Six more hours until school let out. Nothing would happen in six hours. Peyton tugged her phone from her jeans pocket. Holding the phone under the table, she glanced at the display. No missed calls.
“What is the most vulnerable process that can breed mutation?” Mr. Connolly looked at her, then away. “Adrian?”
Dana would call back. She had to.
Eric sat in the courtyard full of kids eating lunch. When he saw her, his face transformed, like he’d been lit up inside, just because he was looking at her. When had she gotten this power? What was she supposed to do with it?
“Hey,” he called. “I got you the last Gatorade.”
Peyton dumped her bag on the picnic bench and took the plastic bottle he held out. “Thanks.”
His hair was fresh-from-the-shower damp at the back of his neck, and he smelled of Axe. He’d just come from PE. She didn’t know why she was noticing these things. It wasn’t like she’d ever thought about what he smelled like before, or the way the muscles in his forearms bunched beneath his rolled-up cuffs.
“So?” he said. “Did you talk to your aunt?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s great. What did she say?”
“We talked for like two seconds. Then she hung up.”
He considered that. “But you asked her, right?”
“I practically begged her.” Twisting off the Gatorade cap, she took a long lemony drink. “She said she’d call back, but she hasn’t.”
“She will.”
Peyton didn’t say anything to that. Lately, everyone made empty promises. She was sick of them.
“She might not be a match anyway. Twenty-five percent of a chance isn’t much. It’s only one in four.”
“I know.” He was the one who didn’t know. Life was perfect for Eric. He was safe with his healthy mom and dad and sister and brother. Twenty-five percent might not seem like much to Eric, but to Peyton it was everything. It was way more than the thousandths of one percent that a stranger would be a match.
“Your folks know you called her?”
“No.” Peyton pulled her sandwich from the bag and took a bite. Her favorite, peanut butter, pickles, and mayo, but today, it tasted like sand. “I’ll tell my mom when I go over this afternoon.” Maybe. It depended on whether Dana called back. It depended on whether her mom was having a good or bad day.
He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “How’s she doing?”
“Okay, I guess.” It was just another infection. There was no need to panic, but who went to the hospital if they didn’t have to? Peyton tore at the crusts. She hated this helpless feeling. She hated soggy pickles, too.
He crumpled up the chips bag. “You want to get together this weekend? We could go to the movies, maybe hang out with Adam and Brenna.”
“I thought they broke up.” She felt hot, and looked down at her hands, the short fingernails painted different colors, the silver ring her mom gave her for Easter last year, the Band-Aid wrapped around one knuckle frayed along the edges.
“They’re back together again.” Eric put his hand on hers and rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand. His skin was warm and rough in places from where he gripped the tools when he worked on his car. He didn’t really know what he was doing, and sometimes she worried that the car would suddenly accelerate or burst into flames, but there was something deliciously reckless about going for drives with him anyway. Just being with Eric felt like that. Her heart gave a funny little flutter.
Picking up his tray, he stood. “I’ll see you later. Hang in there, okay?”
He walked away, sunlight swallowing him up until he was just a mirage. Her best friend. Things had been so much easier when that was all he was.
Peyton shoved the remains of her sandwich back into the paper bag, feeling tears sting her eyes. When had she become such a baby?
“Peyton?”
Mrs. Stahlberg hurried toward her across the noisy courtyard, her skinny arms working, her ugly face flushed. She was only the principal’s secretary, but she always acted like she ran the place. Lots of kids made fun of her, but Peyton wasn’t allowed to. Her mom was always telling her to be charitable because Mrs. Stahlberg carried a heavy burden being LT’s mom. Not that being nice to her made much difference. She was always cracking down on Peyton about one thing or another. As if Peyton was the one with mental problems, not her stupid son.
She must’ve heard about Peyton using her cell at school and was racing out here to confiscate it, which was just great. What happened if Dana did call back? No one would be there to answer.
Peyton balled up her lunch bag and stood to face the consequences. It did no good to plead or sweet-talk. Mrs. Stahlberg was such a witch. “I’m sorry—” she began.
