Or, he thought—and this thought actually startled him, and made him sad—maybe her problem had been that he wasn’t in her, wasn’t her Destiny, never had been, and she hadn’t figured that out until the very end. Although, without question, she’d known at the end.
And now, here he was smiling again. What a sweet, complicated day to be alive for, and in. What a wondrous town, full of dart-horned boys and their blackberry-mouthed would-be lovers, who would never be lovers. Who looked at the Whistler, saw in an instant what none of the others—not Mother, not Aunt Sally, none of them—had discovered. Had seen what he could and should do, for and to them, and opened their blackberry mouths wider still. So he could fill them.
They wanted to play. They all did, and some of them even knew it. And he was hungry, and lonely. And he’d been so very bored for so very long. And his new, Still One was waiting for him, though even he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do to, or for, or with her, yet.
So. Tonight, in just a few hours, when the light went, he’d come out to play. Then they’d all find out together.
13
It was at least a little Amanda’s fault, Rebecca thought just a few hours later, stumbling away from Halfmoon House with that dry-ice reprimand still crackling in her ears and her hands clutched to her chest and her mouth tingling, buzzing with words she’d never imagined she would actually say, had really said, could not unsay.
Had she really just said that? Did she even believe it?
They’d poured back into the yard, she and Joel and Trudi, riding the waves of surf guitar thundering from Joel’s Bluetooth speaker, and washed up sweating and laughing at the long, wooden table in the kitchen. “Malts,” Joel declared, setting down the speaker and abruptly, with a glance around him, lowering the volume. Then, just as abruptly, he turned it back up. “This calls for malts. Rebecca, to the pantry.”
Hoisting Trudi onto his shoulders—and Trudi let him, and she actually laughed, succumbing for the first time to the Halfmoon House magic, which was mostly Joel’s magic—he swayed back out the door toward the shed. He would come back, Rebecca knew, with the special-day sundae glasses Amanda let him trot out only on birthdays and rare celebratory Saturdays, and also one of the family-size cartons of generic French vanilla he kept in the industrial freezer. Rebecca, meanwhile, did as instructed, ducking into the pantry to remove the front two rows of Amanda’s everyday spices—the basil and oregano, peppercorns and rosemary, all in their identical green jars in perfect alphabetical order—to the treat-powders behind them. All of those were Joel’s, and just shoved back there: two mismatched tins of strawberry Quik; an Ovaltine canister Rebecca suspected was the same Ovaltine canister that had occupied that particular spiderwebbed corner since she’d lived here; a lone king-size Hershey bar; and all the way to the left, fresh and unopened and impossibly free of webs or dust, as though Joel had conjured it into being by calling its name, a single jar of milk shake malt.
She emerged from the pantry with that perfect sour-grain taste already on her tongue, and she was thinking, for some reason, about Jack and the ’Lenes: Marlene and her True Detective mags tucked inside her organic chem textbook, her riot of red hair and too-loud laugh; Kaylene and her leggings and K-pop crushes and Pac-Man backpack and reproductive rights crusades and surprising smiles that split her pouty mouth wide open; and Jack, with his fake mustaches and his beer gut (which was actually a milk gut, although he had indeed drunk more beer lately) and his incessant teasing and coercing. All three of them perpetually drawing her closer to them, out into the world. They’d all taken root right in the center of Rebecca’s life, before it had even occurred to her that she had a center, or a life. And now, here they were in her mind, dancing and ’Lening.
In her ears, she could still hear that voice from last night, the one on the phone, from Lonely Street, coiling through all these other, happier voices that buzzed inside her like summer bees. But it didn’t poison them, couldn’t poison them, because these were her bees, from her hive. This was the hive she belonged to, had helped make.
Just another twenty-four hours, she was thinking, shaking her head. Just a crazy, full, careening sort of day. A normal day? Was that what she’d just had? Was this her life settling into place around her? And accelerating? She opened her mouth, started to shout that she had the malt, what was taking everyone so long, when she heard the murmuring. With her free hand on the worktable, Rebecca stopped, malt half-extended in front of her, and listened.
