Hanging by a Thread (6 page)

I had just positioned the dress inside out on the sewing machine so I could take in the seam when the doorbell rang. I put the presser foot down carefully and went to get the door.

The woman standing on my front porch looked familiar, but I couldn’t think of where I’d seen her before. She was in her thirties, with blond hair held back with a headband and a carefully made-up, pleasant face. She was wearing the kind of suit my mom liked, a fitted short-sleeved jacket over a knee-length skirt, except hers was a deep sage green, a shade my mother would never wear.

“Hello,” she said brightly. “You must be Clare. I’m Noreen Granger.”

Granger. Of course. I kept a smile frozen on my face despite the sickening realization that I was talking to the mother of Dillon Granger, the boy who had been murdered two years ago. “Hi,” I said, shaking her hand, which was cool to the touch. “Would you like to come in?”

“Oh, no, I don’t want to intrude. I’m just here on behalf of the historic preservation council. I was hoping to talk to your mom for a few minutes. I knew her when we were growing up, though she was a few years ahead of me in school.”

“She’s at work right now, but I’ll let her know that you stopped by. Is there a message you’d like me to give her?”

“Oh, please do, if you would, honey. I wanted to welcome her back to town and invite her to a meeting. We’re doing some wonderful work with the town, really focusing on our early history and some of our underutilized resources. We’re fund-raising right now for restoration work on the town hall, and we’ll have a booth at the Independence Day festival. Will you two be attending?”

I couldn’t believe she was out doing volunteer work so close to the anniversary of her son’s death, but what did I know? Maybe it helped her to keep busy. Maybe giving her time to the town took her mind off her sadness. “I think so, Mrs. Granger. I’ll make sure to suggest we stop by.”

“That would be great.” She looked around the porch, at the antique wicker furniture, the vase full of sunflowers,
the paperback book my mom had left on the table. “I have to admit I have an ulterior motive. We do a house walk every fall, and I’d love to talk your mom into letting us include your house. It has a unique place in Winston history.”

I searched her face for irony, but there wasn’t any. Maybe the old jokes about the haunting had finally faded away. “That would be fun.”

“You’re going to love the high school. I can’t believe my twenty-year reunion is coming up!” She laughed, revealing a dimple at one corner of her mouth. “What year will you be?”

“Junior.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. You’d be perfect for Gold Key, you’re so darling and smart, but only freshmen are eligible to join. I’m sure you can help on their projects, though—they’re always looking for volunteers.”

“I’m sure I will.” Rachel was a member, and she said there were a lot of boring teas and nursing home visits and holiday caroling, but that anyone who was anyone in Winston was either a present or former member. Her mom had been one but my mom hadn’t, and I got the feeling that being excluded had been yet another painful humiliation for her all those years ago.

Nana said it was just a bunch of stuck-up bitches with nothing better to do, and not to worry about it, which made my mom mutter “That’s easy for you to say” under her breath, which I actually sympathized with since it’s a lot easier not to care about a club that hasn’t rejected you.

“Well, I’d be happy to introduce you to some nice families with kids your age, if you like,” Mrs. Granger said.

She was so warm and easy to talk to, I spoke without thinking. “We have kind of a reputation in Winston.”

She laughed, a genuine, appealing laugh that carried on the breeze. “Oh, you’re not talking about that sweet grandmother of yours, are you?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, feeling disloyal. “I guess some people wish she’d take better care of her house and all.”

Mrs. Granger clucked dismissively. “Don’t you listen to them. I adore Lila. She’s done so much important work in this town. And when … Well, I suppose you know that my husband and I lost our son a while back. Lila wrote me a beautiful letter. I still read it now and then. She’s a special lady.”

Mrs. Granger hugged me before she left. I put her business card on the kitchen counter, thinking that maybe she and my mom could have coffee or something. Maybe she could become a good friend. She hadn’t been at all what I’d expected, but evidently time can heal even the deepest wounds, or at least give you a chance to start living again.

