“Which one did you jump?” Jerry asked, fighting a grin.
“The bigger one,” Helen answered, a half smile of her own creeping up her face.
Jerry looked at Helen, whistled once, and started the engine. “You’re lucky he didn’t seriously hurt you,” he said, not joking around anymore.
Helen nodded meekly, but she was thinking that Lucas was the lucky one. The strangeness of her own thoughts scared her silent for the rest of the drive home.
Chapter Four
Helen sat in a bathtub of cold water, the lights in the bathroom switched off, and listened to the phone ring over and over. She didn’t know what to say to anyone and every time she thought about attacking Lucas Delos in front of the entire school she groaned out loud in humiliation. She would have to leave the country, or at least Nantucket, because there was no way she could live down the fact that she had tried to strangle the hottest boy on the island.
She groaned again and splashed her face, which was still finding a way to blush even though she was submerged in freezing-cold water. Now that she wasn’t being driven half crazy with rage she could think about Lucas objectively, and she decided that Claire hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. Helen agreed with her. She had been trying to kill him, but she wasn’t blind. Normal boys simply weren’t put together the way he was.
It wasn’t his height or his coloring or his muscles that made him so beautiful, she concluded. It was the way he moved. She had only seen him twice, but she could tell he thought less frequently about his looks than everyone around him did. His eyes, as pretty as they were, lookedout, rather than back at himself.
She dunked her head underwater and screamed, just to get it all out without scaring her father. When she came back up she felt a little better, but was still disappointed in herself. One of the terrible side effects of feeling like she somehow already knew Lucas was that she was starting to idealize him, making him more perfect than was humanly possible. Which was uncomfortable because she also still wanted to kill him.
She pulled the rubber plug out with her toes and watched the water creep slowly down the sides of the bathtub until the last of it sucked down the drain. Then she sat naked in the empty tub, staring at her white, wrinkled feet until her butt hurt. Eventually, she knew, she would have to leave the dark bathroom and try to act normal.
She got dressed and went downstairs to check on her dad, finding him just walking through the front door. He had run out to buy ice cream for dinner—and not just any ice cream, but the good stuff from the gelato place that Helen had banned him from when the doctor told him to watch his diet.
“To bring down your core temperature,” he said innocently, shaking the rain out of his hair.
“Is that your story?” she asked him, her hands on her hips.
“Yup. And I’m sticking to it.”
She decided to let it go. There would be plenty of time to worry about his cholesterol in the morning. After so many days with so little food, rich gelato was probably not the best idea, but it did go down easily. They sat on the floor of the living room with their beloved Red Sox on television, passing the pint and spoon back and forth as they cussed out the Yankees. Neither of them answered the phone, which continued ringing periodically, and Jerry didn’t push Helen to explain what had happened. Claire’s mom would never have let her get off this easy. Sometimes there were advantages to being raised by a single dad.
Helen had to change her sheets before she went to bed. The stains from the night before had not disappeared as she had hoped, but tonight she had bigger things to worry about than sleepwalking. For one thing, she could hear someone or something moving around on the widow’s walk. It was different from the sounds she had heard the night before. This time there were actual footsteps directly above her instead of just amorphous whispers coming from all sides. Helen didn’t know what would be worse—going up there and finding a gang of intruding monsters or finding nothing at all. For a moment Helen wondered if she was starting to crack up. She decidednotto go up to check. She’d seen enough ghosts already that day.
The next morning, Helen went to see Dr. Cunningham. After a few minutes of flashing a penlight in her eyes and thumping her on the chest, Dr. Cunningham told her father that there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage done. Then he yelled at Helen and told her she was far too fair to be walking around without a hat on. She didn’t know how it had happened, but after one trip to the doctor her meltdown had been brushed off as nothing more than the carelessness of not keeping her head covered. At least the checkup got her out of school for the day.
When she got home, Helen opened her computer and spent a few frustrating hours online trying to find some information on the three women who were plaguing her. Every search she did overwhelmed her with so many possibilities that her task seemed hopeless, and she couldn’t narrow it down because she didn’t have any real context for what it was she had seen. Were they ghosts? Demons? Or just her own personal manifestations of crazy? It was entirely possible that she had hallucinated the whole thing, and now that she didn’t feel so enraged she was almost starting to think maybe shehadhad heatstroke. Almost.
Claire came over in the afternoon to deliver some bad news. “The whole school thinks you’re on your way to an institution as we speak,” she said as soon as they sat down in the family room. “You should’ve come in today.”
“Why?” Helen asked with a grimace. “It doesn’t matter when I come back, no one’s ever going to forget this.”
“True. It was pretty bad,” Claire said. She paused for a moment before speaking in a rush. “You scared the crap out of me, you know.”
“Sorry,” Helen apologized with a weak smile. “So, washein school today?” For some reason she felt like she just had to know, but she couldn’t bring herself to say his name out loud.
“Yeah. He asked me about you. Well, he didn’t actually talk to me, but Jason did. He’s a jackass, by the way.” Claire started talking with increasing heat. “Get this. So he comes up to me at lunch, right? And he starts asking me all these questions about you. Like, how long have I known you, where are you from, did I ever meet your mom before she skipped town...”
“My mom? That’s weird,” Helen interrupted.
“And I start answering him with my usual flair for clever repartee,” Claire said, a bit too innocently.
“Translation: you insulted him.”
“Whatever. Then that chump had the huevos to call me ‘little girl’! Can you believe it?”
“Imagine. You, described as ‘little,’” Helen said in a droll voice. “So what did you tell him?”
“The truth. That we’ve been friends since birth and neither of us really remembers your mom, and that she didn’t leave any pictures or anything, but that your dad’s always going on about how she was this incredible beauty and how she was so smart and talented and everything, and blah-blah-blah. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that your mom had to be hot. I mean, look at your dad and then look atyou,” Claire said with a knowing glint in her eyes.
Helen winced at the compliment. “Is that it? Lucas didn’t say anything else?” Helen’s hands were curled up into fists. She found it hard to so much as say his name without wanting to punch someone in the head. Obviously, she either still had heatstroke or she really was going out of her mind.
