The Telling (6 page)

Ben slunk from their van gripping a cat carrier. He blinked at me with these giant eyes and a tear-streaked face. He was all uneven, his limbs too skinny for his big, round joints, and he trembled while angling the hissing tabby between us.

“Hello,” he whispered, hardly louder than the cat. He was almost two years older yet a billion times more afraid. Instead of threatening him with the knitting needle I'd commandeered and was holding at my side as a sword, I took his hand and showed him to his room. I didn't want a brother before I met him, and then once I had, imagining life without him was like laughing with one lung rather than two.

Most siblings want to be different. They want to say this is me and that is you. But we were amateur brother and sister from the start. Both survivors of things we didn't want to talk about. Instead of
crying over what we couldn't change, we reinvented ourselves as two kids who had, and only needed, each other.

We wanted secret messages spelled out on scraps of paper, hidden in places only the other would look. We wanted fireworks on the
Mira
; Decembers spent festooning her sails with sparkly lights; gingerbread house–decorating with Diane and Dad after they'd had too much eggnog to care about us pouring ourselves glasses; and weeknights when Ben and I ate dinner on the upper terrace, the Scrabble board between us, the sun fading to chalky rose behind the tree-logged hill.

We wanted traditions and inside jokes and family pictures and secrets. We wanted to belong to each other, and so we did. Do. Present tense intended.

If I am a story, then Ben is also. His prologue is a mystery to me. Did his mother fall in love and marry his father? Where was Ben born? I know pieces. One year he and Diane lived in a double-wide trailer with a car thief neighbor. The next they stayed in a mansion with an ancient plot of graves on the grounds and a giant bloodstain on the floor of the ballroom. Ben talked about nests of fiddler crabs in marshlands, fortune-telling bag ladies in Savannah, and men dressed up as women singing opera on the street corners at night.

But: Where did the inspiration for his stories come from? All those marauding villains with their insatiable appetites for screams and blood weren't born out of air. You had to be sneaky asking Ben about before Gant. I understood he didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want him to have to, just sometimes the curiosity got to me. Ben would laugh and say, “When we met, you were holding a knitting
needle at your side like a sword. Trust me, the stories don't take
that
much imagination.”

Ben had imagination for days.

Perhaps more than imagination, Ben could play the shadows. He knew what words to use to make you laugh; he knew ten more to make you scream.

Most kids would think we were freaks to be so wrapped up in gruesome make-believe. It would take hours of me lying in bed at night before the jitters would stop and I could fall asleep. They weren't for nothing, though. Our stories weren't senseless like the video games where you run around shooting people, stealing cars, and pistol-whipping prostitutes. Good beat evil. I,
a girl
, was the hero.

Ben stopped telling them eventually. That sort of make-believe dries up as you get older. Our games evolved. Ben was in awe of our island initially. He wanted to explore every windswept beach and trail. We spent summers searching for the source of Swisher Spring. We performed high dives between the rocks. When we were old enough, we sailed the
Mira
without Dad; parentless we sunbathed on her decks and waved and yelled as ferries blasted their horns in the distance. We sailed to uninhabited bits of land and foraged for berries and slept under the stars and got bitten lumpy by mosquitoes and roasted near a million marshmallows. We had adventures and swore on everything that mattered to us—on
summer
, our favorite time of year—that we'd never have as much fun with anyone else.

Ben got older, and the awkward boy who showed up with the tabby vanished. The kids at school stopped calling him praying mantis. He grew into his limbs. Ben became golden, popular, and opinionated.
He had better luck than me. Being a teenager isn't as hard for boys as it is girls.

For girls there starts to be all this static in middle school: who likes who; who hasn't had their period; who has boobs; who's stuffing their bra; who's going to second base; what is second base; who's a slut; who dresses like a slut; who's a prude; who dresses like a prude. It goes on and on. I slouched. I dressed to avoid attention. I kept my eyes and head down. I could jump, hoot, and snarl on the wild adventures with Ben, but as soon as I got to school, I made myself small and unnoticeable. I focused on what was ahead.