“Those trailers?” Amanda all but hissed, just outside the open screen door, her voice low, laced with warning. “After all those times I’ve told them—we’ve told them—not to go there, you just took them?”
“I didn’t take them,” Joel said, and from his sigh, Rebecca knew exactly how he was standing and what he was doing, even though she couldn’t see them out by the foot of the stoop-stairs from where she stood. He was giving her the oh-come-on-Amanda smile, reaching for his wife’s hand. “I found them there.”
“And having found them, in a place we’ve repeatedly told them, for their own safety, they are never, ever, ever supposed to go, you and your new playmate—”
“By which you mean the woman on the radio? My music?”
“How about, the woman you devote infinitely more of your time and affection to than me?” Amanda snarled, and Rebecca swayed in place, almost dropped the malt jar.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Joel muttered. “Keep your voice down, please. Not in front of the—”
There was a scrambling, and a “Trudi, wait” from Joel, and a “goddammit.”
Then Trudi exploded into the kitchen, racing for the stairs. Instinctively, Rebecca stepped into her path, putting out her hands as she knelt. But Trudi just aimed a furious kick at Rebecca’s arms and darted around her. Rebecca heard her hurtling up the stairs, heard Danni say, “Whoa, who let the—ow, shit!” Then doors slammed, one after the other.
Rebecca stayed where she’d knelt. Any second, Amanda would appear, somehow yanking her ponytail even tighter, grunting at Rebecca to get up and go get Trudi. Eventually, when he’d recovered from his latest lashing, Joel would follow, waving a pack of paper napkins like a makeshift surrender flag.
This time, though, neither Amanda nor Joel appeared. They stayed in the yard and went right on arguing.
“You found them by the trailers,” Amanda said. “And instead of telling them both off—that little girl’s going to get herself hurt, and you know it, she doesn’t listen, and Rebecca, of all people, should know better—instead of telling them off, or just getting them the fuck out of there, you, as usual, decided—”
“To enjoy the moment. To have a little fun with our girls.”
Whatever Amanda said next, she said quietly. Rebecca couldn’t hear it. Not until Amanda said it again.
“They’re not our girls.”
“Right. Got it. They’re not our girls. Just the girls we’re raising. Yes, Amanda, I decided—”
“That it would be funny. That’s pretty much your prime criterion for decision making, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. Maybe it is. Sometimes. And you know what? It was funny.”
“You think everything’s funny, or should be. Don’t you, Joel?”
Suddenly, Joel had a new tone, too, one Rebecca had never heard him use. She stood, almost went straight out the door and down the steps to hug him, since she knew his wife wouldn’t do it.
“Most things,” he said. Almost whimpered. So softly.
“And there it is, isn’t it? There’s the difference between us. Because I don’t think almost any of it is funny, Joel. I don’t think I ever did.”
“Maybe that’s why we’re such a good team.”
Somehow, the sigh Amanda unleashed next alarmed Rebecca even more than Joel’s broken pleading. The Amanda Rebecca knew did not sigh, certainly not like that: as though something had been ripped out of her, yanked free like a knife from her heart.
But unlike her husband, when she spo
ke again, she sounded exactly the way she always did: flat and controlled. “Are we, Joel? Have we ever been? In any way? Is that how you read the messages our lives together have given us?”
And that—finally, absurdly, after all these years in these people’s house, in their lives and their company—was when Rebecca understood. It had taken her only seven years to register why Amanda and Joel treated each other so distantly, and why they’d built this place and spent their days doing what they did, collecting other people’s orphaned children and preparing them—ruthlessly, on the one hand, joyfully on the other—for living alone.
As much as her caller from the night before had rattled Rebecca, gotten in her ears and her dreams, he hadn’t reduced her to tears. Oh, Joel, she thought, wiping at her face, wondering how even the ruthless world she’d been introduced to all too soon—at four, on the night her parents didn’t make it home to the home she couldn’t even really remember—could be ruthless enough to deprive these two people of that. Of children. And then—precisely because they couldn’t have children, and had wanted them so badly—of each other.
