What We Lost in the Dark (11 page)

“It only takes fifteen minutes,” Angie said. “
Fifteen
minutes.”

She would keep on needling me for thirty, so I got out a bag of frozen blueberries and my mother’s one concession to food hedonism: half and half.

In fifteen minutes, we had gooey, (and I have to admit) delicious blueberry ice cream.

Angie said she couldn’t sleep unless we watched scary movies. Although I had done this to her, I pleaded, “Hey Angie, it’s nearly one in the morning.”

And where was my mother? With Brice or Court or Haven or some other intern with a post-her-generation name?

“Part?” Angie said. “Of one?”

I needed to think, so I agreed.

We popped in a classic,
Night of the Living Dead
. She was out in fewer than twenty minutes. So like me was my Angie now that what would have kept another nine-and-a-half-year-old up all night expecting zombies to rip off the shutters sent my sister to sleep after half an hour. I carried her in to my queen-sized bed, so if she woke up she would feel special—and sure that zombies could not get her there, if she were to feel afraid at all. Even though I wouldn’t be there with her until just before she got up, I knew that Angie still
loved to wake up in my bed, sick with ultra-stuffed pillows and the most lavish sheets my mom could find, about twelve hundred-count sheets. Angela said that the scent of the lavender I used to spray my sheets and pillows felt like a hug to her.

I was about to leave the room when on a whim, I decided to lie down next to her. Even unconscious, Angela did her own sleep ritual, burrowing into the quilts and twisting one around her like the cotton candy twists around the paper cone.

Then, in the dark—no room is darker than mine; it’s like the inside of your favorite pillow—Angela suddenly woke. She said, “Allie?”

“Hmmm.”

“If Juliet was a zombie, would she kill me?”

“There are no zombies,” I said. “And if Juliet were here, she would climb in bed with you and tickle you. She would be so happy to be with you again. She loved you, Angela.”

“Could there be a good zombie?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are there zombie angels?”

I hugged Angela.
Zombie angels
. Juliet would have dug the image. It would have appealed to the twisted side of her nature.

“Go to sleep now, my little zombie girl,” I said.

I was about to get up and clean the kitchen (as well as the living room, the loft, and possibly the garage for extra points) when I heard the door open.

Rather, it
banged
open, smacking the plaster so hard that there’d be a dent.

My first thought was that it was Garrett Tabor, that he had somehow defeated our multiple locks and our security system, too.

It was, however, my mother, and she did not look in the least tipsy. She looked about twice her size, like one of those fish that can puff itself out. Gina was behind her.

“Hi, Gina,” I said. “Hey, Mom. Glad you’re here. Angie’s asleep. I have to do some reading so …”

“You sit down right there,” Jackie said. “Do. Not. Move.”

Gina retreated. I couldn’t believe it. She was going to leave me there to the wrath of Jacqueline Mack Kim. I made an imploring gesture. Gina pretended that she thought I was only waving, and she waved back.

Chicken
.

Gina gently closed the door, her lips forming a kiss.

Traitor.

“I have been tolerant. I have been supportive. I have been all the things that mothers should be. Have I done that? Have I?”

“You have, Jack-Jack,” I said, feebly.

“Don’t even try horsing around with me. Don’t even try. It’s not enough that I have spent nearly eighteen years worried about my very loved child. Is it? It’s not enough that your best friend, who was also like my child, just died. You have to go sink yourself in lake water the temperature of cold beer. And why? Why now? Why not in summer? Why in December?” She paused, and slammed her palm flat against the granite countertop. “Here’s a better question. Why at all?”

“Free diving is actually easier in the …” I remembered Jackie’s favorite phrase. “It’s biology. The mammalian diving reflex …”

“I don’t care! This is unacceptable, Alexis. For what, Alexis? For what?”

“Because I know what he did.”

“Who?”

“Garrettt Tabor. I know … Mom, sit down.”

She did.

