“We can’t go home without Reese,” I say plainly, getting hung up on the fact that I have to explain that to him. Elliott should know I’d never leave this place without Reese. Never. Even if the police said we could, I still wouldn’t leave without her. I owe it to Emily and Nolan to find her, to bring her home.
“No. You’re right. Of course we can’t.” He rubs my back, says then, his tone more solicitous now, making me wonder if I’ve been too sensitive, too critical, “In the morning, why don’t I see if I can find a hotel nearby, somewhere else we can stay.”
I nod, thinking it would help, to get out of this cottage.
“You really don’t know why Emily wanted to talk to you the other night? You don’t know what she was going to ask?”
He says, “I already told you, Courtney. No. If I did, I’d tell you.”
Long after Elliott falls asleep, his breath becoming shallow, I lie awake, thinking through things, belaboring every moment of the past forty-eight hours: wishing I hadn’t left Emily and Nolan’s place when I did; wondering what a twenty-four-year-old man wants with a seventeen-year-old girl; thinking how fish blood isn’t any different than human blood, how it’sred like human blood and you wouldn’t know the difference just by looking at it.
I can’t sleep. I reach for Elliott’s iPad on the bedside table to pass the time. I adjust the brightness so it doesn’t wake him and then I go to his photos app to browse. Elliott likes to take pictures. Unlike me, who usually forgets, Elliott is the one who chronicles our life together. I scroll through the vacation photos on his Camera Roll, finding images of us around the campfire, a selfie of him and Cass by the lake and a picture of me that I have no memory of, taken when I wasn’t looking.
And a picture of Reese.
Or rather, I should say,picturesof Reese. A series of them as if taken in quick succession, like the stop motion movies Cass used to like to take on my phone, positioning her LEGO minifigures so that, when played back, they looked like they were moving. The time stamp on these images is from five days ago at 12:03 p.m. The location: here. This resort.
Why does Elliott have pictures of Reese on his iPad?
My heartbeats become shallow.
The first few are clearly candid. She didn’t know he was taking her picture, which is almost worse than if she did. In fact, itisworse. I think of Elliott sitting there, sneaking pictures of her on his iPad. It makes my stomach hurt.
But the last one takes my breath away. In the picture, Reese sits beside the pool in her little bikini. She’s lying on her stomach on a beach towel, the cheap plastic chaise lounge chair slats leaving indents on her arms, propped on her elbows so that it’s a straight cleavage shot, that hollow between her breasts chasmic, a beaded gold necklace lying over her collarbones, getting covered by her windswept hair. I can’t get a good look at the bikini top, but I can see from this angle that the cups are cut short, the straps wide. The bottoms are higher waisted, but they havea cheeky cut so that you can see her bum, which she makes no attempt to hide, and I envy her, knowing how at my age, my skin has lost its elasticity, making the cellulite more visible despite being relatively thin. I’d never go around showing myself off like this. That said, even at seventeen and with a body like hers, I don’t know that I would have had the guts to do it either.
But what gets me the most isn’t the bikini. It’s her face. The look on it, the angle of her head and the way her lips are parted. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, whether the look is emboldened, playful, flirtatious, angry or something else, something that cuts to the quick.
There’s also the fact that she’s flicking Elliott off with her finger, which feels so ballsy and inappropriate to me. He’s her uncle. He’s more than twice her age. I can’t imagine ever behaving like that to an adult in my life when I was her age.
I imagine Elliott on the other side of the camera lens.
I imagine the way he looks back at her. The expression on his own face or what he said that would rile her up enough to merit her giving him the finger.
I remember that day—12:03 p.m. would have been about lunchtime. I had gone back to the cottage to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone, to bring back to the pool for lunch. Cass and Elliott stayed behind, with everyone else. Cass was in the pool playing Marco Polo with Mae when I left; she didn’t want to leave, and so Elliott stayed, sitting on a lounge chair, drinking a beer, keeping an eye on her.
I didn’t mind. I don’t swim and I was grateful for a minute alone. After days of being with extended family nonstop, I needed the quiet. It was bliss. No one was fighting. No one was talking at all. It only lasted two minutes before I heard the door handle turn and I looked up. The cottage door swung open. Elliott came in, tanned and toned and shirtless, bringing the smell of chlorine into the cottage with him. He kickedthe door closed, saying nothing, but the single-minded look in his eye said all he needed to say. He crossed the room in what felt like three steps, and before I could even put the jelly knife down, he was behind me, his mouth on my ear, his hands moving under my gauzy swim coverup, lowering his own damp swim trunks, tugging aside my bathing suit. We didn’t speak. What happened next was fast and urgent, so that I never had time to worry about whether the front door was locked, about if someone—Cass—might have followed him to the cottage, and that she might come in and find us like that, bent over the kitchen countertop. Before any temperance or self-restraint could kick in, it was over and I was left breathing hard as Elliott hoisted his swim trunks back onto his hips, grinning like a teenage boy before he kissed me gently on the cheek and said, “I better get back to the pool and check on Cass. Do you need any help with those sandwiches?”
It was so unlike him. Not that I minded.
Spontaneous and bold.
I wondered at the time what had gotten into him. I wondered if it was because we were on vacation, totally at ease, free from worry, spending more time together than usual, or if it had something to do with me and the fact that I’d been working out more, trying to lose the extra five or so pounds around my waist and hips, and he’d noticed. It made me feel good about myself, that my husband still found me so desirable after eleven years and a child together.
But now I think, looking at Reese’s teasing, sun-kissed face on the iPad screen, I might know.
And it wasn’t me.
Reese
Someone is awake when I come back to the cottage.
The shape is a silhouette, a black, featureless outline on the edge of my bed, which I see from just inside the front door. My hands shake and I start hatching excuses like that I couldn’t sleep and decided to take a walk or that I was sleepwalking, that I went to bed and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the woods.
As I step out onto the screened-in porch, I make out Wyatt’s smug face. He turns slowly to me in the darkness and I feel my heart beat faster, my temperature rise.
I slur in a whisper, “Get the fuck off my bed, loser.”
He says, smirking in the moonlight so that I want to slap the smile off his ugly face, “It’s not your bed.”
