto the ferry, Dad would release his grip on the wheel, roll down the window, and inhale a bouquet of salt air, fried fish, and bus exhaust. He would lean back in his leatherette chair and let his shoulders sag. To my dad, that smell was like crack.
The Friday before Grant disappeared, we pulled into the holding lanes and parked behind a rusty pickup with a vanity plate that read DCPTION. Somewhere behind us was a car that had our “travel team”: Joyce, Dad’s admin, because God forbid he’d get an idea and have to jot it down himself; Hannah, our cook; and Edgar, our go-to guy. Yuri, our security dude, had gone ahead of us. Dad liked them to remain as invisible as possible. When he was at the beach, he wanted the illusion of it being just the family, the sand, and the easy come and go of the waves.
Although that afternoon, I would’ve welcomed a distraction of any kind because when Dad pulled the key out of the ignition, his shoulders were still up around his ears. I was still in trouble.
My stepmother, Lyudmila, said, “Don’t you want to roll down the window?”
“It’s raining,” he said, and began drumming his fingers on the dash.
Grant, who was sitting next to me in the middle row of the car, unbuckled his seat belt and leaned forward to put his head between Dad’s and Lyudmila’s.
“So are we going for soft-serve today, Dad?” he asked. On the Fridays with the full shoulder slump, Dad took Grant for “ice cream” at the clam joint as we waited for the cars to be loaded. I don’t know what that swirly stuff was. It definitely wasn’t dairy. It tasted amazing, though.
Dad shook his head. “No ice cream today, son.”
“Why?”
“There’s not enough time,” Dad said. “See? The next ferry has already docked. It’s unloading passengers now. We’ll be next. We need to be ready.”
This was a lie. Okay, a half lie. It was true—the last ferry had already pulled up to the dock and was vomiting cars—but that had never stopped Dad from getting ice cream when he was in a good mood, which he wasn’t this afternoon.
I wanted to call him a liar to his face, but that would only make him madder, and he was plenty mad at me already.
Grant said aloud what I was thinking. “It’s because of Henry’s eye, isn’t it? You don’t feel like getting ice cream because Henry got beat up?”
“Not quite,” Dad replied. He was still drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “It’s because he broke another kid’s clavicle. You know what a clavicle is, right, Grant?”
My half brother jerked his shirt to the side and fingered his collarbone. “It’s this bone right here. You can’t put a cast on it. So that makes it tough to treat.”
“Good.”
“I learned that in Emergency Medicine,” Grant said. “Also that when you save a victim from drowning, you should roll them onto their side so they don’t choke on their own vomit.”
My brother went to this swanky, plaid elementary school. Every spring they held “awareness week” for kids in the fifth grade, when they taught the kids how to play the bongos and what an erection is.
I wanted to say my eye didn’t hurt that much, but it totally ached. Worse, Dad said I couldn’t have any painkillers until I’d “learned my lesson.” Which, supposedly, was not smacking someone in the boathouse with an oar and fracturing his clavicle.
“That’s not it at all, Grant,” Dad said.
Liar.
It would’ve been okay if my brother had stopped there, but Grant pressed on. He tugged on his chapped lower lip. “What does ‘nail’ mean?”
Dad wheeled around. “What?” he said. “What kind of stupid-ass question is that?”
You know how parents like to get together and say, “I don’t care if kids swear—they hear worse from us at home”? Our family was like that. Only with a bigger vocabulary. Lyudmila, my stepmom, was Russian, and the Russian language has more swear words than any other language on earth. Or so I’m told. They even have one that means “woman who farts a lot,” which I think is pretty cool.
Grant blinked. “I know that a nail is a thing you pound with a hammer. But Todd Wishlow used it like a verb.”
I pulled up my hood and sank into the beige leather seat.
Todd Wishlow was the guy on my crew team with the broken clavicle. The same one who’d given me a black eye. Dad said we were both lucky that it hadn’t been worse, but I didn’t feel so lucky.
I’d seen Todd twice since the fight, and each time he pointed at his ruined collarbone, which had a lot of sutures where the rod went in. “See this, Shepherd? This is gonna get me a full-ride scholarship wherever I want to go.” Surgery, college—Dad was paying for it all. As long as Todd signed a nondisclosure agreement saying that he would lose everything if he painted me as a rage machine to any media outlet in the known universe.
I, on the other hand, got the three-hour rant. Dad said a lot of things I tried to tune out but couldn’t. The one that pissed me off the most was, “How can you do this to me? How can you do this to our family?”
