What Happened to Lani Garver (36 page)

The old-fashioned English was too difficult to understand, but this time I scanned through. Some lines would jump out at me, their likeness to my English being close enough to run the meaning through my brain.

O floating angel, thou canst take upon thyself the appearance of man—or any of the angels. But possessing thy great humility, thou shalt rarely reveal thy mightier forms when in the presence of men. It behooves thy mission for men to believe thou art like them in body.

I couldn't quite get why Andovenes seemed to be talking
to
a floating angel rather than
about
one. People did weird things like that way back when. I brushed it off, remembering that Lani had said something similar: "
If people knew who the angels were, they would be very nice when they saw one and would still do their same evil garbage when they thought none were around. Knowing who they are defeats the purpose.
"

I almost laughed, sensing how passionately I was going to miss his weird philosophies. My smile dwindled to nothing as my thoughts finally turned to one of the places they'd been avoiding all day. I could feel his violent trembling again, almost like convulsions, as he slowly froze beneath me in the net. The helplessness shot through me again, with the flash memory of pulling off my jacket in a vain effort to warm him. I let myself feel the burning guilt. In my own frustration I had yelled at him. "
What the hell went wrong with you tonight? Acting like that in front of Tony? Why did you tell me you could always think on your feet?
" I'd ended with a charming repeat of "
What the hell is wrong with you tonight?
" He had looked at me so oddly before responding. He'd quit trembling, as if all his energy were, for a split second, spilling into his response.

"
Nothing.
"

Nothing was wrong with him. That had been his answer. He had everything under control. He knew what he was doing. I'd assumed he was losing his sanity.

It behooves thy mission to rely on thy superior intellect when trouble befalls thee...

I considered hurling the book into the corner, though I didn't. I could feel myself circling back to where I had been downstairs. I was back to dreaming up crazed possibilities of how Lani might have outsmarted the tough guys. Only this time, instead of hoping he was secretly an Olympic swimmer, I had hopes that he was something superhuman. I slammed the book shut to snap myself away from more insanity. But it didn't prevent the rest of that sentence from penetrating my eyeballs.

... and to refrain from thy greater forms until thy suffering is complete.

Despite feeling absurd, I couldn't resist wandering around in the difficult language until I started coming up with a translation: An angel would rely on his smarts until trouble came down, and even then, it wouldn't change out of a human form until ...
until thy suffering is complete?
What did that mean? Until the suffering ... became almost unbearable?
Until the freezing water starts to eat you, sinking its icicle fangs into every inch of your flesh ... and your best friend kicks you and swims away from you and leaves you—

I clamored off my throbbing knees and dropped onto the mattress, pressing my palms on my eyeballs. It's like my brain was divided in two. Half of it couldn't resist playing with myths and legends. The other half was reminding me,
Claire, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
I decided that I liked the first half of my brain better. The crazier thoughts left me feeling more peaceful. It seemed funny. A crazy thought was probably the only thing keeping me from going crazy.

"
Your neat little version of reality is crumbling, Claire.
" I had been looking up at Lani's face as he'd said that, rocking me in his arms on that bus ride. His smile had seemed so amused, so...
victorious.
Crumbled realities are secretly your victory. Your crumbled realities create paths to purer truth, to—

"Middle ground, Claire," I muttered, though I knew my heart wanted magic.

I opened the chapter again and took a few words at a time. I translated another section into plain English, and another, until one echoed what Marcus the medic had blathered on about.

"
God informs them, you know, 'Look, there's some evil person at work down there,' and then God turns his back, cuz he can't take the violence, you know?
"

The passage said the angels bring justice through natural disasters and things that wouldn't lead the average person to guess that there was a spiritual force behind them. It said people are generally unaware that these angels can call upon the sky to kill somebody with lightning, or the sea to kill somebody with a wave or a large fish.

I had laughed at Marcus. I didn't laugh now, though I realized hazily I was in the throes of convenient thinking.
Boy ... wouldn't it be nice if this was truth.
I lit into thoughts of Tony Clementi being bitten in half by a shark, carried off a jetty in the jaws of a rogue wave ... some tall, thin, shadowy figure standing on the rocks ...
You thought it would be fun to murder gay people, hypocrite?