It took just half an hour to alter Rachel’s dress. She liked her clothes form-fitting, and I was happy to help, considering everything she had done for me. Besides, it was good practice. I wasn’t sure what it said about me that I knew her measurements better than I knew my own, but when I was done with a pair of Rachel’s jeans, they fit her like they were painted on.

I’d teased her about wearing a dress to the beach, since
she’d end up in just her bikini within an hour, but Rachel was a big believer in first impressions.

I had chosen my own outfit carefully, too, though I wasn’t the beach-dress type. Despite what I’d said to Rachel, I was kind of interested in Luke Herrera, although after meeting Jack I wasn’t so sure. I’d taken a walk with Luke once, and it might have even gone farther if one of his friends hadn’t thrown a volleyball at us from down the beach, hitting Luke in the back. We stopped kissing just as the last of the sun disappeared below the horizon, its reflection trembling on the surface of the water before it slipped underneath.

The truth was that I’d sort of figured I was heading toward … something, with Luke. Maybe even something big. Like,
sleeping with him
big.

It was on my summer to-do list. I mean, not necessarily with Luke, but with someone. I didn’t believe in waiting until you were with someone you loved. I wasn’t sure I believed in love at all. Or at least, not for me. Things hadn’t worked out for my mom, or for my grandmother, who’d already buried two husbands. Nana lost her first husband when my mom was seven. It was a lot tougher back then for single mothers to make a go of it, but Nana always said that was one thing the women of our family were good at—making a go of things.

Ever since I could remember, Nana had dated. Maybe there was something about a free spirit like Nana that was oddly appealing to old men, because she never had any trouble meeting them, despite her sketchy reputation in
town. And it wasn’t that they left her—
she
tired of
them
. “I’d rather be a tart than a bore,” she’d told me more than once during our holiday visits, just one of the many things she said that drove my mother crazy.

My secret fear was that I wasn’t cut out even to be a tart. I didn’t have … 
it
, whatever it was. Mom had it, even if she did her best to suffocate it under her boring clothes and soccer mom hair—I saw how men looked at her. Nana had apparently turned down half a dozen marriage proposals after her first husband died before settling on rich old Doyle Raley. But I suspected I wasn’t half the head turner either of them was.

Maybe that was why I’d told Rachel all about Lincoln Cross, my best friend at Blake. I’d stretched the truth, saying he wasn’t just a friend but my boyfriend. He was a lot more impressive than anyone I’d actually dated, and I told Rachel about how I used to ride behind him on the Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle his dad gave him when he turned sixteen, the music he wrote, the computer room in his dad’s condo with the speakers that cost more than the motorcycle. About his wavy brown hair that came well past his shoulders, and nights up on the roof deck high above their Nob Hill neighborhood. About how Lincoln and I liked to wrap up in a comforter after sex, often falling asleep on the double lounge chair by his dad’s koi pond.

Most of which was true. Except that Lincoln’s father would have never let him touch the Hayabusa. And instead of sex, it was usually Scrabble. And, um, there was the fact that Lincoln was gay. I told myself these were minor
omissions, during those first few days when Rachel and I were getting reacquainted and I needed something—anything—to impress her.… And now it was too late to tell her the truth.

Yet
. I would tell her the truth, about that and a few other small lies I’d told back when I felt like I was trying to get used to the new life my mother had thrust us into. I just wanted to wait a little longer, cement our friendship, make sure it was really going to
last
before I took that kind of risk. I couldn’t afford to lose my one sure thing. The few times I’d spoken to Lincoln since we’d moved, I hadn’t told him everything about Rachel and my new life, either. It was like I wasn’t sure the two halves would fit together, but I knew I had to own up soon and be honest with both of them.

After I finished Rachel’s dress, I pressed it and my own outfit, which was pretty tame by my standards—a plain black tank top and an ancient pair of cutoffs whose pockets I’d appliquéd with the logos from antique flour sacks. I’d beaded my flip-flops myself, and I had a necklace I’d made by drilling holes in coins Nana had brought back from a trip to India and stringing them on a silk ribbon along with black glass beads.

