“Yes,” I say, scooping out the sugar into the bowl, so Pilar can add the other ingredients and mix the batter together.
“Okay. Taste this,” she says, holding out a bit of batter on the wooden mixing spoon. “Sweet, right?”
It has that sort of tame sweetness that every dessert has at Pilar’s house, the kind that makes you think, Maybe I don’t actually need to consume eight pounds of sugar every day. At least, that’s what you think till you go home and eat a bowl of pudding and remember how sugar is the best substance on earth.
“It needs chocolate chips and a slab of ice cream, but other than that, it’s perfect.”
We spoon the cookies onto the cookie sheet, and Pilar puts them into the oven. I follow her into the living room, and we assume our favorite positions on the couch—feet hanging over the back, heads hovering above the floor. It’s getting dusky outside, but we don’t turn on the living-room light. We like the half dark, Pilar and I.
“Professor,” Pilar says.
“Professor,” I answer.
“Two things,” she says.
“Okay. Number one?”
“Number one. What do you think is going on with Thea and Frank?”
“I don’t know, but he really pissed me off today in homeroom.”
Pilar laughs. “I could tell.”
“I just hate the whole thing. The way Frank talks to her, the way Thea so obviously hates it but totally backs down instead of standing up for herself, the way Cray steps in like some hero to get Frank to stop manhandling his sister. I’m sorry, but the whole thing just creeps me out.”
“I’m glad Cray said something,” Pilar says, after a moment. “Anything to stop the kissing sounds. And she is his sister. Frank’s lucky Cray didn’t bust his stupid blockhead open.”
“Cray would never do that. Frank is, like, his leader.”
“You think?” Pilar says. “I mean, I know it seems like that, and Frank is totally Ben’s leader, but I feel like Cray maybe just plays along. Like maybe when the three of them are alone, Cray’s the one who talks all the time and tells them what to do.”
“What do you think they’re up to?”
“You mean with the Willows sign? They’ve always done crap like that.”
“Yeah, but it seems different now, right? Like, they’re always bragging about it, right, but you can tell they keep some stuff secret. Because you know it was them that sugared the gas tank on that tractor at the Willows, right?”
“It totally was them. Idiots.”
“But they didn’t tell us. Usually they can’t shut up about that stuff, but that time they said nothing.”
“So?”
“So, what if they’re going to lead Thea into a life of crime? MayBe will have to bake a nail file into an organic cake so Thea can bust herself out of jail.”
“We’ll all have to sit in a car with the lights off outside the jail all night—”
“Will we have snacks?”
“What?”
“While we’re waiting? Can we have snacks? You could bring your oatmeal cookies!”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll bring chips, and root beer.”
“And Sour Patch Kids.”
“Correct. So we’ll be hunkered down—”
“Hunkered?”
“Yes, hunkered down in the car outside the jail—”
“In the total pitch dark—”
“And then all of a sudden—”
“The search lights will go on, and we’ll see scrawny little Thea—”
“Running!” I do an upside-down imitation of a frantic run. “Across the giant lawn in front of the prison!”
“She’ll yell, ‘Go! Go! Go!’” Pilar laughs. “And we’ll start driving, and then she’ll—”
“Cut through the fence with MayBe’s nail file—”
“And run alongside the car and—”
“MayBe will hang out the car window and pull Thea in.”
“It’ll be awesome,” Pilar says, “because then we’ll totally be outlaws, and we’ll have to drive cross-country and be tough girls that solve crimes against women every town we go to.”
“I was just thinking about that!” I screech. “We’ll be, like, the hottest, brassiest, sassiest girl gang EVER.”
“Until we get caught.”
“Well, you’re the one who leaves a trail of green Sour Patch Kids.”
“I hate the green ones,” she says matter-of-factly. “They taste too green.”
“So we’ll be hightailing it across some desert plain, and there’ll be, like, fifty cop cars right on our tail.”
“And we won’t—,” Pilar says, raising her eyebrows at me.
“We wont—,” I agree. And then we say together: “Drive off a cliff.”
“Because we’re not going to off ourselves,” Pilar says.
“Just because the world isn’t ready for our unstoppable female superpowers.”
“Thelma & Louise is, like, the best movie ever.” Pilar sighs. “Except for the shit box of an ending.”
“And how!” I say in agreement.
We stay upside down, in happy silence for a long while. The sun has started to dip, and in the purpling light I study the thick wooden beams that run crosswise up the slope of the ceiling. If I stare at this certain spot, right between two beams, where nothing else but the white ceiling and brown beams are in my line of vision, it totally feels like I’m floating.
“Whee,” I say.
“Floating?”
“Yep.”
“Professor?” Pilar asks.
“Yes, Professor?”
“Number two.”
“Okay, number two.”
“Did you hear about that little girl?” Pilar asks me in a low voice. “The one from the flatlands who got killed?”
I can feel her looking at me, but I don’t turn my head. “I think I heard something about it on the news this morning. That was all the way in the desert, though, right?”
