The Sight (16 page)

For Ric

rest in peace, baby

I should have known that Saturday afternoon would turn out to be a disaster. And believe me, when I say I should have known,
I should have known.

It all begins with a girl called Marigold. She’s the inexplicable love object of my cousin Diego. I guess her gorgeousness makes up for a certain lack of charisma. For Diego, that is. For the rest of us, we just have to deal with trying to make conversation with someone with the personality of plankton. Diego has dated just about every pretty girl on the island of Beewick, and he’s made inroads onto the mainland, even as far as Seattle. But Marigold, for some reason, knocked him stupid.

Well, she
is
a knockout, in that long-blond-hair, long-legged, blue-eyed category that makes other girls want to either be her best friend or poison her caffeine-free chai.

So when Diego asks me that Saturday afternoon in November if I want to hang with them and Marigold’s brother, I should say no, considering that Marigold’s conversation sends me into a coma and I consider her brother about as appetizing as brussels sprouts.

I look at Diego and Marigold for a minute while I make up my mind. I know I should be concentrating on answering, but I’m thinking about how beautiful people just naturally click together, like magnets. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. Diego is tall and lean and so handsome that once I saw a waitress drop an entire tray of glasses when he walked into a restaurant.

Marigold is leaning against Diego, and she has a hand in the back pocket of his jeans. It’s another thing that bugs me about her. She’s always leaning against him, as though she can’t stand up by herself.

Marigold flashes her halogen smile. “Come on, Gracie. This is Washington State. You’ve got to grab the sunshine while you can.”

You see? Pick the most obvious thing, and she’ll say it.

“Yeah,” Diego says. “Pretty soon it will be January and the sun will be on semipermanent hiatus.”

Marigold laughs as if that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

“Okay,” I say.

Well, what else was I going to do? Homework?

We take off in Diego’s old VW, the one he bought with his landscaping money from the summer. The windows are open, because it’s such an amazing day, so I can’t hear the conversation in the front seat. Which is good, because Marigold is
talking. The hum of tires on the road is far more riveting.

So I look at the scenery, which is not exactly a hardship. I moved from Maryland to the Pacific Northwest only last year, after my mother was killed in a car crash. My aunt Shay took me in. Now I live on an island off the coast of Washington State, in Puget Sound.

I hated Beewick Island when I first got here. It was February, and February is not the best month here. There’s a permanent drizzle, and it’s cold, yet you don’t get the benefits of snow. But after about nine months here, I realize why, when you ask a Pacific Northwesterner the best thing about living here, they say “the weather.” It’s no joke. It’s just our secret, that if you can get past the winter rain, the rest of the year is not too hot, not too cold. You can practically live outside.

Beewick is about an hour north of Seattle, if you drive really fast. The island is almost a hundred miles long but only a few miles wide, with wicked cliffs on the north end and gentle farmland on the south. The sky seems higher here, and bluer. Off to the west are the snowcapped Olympic Mountains. Sometimes they just seem like clouds on the horizon, and then on clear days they startle you with their presence. The Sound is the color of blueberries, and there are fields of farmland and lavender. It’s a pretty nice place to live, and it is a tribute to
my stubbornness that it took me close to six months to admit it.

We drive into Greystone Harbor, the closest town to us, and Diego pulls into a space outside the Harborside restaurant.

“We’re going here?” I ask.

“They have the best fried clams,” Marigold says.

Maybe he won’t be here. Maybe it’s his day off. But I see Zed’s faded red Subaru parked in the lot, and I know he’s here. It’s hard facing the person you put in jail for kidnapping when he didn’t do a thing. It really is.

Last summer, my friend Emily disappeared. I’d had a vision, and it had seemed to connect to Zed. By the time I’d figured out that the kidnapper wasn’t Zed, the police had nailed him for tackling me and demanding why, exactly, I was going around saying he was guilty.

Oops
is not up there on a list of acceptable apologies for this.

The thing I can’t admit, hardly even to myself, is that I still think about the moment he tackled me and we rolled down the hill, how his chest felt so solid, how his breath felt against my skin. I was terrified at the time, but now I can look back and dissect every detail. Which I do. Frequently.

I am
so
glad there isn’t another me around to see my thoughts.

