Vanishing Girls(39)

Parker and I kick our shoes off and roll up our jeans and sit with our legs half-submerged in the water, watching as the waves gather, crest, break, and retreat, every motion provoking corresponding shifts in the patterns of color. Dara would love this, I think, and feel a quick squeeze of guilt.

Parker leans back on his elbows, so his face is partially obscured by shadow. “Do you remember last Founders’ Day Ball? When we broke into the pool and you dared me to climb the rafters?”

“And you tried to pull me in with my dress on,” I say. A burst of pain explodes behind my eyes. Parker’s car. The clouded windshield. Dara’s face. I squeeze my eyes shut, as if I can make the images disperse.

“Hey.” He sits up again, grazing my knee, just barely, with a hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I open my eyes again. Another wave breaks over my feet, this one green. I bring my knees to my chest, hugging them. “It’s Dara’s birthday tomorrow.”

Parker’s face changes. All the light drains from his expression at once. “Fuck.” He looks away, rubbing his eyes. “I totally forgot. I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah.” I scrape at an artificial pebble with a nail. There’s so much I want to say—so much I want to ask him that I’ve never asked him. It feels as if I have a balloon in my chest; at any second it might burst. “I feel like I’m just . . . losing her.”

He turns back to me, then, his face twisted with a raw kind of grief. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know.”

That’s when the balloon bursts. “Are you still in love with her?” I blurt out. There’s a strange kind of relief in finally asking.

Parker looks at first surprised—then, almost immediately, he shuts down, turns expressionless. “Why are you asking me that?” he says.

“Forget it,” I say. I stand up. The colors have lost their magic. They’re just lights, stupid lights with stupid gels over them, a spectacle made for people too stupid to tell the difference. Like the mermaid costume, made out of cheap sequins and glue. “I’m tired, okay? I just want to go home.”

Parker stands, too, and puts a hand on my arm when I turn in the direction of the parking lot. “Wait.”

I shake him off. “Come on, Parker. Forget I asked.”

“Wait.” This time, Parker’s voice stops me. He exhales a long breath. “Look. I loved Dara, okay? I still do. But—”

“But what?” I wrap my arms around my waist, squeezing back the sudden sensation that I might be sick. Why do I care? Parker can love whoever he wants. He can even love my sister. Why wouldn’t he love her? Everyone else does.

“I was never in love with her,” he says, a little more quietly. “I’m . . . I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.”

There’s a long pause. He stares at me as if waiting for me to say something—to forgive or congratulate him, maybe both. Something passes between us, a wordless message I can’t begin to decipher. I’m suddenly aware that we’re standing very close—so close that even in the dark, I can see stubble on his chin, and see the beauty mark dotting the outside corner of his left eye, like a perfect pen mark.

“Okay,” I say finally.

Parker looks almost disappointed. “Okay,” he echoes.

I wait by the water while Parker turns off the wave pool again. We retrace our steps to the parking lot in silence. I listen for the voice, for the singsong call of a ghost in the darkness, maybe crying out for her father, maybe crying out just to be heard. But I hear nothing but our footsteps, and the wind, and the crickets hidden in the shadows, singing for no goddamn reason at all.





JULY 28


Text from Parker to Dara


Hey.

I don’t know why I’m texting you.

Actually, I do know why.

I really miss you, Dara.





JULY 28


Dara


Before we were born, the master bedroom was downstairs, and featured an en-suite bathroom with a massive Jacuzzi tub and cheesy gold fixtures. The bedroom was converted first into a den, and then into a combined office/massive closet for all the random shit we accumulated and then outgrew: paper shredders and defunct fax machines, broken iPads and old phone cords, a dollhouse that Nick was obsessed with for .5 seconds before deciding that dolls were “immature.”

But the tub is still there. The jets stopped working when I was about five and my parents never bothered to replace them, but with the water running from all four faucets, the noise is thunderous and has almost the same effect. The soap dish is shaped like a scalloped seashell. There are divots in the porcelain where you can rest your feet. And for about ten years, my mom has kept the same jar of lemon verbena bath salts perched next to the tub, the label so warped with steam and vapor it has become unreadable.

When we were little, Nick and I used to put on our bathing suits and take baths together, pretending that we were mermaids and it was our private lagoon. Somehow the fact that we wore bathing suits—and goggles, too, sometimes, so we could go under and blink at each other, communicating through hand gestures and laughing out big bubbles—made it fun. We were so small we could both stretch out easily, side by side, her feet at my head and vice versa, like two sardines packed together.