by Tess Sharpe
“Your shots are today,” Dad says. “Didn’t your mother tell you?”
“Oh. She did. I forgot.”
“I thought I’d take you.”
I can’t stop the hesitation that passes over me, and I can tell he’s hurt by it. It’s the barest flash in his lined face, but it’s there.
I remember, suddenly, all those days he took off work so he could drive me back and forth to physical therapy. How he’d sat in the lobby doing paperwork while I bullied my body into working better. How he’d always wrapped his arms around me afterward.
“Sure,” I say. “I’d like that.”
On the drive to the doctor’s office, we talk about ordinary things. About the soccer team that Dad’s dental office sponsors, how he’s thinking about retiring from assistant coaching because Mom wants him to take swing dancing classes with her.
“Have you thought any more about college?” Dad asks as we pass the post office.
I glance at him. “Not really,” I say.
I can’t. Not yet. There are things I have to do first.
“I know how hard it’s been for you, honey,” he says. “But this is an important time. We need to start thinking about it.”
“Okay,” I say. Anything to get him to stop.
Dr. Shute’s office is in a brick building across from the railroad tracks, and Dad pauses a second before getting out of the car, like he’s sure I’ll snap at him the way I did when he took me to therapy with David. So I stand outside the car, wait until he gets out, and we’re both quiet as we walk inside.
He stays in the lobby when the nurse leads me back, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking him to come with me. I tell myself I don’t need him to hold my hand, that I’d learned how to handle getting the shots solo at Seaside. I’ve learned to depend on myself. I sit down on the exam table and wait.
The door opens, and Dr. Shute pops her head in the exam room and smiles at me, her red glasses hanging on a beaded chain around her neck. “It’s been a while, Sophie.” After a minute of small talk and a rundown of my pain level, she leaves so I can get undressed. I take my shirt off, lying facedown on the exam table in my bra. The table is cool against my belly through the crackly paper, and I dig into my jeans pocket and come up with my phone as Dr. Shute knocks and comes back inside. I page through my music and put in my earbuds, letting the sound warp my senses. I press my forehead into the cradle of my arms, concentrating on my breathing.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Dr. Shute says. She knows the deal, knows I can’t stand to see the long epidural needle, knows how freaked out it makes me—that even after all this time, after all the surgeries, I can’t handle a stupid needle sinking into me.
I’ll never be ready. I hate this. I’d almost prefer another surgery.
“Okay, do it,” I say.
The first one goes into the left side of my spine, in the middle of my back, where the pain is the worst. I breathe in and out, my clenched fists crumpling the paper liner set over the exam table. She moves down, three more on my left side, ending deep in my lower back. The long needles pierce through me, the cortisone pushes into my inflamed muscles, buying me some time. Then four on the right side. By the time she’s moved to my neck, I’m breathing hard, the music fuzzy in my ears, and I want it to stop, please, stop.
I want Mina holding my hand, brushing my hair off my face, telling me it’ll be okay.
On the way home, Dad pulls into Big Ed’s drive-through and orders a chocolate–peanut butter milk shake. It’s exactly what I need at that moment, and tears well up in my eyes when he does it without being asked. It’s like I’m fourteen again. I never thought I’d want to go back there, to the days of physical therapy and canes, floating on a cloud of Oxy, but I do. Because then, at least, she’d been alive.
When Dad hands over the shake, he meets my eyes, not letting go of the cup. “Are you okay, honey?” he asks, and I want to hide inside the concern in his voice.
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Just stings a little.”
We both know I’m lying.
44
ONE YEAR AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)
“I hate you!”
I duck just as a shoe comes flying out of Mina’s room, closely followed by Trev.
“Jerk!” Another shoe sails down the hall, and Trev barely looks at me as he stalks past, his face stormy. He yanks the back door open and charges outside, leaving the door swinging on the hinges.
I can hear Mina muttering angrily underneath her breath, and I peek around the corner, knocking lightly on her open door. She whirls around, and my chest tightens when I see she’s been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
“Oh.” She brushes the tears away. “Nothing. It’s fine.”
“Um, bullshit.”
She flops on the bed, on top of a pile of papers scattered across her comforter. “Trev’s a jerk.”
I sit down next to her. “What’d he do?”
“He said I was being too open,” Mina snarls.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “You’re gonna have to fill me in more than that.”
Mina rolls over to her side, freeing up some of the papers she’s lying on. She grabs a stapled stack, handing it to me. “It’s my personal statement for the Beacon internship. I asked him to read it, and because he’s an asshole”—she shouts the last word so he can hear it—“he told me I shouldn’t submit it.”
“Can I read it?” I ask.
Mina shrugs, throwing an arm over her eyes dramatically. “Whatever,” she says, like it doesn’t matter, which means, of course, that it does.
She’s quiet for the five minutes that it takes me to read. The only sound in the room is the rustling of paper when she shifts on the bed.
When I finish, I stare at the last sentence for a long time, trying to think of what to say.
