* * *
The last scavenger hunt was August 21. A cool night for August. We’d zigzagged across town until we were breathless, and our team won.
“The last winners,” Alex had said, handing over twenty-dollar gift cards for the Creekside. And we’d been relieved that we didn’t have to tell her this was the end. We’d worried, privately, that she’d somehow try to keep the hunts going next summer when we were home from college.
Alex seemed better. More in control. Focused. We thought she’d accepted us leaving. And though someone had brought a case of beer and a case of Zima and a case of wine coolers, Alex didn’t take one sip that night. I watched her.
She sat on the bench in the garden next to me with Casey on her lap. Casey smiled at me, cradled in Alex’s arms.
“Just look at that,” Casey said, pointing up at the half circle of the moon, brilliant against the black dome of the sky. Such a clear night, so many luminous pinpricks around it.
I drank two wine coolers, watching the stars, waiting for the crunch of J.B.’s truck wheels on the drive even though he wouldn’t be there for another hour. I was wearing my oldest cargo shorts, the zippered pocket soft and worn-out from my music box, and J.B.’s blue long-sleeved UCLA T-shirt, huge and cozy, smelling of him. Now that the night had gotten chilly, I was grateful for the long sleeves. I’d almost worn my peach short-sleeved T-shirt instead, but it had a blueberry-lemonade stain on the front. If only I had taken the time to scrub it out.
If only I’d worn a short-sleeved shirt, and if only Marjorie Pettit hadn’t been quite so pickled in her particular vinegar of fear, and if only Alex had been into some other hobby that summer. Or, if what happened had to happen, if only it had happened two months earlier. One month, even. So I’d have had time to make it right.
If only.
I closed my eyes, happy, loosely following the conversation in the garden, the unmistakable sighs and whispers of a couple making out on the back steps. The girl giggled, the back door creaked, and they stumbled inside together, laughing. I couldn’t tell who it was, but they were probably heading up to Casey’s bedroom, which would have annoyed me on any other night. Everyone knew J.B. and I got Casey’s room.
Jessie something, a loud sophomore who’d never come to a Shipwreck party before, read aloud from a book she’d found on the potting table. I knew the book well, a fat volume called The Ancient Garden Witch, serene gray-haired woman on the cover. Casey and I teased Alex about it.
“‘Blood spells are the most personal of spells. They can never be anonymous.’ You’ve really done this, Alex? With actual blood?”
“Sure.”
Ginny Ambrose was bursting with pride. “I let her do it on me once. Swear to God.”
“Yeah, right,” Jessie said. “They’re kidding, right, Casey?”
“They’re not,” Casey said. “She’s been after me for a year, but I’ve managed to fend her off. Watch out or she’ll go vampire on you, too.”
I was happy to hear the fondness in Casey’s voice. When I opened my eyes she was pretending to bite Alex’s wrist while Alex twisted away, laughing.
Jessie begged Alex to get out her gear. “C’mon, Alex. You did it for Ginny.”
“And Dina,” Ginny said.
Dina Pettit wasn’t there, but everyone confirmed that she had, indeed, opened a vein for a lifeguard.
Poor Dina was stuck at home. Probably folding nastygrams for Mrs. Pettit to pass out at church the next morning.
Jessie went on. Her boyfriend, smoking pot on the path by the dock, was being a tool. She needed Alex’s help, she said, begging, making everyone laugh. Other voices joined her, with other requests. “I need more help than Jessie, Alex. Just give us a tiny demonstration.”
Alex looked at Casey.
Casey looked at me.
I smiled, sent her a fraction of a shrug across the bench. Alex was just being Alex. Let her have this one last night.
Finally, Casey said, “It’s fine, Mom. Do your thing.”
Alex’s eyes slid from Casey to me. “How about a protective binding, to keep you two safe next year at school?” She couldn’t hide the excitement in her voice.
“No way, Mom. You know how she is about blood. I’ll let you take mine finally, or you can do Jessie’s love spell for her, whatever, but leave Laur alone. Don’t do it, Laur.”
