The Leaving(45)
And Jimmy, with a Guinness at a table in the corner, had said, “Yes, sir!”
“Whatever happened to Danny? You know, the one whose son died?”
“Same as happens to everybody.”
Scarlett had braced for bad news. He was dead, too. The Wikipedia page was out of date.
But then Jimmy had said, “Whispering Pines, I think?”
“There you go.” The bartender had knocked on the bar two times with his knuckles.
“Whispering Pines?” Scarlett had repeated.
“Nursing home up the road.”
Relief had mixed with . . . something else.
“How did his son die?” Lucas had asked.
“Brain tumor.” The bartender had put his hands on his hips. “Was dead a year after they found it.” Some head shaking. “Just one of those things.”
“He ever talk about his work?” Lucas had presented the book. “This book?”
The bartender had looked at it. “He wrote this?” A shrug. “Never mentioned it.” Then he’d looked at them. “Hey, wait . . . you’re . . .”
Scarlett didn’t want to let go of Lucas’s hand when they got to Tammy’s car, but he let go for her. She unlocked the car and got in.
She didn’t like the idea of trees being able to w h i s p e r.
Because what would they say?
I see you.
I see everything.
I remember everything.
I remember you.
“Lucas?” She had her hand on the key but couldn’t turn it. “I’m scared.”
That was the something else.
Fear.
“It’s just a nursing home.” He smiled. “Anyone tries to mess with us, we can so totally outrun them.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said.
What did she mean?
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Hot air balloons.
Swallowed clues.
Old staircases.
Old books.
An unreturned boy.
She didn’t like any of it.
Didn’t like where any of it was heading.
“My mother said the aliens took me because she was a bad parent.”
“You can’t possibly believe—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Of course not. But we were chosen. Right? By someone? Why us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that was part of it. That we were all in these messed-up families? I just don’t know.”
“So why give us back now?” she asked. “Why is it over?”
“Because we were an experiment like in the book?” he said. “Test subjects? And all experiments have to come to an end, so there can be conclusions to draw.”
“What’s the conclusion?” She started the car. “What did they prove?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Scar.”
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“You’re the only one who calls me that.”
Then more drops landed and burst on the windshield.
Then slicing rain kicked in, tiny knives attacking the car.
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And in her mind’s eye she saw them together.
Running.
Panting.
Warm.
Wet.
Lucas
Waiting out the downpour, he showed her some of the pictures he’d taken—of Opus 6, of Miranda and Ryan, of nothing at all.
“Wait.” She reached out for the camera, stared at the display. “I remember your brother, I think. From when we were little. I think he was with me when I chipped a tooth once.”
“Yeah? Was I there, too?”
“I don’t remember. And that’s his girlfriend?”
Lucas nodded. Then he leaned back as far as he could toward his door and snapped a photo of Scarlett: her face pale and angular, the raindrops streaking the windows and blurring the world behind her into a fuzzy kaleidoscope of grays and red and blue. The brown of her eyes like wet dirt in spring, almost black.
“Can I see?” she said.
He leaned toward her, their shoulders touching over the console.
“I like it,” she said. “So do you think you used to do this? Take pictures? That that’s what the tattoo has to do with?”
He lifted the camera, looked through the finder. “I held it like this in the store and the salesperson noticed it and said only people who are like real photographers do that?” He lowered the camera. “So maybe.”
Then he said, “It just feels easy. It feels comfortable. To hold the camera.”
Same way it had to hold the gun.
He had to tell her.