Shallow Pond

by Alissa Grosso

  “Annie’s sick,” I said. “She had to go to the hospital. She’s home now.”

  “Again? Sick as in sick-sick?”

  “A bit more serious than a broken heart.”

  “Crap. Hey, I’m sorry. So do you know what’s wrong?”

  I thought of what a relief it had been to tell Zach everything, but I couldn’t tell Jenelle. I wondered if that meant she wasn’t really a good friend, but maybe I just knew that she wouldn’t understand. She had parents, a normal family. Even without the whole cloning thing, we weren’t exactly normal. Zach, the orphan raised by nuns, kind of got the whole abnormal thing.

  “They still have some tests they want to do,” I told her.

  As we pulled into the parking lot, we saw Zach walking up the sidewalk to school.

  “Well, there he is, Mr. God’s-gift-to-women himself,” Jenelle said. She turned and gave me a smile. “Go on.”

  “No, I’ll wait for you,” I said. “You’ve still got to find a parking place.”

  “Bunting, stop pretending like you don’t want to fling yourself at that boy and jump his bones.”

  “But—”

  “Get out of the car,” she said. She waved me toward the door, grinning.

  “See you later?” I asked.

  “Yes, and I want all the details.”

  I ran after Zach and shouted his name. He spun around, and seeing him made it difficult to breathe. How had I managed to resist him for so long? I didn’t think about the fact that we were standing in front of the school while everyone filed in. I didn’t think about anything. I ran to him and kissed him. We got some hoots and cheers from our classmates. I pulled myself away from him and blushed in embarrassment.

  “Hey,” he said. “There’s not any chance you’d be up for skipping school again today, is there?”

  His eyes had the power to mesmerize me, so I looked away when I said, “We probably shouldn’t. I have enough problems in my life. I don’t really think getting kicked out of school would improve my situation.”

  “See, there you go being practical again.” He shook his head and laughed, then put his arm around me as we walked into the school.

  It was the longest school day I’d ever experienced, and when it finally ended I ran to my locker to dump my books.

  “Is there a fire or something?” Jenelle asked when she saw me scrambling to grab what I needed from my locker.

  “I’m going out with Zach,” I explained.

  “Ah, a fire in your pants then.”

  I’d just shut my locker when I saw Meg running toward me down the hallway.

  “Barbara, I’m so glad I caught you,” she said.

  “What, did you run out of boyfriends to steal?” Jenelle asked. Meg ignored her.

  “Danielle had an emergency, and she needed to know if anyone could fill in at the call center. I have a softball scrimmage today but I thought you might be free.”

  “Why the hell should she save your butt?” Jenelle asked. In that moment I pretty much shared Jenelle’s low opinion of Meg. If I’d just moved quicker, I might have gotten out of there before Meg found me.

  “Isn’t there anyone else who can do it?” I asked.

  “There’s some conference going on and a lot of the regular volunteers are there.”

  Did I need to see Zach this afternoon? My brain screamed, Yes I do! Would I live without seeing him? My brain screamed, Absolutely not! It scared me how much I needed him.

  “I can do it,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do that!” Jenelle shouted at me.

  “Thank you so much!” Meg said. “I owe you.”

  “Big time!” Jenelle added.

  Zach would be there any minute, and I was afraid that if I saw him I would completely lose my will power. “Do me a favor?” I said to Jenelle. “Explain it to Zach for me?”

  “You can tell him yourself,” Jenelle said.

  “No, I don’t think I can.”

  Danielle was still at the call center when I got there, but she had her coat on and was ready to head out the door.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” she said. “The night shift should be here in a couple of hours. I wrote down my cell number in case anything happens, but it’s been quiet here all day. Knock on … ” She looked around for some wooden surface to knock on and settled for a metal desk with a woodgrain-patterned surface.

  It was quiet for about an hour and fifty minutes, then my first call came. The voice of the woman on the other end was scratchy and hoarse. I decided she was either a heavy smoker or someone who’d done a whole lot of crying; maybe a little of both.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “He’s gone. He left. He stuck a note on my windshield while I was at work. The coward couldn’t even tell me to my face. It was something about how he couldn’t stay in this town, that this wasn’t the right place for him. Babie, I don’t know what to do.”

  Hearing my name startled me. I tried to place the scratchy voice on the other end. I played back over what the distraught woman had said, the guy who’d left because this wasn’t the right place for him. This wasn’t the right place for a lot of people, but Cameron had said he was leaving, that he didn’t belong here, and whoever it was knew me well enough to recognize my voice.

  “Gracie?” I said.

  “He left some stupid note.” Now I could hear the familiar voice that was hidden by the scratchiness, the tears.

  “He’s an idiot,” I said. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “No,” Gracie said. She began sniffling. “I need him. You don’t understand. I need him.”

  I heard someone come into the room. I thought it must be one of the night-shift volunteers.

  “There’s something you need to know about Cameron,” I said. “Remember how I said he was on that Megan’s Law site?”

