by Sara Beitia
With the added pressure that he and Olivia aren’t the only ones in the race.
He stares up at the starlit sky, wishing his brain would rest long enough for him to catch another scrap of sleep, one without nightmares.
The thought of Lily hurts him again, a physical pain. Where is she, and what is she thinking? He gives the wall at his head a vindictive punch. It’s like punching ice; an indifferent shingle scrapes off the skin of his knuckles and does nothing for his frustration.
“Feel better?” Olivia’s awake, too.
“No.” He shivers in the cold and adjusts the hard life preserver under his head. “I wish I knew what to do.”
“That’s definitely my sister, in a nutshell,” Olivia says.
Silence again. Albert’s thoughts fracture and subside. His breathing grows slow and deep.
Some time later, Albert’s eyes are popping open again and something is wrong. He’s surprised to find that he has slept; it’s still dark. He feels a hand at his back. Ignoring the crick in his neck, he rolls over instinctively and catches hold of a slim wrist, pulling himself and the owner of the wrist to a sitting position.
Olivia gives a stifled cry and they glare at each other.
“What the hell?” he says, snatching up the object that’s fallen from her fingers. He holds up Lily’s letter. “Why’d you pick my pocket while I was asleep?”
“I had a dream.” Before he can react to this, she takes the letter back from him and scrambles to her feet, away from him, holding the little piece of paper up in an attempt to catch any light. “I wanted to read it again but I didn’t want to wake you up.” Her voice is excited.
Catching her excitement, Albert says quickly, “What is it?”
“We were just being stupid,” she says, ignoring him. “Or maybe just I was. It doesn’t matter. Albert,” she says, “I was so scared when she wasn’t here and there was that smelly bum pile in the boat house—but she was only here for a moment, if at all. She was just passing through. I was having a dream, I don’t even remember it really, and when I woke up, I remembered that the boat was gone.”
“The boat?”
“Shut up. I’m trying to tell you … I know what we missed. I know where she is!”
He staggers up and gives her a happy squeeze, then pulls her arms from around his neck. He’s still confused, but her excitement is so genuine it’s hard not to feel it too. “What are you talking about? How do you know where she is?”
She takes a deep breath. “When we were in the boathouse, I noticed that the canoe was gone. It always hung there when we were here in the summers. Well, whenever we weren’t using it, which was all the time. And it was gone this time, but I didn’t really think anything of it. It’s been so long …”
“You’re still not making any sense.” He wonders whether shaking her will make the story come spilling out any faster.
“We’re so stupid,” she says again. “I just hope she’ll hold on a little while longer until we get there.” Albert’s face must show what he’s thinking, because Olivia says hastily, “You know Lily and her secrets. She had a secret place here that last summer.”
“And you just now thought of it?” But a dim memory reaches him as he says it, and it hovers at the edge of his consciousness, just out of reach.
“I know. But she only had it for an afternoon before I knew about it and it wasn’t a secret anymore. And then I forgot, because we never came back. It was almost nothing, except to Lily.”
Neither of them can stay still. So they walk around the house in the dark, down to the end of the little dock and back, the lapping water a black pool around them. They make a wide, slow circuit around the cottage and the lakefront while Olivia tells Albert what she’d missed about The Last Good Place.
It was late summer, she explains—the last summer, it turned out, that Rene Odilon and her two daughters would go to the little cabin by the lake. “We’d spent the morning doing something together, I don’t even remember what. I remember Mom sending us to our room for a nap while she went to hers for one, too. I fell asleep. When I woke up, Lily wasn’t there. I figured she’d gotten up to go play without me, which was something she was always doing—I wanted to play with her and she wanted to play alone.
“I slipped out of bed to find her, all quiet so Mom wouldn’t hear me, because I knew Lily would be mad if I got her in trouble. I went all around the house looking for her, and when I couldn’t find her I went outside. I couldn’t find her there, either. I think I must have decided to go down to the water, because I remember I was walking barefoot in the sand when I looked out on the water and saw Lily out there in the boat. She was so far away I could barely make her out.
