by Robin Benway
“None of us are,” I said softly.
Oliver kept talking like I hadn’t said anything. “I didn’t know what to do at first because I didn’t want to turn my dad in, y’know? Like, this wasn’t my perfect scenario or anything. But he had let me take this forensic science class through the local high school and we had a field trip to the local precinct and they asked for volunteers to do the fingerprinting and I . . . I thought if it was true, that this way I would be able to see my mom without turning in my dad.” He shrugged and then laughed, high-pitched and a little hysterical. “And so I volunteered and the next day there were two police officers at our house. My dad wasn’t home, but I was.” He shrugged. “And that was it. Gone again.”
I didn’t say anything. The words I needed to say probably hadn’t been invented. A car drove past us, its lights flashing across our faces and making us both duck away from the brightness. When it passed, we came back together.
“Remember last week, when we were talking?” I said. “You said, what kind of kid doesn’t call their mom? But you did, Ollie. You did what you could when you could. And yeah, it’s not easy now but it won’t always be this difficult. It’ll get better.”
Oliver looked down at me. “Is that what everyone said when I first went missing? That it wouldn’t always be this difficult?”
I nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”
“And did you believe them?”
I smiled, my eyes filling with tears. “Nope. Because it never did get better. Not until you came back.”
Oliver kissed the top of my head and I curled up against his arm, wrapping my hand around his. The street was quiet around us, most of suburbia tucked away for the night.
“I’m sorry I was a jerk to your parents,” Oliver finally said after a while. “They’re always really nice to me.”
“You weren’t a jerk,” I said. “I was just nervous that you were going to out me for applying to UCSD. Whatever, it’s fine, I don’t care. But we should probably go back. Our parents might get worried.”
“Yeah, I know.” He squeezed my hands through the hoodie. “Thanks for coming after me.”
“Yeah, well, I needed some cardio, anyway,” I said, then wished I hadn’t made a joke.
He just wrinkled his nose at me, though, then stood up and pulled me to my feet. “Onward,” I said.
“Just so you know,” he said, “I’m probably going to be grounded again. So don’t expect a text or anything for a while.”
“Got it,” I said, but I didn’t think Maureen would ground him, not this time.
I thought that she would probably just be happy to see him come home.
When we got back to the house, Oliver kissed me quickly under the shadow of a bougainvillea tree, its pink petals brushing against the tops of our heads as we met in the middle. “You going up to your room?” he asked, and I could feel the words form on his lips.
“Soon,” I said. I could see my parents moving in our kitchen, their bodies casting long shadows out onto the backyard grass. Oliver followed my gaze, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll wait for you to turn off the lamp, then.”
“You don’t have to wait for me,” I said. “You’re probably exhausted. You should go to bed.”
“Oh my God, Emmy, one mom is enough right now.” But he was smiling as he said it, and I smiled back and then stood on my tiptoes to kiss him again. “Good night,” he whispered. “See you tomorrow.”
“’Kay,” I said, and we split up into our separate yards, our hands staying together until the last possible second, until just our fingertips touched. He swatted playfully at them as we parted, a brief smile crossing his face as if to let me know that he was all right, that everything had just been a joke, a gag to pass the time until something actually interesting happened.
I smiled, too, but I didn’t believe one bit of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When I finally managed to open the sliding-glass door and step into our living room, neither of my parents were in the room.
In fact, the only person sitting on the couch was Maureen.
She had her hand wrapped loosely around the stem of her almost empty wineglass, swirling it around in slow motion so that the wine climbed the sides of the glass and then oozed back down. The rivulets winding their way down to the bottom made it look as though the glass was crying. When Maureen heard me come in, she stopped.
“Emmy,” she said, but she didn’t sit up or even look at me. “I’m sorry you had to see all that.”
Her mascara was smudged, and so was her lipstick, which I later realized was just the red wine staining her mouth. “It’s okay,” I said automatically.
“No, it’s really not,” she sighed. “But you’re a polite girl, I know. You’ve always been very polite.”
“Thank you.” I glanced around for my parents, wondering if they could come rescue me from this conversation. I had seen Maureen break down in our kitchen many, many times, but I had never been alone with her. My parents had always buffered the situation.
I wondered if this was what adulthood was supposed to feel like, suddenly needing my parents and having them be just out of reach, leaving me to fend for myself.
“How is he?” Maureen asked. She started swirling the wine again, then took a sip.
“Okay,” I said. I put my hand on the back of a chair. “He’s home now if you want to talk to him.”
Maureen just laughed through her nose, a sound of disbelief. “Talk to him,” she repeated. “Oliver and I don’t talk. Or rather, he doesn’t talk to me.” She laughed again, but it sounded more like a sob. “You know, I’ve thought of a million different scenarios for him coming home, but not one of them ended with him hating me.”
I sat down in the chair across from her. If my parents weren’t going to steer this boat, then it was time to grab the oars. “Oliver’s in so much pain right now. He doesn’t . . . I don’t think he knows how to talk to you, or even what to say, you know? Everything is so different for him. It’s like . . . it’s like he barely knows who he is, much less who he is supposed to be.” I was trying to explain things without betraying his trust, but all I could do was fumble for words. And Maureen was a woman who had been given a lot of platitudes in her life.
