The Vanishing Season

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  Pauline,

  Maggie looked at the piece of paper, realizing for the first time the complexity of writing to Pauline. What would she say? What wouldn’t she say?

  Things are pretty flat here. Scary as usual. Glad you are in killer-free Milwaukee, though I miss you a ton. Elsa says we (our thriving metropolis of Gill Creek) are going to be featured on 60 Minutes next week. They’re interviewing the police chief and of course Hairica. Elsa is always the first to know these things.

  Liam finished the sauna. The only thing missing is you.

  Love, Maggie

  A week after Liam had shown up on her porch, Maggie sat over a letter to Pauline. She told herself she was only partially obscuring the truth. She did miss Pauline. But nothing, in those middle days of January, was flat. Not the rise and fall of her breath when she saw Liam walking across the snowy side yard or the spiking and slamming of her pulse when he pulled her against a tree to kiss her on their long rambles through the woods or the way her heart spiked when she opened her door to find something he’d left her on the porch: a book on caterpillars or a pair of binoculars or a pinecone.

  Maggie felt like she’d put herself knowingly in danger for the first time in her life, and it was scary and exhilarating. She wanted to talk to someone about it—her mom or Elsa or Jacie, but she didn’t know how to put something so overwhelming into words. Her dad was the person she usually talked to about big things, but talking to him about Liam would make her feel awkward and squidgy. Invisible as it might be to everyone else, she felt like she’d jumped a gap.

  She put the letter in an envelope, addressed and stamped it, then sat staring out her window. At a loss, she stood and went to her shelves, found her old sketchbook, and sat again, studying the pictures one by one. She’d done them ages ago when she still drew: sketches of her mom rolling out bread dough, her apartment building in Chicago, butterflies in the park they used to go to. She’d filled the outlines in with pastels; that had always been her favorite part. The drawings were mostly gray pencil with flashes of color on cheeks or wings or eyes.

  Biting her lip thoughtfully, she dug out her old charcoals and pastels and opened to an empty page. She started drawing the Boden house across the lawn, giving the windows the warm light that let you know there was life going on inside. Sketching things like this had always taken her somewhere else—to a version of life that was vivid and where everything meant “something,” even inanimate objects. She wanted to make the house reflect the personality of its residents. She remembered when she’d been little, she’d been able to sit and draw for hours at a time. Was it too late to go back to that feeling? After a few false starts in which she couldn’t get the warmth of the windows quite right, she let out a frustrated sigh. No matter how hard she tried, the angles were wrong, the house looked lifeless, and the colors she’d picked and blended didn’t fit.

  “I’m too rusty,” she said to no one.

  She tried a couple more strokes, getting nowhere, then closed the sketchbook and put it back on its shelf.

  I’ll try again tomorrow, she thought. Maybe Liam will let me sketch him, for practice.

  She did come back to it the next night and the night after that. Sometimes she tried to draw Liam. But always, when she did, the person who ended up flying from her pencil—with the scar down her back and the spaced-out teeth and the lit-up eyes—was Pauline.

  It was amazing how quickly a roof could be rebuilt, though it was a slipshod one and needed to be shingled. Liam and his dad had moved out all their waterlogged things and pulled up the rugs. Insurance was paying for a lot, but as born do-it-your-selfers, they were reflooring the living room themselves. Liam’s room was livable, and his dad had moved down to what had been a spare room at the other end of the house until his room was ready. It was a little drafty but not too uncomfortable. The insulation had gone in almost immediately after the roof.

  Maggie snuck out the first night they were back, surprising him by tapping on his window. She crawled in, and he pulled her under the covers with him and covered her in kisses, on her lips, her cheeks, her neck, her forehead—breathing her in in his sleepy, half-awake, but very turned-on way. He touched her as if he were afraid of offending her or invading her space, just very lightly on her arms, her neck, shyly, his hands slightly trembling like he was trying to keep himself in check. Maggie was less gentle toward him and was embarrassed by how much she wanted to touch as much of him as possible. He threaded his fingers through hers tightly. “I never saw this coming,” he kept saying.

  “I never really even loved kissing guys before this,” she whispered. “I never really got what everyone was making such a big deal about. My friend Jacie used to call me Saint Margaret. When she wasn’t calling me Grandma.”

  “Maybe you were just picky.”

  Maggie smiled. “Don’t you think highly of yourself?”

  They didn’t talk about Pauline. Her name was conspicuously missing from their hours together. Maggie didn’t even have room in her head for Pauline. She was threaded as taut as a wire; her thoughts were scattered and her blood ran hot; even running didn’t help on the days when the road was clear enough to do it.

  She couldn’t burn the energy out of her veins. And Liam, apparently, felt the same way. Often he lingered in her yard with Abe even after they’d said good-bye, as if going farther and farther out of her sight was painful. He’d crouch and scratch Abe’s ears, delaying, and smile up at her window before trailing off slowly through the woods or down Water Street.

