by Jude Watson
Shay listens on the phone, then says, “Of course, right away.” She hangs up but doesn’t put down the phone. She grips it and takes a breath.
“The Carbonels want us to come over. They want to talk to you about Emily. They think you’re the last person to talk to her. She hasn’t come home.”
The night is warm. The windows are open. I’m shivering, and trying to hide it from Shay.
Emily’s eyes shut tight.
The sound of someone breathing.
Shay is waiting for me to move, and I’m not moving, because I know with cold certainty that everything I saw was true.
It’s happening again, and I can’t stop it.
I don’t want this. I never wanted this. I just want it to go away.
I didn’t want to see a red bloom of a stain spreading on my Uncle Owen’s chest, on his white shirt. Two days later, he had a tear in his aorta and almost died. In eighth grade, I didn’t want to see that Hannah Bascomb was afraid of her own father, or the reasons she was. I didn’t want to know the results of our neighbor Mrs. Shale’s biopsy before she did.
It’s like people are bleeding in front of me, and I can’t move to help them.
I have too much sorrow crowding my heart as it is.
The worst possible thing has happened to me. I don’t have room inside me to care about it happening to anybody else.
But I get up and get dressed.
THREE
Every light in Emily’s house must be on, as if all that light could shine out to tell her it’s okay to come home. I’m surprised when Mr. Carbonel answers the door. He hasn’t stepped foot in the house in months. He must have driven from Seattle as soon as they decided Emily was missing. It must be really bad if both of Emily’s parents are willing to be in the same room together.
Shay gives him a hug, patting his shoulder like he’s a kid. She’s known both Carbonels for years, and I think she’s even closer to Emily’s dad than her mom. Emily’s mom is something of a head case.
We walk into the living room. I’ve never actually sat down in the living room before; it’s just a pass-through on the way to the kitchen for Emily and me. It doesn’t invite lounging, anyway. There’s a 1950s-style orange couch that looks toxic, and a coffee table shaped like a surfboard. Mrs. Carbonel painted one of the walls violet and another wall pink. It doesn’t work.
Mrs. Carbonel sits on the couch. She’s perched on the edge, as if the phone will ring any second and she’ll need to answer it. The phone is lying right next to her on the cushion. Even though it’s almost midnight, everybody is still dressed, down to their shoes.
A stranger is sitting in the only comfortable chair in the room, an armchair upholstered in maroon leather. He rises when we come in. Mrs. Carbonel introduces him as Detective Joe Fusilli. He has a big nose and dark eyes that don’t seem to have any expression at all. The bags underneath them look like suitcases packed for a six-week trip.
I get a quick flash from him. Sometimes this happens. I get sadness from him, sadness that lies buried underneath everything that’s inside him that has to do with the job. I see him bending over someone, someone he loves, who stares blankly out the window.
Shay nods a hello. I think she might have smiled at his name if the situation had been different. It isn’t often you meet a detective named after corkscrew pasta.
Shay and I sit down on the couch. Mrs. Carbonel leans forward, her hands clasped between her legs. Every so often, she catches them between her knees and squeezes. Mr. Carbonel sits on the other chair. He’s a stocky man with big shoulders and arms and a silver beard. I’ve met him maybe four times, and each time, I’ve picked up waves of guilt when he looked at Emily. Now I notice that he never looks at his ex-wife.
The worry in this room is like a heavy blanket on a warm day. I can feel it pressing against me, and I want to kick it free.
“Gracie, did Emily seem upset today?” Mrs. Carbonel asks.
I remembered her face as she walked away. “No.”
Joe Fusilli’s dark eyes are on me. I decide to break my usual habit and tell the truth. It seems called for.
“Well, I wouldn’t say she was really upset. But she wasn’t happy when I wouldn’t go to town with her. It was too hot.”
“Do you think she went by herself?” Mrs. Carbonel continues.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Carbonel’s mouth twists, and she looks away.
