I put on my wet suit as soon as I got up. I was surfing, no matter what. I didn’t care if we had a thunderstorm, I was going out there where I didn’t have to deal with anyone or hear people talk about my face. My arm felt a lot better than the night before. Those drugs were brilliant. I opened my front door and nearly tripped over a pot of flowers. Crap. Some old lady sending me flowers like my mother was already dead. I carried them into the kitchen.
The flowers were in a dented old aluminum coffeepot, and they weren’t anything fancy. They looked like someone grabbed them from a field or something and stuck them in whatever thing they could use for a pot.
I saw a folded piece of white paper stuck in the stems and pulled it out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about you. Sorry if I came on too strong in the grocery store last week. I’d really like to cook you dinner. Something chocolate for dessert! Tonight? Jen
She wrote her phone number again in case I’d lost that scrap of paper she gave me. I hadn’t lost it. It was still in my jeans pocket, though I’d never planned to call it and sure didn’t expect to hear from her either.
I leaned against the counter, remembering that hot bod and those pretty blue eyes. She was hurt inside, she’d said. Did she actually get it? Did she understand? I looked at her number. Picked up my cell.
Maybe I could get laid, at the very least.
Chapter Twenty-One
Maggie
ON FRIDAY NIGHT, MOM, ANDY, UNCLE MARCUS AND I ATE dinner at the picnic table on the deck. Pork chops and sweet potatoes we cooked on the grill, and collards Mom bought from the old woman on Route 17 who was the only person who really knew how to make them the way I liked them. Oh my God, it felt so good to be outside in my awesome yard on the awesome sound! The news vans were gone. Finally. The last one pulled out sometime that afternoon. Maybe it was just because it was the weekend and they weren’t bothering to cover the news, but whatever the reason, I could finally go outside without hiding in the shadows.
Sitting at the picnic table, I felt really, truly happy for the first time in forever. God, I’d missed my family! I munched on my pork chop, smiling inside as Andy talked about Kimmie, Kimmie, Kimmie.
“Somebody’s got Kimmie on the brain,” Mom said after he’d been going on and on for about ten minutes straight.
Andy looked surprised. “Who does?” he asked, and we all cracked up.
At one point during dinner, Uncle Marcus brushed Mom’s hair away from her forehead. She caught his hand. Squeezed it and smiled. I still couldn’t get over watching them. I’d get tense every once in a while around them, the way I used to feel when they were in the same room together. I was waiting for my mother to say something cold to him, to freeze him out like she used to, but those days were gone. A couple of nights, I heard them making love. That was slightly creepy. My mother’d always been so not interested in sex—or at least, that’s how I thought of her. What did I know, though? Daddy died when I was eight, and she never dated anyone. Maybe she craved it all that time. Well, she was getting it now. It was strange. I’d left a family that was screwed up and miserable, and I came home to people who were suddenly giving off all these romantic vibes. I hoped the vibes weren’t catching, because I was done with romance for a while. Maybe forever.
It was nearly dark by the time we finished cleaning up, and I looked through the kitchen window toward our long pier. I hadn’t felt safe enough to walk out on the pier since I got home, but tonight the reporters were gone, and in the darkness no one would be able to see me from the water.
“I’m going to go out on the pier,” I said as I turned on the dishwasher.
“Beautiful night for it,” Mom said.
“Can I come?” Andy asked.
“Sure.” I’d really wanted to be alone, but I needed to make up for lost time with my baby brother.
The sand was cool under my bare feet as we crossed the yard to the pier. Fall was coming already. I’d missed summer while I was locked up. I never wanted to miss another one.
The good thing about fall, though, was that the tourists were gone and the island was dark, which meant you could see zillions of stars. As I walked down the long pier next to Andy, I felt so incredibly free. I put my arms out like I was flying.
“What are you doing?” Andy asked.
“Just feeling happy,” I said.
He stretched his own arms out at his sides. “Me, too,” he said.
