The Next Time You See Me (45 page)

His mother won’t be happy to see Boss. She was always saying, “Ugh, Boss stinks,” and “Ugh, I think I have a flea bite.” But nothing is
even
right now, nothing is normal—and if his parents can make him eat Captain D’s alone at four, and take his walk at five, and have Aunt Bonnie make his mozzarella sticks, then he reckons he can have Boss, too. At least until Mr. Powell gets back home.

6.

Emily has been in and out of a fog, struggling just enough to wakefulness to wish that she were still sleeping, when she notices that Christopher Shelton is at her bedside. He looks worried, earnest; he sits up straighter when he realizes that her eyes are on him, and Emily shifts around in the bed, self-conscious in her hospital gown.

“Hey,” Christopher says bashfully. “You’re awake.”

“Hey,” Emily says. She doesn’t know until she speaks how hoarse her voice is, how sore her throat. When she swallows, her tongue feels broad and stupid in her mouth. “What are you doing here?”

“My mom brought me. I wanted to check on you.”

Her chest swells with gratitude. “Really?”

“Really.”

She can’t stop herself from asking: “You’re not mad?”

He shakes his head, and the dark curl of hair on his forehead trembles. “Of course I’m not mad. It turns out you were right all along, Emily. There really was a body. It was there, just like you said it was.”

“I knew it,” she murmured.

“You’re a hero. Everyone at school is talking about it—about how brave you were. We’ve all been so worried.”

Emily frowns. Something is nagging at her, tickling the back of her mind. “Where was the body?”

“Where you said it was,” Christopher says.

Her mother and father are in the room—she hadn’t noticed before. They smile in that bland, stupid way they can have around people they don’t know well, and she is embarrassed, then confused. “Mom?” Her mother nods encouragingly. Emily looks back at Christopher. “No, I looked there. I crawled around on the ground. It wasn’t there.”

Her father says, “That’s just because you got turned around out in those woods. You took Christopher to the wrong tree.” Emily is bothered, because the answer seems somehow too right, too close to what she had wanted to hear. It’s as though her father has seen into her heart, answered her thoughts.

A dark knowledge settles over her. She wishes her parents away, and they’re gone. She puts out her hand, and Christopher takes it. “You’re not mad at me?” she repeats, and Christopher says no, but now she doesn’t believe him. A tear slides down her cheek, and a soft cloth presses it away.

“Don’t cry, kiddo. We’re here. Me and Daddy.”

She opens her eyes. How could she be so easily fooled by dreams, by fantasies? Reality is coldly inarguable—it’s there in the dark pores on the end of her mother’s nose, which looks red from getting rubbed too many times with a tissue; in the smell of her father’s cheeks and neck, which she can tell with eerie certainty is tinged with the remnants of his Barbasol shaving cream and his usual splash of Old Spice. It’s there in their looks of desperation, how badly they need her to tell them she’s all right, and she resents them for needing this from her, for wanting reassurance more than the truth.

“Go away,” she says, and her mother seems to crumple into the tissue she’s holding.

“Now, don’t say that.” Her father has his arm firmly around her mother’s shoulder, and though the tone of his voice is firm, Emily can tell that he’s just as shaky; her parents are like pins she is knocking down, and she takes a small, bitter pleasure in watching them fall.

“Go away,” she repeats, and she thinks of her brother, Billy, of how he acts when he is displeased, the way her parents scramble to satisfy him, to shut him up. She lifts her head off the pillow, drops it. Lifts, drops. It feels good. It feels right. Bop, bop, bop, she is being like her brother, and her parents exchange terrified glances, seem to say to one another without speaking aloud,
Please, God, not her, too.

“Stop that, Emily,” her mother says sharply.

She gets her shoulders into the motion now. She
is
crazy, isn’t she? Seeing things that aren’t there? The guardrail starts to rattle, and the IV rack trembles. Her eyes are open, and so the square of silver light on the ceiling becomes a bright blur streaking across her vision, and her parents are dark, frantic smudges.

“Press the call button,” her mother says, her voice choked with fear.

“Where? I—”

There is pressure across her middle, on her shoulders. She moves her head faster. She could stop, but what will happen then—what questions will she have to answer, what truths will she have to face? She is talking. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying. And then a new face leans over her, and the silver streak of light becomes a square again, and then it winks out.

