“Hi,” I say.
Somewhere a chuck-will’s-widow begins its evening song, and a chorus of frogs decides to sing backup. The bayou is coming to life all around us.
And I suddenly feel shy and awkward. Like I don’t know what to say next. But then he smiles at me, and there’s so much I want to tell him.
I start with the fight between Case and Hart.
The bloody Saint Sebastian medal. Elora’s good luck charm. How I thought Case was the one. And how Hart says he isn’t. How he can feel the truth of that now.
So we’re right back where we started.
“Did she ever tell you about anyone else?” I ask. “A new boyfriend?”
But Zale shakes his head. “Even that last night I saw her, when she told me she was leavin’ town, she never said who with.”
We sit together in the falling dark while the electric air dances around us. I see the energy coming off Zale in waves that look like heat rising up off the highway. The flies are biting at me something awful, but I never see one land on him.
“Honey says people didn’t like your daddy because he was too powerful.” He doesn’t ask who Honey is. Just like he didn’t ask who Hart is. Or Case. And it makes me wonder how much Zale knows about us.
About all of us.
“She says people were afraid of him. That he could bring storms.” He’s studying me with those fire-and-ice eyes. “You can do that, too, can’t you?”
“Do you know what Zale means?” he asks me. I shake my head, and he gives me a big grin. My heart skips a beat. Or three. “It means ‘strength of the sea.’ I was a hurricane baby.”
It still feels so strange just sitting and talking to Zale like this. But it feels right, too. And that seems strange itself, until I remember that he’s one of us. One of the Summer Children.
Just like Elora. And all the others.
Like Hart.
For a second, I think about those dark curls. And my fingers itch. I remember the way Hart laughs, deep in his throat. How he used to tease me. And I get overwhelmed with missing him.
The way he used to be.
The way we used to be.
But then that feeling fades away, and this beautiful fog rolls in to take its place inside my head. And I’m grateful.
“A huge storm blew in the night I was born,” Zale is telling me. “Moved right across Keller’s Island. My daddy tried to hold it back, but it was too strong for ’im. He couldn’t stop it comin’. And my mama couldn’t stop me comin’.”
“You were born into the storm,” I say, and he nods.
“I wasn’t two minutes old when the wind took our little shack. Blew it clean away. Sucked me right outta my mama’s arms.”
A couple stray clouds are scattered across the sky, but when Zale waves his hand, they roll off. Just like he shoo’d ’em away.
“When dey found me, I was lying in a big old mud puddle. Safe and comfortable as you please. Storm raging all around me, except right dere where I was. In that little bubble, my mama said there wasn’t even breeze enough to move the little curl on the top of my head.”
“The power of the sea and the sky,” I whisper. Just like Honey told me.
We’re sitting so close together. I feel the static charge of his shoulder barely brushing mine. The two of us stay out there at Li’l Pass and talk for a long time while the sky turns velvet black and the stars blink on like Christmas lights.
And we do it the next night, too.
And the night after that.
And that’s how it goes for weeks.
Those terrifying flashes of Elora keep coming, but I don’t learn anything useful. It’s like I swim and swim and swim against the current, but I never make any progress. The river just sweeps me farther downstream.
Hart drifts further away from me, too. And I miss him so much. My fingers still long for those curls sometimes, but he doesn’t come around anymore. I see him plenty. Standing on the dock staring at the river. Or sitting at the end of the boardwalk, watching Willie Nelson down at the gator pond. But there might as well be a hundred miles between us. His busted face heals up, but he loses weight. His cheeks are sunken and his eyes are dark. I’m watching him blow away, just like the ash at the end of his cigarette. I ache for him. But I can’t reach him. I try once or twice, but as soon as I mention Elora he shuts down. Pushes me away. “Don’t,” he warns me. Like he can’t stand to so much as hear her name. “She’s gone. What does it matter?”
Evie’s distant, too. Sometimes I catch her watching me from her bedroom window, but I don’t see much of her. She finally comes over on the Fourth of July to sit with me on the front steps of the bookstore and watch people launch fireworks off the river dock. We eat ice cream sandwiches, and she lets me French braid her hair. “Have you seen Hart lately?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“Not really.”
She looks at me like she thinks I’m lying. “But you guys are together, aren’t you?”
I hear the hurt in her voice, and I wonder how much she saw between Hart and me that night a few weeks back. My birthday. I caught her watching us from her front porch. But now I’m wondering if she saw what happened before that. Down at the old pontoon boat.
That kiss.
“No,” I reassure her. “We aren’t together. It’s not like that between us.”
I don’t tell her the real truth of it.
That Hart’s too messed up to be with anybody right now.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she says, and it gets quiet. Except for the bottle rockets and the Roman candles. I want to ask her about the night of the fight. What happened to her out on the dock. I still need to know if the voice she was hearing was Elora’s.
But I don’t get a chance, because she makes an excuse to leave.
After that, she only comes out to hang more wind chimes.