“I don’t even know how to help him,” she sighed. “The guilt he must feel, the responsibility—”
“You have to ask him about who he is now,” I said. “Trust me. He has a lot to tell you. He doesn’t think you want to hear it, though.”
Maureen blinked away tears. “I don’t think he wants me to listen. I don’t think he wants anything to do with me at all.”
“Look,” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it to be. “When I was eight, my parents wouldn’t let me go to this slumber party because they said I was too young to stay over at someone else’s house. And I was so mad at them because everyone else was going, even Caro, but they wouldn’t let me. So I wrote this note and put it under their bedroom door. It said, ‘Dear Mom and Dad, I hate you. Love, Emmy.’”
Maureen smiled a little. “Like you would ever hate your parents.”
“But see? That’s my point. I didn’t really hate them, but I got mad at them because I knew that no matter what I said, I was safe with them. I could tell them I hated them in a thousand notes and they would still love me because they’re my mom and dad. I think . . . I think Oliver’s taking it out on you because he knows that, deep down, you’re not going to leave. You never really did. You just have to wait for him to come back around to you.”
Maureen’s eyes were filling with tears and I sat back in my chair, suddenly nervous. I wasn’t sure where “making Maureen cry” ranked on the list of things my parents didn’t want me to do, but I imagined it was pretty high up there.
“No, no, sweetheart,” Maureen said when she saw my face, quickly wiping her eyes and reaching for my hand. “It’s all right, I’m not upset. Well”—she laughed a little to herself—“I am, obviously, but not at you. You’r
e just very smart.”
“I feel like that’s still up for negotiation,” I said, and then glanced up as my mom (finally, oh my God) came into the room.
“Everything all right?” she asked as Maureen started to stand up. “Maureen, do you—?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I should probably go home. Emmy says that Oliver is there, so . . .”
My mom wrapped her arm around my shoulder as Maureen gathered her things, and I let her keep it there. Usually, it feels like a trap, like maybe this time she’s not going to let me go, but for the first time in a long while, I wanted to stay close to her.
It had been a long, long night.
“I’ll walk you home,” my mom said to Maureen, giving me a final squeeze, and my shoulders felt cold when her arm left them. “Just to make sure you get there safely.”
Maureen nodded, then took two quick steps forward and grabbed me in a hug. I suspected that its fierceness and strength was meant for Oliver, not me, but this wasn’t the first time I had felt that way. For the first few months after Oliver went missing, she would hug me so hard that it made me wince.
It was just frightening to think that even now, with Oliver home and safe in his bedroom, Maureen still reached for me instead of him.
“Your daughter is very smart,” Maureen said to my mom as she pulled away, then rubbed her thumb across my cheek.
“Yes, she is,” my mom said, then gave me a wink as she pulled the sliding door open for Maureen. I could hear Maureen say something to my mom, but she was already outside, and I waited until my mom shut the door behind them before making a hasty escape out of the room.
I found my dad in the kitchen. Or, to be more exact, I found my dad’s socked feet standing behind the open refrigerator door. There was a lot of muffled shuffling sounds, followed by a clatter. “Dad?”
He poked his head around the door. “Oh, hi,” he said, like I had been there all along. “Are you starving? I’m starving. I don’t know about you, but that wasn’t the most relaxing dinner.”
“Are there leftovers?” I asked, coming into the kitchen and boosting myself up on the countertop. Unlike my mom, my dad didn’t shoo me down.
“Are there leftovers?” he repeated. “Is that a joke? Have you seen your mom’s organizational skills?”
“I caught her using the label maker once,” I told him. “She said she wasn’t, but I know she was.”
“She was,” my dad agreed. He rummaged around, then pulled out a Tupperware container. “What do we think this is? Guess correctly and you win it.”
I looked at it. “Chicken salad. The Waldorf one, with grapes and walnuts.”
My dad opened it, gave it a sniff, then handed it to me. “Congratulations, you get to eat with your father.”
“Yay,” I said, then leaned down to get a fork out of the drawer. “What are you having?”
He found another container. “Mac and cheese, apparently,” he said.
“That’s a pretty good consolation prize,” I said, passing him a fork.
“Not too shabby,” he agreed.
We ate in silence for a minute. I hadn’t realized just how starving I had been and the chicken salad was really good. “So,” my dad finally said. “Tonight.”
“Tonight,” I repeated, still shoveling in food. He passed me a napkin. “Thanks. Yeah, tonight was . . .”
“Tonight sucked,” my dad said, and I started to laugh hearing him say that. “What?” He smiled at me. “Isn’t that the slang you kids are using? The lingo? Do I sound hip?”
I just shook my head. “The only hip I hear is the sound of yours breaking.”
“Ohhhh!” he cried, like I had just made a three-point shot from the free-throw line. “That’s a good one. Let no one say that my daughter doesn’t have a few zingers in her back pocket.”
“Yeah, well, I get it from my dad.”
“Yes, you do, kid.”