I turned the next page. Lani Garver stared at me. This floating angel portrait froze me as I stared into Lani's exact eyes. I almost had to command myself to start breathing. This drawing looked like a double of Lani, the most striking thing of all being the wide eyes—wide like Lani's had been the night before, when we were buried in inky ice water.
Claire, don't leave me down here ... You're kicking for the surface ... You're leaving me...

Same eyes. My chest rattled as I fought to get a breath. The more I stared at this picture, the more I realized that these eyes were wide with laughter, not fear. They shone with victory, not terror. For the first time since it happened, I let myself relive that moment, envision his eyes flashing through the black.
Had it been terror ... or laughter?

"No way," I mumbled out loud, to keep myself steady.

I shut my eyes and reopened them, and that's when my realities came crashing through. I looked over every detail in that picture, that floating angel's china-doll skin, the shiny dark hair, the beautiful features on the stocky frame that would make you wonder,
Guy or girl?

But my doubts had to do with Ellen's friend, Abby. This must have been the picture that Abby used to make the costume. It was very close to the image in the picture. Wouldn't Abby have noticed and trumpeted about it loudly to Ellen if this painting were
really
a dead ringer for Lani? Am I seeing things conveniently? Wouldn't Ellen have said something to me about this particular picture? Told me the likeness was the weirdest coincidence she'd ever experienced?

Am I seeing through smoke and mirrors?

I snapped the book shut. But I gripped it to my chest, thinking of some scheme to get it past Mrs. Garver. I should get to keep it. Somebody else might try to sell it.

I almost turned to go downstairs when I remembered that I hadn't come up here about the book. I glanced around the room, hardly able to think. But it was obvious there was no evidence of a struggle up here that I could point out to Mrs. Garver.
Mundane. Normal room. Real life.
The candles were on the stereo shelves where they belonged ... not even one had been knocked over. His mattress and box spring had not been jostled; the bed was rumpled from where I'd slept on it after eating two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The crumbs were still there. I looked for muddy boot prints where Tony had stood, had kicked at Lani, as Lani kicked at those backpacks.... Tony'd either wiped his boots before he sneaked in the house or we were just unlucky.
Those guys are too lucky.
The floor was clean of anything conspicuous. Even footprints, even the backpacks—

My glance passed the open closet, froze on the smooth floor, and moved slowly back to the closet. It was empty.

I laid the book on the dresser and opened every drawer, all of which were empty. Then I tiptoed silently into the other bedroom. The echo of clanking teacups wandered up, and I realized Mrs. Garver was on the telephone. Someone was keeping her busy for the moment. Gratefully, I opened her closet as silently as possible, then all her drawers, then looked under her bed. Ladies' belongings were all that I could find. I stumbled to the top of the stairs and stood there, wheezing like crazy.

I heard her hang up, and a minute later she passed by below me with a tea tray filled with two cups, a pitcher, and a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

"Mrs. Garver?" I asked, and she backed up again to look at me. "Um, the homework I left might have been in Lani's backpacks. Do you know where they are?"

Her eyebrows shot up, like her sanity had returned but mine had not. "He ran away, Claire. Obviously, his backpacks are with him. I'm sorry—"

"Never mind," I muttered, then let loose a sarcastic laugh that almost sounded angry. "I'm just ... losing my grip on reality today."

I decided not to tell her anything. To tell her that Lani had died might be very misleading. It could end up being very unfair to her. That's what I reasoned on my way down the stairs, looking forward to rolling some of that tea across my stinging throat.

I stayed in Children's Hospital from late Monday night until Friday, having been diagnosed with pneumonia and acute bronchitis. They did some blood-bolstering thing with IVs, for people in remission who had been through a trauma. Dr. Haverford tried to tell me that sometimes a health trauma can compromise a remission and that I would have to get my blood tested every thirty days for six months. I tried not to hear that. I tried to keep my mind occupied with other things.