“I was terrified—afraid she would drown but also afraid Mom would catch her. I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to the house and got into my bed. I guess I fell asleep, and when I woke up, Mom was shaking me and asking me where Lily was.”
“Did you tell her?” Albert asks.
Olivia shakes her head. “Not at first. I was more afraid of Lily getting mad at me for tattling than I was of Mom. But after several hours, when Lily still hadn’t come back and Mom was upset and crying and worried out of her mind, I told her what I’d seen. I acted like I’d seen it from the window, like I might have thought it was a dream. My mom was frantic when I told her. She was about to call the police when Lily came into the house.” Olivia looks toward the black lake as if reliving the day.
“All Lily would say was that she’d been rowing around the lake. Mom was really angry but she believed her. I didn’t believe her, though, because I knew that look she had on her face. She was hiding something. When we were alone in our room after Mom sent us both to bed, I asked her where she’d really gone. She didn’t want to tell me and at first she told me the same story she’d told Mom. But I told her she had to tell me, that she owed me because she’d gone off without taking me with her. So she started to tell me where she’d gone, but that wasn’t good enough, either. I wanted her to take me there. I knew it had to be good if she needed to lie about it.
“So the next morning, right after breakfast, Lily told Mom we were going rowing on the lake. Once we were in the canoe, Lily steered us along the shore until she found what she was looking for—this little stream cutting through an arm of marshy land and flowing toward some other part of the lake. The stream got wider and we floated for a long time, not paddling, not even talking, until we came to this little island-y thing. I guess it was a like a small peninsula. It was crowded with aspen trees and there was this little falling-down house that didn’t have any glass or doors and barely even a roof, with plants growing inside and through it. Lily told me it was a miner’s shack and that she’d played there all yesterday afternoon. It was tiny, hidden in the trees, and I understood why she’d wanted to keep it a secret. It was perfect.”
Albert waits for her to go on, but Olivia is apparently done. “Get it? That’s where she is, I’m sure.”
“Let’s go then.”
“No,” she says. “I can’t find it in the dark. We can’t do anything until it gets light. And when it does, if I can find the way, maybe we’ll finally catch a break.”
When Albert doesn’t immediately respond, she shrugs, that feigned universal indifference that she seems to have perfected, and leaves him at the edge of the little yard. A moment later he hears the tarp crinkle under her weight.
He follows her, lying down next to her on the cold stiff tarp, but the idea of sleep is ludicrous—he’s too excited. Lily might be okay after all. And they might find her after all. And things might work out after all. It’s too good to think about directly; like staring into the sun, it hurts.
He tries to calm his racing heart, feeling that dawn has never been as far away as it is right now. After an eternity made up of wakeful minutes, he receives a second shock, which sends sleep flying away for good.
A sharp crack, like a twig breaking, makes his unsleeping eyes fly open, and he’s s
ure he sees a moving shadow just a couple of feet away. Albert blinks and sits up, unsure whether sleep cobwebs are messing up his perception or what. But what he sees isn’t a tree, or his imagination, or even a stranger.
It’s Patrick MacLennan.
On their first date, Albert had scrounged together all the money he had so he could take Lily out. He was as nervous as he’d ever been and unable to believe his luck that she’d agreed to go out with him. He couldn’t think of anything cool to do, and the idea of trying to eat while sitting across from this beautiful, fascinating girl made him choke, so he took her to the only vaguely datish place he could think of in Little Solace. He took her bowling. And he had to beg and plead with his parents in order to get the keys to his dad’s rusty old Dodge.
Between home and Lily’s house and the bowling alley, the car acted like it was about to die at every other intersection. The bowling itself was a disaster. They both sucked at it, and it was so loud in the bowling alley that they couldn’t really talk. When they gave up after two games and got back into Albert’s dad’s car to leave, they both smelled like the cigarette smoke from the crowded lanes and neither of them could think of anything to say.