At the end of the pier, we sat down and dangled our legs over the side, like we’d done thousands of times before. It was totally still on the water, and I could hear little waves lapping against the pilings. I loved that sound.
“Uncle Marcus is getting me a kayak,” Andy said.
“Really? Mom’s letting him?” Mom had been paranoid about any sort of boat ever since Daddy was killed on Uncle Marcus’s.
“Yup. She said I’m old enough.”
I leaned against the piling and watched the moonlight flicker on the water. For a quick, sickening moment, I remembered the last time I’d sat with Andy looking out over the water—in the Sea Tender during the nor’easter, on that stupid, stupid night when I’d lost every particle of sanity I’d ever had. The memory made me feel queasy. I hoped Andy wasn’t thinking about the same thing.
I suddenly felt the rhythmic vibration of footsteps on the pier. I looked over my shoulder. If it was a reporter, I would jump into the sound before I’d talk to him.
But it was Mom and Uncle Marcus, walking toward us, holding hands.
“What a gorgeous night!” Mom said as they came close to the end of the pier.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can we sit with y’all?” Uncle Marcus asked, even though he was already lowering himself to the pier next to Andy.
Mom sat down next to him. “We wanted to talk with you both about something,” she said.
“What?” Andy asked. I wondered if they were getting engaged.
“Well, first of all, I just wanted to let you know that I’m definitely going to hire a private investigator to help us find Sara,” Mom said.
“Good idea,” I said. Maybe a P. I. could do something the police hadn’t thought of.
“Yeah, good,” Andy said, like he had a clue what a private investigator did.
“But second,” Mom said, “and this is the part that affects you two—Marcus and I think we should ask Keith to move in here while Sara’s gone.”
I looked down at the water beneath my feet. I couldn’t imagine it. Not for a second.
“I don’t know where Miss Sara can be,” Andy said.
“No one does, And,” Uncle Marcus said. “It’s hard to know if she’ll be gone for just another day or maybe forever, so—”
“She might be dead,” Andy said.
“I hope not,” Mom said, “but it’s a possibility we have to face. We just don’t know. But in the meantime, Keith is alone. He has no money. He can’t legally get any of Sara’s savings, so Marcus and I think it would be a kind thing to ask him if he’d like to stay with us.”
I couldn’t even face Keith at the search. How could I live in the same house with him? It would be like a whole new kind of prison for me, but I so understood where Mom and Uncle Marcus were coming from: Keith was a Lockwood. The world might not know it, but—except for Andy—we did and Keith did. How could we let him stay alone when we could help him? I thought it was amazing of my mother to suggest it. She’d forgiven my father and Sara for what they did. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to in her shoes.
Still, I wasn’t quite ready to say yes. And Andy, who didn’t have a clue that Keith was related to us, didn’t get it at all.
“He’s always mean to me,” he whined. “Maybe he could live with somebody else?”
“If he lived here,” Mom said, “it would be with the understanding that he’s not mean to any of us. That he follows the house rules and returns to school. He’d have to treat all of us with the same respect we’d treat him.”
“What are you
thinking, Maggie?” Uncle Marcus reached around Andy’s shoulders to touch my arm. I hadn’t said a word.
I tipped my head back and looked at the stars. I didn’t feel like speaking. I finally felt peaceful and safe for the first time in more than a year, and having Keith there—the flesh-and-blood reminder of what I’d done—would practically be the worst thing I could imagine. How Mom and Uncle Marcus could even ask me to go along with the idea seemed so unfair. But could I be any more selfish? I totally messed up Keith’s life. My half brother’s life. He had some of Daddy in him. Hard to imagine, but somewhere inside that hotheaded, mean-spirited boy was a piece of my father.
“I guess it’s the right thing to do,” I said.
Uncle Marcus laughed. “A ringing endorsement,” he said.
“What’s that mean?” Andy asked.
