Peyton waited until he was halfway across the crowded room before leaning over into the cloud of baby powder surrounding her grandmother. “Grandma, do you remember my aunt Dana?” She had clearly known who she was the day of the funeral, but today could be another story.
Her grandma looked at her with her watery blue eyes that suddenly seemed icy. “Julie’s sister.”
Peyton nodded.
“What’s she up to now?”
Which implied that she’d been up to something before. “The same kind of thing,” Peyton replied cagily.
Her grandma pursed her lips. The skin around her mouth drew tight into wrinkles. “I would certainly hope not. I’d like to think she learned her lesson.”
“I guess she hasn’t.”
“Julie spoiled her. That’s the problem. Julie let that girl get away with everything. But who could blame her? She wasn’t that much older than Dana, and she was trying to live her own life, too. That’s what she needed to focus on, her marriage and her child. You ask me, it was a good thing, Dana leaving town when she did. Julie never could say no to her.”
Her mom had never been that pitiful. Her mom said no to Peyton all the time. No, you can’t see an R-rated movie. No, you can’t eat ice cream for dinner. It was horrible thinking of her mom being so nice to Dana, and Dana not even bothering to call her back the one time her mom reached out to her. A headache skewered itself into the center of her forehead.
Her grandma sipped her coffee, the cup tipping precariously in her grasp. Peyton watched to see if she’d need to grab it, but her grandmother managed to set it back onto the table without splashing a drop of the hot liquid. “And those parties at Gerkey’s.” She shook her head. “I told Alice those kids were up to no good, but she said it was better they drank there than wander all over the highways. Julie wouldn’t listen, either. She insisted Dana would never touch a beer.”
So what if she had? Everyone drank beer. Even Peyton had had a couple before the shifting wooziness convinced her that maybe it wasn’t her thing. But her grandma wouldn’t understand. She had rules about the most stupid things. Peyton had to take off her shoes when she visited. She had to sit with her knees together instead of cross-legged; she couldn’t have pop with her meals, and no cookies except on a plate. Finding out Peyton had had a Bud Light would have made her cry with fear.
“Did she and Julie have a fight?”
“No, not exactly.” Her grandma drew down her spidery white eyebrows. “Poor Julie. It was very sad, altogether.”
Now they were going somewhere. “Like what?”
“Well, I can’t say now, can I? It’s a secret.” Her grandma mimed locking her lips with a gnarled finger and thumb and throwing away an imaginary key.
Wait just a minute. What was a secret, and why on earth would her mom have shared one with her grandma? Peyton moved her fork, her knife. If she came at her grandma directly, the old lady would back away. Peyton would have to go in sideways. She kept her voice casual. “Julie wanted you to tell me. She said it was okay.”
“No, she did not. You are telling a fib, aren’t you?”
It had to be a pretty good secret to make her grandma suddenly make sense. “Does my dad know?”
“Where are all these questions coming from?” Her grandma fixed Peyton with a glare. “You’re not doing drugs, are you, young lady?”
Ugh. “Grandma. Tell me.”
“No, I promised Julie. Where is she, by the way?” Her grandma looked around with a frown. “I’m getting worried now. It’s not like her to keep people waiting.”
“What was so sad?”
“Pardon?”
Peyton wanted to shake her. “You said something sad happened. Was it about my mom? Was it about Julie?”
“Julie?” Her grandmother gave her a pleasant, puzzled smile. “Where did you say she was?”
It was no use. Her grandmother had been derailed. Nothing Peyton said would get her back on track. She pulled her hand from her grandma’s grasp. The old woman didn’t even seem to notice. “She called to say she’d be late.”
Her grandma picked up her cup again. “Oh, did she? That’s all right, then.”
Peyton sighed.
Her dad scanned the jukebox selections, Leslie beside him. She pointed to something and he nodded, smiled. Not his real smile, more a softening of the corners of his mouth, but a smile nonetheless. Five days already and he was smiling. How did a person do that? Peyton was sure her own mouth had forgotten how.
