Mirror in the Sky (28 page)

FORTY-FOUR

T
HERE
were rumors, most of them resembling conspiracy theories. That she took out her trust fund and that she's traveling the world. That the Lightfoots secretly know about it. But if you saw the state the Lightfoots were in that day we went over, you'd know that one isn't true. That she ran off to join one of those cults. But I know how she felt about those organizations. That she was the sole person on our planet who managed to commune with Terra Nova. That she was somehow beamed up there. And then there are the more sinister ones. That she was kidnapped. That she was murdered. That she drowned. Or that she drowned herself. That one makes me shudder. I remember how she hated pools. She hated water. I don't want to believe it.
It can't be
, I tell myself.
It can't be.

April 4—the Day of Prayer—came, and there was still no word of Halle.

“We need to somehow subvert this, mark it, instead of ignoring it,” my mother said. She took my father and me out to our front yard.

“I don't want to pray to commune with people on Terra Nova,” she said. “I want to pray for people on this planet.” And so we held hands and watched the sun set. We did it our way. I thought about Halle. I prayed that she was still somewhere on this planet, that she was safe. I prayed that she was happy. I prayed that she felt loved. I prayed for her to come back.

In the end, the Day of Prayer was peaceful. And apparently, many people did still gather at various energy vortices to look up at the sky, sending out prayer and goodwill. I wondered if anyone else bothered to look here, at us, at our little planet, our pale blue dot.

We don't really see things when they're right here in front of us.

Summer came and went, a long and sweltering one. Each day, I woke hoping for news. Good news. It never came. We checked in with one another, hoping that someone had heard something. There was a national campaign, her face on the news every day for a while. Whenever I saw Amit at the restaurant, he asked me about Halle—if I had heard from her, if I knew anything he didn't, and when I told him no, he nodded wistfully and walked away.

School started. We were seniors now. They held an assembly on the first day. People spoke of how talented Halle was, how exceptional, how brilliant, what a bright future she would have had ahead of her. She had been missing for close to six months. They talked about her as though they were sure she was dead. But to me she was still alive, she was still the Halle we knew—vibrant and pretty and brilliant and cool.

As people spoke at the podium, I thought about it again, the way I had nearly every day since she disappeared, what I could have said, what I could have done, those tiny little details that, we now know, can change the outcome of the whole. I could have stayed home instead of going to the Cape, I could have asked her, begged her to come home with us, and maybe none of it would have happened. I could have said no when I was invited to that party at her house, spent my junior year hiding in the library, and I wouldn't have played a role in our group dynamic. Maybe I could have trusted her more, treated her like a real friend. I could have chosen to stay home on Christmas. I could have said no to Nick. Maybe I could have stopped that fight.

“You can't blame yourself for this,” my mother kept telling me, but I couldn't help it.

I thought about Halle's greatest fear—the one that superseded even her fear of water—that people didn't really love her, didn't truly want to be around her. That was the thing that I knew she felt on the last day we left her at the Cape, and I thought about how I was partially responsible for that.

She wasn't perfect. She could be patronizing, maybe she
was strategic, maybe she did maneuver people. She definitely kept secrets. But she wasn't a bad person. She thought of us as family, perhaps the only family she really had.

I just wanted her to come back. We all did.

I was walking home from school later that week when Nick pulled up at the intersection of Hillside and the Post Road. In the aftermath of Halle's disappearance, Nick had been inconsolable. He couldn't stop crying, not just at the police department and at the various meetings at the Lightfoots' but for days and weeks afterward. I would see him in class, looking at her empty seat, his eyes permanently rimmed with red.

I watched him now as he pulled up beside me and rolled down his window, his face blank.

“Hey, I want to talk to you,” he said. He had lost that perpetual smile, that cheer I assumed would never go away. Now his eyes had constant dark circles under them; his lips were permanently pressed into a straight line.

I hesitated before I got into the car with him. I glanced at him, but he continued to look straight ahead at the windshield. I expected him to drive us somewhere, but he stayed parked on the side of the road and pointed to that spot, that spot in the road where we had sat waiting for the ASPCA.

“That dog . . . Sarah didn't hit him.”

“What? I don't know what you're . . .”

“Listen to me, Tara . . .” He banged his fist in frustration on his steering wheel. “I hit that dog. I didn't want her to know, so I just let everyone think it was Sarah. But it was me.
I
hit
that dog. And then I didn't tell anyone, not her, not you, not anyone.”

He burst out crying, leaning on his steering wheel. I sat next to him, watching him for some time before I reached over and stroked his hair.

“I knew,” I said, unearthing another buried truth, one I had kept even from myself. I sat with him for a little while before I opened the door to his car and walked out. I knew I wouldn't speak to Nick again for a long time.

Love has its own strange velocity. The longer she was gone, the more he loved her. My love for him stayed the same, but Halle was an even stronger force in our lives now than when she was here with us. The difference was, I had come to accept it. I understood by now how fallible we are, the mistakes we make, the judgments we pass. I had watched her for so many years with a mixture of awe and envy, and I had formed a perception of her as a perfect ice queen. But she wasn't the cold one.

I was.

It had taken so long and so much to chip away at my own frozen heart. I was the one who held tight to my perception of Halle; I was the one who kept everything close to my own chest. And yet, she had always tried. She had become my friend, and just when our friendship became real, at least to me,
I
screwed things up. Not her.

Halle had asked me once what I was most afraid of, and I didn't want to tell her, but I was just as afraid of belonging as I
was of not belonging. I hid behind books, didn't talk much, never had. I told myself I was a pariah; I had wished that I was someone else for so long. But even though I was lonely, I have to admit, most of the time, I preferred it that way. I was afraid of the messiness that closeness brings, afraid of friendships that turn to something else, afraid of my own petty jealousies and the monstrous things that can come of them. Afraid of letting people in. It was easy for me to distance myself from Meg after she had left. And it was just as easy keeping all my secrets to myself, never completely letting in Halle or Alexa or Veronica or even Nick either.

The irony was that I had spent all those months feeling like I couldn't reveal my entire self to these people because they would judge me for my difference, for my imperfections, and yet they were all flawed, just like me. It was easier believing that there was someone else out there, a mirror version of me on another planet who would understand me completely, but the friendship that Alexa and Veronica and Halle had offered me was real. I had just been too scared to take it.

Once senior year started, I never saw Bitsy Lightfoot around town. Rumor was that over the summer, the Lightfoots had packed up the estate and sold it, moved to a smaller house or permanently to one of their other homes abroad.

I remembered that thing Halle had said to me about her parents,
I don't know if they even . . . wanted kids.
Was it possible that now they didn't have any?

Then one day in October, after school had ended, I saw
Bitsy walking around the rim of Tod's Point. She was still wearing black, even all these months later. She had on the same sunglasses, the ones she always wore, the large ones that covered half her face. She was walking fast, trying to make it to the tip of Tod's Point, the clearing beyond the sailboat dock where there's a perfect view of the sunset.