No one can save me now, I thought.
And then I looked up at Tabor’s eager, so-false grin.
I thought, Bring it, you piece of shit. I’ll go down, but I’ll take you, too.
11
CRACKS IN THE ICE
Rob spent the night at the hospital, being treated for hypothermia and exposure. It was more or less an excuse to keep him there, to make sure nothing else was wrong, because he was basically unhurt. He’d coughed up what little water was in his lungs, and he’d only briefly lost consciousness.
My mother was already at the hospital. As the nurse in charge of PM’s at the emergency room, she monitored the radio. She was just ending her shift when she heard—for about the fifth time in six months—that the incoming guests were part of her own crew.
So she waited. We got there about 11:20 P.M., and my mother had probably reached the point of no return, anger-wise, maybe fifteen minutes earlier after transmissions from the paramedics made it clear that I was alive and well.
When Jackie strode into the cubicle where I was waiting with Rob and Wesley, her posture was about as yielding and maternal as a sawed-off shotgun. She gave me a quick once-over, and said, “We’ll deal with this privately.”
Whenever my mother said she wanted to deal with anything privately, I wanted our next encounter to take place in an airport or a federal building, because nothing, nothing, could go well if she got me alone and went savage. With very clear exceptions that were compulsory given her over-protective nature, Jackie likes to think of herself as nurturing my independence. She’s more or less in favor of every nutty thing I do. She wants me to feel and be free, despite wishing she could wear me like a lapel pin to make sure that I don’t do anything at all.
I had thought that she would freak out about Parkour; instead, she had said it was beautiful. She never took that back, even after Juliet disappeared. What she would think about my going deep into dark, cold water that would have frozen if it didn’t have wave action, without an air source, I could only imagine. I really didn’t want to imagine.
So when my mom stalked out, telling me to go ahead and stay with Rob, that she was going to call her best friend Gina and go get a drink when it was nearly midnight—which was the equivalent of my mother of telling me she was going to meet her drug connection and score a few rocks of cocaine, I had two reactions. The first: I hoped Gina would talk her down, murmuring things about kids and look what we did when we were young … and my trembling increased. Because my second reaction was picturing myself forced to withdraw from John Jay and work at the hot pretzel stand in the lobby of the Timbers Ski Resort at night for a semester, until I learned a lesson.
When Rob’s parents showed up at the hospital, we were both busted again.
If only Wesley had been able to keep his mouth shut. But, Wesley was the moral equivalent of an Eagle Scout, and he spilled everything about our recent hobby, down to the risks of a DWB.
For this Mrs. Dorn decided to blame me.
Ignoring me, she said to Rob, fuming, “Don’t you have enough problems without going for a little dip in a freezing lake, especially without an oxygen tank?”
Weakly, Rob protested that Wesley was there, and that we were never at any real risk.
“Risk?” Mrs. Dorn said. “Risk is all you do. You and her. Isn’t it enough that Juliet is dead? Doesn’t that make you want to think about the time you have and—”
“It’s all the more reason,” Rob said, struggling to sit up. He did look weak and ashy. I was proud of him, but I sort of wanted him to take it easy.
Mrs. Dorn started to cry, and Mr. Dorn, whom I’d never seen do anything but smile, frowned at Rob. “Why do you want to go and worry her?” he said.
“Obviously I didn’t want to worry her or I would have told you guys about it,” Rob said.
This is actual logic, but it does not cut ice with parents, ever.
The ER doctor, Brice or Brick or one of the other guys about five years older than me whom my mother flirted with, told the Dorns he was admitting Rob. They all turned and looked at me like I was some kind of infected bug bite. I shrugged. It was ten degrees outside. My mother was out at a tavern. What was I supposed to do, walk home? Halfheartedly, Mr. Dorn said I could drive Rob’s car and return it tomorrow night, but Rob’s car was parked back at the Tabor Oaks and I would rather have spent the night on a plastic couch in the lobby than go back there to pick it up.
Wesley said then, “No hassle, parents. I went to school with one of the medics and they’ll give me a ride to my car. I’ll take Allie home.”
It was all so stiff and awkward that I didn’t even kiss Rob goodbye.
“THAT WAS ONE tense moment,” Wesley said after we’d been ferried by ambulance to his car, parked behind the Y. It had to be one of the first Volkswagens ever made, and the floor was not made of floor, but of some kind of pasteboard, like cheap bookshelves. It also had no radio, no heat, and seatbelts that looked like the kind that you see in old movies about airplane crashes. “I don’t mean the hospital. I meant out there on the lake. It doesn’t mean Rob should give up free diving though. That happens even to the best.”
Thanking Wesley for his kindness, I rushed inside my house, now feeling that frozen-through way you do when you are certain you will never be warm again. As I opened the double locks with my keys, my phone pinged.
Good.
Rob was telling me he loved me and his parents had calmed down.
As I opened the door, I fished my phone out of my front pack.
UNKNOWN had texted: You have something that belongs to me.
The door opened the rest of the way, and I nearly fell in.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Angela complained. She was looking up at me, wearing pajamas with moose on them that were about two sizes too big for her frame, which went about fifty pounds soaking wet.