  But there was the sense of waiting too. There was a feeling that they were in a bubble, and Maggie had the overwhelming sense, from time to time, that it would have to pop whenever Pauline came home. But that might be months away. And it might be never.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  16

  MAGGIE HAD DECIDED TO SUCK IT UP AND START DOING HER OWN LAUNDRY, but she still always hurried through it because she didn’t like to stay down in the cellar long. One afternoon as she was yanking the last of the warm, dry clothes from the dryer into her laundry basket, she noticed an envelope at the bottom of the stairs that led to the slanted outer door. It looked like it had been slid in under the door. She opened the envelope to find a folded note and some dried flowers.

  Maggie,

  You may never find this, since you never go underground, but I thought it might be cool to see if you did.

  I picked these daisies in the summer and stuck them in a book. Now they’re a little piece of summer for you.

  Maggie, I don’t always string words together brilliantly when I’m talking, but I wanted to say you are so beautiful. Your curves and those firm legs make me light-headed. But you’re also this beautiful person. You always think about other people. You never shout for attention, you’re a sleeper, you hold all your best stuff close to your chest. You always seem to know where you’re going. You always seem to know exactly who you are.

  I’m so glad I met you. I can’t wait to touch you again. Smack my mouth, but damn I have to say I like touching you.

  Liam

  Maggie traced the words with her fingers and wondered if it was bad that they made her want to undress Liam. She wondered if he’d picked and dried the flowers thinking he’d give them to Pauline. But she decided she didn’t care, that she wouldn’t look a gift flower in the mouth. The old Maggie would have parsed things out and gone over the possible negatives. But not now. She blushed thinking that her mom might have found the note instead of her.

  She started to tuck it into her pocket, but instead she decided to hide it somewhere in the basement, like her own dragon treasure. She tucked it near the back of the room, on a ledge, under an old piece of loose cinder block. Maybe someone would find it one day and wonder about it, just like she’d found the bracelet.

  That afternoon they raced through the woods in their big boots,
and Liam caught her around her stomach and hugged her tight against him like he’d never let go, then threw her in the snow to make her laugh. Cold and wet, they ran to the sauna and, once inside, they sat with their legs entwined and took off their shirts. Maggie felt as if she were unwrapping pieces of herself and letting him see, inside and out.

  He leaned his forehead against hers. It was strange how she’d never made so much eye contact with anyone in her life, but it was endlessly interesting with him. It felt like she was coming to know exactly the numbers of lines in the coronas around his pupils. He traced her shoulders with his hands, carefully avoiding moving them anywhere else.

  “I should have built this for you,” he said.

  “Let’s pretend that you did.”

  Liam sat up, pulling away from her. She felt the loss of his body the moment she wasn’t touching him. “Okay, let’s make it official,” he said. He opened the sauna door, peering around onto the ground outside, then stepped out in his bare feet.

  “You’re going to freeze, Crazy.”

  After a couple of minutes the door opened and he reappeared, happy and shivering, with a nail in his hand. “I knew I’d left a couple of these suckers in the gutter.”

  He shoved the door closed and, still shivering, raised his hand above it, just under the roofline, etching something in the wood with the tip of the nail. When he stepped back, she saw he’d carved a word there: Maggie’s.

  He sank back down beside her, laying the nail in a slat of the bench.

  “I wanna take you somewhere this afternoon,” he said. “If we leave early, we can be back when we’re supposed to.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  Liam looked pained, and then he said, “No. It’s something just for you. I’ve never even been there myself.”

  Maggie sank in tighter against him, their chests touching.

  “Yes,” she said. “Okay.”

  They left within the hour.

  * * *

  I step back. I know it’s not for me to watch. I give the lovers their privacy, that’s the least they deserve: one moment that’s just for them. For these moments of Maggie’s life, her love flares up and lights up the world. It’s like dropping a match into a well.

  I hide in the cellar and try, instead, to imagine myself into these places.

  I imagine us as friends. We laugh and run around in circles, leaving our footprints in the snow. I don’t know what my footprints would look like, what size shoe I had if I ever lived, who Pauline and Liam and Maggie would have seen when they looked at me. But still I imagine we’re lying on the Larsen roof, talking about all the people we know, that I am a teenager too. In my imagination there are so many people I know and love.

  We could have set the world on fire too, if we’d been friends. But we never were.

  I try to imagine that the three of them—or even just Pauline and Maggie—come with me into the cellar, where the bright emptiness is, the growing shaft of light. I try to imagine that they stand beside me when I finally get close. But I always get there first and too fast. And the big, empty place is there as if it’s just been waiting for me the whole time. And I’m so scared—so deeply scared with every fiber of my invisible existence—to go away.

  Then again, sometimes I worry I will never leave Door County at all.

  * * *

  A couple of days later, Maggie and Liam drove to the local diner for dinner in Liam’s dad’s car. It was dusk, and they wove along the windy road into town, watching the lights begin to come on in the houses along their route.

  They kept the windows cracked despite the cold because it smelled so good, piney and fresh. Liam turned up the heat full blast, and the cold and hot mixed together. He tuned the radio to Delilah, and soft, cheesy music drifted into the air. He grinned at her. But Maggie was lost in thought. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know how. She thought maybe Liam Witte was her first great thing, and she wanted him to know. But then the moment passed by as he took a slow left and they pulled up to the diner.

