by Jude Watson
Emily’s parents took her away, down south to Rocky’s sister in Portland. Torie and Jeff have been on Good Morning America, the Today show, and I hear they’ll be on the cover of People next week. They are heroes. The oldest kids who protected the rest of us. They are getting everything they wanted, and I wish them well with celebrity. Somehow I doubt they’ll be able to handle it.
All the rest of the kids have landed back at home—like Kendall—or in social services—like Tate.
They found Jonah waiting on the beach, sitting barefoot, staring out to sea, the house still smoking behind him.
He had started out with street kids. Maybe in the beginning he was really trying to help them. Torie and Jeff were the first. Then he started contacting kids on the Internet. He’d make sure they answered him in cyber-cafés and didn’t tell their parents. When he found out that Emily had written him on her computer, he’d made her take it with her when she came to meet him. Because Beewick Island was so small, he wiped the library computers himself. Emily let him into Rocky’s and he wiped Zed’s computer, too, because Emily had used it. He had gotten sloppy with Emily, because she could be traced through the computer camp, and Kendall had already disappeared. So he asked his publicity department to remove her from the photos, just in case one got into the Seattle papers and triggered a link.
The board of Jonah’s company has hired the best defense team in the country, and it looks like they’ll plead the insanity defense.
I told Shay and Diego all about it, or about most of it. I couldn’t tell them the way Jonah ate away at my insides, the way he made me hurt. But I think they knew. Diego got in about fifty pounds of trouble for taking me to the park that day. I don’t think Shay had forgiven him until I came back.
I don’t think Diego had forgiven himself, either. It turned out that one of those three-year-olds in the park had gotten lost and hysterical, and by the time Diego returned the little boy to one of the nature walk instructors, I was gone.
I think Shay must have lost ten pounds while I was away, and she doesn’t even mention it. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she walked into the room at the Seattle police station. I’ll never forget how she held me, like I belonged to her, like losing me would have killed her. I didn’t know she felt that way.
I swing my legs over the bed. I pad outside to the kitchen. Shay is sitting at the kitchen table with a wadded up tissue in her hand. She’s staring out at the darkness. A pot of milk is on the stove on a low flame.
“So did you and Mom become blonds?” I ask, sitting down.
Shay’s eyes are red-rimmed. Her mouth is taut from crying, from trying not to cry. I see raw grief on her face, and it stuns me. She’s been hiding it from me, I realize. She didn’t want to add to mine. She had let me know, in a thousand ways, how much she missed my mom, but she never let me see her pain. I’m not sure if that was the right way to go, but I understand.
She clears her throat. “Carrie looked fantastic. Like she’d spent a month in the sun. I wanted to look just like her, so I left it on too long. It came out sort of platinum, and not in a good way. So we tried to dye it back, and it sort of looked greenish. So she looks at me, and she says, ‘Maybe we should try on hats.’ I just remember lying on the bathroom floor, laughing so hard. She could laugh so hard…”
“She would totally lose control.”
Shay looks down at her hands. “You know, I just remembered this. I said something about how we’d have to learn to dye our own hair because we’d have to get rid of the gray when we got older, and Carrie said, ‘I’ll never have gray hair.’ She said it totally seriously. I thought she meant she’d be lucky. But now I wonder if…”
“If she knew she’d never get old. If she was…like me.”
“Maybe that’s why she was always in such a hurry to live her life.”
I absorb this. I wonder what it would be like, feeling that you wouldn’t live long. I realize there are parts to my mom that I didn’t know, deep parts, quirky parts. It’s not just my memories that define her. Shay lost her, too. I want to hear those memories now. Now I’m ready to listen.
Shay gets up and pours out the hot milk. She’s made enough for two, just in case.
“Do you ever…sense her?” she asks. I can tell this is hard for her to get out. And I can tell how badly she wants me to say yes.
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s absolutely nothing good about being psychic that I can see. It’s a curse.”
She takes a sharp, indrawn breath as she breaks up the chocolate into two mugs and brings them to the table. Then she pours in the milk. We stir, our spoons gently tinkling.
“You got ten kids out of hell because of it. That’s good.”
“It almost didn’t happen that way.”
“But it did.” Shay blows on her drink. “You can use it. Not let it use you. That’s all I’m saying.”
We take a sip at the same moment, and swallow.
“Do you still get flashes of him?” Shay asks.
I shake my head firmly. “Not new ones.” The memory of what he had done and seen is enough to keep me awake at night. The memories of the kids I tapped into gave me a glimpse into a world I didn’t want to know, a place where love had withered at its root.
It’s going to take me time.
“Loss can stretch you into a new shape,” Shay says. “Jonah was handed too much, and he didn’t have the foundation to handle it. He couldn’t find a way to live that made sense.”
I take my first sip. I like it like this, when the chocolate has just started to melt, when I taste milk and just the beginning of the sweetness.
“You’ll always be sad, Gracie,” Shay says. “That doesn’t mean you’ll never be happy.”
“Yeah,” I say.
The light is changing. It is blue, bluer than blue. We hear the birds begin to squawk.
“By the way,” I tell her, “Joe Fusilli has a crush on you.”
