The Leaving (35 page)

So even though she’d skipped school, Avery went to the auditions that afternoon to support Emma. They sat in squeaky seats in the back row and waited for Emma’s name to be called.

But then Mr. Louska called Avery’s name.

She’d never crossed it out on the sheet.

Would she regret not doing it?

Be jealous if Emma got the lead?

Louska called her name again.

She stood.

Emma looked up at her.

All doubts fizzled on the spot.

Avery didn’t need to be the star of anything.

Preferred not to be, really.

Tragedy had made her famous for a time and now it was time to do things differently, to be, different.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a mistake. I’m not auditioning.”

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Mr. Louska said. Then, without missing a beat, he looked at his list and called whoever was next in alphabetical order.

When it was her turn, Emma sounded nervous at first, but by the chorus, she was soaring, like she
really believed
things were going to be better when she grew up.

Maybe she was right. Maybe for her, they would be.

Avery’s phone dinged but she ignored it.

Emma sounded way better here than she had that day on the lanai and now Avery thought her friend might actually get the lead, which she hadn’t before, not really. But it had been the right thing to say and to hope for.

People in the audience clapped when she was done and Avery put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, loudly. Even from the back row, Emma’s smile beamed.

She rejoined Avery in their seats and Avery high-fived her. “Nailed it!”

“You think?”

“I think.” Avery gathered her things. “I’m heading out.”

“Okay. Talk later.” Emma hugged her. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course.” Avery got up and went out into the hall, then out the doors of school.

The text from Dad said,

Hi hon. You should come home.

In-person news was bad news.

That was the rule.

Sure enough:

“I’m so sorry.” Chambers stood facing her and her parents, who were seated on the living room sofa; Rita puttered in the kitchen. “We found remains at the former principal’s house. We’re still waiting on the confirmation from the lab, but all signs point to the remains being Max’s. He appears to have died quite a long time ago. Possibly the same day as the abduction.”

“An asthma attack,” Avery said.

“Most likely, yes.”

“Did Max even
have
asthma?” She turned to her parents.

“The onset can be unpredictable, and sudden,” Chambers said. “I mean, if he wasn’t diagnosed?”

Her father shook his head.

Chambers said, “It’s possible there’d never been a strong enough trigger before . . .” Then he and her father stepped away to talk further and Avery moved closer to her mom on the couch.

“What did I ever do to deserve this?” her mom wailed.

“It’s not your fault,” Avery said through tears that had started to form. Because it was finally and truly over—the tiny bit of hope they’d all been clinging to had been chopped off, like with a hatchet, taking the whole hand with it.

Just
gone
.

“Oh, Max. My poor Max. I don’t think I can get over this”—her mother was all panicked-sounding—“I don’t think I’m going to be able to get over this.”

The feeling of wanting to take that severed limb of hope and hit her mother over the head with it, just to snap her out of it.

“I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can.”

“You have to, Mommy.”

“I can’t! I won’t! My Max!” Her mother moved far enough to grab a tissue and blow her nose.

“But you have
me
.” Avery’s voice got deep. “
I’m
here. I’ve
been
here. I’ve
been here
the whole time.”

Her father came in and said, “Let’s give her some time, Ave,” and sat beside his wife.

The doorbell rang maybe twenty minutes later and Avery was grateful for the excuse to leave the room. Her dad had just been sitting by her mother’s side, stroking her hand. Avery wasn’t sure he’d even looked at her, though he’d called a few friends, relatives.

She opened the door expecting her mom’s friend Patty to be there, holding some useless casserole.

Lucas said, “I just heard.”

He reached for her hand and she stepped out onto the porch and into his arms. With her chin against his chest, she started to sob.

“You did it, Ave,” he said softly into her hair. “You found him.”

S
c
a
r
l
et
t

Kristen had taken down the puffy princess mobile, and Scarlett had purged the jewelry box of plastic beads and clip-on earrings—everything except the Anchor Beach penny and the half of the best-friend heart she’d split with Vanessa.

Together they’d bagged up clothes and books for donations.

They’d tossed most of the toys and peeled My Little Pony decals off the wall.

They’d gone through a sizable stack of kid artwork—photographing a few nice pieces and chucking the rest.

That left Glinda, which Scarlett decided she was going to burn on the beach.

It would feel cleansing, symbolic.

Perhaps not as symbolic as it would if she had a life-size cardboard cutout of the Great Oz, but close enough.

It was a good evening for it.

A little bit unseasonably cold.

She took a lighter she’d found in a kitchen drawer down to the beach just past the back fence and lit Glinda at the hem of her dress. A moment later the flame went out.

“Brilliant plan,” Kristen said.

“Why are you here again?”

“Moral support.”

“Exactly.” Then Scarlett pulled her into a hug and squeezed. “I don’t care that you think we didn’t like each other.”

“Yeah,” Kristen said, “I’m over it.” She looked serious, then said, “It was never about Lucas, you know.”

“Adam?” Scarlett tried to light Glinda again.

“No, Scarlett. It was
you
. I think I was in love with you.”

  /
    /
  /

“Oh.”

The flame caught.