Detective Fusilli speaks up. “Gracie, do you remember what Emily was wearing?”
“Sure. A white T-shirt and yellow capri pants. They have tiny pink flowers on them. And brown sandals. The kind you can hike in. Merrell’s.”
Mrs. Carbonel nods at the detective like a good student, as if that’s what she’s told him, too. As if we all give him the right answers, he’ll find her.
He writes in his notebook. “Did Emily seem to have anything special on her mind?”
“Nothing in particular,” I say.
“What did you talk about?”
“How hot it was, basically,” I say.
“What about other times?” Detective Fusilli asks. “Did Emily ever talk about running away?”
“No.”
I was sure of that. No matter how much she trashed her parents, she never talked about leaving.
“How about a boyfriend?”
I shake my head.
“A crush?”
I shake my head again. “Emily never talked about boys.”
Detective Fusilli looks skeptical. “Oh?”
“Really,” I say. I’m seriously annoyed now. I want to tell him to think about it a minute. Doesn’t it occur to him that Emily and I might have other things on our minds? Like the fact that her parents are flakes and I don’t have any?
“Did Emily ever mention having a Net buddy? Someone she met on the Internet?”
“She e-mailed some people, sure,” I say. “I don’t know who they are, though.”
“Do you think she’d meet one of them without telling you, or her parents?”
I think about this. One thing about Emily, she follows the rules. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Mrs. Carbonel squeezes her hands between her knees again. “We can’t find her laptop,” she says to Shay. “She took it.”
“Did she have the laptop when you saw her, Gracie?” Detective Fusilli asks.
I shake my head. So Emily must have gone home to get it.
“Is anything else missing?” Shay asks.
“No. No clothes or anything.” Mrs. Carbonel starts to cry. “She was upset that she didn’t get to go to that camp…” She looks at Mr. Carbonel for the first time. “If you would have agreed to exchange summer for school breaks—”
“I did agree,” Mr. Carbonel says. “You wouldn’t agree to Christmas—”
“You know we were planning a trip to Arizona!”
“I was going to send the check!”
"After the deadline!” Mrs. Carbonel’s voice rises sharply and ends on a sob. She looks at Mr. Carbonel as if she hates him, and I guess she does. The anger between them could fill up six houses. No wonder he had to move out. There’s no room to live in this house. I’m finding it hard to breathe. Had all this anger squeezed Emily out, too?
“Let’s try to calm down,” Detective Fusilli says. “She’s only been gone eleven hours. She could come home.”
I know he doesn’t believe it. I can see the dread. It is his enemy. It is lead in his bones. The feeling is familiar to him, it is part of the job, but he hates it.
“It’s midnight and she’s out there somewhere,” Mrs. Carbonel says. “Can’t you do something?”
“We’re on alert,” Detective Fusilli says. He stands up. “What that means is that every cop in the state is looking. If you think of anything, call me. If she gets home, call me. If you remember anything, call me. Even if it’s the middle of the night.”
“You’re leaving?” Mrs. Carbonel asks, her voice rising in pa
nic. “You’re just going to leave?”
“I’m going to get to work and find your daughter.” The detective’s voice is soft now. He feels the dread moving up to his throat, and he wants out of here, he wants to find the kid, and he’s saying, Please, let her be alive.
Mr. and Mrs. Carbonel nod. I can see they want to believe in Detective Fusilli’s competence so badly. Mr. Carbonel rises and shows the detective to the door.
We all stare at the carpet. “Why don’t I make some tea?” Shay asks. No one answers, so she goes in the kitchen. I hear her filling the kettle.
“We did this to her, Rocky,” Mrs. Carbonel says. She doesn’t sound angry anymore. She sounds worse.
“Yeah,” Mr. Carbonel says. “I know.”
It’s like I’m not in the room.
Joe Fusilli left some of his dread behind. I can feel the weight of it settle inside me, anchor me to the chair.