The girls in college wouldn't know that I was excluded from sleepovers because I wore a sports bra that gave me a uni-boob. The boys wouldn't know me as Ben's weirdo sister, or half cousin, or foreign exchange student—no one ever bothered to get the step-thing right.

Luckily, Willa wanted out of high school too. We spent the first semester of ninth grade on our plan. We consulted every college preparatory resource, researched college admission stats, pored over Gant High's course catalog, and plotted out the remaining semesters of high school to maximize our chances of getting into the colleges of our dreams. It was our foolproof map to escape. And then, in a blink of an eye, all that changed. It turned out that I was rushing to a place and time where Ben wasn't real.

There's nothing I can do to change it. You can't go back in time any more than you can regrow a lung once you've lost it. The only thing to do is learn to breathe with just one.

When I emerge outside, the core and Willa are against the lamp-lit brick facade of the police station in various positions. Some of their heels are kicked up on the wall, heads rested on crossed arms,
and butts on the sidewalk. Josh is in a squat; he pops to his feet like a tightly loaded spring released. The rest of them follow.

“You guys waited,” I say as an exclamation and question.

“We weren't going to leave you,” Josh says.

“Why did he want to talk to you alone?” Duncan demands. He's a full head taller than the rest, hovering with the look of a gargoyle—a handsome one, if there's such a thing.

“He wanted to know if I've ever noticed anyone hanging out at the spring or hiking in the preserve, since I told the police that I'd been there a lot before. Ben and I used to go,” I add, looking to the washed-out sidewalk, hoping that my voice isn't shaking. “He asked if Skitzy-Fitzy camps near the spring also.”

“But why ask you
privately
?” Carolynn presses.

I shrug, eyes darting to Willa. I worry that the answer has nothing to do with me knowing the spring better than the others and everything to do with Ben's death and Maggie's part in it. “The detective also asked me what I think happened to Maggie.”

“What did you say?” Josh asks.

“That I don't have a guess.”

“Hold up,” Duncan says, waving in an exaggerated way. “He asks you if you've ever seen Skitzy-Fitzy or anyone else hanging around the spring—the spring where Maggie showed up drowned. Then he's all, ‘What do you think happened to the dead girl?' He thinks someone offed her,” he exclaims, eyes bugging sadistically out of his head.

“Try not to sound so excited,” Carolynn remarks, her heart-shaped face cringing in displeasure.

“But they can't think any of us had anything to do with Maggie-it-doesn't-matter-she's-on-the-rag-ie drowning or whoever might have.”
Becca sings the nasty nickname like a little kid jumping rope.

Willa turns with a shake of the head from Becca. “Maggie's death was mysterious, and none of us had an explanation for it. It stands to reason that they're at least contemplating murder.”

There that pitiless word is again:
murder
. I never questioned who put Maggie at the bottom of the spring. It didn't really occur to me that someone must have. But of course someone did. Maggie was very hateable.

“The whole island knows she's responsible for Ben dying,” Duncan says. “That's a whole island full of people who hated her guts.”

“Maggie didn't off Ben alone. She had a carjacking buddy,” Rusty says. “Maybe it's that she was mixed up with this psycho that got her killed? Maybe
he
killed her?”

I think about this. Whoever was on the highway that night is loose in the world. No one knows what he's done. I can't believe that he'd take the risk of coming back to Gant. I also don't believe that Maggie would have returned to Gant
willingly
, not after she fled the police, not after her staying gone was the only thing preventing the police from pursuing her as a suspect.

“We shouldn't have even tried to save her.” Becca says this for me. “Maggie was beyond shady—totally evil.” She beams at me. I should be grateful. I shouldn't wonder who killed Maggie, or whether her death has anything to do with Ben's. This shouldn't drag me in reverse to the time when I couldn't stop wondering who Maggie's accomplice was. Now I wonder who had more reason than me to want Maggie dead. Who knew where she ran off to? Who hunted her down and lured her back to Gant to drown her? Possibly, she wasn't
even drowned but killed somewhere else and dumped into the spring.

