The Leaving (27 page)

The doorbell rang and it was UPS.

The book from Wisconsin.

So Avery went up to her room and lay down on her bed and started reading. Which was something she generally liked to do.

But this book was painful.

The same way old movies sometimes were, with their incredibly long opening credit sequences and slow starts.

She started to skim.

Then tried to get herself to stop, to focus.

Then started to skim.

Then focused.

Then finally hit the meat of the story and powered through.

And then set the book down and just lay there.

What would her life have been like if she’d been sent away? If she’d
been able to just skip all the boredom and awfulness of the last eleven years and then just been returned to her parents as this happy, well-ad justed, fully formed person.

Because, really. What did she have to show for herself? For the last eleven years?

What had she done that was worthwhile?

What had she accomplished that meant anything?

She got up and walked over to her desk, above which a bunch of certificates of merit hung on a corkboard. French competitions. Math competitions. She started to take them down, one by one, and toss them into the trash can. Then, remembering a trophy she’d won by doing basically nothing that one year on soccer, she opened her closet, pulled it out, put it in the trash, too.

Then she just kept going.

Dumb art projects.

T-shirts from charity events she barely remembered.

Shoe boxes full of friendship bracelets.

What friends?

Posters from concerts and plays at school.

Old class photos.

She slowed her movements, started searching until she found her kindergarten class photo.

Went face by face.

Named names.

Sure enough, she had no idea who some of these people even were. How was that possible?

Setting the photo aside, she saw her handmade calendar.

Her countdown to going away.

And she flipped through until she found today’s date and saw there were approximately 898 days left until she would be able to go to college.

How had she ever thought it was a good idea to make this calendar, when the truth was the idea of leaving home was terrifying?

Who would look after her mom?

What would she do without Emma?

What would she do after college?

What if she never found a job? Or a boyfriend? Or husband?

What would happen when her parents died and she had no one?

Something soft and brown caught her eye back there in the closet, and she reached out tentatively—dead mouse?—and then felt fuzz and pulled and it was Woof-Woof.

She hugged his floppy, dusty body tight to her neck and tears came and sobs followed, and when she was done she tossed the calendar into the trash, too, wanting nothing more than to just be able to stay.

Stay forever.

“Rita!” her mother was calling out. “Rita?”

The response came: “Yes, ma’am.”

“We’re running out of tissues in my room.” Her mother’s voice in the hall. “Can you restock them?”

S
c
a
r
l
et
t

Scarlett’s nap dreams were ripped from the day’s events.

Airboats.

LOUD.

Pink birds and gators.

Lucas with a gun.

And also came from other days and nowhere.

An airport.

A school cafeteria.

Zombies in a nursing home.

Then Scarlett, with a pain in her legs, on a hill, crawling up toward a power plant with four smokestacks.

She woke up and her stomach growled and she got up to go eat. Tammy was vacuuming.

The whole house looked . . . cleaner, yes, but also . . . lighter?

In the fridge, she found leftover pizza and started to eat a piece cold, standing at the kitchen island.

The cat was in a corner, cowering, like maybe it had never seen Tammy vacuum.

Then it hopped up onto an end table that had once been covered with . . .

That was it.

No more
UFO Insider
s.

No more ET magazines.

Whole piles of back issues . . . gone.

“Mom??”

It just slipped out.

Tammy hadn’t heard.

The vacuum too loud.

Louder: “Mom?”

She turned, used a foot to switch off the machine.

Looked like she might cry.

“You okay?”

Her mother sat on the couch, wiping away tears. Shaking her head. “When you have little kids, people are always saying it goes so fast. Blink and you’ll miss it. And I remember feeling like it wasn’t fast enough.” She reached for a tissue box, pulled one out, dabbed her eyes. “Now I just want it all to slow down. I want to rewind and play the whole thing again but with you in it. I’m not ready to be this old. I’m not ready to have to let you go again so soon.”

“You won’t have to.”

“I will! I can’t keep you here forever.”

Scarlett sighed. She couldn’t argue with that. She said, “What happened to all your magazines and stuff?”

Her mother looked around the room, seeming satisfied. “Oh, I figure
it’s just time for us to be moving on with things, don’t you think?” She stood and threw out her tissue and took up the vacuum again.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him,” Scarlett said. “John Norton.”

Her mother shrugged. “Either way, I’m pretty sure now it wasn’t aliens.” She turned the vacuum back on and finished the job.

Lucas

“Do we have any old family photos?” Lucas asked when he got back to the house and after he’d explained everything—about the Everglades, the photos on the walls, the gun, his sense that it was all too . . . neat.

Miranda, for once, wasn’t there.

Ryan turned off the TV. “Yeah.” He got up and went down the hall into their father’s room. He came out with a box and walked past Lucas with it and into the kitchen. He sat. Lucas sat, too.

“Looking for anything in particular?” Ryan asked as he opened the box.

“Not really,” Lucas said. “It’s just that I don’t really remember, you know . . .
Mom
.”

Lucas reached in and took a stack and started to sift through a pile of sepia-toned prints.

Women in skirt suits and old, square swimsuits.

A dog—not Walker—on the front porch of a house—not theirs.

There were no names or dates on the back, nothing to go on.

A bunch of people swimming—a double exposure so that some of them looked like ghosts.

Nothing of use to him at all.

“Here.” Ryan handed over a print. It was one of those long, skinny
sheets of four pictures, each frame featuring a woman making a different silly face. “That’s her.”

“And here”—he handed over a regular-size print—“this is you as a baby.”

At first, the disconnect seemed so wide that Lucas didn’t think it could possibly be true.

