Summerlost (9 page)

“Almost positive,” Leo said. He ran out of the room and came back with some papers. “It's in the copy I made of the police report.”

“Maybe they wrote down
ring
and weren't specific,” I said.

“No,” he said. “They mention a necklace and earrings. A suitcase and the contents. Shoes. Nylons. Clothing. All of that. But no ring.”

I held out my hand. Leo hesitated. But I took it from him and read the list. I didn't let my eyes wander to anything else on the report.

“They were really thorough,” I said.

“They were probably worried because they couldn't tell right off how she died. Plus she was famous. They wanted to do a good job.”

The ring on the screen was the same one that was in her portrait. I was sure of it. Plain gold band, three pale stones.

“Rings don't fall off,” I said. “Earrings, yeah. All the time. And necklaces, maybe. If the clasp breaks. But not rings. Not if they fit right. And I bet hers did. I mean, she'd worn it for all that time when she was married.”

“
Weird
,” Leo said. “All of it. Why was she wearing it that night? Where did it go?”

“Maybe she hid it,” I said.

“But
why
would she hide it?” Leo asked. “She had a heart attack. She didn't
know
she was going to die.”

“Maybe she gave it to one of the people who came to see her at the hotel,” I said.

“Roger Marin,” Leo said.

“Right.”

“But why would she give it back?” Leo asked. “If she'd kept it that whole time.”

It didn't seem likely to me either. If she cared about it enough to keep wearing it, she wouldn't hand it over to her ex-husband. And my mom still wore the rings my dad had given her, the diamond engagement ring and the wedding band. Of course, she and my dad hadn't gotten divorced. He died.

But maybe getting divorced didn't mean you stopped loving someone either.

“Lisette could also have given the ring to the first person who came to visit her at the hotel,” I pointed out. “The person before Roger Marin.”

“Maybe,” Leo said. “But it's not very likely. In the police report the hotel maid said she came up around that time with some fresh towels that Lisette wanted. So the maid thinks she was the first person.”

“It's all pretty interesting,” I admitted.

“I know,” Leo said.

15.

At the end of the play I cried.

Because Lisette Chamberlain was dead?

Yes.

For the first time, she felt real to me. The play had made her real.

And I cried because of other things.

At the end Miranda's dad, Prospero, talked about how our lives are little. How they're rounded out with a sleep. And then, at the very end of the play, he was by himself. The audience was all, all around him, watching him, but he was alone on the stage and he walked off alone.

It was like he was saying good-bye to us. To the world.

“Sorry,” Leo said when he noticed me crying. “Are you okay?”

“The ending is sad,” I said. “How it's about dying.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. He sounded uncomfortable. “I'm sorry. I didn't think about that.” His mouth went down and his eyes went sad. I could tell that he felt bad for me.

But he didn't look away from me the way most people do
when they say
I'm sorry
. I felt like I could say
I'm okay
or I could say something else. I felt like Leo was waiting for whatever came next.

“My brother used to like to go on drives,” I said. I'm not sure why. It's what came out, what I guess I was thinking about. “Sometimes he wanted my mom or dad to take him alone and sometimes he wanted the whole family to come. We'd get in the car and back out of the driveway. He would say left, right, left. You weren't ever sure where he was going to take you but he wasn't doing it at random. He knew exactly where he wanted to go. Sometimes past the police station, or his school, stuff that made sense. Sometimes he'd have us drive past places I'd never even noticed, down streets I'd never wondered about, and then we'd come home a new way. He always knew how to get back.”

“Did the accident happen on one of those drives?” Leo asked.

“No,” I said. “It was on the freeway. Dad and Ben were going to another town to run some errands. The guy who hit them was drunk, right in the middle of the day. He died too.”

I waited for Leo to say things. Like
I'm sorry
or
That's so sad
or
Drunk drivers are the worst
. All of those things were true.

“I wish I'd known your dad and your brother,” Leo said.

“Me too,” I said. “I wish that I had.”

