Flutter (18 page)

As I drifted off to sleep that second night, a tiny idea popped into my head for the first time. Not a full-blown idea or theory, but a little kernel of possibility. Maybe my boy was not warning me against Ash, and I had gotten that wrong.

Maybe Ash was not simply a source of information in this puzzle that my boy was unfolding for me, and Ash was not a side story.

Maybe he fit in somehow in a bigger way. Did this make sense? I chewed on it for a bit. I tabled it and, over the next couple of days, plunged headfirst into getting to know Ash.

I learned Ash loved pasta with red sauce but hated capers. And he had played baseball in high school. Center field. His father had taught him to draw when he was very small. His first car was a green Pontiac, and his first girlfriend was named Melanie. And he was allergic to shellfish.

By day four, I had written many details about Ash in my
purple notebook. But I felt no closer to helping my boy. And getting to know Ash truly was unsettling in the oddest way. These pieces, these slivers of his life, of his character, were real, and a bit too inviting. I loved each new discovery more than the last.

He ate Cody’s Brussels sprouts, for God’s sake, and fixed sick horses, and bought bikes for little kids, and gave me a kitten, and the list went on.

And so did the texts from Gia. The first:
Did u kiss him yet?
The most recent:
Carpe diem
.

“What kind of farm did you grow up on?” I asked the next night while we were playing euchre.

“Soybean and corn.”

“Lots of animals?” I asked.

“Not at first, but my little brother, Frankie, he finally wore Pop down. Frankie had this big idea that we should grow pumpkins, do a whole pumpkin patch thing in the fall, with a corn maze, a haunted house, the works. He was only four or five at the time, but he could be persuasive.”

“So, did you?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. It was hard to turn down Frankie. And so, the next year, Frankie decided the pumpkin patch would be even better with animals, a petting zoo, the whole thing. He enlisted Mom too, because she always said horses would be good on our farm. She liked to ride.”

“So your dad just bought some animals, then?”

“I guess you had to know Frankie, had to know Mom.” He smiled to himself. “That’s how I started falling in love with horses. Made me want to become a vet …”

Ash’s smile was wistful, full of memory, full of love. But it quickly turned dark. “That was when we were young, before Pop …” Ash shook his head, cleared his throat. “Frankie died in the accident with my mom.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, holding back the urge to wrap my arms around him. I knew he didn’t want that. “Do you miss them?” I asked.

“Every day,” he answered, rubbing his stubbly chin. “It took me a long time not to feel like I was the one that should’ve died. That Frankie should’ve lived …”

“Survivor’s guilt.”

“I was older, supposed to protect him. Protect them. That’s all I had been doing for years.” He shook his head then, shook the memory away. “I was fourteen when they died. I just had a hard time processing it all. I went a little wild there a couple years ago.”

We sat quietly for a while. Ash called trump. Spades. “Go big or sleep in the streets.”

I laughed.

“What was your childhood like?” he asked.

“Oh, pretty normal,” I told him. And it felt true to me. The loops hadn’t kept me from a normal childhood for many years at least. Until, of course, they did. But I didn’t tell Ash any of this, not yet.

I went to flip over the first card from the deck at the same time as Ash. Our hands grazed each other, and he surprised me, grabbing my hand for a moment, running his thumb across the back of my knuckles. I smiled at him. He smiled back. And there was nothing between us, keeping us apart, just for a moment.

But then the fire crackled and the moment was gone. I had secrets, baggage. He did too. He let go of my hand.

But I replayed it, that touch initiated by him, over and over in my mind as I fell asleep later that night. His hand holding mine, the dark lashes framing his eyes.

Me in my warm, toasty cabin. Ash in his tent by the fire.

I fell asleep wondering if maybe tomorrow would be the night that he didn’t show up. He wouldn’t think twice about forgetting this girl with the secrets and the bad, frizzy hair. And I wouldn’t have gotten any answers out of him, and I wouldn’t know how to begin looking for him. But that voice sounded surprisingly unconvincing in my head tonight as I thought about his hand grabbing mine. That pull between us.

Even so, this life we were weaving together in bits and pieces seemed fragile and fleeting, and would certainly come to an end. Didn’t everything?