Chapter Thirty-Three

1.

When Susanna got to the room, a man was standing in the hall. He was tall, gangly, with bulging, sorrowful eyes—Buster Keaton in blue jeans and an old flannel work shirt. He leaned against the wall, staring off into space.

“Are you Mr. Houchens?” Susanna asked gently, not wanting to startle him.

He drew up his shoulders, and his large eyes rolled tiredly her way. He nodded, attempted a smile. “Yes, ma’am. Morris.” He held out his hand. She shook it.

“I’m Susanna Mitchell,” she said. “I’m one of Emily’s teachers at the middle school.”

Some emotion passed across his features. She thought it might have been relief. “Oh. Oh, yeah, it’s good of you to come. It’s real good of you.” He pulled a blue paisley handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his neck with it. “Go on in. My wife’s there. Emily’s probably still sleeping.”

She nodded her thanks and went to the half-open door, rapping softly to announce her presence. Emily was in the bed, eyes closed. A woman, her mother, was seated beside her, face in her hands. She
sniffed, lifted her head; her face was damp and blotchy, her eyes obscured by thick lenses.

“Is this a bad time?” Susanna asked.

The woman scrutinized her, confused. “Oh,” she said. “I know you.” To Susanna’s surprise she rose, stepped forward, and embraced her.

“We talked on the phone last week,” Susanna said. She held the woman carefully. She could feel her tears soaking through the fabric of her blouse, an embarrassingly intimate sensation.

“I remember. You were good to Emily.” She was shaking now.

“Is she all right? I had heard she was doing well.”

The woman pulled back, nodding, and sat down again. She motioned to an adjacent chair, which Susanna took. “Oh—yes. She’s OK. The doctor said that the main issue is dehydration, so they’ve got her on an IV. And she’s exhausted and—” She thought about it. “Upset. Hysterical. They had to give her a sedative.”

“It’s only natural,” Susanna said. “She just needs some time.”

“I hope so.” The mother lifted her glasses and backhanded away tears. “I’m sorry. It’s been a rough day.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Susanna said, and she found that she meant it. Despite everything.

The woman’s face crumpled, and her voice broke. “I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I keep replaying things, trying to figure out what we did wrong. I thought we were good to her. We’ve got our hands full with Billy, and that puts a stress on all of us. I won’t say I never raise my voice. But I thought we were good to her.”

“I’m sure you are,” Susanna said, touching her shoulder.

“But she did run off,” the woman said.

“You can do everything right by a person and still have things go wrong,” Susanna said. “Emily was having a hard time at school. She got singled out for a lot of cruelty, and none of that was her fault, or yours.”

Emily’s mother snorted a laugh—a sharp, humorless sound. “I told her to try to be normal. That’s how I supported her.”

“I don’t think that’s such bad advice,” Susanna said. “It’s realistic.”

“She’s never been one to face reality.” The woman looked at Emily lovingly, and Susanna’s stomach clenched with pity. “It’s my fault, because I’ve never been good at facing it, either. I always told her stories. Played make-believe.” She stroked Emily’s hand, which rested on the top of the sheet. “And then we’ve got Billy. Make-believe’s just easier sometimes.”

Susanna, feeling her own tears threaten, nodded briskly. “It sounds to me like you did your best.”

“She told me she wished she was dead,” Emily’s mother said. “She started crying and banging her head like her brother does when he’s unhappy, and she said we should have left her in the woods. She didn’t stop until the nurse put something into her IV. They want her to talk to a psychiatrist.”

“Teenagers say that kind of thing all the time,” Susanna said uneasily. But she thought of Emily that day in the bathroom, after the incident in the cafeteria—her humming, the mechanical way she went about wiping spaghetti sauce off her face—and wondered.

“Kelly?” Morris was standing in the doorway, eyes even wider than before, handkerchief getting twisted between his two hands. “The counselor is here.”

“I should leave you to it,” Susanna said. She shouldered her purse strap and stood.

Emily’s mother—Kelly—looked back and forth between Susanna and Morris. “Does she want to meet in here? In front of Emily?”

