The Telling (5 page)

Carolynn pats at her still-perfect bun. If it wasn't for the slight tremor in her hands, she'd look like she spends all her Saturday nights at the police station. Carolynn's mom and mine grew up on the point, south of the lighthouse; our families are two of the old logging ones who have been here for generations. A photo shows Carolynn and me as plump babies, dressed in white eyelet jumpers, our moms in cashmere cardigans and our fathers in chinos on my parents' sailboat, named after my mother, Mira. Our mothers shared the same honey-blond hair that fell in effortless curls, sapphire-blue eyes, coy smile, and clipped laugh. They were the kind of friends who were closer than blood, an early version of the core. Those pictures are the only evidence that I didn't dream those years. Carolynn pretended I didn't exist until middle school. By seventh grade she had every girl
calling me Uni-Boob. To my chagrin, she even went out with Josh in the ninth grade.

Despite this tumultuous history, the other members of the core welcomed me into their fold. Before I got out of Josh's car as he dropped me off after Marmalade's that first night, he said they were bonfiring at Shell Shores the next afternoon. He didn't even ask if I wanted to meet them, just assumed I'd be there. Who wouldn't? Willa and I arrived and we sat in the car for ten minutes. “You can't crawl back into bed and sleep away the rest of your life,” Willa said. This was back when Willa was just relieved to have me upright. “This moping is beneath you.” She meant to be supportive, but all those comments about moping made me want to hide how sad I was. I forgot all this once Josh spotted us walking over the dunes toward their golden bonfire licking the white sky of late afternoon. He waved and jogged to meet us.

Then Becca showed up at my door two mornings later. “You have got to save me from myself,” she pled. “I cannot be trusted around strappy sandals.” We took the ferry to Seattle and didn't get back until almost nine at night. It was like being with Becca when we were ten on the swings. We giggled and she asked about how I felt about Ben and said all the right sympathetic things and none of the “move on” stuff others did. She was less judgmental than Willa when I said I still hurt. Becca grew dewy-eyed and told me, “I think people can die from broken hearts.” Becca got it.

With everyone but Becca, I struggled with what to talk about until a few days in, when we were at Shell Shores again and Becca was wearing a bikini she kept calling
banger
.
Banger
is a term that Rusty and Duncan used for any girl they wanted to
bang
. Becca thinks
banger
is infinitely charming. And once the boys saw that the term wasn't scandalizing the girls, they lost interest.

We were all smushed together on a blanket. Becca had a pack of sparklers and was lighting one after another and sticking them in the sand in a giant heart shape around the throw. She made us pose for pictures. Then she mixed beer with lemonade and spoke in a bad British accent as she informed us that this was called a
shandy
. Becca had met a foreign exchange student from London in Seattle the previous weekend and considered herself very worldly for making out—
snogging
—with him.

We toasted the queen, and Becca proclaimed her a banger. Carolynn and Willa rolled their eyes, the boys cheered, and I tried remembering what the queen looked like until I fished out the image of my grandma. It was a good afternoon, the kind that makes you bright and weightless. With the core there are a lot of those, and they make it irresistible to forget all the years they ignored me. They provide the ideal distraction from missing Ben.

Becca develops hiccups at some point, and they punctuate the passing seconds like a stumbling cousin to the loud ticking of the clock. In this harsh light I see Duncan's upper lip is stained from his bloody nose, and there's a bruise setting in on his chin where Rusty hit him. Rusty has dried blood on his ear. Josh told the police about their scuffle, but still, the evidence of violence makes me uneasy.

I bury my face in my hands. Maggie shoves me back, closer to Ben. The adventures of this last month—setting the rental kayaks free at Shell Shores, getting fake IDs in Seattle, and tucking bottles of pinot noir into our bags at Island Spirits without paying—matter less. Those escapades were all about the thrill. They were adventures
that made my hands too weak to form fists, and I forced myself through them because I'm done letting adventures pass me by. All the nerve and mischief I had put between me and the loss are disappearing. The earth's revolutions reverse and accelerate; every passing minute hurls me a day back in time.