That
that
baby in that photo in
that
woman’s arms could possibly be him.

But Ryan just kept pulling out photos and started telling stories.

You got stung by a bee that day
.

I loved that bike but I outgrew it and had to give it to you
.

I think this is Mom’s mom
.

This was Mom in high school, I think
.

Oh, this was you . . . that morning
.

Lucas took that one, his hand shaking.

This was what he’d looked like just hours before his life had become the stuff of headlines and movies.

He wore a striped polo shirt and khaki shorts and white socks and sneakers. He had a Superman backpack at his feet. Behind him was a classroom wall, with signs and letters and numbers. Beside him were two boys.

“Do you recognize either of them?” he asked Ryan, who took the picture back to look.

Ryan looked at them, then said, “No, sorry.”

Lucas looked again.

SHINY FLOORS. STACKS OF TOWELS. SHOPPING CARTS.
AISLES OF TOYS.
POPCORN AND HOT DOGS AND COFFEE.

“I remember buying that backpack. Like at a Kmart or something?”

The memory annoyed him. If he could remember that—something so long ago, from before he was taken—why
couldn’t
he remember things that maybe mattered?

He listened with awe as Ryan continued to rattle off stories.

Such a gift his brother had—memories—and he didn’t even know it, would never understand what it was like to be without.

To not even know who you really were.

This is you and mom on your birthday
.

Three candles on the cake. A cone hat on his head. His mother smiling, pointing at the camera. Him looking at the cake, ready to blow. He felt like maybe he remembered but couldn’t fill in anything around it.

Maybe he remembered only the photo.

Maybe he’d seen it before.

“What about photos of after? You know. You and Dad.”

“We pretty much stopped taking pictures.” Ryan shrugged. “Mom was always the one with the camera. Dad lost interest.”

“Any videos?”

“Not that I know of. People take videos of happy occasions, right? We didn’t have many of those.”

They both turned at the sound of a key in the front door, and Miranda came in, carrying a stack of T-shirts. She tossed them onto the couch, came back to the kitchen, and sat down. “Whatcha doing?”

“‘Reminiscing’ isn’t the right word, is it?” Ryan said.

“Not exactly, no.”

“You were cute kids,” Miranda said, studying a photo. Then she smiled. “What happened?”

“Hardy har har,” Ryan said.

“Aw, look at this one,” she said, picking up a picture. “Is this Walker?” She showed it to Ryan, who smiled but then looked at her a little funny and said, “Yeah, that’s him.”

“What?” she said.

“I don’t remember telling you about him.”

“Well, you did.”

Lucas was looking at another picture, this one of him and a girl. And for a second he thought it was Scarlett but no.

It was Avery.

They were squeezed onto a single swing together.

On a beach.

Sand at their feet.

Surf behind them.

His arm around her shoulder.

Her grin wide.

“Where’s this?” he asked Ryan.

“Oh, those swings were death traps. They got taken down years ago.”

Ryan said it like it wasn’t anything at all.

Lucas absorbed it like a fist to the gut.

AVERY

He texted that night when she was watching TV alone in the den:

I’m outside

She got up and went downstairs and out the front door and then down to the car. “My parents are out,” she said. “Want to come in?”

“You sure?” he asked.

When she said “I’m sure” back, she said it in a way that was meant to be doubly meaningful, but of course he wouldn’t notice.

She’d never been more sure of anything than her wish to be with him.

She led him through the house and out to the pool, and sat in a lounger. He took the one beside her.

“So?” She tucked her hands into her hoodie pockets.

“Well, they found clothes and stuff there. There were huge framed photos of the things we remember. Like the carousel horse I’ve been picturing. Scarlett’s hot air balloon.”

“Really?” Avery had certainly never imagined
that
.

He nodded. “They think it was really him. But I don’t know. Nothing was familiar at all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“They found a gun there and I feel like it’s going to have my prints on it.”

Not at all the conversation she’d been expecting.

She said, “Why would you think
that
?”

“It turns out I know how to load a gun.”

She tried to picture it.

Couldn’t.

“I’m confused,” she said. “If you don’t think it was the place—”

“I think the gun is going to have my prints on it but that it’s a setup. I think the whole location was staged.”

“Who would even be able to do that, though?” He was suggesting some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. And people who believed in all that were, well, kind of crazy, right? Backward Beatles records about Elvis. Smoke on the grassy knoll.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know it sounds crazy. Maybe I’m wrong.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t even try. The surface of the pool shimmered like fish scales.

“What do you remember most about your childhood?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start.” She recrossed her legs, switching which ankle was on top. Her bones hurt.

“Try.”

She closed her eyes. A few eager memories were already there, shouting pick-me-pick-me. “Playing with my neighbors, drinking nectar huckleberry blossoms. Riding our bikes. Playing at the beach. I remember being bored a lot. I remember sleepovers with my cousin . . . or actually I remember looking forward to them more than I even remember what we did. I remember having to get picked up from kindergarten because I fell during recess and hurt my knee really bad and couldn’t stop crying. I remember a lot of daydreaming. Wanting to be famous.
Like a rock star or an Olympic figure skater. I think I only gave up on that last one last year.”

He sat up and sat sideways on his chair, smiling. “But what’s your single most vivid memory of your childhood?”

The memories quieted; none stepped forward. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been asked that before and wondered why it would matter?”

“It matters because I’m asking.”

“But what would it mean?”

“Just try. Most vivid.”

“I remember going to Mexico with my parents. They let me buy a piñata. It had its own seat on the plane home.”

“That’s not it. Try again.”