The Leaving (25 page)

“This might sound weird,” she said, “but do you skip the bottom step when you’re going down a set of stairs?”

“I don’t think so,” Kristen said. “Why are you asking me
that
?”

“I think he and I used to sneak out or something. We both keep skipping a last step. Like maybe there was a noisy staircase where we were or something? I don’t know.”

“I heard about your penny, and someone recognized you?” Kristen flipped a page in the magazine she wasn’t really reading.

“It was a crazy feeling.” Everything about the guard’s face—his stained teeth, his unruly brows—was now etched in her mind. She’d felt the spark of a new, amazing feeling when his eyes showed recognition of who she actually was. She was not just some missing child, newly returned, not some walking headline.

“And you’re
sure
he didn’t just see you on the news?”

“He described a jacket I used to wear,” she said. “How it was homemade. And I went home and sat down at Tammy’s sewing machine, and it turns out I know how to sew. Like, I think I made the jacket.”

“Do you
remember
the jacket?” In spite of her questions, Kristen seemed to be losing interest; she looked at her magazine and flipped a few pages. She landed on a page with a row of models wearing formal gowns.

“I don’t.” Scarlett liked the fabric of one of the dresses, the color of another. “But I think you just gave me an idea. I should make it again.”

It was, at the very least, something concrete she could do.

“But you
just said
you don’t remember it.”

“No, but I could just make a jacket that I’d like to make. My taste. See how it turns out. See if maybe it’s the kind of thing more people would recognize or something.”

“It’s a stretch.” Kristen closed her magazine.

“Everything’s a stretch,” Scarlett said back.

“So.” Kristen lay back in her chair. “You can sew. Sarah can maybe draw, we think? Lucas has this camera and tattoo thing going on even though I have no idea how that might lead to anything. And you swallowed a penny. What kind of clue do I have?”

“You really can’t think of anything?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been writing a lot. Like I started keeping a journal. I saw a blank book and I just picked it up and started writing.”

Fascinating.

But how would . . . ?

“Maybe you kept one when we were gone?”

“But where is it? And also what about Adam? What does
Adam
have? What if we need all these things to work together to even mean anything?”

“Maybe we only need a few,” Scarlett said. “Maybe we had no idea what we would or wouldn’t remember and were trying to cover our bases.”

A girl walking along the beach, flip-flops dangling from her hands, stopped. She was flanked by two other girls. She had long blond hair and wore pink sunglasses, which she lifted off her face and perched atop her head. “Ohmygod, Scarlett?”

“No comment,” Kristen said.

But it wasn’t media. Just girls.

Normal girls.

Who looked like maybe they were on their way to a party.

The look of them made Scarlett self-conscious.

Were her eyebrows all wrong?

Hair all wrong?

She had no idea.

Thought she didn’t care.

Maybe she did.

“I’m Vanessa,” she said. “We used to be friends. You know, when we were little.”

Scarlett recognized her from a photograph in her bedroom. She said, “I have a picture of us holding these ridiculously big stuffed horses.”

Vanessa nodded. “My parents took us to the circus.”

Kristen stood. “Do you remember
me
? Were
we
friends?”

Vanessa stiffened. “I’m sorry. I don’t think so.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry.” Kristen grabbed cigarettes from her bag. “I’m going to take a walk.” She marched off toward the water.

“How are you holding up?” Vanessa took Kristen’s seat and pulled her sunglasses back down. Her friends had lost interest and wandered off.

“As well as can be expected, given the circumstances.”

“I heard your mom went off the deep end.”

“Indeed she did.”

“Is she back now? Now that you’re back?”

“We’re working on it.”

“You think they’re ever going to find Max? Figure the whole thing out?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

Vanessa said, “You gave me a necklace right before. It was one of those best-friend hearts cut in half. I still have it.”

“I’ll have to look around upstairs.”

She nodded. “For a long time my mother told me you’d just moved. I didn’t understand why you didn’t say good-bye. I cried a lot. Wasn’t that an awful thing of her to do?”

“How else was she going to explain?”

“I don’t know.” Vanessa shrugged. “It just seems like the truth is always the better option.”

“Oh, sorry, honey, your best friend and five other kids just disappeared without a trace tonight. Night-night!”

Vanessa laughed. “You’re funny. You were always funny.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” Scarlett said.

“I should go.” Vanessa stood and wagged a flip-flop down the beach, where her friends had stopped to wait.

“Sure,” Scarlett said. “Have fun. Thanks for stopping.”

By the water, Kristen was standing and smoking, her ankles buried in sand. Scarlett tried to let her gaze go fuzzy while she watched again for slick gray arched backs to pop up out of the water.

And watched.

And watched.

Down the beach a bit, there was some shouting, pointing.

“Two of them!” someone shouted. “Right over there!”

She panicked for a second. She’d seen on the news earlier that Adam and Sarah had been receiving death threats because they weren’t cooperating with the investigation. Had she and Kristen been recognized?

No.

Two dolphins.

She got up and walked toward the woman pointing, a woman in her forties with two small daughters. “Look that way and maybe we’ll see them again,” she said, bending to share the girls’ view.

“Wait for it,” the mom said.

“Wait . . .

“There!”

“I see them!” one daughter shouted, and the other, smaller one, said, “Where? Where?”

“Oh, you missed them, sweetie,” the mom said. “But we’ll try again later!”

“But I wanted to see the dolphins,” the girl cried.

Scarlett hadn’t seen them, either.

