Shadows Among Us

by Ellery A Kane

  In the corner, Gus lifts his head and whines. And a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding rushes out of me in a sudden, dizzying gust. I hadn’t gone so far off the rails that I’d forgotten him again.

  So.

  It’s not that bad then.

  Nothing two aspirin and a little hair of the dog won’t fix.

  But as soon as I think it, I hear myself, my former respectable doctor self, laughing with derision at what she would’ve described as gross minimization. Call it what it is, Mollie. An all-out drinking binge. Apparently, the apple doesn’t fall far because since Dakota disappeared, I’ve had more than a few of them. But hell, I feel entitled. What did my old self know about life anyway? Sure, she’d been through a few rough patches. But nothing like this. Nothing like orbity, the long-forgotten word for the loss of a child I’d discovered online. At first, I’d thought it sounded too pretty, too fantastical, but after I imagined my soul severed, disconnected, and careening off without me, I deemed it a decent fit.

  I spot my phone balanced at the edge of the Napa State box, its battery dangerously low. I approach it with caution, like it’s a coiled snake, as if it could strike at any moment, as if it could bite. Already, I’m panicked. Because I remember just enough. I’d texted Sawyer. Maybe more than once. But not enough to have a clue what I’d said or when.

  The screen casually informs me of the date: Monday, October 1. The only time I’d done worse had been just after Cole left. When I couldn’t decide who was more pathetic. Him leaving me the way he had or me letting him stay for as long I did. And I’d downed his leftover case of Stella before he’d made it to Seattle, answered his call with a slurred hullooo. The Sawyer texts are cringeworthy. But not as bad as drunk me pleading with Cole—why?—the only word I’d seemed capable of back then.

  r u awake?

  wanna come over?

  i miss u.

  helllloooooo? sawyerrrrrrrr?

  I grimace through the string of desperate messages I’d spewed at 3 a.m. this morning. Is that a winking emoji?

  Sawyer hadn’t responded, not right away. Because any reasonable person our age would be asleep at 3 a.m., not playing detective while downing cheap liquor straight from the bottle. But he’d called a few times this morning. And there was this:

  Damn. Four hours too late.

  Hey—should I be flattered or worried?

  For bonus humiliation, there are several where-are-you texts from Luci and a voicemail from Detective Sharpe that I delete without playing. I know exactly why he’s calling. That part I remember. I’d left him a message detailing a half-baked conspiracy I’d concocted involving my father and the yearbook photo and Boyd Blackburn. I’d blathered on about it for so long I’d been mercifully cut off by the beep. Even if the news of my parking lot escapade hadn’t reached him yet, I’d be living down that voicemail forever. Which is precisely how long I expect to be doing this. This in-between life.

  As I slog around the room cleaning up my mess, Gus trailing long-faced behind me, the thrumming in my head takes a brutal turn, growing sharper and more insistent. The rat-tat-tat of a snare drum quickening the beat. But I deserve it. I’d broken the worst kind of promise. The promise I’d made to myself the last time I’d said never again, again. Which only reminds me of my dad and the lyrics to one of his favorite country tunes and the wet vowels of his plastered singing. I’ve got five hours to turn this—the shell-shocked face I catch in the dark screen of my computer—back into Dr. Mollie Roark. Because childless, divorced pariah is still one step up from fall-down drunk.

  ****

  I circle the lot outside Napa Valley College, watching the familiar cars fill the spaces like pieces on a chess board. Luci and Boludo, apparently still alive and kicking, in a spot near the front, alongside Jane’s slick BMW. Sawyer’s pickup truck nearest the exit for a quick getaway. This is progress, he’d joked. I used to leave her running. And Boyd’s vintage VW bug, a faded yellow, parked in the middle of it all, chameleonlike.

  I’m not fooled. I spot him on my fifth pass around, ignoring the honking behind me to get a good look as Boyd stoops from the car and lumbers inside. Last week, I hadn’t realized his height, but his legs unfold from the miniature interior, thin and spindly as a spider’s.

