And then it’s there. Another image. A different one. Like double vision for my heart:
Slick rocks bite into my palms. I crawl along a pile of them. Sea spray rockets into the air in great plumes. Someone’s behind me, calling my name. “Lake! Lake!” And when I look back it’s my brother standing on two legs. But I don’t listen. I love the roar of the ocean like I love the sound of my own heartbeat and I can hear it best out here on the jetty. Best when I stand and tilt my head back, close my eyes, and let the ocean boom around me.
Slowly, the terror quells. I lift my face. Ringo won’t let go of me. Behind him, the spot in the window is empty. Logan’s gone.
I wake up sore and hours before dawn. The scabs on my wrist are stiff beneath the bandages. Mom didn’t come in to check on me after the shiva. I wonder if she’s mad that I yelled at her. Dad came to sit on the edge of my bed last night. He stroked my hair while I pretended to be asleep and cried into my pillow. He might have known I was bluffing.
The black outside is still thick. I was dreaming about Will coming back to me. He would give Penny a eulogy at her real funeral, one that would be funny and bittersweet and would make people laugh and cry in exactly the right places. He would shower me with flowers and thoughtful cards. Maybe we’d get married after college and have Maddie over for sleepovers with her friends.
Even at night, I feel the minutes ticking by—tick, tick, tick—leading up to my eighteenth birthday. I pull my bare feet underneath me and stand up. Sleep is out of the question.
Propped beside my mirror, I spot the ignored envelope.
“‘Clue Number Two,’” I read softly to myself, pinching the edges between my thumb and forefinger. I’ve been saving it, holding onto the untouched seal, scared to open it. I press it to my chest. I promised Matt I wouldn’t open it without him. But it’s late.
Quietly, I push open the door to my bedroom and pad down the hallway. I’ve always thought that the ocean sounds louder at night. Here, it thunders through the walls when I pass by the great room. Through one of the windows I can just make out the ghostly form of the jetty marker, cast in gray by the nighttime that is punctured by a spray of stars.
I tread through the house, the floor cool against my toes. At Matt’s door I raise my fist to knock. He’ll be sleeping at this hour. I hesitate, then slowly turn the knob and tiptoe inside.
“Who’s there?” The question is instantaneous.
I freeze. For a moment, I consider creeping back out the way I came without saying a word. It’s not like he could follow me.
“It’s me.” My voice rasps. “Lake. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” I slink farther into the room until I’m standing at the foot of his bed.
His eyes gleam in the darkness, staring straight up at the ceiling. “You didn’t.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Matt.”
“Aren’t you observant.”
“I just mean—”
“You just mean what am I doing staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night when I’m supposed to be sleeping? Well, Lake, this might surprise you, but my days aren’t exactly filled with the sort of stimulation that tuckers me out and sends me crawling to bed exhausted but satisfied from a hard day’s work. But after Mom and Dad are sick of me, they put me to bed. Once I wake up, here I am till morning. And, since you asked, it doesn’t help that now the sole purpose of my legs and back is to torture me with pain that makes me want to peel the skin off my face, only I can’t even take up skin peeling as a pastime because—oh yeah—my hands don’t work.”
I curl the envelope in my fist selfishly, wishing I hadn’t come. “So you just lie here in the dark like this?” Matt grunts. “For how long?”
“It depends on when I wake up. I’d guess four or five hours.”
I feel sick to my stomach. “Matt, we have to tell Mom and Dad.”
“Christ, Lake.” Matt sighs. “It’s—it’s not a big deal. It’s not every night. I don’t need you or anyone else feeling sorry for me, okay? I was just…venting. Now tell me, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
“I couldn’t sleep. So I was just thinking and, well, I saw the envelope and thought we might open it together.”
“Hmmph, you sure it’s not already opened?”
“I swear. It’s not.” I tap the crisp envelope on my palm. “Still sealed.” He’s quiet. I take that as a good sign, a sign that he’s interested. “May I turn on the light?” Matt makes another noncommittal noise that sounds enough like a yes to me, so I flip on the lamp.
