I left the message on the screen. But I put my phone down on the passenger seat and then started my car.
* * *
• • •
“Is Katy Nealon here?” I asked the lady at the circulation desk. “She works here, right?”
Jason’s Katy had never worked at Fabuland. She always said that she loved roller coasters but hated fried food smells and “forced fun.” And while I was interested to hear what she had to say about Ethan, I also thought it might be nice to talk to someone who existed entirely outside of the drama of Fabuland.
“She’s shelving,” the circulation lady said, and pointed behind me. “Last I saw her, she was in nonfiction.”
I whispered a quick thank you and walked toward the shelves. Two rows back, I found Katy in the 300s of the nonfiction stacks. She was resting on her elbow, reading, her long, thin limbs bent awkwardly over the cart of books.
“Katy?” I said in a stage whisper. She jumped and slammed her book shut.
“Jesus, you scared me,” she hissed. “I’m not supposed to be reading.”
“Isn’t this a library?”
“Yeah. But we’re all supposed to pretend to have more important things to do.” She lowered her voice. “There’s this creepy old dude who comes in and takes secret pictures of the library ladies slacking off, drinking tea and whatnot. He sends them to the paper and brings them to town hall meetings as numbered evidence to show that the library budget should be cut.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “Does he do it to other people in town? The police, or whatever?”
“No.” Katy picked up a book and glanced at its spine. “Just the librarians. I’m pretty sure it’s a thinly veiled act of misogyny, really.”
“Ugh. Sorry,” I said.
“How are you, by the way?” Katy asked, kneeling to shelve the book. She did it so lithely. She used to figure skate early in high school, and still did everything with grace. No wonder Jason was in love with her.
“Okay,” I replied.
“Just okay?”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Heard from your brother lately?”
“A couple of days ago. We didn’t talk long.”
Katy straightened up and glanced at me. “Did you come to visit or were you just here looking for a book?”
“Visit,” I answered. “But I wanted to ask you something, if you have a sec.”
“Okay,” Katy whispered. She grabbed another book, stepped one shelf over, and began scanning for the book’s place. “What?”
“Some things about Ethan Lavoie, mostly.”
Katy nodded sadly and returned to her cart. “Okay.”
“First of all, I’m really sorry. I know he was your friend.”
“Yeah,” Katy said softly. She picked up a book but just held it gingerly, not really looking at it.
“I just wonder if you think everything they’re saying about the night he died…if everything they’re saying about it feels accurate to you.”
Katy put down the book, absently sliding it back in with the others on the cart.
“How’s your friend Morgan?” she asked.
“Okay, not great,” I murmured. I paused, hoping I wouldn’t have to ask her the question again.
Katy ran her hand along the spines of the books and then looked up at me.
“To be honest, I’ve wondered some things,” she said. “About how Ethan died.”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“Like what?” I asked softly.
“Well…everyone keeps asking why he was walking by himself.” Katy picked up the same book, then put it down again. “Or why he didn’t call someone for a ride. And I get it that the Brewer’s Creek area is a kind of woodsy, and the bridge isn’t like the safest place you can walk. But when I used to hang out with him, he was pretty independent. He walked to places by himself all the time. He walked home from school sometimes, or to the Dynasty when he worked there.”
I wasn’t sure where she was going with this.
“Back when you were both in high school, you mean?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Katy said.
“But the Brewer’s Creek area is more dangerous,” I pointed out, “so that’s why his mom didn’t want him there by himself.”
“I guess,” Katy said reluctantly.
She studied me for a second, then wheeled her cart farther into the nonfiction stacks, settling in the 800s, in the back corner. I followed her.
“But that’s not what I’m wondering about,” she continued, lowering her voice. “There was a time when his mom thought nothing of letting him walk by himself. But about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, she started making all these rules. Monitoring him more closely.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I kind of wondered that myself.” Katy paused for a moment. “I think it was around when he was getting closer to graduating. You’d think she’d have let him become even more independent then. But you know, Ethan rebelled a little bit. He told me it was his idea to apply for a job at Fabuland this summer instead of at the doughnut shop. He got the job without his mom knowing about it, and then once he had it, she didn’t have the heart to tell him no.”
I smiled, thinking of Ethan secretly consulting my dad or Chris about a job switch. Probably Chris. I wondered if he had known Ethan was going over his mom’s head.
“So anyway, all this talk about why was he alone, why didn’t he call for a ride. It all strikes me as kind of…” Katy hesitated, sucked on her lip. “Kind of false.”
“You think he might not have called his mom for a ride just because he was tired of the rule?”
Katy nodded. “Pretty likely, from my perspective. And he wanted to keep asserting his independence. I don’t know why everybody’s not saying that. Maybe that would start to feel like victim blaming, to say he walked home on his own because he wanted to.”
I considered that for a moment. “But why do you think his mom had more rules for him now than before?”
