Shallow Pond

by Alissa Grosso

  “What was that?” Zach asked.

  “Jenelle,” I said. “Something’s wrong. I need to go back home.”

  Zach was propped up on one elbow, looking at me.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll drive you. Let me just grab my coat.”

  Every light in the house was on. From the street, the glowing windows seemed to scream like some sort of warning sign. I felt sick. Why couldn’t Jenelle have told me more?

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “I’ll come with you,” Zach said.

  “No.” The word shot out of my mouth so fast and so loud, I was practically shouting at him. “I mean, it’s a family thing. You should go home.” I got out of the car and looked back in at him. I’d been so focused on Zach I hadn’t even thought of my family, hadn’t even bothered to call home, and now who knew what was going on. “I’ll call you.”

  “Barbara, wait!”

  I didn’t turn back. I shut the door and ran up the front steps. He waited until I was in the house before driving away. I stood inside the door listening to the sound of his car getting farther away from me, trying to catch my breath and ignore the weird aching feeling in my chest.

  “Hello?” I called. “Hello?” I didn’t hear anything. Where were they?

  I searched downstairs, but they weren’t there even though all the lights were on. I ran upstairs, but all the bedrooms were empty. Except for my room, all the lights were on up there as well. What the hell? I heard something downstairs. Was that them at the back door? What were they doing outside? I flew down the stairs and into the kitchen. I yanked the door open before I realized who it was.

  “Cameron?”

  “Babie, hey, long time no see,” he said. He gave me that stupid charming smile of his as he stepped into the kitchen.

  “Do you know where Gracie and Annie are?” I asked.

  “Uh, no. I was actually here to pick up Gracie. We were supposed to go out.”

  Cameron stood there looking confused. I ignored him. I peered around him, to see if I could see our minivan in the driveway, but the outside floodlights were the only lights that weren’t on. I squinted into the darkness, only vaguely aware of how close I was to Cameron until his hand brushed against my face, pushing my hair back behind my ear. I felt the warmth of his breath on my neck.

  I pulled away from him, stepping backward until I bum-

  ped into the table.

  “Babie,” he said. “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … ”

  I didn’t have time for this. “Was our car in the driveway?”

  “What?”

  “The minivan, Cameron? Did you see it in the driveway?”

  “Uh, no. I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Something’s wrong. I don’t know where they are.”

  “What does the note say?” he asked.

  “The note?”

  He pointed past me, and I turned around to see what I’d missed before. A piece of paper in the center of table. Gracie’s scribbled message.

  “I need you to take me to University Hospital.” I said.

  “The hospital?”

  “It’s Annie,” I said. “She collapsed again. Gracie took her to the hospital.”

  I stared out the window as we rode along in silence. How long ago had they gone to the hospital, I wondered. I should have been there. I should have been there to help Gracie.

  “Annie’s sick, isn’t she?” Cameron said.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t know what.” But as I spoke the words, I knew exactly what the problem was. I thought of the altered headstone. How old had Susie been when she died? Twenty-six? How had she died? I had a pretty good idea it wasn’t a car crash or some random accident. She’d been sick. She’d had something wrong with her. My father had cloned a woman with a terminal illness that had killed her at a young age. We were all walking time bombs.

  “That bastard.” I whispered the words, but it was quiet in the car and Cameron had no trouble hearing me.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to will the dark thoughts away. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe what was wrong with Annie was something simple. Maybe she just needed to have her appendix removed or her tonsils or some simple, everyday procedure. But the silence in the car made it difficult to not stray into dark thoughts. I wished Cameron would turn on the radio, anything to distract me from my fears. I turned to ask him, but he spoke before I did.

  “I had an affair with one of my students,” he said. He spoke softly and I knew not to interrupt him. “She looked a bit like a Bunting; same hair, anyway. I’m not making excuses. There is no excuse. What I did, it was stupid and wrong.”

  It all made sense. This was how he’d lost his job and wound up back in Shallow Pond. This was why he was on the Megan’s Law site.

  “I never stopped loving Annie,” he said. “I never really got over her dumping me.”

  “I think she was afraid of becoming obsessed with you.”

  “Yeah. Obsession, I know all about that. It’s an ugly thing.”

  “My father,” I said. “He never really got over losing my mother. It made him into a bit of a monster.”

  “Yeah. I understand that.” Cameron grew silent and I thought he was done, but then he said, “Listen, I want you to know I’m going away. I don’t belong back in this town. It’s not good for me to be here. I need to get away, sort some things out.”

  I nodded. Was it wrong to be jealous of Cameron? He was going to get out of Shallow Pond and I was stuck here. And even if I did make it out, I would only get a few years before the time bomb claimed me. It didn’t seem fair.

  Twenty-Six

  We found Gracie in the waiting area. When she saw me, she threw her arms around me and pulled me into an unexpected hug.

  “Babie,” she said. “I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know what to do.” She released me and seemed to notice Cameron for the first time.