The little hushed crowd of Alex worshippers watched us. I liked it. I liked everyone knowing how important I was to Alex. They were as in awe of her as I’d been the summer I’d first met her. “It’s that important to you?” I said.
Alex nodded.
“Don’t do it,” Casey said. “Mom. She had to put her head between her knees when we dissected the cow’s heart in bio. Just do me so you can show off your gadgets, and put in a lock of Laur’s hair or whatever.”
“I won’t faint.” I sat up, twisting the sleeve of J.B.’s shirt.
Alex dashed up the back porch steps. “Good girl,” she called. “It’ll be over in a flash.”
“You don’t have to,” Casey said, nudging my knee with the tip of her sandal.
“It’s fine. I want to.”
Alex came back with a shoebox and sat between us on the bench. She inserted a clean syringe into a small pewter holder with a dragon design wrapped around it. There were many appreciative oohs over this dragon. “The lady at the store recommended it when I bought the book,” Alex said. “Purely for show, but she’s cute, isn’t she?” She uncapped a bottle of rubbing alcohol.
“That’s kind of modern, isn’t it?” Jessie said, leaning so close over the back of the bench that I could smell the beer on her breath.
“It’s an old and beautiful practice, but that doesn’t mean I have to give anybody an infection,” Alex said.
Casey went first, doing everything she could to mess with Alex’s air of ritualistic solemnity. She extended her left arm like a ballerina beginning a port de bras. “Do your worst, Glinda. I’m so telling a therapist about this someday.”
A few seconds later—“It would be much simpler if we just got pepper spray.”
“Shush. I’m buying you pepper spray, too.” Alex wiped Casey’s arm above the elbow. I didn’t look again until the tiny operation was over and she was capping the vial of ruby liquid, wrapping it carefully in tissue to protect it from breaking, and setting it in the shoebox. Casey, pressing a piece of clean gauze to her arm, rolled her eyes at me.
“And you bury it in the garden now or what?” Jessie said, her voice reverent.
“Later. Have to look at some charts, consult the stars, you know.” Alex got the laugh she expected.
Then it was my turn.
By then I was no longer in the devil-may-care, end-of-summer mood I’d been in just minutes before. Hoping I wouldn’t have to put my head between my legs like Casey’d warned, I tried bunching up the sleeve of J.B.’s shirt, but there was too much fabric. I looked over my shoulder to check that the boys were still pretty far away, congregating around the path and dock. The boy and girl up in Casey’s room wouldn’t be looking out the window anytime soon; I could tell by the fact that they’d switched KJAZ on low, by the lapses between their soft, intimate laughter.
It was only girls in the garden tonight, and I wanted to get the bloodletting over with, so I pulled off J.B.’s shirt.
Some girl started to tease me about my lacy aqua bra. “I’ll bet J.B. looooves that one, Laura—”
“Shut up. Do it fast, Mom.” Casey’s voice was sharp.
I didn’t look. Alex rubbed my left arm with alcohol and I shivered at the cold.
Then—a sting, a warm pulling. It didn’t take long. It was so fast, so small. A tiny poke, something that would barely qualify as pain.
“Almost done, don’t move,” Alex said, her voice soothing.
Casey cradled my head in her lap and caress
ed my hair. “Mom, you owe us big-time. It’s almost over, Laur. You’re doing great. Don’t look yet...”
I was looking up at the moon, so I didn’t see him at first. I only heard the whine of the gate.
Thinking it was one of the boys from the dock, I scrambled up from Casey’s lap, my arm over my chest, distantly registering a thin, slicing pain as the needle in Alex’s hand twisted in deep, then slipped out.
He froze for a moment, just inside the gate. He’d unfurled the black pirate flag. Maybe he’d been planning to wave it, to enter making a joke. Ahoy.
I touched my punctured skin and felt warm wetness, but I didn’t feel queasy. Only tired.