TWENTY-ONE
[DANA]
OUR DAD LEFT WHEN I W AS FIVE YEARS OLD. HE must’ve run, actually, given how completely he vanished. One day he was there; the next he was gone. I’ve never known why, and Julie swore she didn’t, either. I have a few memories of him sitting in a chair by the window, hanging up the bird feeder, mostly doing stuff. He mustn’t have talked much to me. I don’t recall who told me he was gone, but it was probably my mother. I imagine she would have been calm, despite her own sadness, and I would have been pragmatic. We’ll still live here? I probably asked. I’ll still go to school?
Eight years later, Julie had come into my early morning bedroom to tell me our mother had drowned. I remember that more clearly. The sash of my sister’s pink bathrobe tightly knotted, her feet inexplicably bare though the wooden floor had to be freezing.
Those were the dark days, those days limned with black and pinned to the timeline of my life, the days that marked the ends of some things and the uncertain beginnings of others. My father’s silent leaving, my mother’s sudden death. My baby’s birth, swathed tight in a pain so powerful that it carried me to another realm entirely to watch my daughter’s arrival into the world. But I endured it. I gritted my teeth and focused, knowing it would all be worth it. And it had been, for one single, beautiful day.
I was many things: stubborn, impulsive, driven. But I’d never once thought of myself as cowardly. As I lay on the thin, bumpy mattress that smelled of must and insect repellant, listening for sounds of Frank’s and Peyton’s departure, I realized that was exactly what I had become. A coward. Or worse, maybe it’s what I’d always been, all along.
The shallow puddles glinted in the morning sun. Last night’s storm had scrubbed the streets clean. When I reached the lake, the water throbbed extra blue, and the sky was painfully bright. The sand was pocked by raindrops. I started toward a vendor, the umbrella over his cart green-striped and beckoning, the appetizing aroma of coffee drifting over, when someone called my name.
Fred stood on the back patio of Lakeside, broom in hand. “Word to the wise,” he said. “Don’t buy coffee from Hank. He recycles his grounds.”
“Right now, even that sounds good.”
“Hold on. I just put on a pot. Let me fetch you a cup.” When he returned with a tall paper cup, he waved away my money. “You kidding? We’re not even open yet.”
“Thanks,” I said, and took a sip. “This is great.”
“French roast. You’re welcome to sit out here. I can set up a table.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll go down by the lake.”
“Have at it. I might join you after I get things going.”
“Sure.” I started to turn away when he said, “I almost forgot—your friend was in the other night, looking for you.”
It couldn’t have been Joe. Fred would have said so. “Which friend is that?”
“Big dude with tiny teeth. You remember. Some sort of salesman.”
Right. Mr. Specialty Chemicals. I gave Fred a pointed look, like ha-ha. “Too bad I missed him.”
He grinned. “Feel free to come back for a refill.”
I found a bench in the sun and wiped the wood dry with a handful of paper napkins. Sitting down, cup balanced beside me, I studied Julie’s notebook for whatever it was I had missed. The more the answer eluded me, the more certain I became that it was there, somewhere. The numbers, the names, the addresses. Maybe if I plotted everything on a map, something would jump out at me. Then I saw i
t: toward the last page, a word in the margin that had been heavily crossed out. I held it up to the sun and squinted. My name, dana. What did it mean? I sipped my coffee and thought.
This time five days ago, Halim and I had been placing charges, rolling out det cord, studying the blueprints one final time. We’d been focused on the job at hand, but also thinking about the next one. Would there be a next one? I hadn’t placed a single phone call on our behalf. I’d left it all in Halim’s hands.