“Is it that bad?” Mina asks in a small voice.
“No,” I say. “No,” I say again, because she looks so unsure, and it makes me want to curl up next to her and tell her she’s wonderful until she stops. “It’s beautiful.” I squeeze her hand.
“It’s supposed to be about what shaped me,” Mina says, almost like she needs an excuse. “It was what I thought of first. Trev said he’d proof it for me. I didn’t think he’d get so mad.”
“Do you want me to go talk to him?”
Her gray eyes, still red and puffy, light up. “Would you?”
“Yeah. Be right back.”
I leave her in her room and walk outside to the shed in the backyard that Trev’s converted into a shop. I can hear the rhythmic scrape of sandpaper against wood as I walk up to the doors.
Trev’s hunched over his workbench, sanding a pair of triangle trellises for my garden. I watch for a moment, his broad fingers moving confidently over the cedar, smoothing the rough edges. I step forward into his domain, breathing in the smell of sawdust and the sharp bite of motor oil.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Soph,” he says before I can speak. He keeps his back to me, moving to the other side of the trellis. The sandpaper rasps against the wood, motes of sawdust floating up in the air.
“He was her dad, too. She should be able to write about him.”
Trev’s shoulders tense underneath the thin black cotton of his T-shirt. “She can write whatever she wants. Just not…about that.”
“I didn’t know. She never told me,” I say haltingly. “That you two were with him when he died.”
“Yeah, well, we were.” I hate how flat his voice is, like it’s the only way he can actually admit it. “Happened kind of fast.”
I don’t know what else to say. It makes me ache to think of ten-year-old Trev playing ball with his dad and watching him drop from a brain aneurysm between one pitch and the next
.
“I didn’t realize how much she remembered,” Trev says hoarsely. His back is to me, which might be the only reason he’s still talking. “I told her to look away. She was good about listening to me when we were little. And she never talked about it afterward. I thought she blocked it out or something…hoped she did.”
“She didn’t. So you guys need to talk about it.”
“No.”
“Yes.” I know I’m crossing a line here. Spurred on by Mina, unheeding in her shadow.
He finally turns around, holding on to the sandpaper like a lifeline.
“Trev,” I say softly. “It’s been years. If you never have before…you have to.”
He shakes his head, but when I hug him, he falls into me like I’ve cut him off at the knees. I hold on tight, press my palms flat against his shoulders, two points of warmth seeping through his shirt.
When I look up, over his shoulder, I can see Mina standing on the porch, watching us.
I hold out my hand, beckoning, beseeching, and she steps forward hesitantly, off the porch, one step, two, steadier now, until she’s in front of me, wrapping her arms around Trev’s waist as I pull back.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, or maybe it’s her, or both of them who say it, and I move away, out of the shed, toward the house.
Like a silent guard, I sit on the porch, the indistinct murmur of their voices blending with the crickets and night noises, and I wish that things were easy.
45
NOW (JUNE)
I’m supposed to rest after I get my shots, but when Dad goes back to work, I drive downtown to the Harper Beacon office. The newspaper is in a slant-roofed, mustard-yellow building from the seventies that’s next to the best—and only—Mexican restaurant in town. The air is fragrant with cilantro and carne asada as I push through the swinging doors.
The guy at the reception desk points me to the right when I ask him about internships, and I make my way down a winding hallway with framed front pages on the walls, their headlines blaring. The hall leads to a room neatly divided into a dozen or so gray cubicles, the overhead lights bathing everything in a sickly blue sheen.
I make my way through the maze of cubicles. Every few seconds, a phone rings or someone’s printer screeches. There’s a low hum of computers and voices. I can just picture her standing in the center of it all, that smile on her face as the buzz washed over her.
This had been Mina’s first step toward what she always wanted. To become a part of the world outside of our dusty little town, “to contribute,” as she used to put it.
Instead, she’d been reduced to a handful of stories written about her instead of by her.
“Mr. Wells?” I tap on the cubicle wall with his name on it.
“Just one second,” he says before I can move into the cube. All his focus is on his computer screen as he types, giving me time to look him over.
He’s younger than I thought he’d be. Only a few years older than Trev, so maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. His button-down shirt is half-tucked into his jeans, and he’s wearing black Chucks. He’s cute in a rumpled sort of way, like he spends a lot of time running his hands through his brown hair, thinking big thoughts.
Mina had liked him. A lot, actually. Half of our conversations when I was in Portland had been about her internship and Mr. Wells and how much he was teaching her about digital media and what a great journalist he was.
She hadn’t mentioned he was cute.
Probably on purpose.
“Okay, hi,” he says. He spins around in his chair and looks me up and down. “Internship apps, right? Jenny has them, she’s right over—”
“I’m not here about an internship,” I interrupt. “I’m here because of Mina Bishop.”
The easy cheer in his brown eyes dims. “Mina,” he repeats sadly, and sighs.
“I’m Sophie Winters,” I say, and then I don’t say anything else. I just wait for the understanding to snap across his face.
