I worry more about the kids than about Elliott and me. I’m not leaving without Reese, but they don’t need to be here. I tell him, “I’d feel better if the kids could go home. They can stay with their grandparents while Elliott and I help look for Reese.”
But Detective Evans shakes his head. “I’d like everyone to stay put while we finish the investigation. You never know,” he says. “We might need to speak to Wyatt and Mae again. We might have more questions for them. Now,” he says, leaving no room for discussion, letting his eyes rise to the loft to where Elliott and Cass watch TV with the volume so low it could be on mute, “if we could just speak to your husband before we leave.”
Reese
My first night on the porch is cold. The dark, crisp air slips in through the screens, surrounding me. I try to wait it out, telling myself I’ll get used to it, but it doesn’t work. I sit there for a long time, thinking about nothing but how cold and dark it is (my only source of light lying broken on the floor—pieces of glass that I have to avoid because I haven’t bothered to sweep them up), until eventually I dig sweats from my bag and pull them on, wrapping myself in blankets, refusing to go inside where it’s warm because the last thing I need is for Emily to be right about this. I’d just as soon die of hypothermia than go inside.
The darkness is inescapable. It closes in on me like some tactile thing. There are no streetlights and no house lights. No one bothered to leave a light on inside. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t weird me out, not knowing who or what lies just beyond the screens, and for a while, I sit on the edge of the bed, staring out into the darkness and waiting for a face to press against the mesh, thinking of Pennywise, of Jigsaw, of Samara Morgan fromThe Ringin that white dress, her long, dark hair covering her face as she crawls out of the TV. The screens are weak. Other than keeping bugs out, they don’t serve any real purpose. If someone wanted to break in in the middle of the night, they could.
I think about the creep at the lodge today, the one who stood there, smoking his cigarette, his eyes feasting on me and thenon Mae. I wonder if he’s staying at this resort. I wonder if he watched us leave the lodge, if he followed us back to our cottage, if he knows where we’re staying and if he’s out there in the woods right now, watching me.
Sometime after midnight, it starts to drizzle. The rain is a fine mist that comes in through the screens, threatening to get anything within two feet of them wet. On the side of the bed closest to the screens, it just misses. I hold my hand out, letting it dangle over the edge of the bed, feeling rain.
I lie in bed, cocooned in the quilt, looking at Instagram and Snapchat, trying to distract myself, to not let myself be scared. Cell service is less glitchy at night than before. For whatever reason, it just works better. There was a bonfire tonight, back home, at Marshall’s house, because it sits on like six acres of land in the middle of nowhere and his parents go to bed at nine o’clock so that—according to Marshall—they never hear what happens at the far edge of their own property late at night. There are pictures of the party online, including one of Skylar dancing around the fire—Liam Morris grinding behind her—drinking from her bottle of Poland Spring, which everyone knows is not water, but vodka.
I text Skylar my picture of the taxidermy fish. It’s two in the morning. I don’t expect her to be awake or sober. Still, she sees my text but leaves me on read, and I wonder if there was a sleepover after the bonfire, if she’s with Gracie again and if she’s having more fun with her than she has when she’s with me.
In the morning, there’s just one word from Skylar in response to my picture of the fish.Cool.Which means it’s not. Which means it’s lame as fuck. I’m actually embarrassed I sent it.
Did u and Liam Morris hook up?I start to text, but I don’t send it because what’s even more lame than sending pictures oftaxidermy fish at two in the morning is spying on your friends on Instagram, especially when they’re mad at you. I told her I was sorry about what happened before, before we left. I said it would never happen again, and she said,Whatever, forget about it, it’s fine. I don’t think it’s fine. In fact, I keep replaying it again and again in my mind, wishing it was a bad dream, that it never happened.
Emily wants us up and out of the cottage by nine, so we can stake a claim to chairs at the pool. I get dressed in the one bathroom everyone shares, getting naked before stepping into the bathing suit I bought for this trip, the bikini bottoms high enough to hide my new tattoo that Emily and Nolan know nothing about, because if they did, they’d kill me. It’s a butterfly on the side of my hip, because butterflies represent freedom and transformation, which seemed fitting and hopeful. The tattoo is sexy too, except for when I have to hide it, like now. I stand before the mirror, making sure the high waist of the bikini bottoms covers it.
When I come out of the bathroom, Mae is standing there, wearing my pink sweatshirt, which she’s obsessed with because it’s pink and because it’s super soft and fleecy, which means that when I was getting dressed, she went onto the porch and went through my things. “Take it off,” I say, more pissed about her snooping than about her wearing my stuff. The sweatshirt is too big on her anyway, though she poses with it slouchy and off the shoulder with her hands on her hips, doing the duck face like those stupid tween influencers she’s infatuated with on Instagram and YouTube, which Emily knows nothing about because Emily somehow still believes Mae idolizes Disney princesses. She thinks Mae hasn’t discovered social media yet, though she has, because she’s ten and doesn’t live under a rock. She also knows Santa doesn’t exist, but Emily doesn’t know that either. Mae doesn’t have her own phone (in our house, you have to bein middle school to get one) but she steals mine or even Emily’s sometimes and does whatever she wants on it and Emily and Nolan are completely clueless.
“No,” Mae pouts, crossing her arms. “I don’t want to.”
“Take it off now.”
“But I’m cold,” she whines.
“Find your own sweatshirt. That one’s mine.”
“No. Please.”
“I’m counting to three. If you don’t take it off yourself, then I’m ripping it off your head. One... two...”
By the time I get to three, Mae screams, and Emily comes running, out of breath when she arrives, stepping between Mae and me like she thinks I might hurt her. “What is it? What’s wrong? Is everything okay, Mae?” When I tell her, she looks disappointed with me, like this is somehow my fault, and asks, “Can’t you just let her wear it, Reese? She already has it on.”
“No. Give it to me,” I say, dragging it off Mae’s head and telling her to leave my shit alone.
When we get there, the pool is small. It’s cold, like sixty-eight degrees outside, though Emily swears it’s going to get warmer as the day goes on. I watch as some guy skims twigs and leaves from the pool, but it comes back again, falling from the sky like confetti. The only redeeming quality is that there aren’t as many trees here, which means the sun gets through somewhat. If I drag my plastic chair with its broken brown straps into the patches of sunlight, moving it throughout the day with the sun, I might stand a chance of going home with a tan. Then, when people ask, I can say I went somewhere cool like Cancun or Cozumel and not Wisconsin.
The day is never-ending. It moves by at a snail’s pace. Mae and our cousin Cass are cojoined. Whatever Cass does, Mae does. Synchronized swimming, tea parties at the bottom of the pool, pretending to be mermaids. They want me to play withthem, but I say no. I don’t know where Wyatt is. All I know is that he’s not here, which doesn’t seem fair, because he can do whatever he wants, while I can’t even go to the bathroom without being interrogated.
“Where are you going?” Emily asks, as I stand up from my chair, adjusting my bathing suit. She glances up from her book, shielding her eyes from the sun.
“To pee. Or is that not okay?” She says that it is. I ask for the key to the cottage.
“There is a bathroom in the pool house,” she says, but I went in there once and I don’t ever want to have to do it again. The wordspool houseare deceptive. It’s a dingy little building like a shed with a grungy concrete floor that pools with water from people going in barefoot and sopping wet.
“Can I not just go back to the cottage to pee?”
“What’s wrong with the pool house?”
“Have you seen it? It’s disgusting. And there are bugs in there.”
“Fine,” she reluctantly says. “But come right back when you’re done.”