Wanting to sink into a hole and disappear, Albert steered the car automatically toward Lily’s house.
“Hey,” she said after a couple of blocks, “do you want to get some pie or something? I don’t feel like going home yet.”
They ended up going to the twenty-four-hour diner at the truck stop by the freeway and talking over muddy coffee until three hours past Albert’s curfew. When he dropped Lily off in front her house, it felt like no time had passed but also like they’d always known each other. Somehow, while they were self-consciously trading bites from a big slab of peach pie, Albert’s little crush had turned into lovesickness. He caught major hell from his worried parents when he finally got home, but it had been so worth getting in trouble.
There was a second date, after they were both ungrounded. Inexperienced Albert found out that on a second date, Lily hinted at everything. On the third date, she did almost everything. And Albert—who had done nothing besides making out with a couple of girls and getting oh-so-briefly to second base once with a girl he’d taken to a party—couldn’t believe his good luck. For some reason, this awesome and kinda scary girl wanted him as much as he wanted her.
On the fourth date—whether they were dates, exactly, Albert didn’t know or really care—they said they loved each other. Albert had been delirious with desire when he’d said it, but he’d meant it.
It wasn’t too long before Albert was able to recognize when “the Other Lily,” as he thought of it, came around. When she was the Other Lily, she didn’t laugh as much and most definitely didn’t want to be touched. At these times she clung to Albert, craving reassurance but still pushing him away. Her vulnerability was a raw, naked thing, hard to witness and harder for Albert, himself lovesick, to understand.
On that fourth whatever, he’d tried to kiss her, a wet and messy consuming kiss, certainly not the first they’d shared, but she turned her face and his mouth met her cheek instead of her lips. They were alone in her basement and no one else knew he was there. They were squeezed together on an old loveseat, the TV playing a movie on mute and a record spinning out soft music they both ignored.
“Did I do something wrong?” he said.
She wouldn’t look at him and he could see that her eyes were very shiny.
“Hey,” he said, alarmed. “What’s the matter?” The Other Lily had shown up, it seemed.
“It’s so stupid.” She shook her head and laughed, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sometimes I’m afraid you’ll hurt me.”
“I won’t,” he said breathlessly. “I could never, because—
Albert’s first instinct is to shield Olivia from MacLennan, but she’s awake, too, and she’s ducking away before he can do much of anything. From the corner of his eye he sees her spring to her feet. He scrambles up as well, never taking his eyes off MacLennan.
Albert’s tired brain does a few somersaults as he tries to figure out what to do next. He’s been sensing something—someone—for miles, and here that something is. Finally. MacLennan in front of him … not the boogey monster, but a real person. Albert can’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that the guy isn’t here to knock a lunch tray out of his hands for his buddies’ amusement. It’s much more serious.
Albert clenches his fists to stop them from shaking. He wonders what’s going to happen. Are they actually going to have to fight?
Bringing him back to the moment and adding to its surrealness is Olivia’s voice from over his shoulder. “Look, Morales, it’s Perry’s little bitch.” Her voice is bright but brittle, like it’s about to break. As if this is just one setback too many.
“Shut up,” Albert says sharply, adding in a softer voice, “If you piss him off he’s going to punch me, not you.” He glances over at her and sees her biting her lip, her black glare shifting between Albert and MacLennan before settling on MacLennan.
To MacLennan, Albert says, “So?” He wonders how long MacLennan has been hanging around, and what, if anything, he’s heard.
MacLennan takes a step forward and Albert puts out a protective arm to push Olivia back. Albert can’t see anything in MacLennan’s hands, but it’s too dark to be sure and he isn’t taking any chances. “Stop there.”
“You two really know how to make a guy feel welcome,” MacLennan says, putting his hands up. It sounds like he’s laughing, but he takes a few steps back just the same.
“Are you alone?”
