I shake my head. “No. But I did track down the guy they were fighting about.”
“Tracked down?” Sapolu’s heavy brows shoot upward. He looks almost amused. “What, are you running a separate investigation?”
I feel Teffeteller’s eyes sharpen on me. She is obviously not amused.
“They were fighting because he . . . he heard a rumor. That she was cheating. So I thought . . . well, whether she was cheating or not, that’s another person that might know something. So I asked around. The guy’s name’s Seb Collins.” It’s so odd to me how calm my voice can be in a time like this. As long as I don’t look at my dad, my voice is slow and matter-of-fact. “He had a crush on her. I guess he kissed her, and she freaked out.”
Teffeteller runs a hand across her forehead. “Okay. Look, Ruth, I’m going to need you to back off. I know you’re trying to help, but you don’t really know what you’re doing, and you could be tainting the witness pool, or giving away pieces of information that need to remain as private as possible without meaning to.”
“Did you know about Seb before I told you about him?” I ask, the faintest edge of heat to my voice.
“As a matter of fact . . .” she starts, but before she can finish the statement my dad jumps in.
“That’s not the point,” he snaps. “You’re going to stop this, Ruthie. You’re going to mind your own business from here on out, do you hear me?”
“Everyone hears you,” I mutter.
I can feel the tension in his limbs, radiating outward across the kitchen. Brandy puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s a light touch—it’s not like she’s holding him back—but it seems to help. He turns away abruptly, like he can’t even stand to look at me anymore.
“It seems like you might need a little time to talk,” Teffeteller says. Her voice is cold and clipped. “Ruthie, don’t pull any more vanishing acts. The town’s on high alert as it is. And look . . . I know you’re worried about your friend. But the best thing you can do right now is to let us do our job. If you hear something, even if it’s just a rumor, give us a call and we can look into it, okay?” She hands me a card.
I fight the urge to throw it down. “Sure. Sorry for scaring everyone.”
The cops are in the doorway when Teffeteller turns to speak one more time. “There’s going to be a press conference later today,” she says. “But you should hear it first. The tests from the blood on Zahra’s cell phone came back.”
My fingers clench against my legs; I’m tight-shouldered in my seat, waiting.
She grimaces, gives a helpless little gesture with one hand. And I know before she says it.
It’s Zahra’s blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FIGHT IS QUICK and nasty and predictable. Dad snarls; Brandy cries. Ingrid makes herself scarce.
“You’re grounded.” He’s standing in front of me, looking down at me. We’re still in the kitchen. “For the next two weeks. You’ll go to school and come home. And you’ll stay away from that Peavy kid.”
“Okay,” I say automatically. I see his lip curl, see him trying to see if I’m sassing him somehow, if this is some kind of deep sarcasm. I take a little pleasure at that. Good; let him be confused.
But the truth is, I just don’t care. I’m letting him bawl it out to get it over with. All I can think about right now is Zahra. Zahra’s blood.
“And . . . no phone,” he says. He sounds like he’s fishing now, trying to get a rise out of me. Trying to figure out how to make me as upset as he is. But I hand over my phone silently.
Brandy touches his shoulder. “Rick, no. What if there’s an emergency? What if she needs us?”
For a moment, he looks like he might blow up at her next. I see it flit across his face. I remember the hole he left in our wall when I was a kid, after Mom asked how many drinks he’d had before she’d let me in the car with him. But he takes a deep, shaky breath, and hands me back the phone.
“Car keys, then,” he says.
I shrug. I hand him the keys. “Are we done?”
“We’re done when I say we’re done,” he snaps. I nod silently and wait. I distantly, vaguely realize that my lack of response startles him, maybe even scares him. There’s a moment when he doesn’t really seem to know what to do next.
Brandy steps in. She takes me by the hand. “We’ll talk more later, okay?” she says. “Why don’t you go clean up, get some rest. It sounds like it was a long night.”
