by Kara Thomas
I was practicing blowing bubbles in the shallow end, like she’d taught me, when I saw Jos staring at the guy cleaning leaves out of the pool house gutter. Danny smirked at her; Jos didn’t smirk back. Instead, she got this determined look on her face like she saw something she wanted, and that was that.
Callie slides a finger across the screen of her cell phone. “The pool’s open till five. Let’s go.”
•••
The town parking permit stuck on the window of Maggie’s minivan is expired, so we walk to the pool from Callie’s house. I’m weirded out by how familiar this feels, so I remind myself of all the ways this isn’t the same. There are no towels slung over our shoulders. The Greenwoods’ new house is farther from the pool, and we have to take a different route to get there.
The longer trip sucks because there’s more time to fill with small talk. Eventually, Callie decides it’s not worth the effort, and she pulls out her phone and starts texting, stopping only when we have to cross a street.
I hate myself for how much I want to fill in the blanks for her, answer her questions about what my life has become, even though she didn’t ask. I want to tell her about how I’m going to Tampa in the fall and majoring in astronomy; about living in Gram’s retirement community and her bastard neighbor Frank, who is always quick to point out that my presence violates the fifty-five-and-older rule; about Ariel’s letters in pink envelopes and her emphatic pleas for me to Write back!!!!! even though I always did.
I hate myself, and I hate Callie for making me feel like a pathetic loser without even really trying. It makes me all the more sure that I can’t tell her about Joslin yet—not when Callie would never be able to understand why I kept quiet.
We hear the pool before we see it—splashing, shrieking, punctuated by the lifeguard’s whistle. The parking lot is full, and we have to wind through the cars until we reach the gate, a flimsy, barbed old thing posted with a set of pool rules.
The snack bar is gone, replaced with a slab of concrete and a row of lounging chairs. One of the guys who used to work there testified at the trial—Kevin, who snuck Callie and me french fries sometimes.
A man dripping sweat pushes around a cooler, halfheartedly hawking frozen Snickers and SpongeBob ice cream pops.
I catch Callie looking at a group of girls pulling jean shorts over their bikini bottoms and packing up their stuff. They’re looking at us—or Callie, rather—and angling their chins over their shoulders, whispering to each other.
Callie lowers the sunglasses perched on her head. “God, I hate this place.”
I don’t know if she’s talking about Fayette, the pool, or both. “Come on,” I say, uncomfortable with the way that the girls are watching us.
The pool-house-slash-management-office is the same ugly hunter-green building it was ten years ago. A guy with an acne-scarred face sits on a stool next to a soda vending machine, flipping through today’s paper. He’s wearing jeans despite the heat, and he has one of those faces where he could be either thirteen or thirty.
“Hi,” Callie says. “We’re looking for someone who used to work here.”
The guy tucks the paper under his arm. “Don’t keep employee records around. Check city hall.”
“He wouldn’t have worked for the town,” I say. “He worked for a landscaping company.”
“Which one?” The guy slides off his stool to chase away a pigeon that’s wandered in the open door. “The town’s had contracts with four, maybe five landscapers in the past ten years.”
In my head, I try to picture the pickup truck Danny used to ride off in. “Their logo was a leaf, I think.”
Callie rolls her eyes, as if to say, That’s helpful. “It was about ten years ago. Do you know which company the pool used then?”
The guy shrugs. “I didn’t work here back then. Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway.” Callie turns to leave, but I stare at the guy. I figure he could be around my sister’s age, maybe.
“Did you go to Fayette High?” I ask him.
He nods.
“Did you know someone named Joslin Lowell?”
Next to me, Callie stiffens.
“Sounds familiar.” The guy folds his arms across his chest. “Think she was a couple grades younger than me.”
“What about a guy named Danny?” I ask. “Really skinny, smoker, blondish hair?” The more I attempt to describe him, the less distinct his face becomes in my mind. Did he have a birthmark? Busted teeth? I can’t remember.
The guy blinks at me, and Callie tugs at my arm. “Thanks anyway,” she says to him, before dragging me outside.
“He might have known Danny,” I say, pulling down the hem of my shirt. “It wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
“It’s not that. I literally cannot be here right now.”
I trot after Callie, back toward the parking lot. She lets me catch up to her. I can hear her ragged breathing near my ear. Her face is ashen. I know what’s happening to her, because I’ve been there.
“When did you start having panic attacks?” I ask her.
Callie shrugs. “I think I was eleven. We’d been in the new house for a while, and all of a sudden I realized there were still windows I didn’t know about, and a cellar door. I just freaked, I guess, because if I didn’t even know all the ways into the house, how could I stop someone from getting in?”
We step onto the sidewalk, ducking under a low-hanging branch from an oak tree on the other side of the fence.
“I had them too,” I say, after a beat. “When I started at my new school, and there wasn’t a bathroom in the class like there was at Eagle Elementary.”
I leave out the part where I wet my pants and got sent to the nurse’s office; after Gram explained over the phone that I’d witnessed a murder the year before, my teacher was nicer to me, which should have made me feel better but really made me feel kind of pathetic.