I tag after Diego and Marigold into the
restaurant. Marigold’s twin brother, Mason, is already here with a table full of his friends. They’re all jocks, on the swimming team and the soccer team, and most of them aren’t too awful. I just feel like I’m disappearing when I’m around them. I’m not the kind of girl they notice. I’m short, and I have brown hair and brown eyes and a devotion to gray sweaters. Not exactly a head turner.

Zed is waiting tables, and he looks up and sees me. This would be a lot easier if he weren’t so good-looking. He has silvery-gray eyes and black hair he cut short over the summer. He looks startled to see me, as if he can’t believe I have the nerve to show up in his father’s place. Zed works here and in Seattle, at a glassblower’s studio. We’ve seen each other since that whole thing last summer, of course—we live only a mile from Greystone Harbor, and it’s a small town—but we’ve always managed to just nod at each other and look away.

Mason yells at us to hurry up, he wants to order, and Marigold and Diego head over.

“Hey, everybody, you know Gracie, Diego’s cousin,” Marigold says. “Gracie, everyone.” The guys all look at me and say “hey,” or slurp their sodas.

Marigold sits down on an empty chair next to Mason. Diego sits next to her. The only other chair is at the other end of the table, next to Dylan Brewer, one of Mason’s friends. I go and sit there.
This is going to be fun, I can just feel it. All the thrills of a filling without novocaine.

They immediately launch into a discussion of some college football game that’s going to be on tomorrow afternoon. That doesn’t stop them from dissecting what is going to happen and who is going to totally rock.

It makes you think. Here I am, somebody who can occasionally see things that are going to happen. But when it comes to who’s going to win a football game or have the winning lottery number, I’m totally useless.

I watch as Marigold takes a sip of her diet soda and offers the straw to Diego. Everyone orders fried clams, including me, even though I’m not crazy about fried clams. But I can’t quite meet Zed’s eyes when he takes the order. Still, he hesitates next to me. I stare at the silver ring he wears on his thumb.

“So, how’ve you been?” he says.

I look up. I feel ice crack and the earth turn. I realize, at that very moment, at long last, that Zed does not hold a grudge. Relief washes through me.

“Okay,” I say.

“Good.”

This dazzling display of conversational skill ends when Zed nods a good-bye. He tucks the order pad into the back waistband of his pants, which in my addled state I find an incredibly cool move. Then he heads into the kitchen.

The platters of food arrive quickly, which I’m happy about, because I haven’t been able to think of a single thing to say while we were waiting. Nobody noticed, though. Mason and his friends have moved on from football to soccer. These kinds of guys can only talk about sports. I think it’s a kind of primitive form of communication for guys, like gorillas making hand signals. Diego and Marigold are having an intense conversation by themselves. It looks like they could be arguing, but I try not to feel hopeful about the possibility.

I eat a couple of clams dunked in lots of cocktail sauce, and most of my fries, while sneaking glances at Zed waiting on tables. Occasionally, he’ll smile at a customer, and it’s worth waiting for.

Then Mason’s friends start making fun of a couple at the next table. They’re eating the Greystone oysters that Beewick Island is known for and looking out at the blue sweep of bay, and you can take one look at them and know they’re from Seattle. Not that there’s anything wrong with Seattle. But they look pretty rich and they’re wearing pressed khakis and cashmere sweaters that are pretending to be sweatshirts, and Mason starts to goof on them.

“I’ll have the plucky little Chardonnay, muffin, how about you?” he says.

Totally lame, but his buddies all guffaw.

Mason and his friends are the kind of goons
who think that because they’re lucky enough to have lived all their lives on a beautiful island in Puget Sound they get to make fun of the weekenders. It’s true that real estate prices have been zooming lately, and that more and more land is being gobbled up for development. But I don’t think this couple from Seattle, out to have a nice seafood lunch on a Saturday, deserves to get heckled for it.

Meanwhile, Marigold is feeding Diego a French fry. I guess they made up.

I don’t think the couple heard what Mason said, but somehow they know the snickers rolling across the room are directed at them. Zed turns, and I see his face darken. He strides over to our table. I wonder if I can assume the molecular structure of a chair and disappear completely. Zed thinks I’m friends with these cretins.