I took another bite of salad and chewed. Hearing him call me “kid” reminded me of what Oliver had said about his dad. “Maureen wants to do this TV show,” I said. I hadn’t been planning to say anything, so I was as surprised as my dad was to hear me say that. “To find Keith. Oliver’s dad. It’s like a crime show or something, but Oliver doesn’t want to do it.”
My dad just nodded and shoved the food around in his container. “Did he tell you that?”
“Yeah. He says, um, he says he really misses his dad. Like, as much as he missed his mom back when he first disappeared.” It was getting a little more difficult to chew and I set the salad down, suddenly not as hungry as I had been.
“What do you think?” my dad asked me.
“I think that Keith should go to jail or whatever. I mean, he did a really bad thing. But at the same time . . .”
“Punishing Keith punishes Oliver, too?” my dad guessed, and I nodded.
“It’s just hard to see him feel this bad,” I said. “Like, he didn’t do anything but he keeps getting hurt, anyway. I don’t like watching him go through this.”
My dad set down his food, too, then hopped up on the counter next to me. “So. You and Oliver.”
I looked up at him, surprised. “Me,” I said. “And Oliver.”
“Those are two very different sentences, Emmy. Look,” he added quickly before I could protest. “I saw you two at the table tonight. I know there was a lot going on, it got chaotic there, but I saw you two looking at each other. And I know what I saw.”
I was blushing furiously now, untucking my hair from behind my ear so my dad couldn’t see my face. “He’s always been my friend,” I said. “Even when he wasn’t here, okay? And he still is, even though we’re . . .”
“No, I know, sweetie. But Oliver has a lot of pain right now, and I don’t want you to take his burden on yourself.” My dad stroked my hair, eventually uncovering my face, and I let him.
“Dad, it’s, like, ten years too late to worry about that,” I said.
“I know,” he said again. “You saw a lot. Your mom and I tried to protect you from most of it, but Oliver was your friend and he disappeared and there aren’t many ways you can hide that from your kid.” He was still stroking my hair. “But I don’t want you to stay in that place forever. And I don’t want Oliver to stay there, either. You kids have a chance to move on.”
“It’s sort of hard when . . . when you don’t know how.” The words hurt even as I said them and realized how true they were. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been worried or scared for Oliver. How do you move on from that? I could feel tears pricking at my eyes. Do not cry, I told myself. Do not cry, do not cry, do not cry.
“Well, that’s growing up, isn’t it?” my dad said. “You don’t always have to know. And things aren’t always fair. You just have to keep moving forward. A step in one direction.”
“Do you think Maureen should do the TV show?” I asked after a few minutes, while my dad rubbed my back.
“I think.” My dad thought for a minute. “I think that both Maureen and Oliver want answers that they might never get. And they need to figure out how to deal with that.”
I looked up at my dad. “Tonight, when Oliver and I were talking, I said I’d still love you, even if you kidnapped me. I really would. I get how he feels.”
My dad smiled. “That’s the nicest and most sociopathic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said, then wrapped my arms around his neck and hugged him tight. I suddenly wanted to tell him everything—UCSD and surfing and kissing Oliver at the party—but I stopped myself.
One thing at a time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The buzz at school started quietly at first, like one tiny mosquito that kept floating around near you, but always just out of reach so you couldn’t squish it. Then it got progressively louder after lunch, and by the time school ended, it was like someone had smashed a wasps’ nest full of gossip onto the floor.
“Why’s everyone freaking out?” I aske
d Drew once I ran into him. I mean, literally ran into him. He was wearing his soccer uniform and carrying his cleats in one hand.
“UCs are notifying people!” he yelled as he kept running. “Sorry, the bus is leaving! Away game!” He blew kisses in my general direction as he turned the corner, and to be honest, it was a good thing he couldn’t talk.
Because I had gone numb.
The admission letters had arrived. The yes or no I had been waiting for for four months—no, actually, more like four years—was sitting in an in-box somewhere for me, and I suddenly felt terrified no matter what the answer would be.
What was I supposed to do? I immediately started to text Caro, just out of pure instinct, but stopped before I could even start. I couldn’t tell Caro, not yet. She didn’t even know that I had applied to UCSD. In fact, only one person in the entire world knew what I had done, and I needed to find him immediately.
Oliver was coming out of the guidance counselor’s office when I bumped into him. He was scowling a little and had a tight grip on both straps of his backpack, but he smiled when he saw me. “Hey!” he said. “Why are you still—wait, what’s wrong?”
I just shook my head and Oliver bent down and grasped my shoulders. “Em. You’re totally white right now. Are you okay? Did something happen?”
“Acceptance letters are in,” I whispered, and Oliver’s eyes grew as wide and round as I knew mine were.
“They are?” he whispered back. “What did it say?”
“I don’t know!” I was starting to feel a little hysterical. “I haven’t looked yet! And I can’t go do it at home because my mom’s there and she . . .”
“Got it,” he said. “What about the library?”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t know what the news is, or how I’m going to react, but either way, I don’t want to have my reaction in the school library!”
“Okay, okay, calm down.” Oliver squeezed my arms again and I took a deep breath. “You can’t just check it on your phone?”
I glanced at my phone. “I have two percent battery—wait, now it’s one percent battery—left.”