Case is still pissed, and I don’t blame him. We don’t cross paths much, but when we do, he scowls at me. His face is all healed up, but Hart left him with a missing tooth and a pretty good scar over one eye, and I imagine that every time he looks in the mirror, it reminds him that we all thought he was capable of murder.
Even Wrynn stays hidden. Sometimes I look up in time to see her disappear around a corner. Or behind a tree. Her long red hair gives her away. So I know she’s out there. But she doesn’t come in close. And I wonder if she’s more afraid of the rougarou or of me.
The rest of us still hang out, of course. Sometimes it’s a bonfire out at Sera and Sander’s place. Or passing around a couple beers in the clearing behind Mackey’s house. Maybe even a little bit of weed, if someone has it. But with Elora gone and Case avoiding us, plus Hart missing in action and Evie always being a no-show, things are weird. We try our best to act normal. We laugh as much as we’re able to. Listen to music. Tell stories. Occasionally, if Sera has enough to drink, she’ll make out with Mackey. Just a little bit. Or sometimes we’ll all pile up on someone’s couch and watch an old movie. But the truth is, whenever we’re together, I spend all my time counting heads. Just to make sure nobody else has disappeared.
During the days, I keep busy helping out in the Mystic Rose. I reprice the essential oils and dust the healing stones. Then I alphabetize all the books.
I study palm-reading guides and let Sander do my star chart.
I stare into mirrors. Burn sage, like Sera tells me to. Sleep with a piece of clear quartz under my pillow. Because Honey says it will bring me clarity. I even try one of those new yoga DVDs.
But none of it helps.
So I run.
A couple times a week I badger Mackey until he takes me up to Kinter with him. To the high school track. We lace up our running shoes, and I run until my lungs are on fire and my legs fail.
I run until my brain switches itself off.
Until Mackey puts a hand on
my shoulder and tells me it’s time to go home.
But no matter how fast I go, I can’t catch up to Elora.
Or my mother.
Sometimes, when Honey isn’t watching, I stop in the kitchen and study that photo on the wall. I try to imagine what kind of deep power the young woman with one hummingbird hair clip might have possessed. I close my eyes and reach for her, but my mother has never seemed so far away.
By the middle of July, I’ve pretty much given up on ever finishing The Tempest. But I’m still holding out hope that, somehow, I’ll figure out what happened to Elora. Because if I leave here not knowing anything more than I know now, I figure I might as well be dead myself.
The temperature has become truly suffocating. The bayou loves the heat, though. Honey’s roses wither. But the wild things thrive. Cattails and rousseau cane grow tall and thick along the edges of the boardwalk. Someone cuts them down when they threaten to take over. But they come right back. Taller. And thicker. Vines rise out of the muck to twist around the pilings, reaching up to tug at the white-painted planks that blister and peel in the unforgiving sun. Mold and rot creep in around the edges. And the smell of decay is overwhelming. By midday the air is so thick that it’s like trying to breathe wet cotton. We stay inside during the worst of it, but even on high, the AC can’t keep up. It makes us all slow and cranky. And I find myself watching the clock each day, counting the hours until the sun goes down and I can escape to join Zale back at Li’l Pass. Because when I’m with him, at least I feel like I can breathe a little easier.
We meet up most every evening when the frogs start to sing and the light begins to change. The two of us sit back there on the rusted-out trailer and talk until it gets too dark to see each other anymore.
Mostly we talk about Elora. I tell him how the two of us used to share dreams sometimes. How we’d go to bed curled up together under Honey’s quilts, and then both wake up at the exact same moment, having dreamed the exact same thing.
Zale tells me how no one had ever listened to him the way Elora did, without judgment or expectations. How he’d started to feel like a ghost, but the way Elora saw him—heard him—made him feel real again.
And it feels so good just to be able to breathe Elora’s name out loud to someone. It feels like keeping her alive, maybe. In some small way.
“What if I never find out the truth?” I ask Zale one night. “Elora was everything to me. How do I go on living just the same? Like nothing ever happened?”
With summer more than halfway over, the thought of ever caring about trips to the mall or scheduling college visits . . . or even running track again . . . seems impossible.
Zale takes my hand, and electricity sparks between our fingers. He spins Elora’s ring three times. Like making a wish.
“You don’t go on living just the same,” he tells me. “You have to go on living in a completely different way.”
And that’s the first thing that’s made sense to me in a really long time.
We talk a lot about his daddy, too, and Zale always gets quiet when we come to the morning his mama pulled him from the flames and ran with him through the bayou. Her hand clamped tight over his mouth.
The same morning folks pulled Ember and Orli from the drowning pool.
“All those memories are filled with smoke,” he tells me. “But my daddy wasn’t a murderer. That’s a thing I can say for certain.”
So I try to let my old fear go. To think of Dempsey Fontenot as something other than a killer. To picture him the way Zale paints him in the stories he tells. But it’s hard, because it’s a really strange thing to find out the monster under your bed was never really a monster at all.
And at first, it seems like we need each other, Zale and me, so we can help solve each other’s mysteries. But somewhere during those long, hot weeks, something changes. And we start talking about so many other things.