“Apart from the ridiculous horseback-riding thing, it was the one thing I remembered right away.” Kristen had her own lighter out and lit Glinda at another point. “Feeling different than all of you. And then when the memory guy asked me about kissing Lucas and Adam . . .”

“You said Sashor was hot!” Scarlett remembered.

“Objectively!”

Scarlett elbowed her. “So you
do
like me.”

Glinda finally
swoosh
ed; they jumped back.

“I guess I was hurt or angry or something. But I’m done with that.” She nodded. “You think they’ll ever find him?”

There was still so much up in the air.

Charges against Lucas for the murder of John Norton had been dropped, at least, but Miranda was still in the wind.

Scarlett said, “I’m not counting on it.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“I want to be?”

Kristen nudged Glinda farther away from them with a booted foot. “Why didn’t I write their names down? Why didn’t we keep better notes?”

The fire popped and they watched as Glinda’s face became consumed. Scarlett tracked the flames as they made their way to the very tip of Glinda’s magic wand, which lit, then blackened and converted to embers. Tiny, blowing orange bursts of magic that burned until they couldn’t burn anymore.

I’m melting
, Scarlett thought.
Melting
.

Lucas

Ryan and Lucas were on a way-high bleacher bench at the high school football field; the elementary school sat silent and empty past buzz-cut soccer fields.

A marching band had just heel-and-toed out onto the field. Black pants with stripes running down the side. Tall, hot-looking hats.

The members of the color guard were all carrying enormous bouquets of flowers and the instrumentalists made a block of long lines, right at the center of the field. They played a mournful song Lucas didn’t recognize.

There were speakers, then, with shaky voices at a microphone on a small podium by the fifty-yard line.

Some students who spoke about gun safety.

Some parents who spoke about depression, the shooter, the counseling services available locally to anyone with thoughts of harming themselves or others.

Then the school principal—a woman in a red suit—talked about no lives ever being wasted.

Of young people as an inspiration to us all.

Of the heroism of teachers.

The strength of those left behind.

The cause that they all, as a community, could not forget.

Near the makeshift stage and microphone, a woman was holding up a large photograph of one of the victims of the shooting. Probably her daughter. The mother looked so sad and hollow, even now, that Lucas wished that someone could erase her grief, erase her memories—of hearing about the shooting, of hearing there were casualties, of not being able to find her daughter, of having to ID a body, of having to tell her husband, her other children if she had any, of waking up the next day and the day after that into that same bad dream.

The man beside her had one arm around her and a sign in the other that said, NEVER FORGET.

Why
not
forget?

Why
not
just black out something awful?

Like a shooting.

Or war.

Childhood, even.

Sure!

Oh
.

Forgetting meant not knowing, meant ignorance, meant maybe making the same mistakes again and again.

Lucas’s phone buzzed and he looked at it and didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

“You won’t find him,” Miranda said. “He’s long gone.”

“Who?” Lucas asked, turning away from the proceedings and looking out toward the baseball field behind the bleachers. “Who is he?”

“My father,” she said.

Lucas met eyes with Ryan, who raised his brow questioningly. “Why were you watching me?”

“He needed to see how re-entry would impact the results of the treatment.”

“It was only supposed to be for a few hours?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, but then Max died, and you were all traumatized again, so
that
had to be erased, and it took a while and then he had to erase your memory of him and the house and it just got messy, so it dragged on.”

“For eleven years?” he near-screamed.

“Well, the nature of the thing changed. It was working but not consistently—and they really wanted him to get it right, and then he saw this opportunity to raise you all . . .
completely
without trauma. Building on some work he’d already done on me.”

“What kind of work?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Why were we let go?” he asked.

“Couldn’t keep you forever. The plan was always to release you in your sixteenth year. It was more rushed than he’d wanted, but that was because you’d figured out who you were a few times and had somehow found a way to figure it out every day, so it was all a bit out of control at the end. You’d found the gun and all. You always were the fighter. That’s why he picked you for me to keep an eye on. Figured if anybody was going to start remembering, it’d be you.”

“
How
did he do it?” Lucas said. “How did he erase . . . everything?”

“Now, that even
I
don’t know,” she said.

“Why did you call me?” he asked.

“To make sure you knew that it wasn’t
all
awful. We were like a big family. Except he only ever took a few of us out at a time. He always said you were foster kids if anyone asked.”

“I’m going to find him.” Lucas felt his disgust like a foul taste in his mouth. “I’ll find
you
.”

She said, “I won’t remember you if you do.”

•    •    •

Back home, in the RV, Lucas sorted all the photos of himself Chambers had given him into piles according to groups or general age range.

Then, when nothing jarring stood out, he set about hanging all the large photos that had been brought from the faked location of their kidnapping on the walls of the RV’s main compartment. Chambers had agreed to lend them out to him.

He started to study every inch of them.

Not this again
, Miranda had said when he’d taken her photo.

He understood now.

He had taken
these
photos, too.

There was a clue here.

That was what the tattoo meant.

He just had to find it.

Wouldn’t sleep until he did.

He went over every inch of each of them.

Then did it again.

And again.

He’d done it probably twenty times by the time Ryan came to check on him.