What We Lost

by Sara Zarr

  “Don’t pay attention to Paul,” I say to Daniel’s back. “No one thinks that’s what you meant.”

  He turns around, eyes red and watery, a smear of chocolate on his T-shirt, which is stretched tight across his stomach. “It was stupid of me to stay that. I was trying to be funny. It’s a reflex. God, I’d be the worst pastor in the history of the world.”

  “No. Don’t say that.”

  He wipes his hand over one eye, and leans against the wall in the hallway. “I don’t know if you know, but Erin told us about your mom. I mean, I knew something was up. But she told us officially. I thought you’d want to know.”

  I blink. “When?” I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s never really been a secret. We just don’t talk about it. Those aren’t the same things. Every day I’m realizing a little bit more that I could have been talking to my friends about it all along.

  “She sent out an e-mail last night. Seriously, Sam, when is your dad going to let you have e-mail? You miss a lot.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Um, not to talk about it unless you brought it up. That it was a hard time for you. Pray for you. All the usual stuff.”

  I nod.

  “So… do you want to? Bring it up?”

  I try to smile. “You already did.”

  “Oh, yeah. Clever how I did that, huh?”

  “Very. That skill will come in handy in your future career.”

  My little joke doesn’t succeed in making him forget what we’re talking about. “So you don’t want to bring it up,” he says.

  I shake my head no. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter right now. We need to focus on Jody.”

  “I can’t even think about Jody. When I got home after the search on Monday I ate like a whole chicken and a bag of chips just to give me something to do other than think about Jody. If I don’t keep making jokes I’m seriously going to start crying and never stop and that’s not cool for me. She’s just this sweet, goofy kid, like…” He puts his hand over his eyes. “Oh, man. Please, say something to keep me from breaking down. Or go get me a pound of chocolate chips. Punch me in the head. Kick me in the crotch. Anything, because I don’t want to feel this.”

  There’s got to be something I could say to him that would matter in this moment, but my brain has seized up. Because he’s right. It’s too much.

  “Like, the brownies,” he continues, uncovering his eyes. “What are we supposed to say to Nick? I don’t even want to go over there. I can’t look at him. Oh, crap…” He clutches his stomach. “Unless you want to be struck down by the toxic cloud of my puke, you should go away now.” He runs into the bathroom and slams the door. I walk back down the hall, running my fingers along the textured wallpaper until I can see the kitchen, where everyone is quiet. Waiting, I guess, for me and Daniel to come back.

  Erin catches my eye. “Is he okay?”

  I shrug. I mean, obviously, no, none of us are okay.

  “I should have kept my mouth shut,” Paul says.

  “I’m sure he’ll let you off the hook,” Erin replies. Then she turns to me. “Sam, they voted that you and I take the brownies to Nick.”

  Allie makes a bunch of noise with the mixing bowls. She’s had a thing for Nick all year, but it’s hard to believe anyone would see this as an opportunity for flirting.

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “You’re least likely to say something lame and embarrassing,” Kaleb says. They know I’m probably least likely to say anything. “We figure some of your dad must have rubbed off, somehow.”

  Well, it hasn’t, is what I want to say. Daniel comes back in, looking pale and clammy. “Hey, man,” he says to Paul. “Sorry for being an ass. Um, a jerk.”

  Erin checks her watch. “We’ve got eight minutes until the brownies are done. It wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world for us to pray.”

  Each slat of the picket fence in front of the Shaw house has a blue ribbon tied around it. Stuffed animals and flowers and handwritten signs and cards completely cover the front porch. I bend down to pick up a teddy bear that’s fallen off the pile and onto its side.

  Erin exhales loudly. “Every time I come to this house, it hits me all over again. When you’re standing right here you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”

  I reposition the teddy bear, thinking about what to say to Nick, and what expression I should have on my face. Is it wrong to smile? I tighten my ponytail and take the brownie platter from Erin so that I have something to do with my hands. She rings the bell. Maybe we won’t even see Nick. Maybe it will be one of Jody’s parents I have to look in the eye, and that would be even worse.

