GREY SKY SEEPED into the lodge. Or perhaps it was Rudy Madicker’s pipe spilling strands of smoke into the overcrowded quarters.
“Ambulance’s got to drive in from town,” Atticus told me. His dirt-creased hands lingered in my hair. “Don’t got to be so nervous, cher. Your daddy left me in charge.”
“Why would my daddy leave you in charge? My family doesn’t know you.”
“I’ll tell you, nobody knows these swamps better than I do.”
“Where is he, then?” I asked. “Where’s my daddy?”
For the first time since finding us, his hands slid away from me. He turned and broadened his back, addressing my question as if the search crew filling the room had asked instead of me. “He’s down the way,” he said, fingers brushing the air. “Won’t be a minute, I’m sure.”
“But what is it that he’s doing?” I asked.
A woman with cherry-red hair stepped out from the crowd of searchers and drew her face close to mine. She was holding a camping mug, blue tin with tiny white spots. “He’s just through the woods a little, hon, not far from the dock.”
“Ida,” Atticus barked.
“Doesn’t he care that I’m here?” I asked.
Ida frowned. Her face was two inches away with a waxy musk. “He does, sweetpea, but we got word of an emergency, you see.”
“Now, why would ya — ” Atticus started, petulantly, grabbing her shoulder and pulling it back. It had not bothered me until then that the crowd was not speaking. Everyone stood crammed in the damp, boiling space with its heavy smell of wood and its old campy swamp tour maps pinned behind the cobwebbed front desk, sipping from their cups in silence.
I wanted to run to Saul, but two strangers with rolled-up sleeves were standing as staunch as lawn lions on either side of him and his family, like he was some kind of criminal.
“Why aren’t my parents here?” I demanded.
“We told ya, sweetpea.” Ida tugged her sleeve over her thumb and licked it, before using it to crack the dried blood on my cheeks.
“No, you didn’t,” I said. My breaths were speeding up, erratic. “That walkie-talkie, it told Mr. Madicker that you found someone. Who did you find?”
Ida pushed people aside and unwrapped me from the blanket. “Give her air, come on, give her air.”
“Who did you find?” I asked again, raising my voice as if yelling could shake some sense into the quiet.
“Here, come along, dear.” Ida helped me from the bench and led me to the lodge door. Atticus stretched an arm between her and the open door frame. She shouldered it out of the way. “You want a little girl who can’t breathe on your hands?”
Out on the dock, I sucked in streams of air.
“That helping any?” Ida asked.
It did not help any at all. I leaned over the ledge, the stilt-house lodge hovering over its misty reflection. It only made me dizzier. A fear had taken hold of me, dragging me closer to it the harder I clawed for a receding edge, until my breaths could barely squeeze their way out.
Ahead was darkness: darkness in the sky, darkness in the water, darkness between the trees. They had found someone.
Ida’s hands sprung forward. “Hey, now! Get on back here, child!”
I sped down the pier, leaping onto the edge of the woods where my feet clung to wet earth and my arms pulled me up by the rope of a willow branch.
I collided with shadow, crossing from light to darkness in a slippery jump. Behind me Ida shrieked. Thumps and jangly boot buckles hit the pier, catching up with me — but they were just sounds, secondary sensations as my heart pounded so hard it knocked my ears.
Chalky spars of light broke through the cypress. Roaming flashlights. People speaking in low murmurs. I could not see straight, the fear was mounting, ringing, and before every internal facet ripped it apart, a piece pushed through my lips like a clap of dust.
“Connie.”
I said it louder.
“Connie!”
The cypress rumbled.
“Bonavere?” My father’s voice called me through the trees. I felt how thin my breaths were. How fuzzy and blank my mind, everything tuning in and out with the sweep of some translucent panic. No sound, no sight, only slit-like nightmare flashes of my hands grabbing hold of arms and legs that were white-poured-over-blue, and lips like rubber violets, and wet coffee-brown hair tangling around my fingers.
Bowed lips parted up at me — not the right lips. Not the lips I knew. Not the hands, the arms, strange markings on these wrists. Why was the wrong nose pinched above her mouth? The wrong eyes? Green-black like dusty stone staring wild and wide and I did not know these eyes.
My father was all around me. “Bonavere! Bonavere!”
I saw my own limbs flailing, my hair tossing up and sprawling against the night.
“Bonnie, stop!” He held my head to his chest as I froze, heart slinking through my stomach. My breath was faint and wet, coughing into the sudden quiet. “Shhh, baby, it’s okay.” My father lowered himself to the ground, one arm tight enough to bruise around my ribs, as we stared at the body of the girl in front of us.
The dark blue of her dress was bright even in the darkness, and for some reason I thought how bright this blue was, with the dry moon shaking a cool dust over its folds. I had seen this dress before. Connie had needed it for a friend. I had been there when my mother bought it, in the young ladies section.
My stomach had a shivering jelly quality, rather suddenly, and it took some time before I realized that everything was pouring out of me. My thoughts were clear and floating far above me as I wondered if I had vomited my liver and heart onto the muddy grass.
It was the blueness of the dress. Mama, please, Connie had pleaded, it’s not too short, please, it’s her favourite colour. We had carried the dress so carefully that day, folding it over Connie’s lap in the car. Her and Mama chattering about the perfect wrapping paper for Suzanna DeClouet’s birthday.