I’D FORGOTTEN HOW COLD SEATTLE is in March. Summer won’t finally arrive until July. It’s already eighty degrees in Phoenix.
My hand and its pen shake under the chill. Or shake under something, anyway.
Dear Rae,
There was this girl who transferred into my fifth grade class named Lenni Hollingsworth. She used to say that she could tell if someone wasn’t from New York by the way they’d wait at the edge of the street for the Walk sign to turn. Real New Yorkers, she said, would just walk when the coast was clear. I found out later that Lenni actually grew up on Staten Island and only went into the city when she needed to buy new shoes.
Here’s how you knew I wasn’t from Phoenix: I was so fucking lonely that all I wanted was to be alone. When real, achy loneliness kicks in, this is the kind of self-fulfilling destiny that ensues. The kind that makes you want to wrap yourself in a tight ball and imagine the world moving past you, unaware that the curled up thing in the corner is alive and has a name. That same achy loneliness is probably what first made you notice me. People like you have senses specifically tuned to people like me. And they have talents to make people like me decide we don’t actually want that balled-up-tight isolation after all.
You saw me get off the bus, hydraulics sighing like their job was really hard. You watched me until I saw you, then you smirked and kept walking. You just wanted to make sure I saw you see me. And you did it again at lunch two days later. I had a mouthful of ham on rye, and you laughed at me. Not exactly in a mean way. More like in that way that says I’m stupid for being self-conscious about everything. I was sure everyone was noticing what you’d just confirmed in one little laugh. That whatever I was doing was out there for the world to see. You knew that new kids fall into two categories—new and interesting or new and anonymous. I dropped into the anonymous pile. And you reminded me that sometimes the anonymous category gives way to the category of weird new girl from that place where it rains all the time, a world away from the desert.
So when you finally said something to me—in the gym, underneath the basketball hoop where girl after girl attempted half-hearted layups and we dodged errant basketballs—you said, “You’re already a freak. So you should decide right now which sort of freak you’re going to be. The kind people talk about or the kind people are afraid to talk about.”
It wasn’t that you were telling me something new. It’s that you were telling me something at all. Someone had said something to me besides, “Can you move your bag?” or “What’s your name again?” I wanted, just once, for someone to ask me a follow-up. “Is Penny short for something?” So then I could tell them no, it wasn’t, and they could tell me they didn’t think so, but it sounded like one of those names that should be short for something.
I didn’t care that you sounded like you were full of shit half the time. Because you seemed proud of having me for a friend, and that was enough.
Love,
Penny
“It’s strange, isn’t it?”
She’s maybe a foot from me, sitting with her knees under her chin in the cold sand.
Her head is tilted toward my pad of paper. She’s been reading over my shoulder.
“When you’re little, you can’t see all the walls, you know? You just see acres and acres of space, and it’s all yours to run. You can do cartwheels and build forts and bury treasure to find later. But something happens when you get older. You start to see the walls. Maybe it’s because you get taller or something. And then you see the cracks, you see how unstable it all is. And you try to test the walls’ strength, and you pull a little chunk of it out, and pretty soon, all the sides tumble down, and then you’re buried under all of it.”
I look at Rae now.
“Buried alive,” she says.
As usual, I expect her to look like a monster, like something that crawled out of a sewer or my nightmare. But if this is my nightmare, she looks remarkably the same as she always has. Cherry-red lipstick and purple hair rolled into Vargas Girl curls, diamond labret that I used to think was sort of cool in a modern glamour kind of way. Now I think it looks contrived, like whatever she just said to me. She’s the perfect contrast to my undyed hair that’s cut in slants to point at my neck, my cheekbones, my forehead, the star tattoo tucked behind my ear, just enough to see one green tip to hint that there’s more behind what my hair covers. The ring through my nostril is so thin it takes some people a second to see it, even though it took my mom no time at all. Rae is the vividness that’s missing from me.
“Nothing?” she says, a response to my nonresponse. “I just laid the meaning of life at your feet, and I get nothing?”
“You’re not here,” I say.
