Dark and Shallow Lies(3)

Honey yells at me again from inside the bookstore, so I stand up and grab my backpack. Then I spit Evie’s gum into the tall grass before I head inside.

A bell jingles when I open the door, and Honey shouts, “Back here, Sugar Bee!”

I’m careful with my backpack as I weave my way through the crowded shop. Incense burns on the counter, and every bit of space is crammed full of books and bottles and jars and colorful rocks. Herbs dry in little bundles on the windowsills.

I pause a minute to breathe in the comfort of a hundred familiar smells, then I push aside the bead curtain that marks the doorway to the back room. Honey stops unpacking boxes to come give me a big hug. She has on a purple flower-print dress and sensible white tennis shoes. Dangly earrings. A yellow headscarf covers her white curls. I can’t decide if she looks any different than she did when I left last August. It’s like whatever age Honey is, that’s the age she’s always been to me. It’s only when I look at photographs that I see she’s getting older.

“There’s my girl!” She plants a big kiss on the top of my head. “Oh! Look at your hair!” she says, even though I’ve had basically the same short pixie cut for years. “You look so sophisticated!” That makes me smile. “I thought you weren’t coming till later,” she scolds. “I would’ve made breakfast.”

Twice a day Monday through Friday and three times a day on weekends, an ancient ferry shuttles passengers back and forth between Kinter and La Cachette. The first trip of the day is always at ten o’clock. Sometimes, though, if you’re lucky, you can talk Alphonse, the mail-boat captain, into letting you ride along on his early morning run. Today I was lucky.

“I’m not that hungry,” I tell her. “I had a granola bar.” Honey raises one eyebrow, silently judging my dad for putting me on the boat without breakfast.

“Evangeline brought over some fresh muffins,” she tells me. “Bran. And some blackberry, I think.” She leads me back into the shop and points out the basket by the register.

I dig around until I find a big blackberry one. I’m in the middle of peeling away the wax paper when I notice the stack of flyers sitting on the counter.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

Underneath the big block letters, there’s another picture of Elora. This time she’s sitting on the edge of the picnic table out behind her house. She’s wearing cutoffs and an orange bikini top. Her long dark hair is loose, sunglasses perched on the top of her head like a crown. Her mouth is open, and she’s been caught midlaugh.

I recognize the photo immediately. It was taken at the beginning of last summer. Before everything went wrong between the two of us. Only a sliver of bare shoulder at the edge of the picture hints that someone is sitting next to her. Someone who’s been cropped out of the image.

Me.

The best friend she cut out of her life, just the way someone cut me out of that photograph.

I’m stuck for a minute, trying to remember what she was laughing about. Staring at Elora. And the space where I should have been. When I finally look up, Honey is watching me.

“You feel her,” she says. “You’ve always said you didn’t have the gift, but I’ve never believed it.”

“No.” I wrap the muffin back up and set it aside. “It’s not like that. I just keep expecting her to show up, you know?”

I want to ask Honey the same question I wanted to ask Evie. I want to ask if she knows – for sure – whether Elora is still alive. But I don’t. I’m afraid to hear the answer.

Honey is an old-school spiritualist at heart. A true medium. She believes that the spirits of the dead exist and that they have the ability to communicate directly with the living. If they want to.

For Honey, they communicate mostly through visions. She reads tea leaves and stuff like that, but that’s just for the tourists on day trips down from New Orleans. The real stuff she keeps to herself these days. She says nobody wants to listen to the wisdom of the dead any more. They just want to know when their boyfriends are going to propose. Or if they’ll win the lottery. And the dead, Honey says, don’t give a shit about stuff like that. They have bigger fish to fry.

I tear my eyes away from Elora’s frozen laugh, and Honey is still watching me. “Every year you remind me more of your mother,” she tells me, and I know the resemblance she sees goes deeper than our chestnut hair, our big green eyes, and the freckles scattered across our noses. “Always keeping the most important pieces of yourself tucked away somewhere.”

The little bell over the door jingles, and I look up, thinking maybe it really will be Elora standing there and this whole thing will be over. We’ll rip down the missing posters and toss the flyers in the trash. Then I’ll tell her I’m sorry, and she’ll forgive me. And everything will be the way it’s always been.

The way it’s supposed to be.

But it isn’t Elora. It’s Hart.

And I guess that’s the next best thing.





Before I even have a chance to say hello, Hart’s made it around the counter and has me wrapped up in a hug so tight it hurts. His arms are strong. Familiar. And I finally let myself melt into the safety of home. The soft sound of the bead curtain tells me Honey has slipped into the back room to give us some privacy.

“Evie told me you were here.” Hart’s voice sounds different than it did last summer. Deeper. Or maybe just sadder. I talked to him on the phone in February, when he called to tell me about Elora. But that conversation had been so weird. Short and confusing. We weren’t used to talking to each other on the phone. And we were both upset. He hadn’t offered a lot of details, and I’d been too stunned to ask questions. As soon as I hung up, it almost seemed like maybe it wasn’t real. Like I’d imagined the whole phone call.