by Sara Zarr
I move the gearshift down.
“Good. Third is trickier. Follow the map.”
I look at the shifter and try to maneuver into third gear. The truck makes a sick grinding noise.
“Whoa, whoa, not yet,” Nick says. I jerk my hand away, and he laughs. “Wait for me to say when.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He accelerates and puts in the clutch. “Now.”
He puts his hand over mine again and we move the truck into gear, and it’s so gentle, his hand, like when he danced with me that one time, and I don’t know what to think. Two hours ago I barely knew Nick and now he’s not moving his hand off of mine and his long fingers are curled over my shorter ones. We’re just driving, I think, trying to ignore my tingling fingertips.
A car shoots out in front of us from nowhere. Nick takes his hand off mine to honk the horn and swerve to avoid a collision. I put my hand in my lap. “I should get home,” I say, lightheaded.
“Yeah,” he says reluctantly, “okay.”
He turns the truck around and heads back to my house, and I’m thinking that I should say something meaningful about what’s going on, something not canned or slight or stupid. But Nick talks before I think of anything. “Your mom. She’s in rehab?”
I lean my head out the window a little ways to let the air cool my face.
Nick says, “Sorry. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool.”
“No, I… I just keep forgetting that people know.” That life is never really private, that it’s something other people look at and wonder about and make their conclusions based on what really might just be the tip of the iceberg.
“So, what kind of rehab? I’m going to be a psych major. That’s the plan anyway. Hence my nosiness.”
“Oh.” Maybe that’s why Nick wants to spend time with me. To probe my psyche about living with an alcoholic. “I’m not sure. It all happened kind of fast… she wrecked her car and got cited for a DUI and they kind of ‘strongly urged’ her to do this program. I don’t think she would have otherwise.”
“Wow. Your mom is so…” Perfect? “I just never would have thought.” He slows in front of our neighbor’s house. “This it?”
“The next one.”
I feel us both noticing the blue ribbon tied to the tree in our front yard. It wasn’t there earlier—I don’t know who put it up.
The other thing we both notice is the little car behind my dad’s. “Isn’t that Erin’s car?” Nick asks.
“Yeah.” I try to say it like it’s completely expected and okay for the single-girl-youth-group-leader’s car to be in our driveway while my handsome dad is home and my mom is not. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Next time, I’ll let you get behind the wheel.”
“Okay,” I say, sincerely doubting there will be a next time, but make no move to get out. The truck engine idles. “Yeah. I guess I’d better go.” Finally, I lift the door handle, push the door open, and swing my legs out.
“Hey,” Nick says, stopping me. “If you ever need anything, give me a call.”
Like what? He’s the one in the middle of a real crisis. I nod. “Sure.”
“No, really, I mean, I’m just here for… as long as it takes. I’m not working or anything because I thought I’d be leaving for school in a week. And I’m used to doing all kinds of stuff for Jody. Giving her rides or whatever. And now—” For the first time tonight, he looks like he might cry. “Anyway, I’ve got all these big brother skills. That’s all.”
Then, without thinking, I blurt, “Maybe they’ll find her.”
A car drives by, sweeping its headlights over Nick’s face. His gaze is far away, his curly hair sticking out over his ears. Then the cab of the truck goes dark again. “We’d need a miracle,” he says. “A real one. Do you think those happen anymore?”
I want to reach across the truck cab and touch him, and tell him that is the exact same question I’ve been asking myself for a long time now and I’m glad I’m not the only one wondering. Before I can move, the driveway lights come on and flood the truck. Nick shields his eyes and laughs. “Dang. What does your dad think we’re doing out here?”
I scoot out of the truck and close the door. “Thanks again,” I say through the open window.
He lifts his hands off the wheel. “See you, Sam.”
The front door opens the second I reach it. My dad is standing there, Erin behind him, looking like she thinks she belongs. “Finally,” Dad says.