  I do another loop, ignoring the predictable buzz of Cole’s weekly call, his regular reminder of our shared regrets. And then one more, waiting until the last possible minute. Because I don’t want to be late, but I can’t bear to be early. To face Luci’s steely-eyed glare. Teatrera, she’d say, branding me a drama queen. Or Sawyer’s pitying hand on my back. Mostly, I don’t trust myself around Boyd. Not with the remnants of firewater still simmering my blood. My father had called it that, and I couldn’t disagree. Alcohol could burn your whole life down if you let it. No different than the wildfires that razed the Napa hillside.

  I position the Jeep directly across from Boyd’s bug in a stare down. Hardly satisfying with its innocent eyes. Its jolly face, the color of a dying daffodil. I don’t even enjoy kicking the tire as I pass or bumping the side panel with my hip. But I hope it leaves a mark.

  A blazing hot shower, a swipe of mascara, and a long swig of black coffee had brought me back to the land of the living. Still, my brain lags two steps behind me as I open the door to the student break room and blink into the fluorescent lights, stunned. The pleasant hum of small talk grates like a buzz saw, but I prefer it to the sudden silence. In the dead space, I feel their eyes on me.

  “Hello, everyone.” There’s only one seat left—sandwiched between Jane and Boyd, and I fill it, nodding at him. “I hope you all had a good week.”

  Luciana laughs—a spurt of scorn—but I dodge her eyes, delivering the group rules mindlessly. I could recite them in my sleep. Boyd is distracting me, running his thumb over his burn like a talisman. His backpack sits at his feet, upright and close to him, like a loyal dog. It’s partly unzipped, but, despite my efforts, I can’t quite see inside.

  “Who would like to begin?” I ask, hoping once somebody starts talking, I can disappear behind the veil of conversation and retreat into myself. Nodding along, making the occasional murmur of agreement. Passing the time until I can do what I came to do. Which I’ll admit involves me sneak-attacking Boyd with the yearbook I’d left on my passenger seat.

  “I’ll go,” Luciana says, raising her hand like an overeager student. My stomach curdles, a sloshing pit of leftover booze and ice cream. “For those of you who don’t know my story, I’ve got issues. Trust issues. Which started long before I met Mateo. And when he murdered my Isabella, he killed what was left of my faith in people. Muerte.” Of course, she says it right to me. Like our own private joke. Or a hex uttered with graveyard dirt and coffin nails in her pocket.

  “It’s not easy for me to make friends. But I did make one. And she broke my trust. She made me worry about her for six whole days, wondering if she was lying in a ditch somewhere, dead like my little girl. Then, she shows up acting like nothing happened.”

  Some doors are meant to stay closed. And I’m nailing a board over this one. The cryptic text I’d sent to Luciana before I’d gone dark. I don’t blame her for being pissed. I blame her for expecting things of me. Things I thought we’d both understood the other incapable of giving.

  “Maybe your friend didn’t know how you were feeling,” Jane suggests.

  I wince. For her. For what’s coming.

  “¿En serio? Since when am I not clear with my feelings, Jane?”

  Jane’s head jerks back, eyes wide. But she blinks bravely at Luciana. Stupidly and in awe, as if she’s staring directly at the sun.

  “Besides, I sent her—my so-called friend—fifteen texts.”

  Nine, actually. Who’s the drama queen now? Each one a variation on the dónde estás, Mollie theme.

  “I think Jane is onto something,” Sawyer says, with the kind of practiced n
eutrality it took me four years of grad school to master. And when he offers me an encouraging smile, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude. And guilt. Because I’m supposed to be the one keeping the basket cases in check. Not him.

  “This guy who served in my battalion went to the doctor for a physical when he got home from his third tour overseas. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and he dozed off on the doctor’s exam table. The doc came in and tapped his shoulder to wake him up. And he totally lost it. Leapt off the table, started cursing at her. Security escorted him out of the building. Of course, they didn’t know ten months earlier he’d been sleeping on duty at the front gate of our compound when an enemy mortar round struck the building.”

  Luciana cocks her head at him, stubborn and still primed for a fight. “¿Qué importa? What’s your point?”