He looks frail stretched out in the center of his bed like that. I watch the mound of his torso crest and fall. His knees form two shallow hills under the sheet. I nervously crawl onto the foot of the bed and wait for him to yell at me to get off. To my surprise, he doesn’t.
“Well?” he says, peering down his nose at me. “Are you going to read it or not?”
“Right.” I run my finger through the seal. The paper tears. I pull out the card and swallow hard before I begin. “‘Clue Two,’” I read. “‘Atlantis was the theme of the night, dress, tux, roses, the mood just right, Go to our place and ask for the key. There you’ll find the next clue from me.’”
“Can this guy get any lamer?” Matt scoffs.
I stare at the words, read them over again.
“I mean,” he continues, “what’s wrong with a card and one of those little heart necklaces—you know the silver ones?—girls your age seem to like so much? Something less…showboat-y.”
I wince at the implication that Matt doesn’t know he has made, that all this really is just for show. Instead, I look up. “I know this one. I actually know this one!”
I guess Matt finds this sufficiently interesting to stop his silver-necklace vent dead in its tracks. “Where is it?”
My shoulders droop. I play with the fabric on the bed. “I don’t want to tell you.”
“That was the deal. I give you the first clue. You include me. That was it, Lake. Those were the terms.”
He doesn’t have to include the subtext. That I don’t keep up my end of bargains. That I’m a cheat. A fraud. Disloyal. A girl who breaks promises. Even the important ones. Especially the important ones. But this is different. I’m just too embarrassed to tell him how.
Yet.
“I’ll bring you,” I say. “But you have to promise not to laugh, ridicule, mock, or pretend to throw up. Deal?” He resumes looking at the ceiling, stonewalling me. “Those are the terms.”
“Fine,” he huffs as though the inability to mock is a huge compromise. “Deal.”
“Great. Let’s load up.”
“Now?”
“I’m sorry. Did you have something better to do?”
***
Matt weighs less than I do.
I’m surprised at how light he is in my arms as I lift him and set him in his wheelchair. The landing isn’t graceful. I don’t have Mom’s help this time and I’m sure that I’ve hurt him somehow even though he doesn’t say so.
The van part’s easier this time at least, and I make sure not to park in any gravel.
The clock on the dash now reads 4:00. I cut the headlights and we’re left in the fluorescent glow of the Seaside Inn. “This is it,” I say. I’ve been growing more and more anxious the closer we got. This is not a place I had ever hoped to visit with my brother, one of the exotic dots on the maps that the two of us used to talk about going to before the accident—the Forest of Knives, Longsheng Rice Terrace, the Great Blue Hole of Belize—but here we were.
“It’s a motel,” he says from the back.
“It’s a nice motel.” I peer out the windshield at the squat two-story inn painted a faded blue. Rows of doors stare out at us. At one end stands a small office with a vacancy sign in the window and big script letters fixed to the top letting us know that this is the Seaside Inn. Even though it’s actually a couple of miles from the sea.
“Why did Will send you to a motel? Does he want you to get bed b
ugs?” Matt wrinkles his nose.
“Because,” I say, unbuckling. “It’s significant to our relationship.” I go around the side of the van and press a button, and the ramp drops down.
“I thought we were going to a ballroom or something. Like for a school dance. ‘Atlantis was the theme of the night,’” he recites. “Sounds sufficiently cheesy for high school.”
“It was. A school dance, I mean.” I roll Matt backward until his wheels are flat on the asphalt. “Sufficiently cheesy too,” I admit.
Even though I know he can do some maneuvering himself, when I push Matt toward the office, he doesn’t complain about the help.
Go to our place and ask for the key. There you’ll find the next clue from me.
A cowbell clangs overhead when we enter. A man with a walrus face and a sweaty yellow button-down looks up from a crossword puzzle. His hefty jowls give way to an eager grin. “Welcome, travelers. What can I do you for? We’re offering garden-view queen-size beds for thirty percent off this week. And”—he hides his mouth behind his hand conspiratorially—“if you drive a hard bargain I could probably throw in some free Wi-Fi.”
