Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Then she remembered to take a breath. She could handle anything. She had learned that with Reginald. She just had to remember it.

  Reginald. A shiver ran through her despite the heat. He had stayed away from Emily so far—Lyssa wasn’t even sure he knew where they lived—but things could change. And Reginald might have had a serious mental illness, but he was always bright. Too bright.

  Lyssa made herself walk down the steps. “When did you see her last?”

  Sophia looked away. It was an obvious pretext so that she wouldn’t have to look in Lyssa’s eyes. “I do not know. I believe after lunch.”

  After lunch was hours ago, if Emily ate at her usual twelve. Anything could have happened in the space of hours.

  Lyssa wanted to scream at Sophia, but she knew that screaming would do no good. It took all of Lyssa’s self-control to ask the next question.

  “When after lunch exactly? It’s important.”

  This time, Sophia did look at her. Sophia’s big blue eyes were filled with tears.

  “Ah, Mrs. Walters, I do not know, truly. She had the lunch, she went outside, and I saw her on the yard. I was on the phone, you know, because there is problems with my green card, and I have to take care of that, and Emily has been so good, you know? I did not think she would be in any trouble back here. I really did not.”

  So Sophia was thinking the same thing, that someone had taken Emily. Lyssa forced down the panic in her brain. She made herself take rigid control of her emotions. All that mattered now was logic. Calm, rational logic was the only thing that would bring her daughter back.

  And the first logical step was to assume that nothing was wrong. After all, Emily was getting older, and she hated being alone in this part of town. She might have taken a walk, out of shouting range. If she was wearing her watch, she would be back by six because that was dinnertime, and she knew better than to miss dinner.

  But Lyssa could not wait around to see if Emily was going to come home. Lyssa had to check other possibilities first.

  “Could Emily be at someone’s house?” Lyssa asked Sophia.

  “I do not know who the someone could be, Mrs. Walters. There is no little kids here.”

  Yes, said the sneaky, panicked part of Lyssa’s brain, but there might be sex offenders. The studies say there are at least two in every square mile. Maybe one of them—

  Lyssa forced herself to step onto the lawn. The grass was dry and crackly from the summer heat. There were no really good kid parks nearby, but there was the stadium, which was a big explorable place.

  Only Emily hated exploring alone, and she rarely disobeyed rules. In that, she was about as different from Lyssa as a child could get. Lyssa, at that age, had disobeyed every rule ever written.

  “Have you seen her talking to any adults?” Lyssa asked, trying to make the statement sound casual.

  “Mrs. Walters,” Sophia said. “I know better than that. You never know what these grown-ups will do these days. I would tell you and I would stop her. No. No, of course not.”

  But they had already established that Sophia didn’t watch Emily as closely as she could. Hell, Lyssa didn’t watch her as closely as she could. She trusted her daughter, expected a lot from her daughter, and was often relieved at the degree of self-entertainment that Emily could achieve.

  Lyssa let out a small sigh. She walked over to Sophia, who looked distraught, and put an arm on her shoulder. “Did she get any phone messages? Was she on the computer today?”

  “No.” Sophia shook her head for emphasis. “You said no computer when you are not home. I make sure of that. And the phone, well, I was . . .”

  Then she looked at Lyssa, understanding dawning.

  “You think Mr. Walters took her. Oh, and I am so panicked, I have been forgetting to call you Ms. Buckingham now. I’m so sorry.”

  “The name’s minor,” Lyssa said, scanning the lawn. “But I am worried about Mr. Walters. Did he call?”

  Has he been calling? Has he been visiting? Have you been telling me everything you know, Sophia, or have you been lying to me about more than your immigrant status?

  Lyssa didn’t say any of those things, although she wanted to. The anger bubbled beneath the surface, ready to come out. This woman had lost Lyssa’s daughter. She hadn’t been paying attention, and Emily had vanished.