“Completely,” MacLennan says. “My truck is about half a mile up the road.”
“He’s probably lying,” Olivia says to Albert. To MacLennan, she says, “Who’s back there? The GWHS Wolverines’ starting line? The cops? Wait, let me guess, your new best friend, my stepfather?”
“Olivia—” Albert says.
But MacLennan interrupts him. “Well, that’s one thing I don’t have to wonder about. Yes, folks,” he says, as if talking to a crowd, “Liv Odilon is still a huge bitch.” Then, to her, “I guess you don’t wonder why no one likes you anymore.”
“Funny,” she says. “I thought it was because you felt guilty for letting my sister almost bleed to death when you idiots were—”
“Stop!” Albert shouts at them both, his voice ringing. “You,” he says to MacLennan in what he hopes is a menacing voice. “What are you doing here?”
MacLennan turns his face up to the sky for a moment and sighs. He doesn’t act menaced. “Looking for you two.”
Afraid to ask the question but asking it anyway, Albert says, “Did Kogen put you up to it?”
“No,” MacLennan says. His face is grim. “I’m here because the cops are looking for you. I’ve been … I guess you could say I’m sort of helping Detective Andersen.”
Albert’s heart sinks. That isn’t much better.
“Then we can assume you’re not here to kill us, anyway,” Olivia says with a humorless laugh. “How’d you find us?”
“I followed you. You’re not as stealthy as you think you are.”
Before MacLennan can say anything else, Olivia is flying at him. “No matter what, she was your friend!” she screams, her voice echoing in the clear air. “Do you want me to tell you what Perry did to her? What he’ll do to me if your cop friends come and force me to go home?”
MacLennan catches her wrists easily as she comes at him, pulling her to his chest and tightening his grip on her. Albert moves to pull Olivia out of MacLennan’s grasp but MacLennan says, “Stay the hell back, Morales, and let me explain.” To Olivia he says, “I don’t want to stand here and keep your arms pinned, but if you don’t calm down and listen to me for a minute, I will.”
“Let go of me, Patrick,” she says in a dead tone.
He does. He releases her with a small push and she stumbles away from both him and Albert. She sits on a rock a little bit away.
&n
bsp; “Are you going to explain, then,” asks Albert, “or are you stalling for time?”
“Why would I be stalling?”
“You’re still doing it! Is there a SWAT team waiting nearby or something?”
“You’re a weird dude,” MacLennan says, shaking his head. “I’ve been following you by myself. There’s no one else.”
The meaning of this hits Albert hard, and for a moment he thinks his legs won’t hold him up. He’s been thinking they’ve been so clever, and that if they’ve done nothing else right, at least they’ve managed to escape the net of Little Solace. But here this mouth-breathing jock itch has been right behind them all along. They’ve been just that easy to follow—so easy a not-so-bright guy their own age has done it. They’ve led him along, almost right to Lily.
They haven’t escaped at all; they’ve just been given enough rope to tie neatly around their own necks for whoever wants to pull. The only thing Albert can’t understand is why MacLennan has bothered following them in the first place.
“I don’t get it,” he says. “What happened? From what I saw at the gas station, you’re in pretty deep with Kogen. We’re supposed to believe you’re not helping him now?”
“And why did the police let us get this far, if you’ve been behind us all along?” comes Olivia’s voice from where she sits.
“The police didn’t send me,” MacLennan says. “You don’t understand anything. You haven’t been there.”
“I think we understand enough,” Olivia says.
MacLennan ignores her, wrapped up in trying to make his explanation. “After that thing at the gas station, I was really freaked. I knew Kogen was intense, but that was …” He trails off, shaking his head. “I tried to catch you when I saw you,” he says to Albert, “but you were so fast. I figured you didn’t trust me, and it made sense, because up until right before that night I didn’t trust you, either. I didn’t know what happened to Lily or who might know about it or who was to blame. Then after Kogen got all crazy, waving that gun around—”