The Taking (3 page)

Austin would know what was happening. He’d clear things up for me.

I checked my phone again and saw the same
NO SERVICE
message blinking at me from the screen. If Austin’s car had been there, I would have gone to his window. Instead, I went around back to the kitchen door and rapped softly.

When Austin materialized on the other side, peering at me through the panes of glass that separated us, I leaned forward, sagging against the door as relief loosened the knots in my chest and the tension in the back of my neck. I pressed my hand against the window, the same way the little boy had in my house when he’d waved to me through my living-room window.

Austin was here!

Everything would be fine now. Austin would make everything okay.

The door opened, and I moved with it, tumbling inside as I fell into him. His arms opened, catching me before I could fall all the way to the floor.

“Thank god,” I mumbled against his chest, the only place that felt safe. I no longer cared that I was still wearing my uniform, dirt and sweat stains making it rank. “Thank god you’re here. I’ve had the strangest morning. The strangest night. I have no idea what’s going on.”

The arms around me tightened, but only slightly, and then I heard his mother’s voice, so achingly well-known to me that tears brimmed in my eyes. “Tyler? Who is it? What’s going on?”

I hadn’t noticed Tyler, Austin’s kid brother, but it was a relief to know I was no longer alone, that I was surrounded by familiar faces when everything else was so out of whack.

I drew back from Austin so I could see his mom. “It’s just me,” I told her. “I just came over because—” I wasn’t sure how I’d planned on finishing my explanation, but I never had the chance.

Tamara Wahl dropped her coffee mug. The ceramic shards became projectiles as it shattered, sending pieces flying in every direction. Coffee pooled at her feet, but she just stood there, staring at me, her mouth gaping.

“Mom, it’s Kyra . . . ,” Austin said, and for the first time I realized that this was all wrong too. I looked down at the arms, still at my waist, and noticed the wiry hairs on them. They should have been flaxen, closer to blond than brown. Even the arms, the skin, seemed somewhat too pale, as if this version of Austin hadn’t just finished his annual lifeguard certification—something
my
Austin had most definitely done.

His voice, too, was not right. It was deep, yes, the timbre just shades away from Austin’s.

I was almost afraid to look at his face.

And that was when he caught me for the second time. The moment I realized that he wasn’t Austin at all; he never had been.

This was Tyler Wahl. Tyler, who looked far too much like his older brother—my seventeen-year-old boyfriend—in looks, in stature . . . and, most of all, in age.

Tyler, who, the last time I’d seen him
just the day before
, had been only twelve years old.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“
KYRA, ARE YOU SURE I CAN’T GET YOU SOME
thing?” Tamara Wahl asked, her disembodied head looming out of the darkness as she peered into the bedroom.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, but at least I knew where I was. Or thought I did. Everything felt topsy-turvy at the moment.

“No. I don’t think so.” I shifted on the Batman sheets that I’d laid on almost as many times as my own. “No. I’m okay.”

I glanced around at a room I had memorized. I knew right where the poster of Mark Spitz (the Olympic swimmer Austin idolized) was—the one with the preprinted autograph Austin had tried to replicate above it when he was eleven in scribbly purple marker. The furniture was arranged exactly the same as always: his bed, his dresser, his corner desk plastered with a mishmash collection of sports and music and bumper stickers he’d collected.

But despite the sameness of it, it was missing his everyday clutter. His overflowing clothes hamper, the discarded Coke cans and water glasses on top of his dresser, messy homework piles on his desk. Even the bed was too neat, the sheets too fresh and smooth, as if they’d just been changed.

As if I were inside a diorama of Austin’s room. A perfect, unused replica.

His mother had tried to explain things to me, but nothing she’d said made any sense. It was like she’d been speaking gibberish.

Five years,
she’d kept saying. It had been five years since anyone had seen me last.

She was wrong, of course.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

It hadn’t been five years. It had been one night. I knew because I had been at my softball game. The championship game.

I knew because I was still wearing my uniform, and it still smelled like grass and sweat, and I still had the ribbons threaded through my hair.