  Lyssa knew she should have fired Sophia weeks ago, but she hadn’t had the heart. She put Sophia first instead of Emily, thinking, as she had too much lately, that Emily could take care of herself.

  “No, ma’am.” A tear trickled out of Sophia’s left eye. She wiped at it angrily. “I would tell you if he called. You told me to let you know immediately if he even smile at Emily. You said call you at work, and I have not, because I have not seen him since, you know, last year. He scares me, ma’am. I would not let him near her. He is dangerous, that one. He can kill—”

  Sophia put a hand to her mouth, stopping the sound.

  “He could kill her, I know.” Lyssa was surprised at how calm she sounded. “That’s why I divorced him, and why I’m trying to find work somewhere else. So let me ask you again. Have you seen him or anyone you knew from the lake house?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Lyssa wasn’t sure if that was good news or not. If Reginald had taken Emily, Lyssa would at least know what to do. She would call the police and her lawyer and make sure her baby was all right.

  But this was not as easy to figure out.

  “All right,” she said after a moment. “You have been yelling for her.”

  “Yes, ma’am. It has been almost an hour now.”

  Lyssa nodded. “Then she’s not within hearing distance.”

  Lyssa ran a hand through her cropped hair, felt the sweat beaded beneath the hairline. It was hot. Had her baby gone somewhere and passed out from the heat?

  “Go to the neighbors,” Lyssa said, still trying to sound calm. She needed Sophia, and she needed Sophia thinking, not reacting. “See if they have seen Emily at any point today. Maybe we can figure out where she is.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Sophia scurried toward the alley. The nearest neighbor was right across the gravel.

  Lyssa watched Sophia pick her way past the rosebushes. Lyssa wasn’t sure what she would do. Shouting obviously wasn’t going to help. Then she glanced at the garage.

  The door was up, like it had been when she’d got home. But the Volkswagen Beetle she had bought with Reginald was still parked inside. Lyssa rarely drove it, partly because of the memories, and partly because she wanted to save money. Parking near the university was outrageously expensive, and so were gas prices. Since she lived so close, she could take the bus or walk.

  She was halfway to the garage before she realized she had made it her destination. The door shouldn’t have been open. Sophia might not have noticed that. Sophia wasn’t here as often as Inez was and didn’t know the way the household ran. Even if Sophia had known, she might have thought that Lyssa had left the garage door open that morning.

  But Lyssa hadn’t. She hadn’t touched the car in days.

  She stepped onto the narrow driveway. The garage predated the Frank Lloyd Wright creation that she lived in. The garage was old and made of white Mississippi River brick, which indicated—at least to Lyssa—that a beautiful home done in a fin de siècle style had been torn down to make way for Wright’s uncomfortable ranch house.

  The garage barely held a single modern car—in that, she was lucky to have wrested the Bug from Reginald. (What’m I gonna do? he’d asked her plaintively. Drive it with all my medication? Take it. Take it before my mind changes.) Some possessions from previous renters hung on the walls—or maybe from the original owners: a pair of wooden snowshoes with rotting leather laces, a hat that looked as if it had once belonged to a fisherman, cross-country skis from the 1970s, and many other things.

  Lyssa mentally inventoried them and saw that nothing was missing.

  She stepped inside the garage. It was cooler than the outdoors
or than the house, and it smelled musty. The dry odor had a tinge of mold to it, which always made her think of the coast and the strange house in which she had grown up.

  And then she thought of her mother, and her stomach clenched. Her mother would know where Emily was. If this turned out to be a real emergency, not something she’d made up in her head, Lyssa would have to call her mother.

  It was the only sensible thing to do.

  The car was cool and covered with a thin layer of dust. Lyssa used it even less than she thought she had. On one side of the dust layer, there were scrape marks, and the print of a childsized hand.

  Lyssa’s breath caught. She peered under the car, thinking maybe something had happened to Emily. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere in the garage.

  But Lyssa did see one thing in the dirt covering the concrete floor. Tire tracks. Narrow tire tracks.