The phone pinged again.
Leave it in my inbox at the lab, in a sealed envelope, and we’ll pretend this never happened.
Pretend this never happened? I was ready to call the Navy Seals to go down there tonight and rescue those girls—not their lives, but their justice—and secure Garrett Tabor’s comeuppance. Even though Rob had dropped the camera, the camera was down there, somewhere, although the thought of the restless ebb of Superior’s waters made me wary about how far it could tumble before anyone could get back to it. Still, the girls were there. I’d seen them. Rob might have seen them, too, and that was why he panicked. Maybe he remembered by now, having shaken off his stupor.
Pretend this never happened?
I had Tabor. I had him.
It was just a matter of who to call first. I had to think things through. If I called the nearest regional office of the FBI before calling the local police, there would be delays and all kinds of official weirdness. If I called the local police, well … my record of luck with calling the local police was the strongest possible disincentive.
“Did you even hear me?” Angie said.
Distracted, I answered, “Well, you might not need a babysitter. I would like someone to make me bagel pizzas and play the kind of Monopoly with me where you don’t just go around the board, but you get to buy all the properties and make loans and stuff. How come you don’t want that?”
I paid the babysitter, Mrs. Staples, and exchanged the look you give adults that says, Kids, huh … Even if you don’t mean it. All the while I was thinking, who can I call? What the hell am I going to do? Do they put heinous-crime discovery off for the holidays? It was three days before Christmas Eve. My grandmother would be coming, and my Uncle Brian, with his wife and their two daughters.
As Mrs. Staples closed the door, Angela went on complaining, “If I did need a babysitter, I wouldn’t want it to be her. She reads me parts from her books, and they creep me out. She says, ‘How’s this, Ange?’ I hate it when people call me Ange. She reads me things like, ‘He clutched her back, where the heat of her skin burned through the thin wisp of silk ?
??’ Why do I want to hear that? I’m nine.”
I pulled Angela down onto my lap and patted her hair, still bowling options around in my mind. To my mother’s horror, Angela and her friend Keely had recently decided to razor-cut their hair, employing blades they pried from disposable ladies’ shavers. Keely looked like a baby chicken. Nobody could do anything to make Angela’s thick, blue-black hair—shiny as ice—look anything but pretty. This had come close. With her big tip-tilted eyes, she looked like an anime character.
“I think it’s nice that she respects your opinion, Angela. That’s what people have to hear when they’re too old for a babysitter,” I said. “And since when is … you just said you’re nine! Third graders have babysitters.”
Angela pouted. Mrs. Staples’s romance novels, published directly to ebooks under the name Roxanne Royale, were brisk sellers. She finished a new one every two weeks, and some people said she sold more than fifty thousand copies of the last one.
What was she still doing in Iron Harbor?
What was I?
“Could you eat?” I asked Angela. Stuffing my face helped me think.
I made sandwiches of roast beef, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, Thousand Island dressing, mayonnaise, and pickles. Angela ate hers and a quarter of mine. I made another one for me.
“Can we make ice cream?” she said.
“No.”
One of the both ridiculously expensive and fetching things my Grandma Mack had given us last Christmas was an ice-cream maker that produced soft serve in fifteen minutes. As it was getting near to Christmas, my mother had to inventory the storage spaces and get out all the things her mother had bought that we’d never used. She placed them on the counter tops so they’d look as though we used them daily.
“It only takes fifteen minutes,” Angie said. “Fifteen minutes.”
She would keep on needling me for thirty, so I got out a bag of frozen blueberries and my mother’s one concession to food hedonism: half and half.
In fifteen minutes, we had gooey, (and I have to admit) delicious blueberry ice cream.
Angie said she couldn’t sleep unless we watched scary movies. Although I had done this to her, I pleaded, “Hey Angie, it’s nearly one in the morning.”
And where was my mother? With Brice or Court or Haven or some other intern with a post-her-generation name?
“Part?” Angie said. “Of one?”
I needed to think, so I agreed.
We popped in a classic, Night of the Living Dead. She was out in fewer than twenty minutes. So like me was my Angie now that what would have kept another nine-and-a-half-year-old up all night expecting zombies to rip off the shutters sent my sister to sleep after half an hour. I carried her in to my queen-sized bed, so if she woke up she would feel special—and sure that zombies could not get her there, if she were to feel afraid at all. Even though I wouldn’t be there with her until just before she got up, I knew that Angie still loved to wake up in my bed, sick with ultra-stuffed pillows and the most lavish sheets my mom could find, about twelve hundred-count sheets. Angela said that the scent of the lavender I used to spray my sheets and pillows felt like a hug to her.
I was about to leave the room when on a whim, I decided to lie down next to her. Even unconscious, Angela did her own sleep ritual, burrowing into the quilts and twisting one around her like the cotton candy twists around the paper cone.
Then, in the dark—no room is darker than mine; it’s like the inside of your favorite pillow—Angela suddenly woke. She said, “Allie?”
“Hmmm.”
“If Juliet was a zombie, would she kill me?”
