It takes a few pokes to get her attention. Jessa’s face is forever blue-lit by the screen of an iSomething. iPod, iPad, iPhone, doesn’t matter. She rotates between them by the minute. Now she’s peeking at her iPhone below the lip of her desk, texting Jeremy White. I know it’s him because her texts are heavily sprinkled with winky-face emoticons. I prod her once more.
“What?” she huffs.
“Want to go into Boston this weekend?”
She looks up at last, big blue eyes surfacing to meet mine. “When?”
“Hmm,” I pretend to ponder. “When’s your mom working? Can she give us a ride?”
Frowning, Jessa sweeps her hair behind her ear and over one shoulder. It’s the rich red-blond of apple cider and she touches it all the time, the same way Dad pats his pockets to make sure he’s got everything he needs. It’s no secret that she’s gorgeous. She knows she’s beautiful the way I know yellow and blue make green. Some girls don’t like that. Liz Bash sneers about her in the second-floor bathroom and says she’s one of those girls (like there’s only two kinds of girls, and you’re one of those or you aren’t). I’m not exactly Jessa’s white knight, but I don’t see the point in begrudging her looks. I’m fine, possibly cute from certain angles and under the right circumstances and with enough work, but sometimes I think I’d eat live spiders and roll in rotten fruit to see what Jessa sees in the mirror, just for a day.
“Why can’t we take your car?” she asks.
“I need to bring it to the garage for the weekend. Something’s up with the starter.” This is a half truth, as there have been a few shaky starts recently. What follows is the total lie: “I really want to go shopping.” I slip a little whine in my voice.
“Fine, I’ll text Mom and find out.” She hardly bothers to hide her phone, but she won’t get caught. Mr. McCormick’s done fussing with the DVD player and has retreated to his desk, surrounded by copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and stacks of everyone’s essay but mine (Lindy went with “a family matter” in her note). Anyway, it’s Friday, and the last Friday before February break. Not a teacher at Sugarbrook High has their head in the game, hence Alicia Silverstone. In history next period, I’m betting we’ll watch a History Channel documentary on Nazis.
This is good. It gives me time to plan. I’d go into the city alone if I could. Technically, Jessa and I are best friends. We grew up in each other’s houses. Shared teething rings, then sleeping bags, then issues of Vogue. A few years ago we learned about mutualism in biology; how a certain kind of shrimp will drill a sandy home in the seafloor, and in will move a goby fish alongside it. Seems generous, but the shrimp is mostly blind and counts on the little bug-eyed fish to keep watch, and warn it with the flailing of its body if a bigger fish approaches. I hang out over at Jessa’s house and let her copy my English homework and sometimes math, which I secretly love because it’s just like a puzzle written in code. And while I’m there, Jessa polishes up my hopeless art assignments or paints my nails. Meanwhile I get to gaze at her big brother, Chad, who lives in their giant luxury basement and goes to college, and who I’ve had a lingering and unrequited crush on since fifth grade. I guess that makes me the goby fish?
Maybe that all sounds bad. Machiavellian, Mr. McCormick would say. Maybe it’s just honest. But I’m counting on Jessa for three reasons:
1. She doesn’t have a car, never even got her license, and depends on Chad or her parents or her boyfriends to drive her anywhere.
2. She will never turn down a suggestion to shop on Newbury Street, though I can barely afford the cupcakes.
3. Most important, Dr. Van Tassel—Jessa’s mom, who is all about girl power, and doctors under her maiden name—works at Good Shepherd Hospital. I know for a fact she usually has second shift on Saturdays. And it’s her I really need.
While I’m waiting for an answer I slide my hand into the front pocket of the faux-leather satchel at my feet—a present from Dad for my seventeenth birthday—and rasp my fingers against the rough outside of the stone. Whenever I feel myself start to panic because Dad’s been missing for two days now, I think of the stone and repeat to myself that he’s searching. He’s searching. He’s searching. I wanted to stay home today and start my own search, but Lindy wouldn’t let me, said I’d already missed on Tuesday and, in situations like these, normalcy is the best policy. Whatever she means by that. School won’t be normal for long, not once word gets out.