I could tell that Leo didn't know what I meant.

“I mean,” I said, “I thought I knew them really well. But it turns out there was a lot more to them.” And I realized I didn't
only mean Ben, who was hard to know, who had his own world. I also meant my dad. I mean, he was my dad. I knew the way his face looked in the morning before he shaved and that he would read you a story almost any time you asked him to, especially on Saturday mornings. I knew that he loved to watch soccer and eat chocolate chips with a spoonful of peanut butter and I knew his favorite Christmas song was one that hardly anyone knew called “Far, Far, Away on Judea's Plains.” But I didn't know lots of things. Did he believe in God and how much? When he was a teenager, who was the first girl he kissed? How long did it take him to learn how to read? What music did he listen to when no one else could hear?

“You don't have to know someone all the way to miss them,” Leo said. “Or to feel bad that they're gone.”

“Like you and Lisette Chamberlain,” I said.

Leo looked horrified. “That's not what I meant.” His face was red.

“I know,” I said, “but it's true.” I kind of missed Lisette too, now that I'd seen her alive. It was not the same
at all
as for my dad and Ben. But it was still missing someone. Wondering about them.

“Anyway,” I said. “Thanks for letting me watch the play. You're right. She was amazing.”

We went up the stairs and Leo came outside with me. The turkey vultures were wheeling around in the sky above the
neighborhood. “There's those freaky birds,” Leo said.

“Did they live in our backyard before we bought the house?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Leo said. “They came after the Wainwrights left. But before you moved in.”

That did not make me feel better.

I wanted them to be Wainwright birds.

16.

Back at home I pulled Lisette Chamberlain on over my head and studied my new T-shirt in the mirror. It fit perfectly. I would have to wear another shirt over it in the morning so my mom wouldn't think it was weird that I was wearing a shirt with a dead lady's face on it to go running.

There wasn't anything on the windowsill, but it wasn't night yet. Still, it had been a little while. Maybe I was supposed to respond somehow? Like leave something back?

The things Lisette (if it was Lisette) was leaving for me were things Ben would have loved. Was she trying to help me heal?

How could I help
her
?

Did she need us to help her with something involving Roger? Did she want us to find her ring?

Maybe I should leave something purple on the windowsill so Lisette would know I was trying. Or maybe I should ask Leo what her favorite food was, and then I could leave that out for her.

And then I started laughing at how stupid I was.

Because that was what you did for Santa. Who was also not real. Like the ghost of Lisette Chamberlain was not real. Someone real had to be leaving those things.

Maybe it was Leo. Was that possible? The gifts hadn't started arriving on the windowsill until after I met him.

17.

Saturday night after work there still wasn't anything new on the windowsill. But I did have a nightmare. Or maybe a dream.

Ben and I were driving. I was picking Ben up at school, which I did tons of times but I was always the passenger in real life and never the driver. In the dream I was great at driving. Perfect. I flicked my turn signal. We stopped at all the stop signs. It was like I had been driving all my life.

And then when we got home Ben stood in front of the door and wouldn't let me in because he wanted to talk to me. “Blue T-shirt,” he said. “Gray pants. Orange sneakers.”

And I realized he was wearing the outfit he'd had on when he died.

I hadn't remembered until the dream what he'd been wearing that day.

“It's okay, Ben,” I said. “It's okay.”

“Blue T-shirt,” he said again. “Gray pants. Orange sneakers.”

“Ben,” I said.

“Blue T-shirt.”

“Please stop,” I said. “I remember now.”

And he did stop.

Because I woke up. Crying.

18.

The second stop on the tour, the theater, was always the trickiest one because Summerlost Festival employees were around early, getting ready for the day, and the box office opened for a couple of hours in the morning.

In addition to regular-priced tickets, the festival sold discounted day-of tickets to residents of Iron Creek, and those tickets were first-come, first-served on the day of the performance. The seats were only ten dollars but you had to sit on the very back row of the lower gallery, on a bench, not a theater seat. Leo told me all about it because he usually went to a bunch of the plays with the ten-dollar tickets, but this summer he was saving every bit of his money.