And everything slowed down. The voices in the garden, the sounds of Casey and Alex fussing over me, receded to a distant hum. The romantic jazz turned on low, the laughter from Casey’s room, were soft and indistinct, miles above me. Part of the sky.
Everything but my dad’s eyes seemed slow and far away, smeared into the background paint.
Then he was at my side and it all speeded up, sharpened into sickening clarity.
He picked up the syringe, full of my dark red blood, sniffed it, then dropped it to the ground again. He stepped on it, his foot turning, ankle swiveling with a violence I’d never witnessed in him. He didn’t stop until the syringe snapped, emitting a distinct, plasticky crack.
“Oh, shoot, sweetie,” Alex said, fumbling on the ground for pieces of the syringe. “Mr. Christie. It’s not what you think. We were taking the tiniest bit of blood for a game. A silly game...” She knelt by me, clumsily pushing a gauze pad against my arm with one hand, but I let it fall.
Casey picked it up and held it in place. “Here, Laur.” She draped J.B.’s shirt over my chest. I stared down where the syringe had broken. The glinting fragments, the dark spot in the earth that now held my blood.
Alex’s old and beautiful practice looked ugly to him. My father had thought she was putting something inside me, something terrible like what had killed my mom.
He walked to the gate, and for a second I thought he was leaving. But he was picking up the flag he’d dropped. He crossed the garden, set it on the white wrought iron table. “This isn’t the one from the picture. Ordered it from a catalog.”
The girl laughed from Casey’s window, her boy murmured, and one of them turned up the music.
My father glanced up and then quickly away. As if he could see through the wall at whatever passion was unfolding in Casey’s bedroom.
His eyes slowly traversed the silent girls, the empty bottles. He stared blankly past the bench at the dock, toward the distant sound of someone cracking open a can of beer, deep male hoots, splashes.
What’s the harm?
Good clean fun.
Giving the kids something to do on a Saturday night so they don’t get into trouble.
“Group from the church coming by soon,” he said, not looking at Alex. Or me. He stared up at the moon, bright even against its field of stars. “There’s been talk. You’ll want to call it a night, Alexandra.”
My voice sounded raspy, foreign. “Daddy. Alex was only showing us this funny witchcraft thing, it’s not what you...”
But he was already pushing through the rusty garden gate.
42
Spring
At first it felt like a family.
They had their roles, their routines. Chores and inside jokes.
Daniel was the parent, resolving squabbles, letting them borrow his truck, peeling money off a thick roll for food or gas. Though he was their unquestioned leader, presiding over the house because it belonged to him and he was the oldest by nearly ten years, he had a streak of boyish recklessness.
When yellow jackets took up residence on the back porch, it was Daniel who made everyone stand on the lawn as he evicted them. Fearless, he scraped the gluey nest from the beam with a broomstick and carried the buzzing, dust-colored lump high as a flag to the driveway, where he threw a match on it. He got stung five times but said of the welts rising on his temple and hand only this: “Guess I’m not allergic.”
He only went out at night. All day he talked on the phone or played his guitar. Few people were allowed in his bedroom.
Others stayed inside all day, too, or disappeared for hours. But even on the coldest days Katherine joined the group out back in the untended garden, at the picnic table under the aspen tree. It was mostly the younger kids there. They talked, the air was sweet, the radio played.
It felt like freedom.
She learned to make things to sell at the farmer’s market. Discarded kitchen chairs were thrown into the truck, the seat pieces trimmed and polished until they were smooth as stones, engraved with sayings like Life’s a Beach. A piece of wood that countless strange bodies had worn down, and now it would adorn a fancy vacation house.
Twigs and a bag of garish feathers from Goodwill became dreamcatchers, three dollars each. Bath bars plucked from the housekeeping cart behind a Motel 6 up the highway were wrapped in strings of blue and green wool pulled from a moth-eaten sweater. Felted soap: three bars for a dollar.
They all knew how to make something beautiful out of something ugly.
She understood that there was another economy in the house that didn’t involve her. Housemates who never worked at the picnic table. Strange cars that drove up, drove off.
