The Telling (8 page)

I smile, tight-lipped. “What about sadness and hats?” I ask.

Dad rests his ankle on his knee. He couldn't stand being out here on the terrace before Diane and Ben came to live with us. It never bothered me; Mom and I had good memories here too. “It's something I read after Ben,” Dad says. “That one line stuck with me. The author went on with the metaphor, of course.” He gestures with his hands. “Some wear their sorrow backward like a baseball cap, some wear it to the side, some pull the bill as low as possible to hide their faces from the world.” A graying, bushy eyebrow is raised. “Do you understand?”

“Everyone copes with grief differently,” I say automatically.

“That's right, Bumblebee.” He pats my wrist.

“I'm not grieving for Maggie, Dad.”

“No, not how you grieved for Ben, but you went through hell last night. You kids pulled that troubled girl from the water. You knew her. Ben cared for her. I wouldn't be surprised if you were uncertain what's normal to feel in an inconceivable situation like this.” He shakes his head as he lifts the latte to his mouth and continues shaking after a sip.

I watch a low-flying bird and its shadow cut across the harbor.
Troubled
isn't the adjective that comes to my mind when describing Maggie. Even though Dad believed that she had a hand in planning the carjacking, he couldn't fathom that a teenage girl had anything to do with murder. Dad put the blame firmly on her accomplice. He seemed to believe Maggie had no way of knowing that things would turn violent.

I don't like adults much anymore. It took Ben's case for me to see it. Adults let you down. They say
I'll handle this
and then they bungle it all because they have lousy imaginations.

Adults are judgey and terrible and disappointing.

Dad lifts my chin until he's looking into my eyes. “Just promise me that you won't wear your sadness like a hat covering your face from the world. You aren't alone,” he adds tenderly. “If bad memories are resurfacing for you, you can talk to me,
confide in me
, or you could call Mariella. She's a mother, you know.”

Mariella only comes over a couple of times a week now, to stock the fridge with meals and tidy up our barely-lived-in house. Mariella doesn't live on our island and has three sons to worry about, and even if this was not the case, she was never interested in being motherly to me, which is great, since I was never interested in being daughterly to her. “I'm fine, Dad,” I say. “Really.”

Dad's eyes cut from the glittering harbor, and his forehead puckers. I look away from his concern. It's late morning and there are only the barest wisps of fog lingering. The reeds of the marshy banks of the north end hold the snaking tufts in place. I watch as a patch of fog seems to spiral on the shore. The wind blows. The fog begins to take the shape of a boy, about nineteen, hand raised to me, beckoning. I know he isn't real. My brain plays Ben's voice: “C'mon, McBrook. Let's have a summer day.” Ben always wanted summer days.

It didn't need to be summer. It was just one of those things we said. Summer meant freedom from school; summer meant idle days of being rocked on the water. Summer was the highest compliment we had.
That's awfully
summer
of you,
I'd say if Ben brought candy from the movies.
You're always so
summer, he'd say if I saved him the
last piece of key lime pie. When we wanted to make the most serious promises, we swore on summer. We loved the word. I wrote it on the inside of my notebooks and scribbled it on the soles of my TOMS. Once, I wrote it low on my hip bone where no one else would see and pretended that it was a tattoo. We called all our supplies for the adventures we went on
summer provisions
. Butterfly nets, peanut butter and marionberry sandwiches, and beach towels for the spring. Fishing rods, life jackets, and a tube of sunblock on the dinghy.

I raise my hand to wave back to the dissolving fog boy as Dad asks, “Would it help if you went to talk to someone?”

My hand ends up combing my blond hair into wings resting on my shoulders. I know what Dad is hinting at. If he only knew what I was thinking,
seeing
. “I'm talking to you now,” I say, a hint of irritation in my tone. “I talk to Willa.”

Dad passes a hand over his face. “I'm glad that you have Willa to support you, Bumblebee. I'm suggesting you speak with someone who's an expert in coping with loss. Perhaps one of the doctors helping Diane at Calm Coast?”

Dad used to call Diane every night at her emotional health retreat. For the last two weeks she's refused to come to the phone. The doctors say to give her time; she's suffered a loss. A century isn't going to make a difference. Yes, mothers are supposed to be the fiercest beasts in nature, but Diane was never a tigress guarding her cubs. She isn't out of her mind with grief. Diane is on vacation from reality.

