by Lydia Millet
“Yeah. Well. My mom just doesn’t get it. When I tell her she’s getting a rhino hide she just goes, ‘You have to suffer to be beautiful, Hayley.’ ”
Cara nodded and tried on a quick, tight smile.
Hayley reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing it. After a few seconds, Cara moved her hand away, blinking.
“So anyway,” said Hayley. “Sorry I can’t ride home with you.”
“No problem,” said Cara and waved as she turned to head up the cliff staircase. “See you.”
Tonight her dad had promised to take them to the Wellfleet Drive-In, the only drive-in movie theater left on the Cape. It was a ten-minute car ride from their rambling old house on the bay, but they were planning to take their bikes instead; they didn’t need the car, since they would probably see one of the indoor movies in the multiplex part of the drive-in. After the movie, in the dark, they would coast home again along the peaceful streets, listening to the crickets. They did it every Thursday night in the summer.
Their dad was a distracted scholar type who knew Latin and wore three-piece suits and even the kind of watch you kept in a pocket on your vest and pulled out on a chain called a fob. But he did love one modern thing: movies. He would see anything that was playing, but he especially loved bad vintage movies with cheesy special effects, like The Mummy’s Hand and Swamp Thing.
She didn’t know what was at the theater tonight, but this was one time she agreed with her dad: any old movie would do. When she settled down in front of the vast screen, bright pictures flashing in front of her eyes in the dark, she could almost forget that her mother was missing and no one in the whole world seemed to have the faintest clue where she was.
She walked through the wild beach roses to the parking lot. The pink flowers had already disappeared from their low bushes along the trails, leaving the rose hips behind them. Her mother liked to gather the small fruits every fall and make tea with them, which she said helped to ward off colds. At the thought, Cara felt the usual pang.
This fall, maybe, she’d get sicker than usual. This fall there wouldn’t be the warm homemade tea, only the bare counter in the kitchen and empty oven mitts hanging on hooks, unused.
She looked up at the sky, to where the towering white clouds of the morning had flattened out and turned gray and low, and tried to push the thought of winter down and away. Unlocking her bike, she tossed her mesh bag into a saddlebag, got on and took off. With no one in the parking lot except her, she could fly; she could pedal as fast as she wanted across the pavement, through the cooling air of twilight.
She spread out her arms and felt the wind lift her hair.
As she coasted down her street toward her house the surface of the bayside water was turning black; fingers of pink and purple reached across the sky. The trees were shifting slowly from leafy green into dark silhouettes, making home seem even more welcoming.
Her family’s house was big and ramshackle on the outside but cozy within: the warm orange light from the windows reflected across the water and shone through the trees. It was built of weathered silver-gray wood and had started out as a simple box, long ago, but more and more additions had been built onto it over the years. Now it had a wraparound, covered porch overlooking the water on one side and the grassy lawn on the other, where she and Max played badminton and Jax jumped in between them, trying to bat the birdie out of the air with his grubby hand.
During the day, if you sat on the bayside terrace, you could watch boats chugging out to the oyster fields. The harbor was narrow here, and right across from her house she could see the pier with its outdoor restaurant, a fish place that always had long lines in the summer. At night the restaurant sparkled with light, and the sounds of people laughing carried over the water.
She lifted her bike up the sagging wooden steps and leaned it beside the front door, near the pile of her dad’s sea kayaks. Her dad wasn’t the sporty type—that was an understatement, actually—but he liked paddling, as he called it, and used to make the family do it, all together on the weekends.
Not recently.
As soon as she banged through the screen door into the front hall, she smelled cooking. She hung her bag on a peg, kicked off her shoes, and shoved them into a jumble of hightops and sneakers piled up against the wall. The house wasn’t so neat these days. She heard the thump of music above her head, from Max’s room. Max was really into old classics—mostly the Clash, at the moment. Since their mother had gone, he liked to shut himself up a lot and blast it really loud.
Jax was more interested in dead toads.
Rufus, their aging brown Lab, came up to her wagging his tail. She knelt down and petted his head.
“I’m home,” she called out to her dad, rising and making her way down the hall to the kitchen. Rufus followed, his nails clicking on the wood floor.
But when she reached the kitchen door, a woman she’d never seen before was standing at the stove.
“Who are you?” she blurted.
The woman turned. She had a broad front, a sun-weathered face, and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a red-and-white checked apron that said IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY COOKING … LOWER YOUR STANDARDS.
“You must be Cara!” she said and wiped her hands on her apron so she could stick one out. “Call me Lolly. Your father hired me to do some housekeeping. And dinners.”
Seeing Cara’s blank face, she added quickly: “Just, you know. Till your mother gets back and can pitch in again.”
“Oh,” said Cara in a small voice. “I see. Nice to meet you.”
“With him starting back to teaching, and all,” went on Lolly, “and you three kids at two different schools, things will be getting pretty hectic. Hey. You like mac and cheese?”
“Sure, sure,” said Cara, distracted. “So, um, where is my dad?”
“Should be in his study.”