As far as I can tell, none of my classmates know Dad’s gone. Yet. I spent most of chemistry eyeing Ashley Griffin, who revealed nothing. No sympathetic half smiles, no gossiping behind her purple-painted nails. Of course, she might not even be Officer Griffin’s daughter, but she’s still the type who knows everything before everyone else. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her surprised, not by the box of Plan B that tumbled out of Dominique Melcher’s backpack during study hall or Josh Lopez’s brother’s second DUI. Girls like Ashley Griffin are the mouth of the river of gossip at Sugarbrook High, and the rest of us try not to sink in the current. Say what you will about Jessa (and you can say a lot), but she doesn’t blab secrets.
Not that I plan to tell her about Dad. I don’t plan to tell anyone. I’m not embarrassed or anything—I know Dad must have a good reason for skipping out in the night—it’s just that nothing anyone comes up with will be the truth. They’ll say he ran out on us, or that his murdered body is floating listlessly down the Mystic River. False and false. I don’t want anyone to think of my dad that way.
I flinch as a pencil flips past my face and clatters against the frosted windowpane to my left. Katie Rodriguez and Liz Bash giggle behind me, but Mr. McCormick doesn’t look up. I turn on Jessa, who grins unapologetically.
“Mom’s working at three tomorrow. She’ll drive us in, but we have to, like, get my brother to pick us up after.”
I give her a thumbs-up and sit back, my eyes on the TV screen to extricate myself from conversation. When the bell rings, Jessa kicks my shin a little too roughly with one red Converse, says “Call you later, Im,” and walks off without looking up from her phone. Her sequined hoodie winks under the fluorescents and her tight jeans ripple like a second skin. Thus goes my great hope.
After school lets out at three, it’s a fight to get out the door. February break has made everyone a little manic, and I thread through the crowd with my head down, between the senior boys hurtling themselves against lockers, the band kids slinging around black clarinet cases, the slow-moving art kids with ear gauges the size of quarters. When I make it to the parking lot, I watch Oriel Perotta plow right over the island, running down winter-dead grass, cutting through the dinky skate park the school put up to “keep kids out of trouble.” By “trouble” I guess they mean getting high outside the Burger King on Elm Street, the most likely mischief for Sugarbrook students. Ours is one of two small high schools in town—the other is J. Jefferson Agricultural High, for the aggies from the tobacco farms and cranberry bogs just west of us.
This place would show up under a “Middle-of-the-Road Small Town, USA” Google search. Just down the street from school is the Patty Linden Memorial Park, with a shabby stone fountain where the graduating class dumps laundry detergent every June so it foams over the lawn. Around the park, half of the brick one-story businesses are either on the brink or closed for good. Tommy’s Bicycles hasn’t had a new bike in the window in five years. Larissa’s Hair on Main hasn’t replaced a wig since the nineties, it’s rumored. Jamison’s Bakery shuttered when Mrs. Jamison ran off with a police officer from Malden, and is still for sale four years later. I guess there used to be a big electronics company in Sugarbrook, but a decade ago it moved to Boston. Now almost everyone goes to the city to work. A lot of people take the train out of Sugarbrook Station. In fact, it seems like half of Sugarbrook works at Good Shepherd, like Dr. Van Tassel. It’s just one of those towns.
Once I steer clear of the businesses and the main streets clogged with students’ cars, it’s easy moving through the streets. As I
drive east from the middle-class end to the rich-kid end, the pools and trampolines multiply, blocked in by iron gates instead of rough fences. Dad and Lindy and I live right in the middle on Cedar Lane. Down the street and with a considerably bigger fence is the Prices’ house. When we were young, Ma Ma Scott and Jessa’s nanny shoved us together, nurturing a friendship based on our mutual smallness and nearness to each other. That’s all little girls need to be buddies. They don’t even really need to like each other. So back then Jessa and I were friends because, well, there we were, and now we’re friends because we were friends back then. Simple math.
I rattle into the driveway of my pale green house at 42 Cedar Lane and am surprised to find Lindy on the porch glider. She’s wrapped in her cape and rocking slowly with her heels crossed. Maybe it’s the way she hunches down as the wind tugs at her, or the lack of hairspray in her frazzled yellow hair, but all at once I feel worse for her than myself. She doesn’t deserve to be totally in the dark. Maybe it’s selfish to keep my clue and my theory to myself. I’ve got a message from Dad to hang on to; Lindy’s got nothing.