Besides, I hadn’t actually witnessed Lori’s murder. I don’t know if Gram hadn’t bothered to get the story right, or if she told people this version because it was simply easier for them to process.
“I haven’t been to the pool since,” Callie says, her voice soft. “I was supposed to go with Sabrina in the eighth grade, but I freaked when her mom dropped us off. We had to call her to pick us up.”
Callie looks at me. “I just—I want to get out of this place. I’m never going to feel safe here, and that sucks, because it’s the only home I’ve ever known. At least you’re far away from it all in Florida.”
I nod and kick at a chunk of concrete that’s come loose from the sidewalk. Callie’s finally opening up to me after ten years, and I don’t want to ruin it by telling her that she’s wrong.
There’s nowhere in the world that’s safe. No matter how far we go to try to outrun that night, the monsters will always find us.
•••
We can’t think of an excuse for Maggie about why we’re home from the pool so quickly, so we stop at the park adjacent to the pool to kill time. Callie looks up the number for the Fayette Department of Parks and Recreation and reads it to me.
The clerk in the office gives me the name of the landscaping company the town used ten years ago—Faber & Sons Landscaping—but when Callie searches for them online, we get an expired domain name. The only number the results turns up rings about a dozen times when we call it.
Callie hangs up. “Probably went out of business. Like everything else in this shit place.”
I can’t argue with that. I’m sure a lot of people think poorly of their hometown, but Fayette actually is shitty. Seriously, you can smell the cow feces when you get off at the exit for Fayette on the freeway.
This place is too suburban to be rural, too far east to be a fly-over state, too far north to be redneck country. Fayette simply exists—the type of place that no one thinks about. The type of place where people up and leave, and if you ask about them years later, it’s like they never even existed.
“We’ll find him,”
I say, more to myself than to Callie. I have to find Danny, and not just because he might know what really happened between Lori and Jos that night. It’s not even just about Lori’s murder anymore. My father is dead, my mother is God knows where, and I’m not leaving Fayette without finding my sister.
I tried to talk about Jos every now and then when I first moved in with Gram. When Gram gave me macaroni and cheese for dinner: My sister used to make me mac and cheese. When Gram and I sat down to watch a sitcom: My sister liked Friends. Gram would get this blank, pitying look on her face like I was making it all up—this sister of mine was a figment of my imagination. An imaginary friend I’d created to deal with the trauma of being taken from my mother.
I push back the resentment growing in my mind toward my grandmother, who never wanted to talk about my family. She hadn’t ever met Glenn Lowell, or Joslin, and whenever my mother came up in conversation, Gram would get this tired look in her eyes. She was disappointed in how her only daughter had turned out, that much I could tell. It pained Gram to talk about how her relationship with my mother fell apart, so we just didn’t talk about her at all.
Maybe if we had, I’d know enough about Annette to track her and my sister down. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so goddamn lost in a town where I spent half my life.
Callie and I are quiet on the walk back to her house. I guess whatever force took over her earlier and made her want to talk about her panic attacks with me is gone. She doesn’t talk again until she unlocks the front door to her house for us.
“Jesus,” she says, jumping back into me.
Maggie is sitting in Rick’s armchair in the living room, slunk back into the cushion like she’s been waiting for us.
“I got tired of waiting for you to clean your room.” Her voice is strange, like her words are slurring together. “So I did it myself.”
There’s a handle of vodka on the coffee table in front of Maggie. It’s almost empty. Callie tenses; this was obviously the bottle she was worried about leaving under her bed.
I know I shouldn’t be here, and I slip upstairs like a mouse being chased by a broom.
I catch pieces of their argument before I can shut myself into the guest room.
“…not how we raised you to deal with your problems.” Maggie.
“It’s been a horrible week, okay? And it’s not like I can talk to you about it.” Callie.
“That’s ridiculous, Callie. You can come to me about anything.”
“Anything except Lori!”
I let go of the guest room doorknob. I press myself against the wall of the hallway, waiting for Maggie’s response.
Callie is the one who talks next, though. She’s crying. “You never once asked me if I wanted to testify.”
“Of course you wanted to. You wanted to help.”
“No. You made me feel like I didn’t have a choice, that if I didn’t say that Tessa and I saw him in the yard, he’d go free—”
“Stop it, Callie,” Maggie yells. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Yes, I do,” Callie cries. “I’m not eight years old anymore. I’m old enough to know that we might have been wrong and what that detective did to us was fucked up—”
There’s a short crack. Skin on skin. I swallow. Maggie slapped her.
“Callie, wait. I’m so sorry—”
Footsteps on the stairs. I duck into the guest room and shut the door, but it’s too late. Callie’s already flying past the room. She knows I heard everything.
There’s the sound of Maggie stumbling up the stairs. I suck in my breath.
“I don’t know why I did that,” Maggie sobs, outside Callie’s door. “I just lost it. Please let me in.”
No answer. I press my ear to the door just in time to hear Maggie say, “Did she say that to you? Is she trying to convince you that you shouldn’t have testified?”
She, as in me. Maggie thinks I came back to Fayette and brought along the crazy idea that we didn’t really see Stokes in the yard that night.
