Invisible

by Carla Buckley

  When Eric’s family got together, there were so many people, they spilled out of the house and onto the driveway and yard, laughing and bragging about the huge muskies they’d caught.

  “What about your grandpa?”

  She gave him a sidelong look. Eric wasn’t talking about the dead one; he was talking about the one who’d left when her mom was just a kid. When Eric and she were little, they used to pretend that this grandpa she’d never known would reappear with pirate treasure or secret potions; they used to pretend he’d bring Dana along, too, a sort of princess who needed their help to save her. Now that Peyton had actually met Dana, she knew with a certainty her grandpa would be a big disappointment, too. “Right.”

  She wriggled her toes and studied the play of nail polish colors. Just a few days ago, she had daubed on one of each shade she had, pink and red and blue and orange. “My dad’s drinking again.”

  Eric didn’t even look at her, which was right, which was good, but his fingers curled along the plastic arm of the chair. “Sucks.”

  “He started a few weeks ago. Right before Mom went back into the hospital.”

  Mom. Say it once, say it twice, maybe make her come alive even for the space of a moment.

  “How bad is it?”

  Wasn’t even one drink bad news for a drinker? If he had two beers, did that make it twice as bad? If he had three, three times? Where was the line that separated okay from not okay? Her dad was climbing up a steep rocky slope, and once he reached the top, no one could stop him from falling down the other side. Which would leave Peyton even more alone. “He had a couple of beers last night.” A lie. He’d had at least a six-pack. She’d known kids to get trashed on less.

  “Just beer?”

  Eric knew it had once been whiskey, too. He even knew when Peyton’s dad moved out for a little while. “I ever tell you I found one of his empties hidden in my playhouse? I told my mom and that’s when she kicked him out. I guess I figured that made it my fault.”

  He ran a finger along her arm. “Just because he drinks doesn’t mean you will.”

  She got her gold hair from her mom, her height from her dad. Who was to say she hadn’t inherited his trouble with booze and would die just like her mom did, way too young in a hospital room?

  He fit his fingers between hers. “I don’t have to go back to class.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing a presentation?”

  “Whatever.”

  She closed her eyes and put her head back. The wind rustled the spring leaves. Bees buzzed. Her mom’s funeral was tomorrow. Miss Lainie’s had only been last week. A dark and terrible thought pushed in, something her mom always said, and it wouldn’t go away.

  Things come in threes.

  NINE

  [DANA]

  JULIE’S WEDDING WAS SIMPLE, JUST THE TWO OF them, Frank’s parents, his sister, Karen, and her new husband, and me. Julie stood at the altar in our mom’s white dress, nipped in at the waist to fit, her borrowed veil lacy about her shoulders, and beamed up at Frank. The minister had to repeat himself, she was so lost in joy. It made us laugh, even me, standing there in my ugly bridesmaid’s dress. Frank’s mother had insisted I wear one and had sewn it for me herself. No reason to take shortcuts, she’d said, presenting me with the stiff taffeta thing. Yellow. The one color in the entire rainbow guaranteed to make me look like a plague victim.

  I spent the weekend at my best friend Sheri’s house so that Julie and Frank could have the house to themselves. The minute Sheri’s parents went to bed, we sneaked off to Gerkey’s, where the usual Saturday party was in full swing. I had kicked off my shoes and sunk onto the sofa in the employee break room, the skirt of that hideous dress billowing up all around me.

  Nice dress, Joe had said, putting his arm around me. And Brian had leaned over with a can of beer. Wanna celebrate? I don’t know who was more surprised, Brian or me, when I accepted.

  So Frank had a problem with alcohol. Well, I couldn’t fix it, no matter how emphatically Irene played the guilt card. I was the last person Frank would listen to, and I didn’t even want to try. But I knew what Julie would have wanted. Julie would have been certain. Help Peyton.