A detective in a pinstripe suit and shiny black wingtips ambles in front of us. His jacket's boxy in the shoulders and short in the arms—working class, Dad would note as though it were a bad thing. His hair is slicked back with the look of Dracula in those old-timey movies. He's clean shaven, his skin pitted with acne scars.

“First off, kids, my apologies for making you wait. I'm Detective Ward from Seattle PD.” He blinks at us, near-black irises giving him a wide-awake look. “Second off, I know you've been through hell tonight.” His pink lips grimace. “Here's the good news. I've been able to deduce a lot from the scene at Swisher Spring.” He claps his hands once, and I start a little in my chair. “You've recounted events for my colleagues. How about we send you home and if I have additional questions, I contact you tomorrow?”

I'm on my feet, shuffling after the group for the front exit, when Detective Ward calls out, “Ms. McBrook?” I take two more strides before Willa swivels. She furrows her eyebrows at me as if to say,
That's you
. I turn slowly. “Do you mind hanging back for a minute?” Ward asks when he's sure he has my attention.

He doesn't wait to see me shake my head; he makes a beeline for the huddle of uniforms. Willa places her hands on my shoulders. Her bottom lip is indented from where she's been chewing its dry skin. The others siphon through the front door without sparing me a glance. Not even Josh or Becca seem to care that I'm not with them. “He's
going to ask you about how you knew Maggie,” Willa tells me softly.

“He'll already know,” I say. “We gave our names and they know Maggie.”

Willa brings her face closer. “No, Lana. Listen. You don't need to tell him what you thought of her.” Her brows go up meaningfully. “You don't need to be honest.” This last sentence she mouths. I understand. Willa doesn't lie. For her to tell me I should, it's important. I'm going to talk to the detective about a girl who's dead. It wouldn't be smart to express that I despised her. This is okay. I am a sometimes liar. Always have been. I get it from my mother.

Willa leaves, and I unravel a loose thread on my distressed jean shorts, working the small tear that's supposed to be there into a gaping wound as I wait for Ward to return. While I do, I remind myself of this, my most important childhood lesson.

I was four years old, feather boa draped on my shoulders, Mom's lipstick smeared in a clown's smile on my face. It was the week before she died. I know because she was lighting sparklers left over from the Fourth. I called them fireworks. Mom would be gone by mid-July.

I remember the bottle of wine overturned at her feet, her heels across the terrace, the way all her words were sighed, and her twinkling eyes. Dad used to say they were the exact color of the sea surrounding Sardinia, where they honeymooned. He wasn't home then to coax a wisp of a smile out of her. She was beautiful and crying.

“Mommy, are you happy?” I asked. I had this baby doll that whimpered when you pressed the plastic palm of one hand and cooed when you squeezed the other. Both recordings sounded like a deranged goat, but I'd had a lot of practice identifying sadness.

“Yes, baby. Perception is nine-tenths of everything. Even of the truth, Lana. Don't I look happy?” She smiled tightly, little creases radiating from the corners of her mouth. I nodded. But she didn't fool me.

I can replay this dialogue because my memory's been helped along. Mom left journals and pastel sheets of perfumed stationery with letterpress roses along the borders and all her little idioms written out in cursive in her hope chest. I pored over them when Ben found the chest's key in Daddy's desk for me.

Ward's smile warms to the degree of an elderly lady eager to serve you scratch lemonade when he returns to the waiting room. “Lana, may I call you Lana?” I nod. “Good. I appreciate you staying behind. The officers said you mentioned being pretty familiar with Swisher Spring. You kids said you didn't see anyone hanging around its vicinity today, but I wondered if you'd noticed any regulars around the preserve during any of your previous visits. Any hikers or strangers you've noticed more than once?” His tongue flicks to wet his lips; a reptilian tic.

“Tourists don't usually swim at the spring, since there's no sign at the trailhead and they don't know it's there. There are hikers, yeah, but I don't know if I've seen anyone more than once out there.” My eyes stray in the direction that Willa and the others disappeared.

“What about locals? There's a homeless man who camps in the area, no?”