“It’s sort of freaking me out,” she whispers. “I mean, if anything like that ever happened to Grace …”
“Pilar, that was hours away from here,” I say quickly. “They’ll probably catch the guy who did it by the weekend.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she says darkly. “That’s what they said about the Drifter. They kept saying it was just a matter of time before they caught him, but they never did. I heard it on the news, you know. They think he’s the one who got that little girl in the desert.”
“Wait. Who?” My voice is shaking. What is she talking about?
“The Drifter,” Pilar says. “They think he’s come back and that he’s the one who killed that little girl in the desert.”
“Where did you hear that?” I ask. I’m finding it hard to keep my body from going limp, from slipping sideways off the couch into a pile on the floor. Why didn’t Deputy Pesquera tell me? Why didn’t I know? I think back to my dream, the one I had on the way home from Salvation. The person whose footsteps I could hear behind me. It couldn’t be. I would have felt it if it were him. Wouldn’t I?
“Mom and Dad heard it at the university. Some of their students commute over from Salvation, where it happened.”
“It’s not the Drifter,” I say, and even though I mean it to sound reassuring, it just sounds dismissive.
“But what if it is?” Pilar asks, the tightness in her voice a sure sign that she’s about to cry. “What if he’s back? I swear to God, Dylan, if he ever came near my Gracie, I’d tear his throat out with my teeth.”
“It’s not him!” I finally let my body collapse onto the floor. I move to my knees, and hold on to the edge of the coffee table, my eyes closed, waiting for my head to stop spinning.
Pilar sits up too. “They told us they’d catch him, and then they told us he’d never come back. They lied to us, Dylan. Everyone on this mountain is walking around with their eyes closed.”
I open my eyes, and see that she’s watching me.
“I’m just …,” I say. “I don’t want it to be him.”
Outside the wall of windows the sun has set, and the darkness has come.
“I should get Grace up or she’ll never sleep tonight,” Pilar says, standing. “Take the cookies out in five minutes, okay?”
I wait till she’s upstairs before I go into the downstairs bathroom. I lock the door, and sit on the edge of the tub.
The deputy picks up on the fifth ring. “Pesquera.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“Dylan?”
I pick a rubber butterfly bath toy up off the floor and squeeze it. It squeaks. I toss it into the tub. “Last night. Why didn’t you tell me you thought it was him?”
I can hear the creak of her office chair as she stands, and the soft click as she closes her office door.
She clears her throat before she speaks. “We don’t know anything for sure.”
I slide down until I’m sitting on the bath mat and resting my head on my knees. “But you think it might have been him?”
Deputy Pesquera sighs. “We’re not sure of anything right now, Dylan.”
“But you think it might be …”
“You know how this works, Dylan. I can’t tell you anything.”
“Oh, but I have to tell you everything?” I ask sharply.
“Did you tell me everything?” she asks.
I stand up. “What is that supposed to mean? Of course I told you everything! I always tell you everything!”
“You call me,” she says, “if you remember anything else.”
“What did I say in the truck last night, in my sleep?”
She clears her throat again. “You said, ‘It’s you.’”
I listen to the dial tone for a long time before hanging up.
I hear Pilar calling from upstairs, “Are they out?”
“Yes!” I yell, opening the bathroom door and dashing to the kitchen.
When Pilar comes downstairs, I’m blowing frantically on the cookies before the deep brown on their edges turns black. Pilar hands me a still-sleepy Grace, and starts using the spatula to put the cookies onto a cooling rack.
“I was going to do that,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I just … I’ll do it.”
“Are you all right?” I ask. She doesn’t look all right.
“I just got really tired all of a sudden. I don’t like the dark,” she says, looking out the window into the early night. “It makes me think about things. Don’t you ever think about things, Dylan? Don’t you ever think about Clarence?”
Instead of answering I get soy milk out of the fridge and pour some into a sippy cup for Grace. Pilar hands me a cookie. I sit down with Grace on my lap, her head resting against my shoulder, her breath evening back into sleep.
“Hey, Gracie,” I whisper, breaking the cookie in half and blowing on it till it cools. “Wake up and eat your cookies. They have a magical ingredient called sugar”
Grace yawns, stretches out her legs, looks at me, and says, “Lala.”
“I think about Clarence sometimes,” I say to Pilar.
“Me too.”
“It’s good, though, to think about him.”
Pilar smiles. “So we can keep him in our hearts?”
That’s what Fran, who was the elementary school secretary when we were in kindergarten, said to us on our first day back to school after Clarence was buried. We all liked her because she would come out and play games with us during recess, and because if she wore her magic snowflake earrings during winter, that meant it was going to snow that day. She changed schools, right along with Pilar’s and my class. She was the school secretary for the middle school and is now for the high school. I don’t think she could let us go.
“Can we please talk about something else?”
For a second Pilar looks completely deflated, but then she smiles again and says, “Sure. What’ll we do if the nail-file-in-a-cake doesn’t work?”
“Hmmm. Smuggle Thea out of prison in a basket of dirty laundry, like in Annie?”
When Pilar’s parents get home from the conference, the kitchen’s been cleaned, dinner is started, and we have Grace painting at the kitchen table.
Pilar’s mom insists on paying me, like she always does.
“Really, it’s fine,” I say. “I’m happy to help out.”