A young woman, as young as Susanna, slipped into view. She was dressed in a costume of seriousness: a flowery blouse with a bow at the neck, long skirt, tailored jacket. It reminded Susanna of her wardrobe in the first year she taught at RMS, when she had the audacity to consider her round, unlined face a liability. “Mrs. Houchens, there’s a conference space we can use just down the hall. I thought we could go there.”

Kelly stood. She already appeared defeated; she had the confidence and posture of a person shuffling down the hall in a robe and slippers. Her hair was limp and uncombed, and Susanna noticed for the first time that she appeared to be wearing a long nightshirt over
her jeans instead of a regular T. It was a thin, nubby polyester with a cracked screen print that read
CAFFEINE, PLEASE!

“I don’t think I should leave her,” Kelly said. She held on to the edge of the bed as if she might fall.

“Go on,” Susanna said softly. “She’s sleeping—she won’t miss you. I’ll stay with her until you get back.”

“You don’t have any place you need to be?” Morris asked.

Susanna said no.

“Thank you,” Kelly said. She followed Morris out to the hallway, and Susanna tried not to listen to the soft, awkward murmur of introductions. At last the voices dwindled. She and Emily were alone.

She felt, strangely, that there was no better place for her to be at this moment, no better person for her to spend time with. Home had not been right. Her mother’s house had not been right. Not with her husband or even her own daughter. This girl—this odd, haunted girl—was the one she needed. This child whose resting place had revealed her sister’s. Susanna watched Emily sleep. Her stomach moved gently under the sheet, and her lashes lay long, almost prettily, on her freckled cheeks. Her hair was coarse and limp, a light brown so joyless that it was practically green. The resting hands, Susanna noticed, looked as if they had been wiped with a cloth but not scrubbed; the fingernails had crescents of grime beneath them, and the knuckles were nicked and scraped, damp with some kind of clear ointment.

“Why were you there?” Susanna said softly. “How did you know?”

Emily’s eyeballs twitched behind their lids. Her forehead creased, and she made a sound, faint, kittenish—something between a grunt and a wince.

“What did you see?” Susanna whispered.

A sound from behind her: a clearing throat. Susanna sat up with a start, turned.

“Tony,” she said, standing.

“Hey there,” he said.

She gave no thought to what he wanted, what he would be
comfortable with. She gave no thought to appearances. She went forward, arms opened, and made him envelop her—bold because she knew now she could be, that it didn’t matter any longer. Or didn’t matter in the way she had once thought it might.

His bright-smelling cologne was a distant note, an afterthought. The spice of his skin was stronger, ripe, and she knew without asking how tired he was, how hard he had pushed himself today. It was on his face when he pulled back: the red threads running through the whites of his eyes, the gray cast to his skin. The planes of his cheeks above the neat line of his goatee were grizzled faintly with hairs.

“I already know about Ronnie,” she said. “I already know, Tony.”

He touched her cheek; she could feel the rough callus on his thumb. “I went to your house,” he said. “Your husband was there. He told me you’d heard.” She blinked, and a tear spilled toward his hand. “It shouldn’t have gotten to you that way.”

“There was no good way.”

“Nothing is certain yet,” Tony said. “We won’t know until they finish the lab work.”

“Did you see it? The body?”

His eyes darted to the side. “I didn’t see much. Enough to know what it was.”

Her breath hitched, and she pressed her palm to her chest. “And it looked like it could be her?”

He was still staring at some point to the left of her. “You have to believe me when I say I can’t answer that.”

“You mean you won’t. You’re not supposed to.”

“I mean I’m not able to,” Tony said. There was something in his face. Fear. Weakness. She wondered for the first time if she could trust him.

“It’s her,” she said. “I feel it. I know it.”

He didn’t reply.

“And you know it, too,” Susanna said, at last believing. She had wanted to elicit in Tony some reaction of surprise or refutation. Something to make her hope. But there was no hope on his face.

“I think it is, yes,” he said. “I’m so sorry. But I think it’s your sister. There aren’t any other missing persons reported in the area.”

“And somebody put her there,” Susanna said.

“Yes,” Tony said.

“Somebody put her there,” she murmured to herself. “Tony, you’ve got to find out who. You’ve got to find him.”

Tony stepped abruptly around her and looked down at Emily. “How is she? I was here—and I had some time. I thought I’d check in.”