  They were just pulling into a spot when she noticed the flashing red and blue lights at the police station across Route 42. Liam parked, and they climbed out and stood with their backs against the car, staring.

  Reporters had gathered in front of the main door of the station, and the parking lot was so bright with camera lights, it looked like it could be daytime. A few people had come out of the diner to watch, and one of the waitresses Maggie knew walked up beside them.

  “Can you believe it?” she asked. “He works at the antiques shop. All this time. Can you believe it?”

  They stared at the spectacle across the street as Gerald Turner was led across the lot in handcuffs. Cars and TV crews were pouring into the lot, and so many flashes were going off, it felt like lightning.

  That night it was on every broadcast in the county. The Door County Killer had been caught.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  17

  PAULINE BODEN CAME HOME HOLDING JAMES FALK’S HAND. SHE STOOD AT Maggie’s door one gray afternoon in early February like she’d never left. She lowered her chin into her bright blue Patagonia ski jacket and said that her mom had let her come home for good now that the killer had been caught.

  She shoved a gift into Maggie’s hand: a snow globe of Milwaukee, white snow coming down on the buildings and the river. Maggie held it in her palm, not knowing what to say.

  James—tall, dark-haired, muscular—stood beside her, looking at Maggie directly and confidently. He looked exactly like the kind of guy Maggie would have pictured Pauline with when she’d first met her—very handsome and athletic, with an air of holding the world on a string. He thrust his hand into Maggie’s.

  “Mags. Great to meet you.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows at Pauline. Mags? Pauline shrugged.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” James went on, reaching an arm around Pauline. “My girl really missed you.”

  “Um, yeah, I missed her too,” Maggie said.

  “Well, I was just dropping her home so . . .” James leaned over and kissed Pauline, pulling her in by the waist. Pauline gave the slightest resistance, let him peck her lips, and then pulled away. “I’m sure I’ll be at Pauline’s a lot, but don’t be a stranger. The more the merrier. See you.”

  “Bye.” They watched him walk across the yard to the driveway. Maggie wondered if he had just given her permission to hang out with her friend. Pauline turned back to her, her eyes lighting up.

  “Come help me unpack.”

  In Pauline’s room items flew from her suitcase like a hurricane. Her mom had cleaned her room while she was gone, but it was quickly disheveled as Pauline tossed clothes on the floor and toiletries across her desk. Two iPods; her portable Bose speakers; several sparkly tops; and a pair of new, bright-red platforms tumbled onto the floor, where Pauline shoved them under her bed. She talked excitedly while she threw her clothes in the pile and tossed everything else—a cracked iPad, a Tiffany heart bracelet, two purses—toward her dresser. “I’m so happy to be home. So, so happy. How are things? How’s the shop? How are your parents?”

  “The shop is closed. I didn’t tell you? My parents are good. Everything else is”—Maggie paused, looking around the room—“the same.” Maggie swallowed guiltily. “They’re planning a Valentine Social thing, down at the Clipper.”

  “Oh, they always do that.” Pauline waved her hand dismissively. She was pale and thinner even than she had been when she’d left.

  Pauline noticed Maggie studying her. “I know, I look like I’m withering away. I can’t take another week of winter, I’ll die.”

  “You should try eating something other than Twizzlers.” Pauline pulled a wrinkled, balled shirt out of the suitcase, squinted at it like she’d never seen it in her life, then threw it across the room.

  “Yeah, I just ha
ven’t had much of an appetite. I don’t know why.”

  Maggie nodded. “So, James seems, um, familiar with you.”

  “I know,” she said apologetically. “It’s a little intense. He’s been trying to get me to go out with him forever, so I guess he’s a little . . . enthusiastic. He’s already saying that if I move to Milwaukee after I graduate, he will too.”

  “Huh.” Maggie couldn’t picture Pauline ever liking someone so clingy.

  “He’s kind of . . . intent on things. But he boxes, to get out all his energy.”

  “Huh.”

  “I know. Who boxes? But he likes it.”

  Pauline unpacked sweaters and boots, and at the bottom of her suitcase was a postcard. It was a piece of old Scandinavian-looking art, pencil-drawn, with a wooden Scandinavian-looking house in the background and a creepy, bony old lady hobbling along the rocks of a lakeshore. Pauline saw her studying it.

  “It’s from Liam,” Pauline said. “It’s so dumb.” She held it up. “It’s Pesta. Remember, the goddess of death I was telling you about? He said he saw it in a junk store and thought of me. Because he thinks I’m kind of obsessed with her.” She crumpled it, then dropped it lightly into the trash can beside her dresser.

  “So how does it feel that the Door County Killer gave you a gramophone?”

  Maggie hated talking about it. It still felt surreal to her. She actually hadn’t come around to believing it yet. She knew she should tell her parents, that maybe she’d be called as some kind of witness, but the idea of laying that kind of stress down on her mom right now—just when things seemed to be coasting for the first time in years—was extremely unappealing.

  They sat in silence for a while. Finally Maggie said, “Did you hear about the fire?”

  Pauline nodded. “My mom told me.”