“Don’t be silly,” her mom says, pushing a ten-dollar bill into my palm with the tips of her blood-red nails. “Take it!”
She’s not a lady I can argue with. I pocket the money, and pretend to be intensely interested in putting on my book bag as Pilar’s mom takes out another ten and tries to hand it to Pilar. “Here you go, for babysitting.”
“Mom. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why? You worked as hard as Dylan. You deserve this.”
“I don’t need to get paid for being part of this family.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
Pilar’s dad is suddenly just as interested in my book bag. He helps me put it on, and then we make small talk over its uninteresting zipper.
“Family meeting,” Pilar growls, and that’s my cue. Just in time, Mom’s truck pulls up to the driveway.
“Bye, guys. See you tomorrow, Pilar.”
Pilar’s family is big on family meetings. Since she was for most of her life an only child, she and her parents made a lot of decisions by committee. There’s never been a lot of “Because I said so,” from her parents. When Grace came along, they all started raising her the same way, by committee, and I know it drives Pilar crazy when her mom tries to treat Pilar like a child, instead of someone with full voting rights, as Pilar puts it.
“God, this rain,” Mom says, wiping away condensation from the inside of the windshield with her glove. “It makes it feel colder than when it actually snows.”
“Mom?”
“The damp, I guess, chills you right to the bone,” she says, taking off her gloves and pressing her hand up close to the heater vent. “I can’t wait for first snow.”
“Mom?”
“Hm?”
“When the deputy briefed you on what happened, on that girl in Salvation, what did she say?”
Mom puts the truck into reverse and pulls out onto the street. We’re back on Lakeshore Drive before she answers me.
“Let’s see,” she says. “She told me basically the same thing you told me. That you had a vision of the little girl being trapped inside a barrel. A blue barrel, out behind their little downtown area. She told me you two almost got in a wreck, which I didn’t like hearing about.”
“Did she say anything else? About who did it?”
“Nope. Why do you ask?”
“They just haven’t caught him yet,” I say. “And I wish they would.”
“Oh, they’ll catch whoever did it, baby. They always do.”
“They didn’t catch the Drifter,” I answer.
“You kids still call him that?” she asks.
I shrug. “What else should we call him?”
“Long gone,” Mom says. “You should call him Long Gone and Never Coming Back.”
“Are you talking about the Drifter or Dad?”
She doesn’t look at me, just makes a shocked sound in her throat that sounds like “Oh.”
“Because Dad’s not coming back, is he?”
Mom fiddles with the heating vent. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” I say. “You know he’s not coming back. We don’t even know where he lives.”
“He knows where we live,” she says sharply.
Sometimes I forget that my mom must still love him. Sometimes I even forget that I’m the reason he left.
The night my dad didn’t come home after work was three days after my ninth birthday, and three days after I had a vision of the very last moments of a little kid named Wesley’s life. I didn’t know it then, but that ended up being the first vision that my dad ever knew about. Mom and I ate meat loaf at the table alone together, wi
th the phone sitting next to her plate. I said, “Mommy, you know he really likes your meat loaf, right?” I said it ten different ways, so scared that her feelings were hurt and thinking of what I’d say to my dad when he got home. She kept saying, “Oh, I know.” Like they were playing a joke on me together. I let myself think he was out getting a late birthday present for me. A pony that I could keep at Ben’s, most likely.
After dinner Mom let me watch a movie while she made another round of calls to his cell phone, his office, his boss, and his friends, anywhere she could think of. By eight o’clock I could tell she was really worried. We kept the phone on the counter in the bathroom while I took my bath. She let me sleep in her room that night.
Sheriff Dean was on our couch, across from Mom in her armchair, when I came downstairs in the morning. For a second, from behind, I thought he was Dad. Sheriff Dean is bald, and the first thing I thought was that Dad had gotten cancer and lost his hair overnight. I scrambled over the back of the couch onto Sheriff Dean’s lap, yelling, “Dad!”
Sheriff Dean jumped out from under me, holding me by my shoulders and pushing me away, hard. I don’t know what made me cry more—that he wasn’t my dad or that he’d handled me so roughly. It was the first time I’d ever felt how strong grown-ups were, compared to little kids, and it’d scared me half to death. Sheriff Dean didn’t handle it too well either. His hand was over his heart now, his other hand on the butt of his gun, like it might fly out of its holster. “Dylan! You don’t jump on someone who has a gun!” His booming voice made me cry even harder. Mom picked me up off the couch and held me. I clung tight to her neck, tighter still when Sheriff Dean leaned forward to say softly, “I’m sorry I shouted, Dylan. I just got scared you’d get hurt.”
I always liked Sheriff Dean and hated the way flatlanders treated him like a walk-around character at an amusement park. His pudgy belly, good manners, and the fact that everyone called him “Sheriff Dean” made the weekenders get all cackle-laugh and say, “Bryce, get the camera and take my picture with the long arm of the law.” They’d think he was really charming, until one of their minimansions got vandalized. Then they’d insult him while he took the police report, and usually call the down-the-hill police to see if they would take care of it. That’s why they wanted all their minimansions to be behind a gate, so they could hire their own security detail.
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