  She glanced at the bike rack, hidden in the corner near the garage door. Her bicycle remained on the upper part of the rack, which was all she had looked at.

  The lower part, where Emily kept her bike, was empty.

  Bike riding? On an afternoon like this? Where would Emily go that would keep her away from the house for so long?

  Then Inez’s voice from a few days ago rose in Lyssa’s head.

  Miz Buckingham, we need to watch our Emily. She is sick of the home, hmm? She needs little friends to keep her busy. She misses the lake. This afternoon, she tells me to take turns to go somewhere special. We get to the Whitney Way, and I know then what she is doing. She wants to see her old house. I tell her she cannot, and she says all she wants to do is swim in the lake. I say no. I say, next time, I take her to the city pool if that is okay. She will like the pool, maybe make new friends. All right?

  Lyssa braced herself on the side of the car. A hot afternoon. The lake would seem inviting on a hot afternoon, and what would a child do? Wrap her swimming suit in a towel and ride to the lake.

  Lyssa bolted out of the garage and into the house. She hurried to Emily’s room. Emily’s book was gone. Lyssa should have known right away what that meant. It meant that Emily had gone somewhere. She never traveled without a book.

  The bedroom seemed even emptier than it had before. Lyssa went to Emily’s dresser. The swimming suit was gone, along with her goggles.

  Lyssa checked the other drawers and the closet to make sure the suit wasn’t in them, but she knew, even as she looked, that it wouldn’t be there.

  It wouldn’t be anywhere. It would be with Emily, on her bike, on her way to the only place where she knew to swim.

  Her father’s house.

  Beside the lake.

  Four

  Madison. Wisconsin

  Emily heard sirens. They were faint, but present, like the buzzing of the bees along the shoreline.

  She sat on the edge of the dock, her knees against her chest. Her hair dripped down her back and her wet clothes clung to her skin. She was shivering, freezing cold, even though the air around her felt hotter than ever. She had her back to the lake.

  If she kept her back to the lake, she didn’t have to see Daddy floating out there, his hair burned and mostly gone, his face like a Halloween gross-out mask of a scary person’s face.

  She didn’t mean it. She didn’t mean any of it.

  Only she couldn’t breathe, and Daddy’s hands pushed her deeper into the cold water, and all she could think about was how her lungs burned, they burned, and she pushed the burning away—

  And Daddy’s hands let go. She clawed her way up through the murky water, hearing a strange sound as she did. Something that was outside the water, so loud that she heard it even before her head broke the surface.

  She burst from the water with a splash and a great gasp of much-needed air. Water streamed down her face and into her eyes, and she caught some of it in her mouth, choking.

  Around her, screaming echoed, horrifying and deep, screaming like she had never heard before. She coughed the water out of her lungs and breathed, and then she turned around, reaching for the dock as she did.

  The air was filled with black smoke and an awful rancid burning smell. She could recognize part of the smell—hair burning—but the rest was something she had never encountered before.

  The inky blackness poured off the dock and across the lake, engulfing her. She grabbed the ancient wood, then saw through the slats what was burning.

  It was Daddy.

  She screamed for him, but he didn’t seem to hear her. He was slapping himself and dancing on the top of the dock, trying to put out the fire, which seemed to come from his chest and burn upward.

  He had to get into the water. He had taught her that a long time ago. Get into the water, get into the water, get into the water, water puts out flames.

  But he didn’t and he wouldn’t stop so that she could help him. She pulled herself onto the dock. When he saw her, he screamed louder, as if he was afraid of her, and he started running toward the dry grass.

  If he did that, everything would burn up. The grass, the house, the neighborhood.

  Emily wasn’t going to catch him. She wished there was a barrier between him and the grass, so the worst wouldn’t happen. But there wasn’t. He was going to burn up the whole world—and the sad part was he could stop it if he just jumped into the water.

  Then he tripped and fell backward, almost as if he had slammed into something. He lay sprawled on the dock, the fire still burning his clothes, and starting to catch the dry wood.