“But don’t think for a minute I believe that bull honky about the bear,” he shouts after me as I make my way downstairs.
Bull honky. It seems such a waste to hear that right now, when I can’t laugh at anything. When hope rides so low it scrapes the floor.
Ingrid’s sitting on the sofa in the rec room, playing with her phone in its pink glitter case. The TV’s on, set to some random nature show—fennec foxes skittering across the desert floor, chasing rodents and hiding from humans. I sit down next to her.
“It’s her blood,” I say.
She’s quiet for a long time. She’s not wearing makeup today, and her hair is limp against her scalp. She looks exhausted.
I try again. “I’m sorry if I scared you,” I whisper. “We really did plan to be back last night, but . . .”
She throws her phone down on her lap. It’s a gentle toss, but it’s so uncharacteristic I go silent.
“After Mom sobered up they put me in therapy for a while,” she says. I don’t ask who “they” were; from what I know of her mom’s past, it was probably a court order of some kind. “And the therapist had this poster in the waiting room. It was this chart, of all the different kinds of roles kids take on in dysfunctional families. You know—‘the Hero,’ who has to succeed at everything in order to pretend things are okay. ‘The Scapegoat,’ who acts out and takes on all the blame. ‘The Mascot,’ who makes everyone laugh to cut the tension. I knew without having to be told that I was ‘the Caretaker.’ The one that tries to smooth things over, that tries to keep everyone calm so things don’t escalate.”
I’m not sure why she’s telling me this. I’m not sure what it has to do with anything. But I don’t interrupt.
“Anyway, it’s a role that sounds very sweet but it’s pretty self-serving,” she says. “You bend over backward to make peace, no matter what happens. It’s not because you care about anyone else’s well-being. It’s because you’re scared. It’s because you’ve figured out how to make this awful situation work for you, and if it changes, you don’t know what you’ll do. Even if it changes for the better. Better not to fight or let things come to a head, because if they do, if your mom hits her bottom and has to get clean, all these systems you have worked out are going to fall apart.” She gives a little toss of her head. “It’s not like I was aware of all that while I was doing it, obviously—I was just a kid. But it’s something we talked a lot about in therapy. How I’d accommodate every crappy thing Mom did so I didn’t have to face the truth.”
“Okay,” I say slowly.
She looks at me then. Her eyes are wide and blue and clear as glass. But somehow, in all that transparent depth, there are things I can’t see.
“There’s another role on all the posters. The Lost Child,” she says.
My body goes tense. I wait.
“The one that opts out. That disappears. That writes the whole thing off,” she says. “The one that makes herself small and assumes no one wants her or needs her.”
Anger starts to crawl up my spine. “Are you seriously going to throw some psychobabble bullshit in my face right now?”
She doesn’t flinch. She takes a deep breath.
“You owe it to me to listen for a minute,” she says.
She’s right. I do.
“I’m just trying to tell you . . . we want you, Ruthie. We need you. Okay? So don’t just . . . vanish.” She looks at me another
moment, then she stands up.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“School,” she says. “It’s lunch, I can go in for the last couple classes.”
She picks up her backpack from where it’s slumped against the ancient wood paneling. Then she slings it over her shoulder and heads up the stairs.
I watch her go, thoughts lurching and stumbling through my mind. Her words hit harder than Dad’s ever could. His just made me angry. Hers did, too; but they also made me feel guilty.
Never mind the guilt I’ve been carrying already. My skin burns with it; it lingers in the memory of Ben’s touch. Now in the light of day I can’t believe it happened. I can’t believe I let it happen. My best friend’s ex. What’s wrong with me?
But even thinking about it makes my breath catch. I close my eyes. The way he touched me . . .
How can I still want that so bad, with the fact of Zahra’s blood in front of me? How can I be almost dizzy, wondering where he is, what he’s doing, knowing what that might mean?
I pull out my phone. First I text Tabitha.