I look up the sidewalk. It's on the late side of ten, lampposts glowing like orbiting moons, and there are adults wobbling inebriated from restaurants and stepping over flower beds. A few middle-school-aged boys balance on skateboards outside the ice creamery under the candy-cane-striped awning. Maggie's killer could be somewhere, not too far beyond them.

There's an eerie symmetry between Maggie's death and our stories. They always ended in the same way. The villains weren't carted off to prison; they lost their lives. Maggie set the events in motion that led to Ben's death and she turned up dead, possibly murdered. It makes me sick and happy at once. If Ben were here—Ben, whose heroes always killed their villains—he would call this justice.

Willa shifts forward confidentially and keeps her voice low. “Lana said Maggie was caught under the water. It's possible that the killer tried to prevent her body from being discovered. They didn't want her to be found, and
we
found her. What if we're in danger for it?”

Josh winds himself up and gives a nod he thinks will settle it all. “We're careful until we know anything for certain. Nothing we can do but wait and see.” There's an optimistic swing to his words, and it sends comfort fanning out over the core, like a security blanket, easing their frowns and paving the way for Becca to remind the group that Josh's birthday is tomorrow and that she will
so not tolerate a canceled party
. Then there's a lot of agreeing to wait and see—and presumably to not commit the unthinkable act of canceling a party. The specifics of being careful or waiting and seeing—what we're going to do after we wait and see or what we're waiting for—aren't discussed.

It's difficult in Gant to believe you aren't safe. Hard to make the adjustment even after you've seen proof. Everyone but Willa, who stares at her shoelaces, seems convinced that all will work out, somehow.

Danger didn't used to be real on our island. You have parents and house alarms. You leave your bags on the beach during a swim and no one touches your cell. In the winter you leave your car running with the heat blasting to duck into Marmalade's for mochas, extra whipped cream, dark chocolate shavings on top. Gant is a state of mind as much as a place. I learned this summer that the idyllic island doesn't exist. Bad things usually happen when you least expect them, in places you believe you're safest.

We trade good-byes, and Willa and I separate from the core. I eye the dark gaps between buildings.

I know these lessons better than the others:

Life is biting into a cupcake and finding an eyeball at its center. Going to bed with the covers to your chin, all snuggly and dreamy, and waking up without your teeth.

T
here's the smell of bonfires, sweet charred marshmallows, and the singed edge of fireworks in the air as Willa and I walk to where the police parked her car. Gant Island is perfumed by its coastal celebrations all summer long. The breeze parts my hair like a finger brushing my neck. I shiver and smooth it to one side.

To my right there's a grassy slope leading to the pedestrian promenade that meanders along the water the length of downtown. We slip between two clots of tourists gathered at the front of a gallery with strummed guitar chords floating from its open door. I sidestep a woman in tall, spiky heels. I trip from the curb before I catch my balance. My head snaps up to avoid any cars. When I focus ahead, I see Ben, kicked back on an iron bench, one arm folded behind his head, long legs extended and crossed at the ankles just above his Vans.

A surprised cry from me and I run. He points toward the sky. There's a girl kneeling beside him, gazing dreamily up his arm, her black hair cascading over her shoulder. A flick of his fingers and he produces an origami star he holds up among the real constellations. I'd sit for hours studying in the kitchen, and when Ben had given up
on distracting me with silly faces, he'd toss paper throwing stars into my hair. When my attention finally strayed from the books, he'd be smiling. “You have stars in your hair,” he said once, gray irises almost silver. I wanted to say,
You have them in your eyes
.

This memory plays as a transparent screen over Ben and the girl on the bench. They both laugh as he lets the star drop into her lap—
a shooting star
. His laugh is warm and liquid like Ben's always is. Was. I stop a yard away. I squint. All at once the boy looks nothing like Ben. His hair is too dark, his nose too small, his jaw rounded rather than squared, his posture not nonchalant enough.