This time, it is me who hears the footsteps, hears the sob that escapes despite the hand pressed against it, trying to hold it in. I lay awake, listening, as Shay moves down the hall. The door squeaks as she enters the kitchen. I can’t hear the birds yet, but I can just make out the trees outside my window.
I’ve been back for a week now. A week of eating and sleeping and not answering the phone. Shay took the week off from work. It’s the biggest story to hit Seattle since…well, since anyone can remember.
There was a compass on board, so we headed east, hoping we’d bump into land before we ran out of gas. We saw the ferry before they saw us, and we found the flares in the emergency kit. At first, it was just logistics. Calling parents, getting back to Seattle. Then the media storm broke on us the next day. We woke up famous.
Emily’s parents took her away, down south to Rocky’s sister in Portland. Torie and Jeff have been on Good Morning America, the Today show, and I hear they’ll be on the cover of People next week. They are heroes. The oldest kids who protected the rest of us. They are getting everything they wanted, and I wish them well with celebrity. Somehow I doubt they’ll be able to handle it.
All the rest of the kids have landed back at home—like Kendall—or in social services—like Tate.
They found Jonah waiting on the beach, sitting barefoot, staring out to sea, the house still smoking behind him.
He had started out with street kids. Maybe in the beginning he was really trying to help them. Torie and Jeff were the first. Then he started contacting kids on the Internet. He’d make sure they answered him in cyber-cafés and didn’t tell their parents. When he found out that Emily had written him on her computer, he’d made her take it with her when she came to meet him. Because Beewick Island was so small, he wiped the library computers himself. Emily let him into Rocky’s and he wiped Zed’s computer, too, because Emily had used it. He had gotten sloppy with Emily, because she could be traced through the computer camp, and Kendall had already disappeared. So he asked his publicity department to remove her from the photos, just in case one got into the Seattle papers and triggered a link.
The board of Jonah’s company has hired the best defense team in the country, and it looks like they’ll plead the insanity defense.
I told Shay and Diego all about it, or about most of it. I couldn’t tell them the way Jonah ate away at my insides, the way he made me hurt. But I think they knew. Diego got in about fifty pounds of trouble for taking me to the park that day. I don’t think Shay had forgiven him until I came back.
I don’t think Diego had forgiven himself, either. It turned out that one of those three-year-olds in the park had gotten lost and hysterical, and by the time Diego returned the little boy to one of the nature walk instructors, I was gone.
I think Shay must have lost ten pounds while I was away, and she doesn’t even mention it. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she walked into the room at the Seattle police station. I’ll never forget how she held me, like I belonged to her, like losing me would have killed her. I didn’t know she felt that way.
I swing my legs over the bed. I pad outside to the kitchen. Shay is sitting at the kitchen table with a wadded up tissue in her hand. She’s staring out at the darkness. A pot of milk is on the stove on a low flame.
“So did you and Mom become blonds?” I ask, sitting down.
Shay’s eyes are red-rimmed. Her mouth is taut from crying, from trying not to cry. I see raw grief on her face, and it stuns me. She’s been hiding it from me, I realize. She didn’t want to add to mine. She had let me know, in a thousand ways, how much she missed my mom, but she never let me see her pain. I’m not sure if that was the right way to go, but I understand.
She clears her throat. “Carrie looked fantastic. Like she’d spent a month in the sun. I wanted to look just like her, so I left it on too long. It came out sort of platinum, and not in a good way. So we tried to dye it back, and it sort of looked greenish. So she looks at me, and she says, ‘Maybe we should try on hats.’ I just remember lying on the bathroom floor, laughing so hard. She could laugh so hard…”
“She would totally lose control.”
Shay looks down at her hands. “You know, I just remembered this. I said something about how we’d have to learn to dye our own hair because we’d have to get rid of the gray when we got older, and Carrie said, ‘I’ll never have gray hair.’ She said it totally seriously. I thought she meant she’d be lucky. But now I wonder if…”
“If she knew she’d never get old. If she was…like me.”
“Maybe that’s why she was always in such a hurry to live her life.”
I absorb this. I wonder what it would be like, feeling that you wouldn’t live long. I realize there are parts to my mom that I didn’t know, deep parts, quirky parts. It’s not just my memories that define her. Shay lost her, too. I want to hear those memories now. Now I’m ready to listen.
Shay gets up and pours out the hot milk. She’s made enough for two, just in case.
“Do you ever…sense her?” she asks. I can tell this is hard for her to get out. And I can tell how badly she wants me to say yes.
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s absolutely nothing good about being psychic that I can see. It’s a curse.”
She takes a sharp, indrawn breath as she breaks up the chocolate into two mugs and brings them to the table. Then she pours in the milk. We stir, our spoons gently tinkling.
“You got ten kids out of hell because of it. That’s good.”
“It almost didn’t happen that way.”
“But it did.” Shay blows on her drink. “You can use it. Not let it use you. That’s all I’m saying.”
We take a sip at the same moment, and swallow.
“Do you still get flashes of him?” Shay asks.
I shake my head firmly. “Not new ones.” The memory of what he had done and seen is enough to keep me awake at night. The memories of the kids I tapped into gave me a glimpse into a world I didn’t want to know, a place where love had withered at its root.
It’s going to take me time.
“Loss can stretch you into a new shape,” Shay says. “Jonah was handed too much, and he didn’t have the foundation to handle it. He couldn’t find a way to live that made sense.”
I take my first sip. I like it like this, when the chocolate has just started to melt, when I taste milk and just the beginning of the sweetness.
“You’ll always be sad, Gracie,” Shay says. “That doesn’t mean you’ll never be happy.”
“Yeah,” I say.
The light is changing. It is blue, bluer than blue. We hear the birds begin to squawk.
“By the way,” I tell her, “Joe Fusilli has a crush on you.”
A small smile curves her lips. “Yeah?”
She props her bare feet up on the sill. I put my feet next to hers. I remember the day I stared at her feet and transferred all my hatred onto her toes. Now I see how her foot is shaped like mine, how her toes are all almost the same size, like mine. I hold the warm cup cradled against my chest. In his loony way, Jonah was right about something.
You just can’t get away from family.