  But the man who answers the door is a stranger, to me at least, an older man leaning on a cane. “Oh, hello again,” he says to Erin.

  “Brownie delivery,” she says. I hold up the plate. “From the youth group. They all wanted to send their love to Nick. Is he home?”

  He opens the door wider.

  “Come on in.”

  “This is Pastor Charlie’s daughter, Sam,” Erin says. I half-smile.

  “Nice to meet you, Sam, I’m Ron. Jody’s grandpa.”

  “Hi.” I hadn’t thought about grandparents. And there are probably cousins and aunts and uncles, too, a whole devastated family.

  “We don’t want to bother you,” Erin says. “But we could visit a little if he’s up to it.”

  “I’m sure Nick would be glad to see you.” We follow him in and he turns and speaks low. “We’ll just keep our voices down. Trish and Al are sleeping. First time in a couple of days. They kind of hit the wall this afternoon after you and Charlie left and are finally getting some rest.”

  “We can just leave these if that’s better,” Erin whispers, glancing up the stairs.

  He waves his cane. “No, no. Nicky is up. The distraction will be good for him. Be right back.” He goes up the stairs slowly, gripping the wooden railing.

  I set the brownie platter on the coffee table; Erin sits on the sofa. The Shaws’ house is older than ours, more interesting and kind of Victorian, with a high-ceilinged formal parlor where we are now. Pictures of Jody and Nick and their parents and other relatives line the piano and mantel. Some of the pictures have been featured on the news—I recognize one of Jody on a beach somewhere, smiling into the camera, showing off a sand dollar. I touch the frame.

  “I love that picture,” Erin says.

  It’s a good picture. But all I can think is how every day the girl in that picture becomes less real. The more she’s on TV and on flyers and represented by blue ribbons, the more the real Jody—the one in choir, the one who lives… or lived… in this house—disappears. How long before the real person is permanently changed into a memory?

  “Hey.”

  I turn to see Nick coming down the stairs, a small white dog trailing behind him. Erin stands to give Nick a hug, up on her toes since he’s about a foot taller than her. When he lets go of her, he looks at me. “Hi, Sam.”

  He needs a haircut and probably about twenty hours of sleep, but other than that he seems like himself, barefoot and dressed in cargo shorts and a Lakers T-shirt. “Hi,” I reply, bypassing the moment when we would have hugged by pointing to the brownies. “The youth group just made these.”

  “Thanks.” He picks one up.

  “Let me go grab some napkins,” Erin says, and heads off toward what I guess is the kitchen.

  “You want to sit down?” Nick asks me, indicating an armchair near the piano.

  I sit, and the little dog comes over to sniff my legs. I reach to pet it. “Probably smells my cat. What’s his name?”

  “Her. Noodle.” Hearing her name, Noodle goes over to Nick, who’s still standing there with his brownie. “She’s been looking for Jody. I think that’s actually one of the hardest things for my mom… seeing Noodle running around the house, all frantic, smelling Jody everywhere.”

  He crouches and scratches Noodle’s head, then looks at me with a kind of startled expression, like he’s just
noticed who I am, that I’m here. “Thanks for coming. It’s been awhile, huh?”

  I could point out that we only just saw each other on Sunday, but since then time has stretched and bent in strange ways so I know what he means. “I was going to come over with my dad a couple times, but…” I’m unsure how to finish that sentence. But I was too chicken? Too selfish?

  Erin comes back in with some paper towels and two glasses of milk. “I took the liberty,” she says, handing us each a glass. I sip from mine, watching Nick finally take a bite of his brownie, then another, then finishing it off with a third and gulping down most of his milk before wiping his mouth with a paper towel.

  Realizing we’re staring, he says, “Really good,” and picks up another one.

  I glance at Erin, thinking we should leave or be saying something meaningful, or do something other than watch Nick eat. The youth group was wrong, obviously, about my dad rubbing off on me.