I’m really sorry, is all I say.
Because I am, and because she came to look for me. And because now I have no leg to stand on; she may be the one who’s got a crush on Ben, but I’m the one who made out with him.
Then I text Ben.
Are you okay?
He doesn’t reply. I head down the hall to the yellow-and-white bathroom and plug the phone into the wall. Then I get into the shower.
I crank the water up as high as it can go, so it stings my skin, so it turns me lobster-red. After our night shivering in our own sweat, it feels good. And maybe it burns away some of what we did. Maybe if I can scorch my skin, it’ll stop wanting what it can’t have.
The text alert comes just after I’ve soaped up my hair. I don’t wait; I pull back the curtain and look.
Cops here too. they have a warrant now. Tearing the house apart.
My heart sinks. Now that they have blood evidence, Ben will be locked in their bull’s-eye. If they even think they can win a case against him, they’ll make his life a living hell.
The only way to fix this is to find her. And time is running out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WE HAVE TO TAKE the bus the next morning. Ingrid’s stoic about the whole thing, which almost makes me feel worse. I’m grounded, so she has to ride the bus with the rowdy, ungovernable freshmen of our neighborhood. She keeps her eyes on her phone while spitballs course overhead, ignoring the kid that calls her a fat-ass when she has to squeeze down the aisle to find a seat. It’s really not fair. Dad should have at least given her a ride.
We’re the last stop, so we don’t have a chance to sit together, and when we get off the bus she gives me a quick wave before disappearing into the crowd. I wonder if she’s mad at me, or just preoccupied, but it leaves me feeling weirdly lonely.
Inside, I make my way down the wide checkerboard hallway. I’m almost to the stairs when someone grabs me by the hand and jerks me to one side.
It’s Ben. He pulls me into a room and shuts the door quickly behind us. The momentum sends me crashing into him, up against his chest, and he puts his arms around me to steady me.
He clears his throat, moves away slightly. “Sorry. I’m not supposed to talk to you. I didn’t want anyone to see us.”
“It’s okay,” I say, smiling. “I’m not supposed to talk to you, either.”
We’re in the athletic supply closet. It’s huge but cluttered, and the air smells like old sneakers and bleach. There are a handful of football dummies clustered in one corner, and mesh bags full of balls slumped against the walls. A broken gymnastics horse sits on its side. The only light comes from the gap under the door, dim and distant.
He looks down at me, and I wonder fleetingly what it is he sees. A co-conspirator, an ally in the search for his ex-girlfriend? Or something else . . . something beyond the relationship we both have with Zahra?
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I set down my guitar case, bite the corner of my lip. “I’m grounded until I die. But it’s fine. What’s going on with you?”
“I’m going in this afternoon to make another statement. Mom wouldn’t let them talk to me without the lawyer present. So instead they just tore up the house.” He grimaces. “I guess you know about the blood?”
I nod. “They told me.”
“They don’t know for sure if that means she was hurt,” he says. “The phone was broken and the blood was along one of the shards. She might have just cut herself on the screen.”
I nod. But then we fall silent. Outside, the normal noise of the pre-class crowd swells for a moment, then subsides again. I bite the corner of my lip. It’s a big closet, but we feel impossibly close.
“My dad didn’t believe me about the bear,” I say, more to have something to say than anything else. It’s a mistake, though, because as soon as I mention it, we’re back in the cabin, pressed together and frantic. For a second I think it’s just me—that I’m the only one imagining it, reliving it, wanting it again. But then he steps toward me and grabs me in one quick movement, one hand on my hip and the other cradling my face, and my body goes vibrantly, brilliantly alive again.
I lean up, ever so slightly, and that’s all it takes. Our mouths are already so close, so hungry. His lips are dry, slightly chapped, but I don’t mind. I run my fingers across his hair, the short-shaven sides and the longer locks along the top. I feel the rhythm of his lungs and his heart through the soft cotton of his shirt.