“What took you so long? You texted me almost half an hour ago, Sam.” Erin is aggravated. “It’s a five-minute drive.”
“We were talking.” I squeeze past them and into the hot living room, where there are mugs on the coffee table and a plate of brownie crumbs. Ralph rubs himself against my legs.
“That’s fine,” Dad says. “But you need to let me know where you are, especially now.”
“And keep your phone on when you’re out,” Erin adds.
I pull my phone out of my pocket. The display is black. I turn around to face them. “The battery must have died. I didn’t know.” Then I think about what she just said and the way she said it. Like she’s my mom.
“Nick’s phone was off, your phone was off… anyway, you’re okay, so, phew.” She turns to my dad. “Remember what I said, Charlie, okay? See you tomorrow.”
“Okay.” He smiles and nods. I follow his eyes following Erin as she leaves, her calf muscles flexing and shiny hair swinging.
“What did she mean, remember what she said?” I ask as the door closes.
“Oh, she offered to bring dinner over again sometime.”
“I can try to cook.”
He laughs and walks past me to lock the door for the night, something we never used to do. “So, what did you and Nick talk about?”
“I don’t know. Is there any food left?” I head for the kitchen.
“You don’t know what you talked about?” he asks, following.
“Stuff.” I open the fridge. Erin’s potato salad is still there. I push it aside to get out the grape jelly, butter, and bread, and put a slice in the toaster.
“Ah. Stuff. Well, next time I’d prefer it if you called me for a ride, or Erin, or Vanessa’s mom.”
I stare at the toaster. “Why? Nick offered. He didn’t have anything else to do. He was lonely.”
“Because. I’d just prefer it.”
The toast pops up. I spread on butter and a thick layer of jelly. “That’s not a reason. You told me you wanted me to spend more time with youth group people.”
“Nick is barely in youth group. He’s older. He’s in college.”
“Not yet.”
“Sammy,” he says in his don’t-wear-me-out voice. “Just say you’ll do as I ask.”
I wrap a napkin around my toast and go past him toward my room.
“Sam?” he calls after me. “Samara?”
“Good night, Dad,” I say, and close the door.
Day Six
Thursday
I stand over the stove, poaching an egg in the little pan that has four neat poaching cups, the one Mom used for eggs Benedict. Also, there’s a peeled and sliced banana on a plate, a glass of milk, and a glass of orange juice. I want to show my dad that I do listen to what he says, and I can take care of myself and he doesn’t need to make me move to Vanessa’s.
But when he comes into the kitchen, his first words to me are, “You’ve got your stuff together?”
He’s purposeful as he heads to the coffee pot, eager to check this off his to-do list.
“Not yet.”
“I need to be out of here in forty-five minutes. I’m sitting down with the Shaws to plan the prayer vigil for tomorrow night. The press wants to come, and it’s sort of a logistical nightmare.” He dumps a full coffee filter into the trash and whips open a kitchen drawer to get a new one.
“What about Mom?” I ask, poking at the egg in the poaching cup. It’s still jiggly.
“What?”
He scoops coffee out of the can he keeps in the fridge. The spoon scrapes the bottom with a metallic ring. “Yes, we were.” He measures out water. Turns on the pot. Thinking what to say next. “And we will. Let me get this prayer service out of the way and we will.”
There’s always something in the way. If you ask him for things on a Wednesday or after, he says let me get Sunday out of the way. Then Sunday is out of the way and he says let me catch up and recover, so basically Tuesday is the only day of the week he’s not in recovery or needing to get something out of the way. And this has nothing to do with Jody. It’s always like this.
But now, I’m taking matters into my own hands. Seeing Erin’s car in our driveway last night and imagining seeing it there again has made me determined to get Dad to see Mom. To look at her, and remember who is who. “We could go get her after church on Sunday and go to the Lodge.”
He sniffs at a carton of half-and-half. “Oh. Let’s see what else is going on—a lot can happen between now and Sunday.”