I’m in the boy’s barn, but he is not there. The Victrola sits on an old wooden workbench. I touch the cold metal of the large, swirled cone. A stringed instrument sits next to the Victrola, a flat wooden frame with many strings. It looks related to a harp. I think it is called a dulcimer. I try to pluck a string, but I can’t work my fingers precisely enough
.

Over the workbench, a jersey hangs tacked on the wall. A baseball jersey, red and white, with the number nine sewn on the front. It is made of shiny polyester material. It looks odd, out of place in this barn, too modern beside the metal hand plows leaning up against the wall and the large wooden carriage in the rear corner
.

I reach up to the jersey. It is silky and smooth under my touch
.

The colors whoosh into view, coming from my peripheral vision
.

Nine, I think. And I am gone
.

I awoke suddenly in my library study carrel with my head on the desk in front of me, a small puddle of drool beside my mouth. I wiped it away on my sleeve and looked around. My ears rang with the whooshing, wind-tunnel sounds of my loop. It took several moments for my hearing to come back.

My vision blurred as I cleaned up my papers and put the microfiche away. My temples throbbed with the after-loop headache. I fetched my notebook from my backpack and jotted down a few notes. How could that modern-day jersey be there, in my boy’s barn? And the significance of that number again. Nine.

I suddenly felt defeated. I had been gone and free from Ann Arbor for thirteen days, and what did I have to show for it?

I stomped home crabbily from another fruitless day at the library, another absurdly cryptic trip in the loop. I was utterly unable to make any headway in my mystery. In my life. In my control of these loops. I had been so excited that I had controlled one. One. But here I was.

And I was mad at myself for letting Ash take so much of my time, thoughts, and energy. I felt selfish. Because if he cared about me, even just as a friend, wasn’t I merely setting him up for loss? It was all only a matter of time.

Ugh.

Time. I was racing the clock here. I needed to help my boy, figure this thing out, and for too many days, my notebook had nothing new written in it except ridiculous, poorly rendered portraits of the span of Ash’s shoulders, the cuffs of his work jacket, his jawline in the firelight.

My boy was in the past, probably waiting patiently, being devastated by whatever he needed help with, and here I was, screwing around. For some reason, he was counting on me. He obviously couldn’t lean on anyone else, couldn’t depend on anyone around him.

And it was more than that. I was exhausted, wrung. This was killing me. The loops were killing me. Even if they were more infrequent lately, they were worse, harder.
Evolving
.

I jerked my backpack higher onto my back and stopped to catch my breath, the woods on the evergreen path suffocating me. I couldn’t get my breath. I sat down then in
the snow. I gasped, trying to draw enough oxygen into my lungs. My heart beat heavy, uneven in my chest. My head pounded; my vision blurred, burned.

I promised myself that I would spend the evening brainstorming new ways of coming at my problem.

When I walked up to the cabin, I saw that the door was cracked open. I immediately felt my hackles rise. Who was here? Who was looking for me?

But as I peeped inside and tiptoed around, I saw that nothing was out of place. Could I have left it unlocked? Could the wind have blown it open?

Then I saw Dala’s box. She was gone.

“Dala!” I called. I clucked my tongue. Nothing.

I got out two saucers and poured a bit of milk in one, clicking the saucers together, her usual, most favorite, can’t-purr-enough moment.

Dala didn’t appear. I looked under the bed, inside the tub, behind the bathroom door. Everywhere. Then I flopped on the love seat, unsure what to do. I put my head in my hands, rubbed at my eyes. Was I really going to cry over this?

“Hey,” Ash said, startling me. He stood at the still-open door.

“She’s gone!”

And I immediately became furious, seething with anger at Ash. “You gave me that damn cat!” I yelled. “You gave her to me! Made me care about her! And now look! She’s gone!”

“She is?” Ash’s eyes scanned around the cabin. “Did the door blow open? That happens sometimes when it’s not locked.”

I stood up. “Don’t you blame this on me!” I screamed, and my anger swelled. “She’s out there, probably freezing! All alone!”

“She’s a barn cat, Emery. She’ll be fine.”