Amanda was coming. Her steps were firm, unmistakable, taking her straight up the grooves she’d worn in her stairs toward her kitchen, her pre-dinner tasks. Rebecca didn’t want to face her. She just couldn’t, not yet, not knowing what she knew now. She could already imagine Amanda’s reaction to anything Rebecca might say, so vividly that Amanda might as well have already said it:
“Seriously, Rebecca the Caretaker? Rebecca the Legendarily Empathetic Observer? You really just now figured this out?”
Her first instinct was to head upstairs, because that’s what she had done when she’d lived here. It was also possibly the right thing to do now. She could stand outside Trudi’s room—which had once been her own room—and knock quietly, over and over, until Trudi let her in. She’d calm the little girl down and tell her not to worry, because there really wasn’t anything to worry about. Not from the masters of Halfmoon House. Not for the girls they harbored here.
Instead, keeping her head low, Rebecca slipped past Amanda, out the back door into the late-afternoon murk. The sun was a smear of yellow across a sky the color of unprimed canvas, and the trees seemed to sag beneath the watery weight of the air. It was time for her to go, anyway; she was due at Jess’s house in half an hour. She glanced around for Joel, figured he’d retreated to his shed, and started fast across the grass. Gnats materialized as though they’d been hiding in her hair. Their whine sounded like a leak in her head, as though some of her was escaping.
Are we, Joel? Have we ever been?
Then, abruptly, there he was under the live oak at the edge of the yard, with a rake in his hand that he’d picked up somewhere, having apparently forgotten the malts he’d promised Trudi, the spell he’d been stopped from casting, in mid-cast. He was just standing next to the path with his chin halfway down on his chest and his head tilted sideways and his eyes half-closed and the rake in the long grass like the blade on an oar: the ferryman of Halfmoon House, forever rowing his rescued charges back and forth to and from the world he’d left, without ever meaning to.
What Rebecca did next was not only unplanned but almost unconscious; it just happened. Striding straight up to Joel—the only father-type figure she had ever considered a father, and still quite possibly her closest friend—she grabbed him by the sweat-soaked shoulders, caught his downturned eyes with her own, and said, “Joel. You should leave here. While you still can. This is … You’ve been so good to me. You both have. But she’s killing you.”
And what stunned her most, immediately afterward, as her mouth snapped shut and she realized what she’d said and how badly she’d overstepped and how little she actually understood about this man, whom she loved, and his icy wife—whom she also loved—was the way Joel just sagged into himself. His head folded into his neck. His arms seemed to swing off the joints in his shoulders and dangle, and his legs twitched, went slack. It was as though he were a scarecrow she’d unpinned from its cross, set free, and so transformed back into raggedy clothes and straw, with nothing in them.
“Oh, Bec,” he whispered. He was gazing at her as though he were an old man, as though she were a little girl. “You really need to…” But he couldn’t seem to finish that sentence, or didn’t want to.
Rebecca had already fallen back a step, was waving a hand in the air as though she could wipe away what she’d said, erase the whole last five minutes of her life and start them over. And the worst part was, her brain had already completed his sentence for him, and it went on completing it, over and over.
Leave. Joel was going to tell her she should leave.
At least his voice had been gentle. Amanda’s, on the other hand—which came from the steps, where Amanda now stood just outside the door with her arms folded and that gaze locked on Rebecca like a rifle sight—was anything but.
“Quite enough of that, I think,” she said.
Rebecca sucked in a horrified breath, but Joel recoiled as though he’d been shot. As though he’d been the one who’d said his wife was killing him, not Rebecca.
“Amanda, she was only—”
“Shut up,” said Amanda, and Joel did.