“The Lodge is practically halfway to New Beginnings, and we go almost every Sunday anyway. Let’s just call her right now.”
I turn off the flame under my egg and reach for the phone. Dad looks at his watch, but I think he knows he’s out of excuses. I punch in the number and go through the automated menu to talk to a person, a man. “Is Laura Taylor available?”
“You can leave a message and we’ll make sure she gets it.”
“This is her daughter. I left a message before.”
“Yeah, I think I got that message off the system. I delivered it myself.”
“Are you sure?” I feel Dad’s eyes on me, but I keep mine on the stove.
“Do you want to leave another message?”
I just want to hear her voice.
“Yeah. Tell her I called and she should call me back. About brunch on Sunday.” I give him my cell number and make him say it back, in case there’s any chance my mom forgot it. When I hang up I go straight to my egg to put it on the plate, but the whites stick to the poaching cup and by the time I get it out the whole thing is a mess. My eyes fill with tears but I’m making myself not cry, not cry, as I sit to eat.
I wish that for once, my dad, who always has the right words for everyone else, would have a clue what to say to me.
He does try to talk to me on the ride to Vanessa’s, but not about Mom. “We never finished our discussion last night,” Dad says.
“There are a lot of discussions we never finish.”
“About Nick, Sam.” He’s not playing around. “I need to have your word that you won’t see him without my permission.” Which is more explicitly anti-Nick than what he said last night about not taking rides in general.
I say okay, just to end this. And also because Dad didn’t keep his word about calling Mom, or about talking about our plan, or about half a dozen other things I can think of off the top of my head, including how he was going to teach me to drive this summer. I’m figuring out, finally, that it’s easier to do what he does: give your word and then make up an excuse later.
When we pull up to Vanessa’s, I can see her waiting on her wide front porch, swinging in the hammock, one foot on the ground, pushing herself back and forth. Daisy is underneath, napping. I start to climb out of the car and my dad says, “Sam, this is just for a few days. A week, tops.”
How do you know? I want to ask. I don’t know if he’s saying he’s confident Jody will be found, or he’s confident she won’t and then we’ll go back to normal, or he’s confident Mom will actually want to come home after her time is up even though she won’t even return a phone call. The way things have been going, I don’t know how he can be so sure about anything.
All I can do is nod. He touches my hair. I look at him. Considering everything, he might actually be doing his best. I’m disappointed but also know that if I really thought about it, I could probably come up with at least as many times he’s kept his word as times he hasn’t. Most of all I want to believe—in him, in God, in our family—the way I used to. It used to be that there was always one of them I could count on. If Dad was lost in his work, Mom and I had each other, even if it wasn’t perfect. If Mom was lost in her drinking, Dad would pull us together and get us back on track. And I was always sure God hovered around there among us, somehow.
Right now it’s like we’re three islands, and nothing but oceans between us.
Moving into another family’s house, even temporarily, is just one more thing to separate us.
“Let me help you take your things in,” he says.
“I got it.”
I lean over and give him a kiss, collect my stuff from the back seat, and close the door.
He drives off before I’m even halfway up the walk.
I drop my duffel bag and pillow onto the porch before petting Daisy hello and wedging in next to Vanessa.
“Hey,” she says, scooting over.
“Hi.”
We sway back and forth for a little while, and even though I didn’t want to come here, I’m starting to relax. “It’s kind of nice out,” I say.
“I know. For a change I’m not roasting like a Thanksgiving turkey out here.”
There’s a blue ribbon around the Hathaways’ mailbox. When we’re sitting out here two weeks from now, in a month, in a year, will the ribbons still be up? I wonder how you’re supposed to know the exact moment when there’s no more hope.
“How did it go at Nick’s last night?” Vanessa asks.
“Okay. I mean, sad, but okay.” I don’t really want to share any of the personal stuff Nick and I talked about, or even that he gave me a ride.