Ahmed might have misled me. He might have wanted me to feel doubt and worry about whether I deserved to be Halim’s partner. After all, he’d been there before I joined the company, and all along the way he’d let me know I was the intruder. Making sure he was the one who signed the delivery sheets. Keeping phone numbers from me at critical times. He’d be talking to Halim, and when I entered the room, he’d stop and look busy. Why had I put up with it these past five years? Because it kept me moving, kept me from dwelling on the past, forced me to focus on the future. All the reasons I didn’t want to be back here in my hometown; all the reasons I couldn’t leave.
“J-Julie?”
LT Stahlberg stood behind me on the path that cut between beach and grass. He’d gotten fat, his sweatshirt stretching across his solid chest and thick arms, his big cheeks squeezing his eyes into slits. Aluminum foil was wrapped around his head, and his face was alarmingly red. Was anyone monitoring his blood pressure? “Hi, LT,” I said, hoping I hid the dismay I felt seeing him looking so unwell. “It’s Dana.”
“Dana.” He seemed to think about that, then nodded. “Julie’s sister.”
“That’s right.”
“Julie’s gone.”
“Yes.” The simplicity of that welled up in me, pushed aside the busyness I’d protected myself with. I cleared my throat. “How are you? It’s been a long time.”
“Don’t come over here,” he said. “You’ve got sand on your shoes.”
So he really hadn’t changed. He used to huddle on the playground, terrified to set foot on the grass because of the worms. “What’s the matter with sand?”
“It’s made from rocks, from all over. Trucks brought it here, with different license plates. You don’t know where those rocks are from. They could be radioactive.”
Was this how I’d sounded to Doc Lindstrom? “You know, I was worried about the sand, too.”
“You were?”
“I talked to Doc Lindstrom about it. He said it’s perfectly safe. You remember him, right?”
“He put a cast on my arm.”
That had been a long time ago. It had been bright pink and Brian Gerkey had taunted him mercilessly. You a girl? That what your problem is, LT?
I’d swelled up with an emotion so powerful that it burst right out of me. I’d wheeled around and smacked Brian with my skateboard, and I bet he still had the scar on his arm to prove it. The sight of the blood had sent LT running. It took Irene Stahlberg all afternoon before she found him, huddled in the pavilion, sobbing.
The summer I was fourteen and applying for a job, Alice Gerkey hired me on the spot without so much as glancing at my application, not saying a word about how I’d once beaten up her only son. I always suspected she felt he had it coming to him.
LT shuffled his feet. “Going to the doctor’s what made Julie sick. All those things plugged into the wall. She used that stuff all the time. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“You talking about blood pressure cuffs, stuff like that?”
He crossed his arms over the bulk of his belly, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Doc Lindstrom uses those things, too. So he wouldn’t know about the sand. No way, José. He can’t know for sure.”
“If you’re worried about the beach, then why are you down here?”
His eyes widened. “Dana,” he said, reproving. “It’s the lake. The water absorbs the rays. I just wish I could get closer.”
“What if you wore boots or something? You could walk out to the pier and sit on the end.”
“That won’t work. Sand gets in everything. It’s good today because it’s heavy from the rain. It won’t fly up or anything right now. So this is a good time.”
“It is a good time,” I agreed. “It’s quiet out here.”
“You can hear your thoughts. You can hear if anyone’s listening to them.”
I was wrong. He’d gotten worse since the last time I saw him. I felt a tug of sorrow. “I hear you’re living on your own now.”
“It’s a pretty cool place. There are three other guys and they’re okay. I have to check in and out whenever I go anywhere, like to the store or to work. But I don’t mind. At least that way someone knows where I am, in case the aliens find me and take me away.”
Aliens were new. “Has that happened before?”
He lowered his voice. “I hear them talking. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and they’re whispering in my ears.”
Poor LT, living in a frightening world peopled by his own nightmares. “Is that what the foil’s for?”
He patted the thin silver. “It keeps them from reading my mind.”
It probably made things worse, the foil rustling against his ears and confounding noise. I held up my cup. “You want coffee or something?”