  “My point is that it probably isn’t about you. Just like it wasn’t about that doctor my buddy cursed out. Sometimes other people’s stuff is so big they can’t see around it.”

  It’s a kick to the gut, and for a second, I lose my breath. Is that what he thinks of me?

  “Thank you for sharing, Sawyer.” In my therapist voice. I’m such a fraud. And a lousy friend. “What a perfect metaphor for loss. Some days I feel like I was dead asleep when I got ambushed by enemy fire.”

  When our eyes meet, he winks at me, knocking the rust off my old, tired heart again. Turns out it still works. Even if it cranks and groans like one of my dad’s hopeless cases.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he says.

  But Luci huffs at my psychobabble. “Enemy fire should never come from a friend. It’s bad enough I let that pendejo, Mateo, into my life. That I couldn’t see him for the wolf he was.”

  My chest aches as I force myself to look at her. “We’re only human, Luci. We’ve all made mistakes. I’m sure everyone in this group has regrets, things they’d do differently this time around.”

  Next to me, Boyd shifts in his seat, and I can feel him working up the nerve to say something. The air between us fizzes; his fingers coil into tight fists. I don’t want to look at him, but I can’t help myself. I want to show him I know he’s a liar.

  But when I turn, he’s right there, hazel eyes as innocent as his VW’s. His backpack is gaping now. He drops his gaze to his lap, but all I see is a gray hoodie crumpled on top, one arm loose and hanging out the side. Dakota had one just like it with Napa Grizzlies Swim Team appliqued on the back. I stick my hands beneath my thighs, so I won’t grab for it. Now that would be crazy.

  “What would you do differently?” he asks. “If you could.”

  I know he’s talking only to me.

  ****

  As soon as the hour is up, I spring from my seat, a sprinter off the line, my heart firing like a starter’s pistol. But before I reach the door, Luciana corners me with a saucy glare, allowing Boyd to duck out behind her. His long legs make quick work of the hallway, the hoodie stowed inside his backpack getting farther from me with every step.

  “Well?” Such a harmless word. But not the way she says it, lilting and vicious as a slap, in spite of her wry smile. I deserve it. Because she’d been the one to answer Boyd’s question, while I’d gaped, open-mouthed. I would’ve never showed up to that house party in Vallejo, she’d said. And Mateo de Leon would’ve been somebody I’d never met. Instead of the man who took everything from me. I owe her for that one, and I know it. And she knows I know.

  “Anything you’d like to say to me? Maybe lo siento? Or perdoname, por favor?”

  I give her arm a firm squeeze as she slips into her leather jacket. “I’m sorry, Luci. But Sawyer was right. It’s really not about you.”

  She starts to mount a protest, but I interrupt. “Tacos tomorrow, okay? I’ve got to—”

  I point up ahead to Boyd just as the exit door closes after him. It makes an impossibly loud noise. Crisp and final, like the snap of a twig under a heavy boot. I push past Luciana, leaving her shaking her head and muttering in Spanish.

  “Hey,” I call out to Boyd, as soon as I clear the door. The wide expanse of the parking lot looms between us. Boyd glides across it effortlessly, head down against the blustery wind that’s kicked up out of nowhere, raising goosebumps beneath my thin sweater. “Wait up.”

  He glances over his shoulder, and I give my best attempt at a friendly wave. I used to be good at that once upon a time. At cracking even the hardest nuts with a smile and a willing ear. But that person feels so far from me now. I regard her with wistfulness and a little embarrassment, the same way I do the love notes Cole and I had exchanged in our first year of dating. How sweet. How pathetic.

  This new version of me—bitter lunatic—eats love notes for breakfast. My arm feels wild and unhinged as I signal to Boyd, like it might pop from its socket. My face contorts, more Pennywise than Bozo. Because he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even slow down.

  Any second now he’ll be in his car and leaving. And he won’t come back. Not ever. He’ll take the answers with him. The answers I need in a way I can’t explain, as essential as breathing.

  A savage panic pierces my chest, splintering behind my breastbone. I stop, doubled over and gasping with the sudden sharpness of it. The way it steals the air from my lungs.

