Her mother left soon after. Dee knew she couldn’t stand the sight of Dee, the pale copy of her lost daughter. She emptied the checking account and was gone. Dee couldn’t blame her, although her father felt differently. Then the other thing happened.
The night before, snow fell like ash from the quiet sky. Her father was building a model airplane below in the living room. Dee could smell the epoxy drifting up the stairs. He would sit there for hours, until his eyes were red-rimmed with fumes. He would not come up to bed until the night was almost worn out.I’ll talk to him tomorrow, Dee thought.I have to.
She was a term late for Pacific, but she could catch up. Money was tight, but she could get a job, couldn’t she? Her father didn’t need her to make model airplanes and stare into the dark, after all. Dee breathed through the guilt that stabbed at her. The air was laden with mingled scents of hot glue and despair. She thought,This cannot be my life. This is a ghost life.Tears traced burning lines down her cheeks.
In the morning Dee made the special coffee to take to her father in bed. The special coffee was made with the fancy glass thing from San Francisco, and it took a long time to drip through. It was bitter and gritty like river sediment and her father loved it. Maybe he put all his love into the coffee maker because the bigger things were too painful. Dee hated the coffee maker because it remindedher of when they were all together. She poured the scalding water over the coffee grounds. The dark-brown scent filled the kitchen. This morning she was going to speak to him, she really was.
She pulled back her long sleeve and poured a little boiling water over her wrist, gasping. She watched the bracelet of red blisters rise on her flesh. That helped. She let the sleeve fall down to hide it, and finished putting everything on the tray. She would tell him today. He would be mad, he would be hurt. But she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer.Pretty pebble.
She went into her father’s room and put the tray on the table. She thought it would put him in a good mood, if the scent of coffee led him out of sleep. She opened the curtains to the white world. Houses, mailboxes, cars – the edges of everything were blunted with white snow. She turned to say,Look how much fell in the night!Then she saw him. His body lay very straight in bed, still in the blinding snowlight. His face wore an expression that for a moment she could not place. Then she recognised it as a welcome.
It was a stroke, they said. They didn’t say it was brought on by Lulu’s vanishing, and then Dee’s mother leaving. They didn’t need to. So the person who took Lulu also took Dee’s mother, and then her father. Dee was taken too. For how much of her remains, after everything? She feels like a big, dark, empty room.
There was no ballet school because there was no money to pay for it. She didn’t finish high school either. Dee got a job at the drugstore. But she had her real work, which was to look for the person who took her sister. All the men who had been at the lake that day, all the glances, the roll call of suspects. They are her job now.
She calls tired Karen each week, sometimes more. Tired Karen is the detective in charge of Lulu’s case and she always sounds both exhausted and frantic. Her face is expressive; it shows all the hurtshe has seen; every back she has patted, every tissue handed over, every screaming face pushed close to hers.
She and Dee were close, for a time. The detective felt sorry for Dee, a young girl with no one.Call me Karen.She told Dee things when she called. Now she just says, ‘We’re working on it.’
Ted
I can’t always tell, but this time I’m pretty sure I am about to do something important. I am going to find a friend. I go away more and more, these days. Who will look after Lauren and Olivia if I don’t come back, one day? I’m only one person, and it’s not enough.
Mommy took me to the forest three times. The last time she sent me back alone. Yes, I still feel her under the dark canopy of leaves. She is in the scatter of light across the forest floor. And yes sometimes she’s in the cupboard under the sink. But really, I have been on my own since that day.
I tell myself that this is for Lauren and Olivia, and that’s true. But also it’s because I don’t want to be alone any more.
I pick a time when Lauren isn’t around. If she knew what I was doing – well, that wouldn’t be good. I take the padlock off the cupboard in the living room where I keep the laptop. The screen is a square of ghostly light in the dark room, like a door to the dead.
Finding a site is easy. There are hundreds of them. But what comes next? I scroll through. Faces race by, eyes and names and ages, little snatches of existence. I think hard about what I need, about what would be best for Lauren. Women are morenurturing than men, they say. So, a woman, I guess. But it has to be a very special woman who will understand our situation. A couple of them seem nice. This one, thirty-eight, likes surfing. Her eyes are chips of blue, as blue as the water behind her, and kind. Her skin is a little weathered by the sun and the sea. Her hair is the colour of butter, her teeth even and white. She has a happy smile. She looks like she cares about other people. The next one is all the colours of the forest. Brown, green, black. Her clothes are beautiful and cling to her. She works in PR. Her lipstick is like a slick of red oil.
