Sight

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  Ten

  On the rainy walk to the bus stop a few days later, Cate tells me she’s taking us all on a field trip after class. The sky is low and dense with white, but the flakes still refuse to fall.

  “Frank can drive us,” she says. “I already asked him.”

  When we meet at Frank’s truck after school, Ben, MayBe, Thea, and Cray are there, but not Pilar. All day I’ve been trying to track Pilar down, but during homeroom she was in the nurse’s office with a headache, and then at lunch she was finishing a lab for bio.

  “Where’s Pilar?” I ask. It’s so weird, to be asking the whereabouts of someone who’s usually standing right next to me.

  “She didn’t want to come!” Cate says, like she’s amazed. I try to remember if I talked to Pilar about coming with us. Have I even talked to her at all today?

  When we pull out of the parking lot, we see Pilar waiting for her bus. Frank honks and we all wave. She waves back and I crane my head trying to catch the look on her face as she watches us drive away. I feel like I am in the wrong place: I should be with her, going wherever she’s going, not in this packed truck that smells like oil.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, hoping the answer will be a place I can find an excuse for not wanting to go to.

  “I told you, it’s a surprise for everybody!” Cate says.

  Cate gives directions, leaning over and speaking low into Frank’s ear. We drive to the south side of the mountain, and up an unfamiliar long street with faded and cracking pavement. I realize my house is over the ridge.

  “Oh my God,” Thea says. Cray pats her knee. The street ends in a cul-de-sac, a wide circle edged by seven houses with darkened windows and empty driveways. They aren’t the usual mountain houses. High and narrow with small windows, it’s like they are lying in wait. Or standing guard.

  “Nobody lives here anymore,” Cate says. “My dad is building our house up here after they tear everything down.”

  She finally notices the silence that’s come over us all. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

  “I haven’t been up here for years,” MayBe says, “not since I came with my mom to drop off a casserole.”

  Frank looks at Cate for a long moment and then says, “This is the old Croondon settlement.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my dad says. What’s that mean?” she asks, confused.

  “It was a whole extended family that lived up here,” MayBe says with a sigh. “From Delaware or someplace like that. They bought this land together and paid to get the road paved, and then spent months building each other’s houses.”

  “Why’d they move out?” Cate asks. “Dad says they left plates on the tables, laundry on the line, like they all just walked outside to look at a rainbow and kept on walking,”

  Nobody says anything.

  “So why’d they move?” she asks again.

  “Because Clarence was a Croondon,” Cray says from the back.

  “Clarence … I thought his last name was Lacie?”

  “Lacie was his stepdad’s name,” Thea says. “I don’t know what his real dad’s name was. Croondon was his mom’s maiden name. They were all sisters, all the Croondons; most of them kept their names, even when they got married.”

  It’s weird how when someone dies, you fall into this never-ending process of really realizing they’re gone forever, that there is a whole lifetime’s worth of conversations you’ll never have with them. If Clarence were still here, he and I could talk about how we both come from families where the moms kept their maiden names and about how weird the term maiden name actually is.

  Frank opens the door and gets out. He looks back into the car at Cate. “You got us here. Now what?”

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, as Ben gets out too. That familiar wrinkle is creasing her chin. “I didn’t know … I thought … I thought we’d just go in and look because it’s so … spooky.”

  Cray climbs out, and Thea and MayBe follow, leaving just Cate and me in the back. Cate looks at me. “I swear, Dylan, I didn’t know. We should just leave. Will you get them back in the truck?” she asks.

  “We’re here now,” I say, climbing out. She gets out after me. We stand in a clump, nobody talking, us looking at the houses, and the houses looking back at us.

  Frank raises his eyebrows at MayBe.

  “It was that one,” she answers, pointing to a house that was probably once a pretty shade of blue. Frank starts walking.

  “We don’t have to go in!” Cate calls after him, but everyone’s following him already. She looks at me for a moment and then, with a sigh, follows too. I stand alone. The stillness of the houses seems purposeful, like just a moment ago they were leaning over and whispering into one another’s front doors. I hurry into the house.

  Cate’s right. They did leave everything behind. The musty smell is overpowering. I can smell the dampness of the rotting couches, the moldering rugs, and the dust caked on top of the picture frames. From the front entry I can see into the kitchen. On the counter is a plate mounded with something gray, and five plastic glasses stacked neatly beside it.

  “Where are you guys?” I call.

  “Up here.” I follow Thea’s voice to the top of the staircase, where everyone is gathered outside an open bedroom door, their eyes all focused on something inside the room. I lean in to see what they’re looking at. The faded mural covers the whole wall, a jungle with tree frogs and panthers and monkeys and Clarence’s name spelled out in vines.

  Frank’s the first one who steps inside the bedroom, and almost immediately Ben is slapping him on the back saying “It’s all right, man, it’s okay” at Frank’s ragged sobs. MayBe cries openly. So does Thea, Frank’s arm wrapped around her. Even Cate has tears streaming down her face. I’m the only one still standing in the hallway. Cate reaches out her hand from inside the bedroom, and I let her pull me inside. Almost immediately I drop her hand and step away from her, glaring at her. I can’t believe this. The sniffling around me stops.

