Abby laughed, but then the tears broke through. “I don’t think I’ve slept for nearly four years.”
Leo nodded slowly. “I know. Those damned ghosts always come at night, don’t they.”
A moment passed.
Then Leo stood and took Abby’s hand. “Come for dinner tonight. Susan wants to make you a cake.”
“But it’s not my birthday,” Abby answered.
Leo smiled then, his head tilted, one eyebrow raised. “Yes, it is.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Cass
It was very hot the summer before I ran away. Records were broken. Everyone was complaining. People started talking about global warming again, even though the prior winter had also broken records for snow and cold. I think sometimes that having too much information can be a very bad thing. It pulls our attention this way and that way, that way and this way, until our heads are just spinning around and we are never able to see what’s right in front of us. We are not owls and our heads were not built to spin.
When I see and hear exploding news stories, like that summer with the heat wave, and when it makes me get worried about things, I make myself remember something I learned in the sixth grade. We were studying the solar system and we learned about how the earth began 4.5 billion years ago and how the sun will die in about the same amount of time. It’s so easy to think that we are important and that the things that happen to us are important. But the truth is, we are so small, so insignificant in the scope of even just our solar system, which is itself meaningless in the scope of the Universe. The truth is, nothing really matters unless we decide it matters. We could set off every nuclear bomb we’veever made and kill all life on the planet, and the Universe would just shrug and yawn because within the next five billion years while the sun is still shining, some kind of new life would come and we would be talked about by them the way we talk about dinosaurs.
After my escape, I could have taken that train anywhere in the world. Or at least anywhere that train was stopping all the way down to Florida. I could have stayed gone forever. My father was sad, but it was three years old, his sadness, and it had become more of a scar than an open wound. The same was true for Witt. He’d gone to law school and gotten married. I’m sure he missed me, but his life had filled in whatever hole my leaving had caused, like when you make footprints in the sand and then the water comes in bringing more sand and more sand until they disappear.
It was not necessary that I come home. It was not necessary that I find Emma. It caused a lot of upheaval to everyone, including myself, and in the scope of the Universe, it was irrelevant and unimportant. But in my years on the island, I made a theory for myself about the meaning of life. I decided that life would be about choosing things to make important even though they are not, and cannot ever be. I took this theory and I started to make a list of the things I would choose to be important and that I would honor. I decided that I would measure myself against my list and whether I had been true to that list of important things.
Finding Emma was on that list.
The summer before we disappeared, Emma had left for Paris in early June. I did not leave for my program in England until two weeks later. I had not been alone in the house with Hunter, Mr. Martin and my mother before. Not ever. I always went to my father’s house when Emma was away.
The truth is, I could have gone to my father’s house. My fatherwanted me to stay with him, and with the war going on at the Martins’ house, I was like a bird on the battlefield. I knew I would be fine if I just flew off when the soldiers returned. I also knew that no one sees a bird on the battlefield when they’re always on the lookout for the enemy soldiers. It was hard to be that bird that no one saw and that would be crushed if it didn’t fly away when the fighting began again.
I was fifteen that July. But that is no excuse. I felt invisible and powerless in my family and in my life. But that is no excuse. There is no excuse for what I did that July.
The idea came to me one night at dinner. Mrs. Martin had wanted to go to the club, so we all got dressed up and went—me, Hunter, Mrs. Martin and Mr. Martin and Hunter’s girlfriend. Hunter was still being annoyingly flirtatious with my mother, so she wore a sexy dress and put on extra makeup. I saw Hunter’s eyes run up and down her when he knew his father was looking at him. He was relentless in his efforts to keep them estranged until Emma got back from France. It was part of his plan to destroy her. Or maybe to win her back. To this day, I don’t know which it was, with love always turning to hate, hate turning back to love.
I got dressed in Emma’s room. I wore one of Emma’s dresses and I used her special flat iron and I put on her makeup. I knew what I was trying to do. None of this was subconscious. I did not want to be invisible and powerless anymore.
Hunter’s girlfriend was very talkative at dinner and she was also very nice to me, which was almost as annoying as my mother and Hunter’s flirting.
Nothing really happened at that dinner, except for one small look. Emma had talked to me about how you know if someone likes you and how you can tell someone you like them, and I hadtrouble believing her because I had never done it or had it done to me.
It’s hard to explain, Cass,she said one night in my room, her arms around me.
It’s a look that comes in a different way or that you send out in a different way. It’s just a tiny bit longer than a normal look. And it’s completely still, it’s not moving with a smile or talking or even eyes squinting or your eyebrows lifting up or anything at all. It’s totally frozen, like a deer in the headlights. It’s frozen by a thought that has just hijacked your brain for that second and that’s why it lasts too long, because you have to rescue your brain from the hijacker.
I asked her what that thought was that could hijack your brain and freeze your face like that.
It’s the thought that you want that person.
That night at dinner, I finally understood what she meant. My mother had noticed the dress I was wearing and the makeup and my hair, and she did not like it one bit. She did not like that I was trying to be like Emma and take attention away from her. She had made a few comments to me as we were leaving the house and I ignored them, but inside I was smiling because my plan was working. I was reappearing from my state of invisibility. I was finding some power of my own.
When we were at the table at the club, Hunter’s girlfriend said how pretty I looked. How grown-up I was becoming. My mother smiled at me and said,Isn’t that Emma’s dress?I said it was but that Emma didn’t want it anymore. I lied and said that Emma told me I could have it. My mother smiled again and said,Well, remind me on Monday and I’ll take you to the tailor. It really needs to be brought in around the bust. You definitely got your father’s side in that department. All the women are flat as boards.
I felt my face flush as the blood rushed in. I felt adrenalineseething through me. Hunter’s girlfriend looked horrified but that was because she did not know the kind of mother Mrs. Martin was and that I had incited her fury by trying to take some of her attention for myself. She wiped the horror from her face and said again that she thought I looked beautiful.
It was at that moment, in the chaos of blood and adrenaline and horror, that I saw that look come my way, the look Emma had told me about. It was coming from across the table. It was coming from Hunter.
I looked away as fast as I could, but I would soon learn that I had not been quick enough. I had not rescued my own brain from the hijacker in time, and now I had seen Hunter’s hijacked brain and he had seen mine.
I knew that our hijackers were different types of criminals. I won’t pretend that I came to see this after I was older and wiser. I knew it then, right then, at that dinner. Hunter saw that I was no longer irrelevant to the war. With one dress and some makeup, I had made myself a weapon he could use against my mother, and then against Emma when she returned from Europe. And I saw that Hunter could make me a weapon and I wanted to be a weapon because a weapon is, at the very least, seen by everyone on that battlefield. I was tired of being a bird.