“Did he seem… normal? Or, like, weird about Jody? Or anything?”
“He seemed sad, like I said.”
She’s quiet after that. Too quiet, for Vanessa.
I look at her. “What?”
She looks back, touches her neck. “I know you don’t go on the Internet, but you’ll probably hear about it anyway eventually.”
“What?” I repeat.
“There’s this whole big theory about Nick. Being… a suspect.”
Without missing a beat, I say, “That’s stupid.” I can tell from her face and the tone of her voice that some part of her believes it could be true.
“I heard that the police confiscated his laptop,” she says, as if that’s evidence.
“They took all the computers in the house. I heard about it on the news, too. They just wanted to see if Jody had been talking to anyone online or whatever.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Nick didn’t do anything.” I get up off the hammock, throwing Vanessa off balance so that she has to steady herself with her hands and move back to the center. Daisy gets up, too, and stands between us, tail wagging slowly. I pick up my duffel bag, ready to go inside.
“Well I don’t think so, either,” Vanessa says, “but they keep saying it’s usually someone in the family and think how many times you’ve heard stuff like that on the news—how the person who does something horrible is the last you’d suspect.”
“It wasn’t Nick.”
“Okay,” Vanessa says guiltily. Then, with a burst of insistence, says, “But we don’t really know him, do we? I was thinking about it and we see him at church on Sundays and sometimes at youth group stuff and around school but do we know him?”
“We’ve known him as long as we’ve known anybody. You might as well say it’s Daniel, or my dad.”
“That’s not the same.”
“It is, though. If you say it could be Nick, it could be anybody.”
She stares up at me, eyes watery, and says, “That’s what I mean, Sam. It could be anybody.”
And I know what she means, what she’s trying to get across. That a thing like this changes the way you think about everything and everyone, and you can never go back.
Mrs. Hathaway drives us to Daniel’
s in the afternoon to swim in his pool. Robby begs to go with us, but Mrs. Hathaway saves the day by offering to take him and any two friends he wants to the water park on Saturday instead.
We lay out in our suits, baking in the three thirty sun. Vanessa and I spent most of the day so far looking at all the Jody news on her dad’s laptop, and now my head is cluttered with the rumors. And they aren’t just about Nick. They’re about Jody’s dad, her uncle, her teachers, some random guy in Ohio. There are people all over the country who think they’ve seen her in their town. Someone in the boonies of Alaska says they saw her, and someone in Chicago says they saw her, on the same day. Already there are all these blogs and websites and message boards filled with theories and guesses and people just trying to figure this out. Finally I told Vanessa, “I don’t want to look at this stuff anymore. It’s crazy.”
She closed the laptop and said, “I know. Every day I promise myself I’m not going to look, but then I do and I can’t stop.”
My dad not wanting me to be alone with Nick makes a little more sense, considering everything I saw online. Not that I think there’s even a remote chance it could be him, but I can see how easy it is to get paranoid.
Now Daniel and Vanessa are theorizing some more. “Maybe she did run away,” he says. “Or maybe at first she was taken but now she has that thing. That syndrome.”
“Stockholm,” Vanessa says. “Stockholm syndrome.”
“Yeah, that. And now she’s like in a cult and we should leave her alone.”
“I don’t think you can get that so quick.” Vanessa props herself up on her elbow. “And if she’s in a cult, we should definitely not leave her alone. Cults are bad, remember? As a future pastor I’d think you’d know that.”
He groans. “I wish I’d kept my fat mouth shut about the pastor thing.”
I get up and slip into the pool, letting the water close over me. It’s not as cool as I wish it were, but at least it’s quiet, surrounding me with the white noise of the pool filter. I try to clear my head so it’s as quiet as the pool, using an image of how I want our garden to look as a way to silence everything else. Then I hear a muffled splash and re-emerge. Daniel swims toward me, making a shark fin out of his hands, palms pressed together on the top of his submerged head. It’s very sixth grade.