“It means we all have reservations about it,” Mom said in a voice that let me know she really did have reservations. “We all have concerns. But like Maggie said, it’s the right thing to do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Andy
“I CAN’T READ THIS ONE,” KIMMIE SAID. SHE STOOD BY THE cork wall in my room. She was writing things from my calendar into her special phone that has a calendar in it. At night when we talk, she reminds me what I have to do tomorrow.
“What one?” I got up from my desk where I was doing organizing and walked to the cork wall.
“This one.” She pointed at the October 2 square. It was Mom’s handwriting. Usually I could understand it, but not when she wrote uphill. I turned my head sideways to try and read it.
“Shergletropskinder,” I said.
Kimmie laughed. She thought I was funny a lot of times. “Say it again,” she said.
“Shergletropskinder.”
She giggled so hard she had to flop onto my bed. I loved when she laughed ’cause a lot of times she was serious. Like Mom. I flopped next to her and laughed, too. My ceiling had little stars on it that lit up at night from when I was a kid. I could see them now even though it wasn’t dark.
I turned to see Kimmie. She was looking at the ceiling and I just stared at her because it wasn’t impolite to stare if she didn’t know I was doing it. She was so pretty. I wanted to hug and kiss her. She had on a green shirt like her eyes and I liked how it went over her breasts like hills. I would’ve really liked to touch them. I never did, except when I hugged her and could feel them on my chest. I had a hard-on again. I had one most of the time around Kimmie.
I knew a lot about sex even though I never did it. Uncle Marcus told me stuff a long time ago. Mom did, too, but she never explained about hard-ons and everything because of being a girl. I also seen magazines Max brought to school sometimes. Max called hard-ons boners. One thing I knew was that you weren’t supposed to do sex unless you loved somebody and you were supposed to use a condom, too. So I started thinking about the condom Uncle Marcus gave me back when he did the sex-talk thing. I found it in my clutter drawer a few weeks ago, but the date on it said 10/07 which meant it was too old.
“Okay!” Kimmie all of a sudden sat up. “Back to work. Did you organize your desk?”
I sat up, too, so she wouldn’t see my hard-on. “Almost all of it,” I said.
Kimmie was a neat freak. Uncle Marcus called her that and Mom said, “Don’t knock it.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then we can do our homework now.” She walked over to my desk to get our book bags. She has a bad limp because of her foot, but it doesn’t hurt her.
We were at the movies once and a girl called Kimmie a gimp. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it was mean. Like when somebody called me retard. I wanted to hit the girl. I used to actually do it—hit people when they said things I didn’t like. But now I had self-control. Instead, I just told Kimmie not to listen and about the sticks and stones and everything. Kimmie said the girl was just an igoramus. That was a funny word and made me laugh. So instead of hitting the girl and getting in trouble, I was laughing. My life was lots better with Kimmie in it.
Kimmie gave me my book bag and sat next to me on my bed. We both liked to do homework sitting on our beds. It was one of our things in common. I opened my book bag and pulled out a bunch of papers.
“Your book bag is a total mess,” Kimmie said. “You should clean it out before you start.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” I never cleaned it out. I wasn’t even sure which papers were my homework and which were old.
Kimmie leaned against the wall and started reading her history book. I sat on the end of my bed and dumped all the things out of my book bag onto my dresser. It was a mess. I even had cigarettes in there that were so old I forgot about them. I got my trash can and started putting the old things in it. I found a card from Maggie. It was a thank-you card she made in prison, but I couldn’t remember why she thanked me. She drew a picture of a big yellow flower on it. I didn’t want to throw it away, so I pulled out the clutter drawer of my dresser and put it in there. I could hardly get my clutter drawer open. I’m allowed to keep it messy, though, so it was okay. Even Kimmie knew I was allowed to keep that drawer messy.
“Do you need help?” Kimmie asked.
“I’m good,” I said.
I found some tests with B and C on them and put them in my clutter drawer, too. Then I found an envelope. I thought it was a note from a teacher I forgot to give Mom until I turned it over. Keith, it said on it. I was confused.