Cara turned and left the kitchen, making her way over the thick boards of the dining room floor to her dad’s half-open door.
“Cara, dear,” he said when she pushed it open further, looking up over the glasses that were set low on his nose. He was reading in his armchair, legs crossed. “How was the beach?”
“You hired a housekeeper?” she asked.
“Apparently,” said her dad.
“But what if—you know—I mean she could come home any day, couldn’t she?”
“When your mother comes home, Lolly will go,” he said gently. “She needed to pick up a few hours. She has a two-year-old grandson she takes care of. I’m sure you’ll like her cooking.”
Cara nodded, the tense feeling in her stomach growing a little less.
Her dad was sad, she thought. Just like her.
“Very good, then,” he said, and went back to his reading. When he was reading, he was lost to the world.
Softly she walked over to the big dictionary he kept on a stand in the corner. Under the cover he’d tucked the note her mother left. She didn’t know if he’d even noticed she’d found it, but she liked to go into his study when he was out and just gaze at the note, smoothing her fingers over the scrawled words her mother had written.
Now she turned the heavy sheaf of pages over and exposed the fragment.
Have to go. Danger. Keep them safe — love
That was all.
Now, with her hand touching the worn paper, she felt tears filling her eyes. It had been two months, and there was still no sign of her mother coming back. No one was doing anything to help, either. The police hadn’t taken it seriously. Despite her mother’s note—the word danger echoed in Cara’s head when she was trying to fall asleep—the cops obviously thought her mother had left her dad. For some other guy.
They had looked at the pictures of her mother in the family albums—her mother was beautiful, with long dark hair, olive skin, and green eyes, and people often thought she was Cara’s sister—and then looked at her dad, in his glasses and vest, and decided it was a “routine domestic situation.” Cara had heard one of
them say that when they didn’t think any kids were listening.
She’d felt so bad for her dad. It was like the cops didn’t think he was good enough for her mother.
But he was. They all were. They were all good enough for each other.
It wasn’t like that.
“Sweetheart,” came her dad’s gruff voice behind her, as he put a hand on her shoulder, “don’t worry. Your mother is a strong person. She can take care of herself. And she will come back to us.”
She wiped away the tear that had leaked out, sniffed, and turned around.
“OK,” she said stiffly, and gave a small nod. If she hugged him she would lose it.
Standing there together, they heard the low roll of thunder.
“Well, I guess we’ll be driving to the movies after all,” said her dad.
She trudged up the creaky staircase to take a shower before dinner. Max’s door, at the end of the hall, had a glossy picture of Joe Strummer on it. Jax’s, on the other end of the hall beside her own door, featured your typical Einstein-with-messy-hair photo. It was taped right on top of an older poster of fossils.
She didn’t know if Jax was a genius Einstein-style, exactly, but he definitely had some kind of photographic memory—among other things. Last year his elementary school had wanted him to skip three years, which would have put him in Cara’s grade at Nauset. Luckily her parents had said no, because even if he was a brainiac he was still just a ten-year-old at heart. Since June 20th he had been teaching himself about Great Geniuses of the Past: Mozart, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Kurt Gödel, and sometimes child prodigies like Bobby Fischer.
It hadn’t escaped Cara’s notice that a lot of the Great Geniuses of the Past hadn’t ended up too happy.
She knocked sharply on Einstein’s face.
“Enter please,” said Jax, using his most annoying robot voice.
She pushed the door open. The room smelled like a moldy sock.
“Ew,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
Jax was sitting on the floor, books spread open around him, fooling with a database on his laptop.
“Did you meet the housekeeper?” she asked.
Jax nodded, intent on his database.
“So? What did you think?”
She always asked what Jax thought of new people. Jax had a way of knowing things he shouldn’t know, and if he didn’t trust someone, she’d learned from experience to steer clear of them herself. One guy who mowed their lawn last year had gotten Jax’s thumbs-down even though he seemed really friendly; then it turned out he was some kind of perv. A lady at the post office told them: outside the Stop & Shop, men in suits came and took him away.
Now Jax gave her a thumbs-up. Lolly must be OK.
Cara leaned in close to see what he was typing about.
“Watch out. Right foot,” he said, never looking away from the screen, and kept typing rapidly on the keyboard.
She glanced down and narrowly missed stepping on a big snail that had left a slimy trail on his floor.
“Jax!” she said, irritated. “You’re not supposed to do that!”
“There is a prejudice in this house against gastropod mollusks,” said Jax sternly.
He used even bigger words than her dad, the PhD. It was one reason most kids his age made fun of him and the only real friend he had was a bigger geek than he was. She was glad he was past his “citations phase,” at least. That was what her parents had called it. The citations phase was when he used to give footnotes for practically everything he said, like “Scientific American, September 1997, Volume 277 #3, pages 70-75.”
It had been pretty tough to talk to him during the citations. Her parents had made him get checked for Asperger syndrome, but it turned out he didn’t have it.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“And also against chelicerate arthropods and decapod crustaceans.”