  “I don’t care about that,” Gracie sobbed. “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe it’s better for both of you if you just let Cameron go.”

  “But I can’t just let him go. I can’t handle this anymore. Maybe it’s good that he left, before he found out about us, but I don’t know how to go on without him.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “How do you go on living when your reason for living is gone?”

  “Seriously? Cameron Schaeffer is your reason for living? Do you know how messed up that is?”

  “I love him. I love him so much. I just can’t handle it anymore.”

  I heard someone moving around, the rustling of a jacket. It would be okay. I wouldn’t have to stay on duty much longer.

  “I’m on my way home,” I said. “Just sit tight. I’ll be there in like ten or fifteen minutes. Just hang on, okay?”

  “Why would he leave without me?”

  “I’m on my way there,” I said as I hung up.

  “Do you need a lift?”

  I looked up to see not a night shift volunteer, but Officer Hantz.

  “Danielle told me you were on your own this afternoon,” he continued. “I’m on my way home, so I thought I’d check and see if you needed a ride.

  “I have to wait for someone else to take over,” I said, “but I think they’ll be here any minute.”

  “Was that your sister on the phone? It sounded pretty serious.”

  I nodded. “Cameron left town.”

  “Damn it,” Hantz said. “Sorry. He’s supposed to check in with us before relocating.” He looked at me, and his voice grew soft and serious. “Did something happen? Is there a reason he left?”

  “Nothing happened,” I said. “He told me about what happened at the school where he worked. He said he wanted to get out of Shallow Pond, get his life straightened out.”

  Office
r Hantz nodded as he considered this. Maybe he also had come to the conclusion that Cameron wasn’t really a bad guy.

  A few minutes later my relief arrived. Officer Hantz drove me home. As I stepped out of the car, Annie poked her head out the front door.

  “Is that your sister?” Officer Hantz asked.

  “The older one,” I said. “Annie.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  She was. Being her clone, how could I not have been pleased by such a remark? I nearly thanked him. Hopefully he didn’t see me blush. I noticed the worried look on Annie’s face, though, and got scared. Something was wrong.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said. I wondered if I should ask him to stick around. I didn’t. He did stay long enough to give Annie a smile and wave.

  She was watching him drive away when I reached the door.

  “Gracie called the hotline,” I said. “She sounded pretty upset. Cameron left town. He left her some note.”

  “Apparently it’s an epidemic.”

  “What?”

  She handed me a slip of paper. Scribbled in Gracie’s handwriting was a note to let us know that she could no longer stay with us. She was going off to find Cameron. She needed to be with him.

  “But I was talking to her a few minutes ago. It couldn’t have been even twenty minutes ago!” I said. But twenty minutes gave someone enough time to throw clothes and clean underwear into a duffel bag, write a hasty note, and hit the highway. “Did she take the minivan?”

  Annie nodded.

  Great, she’d taken our only means of transportation. It wasn’t like we could chase her down without wheels.

  “I can call someone, get them to give us a ride,” I said. I looked up the road, but Officer Hantz had already turned the corner. I could call Jenelle, but how much could she do to help us catch Gracie? On the other hand, Zach had a Mustang. That thing had enough horsepower to give our minivan a pretty good chase. “I know someone with a sports car.”

  “No. Let her go,” Annie said.

  “What?”

  But Annie only shook her head and went back into the house. I followed her inside.

  “I’m happy for them,” she said. “She loves him. They deserve to be together.”

  “Aren’t you jealous?” I asked.

  “No, that was all a long time ago. Gracie’s young. She deserves the chance to be free and happy.”

  “You’re not exactly old.”

  “She’s not happy here,” Annie said. “This is better for her.”

  I went over and looked at the picture on the mantle. Susie, the woman who’d started this whole mess. I tried to imagine Gracie out there in the world somewhere, happy and smiling like the woman in the photograph, but another, darker part of me wondered if there was something about how we were raised that made us more prone to obsession. I thought of the crazy-sounding woman I’d spoken to on the phone. The one who turned out to be Gracie. Would finding Cameron make her happy? Or would she simply cling desperately to him, afraid to ever let go?

  I knew what it was like to feel that almost magnetic pull, to be lost when you were in the presence of that one person who seemed to have been plucked from the heavens just for you. Only Annie seemed to be free of this burden, but she wasn’t really free. For years she’d clung to her memories of Cameron, and I knew that even now she was still in love with him.

  “The thing with cloning,” Annie said, as if she were reading my tortured thoughts, “is that genetically it creates an exact copy of an individual. But we are more than genetics. There’s so much more that goes into making us who we are.”

  “He never wanted to have children,” I said. I knew I was changing the subject. “He only wanted the love of his life back.”

  “But she was gone,” Annie said. “Creating a genetic copy of her is not the same as bringing her back from the grave.”

  “But we did look like her,” I said.

  She nodded, and then I knew. I knew for sure. It made sense that she’d become so alarmed when I’d mentioned rape; of course, my theory that the rapist was Cameron was wrong, just like my guess that she and Cameron were my parents was wrong. The rapist was the man we’d called Dad.

