“Did I do something wrong?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I thought it meant more to you than that.”
“The cross?” When Shelby saw it, she said, “Huh. Cute.” I caught her eye roll. Maybe that’s why it’s sitting on my dresser.
“You don’t have to pretend it matters to you.” There’s a hitch in his voice.
“It does matter to me! I just forgot it,” I lie. “I was in such a hurry to leave. That’s all.”
“I shared a piece of my past with you.”
“And I’m grateful.”
“I don’t like to complain,” he says, and I murmur in agreement, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard him complain, “but it was a fucking hard thing, me growing up.” He seems to choke on the words. “Really hard, Max.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I realize I don’t know much about that part of his life. I had assumed everything was fine until Henry was killed.
“I did talk about it,” he says, exasperated. “At least I was trying, when I made you the cross that you left at home.”
“We’re hours away by now,” I say, trying to hide the annoyance building in me, “but if it would make you feel better, let’s go back so I can grab it.”
He scoffs. “Don’t protest too much.”
That’s the thing about Chris. He makes jokes about being “just” a welder, but he’s smart as hell. Intuitive, too.
His broad shoulders sag. He’s hurt. I did that. My annoyance crumbles. Harper had told me once there was power in being able to hurt someone. She liked it, she said. I decide I don’t.
“Chris, I’m sorry.”
“Max.” His voice goes misty. He looks up at the stars. “I know it’s just a thing.”
“No, it’s more than that.” I climb out of the truck to stretch. “I should’ve remembered it.” Arching my back, I catch sight of a large shape gathered in the branches above. I think it’s an owl, though it’s hard to make out in the layered darkness. I don’t believe in superstitious bullshit, but owl sightings are supposed to be bad luck. So I hope I’m wrong. The gravelly foghorn call gives her away. A great horned owl. I hear her chiding me for forgetting the cross.
I need to make it right. He’s always asking me to tell him what’s really going on with me. Why am I only ever telling Ezra the whole of it? That has to stop. I clear my throat. “So I got this e-mail.”
I don’t know why I don’t tell him about the girl. I just know that I don’t. I sit on the edge of the truck bed. I tell him about the cyber Good Samaritan. He listens. He takes my hand when he knows what it’s about. I know it sounds cliché, but I feel lighter for the telling.
“Hey,” I say, after the owl hurls herself into the night sky, “do you ever catch yourself thinking about what Henry would be doing?”
“Who?”
“Henry,” I say.
The name swings on a trapeze between us. He’s looking at me with part blankness, part waiting-for-more.
“Your Henry.” I can feel the confusion rearranging my face.
“Oh. Sure, sure. I didn’t hear you, is all. Yeah, of course I think about that. Who wouldn’t?” And then, almost sternly, “You should listen to Jonathan, Max. It sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
It’s only much later, in the motel shower, when something that only tapped at me before pelts me like shards of ice:
I never said the Good Samaritan’s name.
21
HARPER
It’s past midnight. I’m tired, but good luck convincing my brain to shut the hell up and sleep already.
I try sleeping in the room that’s obviously hers. Linnea’s. I dab the name on like perfume at a department store counter. Something I can wash off later.
I can’t do it, though. I can’t sleep here. Everything feels wrong. The smell of her shampoo on the pillowcase. The extra-firm pillow severe under my head. The sheets a Hallmark channel mauve I’d never allow in my own room. Next I try her mother’s bedroom. IKEA nondescript. This should work. Especially because I know the mother isn’t coming home until next week. Nope, not even a lousy yawn.
When I got back here from my fight with Max hours ago, Alma and Julie showed up. The way they crept up to me, brimming with expectancy, told me they hoped Linnea had returned. They must be close friends to know from just a word. Just a hey. I envy that. I’ve had lots of friends, but none that close. And once Ezra and I got serious, I stopped investing time in friends altogether. Many times I envied Max her friendship with Shel.
I did not invite them in. I was too tired to be around people who so clearly were rooting for me not to be around.
