After such a long bout with Harrison in the dark, my thoughts turned inside out in the startling brightness. To me, the letters read as sentimental. They highlighted what was best about each of us. They gave us each a task.
That didn’t seem despairing. Did it?
Chasing the Adventure five years later wasn’t supposed to mean rewriting history. But words could do that. Take on new life in different minds. Turn themselves into monsters when they might have been conceived as angels.
We were a team, but I was the leader. I needed to gather up every piece of Marley spread out across every inch of this place before anyone else got to it. It was possible to both share the information and control what people thought of it. I watched Marley do it all the time. But if the Albany kids started finding things without me, they might continue to mishandle Marley’s memory. They wouldn’t even discuss her at all until I brought us together again, and this is how they chose to revisit what she’d been to us? I had to show them they were wrong.
The tunnel had led me back up, like Harrison’s letter said. The next clue was here. At the point of no return.
Perfect.
Every year, Marley scolded us when we inevitably gave up on finishing her scavenger hunt. “Ugh. It’s so obvious,” she’d say when the last of us surrendered. The last being me. Always. I’d have to give my verbal resignation because adventures ended with summer. I’d walk to her house at six thirty in the morning on the first day of the new school year and tell her I hadn’t found anything else. What she didn’t know is that I always kept searching even after that point, trying to squeeze meaning out of misplaced rocks in our driveway or even holes in my shirt. Papers discarded in the trash. Everything.
I started digging into the ground beneath the POINT OF NO RETURN sign. Sweat mixed with the blood falling from my face. Red drops dripped onto my clenched fists. After a while, something grazed the tips of my fingers. Soft and solid. Distinctly different. My digging took on new fervor. Right beneath the surface was a third of a journal: the front side leather bound, the back side sheets of paper dangling off binding. I pressed its sand-stained cover to my chest.
Marley’s journal.
In my mind, her words propped up and became a movie playing on fast-forward. The Albany kids were nowhere to be found on the first pages. Marley painted vignettes of the life she lived without us. Late nights with her dad in their shed, working on a project she never referred to with any specificity. Memories of drives to pageants all across the coast, her mom forcing her to eat only cottage cheese the entire weekend. Impressions of a fight between her parents as she overheard it from her bedroom. That particular entry devolved into direct quotes, each getting scratchier and more urgent, Marley fighting to keep pace with the crescendoing argument.
MOM: You didn’t love me like I asked of you.
DAD: I could say the same.
MOM: You know it’s not the same.
DAD: Karen.
MOM: Don’t try to compare. The sickest part is that still, I love you back, even though I know it’s not a good idea.
Why can’t my mom see that the way she feels about my dad is the exact way I feel about her? You didn’t love me like I asked of you. Still I love you back. But it doesn’t seem to be enough. Nothing is ever enough.
Harrison was wrong. Those words in the tunnel weren’t about us. They were about Marley’s parents. My eyelids grew heavy with angry tears. I pushed the pages into the band of my shorts and stood, Marley’s journal like a weapon I brandished for show. Aidy had tainted my thoughts. I couldn’t help but filter every word of the journal through what Aidy had said. She made Marley seem sad to me. And hurt. Lost. Confused. Ignored.
I hated Aidy for that. So much. More than I could handle.
In my anger I stalked off, headed toward Arbor Street. Under my breath, I rehearsed different phrases. What happened with you and Marley? What did you do to her? Why couldn’t you love her like she asked? The incessant practicing made my tongue melt the words into unrecognizable blobs. I started running to chase off self-doubt. My speed built to a pace that required all of my focus. I ran until my words no longer had sound at all.
The blood that dripped onto my knuckles was still wet, leaving red stamps on the cream-colored lacquer of her front door. “Ms. DeVeau!” I called out. I pressed my ear to the wood to hear something. Anything. I imagined Ms. DeVeau manifesting in her living room, teleported from wherever she was by the sheer urgency with which I continued knocking.
“Karen!” I tried, testing out her first name. Willing myself to be the kind of person she had to answer. “Karen, it’s Olivia Stanton. I need to talk to you!”
“Olivia!” a voice called out from behind me.
Terror froze me in place. The sharpness in tone, coated in confidence, sprinkled with the faintest traces of affection. It was Teeny.
“Olivia, I know you can hear me!” she yelled. “Get over here! You’ve got people blowing up my phone asking me to look for you.”
I turned around.
“Didn’t I tell you she’d be over this way?” Teeny asked Bigs as she waved me down. She was in the passenger seat of their shared car, an impeccably maintained silver Honda Civic they’d been gifted with two years ago, right around their sixteenth birthday. I knew about it from Aidy. In fact, I got almost all of my Campbell twins information from her.
“Yes, I see you,” Teeny said. “You see me. Please come over here.” Teeny gasped as I got closer. “What did you do to your face?” I opened the back door. “Hold on a second.” She tossed a magazine into the back seat. “Rip this up and sit on it. You’re filthy.”
Bigs and Teeny wore khaki pants and matching blue polos with their aunt’s hotel name monogrammed onto the front right corner. On a different day, it would’ve made me laugh to see the two of them dressed alike, something their parents used to force upon them as young children.