Because maybe we just need each other.
He tells me more about growing up in Florida. How his mama taught him the names of all the wetland plants, which ones you can eat and which ones are good for healing. And I tell him about why I love to run. How it makes me feel. The freedom I find in it.
And it feels so good to talk to someone. Really talk to someone.
About things that don’t hurt.
And about things that do.
Night after night, we sit out there until the sky goes inky and the owls start to call and I know I’m late for supper. And then some.
But I never want to go in. Because being with Zale makes me feel like maybe I’ll be okay. And the whole time I’m with him, I drink up that peaceful, slightly fuzzy feeling like it’s cold, fresh water. And I’m dying of thirst.
More and more often, he’ll hold my hand. Or brush against my arm. On purpose. And I’ll feel that little shock of electric current. That tiny zap. Skin on skin.
One night he’s telling me a story about the first time he ever tasted ice cream, and he puts a gentle hand on my bare thigh. Just for a second.
And I almost pass out from how good it feels. It makes me curious. Maybe even a little excited.
And that’s a bit of a distraction, but it’s not enough. Because as the summer wears on, I can’t ignore this idea that something is coming. It’s not a psychic vision or anything like that, but with every day that passes, I feel it building.
Gathering around us.
Something that nobody can stop.
Something that’s even bigger than Zale’s search for his dead father or our questions about what really happened to Ember and Orli thirteen summers ago.
Bigger than the mystery of Elora’s murder, even.
Something with the power to sweep us all away.
I feel his hands around my neck. Squeezing.
Choking. Holding me down in the mud and
the water while the last bit of life drains out of me.
17
It’s August 6 when I first hear it on the radio. But I know before that. When I wake up that morning, the air is different. Thicker. But also more alive. The bayou has started to breathe.
It’s waiting.
“Storm warning,” Honey says when I walk into the kitchen for breakfast, and she jerks her head toward the radio sitting on the counter. The weather guy tells us that a tropical depression has formed over the Bahamas, 350 miles east of Miami, Florida. But that’s an awful long way from La Cachette, so Honey isn’t paying much attention. She’s too busy rolling out dough for biscuits. It makes me uneasy, though. I’m supposed to have three weeks left, but if it looks like things might get bad, Honey will send me home early.
But then the ten o’clock boat comes, and the weather forecast gets forgotten. It’s a busy Sunday morning, and I spend most of my time ringing up sales. Then I rearrange the shelves of incense and organize the meditation CDs.
Every time I look down at my ring finger, though, or touch the little blue pearl hanging around my neck, I remember that I only have one mission this summer.
Figure out what happened to Elora.
And I know that I’m failing at it. Failing her. And now I might be running out of time.
I think about that latest vision. Strong hands around my throat.
Around Elora’s throat.
The certainty that I’m going to die in the mud.
I feel Elora’s panic rise inside me until I drop the meditation CDs and they scatter across the floor. And I have to start all over.
None of the flashes I’ve seen make sense.
Did Elora drown? Like I did that night on the bathroom floor?
Or was it the cold metal of a gun cocked behind her head that sealed her fate?
Click.
Or did someone steal her life with their bare hands? Fingers tightening around her windpipe?
How many ways are there to die?
&
nbsp; Evie scampers across the boardwalk to sit with me on the porch for a little bit that evening after dinner. She’s nervous and fidgety. Paler than usual. Her hair is wet and matted, so I go inside to get a brush, and she crouches on the steps between my feet while I work out the tangles.
It isn’t long before Sera and Sander join us. And then Mackey. Almost like something had pulled us together in the fading light. That used to happen all the time when we were kids. One of us would be outside somewhere. And then another of us would just show up. And another. And another. Until we were all there. Carrying on and horsing around.
But nobody has much to say now. We’re all lost in our own thoughts.
“There’s a storm comin’,” Evie finally announces.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Sera says, and I know her words are meant to reassure us all. Not just Evie. “It probably won’t hit here.”
“I’m not afraid,” Evie answers. “I hope it does come.”
“You okay?” Mackey asks her.
“Everything’s different.” Evie frowns. “I thought things would stay the same.” A breeze stirs, and her wind chimes come to life. There must be close to fifty of them now, made out of everything from seashells and Mardi Gras doubloons to old soup ladles and metal pie plates. The noise is enough to wake the dead, and her house has become kind of a tourist attraction. She chews on a broken fingernail. “I just wanted things to stay the same.”
“I know,” I say. “I did, too.”
“Me too.” Mackey sighs.
“Yeah,” Sera says, and she reaches for her brother’s hand. “We all did.”
When they all leave, I trade my flip-flops for boots and grab a flashlight, then I head down the back steps into mud. Zale is already waiting for me back at Li’l Pass. Shirtless and smiling. Worn-out jeans rolled up to his knees. He’s been fishing, he tells me. His hair is windblown, and his skin is warm from the sun. He smells like sweet grass and pine trees, and when I crawl up to sit beside him on the trailer, I slip my hand into his, almost without realizing it.
Dark and Shallow Lies Page 16