I took the mirrors down some years ago because they upset Lauren. But I don’t need a mirror to know how I look. Her words stung me.Big, fat.My belly is a rubber sack. It hangs like it has been strapped there. I’m getting bigger all the time. I can’t keep track of it. I knock things over, I bounce off doorways. I’m not used to how much space I take up in the world. I don’t go out much so my skin is pale. Lauren has this new habit of pulling my hair out by the handful and there are shiny pale patches of skull among the brown. I don’t keep razors or scissors in the house and my beard spills down over my chest. For some reason it’s a different colour and texture to the hair on my head; red and thick. It looks like a fake beard, like something an actor would wear to play a pirate. My hands and face are covered with scratches, my fingernails bitten to the quick. I haven’t had the courage to look at my toenails in some time. The rest of me – well, I try not to think about that at all. There’s a smell on me these days, like mushrooms, earthy. My body is turning on me.
I scroll down. Somewhere in here there must be a friend. The women look out from the screen, skin glowing, eyes bright. They have fun interests and perky jokes on their profiles. I try to think of a way to describe myself.Single dad, I type.Loves the outdoors.Obeys the gods in the white trees … No. Who am I kidding?
Last week I went to the 7-Eleven for more beer. I felt faint so I sat down on the step outside the store, just for a second. Maybe it was old habit. But I was also just tired. I’m always tired. When I opened my eyes, a guy was putting down quarters by my feet. I gave a growl like a bear and he jumped and ran away. I kept the quarters. I can’t imagine being in a room with these women.
I’m about to shut down the laptop when I hear something stir. The hair on the back of my neck stands up slowly. I don’t close the computer, because I don’t want to be alone in the dark. I have the sensation of eyes moving across my skull. The furniture lies quiet in unfamiliar shadow, in the screen’s faint blue light. I can’t shrug the feeling that it’s watching me.
I have a twist in my belly. Where am I exactly? I get up quietly to look. The ugly blue rug is there, check. On the mantel the ballerina lies as if dead in the ruins of the music box. So I know where I am. But who else is here?
‘Lauren?’ My voice is a whisper. ‘Is that you?’ Silence follows. Stupid, I know she isn’t here. ‘Olivia?’ But no, it wouldn’t be.
Mommy’s hand is cool on my neck, her voice soft in my ear.You have to move them, she says.Don’t let anyone find out what you are.
‘I don’t want to,’ I say to her. Even to myself I sound whiny like Lauren. ‘It makes me scared and sad. Don’t make me.’
Mommy’s skirts rustle, her perfume fades. She is not gone, though – never that. Maybe she is spending a while in one of the memories that lie around the house, in drifts as deep as snow. Maybe she is curled up in the cupboard beneath the sink, where we keep the gallon jug of vinegar. I hate it when I find her there, grinning in the dark, blue organza floating around her face.
The fresh can is so cold it almost sticks to my palm. The hiss and crack as it opens is loud, comforting in the silent house. I keep scrolling down, down, through women’s faces but Mommy’svoice is singing through my head and it’s no good. I go to find the shovel. It’s time to go to the glade.
I’m back. Recording this, in case I forget how I hurt my arm. Sometimes I can’t remember stuff and then I get scared.
I woke up to a hum. There was something walking on my lips. The morning was filled with clouds of flies, fresh-hatched. It was like a dream but I was awake. Early summer sun shone in the webs of orb spiders stretched between the trees. It made me think of that poem.‘“Come into my web,” said the spider to the fly.’You are supposed to sympathise with the fly, I think. But no one likes flies, really.
My arm was twisted at a bad angle. I think I fell. There was iron on my tongue. I must have bit down hard on it while I was out. I spat out the blood at the foot of a mountain ash. An offering to the birds, who were calling in the trees overhead. Blood for blood. They won’t come to the garden since the murder. Birds tell one another about those things.
I got back home somehow. It was so good to hear the locks clicking into place. Safety.