  “How long did it go on?” I asked quietly.

  “It started when I was eighteen. That’s how old she was when they met.”

  “How come you never told anyone?”

  “I knew we had to keep a low profile, not rock the boat. If I went to someone about what was going on it would have thrust us into the spotlight. Someone sooner or later would have pieced things together, realized our mother died before any of us were born. I didn’t want us to end up in some laboratory somewhere to be studied by scientists.”

  “Then why didn’t you leave? You could have gone to college. You could have run away.”

  “I couldn’t figure out a way to take you and Gracie with me. I couldn’t leave you behind. Not with him.”

  I used to think my sister had stayed in this crappy little town, had become a recluse, all because a boy she’d once loved had broken her heart. I wished I still was under that mistaken impression, because it was a lot easier to deal with than the fact that Annie had sacrificed everything for me and Gracie.

  The burden weighed down on me. She’d stayed around while some obsessed, deranged pervert tried to pretend she was the wife he’d lost, just to save me and Gracie from the same fate. It wasn’t fair. How could I ever begin to repay her? Now she was sick and probably dying and I felt so weak and helpless. I blinked back the tears that burned my eyes. I wished I could run away from everything, like Gracie did.

  I wished there was someplace I could go that was far enough to really get away, but I knew that no such place existed.

  I turned and was about to head upstairs, lock myself in my room, but Annie caught me before I made it to the stairs and wrapped her arms around me. I lost it. I began to sob helplessly while she patted my hair. It was all backwards. I should have been the one comforting her.

  “It’s not fair,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “it’s not.”

  Twenty-Eight

  For the next week, Annie and I went through the motions of everyday life. I went to school and acted like I was nothing but a normal human being. I wasn’t used to having a boyfriend, and though I wasn’t intentionally avoiding Zach, I found ways to not hang out with him. I needed to look after Annie—how could I put some guy ahead of my family? Annie, meanwhile, continued to cook and to pretend that she wasn’t seriously ill.

  Every time the phone rang, I ran to it, expecting it to be Gracie, but it never was. Annie refused to report her missing.

  “She could be dead and lying in some ditch somewhere,” I said, but somehow I knew she wasn’t. She was out there somewhere trying to escape. Maybe she’d found Cameron, maybe she hadn’t. “Do you think she’ll come back?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Annie said. “I think she will, eventually.”

  If anyone deserved to run away with the guy she loved, it was Annie, even if that guy was Cameron Schaeffer. Seeing her moping around the house, and thinking about what she’d told me, drove me crazy.

  “You should go out,” I told her.

  “Go out? Go out where?”

  “Anywhere. Go to the movies. Go to the mall.”

  “Gracie took the car.”

  “You should go on a date.”

  “With whom?”

  But I knew the perfect person.

  Officer Hantz was surprised to see me waiting for him in the police station. He looked a little bit worried.

  “I’m actually here about a personal matter,” I said.

  “Did you want to go into the interview room?” he asked. We stood in the waiting area at the station.

  “No, it’s okay. I was just wondering if you had a girlfriend or were in a relationship.”<
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  His face blushed red and he looked around nervously to see if anyone was listening.

  “I, um, ah,” he stammered. “Listen, Barbara you’re a very lovely girl, but you have to understand that—”

  “No, not me!” I said quickly. “It’s my sister.” He still looked a little bit lost. “The pretty one,” I reminded him. It clicked, and a relieved smile appeared on his face.

  “For a second there I thought you were, that you—”

  “She’s free Saturday night,” I said. “Can you pick her up at seven?”

  “Um, sure,” he said, and I got out of there before he had the chance to change his mind.

  “You know this is completely backwards,” Annie said. “Little sisters are not supposed to fix up their older sisters on blind dates.”

  We were in her bedroom and she was trying to figure out what she was going to wear on the big date. If I’d known that it was going to take her this long to find a suitable outfit, I would have insisted we start earlier. It was already six thirty, and a pile of discarded clothes lay in a pile beside her bed.

  “Well, technically we’re not sisters,” I said, “and this isn’t an entirely blind date. He saw you the other day and said you were pretty.”

  “What about this?” Annie asked. She stepped out of her closet wearing a badly fitting pair of jeans with a patterned turtleneck.

  “Please tell me you’re joking,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with this?”

  “You look like a soccer mom.”

  “Well, you thought I was old enough to be your mom,” she said.

  I thought of that theory. It would have been nice if it were true—Gracie would probably still be home, we could all be nice normal people, and Annie wouldn’t be dying of some stupid disease that was going to kill all three of us while we were in the prime of our lives.

  “I can’t believe you don’t have anything decent to wear. I’m going to take a look at this closet.” I was pawing through her clothes, trying to find something that didn’t make her look completely frumpy, when the doorbell rang. Crap. He was early. I jerked my head up and hit it on the rod. “I’ll get the door,” I said. “You can not answer it dressed like that.”