Local Girl Swept Away (2 page)

I stayed awake bargaining with God, even though I didn't believe that kind of thing ever worked.
If she lives,
I begged
, I won't let her take chances anymore. If she lives, I'll watch over her. I'll make sure she's more careful. I will make her follow me!
But Lorna was not found, not even her body. A special edition of the
Provincetown Banner
came out the next day, its headline set in 72-point type: LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY.

The whole next week, I stayed in bed. I came down with a bad cold, but that was just a good excuse. I knew I couldn't manage anything as complicated as walking or eating—all I could do was stare at the cracks in my bedroom ceiling, going over and over the events of that horrible afternoon, trying to figure out a way to change the outcome. I kept thinking there had to be a way to bring her back. There
had
to. But I couldn't come up with one, so I pulled the covers over my head and wailed.

Mom showed up at mealtimes with cups of tea and a sleeve of crackers or a bowl of soup. “It takes time,” she kept saying. “You'll learn to live with it.” But I didn't want to learn to live without Lorna. I didn't want to take the smallest step in that direction.

I tried to make some kind of sense of it, but the whole thing was ridiculous. An ordinary person—any of the other three of us—might slip on a wet rock and fall, but not Lorna. She was a professional traveler on this earth, graceful and fearless. Lorna didn't make mistakes. “Together the four of us can do anything,” she used to say, and I never questioned the truth of it. But now, with Lorna gone, I could hear the dark echoes of her rallying cry: “The three of you need me. The three of you are useless without me.” It was true.

Lorna and I had been best friends since the morning she showed up in our fourth-grade classroom. She'd been homeschooled until then, but when her dad left town, her mom gave up on that and just about everything else. That first day Lorna picked us—Finn and Lucas and me. She gave us a sly grin as if she already knew all our secrets. Her eyes sparkled like jewels and drilled right into our skulls. We fell in love with her immediately.

Finn and Lorna became a couple four years ago when we were all thirteen, so Lucas had to adore her from a distance. The golden boy and the wild girl were obviously the perfect pair, but sometimes I couldn't help wishing Finn would look at me the way he looked at her. I didn't dwell on it. I'm not stupid. Lorna was Number 1; I was clearly Number 2, and always would be. Only now Number 1 was gone and I didn't know who I was without her.

Once or twice a day I got up long enough to pull the old telephone with the long cord from the hallway into my bedroom. I tucked it under the covers, as if even the phone needed to be protected now, and called Finn. He wasn't going to school either, and we talked for hours. Well, no—we stayed on the phone for hours. We ran out of things to say pretty quickly, but we didn't hang up because neither of us could stand being alone with the overwhelming, nauseating truth of our new lives. Finn was the only one who understood what I'd lost and vice versa. We'd stay silently connected until the battery on his cell phone died and the limits of technology forced us to grieve alone.

Of course, I called Lucas too, and so did Finn, but, oddly, we were always turned away by Simon or Billy.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Simon said to me, “Lucas can't talk now. He's so tired. He just needs to rest. You understand.”

I tried to understand, but after the third time one of Lucas's dads ran interference, I got mad. There was no sense taking it out on them, though—Lucas must be telling them to turn us away. What the hell was wrong with him? He wouldn't talk to
us
? Finn was Lorna's boyfriend and I was her best friend. No matter how you sliced it, Lucas came in third. And now he was acting as if he was more injured, more traumatized than we were? We had the strength to call him, but he was too debilitated to get on the phone? I was so irritated by it I finally got out of bed, got dressed, and went out.

Finn's younger sister, Tess, answered the door at the Rosenbergs' and I realized it must be the weekend already if she was home in the middle of the day. The minute she saw me, Tess started crying. I put my arms around her even though it felt like lifting lead weights.

“I'm so glad you're here,” she said, tears leaking down her cheeks. “Everything's all screwed up. Everybody's so sad. I can't stand it.”

“I know,” I said. Seeing Tess cry made me feel as if my bones were brittle. As if I'd been barbecued over a hot fire and was all crispy and crunchy. I wanted to turn around and run home to bed again, but I managed to stay put. “Is Finn here?”