Diane began mysteriously. Ben was more interesting than anyone I'd ever met, so surely Diane had secrets and a story herself.

I asked her what happened to her missing finger a few weeks
after they came to Gant. She was sitting right here at this table with Ben and me. She was eating a croissant, one flaky layer poised at her lips, when I asked. The burnt golden bit fell to the tabletop, and her head dipped strangely as she turned away. I looked quizzically to Ben when she retreated to the kitchen. “Do you know?”

Ben leaned in and whispered, “A monster took it.” Then he flicked the fallen crumb of croissant to a speckled bird at his feet. I didn't move. He looked up, all sly-smiled. “I had you going,” he said with a laugh. “She got frostbite during a snowball fight when she was a kid and lost it. Can we not talk about my mom?” I agreed. Who wanted to talk about moms anyway?

My point is this: Diane was always spacey and lost. A bit like a windup toy right before it dies. Everything happens slower, if at all. When I brought good grades to her, and Ben brought sketches, she'd murmur
how nice
and drift away. When Dad was at work, she'd disappear. I'm sure it wasn't as dramatic as that. She went places and had friends. We didn't mind. We had freedom. Dad brought us to school and we rode the bus home until Ben got his license. We ordered takeout or heated a dinner left for us in the fridge. Diane was always way more Dad's wife than my stepmother—even more than she was Ben's actual mom, which he didn't appear to mind.

“Really, Dad, I don't need to talk to anyone else. I'm never going to end up as a hermit in my room again. I'm not even going to stay home today.”

“Oh? You'll need to be vigilant going out.” Dad flips over the
Gant Island Times
on the table in front of him. The headline reads
SUSPECT IN VIOLENT CARJACKING FOUND DEAD
. A small, faded picture of Maggie is below.

“How is it already on the front page?” I ask. “It was barely twelve hours ago.”

“I'd say an officer called the paper last night,” Dad muses. “In Gant, it's big news. You recall the coverage of Ben.” A long pause, possibly fueled by Dad remembering that I actually don't know about the news coverage because no one delivered the newspaper or turned on Channel 5 under the covers in my bedroom. I avoided it then and sure, I could use the Internet now, but what would be the point? I was there. “You kids weren't mentioned by name, although the piece does state that a person related to the victim of the attempted carjacking was among those who uncovered Maggie's body. It won't take long for everyone to deduce who they mean. I think you'll be safe as long as you stick to someone's house. Maybe invite Willa—or even Becca and her sort—over here?” Dad suggests.

I turn the cappuccino in a 360-degree revolution in its saucer. “It's Josh's birthday and he's throwing a party,” I say, glancing up at Dad. “I don't have to go, though.”

Dad shakes his head. “Don't miss it. New friends are important. I'm proud that you're making them.”

I cringe inwardly at this reminder that even Dad was aware of my relative friendlessness before this summer. “I'm going to call Willa,” I say, sliding my chair away from the table.

Dad's flipping through the paper before I make it into the kitchen.

I curl on the window seat in my bedroom with Basel. He purrs into my chest and his heat lulls me sleepy. I try Willa three times on her cell with no answer. I toss my phone and it lands on the carpet below. Once it's there, I know I should have used it to dial
Josh or Becca to confirm that his party is really still happening.

Minutes roll on and I mean to reach for it and make those calls. But after hours of the same position, a pleasant numbness spreads. There's the faint tickle on my toes that rest on the window-seat cushion, and I imagine that spiders have mistaken me for furniture and are busy shrouding me in their webs. My sticky eyelids part in brief, fluttery intervals to catch Ben standing in my doorway, watching me. I'm losing my mind. It isn't unpleasant.

Becca calls eventually, a giddy and frantic lilt to her voice that doesn't fit the conversation. “I'm a celebrity today—I've gotten like a zillion texts about Maggie. Pick you up for Josh's bash at nine.” I picture her clasping her hands at her chest, dancing from foot to foot in anticipation of an event worthy of a cute outfit.

“Okay,” I say listlessly.