He rips the check off his pad.

“Whoa, dude,” Mason says. “You didn’t ask about dessert.”

“You want dessert?” Zed asks. “There’s a great ice cream parlor across the street. Our pies suck.” He drops the check on the table and walks away.

“Whoa,” Mason says. “Touchy Waiter Boy thinks we’re rude.”

“Yeah, you’re upsetting the clientele, Patterson,” Dylan says. Mason and his friends usually call each other by their last names, which is kind of funny
because most of them have last names for first names anyway.

Andy Hassam pushes away his plate. “We should push their cars off the ferry, man. All we get from them is traffic and garbage. Pretty soon we won’t be able to eat our own oysters. The water will be too polluted.”

Everyone knows why Andy hates the weekenders and the new summer people. His family owns a farm. Last year they had to sell a chunk of their land to a developer, who built a whole bunch of houses on the site. Nobody is happy about it. Hassam’s farm stand is a local institution. They have hayrides in the fall and a pumpkin field. Now, instead of overlooking fields of farmland and meadows, it’s going to overlook a bunch of BMWs.

“What are you talking about? You don’t even like oysters, man. You call them snot on a shell,” Dylan says, hooting at Andy.

Andy flushes red. “And what are you talking about, Brewer? You’ve only lived on Beewick for five minutes.”

“Try four years, dude,” Dylan shoots back.

“Try all my life, dudette,” Andy says.

“I didn’t know this was a contest.”

Mason’s eyes gleam. “Whoa. Do you two need to take this outside?”

“Knock it off, Patterson,” Andy mumbles.

“No, I mean
really
outside,” Mason says. “On
the deck. Speaking of contests, I have a way to prove who’s a true Beewick Islander.”

Dylan looks intrigued, but Andy looks like he wants to go home and bond with his Game Cube. Marigold and Diego finally look up from their deep and boring conversation to notice what’s going on around them.

“If you’re really an islander, you know the tides,” Mason says. “You should be able to gauge whether you can dive off the deck safely or not.”

Andy looks green. “Dive off the deck?”

“Hey, Mason,” Diego says. “Not such a great idea, dude.”

“I think it’s awesome,” Brewer says. “My brother told me that guys used to dive off the decks of all the restaurants on this strip every Groundhog Day.”

“It was extreme radical stuff,” Mason says. “They called it The Gauntlet. You had to dive off at least three to be a member of the club.”

“And they stopped doing it because it was too dangerous,” Diego points out. “Somebody broke his leg.”

“Which is, like, my point,” Mason says. “If you’re a real islander, you can figure out if you can do it by watching the water.”

“Listen to Diego, Mason,” Marigold says.

If Mason had been half-fooling before, now he’s committed. You don’t have to be psychic to see
that he isn’t about to let his sister’s boyfriend tell him what to do.

“Let’s go, dudes,” Mason says, pushing back his chair.

Dylan stands up, and Andy has no choice. Diego shakes his head.

I look around for Zed, but he must be in the kitchen. By the time I turn around again, Mason, Dylan, and Andy are outside on the deck, and Dylan is kicking off his shoes.

Suddenly, the room whites out.

Water foaming, arms thrashing…

Panic. Fear. A heart bursting, everything bursting. Everything is red now and through the red I see a body falling through murky water.

When I return to where I am, I see that Dylan is looking over the railing. Diego is trying to talk to him. He puts a hand on his arm, but Dylan shakes it off.

I stand up so quickly, I knock my chair over. Across the room, Zed looks over.

“Zed!” I call. “You have to stop him!”

Zed looks out the window to the deck. He slams the tray onto the nearest table and starts to sprint across the dining room. The couple from Seattle look up from their wine.

I run behind Zed, but we’re too late. Before we can get there, Dylan hoists himself up on the deck
rail, balances for a split second, and dives. Diego shouts, and Mason laughs, and Marigold screams.

We all race to the railing and look over. I can see a white shape under the water, but then it’s gone. Ripples are absorbed into the current. It was like Dylan was never even there.

“Diego,” I whisper.

“Call 9-1-1,” Diego tells Zed.

“Just wait a second,” Mason says. “Brewer’s laughing at us, man. He’ll come up. He’s on the swim team.”