My phone, between us on the counter top, began to ping. I snatched it up, hiding the screen from my mother. Texts were arriving. They were photos. The first one was of my mother and Gina, exchanging a hug. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes earlier. The second was … it was Angela. Dressed in her snowmobile suit, using a broom to knock snow out of the trees where our backyard opened onto a portion of the Superior National Hiking Trail. Angela’s snowmobile suit was only a week old. That picture would have had to have been taken by someone with a long lens … or standing in our driveway, observing my sister unawares. There were more. Angela with Keely at the bus stop. Angela walking into school. My mother and Gina on a run in their woolies and headbands. In all, there were a dozen pictures.

He didn’t have to tell me that he could get close to the people closest to me.

He could get way too close.

All it would take would be a wheel over a curb on a dark morning, a car that came out of nowhere. Tabor knew how to do that. I had surgical pins in my arm to prove it.

How did he know that we were talking, here … now?

Shoving my phone in the front pocket of my big hoodie, I jumped to my feet and yanked the kitchen blinds down so hard that they jangled crooked on their tracks.

Was he watching us now?

“What’s wrong with you?” Jackie asked.

“We were watching a horror movie. Angela and I were. The girl looked up and there was this creepy burned guy with this face pressed up to the window. I just looked out there,
and it was so black and cold.” I thought of that night on the balcony of the Tabor Oaks, and Tabor’s face as he calmly looked at me. His handsome face, worse than any distorted rubber monster mask. My life was a horror movie. “Mom, I’m sorry. I have to prove to myself,” I said, improvising desperately. “I have to prove that I can go on without her, Mom. I have to prove that whatever Garrett Tabor and Juliet did together has nothing to do with me now. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea for us to try free diving now. But I’m grieving now. And I’m lonely now. And so is Rob.”

Don’t believe me
, I thought.
What I’m saying sounds nuts. Call me on it. I would collapse and just tell you
.

“What did Rob want?” my mother asked.

I had no idea what she meant. Then I realized she believed that the cascade of texts had come from Rob.

“I ask for a reason,” she added. “You’re not going anywhere tonight.”

“I won’t see Rob that much over Christmas …”

“You should have considered that before. It seems that for the past year, all you’ve done is risk your life in stupid ways.” Jackie got up, as well, and she got in my face, close to me. She had never spanked me or even given me a slap on the butt when I was a child. At this moment, it wasn’t out of the question that she would slug me. She was breathing hard. Her hair was sticking up like she’d tried to craft a faux-hawk for Halloween. “When is your birthday, Alexis?”

“That would be January eighteenth,” I said. “You were there, remember?”

Jackie grabbed my arm. “I don’t care how old you are. The day you turn eighteen is the next time you leave this house except for work. And I will drive you to work. Do you hear me? Do you?”

“I hear you,” I said. “I’m sorry.” For the first time since I was ten, I crossed my fingers behind my back. Now, I would have to evade not only the authorities, but Garrett Tabor and my mother to prove what I had seen. I would do it, though. I would do it somehow.

The next night, I asked Rob to buy me a camera. We were sitting alone, side by side on my bed, in the dark, music quietly playing from my dock.

“For your birthday?” he said. “I sort of had a plan for that, actually.”

“Well, I was thinking before. I was thinking for nothing. I’ve never asked anybody for anything in my life, like since I was little and wanted a Dracula’s Daughter doll. But I need a camera better than mine. I need a camera that does better video than mine.” I stopped and took his hand. “But that a dummy person like me could use.”

“No offense, Allie-Stair, but why are you asking me to buy you a camera? I don’t mean I won’t. I just wonder why, because you have money. I mean, I know you have enough that even if you didn’t have savings, if it was for school or something, then Jackie would …” Rob turned over in the darkness and drew me close, throwing his leg over mine.

“Jackie can’t know. That’s why. If I buy anything online,
she’ll know. Since we dived, since you got hurt or in danger because of me, I’m officially her ex-kid.”

“I get that. It could have been you. She was scared.”

“Her scared is over and she’s furious.”

“Well, maybe now. But not for long. That’s bullshit. It’s two days until Christmas Eve. She’s not going to stay mad at you over Christmas, Allie.”

“Believe me, she is.”

Rob knew my mom well, but he didn’t know the kind of anger engendered by the thought of her daughter beating XP only to drown. My mother would be civil to me in front of our relatives, for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when my Grandma Mack paid for the whole family (including Mom, Angie, and me) to stay up at The Timbers on Torch Mountain in a big chalet, to ski every night (and every day, for everyone else).