  “You all right, Dylan?” Frank asks.

  “She didn’t know, Dylan,” MayBe says. “She didn’t know this is where he lived.”

  I’m still staring at Cate. I try to hold my words in, but they hiss out. “He died in this room.”

  Frank starts bawling all over again, and Ben says, “Shut up, no he didn’t. He died in the woods.”

  MayBe looks at me. “No. Remember. The woods are where they found him. But maybe it happened somewhere else.”

  “How did you know that?” Thea asks me, her hands making soft circles on Frank’s back.

  Cate looks at me, terrified. At first I think it’s because she knows the position she’s put me in, but then she says, “That’s not true, is it, Dylan? He didn’t die here, right?”

  I look helplessly at my friends and then manage to sputter, “M-my mom … Sheriff Dean told her,” I say.

  “When? When did he tell you? I mean her?” Cray asks harshly.

  “Last week,” I lie. “They were talking about those metal shavings and he said …”

  I look at the window and the image flickers and brightens until the window I am seeing is not broken and caked with dirt, it is whole and clean with neatly painted trim. I turn to my right, ready to ask Cate if she sees what I’m seeing. But she’s not there. Instead I see the mural on Clarence’s wall, its colors still bright and fresh. There is a neatly made-up roll-away bed against the mural. I look back to the window. Outside, snow is falling. The window opens, and first snowflakes come rushing in, sprinkling the green with white, and then comes a heavy black boot that scuffs the wall and presses mud into the carpet, the leg and body it is attached to working their way through the window. “He came in through the window,” I hear myself say, watching a man, his legs and body inside the room, huge next to the child-size furniture, stooping down to fit his shoulders and head through the window. His hands push against the sill, and with his back toward me, he is all the way in the room. Turn around, I think, turn the hell around
and let me see your face. I lunge forward, wanting to grab at his shoulders to make him face me, wanting to slam him against the wall, wanting his head to smack against the hard trim of the window, wanting him to feel the fact that he’s not so big after all.

  “Dylan?”

  The broken window, the peeling mural, the matted and moldy carpet, appear around me. Outside there is no snow. There is no man coming through the window. There are only my friends, watching me with anxious faces.

  “You all right?” Thea asks.

  I nod.

  “So what happened?” Cate asks. “What happened when the man came through the window?”

  It takes me a second to find my voice. “I don’t know,” I say. “Dean said the Drifter must have done it here, and then taken Clarence out the window. And then everybody in these seven goddamn houses full of people assumed someone else had taken him to school.”

  We ride home in silence until Ben squeezes Frank’s shoulder and says, in all seriousness, “You have a good cry, man?”

  Of course we all laugh. And when we repeat this story to one another in the future of our lives, we’ll all laugh again at Ben’s earnest squeeze of Frank’s shoulder.

  “It’s just so morbid. Standing in his room,” Pilar says the next morning. We’re on the bus on our way to her house to babysit Grace.

  “Cate says she didn’t know,” I say, shaking my head against the memory.

  “Well, I’m glad I missed it.”

  “I miss you,” I say, nudging her with my shoulder.

  “I know. Me too,” she says. “I just need to get caught up.”

  “Cate’s a whiz at pre-calc,” I say, “if you need help. She took it last year,”

  Something flashes over Pilar’s face.

  “What?” I ask. “You like Cate. Right?”

  “Yeah, of course I do.”

  “But why’d you make that face?”

  I think she’s just going to deny it, say that she’s tired again, but after a second she says, “Because I miss it being just me and you.”

  “It is just me and you,” I say.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “She’s got a hold on you.”

  “How do you mean?” I’m trying really hard not to sound defensive.

  “I just mean that you guys got into this really deep friendship, really fast.”

  “Oh, that’s just Cate,” I say quickly. “She’s a blabbermouth; it makes her easy to talk to.”

  “How come we don’t tell each other our secrets, like you guys do?” Pilar asks.

  This silences me. The thing I have always liked about my friendship with Pilar is that I know we both have our secrets. I know that there are things with her family that she doesn’t tell me about. And I think she knows there’s something I keep from her.

  “Because that’s what makes us us. The fact that we keep each other’s secrets, even if we don’t know them. We keep them by not asking about them.”

  She looks at me a long time without nodding. “I’ve always liked that about us.”

  “Me too,” I say, wanting nothing more than to get off the bus, to get away from the lies I just told, and the person who saw through them.

  We don’t talk any more about anything. We get to her house and play with Grace, and then my mom comes to pick me up. Pilar’s already walking upstairs when I’m putting on my coat to leave. She stops at the upstairs landing and leans on the railing, looking down at me. I try to read the realness of her smile. We say good-bye, and I fight the urge to run out the door. When we were on the bus, she gave me the chance to tell her, and I lied. I can’t believe what I’ve done.

  Eleven

  I’m in the shower the next morning when the vision comes. I say out loud, “What?” pressing my palm against the wall to keep myself from falling. “What?” I say again, my brain feeling brittle, cracking and ripping with the image of a round little chin, a red-and-white-striped shirt stretched out at the neck, and a small red mouth shoved into the dirt.