“What are you doing?” I ask as I climb the porch steps.
“I made this flier on the computer,” she says. “I was thinking of printing out a bunch of them, dropping them off at the grocery store and the mall.”
I glance briefly at the paper in her lap and see Dad’s bubble-pipe headshot from No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem, and in bold font just below, the caption: MISSING. Jesus, I think, sick at the thought of incoming gossip, and look away without reading the rest. Instead, I pick at a loose thread on the glider seat, patterned with squiggly ivy vines. “How will that help? It’s not like Dad got lost in the produce aisle.”
She cups her hand around her chin and drums her fingers against her lips while she looks at me sideways. “I’m exploring all of our avenues,” she says evenly.
“Explore a different avenue,” I snipe. “Stake out a few places before you put a poster up in Wetzel’s Pretzels.” I’m probably picking a fight to squash this twist of guilt on my dad’s behalf.
To my great surprise, Lindy nods. “That seems reasonable. All right, where shall we start?”
I frown, wondering what kind of trap I’m walking into. “Like, together?”
“Sure. We won’t get in anybody’s way. But I’d like to spend some time with you, and if you feel like taking a drive, we can keep our eyes open as we go, can’t we?”
“I guess. . . .”
“Okay then.” She claps her hands, her gold watch jangling around her slim wrist. “What if we head out to that beach you both love? Seems like a good place to start. We could go right now, in fact. What do you say?”
The cops already did a sweep of Victory Island this morning; Lindy told me so when I checked in during lunch. But I can use the ride to sniff out scraps of information Lindy may have on Sidonie Scott. Besides, my only argument against it is my natural aversion to alone time with Lindy. And I can’t tell her that. She’s okay, for a stepmother. I don’t know if any thirteen-year-old would be psyched to share their dad and their bathroom with a new woman. But even if Lindy and I never did the whole hair-braiding, chick-flick-watching, homemade-cookies thing, she could’ve been worse. She left her fancy Boston practice and joined a smaller clinic in Framingham just so she could break the rules and be with Dad, so I guess she loves him. And if it was weird to have this therapist we’d been seeing suddenly walking around my house in her silk pajamas, at least she didn’t try to smother me or anything. She said I was a “partner in the family,” and never treated me like a pain, or the price of marrying Dad, or some pathetic little half orphan.
So yeah, it could’ve been worse, for sure.
I don’t know what’s gotten into Lindy, or what her angle is. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this is just another case of mutualism.
Crawling through rush hour traffic, Lindy and I retrace Wednesday’s route to the island. While bogged down on I-95, she keeps our conversation bland and safe:
“How’s that English paper coming along?”
“It’s okay. I got an extension.”
“Did you score the defense attorney spot in mock trial?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“How many volunteer hours are you up to?”
“Don’t know. Twenty? Twenty-two?”
“That hamper of your whites in the laundry room—are you waiting for a special occasion to wash them?”
“Not particularly.”
I’m pleasantly surprised by her benign questions. What Lindy really likes is some good self-reflection. It’s the therapist in her, which dozes but never truly slumbers. If I leave my late-night cheese and crackers and cold chicken and ice cream dishes in the sink? We have a talk about pride, and whether my lack of pride in my surroundings signals a lack of pride in myself. If I get a B-minus on a calculus test? We have a talk about my potential, and how my intelligence is a responsibility, and requires responsible choices, and what can we do to nurture said responsibility?
I count myself lucky and, in the breaths between answers, formulate my own questions for the drive back.
The beach, when we reach it at last, is even colder today. The wind whips brutally through the dunes, and with every step Lindy’s boot heels sink into the sand like golf tees.