What was wrong with her?

She felt a sliver of her heart break off and

d r i f t.

•     •     •

Back by the house, Tammy and Steve were standing on the beach, looking up and down, looking
for her
.

“We got your book ending for you!” Steve called out.

“What do you mean?”

“They found the guy, Scarlett,” Tammy said. “They found where you were.”

Then Tammy kept talking about the Everglades and how they’d all go there in the morning and how there were photos and evidence they’d been there—clothes and stuff—and Scarlett felt her body seize up at the thought of seeing him, confronting him.

Her nerve endings vibrated.

He’d have to explain.

He’d have to fix them.

So they could retrieve.

Everything.

Get eleven years back.

Then Tammy said, “He’s dead, Scarlett.”

Seagulls halted midair.

Waves stopped midcrash.

And a breath caught in Scarlett’s lungs and starting to congeal there. Her mother came up to hug her and she felt her body go

limp
,

accepting.

Lucas

He’d come alone.

Like in a dream state.

Hadn’t been able to sleep.

Hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Avery.

Had she been relieved that the body wasn’t Max’s? That it was a guy named John Norton?

Or was she disappointed?

They’d said they’d found evidence that they’d been here.

Photos of them as children.

But none of Max.

What did that mean?

He’d texted her.

She’d wished him good luck today.

Too late for good luck.

Scarlett had come with her mother.

Kristen with her parents.

Even Adam and Sarah and
their
parents had deigned to show up. Lucas couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with either of them. But then Adam walked up to him and said, “It’s good to see you.”

“Get away from me,” Lucas said.

“Wow,” Adam said. “Sorry. Don’t know what I did to offend you.”

“I asked you to get away.”

“You told me. That’s different.”

“Listen, Adam. You let your parents turn you into a puppet and it’s obvious you don’t care about any of the rest of us at all. So seriously, get out of my face.”

Adam said, “You should get help for that.”

Lucas looked away. “Like you know anything.”

“Can we focus?” Chambers said; he’d been speaking with the boat’s captain.

Lucas nodded.

They were about an hour south of Fort Myers, standing on the dock of an airboat company—a business that John Norton’s family had owned but he’d sold years ago, with the provision that he be allowed to come and go and keep a house on the property. “So that explains how no one saw you or knew where you were,” Chambers had said on the phone. “This is twenty acres of private swampland.”

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lucas asked.

John Norton was dead, single gunshot to the head, and they were heading to a small cluster of structures he’d maintained—accessible only by airboat.

The airboat held just ten passengers, so Chambers’s partner, Sarah’s mother, Kristen’s father, and Adam’s mother would all follow in a second boat.

Lucas sat in the same row—on the same bench—as Scarlett, but with her mother between them.

Hated the look of the back of Adam’s head.

The fan that powered the boat was as tall as Lucas and, when it turned on, louder than bombs.

The captain wore huge black padded earphones that surely blocked the sound.

Why hadn’t they all been given earplugs?

Or at least a warning?

The boat moved with shocking speed and surprising grace.

Just whizzed across the surface of the water effortlessly.

Birds—some bright pink, some white—lifted off, their long legs dangling in flight.

Lucas swore he could feel the eyes of alligators on him, could close his eyes and feel his stomach shift with the turns of the boat and see their jaws opening and snapping.

They glided over long grasses and through archways of mangroves. They made hairpin turns through channels, the boat spraying them with briny water here and there. It was giddy-making—the speed, the roar, the way the boat seemed to be defying some of the laws of psychics—and Lucas wished he were experiencing it as a tourist, not as himself.

Wooly cloud cover made for a chilly gray day. The girls had borrowed thick rain slickers that smelled of swamp. Lucas didn’t like the three of them in identical orange; it reminded him of how they’d all come back in the same clothes, like a uniform. Scarlett’s hair leaped fitfully in the wind and seemed to be darkening in color from the weight of mist.

A group of six white birds danced in front of the boat, and when they passed, Scarlett pointed at something and Lucas looked.

Another pink bird.

Like fake pink.

Pinker than flamingos.

Pinker than any pink he could recall.

He felt like he’d remember having been here, having been on a boat like this, having seen that shade of pink in flight.

He’d have framed it all in his viewfinder.

Photographed it.

His hands itched for his camera.

But it was in his bag, which had been stowed in the back row.

He’d been afraid to have it out, afraid it would get wet.

Or broken.

Now, regretted it.

Around a turn, the boat slid into a wider channel, and a dock appeared up ahead.

A house appeared next—like an old shack but big.

Then behind it a series of smaller structures—almost hut-like—connected by a series of rope bridges.

A sort of mini-village.

When the boat’s roar ceased and it pulled up to the dock, Chambers stood. He stepped out onto the dock, then turned to face them.

“Anything seem familiar?”

Heads shook.

“Well, let’s go look around,” Chambers said, holding out a hand to help Kristen off the boat. “We took the photos and personal effects away to bag them and tag them and dust for prints and run DNA, but you’ll be able to see those later.”

He led them to one of the structures, had to duck to go through the door. “This,” he said, “is where you slept.”

One room.

Five beds.

Not six.

Lucas walked down the center aisle.

He picked a bed, lay down on it.

The view out the window was nothing but sky.

What was Avery doing at that very moment?

Chambers said, “Anything?”

Lucas said, “No.”

“Anybody?” Chambers tried, almost sounding irritated.

“Sorry,” Adam said. “No.”

Sarah shook her head.

“Kristen?”