“Thanks.” I try to look grateful. “But actually, we’re not here for a room. We’re here for a clue.”
The man’s blond eyebrows pinch inward. “A clue?”
I’ve been hoping he’d know right away what I was talking about. It feels silly to explain. “Yeah. See, my boyfriend, he came up with this scavenger hunt for my birthday. I’m on the second clue and I’m positive he meant for me to come here. He told me to ask for a key and that would lead me to the third clue.”
“Well, I’ll be.” He lays the pen down over his crossword puzzle. “A real-life treasure hunt.”
“Yeah,” says Matt, pouring on his tricky sick-kid charm. “It’s a real humdinger, isn’t it?”
I slap the back of Matt’s head and smile back at the man, who points to Matt and walrus-grins back. “Sure is, kid, sure is!”
When he stands up, his stool screeches across the floor. “Loretta’s the day manager. She might have left a note or something. Let me check in the back.” The man trots his girth to the back, where I hear rummaging around.
“What?” Matt answers my glare. “I’m just saying. I have not seen a doozy such as this before. Nosireebob.”
I snort. Just a little.
“What room did you say?” The night manager calls.
“I—I didn’t.” Ask for the key. Right. Will expected me to remember the exact room number, because of course he would remember it. I think back to that night. We’d been dating seven months. I wore a strapless pink dress. My mom had taken me to the mall a week before. She never took me shopping. Between Matt, my private school tuition, and my parents’ dwindling bank accounts, there was really no room for frivolous purchases. But this dress she’d bought me wasn’t on sale. It hugged my hips and had what felt like a thousand rhinestones on the bodice that shimmered when I walked. I adored it like I hadn’t adored anything that I’d ever owned. I felt beautiful and that feeling was reflected in the way Will looked at me.
I pictured the night. We’d dropped Penny off at her house first even though mine was closest. We’d grown accustomed to this routine ever since Will and I had started dating. She didn’t say anything when we both gave her hugs and made sure she got inside, but I think she knew what was about to happen and was too nice to comment. That was Penny for you.
I close my eyes, remembering how my palms were sweating when we pulled into the parking lot. My heart beat quicker than a hummingbird’s as I waited for Will to come back with a key. And I kept thinking how I loved that dress.
“I’m not sure of the room number,” I say. “But it’s on the first floor, the third door from the right when you’re facing the building.”
More shuffling. A few G-rated substitutes for curse words. “Nope, I don’t see anything.” He lumbers back to the counter. “Ah, now, don’t look disappointed like that. I can’t stand to see it from you both.”
I look down at Matt. He has his lower lip jutted out in a deep frown. “What are you, Tiny Tim?” I mutter through clenched teeth.
“Is the room, that one that I described,” I say. “Is it occupied?”
He arches and peers into the back room, squinting his eyes. “No, no, doesn’t look like it is.” Now it’s my turn to look pitiful. Not that I feel guilty. If he knew the whole story, he’d feel plenty bad for me.
He scratches his head. “I suppose it can’t hurt for you to take a quick look-see,” he says.
He goes back to retrieve the key, then dangles the flimsy credit card–size thing in front of me. “Say, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?” he asks. “This isn’t the boyfriend, is it?” First I see him glance at my bulky cast and bandages. Then he looks down at Matt. I have a grudging respect for the lack of judgment he shows about the fact that my beau might be in a wheelchair.
“No!” Matt and I both shout at once.
The man holds up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. None of my business. We just don’t usually get much excitement this time of night and now here we are with a real live treasure hunt.”
“Sure, yeah, well,” I say, sliding the key from its spot on the counter. “You know what they say—‘the early bird gets the worm.’” My patience for this sort of banter is waning, so with a few more pleasantries, we take our leave of the portly night manager of the Not-So-Seaside Inn.
“You know,” Matt says, as I wheel him down the covered first-floor walkway. Cheap aluminum blinds are drawn over each window. The only noise is the freeway and the whir of a vending machine fan. “My mind is starting to paint an unpleasant picture as to why we’re here.”