But Mrs. Stahlberg shook her head and put a hand on Peyton’s arm, her fingers firm and unexpectedly moist. “Come along, honey. We need to get to the hospital right away.”
THREE
[DANA]
MALE, FEMALE. I DIDN’T KNOW WHO LAY BENEATH the rubble. I told myself I didn’t care, that agonizing over it wouldn’t change the facts, but as I drove north, I felt as though I were the one lying pressed against the ground, the breath being squeezed out of my chest. Finally, I pulled over at a gas station in Wisconsin and huddled in the cramped bathroom lit by one narrow window, splashing cold water onto my face until the shaking finally subsided.
The police had separated me and Halim as though we were criminals united in an unspeakable scheme, questioning us in their cars, the rain sluicing the glass. Again and again, I answered their questions. Someone was dead because of me. It had been my hand pushing the button. The wipers swept across the windshield; the close interior gently steamed, smelling of stale coffee and pungent aftershave, and finally I said to the cop, “Look. I have a family emergency.” Family. I could barely get the word out.
He gave me a skeptical look but let me go. He had my phone number, he reminded me.
The rolling Wisconsin hills peeled away as I entered Minnesota, and now farmland sprawled all around me. Towns popped up one after another like dusty beads on a string, so small and insignificant I was almost out of them before I realized I was in them. Leaving behind the lashing rains of Chicago, I had the dizzying sense I was headed into a worse storm. Not one that boomed and soaked the pavement, but a dark and spreading one of my own making.
When I told Julie I was pregnant, she stared at me for a long time. I’d expected anger, or worse, disappointment, but all I saw on her face was shock. How far along are you? she finally asked. I put my hand protectively on my belly, where I imagined the baby curled up, sleeping. I think . . . four months. Too late to do anything, and maybe I’d planned it that way. You can’t tell anyone, I insisted. She’d tilted her head, with a worried frown. Not even Joe? I shook my head. Especially not Joe. I rubbed at my eyes, furious at my sudden tears. She didn’t ask why; she simply stepped forward and took me into her arms, enveloping me in a fierce embrace. Do you want to keep the baby?
Yes, I said, with a desperation that surprised me.
We’ll move to Hawley when school lets out, Julie said. We can start over there.
Not a word about Frank, or how disappointed he’d be in me, his young, foolish sister-in-law. Not a word about college, or how we’d afford the baby. Her voice was calm and certain, and I believed her. But no one could have predicted how things would turn out.
Stopping for a snack, I tried calling Peyton back to let her know I was on my way, but her voicemail picked up. Hi! This is Peyton! Leave a message! I dialed Julie’s number, too, waiting for the clear sound of her voice and wanting very much to hear it, but her cellphone rang on and on. I paid for the bottled water and got back behind the wheel.
The sun was setting when Black Lake finally came into view. Hotels perched on the shore, their parking lots studded with cars. The water sparkled in the last rays of sun, looking deceptively inviting. But I knew it was heart-stopping cold. Growing up, I thought all water
was freezing. The first time I stuck a tentative toe into the Atlantic and found the water as warm as bathwater, I’d laughed.
Dark woods frilled the far shore. Above the Norway spruce and tamaracks heaved the curving metal loop of a roller coaster. An amusement park? A Ferris wheel rotated beside it, surreal lights flashing in the twilight. I almost missed the exit for Black Bear, Home of the Golden Vikings, veering off the highway just in time.
The green plaster dinosaur with its scabbed knees and snout should have been stretching its long neck on the corner as I rounded the curve, as if protecting the town’s only two gas pumps, which sometimes ran out of gas before the end of the month. Beside them should have been Miss Lainie’s dank little Stop ’n Shop with its shelves of dusty cans and withered produce, and then a few hundred yards beyond that should have been that creepy trailer park. I’d dreaded biking past there at night. Half the time someone was screaming or moaning; whether from pleasure or pain, I’d never stopped to find out.