  “Cameron gave me a ride,” I said. I wondered if she knew about what Cameron had told me, but then realized that of course she didn’t. “How’s Annie? Is she okay?”

  “It’s—they think she can come home in the morning.” Gracie shook her head and sat down. “I can’t do this.”

  I thought she meant dealing with Annie being sick; I thought there was some sort of accusation in her words, that she was mad at me for not being there. But then I saw the way she glanced over at Cameron. He looked awkward, like he didn’t know what he was doing there. She didn’t want to say anything in front of him.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You should eat.” I turned to Cameron. “Can you go down to the cafeteria and grab her something?”

  He looked relieved to have something to do and practically ran out of the room.

  “Dr. Feld knows,” Gracie said. “He wants to do tests. Not just on Annie, but on you and me too. Babie, I can’t do this. I can’t be this … this thing. I can’t handle it.”

  “We won’t let them do any tests we don’t consent to,” I said. “But you know that she died, and whatever it was that killed her, we must have it too.”

  “I’m not sick. I’m a perfectly normal person. Look at me! Do I look like a freak?”

  I was glad we were alone in the small waiting area, but her voice had grown so loud that I was sure they’d heard it at the nurse’s station down the hall. Gracie stood up and began to pace the small room.

  “What about Annie?” I asked. “What are they going to do with her?”

  “Prod her with needles, scrape off her skin and look at it under a microscope, get her a gig at the local circus sideshow. I don’t know—they said something about possible treatments. I can’t do this.”

  Gracie�
��s pacing made it hard not to get freaked out. Annie was always the calm and cool one. Annie was always in charge, but Annie was sick. It shouldn’t make a difference, though. If Annie could take charge, then why couldn’t I? Other than a few years, there was no difference between Annie and me.

  “We’ll find a specialist to treat Annie, we’ll locate the best doctor in the country,” I said. “Everything’s going to be fine.” I forced the shakiness out of my voice as I spoke, trying hard to be strong so that Gracie didn’t break down any more, but inside I was a wreck.

  “No,” Gracie said, “it can’t be fine. It can’t be fine ever again.”

  Cameron picked that moment to return from the cafeteria. He was holding a plastic-wrapped sandwich in his hand and a few bottles of water.

  “Tuna okay?” he asked.

  “I hate tuna,” Gracie said.

  “Really?” I said. “I like it.” Cameron handed it to me. I looked over at Gracie. She’d stopped pacing, but she still had the look of a cornered animal. How was it possible that we could be clones when we were nothing like each other?

  Gracie and I spent the night camped out in the waiting room. When we took Annie home in the morning, she almost didn’t look sick. She was still too thin and her hair was a mess, but she looked bright and alert, and even seemed to have energy. She got into a spirited debate with Gracie over the best route to take to get back to the highway. It gave me hope, but at the back of my mind was the nagging feeling that we would be back at the hospital before long.

  Annie confirmed my fears that night at dinner.

  “There’s no cure,” she said, “but the treatments have come a long way since Susie was sick. The drugs are expensive, but they work.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “What it means is, I feel great,” Annie said.

  That wasn’t any kind of answer, and she knew it. I looked over at Gracie, but she only sighed and looked away. She’d never really relaxed—she was still on edge, capable of snapping at a moment’s notice. It was scary.

  “But you’re not going to get better,” I said.

  “I’m fine,” Annie said.

  “Except not really,” I said.

  “Shut up! Both of you!” Gracie slammed down her fork. “Am I the only one who isn’t cool with becoming some sort of medical pin cushion in the name of science? Did you see the way everyone there was looking at us? We’re oddities to them, rare specimens.”

  “Only Dr. Feld knows,” Annie said.

  “Right, and he doesn’t talk to anyone else, I’m sure. Trust me, they know, and if they know, it won’t be long before everyone knows. What happens when everyone in Shallow Pond knows?”

  “It’s possible they could descend on us in an angry mob,” Annie said. If you didn’t know her better, you might not have seen the smirk on her face. But I didn’t think this was the right time for Frankenstein references.

  “Maybe it’s all a joke to you,” Gracie said, “but I’ve got friends here, a boyfriend. I’ve got a life. When this rumor gets out, I can kiss all that goodbye.”

  “If we’ve made it this far without anyone finding out, then I think your precious little life is safe,” Annie said.

  “By the way, you’re welcome,” Gracie snapped. “You would think you’d be a little more grateful that I dragged your sorry ass to some distant hospital, that I gave up my whole night sitting around the hospital being treated like a complete freak.”

  “I am grateful,” Annie said.

  “You sure as hell don’t act like it,” Gracie said. She pushed her chair back from the table and stormed out of the room.

  Behind my closed bedroom door, I called Zach. My fingers shook as I pressed the buttons on the phone. Only a day had passed since I’d seen him, but it felt like longer. The world had changed since then.