  Yes, my sister would have put that right into my hands and closed my fingers tightly around it. But just because I gave birth didn’t make me a mother. It didn’t make me magical or knowing or somehow specially connected to the baby I’d given up back when I was still a girl. I’d missed out on all those things that shaped a person into a mother. I didn’t know when Peyton started to walk or lost her first tooth or had her first crush. I didn’t know if she had allergies. I only knew that she came out squalling and silenced the moment the nurse set her in my arms. I only knew that she had soft downy hair and a way of turning down her tiny mouth as she slept, as though she was seeing something terrible coming her way.

  The lake shimmered in the distance, bright with early morning sunshine, hopeful. A school bus lumbered across an intersection. Peyton’s bus, or did she walk to school? People headed into the Catholic church for mass, and an orange tabby slunk past on the opposite sidewalk before disappearing into some bushes.

  Someone stood in my old front yard, a man reaching up to unhook the bird feeder dangling from the lowest branch of the big locust tree. The memory whooshed back with force. My father had stood by that very same tree to tap a bag of birdseed into a glass tube. The image changed. Not my father in his brown suit, but a stranger in baggy jeans and a T-shirt. He was waving at me in a friendly way. How had that memory surfaced? I thought I’d buried them all long ago.

  People sprawled on beach towels scattered across the sand. A mother and her child hesitated at the water’s edge, holding hands. The lifeguard stand was empty; boats tied to the dock bobbed in the wake of a passing motorboat.

  The sun was beating down and already I could feel the skin on my cheeks tighten, signaling the beginning of a sunburn. I pulled out a tube of sunscreen from my purse and squeezed some across my fingertips.

  I’d returned to Black Bear ten years before, a sudden impulse to reunite with Julie and my daughter. I’d had a job interview in the Twin Cities—something that hadn’t panned out—and I had found myself driving the rental car north instead of heading east to the airport. As I drove, I thought of all the times I’d dialed Julie’s phone number, only to disconnect before the call went through. Six years had passed by then; I was a brash twenty-three, and I thought I could face my past and the choices I had made.

  As I neared town, I pictured knocking on Julie’s door and hearing her footsteps approach from the other side. She’d swing open the door and be astonished to see me. My small daughter would appear behind her and shyly ask who I was. I imagined the girl, the shape of her face and the color of her hair, the smell of supper cooking on the stove, Frank’s voice as he called from another room, asking who was at the door, and I found my palms sweating on the steering wheel. My heart pounded so hard I couldn’t hear the car radio. The blaring of a car horn made me realize I’d veered into oncoming traffic and I swerved back into my lane as the other car shot past, the driver looking over with wide-eyed fear. I pulled onto the verge and sat there, trying to push away the rising panic.

  Maybe motherhood had changed Julie, turning her into someone I wouldn’t know. Maybe she was glad I was gone, and that the very last person she wanted to see standing on her doorstep was me. Maybe the reason I hadn’t heard from her was because she was terrified that any contact between us would shake down the house of cards we’d so carefully constructed.

  I should call. I’d know just by hearing her voice whether or not she wanted me back in her life. But I found myself crying, sitting in that small car on the side of the road, my cheeks slick with hot tears. I couldn’t bear to find out that Julie didn’t love me anymore. I couldn’t. So I turned my car around and drove back to the airport to reschedule the flight I had missed.

  I told myself I would try again after I’d gotten a good job and had settled myself,
when I was strong enough to withstand the possibility that Julie wouldn’t want me back in her life. I kept telling myself that, but I should have known that that time would never come.

  My cellphone bleated. I glanced at the display. Finally. “Halim!”

  “Dana.” His voice was liquid with concern. “How is your sister?”

  Across the lake, the Ferris wheel rotated lazily. The buzz of the motorboat faded into the distance. “I was too late.”

  “Ah.” A pause, and then he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “The funeral’s tomorrow. I’ll head back to Chicago Saturday.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll still be here.”

  Not a good sign. We should have both been long gone and on to our next job by then. “Ahmed said it was a woman.”