“Believe me, I wish I wasn’t. It’s freezing as fuck here, and look at us. Both without jackets.” She puts her arm across my shoulder and squeezes. “Just like your mom to send you north without one. Guess she really didn’t want to deal anymore, huh?”
In biology, we learned about all the different species of animals and insects that eat their young. There are tons of them. Way more than I ever would have thought. And when we talked about why, inevitably the conversation turned to evolution. There was just something that seemed to work in the practice. Otherwise, why would it continue to happen? Or maybe that’s the reasoning that keeps wolf spiders and finches and voles licking their lips when they cozy up to their trusting offspring.
Rae tightens her grip on my shoulder briefly before releasing it.
“I’m done reading letters,” she says.
“Then don’t read them,” I say.
“See, that’s the thing, though. I have to. I have to because that’s the only reason I’m here. And believe me, I’d rather be anywhere else but close to you.”
I take the beating of her words as best as I can, deflecting what doesn’t puncture. And then I look into her eyes. The normally cold stare of her blue irises. I’ve never been able to get past the color. But now I catch a glimpse of something else, something that sends a fresh wave of guilt over me.
She looks confused. Confused about how I could cut off our friendship like a dead limb. Quick, one snip of the garden shears on a rotted stem.
For a second, it all falls away—Rae’s exterior of hair dye and red lips and piercings. I see a girl who thinks she’ll be alone without the person she’s made her friend. I see the bruises of companionship deflected one too many times. Then, as quickly as her armor drops, she raises it back up, and her shell is thicker than ever.
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing you soon,” she says.
Then she gives me a slow wink and slips away. I only watch her go for a short time, and then the sight of her hurts.
I walk home the long way even though I’m freezing. I keep thinking I should be feeling something more, but maybe the brain stops making the body and the heart feel anything after a certain point. Maybe it has some sort of automatic shut-off after it hits its trauma limit for one day.
I look around at the brightly painted bungalows lining the streets of my dad’s neighborhood and pick out pieces of their yards that might represent this sensation. Because I’m done with words for a while, and I think it might be nice to find a picture like I used to do.
I suddenly regret leaving my camera in Arizona.
The first place my gaze lands is on a garden gnome crouching between two dying rose bushes. Passing the bushes, I look back at the gnome and realize he’s crouched because he’s pulling his pants down, exposing his bare ass to whoever approaches from the other direction.
“Almost perfect,” I say, framing my hands and snapping an imaginary picture.
When I get back to my dad’s house, I see that Mom’s car is gone.
I didn’t want it to be here when I got back. And even still, I can’t manage to catch my heart before it drops, a heavy weight suspended above my stomach. Not adrift. It’s still secure. The only thing that’s still secure, maybe. And the one thing I wish I could detach.
Rob’s shifting the soccer ball between his feet on the front lawn.
“Sounds like peace negotiations went great as always,” he says, pausing his dribbling to swipe the curtain of blond hair from his forehead.
He might be able to pull the look off better if his hair was wavy, but it’s stick-straight and cut at odd angles, which is why he’s constantly moving it out of his eyes.
“Oh yeah, they’re on their way to an amicable treaty,” I say.
It’s maybe the only thing we share as stepsiblings: the unsuccessful dodge of parental conflict. We both know that even after the gunfire ceases, the tinnitus rattles your brain until you want to stick a screwdriver through your ear. I’m willing to bet Rob talks about his dad as seldom as I talk about mine.
And I wonder for the first time if that’s something I’ll have to change now that I’m living with the man I don’t ever talk about and the stepson he lets call him Dad.
Rob stops kicking the ball but keeps looking down at it. “So this is for real then?” he says.
I nod because I can’t make myself say the words. I want to be casual about this, but it’s hard to make light of the knowledge that you’ve been deemed hopeless by one of the only two people who is never supposed to give up on you.
“I’m really sorry,” he says.
It’s getting noisier again. The sounds of all those fake apologies, those shoulder squeezes, that static sympathy that isn’t meant to actually move anyone toward healing.
A black truck with glittering flames rounds the corner, and I see the wrong person behind the wheel before I have a chance to assess the truck with my usual eye roll. I would think Rob was being ironic with the unmistakably eighties paint job, except that I know when it comes to his truck, Rob is deadly serious. Not even the landscape of a wolf howling at an honest-to-God full moon tinted into the back windshield can make him crack a smile.