A small smile curves her lips. “Yeah?”
She props her bare feet up on the sill. I put my feet next to hers. I remember the day I stared at her feet and transferred all my hatred onto her toes. Now I see how her foot is shaped like mine, how her toes are all almost the same size, like mine. I hold the warm cup cradled against my chest. In his loony way, Jonah was right about something.
You just can’t get away from family.
DISAPPEARANCE
For Ric
rest in peace, baby
When she hands me my change, I feel a pain that lives inside her, a restlessness that won’t go away. Two days later, Susan Reilly abandons her husband and children and runs away to Las Vegas. For good.
When he takes my spaghetti order, I know the waiter is worried that his wife is cheating on him. She is.
I can feel what people want…and what they’re willing to do to get it.
What if you could feel what other people felt…and it was unbearable?
What if you saw what was going to happen…and you couldn’t stop it? What if that something was murder?
ONE
I should have known that Saturday afternoon would turn out to be a disaster. And believe me, when I say I should have known, I should have known.
It all begins with a girl called Marigold. She’s the inexplicable love object of my cousin Diego. I guess her gorgeousness makes up for a certain lack of charisma. For Diego, that is. For the rest of us, we just have to deal with trying to make conversation with someone with the personality of plankton. Diego has dated just about every pretty girl on the island of Beewick, and he’s made inroads onto the mainland, even as far as Seattle. But Marigold, for some reason, knocked him stupid.
Well, she is a knockout, in that long-blond-hair, long-legged, blue-eyed category that makes other girls want to either be her best friend or poison her caffeine-free chai.
So when Diego asks me that Saturday afternoon in November if I want to hang with them and Marigold’s brother, I should say no, conside
ring that Marigold’s conversation sends me into a coma and I consider her brother about as appetizing as brussels sprouts.
I look at Diego and Marigold for a minute while I make up my mind. I know I should be concentrating on answering, but I’m thinking about how beautiful people just naturally click together, like magnets. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. Diego is tall and lean and so handsome that once I saw a waitress drop an entire tray of glasses when he walked into a restaurant.
Marigold is leaning against Diego, and she has a hand in the back pocket of his jeans. It’s another thing that bugs me about her. She’s always leaning against him, as though she can’t stand up by herself.
Marigold flashes her halogen smile. “Come on, Gracie. This is Washington State. You’ve got to grab the sunshine while you can.”
You see? Pick the most obvious thing, and she’ll say it.
“Yeah,” Diego says. “Pretty soon it will be January and the sun will be on semipermanent hiatus.”
Marigold laughs as if that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.
“Okay,” I say.
Well, what else was I going to do? Homework?
We take off in Diego’s old VW, the one he bought with his landscaping money from the summer. The windows are open, because it’s such an amazing day, so I can’t hear the conversation in the front seat. Which is good, because Marigold is talking. The hum of tires on the road is far more riveting.
So I look at the scenery, which is not exactly a hardship. I moved from Maryland to the Pacific Northwest only last year, after my mother was killed in a car crash. My aunt Shay took me in. Now I live on an island off the coast of Washington State, in Puget Sound.
I hated Beewick Island when I first got here. It was February, and February is not the best month here. There’s a permanent drizzle, and it’s cold, yet you don’t get the benefits of snow. But after about nine months here, I realize why, when you ask a Pacific Northwesterner the best thing about living here, they say “the weather.” It’s no joke. It’s just our secret, that if you can get past the winter rain, the rest of the year is not too hot, not too cold. You can practically live outside.
Beewick is about an hour north of Seattle, if you drive really fast. The island is almost a hundred miles long but only a few miles wide, with wicked cliffs on the north end and gentle farmland on the south. The sky seems higher here, and bluer. Off to the west are the snowcapped Olympic Mountains. Sometimes they just seem like clouds on the horizon, and then on clear days they startle you with their presence. The Sound is the color of blueberries, and there are fields of farmland and lavender. It’s a pretty nice place to live, and it is a tribute to my stubbornness that it took me close to six months to admit it.
We drive into Greystone Harbor, the closest town to us, and Diego pulls into a space outside the Harborside restaurant.
“We’re going here?” I ask.
“They have the best fried clams,” Marigold says.
Maybe he won’t be here. Maybe it’s his day off. But I see Zed’s faded red Subaru parked in the lot, and I know he’s here. It’s hard facing the person you put in jail for kidnapping when he didn’t do a thing. It really is.
Last summer, my friend Emily disappeared. I’d had a vision, and it had seemed to connect to Zed. By the time I’d figured out that the kidnapper wasn’t Zed, the police had nailed him for tackling me and demanding why, exactly, I was going around saying he was guilty.
Oops is not up there on a list of acceptable apologies for this.
The thing I can’t admit, hardly even to myself, is that I still think about the moment he tackled me and we rolled down the hill, how his chest felt so solid, how his breath felt against my skin. I was terrified at the time, but now I can look back and dissect every detail. Which I do. Frequently.
I am so glad there isn’t another me around to see my thoughts.