  Nick saves us by picking up the plate of brownies and holding it out to me. “Go ahead. I can’t eat all these. I mean, I can, but I shouldn’t. And we’re not exactly having a food shortage here with people bringing stuff constantly.” I take one.

  Something about the way he offers the brownie reminds me of when he asked me to dance at that wedding, his natural niceness coming through in unexpected ways, even at a time like this.

  I bite into the brownie. It’s good, and still warm. I think hard about what I could say to Nick. I’m sorry about Jody feels empty and seems to go without saying. Erin starts talking to him, and I watch his face. What would I want someone to say to me if a person I loved disappeared, and I didn’t know where she was?

  A person I love did disappear.

  But it’s different. Every future I imagine has my mom in it. Whereas Nick has to imagine possible futures without Jody, without that person who looks like you, and knows what it’s like to be in your family. Possible futures as an only child.

  “So, you know,” Erin says to Nick, “we’re all here for you, whatever you need.” Her cell phone rings; she picks it up from where it’s sitting on the coffee table with her car keys, and makes an apologetic face. “I should get this.”

  I eat another bite of brownie. Take a sip of milk. Pet the dog. Continue to say nothing. The Youth have no idea how much they should regret sending me.

  “Can’t the twins take you?” Erin is saying. “Well, did you ask?… Okay, give me a couple of minutes.” She hangs up. “Allie needs a ride home. I can’t let anyone walk or I’ll be in deep doo-doo.” Looking at me, she says, “I don’t want to rush you out, Sam. Why don’t I go get Allie, run her home, and then come back for you?”

  “Oh.” I start to get up. “I can just go now.” It’s painful enough with Erin here, who at least is a kind of buffer.

  “No,” Nick says quickly, almost desperate. “Stay. I mean, you just got here.”

  I glance at Erin. Please say you have to get me home.

  “Yeah, Sam, stay.” She picks up her keys.

  “You don’t mind coming back for me?”

  “Don’t be crazy.” And she gives Nick another quick hug—it’s so easy for her—and walks out. Nick takes a third brownie. I look around the room at all of the pictures and cards, just to have something to do with my eyes other than look at him.

  Forced to deal with a mute, he says, “Your dad’s been really great. I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Good.”

  Sometimes, moments like this, I can see my dad a little bit through other people’s eyes. Objectively I can say he’s a good man who cares about people, a good pastor who cares about his church. And I wonder if I expect too much. If I picture it as a giant scale, with me and Mom on one side, and the whole congregation on the other, Mom and I are way up there, light as feathers, compared to the weight of the rest of everyone else who needs him.

  Nick leans back on the sofa, groaning and patting his stomach. “One brownie over the line.”

  I smile a little and set down my milk. “Yeah.” I’m sure this conversation will go down as one of the worst in the history of Nick’s life.

  “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry. I know this is… I should have let you go with Erin.”

  Even he realizes this is a disaster and wants to get rid of me.

  He sits forward. “I just wanted to feel normal for a minute. Spending twenty-four hours a day with my parents and grandparents is definitely not normal.”

  I want to feel normal, too. “When do you leave for State?”

  “I’m supposed to be packing up my room and stuff for moving into the dorms, like, right now. I can’t do that to my parents… pack up and leave in the middle of this. But in my head I am. Sorting out my junk. What I’ll take, what I’ll leave.” He glances toward the staircase and lowers his voice. “I want to leave, though. That’s horrible, right? To want to bail? To want to just get out of here and be somewhere else?”

  And that second, everything changes. Nick doesn’t think I’m a disastrous, boring mute. We really are having a conversation. I just haven’t figured my part out yet. Now is my chance to finally say something. “I don’t think it’s horrible. I think… probably anyone would want to be anywhere else.”

  “Yeah.” He nods, like he expected nothing less of me than to understand. “You’re right. Speaking of getting out of here, I can take you home, you know.”

  “Oh, I think I should wait for Erin.”

  “Call her,” he says, already standing to get his keys off the side table and feel for his wallet.