Katy shook her head. “I don’t know. His mom’s a nice lady. But protective. Maybe she didn’t realize she was doing it—trying to hold him closer once he was done with high school. There was this social worker who’d come and check on them sometimes, at least when Ethan was younger. Maybe it was her idea. Or maybe the family had some other trouble and was just closing ranks for some reason, pulling Ethan in with them. I don’t know.”
“Meanwhile, Winnie and Tim have to feel terribly guilty that they weren’t at Fabuland that night to walk or drive him home,” I said, fishing, hoping Katy might offer something about the Malloy siblings, since she lived near them.
“Yeah. I don’t get that either. Maybe Ethan’s mom needs to blame someone. So Winnie and Tim get the blame for not being there.”
“Has she said that explicitly, though?” Even though I didn’t know what to think of Winnie and Tim, that seemed really rough.
“Well, no…but if you read between the lines in what’s been quoted to the press, there’s all this hand-wringing about a kid walking by himself who was actually perfectly capable of it. It’s weird to me, that’s all. It’s kind of an insult to Ethan’s memory.”
“But…how do you think he fell, then?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Katy said softly. “I don’t have any brilliant theories on that. I don’t think anyone does.”
“Do you think it’s possible he was headed to his cousins’ house after work instead of his own?”
Katy cocked her head skeptically at the question. “It’s possible. He spent a lot of time at their house, yeah. And vice versa. I don’t think it matters whose house he was headed for, really. Either way, he didn’t make it there.”
Katy’s voice broke as she said this. She closed her eyes for a few seconds—willing b
ack tears, it looked like. When she opened them again, she scanned the spines of the books on the top shelf and sighed.
“Jesus, this town just gets sadder and sadder.” Katy shook her head. “Your brother’s smart to take a break this year.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about Jason and how lucky he was not to be here.
“So, why did you decide to come back here this summer?” I asked instead. “Weren’t you somewhere really cool last summer? Like Portland, Maine?”
“Yeah, that’s where I was. But that option wasn’t available this year.”
“Why not?”
“I was working there with my girlfriend. At her parents’ restaurant.”
“Girlfriend?” I repeated.
“Ex-girlfriend,” Katy said. “We broke up in March. So that would make it kinda awkward, you know, for me to stay at her parents’ house and work in their restaurant.”
“But…wait. You had a girlfriend?”
“Oh, God. Jason didn’t tell you?”
I took a moment to digest this. Katy liked women. Now that I thought about it, the fact wasn’t actually that surprising. What was weird was Jason’s failure to mention it.
“Well, how long has he known?” I asked.
“About two years. Maybe a little more. It figures. I hope you don’t mind me saying this. Your brother is so sweet, but he kind of has a tendency to ignore information that’s not convenient for him.”
I was silent for a moment.
“I’m sorry, Ivy. Should I not have said that?”
I wasn’t sure how to reply. I was used to hearing Jason criticized in the past year or so. Mostly by our dad.
“You know I love Jason,” Katy added quickly. “I mean, as one of my oldest friends. You know I don’t mean it in a vicious way.”
“Of course not,” I murmured.
I thought about my phone, still sitting on the passenger seat of my car, with the words I will still love you no matter what you decide to tell me still unsent. There was a reason I hadn’t sent it. There were things Morgan couldn’t tell me. Things I wasn’t sure I could bear to hear. I had known this, instinctually, the moment I met her eyes on the Ferris wheel. I knew it now too. So it wasn’t vicious at all, what Katy had said. It was simply true. And not just of Jason.
“Are you okay?” Katy asked.
“Yeah,” I lied. “But I should go. I’m supposed to be working.”
THIRTEEN
It was only a five-minute walk from the scenic turnoff on Brewer Road to the trestle where Ethan had fallen and died.
When we were a little younger, Morgan would hold my hand when we walked over the trestle. Eventually, I started to feel it was wide enough that I didn’t need to be afraid. I could focus on the tracks beneath my feet and the trees ahead of me and not really think about it.
Now I took the well-worn path into the trees. After a minute’s walk, I could still hear faint carousel music and roller-coaster screams from Fabuland. But it felt very distant and irrelevant here—like the low hum of a neighbor’s television through an open window in summer. For a minute or two, I could block it out; enjoy the relative quiet, the seemingly endless leafy green. Until the trestle came into view.
It terrified me to think of Ethan approaching the trestle by himself in the dark.
My heartbeat quickened as I came closer to it. I could hear my own strides—the determined thpt thpt thpt of my skirt against my knees. I kept my spine straight and my head up, to make my posture match the sound. If someone was watching from the other side of the bridge, they’d never know my legs were shaking.
When I got halfway across, I slowly lowered myself to a sitting position, dangling one leg over the edge, then the other. I knew Morgan liked to sit here like this with other friends—legs swinging, hair blowing in the breeze, sipping leftover lemonade from Fabuland. She never made me stop and sit, because she knew I hated it.