I tag after Diego and Marigold into the restaurant. Marigold’s twin brother, Mason, is already here with a table full of his friends. They’re all jocks, on the swimming team and the soccer team, and most of them aren’t too awful. I just feel like I’m disappearing when I’m around them. I’m not the kind of girl they notice. I’m short, and I have brown hair and brown eyes and a devotion to gray sweaters. Not exactly a head turner.
Zed is waiting tables, and he looks up and sees me. This would be a lot easier if he weren’t so good-looking. He has silvery-gray eyes and black hair he cut short over the summer. He looks startled to see me, as if he can’t believe I have the nerve to show up in his father’s place. Zed works here and in Seattle, at a glassblower’s studio. We’ve seen each other since that whole thing last summer, of course—we live only a mile from Greystone Harbor, and it’s a small town—but we’ve always managed to just nod at each other and look away.
Mason yells at us to hurry up, he wants to order, and Marigold and Diego head over.
“Hey, everybody, you know Gracie, Diego’s cousin,” Marigold says. “Gracie, everyone.” The guys all look at me and say “hey,” or slurp their sodas.
Marigold sits down on an empty chair next to Mason. Diego sits next to her. The only other chair is at the other end of the table, next to Dylan Brewer, one of Mason’s friends. I go and sit there. This is going to be fun, I can just feel it. All the thrills of a filling without novocaine.
They immediately launch into a discussion of some college football game that’s going to be on tomorrow afternoon. That doesn’t stop them from dissecting what is going to happen and who is going to totally rock.
It makes you think. Here I am, somebody who can occasionally see things that are going to happen. But when it comes to who’s going to win a football game or have the winning lottery number, I’m totally useless.
I watch as Marigold takes a sip of her diet soda and offers the straw to Diego. Everyone orders fried clams, including me, even though I’m not crazy about fried clams. But I can’t quite meet Zed’s eyes when he takes the order. Still, he hesitates next to me. I stare at the silver ring he wears on his thumb.
“So, how’ve you been?” he says.
I look up. I feel ice crack and the earth turn. I realize, at that very moment, at long last, that Zed does not hold a grudge. Relief washes through me.
“Okay,” I say.
“Good.”
This dazzling display of conversational skill ends when Zed nods a good-bye. He tucks the order pad into the back waistband of his pants, which in my addled state I find an incredibly cool move. Then he heads into the kitchen.
The platters of food arrive quickly, which I’m happy about, because I haven’t been able to think of a single thing to say while we were waiting. Nobody noticed, though. Mason and his friends have moved on from football to soccer. These kinds of guys can only talk about sports. I think it’s a kind of primitive form of communication for guys, like gorillas making hand signals. Diego and Marigold are having an intense conversation by themselves. It looks like they could be arguing, but I try not to feel hopeful about the possibility.
I eat a couple of clams dunked in lots of cocktail sauce, and most of my fries, while sneaking glances at Zed waiting on tables. Occasionally, he’ll smile at a customer, and it’s worth waiting for.
Then Mason’s friends start making fun of a couple at the next table. They’re eating the Greystone oysters that Beewick Island is known for and looking out at the blue sweep of bay, and you can take one look at them and know they’re from Seattle. Not that there’s anything wrong with Seattle. But they look pretty rich and they’re wearing pressed khakis and cashmere sweaters that are pretending to be sweatshirts, and Mason starts to goof on them.
“I’ll have the plucky little Chardonnay, muffin, how about you?” he says.
Totally lame, but his buddies all guffaw.
Mason and his friends are the kind of goons who think that because they’re lucky enough to have lived all their lives on a beautiful island in Puget Sound they get to make fun of the weekenders. It’s true tha
t real estate prices have been zooming lately, and that more and more land is being gobbled up for development. But I don’t think this couple from Seattle, out to have a nice seafood lunch on a Saturday, deserves to get heckled for it.
Meanwhile, Marigold is feeding Diego a French fry. I guess they made up.
I don’t think the couple heard what Mason said, but somehow they know the snickers rolling across the room are directed at them. Zed turns, and I see his face darken. He strides over to our table. I wonder if I can assume the molecular structure of a chair and disappear completely. Zed thinks I’m friends with these cretins.
He rips the check off his pad.
“Whoa, dude,” Mason says. “You didn’t ask about dessert.”
“You want dessert?” Zed asks. “There’s a great ice cream parlor across the street. Our pies suck.” He drops the check on the table and walks away.
“Whoa,” Mason says. “Touchy Waiter Boy thinks we’re rude.”
“Yeah, you’re upsetting the clientele, Patterson,” Dylan says. Mason and his friends usually call each other by their last names, which is kind of funny because most of them have last names for first names anyway.
Andy Hassam pushes away his plate. “We should push their cars off the ferry, man. All we get from them is traffic and garbage. Pretty soon we won’t be able to eat our own oysters. The water will be too polluted.”
Everyone knows why Andy hates the weekenders and the new summer people. His family owns a farm. Last year they had to sell a chunk of their land to a developer, who built a whole bunch of houses on the site. Nobody is happy about it. Hassam’s farm stand is a local institution. They have hayrides in the fall and a pumpkin field. Now, instead of overlooking fields of farmland and meadows, it’s going to overlook a bunch of BMWs.