I couldn’t muster up amusement anymore. After I covered my seating area, I rested my elbow atop the ledge of the passenger window and used it as a kickstand for my face, watching my chance for answers turn into a heat-choked blur of scenery. “Thanks for finding me,” I forced myself to say. Putting aside what I’d wanted to do, it meant a lot that they would go out and look for me.
“We’d just left the hotel when Ruby called me five times in a row,” Teeny said. “I looked at Bigs and said, Can’t she send me a text? But she kept calling, and I got scared that—” She stopped. “Well, I answered then. It’s a good thing we were only working the morning shift.”
“Are you all right?” Bigs asked.
Explaining myself felt like a courtesy I owed his kindness. “I fell in the tunnels.”
“Ruby said she came up over by the school,” Teeny told me. “She tried to call you, but your parents have your phone? You were down there without a single way to talk to anyone? You’re lucky I guessed you were over by Marley’s mom’s house! I don’t know how I knew that. I said to Bigs, I bet she found her way out to the train tracks. You were always trying to go to the train tracks.” She wore a satisfied smile, showcasing it in the rearview mirror for me to see. “Little Ollie, still thinking you’re so tough.”
She was misremembering history. It was Ruby who loved the tracks.
I didn’t love anything.
Teeny started to travel down the road of reminiscing until something drastic snatched up the sentence she meant to say and replaced it with one more urgent. “Where’s Harrison?”
Where is Harrison? I wondered with the same newfound panic. “I don’t know.”
“Ruby said he’d be with you.”
“The tunnels split again. Aidy wanted us to cover as much ground as we could, so I—I left him.”
Teeny shook her head. “You left him? Down there all alone?”
“Did you try calling him?” I asked.
Teeny shot me a look.
Bigs redirected our conversation. “She called him twice. It didn’t ring. Where do you think he’d end up?”
A helplessness started to consume me. “I really don’t know. You said Ruby came out by the haunted house? What about Aidy and Nick?”
“She tried calling Aidy when we were looking for you,” Bigs said. “No answer.”
“Aidy doesn’t have her phone either,” I admitted.
Teeny looked at me as if I’d failed an un-failable test. The shame I felt rivaled anything I’d ever experienced with my parents. This was true disappointment. Letting down the people who included me in their life by choice, not genetic obligation.
“Do either of you have Nick’s number?” I asked.
“Do you?” Teeny let that rhetorical question sit. “First, you were lost, now everybody’s lost except for you. The Adventure’s about as successful as it usually is, huh?”
The Adventure had deteriorated with such rapidity that in trying to figure out when the downfall began, all my memories seemed clouded with doom. I reminded myself I was the only one with Marley’s journal. I was the only one with fingers to point at people who may have hurt her. I could still get ahead of this, and the outcome would still be worth the price being paid. It had to be.
Bigs pulled into Cadence Park’s parking lot. In the distance, Ruby stood at the concession stand over by the park district. The girl who was usually behind the counter was out front, helping Ruby clean herself up. The physical tenderness between the two of them told me more than Ruby had in quite some time. I took in the situation with a different kind of curiosity. Last we spoke of concession-stand girl, Ruby decided it wasn’t worth it to try and pursue her.
Her Marley letter was right. Ruby could keep secrets locked inside of her.
I never thought she kept them from me.
A sudden, flaming embarrassment over how I’d made her worry burned through me. I conjured up an image of her talking to concession-stand girl in between phone calls to Teeny. In my imagined scenario, Ruby was complaining about my shortcomings, thinking to herself, Finally, a person I can confide in about Olivia.
When she saw me get out of the car, she ran over. “Why were you so worried?” I found myself asking once she reached me. If no one else had returned, why was it me she sent Teeny and Bigs to find on the streets?
“I had this terrible feeling you’d gotten hurt,” she told me as she rested her head on my neck. She pulled back to look at my face. “Looks like I was right.”
There would be nights I felt scared—of the dark, of the future, of the past, of nothing in particular—and my usually useless cell phone would ring, Ruby’s gravelly voice on the other end, telling me she’d been thinking of me.
“What happened?” she asked. “Where’s Harrison?”
“I left him,” I told her. It was a retaliation best suited to the situation building in my head. Scare her off. Let there be no more secrets for her to tell someone else. Let there be no more things for anyone to misinterpret.
“I thought that might happen. My path split a few times. I made guesses. I didn’t find anything.” She touched Marley’s journal poking out of my shorts. “You did, though. I knew you would.”
My disposition became a collapsible chair, folding inside itself. “It’s not really much,” I lied, having no way to back it up. I’d been so surprised by Teeny and Bigs—so caught up in trying to confront Ms. DeVeau—that I’d forgotten to hide the journal. Everyone would expect to have a chance to read it. Ruby would know that I’d lied to her. The failures to come made me so weak my knees buckled.
Ruby placed her hands on my shoulders to steady me. “Come on. Emery has a first aid kit at her stand. We need to clean you up.” She said her name as if we spoke it often. As if life post-Marley had always been Ruby, Ollie, and Emery, yet another group of -ee girls, arms interwoven, skipping through Cadence Park.