One night, I kept insisting while my head and my throat ached. My dad and I had had an argument, and I’d run off to have a few minutes to myself—that was all. I must’ve wandered until I’d fallen asleep. At the Gas ’n’ Sip. Behind the Dumpster.

One damn night. Not five long years.

But she’d given me some time alone to absorb it, to let it sink in before coming back to check on me.

She patted my hand now, her voice cautious, as if I were held together by wishes and hopes. “Well, your mom should be here soon. Maybe she’ll do a better job of explaining things than I did.”

I shot upright.
“My mom?”
My throat constricted around the anticipation. “She’s coming?” My words barely made it through my airway, and the last one came out as a squeak. I didn’t want to cry, but just hearing that my mom was on her way made everything better somehow, and there was no way to stop the tears.

And then Austin’s mom, who I couldn’t remember
not
knowing, had her arms around me, comforting, reassuring, holding me in the way only a mother knows how. “It’ll be okay, Kyra. Everything’s gonna be okay now.”

Waiting, the same way I used to do when I was a little girl and I knew it was time for my mom to come home from work, I was standing at the window when I saw her pull up. She was driving a car I didn’t recognize: black and shiny and sporty.

If what Tamara Wahl had said was true, which I still couldn’t wrap my brain around because it was utterly-completely-
totally
insane, but if I allowed myself even to consider that I’d really lost five whole years of my life, then more than just who drove what had changed.

I know Austin’s mom believed what she said, and she definitely had some evidence to back up her story. Austin was off at college, or so she’d told me—living the life we’d always planned, attending his last year at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. And Tyler—pipsqueak Tyler, who used to follow us around the house, intruding on conversations and telling the same annoying jokes that we used to tell when we were his age—was now a junior at Burlington Edison High, the same school Austin and Cat and I had once gone to. I couldn’t deny that part, that he’d changed—I’d seen it with my own two eyes.

And, obviously, my mom and dad had moved.

All those things made it hard to argue with her. But that didn’t change the part where everything inside of me said she was wrong.

I wanted to cry and scream at the same time, and I was so ridiculously confused, I could hardly think straight.

Five years was a lifetime. An eternity.

I was surprised, then, when my mom stopped her sleek black car, not in front of Austin’s house, but in front of our old house. Habit, I supposed. It was the first place I’d gone too.

I watched as she emerged from her new car. Her hair was more highlighted than I remembered and shorter too, skimming her shoulders rather than falling to the middle of her back.

I wondered if I looked different too. I’d tried to wash up and had examined myself in the mirror. I didn’t feel changed, and I couldn’t see anything that said five years had gone by, right down to the farmer’s tan where my uniform sleeves hit, from spending hour after hour practicing in those last days of softball season. I even had the same bruise on my right shin from where I’d banged it against our coffee table when Cat and I had been wrestling over the remote last weekend.

Well, last weekend plus five years.

But how was any of that possible? How could I have the same bruise and suntan? How could I still be wearing my uniform and the ribbons threaded through my hair, and smell like sweat and softball field if five years had passed?

Those were the things that made me hesitate, no matter how logical Tamara Wahl’s explanations might seem. No matter how much Tyler had grown.

Outside, my mom faltered for a moment, looking up at the blue-gray house I’d tried to barge into before she made her way across the street toward Austin’s house.

Toward me.

My stomach fluttered nervously.

“This must be so weird for you.” Tyler’s voice came from behind me. It was the first time I’d heard him say anything in his new, deep voice since that moment I’d collapsed in his arms in the kitchen. Vaguely, I could make out the shape of him, still too tall to reconcile with the Tyler I remembered, in the reflection of the glass. But all my focus, all my energy was directed on her . . . on my mom.

I nodded and then slipped away from the window to meet her at the front door. She didn’t go around back like I had.

I opened it before she could knock, startling her.

Seeing her there, her face looking drawn the way it did, her lips pinched and her eyes strained, I could almost believe that everything I’d been told was true. It truly had been five years since I’d last seen her.