Now, in the luxury SUV, I sent vibes to Grant to leave it alone. The last thing I wanted was another mega-harangue.
I slumped farther in my seat and stared at the tight bun on my stepmother’s neck. I often wondered what her hair would look like if it wasn’t cemented into a certain shape. Even when we vacationed in the Kalahari, she kept her hair
off her face and penciled in her eyebrows.
I would find out Sunday.
It would not be pretty.
Meanwhile, Grant wasn’t done getting me in trouble.
“I think Todd said, ‘I nailed Pixie, and she was fabulous.’”
“Slobber, slobber, slobber,” Lyudmila said. I loved hearing her speak Russian. I thought it was a lovely language. But when she swore in Russian, she spat. I think every language should have swear words that require spitting. It adds emphasis.
She massaged her eyebrows, and thick, leaden gunk came off, which she wiped off her hand with Germ-B-Gone patented hand sanitizer. Which was followed by shea butter and Derma White lotion, to prevent those pesky liver spots.
That she was swearing meant she thought Todd Wishlow, whether or not he had nailed Pixie, should not be bragging about it in the Lakeside School boathouse.
Dad pounded the steering wheel with his head. The horn went off. In the holding lanes of ferry-bound cars, everyone looked at us, including the bomb-sniffing dogs and the fat toddlers eating soft-serve seaweed and getting half of it on their rompers.
And here it came.
Dad went bug-eyed. “Is that what happened, Henry?” he said.
Grant said, “I think Todd also said she was a real tiger in the . . .”
“Thanks, Grant. I think he gets the picture.”
“Well? Is that true?” Dad said.
“Which part? The part where I accidentally hit Todd’s clavicle with an oar? Or the part where he goaded me?”
Meredith spoke up from the third row. “Just for the record, he didn’t nail her.”
“Really? How would you know?”
“Because he’s Todd Wishlow. He doesn’t have the guts. He’s just a little kid trying to be big.”
“Will someone please tell me what ‘nail’ means?” Grant said.
Lyudmila said something in Russian that was probably, “We’ll talk about it later. When your brother isn’t around to bust more clavicles.”
Don’t get me wrong—Lyudmila was cool. But she wasn’t my mom, didn’t teach Meredith or me to speak Russian. At least she was cool enough to know that she shouldn’t be explaining trash talking about Pixie in front of me—in any language.
Dad wasn’t done. “We’ve talked about this, Henry. It’s stupid to have a girlfriend in high school. You’ll just get separated. And then, even if you get through college together, you’ll grow apart, and then you’ll be divorced at twenty-seven.”
He wasn’t talking about me and Pixie now—he was talking about him and Mom. Meredith’s and my real mom.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been able to excavate a nugget of a memory about what life for us was like before. Before Lyudmila, before Grant. Back in the days when Meredith and I had a real mother, and we all thought we were happy—Dad included.
What was strange, though, was that it was Pixie, whom I was not dating, who pulled it out of him. Dad could’ve given me this speech about Adelina, the exchange student from Brazil, or Kathy from advanced chem or Channing from Medina Coffee (and post office). But none of them merited “The Lecture.”
Pixie did, yet he kept inviting her and her brothers down to our house on the beach on Useless Bay. “Let’s set up the volleyball net right here,” he would say, pointing to a place on the sand right in front of the house. Which was weird because he was usually very protective of his land and his privacy. He once threatened to throw a fence around the bluff behind the house to keep people from using the path along the dike, which, technically, was his.
He abandoned his fence plans when he got to know the Grays. He had a soft spot for them in general and Pixie in particular. They looked like summer, he said, with their blond hair and broad shoulders. Plus they were “good kids.” They all had the combination to the house alarm, and when we’d be away for a while, they’d come through every so often to make sure no one had broken in and no pipes had burst.
But the main reason he kept inviting them down, I think, was that they were good with Grant. They treated my little brother like he was one of them, including him in their volleyball teams and showing him how to set and how to spike the ball from the outside. They also showed him things that we wouldn’t know, like the difference between an osprey and a red-tailed hawk, and why none of the giant birds that fished in the lagoon liked the taste of spiny dogfish. (It’s because they pee through their skin, in case you’re wondering.)
Dad sometimes said that Pixie and her four brothers were part of the landscape. It was almost as though, a million years ago, when a glacier melted and left Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, it had deposited the five mountainous Grays, too, complete with blond hair, sunglasses, and zinc on their noses.
Me? I thought that might have been true of her four brothers, but not of Pix herself. We’d known each other for six years, and I don’t know when my attitude toward her changed. Probably when she started to fill out her bikini top and board shorts. A lot of people noticed her then.