They were all gone—the dinosaur, Miss Lainie’s store, even the trailer park. A ruthless hand had swept them away, plunking down instead a gas station with tidy rows of pumps and a convenience store with signs in the windows offering lottery tickets, homemade lefse, a sale on bait.
A car horn blared. I raised my hand in apology and accelerated through the intersection, too fast.
The boarded-up storefronts downtown were gone, too, replaced by eateries with awnings. Pedestrians lingered on the sidewalks, swinging shopping bags or sipping from takeout cups, acting for all the world like they wanted to be there in the cheerful spill of lights.
It looked like the spook house had been renovated. A perky bay window smiled over the fresh green lawn, and the crumbling stone wall had been rebuilt. There wasn’t a single car on blocks to be seen anywhere. I rolled to a stop in front of a modest house tucked beneath the spreading branches of a honey locust. Curtains fluttered in the opened windows. Lamps were on inside. Someone was home. I wondered if they were happy, if they’d been more successful in making this place a home than my family had. The sage green paint Julie and I had slapped across the boards was now cream, the shutters we’d painted black were now an earthy brown. Our new start, Julie had said as I held the ladder for her. I think Mom would have liked this color, don’t you, Dana?
A few years later, up on the second floor, beneath the sloping bathroom roof, I’d held the pregnancy test in my hand and stared disbelieving at the solid pink line.
An American flag jutted from beneath the eaves of the brick house next door. Perhaps Martin still lived there. But I wasn’t ready to see Martin just yet.
I drove on.
Julie’s house was small and yellow, with a front porch that tilted toward the gravel driveway as if whispering a secret. I switched off the engine. Silence filled the car, a profound quiet that sounded like a thousand tiny insects buzzing in my ears. The air was cooler up here, fresher, scented with pine.
No one answered the doorbell.
Maybe Google had given me the wrong address. But no, the label on the rolled-up newspaper lying on the mat read Frank & Julie Kelleher. Strange no one was home. With a teenager in the house, didn’t they have to do things like prepare dinner and supervise homework? Unless Julie was sicker than I’d realized. Maybe that was the reason she’d allowed Peyton to make the call. Maybe that was why I hadn’t heard from her, or Frank. No, I decided. If Julie were really in trouble, Doc Lindstrom would have let me know. Or Martin. It wasn’t as though I was that hard to find. After all, a teenager had located me without any difficulty at all.
Sitting on the front step, I checked my phone messages: a neighbor in Baltimore wondering when I was getting back to town so we could get together, a friend I’d made in the Chicago planning office calling to express sympathy, and Ahmed.
He answered on the second ring. “How was your trip?”
“Fine.” I waved away the mosquito hovering by my cheek. “How is everything there?”
“The police left a few hours ago. We got permission to finish clearing the site. But now we are looking at paying the crew overtime.”
A worry. “Have the police learned anything?”
“It was a woman.”
That made everything seem much more personal, and doubly strange. How had a woman found herself in the lonely, predawn hours inside an abandoned building about to be demolished? “Who?”
“We don’t know.”
Across the street, porches were bathed in warm yellow light. Windows glowed, and shadows moved within, people gathering for supper. “Ahmed, please have Halim call me as soon as possible.”
“Of course.” His reply was smooth, and not the least bit reassuring.
Julie’s house crouched dark and silent behind me. I eyed the split-level next door, the ragged line of houses across the street. I didn’t want to ask a stranger where my sister might be. Far worse would be to talk to someone I did know. Maybe Peyton played a sport, and Julie and Frank and Peyton were all at a game. What sport? I wondered. Was Peyton tall and lean like Julie, a sharp point guard? It wasn’t basketball season. Maybe she was a swimmer. Or ran track. Afterward, the three of them might have gone out to eat; with so many new restaurants in town, they’d have lots of choices.
After all, no one knew I was coming. No one would have hurried home to greet me. But I couldn’t tamp down the uneasiness. Where was everyone?