There were two types of customers at the farmer’s market. Some were well dressed, carrying baskets or canvas bags to hold their heirloom squash and pies and local handiwork.
Others didn’t have baskets and didn’t make eye contact. They strolled casually from the blanket to the truck with Daniel or the tall, blond boy named Finn. They left in a hurry, their purchases hidden.
In April, whispering in bed, Alexandra admitted to Katherine that she sold for him, too, evenings. At the skate park behind the high school.
She’d sold for him in San Francisco all fall. “Nothing terrible,” she said. The pills called Skittles, or Eve, or Malcolm. The ones kids used at the under-eighteen clubs.
“They’re not even illegal for adults,” Alexandra said.
Now Katherine knew; those wonderful candy buttons Alexandra produced from her turtleneck in the church restroom—they’d come from Daniel.
One afternoon she ran upstairs for a sweatshirt and heard Daniel and Finn and a man who didn’t live in the house, arguing.
“Don’t trust those guys...that last batch was No-Doz cut with Raid...probably fucking Easter Egg dye.”
She crept into the bathroom and peered through the half-inch opening of the door, holding her breath.
“I’ll give them a try,” Daniel said. “Unless someone else wants to be guinea pig for a change?”
The other two were silent.
“What a surprise. More for me.”
“Don’t, dude. Test it on one of your little groupies.”
Daniel scraped a gobbet off a piece of foil and popped it in his mouth.
“Man, you have a death wish.”
Daniel grabbed his throat, bugged his eyes out. Then laughed, crumpling the foil and throwing it at Finn. “It’d take more than this to kill me.”
He rolled up his jeans, showing off the three long, pink scars on the side of his left leg. Shiny parallel lines gouged into the hair, as if a precise animal had raked its claw down his calf. “See this fucker?” Daniel said. “My mutant mark. Only one in the world.” Daniel seemed proud of this scar, but Katherine had to be careful not to stare at it when he wore shorts.
She shut the door between her room and the bathroom quietly, so they wouldn’t know she’d eavesdropped. He didn’t act tough or speak like this with her. He was gentle, telling her she was his favorite.
He didn’t expect her to sell. He confided in her. He told her they were the same, how he was homesick, too. He missed Coeur-de-Lune, the town where he�
�d grown up, but couldn’t bear to visit it, even though it was just over the mountain.
He missed his two brothers, who had died young. They’d both gotten sick but he’d been spared. One night he said he knew it should have been him who died.
* * *
One afternoon he showed her what he kept in a boot at the back of his closet: a child’s thermos with a cowboy on it, a lasso forming the word Gunsmoke in the blue sky. He’d had it since he was a kid, he said, though he’d lost the matching lunch box. The thermos concealed a thick roll of cash. He said she was special, that she could ask him for anything she needed.
Everyone knew she was his favorite. He treated her gently, protectively. He saved the pills stamped with stars just for her. They were the best ones. When she took them, every fear, every longing for the past dissolved into the giddy certainty that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
He played music for her through the bathroom doors.
He’d sent Alexandra to rescue her; she could never forget that.
43
Eighteen
August 21, 1999
The night of the last scavenger hunt
It was my mother who’d tipped my father off about the church people coming that night.
Marjorie Pettit had asked her to confront Alex but she’d refused to come along, said something to my father about people with nothing better to do with their evenings.
At the time I thought it was malicious. My mother’s brilliant plan to shame me, to out me as a liar and a fraud.
But it’s possible she was simply being decent. She couldn’t have known that he would go. Certainly not what his going would set in motion.
My father walked over when she was sleeping. I think he brought the pirate’s flag as an excuse, planning to slip in the warning to Alex about Marjorie Pettit casually, so as not to embarrass her.
Casual. The decisions that flay us often begin this way.
* * *
I called Casey from the pantry while my parents slept.
“How bad is it?” she answered.
“Bad. I tried to explain but he only said, ‘You’re eighteen. Sorry I intruded.’ His voice was so cold.”
The Summer List Page 27