“Then you might want to tell your mind to put down the brush.”
We arrive at the third door from the right. The same nerves that I felt that night all rush in on me at once. It takes me two tries to get the key into the lock. It clicks open.
A blast of musty air greets us. I push Matt’s wheelchair over the threshold and onto the thin carpet. The room smells like a damp towel. “This is it.”
I don’t know what I expect to feel when I walk into the room. Worse, I don’t know what I do feel. Basically a bunch of emotions muddled at once, the way a thousand colors would mix together and form only an ugly, muddy brown.
“You did it in a motel room,” Matt says thoughtfully. “How original.”
I am praying that Will had already hidden the clue inside the room for me to find. Will Bryan was an orchestrator, never a procrastinator. And this was his magnum opus.
I leave Matt to rest where he is and cross a few feet over to sink onto the striped duvet of the room’s queen-size bed. “We’re in high school. It’s all we could afford.” Which is true, but it also hides some of the truth too.
I remember walking in the night of the dance, how all the rose petals leading to the bed couldn’t mask the damp-towel smell. But Will was Will and he was in host mode. He was also in grand romantic gesture mode and, to him, this was the grandest of them all.
He’d chilled champagne that his cousin Jeremy had bought for him. He’d brought bubble bath for me to use in the shallow shower-bath combo inside the tiny bathroom with the scratchy towels. I loved him for all these things and more. My first time wouldn’t be like other girls’ first times. It wouldn’t be in the back of a car or in some dude’s basement while I listened to make sure his parents weren’t home. Mine would be different. Special. It would be with Will, who, being Will, would make sure it was everything.
But that night, when I let him unzip the back of my hot-pink dress, I felt like an actress playing a part. The roses, the champagne, the bubbles—I recall a single moment when I was curled next to him beneath the sheets feeling like, sure it was so romantic, so thoughtful, but it was also so much. We were kids, weren’t we?
Matt scans the room. “I guess it’s not the worst place.” His voice has gone husky and he clears his throat.
; “Yeah, well, it’s not the back of a car at least,” I say, noting the puke color of the quilted duvet.
He emits a soft snort. “I’d take the back of a car.” We both fall silent. I watch my brother carefully, studying him as he stares down at his lap and presses his lips together. “Or, you know, anywhere.” His nose twitches. “You know I never…” Matt says without looking up. Pink patches crop up on his sharp cheekbones.
Startled by the change in conversation, I feel my own cheeks flush. “Oh,” I say, trying hard not to sound totally grossed out. Instead, I pick my feet from the floor to sit cross-legged. “No, I didn’t—I mean, I wasn’t sure.”
He shakes his head, slowly, still staring at his lap, where his too-skinny legs dangle off the chair. “It’s embarrassing.”
My eyebrows pinch together. I pick the threads on the duvet. “It’s not embarrassing.”
“I’m a twenty-three-year-old virgin. It’s pathetic.” He wets his lips before speaking. “I just thought I had plenty of time, you know?” he mumbles.
“Yeah,” I say with an unexpected strain in my voice. “You should have. Had plenty of time, I mean. I’m…sorry.”
His eyes snap to mine. He studies me in his typically intense Matt-like fashion, then nods slowly. “Yeah, okay, um, thanks.”
I chip at the two-week-old polish on my toenails, sprinkling the bed with aqua flecks.
“Mom gave me a pack of condoms for my seventeenth birthday,” he says. “Can you believe that? Told me Dad was going to come by and give me ‘The Talk,’ but he never did. They’re probably still in my nightstand. I wanted to get a girlfriend, though, someone I was actually comfortable with and knew wouldn’t, like, laugh at me when I took my—well, when, you know.” His mouth twists to the side. “Like you and Will, I guess.”
I swallow. “Yeah, like me and Will,” I say sadly.
Matt glances at me again and then quickly off to the side. Away. “It’s fine. It’s…it’s whatever. It’s…” He rolls his eyes and sighs. “It’s just that, I guess I’ve always wanted to know, like, how…” he begins. “I mean what…” He huffs. His face has turned blood red.
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