“No! Don’t come any closer. The sand, remember?”
“Oh, right.” The sand that was now clinging to the bottom of his sweatpants. I hoped it fell off before he realized it.
“Dana, does it happen to you, too? When you wake up, can you tell that things have changed while you were sleeping?”
Change. Maybe that was it. He was looking at me, waiting. “Well, sometimes my dreams can make me think about things in a different way.”
He nodded, sending the foil pieces sliding down his cheeks. “That’s why we have to be careful. That’s why we always have to watch.”
What were his touchstones, the things he used to keep himself balanced? Had one of them been Julie? “It’s good you’re doing that.”
“Yeah?” His face relaxed, and I wondered what small comfort I’d given him.
A low rumble made him glance upward. “I got to go. Planes can kill you.”
He lurched down the narrow path, his feet making odd steps as he tried to avoid swaths of sand washed across the cement, as the low grumble of the plane chased after him.
Shielding my eyes, I squinted up at the white machine with its wings outstretched and tried to make out whether it was Joe’s, but in the end one small plane looks pretty much like another, and I watched it grow smaller and smaller until it was just a speck sailing into the sun.
Martin smiled, seeing me. His cheeks were puffy, the skin stretched taut across his face. His look of surprised joy took me aback, and I felt ashamed. I had had every intention of leaving town the day before without saying goodbye, of just packing up my suitcase and driving away.
Turning to the nurse walking alongside him into the dialysis clinic’s waiting room, he said, “I’m good now. My daughter’s here.”
I didn’t let my step falter. I didn’t react at all.
The nurse glanced at me, confusion evident on her face. We didn’t know each other. “That’s nice,” she said. “Why don’t you sit out here for a little while and make sure you’re ready to go?”
Two Native American children played on the floor, and as Martin lowered himself to an upholstered chair, a crayon rolled his way. Bending, he handed it to them. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have brought my Scrabble board, but Milly Peterson’s using it. She’s got some championship going.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I just wanted to talk, anyway.”
“Oh, sure, then.”
The nurse lifted an afghan from the back of the couch, a dizzying swirl of dandelion yellow and purple, and folded it around Martin’s knees. She gave me a meaningful look, and I nodded. I’d stay with him for a while.
“How are you two doing?” she asked the children.
“Fine,” the
older one said.
“Is our mommy done yet?” the younger girl asked.
“One more hour, honey.” The nurse patted Martin’s shoulder, and walked back through the sliding doors into the dialysis room.
“What’s up?” Martin asked me.
“I’ve been thinking that Julie was right—something’s making people sick.”
“Even though the Department of Health said it’s all clear?”
“Even though.”
His gaze moved around the room and came to rest on the children playing nearby. “Go on,” he said, at last.
“I thought you might be able to help me figure out what’s changed in Black Bear over the past few years.” Change, LT had said. What had changed overnight, literally and figuratively?
The clock on the wall above his head chirred, and the hour hand struck one.
He sat back. “Let’s see. Were you here when they opened that new highway north of town?”
“Highway 10?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Took half the traffic right out of town, and the stores really suffered.”
“I was here.” Ten had opened way back when I was a teenager, and we’d christened it with drag races until the highway patrol stopped us. It had curved around Black Bear now for almost twenty years and could have nothing to do with what I was searching for.
“A few years back, we got a girl on the high school football team,” he mused. “That was big news around here.”
“That’s not the kind of changes I’m talking about.”
“I know, I know. I’m just trying to jog things loose.”
He was right. I needed to let him do this in his own way. “Okay. A girl joined the football team.”
“We added two more handicapped spots in front of the library. The Main Street Café started serving breakfast on weekends.”
The younger girl looked up, the light polishing the glossy lengths of her hair. “We got new swings at school.”
“There you go. We got new swings.”
Which neither he nor Julie had been anywhere near. Satisfied, the little girl returned to her coloring.
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