“Talk normally,” said Cara, impatient.
When her dad wanted Jax to speak so that average people like her or Max could understand him, he always said Jackson, please use the King’s English.
“Horseshoe and hermit crabs. As you may know, neither is a true crab per se.”
She sighed.
“I could have squished it.”
“But you didn’t.”
She thought about telling him about the otter. She’d meant to when she came in. But now, somehow, she felt like letting it slide.
Because that was the other thing about Jax, the other thing that made him different from everyone else she knew. If he wanted to, Jax could suss out what she was thinking without asking her.
Jax, basically, had some form of ESP.
He didn’t like it when she called it that. He said there was nothing extrasensory about it, that it wasn’t paranormal but as scientific as anything else—just not yet understood.
Whatever it was, it made her hemmed in and claustrophobic: when Jax felt like reading her, her brain had no privacy. She’d seen him do it with Max occasionally, and even their dad—know what they thought before they said it, anyway—but the other guys didn’t seem to notice. Or if they did, at least, they didn’t say anything.
She’d told him not to do it with her, that it wasn’t his business what she was thinking unless she wanted to tell him. But sometimes she suspected he was doing it anyway. And one time, recently, he’d spied on her for sure—about a guy she liked, though only for about three seconds—and it was so embarrassing it had made her feel sick to her stomach.
He called it pinging. He pinged people.
Anyway, if he really wanted to know about the otter, she figured, he probably already would.
“I’m taking a shower,” she said, “so don’t flush the toilet,” and she went out and closed his door behind her.
Their house had eccentric plumbing; sometimes the shower water turned scalding hot if someone turned on the cold water in another room.
It was only while she was standing under the shower nozzle, feeling the warm water fall on her face, that it occurred to her: Jax and the otter—the otter who had spoken into her mind—might have more than a little bit in common.
“Pleash pash the rollsh,” said Max over dinner, his mouth so full of corn on the cob that Cara could barely understand him.
They were all sitting in the dining room, at the same oval wooden table they’d always sat at for dinner, with the same striped cotton napkins and polished wooden napkin rings. Above them was a dusty chandelier, and alongside the wall was a wooden sideboard beneath a large painting of the ocean with soaring white birds.
They’d taken one of the chairs away from the table a few weeks ago so they didn’t have to look at it, standing there empty, while they ate.
Max—still talking with his mouth full about something she couldn’t quite make out—was pretty much the opposite of Jax: girls loved him, and, being good at running and basketball, he was popular with boys too. He was smart enough, but he put his energy into other things, so he barely squeaked by at school. This summer he’d been using his money from the restaurant job to buy boards and board stuff, and hanging out a lot at the skatepark. And it was even harder than usual to get his attention. When he wasn’t at the restaurant, the park, or in his bedroom with the stereo volume turned way up, he was plugged into his iPod.
She had to admit, Lolly was a way better cook than their dad, whose range was limited to soup from a can and frozen pizzas that he took out of the oven when they were still cold in the middle. Tonight they were having baked macaroni, roasted corn on the cob, fresh rolls, salad, and for dessert a homemade strawberry rhubarb pie cooling on the sideboard.
“So,” said their dad, holding a newspaper open, “we may have to rush when we’re finished eating. Playing at the right time: a cartoon, an historical epic that involves cutlasses and ships, and a thriller that’s probably too scary for Jax.”
“I want to see the thriller that’s probably too scary for Jax,” said Jax.
“R rating,” said their dad.
“The ships,” agreed Cara.
“The cutlasses used in films,” intoned Jax, “are often historically inaccurate, nineteenth-century weapons.”
“That is correct, Jackson,” said their dad.
Just then rain started beating down on the roof. Cara loved that pattering sound.
“Everyone’s bedroom windows closed?” asked their dad.
But the next moment Jax was staring into the front hall. Cara followed his gaze and saw only the closed screen door and the dimness of the unlit porch beyond.
“Jax?” asked Max.
Jax didn’t break his stare. Rufus, lying on the floor beside him with his chin on his paws, stood up and looked in the same direction, his tail held low.
“Jax,” urged Cara. “What is it?”
Slowly, still not blinking or looking at them, Jax raised one hand and pointed at the front door.
Their dad scraped his own chair back and walked to the door; Cara watched as he pushed it open.
“Hello?” he called, into the dark. “Anyone there?”
They waited silently. Cara’s stomach flipped. What if—what if … could it be her?
Jax’s finger still hovered in the air, pointing.
Their dad flicked on the outside light. The rain picked up.
“No one,” he said breezily, closing the outside door behind him. He sat down at his place again.
“What was that, Jax?” asked Cara. “Huh? Did you see something?”
Jax finally dropped his finger. After a moment he shrugged and shook his head, smiling at Lolly, who’d come in to cut the pie.
“He was playing with us,” said Max under his breath. “He’s just looking for attention.”
That made Cara feel bad for Jax. He was never nasty on purpose.
Still, she felt a hole in the pit of her stomach. He’d gotten her hopes up, even if he didn’t mean to.