Mom still wasn’t home, so I put the casserole in the oven and opened the box of old clothes I stored in my room. I’d bought some of them at a tag sale the week before, and the rest I’d found on the porch. Word had gotten around town about my business, and people had started leaving me old clothes and quilts, even tablecloths and dish
towels. Everyone—friends of my mom, kids I’d met through Rachel, neighbors along San Benito Road—thought of me when they had things they didn’t want anymore, and I got some good things that way. But I still went to garage sales and junk sales and flea markets, because I loved old things, vintage pieces full of personality, things you couldn’t find today.

At the top of the box was a plastic bag stuffed with clothes that I’d bought from a dazed-looking woman in a baseball cap. She had been sitting behind a card table in a vacant lot at the edge of town along with half a dozen other vendors. I didn’t know where they had found the things they sold at their hard-luck flea market, but every week their broken-down cars and ancient trucks were loaded with junk—mismatched dishes and tarnished silver and water-stained books, blankets and toys and lamps that had seen better days. I went through piles of clothes without seeing anything special, but then I saw a plastic bag labeled “Odds and Ends $5.” I could see a brown suede garment through the plastic, probably a skirt. I had no doubt that it was either ruined, ripped, stained, or burnt, but I knew I could cut it apart and use it anyway, and that was worth five dollars no matter what else was in the bag.

I dumped the contents onto the carpeted floor, and colorful pieces tumbled out: a paisley polyester blouse and a pair of striped tights with a long run in them.

A denim jacket with a cropped hem and distressed silver buttons caught my eye. It was badly stained and wrinkled, with dirt ground into the seams, and there was a rip in one
sleeve. The label read “Ripley Couture,” an expensive brand I’d seen in a San Francisco boutique. The jacket had to have cost several hundred dollars, and I wondered how it had ended up in the flea market, especially in this condition. It was too damaged to be salvaged, but the buttons were pretty, and I knew I’d find a use for them. In the time it took for my hand to reach for the jacket, I’d already decided to try them with a seventies-era jumper I was working on—

A powerful tremor shattered my synapses, jerking my thoughts violently. I cried out. I think I did, anyway. The fabric was alive in my hands, sending silvery sparks rocketing through my body into my mind, exploding with pain.

It had never been this strong before.

I couldn’t let go. My fingers were frozen around the fabric, and my other senses faded away. All that remained were the flashes and the sparks and a sudden burning heat that radiated out from my heart to my fingertips. I waited, struggling to keep breathing, because I knew what would come next.

I held the jacket in my hands, unable to let go, waiting for the painful tremor to run its course. Finally it fell from my trembling fingertips into a heap on the floor. I crawled away from it, forcing myself to calm down. The shortness of breath, the pain behind my eyes—these felt real, but they were illusions too, just like the visions.

It’s not real
, I whispered to myself. Technically, it was true—the denim jacket was only a garment, an inanimate thing that was bound by the same physical laws as every other object in the house. Gravity made it fall to the floor;
invisible air currents lifted and fluttered the collar. The shade of blue, I knew from my color theory class at Blake, was a product of light refraction, no more real than concepts like virtue or destiny.

“You’re not real,” I told the jacket, but I still felt its tug. I felt like I wouldn’t be able to leave it alone until I understood the vision, what it was trying to tell me.

My bedroom carpet was soft and soothing under my hands and knees. Never had my visions altered the physical world—no garment had ever wrapped itself around my wrist or throat; no zipper had scraped itself against my flesh. The sparkles I felt were not temperature or sensation—they were not of any sense I could name, other than the connection I felt to others’ lives.

But this time had been different. Moments earlier, the tremor had shocked me, rocked me, thrown me from my axis. Left me gasping, as though if I hadn’t let go, it would have consumed me. Taken me.

Ended me
.

Stupid
, I chided myself at the unbidden words. I was being overly dramatic and ridiculous, the result of anxiety about the evening ahead. I’d been high-strung all afternoon because of the encounter with Hoff, the thrill of selling so many items, the … whatever it was with Jack. And like every Saturday night, I fretted over getting dressed, over what I would say, how much I would drink, how I would hide it from my mom, whether this would finally be the night Rachel realized I was nothing but a liability.

That was all it was. Overreacting by an epic overreactor.