Music wailed from the jukebox, someone else’s heartbreak flayed through tinny speakers. People sat at booths along the wall, and a couple rotated on the small dance floor, the woman taller than the man and tenderly draped around his shoulders. True love.
I sometimes wondered about true love, what it looked like, whether it pounded toward you or sneaked up alongside and just astonished you one day. Did it wait behind a door I had yet to open? Or had it already walked past, in the guise of a stranger who’d glanced at me and moved on? My mother had given up on true love, and Julie thought she had found it in Frank: she’d desperately wanted it to be so with him. But wanting didn’t make something come true. My brother-in-law was taciturn and stubborn, not someone I could ever envision embodying true love for anyone, let alone someone like Julie.
Though what did I know? Men had ventured in and out of my life, some of them staying long enough to make me wonder whether they were the one. But in the end, we’d drifted apart and there hadn’t been a single true love among any of them. Well, maybe there had been one, but that had been long ago.
And there I was again, for the second time that day, peering down the path I hadn’t taken. It was being back in Black Bear that was dredging up all this old history, memories that needed to remain buried. If I could, I would obliterate my past completely. It didn’t do any good to look back over one’s shoulder. The only thing to do was to keep moving forward.
“Leinie’s, please,” I told the bartender, taking a seat at the long curved bar. “On tap.”
Someone had done a pretty good job of sprucing up the old Lakeside Bar and Grill. The battered linoleum had been pried up and replaced with light oak flooring; the bare plaster walls had been painted a deep red and hung with boating gear and old-fashioned road signs. A definite improvement, but the bar itself was still sticky with wax and the air rich with the same yeasty smell of beer laced with grease.
Years ago, Sheri and I had thought this was the big time. We spent hours giggling before our bedroom mirrors and gluing on false eyelashes, tugging on tight jeans and strutting around that pool table as if we had a clue. Did Peyton try the same thing? Did she doll herself up and borrow Julie’s heels to sail in here on her boyfriend’s arm? I tried to imagine it, but couldn’t.
She’d had that high-pitched voice of youth, that breathless way of making everything into a question. You don’t know me? It’s about my mom? She’s sick? There had been nothing there I could pin an impression on, no matter how hard I tried, nothing to indicate if she was scholarly, athletic, spirited, or contemplative. There had just been that s
oft voice lengthened by Midwestern vowels.
Why hadn’t Julie let me know she was sick? Pride, or was Peyton overreacting? I’d finish my drink and head back to Julie’s place. If no one was home, I’d just have to start knocking on neighbors’ doors.
A jar with a photograph taped to its side sat on the bar, half-filled with coins and rumpled bills. Rotating it, I was surprised to see the fierce scowl of Miss Lainie glaring back at me. What the hell you want? the old woman seemed to snarl.
The bartender placed a mug in front of me, a perfect half inch of foam.
“Thanks.” I reached for my wallet.
“It’s on the house, Dana. Welcome home.”
I took a closer look. Right, that overbite. He had to be one of the Petersons. “Fred,” I guessed.
“I own the place now.” He sounded pleased I’d recognized him. “Me and my brother. Going on two years.” He nodded at the collection jar. “I saw you looking. We’re collecting for her burial. You remember Lainie?”
Of course. How could I forget Miss Lainie? She was the most taciturn person I’d ever known, and given some of the work crews I’d dealt with, that was saying something. Miss Lainie chased people out of her store with a broom if they tracked in a flake of snow; she hovered behind them as they decided between Reese’s Cups and Three Musketeers. She snatched coins from shoppers’ palms, leaving behind painful red marks. One day Miss Lainie shortchanged me, and Julie marched right into the store and demanded the quarter back. Julie hated confrontation but she hated unfairness worse. “She owned the Stop ’n Shop,” I told Fred Peterson. How old had Lainie been? Ancient, I decided. She certainly seemed ancient to Julie and me.
“Until she sold it and went to work at Gerkey’s. In the gift shop, if you can believe it.” He chuckled.
“Since when does Gerkey’s have a gift shop?”
“Since Brian took it over five years back.”
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