“So we figured we should go to the restaurant and give Nicola some excuse for you,”
Alma explained.
“Nicola?”
“Your boss,” Julie said.
“Linnea’s boss,” I corrected.
Julie pushed her glasses up. They caught the sunlight so that bright prisms danced over her eyes. “Yeah, right. We told her that you … I mean Linnea wasn’t feeling well.”
“Okay …” I’m living through something that even science can’t wrap its head around, and they expected me to be worried about some after-school job? “Thanks?”
“She said to tell you she hopes you feel better,” Alma said.
I started to close the door.
“Wait,” Julie said. “We got your … uh … the purse and phone.” “There are like a million texts and missed calls from Linnea’s mom,” Alma said.
“But it hasn’t even been a full day,” I said.
“She’s a worrier,” Julie said.
“If you don’t respond,” Alma said, with the knowing, patient tone of a hostage negotiator, “she’ll come home.”
That’s exactly the last thing I needed, so they coached me in how to calm her down.
Mom! So sorry I missed your calls! Left my cell in freezer at work, can ya believe it? Apple Store geniuses finally thawed it. All is well here.
Working double shift so can’t talk. Miss you lots. But feel great!!
Love you to pieces! Xxoo L
“Can you take it from here?” I said, holding the phone out to Julie.
“You mean … ?”
I nodded. “Take the phone. Keep up the illusion, at least for now. It feels wrong for me to pretend.”
“But we’d be pretending too,” Alma said.
“True, but you’re way closer to the gir—to Linnea than I am, so it’s more sincere coming from you.”
Reluctantly, Julie pocketed it. “She’ll want to hear your voice at some point.”
“Say I woke up with laryngitis.”
They shared a panicked look.
“Look,” I said, “I know this sucks for you.”
Alma nodded. And then got teary. She pressed her fingers against her mouth as if she was holding back a sob. Julie put an arm around her.
“It has to be a million times worse for you,” Julie said to me.
I half-wished she’d put her arm around me.
Although the mother’s room isn’t decked out in dreamy colors I wouldn’t pick, I can’t sleep there, either, because the nightstand is crowded with pictures of Linnea. From baby right on up. Birthday hats, goofy grins, pensive looks, golden autumn leaves, vibrant wildflowers, fake swirly studio backgrounds.
“Jesus,” I grumble. “She’s right down the hall.”
I put them facedown and roll over. No go. I stash them inside the nightstand drawer and try again. I don’t even get my eyes shut. It’s like the photos are accreting strength in their prison. I set them free, rearranging them as before. They almost give off their own light in the dim room, a glow that draws my eyes to it as it dulls everything else. I have to work hard to wrest my gaze out of the picture montage, like I’m heaving a leg out of quicksand.
Shaking off the weird photo hold, I head downstairs. On the way, I’m careful to avoid mirrors. They�
�re cruel because they conspire with my brain to show me what I want to see, not what is. I stretch out on the sofa, blanket myself with a soft throw draped over the back. I wouldn’t say I’m comfortable (which I guess means I’m not Goldilocks), but at least here I feel less like a sneaky borrower and more like a hey-can-I-crash? guest.
It’s too quiet in here. I reach for my phone and open Pandora. God knows where my charger is, but I’ve got enough battery for now. I try a “music for relaxation” station instead of my usual alt indie stuff.
The thought that music can’t drown out, the thought that has trailed behind me from room to room, bed to bed: Max had no right to give something away that wasn’t hers to give.
No right.
If Mom were here, she’d tell me to go easy on Max. “You’re the strong one, Harper,” she’d said to me once. “Max is steady, true, but that’s hiding a fragility underneath.”
The walls of my throat constrict. Mom isn’t anywhere near here. I heard Max and Ezra talking: Mom’s in the hospital. With a broken heart.
