Chapter 16

I guess I was paying too much attention to the cymbals, because I never felt my phone buzz in my pocket. When I reach for it, I see three texts from Dad, all sent in the last fifteen minutes.

Where are you

Calling Mama now

Mama’s heading home, calling police, please answer

“No!” I shout, pressing my palm into my forehead. My heart races. I fumble with the phone—

Coming home now

Don’t call police I’m fine

“Your dad woke up?” Tai says. “Wow. That sucks.”

“You’re telling me,” I say. “My parents will be so mad.” Even though I’m annoyed, I feel guilty too. I know they have a right to be upset.

“You want me to come in with you?” Tai asks. “Try to explain?”

“No,” I say. “Please don’t come in.” It’s hard to think about the scene Mama will make when she sees me. “Let’s just get back fast.”

At home, I turn the knob quietly, even though I know Dad’s awake and Mama’s car is already in the driveway. I wonder if they’ll dock her pay for leaving in the middle of a shift. I wonder what she said—an emergency. My daughter. Everybody must have been thinking: Not again. My stomach flip-flops, and I feel sick.

I tiptoe into the living room. Maybe some small part of me thinks that if I don’t make noise, they’ll forget I snuck out. Forget I scared them to death. I’ll go into the living room and they’ll be watching TV, eating microwave popcorn. Mama will scoot over on the couch and pat the warm spot next to her and tell me to snuggle in, here’s a blanket. Maybe it will be okay.

But the first thing I see is Mama’s face, wet with tears. Dad’s sitting beside her, one hand on her back, the other over his eyes.

I stand perfectly still. When Mama sees me, she starts crying for real, and that makes Dad move his hand away from his eyes and stand up like he’s about to say something. Instead, he sits back down and puts his face back in his hands. His shoulders shake.

It is so weird to watch my parents cry. The last time was at Amos’s funeral. And that wasn’t as weird because I was crying too. I can go back to the memory of that day, but I can’t stay very long. It just comes in flashes. The casket, shiny polished wood. His face, unspeaking. Someone’s voice telling me It’s okay, you can touch him, and me wanting to hit the voice because this wasn’t really him. The preacher opening his Bible, then closing it. Not saying anything for a long, long time. Muffled cries and tissues. So many casseroles afterward, and people telling me to eat even though I didn’t want to, not ever again. And Mama and Dad, crumpled against each other.

“I’m okay, you guys,” I say, and that makes Mama cry harder. She blows her nose and looks right at me.

“You don’t get to do this,” Mama says. “Do you have any idea what we—” She stops, buries her face in her hands.

“Okay, I’m sorry, but—”

Dad cuts me off. “If you’re going to sneak out, shouldn’t you at least have your phone on you?”

“I did have it, I…” But I stop then and look at the floor. I know having it isn’t really the point if I’m not going to listen for it.

“We bought you that phone for a reason,” Dad says. “So we wouldn’t have to wonder where you were, the way we had to wonder about—” Then he stops too, shakes his head. “What were you thinking, Addie?”

Dad, Mama, me, we all just sit there with springs and wires popping out of our bodies. Anger fizzles inside me, a spitting current. They’re going to worry about me too much forever now. Maybe this is what happens when someone dies. A thing inside everyone else breaks and you just have to know you’ll never really be able to fix it.

I feel the whale tooth cutting into my pocket, a reminder of everything I lost. And all I have left. And just then, I feel that warmth surround me.

I don’t feel like I have very much to lose when I tell them about Amos and the creature. Maybe when Mama hears his name, she’ll cry harder. Maybe Dad will clench his jaw and hold up his hand, tell me to stop talking. But then again, maybe they’ll listen. Because it’s either that, or keep on breaking.

I take a deep breath. “I was working on a project for Amos.” The warmth gets stronger, holding tight.

Mama’s face stills then and she looks up, the crumpled tissue rolling from her hand to the floor. Her eyes find mine. It’s hard to look at her—at her forehead, full of lines so deep now they look like the furrows in Uncle Mark’s fields.

But I do look at her. I keep going. “He believed something about the lake—he thought there was… something living down there. He wanted to prove it.”

“Something?” Dad says. “Something, like what?”

“Like a creature,” I say.

“A creature?” Dad’s voice cracks roughly. “What kind of creature?”

I squirm under Dad’s gaze. “You know how we read those stories growing up, like about mysterious animals or… magical things living in the woods and the water? Amos thought there could be something like that in Maple Lake.”

Mama looks up at the ceiling and sighs. “Nothing could beat his imagination,” she says. Then she looks at me. “I suppose he thought only he could see it?”

“It had more to do with believing,” I say. “I think he figured if you believed in it, you’d see it. He wanted me to help him investigate before he—” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Before he died. I didn’t pay much attention at first, but now I’m kind of trying to go back and see if his clues were real.”

“And that’s why you snuck out of the house in the middle of the night?” Mama asks, shaking her head. “To find a magical creature?”

Then her eyes get really big. She doesn’t have to say anything out loud; I see everything in her eyes. Amos sneaking out. The cold, the ice, the slipping and cracking. She knows now what he was looking for.

The air around us freezes, and I shiver in the summer heat. I need to keep talking, to just answer Mama’s question like I don’t know what she just realized.

“That’s, um—that’s most of it,” I say. “I mean, I can see how it sounds kind of crazy. But it’s not just about finding a creature. I think the pollution in the lake might be related. And I want to figure out how.”

Mama just looks at me, and I can tell it isn’t anger that makes her eyes flare like sparklers, then go dim. It’s something else. Sadness, maybe.

“Well,” Dad says, his voice hard and heavy. “You’re grounded. All week. I bring you to the biological station, your mother or I pick you up, but otherwise you stay in your room. No library, no trips to the ice cream shop or Teddy’s, no bike rides. And no calf. That’s it.”

“But Liza needs me!” I say. “Why do you want to punish her too?”

“Your cousin will be fine,” Dad says. “She knows what she’s doing. Besides, I don’t think you’ve been going to the farm nearly as much as she expected you to.”

I stare at the ground, my cheeks puffed out, my eyes burning. Dad’s right, and it’s not like Liza’s going to be sympathetic when she finds out I can’t help with Rascal because I was out at Maple Lake.

At least I can still go to the biological station—I really need to get back to my research.

Dad stands up and puts his hand on my shoulder. Its heavy weight rests there. “Don’t ever do that again,” he says quietly. Then he leaves the room.

Mama surprises me then. She leans forward and takes my face in her hands. And even though her eyes are still wet, she smiles. It almost feels like that time in the lake when she held my face and said, “My little girl.” Now, she strokes my hair. And then, so sadly I feel the rest of my heart flop out and slither away, she says: “Don’t you know there isn’t such a thing as magic?”

I look down at the floor, blinking back tears.