Tyler looked five years older. My mother looked five years wearier.

Tamara had said that, after a few years of private investigators and police, my parents finally had to go on with their lives and had left it at that, even when I’d tried to probe to find out what exactly “go on with their lives” meant.

I guess I was about to find out.

“Kyra?” My mom’s voice was more like a question. A terrified, hopeful, incredulous question. And suddenly she was just my mom. The same mom I’d had breakfast with yesterday. The same mom who shared dorky memes on Facebook and who laughed at my dad’s lame jokes and who’d continued making me Mickey Mouse pancakes on Sunday mornings long after I’d told her I didn’t care if my pancakes were shaped like cartoon characters.

“Mom . . .” Just saying the word made it real, and I started to cry, but really only because she was crying, while at the same time she did the mom-thing and wrapped me in her arms and started whispering nonsense words that tumbled over one another. Words like how she never thought she’d see me again and how I hadn’t changed a bit and how she was never letting me out of her sight again.

I stayed inside the circle of her embrace, listening to it all. She made promises and we cried, and she hugged me and I hugged her until my arms ached and hers probably did too. When her grip loosened, I finally found the words to ask “Where’s Dad? Is he coming too?”

I thought she might have stiffened, but I couldn’t say so for sure. I didn’t have the chance to decide, because we were interrupted by that man, the one from across the street. The one who’d chased me out of his house earlier.

His actions made sense now, I guess, since I was a complete stranger who’d been trying to shove her way into
his
home; but it didn’t make me bristle any less when he appeared at my mother’s back.

Or when his hand fell on her shoulder.

Like he knew her.

Knew her
, knew her.

Her brow crumpled when she turned to face him. “Grant.” She spoke to him in such a familiar way, in a way that made my stomach drop. The same way she spoke to my father. “I haven’t had a chance to tell her yet.” When she looked back to me, her expression was apologetic. “Kyra.”

“I’m so sorry,” the man said. “I should’ve recognized you. From your pictures.”

I looked up at him, really looked at him. Tall and dark eyed, and, even now, holding the little blond boy in his arms. She didn’t explain
who
he was. She didn’t have to. The toddler reaching for my mother said it all when he squealed, “Mommy!”

She took the little boy, and he clutched her, looking more like a monkey than a child the way he clung to her. He dropped his head on her shoulder and sighed contentedly, and I briefly wondered if I’d done that, too, when I was his age.

I looked at the boy, and then my mom, and then the man again, at the way his hand stayed on her shoulder.

Five years . . .

My parents had gone on with their lives. . . .

But not with each other.

This was her new family. This was her son. And her husband. Her
new
husband . . . shiny and sleek and new, like the car parked in front of the house.

“I didn’t want you to find out this way,” she told me, reaching for me with her free hand. She squeezed my arm, trying to pull me to her, to make me part of the embrace with her and the little boy in her arms.

Maybe she didn’t get it, how much this was for me. That this was happening too suddenly, and it was too, too,
too
much. Or maybe she did, because then she said, in a voice that was almost too hopeful, making me wonder if she was talking to me or to the little boy in her arms, “This is Logan. Your brother.”

I tried to look at him—this replacement child—but I couldn’t. He might be my brother, but I’d never asked for him. I didn’t want him. I wanted my old family. The one I’d had yesterday. “Where’s Dad?” I finally asked, turning to look at my feet, the only place that felt safe.

“He’s coming, Kyr. He’s on his way.” She was trying to sound sympathetic; I knew she was.

“Good. I’ll be inside. Let me know when he gets here.”

“What else do I need to know?” I asked when Tyler appeared in the doorway to Austin’s bedroom, the only place that seemed semifamiliar and nontoxic at the moment.

Tyler smiled at me from where he leaned against the doorjamb, and I realized why I’d mistaken him for his brother when I’d first seen him. His hair was slightly darker and longer and more mussed, and his skin was lighter than Austin’s, as if he spent more time indoors than out, but there was that same confidence about him. Those same green eyes that crinkled when he grinned his sideways grin.