I sit up, pain splitting my own chest. Mom. I have to see her. Will she know it’s me? Will she recognize her firstborn even in this unrecognizable body? And if she does, will that be worse for her? And worse for me? Still, I have to see her.
I grab the phone. Nearly 1:00 a.m. Okay. Tomorrow, tomorrow.
Linnea’s purse catches my eye. It feels wrong to rummage in it, more of an invasion than being in her house, but I do it anyway.
As purses go, it’s ordinary as hell. Compact, lip gloss, brush, hair elastics, stray earring, takeout menu, wallet, tissues. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I open her wallet and slide her driver’s license out. Happiest freaking license photo I’ve ever seen. Like Whoo-hoo! I’m road legal! I scowl at it at first, until I feel my lips turn up at the corners in spite of myself. I prop it up against a candle on the coffee table so that the pic is facing me. As I go back into her bag, my palms start to itch and feel peppered with little dots of heat. There’s a paycheck in there, the stub attached.
She worked thirty-seven hours last week. And I don’t remember a single one of them.
“Who are you?” I say to the DMV photo. “Who am I?”
Finally, a yawn. I sense grease slicking the gears of sleep. But a surge of dread in my belly warns me to resist going under. Maybe the real problem with falling asleep is wondering who I’ll be when I wake.
22
MAXINE
“Max? You okay?” Chris knocks, then tries the bathroom door. It’s locked.
“Fine.” I try to make my voice sail over to him on a reassuring breeze.
“You’ve been in there a long time.”
“Just real dirty,” I call out, and dip back under the spray.
So maybe I had said Jonathan’s name when I told Chris about the e-mail. It’s possible, really. Maybe even likely. Did I? I’m so tired.
There’s a pause. “Okay, then,” he says. Another pause. “I’m gonna get some ice. You want anything?”
“Diet Coke?”
“I gotcha, babe.”
I grimace at “babe,” a bite of food I thought would be delicious but now wish I could spit out.
Once I hear the heavy room door open and close, I kick the faucet off with my heel. I twist my wet hair into one of the pitifully thin, nubby towels they warn you not to steal. Wrapping another around my torso, I have to hike it up to my pits and squeeze it to stay in place. It covers up my new tattoo, which is still deeply pink around the edges.
What if I hadn’t mentioned Jonathan’s name? What if Chris only knows it because he knows Jonathan and knew he sent the e-mail?
The towel slides off my body.
Or … What if there is no Jonathan? What if Chris sent that e-mail? And, beyond the fact that Chris was lying to me (at best) and manipulating me (at worst), what would that prove? I wipe a circle of condensation off the mirror and my own face floats up at me, weirdly surprising me for a second. I stare into my tired, tired eyes, as if the answer will float up too. The e-mail was helpful. Maybe he was only trying to help.
I shiver. I grab the towel and wrap it around me again. I pull on sweatpants and the Y’all tee Shelby gave me a couple of years ago. I don’t notice I’m chewing on the inside of my cheek until it hurts. Damn. Where’s Ez?
I untwist my hair and let the sodden towel splat to the floor. As I’m roaming the loud-as-hell dryer all around my head, I remember something else. Something I can’t splat to the floor like a used-up towel.
“Who?” That’s what Chris said when I mentioned Henry. Who? I try to imagine an instance when someone would say Harper’s name and I’d respond with “Who?”
I can’t.
Chris said he hadn’t heard me. He heard enough to know I was talking about a someone, though. And we weren’t on the noisy road when it happened, we were in a quiet, grassy field under the stars.
Is Chris a liar?
And so what if he is?
I flick off the hair dryer and try to jam it into its slot on the wall. It keeps falling back into my hand, and I don’t have the fucking patience for this right now. It’s those stupid little things that make you lose your shit, and before I know it I’m crying and I slam the goddamned thing on the counter and its shell cracks and I hear the door open and Chris yell, “Miss me, baby?”
Using the mirror to make sure it’s on straight, I put on my best smile. I fling open the bathroom door. “’Course I did, handsome.”