The idea behind the cheap day-of tickets was that they wanted to make the theater experience accessible to everyone, like the way people in Shakespeare's time could go to see the show for a penny if they were willing to stand.

It would be awful to stand for that long.

Anyway, Leo and I didn't want to run into a neighbor coming to stand in line or an employee working or, especially,
Gary.

If we ran into Gary, it would be a one-way ticket out of England.

Because of all that, we didn't take the tour clients to the actual theater. We took them to the forest nearby.

It had rained the night before, a high-desert rain that left everything smelling good and the sky clear and enormous. Our feet crunched on the pine needles under the trees and our group murmured quietly to one another. It was a nice group of six older people, three sisters and their spouses, who had been coming to Summerlost for thirty years. Even though it was early, all three sisters were wearing sunglasses that looked so powerful it seemed like you could wear them into space.

“You can learn about the theater and the way it works on one of the official tours,” I said, when we'd all gathered in one spot under the trees. “But we like to bring you here to see the whole festival below you as we talk about Lisette's career.”

“All these years coming here and we've never been over to this forest,” said Amy, one of the women. I knew her name because Leo and I had started giving the people on the tour name tags, and wearing them ourselves. It was easier that way for questions.

“Silly of us,” said her husband, Bill. “It's nice here.”

“They're talking about building an amphitheater over here,” I said, “for festival lectures and things. But it would mean cutting down some of the trees.”

“Oh, I don't like that idea,” said another sister, Florence.

There wasn't a lot of undergrowth under the pine trees, so you could see between the tree trunks to the theater. In the cool morning light, the banner on top waved at us.

“Lisette began, of course, in the Greenshow,” I said, and everyone's gaze shifted to the Greenshow stage, with its half-timbered platform. “She was eleven. She'd been watching the show for years because it was free and her family didn't have much money. They came every night. Lisette was later quoted in many interviews as saying the Greenshow was better than a movie.”

Leo grinned at me. We'd been doing the tour for a few weeks now and I sounded like a pro.

I gave the same information Leo did but I said things in different ways.

“When she was eleven, the Summerlost Festival decided they wanted to do a Greenshow act with children in it,” I said. This was my favorite part. “Lisette didn't audition. She didn't hear about it in time. But she watched the performances all summer long. And one day, when one of the children stayed home sick, she jumped up on the stage. In her shorts and her T-shirt and sneakers. And she did the whole dance, and then said all the missing girl's lines.”

Florence clasped her hands and smiled, even though she must have already known this. I smiled back. I understood.

I loved the story because Lisette went ahead and took her chance. She decided to go for what she wanted.

And I loved the story because it reminded me of my dad and that day he'd been pulled out of the audience. Even though he and Lisette were totally different onstage. Even though she'd wanted to go up and he'd been embarrassed the whole time.

“After that,” I said, “the Greenshow director wrote Lisette into the production for the rest of the summer. And that was the beginning.”

Leo took over the next part because they loved it when he rattled off the dates and names of every single Lisette Chamberlain performance in less than two minutes. He dared them to time him and they always did.

“Young man!” said Ida, the third of the sisters. “That was amazing!”

Leo smiled. “What was your favorite performance of Lisette's?”

I stood, half listening, and I noticed someone walking across the courtyard stop and look over in our direction. Whoever it was raised a hand to shield their eyes.

Uh-oh. Had we been sighted? Could they see us through the trees?

Leo and I had a code in case something like that happened.

I raised my hand, which I never did otherwise.

Leo was smooth. “Ladies and gentlemen, let's discuss this more as we move on to our next stop.”

They followed him out the way we'd come, through the
trees toward the parking lot near the college's science building. Away from the festival. I looked back. People still crisscrossed the courtyard, walking back and forth, but no one watched us anymore.