“Skitzy-Fitzy.” I suck in my breath. “Sorry. Fitzgerald Moore.” Kids call Gant's only homeless man Skitzy-Fitzy or “the troll,” which is brainless, since trolls live under bridges and Fitzgerald camps on the embankment of Swisher Tunnel. Kids throw soda cans at him along the road with his rusted, ancient shopping cart. After an incident
with two boys from the baseball team a couple of years ago, he ended up badly injured. At best people pretend not to see Fitzgerald. Ben's the only reason I know his real name. Ben said he was schizophrenic and had a long-dead uncle who had lived on the island.

“And?” Ward prompts.

“I've never seen him at Swisher Spring,” I say. Does he suspect Skitzy-Fitzy of something? And if not, why ask?

“All of you knew the deceased?”

My stomach does a flip at how quickly we move from Skitzy-Fitzy to Maggie. “Yes,” I say. “Maggie was two grades ahead of us. Our high school's small and everyone knows each other.”

He points at me. “But that's not how
you
knew her.”

I bite the inside of my cheek, looking from the finger to his eyes. This is what Willa was worried about. “That's how I first knew of Maggie. She went out with a lot of guys, and people always talked about that. I met her when she started dating my stepbrother right before their senior year. That was two years ago.”

Ward tilts his head at a sympathetic angle. “Yes, I'm aware of your and Ms. Lewis's history.” My forehead puckers. It means something that Ward knew about my connection to Maggie and questioned me about it anyway. Did he suspect what Willa knew, that I hate Maggie Lewis? And why would it matter? “One more question, please. If you had to guess, what do you think happened to Ms. Lewis that she ended up at the bottom of Swisher Spring?”

I think
karma
loud and clear and I'm almost certain Ward's pupils dilate like he hears. “I don't know,” I tell him.

A long moment of silence, his alert eyes fixed on mine. I shift my weight from one foot to the other. “I see,” he says finally. “Well,
you keep thinking about it and be certain to let me know if anything plausible occurs to you.” He turns to go and then adds, “Thank goodness the lot of you happened upon Ms. Lewis's body. I wonder how long she might have gone undiscovered. I'm sure the last thing you wanted was to lose another close to you.” He watches my reaction. “So sorry for your loss, Lana. Oh, excuse me”—his palm to his chest—“
all
of your losses.”

I walk rubber-kneed to the station's front door. The whole way I replay Ward's words—
all of your losses
—in my head.

There are more than he knows.

I
am a story.

My
before
predates Ben's death and my
after
postdates it. I have a prologue that I guess could be defined broadly as the whole history of the universe and as narrowly as my mom and dad meeting, falling in love, marrying, and ending up with me. I don't know those parts all that well, so I won't tell them. I guess by the same logic I'll have an afterword, and it will go on once I'm dead and can't dream or think anymore. All that does is make me panicky as a caged animal.

The story I know well starts when Mira McBrook drank two bottles of Sancerre, swallowed three antidepressants, kicked off her black satin pumps, told her four-year-old daughter that she was tired of pretending, and jumped from the upper terrace to her death.

It was dusk and Daddy was on his way home. The french doors to the kitchen were open and he heard me screaming as he came into the house.

Dad and I did fine without Mom. We mourned appropriately, and when it was time to move on, we did. I was a lonely kid, but it had nothing to do with Dad not being there. He often was. And when he wasn't,
a babysitter was there to entertain me or I was getting bossed around by Mariella, who cooks and cleans for us and has a talent for making her voice heard over the roar of the vacuum. Sure, I pine for some people's moms. All motherless girls do that.

Six years after Mira McBrook said good-bye in her strange way, Dad met Diane away on business. They dated mostly over the phone. Dad was lonely, romantic, and impulsive. He proposed. The day I met Ben was the day they arrived to move in. The wicked stepmothers and bullying brothers I'd seen on TV didn't exactly send me bouncing to greet them. Diane turned out to be a bird-boned brunette, younger-looking than the moms at school, with a sweet smile and a way of speaking that made me think of air escaping my bike tires. She brushed my braids from my shoulders, and I saw that she was missing the middle finger of her right hand. I liked her more for the mystery.