“I didn’t mean it,” I say again. “That I hate you. Or that I want you to die. I was just mad. I say things I don’t mean when I’m mad.”
“We all do, honey. It’s human nature.” She reaches out a hand to me and says, “Come here. Let’s sit on the sofa,” and I take her hand, which feels foreign in mine. It’s been so long since we held hands that I forgot what hers feel like, though they’re soft, the nails long and clean when I look at them, though as I do, I realize she’s not wearing her wedding ring. “Do you know why I’m hard on you sometimes?” she asks, sitting beside me so close that we touch.
“Because you love Wyatt and Mae more than me?”
“No,” she says, her face pained. “That’s not true, Reese. I don’t love them more than I love you. I love all three of you the same,” she says. She holds my eye and says, “It’s because I worry the most about you. You just seem so angry and unhappy all the time. I hate seeing you like that. I only ever want you to be happy.” She pauses, looking at me, searching my eyes, and then says, “You remind me of myself when I was your age. You’re in such a rush to grow up, to push the limits, to be twenty-five and not seventeen. You want time to go faster,” she says, and I look away because it’s true, because she knows me better than I thought she did. She reaches for my face, turns it so that I’m looking at her, and says, “I was that way too. I couldn’t wait to be an adult. I rushed things. Your father was the only man I ever dated. I didn’t know anything else. People told me that I should experience things, like dating other men and living on my own before I got married, but I never did because I was so afraid of being alone.”
“I didn’t know that,” I tell her.
“I never told you. To be honest, I don’t know that I ever really loved him. I thought I did, but you can’t really knowthings like that when you’re nineteen. I loved the idea of him. I loved that when I was with him, I wasn’t alone. Not physically anyway.”
“You shouldn’t stay with him if you don’t love him,” I tell her, thinking how she can still be happy. How it’s not too late for that.
She nods and tells me how she plans to talk to Uncle Elliott in the morning and see if he’ll help her file for divorce. I should be sad, knowing my parents are getting a divorce. But for whatever reason, it makes me happy, because I want her to be happy. I want both of them to be happy.
“Are you okay?” she asks, and I say yeah.
“I know being a teenager is hard,” she says. “There are so many emotions, so much angst. Just slow down, Reese. Be happy with who you are now. Don’t rush things. Be a kid while you can. I promise it will be worth it.”
She asks me about Skylar. I tell her we’re not friends anymore. “I figured as much.”
“How?”
“I saw the necklace of hers, the one you borrowed, in the trash.”
I let her think the necklace really was Skylar’s. Because telling her about Daniel, too, would be too much for one day. Another day I’ll tell her about him.
She says she’s sorry about what happened with Skylar. “Losing a friend is never easy. Maybe you two will work it out eventually, but either way, I promise you it will be okay, Reese. It doesn’t feel like it now, but there is a whole life after high school. One day none of this will matter anymore.”
I believe her. It makes me feel better.
“The best is yet to come,” she promises me as she reaches for me, as she wraps an arm around my shoulder and I lean into her,resting my head on her shoulder, thinking how I haven’t been this close to her in years. Physically. Emotionally.
It’s dark outside now.
The darkness creeps into the cottage through the open windows.
I try not to let the fear in too, knowing most bad things happen after dark.
Courtney
“What are you looking at?” Elliott asks.
I look up. He stands in the hotel room, wet, a towel wrapped around his waist. He’s shirtless, his hair standing on end like he towel dried it, but didn’t touch it with a comb. Steam enters the room from the bathroom, suspended behind him like a cloud. There is artwork on the wall, which feels so out of place in this squalid room. It’s something mass-produced and in a dime-store frame that hangs at an angle, the plaster behind it cracked. The image looks cheap and unexceptional, a painting of a lake that could be any lake in the world.
But a lake.
I think of the search I found on Elliott’s iPad just now.
Pearl Lake depth.
The thought comes to me like a knockout punch: blinding, unexpected and from out of nowhere.
I realize the one place no one has yet thought to look for Reese is in the lake.
“Sorry,” I say, feeling pain, a tightness in my chest all of a sudden, whispering, not for the kids’ sake but because I don’t trust my own voice. I don’t trust it not to tremble if I speak at full volume. “I forgot to charge my phone last night. It’s dead. I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed your iPad.”
“Of course not,” he says, running his hands through his hair,flattening it and pushing it back from his eyes. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
