Here So Far Away(76)

“You did?”

“For what it’s worth, she felt bad about it. She was trying to be funny.”

“Who would think that was funny?”

“She thought you would. She’s always tried to be like you. No, it’s true. Problem is, she doesn’t know the difference between being tough and just being mean.”

“I was mean to you. I said awful things.”

“Yeah. You did.”

“I was jealous of Keith. I guess I was scared because I didn’t have a plan if you weren’t in it. And I didn’t call you back because I didn’t think it was possible for us to be friends again, not because I didn’t want to.”

“Is that all?”

She knew it wasn’t. Of course she did.

I fell silent, transfixed by her hair. It was floating about her head in a halo of red spirals, completely untamed. Her face was thinner, her jaw stronger. There was a raised line winding around the freckles on the back of her left hand, a scar from some long-ago incident I’d missed. (It was wriggling, but I was pretty sure that was the drugs.) She had changed so much, probably all for the better. And I realized that she would never understand what had brought me to this place because it was an impossible thing to understand from the outside. Even on the inside it was nearly impossible.

“I know you don’t need an enforcer anymore.”

She turned the key chain over in her hands. “You say that like it was the only reason we were friends.”

A tap on the window. Keith was on the other side, motioning to Lisa to come out. “I gotta go,” she said. “Sorry. See you at school?”

“Okay. See you.”

She inched to the edge of the booth, but didn’t get out. “Maybe someday you’ll trust me enough to tell me the rest,” she said.

“It’s not that.”

“It is that. And I’m sorry too.”





Thirty-Eight


“First we should find out if she’s missing and if there’s a reward for her. Then we can call the police.”

“No, first we should find out if she’s dead.”

“She’s dead. Look—”

I felt something tap my heel.

I’m not entirely certain how I came to be facedown under my mother’s shrub and subsequently the object of an Encyclopedia Brown investigation. I recall stumbling home. I recall thinking that a little lie-down would be pleasant and that I could make the rest of the journey to my house after I’d rested up. I remember trying to stand and feeling dizzy and the ground coming up.

“I’ll take this leg; you and Russ do the other. One . . .” Hands around my ankles. “Two . . .”

“I’m not dead!” I shouted.

I shimmied out of the shrub to see three redheaded boys tearing down the sidewalk. “Dad! Dad!” they shrieked at a man who was power-walking with two small redheaded girls hanging off him like he was a set of monkey bars. The boys got distracted by the urgent need to pummel one another before they reached their father, but the father’s attention was fixed on me.

“I’ll leave this one to the Sergeant,” Mr. Humphreys said. “Be in my office at nine a.m. on Monday.”

He didn’t even break his stride.

Dad was standing in the doorway of our porch in his old robe, one leg of his jogging pants fluttering in the breeze under his stump. He didn’t say anything, and so I sat there, feeling the cold muck seep through my jeans. No excuses. For once I’d been doing exactly what my dad and Mr. Humphreys thought I was doing all the time and they’d caught me red-handed. I was getting grounded, two seconds after the thaw-out with my friends, and probably worse.

Then Dad’s face crumpled, and that was easily the most god-awful sight I’ve ever seen—my father crying, chin to his chest, looking disheveled and trapped and clutching the doorframe like it was the only thing keeping him from getting sucked into a world he no longer inhabited.

My mother was hogging the pay phone in the emergency room hallway, telling everyone she’d called regarding my whereabouts that I was alive in spite of all her deficiencies as a parent. I hadn’t been able to persuade her that I’d been asleep in the yard with a little bonus fainting, so now I waited behind a curtain for an emergency room doctor who was a dead ringer for my cousin Buster, down to the black goatee and minor mullet.

I sat on a bed in my wet jeans, Dad in a chair in the corner. He’d come in after my examination but hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten in the car to drive to the hospital. “I’m sorry,” I said for the tenth time. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“June called me last week,” he said. “She saw you driving like a maniac in Scotch County. Would have pulled you over but was on her way to a serious domestic call. She wanted to make sure you’d made it home.”

“I was just running late. I wasn’t drinking or—”

“I didn’t do anything about it.” He was blinking hard. “When you didn’t come home last night . . .”

Oh geez.

“I checked your room. All your toys and keepsakes were gone. That’s often a sign, giving these things away.”

“A sign of what?”

“That someone is planning to hurt themselves.”