Emily’s parents feel guilty. But they weren’t the one who could have stopped her.
I was the one who could have done that.
I was the one who saw her future.
I was the one who let her go.
FOUR
We don’t talk on the ride home. I’m thinking about my answers to the detective’s questions. How many times had I said I don’t know? Had I really known Emily all that well? Had I ever really listened to her? Or was I too busy listening to my own head?
I wish I’d turned the hose on her feet, too.
Shay pulls into the driveway. She turns off the car, but she doesn’t move. “Gracie, is there anything you didn’t want to say in front of Emily’s parents?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Something Emily might have said, or done, and you don’t want to get her in trouble.”
“That would be pretty stupid of me,” I say. “She’s pretty much in the worst trouble I can imagine right now.”
“Yeah. If you want to talk—”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I say, shouldering open my door. Which, I admit, is a pretty stupid thing to say, considering my best-friend-by-default is missing. But what’s the good of talking about anything? Adults just don’t get it. They think that expressing your feelings makes them go away. Next, Shay would be tossing stuffed animals at me to hug.
Shay gets out of the car. It’s cooler now. The heat of the day has dissolved into a breeze that makes the pines whisper.
“I don’t think I can sleep yet,” Shay says as she opens the front door. “Do you want to share some cookies and milk? Or I could make omelettes.”
“Do you always think you can fix things with food?” I ask. I’m tired, and the question comes out snottier than I meant it to. The truth is, I’m so stuffed full of the emotion I felt at the Carbonel house I feel sick.
Shay looks hurt for a minute. She runs a hand through her springy hair and takes a breath. I can tell she’s searching for the right thing to say. “No,” she says finally.
“I think I’ll just go to bed,” I say.
“All right, sweetie,” Shay says, but I’m already walking down the hall.
I pull on a big T-shirt and climb into bed. My room is tiny, but I don’t mind. There’s something about it that makes me feel safe. My mom used to say, “Climb into your nest,” when I was a little kid, and pull up the blankets and mound the pillows and stuffed animals around me. This room reminds me of that, in a way.
It used to be a mud room, a sort of summer porch in the back of the house. Shay and Diego went to some trouble to fix it up, I guess. Shay had winterized it. They painted the floor dark blue and the windowsills yellow. Shay bought an old dresser and painted it white. My bed has a patchwork quilt with moons on it. White gauzy curtains hang at the windows now, because it’s summer, but in winter Shay had hung thick velvet drapes to keep out drafts. Now that’s it’s warm I can open the windows all the way, and hear all the night noises outside. I can smell the Sound and hear the foghorns. Sometimes I feel I’m on a big liner, out in the middle of the ocean. That’s how far away I feel.
I reach for my mp3 player. I’ve filled it with songs my mom loved, dopey songs I never listened to when she was around. We used to have a serious difference in musical tastes. But now when my head is full of things I don’t want to think about, which is most of the time, I just drown them out. If something plays in my head, I can’t hear what I’m thinking. Tonight I listen to Boy George singing “Karma Chameleon.”
But I can’t stop thinking about the dread I’d seen in Joe Fusilli. It wasn’t in his eyes, or his face, or things he said. It was there inside him.
He doesn’t think Emily is coming home tonight.
I don’t think so, either.
This is how it started.
When I was ten, I went to the shore with my best friend, Annie Keegan, and her three brothers. Her mom set up the cooler and blanket and the chairs, and we all ran into the ocean. Mrs. Keegan yelled for us to wait for her, but we pretended we didn’t hear her over the wind and the seagulls.
I remember how high the waves were, but I didn’t want Annie’s brothers to tease me about being a wimp, so I waded right in. I was doing okay until I misjudged a wave. I remember being taken over by the wave, how I tumbled and tumbled, how I tried to swim and couldn’t. The force of the wave was incredible. I couldn’t get my head above water. Then when I did, another wave was coming, and that one hit me, too. I swallowed water and I suddenly knew I was drowning. I don’t remember that part very clearly, just that things slowed down, but I still couldn’t get out of the grip of the wave.