  Emily reached him. His eyes were open, his face a hideous mask of black crustiness over red swelling. She could feel the heat rising off him, burning her like her lungs had.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, please, get in the water.”

  He wasn’t screaming anymore. His eyes were open and they were staring at her, but they weren’t understanding her. She couldn’t see Daddy in them.

  But that couldn’t stop her. His clothes were still burning, only now the fire was moving down his arms and his stomach. She slid her arms under his back, wincing at the heat—it was burning her too—and rolled him over, once, twice, until he splashed into the lake.

  Water rose in a funnel around her, like a giant whirlpool, rising, rising, rising, but never touching her. The water spilled onto the dock, putting out the small fires that had started on it, then dripped back into the lake where it belonged.

  Daddy was floating on his stomach. That wasn’t good.

  Emily jumped in beside him and rolled him over. His eyes were still open, his face almost gone, and his chest—

  She could see his bones.

  She screamed and shoved him away from her. He moved like a boat heading toward rapids, faster, and faster, as if the water took him where it wanted him to go.

  Emily didn’t reach for him anymore. She couldn’t. She knew it would do no good.

  Instead, she climbed out of the water, sat on the dock, and turned her back to the lake. She was too smart to think that if she couldn’t see him, everything would be all right.

  It wasn’t going to be all right. The sirens told her that. They were getting closer and closer, as if they were coming for her.

  And why wouldn’t they?

  She had shoved him into the water, and he had been unconscious, and he couldn’t hold his breath then like she had been able to do. He drowned, and she had drowned him, even though she had been trying to help him.

  He had set himself on fire, but she had killed him.

  She rested her chin on her knees and stared at the house where she used to live with her mommy and her daddy, back when they had been the perfect family.

  Everything was gone now. Everything was ruined.

  And it was all her fault.

  Five

  The Village of Anchor Bay. Oregon

  Cassandra Buckingham held the boy’s grubby hand in her own. With his other hand, the boy rubbed his nose. He was ten, reedy and windblown from being on the beach. His brown hair curled beneath his ears and he had
dark brown eyes, alive with warmth.

  His mother looked on fondly, her cheeks reddened by the wind. She didn’t look anything like her son. She seemed too young to have a ten-year-old, and too buxom—she had probably never been reedy in her life. But her blue eyes were kind and she seemed polite, even though she was as sand-covered as her child.

  For the thousandth time, Cassie wished the sign on the window outside read Fortune-Teller, not Palm Reader. She should have thought the entire game through before she had set up her little shop.

  She had tried to set up shops before, and had failed, usually because she had to borrow money from her mother. This time, she had saved from last summer’s waitressing job and decided to do this on her own.

  Fifty-four was too old to be borrowing money from your mother. It was also too old to waitress, as her knees were telling her. She was still as thin as she had been when she was twenty, but she was getting tired of winding her long black hair on top of her head and sticking her hands in burning-hot water to scrub the dishes when the busboy failed to show.

  Initially, she had gotten the waitressing job to prove to her mother that she could survive on her own. Twenty years into the work and Cassie was still trying to prove herself.

  She traced the lines on the boy’s hand, even though she didn’t have to. Her talents didn’t lie in palms. She had psychic powers that one police department had described as scary, back in her younger days when she’d thought she could use her powers for the common good.

  When the boy had walked in the room, she had known that he was the one who wanted the reading. She also got his background—that he had lived in or near Anchor Bay his whole life, and that he was here on the beach this afternoon because his aunt, uncle, and cousins were in town, and they wanted to see the touristy sites.

  The boy, his mother, and Cassie sat at the table in the center of the room. This table was covered with scarves as well as lit candles and a fake crystal ball she had picked up at a store in Seavy Village. The rest of the room was decorated with some plush chairs (for the waiting customers), smaller tables with scarves (because customers expected that), and some magical doodads she had picked up all over the coast.