“She’s a runt! You said so yourself. And she’s probably scared and not knowing what to do. And just feeling like she’s in this all by herself!” I was poking Ash in the chest when I said this now, spitting my words at him. “You did this! Why did you have to show up here, anyway? With your stupid kitten and your stubble and your evasiveness and your impossible swagger!”

“Emery—”

“No, I have things to figure out! On my own!” I yelled at him.

He looked at me, although I could barely register his face through my blurry-eyed rage. “Get out of here!” I yelled, and pushed him with both hands as hard as I could, right in his chest. “She’s out there all alone!” I pushed him again. He didn’t budge. He just took it, his face drawn, stalwart. He reached his arms out for me, but I pushed them away.

“Just leave me alone!” I beat my fists on his chest then, and he let me. I hit him and I swore, every word in the book, and I bit my lip, biting back the tears, for my lost cat, for my
lost little boy who needed me, for my lost hope … my lost chance for a normal life.

When I had exhausted myself, Ash gently smoothed my hair, and the last thing I saw before he turned to leave was the look on his face. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t pity. It was the soft stare of empathy.

And in that moment, I was sorry, so sorry I had taken it all out on him, because I knew none of it was his fault. But as I opened my mouth to say the words, nothing came out. I just watched him walk out and shut the door quietly behind him.

I lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I started dialing Gia’s number about twelve times, but I never pushed Send. I didn’t know if I was giving Dad something to track.

But I had to talk to her.

Finally I called. Her phone rang only once. “Emery,” she said, her voice low, relieved.

“Gia, is this safe?”

“I think so. No, I don’t know.”

“You quit texting me.”

“Listen, I don’t know what’s safe. Emery, they are nuts looking for you. They had these dogs at the hospital, your house.”

“Dogs?”

“You know, the kind that track scents. Loretta said they tracked you to the bus station.”

“Jesus. Maybe I should just come home.”

“Emery, are you crazy?”

“Yes.” I felt homesick, defeated.

“I think you’ve had enough people telling you what to do. You’ve gotta make up your own mind.”

“I know.”

“You okay?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m not coming home.”

“You getting anywhere with all this?”

“Not really,” I answered with a sigh. We were silent for a long moment.

“Remember the fifth-grade talent show, when I was doing that dance—”

“Your leotard split right up the back. Who could forget that? Thank God you were wearing underwear, Gia,” I laughed.

“Yeah, too bad they were SpongeBob.”

“Oh, jeez, I remember that kid—Rotten Ronald—he would never let you forget that.”

“Emery, you ran up on stage and threw your sweater around my waist, started doing the dance with me, just acted like it was no big deal.”

“Why are you telling me this, Gia?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed like the time in the conversation when I was supposed to tell you some meaningful story, give you some awesome advice, and send you on your way. And I got nothing.”

“Gia!” I laughed.

“At least I made you laugh.”

“Thank you,” I giggled.

“Plus, I was the one who made sure Ronald sat in all that paint in art class about a week later. I never fessed up about that.”

“Gia!”

“What? I was ten.”

I laughed hard then.

“Are you scared, Emery?”

“Yeah.” We sat in silence for a few moments.

“I love you, Emery.”

“Like a sister.”

Sometime in the night, I heard a gentle knock at the door. At first I thought it was part of my dream. But then I slowly became aware of another noise that eventually roused me. It was a meow.

I quickly got out of bed and opened the cabin door. There, in a small wire pet carrier, sat Dala. She meowed pleadingly over and over when she saw me. “You’re home!” I squealed, and I reached down and picked up the crate.

I brought Dala inside. I carried her to the bed, cuddled her, so glad to have her back. She purred and purred, and she did that little thing where she nuzzled her nose into my ear and then bit my hair a little. We sat on the bed for a while, playing. I scratched her belly, and she pretended to bite me,
just enough to let me know she was playing. I held her like a baby for a while, petting her, in the crook of my arm, and she swatted at the curls of my hair hanging down. She seemed so happy to be back. She even ignored her milk dish for a while so that she could curl up in my lap and be petted.

But when she did go to her milk dish, I walked to the window. The tent was up now. I could feel the wind slipping through the cracks of the old window. It was getting cold. Very cold.