I read for the rest of the afternoon, until the words rearrange themselves on the page and I'm squinting to make them out at dusk. I pull myself up, turn on the shower in my bathroom, and return to the window seat, waiting for the warm water to kick in.

I must have drifted off to sleep, because I open my eyes to a dark, steamy window. I haven't been out of it for too long, since the gushing hot water continues to send fog wafting through the doorway. I prop myself up on my elbow. At chest height there's a little boat, triangle sail and mast, drawn into the steam on the glass.

I rub my fingers together; not wet. Was I dozing off, doodling absentmindedly? Thinking of Ben so I drew a sailboat like he used to? I stand and try to stretch myself alert. This sailboat might be a little drawing left for me by Ben just like the drawings on the kitchen windows. But how many times have I showered recently? I always
leave the door between my bathroom and bedroom open, allowing steam to enter, making the windows sweat.

I haven't been perceptive lately. I put flip-flops on the wrong feet the other day; the granola in the fridge a week ago. I let the weird, sleepy state wash away in the shower.

While I blow-dry my hair, I decide on wearing a black dress that Becca and I found at a boutique in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. She said it made me look like a
banger
. If I'd been alone, I would have passed on the too-short dress. Becca—with her fingers crossed under her chin, her tousled chestnut hair smelling of saltwater spray, and her pink lips pursed in a heart while she waited for my verdict—was too hard to say no to. I pull on a black cardigan, almost as long as the dress, and slip on flat sandals even though Becca says no girl over fourteen should ever wear flats. Maybe she really believes this; maybe she only wears heels and ankle boots to hide that she's slightly pigeon-toed. She creates camouflage to cover up her insecurities.

Three blasts of a horn come from the driveway. Dad's on the porch when I get downstairs. Becca's in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. “I told Lana to phone if you two need a ride home,” Dad calls to her, waving toward her house. I remember Dad asking me years ago,
Why aren't you buddies with Sophia Atherton's girl anymore? You kids are three houses away. Wouldn't that be fun and easy?

Becca leans out the window and waves as if she's royalty riding in Gant's homecoming parade. “Thank you, Mr. M.”

“She looks a little enthusiastic, recent events considered,” Dad says from the corner of his mouth when I stop at his side.

Becca's grinning like a happy lunatic.

“If you want me to stay home, I will,” I offer.

Dad nudges my side and smiles encouragingly. “You should go. It'll be good for you to get out. Worst thing you could do is sulk and think about the past.”

The foamy-looking clover bordering the front porch sparkles in the beams of the headlights. Carolynn gives one last belligerent honk as my fingers close over the door handle.

I slide in as Becca whispers, “Play nice with the other kittens, pleeeease.”

She could be talking to Carolynn or the twin toy schnauzers straining for freedom in her arms. Winkie's and Twinkie's lavender-painted nails clack against the center console as they try to claw their way to me. The car is full with the smells of mint, the flowery perfume Becca dabs in no less than ten places on her body, and the four drained iced coffees in the cup holders. Carolynn has a serious caffeine addiction and will only take her coffee and espresso over ice and sugared up with whipped cream, chocolate shavings, and caramel syrup.

“Hey”—Becca twists around to blow me a kiss—“you look freaking gorg.”

“So do you,” I say. “Hey, Carolynn.”

“Hi,” she answers curtly, without taking her eyes off her car's backup camera.

Becca sticks a pink flask in my face and sloshes the liquid. “Peppermint schnapps,” she sings. “Yum-yum-yummy!”

“Thanks.” The liquid is cool and syrupy on my lips. It leaves me thinking about winter and hot cocoa. I shiver even though the leather's heated under my butt. The windows are fuzzy with steam. I trace half of a boat's triangle sail before I stop.

Becca props herself up on her knees to face me, folds her arms on the headrest, and cups her chin. Her eyes are sleepy, dewy, and drunk. Her smile is lazy and warm. The dogs are set loose, and once they avoid getting tangled in the long gold necklaces she's wearing, they make desperate leaps to the backseat. Their little lavender nails paw at my hands as they whine shrilly to be petted. Becca sways gently with the car's momentum around a turn. “My babies love Josh. They had to come celebrate,” she says. “He's the only guy who plays with them and never complains that I make them look faggy or if I paint their nails.”