Maggie gives up, and moments later, the door to her room closes. I wait twenty minutes, until I’m sure she’s not coming out, before I sneak downstairs and slip outside.
I hop onto Callie’s bike and peel away from the Greenwoods’ house. I follow the main road all the way to Deer Run; I circle around the trailer park, wondering what Phoebe, the little girl with the stroller, is doing right now. I wonder if Nicki is being more careful with the baby around the pool.
I ride in circles until the sun starts going down and I figure that maybe someone at the house might start looking for me.
When I get back, Maggie is still passed out in her room. Rick is home. Callie tells him Maggie doesn’t feel well and has been sleeping this afternoon. Rick has Callie order a pizza for us.
After dinner, I excuse myself to the guest room. I shuffle through my father’s drawings until my eyelids start to droop. I replay Maggie’s words from earlier, as though if I kept turning them around in my mind, their sharp edges would dull.
Is she trying to convince you that you shouldn’t have testified?
Maggie pressured Callie to say she saw Stokes in the yard that night. Callie said as much, in the hallway earlier. I’d always suspected it. Maggie had needed us to put Stokes in jail, to put away her niece’s killer and stop the pain.
She needed Stokes to be found guilty. She was convinced he’d killed all those girls and that testifying was the right thing for Callie and me to do.
I used to lay awake at night sometimes, sure that all the questions I had about Lori’s death and Jos’s disappearance would eat at me until there was nothing left. I was terrified of the years ticking by, of eventually dying without ever knowing every detail about what really happened that night.
I always assumed that the doubt would destroy me. But now I wonder if it’s the opposite of doubt that’s the dangerous thing—if instead, it’s the things we’re so sure of that have the power to undo us.
I think of Bonnie Cawley screaming at Wyatt Stokes that he’d burn in hell for killing her baby. I think of Maggie, stone-faced, walking Callie into the courtroom, refusing to look at him.
They were always convinced that Stokes was the reason that Lori was taken from them. If he’s taken away from them too, if they can’t point to him as the murderer, what will they have left to hold on to?
My heartbeat falls into pace with the cuckoo clock on the wall of the guest room. I slip my earbuds in and turn up the volume on Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.” My father used to play it for me once he figured out that it helped put me to sleep.
I could use the help now. Ariel’s funeral is tomorrow morning.
It’s nine-thirty, and the service starts in half an hour. I’m in the black work jeans I wore on the plane ride here, plus my T-shirt. I’ll probably be mistaken for someone who works for a catering company. When Callie slips out of her room and sees me in the hallway, she sighs. She’s in a black pencil skirt and a blouse. Her eyes are swollen.
She disappears into her room and comes back with something crumpled and black. A cardigan that falls all the way to my thighs. It’s been doused in perfume, like Callie plucked it from the top of her dirty laundry and tried to disguise the stench.
“Thanks.” I slip the cardigan on and follow her downstairs. “Are you okay?” I add, when I see that no one is in the kitchen or living room.
“Fine,” Callie says, in a way that makes it clear this isn’t up for debate. She pauses by the coffeepot. “She drank more than half of that bottle. I’m surprised she’s alive.”
We’re all going to the funeral together. Rick comes down to the living room, wearing a gray suit with pants that come up to his ankles when he sits in his armchair. He took the day off. Maggie is the last to come downstairs, offering me a wan smile, her face heavily powdered with foundation.
I force myself to return the smile. Pretend I never heard the exchange between her and Callie last night. I ignore the nagging feeling that after the funeral,
she’ll be asking me about my plans for going back to Florida.
No one speaks on the ride to the church. I’ve been here only once before. The summer she was killed, Lori brought Callie and me to a summer fair on the church grounds. We ate blueberry pie off napkins while Lori pawed through the homemade earrings on sale at one of the stands. Jos was at work.
Rick parks on the side, by the entrance to the Sunday school. The church looks the same, except for a new message on the board outside: SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK.
There’s a line to get inside, even though we’re twenty minutes early. Someone says Callie’s name. I look up to see Sabrina wading through the crowd to get to us.
“You look like shit,” she says. Callie looks over her shoulder, but Maggie and Rick are busy making small talk with the couple standing behind us.
“Long night,” Callie mutters, and we inch up in the line.
We break away from Maggie and Rick once we’re inside the church; we sit on the outer portion of a pew about four rows back from the front. I’m suffocating in Callie’s cardigan. The fans overhead do little but blow around the hot air trapped in the building.
Up front is a blown-up version of Ari’s senior portrait, her hair stubbornly flat from the September heat. The coffin next to it, covered in white carnations, is empty; I know because behind me, someone whispers that Ariel’s body is evidence, shut up in a metal drawer at the medical examiner’s office. Her burial will have to wait.
I stare straight ahead, tuning out the sounds of grief around me by thinking of Lori Cawley in her casket, the name necklace draped across her throat. I don’t realize that my knee is jiggling until Callie shoots me a look, as if to say, Pull your shit together.
Was Ari wearing a necklace when they found her? I want to ask, of no one in particular. Earrings, maybe, or one of those color-changing mood stones around her thumb that she used to love so much?