She pointed toward the family room. “He hasn't gotten off the couch all week. He has to though. Mom says he has to go back to school on Monday.”

“Yeah. I guess I do too.” I hated to think what that would be like.

“Finn,” I said, marching over to him, trying to sound tough, “you have to get up.”

He was lying on his back with pillows under his head, staring at the ceiling. He rolled his eyes lazily in my direction and grunted. “Why? Because you did?”

Just looking at his blotchy face made my throat thicken. His ash blond hair, too long and already starting to bleach in the sun, fell across his forehead and over one eye. His lips, heavy with sadness, twitched at the corners. Why couldn't I just crawl onto the couch next to him and cry and cry and cry? Why couldn't he hold me and rock me, and, when there were no tears left, why couldn't he kiss me? Isn't that what would happen in a movie?

Oh, for God's sake, stop it
. I shook my head to knock out the nonsense and tried to channel Lorna's energy. “That's right,” I said. “I got out of bed; you can too. Let's take a walk on the beach before we forget how to use our legs.”

“I don't want to,” he said, flatly. End of discussion.

“I know you don't want to. I don't want to either, but we have to.”

“Why?”

The question stumped me, but Tess, standing in the doorway, came to the rescue. “Because you aren't dead!” she said. “Because you have to figure out how to keep living.”

I stared at her. When did little Tess get so smart?

It took him a minute, but finally, Finn sighed and sat up. He groaned like an elderly arthritis sufferer as he pushed himself to his feet, but he followed me outside as if I had a leash on him.

We stumbled a hundred yards down the beach in silence and then Finn said, “I can't stand it, Jackie. I. Can. Not. Stand. It.”

“I know,” I said. I had a feeling Tessie was standing at the window, watching us.

“No, I mean really,” he said, angrily pushing his hair out of his eyes. “I miss her. I need her. I'll never
not
need her.”

“I know. You're not the only one.”

Finn looked at me then, but I wasn't sure what he saw. Our shells had been cracked open and we were oozing out all over the place. I wasn't even sure where I started or ended anymore.

“Right,” he said. “I know. You were her best friend.”

Something about the way he said it bugged me.
Best friend
. She
was
my best friend, of course, but the words didn't sound large enough for the way I felt about Lorna. And also, he obviously thought best friend came in a distant second to boyfriend.

“But Jackie,” he went on, “I
loved
her. I always loved her. From the very beginning I was crazy in love with her.”

It was as if he'd hit me with a big stick. A stick I knew he had right behind his back. A stick I was waiting for. “
I
loved her, Finn! I loved her
too
!” I was yelling and pointing to myself. “Just because I didn't want to sleep with Lorna doesn't mean I didn't love her! You don't own her, Finn! You don't own the pain of losing her!”

Then, of course, we both cried like crazy, and held on to each other to keep from falling over. And when I looked back at Finn's house, sure enough, Tess was watching.

After that, walking became our religion. The rhythm of one foot following the other calmed us. We spent hours slogging through sand and seaweed up and down the bay beach—before school, after school, every weekend—the smell of fish rising with the spring temperatures. Just the two of us—we gave up on Lucas. The mystery of his absence was irritating, but not remotely as painful as the disappearance that had changed our lives.

Sometimes we walked in silence; sometimes we talked about Lorna. Never about the accident though, only about memories.

“Remember that first day she showed up in our class?” I asked him. As if there was a chance in hell he wouldn't remember that.

“It was surprising because we almost never got any new kids,” he said. “And also because we'd never seen anybody like Lorna before.”

“The way she looked you right in the eyes.”

“The way she whipped that long red ponytail around like a weapon.”

“The way she stood up to people, even that bully, Frankie Reeves.”

Finn stared into the distance. “That first day I watched her swing herself hand over hand across the monkey bars. She lifted her legs over a crossbar, let go with her hands, and swung back and forth with her eyes closed. She hung by her knees longer than I'd ever seen anybody do it, boy or girl.”