  I stand, too, and straighten my shorts, tighten my ponytail. I pull my phone out of my pocket and pause. I don’t want Erin to say no, to say she’s already on her way. In about three minutes I’ve gone from desperately not wanting her to leave me here alone to desperately not wanting her to come back. So I text her instead of calling: Nick’s taking me home.

  On our way out, Nick slides his feet into the sandals by the door and says, “Let me just tell my grandpa I’m leaving so that no one worries.”

  He jogs up the stairs, and I step out into the night to wait. Though the sun is down, the day’s heat lingers, pulsating from gravel and through the thin soles of my flip-flops. It feels more like a regular summer night, and less like the backward world we’ve been living in since Sunday. And even though so many things are going wrong right now, I want something in me to still be able to enjoy a night like this, to feel that it’s good to be here, and alive.

  “Okay,” Nick says, closing the door behind him and pointing to the silver mini-truck in the driveway. “You’re the first passenger in my new ride. I just got it Saturday. It’s five years old, but my last one was thirteen so it feels brand new to me.”

  I walk around to the front of the truck as Nick turns on the headlights, illuminating my legs and swarms of gnats. When I climb in, his cell rings. He flips it open while simultaneously backing out of the drive. “Hey,” he says. “Nothing.” He holds the phone to his shoulder with his head and puts the truck in gear to start us moving forward. “I can’t.”

  The trees and houses and fences flick by as we gain speed, blue ribbons everywhere.

  “I know,” Nick says into the phone. “I’m sorry.”

  I find the button to lower the passenger window. The breeze dries my damp neck.

  “Not sure,” Nick says. “Dorrie—” Then he holds the phone out for a second, looking at it in disbelief before turning it off and folding it shut. He tosses it into the cup holder and accelerates, upshifting as we hit the straightaway on Main. “My old car couldn’t do this. It was a four-cylinder automatic. That’s not driving.” He glances at me. “Do you have your license yet?”

  “Next year. My dad’s supposed to teach me to drive this summer.” I’m wondering how Dorrie Clark could hang up on Nick, especially with everything that’s going on.

  “The clock is kind of running down on ‘this summer.’ ” He accelerates again. “Here. In about five seconds I’m going to put the clu
tch in and you’re gonna put it in fourth. See the little diagram here?” He taps the stick shift. “Just follow the map. Ready?”

  “Really? What if I break it?”

  “You won’t. One, two, three… now.”

  I touch the shifter tentatively. Then Nick puts his hand over mine, firm. “Straight down. There you go.” He lifts his hand, completely unaware that it’s as close to holding hands as I’ve ever come. He eases his foot off the clutch and now we’re flying, the speed of the truck cooling down the air that blows through the open windows. “I wish we could take it out onto the freeway,” he says. “But I guess I should get you home.”

  No rush, I want to say. But at the corner of Sagebrush and Main I tell him, “You can turn here to get to my house.”

  He stops but doesn’t signal, letting the truck rock back and forth while he keeps one foot on the gas and one on the clutch. “Let’s at least drive it back up Main. You can try the other gears.”

  A bead of sweat trickles down the side of my face, the air still again. I can see the hardware store up ahead on the next block, the window display lit up but the shop lights out.

  “Just ten more minutes,” Nick says. He must take my silence for hesitation, which it isn’t. It’s just silence. “Five. I don’t want to go home yet. I really, really just don’t want to go home.”

  I turn and study his profile the way I figure every girl who’s ever known Nick has studied him. His face has perfect symmetry. Each feature works with the others: eyes set at the right width and depth, leading to the nose that’s exactly centered and straight, leading to a dip above his mouth that you want to put your finger on, tracing it down to his wide lips and strong jaw. He could probably be a model.

  “What?” he asks, looking back at me and smiling a little.

  “We can keep driving for a while,” I say. “Five minutes.”

  “Okay. Cool.” The whole time we’ve been idling here, there’s been exactly one car coming from the other direction, and one car behind us, which simply went around without beeping or anything. “When I tell you,” Nick says, “ease it from first to second.” We’re in motion again. “Go.”