Then she just stood there in the shadow of her house: a small and pale woman, a single string of hair stuck to her cheek like a strand of web she’d walked through, faded button-up work shirt crisp under her apron, starchy and yet shapeless as a hospital gown. Rebecca wouldn’t have thought it possible for Amanda’s eyes—or anyone’s eyes—to look more remote, but they did, now: emotionless as a bird’s, blue as a lake. And empty.
“You should go,” Joel said, at Rebecca’s elbow. He no longer sounded gentle, or even like Joel. “Really. Get out of here.”
Tears blurred Rebecca’s vision again, gummy and awful. She could neither blink them out nor get them to fall. At her sides, her hands were shaking. And in a totally different way, her lips … her mouth … good God, her mouth … which kept betraying her …
“Amanda,” she managed, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t … I don’t even know what I…”
“Yep,” Amanda said, almost to herself, and cocked her head. Like a bird, again. “But of course you wouldn’t, really. How could you know? You’ve never really had one of your own.”
For one ridiculous moment, Rebecca thought she meant a man, which was almost funny, and true enough, in its way, not counting her one and only high school guy, Darren, who’d lured her out for a handful of sweet orchard nights that last summer before he went off to Dartmouth and never came back.
But Amanda didn’t mean a man, and she was almost talking to herself, now. “Not a real home, I mean,” she murmured, and Rebecca almost staggered in place, grabbed her own ribs, her fingers splaying across them as though plugging holes.
“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”
“So you have no idea what losing one costs.” And with that, Amanda turned and disappeared back into the house.
Rebecca swayed, heard herself make a noise—half whimper, half calling out, though even she wasn’t sure to whom—and by the time she got control of her throat again, smashed her tears flat with her eyelashes, and looked up, Joel had gone, too. She caught just a glimpse of his back, the rake driving into the ground and propelling him forward as he vanished into the woods. For a moment, an entirely different, disconnected panic rose in Rebecca. Not there, she thought. Don’t go back in there.
Then she was stumbling away from Halfmoon House, down the lane toward town. Her whole body throbbed with guilt and confusion, and her eyes kept filling, no matter how furiously she blinked.
“So you have no idea what losing one costs…”
What had she done? Rebecca’s arms still encircled her own chest. Her breathing came in ragged gasps, though she wasn’t exactly crying. Every motion she made drew air across the nerves in her ears, set them tingling all over again, ringing with words—her own, Amanda’s, her midnight caller’s—and also with whistling. Her
caller’s whistling.
What had she done?
She barely even registered that she’d made it back to Campus Avenue, and so had to stop momentarily to get her bearings. She looked right toward the bank and the Lutheran church and the movie theater, left down the block toward Starkey’s, the bus stop, the road north that wound all the way through the woods, up Maine into Canada. For the thousandth time in her life, she thought about turning that way and just setting off. She could simply flag the bus when it passed, climb aboard, and disappear. It would be so easy, would hardly be noticed.
But she wasn’t going to do that. Not even if Amanda wanted her to. Not even if Joel did. She had promises to keep.
Prying her arms from her body, clamping her mouth shut, and shaking herself as free as she could get from these last horrible hours, she turned toward Jess’s house. When the figure stepped out of the shadows of the bank building and grabbed her, she was too tired even to scream. Then it spun her around, and her first thought was Joel, and her second was the guy from the trailer, whoever that had been who had flung open the door of that black truck in the bushes as she and Joel and Trudi fled.
“Rebecca,” Jack said, gripping her so hard that she half-thought he might hoist her in the air, throw her across his shoulders, and make off with her.
She tried to wrench free and failed. Her heart was flailing, and she sucked breath out of the sodden air, which felt like breathing through a pillowcase.
“Jack?”
He looked awful. Pizza sauce—at least, Rebecca hoped it was pizza sauce—streaked the entire left side of his bowling shirt. It was the same shirt from last night. He still had the dart, too; the suction end was sticking out of his pocket like a broken-off antenna, over the cursive Herman stitched into the fabric. His hair, face, everything about him seemed rumpled, as though he hadn’t slept in his own skin. As though he’d left his skin last night, and now he couldn’t get himself properly settled.
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