Dark and Shallow Lies(50)

Hart drifts further away from me, too. And I miss him so much. My fingers still long for those curls sometimes, but he doesn’t come around any more. I see him plenty. Standing on the dock staring at the river. Or sitting at the end of the boardwalk, watching Willie Nelson down at the gator pond. But there might as well be a hundred miles between us. His busted face heals up, but he loses weight. His cheeks are sunken and his eyes are dark. I’m watching him blow away, just like the ash at the end of his cigarette. I ache for him. But I can’t reach him. I try once or twice, but as soon as I mention Elora he shuts down. Pushes me away. “Don’t,” he warns me. Like he can’t stand to so much as hear her name. “She’s gone. What does it matter?”

Evie’s distant, too. Sometimes I catch her watching me from her bedroom window, but I don’t see much of her. She finally comes over on the Fourth of July to sit with me on the front steps of the bookstore and watch people launch fireworks off the river dock. We eat ice cream sandwiches, and she lets me French braid her hair. “Have you seen Hart lately?” she asks, and I shake my head.

“Not really.”

She looks at me like she thinks I’m lying. “But you guys are together, aren’t you?”

I hear the hurt in her voice, and I wonder how much she saw between Hart and me that night a few weeks back. My birthday. I caught her watching us from her front porch. But now I’m wondering if she saw what happened before that. Down at the old pontoon boat.

That kiss.

“No,” I reassure her. “We aren’t together. It’s not like that between us.”

I don’t tell her the real truth of it.

That Hart’s too messed up to be with anybody right now.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she says, and it gets quiet. Except for the bottle rockets and the Roman candles. I want to ask her about the night of the fight. What happened to her out on the dock. I still need to know if the voice she was hearing was Elora’s.

But I don’t get a chance, because she makes an excuse to leave.

After that, she only comes out to hang more wind chimes.

Case is still pissed, and I don’t blame him. We don’t cross paths much, but when we do, he scowls at me. His face is all healed up, but Hart left him with a missing tooth and a pretty good scar over one eye, and I imagine that every time he looks in the mirror, it reminds him that we all thought he was capable of murder.

Even Wrynn stays hidden. Sometimes I look up in time to see her disappear around a corner. Or behind a tree. Her long red hair gives her away. So I know she’s out there. But she doesn’t come in close. And I wonder if she’s more afraid of the rougarou or of me.

The rest of us still hang out, of course. Sometimes it’s a bonfire out at Sera and Sander’s place. Or passing around a couple beers in the clearing behind Mackey’s house. Maybe even a little bit of weed, if someone has it. But with Elora gone and Case avoiding us, plus Hart missing in action and Evie always being a no-show, things are weird. We try our best to act normal. We laugh as much as we’re able to. Listen to music. Tell stories. Occasionally, if Sera has enough to drink, she’ll make out with Mackey. Just a little bit. Or sometimes we’ll all pile up on someone’s couch and watch an old movie. But the truth is, whenever we’re together, I spend all my time counting heads. Just to make sure nobody else has disappeared.

During the days, I keep busy helping out in the Mystic Rose. I reprice the essential oils and dust the healing stones. Then I alphabetize all the books.

I study palm-reading guides and let Sander do my star chart.

I stare into mirrors. Burn sage, like Sera tells me to. Sleep with a piece of clear quartz under my pillow. Because Honey says it will bring me clarity. I even try one of those new yoga DVDs.

But none of it helps.

So I run.

A couple times a week I badger Mackey until he takes me up to Kinter with him. To the high school track. We lace up our running shoes, and I run until my lungs are on fire and my legs fail.

I run until my brain switches itself off.

Until Mackey puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me it’s time to go home.

But no matter how fast I go, I can’t catch up to Elora.

Or my mother.

Sometimes, when Honey isn’t watching, I stop in the kitchen and study that photo on the wall. I try to imagine what kind of deep power the young woman with one hummingbird hair clip might have possessed. I close my eyes and reach for her, but my mother has never seemed so far away.

By the middle of July, I’ve pretty much given up on ever finishing The Tempest. But I’m still holding out hope that, somehow, I’ll figure out what happened to Elora. Because if I leave here not knowing anything more than I know now, I figure I might as well be dead myself.

The temperature has become truly suffocating. The bayou loves the heat, though. Honey’s roses wither. But the wild things thrive. Cattails and rousseau cane grow tall and thick along the edges of the boardwalk. Someone cuts them down when they threaten to take over. But they come right back. Taller. And thicker. Vines rise out of the muck to twist around the pilings, reaching up to tug at the white-painted planks that blister and peel in the unforgiving sun. Mold and rot creep in around the edges. And the smell of decay is overwhelming. By midday the air is so thick that it’s like trying to breathe wet cotton. We stay inside during the worst of it, but even on high, the AC can’t keep up. It makes us all slow and cranky. And I find myself watching the clock each day, counting the hours until the sun goes down and I can escape to join Zale back at Li’l Pass. Because when I’m with him, at least I feel like I can breathe a little easier.