  I’m sitting on the couch with a wet washcloth on the back of my neck when the deputy arrives. My mom is pacing the floor in front of me.

  “I don’t think she should go,” my mom is saying.

  “Okay,” the deputy says, “that’s your choice.”

  “I know it’s my choice. I’m her mother.”

  “I’m going,” I say, standing up. I hand the washcloth to my mom.

  “No,” she says firmly, splatting the washcloth back onto my neck. “You’re not.”

  “I can’t help it, Mom,” I say. “You know I can’t. I’m sorry if you …” My words falter, and I breathe deeply to keep from crying.

  “You’re sorry if I what, darling?”

  “Nothing.” I hand her the washcloth again. This time she takes it.

  Deputy Pesquera and I drive down the mountain in silence, until we reach the familiar browns and washed-out greens of the desert.

  The deputy turns off the highway as soon as we’re down the hill.

  I look at her, surprised. “This close?”

  She nods.

  “In Taluga?” I ask. “Where Open Earth is?”

  She nods again. “This is where the company that bought them is. Partridge Pharmaceuticals or something like that.”

  “He’s getting closer,” I say quietly.

  Taluga is practically at the base of the mountain.

  A high desk that reaches up to the top of my head blocks our entry when we walk into the station.

  The desk sergeant looks down at me, making his fat neck puff out over his collar. “This her?” he asks.

  “Yep,” Officer Pesquera says. The sergeant nods toward a door, pressing a button to buzz us in. Officer Pesquera has her hand on my shoulder and she leads me to the interview room.

  There’s the usual metal table in the middle of the room and the usual one-way mirror on one wall. Leaning against the mirror is a short blank-faced female officer who, when I come in, looks to the other officer, a short, stubby man with his hands on his hips.

  “This her?” the man, who has a wiggly mouth that I instantly dislike, asks.

  “Yes, this is Dylan,” Deputy Pesquera says, coming in behind me.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “I’m Detective Armstrong,” the wiggly mouth says. “And this is Detective Cronin.” He doesn’t even motion to her and she does nothing to acknowledge that he has said her name.

  “Hi,” I say again.

  “How does this work?” Detective Armstrong asks, like he’s already unhappy with the answer. “Do you see anything?”

  “I don’t …” I look to Deputy Pesquera for help.

  “You need to brief her on the case,” the deputy says.

  “Fine. Sit down,” Armstrong says, nudging a chair out from under the table with his boot. He sits down across from me and opens the file in front of him. “Ten-year-old Brian Ferr, missing since yesterday. Sandy-brown hair, last seen wearing blue jean shorts and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and I think what they say you can do is bullshit.”

  “May I?” I reach for the picture of Brian from the file. He takes it out from under the paper clip and slides it across the table.

  “That was taken on school picture day, three weeks ago.”

  “He was wearing this same thing when he went missing?” I ask, pointing to the red and white shirt in the photo.

  “Guess so.” Armstrong grunts.

  “Hmm,” I murmur.

  “‘Hmm’? That’s all you’ve got, is ‘Hmm’?” Armstrong takes the photo back. “Is the kid alive or what?”

  I look at Deputy Pesquera. She just looks back at me. Big help she is.

  “I’ve only been able to find kids that are …” My confidence wavers and I can’t finish the sentence.

  “Oh, great!” Armstrong says, standing up and crossing his arms. He looks down at me. “So is he dead? Do you see him being dead?”

  “No,” I say.

  “So he’s alive?” Armstrong says. I coul
d punch him in the crotch from where I sit.

  “I don’t know. I can’t concentrate with you yelling at me.”

  “Oh, this isn’t yelling, sweetie. This is playing nice. Let’s hope you don’t have to hear me yell.”

  “Does that actually work with criminals?” I ask. I can feel something; I can feel the edge of something in my mind.

  “You tell us he’s near water, so no matter where we find him—near a garden hose, the ocean, or a bucket—you get to say you’re right, right?”

  “I think you should go outside and let us work with her,” Deputy Pesquera says.

  “No, this is our investigation. I don’t know what kind of mountain-law you practice, but if it happens here, I stay here.”

  “Then you’ll have to shut up,” I say.

  He motions with his hand, a Fine, I’ll stop talking motion. He winks at Officer Cronin. She ignores him.

  I look at the picture. Brian’s hair is slicked down, the beginnings of a cowlick raising a chunk of hair near his part. I laugh a little.

  “What?” Armstrong says. “This is funny to you?”

  “His mom, she used to give him a spit bath to make that part in his hair stay down,” I say.

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” he says.

  “This is how it works,” I say dryly. “I tell you his story, and when we get to the end, we know how it ends.”

  “Well, I’ll come back when you get to the end,” Armstrong says, heading for the door.

  “No,” I say, realizing something. “You have to be here. The fact that you’re being a total prick is helping; it’s … it’s started something. I have to tell the story to you. Sit down.” I kick the chair out from across the table. It’s quite possibly the most badass thing I’ve ever done. Armstrong sits, laughing.

  “We’ll do this together, you and me,” I say, not letting him look away. “I know you don’t believe me, and that’s good. Keep disbelieving.”