The first time I remember coming here, it was one of the hottest nights in a legendarily hot summer. Dad told me so. A thunderstorm had knocked the power out and killed our air conditioner hours before, turned our house into a miserable, sticky swamp. In the middle of the night, after the storm blew past us, Dad came into my bedroom, where I was sweating through My Little Pony pajamas. He drove us to the coast. I don’t know how he found our particular beach, if he just went eastward until he couldn’t anymore, but I do know it was right around the Fourth of July, because I watched from the highway as amateur fireworks popped off above the cities. We walked barefoot through the still-warm sand. Lightning flashed in the distance over the ocean, and behind us, fireworks bloomed over Newburyport, so the whole sky was lit up in turns. It’s the first time I remember my little child-brain formulating the words I’d repeat to myself, often and forcefully: We are enough.
Silently, Lindy and I trudge a little ways up the beach, chins tucked into our collars. I don’t think either of us expects to find Dad huddled over a driftwood bonfire.
When sunset dusts the sky, we drive in circles through the kite shops and themed motels and clam shacks. We park pointlessly to show Dad’s photo inside a used bookshop he loves, and a gallery of wood carvings where he’s always threatening to buy something. As if Dad only stepped out to pick up a half-price paperback or a leaping salmon totem pole for the scraggly flowerbed in our front yard.
“It was a long shot,” Lindy says, and sighs as we turn and head for home. I agree; this place is ours, mine and Dad’s, so I hardly think the trail to my mother winds through the Victory Island Soap Emporium. Lindy doesn’t seem dejected, though. I think she spent more time side-eyeing me than scanning the streets out her window.
Still, I give it a little time before I break the silence. “So, did Dad ever tell you any stories? From before?”
“Before?” She takes the entrance ramp for the turnpike.
“I don’t know. Before . . . you.”
“You mean, did he tell me about your childhood?”
“Or before that.”
She wipes her wind-snarled hair out of her face. “What specifically are you asking me, Immy?”
I kick at the sandy floor mat below my boots. Stupid therapy-communication-speak. “Did he ever tell you about, like, my mother?”
Her perfectly manicured and moisturized hands tighten slightly around the wheel. “Your father has never been very effusive about that relationship.”
“Yeah, I know he isn’t effusive. I’m just asking . . .” The next words are a little painful to speak aloud, like needling out a splinter. “Did he tell you stuff about her he wouldn’t tell me? In s
essions or anything?”
“No,” she says slowly. “Only that your mother left when you were two, and the divorce was finalized shortly after. And that your mother had her problems, as we all do. He didn’t talk about them, and it would be irresponsible of me to speculate.” Lindy glances over at me. “I was always more interested in your father’s history.”
“But did my mom ever—”
“I wanted to talk to you about something, Immy,” she cuts me off, which is not like her. “I want to talk to you about your dad. About what’s been going on around here. I don’t know how much you’ve picked up on. . . .”
“Well, I’ve picked up on the fact that he’s not here.”
“I mean before that. You know your dad’s had some real trouble in the past.”
A horn honks through the quiet in the car, and Lindy flicks on the blinker, glides into the slow lane. I can feel this horrible, queasy seed sprouting in my stomach.
“That was a long time ago,” I finally answer.
“Not so very long. Your father . . . he’s had a hard time of it. Periodically. He was going through a stretch of it when I met him.” She looks over at me, suddenly flustered. “Of course, you remember, because you were there. He’s been battling this in therapy, and he takes his medication. And he has us. You know how much he loves you.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” I say coldly.
“Immy, wherever he’s gone, he left his medication behind.” She lifts a hand from the wheel and lays it atop my own, which I’ve fisted into the seat without noticing. “This is not his fault. This is not our fault.”
“You think he’s crazy?”
“Bipolar disorder is a condition, Immy. You know better than that. It’s medical, it isn’t—”
“He’s not crazy. I would know.” As I yell at her, I flip through the past few months, sift through moments of my dad. Were there any of the old signs from the bad times? That Sunday afternoon I came home to find him on the couch at three p.m.—was he napping? Staring listlessly at the ceiling? Did I have to call his name a bunch of times before he heard? Was his voice slow and slightly blurry when he answered, as if fighting up through water to reach the air? And that other night, was he wandering the halls at three a.m., or mumbling to himself behind locked bathroom doors? I think of the beach. He was a little different on the beach . . . but no. I would’ve noticed if he was changing. Changing back. He’s been fine for years. He’s perfectly fine.
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 3