“We’re going to invite Keith to move in with us,” I said to Kimmie. I kept staring at the envelope, trying to remember.
“The boy whose mother is missing?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s so cool. Two more kids and your family’ll be as big as mine.”
Why did I have that envelope? Then I remembered it was mail for him from the day I was sick. That was so long ago. He’d make fun of me that I forgot to give it to him. I threw the envelope in my clutter drawer and pushed it all the way to the back.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sara
His Wife
1990
IF I HAD TOLD ANYONE ABOUT MY LIFE, THEY WOULD HAVE thought I was out of my mind. I was married to a man I didn’t love, expecting the baby of a man who was my soul mate—although not my lover; not since that one time—and I was nurturing a friendship with that man’s barely functional wife. Why? Because I felt his love for me even though he could promise me nothing more than that. Because every time I was in the Free Seekers Chapel with him on Sundays, I still felt lifted up by the space, by the sound of his voice, by the way people responded to him. Because there was an honesty between us we couldn’t have with anyone else. And because I made a decision to appreciate the richness of what he could give me instead of focusing on the limitations. Yet the longing would always be there. Always.
I worked out a schedule with Jamie to check on Laurel, bringing lunch over to the Sea Tender once a week, making sure she was at least out of bed. By then, Laurel had started drinking. Jamie wasn’t sure how bad it had gotten. I hadn’t actually witnessed her drinking, but I’d seen empty wine-cooler bottles in the kitchen.
“It’s Marcus’s influence,” Jamie said. Marcus had moved out of the Sea Tender and now lived next door. “I appreciate that he’s keeping an eye on her, but I think he brings booze over and encourages her to drink with him.”
I was four months along when I decided it was time to tell Laurel about my pregnancy. It was a sparkling November afternoon, and we ate sandwiches I brought to the Sea Tender—or rather, I ate a sandwich, while Laurel picked at hers. Laurel didn’t seem quite as down as she usually did, though, and I was amazed when she agreed to join me for a walk on the beach.
“Bare feet in November!” I said as we walked near the water’s edge. “I’m never going back to Michigan.”
“Good,” Laurel said. “I’d hate for you to leave.”
I looked out to the horizon. When Laurel said things like that, I felt the depth of my deception. What had happened to my self-respec
t? My integrity?
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” I said when I got my emotions under control, “but things are about to change.” I rested my hand on my stomach. “I wanted to tell you before it became obvious,” I said.
“You’re pregnant?”
I nodded. “Due in May.”
“Congratulations!” Laurel said. “Is Steve excited?”
I laughed. “Oh, you know Steve. Always cool, calm and collected.” I had a sudden, almost irresistible urge to tell Laurel the baby was Jamie’s. To finally bring this thing to a head. But I couldn’t do that to him. I just couldn’t.
I couldn’t even do it to Laurel.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Keith
JEN LOOKED EVEN BETTER THAN I REMEMBERED HER FROM the grocery store. When she opened the door to the house where she was staying, she had on this short little strappy dress, one of those that made certain girls look pregnant even though you knew they weren’t. On a girl like Jen, the way it hardly covered her ass, it just made her look hot. Her legs were long and curved just right, and her feet were bare.
“Hey,” I said. I tried not to think about how I must look to her.
“Hey.” Her smile was so sexy, but I hardly had a chance to take it in before she put her hand on the back of my neck, leaned forward and Frenched the hell out of me. Damn.
We were still kissing as I staggered into her house, thumping into the doorjamb with my knee, just managing to get the door closed behind me. Then I was devouring her. I was unstoppable, and she didn’t want to stop, either. You could tell when a girl really wanted it and when she was just faking, and this one wanted it. She was every bit as hot as she looked. She had me flat on the living-room floor before I knew it, straddling me, tossing that hair around. I reached up to touch her breasts, braless beneath the slippery stuff her dress was made out of. Her nipples pressed against my palms, and I ran my thumbs over them.
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