  “Yes, but they don’t know her identity yet. They’ve released an artist’s sketch to the media in hopes someone recognizes her.”

  Not a photograph, which meant she’d been badly disfigured. I shivered. I didn’t know what happened to a human body after a many-ton building fell down on it. “I don’t understand how we could have missed her—”

  “There were countless places she could have crawled into. Don’t punish yourself over this.”

  “You make it sound like she was there intentionally.”

  “Perhaps she was.”

  Who would choose to die that way? The woman must have been out of her mind. “What does the guard say?”

  “Actually, that is one reason I’m calling. We’re having a difficult time locating him. Would you happen to have his contact information?”

  “He’s gone?” Oh, God. That couldn’t be good. “He’s not illegal, is he?” At the very least, we’d be fined. At worst, we would lose our license, and with it, our livelihood.

  “No, no. Of course not. The poor fellow is just nervous. We are all on edge, Dana.”

  “The poor fellow should be nervous,” I retorted sarcastically. “Where the hell was he when she was breaking in?”

  “We can’t blame him. The building was completely stripped. We weren’t expecting junkers. We hired him to guard the explosives and he did that.”

  That woman couldn’t have been a junker. There wasn’t anything left in that building for her to steal and sell on the black market, except for the explosives themselves, and I had seen for myself everything had been present and accounted for. “The entire lot was fenced. There was only the one gate. How on earth could he have missed her? He must have been drinking. Or maybe he was asleep.” I looked unseeing at the woman and the boy, now wandering the shoreline. “That’s what we get for hiring amateurs, Halim.”

  “He came highly recommended.”

  “Then, damn it—ask whoever recommended him how we can locate him.”

  “I have. Those contact numbers are no good.”

  Meaning Halim hadn’t been that diligent in following through when he’d hired the man. For all his cleverness, he could be lazy when it came to tying up loose ends. He preferred to go on his own instincts. Halim had liked the guard, so he’d seen no reason to make sure the man wasn’t anything but what he said he was. People didn’t ask too many questions when things were going their way. After all, had I ever once asked Halim why he had brought me, a complete novice, into his company? I hadn’t wanted to know.

  “Maybe Ahmed knows whether the guard was friendly with anyone.” I was grasping at straws. The guard had worked when no one else had, but still, there could have been some crossover, people coming in early for their shift, or staying late, congregating in the temporary trailer. Ahmed was good at picking up on that sort of thing. How many times had he warned me about a guy showing a little too much interest in our security combinations, or mentioned a brewing discord between a couple of men on the crew that needed to be headed off before it escalated into rage?

  “Good idea.” Then, in a different tone, Halim added, “The police have begun asking some difficult questions.”

  A seagull screeched overhead. “How difficult?”

  “Licensing questions. Procedural questions.”

  Alarm traced a cold finger down my spine. “Why would they do that?”

  “I think they’re just fishing. Try not to worry. I’ve got matters well in hand.”

  Right. “You don’t even know where the guard is.”

  “If you’re so concerned about how I’m handling things, Dana, then perhaps you should return and handle them yourself.” An uneasy silence, into which he sighed. “I didn’t mean that.”

  We were both on edge. There was no point in discussing it further. “Call me if anything changes.”

  “You’ll be the first to hear.”

  I cradled the phone in my hand as if it could reassure me that, indeed, Halim would call. Halim was a practical man. He’d only keep in touch as long as it benefited him. That calculating look on his face as we’d both stood over the dead woman had revealed his true nature. Halim was loyal to one person: himself. I’d known that and I’d still signed the partnership papers.

  I hadn’t realized that at the beginning. Halim had offered me a chance to belong to the small select group of people who imploded structures for a living. It was a secretive business, almost entirely family-built. But Halim had seen something in me that made him reach past his own brother and hold out his hand to me. I’d jumped without thinking. I’d quit my boring office job, signed the partnership papers, and uncorked a bottle of champagne.