I nodded. “Everybody liked her right away, but she didn't need
everybody
. She picked us.”

“We were her gang. Lucas and I had never hung around with girls before that day we all walked home together. Remember that? It should have taken us fifteen minutes, but it took two hours and everybody's parents were furious. Well, I'm sure Lorna's mother wasn't—she probably didn't even know what time it was, or that her ten-year-old daughter hadn't come home from school yet.”

I'd thought about that first long walk at least a dozen times since Lorna's death. Our skinny, sandy town was Lorna's playground, and she showed us how to claim it as ours too. Every curb was a high wire to balance on, every tree trunk was a ladder to its branches, every shopkeeper was a potential giver of treats, every alley was the setting for a story to act out. The beach that ran parallel to the long downtown street was not just a sunny spot to take off our shoes—it was an undiscovered planet where treasure could be found by those willing to look for it. Without even realizing it, we all started to see the world through Lorna's eyes. By the time we straggled home that day, we'd become a team, and Lorna was our undisputed leader.

“When did she start wearing that white jacket every day?” Finn asked. “She thought it made her hair look like a bonfire. Which was true.”

“Last fall. I was with her the day she found it at Old Hat, where her mom works,” I said. “A woman from up-Cape brought in a bunch of gorgeous old clothes from the fifties and sixties. In perfect condition. Carla snagged some dresses for herself, but Lorna fell in love with that jacket. It had black diamonds embroidered on the collar and cuffs.”

“I don't pay much attention to girls' clothes, but everything Lorna wears is beautiful. It doesn't matter what it is—any old shirt or pair of jeans—she makes it look great.”

I'd had years of practice ignoring the little stabs of jealousy that stung like hornets, but it still wasn't easy. “Lorna always knew what looked good on her,” I said, “and that jacket fit her perfectly. Of course, Carla didn't want her to have it. She said it was a couture piece and she could get a good price for it, but you know how Lorna was when she wanted something. She just buttoned it up and walked out of the store. No way was Carla getting it back.”

Finn nodded. “When Lorna sets her mind on something, you might as well not argue with her because you aren't going to win.”

It broke my heart over and over, the way Finn couldn't talk about Lorna in the past tense. But at least we were both standing up now, walking around, impersonating normal people. Those first weeks Finn and I were inseparable. We'd both had an amputation, but if we leaned on each other, we could limp along. I couldn't imagine how much worse it would be going through this alone. And sometimes there were brief moments when I almost forgot about Lorna and allowed myself to feel just slightly joyful about having Finn to myself. Spending hour after hour with Finn, even this hollow, miserable shadow of Finn, was almost a dream come true. But it was a dream that arose out of a nightmare, and I felt guilty taking even a tiny bit of pleasure in it.

When we walked down the hall at the high school, people smiled at us, but almost never stopped to talk. Sometimes Tony Perry or another one of Finn's friends from the basketball team came over and silently smacked him on the back or shoulder. He didn't seem to mind, but it aggravated me. Why would you hit somebody who was already in pain? I suppose it meant,
I'm male and I don't know how to talk about anything emotional, so I'm just going to pound on you
. I understood that people didn't know what to say, but I appreciated the ones who at least made an effort. “I'm so sorry,” was enough and didn't beg for a response.

I didn't have a lot of friends. Neither did Lorna or Lucas, for that matter. We didn't need them. Finn played sports, so he knew pretty much everybody. If he hadn't been exclusively with Lorna, he would have been extremely popular—he had all the attributes: looks, brains, athletic ability, even money. But popularity was a goal for suckers—Lorna taught us that. We had more. We had a gang of amigos, a winning team, an endless party, an exclusive club, a band of like-minded souls, a full circle.

But now that Lorna was gone and Lucas was AWOL (showing up at school just long enough to take tests and then racing back home so he didn't have to talk to anyone) I was lonely. Of course I had Finn, but he was hardly the comrade he used to be either, so I was grateful when Charlotte Mancini came over to us in the cafeteria one day.