“Rob, you were supposed to call me!” April scolds from the open driver’s side window. She throws the emergency brake before shifting the handle at the wheel into park, swinging her tiny legs out of the raised cab.
“Mom, Jesus, the transmission!” Rob runs to the truck’s side, absently extending a hand to help his mom down while keeping his full focus on the truck. He’s looking for damage, but Rob’s one of those rare breeds who possesses a thoughtless chivalry. In the midst of his panic, he wouldn’t let a lady jump from the cab all on her own.
“Well I’m sorry, but you know the big signs don’t fit in my jeep.” Then she turns to me. “Penny, we are so, so sorry for all you’ve been through.” She envelops me in a hug I never once indicated was welcome.
Even in heels, she barely matches my height. She’s maybe a size two at her most bloated, her shiny blond hair trying to make her look older in a loose bun, but she still looks all of twelve.
“If I’d known you were here already . . .” she shoots Rob a look, but Rob is stroking the top of the steering wheel.
“What’d she do to you, baby? Did the mean lady hurt you, Alfredo?” he says.
Alfredo is of course Alfredo di Stefano: history’s most transcendental soccer forward ever, at least according to Rob. He could name his precious truck after no one else. Thus completes the vaguest of pictures I have of my stepbrother: a soccer ball, long arms and legs to match the rest of his Gumby body, and a 1993 black Ford Ranger pickup, his pride and joy for no good reason.
April extends her arms to take in the sight of me. “I would have come home right away,” she says, finishing the thought I’d forgotten she started.
“I just got here,” I say.
“Well, I’ve got dinner planned,” she says, then squeezes my arms. “Things are going to get better now. I have a very strong feeling.”
“Because of dinner,” I say, and the corners of her mouth twitch.
“That’s typically where it starts,” she says.
April releases me and trots inside with Rob close behind, her sandwich board and rolling briefcase filling his arms.
“She’s making chicken Kiev,” he says.
“I didn’t know she cooked,” I say.
“She doesn’t,” he says.
I’ve never really been susceptible to the discomfort of silence. People talk about that awkwardness that follows long breaks in conversation, but I’ve never seemed to notice them.
Until now.
“Could you pass the salt?” my dad asks, his water glass lodged firmly in his paw, his lumberjack body hunched in an effort to make up for his size at such a small table. He sips from it every few seconds. My mom used to tease him that no one was going to steal his water. And he would laugh and keep holding on to it. Clearly, there were things she said that Dad never fully believed.
“It’s good, Mom,” Rob says. He’s lying, of course. We’re all lying just by eating it. We’re only encouraging her to keep doing this, but it’s obvious none of us is going to be the first to get honest.
“I never realized how relaxing cooking can be,” she says, her face still glowing and damp from the steam of the kitchen.
“Mmhmm,” Dad says behind his water glass. I can’t tell if it’s agreement. Dad’s one of those men who would be horribly intimidating to a guy I brought home. If I were the type to bring a guy home to meet my dad. If I were the type to have a dad at home at all.
“And it’s so simple when you have a recipe,” she says.
I suspect it’s even simpler when you follow the recipe, but I don’t dare thicken the silence by bringing that up. I just shove my plate away instead.
Dad notices, but his eyes don’t get past my plate. I try very hard to remember the last time he looked at me. Not at my arm or my sweater or the hair caught in my earring. At me.
“We had a great turnout for the broker’s open today,” April says to the table, but the only one really listening is Rob.
“Cool,” he says.
“Yeah, it is,” she agrees. And her enthusiasm is genuine, which is what has always puzzled me. Not because she loves her job. It’s great she loves buying shitty houses and fixing them up and selling them for tons more money. It actually sounds more exciting than Mom’s job, which has something to do with surveys. What surprises me about April’s enthusiasm is that it’s everywhere. She gets excited about lots of things.