I like to think it was more than that. In my mind, she was always on the beach with Grant, the two of them poking something interesting with a stick, Pix with one hand in her blond hair to keep it from getting in her eyes.
She was more than good to Grant. She was almost tender, and it wrecked my heart to watch them, but in a good way.
But I never told anyone that. Pixie Gray was just my weekend friend, the way she’d always been.
My black eye and Todd Wishlow’s broken clavicle might’ve indicated otherwise.
“Pixie’s not my girlfriend,” I said, picking at my nails.
“Good,” Dad said. “Let’s keep it that way. For both your sakes. You’re going to college soon. It does no good to have a serious girlfriend when you’re still young.”
I hated getting this speech again, but I didn’t blame him. After all, Dad had married his college sweetheart, my mother, when they were both twenty-two years old.
And look how well that turned out.
“I think they’re loading,” I said as the car in front of us started up and began to move onto the ferry.
Dad turned back around and started the car. “And no more violent outbursts, all right? We can’t afford for you to break any more bones.”
Afterward, I thought a lot about what Lyudmila said next. As Dad maneuvered the car onto the ferry, Lyudmila put a hand on my father’s arm and craned around at an impossible angle. She was a dancer and amazingly supple. “You will heal,” she said to me. Then to my father, “Henry is good boy. You will be proud.”
Those were her last words to me.
No, they weren’t.
She and Grant didn’t go missing until Sunday, and this was a Friday. So at some point she must’ve said, “Pass the salt” or “Take out the trash.”
But we remember the things we choose to remember, I suppose. And I choose to remember this moment. That Friday, the day my eye was throbbing and her long arm was draped around the back of Dad’s seat, her fingers curling the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. I choose to remember how, at this moment between a small hurt and a much bigger hurt that was to come, she managed to carve us out a tiny chunk of peace.
three
PIXIE
When the police finally came, it was Dean who was led away for questioning.
It was a Sunday night. The wind was blowing the Douglas firs sideways, and the eagles were air-surfing the gusts above the bluff.
In our living room, the sofas and chairs had been pushed aside and cushions placed at sharp edges on the floor. By the fireplace. Around the coffee table.
Lawford was practicing his takedowns. On me.
When he was done throwing me around, he expected me to Taser him. That’s because he was taking a Criminal Justice course after school at the police academy on the mainland, for kids who were interested in going into law enforcement. Next week he was going to have to resist a takedown and get Tasered for real, and he was really excited about it.
Which would be
weird if you didn’t know my family.
The doorbell rang.
Splat! Lawford threw me. My head smacked the area rug, and my legs purled over the sofa.
I heard Mom answer the door. “Hey, Rupe. What brings you out? I was just making chili for the boys. Can you come in for a bite?”
As soon as I got to my feet, Lawford had me in a choke hold, so I flipped him and went to see what Mr. Shepherd was doing at our house on a Sunday night. He should be gone by now. He and his family were weekenders. He owned all the land below our bluff, which included the lagoon and the bay. They let us walk around in it but made it clear it was his.
It was strange they were here. Especially since I knew Henry’s dad earlier had to take a helicopter back to Medina because he’d forgotten that he had a meeting with the Kid Trying to Save Africa with Electricity. Why had he come back, just to get on the ferry?
It didn’t make sense. Something was going on.
I joined Mom at the front door.
Mr. Shepherd was standing there in a thin Windbreaker. His hood was up over his bald head, which, even in this weather, he had to slather with SPF 50 because it was already covered with precarcinomas.
Next to him was Sheriff Lundquist, which was odd. I tried to think if we’d done anything more illegal than trespassing.
I’d done something wrong earlier, but at the time I hadn’t been sure of the right thing to do. I only knew it wasn’t what was requested of me. Besides, I’d fixed it, right? I’d brought him home.
“What’s happened?” I said.
Mr. Shepherd said, “It’s Grant, Pix. We can’t find him.”
Again, I didn’t understand the need for the law. Grant came here all the time on Sunday afternoons in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, and Mr. Shepherd always came here threatening to fence our property and spoil our view if we didn’t hand him over right now. I didn’t blame Mr. Shepherd for being frustrated. We knew Grant probably didn’t want to face the school week. The kid was obviously ADD, and we guessed his grades were in the toilet. We felt sorry for him and played along, even knowing that it was an inconvenience—the Shepherds always had a ferry to catch and things to do.
Useless Bay Page 2