“It won’t get here in time for Christmas,” Rob said. “The camera.”

I nodded, biting back tears. Christmas this year was a difficult subject between us.

Rob was going skiing, too. He was going skiing in Vail with his parents, leaving in one day. When my Uncle Brian arrived in Duluth, Rob would be taking off at the same airport. We weren’t married, or engaged, or anything. But it felt wrong for us to spend Christmas apart the first Christmas after Juliet’s death, the first Christmas that we were a couple. Still, we were kids, and there was no way that we could buck our parents’ wishes. The Dorns thought they were giving Rob a treat—he’d always wanted to ski Vail or Mammoth or Whistler—but I suspected also that, especially now, they didn’t particularly want him around me.

“We can wait until after Christmas,” I said.

“It could be after New Year’s.”

“Well, it’ll come before then, and I can do this myself.”

“What do you want to do yourself, Allie?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Allie, since when do we have secrets?”

“Not ever.” But we had, and we did.

“Then tell me.”

We had agreed that I had mental problems where it came to Garrett Tabor. Why should I reinforce this already unfounded, unfair idea by telling … the truth?

But this was Rob. So I blurted out, “I want to take video of him … like surveillance. I want to set the camera up on a timer so that it would take a few minutes every hour, so I can see what he does when he comes and goes. I could see what he carries with him. I want to take pictures so I can remember exactly where we saw the bodies …”

Rob sat there motionless.

“You saw them. You saw the skeletons.”

Rob said nothing.

“You saw them!” Just as it was impossible that Rob had nearly died down there, it was impossible, for
the third time
, that he had failed to see what I saw. It could not have happened. He hadn’t seen the dead girl in the apartment, the second time we scaled the Tabor Oaks. He hadn’t seen Juliet with Garrett Tabor at the Fire Festival.

“You were taking pictures!” I said, grabbing for his shirt, not to hurt him, not to startle him, but to shake him—to make him remember. “You dropped the camera, Rob, but the camera has pictures of them. I saw the flash going off.”

Rob’s voice was muffled. I imagined him covering his face with his big hands. “I don’t even remember taking pictures, Allie. I passed out. All I remember is waking up in the
hospital. I’ve tried, honey. I don’t even remember being in the boat. I don’t remember seeing Tabor at all.”

“So, you think I made it up. Anyone would think I made it up. Skeleton girls chained to the old pillars, pushed back inside the cliff cave. It sounds like a horror movie. Maybe I’ll only be able to find the place that once. So he gets away again.” I started to cry. “Then where did I get the chain? Where did I get the medal?”

That I still hadn’t shown Rob. That I hadn’t figured out. I could feel it in my drawer, glowing and pulsing as though it had its own small power source, a beacon that that had led me to it. I struggled to pull myself together. This would be our last night for ten days. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Rob. I’m sorry that I’m making it feel like your fault.”

“I know you’re not trying to, but I do feel that way.”

“No, no …” Roughly, I wiped the tears off my cheeks and chin and steadied my voice. “Let’s forget it. Let’s forget it for tonight. Those … bodies, if that’s what they were, have been there for years. They’re not going anywhere.”

Rob got up and stood with his hands pressed against the frame of my big bedroom window. “You can’t forget it, Allie.”

Without another word, Rob sat down at my computer. I saw my screen come to life. He punched in a website and ordered me a Canon G12 with an extra lens, a bag, a sturdy tripod, an underwater case, and a weather housing. I saw him charge it and I glimpsed the price, with a sharp, involuntary gasp. It was more than six hundred bucks of camera and equipment—with being on deep sale for the holidays.

“It will be here tomorrow,” he said dully. “It’s just like one of mine. It takes great video.”

“Rob … you didn’t need to do that now …”

“Well, sure. I did. I won’t be here to help you. And I’m not sure that I would want to help you if I was going to be here.”

I stood to reach for him, and then stopped. “Well, tonight we’ll feast! I’m going to make shrimp curry for us. Surprise!” It’s the one thing I’m really good at cooking—curry. I try to save it for special occasions. “I got all the stuff yesterday.”