“Of course,” Dan says. She doesn’t mean to look at him full-on, but he won’t let her glance away this time. Andoh. There he is. Her Dan, withhis kind eyes and his floppy brown hair. His mouth with its Harrison Ford quirk at the side when he’s worried or amused. He’s the former now.
“Caro.” He puts his hands, very gently, on either side of her face. “I’m so sorry.”
“It could have happened with me,” she says, and she feels that same flash of recognition—the feeling she described to the other women earlier on this very trip. Even though she’s upset with Dan for losing her dad, he’s the kind of person you could ask to keep an eye on your dad in the first place. He’s so good. He’s the best person she’s ever known, and she’s been lying to him.
“Is anything going on?” he asks. His voice is very gentle. He knows there is.
“Besides my father being missing and my friend getting swept away in a flash flood?” She lets all of the anger she’s feeling at herself out in her voice. She lets him think it’s for him.
I am a terrible person.
“Okay,” Dan says, after a moment. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Same.” She turns away before she can see the hurt in his eyes.
It’s late afternoon now, but the cars at the drive-in theater are still unbearably hot inside, even with the windows rolled down. The chalkboard says that they’re showing Hope Hanover movies all day, but this one is a sci-fi alien western movie calledThe Last Portal. It’s so bad it might actually be classified as a B movie. Caro can’t imagine that Hope’s ever been in one of those. Almost no one else is watching, and those who are brought camp chairs and quilts to sit under the patchy shade provided by the trees Sonnet has planted—cottonwood, because they grow fast. As Caro watches, the movie rings more and more of a bell. It was filmed near here when she was in college. Everyone made a big deal about how low-budget it was at the time, but everyone wanted to be an extra on the set anyway.
She remembers the weekend two years ago when she and Dan camedown to St. John to check out residential care facilities for Henry. They’d arrived at Lookout Pointe, and Dan had been unable to get over the incongruous lighthouse built in front of it, painted red and white and emblazoned with the name of the facility.
“What’s up with the lighthouse?” Dan had asked when they started the tour. “We’re landlocked by a few states in each direction.”
The director had clearly been asked this question before.
“It goes with the name,” she said, sounding defensive. “Lookout Pointe. We’re keeping watch over your loved ones.”
“I like it,” Dan said. “It also feels kind of like the eye of Sauron.”
“Excuse me?”
Caro had punched his arm.
Dan had begun referring to the facility as“Lookout Pointy,”because of the extraneouse, which had cracked Caro up. She’d needed that.
It wasn’t as funny when she brought her dad to check it out the next day. He was having one of his affable, gentle days, clearly unsure as to what on earth they were doing but determined to be a good sport about it nonetheless. He gamely walked around with her, expressed appreciation for all the things she pointed out. (“Look, Dad, they have a soft-serve ice cream maker! You love soft-serve ice cream!”) But at the end of the tour, when she’d said, “So what do you think about living here?” as gently as possible, he’d been baffled.
“Whowould live here?” he asked.
“Well, you,” she’d said.
“Me?” He sounded genuinely astonished. She supposed it made sense. He’d spent so much time taking care of other people, being the expert, that his being the one who might need to live here did not compute.
Her phone begins to ring.
Wait, not her phone. Her dad’s phone. Henry’s phone. It’s a number she doesn’t recognize. She almost drops it in her haste to answer. “Hello?”
Tears instantly flood her eyes when she hears Henry’s voice. “Hello?” he says. “Who is this?”
“It’s Caro.”Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, she thinks, to whatever higher power has done this. “Dad, where are you?”
“Why do you have my phone?” he asks. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”
“You left it at Wendy’s.” She’s trying to level and calm her voice. She doesn’t want to frighten him. “The police found it. Where are you now? Whose phone are you calling from?”
“I lost her,” Henry says.
“Okay,” Caro says, trying to understand. “You lost her?” Is he talking about her mom? It’s a common way of describing someone who has died, but his tone sounds so urgent, like this is happening right now, like there’s still a chance that this person,thisher, could be found.
“That’s what I’m saying,” he says, his tone now entirely unlike him. It’s angry, unkind. “Do you need me to repeat myself?”