It’s there instantly. He is a reporter, after all. Even if the police weren’t allowed to release my name to the press as a minor, everyone knew. “What can I help you with, Sophie?”
“Can I sit?”
He nods, gesturing to the stool in the corner of the cube. I balance as best I can, my lower back, still red and sensitive from the shots, flaring hot with pain. “I found some notes of Mina’s.” I open my bag, grab the printouts I’d made of the excerpts from Mina’s time line, and hand them to him. “I was wondering if she ever mentioned to you that she was looking into Jackie Dennings’s disappearance.”
Mr. Wells’s lips press together tight, then disappear as he scans the three pages I’ve given him. “This is…” He looks up. “This was Mina’s work?”
I nod.
“Is there more?” he asks.
“No,” I say. It comes out of my mouth, all instinct. I slip into that part of me that can bullshit so easily. It knocks too close to the addicted pieces, the ones I’ve beaten into submission, and I can feel them stir.
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but Mina never brought Jackie up. And she would have if she was interested in the case. It was one of the first stories I covered for the paper. I suppose she just never got around to it?”
I think about Mina saving the articles on Jackie’s disappearance. No way she wouldn’t have noticed that Wells had written a lot of them. “Maybe,” I say. “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to know.” I get up off the stool, leaning on his desk to keep my balance. “Did you have any theories?”
“About Jackie?” Mr. Wells leans back in his chair, threading his hands to cradle his head as he thinks. “The detective in charge was convinced it was the boyfriend.”
“What about you?”
Mr. Wells grins, his enthusiasm over an old story almost infectious. It reminds me of Mina, of the hunger in her, to know…to tell. “Sam James is a good detective—” he starts.
“Detective James was in charge of Jackie’s case?” I interrupt.
“He was,” Mr. Wells says, frowning.
“Right,” I say quickly. “Anyway, sorry. You were saying? About Jackie?”
“Matthew Clarke is a solid suspect,” Mr. Wells says.
“But you don’t think he did it.”
“Can’t really say. It’s a decent theory, considering the lack of motive elsewhere, but the evidence just isn’t there.”
“Did Matt have a motive?”
“You’re awfully interested in this,” Mr. Wells says.
I shrug. “I guess I just thought…it was important to Mina, you know? Working here, for you. She was always talking about how much she learned from you. I thought maybe if I did some research on the stuff Mina was doing, it’d help me, I dunno, move on. It’s been hard, since, you know…” I trail off, resisting the urge to widen my eyes, because that’d be pushing it.
Mr. Wells sets the copy of Mina’s notes on the desk, his expression softening. “I understand,” he says. “Look, the Dennings case, it’s a dead story. Whatever happened to that girl, it’s doubtful that after all this time it’ll ever be known. That’s the nature of things. You’re better off just letting it go.”
I nod, like I’m agreeing with him instead of searching for a way to bust both cases wide open. “I should get home,” I say. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I appreciate it.”
I’m almost out of his cube when he stops me. “Sophie, what happened at Booker’s Point that night?”
I look back at him over my shoulder, and it’s there again, that gleam in his eyes that reminds me of Mina. She’d had that look that night. She’d been practically vibrating from it, the excitement humming beneath her skin, close enough to the truth to taste it.
“Off the record?” I ask, because I’m not stupid.
He grins approvingly. This guy has to have all his girl interns wanting to jump him. Probably some of the guys, too. “I’d prefer a comment on the record.”
“I’m sure you would,” I say. “Thanks again for your time.”
I don’t turn around to confirm it, but I can tell he’s watching me the entire time I walk away.
46
TWO YEARS AGO (FIFTEEN YEARS OLD)
I dig in the dirt, making small furrows. “Will you hand me that flat?” I point to the seedlings I nursed under fluorescent lights for weeks, waiting until they were strong enough to transplant. I was pretty proud of them; they were the first I���d grown under the lights Dad had bought for my birthday.
Mina sets her book down and gets up off the wicker chair so she can move the flat closer to me. She balances delicately on the edge of the redwood bed, eyeing the soil suspiciously. “What are these going to be, again?”
“Tomatoes.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble for tomatoes,” Mina says. “Couldn’t you just get the plants at the garden center? Or one of those plastic upside-down-hanging planters to put them in?”
“These are different. They’re purple.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I ordered the seeds specially.”
Mina beams. “You could’ve just gotten me flowers.”
I set a seedling carefully into the dirt. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“We can make purple pasta sauce,” she suggests.
“As long as you’re doing the cooking.”
“Oh, come on—remember that vegetable soup you tried to make? There was only a teeny tiny fire that time. You’re getting better.”
“I think I’ll stick to what I’m good at.” I dig a third hole, lift another seedling out of the tray, and set the fragile roots into their new home.
“Aren’t you glad I made you get a hobby?” Mina asks, grinning. “When you become a world-famous botanist, I can say I’m responsible whenever I brag about you.”
“I think out of the two of us, you’re going to end up being the world-famous one,” I say, laughing.