Sometimes just a question will rock a household, even if the answer is what you want to hear. I can tell that Shay is worried about the crowd Diego is hanging with. Diego is a pretty independent guy, so it’s unusual that he’s spending all this time with Marigold’s brother.
The fact that my father has suddenly shown up hasn’t made things any easier. When he calls on Sunday, I tell him I’m busy. I’m just not ready to deal with it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But even though I tell him I’m not ready, I still think about him all day, so what’s the point? I can feel his presence on the island. I wonder what else he has to tell me. I wonder if I can ever ask the questions that burn me up inside. I know he’s staying at the inn in Greystone Harbor, and so I stick close to home all afternoon. I don’t want to run into him in town.
Shay has to work on Sunday afternoon, and Diego is off with Marigold, so I take out the photo album my mom made for me. I don’t have that many photos of my dad in it, but I’ve memorized every one.
There is one I used to look at all the time, taken before they were married. He’s at the beach, and he’s wearing a dark T-shirt and loose khaki pants. They’re rolled up at the ankles. He’s sitting in the sand, his hands around his knees. The wind is blowing his hair, and he’s laughing. Really laughing. This is the photograph that used to break me, because he looks so happy. So handsome. So much like a dad someone would want.
What is real? How much of what I see is influenced by how I feel? Do I want my father to be bad, or good?
I am a person who already has problems with reality. I see things that aren’t there. But my psychic ability isn’t going to help me figure out my own life—it doesn’t work that way. It just confuses things more. I don’t know if the feelings I’m picking up from him are true or not. I don’t know if the yearning I felt in him the other night is real.
I flip through the pages of the album. When I was born, my mom and dad lived in a tiny house in Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. There’s one photograph that my mom said my dad took of me. I’m probably about two, I guess. I’m sitting on the lawn, wearing my mom’s hat, which makes me look like a baby version of the Cat in the Hat. My father picked the wrong place to stand, because the sun is casting his shadow on the lawn next to me. Some of his shadow lies over me.
It always has. It’s all I ever had of him—a shadow. Now I have the real thing, the real man, the one I’ve hated. The one I’ve loved. The one who broke my life into two pieces.
I close the book. I’d rather have the pictures, have the shadow. The man is too real.
It’s late when Shay struggles in the door, carrying grocery bags. I run forward to help her. We go toward the back of the house and put the grocery bags on the counter. Instead of unpacking them, Shay plops down in a kitchen chair, still in her coat.
“Founders Realty was vandalized last night,” she says.
“What did the vandals do?”
“Threw some files on the floor, put trash on the desks, unplugged the little refrigerator, stuff like that,” Shay says. “Joe says it’s like they didn’t want to do too much damage to push it into a serious crime, which sounds like—”
“Teenagers,” I say. “Do you think it could be Mason?”
Shay shrugs out of her coat. “Diego has always been sort of idiot-proof,” she says. “I mean, even as a kid, he knew what kids to avoid. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. But he’s in love. Sometimes you’re looking so hard at who you love that…you miss things. Big things. Because you’re trying to fit your love into the kind of thing you want it to be.”
“Is he really in love with Marigold?” I ask.
Shay smiles gently. “Yeah. Look, Gracie, I’m as surprised as you are that it’s this girl. But love is love. He’s got to go through it. And we have to stay out of it.”
She says this last part with meaning, and I nod slowly. “I guess I haven’t been so nice about Marigold sometimes.”
“So I hear. Let’s just try to keep our mouths shut and support him, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Joe will find out who’s doing this. That’s his job. Not ours. Your job is to do your homework, and my job is to get through this next few weeks with my job, and then we’ll all be happy again. Right?”
“Absolutely.” We smile at each other. We’ve been talking in the dark. It reminds me of the early mornings we once spent together, when I first moved here and wasn’t talking to anyone. When I’d wake up in a panic, I’d sit in the kitchen, and somehow Shay would know I was awake, and come and join me. She wouldn’t say a word, just pad around the kitchen warming up milk and cups until my crying stopped. She wouldn’t even touch me. She knew if she’d touched me, I’d run back in my room. So she’d make hot chocolate, and we’d sit in silence, sipping the hot drink, and watching the light turn from navy to deep blue. And then, still without saying a word, I’d wash the cups and the milk pan, and we’d both go back to bed.
I have this, I think. I don’t need him. I have this.
“Well, I’m going to take a shower, and then start dinner,” Shay says. “Maybe trays in front of the fire tonight. I’m beat.” She heads for her room, stretching as she goes.
I head to my room, which used to be a mudroom that Shay and Diego had fixed up for me. I reach out for the light switch, but for a moment, I get disoriented. I’m not seeing the room as it is, with glass panes. I see a broken screen, blowing. I see a door where a window is now.
And I smell that smell again, mildew and rot and staleness, as if the house had been shut up for years and years. I can’t find the light switch, and my heart is pounding, and suddenly I feel terror well up in me, because the floor is sticky underneath my feet.
I see it in flashes. Footprints on floorboards, the outline smudged and rusty-looking.
Blood. Someone walked in the blood.
Clean it up clean it up clean it up…
A bloody towel.
The smell of it in the house.
“No!” I shout, and I step back, my hand desperately scrabbling for the light switch. Light floods the room, and it’s just my room again, with the headboard painted yellow and the blue floor and the patterned curtains. I can hear Shay in the shower, singing a Joni Mitchell song.
I sink down on the bed and grab my pillow and squeeze it.
I don’t want to see what I see.
I want it to go away.
I know that whatever it was that I saw—past or future—was murder.