23
HARPER
There’s a door. At least I think it’s a door. It’s shiny, it reflects my face, but distorted, like a funhouse mirror. I’m pounding on it, screaming.
Help! Help me!
My hands are cramping. Not only from the impact of fists on metal, but from extreme cold. My lipseyelashesnostrils are ice fossils. I’m crying, but within seconds of shedding, the tears turn to skin-frost.
I’m in here!
I grab a plastic tub of some frozen liquid—sauce or soup, who cares—and smash it against the door handle, over and over and over. But nothing gives, nothing breaks, except, eventually, the tub itself.
I’m slowing down. I crumple to the floor.
That’s when the bees come. Not regular bees. These are made of ice. Silver and shimmery, their wings carve chinks into the polar air. They buzz near my ear, until they’re in my ear. Boring straight in and into my brain.
I scream.
“Whaaa?” I’m sitting up on the couch I fell asleep on, cold and yet slicked with sweat. I still hear the buzzing. I swat at my ears.
It’s my phone, spinning and vibrating on the coffee table.
“Hullo?” Icicles cling to my voice.
“Is this Harper’s phone?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“This is Shelby. Max’s friend.”
“I know who you are. Why are you calling me?” Linnea’s driver’s license is right where I left it, her happy pic a bizarre juxtaposition to the dream.
“Is Max with you?”
I feel the cemetery slap all over again. “Why would she be with me? She hates me.”
Shelby’s all business. “Look, she’s not answering her phone. She ignored texts about the boys, and she’d never do that.”
“What’s wrong with the boys?” I throw off the blanket and swing my feet to the floor.
“Nothing. I mean, Will woke up with a sore throat and a little fever. I called to ask her if I should take him to the doctor, in case it’s strep, and I got her voicemail and—”
“Wait a minute, why isn’t she with the boys?”
“That’s not the point,” Shelby snips. “I’m worried about her.”
“I’m sure she’s okay,” I say. “I can take Will to the doc—”
“Can you meet me at the house?”
Someone nailed the laundry room window shut since I last crawled in. Thanks a fucking lot. So I’m sitting on the front steps fingering the red streaks on my arm.
When I was in
the bathroom at Linnea’s house, splashing cold water on my face, I noticed writing on the inside of my left forearm, on the pale thin skin. Yesterday I’d noticed something faded on the other one, indiscernible beyond a few curves and loops. But this one was fresh. And wasn’t there last night.
Even though skin and paper aren’t equal mediums, I can tell the writing is a match to the note Linnea wrote from the freezer. You’d think with all I’ve had to accept over the last day, mysterious writing on my body (not in my handwriting and yet not attributable to anyone but me) wouldn’t warrant a second glance. But, to put it mildly, it freaked me out.
It was in ballpoint ink, so I was able to wash it off. Even if I felt a weird kind of throat-squeeze when loved disappeared.
Shelby pulls up and hops out of her car. “You must be …” she says, gawping from Max’s car in the driveway to me.
I have no patience for unnecessary introductions. “Where are the boys?”
She unlocks the front door and steps inside. “With my mom.”
I follow her. “So what am I doing here?”
She drops the keys on the mail table in the small foyer. They land on a stack of sale circulars and coupons. “I’m really worried about Max,” she says. “What if they had an accident?”
“They?”
“Her and her boyfriend.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Not sure.”
“Why didn’t she tell you?” I ask.
“It’s not like that. She needed a few days away. She’s been under a lot of stress, you know. That’s why I took her brothers.”
“Her” brothers. Not “your” brothers. “So maybe she wants you to deal with everything. She’s never micromanaged the boys before.”
“You really don’t know what’s happened in the last year, do you?” She shakes her head. “She’s different now. The boys are everything to her.”
The front door opens. Ezra bounds inside, out of breath. “I can’t reach her,” he says, as if he’s been part of the conversation the whole time.
“What’s he doing here?” I say to Shelby.
“I called him.”
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