  “What’s your sister’s name?” The wind carries my thin voice back to me. As if I’d asked myself the question. With it, tiny whispers in my head. Dakota. Dakota. Dakota. “Because I didn’t find any Blackburns in the yearbook.”

  Boyd fumbles at the door of his VW, the sunny yellow now jaundiced beneath the street lamp, tinged with the green of an overcooked egg. His keys drop from his hand and strike the pavement with a clatter. He stares at them regretfully—we both do—lying there like a dead thing.

  I stagger toward him like a dead thing myself. When he finally pries his eyes from the pavement, he takes a step back, bumping up against his car. Next to him—his long limbs, his burn scar, his pockmarked cheeks—it looks cartoonish, ridiculously small and cheerful. I’d like to take a bat to it.

  “Who are you really?” I ask. Softer. Coaxing. How my father had murmured to the squirrels through the window. C’mon. Just a little closer, you rat bastard. Gimme a clean shot. “You can tell me the truth. Where’d you get Dakota’s hoodie?”

  “I—I don’t have her . . . I am telling the truth.”

  “I don’t believe you. You don’t even have a sister. Or a kid. Much less a dead one. You don’t belong in this group. Now, tell me who you are and how the fuck you knew my daughter before I call the police.”

  I hope I’m still drunk. That my frontal lobe—the responsible one—is out to lunch, pickled in Absolut and unable to come to the phone right now. Because I sound wasted even if I’ve never felt more sober. My brain, burned clean by rage. Not at Boyd. I know that on some level. But at my father. At Cole. Mostly at myself.

  “Mollie.” I shrug off Sawyer’s touch and catch his reflection, his worried frown, in the window of the VW. Further back, some of the group has gathered, watching me warily. “Relax.”

  Relax? That rankling word I’d always steered the psych interns away from, especially with an agitated patient. The implication behind it, the dismissal, prods like a stick to the ribs.

  A laugh scrapes up my throat, a vicious cackle. I’m the agitated patient now. I reach for Boyd’s keys, scooping them up before he can stop me. Before he can get away.

  “I am relaxed.”

  But I’m brandishing them now, squeezing them so tight, my palm hurts. Sawyer takes my wrist and lowers it gently, gesturing at Boyd.

  “The man is trying to say something.”

  Boyd’s cheeks are fire-red, his eyes tearing. “Mandy,” he whispers. “Amanda Phillips. She’s my half sister. That’s why you didn’t . . . uh . . . why there are no . . . you know, Blackburns.”

  He unzips his backpack and holds up a ratty gray sweatshirt in surrender. It
’s not Dakota’s. Of course it’s not. Hers is in an evidence room downtown. Her favorite, she’d taken it with her that day when she’d left the house. The police had found the sweatshirt in a ditch a mile from the lake. So it couldn’t be this one.

  The rage drains from me, a sudden bloodletting, and my legs weaken. I don’t have the strength to protest when Sawyer takes Boyd’s keys from my hand and returns them. Fast and furtive as a burrowing animal, Boyd opens his door and lowers himself inside. His engine fires, and he speeds out of the parking lot, zipping into the night.

  “Damn, Mollie. You hurt yourself.”

  When I look down, my shaking hand rests in Sawyer’s, tiny pricks of red dotting my palm where the key’s teeth dug in. I stare at it, at Sawyer’s fingers holding mine, stilling them, but only because I’m afraid to put my eyes anywhere else. To look at Luciana. Or Jane. Or Debbie.

  It’s only her second group and probably her last. Now that she’s realized what I am. The Lead Basket Case. But hardly fit to lead anyone.

  “And you scared that guy shitless. You really think your Shadow Man bops around town in a yellow bug?”

  I pull away from Sawyer, newly indignant. “Do you know who else drove a Beetle?”

  “Ren McCormack in Footloose?” The corner of his mouth tilts up ever so slightly in a wry smile I’d like to slap—or kiss—off him.

  “Ted Bundy, smartass. That’s who.”

  ****

  Sawyer insists on following me home, his headlights blinding me in the rearview every time he gets too close. To my foggy brain, it feels like a metaphor for something. Which is why I’m not letting him in. No matter how much I want to.