I called DYFS on my mom. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The lady social worker was really nice when I said Mom wasn't like this before I had gotten sick. I said she had been a good mother, but now she needed some help that was way over my head. The social worker said in cases like this they usually try to talk parents into attending AA, instead of forcing them to relinquish custody of their kids and go to rehab. That was a relief. I didn't want to turn my mom's life on its head, only get her to return to her former self. I also didn't feel like leaving Hackett and staying with my dad—not after Hackett had gotten rid of Lani so easily. It was like a matter of principle for me to stay there, if I could get out from under my fear of Tony and Vince. One step at a time.

I called Ellen. She came right after school Tuesday and stayed until dinner every night, when my dad and Suhar showed up. The first night, she fired off the ever important question: "Where is Lani?"

I told her that we'd been thrown in the water and that he'd gotten away somehow, and I hadn't seen him since. I knew I could be telling a serious lie, but she might tell someone if I hinted the worst, and I wasn't ready for any full-blown police thing. Not yet. At first my wheezing and coughing was out of control, so she didn't ask endless questions. But I could sense her heartbreak ... how she watched the door every time footsteps approached, like maybe it was him. It might have driven me nuts, except I figured I could tell her the whole truth when the time was right.

I asked her to share some acting lessons to pass time. She gave a couple of great performances that taught me stuff and kept my mind focused. Then Wednesday night, after my dad and Suhar went home, I used everything she'd taught me, and I called Scott.

"I just want to tell you I'm sorry for everything ... It was completely my fault, and I know you could never like me now, but ... I wanted to make sure you were doing all right—" I let go of a huge lungful of white stuff, but he sighed in relief so loudly I could hear it above the earthquake. I guessed it was driving him crazy that I might snake, and this phone call meant to him that I wouldn't.

He finally went on in a stony voice that said nothing. "Macy said your mom says you're in the hospital."

"I'll be out in a couple days. Got pneumonia."

The silence got way long, then some of his steel melted a little. "Claire, I never, ever meant for you to get hurt like this. It just got out of hand. Me and Phil, we're not killers. We tried to save him. You were there. Right?"

I was going to edge around to my important questions, but Scott didn't need any help.

"We went back at first light. He never washed up, but guess what did? That white thing ... that contraption he was dressed up in. Big goofball. Goddamn, that was eerie, finding that floating on a wave in a slop of seaweed. The green kind."

Bingo. I knew a body had not washed up yet.
"Yeah, wow, that's awful. What did you do with it?"

"Phil and Vince and me, we—" He sniffed, not trying to hide his crying jag anymore. "We tied it around a cinder block and heaved it off the stern of the boat."

"Good thinking." I winced with guilt at my own good acting. "And ... what about Tony? Where did he go after he left us?"

"To the emergency room at Port Dingo. Told them he got sliced on an outboard motor. Took twenty-some stitches."

I wanted to know if Tony had sneaked back to the Garvers' and taken Lani's backpacks, to make it look like Lani ran away. "So ... he went ... right home after that?"

"Uh-uh. He saw Vince's car in front of my house. He came here and crashed out, like, went totally to sleep, though the rest of us were nuts. Hospital gave him some of those painkillers he loves so much. He says it was worth it to be stoned out on Percodan all day long."

I clamped down on my jaw, fighting my anger with a stray hope that floating angels might be real, and Tony would get what he deserved.

"Uhm..." I quickly came up with a pretty good lie to use, since he hadn't completely answered my question. "My mom said Mrs. Garver thought somebody broke into the house. She got home from the VFW that night and ... some stuff was missing from their house. Two backpacks full of stuff. Tony didn't steal them when he came out of the house, did he?"

"No. He was using both hands on that moron." Scott sighed a couple of times, sounding distracted. "Like I give a flying fuck about that pervert lady and her son-slash-daughter. Whoever it was, it wasn't any of us. You can tell her that much. But, Claire, you know ... me and Phil, we could go to jail ... if you sound off. You know? You're still with us, right?"