The next thing I knew, I was on the beach. I heard a voice clearly in my head, a voice I didn’t recognize. It was saying, Come on, come on, come on, come on. I opened my eyes. A lifeguard was looking down at me. Oh please oh please oh please…She had blue eyes that were filled with fear. Her freckles stood out against her tan like blotches.
I saw the relief on her face and I also felt it. It flooded my body, like it was inside me. Then I started to cough and threw up on her leg.
Mrs. Keegan wrapped me in a towel and hugged me. I remember that so clearly. How scared everyone looked, how the lifeguard sagged down on the sand, how the other lifeguards clustered around her and me. I remember Mrs. Keegan’s hair blowing into my mouth, and that it tasted like salt. Everything looked different, somehow, like the world was sharper than it had been. Everything was louder. I could feel the day like it had weight, like I could feel seconds passing like air currents, like I could cup my hands and collect moments like water.
Then I sat on the blanket for a while, and drank some water, and ate a chocolate chip cookie, and things shifted again, and I felt normal.
Mrs. Keegan asked me if I was still scared. I said no. Mrs. Keegan smiled and said she thought the lifeguard had been more scared than I was. She said the lifeguard had to go home—it had been her first day on the job.
Somehow I’d already known that. I figured I’d overheard someone saying it. I said something about how her voice had called me back, saying, come on, come on and please please please…
Mrs. Keegan shook her head. “The lifeguard never said anything. She was trying to resuscitate you. Nobody said anything. We were all frozen. Everything went very quiet. I think even the seagulls stopped squawking.”
I stopped asking questions and chewed on this along with my cookie. The lifeguard hadn’t spoken, but I’d heard her voice. I didn’t know what to make of that, so I just hoped I wouldn’t get in trouble when I got home for not listening to Mrs. Keegan and running into the surf.
I didn’t realize everything that had changed until later, until after I began to see things and feel things. It’s hard to explain. People talk, and I hear what they’re saying, but I also see something in a flash, like a digital photograph starting out jagged and then filling in.
I finally told Mom. It took her a while to accept it. Then after I told her that something was wrong in Uncle Owen’s chest and two days later he was in the ER, she got s
erious. She called a couple of places and thought about getting me tested, but neither of us wanted to do that. I didn’t want it to be real, somehow. I don’t think Mom did, either. She was a very practical person. I think she just wanted it to go away. I couldn’t blame her. So did I.
I still do.
I turn up the music. I don’t want to think about where Emily is. I don’t want to know what’s happening to her. It will be a long time before I’m able to close my eyes.
I’m afraid of what I’ll see if I do.
FIVE
I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I wake up at five A.M., I know I’m not getting back to sleep. I never do. My face is wet, and so are the ends of my hair, which is clinging to the back of my neck. I know I’ve been crying in my dreams again. I’m shaking and I pull a sweater on over my T-shirt.
I asked her not to go.
She said, Did you see something?
No, I said. Not like that. It’s just…a feeling. I’m afraid something will happen.
She had smiled. I’ll be back tomorrow. I’m just flying down to take a deposition.
I didn’t say anything. That was the moment. That was when I could have said, don’t go. I could have begged. I could have pitched a fit. I could have lied and said I saw a vision of her plane crashing.
I’ll call you when I land, she said.
She called from her cell phone, right from the plane while it was on the runway. She’d landed safely. The weather was clear in West Palm. After the deposition, she was hoping to take a walk on the beach. She wished I was with her—it was December, and it was seventy-five degrees. She wanted pompano for dinner. She’d never had pompano.
And key lime pie, I said.
I had hung up the phone, feeling relieved. And then I couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with the day. Rosie, the friend of my mom’s who was staying with me, made me a sandwich. I sat in front of the TV and ate it. It stuck in my throat and it was hard to swallow.