“There are no zombies,” I said. “And if Juliet were here, she would climb in bed with you and tickle you. She would be so happy to be with you again. She loved you, Angela.”
“Could there be a good zombie?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are there zombie angels?”
I hugged Angela. Zombie angels. Juliet would have dug the image. It would have appealed to the twisted side of her nature.
“Go to sleep now, my little zombie girl,” I said.
I was about to get up and clean the kitchen (as well as the living room, the loft, and possibly the garage for extra points) when I heard the door open.
Rather, it banged open, smacking the plaster so hard that there’d be a dent.
My first thought was that it was Garrett Tabor, that he had somehow defeated our multiple locks and our security system, too.
It was, however, my mother, and she did not look in the least tipsy. She looked about twice her size, like one of those fish that can puff itself out. Gina was behind her.
“Hi, Gina,” I said. “Hey, Mom. Glad you’re here. Angie’s asleep. I have to do some reading so …”
“You sit down right there,” Jackie said. “Do. Not. Move.”
Gina retreated. I couldn’t believe it. She was going to leave me there to the wrath of Jacqueline Mack Kim. I made an imploring gesture. Gina pretended that she thought I was only waving, and she waved back.
Chicken.
Gina gently closed the door, her lips forming a kiss.
Traitor.
“I have been tolerant. I have been supportive. I have been all the things that mothers should be. Have I done that? Have I?”
“You have, Jack-Jack,” I said, feebly.
“Don’t even try horsing around with me. Don’t even try. It’s not enough that I have spent nearly eighteen years worried about my very loved child. Is it? It’s not enough that your best friend, who was also like my child, just died. You have to go sink yourself in lake water the temperature of cold beer. And why? Why now? Why not in summer? Why in December?” She paused, and slammed her palm flat against the granite countertop. “Here’s a better question. Why at all?”
“Free diving is actually easier in the …” I remembered Jackie’s favorite phrase. “It’s biology. The mammalian diving reflex …”
“I don’t care! This is unacceptable, Alexis. For what, Alexis? For what?”
“Because I know what he did.”
“Who?”
“Garrettt Tabor. I know … Mom, sit down.”
She did.
My phone, between us on the counter top, began to ping. I snatched it up, hiding the screen from my mother. Texts were arriving. They were photos. The first one was of my mother and Gina, exchanging a hug. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes earlier. The second was … it was Angela. Dressed in her snowmobile suit, using a broom to knock snow out of the trees where our backyard opened onto a portion of the Superior National Hiking Trail. Angela’s snowmobile suit was only a week old. That picture would have had to have been taken by someone with a long lens … or standing in our driveway, observing my sister unawares. There were more. Angela with Keely at the bus stop. Angela walking into school. My mother and Gina on a run in their woolies and headbands. In all, there were a dozen pictures.
He didn’t have to tell me that he could get close to the people closest to me.
He could get way too close.
All it would take would be a wheel over a curb on a dark morning, a car that came out of nowhere. Tabor knew how to do that. I had surgical pins in my arm to prove it.
How did he know that we were talking, here … now?
Shoving my phone in the front pocket of my big hoodie, I jumped to my feet and yanked the kitchen blinds down so hard that they jangled crooked on their tracks.
Was he watching us now?
“What’s wrong with you?” Jackie asked.
“We were watching a horror movie. Angela and I were. The girl looked up and there was this creepy burned guy with this face pressed up to the window. I just looked out there, and it was so black and cold.” I thought of that night on the balcony of the Tabor Oaks, and Tabor’s face as he calmly looked at me. His handsome face, worse than any distorted rubber monster mask. My life was a horror movie. “Mom, I’m sorry. I have to prove to myself,” I said, improvising de
sperately. “I have to prove that I can go on without her, Mom. I have to prove that whatever Garrett Tabor and Juliet did together has nothing to do with me now. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea for us to try free diving now. But I’m grieving now. And I’m lonely now. And so is Rob.”
Don’t believe me, I thought. What I’m saying sounds nuts. Call me on it. I would collapse and just tell you.
“What did Rob want?” my mother asked.
I had no idea what she meant. Then I realized she believed that the cascade of texts had come from Rob.
“I ask for a reason,” she added. “You’re not going anywhere tonight.”
“I won’t see Rob that much over Christmas …”
“You should have considered that before. It seems that for the past year, all you’ve done is risk your life in stupid ways.” Jackie got up, as well, and she got in my face, close to me. She had never spanked me or even given me a slap on the butt when I was a child. At this moment, it wasn’t out of the question that she would slug me. She was breathing hard. Her hair was sticking up like she’d tried to craft a faux-hawk for Halloween. “When is your birthday, Alexis?”
“That would be January eighteenth,” I said. “You were there, remember?”
Jackie grabbed my arm. “I don’t care how old you are. The day you turn eighteen is the next time you leave this house except for work. And I will drive you to work. Do you hear me? Do you?”
“I hear you,” I said. “I’m sorry.” For the first time since I was ten, I crossed my fingers behind my back. Now, I would have to evade not only the authorities, but Garrett Tabor and my mother to prove what I had seen. I would do it, though. I would do it somehow.
12
BREAKING UP