  “My sister was sick,” I told him. “She had to be taken to the hospital.”

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Is she all right? Which one?”

  “Annie,” I said. “And what she has is incurable.”

  I waited for this to sink in. I waited for him to get it. Zach was a smart guy. I knew it wouldn’t take him long.

  “Incurable and fatal?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And is this something hereditary? Like, in your genes?”

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “And it’s how the original, the one you thought was your mother, died?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t really know what to say.”

  “The doctor—he was a friend of my father’s, he knows all about us—he wants to do all sorts of tests on us. Gracie is freaking out.”

  “And you? Are you freaking out?”

  “I don’t see the point in it.”

  “Well, that’s amazingly rational.”

  For some reason this struck me as funny. I started to giggle, but the giggle turned into full-blown laughter that I was powerless to hold back.

  “Uh-oh, now you are freaking out.”

  “No, I’m not,” I managed to choke out between laughs.

  “I love your laugh,” Zach said. “I love everything about you. I need to see you. I’m coming over.”

  “No, it’s late, and I’m tired. I spent last night trying to sleep in a hospital waiting room. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s not soon enough. I need to see you now. How am I going to live without you?”

  He meant, how was he going to live without me tonight, but for some reason that wasn’t what I heard. “After I die, you could always clone me,” I said.

  My laughter vanished. I knew the remark was overly bleak and negative. Zach was so quiet on the other end I wasn’t sure if he was really there.

  “Okay,” he said. “You win. I’ll figure out a way to make it through the night without you. I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

  “Yeah, tomorrow,” I said.

  I sat there for a while on my bed with the phone still in my hand. I tried to understand how in love, how far off the deep end with grief you have to be before thinking that cloning your dead lover is a reasonable solution to your problem. I thought about Cameron Schaeffer and his own battle with romantic obsession. I thought about Annie breaking things off with the boy she loved. She’d said there was someone else.

  It wasn’t something I wanted to think about, and I tried to think of things to distract myself: school, Zach, whether my blue shirt was in my closet or in the pile of clothes to be washed. But my mind refused to be distracted. A thought wormed its way up from my subconscious; I tried to shake it off as another one of my mistaken theories. It seemed Annie would have told me, but I saw now that she’d tried—she’d dropped clues, and like an idiot I’d missed them.

  A good sister would have gone to her, talked to her, off-ered her belated comfort. But I only lay down on my bed and tried to forget about everything.

  Twenty-Seven

  There was a hint of spring in the air as I walked to school Monday morning. It wasn’t warm out, but it wasn’t bitter cold either, and the breeze that blew carried with it the smell of spring. It was like Mother Nature’s way of trying to tell me to be more optimistic. But my dark and troubling suspicion haunted my thoughts. I knew it would take more than the sight of a robin and the promise that in a month or so I could go outside without a jacket to lift my spirits.

  I heard a car roll up beside me and turned around to see Jenelle. She rolled down the passenger window.

  “Want a ride?” she asked.

  “I thought you weren’t speaking to me,” I said.

  “Bunting, just get in the car.”

  I did as she commanded. It was just her in the car. “Where’s Shawna?” I asked.

  “Home sick. She says it’s strep, but I think it’s far more serious.”

 
I thought she was taking her candy-striper duties a bit too seriously. Now she was going around diagnosing people? “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  “Broken heart,” Jenelle said.

  “Broken heart?”

  “Bunting, if you ever paid attention to anyone else, then you’d know that Frank dumped her on Friday.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Apparently he realized he still has feelings for Meg.”

  I remembered how Meg said something about getting back together with her ex, and now I remembered that Frank used to date her before he started going out with Shawna.

  “What a scumbag,” I said.

  “On the plus side, I guess that means Zach is free.”

  “Oh, he’s not free,” I said.

  Jenelle gave me a look. “That guy sure gets around. Who is he with now?”

  I smiled. Thinking about Zach accomplished all those things that the warmer weather and the hint of spring in the air weren’t able to. I abandoned my negativity long enough to picture him. That look in his eyes, the way he smiled. In my head, I heard the way he said my name and it was all I could do not to explode with happiness.

  Jenelle brought the car to a screeching halt and I snapped out of my reverie.

  “Barbara Bunting, are you and Zach a couple? How come I am just finding out about this?”

  “I’m in love with him,” I said. “And you weren’t speaking to me, remember.”

  “Unbelievable,” she said. “The other night, when Gracie couldn’t find you?”

  “I was at his place.”

  Someone behind us beeped. Jenelle sighed and rolled her eyes, as if they were the ones being annoying when she was the one stopped in the middle of the road, but she did resume driving.

  “Oh my God. Who are you and what did you do with Barbara?”

  “What?”

  “Seriously, Bunting, I don’t really recognize you anymore.”

  She wasn’t alone there. I hardly recognized myself either.

  “Hey, about the other night, what happened?” Jenelle asked.