We don’t talk on the ride home. I’m thinking about my answers to the detective’s questions. How many times had I said I don’t know? Had I really known Emily all that well? Had I ever really listened to her? Or was I too busy listening to my own head?
I wish I’d turned the hose on her feet, too.
Shay pulls into the driveway. She turns off the car, but she doesn’t move. “Gracie, is there anything you didn’t want to say in front of Emily’s parents?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Something Emily might have said, or done, and you don’t want to get her in trouble.”
“That would be pretty stupid of me,” I say. “She’s pretty much in the worst trouble I can imagine right now.”
“Yeah. If you want to talk—”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I say, shouldering open my door. Which, I admit, is a pretty stupid thing to say, considering my best-friend-by-default is missing. But what’s the good of talking about anything? Adults just don’t get it. They think that expressing your feelings makes them go away. Next, Shay would be tossing stuffed animals at me to hug.
Shay gets out of the car. It’s cooler now. The heat of the day has dissolved into a breeze that makes the pines whisper.
“I don’t think I can sleep yet,” Shay says as she opens the front door. “Do you want to share some cookies and milk? Or I could make omelettes.”
“Do you always think you can fix things with food?” I ask. I’m tired, and the question comes out snottier than I meant it to. The truth is, I’m so stuffed full of the emotion I felt at the Carbonel house I feel sick.
Shay looks hurt for a minute. She runs a hand through her springy hair and takes a breath. I can tell she’s searching for the right thing to say. “No,” she says finally.
“I think I’ll just go to bed,” I say.
“All right, sweetie,” Shay says, but I’m already walking down the hall.
I pull on a big T-shirt and climb into bed. My room is tiny, but I don’t mind. There’s something about it that makes me feel safe. My mom used to say, “Climb into your nest,” when I was a little kid, and pull up the blankets and mound the pillows and stuffed animals around me. This room reminds me of that, in a way.
It used to be a mud room, a sort of summer porch in the back of the house. Shay and Diego went to some trouble to fix it up, I guess. Shay had winterized it. They painted the floor dark blue and the windowsills yellow. Shay bought an old dresser and painted it white. My bed has a patchwork quilt with moons on it. White gauzy curtains hang at the windows now, because it’s summer, but in winter Shay had hung thick velvet drapes to keep out drafts. Now that’s it’s warm I can open the windows all the way, and hear all the night noises outside. I can smell the Sound and hear the foghorns. Sometimes I feel I’m on a big liner, out in the middle of the ocean. That’s how far away I feel.
I reach for my mp3 player. I’ve filled it with songs my mom loved, dopey songs I never listened to when she was around. We used to have a serious difference in musical tastes. But now when my head is full of things I don’t want to think about, which is most of the time, I just drown them out. If something plays in my head, I can’t hear what I’m thinking. Tonight I listen to Boy George singing “Karma Chameleon.”
But I can’t stop thinking about the dread I’d seen in Joe Fusilli. It wasn’t in his eyes, or his face, or things he said. It was there inside him.
He doesn’t think Emily is coming home tonight.
I don’t think so, either.
This is how it started.
When I was ten, I went to the shore with my best friend, Annie Keegan, and her three brothers. Her mom set up the cooler and blanket and the chairs, and we all ran into the ocean. Mrs. Keegan yelled for us to wait for her, but we pretended we didn’t hear her over the wind and the seagulls.
I remember how high the waves were, but I didn’t want Annie’s brothers to tease me about being a wimp, so I waded right in. I was doing okay until I misjudged a wave. I remember being taken over by the wave, how I tumbled and tumbled, how I tried to swim and couldn’t. The force of the wave was incredible. I couldn’t get my head above water. Then when I did, another wave was coming, and that one hit me, too. I swallowed water and I suddenly knew I was drowning. I don’t remember that part very clearly, just that things slowed down, but I still couldn’t get out of the grip of the wave.
The next thing I knew, I was on the beach. I heard a voice clearly in my head, a voice I didn’t recognize. It was saying, Come on, come on, come on, come on. I opened my eyes. A lifeguard was looking down at me. Oh please oh please oh please…She had blue eyes that were filled with fear. Her freckles stood out against her tan like blotches.
I saw the relief on her face and I also felt it. It flooded my body, like it was inside me. Then I started to cough and threw up on her leg.
Mrs. Keegan wrapped me in a towel and hugged me. I remember that so clearly. How scared everyone looked, how the lifeguard sagged down on the sand, how the other lifeguards clustered around her and me. I remember Mrs. Keegan’s hair blowing into my mouth, and that it tasted like salt. Everything looked different, somehow, like the world was sharper than it had been. Everything was louder. I could feel the day like it had weight, like I could feel seconds passing like air currents, like I could cup my hands and collect moments like water.
Then I sat on the blanket for a while, and drank some water, and ate a chocolate chip cookie, and things shifted again, and I felt normal.
Mrs. Keegan asked me if I was still scared. I said no. Mrs. Keegan smiled and said she thought the lifeguard had been more scared than I was. She said the lifeguard had to go home—it had been her first day on the job.
Somehow I’d already known that. I figured I’d overheard someone saying it. I said something about how her voice had called me back, saying, come on, come on and please please please…
Mrs. Keegan shook her head. “The lifeguard never said anything. She was trying to resuscitate you. Nobody said anything. We were all frozen. Everything went very quiet. I think even the seagulls stopped squawking.”
I stopped asking questions and chewed on this along with my cookie. The lifeguard hadn’t spoken, but I’d heard her voice. I didn’t know what to make of that, so I just hoped I wouldn’t get in trouble when I got home for not listening to Mrs. Keegan and running into the surf.
I didn’t realize everything that had changed until later, until after I began to see things and feel things. It’s hard to explain. People talk, and I hear what they’re saying, but I also see something in a flash, like a digital photograph starting out jagged and then filling in.
I finally told Mom. It took her a while to accept it. Then after I told her that something was wrong in Uncle Owen’s chest and two days later he was in the ER, she got serious. She called a couple of places and thought about getting me tested, but neither of us wanted to do that. I didn’t want it to be real, somehow. I don’t think Mom did, either. She was a very practical person. I think she just wanted it to go away. I couldn’t blame her. So did I.
I still do.
I turn up the music. I don’t want to think about where Emily is. I don’t want to know what’s happening to her. It will be a long time before I’m able to close my eyes.
I’m afraid of what I’ll see if I do.