I can hear, vaguely, an announcement coming over the intercom, muffled through the door. Then his hand glides around my hip, resting on the small of my back, and I don’t care. I wish I could turn off the sound as easily as the light. I wish I could stay in here forever, learning the textures and shapes of him.
But outside the door, a commotion is building—a long wail, a shouted curse. The quick-building rumble of a crowd. We pull back from each other, eyes wide in the dim light.
Then we step out into the chaos.
The hallway eddies and swirls with activity. Everyone’s looking at their phones. A few people are crying.
I pull my phone from my pocket to see what’s going on. But before I can check my alerts, I hear Ben’s voice. “Tabitha!” he calls. I look up and see her there, down the hallway.
She turns around slowly. I half expect her to see us together and make a nasty face, but she looks numb. She holds up her phone. I can’t make out what’s on it, but I don’t have to. She tells us.
“They found her body,” she says.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Anchorage Police discovered human remains buried near an abandoned playground in Russian Jack Springs Park Thursday evening.
APD officials have declined to comment further, stating that the investigation is ongoing, but sources did confirm that the body was found with the help of cadaver dogs requisitioned in the search for Zahra Elizabeth Gaines, the seventeen-year-old who has been missing since the night of September 16. Gaines was last seen at a friend’s party fewer than four miles from the crime scene.
Anyone with information is asked to call the tip line at . . .
* * *
—
SOMEONE’S LEADING ME THROUGH the halls of the school. There’s a hand on my elbow, not gripping, just touching. I let them propel me forward.
“Ingrid Bell, Ruthie Hayden, where do you two think you’re going?”
“Sorry, Mr. Thatcher, Ruthie’s . . . not well. I’m taking her home.”
They talk for a moment, somewhere to my left, their voices low. I’m aware of the great press of the crowd around me. I hear Zahra’s name on everyone’s lips. Everyone seems to have heard about the body.
The words of the article—so short, so succinct—drum through me on repeat. Human.
Remains. Buried. Abandoned. Playground. Investigation. Cadaver. I can see the clearing in the park, our old refuge. The bare swing set frame like a giant daddy longlegs poised over the weedy ground. The crumbling playscape, wooden platforms ravaged by insects and weather. The faded animals lying in the overgrown grass, the springs that used to mount them long pillaged.
I can see, so clearly. Blood spattered across the dirt. Soaking down into it, making hot, sticky mud.
“Come on, Ruthie.” Ingrid’s voice. Weirdly calm. The Caretaker—the great soother. She was right about that, of course. Right about me, too; I am a lost child. I have never been so lost in my life.
She takes me by the hand. “Let’s go.”
A thought stirs. “We don’t have the car today.”
“I called Rick. He’s coming to pick us up.”
I nod robotically and follow her outside, my eyes unfocused. I don’t really want to see my dad; I am mad at my dad. All these thoughts, though, are like rocks falling into a well. They hit the water with a splash and then sink out of sight.
Dad’s energy is frantic, frenetic. At one point he comes into sharp focus in front of me, his blue eyes the only color in his face. He stares down at me, and he’s saying something, again and again, his voice urgent.
“Ruthie. Ruth. I’m so sorry, Ruthie, I know you must feel . . .”
I just nod, nod, nod. Except I don’t feel. I don’t feel anything.
At home I lie on my bedroom floor. I didn’t quite make it to the bed, and now I just don’t care. The floor is cool and quiet, the cheap carpet bristly against my skin. I don’t fall asleep but I can’t seem to move. I lie there and listen to the sounds around the house. Ingrid and Dad talk quietly in the kitchen upstairs for a while. I hear Dad leave—maybe heading back to work. I hear Ingrid’s steps on the stairs and then her soft knock at the door. When I don’t answer, she goes away.
Outside the high window I watch time pass. Clouds thread across the sky. The light moves in its sallow autumn arc.
I Know You Remember Page 18