When my dad dropped the bomb that he was getting remarried, and that The Other One had a son a year younger than me, a ready-made family for Dad to plug right into, I thought I’d hate them all. It was easy to hate from a few states away. Dad had already given me ample reason, and April made it pretty simple with her birthday cards signed “Your Evil Stepmother”—as though she got me. I suppose her being a mere seventeen years older than me lent some credibility to that assumption. And then there was the replacement kid—Rob. April’s son that she had super young, so Mom says, who never made an appearance in my life outside of the annual family picture they’d send me, with Rob always looking a little confused.
“I have some other news,” she says.
None of us asks her to share it because we know she’s going to anyway. My dad is still staring at my plate in the middle of the table.
“My bid on the Carver House was accepted!”
April slaps her hand down on the table in victory, but she only succeeds in jolting Dad and me out of our respective meditations.
“Hot damn, it feels good to win!”
“Is that the one near Tacoma?” Rob asks her, and I hear his teeth close around something crunchy. I don’t know much about chicken Kiev, but I know it’s not supposed to be crunchy. He seems to know that too, because I can see his hand curl around the napkin by his plate.
“I wouldn’t call it near, but yeah, it’s south of here. My first historic project. If I can flip this sucker into a bed-and-breakfast, oh the investment potential! It’s a little off the beaten path, but I’m thinking it should appeal to the outdoorsy types.”
“You don’t know anything about historical renovation,” Dad says. A statement of fact that should be discouraging, but April just shrugs.
“It can’t be that much different than what I’ve been working on,” she says. “Pull out old plumbing. Put in new plumbing.”
“Right. That’s all there is to it,” Dad says, and now he pushes his plate away too.
“Oh, don’t get surly. I know you know everything there is to know about HVAC and heating and cooling,” April says, making my dad’s business sound somehow adorable. “But I’ll never learn if I don’t try. And I’ve wanted a historical project for ages. I can’t wait to pick out light fixtures! I’ll have to do some serious antiquing.”
Every time she starts a new sentence, April lifts out of her seat a little. I keep thinking she’s going to stand up and start running laps around the table, but she stays put for now.
“That’s great, babe,” Dad says.
Babe? I can’t . . . I just can’t.
“You don’t do fake enthusiasm very well,” she says, but smiling. Because nothing bothers April.
I see Rob take advantage of their exchange to spit his last bite into his napkin while April stares at my dad the way Mom never did.
As though summoned, my phone lights up, rattling the whole table while my mom’s picture adorns the screen. In front of the empty chair at the end of the table, she looks like a dinner guest arriving late, after everyone had given up hope she was ever coming.
We all stare at the phone until it stops buzzing, the missed call indicator the only thing left when she’s done interrupting.
April picks up where she left off, some of her earlier enthusiasm diminished, but the breath behind her voice is still electric, as though she’s talking on top of a layer of carbonation.
“Renovation starts in June.”
“What?” my dad says.
“Cool,” Rob says.
I say nothing.
“I know. I know. You have your big job in Vancouver, so you’re defecting for the summer,” she says to Dad.
Then she turns to Rob. “Soccer clinic goes until August fifth. You’ll leave before we do and come back after we come back.”
We?
She turns to me. She smiles. She knows I have nothing. “Which is why Penny will be coming with me to Point Finney.”
And now it’s my turn to answer.
“No.”
“Now before you say no—” she says.
“No,” I say again.
“You think you can renovate a place in two months?” Dad’s eyes bulge in that way they used to when my mom would correct his grammar. “Anyway, you and I should be the ones talking about this, not you and Penny.”
“Seriously?” And now I see, for possibly the first time ever, a pissed off April. “So when you said to treat her like family, you meant treat her like your family?”
Dad leans in. Finally, a familiar look. I actually find a little comfort in the recognition. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“See, that’s where I think you’re wrong. We won’t talk about it later. We’ll kill the conversation right here, at least if you have anything to do with it,” she says, skirting dangerous territory with Dad. If I learned anything from his fights with my mom, it’s that he doesn’t respond particularly well to being told what he’s doing.
The tinnitus is creeping in again.
Rob leans over to me. “Do you like soccer?”
“Nope,” I say.
“Do you like soccer better than being in here right now?”