  And for the first few years, despite financial hardships, things had progressed smoothly. Halim had brought me along and I had turned out to have a gift for eyeing a building and seeing its weak spots. It had thrilled me to discover this talent within myself. But then the economy had tightened even more, and I had started noticing things, like how Halim sometimes took on a job without consulting me, ordered supplies without letting me know, hired and fired people without so much as a passing word. Things that told me Halim still firmly considered himself in charge and I was nothing but an employee.

  In which case, why even bother to bring me in? It was time I found out. When I got back to Chicago, we’d have that conversation. I was ready.

  “Dana?”

  The woman who’d been down playing at the lake’s edge with her child stood before me.

  There was no mistaking those eyes and that crooked smile.

  “It is you!” Sheri threw her arms around me, rocked me from side to side. “Omigosh, I heard you were back! I’m so sorry about Julie. You didn’t even get a chance to see her, did you?” Sheri had filled out some; the extra weight had softened her features. She wore her blonde hair pulled back in a black elastic headband, exposing her high round forehead. “They should have called you sooner. I almost did myself.” She hugged me tighter. She smelled of sun and sunscreen. “I just can’t believe it! You owe me, sister. All these years and not even a postcard.”

  “Mommy?”

  “Oops.” Sheri drew back and put her hand on the head of the towheaded boy beside her. “Logan, this is Miss Julie’s sister. Peyton’s aunt.”

  He peered up through his glasses, crinkling his nose and drawing up his upper lip, badger-like.

  I smiled down at him. This was the little guy Peyton mentioned had kidney disease. He looked so young. “Logan! You have got to be Mike Cavanaugh’s big boy.”

  He leaned against his mom and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

  Sheri pushed down his hand, gently. “We’ve been married twelve years, Mike and me, if you can believe it. Logan’s four. Our other son, Mikey, is in second grade.”

  Twelve years, two boys. Sheri had dreamed of being a groupie for Nirvana. She’d written love letters to Kurt Cobain and had his initials tattooed onto her ankle. The night he killed himself, she locked herself into the old pavilion down by the lake. I’d climbed through the window to coax her out.

  “I’m hungry, Mommy.”

  “How about some grapes?”

  “I don’t want grapes. I want a banana.”

  “Yo
u know the deal, buster. How about a hamburger?”

  “With cheese?”

  “Sorry, honey.”

  “No ketchup, either,” he said sadly.

  Sheri clasped his small hand in hers and smiled at me. “Want to walk to the snack shack with us?” she suggested.

  We found a table beneath an umbrella, on a small skirt of concrete fronting a restaurant with its doors propped open. Another table was occupied, a young couple, sitting close together, their hands intertwined.

  “What are you having?” Sheri asked me. “My treat.”

  I’d never had that second cup of coffee. “Coffee would be great.” Coffee would be heaven.

  “Let me guess. Just a little cream, right? You always were so disciplined. Be good, you two—I’ll be right back.”

  Logan and I eyed each other. “So you’re four, huh?” I ventured.

  He put his thumb back into his mouth and turned to look at the lake. Yep, that about summed up my conversational skills with kids.

  We watched a motorboat churn across the water, a water-skier bumping along behind it.

  “Here you go.” Sheri slid a paper plate in front of her son. “Cheers.” She tapped the rim of her cup against mine, smiling.

  Logan peeled back the top of his hamburger bun and scowled at the patty. “Where’s the mustard?”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I told them plain.”

  “Want me to get some?” I asked.

  He ignored me, replaced the top of his bun, and took a big bite.

  “That’s a good boy.” Sheri patted his shoulder. “Dana, you’ll never guess what I was thinking of the other day. That time we went sledding down that pile of snow in the church parking lot and you ran into that parked car buried underneath—remember?”

  The old Chevy had been buried beneath ten feet of hard-packed snow. I’d shot directly into the hidden rear bumper. I rubbed the scar on my chin and smiled ruefully. “I think of that now and then, too.”