But Gloria kept her eyes trained on me, kept gripping my face. “You’ll recognize those men, the ones inclined to their dark side, because they’ll expect you to carry their load. They’ll smother your anger with their pain, they’ll make you doubt yourself, and they’ll tell you they love you the whole time. Some do it big, like Ed, but most do it in quiet steps, like your father.”
My heart was hammering as loud as a bass drum.
“You meet those men, you turn and don’t look back,” she said. “Leave them to it. There’s nothing there for us. We’ve got all the good stuff right here, everything we need.”
She said that last part just as Mom slipped through the amber beads, her color high, her smile enchanting, her beauty almost painful to see. She held a glorious bouquet of sweet pink roses in her gloved hands.
“Those are as gorgeous as you, Connie!” Gloria said, turning to my mom.
I stared at Gloria’s back, realizing that was that. It was all she’d ever say about my dad. I didn’t know how I felt, so I stored it away, for the time being. I still hadn’t shown Gloria Maureen’s diary and didn’t think I would. It would only cause more pain. We wouldn’t ever know who Maureen had been afraid of, Jerome Nillson or Ed Godo.
I suspected it was both men. Maureen had great instincts, even if she wasn’t always able to listen to them, not with all the Pantown rules for girls crowding her thoughts.
Beth decided to enroll at St.Cloud State University rather than attending college in Berkeley. She didn’t feel safe traveling that far from her parents anymore. “For now, anyhow,” she said, during one of her weekly visits. “Not forever. You can’t keep a good woman down.”
I smiled at Beth, but I knew what I’d seen in her eyes back at the cabin. That terrible awareness that life could twist on you in a blink wasn’t something a person could forget. Well, I now knew something about that, too, and I was happy to have Beth around. It gave the world more color.
I think it helped her to spend time with us, too, even though when she dropped by, she’d rush inside like she’d left a stove on and would need to touch Junie and me—our cheek, a hand, our hair—before she could draw a full breath. Still, every time she came to see us, she was growing stronger. Her muscles were returning, her eyes becoming clearer. She also swore a lot. I didn’t know if she’d always been that way but decided that if anyone deserved to cuss like a sailor on shore leave, it was Beth McCain.
Both Ed and Ricky were dead.
Ricky had drowned, not surfacing until divers came for his body. Beth had taken care of Ed in the basement—Ed, who Agent Ryan established had murdered his first girlfriend in a rage when she told him she was leaving, then kept the look-alike waitress in Saint Paul alive for twenty-four hours, killing her when she tried to escape. Agent Ryan believed Ed had learned from that and was planning to keep Beth indefinitely.
The newspapers called Beth “The Heroine Who Saved Herself!” She laughed when she saw that headline, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.
“Wouldn’t have minded some help,” she’d said.
Sometimes Beth, Junie, and me just sat on the couch and were all quiet in the warmth of each other. Other times, Beth’d beg me to play drums, so I’d haul her and Junie over to Gloria’s, and we’d pick up Claude on the way. We’d open the garage and fire up the lava lamps. I’d pound away while Junie shook the tambourine, Claude twanged the triangle, and Elizabeth danced. No one played bass or sang. I wasn’t ready for that yet. I did my best to keep my face happy, but sometimes it split my chest open how bad it hurt to be in the garage without Brenda and Maureen. I think Claude felt it, too, because sometimes he’d come over and hug me when I needed it the most.
We were officially dating now. It’d been weird at first. Until we finally kissed. I’d been all tense, but then Claude’s warm lips met mine, his tasting sweet like 7UP and sending bubbles all the way to my toes. I felt so safe that I cried. A lot of other guys would have freaked out at that. Not Claude. He cried right along with me.
“You know what we should do today?” Beth asked, peering up at the blue sky. We sat on our front porch, dried brown leaves skittering across the lawn. We’d been in school for over a month, Junie in eighth grade, me in tenth, Beth a freshman in college. I could tell Beth was getting restless. She never complained, but it must have been hard living in a town where everyone thought they knew you.
“What?” Junie asked. She’d taken to styling her hair like Brenda, though she wore less makeup than she had over the summer. The combination made her look her age for the first time in a while.
“Go to Valleyfair before they close for the season,” Beth said triumphantly. She tugged her keys out of the pocket of her cords and jangled them in front of me. “You in?”
“Sure,” I said, half smiling. She’d been teaching me to drive for the past week. I was terrible. “But no way am I driving in the Cities.”
“Fine,” she said.
After we let Mom and Gloria know where we’d be, we bundled into Beth’s orange Vega. It was a quiet drive. When we arrived at Valleyfair, seeing the roller coaster made me miss Brenda and Maureen, but I was making peace with the fact that everything would. The smell of Bubble Yum gum, which’d been Maureen’s favorite until she heard it was made out of spider eggs.Peyton Placereruns, which Brenda and I had watched religiously. Every good song that came on the radio. The whole world was a reminder that my best friends were no longer here, but it was also a reminder of how great they’d been. So I rode the High Roller and I screamed for Brenda and Maureen, half laughing and half crying.
Junie looked alarmed at my outburst, but Beth squeezed my arm and let me get it all out. It was funny, I’d never realized before how much alike the two of them looked, Beth and Junie. They had the same red hair, freckles, and wide grins, even similar curves despite the age difference. It gave me a burst of joy how much like sisters they looked, followed by a gut punch when I remembered that’s why Ed had picked them, because they’d reminded him of his first girlfriend, the one he’d murdered. That’s how the whole day went—ups and downs and ups. The three of us were wrung out by the end of it.
In the parking lot on the way to Beth’s car, a man with his family, a man who looked a little like my dad, like a Kennedy but in this case the famous one, glanced over and spotted our glum faces. He didn’t know we weregoodexhausted. He didn’t see that we were together, and we were fine.
“Smile, girls!” he said cheerfully. “You’ll look so much prettier.”
Junie’s mouth twitched, like it was automatic to show him that beautiful grin she’d worked on all summer, the one I hadn’t seen since the horror night in the cabin. I watched her, not knowing if I was more nervous that she would smile or that she wouldn’t. She’d been so withdrawn lately. Even today at Valleyfair she’d been quiet. I wanted to see her happy, but I didn’t want her to feel obligated to do anything for strangers.
Her lips tipped up, revealing her sharp, shiny teeth. “My sister’s friends are dead, and the people I thought I could trust, I can’t,” she said. “SoI’ll damn well decide for myselfwhen I’m ready to smile.”
I startled myself with a pure burst of laughter. “That’s my girl,” I said.
“Goddamn right,” Beth said proudly.
We linked hands and headed to the car. Junie was going to be all right.