Outside, we kick the ball back and forth on the grass with the soundtrack of Dad scrubbing dishes vigorously and April nagging him to the brink of his demise.
“You know she’s gonna win, right?” Rob says.
“She’s never gone toe-to-toe with me before,” I say, already losing faith in my dad’s prospects. “I’m like this super hybrid between my mom and my dad. She doesn’t stand a chance.”
Rob stops the ball under his foot. “When I was little, I hated chocolate.”
“God, you were one of those kids?”
He holds his hand up. “Spare me. I came around eventually, but that’s totally a product of my mom’s determination. She made me a chocolate cake for my fifth birthday, and I flat out refused to eat it. I sat there and stared at it until the candles burned down. She left it on the table the rest of the day. I didn’t know she threw it away that night, though, because for every day that summer, there was a chocolate cake sitting in the middle of the table, untouched. She baked a new cake every day and left it there for me, but I thought it was the same cake she just left sitting there, waiting for me to eat it. I couldn’t understand why she was so determined to make me like chocolate until I started going to all kinds of birthday parties the next fall.”
“And they all had chocolate cake,” I say.
Rob kicks me the ball. “She didn’t want me to be the kid who wouldn’t eat the chocolate cake. I don’t know. Maybe she thought that was the harbinger of death or unpopularity.”
“Maybe she didn’t want you to be an ungrateful little snot,” I say.
“Same thing,” he says. “Either way, you’re going to Point Finney in June, so be ready to get your hermit on. I heard it’s got a population of, like, five.”
“That’s comforting. Thanks, Rob.”
“She’s also going to make you take up an extracurricular at school between now and then. She’s big on extracurriculars. They build character or something. She’s already started talking about it to Dad, so it’ll seem like it was his idea. But that’s all her.”
This I can’t bear. I’m already being hijacked to the Pacific Northwest backcountry for the summer. By my dad’s—excuse me, our dad’s—teenager of a second wife. She’s in there with him right now, talking about me like I’m hers to talk about. And she’s choosing my hobbies, too?
“She can try,” I tell Rob. “She can sure try.”
NEWS TRIBUNE | TACOMA, Feb. 22, 2004—Efforts have slowed in the search for four youths who went missing January 19 in Point Finney.
In a mystery that’s shaken this sleepy town northwest of Tacoma, residents are beginning to lose hope that the children will be found.
“It’s just so tragic,” says Claire Schuman, a lifelong resident of the former lumber town. “Nobody feels safe right now.”
Mike Marlboro agrees. “My wife and I won’t even let our daughter walk to the store up the road anymore.” Marlboro, whose family has lived in Point Finney for four generations, owns a house less than five miles from where the minors were last spotted. “The things they say about those woods, I just won’t risk it.”
Anna Riley (12), Jack Dodson (14), and brothers Russ (11) and Blake (12) Torrey of Point Finney have been missing for 34 days. The youths were last seen together around 3:00 p.m. on January 19 behind Keller-Finney Middle School in Point Finney. First reported missing by Joy Riley, Anna Riley’s grandmother, authorities issued a missing children alert the same day. Using a shoe determined to belong to Russ Torrey, police canines tracked the boy’s scent to the southern tip of the Kitsap Woodlands Reserve before the trail went cold.
“I’ve been working for this department my entire eighteen-year career, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Sergeant James Meckel of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. “Normally we’d see some evidence, some indication of abduction or foul play. But we haven’t even recovered a footprint. Not a trace of them anywhere beyond that shoe.”
Search teams are gearing up for their 35th day of searching, this time scouring the area of the region known as the Center Thicket, widening their coverage beyond the perimeter. “There’s not much in there,” says Sergeant Meckel. “No one’s lived in those woods for a while, and it’s hard to contain a search area that wild.”
Asked whether they’ll be able to continue searching if the snow that’s called for on Tuesday falls, Sergeant Meckel is reluctant to give specifics.
“We’ll search as long as we can. We’re already tight on resources, and we’ll be hard pressed to put any more people at risk sending them into the woods in that kind of weather.”
The three families and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department are offering an undisclosed reward for any information on the whereabouts of the missing children.