Looking across to the other side, I saw a little makeshift memorial for Ethan. There was a sign I couldn’t quite read from where I was, a few stuffed animals, and some flowers in a narrow black plastic vase. From where I was sitting, the flowers looked like fresh lilies and gerbera daisies. Someone had either put them here in the last couple of days or was replacing them with new ones.
I pulled my attention away from the flowers and forced myself to look at the creek bed. I wasn’t good at calculating distances, but it was a long way down. At least three stories, if you were going to compare it to a building. Some of the rocks below looked viciously sharp. Whatever had happened to Ethan, I hoped it was quick. I hoped he’d died as soon as he hit the rocks and not suffered, lying there by himself.
I took out my phone. The message I’d typed an hour ago was still there.
I will still love you no matter what you decide to tell me.
I stared at the message and then looked down again at the creek bed. I couldn’t decide which sight made me feel more ill, or more scared. It occurred to me that I had come here not so much to figure anything out about Ethan but to determine if I was really going to send the text.
Glancing away from my phone, I could see the faintest blur of my reflection in the shallow water of the creek.
Then I held my breath and hit Send.
I stared at my phone for a minute. And then another. The leaves around me rustled. A random thought came to me, stirred by my interaction at Cork’s earlier in the morning. Penny, the girl at Doughnut Dynasty who’d laughed at Dad’s jokes. Shiny Penny, my dad used to call her. She did have shiny, eager brown eyes—and would always ask me about school and friends and boys. I’d liked her, but it was weird how she just left without saying goodbye.
A bird chirped. I waited, and willed Morgan to write back.
I thought about our last night together before I’d left for North Carolina.
We’d been eating pizza at her place and decided to health it up with a side salad. While she was washing the lettuce, she’d said, “Any chance your dad would consider naming a ride the Salad Spinner?”
This was a running joke we’d had since last summer, when my dad was toying with the idea of renaming some of the older rides to make them sound more exciting.
Privately, Morgan and I would try to think up the dumbest and most unappealing ride names possible, attempting to one-up each other.
“How about the Brain Fart?” I shot back.
“You’ve said that one before,” Morgan reminded me. “But I have a new one. The Face Lift.”
I washed a tomato and started cutting it, thinking hard.
“The Intervention,” I replied.
“The Kiddie Fiddler.” Morgan grinned wickedly and took a red pepper out of the fridge.
“The Time Manager,” I said quietly, still going for boringly awful instead of viscerally awful.
“The Expectorant,” Morgan countered, after a few minutes of silence.
“Gross,” I said. “You win.”
Now I closed my eyes to keep myself from boring a hole through my phone. Another minute or two passed, and it was still silent.
I gazed at the rocks and wondered if anyone had ever thought the one thing about Ethan that they might have thought first if he hadn’t had Down syndrome.
Had anyone considered that he could have jumped?
It felt very simple now—why Morgan might have said Ask Ethan while at the top of the Ferris wheel. Maybe she’d been thinking of jumping, and she’d wondered if he’d jumped as well.
She’d asked me to consider the question of “if he didn’t fall.” But then she’d said she wasn’t necessarily talking about him being pushed. The stuff everyone was wondering about—the backpack he’d left and the fact that he hadn’t called his mother—none of those were inconsistent with jumping. Someone who was going to jump wouldn’t care about leaving their backpack. Someone who was
going to jump wouldn’t ask for a ride home. Someone who was going to jump might ride a roller coaster they’d been afraid of before, and say, I can’t do it on another day.
And it was narrow-minded of all of us, thinking that Ethan couldn’t experience the kind of pain that made someone think about doing something like that. Because of course he could. Even if we didn’t understand why. Ethan could have had secrets just like the rest of us.
My phone vibrated. I gripped it hard, like Morgan’s reply might save my life.
Hello Ivy?
The text wasn’t from Morgan. It was from my dad. I stared at it for a moment. Then he wrote again.
Ivy honey.
And right after that:
Are you feeling well enough to come back?
I put the phone down next to me. I watched my blurred reflection in the shallow water, swaying slightly at the edge of the trestle.
Anyone could feel that way sometimes. Even if it was just for a moment here and there. The way Morgan had probably felt up on the Ferris wheel. People felt that way even when no one would ever guess. Smiley, innocent guys like Ethan. Beautiful girls in Cinderella costumes. People who otherwise looked and acted like they were busy or happy engaging in generally sunnier, sparklier things.
It was about as believable as Ethan spontaneously falling.
It was about as believable of Ethan as it was of me.
I looked down at my wobbly, distant reflection again.
I’ve always known that about you. That you wanted to stay small.
I heard those words in my father’s voice. But I didn’t quite know if the tone was affectionate or critical. I couldn’t remember if the thing had really been said near the wonky mirrors in his office, or somewhere else. Or why I would think of those words now.
Write back, Morgan. I prayed this in my head until I was saying it out loud.
All the Pretty Things Page 12