I took a step back, leaving Ruby’s arms reaching for nothing. “What about Aidy and Nick?” I asked. “What about Harrison? It’s them we should we worried about.”
Ruby pulled her hands in and buried them under her backpack straps. “Aidy called me from Nick’s phone before you got here. She thinks they found what Marley was talking about in Harrison’s letter. They’re bringing it back with them.”
No. No. No.
“Aidy has your number memorized?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said with a breeziness that tried to blow the follow-up questions away. Of course she does, Olivia. You never know when she’ll have to call me, wherever she is, with whatever phone is closest. You Stanton girls never seem to have your cell phones on you.
“Harrison’s down there all alone. We both fell. He might be more hurt than I am,” I said, trying again to scare her off. Couldn’t she see by now that everyone and everything that got close to me eventually broke? It was only a matter of time before her number was up.
“Then I’ll go in again and look for him. You shouldn’t. Your face is already bruising. And your legs are bleeding too.”
I looked down. There were little pebbles embedded into my kneecaps. Blood traced their edges. My clothing, already ragged, now looked post-apocalyptic. “Oh,” was all I managed to say.
“Come on,” Ruby said. “It’s okay.”
She placed her hand on my back and guided me to Emery, who did her part and waved, one-third of the famous trio that never was. “Hey,” she said, careful to sound both comfortable and concerned, like, You don’t look great right now, but I can help. I’m not worried. Well, I am, but only in the way that makes me worried about your injuries, not in the way that says anything bad has actually happened or will happen. Okay? Friend to friend!
She had the smile of someone who’d once been embarrassed by her braces. Her teeth looked to be perfect, and when she found something funny enough to lose self-consciousness, like Ruby’s joke about my injury being what it takes to be the friend of a bicyclist, she showed them. But for me, as she wiped my knee with an antiseptic, she pursed her top lip over the enamel as she grinned for my approval. “Does this hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth.
Ruby explained to Teeny and Bigs how we decided to wait for them before looking inside the box.
Shifting my eyes. Fidgeting with my seat. Rolling my wrists for no good reason. I tried everything short of actually talking. I wanted to communicate to Ruby that Emery shouldn’t be overhearing this. Our Albany kid activities had always been covert. We operated under a strict code of honor that never needed to be mentioned, for it was always understood. We were a self-contained unit. In school, my friends in my grade were casual. There were no sleepovers. No talks of our childhood. They knew my relation to Marley—I was her post-death representative, after all—but they never talked about her to me. I only saw Ruby at lunch and in between classes. That’s what I got for being the youngest of all of us. Forever a grade, or two, or three, or four, behind everyone.
Well, everyone but Nick, but he was at his other school.
As I thought it, he and Aidy came up from over the hilly part of Albany. My alliances shifted so much, so thoughtlessly, that until I saw him, I didn’t realize he was the only one who could ever fully understand. He wouldn’t misinterpret the Adventure. He wouldn’t find someone else to tell his secrets to. He didn’t have siblings or other friends. He had me. And we had Marley. A Marley no one else could find.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like that feeling, I realized. I was afraid of it. And I hated to be scared.
Aidy started running when she saw me. “What happened?” She looked every bit the part of a frantic parent as she dropped beside Emery to examine my knees. She took her inventory then leaned into my face, touching my apparently bruising skin with a firm tenderness, applying more pressure than she should, but not so much that I would cry out in pain.
“I’m ok
ay,” I said, a parody of myself.
“What are we going to tell Mom and Dad?” she asked.
“The phone call,” we said together, both of us remembering the element of our punishment we’d let slip away. Aidy turned to Teeny. “What time is it?”
“Why?” Teeny observed the two of us, her very body a shield, leaning back and away, desperate not to catch whatever problems we had.
Bigs showed Aidy his phone screen. “We have to go,” Aidy announced upon seeing it. “We’ll be back soon.”
Her behavior was classic. We both knew our punishments to be somewhat decorative. We were, after all, standing next to Cadence Park when we were supposed to be inside our house. Yet she treated their rules for us as if we were legally bound to them.
“The Campbells have a car,” I reminded her as she tugged me along.
She had an internal debate with herself over what was easier, even though it was obvious the drive was the better choice. They could let us out at Arbor Street and we’d sneak back into our house the very way we came out.
“Hey, Bigs, could you drive us?” I decided for both of us. “And maybe, if you didn’t mind, wait a second while we get cleaned up and call our parents?”
“Can we all go home first? We’re still in our work uniforms,” Teeny said. “An eight-to-one shift and straight to search for you.”
“We’ll drop you off. You can call us when you’re ready to get picked up again,” Bigs told me.
Lucky for me, Aidy didn’t notice Harrison had not yet resurfaced. As we walked to the Civic, I nodded at Ruby like Go find him, which she understood. How convenient that she could read my body language then. Entire plans could be hatched through simple gestures and ignored through grand ones. We went in opposite directions, Ruby back down the bowl, us siblings into the car. Nick and Emery stayed stationary between us.
When the Light Went Out Page 12